The Difficult Art of Giving: Patronage, Philanthropy, and the American Literary Market 0812246306, 9780812246308

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Preface. From the Harlem Renaissance
Introduction. ‘‘The Difficult Art of Giving’’
Chapter 1. American Generosity: Philanthropy in Henry James
Chapter 2. ‘‘Livin’ on My Money’’: The Politics of Gratitude and Ingratitude in Howells
Chapter 3. ‘‘The Gospel of Self’’: Philanthropy and Political Economy in Mark Twain
Chapter 4. ‘‘That Friendship of the Whites’’: Patronage and Philanthropy in Charles Chesnutt
Chapter 5. ‘‘Inexplicable Tangles of Personality’’: Patronage, Philanthropy, and Progressive Irony in Theodore Dreiser
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
J
K
L
M
N
P
R
S
T
U
W
Y
Z
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

The Difficult Art of Giving

This page intentionally left blank

The Difficult Art of Giving Patronage, Philanthropy, and the American Literary Market

Francesca Sawaya

universit y of pennsylvania press phil adelphia

A volume in the Haney Foundation Series, established in 1961 with the generous support of Dr. John Louis Haney

Copyright 䉷 2014 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-8122-4630-8

contents

Preface. From the Harlem Renaissance Introduction. ‘‘The Difficult Art of Giving’’

vii 1

Chapter 1. American Generosity: Philanthropy in Henry James

39

Chapter 2. ‘‘Livin’ on My Money’’: The Politics of Gratitude and Ingratitude in Howells

75

Chapter 3. ‘‘The Gospel of Self’’: Philanthropy and Political Economy in Mark Twain

100

Chapter 4. ‘‘That Friendship of the Whites’’: Patronage and Philanthropy in Charles Chesnutt

134

Chapter 5. ‘‘Inexplicable Tangles of Personality’’: Patronage, Philanthropy, and Progressive Irony in Theodore Dreiser

161

Afterword

186

Notes

189

Bibliography

227

Index

243

Acknowledgments

247

This page intentionally left blank

preface

From the Harlem Renaissance

his book about canonical nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature emerged paradoxically out of a class I taught on the Harlem Renaissance. For any scholar interested in the economic history of modern American literature, the Harlem Renaissance seems anomalous. In standard accounts of literary history, scholars argue that the mode of production for literature switches unevenly in the post-Civil War period from a system of elite patronage and genteel amateurism to what is described as the free literary market and self-supporting professionalism. The market, literary scholars say, helped democratize literary production and consumption, even as it enabled the creation of a new profession in which writers could sustain themselves without a need for patrons or sponsors. The Harlem Renaissance, however, seems to pose an exception to this economic narrative. Many Harlem Renaissance writers had patrons—black but also white (Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, A’leila Walker, W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as ‘‘Godmother’’ Charlotte Mason, Nancy Cunard, Carl Van Vechten). Even more strikingly, Harlem Renaissance writers’ work was sponsored or promoted by a number of philanthropic or philanthropically inclined organizations (Guggenheim, Rosenwald, the NAACP, the Urban League). Individual patronage and institutional philanthropy— especially involving white elites—have therefore always been controversial features in debates about Harlem Renaissance artists, in a way that they have not been for white artists of the same period.1 At one level, this controversy is not surprising, because if Harlem Renaissance writers themselves are any gauge, patronage and philanthropy were of deep interest to these writers in imagining the significance and critical potential of their work. Repeatedly in the Harlem Renaissance and

T

viii

Preface

the period that followed it, African American authors quite directly depict and analyze the effect that patrons and philanthropic organizations had on the art and intellectual work that they produced.2 However, relying on the critical vantage point of Harlem Renaissance writers on patronage and philanthropy, one quickly realizes that sponsorship is not as anomalous as our modern literary histories have made it seem. A double standard has been used to study Harlem Renaissance cultural production. While the racial politics of the Harlem Renaissance are specific to it, patronage and philanthropy have been continuous features of cultural production in the United States generally. The quest to create or define an American literary tradition, so central in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was often also (whatever else it was) one about funding the production of American literature. The ‘‘market’’ is thus often figured, both in the nineteenth century and in the literary histories written afterward, as a central solution to this problem of funding; however, this market is nebulously defined. Indeed, as ‘‘the new economic criticism’’ has shown, literary history often simply borrowed its standard narrative about free and democratizing markets from liberal economics, even as liberal economics depended, without acknowledgment, on literary modes. As Gordon Bigelow argues, the fiction of the expansive democratization of free markets is foundational to liberal economics. At the same time, that fiction is inextricably linked to romanticism in its depiction of the consumer freely expressing his/her inner self through the articles s/he selects. Bigelow’s point is that romantic expressivism is conceptually problematic in and of itself, but even more so when used to create a quasiempirical model of how markets work, which in turn literary historians then unproblematically borrow.3 In short, one of the terms literary historians most rely on to discuss cultural production in modernity—the market—is also one of the most opaque. This is not to say that the term has not helped in clarifying the dynamics of cultural production in modernity, or that markets do not exist. Rather, it is to say that our often unconscious reliance on liberal economics’ notion of markets as free and as democratizing production and consumption has meant that we often ignore the systematic forms of what economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi calls ‘‘interventionism’’ that construct or create markets. What the Harlem Renaissance thinkers’ intensive, sustained, and self-conscious scrutiny of the social and economic practices of patronage and philanthropy does is help us think about interventionism. It is precisely

From the Harlem Renaissance

ix

because Harlem Renaissance intellectuals were racial outsiders that they became so deeply fascinated with patronage and philanthropy. The Harlem Renaissance represents a moment when these social and economic practices were used for the first time systematically to invite black intellectuals to enter a historically segregated national market, and these practices then mediated their relation to that market.4 But if such systematic invitations and mediations were new for Harlem Renaissance artists, they were not new more generally in the United States. Patronage and philanthropy have been two central forms of interventionism in the literary market since the eighteenth century—albeit in historically variable and changing ways. This book particularly analyzes corporate-based philanthropy as it is linked to older forms of cultural sponsorship like patronage. Such philanthropy, emerging in the late nineteenth century, was to become central in the funding of cultural and intellectual work in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, including the funding of this book. The book analyzes the productive features of this emergent philanthropy in two main ways: first, in terms of the careers of well-known individual writers, and second, in terms of the rich and complex representations of the economic world that these writers created. In particular, I am interested in the ways these writers’ representations of sponsorship provide valuable critiques of the notion of the free market. My focus on critique reveals the trace of the present day on this historical project about patronage, philanthropy, and literature. In an era in which neoliberal ‘‘free market fundamentalism’’ has had devastating consequences on human life and the environment, I hope that older critiques of the fiction of the free market can be illuminating.5

This page intentionally left blank

introduction

‘‘The Difficult Art of Giving’’

About the year 1890 I was still following the haphazard fashion of giving here and there as appeals presented themselves. I investigated as I could, and worked myself almost to a nervous break-down in groping my way, without sufficient guide or chart, through this ever-widening field of philanthropic endeavour. There was then forced upon me the necessity to organize and plan this department of our daily tasks on as distinct lines of progress as we did our business affairs. —John D. Rockefeller, 1909 The road to the free market was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous, centrally organized and controlled interventionism. To make Adam Smith’s ‘‘simple and natural liberty’’ compatible with the needs of a human society was a most complicated affair. —Karl Polanyi, 1944

n Karl Polanyi’s classic economic analysis of the nineteenth century, he emphasizes the intervention of the state and business in constructing and enforcing what he describes as the ‘‘utopian’’ (138) fiction of the free and self-regulating market.1 The paradox Polanyi highlights—the naturalizing of a powerful and resilient narrative of free markets through radically ‘‘interventionist’’ methods—is central to this book. Polanyi analyzes not only the social necessity for such interventionism to stave off the worst excesses of ‘‘catastrophic dislocation’’ (33) caused by a market system, but also the variety of forms such interventionism takes (through the establishment of trusts, cartels, tariffs, and currency policy, as well as through collective bargaining, workers’ rights, and unions).2 This book, by contrast,

I

2

Introduction

highlights the emergence of a much more directly expressed form of interventionism, one nonetheless closely linked to the kind Polanyi focuses on: the large-scale, corporate-based philanthropy that emerges at the turn of the twentieth century, which, as one recent study puts it, has powerfully ‘‘influence[d] the course of . . . history’’ in the United States and elsewhere.3 Corporate-based philanthropy is a complex phenomenon that cannot help but bear witness to the failures of market capitalism. Once John D. Rockefeller begins ‘‘giving,’’ he finds an ‘‘ever-widening field of philanthropic endeavor.’’ The blandness of the language, its aim at establishing philanthropy as an area of professional expertise, nevertheless fails to contain the fact of an ‘‘ever-widening field’’ of need. Indeed, this famously unreadable and private man claims he is led to ‘‘nervous break-down’’ as he ‘‘grope[s]’’ his way through the apparently numerous ‘‘appeals’’ made to him.4 Yet he is not therefore led to question the system that has created such ‘‘ever-widening’’ need. To Rockefeller the solution instead lies in the system itself, in capitalism. As he puts it, he seeks to ‘‘organize and plan’’ his philanthropic interventions and model them on his ‘‘business affairs.’’ Philanthropy must be carefully managed so that it not only supports but also resembles a market economy.5 This book focuses on the kind of largescale, corporate philanthropy Rockefeller and others helped create in order to investigate quite directly the multiple paradoxes of this form of ‘‘continuous, centrally organized and controlled interventionism’’ that enforces the utopian fiction of the free market. This book’s governing argument is that the form of philanthropy that emerges at the end of the nineteenth century is an expression of the crisis in liberal capitalism over interventionism, a crisis that led in a quite different direction as well—through Progressivism and a long bumpy road to the welfare state.6 A genuine hysteria is evident among defenders of liberal capitalism, business leaders, and intellectuals at the turn of the century that intervention will destroy the (putatively) free and self-regulating market system. At the same time, as Andrew Carnegie points out in his famous manifesto for corporate-based philanthropy, ‘‘The Gospel of Wealth’’ (1889), without intervention it is also possible that ‘‘Socialism,’’ ‘‘Anarchism,’’ or ‘‘Communism’’ will be validated and be successful at ‘‘overturn[ing] present conditions.’’7 Philanthropy is both a problem and an uneasy solution for defenders and proponents of liberal capitalism.8 What Polanyi refers to as the ‘‘veritable faith’’ (135) and the ‘‘militant creed’’ (137) of liberal economics is profoundly challenged by philanthropy in these years,

‘‘The Difficult Art of Giving’’

3

even as the creed is anxiously restored through a carefully circumscribed definition of what philanthropy is, what it can do, and what it must never do at great risk of endangering the (fiction of the) free market, and thus the ‘‘progress of the people’’ (‘‘Gospel,’’ 17). Nonetheless, and despite the anxious restoration of the creed of liberal economics, philanthropy cannot also help but bear witness to failure. My analysis of philanthropy as an expression of crisis seeks to highlight this dynamic. I hope to avoid the Scylla and Charybdis that plague analyses of philanthropy: on the one hand, the naturalization of it as an expression of the benevolent progressivism of corporate capitalism, or more simply of the good intentions of individual capitalists; on the other hand, its reduction to an easy and unchallenged capitalist hegemony. While this crisis among defenders of liberal economics over interventionism is central to my book, I am primarily interested in the exchange between literature and philanthropy. In particular, this book focuses on the relation between American literature and the emergence of corporate-based philanthropy at the turn of the twentieth century. While sociologists, historians, and art historians have explored this form of philanthropy extensively, the relation of modern literature to philanthropy has not been fully investigated.9 Indeed, scholars rely on what Geoffrey Turnovsky has called ‘‘the standard narrative’’ of literary markets to argue that in the post-bellum United States patronage and elite amateurism gave way to a free market in literary goods as well as self-supporting professionalism.10 Modernism is seen as an ambivalent or critical response to the expansion of this market in both the social world and cultural work, and thus as an attempt to create an autonomous sphere for art—even as modernists frequently marketed their putative autonomy. Rethinking the modern literary field in terms of the continuation of patronage and the emergence of philanthropy challenges this economic history that relies unconsciously on the fiction of the free and self-regulating market borrowed from liberal economics. I argue that in the expanding literary market social practices like patronage do not disappear from the literary field, even as new social practices with residual characteristics—like philanthropy—are emerging. In the literary market, just as in markets generally, different kinds of social interventionism remain and new ones become important. Philanthropy raised questions for artists about interventionism in their work generally, but it also enabled them to reflect on the social changes a market economy creates, as well as its foundational narratives. The variety of fictional representations of patronage

4

Introduction

and philanthropy by American writers in this period—from women and minority writers (Abraham Cahan, Willa Cather, Charles Chesnutt, Sarah Orne Jewett, Zitkala-Sa, Edith Wharton, and Anzia Yezierska) to the successful men of this book (Henry James, William Dean Howells, and again Charles Chesnutt, Mark Twain, and Theodore Dreiser, among others)— suggests how central those social practices were to modern literature.11 If modern literature has historically been read as an ambivalent or critical response to the necessity of the market, this book argues that it is equally profoundly an ambivalent or critical response to the necessity of patronage and an emergent philanthropy.12 Philanthropy, however, does not simply present us with a rich set of paradoxes and narrative possibilities to explore in the history of economics and literature. With the fall of Soviet communism and what has been heralded as the triumph of liberal capitalism, there has been today, as Scott Shershow puts it, ‘‘a broad resurgence of intellectual interest in the question of the gift,’’ in which ‘‘an ideal of generous giving now presents itself, at least to some thinkers, as an ethical and political alternative to Marxist socialism.’’13 But if Shershow usefully links this resurgence of intellectual interest in the gift to the apparent triumph of liberal capitalism, one could again link it simultaneously to a legitimation crisis. As Warren Buffett said directly when he gave $31 billion to the $30 billion Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2006, ‘‘A market system has not worked in terms of poor people,’’ and philanthropy today, as in the past, cannot help but highlight the human and environmental failures of the market.14 The ‘‘ideal of generous giving’’ is everywhere celebrated, whether in the New York Times special section called ‘‘Giving,’’ which charts new trends (microlending, dot.com, and profit-oriented philanthropy), on the prime-time television show Oprah’s Big Give, or in the numerous articles about celebrities of the Brangelina variety. But the celebration is often also openly anxious, highlighting the strange conjunction—as a student of mine forthrightly put it—of ‘‘rich people holding dances to raise money for poor people.’’15 Before but especially in the wake of the economic crisis of 2008, philanthropy cannot help but reveal the systemic inadequacies and injustices of global capitalism, to which it can apparently provide sometimes only palliative, sometimes only paradoxical or self-defeating solutions. Shershow’s point, however, that this is a ‘‘resurgence’’ of interest is certainly correct. The media regularly chart the growing inequality between haves and have-nots, as well as business titans’ and celebrities’ response to

‘‘The Difficult Art of Giving’’

5

such inequality through philanthropy, denominating our era a ‘‘New Gilded Age.’’16 Likewise, our era’s most famous philanthropists, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, cite Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller as models, while a host of books argue that the modern form of philanthropy that remains an object of scrutiny today became powerfully articulated, particularly effective, and enormously controversial at the turn of the twentieth century.17 A sign of this resurgence is the interest academics and intellectuals have expressed in rethinking different conceptions and configurations of gift-giving, a rethinking to which Shershow’s book offers exemplary testimony. Such a resurgence arguably coincides with the current changes in the relation between institutions of higher education and philanthropy. Since World War II, universities have sponsored much intellectual and artistic work, and as these institutions increasingly face cutbacks in federal and state sponsorship, the close relation between intellectual work and corporate-based philanthropy in the United States is highlighted. By no means do I seek to exaggerate the relation between philanthropy and the university. Federal and state government funding remains central to private and public universities alike. Indeed, a crucial point David Hammack has made is that exaggerating the influence of patronage and philanthropy in U.S. education and civic life, as opposed to that of the government, is characteristic of both scholars and the general public. I would add to Hammack’s important argument that such exaggerations enforce the fiction of the benevolent efficacy of the free market.18 Nonetheless, at my own large state university, only 17 percent of the budget came from state government in 2012, as opposed to 38 percent in 1980, even as many of my state’s legislators mount relentless attacks on public education and the university. While raising tuition in the current era of budgetary crisis is the recourse of most (thus, as my university’s president says, ‘‘clos[ing] the door of opportunity for countless students’’), corporate and private philanthropy also step in. At my university, ‘‘private giving’’ constituted 4 percent of the budget in 1980 but 10 percent in 2012.19 The university and the corporation have supported each other’s development, as Christopher Newfield has shown in his intertwined history of the two; however, as he also writes, the research university is ‘‘a major, if partial, outsider to this business system, having sought to support free inquiry and the pursuit of truth independently of what the market will buy.’’20 New challenges and debates about academic freedom and the relation of the university to the corporation necessarily emerge as corporate-based sponsorship increases at

6

Introduction

universities.21 In short, philanthropy is and has been central to modern intellectuals—seeming sometimes more, and other times less, problematic in how it shapes their work.22 If both past and present crises in liberal capitalism and their significance for intellectual work are central to this book, I nonetheless need to make clear that the book is not about the anthropologically inflected term Shershow and others use, namely, the ‘‘gift.’’23 Nor, must I add, is it about the psychologically inflected term ‘‘paternalism.’’24 Indeed, while I often borrow from theorists of the gift and of paternalism, my attention is focused on philanthropy—a historically specific set of social (and thus economic) practices associated with the emergence of corporate capitalism. Two questions are immediately raised by such a statement: what is philanthropy, and why would it be important to focus on that social practice, ignoring the many other social practices of distributing access or giving? Thus far, my use of the term philanthropy has simply assumed what it is, associating it with corporate or managerial capitalism and loosely connecting it to patronage. The problem here, however, is that both patronage and philanthropy generate an enormous amount of conceptual confusion separately, let alone together. Patronage is typically described as a premodern phenomenon that links individuals in complex, usually personalized ways across institutionalized hierarchies or divides. It is furthermore associated with relations of mutual self-interestedness within contexts of inequality, for example, feudal or aristocratic societies.25 However, while patronage is seen as premodern, with Dr. Johnson’s famous 1755 letter breaking with his patron Lord Chesterfield used to mark a watershed moment in English literature, such periodization is clearly false. Patronage continues to be important in modernity, though its form may shift, and though the term may be used to describe a variety of different phenomena.26 In the period that is the object of study here, for example, the term was used to describe a range of practices. Most famously, it described the collusion between the state and corporate interests and between different corporations, both of which helped galvanize the loosely affiliated movement called Progressivism.27 Philanthropy as a term represents an even more complex set of historical problems. The Oxford English Dictionary provides an etymology that dates back to ancient Greece, defining philanthropy as a ‘‘Love of mankind; the disposition or active effort to promote the happiness and well-being of others.’’ However, the OED then goes on to distinguish between that ancient definition and one current today: ‘‘practical benevolence, now esp.

‘‘The Difficult Art of Giving’’

7

as expressed by the generous donation of money to good causes’’ (emphasis added).28 Without commentary, the OED charts the transformation of a concept from a premodern religious or humanist imperative to love others to a modern practice, situated specifically in a capitalist ethos, in which the ‘‘generous donation of money’’ is placed in the service of measurable (‘‘practical’’) outcomes.29 For some historians, therefore, philanthropy is the term for expressions of benevolent action in capitalism; there is no prehistory to the term. Robert Gross, for example, distinguishes philanthropy from charity by defining and periodizing the former as an ‘‘innovation of the market revolution’s’’ joint stock company of the seventeenth century.30 Philanthropy, he argues, sought ‘‘to apply reason to the solution of social ills and needs’’ through ‘‘abstract and institutional forms’’ (31), as opposed to the face-to-face interactions of ‘‘charity,’’ which depend on a religious obligation (44–45). Gross particularly highlights the turn of the century, with Andrew Carnegie as the exemplary figure of philanthropy, contrasted with Jane Addams’s Hull-House as a model of charity.31 Olivier Zunz’s acclaimed recent history of philanthropy depends on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century legal decisions that enabled philanthropy to thrive in the United States and so defines the term in a comparable but much more historically specific manner as ‘‘a product of the large organizational revolution that American managerial and financial capitalism orchestrated in the last century and a half.’’ Against philanthropy, Zunz poses not charity but what he generalizes as ‘‘a universal altruistic impulse’’ (294). These historical definitions of philanthropy reveal why debates about the practice can be both confused and contentious. Is the modern notion of philanthropy a misuse of the original meaning of the word? Should corporate-based philanthropy be called philanthropy? Especially, after 1913 when United States tax laws were changed (Zunz, 4), should such philanthropy simply be seen as an extension of corporate welfare or crony capitalism, since it became a form of tax relief and evasion, as well as a form of public relations for corporations—part of a systematic policy of representing themselves as inherently progressive and benevolent?32 Or should philanthropy simply be collapsed into the term patronage, highlighting the forms of self-interestedness (rather than benevolence) and continuous (if changing) inequality that inhere in it? In addition, patronage is often described as an individual practice, but couldn’t one simply say it changed in modernity and became institutionalized and systematic? Or, given the close relationship between the government and corporate foundations,

8

Introduction

should corporate philanthropy more rightly be called an ideological state apparatus?33 Perhaps even more interesting, modern philanthropy forces us to ask: could or did philanthropy ever exist? Given the transhistorical and transcultural account of self-interested Economic Man provided by eighteenth-century liberal economics, was any benevolent expression of a disinterested ‘‘love of mankind’’ ever possible? Hasn’t philanthropy always been a misnomer? But we might reverse the question just as easily: isn’t it possible that our use of the old term for the new phenomenon reveals the way modern philanthropy might well contain residual or emergent forms of sociality that are either precapitalist or anticapitalist? These questions, which definitions of patronage and philanthropy raise, are central to the conceptual confusion about the two practices. But philanthropy is particularly compelling—today as at the turn of the last century— because (in contrast to patronage) it raises fundamental questions about the beneficence and efficacy of the economic system that has been dominant in the West since the nineteenth century. At the same time, it raises questions about the conception of the human in modernity. For now, however, I simply want to state that I rely in this book on the modern definition Gross and Zunz use. In other words, I see philanthropy as a specific set of social (and thus also economic) practices that emerges out of capitalism and the Enlightenment but is more particularly ‘‘a product of the large organizational revolution that American managerial and financial capitalism orchestrated in the last century and a half’’ (Zunz, 294). However, I expand Gross and Zunz’s historical definitions in two main ways. First, I see philanthropy as an expression of and an attempt to solve the crisis among defenders of liberal capitalism over what Polanyi calls interventionism. It seeks to intervene in the putatively free market while evading the philosophical consequences of doing so. Philanthropy thus highlights both the failures of the market and the constructedness of the notion of that market. Second, while philanthropy builds on the longstanding (albeit also changing) social practice of patronage and can seem indistinguishable from it, its difference lies in its claim to benevolent morality in a capitalist system. Such a claim attempts to establish capitalist hegemony, yet also expresses the desire to imagine human motives beyond the limited conception provided by the transhistorical and transcultural theory of Economic Man.34 Indeed, this desire may be one of the reasons philanthropy—despite critiques from both left and right—has been as effective as it has.35 This desire is also a reason why philanthropy has proven such a fertile topic for literature.

‘‘The Difficult Art of Giving’’

9

However, the tensions between patronage and philanthropy, as well as between the original and modern meanings of philanthropy, are not the only causes of conceptual confusion in discussing philanthropy, particularly in the United States. There are two other linked confusions: one involving voluntarism and the other exceptionalism. Both confusions stem from what we can call the origins myth of philanthropy in the United States. Historians and sociologists alike typically begin their analyses of philanthropy with an invocation of Alexis de Tocqueville’s account of voluntary aid in Democracy in America. De Tocqueville writes in 1835: Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types—religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute. . . . if they want to proclaim a truth or propagate some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form an association. In every case, at the head of any new undertaking, where in France you would find the government or in England some territorial magnate, in the United States you are sure to find an association.36 De Tocqueville’s analysis has led many scholars to argue that modern, corporate-based philanthropy is a uniquely American phenomenon that represents the same democratic impulse that galvanizes all voluntary associations and grassroots organizations in the United States.37 The objections to such logic seem to me strikingly self-evident. The argument presumes that the work of abolitionists and Rockefeller’s huge fund for education in the South, the General Education Board, the publication of temperance tracts by religious societies, and the Flexner Report on medical education (funded by the Carnegie Corporation) not only are expressions of the same comparable and equivalent American democratic and voluntaristic spirit, but work in the same way. In fact, these quite different expressions of sociality and civic life often operated in direct opposition to each other. As I will discuss below and throughout the book, what made Rockefeller’s and Carnegie’s philanthropy objects of particular attention to their contemporaries was their link to corporate interests, their wealth, and the disproportionate power they could therefore wield in a democratic society. Likewise, the exceptionalism of American philanthropy is also easily disputed. As

10

Introduction

Thomas Adam, among others, has made clear, philanthropy and the kind of cultural and social interventions it made is a transatlantic phenomenon.38 He shows through case studies in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Canada how members of a mobile, urban, cosmopolitan bourgeoisie directly borrowed from each other’s philanthropic models, even as they competed with each other. Philanthropic activity, Adam asserts, is central to bourgeois self-definition throughout the West. Therefore, this book insists, first of all, on a distinction between corporate-based philanthropy and other forms of voluntary association or grassroots organization. As I will discuss later in this chapter, there is an ongoing struggle between the quite different forms of interventionism of corporate philanthropy and of other associations and organizations involved in social reform or change. Likewise, I insist that philanthropy is a transatlantic phenomenon, though I primarily analyze U.S. literary texts. This latter focus requires some explanation. My reasoning here is that largescale philanthropy does become particularly associated with this nation at the turn of the twentieth century and continues to be so today, despite all evidence to the contrary. The American Century is one in which American philanthropy comes to the fore. When Henry James, for example, decides to write about the bad faith of wealthy philanthropists engaged in poor relief, he focuses on the American-born Princess Casamassima, even though his story is set in England and could as easily have focused on the English-born Lady Aurora. Likewise, when James decides to delineate the rise of American imperialism and contrast it with a declining British empire, he focuses on millionaire American cultural philanthropist Adam Verver and his daughter Maggie, even though he sets his story again in England. To James, modern American philanthropy is noteworthy because it is linked to the nation’s current position as a newly puissant empire. Philanthropy is by no means unique to Americans in James, but the American version of philanthropy bears intensive scrutiny because it has become a key expression of American imperial power. James’s analysis builds on what we now know is a well-established relation between imperialism and philanthropy at the turn of the twentieth century. From the beginning, both Carnegie’s and Rockefeller’s philanthropy was focused not just on the nation, but also on ‘‘extending the ‘benefits’ of Western science, technology, and value systems abroad’’ (Arnove, 5)—an extension that was intended to make economic sense. A 1916 Rockefeller report describes the relation between philanthropy and

‘‘The Difficult Art of Giving’’

11

imperialism this way: to ‘‘peacefully penetrate . . . areas of the Philippine Islands,’’ and ‘‘for the purposes of placating primitive and suspicious peoples,’’ ‘‘medicine has some advantages over machine guns’’ (quoted in Richard E. Brown, in Arnove, 132).39 Scholars have argued that American imperialism differed from British in that it sought to open commercial routes rather than gain control of land, but as James’s fiction and the historical record suggest, the differences could be further examined by specifically linking it to modern philanthropy—in all its institutional, economic, and ideological complexity.40 Philanthropy, then, helps us to ask important questions about ‘‘the economic superstitions of the nineteenth century’’ (56), as Polanyi puts it, particularly about the free and self-regulating market. Like many others, I see these superstitions as having had and continuing to have—through the form of neoliberalism—a devastating impact on human life and the environment.41 At the same time, philanthropy often, and paradoxically, provides a record of the resistance to that devastation—even if in inchoate, contradictory, profoundly problematic, or self-defeating ways. A focus on philanthropy furthermore helps us look at the ways in which, seemingly unconsciously, the field of literary studies has also relied on and translated these superstitions. While this reliance may not have been as destructive as it has been in our society at large, it does demonstrate how deeply the idea of the free and self-regulating market has saturated all aspects of our thought: it has narrowed down the kinds of questions we ask about our world and the histories we tell about it. Finally, however, I want to repeat that my central concern is literature itself—how it responds to and also how it shapes the debates about the crisis in liberal capitalism and the market. As Polanyi’s work highlights, the notion of a free and self-regulating market has been one of the most resilient and powerful, yet also palpably fictional narratives of the West in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. I argue that it has therefore lent itself well to fictional treatment. The field of literature since the nineteenth century has often seen itself, as Pierre Bourdieu writes, as ‘‘the economic world reversed.’’42 While for Bourdieu this reversal signifies finally the irreducible economic rationality that determines literary production, I argue in the chapters ahead that the reversal also means that literature turns an analytical eye on the classical narratives about the ‘‘free market,’’ in part because literary texts see and perform themselves in reverse. It is not simply that the densely particularistic texts of the late

12

Introduction

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries read economics socially, though that is often—productively and problematically—the case.43 As we shall see, it is also true that the writers of those texts, in seeing literature as the reverse of the ‘‘real’’ economic world—a world of free and self-regulating markets—acknowledge (often quite ambivalently) the variety of ways such freedom is not true in the production of literature, and then extend that analysis—tentatively or insistently—back upon the larger world they seek to represent.44 The fiction of the market helped produce philanthropy, and philanthropy generated fiction—in terms of both production and content. For the remainder of this introduction, I want to explore the dominant fiction of the market at the turn of the twentieth century that helped produce philanthropy, before turning to a brief delineation of the ways that philanthropy generated fiction. ‘‘The miseries everywhere being suffered’’: Laissez-Faire Capitalism and the Crisis of Liberal Economics To understand the fiction of the free and self-regulating market at the fin de sie`cle, I want briefly to invoke Adam Smith’s foundational formulation of it in the eighteenth century. Smith’s theorization of the market first appears in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), not in The Wealth of Nations (1776), and the ‘‘invisible hand’’ is thus defined by the way it works to oppose and counterbalance the fundamental self-interestedness of human beings. Smith writes of the wealthy: [in] spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose . . . be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society.45 Here, the ‘‘invisible hand,’’ countering naturally selfish human beings, expresses its benevolent ‘‘love of mankind,’’ dividing necessities between

‘‘The Difficult Art of Giving’’

13

those who have and ‘‘the poor,’’ in ‘‘the interest of society’’ as a whole, rather than in the interest of any individual. Two issues are highlighted for us here. First, as numerous scholars have argued, we see the theological roots of liberal economics.46 Against a fallen, selfish man, there is an ‘‘invisible hand’’ that distributes resources fairly. Second and relatedly, we notice that the free market is conceived of not simply as an economic system, but also as a system of benevolent morality. Thus morality became central in legitimating and constituting the fiction of the necessary predominance of the market. However, this morality must necessarily be disassociated from the human. No action to others can be beneficent in this foundational formulation, given man’s ‘‘natural selfishness’’; only the mystical workings of the ‘‘invisible hand’’ can be philanthropic. While scholars have shown that Smith’s thought was more complicated than ‘‘a naı¨ve glorification of economic selfishness and providential belief that the sum of self-interested acts adds up to the collective good of all’’ (Liebersohn 35), by the midnineteenth century his theologically rooted account of the free market had become a naturalized account of laissez-faire capitalism.47 Noninterference resting on an ‘‘invisible hand’’ of God now rested fully on the ‘‘invisible hand’’ of nature. Some recent historians and critics have argued that the emergence of corporate capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century represents a significant break from both market and laissez-faire capitalism and demonstrates the pragmatic and progressive possibilities of the former as opposed to the latter.48 What such arguments ignore is the tangled and contradictory ways in which the fiction of a free and self-regulating market and especially its benevolent morality are nonetheless propped up in the culture of corporate capitalism. More particularly, as an expression of the turn-of-thecentury crisis in liberal economics, corporate philanthropy developed techniques of rationalization that justified interventionism—even as the fundamental fiction of markets was maintained.49 To demonstrate this, I turn to two influential philosophers of laissez-faire economics who were particularly popular with corporate capitalists: Herbert Spencer and his American epigone, William Graham Sumner.50 Having examined their theoretical response to the question of interventionism through benevolent aid, I then turn to Carnegie’s and Rockefeller’s ideas on philanthropy to demonstrate how, following the tangled logic of Spencer and Sumner, the two quite different corporate capitalists cum philanthropists rationalize philanthropy

14

Introduction

so it can shore up the fiction of the free and self-regulating market and its benevolent morality. Herbert Spencer’s popular The Data of Ethics (1879) is a useful starting point for an examination of how laissez-faire thinkers responded to the crisis in liberal economics.51 An attempt to give a scientific rather than mystical basis to the ‘‘ethics’’ of laissez-faire capitalism, the book popularized the concepts of ‘‘altruism’’ and ‘‘egoism’’ to explain human behavior and to justify noninterference in the workings of the market. Altruism, according to Thomas Dixon’s magisterial history, was a concept developed by August Comte to connote his ‘‘scientific discovery’’ that humans are innately benevolent, rather than innately selfish, as both Christian doctrine and Adam Smith had argued (5). Dixon points out that altruism was always confused conceptually; nonetheless, he argues convincingly that it was deeply appealing because it ‘‘helped people to think and argue, and to position themselves, in relation to two of the most pressing political questions of the time, namely what to do about the empire and what to do about the poor’’ (193). Likewise, these were also two of the most important questions with which philanthropy engaged itself, as this book shows. Spencer was ‘‘the most influential theorist’’ (183) of altruism, and his ‘‘popularity’’ (8) across the board, not simply with corporate capitalists, guaranteed that the concept was widely disseminated. To a reader today, the impact of Data is difficult to understand, not only because its reasoning is absolutist and contradictory, but also because its contradictions smack of the familiarity that breeds contempt. At bottom, its central question is whether anything should or can be done to alleviate the extraordinary human suffering witnessed in the nineteenth century, given the necessarily brutal ‘‘natural’’ conditions under which human social evolution and progress occur. After two hundred pages affirming the progressive course of natural laws, the despair at the heart of this question is articulated clearly. Spencer writes: ‘‘Life would be intolerable if, while the causes of misery remained as they now are, all men were not only in a high degree sensitive to the pains, bodily and mental, felt by those around and expressed in the faces of those they met, but were unceasingly conscious of the miseries everywhere being suffered’’ (285). While Spencer’s larger point here is that, thankfully, human adaptation has enabled us to be desensitized to others’ suffering (while in the future we will be more sensitive, even as such sensitivity will be unnecessary), this passage is remarkable for the way it acknowledges the ‘‘catastrophic dislocation’’

‘‘The Difficult Art of Giving’’

15

(Polanyi, 33) that nineteenth-century capitalism was causing. The passage expresses, however briefly, the crisis in liberal economics as experienced by even one of the most assertive advocates for laissez-faire capitalism, and thus the appeal that direct interventionism raised. Data is thus a dogmatist’s effort at claiming that the free and self-regulating market will end all suffering, and that any human attempt to stave off suffering is necessarily done in bad faith and will disrupt the unchangeable and beneficent laws of nature—even as the pressure of suffering is so extreme that Spencer is forced to lay out possibilities for momentary human interference. As is to be expected, Spencer’s central argument for nonintervention is naturalized. The ‘‘uniform principle’’ of social evolution, as in nature, is that the ‘‘better adapted’’ leave to their offspring their ‘‘better adaptation,’’ while the ‘‘ill-adapted’’ ‘‘either disappear . . . or . . . dwindle away’’ (217). Therefore, ‘‘Whatever qualifications this natural course of action may now or hereafter undergo, are qualifications that cannot, without fatal results essentially change it. Any arrangements which in a considerable degree prevent superiority from profiting by the rewards of superiority, or shield inferiority from the evils it entails . . . are arrangements diametrically opposed to the progress of organization and the reaching of a higher life’’ (218). Likewise, noninterference is a necessity because one of the unrecognized ‘‘self-evident truths’’ of the natural world is that ‘‘a creature must live before it can act,’’ and therefore ‘‘Ethics has to recognize the truth . . . that egoism comes before altruism,’’ that acts of ‘‘self-preservation . . . are the first requisites to universal welfare’’ (216). Because survival is a necessity, egoism is thus ‘‘an ultimate principle of conduct’’ and ‘‘egoistic claims must take precedence of altruistic claims’’ (218). ‘‘Absolute ethics’’ must therefore be grounded in egoism: ‘‘with arrival at finished adaptation . . . those occasions for postponement of self to others, which pure altruism contemplates, disappear’’ (266). Much as Smith’s theological formulation of the ‘‘invisible hand’’ of morality implied that any action by humans intended to be benevolent is both suspect and injurious to the social whole, so also in Spencer’s naturalistic logic. Spencer’s primary example of the problem with benevolent aid or altruism is in regard to imperialism, of which he writes: A society in which the most exalted principles of self-sacrifice for the benefits of neighbors are enunciated, may be a society in which unscrupulous sacrifice of alien fellow-creatures is not only tolerated

16

Introduction

but applauded. Along with professed anxiety to spread these exalted principles among heathens, there may go the deliberate fastening of a quarrel upon them with a view to annexing their territory. . . . And as in these cases transcendent altruism in theory co-exists with brutal egoism in practice, so conversely, a more qualified altruism may have for its concomitant a greatly moderated egoism. (231) There is much that is puzzling here. First, Spencer ignores longstanding arguments that equate imperialism with capitalism, with the ‘‘jealousy of trade.’’52 To Spencer, imperialism is linked only to religion, the expression of benevolent aid that masks self-interested greed. Dixon convincingly argues that the ‘‘egoistic’’ ‘‘anti-altruists’’ (321) of philosophical modernism, like Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche, are responding critically to Spencer’s popular ideas about altruism. However, I would add, one can also see how deeply indebted such thinkers were to Spencer. The scandal inhering in Nietzsche’s important concept of ressentiment is that morality hides a will to power; such a scandal is bread and butter to the notion of Economic Man foundational to a liberal economist like Spencer. (And indeed ressentiment becomes a crucial narrative frame in which to discuss philanthropy, as I will show in Chapters 1 and 4.) Spencer’s second example of the problem of benevolent aid, as Dixon predicts for us, is in poor relief. Spencer’s argument is a bit more layered here than in regard to imperialism. Imperialism, to Spencer, represents selfish greed masking itself as altruism, but apparently it is only those whom he dismisses as uncivilized savages who are hurt. By contrast, poor relief in a civilized society is a problem not only because it masks selfish greed but also because it injures both the selfish giver and the selfish recipient: ‘‘Most thinking people now recognize the demoralization caused by indiscriminate charity. They see how in the mendicant there is, besides destruction of the normal relation between labor expended and benefit obtained, a genesis of the expectation that others shall minister to his needs; showing itself sometimes in the venting of curses on those who refuse’’ (227). This notion of the serious problem of ‘‘indiscriminate charity’’ and of the ungrateful and ‘‘destruct[ive]’’ mendicant appears again and again in the writings of this period (and today in the various reimaginings of the ‘‘welfare queen’’ Ronald Reagan popularized). In Spencer’s thought to give is to injure and to receive is also to injure. As he puts it in a virtuoso

‘‘The Difficult Art of Giving’’

17

tautology, the giver ‘‘injure[s] self in benefiting [others],’’ while the recipient is ‘‘regardless of others . . . [in] accepting benefits which . . . [others] injure themselves in giving’’ (270). While demonstrating the problems altruism causes between nations and among the rich and poor, Spencer nonetheless and surprisingly cannot decide whether or not egoism is or should be the only imperative guiding human behavior. He acknowledges that altruism in nature is ‘‘no less essential than egoism’’ because ‘‘race-maintenance’’ through offspring is necessary for species survival and involves ‘‘expenditure of individual life to the end of increasing life in other individuals’’ (232). He furthermore argues that altruism is a sign of the higher ‘‘Aryan’’ civilization. As opposed to ‘‘wild,’’ ‘‘polygamous’’ (236) societies, where Spencer asserts there is little ‘‘subordination of self to others’’ and little ‘‘social co-operation,’’ Aryan societies are able to organize themselves into an interdependent society and thus create ‘‘altruistic relations in the political group’’ (236). Spencer furthermore equates the egoism of the uncivilized with that of the working class in order to describe the destructive impact such an ethos has on both the nation and on the others outside it. He writes that the ‘‘industrial classes, absorbed in questions about capital and labor, and thinking themselves unconcerned in our doings abroad, are suffering from lack of that wide-reaching altruism which should insist on just dealings with other peoples, civilized or savage’’ (251). Likewise, working-class political agitation is the ‘‘complete appropriation by each of whatever benefits are due to him, and consequent exclusion of his fellows from such benefits’’ (277). Nonetheless, what renders Spencer’s argument broadly consistent is that, after much tortured vacillation, he concludes that altruism is egoism. Repeatedly he explains, ‘‘the state of mind accompanying altruistic action, being a pleasurable state . . . cannot be other than egoistic’’ (247). He thus reconciles the contradictions of his position by arguing that while both altruism and egoism are required in a society, altruism represents a ‘‘higher egoistic satisfaction’’ and egoism a ‘‘lower egoistic satisfaction’’ (282). (Mark Twain was to have much fun parodying this particular distinction, as Chapter 3 explores.) Still, Spencer’s desire for balance and his evolutionary logic mean necessarily keeping the terms altruism and egoism analytically separate, so ‘‘pure egoism and pure altruism are both illegitimate,’’ and ‘‘a compromise is the only possibility’’ (253). This ideal compromise of egoism and altruism can only emerge in the future with ‘‘Absolute Ethics.’’ Spencer acknowledges,

18

Introduction

however, that the future has not yet arrived. Thus while Absolute Ethics is the horizon of possibility, we must necessarily be mired for the present in ‘‘Relative Ethics’’ (332–34). The balance of altruism and egoism in Relative Ethics provides ‘‘compromises that are the least objectionable’’ (329) as ‘‘approximately true answers’’ (334). And so it is that ‘‘the multitudinous philanthropic societies’’ (277) of elites reveal to Spencer an example of the temporary and imperfect, but nonetheless important, compromise of Relative Ethics, in which the claims ‘‘of personal well-being’’ made by the working class are balanced out by the ‘‘regard for the well-being of others’’ (277) of the upper classes through their philanthropic societies. If through tortured vacillation, Spencer finally endorses elite philanthropic interventionism, his epigone in America, William Graham Sumner, aggressively constricts such interventionism, arguing against the kinds of concessions Spencer makes. Sumner limits the possibilities of interventionism particularly by reading it in the post-Civil War context as a form of paternalism. However, even as Sumner’s market fundamentalism outstrips Spencer’s, Sumner nonetheless develops a formula that was very influential in rationalizing philanthropic intervention in the United States and representing it as nonintervention. In What Social Classes Owe Each Other (1883), Sumner formulates his central question in a different way from Spencer’s. Sumner asks ‘‘whether there is any class in society which lies under the duty and burden of fighting the battles of life for any other class,’’ or more specifically, should the class of ‘‘the rich, comfortable, prosperous, virtuous, respectable, educated, and healthy’’ seek to make the ‘‘less fortunate or less successful in the struggle for existence’’ ‘‘as comfortable as the former?’’53 The answer is an unequivocal no, and the same basic assumption that guides Spencer also guides Sumner: ‘‘God and Nature have ordained the chances and conditions of life on earth once for all. The case cannot be reopened’’ (14). As Sumner felicitously puts it, ‘‘Probably the victim is to blame. He almost always is so’’ (159). As with Spencer, the central problem in attempting to ameliorate the lot of the ‘‘unsuccessful’’ is not only that it interferes with the ‘‘automatic and instinctive’’ operations of that ‘‘impersonal force—supply and demand,’’ ‘‘this great co-operative effort [which] is one of the great products of civilization’’ (66), but also that benevolent action (as opposed to the cooperative action of the market) is always aggressive. The ‘‘humanitarians, philanthropists, and reformers,’’ in ‘‘recommend[ing] the less fortunate classes to pity and consideration . . . forget all about the rights of other

‘‘The Difficult Art of Giving’’

19

classes’’ (21). The ‘‘organized intervention of society through the State is either planned or hoped for, and the State is thus made to become the protector and guardian of certain classes’’ (23) by these supposed philanthropists. The ‘‘successful’’ man therefore becomes, in Sumner’s terms, the ‘‘Forgotten Man’’ (23), the man whose rights are abrogated. At the same time, ‘‘All schemes for patronizing ‘the working classes’ savor of condescension’’ (127). Paternalistic philanthropists render the poor into their ‘‘social pets’’ (124), which ‘‘demoralize[s] both parties, flattering the vanity of one and undermining the self-respect of the other’’ (128). Like Spencer, Sumner expands thus on the dangers of benevolent aid: ‘‘I fully believe that today the next most pernicious thing to vice is charity in its broad and popular sense’’ (157). Again, we have the discovery that morality masks a will to power and that benevolent aid is destructive to giver and recipient, an insight that links Sumner and Spencer to, as much as it separates them from the ‘‘anti-altruistic’’ philosophers of modernism who rebelled against them. But if through benevolent aid the philanthropist aggressively injures himself and those he putatively seeks to help, Sumner is most worried, as his rhetoric makes clear, about the ‘‘Forgotten Man.’’ According to Sumner, there are dangers in every form of government because of the ‘‘selfishness, cupidity, envy, and lust in all classes from highest to lowest’’ (33, his emphasis), but ‘‘the real danger of democracy is, that the classes which have the power under it will assume all the rights and reject all the duties—that is, that they will use the political power to plunder those-who-have. Democracy . . . must oppose the same cold resistance to any claims for favor on the ground of poverty, as on the ground of birth and rank’’ (37). Sumner’s account of the egoism of the working classes is again more aggressive than Spencer’s, just as his constriction of intervention is more consistent: ‘‘Free trade,’’ he concludes, ‘‘would be a greater blessing to ‘the poor man’ than all the devices of all the friends of humanity if they could be realized’’ (161). Nonetheless, even Sumner lays out the possibility for intervention. Striking a note of moderation, he concedes that ‘‘Environed as we are by risks and perils, which befall us as misfortunes, no man of us is in a position to say, ‘I know all the laws, and am sure to obey them all; therefore I shall never need aid and sympathy’ ’’ (158–59). Still, to Sumner, the injury that aid causes for both the giver and the recipient, combined with the selfinterestedness of working-class egoism, limits what humans can do for each

20

Introduction

other. Sumner thus argues that aid must always remain ‘‘private and personal’’ (159) and must never be legislated by the state or institutionalized, because it then no longer qualifies as true and heartfelt, and therefore, noninjurious, aid (157, 166). Gifts, he argues in a formulation influential for corporate philanthropy, can only be of the kind that ‘‘helps a man to help himself,’’ that ‘‘open[s] . . . the chances around him.’’ He makes clear that helping others to help themselves is ‘‘not in the least akin to the aid which is given in charity’’ (165). This distinction is ‘‘so plain as never to be forgotten,’’ though if the reader is confused, she is not alone, for as Sumner ingenuously notes, ‘‘the fallacy of confusing the two is one of the commonest in all social discussions’’ (166). Likewise, the reader might be confused by the insistence, on the one hand, that such aid leads ‘‘to restriction, not extension, of the functions of the State,’’ and on the other hand, that it is the State’s duty to ‘‘increase, multiply, and extend the chances’’ (168, his emphasis) available to all. In the differences between Sumner and Spencer, particularly in this notion that aid must be ‘‘private and personal’’ and must only ‘‘help a man to help himself,’’ while the actions of the State are ‘‘restrict[ed]’’—even as the State intervenes in ‘‘extend[ing] the chances’’—we see how liberal economists described philanthropic intervention without in the least acknowledging it as intervention or, oddly enough, as linked to the state. In other words, what is at stake in Sumner and Spencer, despite their differences, is a commitment to describing philanthropic intervention in such a way that it cannot be understood as undermining the conception of the free and self-regulating market. The insistence that such aid is not intervention and furthermore that it does not involve the state confirms the fiction of the beneficence of capitalism. In short, despite the overall logic of both theorists, the door is opened to intervention: aid must be given, chances must be extended. Such aid, however, must confirm the fiction of a free, self-regulating, and beneficent market that works beyond the human, rewarding natural merit and punishing natural incompetence, in the name of social evolution and human progress.

‘‘The Difficult Art of Giving’’ Given the contradictions as well as the often confusing strictures on intervention that are created during the late nineteenth-century crisis in liberal

‘‘The Difficult Art of Giving’’

21

economics, it is not surprising that a common discourse in Carnegie’s and Rockefeller’s writing on their philanthropy is what Rockefeller called ‘‘The Difficult Art of Giving’’ (Random Reminscences, chap. 6). ‘‘Pity the poor millionaire, for the way of the philanthropist is hard,’’ Carnegie wrote to the editor of the Independent in 1913.54 There cannot but be something ludicrous in this discourse of how ‘‘giving’’ away (while also keeping) extraordinary sums of money represents hardship. One is tempted simply to take this discourse with a large grain of salt, as did some of Carnegie’s and Rockefeller’s contemporaries.55 Even so, this discourse is telling for the case I am making—that large-scale institutional philanthropy represents a crisis in liberal economics and the notion of the free and self-regulating market’s beneficent morality. Repeatedly the two robber barons discuss, separately and together, the kind of critique their philanthropy came under and encourage each other to soldier on despite the hectoring of their critics.56 In a letter to Herbert Spencer, whom he called ‘‘Master,’’ Carnegie compares his sufferings at the hands of the ‘‘working masses’’ who criticize and reject his philanthropy to those of Christ on the Cross, saying that they ‘‘know not what they did.’’57 Likewise, if Carnegie faced working-class critics and his libraries were rejected by numerous cities, he also faced opposition from fellow elites like Thomas Mellon, who had also read Spencer and was utterly opposed to Carnegie’s philanthropy.58 In this sense, philanthropy is a ‘‘difficult art.’’ One could argue that these men’s business practices should have inured them to the critique of ‘‘interventionism.’’ As I will discuss in Chapter 4, Rockefeller gave little credence to the notion of the ‘‘struggle for the survival of the fittest’’ in markets, referring to corporate capitalism (as Sumner also had) as ‘‘cooperative’’ rather than competitive.59 Nonetheless, ‘‘the difficult art of giving’’ was difficult precisely because it highlighted a crisis in the foundational fiction of the beneficent free and self-regulating market of liberal capitalism. On the one hand, philanthropy revealed that whatever the benefits of business cooperation, such cooperation had not functioned benevolently in distributing equally the necessities (let alone the luxuries) of life. On the other hand, it highlighted the fact that powerful capitalists not only could but did intervene substantively in the economic laws (cooperative or otherwise) that they claimed governed the world. Focusing on Carnegie’s famous paired essays ‘‘The Gospel of Wealth’’ and ‘‘The Best Fields for Philanthropy’’ (June, December 1889),60 but referring also to Rockefeller’s central writings on philanthropy in Random Reminiscences of Men and Events (1909), I want to show that, as with Spencer

22

Introduction

and Sumner, philanthropy is an impossibility to Carnegie and Rockefeller, and yet in different ways also a necessity. To begin with Carnegie, the selfdescribed disciple of Spencer, takes as his central assumption that the ‘‘law of competition’’ cannot be abrogated: ‘‘while the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department’’ (‘‘Gospel,’’ 3). Likewise, abrogation is impossible because of ‘‘human nature,’’ which is fundamentally selfinterested (4). Like Spencer and Sumner, Carnegie’s account also implies that working-class agitation on issues of ‘‘social equality’’ (2) is mere egoism, but interestingly he spends as much of his time on the topic of how his fellow millionaires have responded improperly to such agitation. Class warfare is indeed the central threat, or as Carnegie puts it in the first sentence of ‘‘Gospel’’: ‘‘The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship’’ (1). Such harmony, he concedes, is not currently in evidence (2–3), and the Socialist, Anarchist, Communist, as well as the Swedenborgian and Tolstoyan (‘‘Gospel,’’ 4, 8, 9; also ‘‘Fields,’’ 14), are each attempting to remedy the conflict of classes in their various ways by attacking ‘‘the foundation upon which civilization itself rests’’ (‘‘Gospel,’’ 4). However, if the threat of these various movements and philosophies worries Carnegie, the wealthy themselves are of even greater concern. Variously the millionaire is described as an ‘‘ignoble hoarder’’ (‘‘Fields,’’ 30), filled with ‘‘vanity,’’ hobbled by ‘‘folly,’’ ‘‘selfish,’’ and ‘‘unworthy’’ (‘‘Gospel,’’ 5, 7), and very much like the camel of the biblical parable who cannot enter the eye of a needle (‘‘Fields,’’ 30). The real problem with the millionaire, as it turns out, is his dangerous generosity: ‘‘As far as my experience of the wealthy extends, it is unnecessary to urge them to give of their superabundance in charity so-called’’ (‘‘Fields,’’ 17). As with Spencer’s critique of ‘‘indiscriminate charity’’ (Data, 270), Carnegie says that a bigger problem than poverty is millionaires’ ‘‘indiscriminate giving’’: ‘‘It is ever to be remembered that one of the chief obstacles which the philanthropist meets in his efforts to do real and permanent good in the world is the practice of indiscriminate giving’’ (‘‘Fields,’’ 17; see also 15). Such giving is fundamentally ‘‘injury’’ (‘‘Gospel,’’ 11); it does ‘‘injury to society’’ (‘‘Fields,’’ 17); it is ‘‘injurious to the community’’ (18); it ‘‘breed[s] the diseases which afflict the body politic’’ (21). Indeed, in a grand rhetorical flourish reminiscent of both Spencer and

‘‘The Difficult Art of Giving’’

23

Sumner, he argues that ‘‘injurious giving’’ is ‘‘a greater obstacle to the progress of humanity, than a score of wordy Socialists’’ (17). Carnegie illustrates the moral through a direct allusion to Spencer and his ‘‘destruct[ive]’’ (Data, 227) mendicant, narrating how a ‘‘professed . . . disciple of Herbert Spencer’’ nonetheless once thoughtlessly gave a ‘‘quarter of a dollar’’ to a ‘‘beggar,’’ thereby causing ‘‘more injury than all the money . . . [he] will ever be able to give in true charity will do good.’’61 The thoughtless gift of a quarter from this otherwise ‘‘most worthy’’ individual represents ‘‘one of the most selfish and very worst action[s] of his life’’ (‘‘Gospel,’’ 11). Carnegie’s solution to the threat of indiscriminate quarter distribution, a threat which as we shall see both William Dean Howells and Mark Twain satirized fictionally, is administrative. He argues we should empower the ‘‘MAN’’ with a special ‘‘talent for organization and management’’ (‘‘Gospel,’’ 3), the ‘‘millionaire’’ (12) who does not engage in ‘‘injurious giving,’’ to be the ‘‘trustee for the poor; intrusted [sic] . . . with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself’’ (12; see also 9, and ‘‘Fields,’’ 21). This millionaire will engage in administered and thus also rightly capitalist giving. Though no citation to Sumner’s book is given (and certainly no reference to his critique of paternalism), Carnegie’s formulation is the same: ‘‘In bestowing charity, the main consideration should be to help those who will help themselves’’ (‘‘Gospel,’’ 11; see also 12 and ‘‘Fields,’’ 17, 21). Like Sumner, Carnegie assumes this distinction is clear, but unlike Sumner, he sees dangers surrounding even such a clear distinction. Such gifts, no matter how worthy the recipient, may have a ‘‘degrading, pauperizing tendency’’ (‘‘Fields,’’ 16) and ‘‘spread . . . a spirit of dependence’’ (17). Relying on what Susan M. Ryan calls the ‘‘rhetoric of suspicion,’’ which she demonstrates was common in the discourse of mid-nineteenth-century benevolence, Carnegie argues that every gift of the philanthropic rich must be matched by gifts from the ‘‘community’’ or state to avoid demoralization, a sentiment he repeats so frequently (‘‘Fields,’’ 17, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 27, 28) that even the wise administrator of surplus funds who has avoided all previous pitfalls of ‘‘injurious giving’’ seems to be thoughtlessly headed for disaster.62 Likewise, while Carnegie states there should not be ‘‘general concurrence as to the best possible use of surplus wealth’’ (29), he makes clear that certain kinds of gifts are preferable to others. Carnegie lists seven

24

Introduction

major discriminate uses of wealth, with various subcategories, but also makes clear that two kinds are taboo. First, redistribution of surplus wealth through wages is not acceptable. While wages are ‘‘the highest form of distribution, being for work done, and not for charity’’ (‘‘Gospel,’’ 8), they are nonetheless often ‘‘wasted in the indulgence of appetite, some of it in excess’’ (9). Second, surplus wealth should not be used on the ‘‘irreclaimably destitute, shiftless, and worthless’’ (‘‘Fields, 16–17; see also ‘‘Gospel,’’ 11). The latter are the responsibility of the ‘‘city or the state’’ (‘‘Fields,’’ 17, 26), not the millionaire. The hysteria surrounding the quarter given indiscriminately to a beggar and the strictures on philanthropy even for the ‘‘worthy’’—in short, the dangers to both the wealthy and their recipients— makes philanthropy appear even more mystical than the potlatch rituals Marcel Mauss famously described.63 Administration can (barely) tame the danger of philanthropy. While Rockefeller’s account is somewhat different, the same anxiety about the dangers of philanthropy and the same rhetoric of suspicion are evident, as is the same solution in administration. As noted earlier, the famously private and unreadable Rockefeller describes himself as led ‘‘almost to a nervous break-down’’ by what he refers to as the ‘‘everwidening field of philanthropic endeavor’’ (Reminiscences, 156). While Rockefeller is less direct than Carnegie in stating what makes philanthropy so very difficult, he nonetheless insists, like Carnegie, that the challenge has to do primarily with the laws of progress: ‘‘No matter how noisy the pessimists may be, we know the world is getting better steadily and rapidly, and that is a good thing to remember’’ (184). Like Carnegie, then, he argues that philanthropy is a response to socialism, anarchism, and communism, what Rockefeller calls blandly, the ‘‘many crude plans’’ for providing ‘‘the widest possible distribution of the blessings of life,’’ a distribution he also insists that ‘‘We all desire’’ (154). Such crude plans, Rockefeller argues in a similar vein to Carnegie, ignore the ‘‘essential facts of human nature, and if carried out would perhaps drag our whole civilization down into hopeless misery’’ (154), as they either place capital ‘‘into the Treasury of the Nation and of the various states’’ or would involve ‘‘schemes of socialism’’ (159). Rockefeller doesn’t explain the dangers here; the ‘‘militant creed’’ of liberal economics renders such explanation unnecessary. Following Sumner, Rockefeller philosophizes that ‘‘the principal cause for the economic differences between people is their difference in personality, and that it is only as we can assist in the wider distribution of those qualities which go to

‘‘The Difficult Art of Giving’’

25

make up a strong personality that we can assist in the wider distribution of wealth’’ (154). Repeating Sumner’s and Carnegie’s formulation, Rockefeller writes, such ‘‘qualities can never be developed in a man unless by his own efforts, and the most that any other can do for him is, as I have said, to help him to help himself’’ (154; see also 152–53, 186). This familiar formulation of course implies the dangers of philanthropy as well as its possibilities in staving off the ‘‘many crude plans’’ for redistribution of wealth. ‘‘It is easy to do harm in giving money’’ (182), writes Rockefeller. The destructive mendicant, therefore, appears again; however, this time he is a problem to be solved and managed, not dramatized: ‘‘One man says: ‘I do not believe in giving money to street beggars.’ I agree with him. I do not believe in the practice either; but that is not a reason why one should be exempt from doing something to help the situation represented by the street beggar’’ (173). Rockefeller’s solution to ‘‘the situation represented by the street beggar,’’ like Carnegie’s, is administrative and top down, for ‘‘men of wealth’’ ‘‘to administer their funds . . . for the general good’’ (160). However, administration as a solution to the dangers of ‘‘indiscriminate charity’’ is more thoroughly explained by Rockefeller than by Carnegie. It is a solution because it is business: The best philanthropy, the help that does the most good and the least harm, the help that nourishes civilization at its very root . . . is not what is usually called charity. It is, in my judgment, the investment of effort or time or money, carefully considered with relation to the power of employing people at a remunerative wage, to expand and develop the resources at hand, and to give opportunity for progress and healthful labour where it did not exist before. No mere money-giving is comparable to this in its lasting and beneficial results. (141–42) Here Rockefeller differs from Carnegie in his argument about wages, but he does so in part to express the dangers yet again of philanthropy (‘‘mere money-giving’’) and to make a larger argument, which should be familiar at this point—that no distinction obtains between morality/philanthropy and business/capitalism. Rockefeller enforces this larger argument by modeling his administrative philanthropy on business. As with the businessman who pays his workers, by analogy the philanthropist businessman keeps

26

Introduction

money ‘‘universally diffused, in the sense that it is kept invested’’ (159) through projects that help men to help themselves. More important, philanthropies should model themselves on corporations like Standard Oil: ‘‘If a combination to do business is effective in saving waste and in getting better results, why is not combination far more important in philanthropic work?’’ (165). Thus, Rockefeller advocates for what he calls ‘‘Benevolent Trusts’’ (185), run—as Carnegie also advocated—by businessmen (184– 88). Only in this way will the ‘‘business of benevolence’’ be conducted ‘‘properly and effectively’’ (188), rather than in a ‘‘haphazard’’ (184) fashion. I have thus far focused on the tangled formulations created in the dialogue between liberal economists and corporate businessmen during the crisis in liberal economics. These defenders of liberal capitalism worked to intervene in the ‘‘miseries everywhere being suffered’’ through a carefully circumscribed philanthropy, while keeping the fiction of the beneficent, free, and self-regulating market alive and well. Nonetheless, what my account has thus far minimized is the obvious fact that such intervention occurred under extreme pressure from anarchists, socialists, communists, and Social Gospel Christians, as well as free silver and tariff reform advocates, settlement house workers, and union activists, who were critically scrutinizing the notion that the benevolent morality of free and self-regulating markets was leading to inevitable human progress. Both men therefore explicitly describe their philanthropy as necessary to defend or legitimate themselves and their class, and by implication the system that produced them.64 For Carnegie, philanthropy will ‘‘dignify’’ the lives of ‘‘rich men’’ (‘‘Gospel,’’ 9), bring them ‘‘affection, gratitude, and admiration of his fellow-men’’ (30) and will not bar them from ‘‘the Gates of Paradise’’ (30). More directly, and less emotionally, Rockefeller says that philanthropy enables ‘‘men of means to maintain the title to their property’’ (160). If Carnegie and Rockefeller expressed the need to ‘‘maintain the title to their property,’’ this was in part because a wide range of groups and people were criticizing such title. Indeed, in 1915, one year after the Ludlow massacre at Rockefellerowned coal mines (1914), four years after the official incorporation of the first modern foundation in the United States by Carnegie (1911), and two years after the incorporation of the second by Rockefeller (1913), Congress convened the Walsh Committee to investigate the influence of corporatebased philanthropy on American politics and society. Among other corporate philanthropists called to testify before Congress were Andrew Carnegie,

‘‘The Difficult Art of Giving’’

27

John D. Rockefeller, Sr., John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Henry Ford.65 Broadly speaking, we could call the resistance that these hearings represent to corporate-based philanthropy and narratives of corporate beneficent morality ‘‘Progressivism.’’ Such a statement will be immediately controversial, given that philanthropy is deeply indebted to many of the central commitments also associated with Progressivism.66 Indeed, two contrary readings of Progressivism still obtain in historical scholarship: on the one hand, that Progressivism was a political movement engaged in a critique of corporate capitalism, and on the other hand, that Progressivism was quite simply the political arm of corporate capitalism.67 For the purposes of this book, my own definition relies primarily on Richard L. McCormick’s account of it as a loosely united, but also internally contestatory, nationwide movement that was galvanized by the ‘‘discovery’’ that ‘‘business corrupts politics’’ (311). McCormick argues that Progressivism in the end did become the political arm of corporate capitalism, but nonetheless insists that it also provided the political critique—sometimes radical, sometimes not—of laissez-faire economics and corporate capitalism (270). What galvanized Progressives, McCormick argues, was the interventionism of nineteenth-century market society in the form of the cozy social and economic relations that obtained between business and government elites, or more simply, ‘‘patronage’’ (322).68 While such social interventionism was acceptable in mid-nineteenth-century America, McCormick says, by the turn of the century, as the power and size of corporations grew, such social interventionism became unacceptable to a wide spectrum of people. Committed themselves to an ethos of active ‘‘interventionism’’ (270) in the name of reform, Progressives with a range of political positions created voluntary associations that studied and sought to disrupt the cozy patronage relations between business and the state. McCormick argues that, given the disproportionate power that corporations exerted in American society, the new kind of state intervention that emerged unfortunately became inextricably yoked to the interests of corporate capitalism; however, he also insists that that was not the aim of many Progressives (see especially McCormick, chaps. 7, 9). Particularly useful in McCormick’s analysis for understanding corporate philanthropy are three main issues: first and most important, that Progressives’ political activism—in whatever shape it took—represents a scandalized response to the patronage relationship between businessmen and the state. We could call this the Progressive critique of (unequal or

28

Introduction

unacknowledged) social interventionism in the putatively free and selfregulating market. Second, whether socialists or free trade advocates, Progressives created new kinds of voluntary associations and new methods of lobbying and advocacy in order to criticize the previous forms of social interventionism and replace them with new ones. Third, while the outcome of Progressive voluntary association and advocacy may have inadvertently worked to turn the state into the political arm of corporate capitalism, that was not the intention of many Progressives. In other words, while McCormick’s larger point—that politics can be unpredictable—is not mine, what he usefully highlights is that Progressivism is central to the crisis in liberal economics and the struggles over interventionism and the form such interventionism takes. Thus, while corporate philanthropy can be read as a form of Progressivism, such philanthropy is formed in opposition to the politics of many other kinds of Progressives and to many of the grassroots or voluntary associations and institutions they created. I am not alone in claiming that the emergence of large-scale philanthropy at the turn of the century represents, at least in part, a struggle with other voluntary associations, including grassroots ones, over how to intervene in the ‘‘miseries everywhere being suffered.’’ If, from one angle, corporate philanthropy can be seen as having co-opted Progressives and their grassroots or voluntary associations, as scholars like Joan Roelofs and the INCITE! collective argue, from another angle, we can argue that this process also represents concessions made by corporate capitalists to those with very different politics.69 In recent years, Bourdieuvian accounts of philanthropy as an exclusively intra-class social phenomenon have been particularly prominent. While such accounts have been useful in challenging the notion that modern philanthropy represents the benevolence of corporations or individual donors, they also tend to minimize the cross-class pressures that philanthropy also registers. My definition of philanthropy depends on cross-class contestation.70 The ‘‘difficult art of giving’’ that corporate philanthropy represents was difficult because it had to rationalize itself to fit in with the foundational fiction of the benevolent morality of the free and self-regulating market, stretching that fiction to its breaking point. At the same time, corporate philanthropy had to distance itself from ‘‘patronage’’ as a form of (social) interventionism that had become deeply controversial, while nonetheless proving it was a better form of interventionism than the many others proposed at the

‘‘The Difficult Art of Giving’’

29

time, including emergent ideas about the welfare state. Philanthropy therefore embodies a crisis in the fictions of liberal economics and a solution to that crisis, but also a series of concessions made to the critics of liberal economics—critics of all different political stripes.

The Literary Market I have demonstrated some of the ways the fiction of the market at the turn of the twentieth century helped produce philanthropy. I want now to open up briefly the question that the rest of the book engages with in a variety of ways: namely, how patronage and an emergent philanthropy helped generate literature. At the level of production, the central issue I focus on is, again, interventionism. In the ‘‘standard narrative’’ (Turnovsky, 5) of literary history, scholars describe how the mode of production for literature switches from a constraining system of patronage by elites and genteel amateurism to what is described as the free literary market and professionalism. Dates for this change continually shift within and across nations, but in U.S. literary history, scholars generally periodize the transformation as occurring in the post-Civil War period. Literary historians have translated the notion of the beneficent working of the free and self-regulating market most typically into a notion about the democratization and professionalization of the literary field. The market, they argue, helped democratize literary production and consumption, even as it enabled the creation of a new profession in which writers could support themselves without a need for patrons or sponsors. This narrative thus also tends to focus on the individual writer and how he or she freely sold his or her literary wares on the market.71 While literary historians may trace the role that mentoring, coteries, and sponsorship play, the artist’s role in making and selling his/her work is the central focus.72 This narrative as a whole and in its different strands, has been useful in many ways and has generated important scholarship and insights. In recent years, however, the ‘‘new economic criticism’’ has mounted the most aggressive critique of the central assumptions the narrative borrows from political economy: namely, the progressive effects of the market and the notion of the author as Economic Man.73 Leon Jackson’s study of the multiple ‘‘authorial economies’’ in antebellum U.S. literature has been the most useful in shaping my own analysis.

30

Introduction

Jackson criticizes the standard literary historical narrative of ‘‘consumer triumphalism’’ and ‘‘triumphal democratization,’’ as well as the ‘‘conceptually impoverished’’ division of writers into amateur and professional.74 He argues convincingly that, if anything, the literary field becomes less democratic as the ‘‘market’’ comes to dominate. In a series of brilliantly conceived and researched microhistories, Jackson shows the ways in which the ‘‘market’’ was not central in nineteenth-century American literature, and that instead, literature was purposely exchanged so as to gain ‘‘not only money, but other desirables, such as knowledge, honor, prestige, and legitimacy’’ (31–32). Jackson demonstrates that economic rationality or profit was only one small part of the closely mixed social and economic purposes of literature. Relying on Polanyi’s work in a way different from mine, Jackson contrasts the antebellum period’s ‘‘socially embedded’’ literary economy with the post-bellum period’s ‘‘disembedded’’ economy, in which literature became ‘‘detached from the dense social worlds of which . . . [it was] part’’ (3). Jackson’s analysis of antebellum patronage, gift exchange, literary debt, and literary competitions provides a powerful critique of the thesis of expansion and progressive democratization by showing how socially embedded literary culture often operated both more expansively and more democratically than the disembedded market culture that succeeded it. The book thus helps us to reevaluate both the uncritical acceptance of triumphalist narratives of expansion and democratization and the notion of the author as transhistorically Economic Man.75 However, even Jackson’s beautifully argued critique of the standard narrative of expansive democratization ends up relying on unexamined assumptions about the market borrowed from liberal economics. Jackson’s adaption of Polanyi’s concepts of social embeddedness and disembeddedness to describe antebellum and post-bellum literary production highlights the problem. Jackson uses these concepts to compare degrees of ‘‘marketness’’ (46) in the two periods. However, Polanyi used the terms embedded and disembedded in two different ways, rather than the singular way Jackson uses them. On the one hand, as Greta Krippner explains, Polanyi applied the term disembedded ‘‘within the limited purview of nineteenth-century British industrialism’’ to distinguish that economic system from others that did not depend on rationalized utility.76 This enabled Polanyi to criticize how classical economics applied itself transhistorically and cross-culturally to contemporary non-Western societies. On the other hand, Krippner shows, Polanyi knew that market society as imagined by

‘‘The Difficult Art of Giving’’

31

classical economics was a utopian ideal that was never actually achieved anywhere. The notion of ‘‘disembeddedness’’ was therefore for Polanyi not only a comparative tool that called into question the transhistorical assumptions of nineteenth-century Western economics, but also one which enabled Polanyi ‘‘to portray the market, even as it approximated the ideal of theory, as an inextricably social object’’ (782), against liberal economics’ imagining of the market. Krippner argues that scholars need to balance Polanyi’s comparative notion of a disembedded economic system with his account of how disembeddedness is also a social construction, is also embedded. Indeed, if the literary economy of post-bellum America became less expansive and democratic, as Jackson and others convincingly argue, following Polanyi’s logic, one need not assume this is the result of disembeddedness only in the comparative sense. Instead, it may well be expressive of a different sociality in which certain kinds of interactions or connections matter more than others. Without in the least diminishing the importance of rationalized utility in the late nineteenth century, one can still be left with numerous questions about the relation of sociality to economics.77 The conflicts in literary history over periodization help open up these questions. While the standard periodization in the United States has been that patronage and genteel amateurism gave way to a free market in the post-bellum period, dates remain contested. Some literary historians of the United States have described the same kind of disembeddedness Jackson does, but say it occurs not in the post-Civil War period, but rather in the middle of the twentieth century. Focusing on ‘‘literary’’ texts rather than ‘‘mass’’ culture texts, these historians argue that well into the twentieth century the major literary publishing firms were still run by families, and personal and intimate relations between publishers and authors were central to the publishing process.78 While not definitive, such arguments suggest that what we now call ‘‘niche marketing’’ in the early twentieth century might well be explored in terms of social interactions at the level of production as well as of consumption.79 Literary publishing, we could speculate, might indeed be characterized by one set of social interactions, mass publishing by another—neither of which has been fully charted. Indeed, current studies of the ‘‘cultural economy’’ of high modernism have pointed in precisely this direction. Patronage in elite cultural production, for example, has become an object of renewed attention. Focusing on the high literary modernism of the teens and twenties, Lawrence Rainey

32

Introduction

and Paul Delany have separately analyzed the significant role that face-toface patronage by a cosmopolitan rentier class played in funding and shaping that movement, rather than the mass market. While Rainey and Delany read this ‘‘new patronage’’ in completely different ways, as I will discuss in Chapter 1, their work suggests how social embeddedness remains crucial in the twentieth century.80 Current social network theory further opens up these possibilities. Sociologist Paul McLean, like Rainey and Delany, argues that paradoxically the more competitive a market society is, and the more it is driven by an ideology of upward mobility and self-help, the more familial and social ‘‘networks’’ are actually determinant. Social relations are not subordinated to economic relations and do not become abstracted, McLean argues; in fact, they become more important and all-consuming— albeit in historically different ways.81 Karl Marx famously argued in discussing two different Napoleons that history repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce. We need not make the same generic claims, but we can follow him in noting a certain repetitiveness as social networks in the United States create de´ja` vu all over again (Brown I and Brown II; Bush I, II, and III; Clinton I and Clinton II; Romney I and Romney II). I should be clear here that my object in this book is not to create a new theory and periodization of the literary market, or to somehow purify literary studies of the assumptions of classical economics, a purification that as Gordon Bigelow’s work suggests may well be impossible.82 Instead, the aim of this book is to explore one particular form of embeddedness at the level of production within and outside the literary field: namely the social interventionism of patronage and an emergent philanthropy. This interventionism has bearing on how writers understood, analyzed, and represented the fiction of liberal economics of the free and self-regulating market that continued to dominate at the time. Such interventionism also helps us to rethink the pieties on which we as literary historians have relied almost unconsciously to understand the literary market. On the one hand, social interventionism, rather than the ‘‘free’’ market, was a central experience for all the authors in this book. On the other hand, the writers of this period were profoundly fascinated with the topic of social interventionism more generally, and particularly with patronage and an emergent philanthropy. I must emphasize here, however, that the book’s focus on both authorial experience and textual representation is in no way meant to suggest that there is an easy connection between the latter and the former or that one is reducible to the other. While I depend on biography to some extent

‘‘The Difficult Art of Giving’’

33

throughout the book, I do so with the characteristic hesitation of a literary scholar who sees cultural representation as potentially exceeding personal and historical determinants. As is evident from the vocabulary I have used throughout the introduction, this book depends on Raymond Williams’s argument that a mixture of dominant, residual, and emergent elements of social phenomena appear in cultural representations.83 In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, important innovations in sponsorship were becoming evident, in the ways in which businessmen and artists/intellectuals were forging new (if also familiar) connections in men’s clubs and other urban venues (Chapter 2, 3, 5), and also in the ways these new connections led to the founding or expansion of arts and educational institutions— museums, schools, and universities (Chapters 1, 4, 5). Nonetheless, the transformation from older forms of sponsorship and interventionism to newer ones was slow and uneven. Most of the texts I discuss were written well before the two major modern foundations—Carnegie and Rockefeller—were officially incorporated (though both men had already established public records of philanthropic giving by the 1880s); and none of the artists I discuss were directly funded through the kind of institutional sponsorship and grants that are normative today. Williams’s framework thus helps me analyze representations that exceed a smoking gun theory of biography and history, even as I chart how sometimes direct, sometimes indirect forms of corporate-based sponsorship led to political and ethical questions we continue to wrestle with today. I would add that while I distinguished patronage and philanthropy from each other earlier in this chapter, as must be evident from my discussion of their conceptual complexity, there is also frequently historical and philosophical overlap between them, for which Williams’s framework also allows. Finally, in terms of my use of biography in this book, my central interest is the emergence of corporate-based philanthropy, and so authorial experience is of lesser and greater importance in different chapters. All the authors in this book depended on social interventionism in their careers; however, the form in which they experienced such interventionism is not always important to trace out for my larger argument. But even in the lesser and greater weight I give to biography in individual chapters, I continue to refuse any simple connection between biography and representation. Some authors with little personal experience of corporate-based sponsorship nonetheless observed the phenomenon with equal or greater attentiveness

34

Introduction

than those authors with personal experience of it. In short, I see all the writers in this book as critical thinkers of ‘‘The Gilded Age,’’ engaged by and concerned with the interventionism of patronage and philanthropy— their work inflected but not limited by the conditions of interventionism they themselves experienced in their vocation as writers. Nonetheless, despite the complexities and limitations of biography as a tool, I clearly also have relied on it at the broadest level as a form of sociocultural analysis. This is evident particularly in my selection of writers— namely authors whose social status and writings are (for the most part) not marginal. My selection of well-known and canonical writers is partially a pragmatic choice: rereading these writers’ career trajectories which have been carefully documented by generations of scholars helps me highlight the social interventionism that we often describe without analyzing.84 At the same time, my choice involves a feminist polemic about the social world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I am interested in how gendered and racially segregated social networks have remained relatively unacknowledged aspects of these writers’ careers, just as such networks remain relatively unacknowledged in American society more generally. Put another way, interventionism on the market intersects with the notion of ‘‘social capital,’’ what the historian Pamela Laird has defined as ‘‘the necessity for connections and connectability’’ in the United States.85 The choice of these authors has everything to do particularly with ‘‘connectability,’’ with the factors ‘‘that determine who gets invited into the networks of . . . opportunity’’ (2) in a given historical moment. However, and again, I do not want to reduce these authors socioculturally to their connectability, to the ways whiteness and maleness provided social capital in the period. These authors were selected because they depict and examine the relation of connectability and interventionism and explore how those factors call into question the ‘‘militant creed’’ of the free market. Their work does not simply evade the logic of its own production, but usefully and complexly engages it.86 Finally, my focus primarily on successful white male writers is not meant to signify that women or social minorities more generally did not rely on intervention or social capital as they negotiated the market.87 On the contrary, intervention for those with historically negative social connectability was what provoked my interest in this topic. As I stated in my Preface, I was originally interested in the ways sponsorship was crucial for

‘‘The Difficult Art of Giving’’

35

Harlem Renaissance writers and artists, enabling them to enter the putatively free market. That interest shifted, however, into one which focused on the double standard of analysis we use in modern literary studies, whereby Harlem Renaissance writers are frequently read as tainted by their relation to sponsorship, while other writers equally, if differently, sponsored are seen as succeeding through their merit on the free market. This book demonstrates the way systems of sponsorship are a necessity for all writers in a capitalist economy, both those ‘‘invited into the networks of . . . opportunity’’ (2) and those who are not. Some work has been done on the ways in which women and minorities relied on similar and different forms of social capital in this period.88 In my chapter on Charles Chesnutt, I gesture toward such comparisons; however, fuller comparisons will have to wait for another book. For now, highlighting the double standard we have used to talk about sponsorship, as well as our neglect of the different ways social capital matters historically, is my focus. Each chapter explores an individual case of the interventionism of patronage and an emergent philanthropy in the literary field. Nevertheless, common themes emerge across chapters. Chapters 1 and 2, on James and Howells, focus on patronage and an emergent philanthropy by particularly highlighting the international context in which they emerge. Chapter 1 begins by analyzing some conceptual problems in studying philanthropy before examining how a specifically American generosity (in the form of philanthropy) provides Henry James with a way to compare the European empires of the past to a new American one. Like Friedrich Nietzsche, James reads American social reform and cultural philanthropy, in novels like The Princess Casamassima and The Golden Bowl, as the product of ressentiment, the envious and vengeance-driven resentment of American ‘‘slaves’’ against European masters. Despite such a reading, James nonetheless argues that one kind of American philanthropy exceeds such envy and redeems itself through its effects—namely cultural philanthropy. American imperialism, expressed through American cultural philanthropy, is central to James’s modernist argument for the autonomy of the art object. Chapter 2 focuses on the way philanthropy and the international context intersect in meaningful ways to change intellectual work. William Dean Howells’s most important novel, A Hazard of New Fortunes, is often read as analyzing the expansion of a free literary market and its effects upon intellectuals and writers. By contrast, I focus not only on his critique of the

36

Introduction

‘‘market,’’ but also of its alternative—the corporate sponsorship of intellectual endeavors. I examine how state sponsorship in Howells’s own career complicated his sense of the intellectual as a disinterested cosmopolitan. In Hazard, such cosmopolitan disinterestedness seems at first enabled by corporate philanthropy, by a ‘‘natural gas millionaire’’ who sponsors a literary journal and ‘‘frees’’ the journal from market imperatives. However, sponsorship makes clear that such disinterestedness is a misrecognition of intellectual work. Intriguingly, Howells does not give up on the cosmopolitan ideal in the era of corporate philanthropy. Instead, he hesitantly theorizes that sponsorship may lead to artists’ forced recognition of themselves as parochial and interested, and thus to more activist critiques of corporate capitalism and its forms of sponsorship. Such situated activist critique, Howells suggests, is paradoxically the form that true cosmopolitanism must take in the era of corporate capitalism. In the next three chapters I particularly explore the ways the social networks at the turn of the century helped establish the relation between literature and philanthropy and shaped the market in cultural goods. In Chapter 3, I examine both Mark Twain’s career and his later writing within the context of the late nineteenth-century recreational ‘‘male culture of the workplace.’’89 Twain is often used to illustrate the democratizing and progressive features of the market in literature, his inherent merit creating both monetary and critical success. By contrast, I argue that Twain’s career reveals his exasperation with and eventual failure on the market and his recourse thereafter to a patron, the infamous vice president of Standard Oil, Henry Huttleston Rogers. Twain’s case is helpful in showing the ways in which friendship and patronage began to transform into philanthropy (what Twain experienced as a kind of intra-class welfare) as the business classes mixed with the artistic classes in the all-male clubs of the time. Because of his intellectual and political commitment to democracy, on the one hand, and his loyalty to the intra-class welfare he experienced, on the other hand, in Twain’s late writings, like A Connecticut Yankee and Which Was It?, he highlights the moral compromise created by the philanthropy of managerial corporate capitalism. In his anti-imperialist writings at the very end of his career, however, he comes to a despairing conciliation with such philanthropy. Charles Chesnutt’s career and writings in Chapter 4 provide a useful comparison to Twain and other white writers in thinking about the importance of social networks. One of the few African American authors of the

‘‘The Difficult Art of Giving’’

37

time who reached a mainstream national audience, Chesnutt had to work aggressively and self-consciously to gain access to the social networks to which Twain was connected and to the kind of ‘‘friendship,’’ and thus sponsorship, that emerged out of the (segregated) recreational male culture of the workplace. Chesnutt’s writings analyze the discourse of friendship and cooperation central to corporate capitalism and its forms of patronage and philanthropy. Deeply intrigued by this discourse and its possibilities for race relations, Chesnutt works to imagine if such discourse can be linked to an older, radical one stemming from the revolutionary era. In the end, however, especially in The Colonel’s Dream, Chesnutt finds himself frustrated by what corporate philanthropic friendship evades—namely issues of justice. Chapter 5 analyzes Theodore Dreiser’s account of social networks in the era of corporate capitalism and their significance to the kind of philanthropy that emerges from that economic system. His analysis overlaps with both Twain’s and Chesnutt’s, but is very differently inflected. Dreiser is not the friend of individual corporate capitalists, like Twain, but he is mesmerized by the idea of such sponsorship. In some of his writings, like much misogynist male modernism generally, heiresses are figured as an alluring yet threatening solution to the artist’s funding dilemma in capitalist America. Nonetheless, he is also deeply interested in male-to-male patronage, and the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh becomes a touchstone for his work. Dreiser toys with an idea, comparable to Twain’s, that such sponsorship leads to moral compromise, but instead suggests that the Carnegie Library ironically helps him demystify the narratives about capitalism that Carnegie and other corporate philanthropists seek to enforce. Likewise, in his ‘‘Trilogy of Desire’’ Dreiser depends on irony to read both corporate capitalism and its cultural philanthropy. Just as social networks that predetermine the outcomes of markets in the trilogy are easily undermined by the individual personalities that constitute such networks, so also Dreiser argues that corporate-based cultural philanthropy which seeks to establish hegemony ironically overturns itself. In this way, philanthropy for Dreiser, as for Chesnutt, engages questions of justice; however, Dreiser’s conception of the justice that irony provides is far removed from the one Chesnutt holds. While all these chapters focus on individual problems and analyses of patronage and philanthropy in turn-of-the-century literature, I focus throughout on the paradox Polanyi describes: that the ‘‘free market was

38

Introduction

opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous, centrally organized and controlled interventionism.’’ By exploring the ways writers engaged and criticized this paradox, this book continues the work of defining and analyzing more precisely that useful but also difficult concept: the literary market. At the same time, in this era of economic crisis, I hope that this book can help us also think through the problem of ‘‘markets’’ more generally, both as putatively free and as benevolent.

chapter 1

American Generosity: Philanthropy in Henry James

ne of the challenges in studying philanthropy is that the word is used to encompass so many varied forms of voluntary aid. Robert Gross’s historical definition, which I rely on throughout this book, defines philanthropy historically as an ‘‘innovation of the market revolution’s joint stock company of the seventeenth century’’ (37) and thus as those practices that seek ‘‘to apply reason to the solution of social ills and needs’’ through ‘‘abstract and institutional forms’’ (31). However, when Gross tries to account for the different forms such aid takes, clear problems emerge. He separates modern philanthropy from charity, saying that while charity is a premodern phenomenon, it continues in modernity. In contrast to philanthropy, Gross argues, charity is linked to religious strictures and is characterized by face-to-face interaction (44–45). In the eighteenth century, charity cannot be fully distinguished from philanthropy; however, a noticeable divide between the two forms of aid emerges in the nineteenth century and becomes acute by the early twentieth century. Gross represents this divide between charity and philanthropy figuratively as that between Jane Addams and Andrew Carnegie, arguing for a reconciliation of the two forms of voluntary aid. Gross’s distinction between charity and philanthropy is hardly definitive, and it is certainly problematic in regard to the two central figures he uses to represent it in the modern period.1 On the one hand, and despite Addams’s rhetoric of personal, sympathetic interaction, the settlement house movement had carefully reasoned commitments and was a significant transatlantic institutional phenomenon with close connections to other institutions, including the university. On the other hand, and despite Carnegie’s rhetoric

O

40

Chapter 1

of impersonal managerial expertise, he not only handed out money directly to individuals he deemed worthy, but also engaged in highly ‘‘whim[sical]’’ (Zunz, 23) solutions to social ills uncoupled from any attempt at rationalization. Nonetheless, if the differences between Addams and Carnegie cannot be summarized as those between charity and philanthropy (as Gross defines them)—between religiously or ethically driven, personal involvement and rational, impersonal managerial expertise—there clearly are distinctions to be made between different kinds of aid in modernity. Part of the reason that even so careful a historian as Gross creates a problematic divide between charity and philanthropy is that he relies on what in the Introduction I called the de Tocquevillean origins myth of philanthropy. Gross ends up describing charity and philanthropy as different expressions of the same American spirit. He begins his essay this way: ‘‘Americans like to think of themselves as a generous people. We take pride in the multitude of benevolent groups constantly at work to help the needy and uplift society, both at home and abroad. Such generosity, freely given by ordinary individuals, is commonly deemed the natural expression of democratic life’’ (29). While others have usefully challenged this origins myth in terms of the uniqueness of American generosity, I would suggest that we also need to trouble this myth in terms of the ways it prevents us from seeing the very different philosophies and institutional forms that philanthropy in and of itself has taken in modernity. In this chapter, I focus on two kinds of philanthropy, which can be figuratively embodied by Addams and Carnegie. Indeed, both philanthropists sought ‘‘to apply reason to the solution of social ills and needs’’ through ‘‘abstract and institutional forms’’ (31); however, two very different kinds of reasoning about institutions are evident in their work, and as a result, there are two different systematic approaches to aid and reform. Thus, while founded by elites, Hull-House relied on and fostered the growth of mutual aid associations, unions, and cooperatives. In other words, philosophically (if not always in practice or effect), Hull-House’s philanthropy worked to support the development of horizontal forms of voluntary aid. By contrast, Carnegie advocated solutions developed by a managerial elite. In other words, philosophically (if not always in practice or effect), Carnegie embraced a vertical or ‘‘top-down’’ form of organized philanthropy, as Judith Sealander describes it.2 Neither Addams’s nor Carnegie’s philanthropy should be confused with grassroots activism. Nonetheless, philanthropy created by elites which advocates for horizontal social

Philanthropy in James

41

solutions, and that which insists on vertical ones, can have different relations to grassroots activism and quite different politics. Certainly Addams’s and Carnegie’s philanthropy had different relations and politics. This distinction between horizontal and vertical philanthropy is central to my analysis of Henry James’s representations of philanthropy.3 Throughout his long career, James returned again and again in his fiction to the question of what we could call, following Gross, American generosity.4 In James’s novels, Americans are characteristically represented as inextricably financially open-handed and morally benevolent, but James levels a profoundly critical gaze at this imbrication of financial and moral largesse.5 This chapter argues that James consistently invokes the notion that American generosity is ‘‘the natural expression of democratic life’’ (29), as Gross summarizes the de Tocquevillean origins myth of voluntary aid. However, James complicates issues by also placing generosity under suspicion because of the conscious or unconscious motives that animate it and because of the residual Puritan morality that inflects and works to disguise it. More specifically, I argue that James’s account of American generosity —particularly of philanthropy—is indicative primarily of what Friedrich Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals (1887) called ressentiment, resentful envy that enacts direct or displaced attempts at revenge. Interestingly, James makes no distinction between horizontal and vertical American philanthropy in terms of the motivation of the philanthropist. To James, Addams and Carnegie (figuratively the Princess Casamassima and Adam Verver in this chapter) represent the same American phenomenon. In light of what philanthropy of all sorts at the turn of the century (and subsequently) claimed and attempted, James’s critique has its salutary features. Like Nietzsche’s ‘‘revaluation of morals’’ in Genealogy, James’s work seeks to demonstrate the will to power behind putatively moral, or what Nietzsche calls ‘‘unegoistic,’’ impulses.6 James, like Nietzsche, theorizes that the most powerful modern psychological state is ressentiment, and that it is through the mechanism of a disguised and slow-working resentful envy that poses itself as a form of morality that ‘‘slaves’’ especially, but also in modern times ‘‘masters,’’ exert their will to power. 7 In addition, James theorizes that ressentiment characterizes not only personal or domestic relations, but also international ones. American generosity—enacted as resentful philanthropy—thus illuminates the struggle between a new American empire and a declining European one.

42

Chapter 1

Finally, however, James’s conflation of horizontal and vertical ‘‘American’’ philanthropy as forms of ressentiment is marked by one significant inconsistency in regards to effects. To James, horizontal philanthropy oriented toward social reform has effects that coincide with its vengeancedriven intentions; by contrast, vertical philanthropy oriented toward cultural or aesthetic projects—and despite its vengeance-driven intentions— has potentially salutary effects that exceed its intentions. Vengeful motivations are indissolubly linked to destructive effects in social reform philanthropy, while they are uncoupled (albeit hesitantly and ambivalently) from such effects in cultural philanthropy. James’s inconsistency reveals the allure, the glamor of capitalist philanthropy for an antimodernist modernist as America became an imperial power. Equally important, this inconsistency is revelatory of the predicament of modern intellectuals and artists as they seek to defend their vocation and work during an era in which philanthropic institutions—both social reform oriented and cultural—are emerging and proliferating. Such a predicament galvanizes the modernist conception of artistic autonomy, while also revealing the way political economy shapes that conception through the notion that the gift necessarily injures. If Virginia Woolf warns, ‘‘be sure you choose your patron wisely,’’ James by contrast suggests such choice is impossible. Nonetheless, he posits that the art object can exceed the injurious economic determination of what Woolf calls the ‘‘paymaster’’ and the ‘‘subtle and insidious way’’ the paymaster’s economic power shapes the work.8 James may seem like a counterintuitive choice with which to begin a book about an emergent corporate-based philanthropy because he is the writer in this book personally most distant from it. His early career represents an older model of authorship, in that he relied on the social interventionism of familial connections to the world of literary publishing as well as the financial backing of his family.9 At the same time, as Michael Anesko has demonstrated, James was ‘‘placed . . . squarely between the forces of innovation and tradition’’ as he worked to become a professional writer. For Anesko, this particularly means that James had to learn how to sell his literary wares as best he could on a free and ‘‘competitive’’ literary market (37). Anesko’s argument about James’s ambivalent but canny professional relation to a modern literary market (a literary market Anesko imagines in conventional terms) is not an uncommon one these days in James criticism. The result has been that critics have increasingly ignored or downplayed the role interventionism played in James’s career.

Philanthropy in James

43

Anesko’s important book, for example, argues that James earned his living by his pen and suggests how this shapes his fiction. To prove his point about James’s professionalism, and in an impressive feat of research, he has calculated the money James earned each year of his writing career. However, Anesko himself notes that in focusing on James’s relation to the literary market, he chose not to calculate how much money James earned every year ‘‘from the family’s Syracuse properties’’ (172), which, Anesko concedes, especially after 1893 provided ‘‘a comfortable increment’’ ( 223 n1). In this chapter, therefore, I build on the important work done by Anesko and others on James’s biographical and intellectual relation to the ‘‘innovations’’ in the literary market and capitalist culture; however, I also highlight James’s status as a member of New England’s rentier class and as a cosmopolitan bourgeois intellectual, for whom familial and selfsponsorship plays a role. Such a focus is by no means intended to reduce our reading of James; instead I seek to open up the kinds of questions we ask about his work and its relation to both old and new forms of ‘‘interventionism’’ in the market. This chapter begins with an analysis of Nietzschean ressentiment and the important and underexamined role philanthropy plays in it. That philanthropy is central to Nietzschean ressentiment highlights a broad transatlantic philosophical debate among cosmopolitan bourgeois intellectuals in regard to its significance in capitalism. Situating James’s work within this debate, I turn to James’s comparable meditations in The Princess Casamassima (1886), The Golden Bowl (1904), and briefly The American Scene (1907). For James, American generosity in these texts is synonymous with ressentiment. However, James’s critique of elite-based, but horizontally directed social reform philanthropy and the way such generosity reveals conscious or unconscious desires for revenge in Princess finally diverges from his analysis of elite-based vertically directed cultural philanthropy in Golden, and definitively breaks from it in The American Scene.

Ressentiment and Philanthropy In recent years, Nietzsche’s account of ressentiment in On the Genealogy of Morals has been of great interest for what it reveals about bourgeois transatlantic attitudes toward the social movements of the nineteenth century. Nietzsche writes that his aim in Genealogy is to create an ‘‘historical and

44

Chapter 1

philological’’ (17) analysis of the ‘‘origin of morality,’’ or more specifically ‘‘the value of the ‘unegoistic,’ [of] the instincts of pity, self-abnegation, selfsacrifice’’ (19), which he also calls ‘‘the pernicious modern effeminacy of feeling’’ (20). Richard Holub has pointed out that Nietzsche sought to create a sense of mythological ‘‘untimeliness’’ in his work, and Genealogy is an apt example of this.10 Nietzsche argues that in a vaguely described past ‘‘Good’’ was associated with the nobility and power, while ‘‘bad’’ was associated with plebeian status and powerlessness (28). It was ‘‘in jealous opposition’’ to the nobility that ‘‘the Jews, that priestly people’’ created ‘‘a radical revaluation of their enemies’ values, that is to say, an act of the most spiritual revenge,’’ inverting ‘‘the aristocratic value-equation’’ (33–34, Nietzsche’s emphasis).11 Relying on their ressentiment, on their ‘‘abysmal hatred (the hatred of impotence)’’ the Jews, and later the Christians, asserted that ‘‘ ‘the wretched alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good . . . and you, the powerful and noble, are on the contrary the evil . . . and you shall be in all eternity the unblessed, accursed and damned!’’ (34). As a variety of scholars have shown, the figure of the Jew/slave is crucial in historicizing Nietzsche’s mythical account of the ‘‘Jewish revaluation’’ (34) of morals, for the Jew/slave becomes emblematic of all the rebels of modernity. Jewish ressentiment, writes Nietzsche, is the origin of ‘‘the democratic prejudice in the modern world,’’ ‘‘the plebeianism of the modern spirit’’ (28, Nietzsche’s emphasis); it is connected to ‘‘modern democracy . . . modern anarchism . . . [and] socialis[m]’’ (31). Jewish ressentiment reveals how ‘‘the people have won—or ‘the slaves’ or ‘the mob’ or ‘the herd’ ’’ (35). The modern era is one of ‘‘decline,’’ as evidenced by ‘‘the advent of democracy, international courts in place of war, equal rights for women, the religion of pity’’ (154), of ‘‘shameful emasculation’’ (124), as witnessed further by the ‘‘blood poisoning . . . [of] mix[ing] the races together’’ (36). The mythological ‘‘untimeliness’’ of Nietzsche’s reflections on the ‘‘slave revolt in morality’’ (34, his emphasis) thus actually registers his critical responses to specific social movements of the nineteenth century: socialism and anarchism, internationalism, transformations in gender relations, and the abolition of slavery. It is thus also that contemporary scholars argue that Nietzsche’s account of ressentiment is itself expressive of a widely felt ressentiment by the bourgeois classes in the Euro-American world about these social movements. In Fredric Jameson’s influential formulation, Nietzschean ressentiment is an ‘‘unavoidably autoreferential structure.’’12 By psychologizing social change

Philanthropy in James

45

through the concept of ressentiment, Jameson argues, Nietzsche trivializes class struggle, analyzing it as simply personal and vindictive envy, ‘‘little more than an expression of annoyance at seemingly gratuitous lower-class agitation,’’ as well as at the dissident intellectuals who supported such agitation (202). Jean Gregorek, Sianne Ngai, and Eve Sedgwick have helpfully expanded on Jameson’s analysis to show the ways ressentiment’s autoreferentiality also clearly registers ‘‘annoyance’’ at the women’s movement and the emergence of gay or queer identities. 13 I build on these critics’ important work in my analysis of Princess Casamassima, while also expanding the applicability of the term to geopolitical debates about and contests over empire in The Golden Bowl and The American Scene. The autoreferentiality of ressentiment, as well as the variety of social phenomena for which it became an explanatory discourse, will be crucial for my analysis of James. For now, however, I want to address the foundational anxiety that inheres in Nietzsche’s account of the form of activity that ressentiment takes. Nietzsche describes this form at the end of the book as a ‘‘will to mutual aid,’’ emerging first among the Christians in the Roman period (135). Such a description could simply be an adumbration of any grassroots-based social struggle. But Nietzsche’s analysis of a will to mutual aid exceeds such a description and is figured so as to include nineteenthcentury horizontal and vertical philanthropy, both Addams and Carnegie.14 In the last chapters of the book, discussing the ‘‘consolation’’ (130) that priests and philosophers have provided for the ‘‘sick herd’’ (125),Nietzsche notes that the herd need to be protected not only from their own ‘‘baseness, spite, malice’’ but also from ‘‘the envy of the healthy’’ (126). The reader is momentarily puzzled by this formulation. Why should the master envy the sick herd for the (false) solace they find in their powerlessness? The reader’s confusion grows as Nietzsche focuses particularly on the ‘‘pleasure of giving pleasure (doing good, giving, relieving, helping, encouraging, consoling, praising, rewarding)’’ (135, his emphasis). ‘‘[D]oing good [is] . . . the most effective means of consolation’’ because through the use of ‘‘ ‘love of the neighbor,’ the ascetic priest prescribes fundamentally an excitement of the strongest, most life-affirming drive, even if in the most cautious doses— namely, of the will to power. The happiness of ‘slight superiority,’ involved in all doing good, being useful, helping, and rewarding, is the most effective means of consolation’’ (135, his emphasis). On the one hand, ‘‘doing good’’ is an expression of ressentiment, of powerlessness. It provides mere ‘‘consolation.’’ On the other hand, it is also somehow an action of a will to power,

46

Chapter 1

a vertical expression of power (the ‘‘happiness of ‘slight superiority’ ’’). Philanthropy even more than lower-class agitation, reform even more than revolution, is at stake here. Nietzsche’s argument shifts abruptly in these last chapters. While the Jew/slave has been consistently associated with ressentiment, the master begins to be associated with that emotion. Nietzsche now argues that in contrast to this ‘‘will to mutual aid’’ (135), the powerful ‘‘are as naturally inclined to separate as the weak are to congregate,’’ and thus the powerful are always ‘‘fundamentally irritated and disquieted by organization. The whole of history teaches that every oligarchy conceals the lust for tyranny’’ (136, his emphasis). The powerful masters are not only filled with envy of the herd whose will to mutual aid and whose ‘‘organization’’ (136) upsets them, but also ‘‘lust’’ jealously after each other’s power. Nietzsche’s account of the will to mutual aid, of grassroots radical movements as well as philanthropy, thus comes to provide an autoreferential critique of ressentiment. Suddenly the master is the resentful and envious one, who is ‘‘fundamentally’’ irritated by the slave and acts accordingly (136, my emphasis).15 Vengeance-based envy ends up characterizing the powerful master as much as the sick herd. It is with this understanding of Nietzschean ressentiment, as alternately an autoreferential response to and critique of both nineteenth-century philanthropy and grassroots activism, and with a disenchanted analysis of the pervasive vengeance-based hostility posing as morality of both slaves and masters, that I want to turn to James. This chapter focuses, first, on The Princess Casamassima, James’s most unambiguous account of what he sees as the link between philanthropy and ressentiment among both grassroot activists and elite philanthropists cum revolutionaries. The unrelenting analysis of the envious motivations, particularly of the novel’s titular American heroine who uses her wealth to sponsor English working-class socialist struggle, provides a striking comparison to The Golden Bowl with its American hero who uses his wealth to sponsor a museum.

Social Reform Philanthropy, Revolution, and Ressentiment Arguably his most scandalized, though by no means his first, articulation of a theory—as well as an autoreferential expression—of ressentiment, The Princess Casamassima is an extraordinarily strange novel. Described as

Philanthropy in James

47

James’s ‘‘most explicitly ‘political’ novel,’’ it is typically paired with The Bostonians, both serving as sites of intense debate about James’s politics, or rather, as Mark Seltzer explains, about James’s putative disavowal of politics.16 Like most contemporary critics, I focus on the novel’s politics, not its disavowal of them, by analyzing James’s reductive account of nineteenthcentury working-class movements as merely expressions of ressentiment. Intriguingly, James does not analyze what he represents vaguely sometimes as socialism, sometimes as anarchism, as rooted solely in working-class envy; rather, he focuses even more directly on the displaced intra-class, gender envy of upper-class women, as the novel’s title suggests.17 Contra the standard reading, I argue that the Princess and Bostonians are linked not so much by an engagement with politics per se as by a reading of modern politics through elite women’s social reform activism, what the Princess itself refers to as ‘‘lady-bountiful.’’18 Jane Addams and the many other upper-class women who flocked to social reform activism in the nineteenth century, in other words, provide an obvious context for this novel.19 In contrast to The Bostonians, however, James pushes the figure of lady bountiful in Princess to its furthest extreme. In terms of her class status (aristocratic rather than bourgeois) and her activities (assassination and bombing, rather than publicizing sentimental feminism), lady bountiful in Princess, as opposed to Bostonians, is a radical—committed to revolution rather than social reform. In short, Princess focuses its political analysis on elite women’s philanthropy—figured as radically rather than nominally horizontal. Ostensibly the topic of Princess is working-class discontent and revolutionary struggle, yet no working-class character is able to articulate an intellectual or ethical reason why the working class’s position should be changed or their oppression alleviated. The minor working-class characters of the novel gather together to analyze their oppression and foment revolution, but, as a variety of critics point out, the discussion consists mainly of invective and name-calling alternating with self-congratulation (280–94). At the same time, the major working-class or petit-bourgeois characters either support the status quo unequivocally (Millicent Henning, Rosy Muniment, Amanda Pysent, and as the book progresses Anastasius Vetch), are revealed to be complacent windbags and rhetoricians (the Poupins, Schinkel), or more dramatically are using revolution only for their own personal advantage (Paul Muniment). The petit-bourgeois hero of the novel, Hyacinth Robinson, commits his life to revolution not because he believes in it, but in order to express his love for his unworthy and opportunistic best friend

48

Chapter 1

(Paul Muniment) and to prove that despite his ‘‘mixed blood’’ (he is the illegitimate son of an aristocrat and a working-class mother) he is willing to die for the cause his friend has putatively also embraced. At no moment in the text does Robinson believe the working-class struggle involves issues of justice, even when he pledges his life to the cause. Instead, throughout the novel, he expresses nothing but contempt for the working class. His most profound intellectual and ethical commitments are to art, imagined by Robinson as protected and promoted solely by the upper classes. The fight for social equality, he decides, is comparable to ‘‘cut[ting] up the ceilings of the Veronese into strips, so that every one might have a little piece. I don’t want every one to have a little piece of anything, and I have a great horror of that kind of invidious jealousy which is at the bottom of the idea of redistribution’’ (396–97; see also 405). At best, revolution is imagined by James through his petit-bourgeois hero’s eyes simply as ‘‘the day of the great revenge’’ (124), rather than as involving (for example) questions of justice. In short, James, in precisely the same manner as Nietzsche, psychologizes working-class unrest through his hero’s own analysis of it as merely ressentiment, a combination of self-hatred and vengeance-driven ‘‘invidious jealousy’’ that James suggests inheres in any desire for ‘‘redistribution.’’ There is, however, a certain quality of wishfulness in James’s account that is not evident in Nietzsche. James seems to want to erase even the possibility that there might be such a thing as an effectual grassroots will to mutual aid that links members of the petit-bourgeois and/or working class to each other. The working class is totally disorganized, and, as far as we are able to see, the subterranean political organizations at work in the novel are unable to gain the loyalty of the most ethical and idealistic of their followers, let alone their resentful majority. The working class is therefore incompetent at achieving their nefarious aims of cutting up and redistributing ‘‘the ceilings of the Veronese.’’ Even more wishfully, James seems to posit that the most ethical and idealistic member of the movement would rather kill himself, as Robinson does, than engage in activities that might redistribute ‘‘the ceilings of the Veronese.’’ Working-class agitation in the novel is reduced to ressentiment, but is also, even more strikingly, a phenomenon that the novel marginalizes and discounts. If no character in the working class can articulate either an intellectual or ethical commitment to social equality, and if to James envy and vindictiveness are what galvanize and divide it, the novel nonetheless presents one

Philanthropy in James

49

group of people who not only articulate a commitment to social equality and change but work hard to link themselves to the working-class movement,such as it is: upper-class women. James’s novel seems to suggest that not only the financing of but the commitment to working-class revolution stems solely from upper-class women. In a carefully structured temporal conjunction in the book, Robinson meets two aristocratic women who ‘‘have very little respect for distinctions of class’’ (247), who ‘‘cherish the creed [of democracy]’’ (248), and who express a desire ‘‘to know the people, and know them intimately’’ (248, James’s emphasis). If the temporal conjunction had not struck the reader, James drives the larger point home, again through Robinson, who thinks to himself, ‘‘Very strange it seemed to him that within so few days two ladies of rank should have found occasion to express to him the same mysterious longing’’ (248). The differences of the women, combined with their similarity, ‘‘made their curiosity [in the working class] the more significant’’ (248), Robinson decides. While these two very different women’s commitment to equality is critically analyzed at length, they nonetheless are the only characters who argue that the notion of equality is intellectually and ethically viable (219–21, 248–50). In other words, Princess is not really interested in industrial conditions or the philosophical commitments and reasoning that motivate socialist and revolutionary movements, any more than Bostonians is interested in the status of women or the philosophical commitments and reasoning of the women’s rights movement. Instead, James is interested in what motivates lady bountiful and what effect she will have. The modern lady bountiful in Princess theoretically could test the outer limit of voluntary aid, of philanthropy, of a truly disinterested ‘‘love of mankind.’’ She is not only elite, but also leisured and fundamentally nonproductive. Her motivations are inherently suspect to everyone in the novel, though most strikingly to those whom she seeks to benefit. As the major working-class characters repeatedly tell these ladies in different ways, when the revolution comes, the working class will ‘‘trample on’’ them and not ‘‘let [them] off easily, for the sake of the concessions . . . made in advance’’ (141). The overtly suspect status of these elite women activists is one reason praise for the novel has united Cold War liberal critics with contemporary political conservatives and radicals.20 James’s figuration of lady bountiful in actuality, however, provides no test to the definition of philanthropy because he demonstrates that these women’s interest in the working class does not actually involve convictions

50

Chapter 1

or reasoning about justice and injustice (though they mouth such convictions). Instead, their interest stems simply from a gender-specific ressentiment. Carolyn Betensky, who in recent years has provided the most extensive account of James’s response to lady bountiful, has written in praise of the novel that James is ‘‘unsparing’’ in his diagnosis of how ‘‘anarchism’’ and ‘‘altruism’’ are ‘‘complicatedly and obscurely libidinal’’ (166). I am arguing a comparable point, but from a very different angle—namely that, in James, both lower-class anarchism and upper-class women’s philanthropy are reduced to libidinal impulses. James’s account of lady bountiful is not really as complicated as Betensky suggests when situated in relation to ressentiment. It is indeed a relatively common formulation of the period. Lady bountiful has a particularly gendered case of ressentiment, what Freud later called penis envy. This form of envy, as Jean Gregorek points out, was anticipated by Nietzsche’s conception. For James, lady bountiful’s vengeance-based hostility is directed toward the men of her own class, displaced into a putative sympathy for the men of the working class. Thus, we learn how Lady Aurora’s philanthropic impulses are motivated by her abysmal failure in her role as upper-class woman. She is one of ‘‘twelve at home, and eight of us are girls; and if you think it’s splendid . . . I should like you . . . to try it for a little! My father isn’t rich, and there is only one of us married, and we are not handsome’’ (221). Lady Aurora is repeatedly described in the novel as pitiably ugly and thus unmarriageable. Philanthropic action for Aurora provides both revenge on her class and consolation for herself. As Robinson thinks of her, ‘‘No one could have less the appearance of being animated by a vengeful irony; but he saw that this . . . evidently most tender creature was not a person to spare, wherever she could prick them, the institutions among which she had been brought up and against which she had violently reacted’’ (222). Aurora’s sympathy and tenderness is the ironic form her desire for revenge takes. The Princess’s philanthropy, however, is described as even more twisted than Aurora’s, for she is not a failure, but an astounding success as a woman. As Aurora points out, the Princess is ‘‘so wonderfully attractive!’’ (429) and thus ‘‘give[s] up something’’ (429) in joining the revolutionary struggle. Even more telling, however, the Princess is originally American, and it is in the characteristically American ethos she displays that her ressentiment outdoes Aurora’s. The Princess feels she ‘‘sold herself’’ in marriage and that for ‘‘such a horrible piece of frivolity . . . she can never . . . be serious enough to make up for it’’ (259). Like other Americans whom James

Philanthropy in James

51

scrutinizes throughout his career, Puritan morality drives the Princess.21 Her desire for revenge takes the ‘‘serious’’ shape of social activism, to which she commits her money and time, as well as her libido. But lady bountiful is really driven not by morality but by hatred, as is characteristic of James’s American Puritans. The equivalence Robinson notes between Lady Aurora’s and the Princess’s politics therefore is a comparably displaced gendered ressentiment. To emphasize this point, James also figures their politics as reducible to their mutual pursuit of and sexual ‘‘passion’’ (222, 251) for the selfserving, working-class revolutionary, Paul Muniment, a pursuit and passion figured repeatedly by all the characters as deeply humiliating to men of the upper class. In other words, a twisted form of revenge on elite men is enacted by lady bountiful through her quite literal, as well as figurative, romance with the working class. However, as an American, the Princess’s desire for revenge exceeds Aurora’s, and so James lingers on her hatred for her husband and for men of her class (and perhaps for all men), and as in The Bostonians, describes such hatred as at the root of her claim to an interest in women’s rights (196, 197, 199–200, 249–51, 498–99). Likewise, he lingers on how she distracts and destroys every man she meets with her beauty and cleverness. Paul Muniment is the only male character who apparently withstands her castrating machinations and thus is able to declare what the book confirms, namely that the Princess is ‘‘a monster!’’ (227). But if gendered and nationally based ressentiment is central to James’s analysis of the social politics of elite women philanthropists, it is true that his analysis extends beyond gender to focus on its imbrication with class privilege. The Princess’s social activism is unmistakably shaped by the class to which she belongs and which she claims she wants to destroy. If James’s charge is that lady bountiful’s philanthropic love for working-class men is actually ressentiment toward the men of her own class, his larger point is that she is profoundly embedded in her class (and gender) status and thus cannot ever have a genuine philosophical commitment to the working class. It is not just that the Princess is ‘‘narcissistic’’ or ‘‘self-interested’’ (173, 174), as Betensky suggests, though that of course is true; rather, it is that the Princess cannot escape herself, her situatedness, which is paradoxically that of the elite woman’s utter ungroundedness.22 Even more paradoxical is that this ungroundedness has been sponsored by the men of her class, against whom she enacts her revenge. James focuses particularly on metaphors of theatricality and collecting to describe her inability to escape her ungroundedness.

52

Chapter 1

The Princess is described repeatedly as an actress and as a collector. When the Prince visits her London home, he notes that ‘‘she had not ceased to ‘collect’ ’’ and is ‘‘living as expensively as ever.’’ He reflects further that ‘‘no one had such a feeling as she for the mise en sce`ne of life’’ (233). The Princess’s collections represent the mise en sce`ne of whatever performance she then enacts. Likewise, as Hyacinth waits for her at her London home, gazing at her ‘‘innumerable bibelots,’’ he has ‘‘much the same feeling with which, at the theatre, he had sometimes awaited the entrance of a celebrated actress’’ (245). Collecting bibelots and performing life are inextricable from each other in this book and from the ungroundedness of elite women. It is therefore the Princess’s collecting and performing habits that are described as the basis for her scandalously ungrounded interest in class revolution. As Captain Sholto explains why he introduced Robinson to her: ‘‘I was looking for anything that would turn up, that might take her fancy. Don’t you understand that I’m always looking? There was a time when I went in immensely for illuminated missals, and another when I collected horrible ghost-stories (she wanted to cultivate a belief in ghosts), all for her. The day I saw she was turning her attention to the rising democracy I began to collect little democrats. That’s how I collected you.’’ (346) As Sholto describes it, the Princess did not believe in ghosts or cultivate a belief in ghosts; rather, ‘‘she wanted to cultivate a belief in ghosts.’’ She wanted to act the role of the kind of person who cultivates an interest in ghosts. This luxury of ungroundedness is inextricable from her habit of collecting. When she decides to perform lady bountiful and turns her ‘‘attention to the rising democracy,’’ ‘‘little democrats’’ become the bibelots that will be important to her new performance, to her mise en sce`ne. The metaphor she uses to describe her relation with Hyacinth is one that emphasizes his role as collector item: ‘‘I am determined to keep hold of you’’ (324, my emphasis).Then, later on, she tells him that she has sold all her ‘‘bibelots’’ (412) in order to ‘‘give [money] to the poor,’’ but that she has nonetheless not sold him: ‘‘I have kept you’’ (416). (Both statements are of course untrue, since Madame Grandoni tells Hyacinth that the Princess has ‘‘kept’’ (421) some of her bibelots, while later in the book the Princess betrays Hyacinth, or in the language of collecting, gives him away.)

Philanthropy in James

53

But the Captain’s analysis of the Princess’s performing and collecting practices also highlights something else about her class status, namely, the always incipient boredom of ungroundedness of which endless collecting is both cause and symptom. As Susan Stewart argues, modern collecting is a paradoxical phenomenon: it turns complexity and multitude into coherence and seriality.23 The Princess has ‘‘an exaggerated fear of the commonplace’’ (193). Her fear is consistent with the kind of collecting she does, which, Hyacinth thinks, ‘‘reveal[s] not only whole provinces of art, but refinements of choice on the part of their owner, complications of mind, and—almost—terrible depths of character’’ (244). On the one hand, she collects in order to create distinction. On the other hand, collecting ends up creating commonness—seriality and coherence—and thus ensures the failure of distinction. Madame Grandoni regularly advises the Prince not to worry about the Princess’s collection of little democrats because it is only one phase, in which soon enough she ‘‘will bore herself’’ (511; see also 240, 257–58). Likewise, both Grandoni and Sholto warn Robinson that the Princess will tire of him, as she tires of everything. And indeed, right on schedule, the little democrat comes to bore the Princess. The Princess is always in ‘‘fear of the commonplace,’’ so much so that paradoxically her quest for commonplace democrats is a sign of the depth of that fear. But the Princess as a collector renders everything commonplace, so even the commonplace becomes, indeed, commonplace as yet one more bibelot. An important though obvious argument that James is making through his depiction of elite women’s philanthropy is that they are of the class which can and does collect, who bibelotize reality, to paraphrase Re´my Saisselin.24 The book thus suggests that the logic of collecting structures the logic of elite women’s philanthropy. This has a number of implications. First and most obviously, the Princess objectifies working-class subjects and experience. Bill Brown has pointed out that the critical truism that James turns subjects into objects is not accurate, in that James’s work reveals an equally deep commitment to turning objects into subjects.25 But as a collector, bored by the seriality and coherence she creates, the Princess respects neither subjects nor objects; she turns both into objects, which she collects. It is hard to know in the book’s judgment which form of the Princess’s objectification and eventual boredom of illuminated missals and little democrats is judged more severely. Second, James is intervening specifically in an American debate about elite women’s social reform activism as a response to what was often

54

Chapter 1

described as their vicarious or parasitic status. Jane Addams, for example, argued that upper-class women’s leisured and cultivated lives forced them to read reality only through the lens of culture. She thus saw social reform activism as a ‘‘subjective’’ attempt by elite women to return to reality; but she also insisted that both despite and because of the ‘‘subjective’’ motivations behind reform activism, it was nonetheless capable of addressing ‘‘objective’’ needs.26 Thorstein Veblen validated women’s social reform activism in a different way. Like Addams, though with a different emphasis, he saw the position of elite women as divorced from real activity, as parasitic. Elite women merely performed leisure and conspicuous consumption in order to demonstrate the power of their husbands. He suggests that women’s social reform activism, as a result, is a conscious response to their parasitic performance, that such women have ‘‘a livelier sense of the discrepancy between the accepted scheme of life and the exigencies of the economic situation,’’ and that ‘‘women may therefore be expected to show a more pronounced reversion to a non-invidious temperament than the men.’’27 For both Veblen and Addams, in other words, elite women’s vicarious and parasitic status, their situatedness in ungroundedness in Jamesian conceptual terms, paradoxically allows them to see the problems in the economic system and potentially move beyond them. James’s disenchanted view of lady bountiful obviously leads in a quite different direction. Her parasitic and vicarious status highlights the impossibility of her social activism being either genuine in its motivations or useful in its effects. Thus, when the Princess and Lady Aurora ‘‘express . . . the same mysterious longing’’ ‘‘to know the people, and know them intimately—the toilers and strugglers and sufferers—because . . . they were the most interesting portion of society’’ (248, James’s emphasis), the most explanatory feature of this sentence is ‘‘because.’’ What Robinson represents to the Princess, therefore, is a privileged access to the ‘‘interesting,’’ which is also the ‘‘real.’’ James’s satire of lady bountiful is at its broadest and most pungent in treating the Princess’s request for access to reality. She tells Robinson that she expects him to show her the ‘‘real London, the people and all their sufferings and passions’’ (201), ‘‘the reality of the horrors,’’ ‘‘the slums,’’ ‘‘the worst that London contain[s]’’ (401). Reality can only be imagined as horror and suffering in the ungrounded luxury in which the Princess lives. ‘‘We might have immense fun, don’t you think so?’’ she says to Robinson at one point, adding, ‘‘Remember . . . I expect you to take me into the slums—into very bad places.’’ The narrator adds,

Philanthropy in James

55

‘‘Why the idea of these scenes of misery should have lighted up her face is more than may be explained; but she smiled down at Hyacinth—who even as he stood up, was of slightly smaller stature—with all her strange, radiant sweetness’’ (253). The satire is multiple and direct. The Princess has experienced all the pleasures life can afford and can only imagine ‘‘immense fun’’ therefore in the ‘‘reality of horrors,’’ of misery. The Princess’s ignorance—that Robinson is actually a quite unsuitable guide to the worst poverty and misery—is as much an indictment of her bad faith as the grin she apparently levels at him as she makes her request—a request made physically and economically from above—to see the worst suffering. The dialogue and the body language, the desires and motivations represented in this scene, are all—at best—‘‘incongruous’’ (251; see also 465), as the narrator dryly puts it. Indeed, James argues that what keeps the Princess’s attention focused on the little democrat for a large part of the novel is that he will soon be dead. As he tells her when he visits her at her country estate, ‘‘I gave my life away.’’ Her immediate and revealing response is ‘‘Ah, well, then, I’m all the more glad you stayed [for a visit]!’’ (327). It is particularly as a man who is dead that he conjures her interest: ‘‘he had charmed the Princess into the deepest, most genuine attention; she was listening to him as she had never listened before’’ (334). His imminent death compels her engagement because it enables her to see, she says, what is ‘‘real’’ and ‘‘solid,’’ which is ‘‘exactly what I have been trying to make up my mind about for so long’’ (330). Thus, Hyacinth’s death will help her make up her mind about that little puzzle of reality. Later, when Vetch attempts to intercede with the Princess and suggests various ways to keep Robinson alive, the Princess’s greatest fear appears to be that her view of (real) suffering will be thereby attenuated. Of one solution Vetch proposes, she says spontaneously, ‘‘Don’t do that—you’ll spoil everything!’’ (470). While what Vetch will spoil is left ambiguous, it is clear that the drama of Hyacinth’s death is one that the Princess wishes to sustain at any cost, apparently to stave off the boredom of ungroundedness. The novel ends, therefore, with Hyacinth’s suicide laid at the Princess’s feet in multiple and intersecting ways: she introduces him to the beauty of ‘‘civilization,’’ and then withholds civilization from him; she literally picks him up (or more characteristically has Captain Sholto work as a tout for her), and then drops him (without discarding him); and finally, she engages either skillfully or ineptly in backstage political machinations that lead his

56

Chapter 1

former comrades to test his loyalty. The test will render him either murderous and dead or just dead. He apparently nobly and consistently chooses the latter. Like Nietzsche, then, James reduces working-class unrest to ressentiment. But in a more wishful mode than Nietzsche, James furthermore describes working-class unrest as an epiphenomenon of upper-class women’s resentful philanthropy. Such philanthropic efforts are motivated by the vicariousness of upper-class women’s existence, in which they can only ‘‘collect,’’ not engage, experience. Upper-class women’s philanthropy is thereby not only responsible for working-class unrest but is also destructive to the individuals it imagines it aids, by encouraging desires and aspirations it will never actually allow to come to fruition. This indictment of upper-class women’s philanthropy, however, is a puzzling one to find James making. James’s theory of realism consistently underlines the falsity of a dichotomy like this one—of vicarious versus real experience, of collecting versus engaging reality. Nowhere is his polemic about the falsity of this dichotomy stated more powerfully than in his preface to The Princess Casamassima. Never is James more explicitly defensive about his theory of realism than in this preface, where he continually addresses skeptical interlocutors, people who might have knowledge of ‘‘London mysteries (dense categories of dark arcana)’’ (35), ‘‘ ‘authentic’ knowledge’ ’’ (47), or ‘‘readers’’ who might ‘‘challenge . . . [me with] a knowledge greater than mine’’ (48). Writes James of these skeptics, ‘‘I had to bethink myself in advance of a defence of my ‘artistic position’ ’’ (48, my emphasis). James’s main defense hinges on ‘‘the unreality of the sharp distinction, where the interest of observation is at stake, between doing and feeling’’ (38), between experience and consciousness. More specifically, he defends the use of his own consciousness to construct his working-class hero’s, despite the difference in their ‘‘experience.’’ Thus, James identifies himself sympathetically with Hyacinth. What would it be like, James says he asked himself, to be ‘‘some small obscure intelligent creature . . . capable of profiting by all the civilization, all the accumulations to which they testify, yet condemned to see these things only from outside’’ (34). Writes James, ‘‘I had only to conceive his watching the same public show, the same innumerable appearances, I had watched myself, and of his watching very much as I had watched; save indeed for one little difference . . . that so far as all the swarming facts should speak of freedom and ease, knowledge and power, money, opportunity, and satiety, he should be able to revolve around them but at the most respectful of distances and with

Philanthropy in James

57

every door of approach shut in his face. For one’s self, all conveniently, there had been doors that opened’’ (34). Highlighting the advantages he has obtained from his class status, James repeatedly posits that ‘‘envy’’ (34, 35) or ‘‘jealous[y]’’ (43) would be the result of being himself and yet being working class, rather than a well-connected elite. Robinson’s consciousness thus is the product of experience. This moment, in which the artist’s consciousness is imagined as bridging the divide of experience between James and his working-class hero, instead confirms the contemporary critical assessment of ressentiment as an autoreferential formation. By describing ‘‘envy’’ as the result of ‘‘every door’’ shut in one’s face, James reveals not that consciousness has been bridged, but that his own consciousness has shaped his depiction of what the working class feels and thinks. But James’s ‘‘defence of my ‘artistic position’ ’’ (48) acknowledges such shaping. He makes clear that if he is ‘‘challenged by readers of a greater knowledge than mine,’’ he can nonetheless ask, ‘‘Yet, knowledge, after all, of what? My vision of the aspects I more or less fortunately rendered was, exactly, my knowledge. If I made my appearances live, what was this but the utmost one could do with them?’’ (48, his emphasis). There is a compelling argument here. To avoid being like his fictional construction, the Princess, whose luxury of ungroundedness results in the bad faith of her philanthropic motivation and activities, James argues for groundedness, a claim only to ‘‘my knowledge.’’ However, James finally pushes evaluative judgment outside situated subjectivity by claiming that all that matters is whether his representations ‘‘live.’’ Here he returns to what he calls earlier in the preface ‘‘that sovereign principle’’ of the ‘‘novelist,’’ namely ‘‘the economy of interest’’ (37). But this economy makes us hesitate, for after all, it is precisely the level of ‘‘interest’’ an experience holds that James criticizes as characteristic of the bad faith of the Princess. And while many critics have pointed to the association James establishes between the tragic Hyacinth and himself, one might more easily link him with the Princess, whose bad faith James has so carefully dissected. Like the Princess, he figures himself (though with approbation) as a collector. She collects bibelots and little democrats; he collects ‘‘notes’’ and has collected ‘‘from the cradle [as] the ineluctable consequences of one’s greatest inward energy’’ (47). Like the Princess, he is overwhelmed by his collections. He ‘‘positively . . . groan[s] at times under the weight of one’s accumulations’’ (48). Like the Princess, he therefore experiences a profound luxury of disconnection by which the ‘‘sovereign

58

Chapter 1

principle’’ becomes ‘‘the economy of interest’’ (48). Indeed, the Princess strikes the same note as James when she describes Robinson. ‘‘Fancy,’’ says the Princess, ‘‘the strange, the bitter fate: to be constituted, to feel the capacity that you must feel, and yet to look at the good things of life only through the glass of the pastry-cook’s window!’’ (337). The puzzle, then, is why the Princess’s cross-class social activism is described as a preeminent example of bad faith, while James’s cross-class social imagination is described as a carefully theorized ‘‘artistic position’’? Again, we could say that as with the autoreferential status of James’s critique of working-class ressentiment in his analysis of Hyacinth, here we see the same process at work in terms of lady bountiful. As Alfred Habegger particularly has argued, James’s position as an intellectual, figured as living vicariously in the world of representations, places him ironically enough in the position of the women upon whom he aims his skeptical and critical gaze.28 Thus, we could add, the novel, and James’s theory of realism, register a competitive anxiety or envy about social philanthropists as members of the same class as James, but who ‘‘challenge’’ him with claims to have ‘‘knowledge greater than mine’’ (48). We could even hypothesize that as a member of the bourgeois rentier class of Boston, but in flight from ‘‘the Bostonians’’ and the moral earnestness and social reform values they embody, James worries about his choice of vocation as a novelist generally disengaged from philanthropy. The ‘‘intra-class’’ competition (that other critics have noted in James’s work) is specifically here an inter-gender competition.29 James worries about the ethical as well as epistemological challenge that lady bountiful levels at him, as historically women of his own class flocked to reform movements in the Euro-American world. At the same time, the odd identification we can easily make between James and lady bountiful points us in a different direction. While intraclass, inter-gender envy may help produce James’s account of lady bountiful’s ressentiment, James also evinces an anxiety that envy may not be definitively explanatory. What the current critics of ressentiment—Jean Gregorek, Fredric Jameson, Sianne Ngai, and Eve Sedgwick—do so well is show that the autoreferentiality of ressentiment does not validate the simplistic reduction of historical conflict to psychological accounts of envy. It ‘‘couldn’t pass for a privilege,’’ James writes in his preface, to know ‘‘the meaner conditions, the lower manners and types, the general sordid struggle, the weight of the burden of labour, the ignorance, the misery and the vice’’ that his ‘‘tormented young man’’ does (35), but it is also true that

Philanthropy in James

59

James calls this lack of knowledge ‘‘in a degree an exclusion and a state of weakness’’ (35). The question opened up here tentatively, as it was indeed by James’s acknowledgment of his novel as representing only ‘‘my knowledge’’ (48), is what if envy is not what galvanizes organized social movements? What if the working class ‘‘will to mutual aid,’’ or even more puzzling, upper-class women’s cross-class involvement in such mutual aid, is more than what he represents it as, is more than mere envy? To imaginatively construct Hyacinth Robinson through himself, as James tells us he did, may well demonstrate the workings of the artist’s powerful and expansive imagination; it may also simply register the failure of ‘‘the rich principle of the Note’’ (47) and even more profoundly and damningly the limits of bourgeois art. The bad faith of bourgeois horizontal philanthropy, as James depicts it, cannot help but raise the question of the bad faith of the bourgeois artist writing about the working class. In Kenneth Warren’s classic account, a central problematic of realism—and James is one of his prime examples—is that its argument for the inescapability of situatedness (as opposed to sentimentalism’s transcendent ethic) tends to work against its aim of an inclusive or democratic politics. Realism thus became an ‘‘aesthetic that acknowledged its inability to represent the needs of oppressed and debased peoples’’ (65). For James, defense of art and the artist might well, therefore, need to be located elsewhere than in situated subjectivity or in the economy of interest. It is in James’s analysis of the ressentiment of vertical cultural philanthropy that he can find a new way to defend art— through its autonomy, specifically its autonomy not simply from the market, but more directly from the vengeance-driven hostility of philanthropy. And thus also, he can indirectly defend his vocation.

Cultural Philanthropy and Ressentiment The millionaire businessman, American art collector, and philanthropist Adam Verver in The Golden Bowl would seem to have no reason to be filled with ressentiment. Verver first appears to us through the consciousness of Prince Amerigo as the embodiment of American imperial power, as ‘‘Alexander furnished with the spoils of Darius.’’30 Verver’s imperial triumph is not measured just by his ‘‘millions’’ (44, 52) nor by his massive art collection that now includes the Prince as a particularly fine ‘‘morceau de muse´e’’ (49), but by his generosity. As the Prince puts it, Adam’s ‘‘easy way with

60

Chapter 1

his millions had taxed to such small purpose, in the arrangements [of marriage], the principle of reciprocity’’ (44), leading the Prince to say to his fiance´e, Maggie Verver, that Adam is a ‘‘real galantuomo’’ (45, James’s emphasis). The Prince indeed worries throughout the first and second chapters how he can likewise prove he is a real galantuomo, since the ‘‘principle of reciprocity’’ is abrogated by Adam. In any case, according to Maggie, the most profound sign of Adam’s generosity is his museum. We first find Adam in Europe collecting art, not merely for himself, but for ‘‘the Museum with which he wishes to endow [his collection]’’ in ‘‘American City.’’ The museum is ‘‘the work of his life and the motive of everything he does’’ (49). And it is in discussing this characteristic form of cultural philanthropy that we have our first hints of the moral problematic I have associated with Nietzschean ressentiment. The Prince says to Maggie that Adam, ‘‘though older and wiser, and a man into the bargain, was as bad— that is as good—as herself’’ (48), while Maggie declares, ‘‘Oh, he’s better . . . that is he’s worse’’ (49). Adam’s generosity generally and his cultural philanthropy specifically, in James’s ambiguous formulation in these opening pages, is as bad as it can be, which is to say, good; better in that it is worse. Relying on contemporary critics of Nietzsche, in the first half of this chapter, I have explored ressentiment through the lens of social activism, but one can also find this discourse saturating the struggles between a newly puissant American empire and older European ones, especially the British empire. Indeed, and more broadly, as Istvan Hont has shown, eighteenthcentury political economy emerged in order to deal with this very notion of what David Hume in 1758 called ‘‘jealousy of trade.’’31 To Hume and Adam Smith, ‘‘jealousy of trade’’ had corrupted the reciprocity and friendship that were supposed to inhere in trade (Hont, 124). The jealousy was such that in ‘‘modern politics the logic of trade was bent to the logic of war,’’ and the globe had become a ‘‘theater of perpetual commercial war’’ (Hont, 6). Following this longstanding tradition of economic analysis, J. A. Hobson in 1902 described in his famous book Imperialism: A Study how ‘‘resentment’’ between all Western nations was increasing and contributing to growing and destructive militarization.32 James does not use trade per se to describe imperial struggle in The Golden Bowl. Instead, he focuses on what Neil Harris calls ‘‘the collecting mania’’ that overtook U.S. elites in the late nineteenth and early twentieth

Philanthropy in James

61

centuries.33 As Harris shows, the media and the public found the ‘‘international competition for art, like the race for empire, a spectacle of considerable significance’’ (253). To demonstrate the link between the two, Harris particularly shows the way robber barons’ collections of European art treasures elicited enormous ‘‘civic pride’’ and a belief in ‘‘national supremacy’’ in the United States (259, 260), while sanitizing the reputations of supra-wealthy capitalist collectors.34 James’s redaction of the struggle between empires—especially America and Great Britain— thus focuses on this ‘‘international competition for art.’’35 More specifically, he refracts this intra-imperial competition through the discourse of ressentiment, which is central to Adam Verver’s imperialist cultural philanthropy. 36 James’s decision to embody an emergent U.S. empire through the figure of a philanthropist who collects European art to place in a museum in America is a fascinating one. He focuses on cultural imperialism, but not in its usual senses as either ‘‘the use of political and economic power to exalt and spread the values and habits of a foreign culture at the expense of a native culture,’’ or ‘‘the deliberate and calculated process of forcing a cultural minority to adopt the culture of the dominant group in a society’’ (cited in Arnove, ‘‘Introduction,’’ 3), but instead as a kind of aesthetic resource extraction but also redistribution.37 The questions he asks are important ones for thinking about aesthetics and imperialism in the modern period: How does American sponsorship of art differ from that of previous empires—particularly Roman and British? What does American cultural philanthropy reveal about American empire—both domestically and internationally? Or are all empires alike in their forms of artistic sponsorship and power? What do different forms of imperial cultural philanthropy reveal about the status of art? James suggests that American imperialism can be imagined through previous empires, but is finally different in that it represents in Nietzschean terms ‘‘a slave revolt in morality.’’ It is therefore motivated by ressentiment, by vengeance-driven hatred and envy posing as morality. In Golden, James thus creates an origins myth about the exceptional status of American philanthropy through the rubric of an emergent American empire. He likewise argues that American philanthropy and thus the nation’s form of imperialism represent, as Nietzsche would have it, an inversion of the ‘‘aristocratic value-equation’’ (Nietzsche 33). However, James’s critical account of cultural philanthropy also

62

Chapter 1

becomes complexly celebratory, while revealing his indebtedness to the popular political economy of the time, in which the gift is read as by necessity injurious. To begin with, like the Princess Casamassima, Adam is associated with American-style Puritan ethics, though in deeper and more profound ways. He is described as conscientious, duty-bound, and selfless. He can only play with ‘‘the innocent trick of occasionally making-believe that he had no conscience, or at least that blankness, in the field of duty, did reign for an hour’’ (130). Writes James, ‘‘this amiable man bethought himself of his personal advantage, in general, only when it might appear to him that other advantages, those of other persons, had successfully put in their claim’’ (129), and therefore, ‘‘A quarter of an hour of egoism was about as much as he, taking one situation with another, usually got’’ (131). His daughter is described as comparably self-disciplined in her conscientious unselfishness. Says Charlotte Stant, ‘‘She’s not selfish enough. . . . She lets everything go but her own disposition to be kind to you. It’s of herself that she asks efforts’’ (110–11). Charlotte compares her own and the Prince’s cosmopolitan or European ethos, saying they are quite different from Maggie: ‘‘We happen . . . to be of the kind that are easily spoiled’’ (111). Adam’s selflessness, however, is the focus of attention in the novel. His lack of egoism is evident in his marriage proposal to Charlotte, for example, which he explains to Charlotte as involving no desire on his part, but only a wish to be ‘‘kind’’ to Charlotte and to ‘‘put [Maggie] at peace’’ (196). In other words, Puritan conscientiousness and unselfishness here is also, in James’s elaboration, Puritan sexlessness. Adam is, on the one hand, utterly undesirable, ‘‘a small spare slightly stale person, deprived of the general prerogative of presence’’ (160); on the other hand, he is figured as undesiring. To emphasize this point, James also describes him as impotent or sterile. Says Charlotte, ‘‘Ah if I could have had [a child]! I hoped and I believed . . . that that would happen. . . . He thought so too, poor duck—that it might have been. I’m sure he hoped and intended so. It’s not, at any rate . . . my fault’’ (256). Interestingly, however, while Verver could become a traditionally ridiculed figure in literature, a cuckolded husband, his cuckolding instead leads to the opposite response—terror and aggrandizement. It is precisely whether or not Verver knows he has been cuckolded that Maggie uses to discipline her husband, and through him Charlotte (464–65). Indeed, in a novel full of violence, the selfless Adam is described as one of the most

Philanthropy in James

63

creepily violent characters. By the end of the novel he appears to be ‘‘holding in one of his pocketed hands the end of a long silken halter looped round her [Charlotte’s] neck’’ (523) and with ‘‘a smile,’’ giving that halter a ‘‘soft shake’’ (524).38 But even more intriguing about James’s elaboration of Puritan sexlessness is that even if Adam does know he has been cuckolded (which he probably does), he does not particularly care (347). It is Maggie who has asked Adam to discipline Charlotte, and his undesiring unselfishness is such that he immediately and efficiently complies. The traditional tropes of literature are inverted by the American Adam, who is, as the usually astute and reliable Fanny Assingham says, ‘‘beyond me’’ (419), or as Maggie says, ‘‘beyond everything’’ (507). If Adam as American Puritan inverts the norms of self-interest and desire, but even more strikingly, the longstanding literary tropes that equate male power with sexual potency, such inversion links him to the figure of the Jew in James’s analysis, as it does in Nietzsche’s. Jonathan Freedman has most extensively pursued the ‘‘labile’’ (Temple, 150) figure of the Jew in Golden, arguing that James uses the Jew to reveal a failure of assimilation (against which the Prince’s final assimilation is measured), but more particularly and ambivalently the unassimilable degeneration which the artist, James, himself represents (132–50). Like Freedman, I too want to focus on the stereotypical associations James calls upon, as well as his ambivalent embrace of the figure of the Jew. I focus, however, on the ways James associates Jewishness with the American Ververs and thus on the ways Jews and Americans are inverting traditional power relations in modernity. The primary stereotype James relies on to link the Ververs to the figure of the Jew is that of the commercial tendencies and acquisitiveness of both Americans and Jews. This stereotype is invoked in the very first pages of the novel as the Prince thinks about the decline of his family. The Prince, anxiously hoping ‘‘to look the other way’’ (55) from his own marriage, contemplates how his brother married a woman ‘‘of Hebrew race’’ but ‘‘with a portion that had gilded the pill’’ (53). The Prince, of course, is marrying into the American race, and his desire emphasizes that what gilds his ‘‘pill’’ is the ‘‘portion’’ Maggie brings. The novel again and again shows how much Maggie bores him, but what he ‘‘more and more . . . like[s] [is] Maggie’s money’’ (93). Commercial success enables the unlikeable upstarts from below—the ‘‘Hebrew race’’ and the American—to acquire Princes. 39 Equally important for a novel focused on cultural philanthropy, the art

64

Chapter 1

dealers in the novel are all Jews. In a tautological fashion, the figures that preside over the scenes of contemplated or achieved acquisition—of persons and things—are the American Adam and/or Jews. In the prehistory of the novel, the Ververs’ purchase of the Prince is initiated by Fanny Assingham, who is figured first of all as a ‘‘Jewess’’ (64) as well as an American.40 In the case of the Prince’s and Charlotte’s quest to buy a ‘‘gift’’ for Maggie, they likewise end up in a little store owned by a Jewish shopkeeper. Adam’s acquisition of ‘‘a set of oriental tiles . . . to which a provoking legend was attached’’ (179) is also the scene of the acquisition of Charlotte and is presided over redundantly by the presence of Mr. Gutermann-Seuss and ‘‘the rest of the tribe’’ (190), his family. In acquisition, the upstart, symbolically Jewish and also American, is always present. Particularly, acquisition conflates the figure of the Jew with Adam’s aesthetic interests and thus also cultural philanthropy. Thus, as James describes the course of Adam’s life: ‘‘His life ‘‘at first . . . had kept him hard at acquisition of one sort as a perfect preliminary to acquisition of another’’ (142). But if James associates acquisition and commercialism indistinguishably and stereotypically with the figure of the Jew and the American in this novel, more important is the fact that the Jew and the American invert power dynamics through morality. The unnamed Jewish shopkeeper who seeks to sell his golden bowl therefore provides us with perhaps our best understanding of Adam’s cultural philanthropy. It is in his shop, as mentioned, that Charlotte and the Prince try to find a gift for Maggie. It is in this shop that Maggie also looks to find a gift for her father. ‘‘[T]he coincidence,’’ even the Prince agrees, ‘‘is extraordinary—the sort of thing that happens mainly in novels and plays’’ (459). Even more extraordinary to all concerned, however, is why this mere coincidence provides Maggie with all the knowledge she needs to upend the established relations of Charlotte and the Prince and gain her revenge (462–63). The relatively astute Prince requires it to be explained to him twice because the reason is so ‘‘remarkable’’ (479). Likewise, even Maggie ‘‘felt her explanation weak, but there were the facts, and she could give no other’’ (479). The facts are that the Jewish shopkeeper engaged in what Nietzsche calls a will to mutual aid with the democratic American woman. Maggie had ‘‘chattered to him almost as to a friend’’ (479), and ‘‘he ‘liked’ ’’ me!’’ (480); he had become ‘‘inspired with sympathy’’ (460) to tell her the ‘‘truth’’ about the golden bowl. To this, the Prince ‘‘uttered an extraordinary sound, something between a laugh and a howl . . . though she [Maggie] remained in doubt of whether

Philanthropy in James

65

that inarticulate comment had been provoked most by the familiarities she had offered or by those that, so pictured, she had had to endure’’ (480). The Prince’s contempt for the shopkeeper, whom he sees as a ‘‘wretch’’ (120) and a ‘‘rascal’’ (122), starkly differentiates the Prince’s aristocratic perspective from Maggie’s upstart democratic one. But it is not just Maggie’s and the Prince’s perspective we have here, but that of the Jewish shopkeeper as well. Repeatedly described in a similar way to Adam, as physically ‘‘little’’ (121, 480), the shopkeeper’s friendship for Maggie is galvanized by his desire for revenge toward the Prince and Charlotte, toward the class and group of people who treat him with contempt. Twice, it is emphasized, he tells Maggie the truth of the golden bowl because he does not want her to accept an object that the Prince and Charlotte had refused: ‘‘he had been sure they were great people, but no, ah no distinctly hadn’t ‘liked’ them as he liked the Signora Principessa’’ (481). Maggie, by contrast to the Prince and Charlotte, has ‘‘easy humanity and familiarity’’ (481) with him and demonstrates her ‘‘good faith’’ (479): ‘‘her kindness, gentleness, grace, her charming presence’’ writes James in free indirect discourse, ‘‘had inspired him’’ (481). It is Maggie’s democratic American tendencies that instigate his act of largesse, ‘‘almost unprecedented in the thrifty children of Israel,’’ an act ‘‘all the more remarkable to his own commercial mind’’ (479). ‘‘I remembered the man’s striking me as a horrid little beast’’ (460), the Prince says in response to Maggie’s explanation. Maggie shakes her head, no, saying ‘‘I can only think of him as kind, for he had nothing to gain. He had in fact only to lose’’ (460). Freedman reads this as a moment where the Jew briefly assimilates and becomes ‘‘Christian’’ (Temple, 143). But I read it instead as a moment whereby if the Jew becomes Christian it is only in the Nietzschean sense in which the Christian inherits Jewish ressentiment. In other words, this is a moment defined by pure selflessness, pure philanthropy, in the sense of James’s and Nietzsche’s work more generally—as an act of revenge, and of a will to power, by the powerless in the guise of ‘‘conscientious’’ (479) generosity. With the Jew as the presiding figure in the background, Adam’s collecting and cultural philanthropy are an expression of geopolitical ressentiment, particularly of the struggle between a new American empire and older European empires. James describes Adam’s revelation about ‘‘his facility’’ (145) in terms of a struggle over power with Europe: To think how servile he might have been was absolutely to respect himself, was in fact, as much as he liked, to admire himself, as free.

66

Chapter 1

The very finest spring that ever responded to his touch was always there to press—the memory of his freedom as dawning upon him, like a sunrise all pink and silver, during a winter divided between Florence, Rome, and Naples some three years after his wife’s death. It was a hushed daybreak of the Roman revelation in particular that he could usually best recover—the way that there above all, where the princes and popes had been before him, his divination of his faculty had gone to his head. He was a plain American citizen staying at an hotel where sometimes for days together there were twenty others like him; but no pope, no prince of them all had read a richer meaning, he believed, into the character of the Patron of Art. He was ashamed of them really, if he wasn’t afraid, and he had on the whole never so climbed to the tip-top as in judging, over a perusal of Hermann Grimm, where Julius II and Leo X were ‘‘placed’’ by their treatment of Michael Angelo. Far below the plain American citizen—in the case at least in which this personage happened not to be too plain to be Adam Verver. (146) Adam’s revelation is ‘‘Roman’’ in that it is an awakening to imperial power, but it is also a revolutionary moment, described in terms of the upending of Adam’s previous ‘‘servility’’ and his acquisition of ‘‘freedom’’ through his own ‘‘faculty’’ or ability. In this revolution, the democratic ‘‘plain American citizen’’ stands above his mass-produced fellow citizens who seem (but are not) ‘‘like him.’’ More important, however, he ranks ‘‘above’’ popes and princes who have merely inherited rather than cultivated a meritorious ‘‘faculty’’ of artistic patronage. Adam is so far above these former rulers and leaders of European empire that he is ‘‘ashamed’’ of them. He is the figure of modernity, following in the tracks of the empire builders ‘‘before him,’’ but he exceeds and supplants all of them in his ability to ‘‘read a richer meaning . . . into the character of the Patron of Art.’’ The narrator points out later that the view that Adam’s freedom and faculty exceeds that of previous imperial patrons might be supplemented by ‘‘a view more penetrating than the occasion really demanded,’’ that Adam’s faculty also (or merely) represents ‘‘a rare power of purchase’’ (574). In short, Adam’s belief in his connoisseurship may be a delusion; his money may simply have ‘‘gone to his head.’’ Nonetheless, the seemingly ‘‘servile,’’ acquisitive American citizen, like the Jewish shopkeeper, does appear in the novel as winning out over European princes and popes, whether or not he

Philanthropy in James

67

is deluded about his ‘‘faculty.’’ He has, within the novel, ‘‘climbed to the tip-top’’ (146). Broadly speaking, then, modern American empire is aligned with the figure of the Jew in order to emphasize that this new empire works through acquisitiveness and commercialism. More important, however, the alignment seeks to demonstrate that American power will be exerted through a pose of benevolent or moral generosity that attempts to hide its revengeful envy. To be fair, however, while a uniquely American philanthropy in the context of imperial struggle is the central focus of Golden, James’s disenchanted account of American benevolent generosity is matched by a disenchanted reading of any act of generosity. Figured frequently as gift giving, benevolent generosity in the novel is simply the moral mask the resentful wear as they jockey for power.41 Nonetheless, if James’s analysis in Golden of the motivations behind American cultural philanthropy specifically, as well as any form of modern generosity generally, is consistent with the vengeance-driven motivations seen in The Princess Casamassima, James nonetheless separates the effects of American cultural philanthropy from its intentions. While being a philanthropist places Adam under suspicion, the fact that he is a connoisseur, a professional collector, opens up James’s reading of him. The contrast stands out particularly acutely when we think of how James treats the Princess Casamassima’s collecting. While her collecting leads her to bibelotize reality, to objectify both subjects and objects, and to be continuously therefore bored, Adam’s collecting by contrast represents a form of misanthropy that the novel consistently endorses. Writes James of Adam: it had never for many minutes together been his portion not to feel himself surrounded and committed, never quite been his refreshment to make out where the many-coloured human appeal, represented by gradations of tint, diminishing concentric zones of intensity, of importunity, really faded to the impersonal whiteness for which his vision sometimes ached. (130) Jamesian ambiguity inheres in the notion of ‘‘impersonal whiteness,’’ which as Thomas Galt Peyser compellingly argues could be read as signifying the self-delusions of a ruthlessly acquisitive and assimilative American empire that imagines it can incorporate ‘‘many-coloured’’ others into itself (‘‘Imperial Museum,’’ 63). Nonetheless, like Adam, the reader comes to

68

Chapter 1

yearn for the ‘‘impersonal whiteness’’ that might replace the unvariegated forms of self-interested, revenge-oriented, and violent benevolent generosity that apparently account for the ironically termed human ‘‘appeal’’ throughout the book.42 Likewise, an unusual emotion for a Jamesian novel—namely joy—also validates Adam’s connoisseurship. Thus, ‘‘apart from the natural affections he had acquainted himself with no greater joy of the intimately personal type than the joy of his originally coming to feel, and all so unexpectedly, that he had in him the spirit of the connoisseur’’ (140). In this famous passage Adam’s elation at discovering his facility is also compared to that described in ‘‘Keats’s sonnet about stout Cortez in the presence of the Pacific.’’ Adam’s ‘‘peak in Darien,’’ his discovery of his connoisseurship, ‘‘reversed’’ ‘‘the page of the book of life’’ of his acquisitive, commercial past and ‘‘sent up into his face the very breath of the Golden Isles.’’ In short, a ‘‘revolution of the screw [of] his whole intellectual plane’’ explains and justifies ‘‘why he had been what he had’’ (141). Jamesian ambiguity, however, is again at work: Adam’s joy is constituted by the desire (like that of the explorer/imperialist Cortez) ‘‘To rifle the Golden Isles,’’ and to make such rifling ‘‘the business of his future,’’ a desire that suggests that Adam’s intellectual and aesthetic discovery is actually nothing more than a repetition of his acquisitive and commercial tendencies writ large as cultural imperialism. Furthermore, the ‘‘revolution’’ in Adam’s perspective that creates such inner joy could be described more simply as the success of the resentful: Adam now imagines ‘‘the affinity of Genius, or at least of Taste, with something in himself,’’ that ‘‘He was equal somehow with the great seers, the invokers and encouragers of beauty—and he didn’t after all perhaps dangle so far below the great producers and creators’’ (140). Again, James might be emphasizing the American connoisseur/collector’s ressentiment here even toward the artist. Nietzsche in an 1873 essay insisted on describing the dilettante patron as inferior to the artist, highlighting the struggle between the two, and James, in an earlier novel, Roderick Hudson (1875), had suggested that the patron’s generosity might stem from his ressentiment of the artist, with the result that patronage might well render an artist not only financially indebted but artistically defeated, even dead.43 Nonetheless, James tips the balance toward Adam’s perspective of his own joy in that it is Adam who himself criticizes the kind of acquisition that had before characterized his life. Robber baron cultural philanthropy, James suggests, can redeem its acquisitive roots. Or as Adam more simply

Philanthropy in James

69

puts it, defusing the critical analysis of ressentiment James has constructed throughout the novel and underlining his ‘‘impersonality,’’ ‘‘I guess I’ve never been jealous’’ (507). Such a figuration of the millionaire businessman whose connoisseurship and collecting redeem him and may well redeem capitalism is not unusual in literature at the turn of the century. We find such figurations present, along with hesitations comparable to those in James, in Edith Wharton’s Elmer Moffatt in The Custom of the Country (1913) and Theodore Dreiser’s Frank Cowperwood in his ‘‘Trilogy of Desire’’ (1912–47). Finally, as connoisseur, Adam is not stupid. Adam does not depend on the art market for his evaluation of art. James carefully folds this point into his plot to tip the balance again toward an argument of the value of Adam’s cultural philanthropy. At one time or another, all three of the main characters, including Maggie, are ‘‘stupid’’ (565) (as the Prince says of Charlotte) because they believe appearances. Adam’s mind is that of a connoisseur who sees beyond appearances to another value system altogether. There is only one kind of appearance he cares about: ‘‘He cared that a work of art of price should ‘look like’ the master to whom it might perhaps be deceitfully attributed; but he had ceased on the whole to know any matter of the rest of life by its looks. He took life in general higher up the stream’’ (144). This is a somewhat puzzling formulation. We assume an art collector wants an authentic work of art, but authenticity is part of a market-based value whereby a piece of art becomes valuable because it is the work of an artist the market has decided to value. Authenticity, in other words, cannot simply be understood as aesthetic value. In a later James work, The Outcry (1911), authenticity is shown to be important to a rapacious and vulgar American robber baron only because it represents market value, not because it is attached to aesthetic value. By contrast, Adam knows that appearances in life and in art may be deceptive, but he doesn’t in the least care. He judges by purely aesthetic standards, namely that a work should ‘‘look like’’ the piece it is supposed to be; whether it is authentic doesn’t matter to him (as it does to the art market), so long as it is beautiful. He takes life ‘‘higher up the stream’’ than noting the all too obvious fact that appearance and truth are always discrepant in life and in artistic provenance. Because he works ‘‘higher up the stream,’’ the issue is not authenticity, but an aesthetic standard beyond it. And the bigger issue here, in any case, is Adam’s museum. Here again Adam’s ressentiment is key; however, James suggests both that Adam is

70

Chapter 1

redeemed by his cultural philanthropy and that his philanthropy may exceed his vengeance-driven intentions: He had wrought by devious ways, but he had reached the place, and what would ever have been straighter in any man’s life than his way henceforth of occupying it? It hadn’t merely, his plan, all the sanctions of civilization; it was positively civilization condensed, concrete, consummate, set down by his hands as a house on a rock—a house from whose open doors and windows, open to grateful, to thirsty millions, the higher, the highest knowledge would shine out to bless the land. In this house, designed as a gift primarily to the people of his adoptive city and native State, the urgency of whose release from the bondage of ugliness he was in a position to measure—in this museum of museums, a palace of art which was to show for compact as a Greek temple was compact, a receptacle of treasures sifted to positive sanctity, his spirit to-day almost altogether lived, making up, as he would have said, for lost time and haunting the portico in anticipation of the final rites. These would be the ‘‘opening exercises,’’ the august dedication of the place. (143) Again, we have the hidden violence behind morality—the ‘‘deviousness’’ of Adam’s slave morality is in evidence, and an implicit tragedy is evident in the ways that the ‘‘final rites’’ on European civilization are the ‘‘opening exercises’’ of a museum in the dreaded American City. But such deviousness is for the purpose of what is described as almost revolutionary redistribution— that of releasing his people from ‘‘the bondage of ugliness.’’ Again American identity is associated with slave morality—Jewish, and here also implicitly African American. While James’s tone is facetious and satirical, he nonetheless ambivalently embraces Adam’s actions in their misanthropic spiritual purity. Adam’s ‘‘spirit . . . almost altogether lived’’ in this temple to ‘‘civilization,’’ rendering him impersonal, able ‘‘on no occasion to have an attitude’’ (572) (unlike all the other characters in the novel) because the human spectacle, not to mention the market, means so little to a man with a purpose beyond it. James validates the ‘‘impersonal whiteness’’ that cultural philanthropists like Verver represent—often beyond their own intentions—more definitively in The American Scene. Here, James’s hysteria about what America

Philanthropy in James

71

represents is only modified in moments where cultural philanthropy, what he calls ‘‘patronage,’’ appears. And particularly, it is not through the intentions of patrons per se that patronage is redeemed. Indeed, patronage is associated again with hatred, envy, and revenge. However, the effects that patronage creates are what matters. The guiding metaphor in the book is that America is in the dark ages because of its combination of acquisition and rapacious commercialism, homogenizing, race-mixing, and leveling democratization.44 But James also argues that the patron might redeem America, not because of who he is, but because of what he can provide. Thus, early in the book, as he reflects on the ‘‘vacancy’’ (24) and ‘‘ugliness . . . the so complete abolition of forms’’ (25, his emphasis) in New England, he suddenly realizes how much Europe owes to its patrons. He writes that the ‘‘pervasive Patron’’ of Europe is an ‘‘absence’’ in America and thus leaves ‘‘such a hole.’’45 He continues, ‘‘We went on counting up all the blessings we had, too unthankfully, elsewhere owed to him [the Patron]; we lost ourselves in the intensity of the truth that to compare a simplified social order with a social order in which feudalism had once struck deep was the right way to measure the penetration of feudalism’’ (25). While this argument about feudalism is a bit ambiguous, he concludes more definitively that ‘‘if the Patron is at every point so out of the picture, the end is none the less not yet of the demonstration, on the part of the figures peopling it, that they are not to be patronized,’’ and he concludes with the hope that the rich, vacationing ‘‘summer people’’ will take up the task of the ‘‘production and imposition of forms’’ (26). Opposing himself to the contemporary discourse that used feudal imagery to criticize the contemporary U.S. (as figured, for example, by the popular term ‘‘robber baron’’),46 James somewhat comically embraces feudalism in that it promises to impose aesthetic form. Likewise, it is with relief that his eyes light upon cultural institutions (museums, libraries, universities) and the ways in which these institutions represent wealth and power imposing form on America. He repeatedly describes them as comparable to ‘‘the housing and harbouring European Church in the ages of great disorder . . . they are large and charitable, they are sturdy, often proud and often rich, and they have the incalculable value that they represent the only intermission to inordinate rapacious traffic that the scene offers to view’’ (353–54; see also 57–58). But at the same time, he admits that these sanctuaries, these ‘‘defined alternative[s]’’ and ‘‘possible

72

Chapter 1

antidote[s],’’ (57) might well be produced, as he had also said of Adam, by ‘‘the violent waving of the pecuniary wand’’ that ‘‘has incontinently produced interest’’ (354). He gives a ‘‘shy assent’’ to the latter assertion, but concludes that nonetheless ‘‘the treasures of knowledge . . . themselves organize and furnish their world. They appoint and settle the proportions’’ (354). What is acquired and then collected for all to see works beyond the meretricious or vengeful intent of the giver, purifying the transaction. When James visits the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the kind of institution that his fictional Adam Verver was founding, he is of mixed feelings about ‘‘the Patron’’ and his gift-giving. James meditates here on what he called in terms of Adam the ‘‘devious’’ routes cultural philanthropy takes before it redeems itself: I know not if all past purchase, in these annals (putting the Cesnola Collection aside), has been without reproach, but it struck me as safe to gather that (putting aside again Mr. Marquand’s rare munificence) almost no past acceptance of gifts and bequests ‘‘in kind’’ had been without weakness . . . but the gifts and bequests in general, even when speciously pleasing or interesting, constitute an object-lesson in the large presence of which the New York mind will perform its evolution, an evolution traceable, and with sharpness, in advance. What James refers to is the partially forged, partially looted collection that the Museum’s first director, Luigi Palma di Cesnola, sold to the museum as its director for great profit. The tainted gift, one motivated solely by selfinterest, is part of what James sees in the museum. And yet that tainted gift provides an ‘‘object-lesson,’’ which creates future possibilities, even future possibilities of real gifts, James implies. The ‘‘harsh’’ passages ahead ‘‘would be invidious, would be cruel, if applied to personal interests, but they take on a high benignity as soon as the values concerned become values mainly for the mind. (If they happen to have also a trade-value this is pure superfluity and excess.)’’ (192). Here we have a new formulation of the misanthropic ‘‘impersonal whiteness’’ of Adam Verver as James praises ‘‘values of the mind’’ rather than ‘‘personal interests.’’ Likewise we have a refiguration of Adam’s ability to take ‘‘life in general higher up the stream’’ (144) than worrying about market value; ‘‘trade-value’’ is ‘‘pure superfluity and excess’’ to the ‘‘values of the mind.’’ James concludes thus that ‘‘The

Philanthropy in James

73

Museum, in short, was going to be great, and in the geniality of the life to come such sacrifices, though resembling those of the funeral-pile of Sardanapalus, dwindled to nothing’’ (193). Or as he also puts it in a stronger formulation than in Golden, ‘‘Acquisition’’ can ‘‘be on the highest terms’’ (193). Aggressive acquisition and resentful cultural philanthropy can purge themselves through the artistic objects acquired, collected, and then displayed in institutions, the whole process constituting in James’s pun an ‘‘object-lesson’’ (192). I have argued that James was engaged throughout his career by the question of American generosity. His analysis aligns with the de Tocquevillean origins myth of American philanthropy in two ways: first, by describing it as primarily an American phenomenon, and second, by conflating different forms of it as motivated by the same desires. At the same time, James diverges from that origins myth by describing American generosity not as ‘‘the natural expression of democratic life’’ (Gross, 29) but as a vengeance-driven will to power of slaves and masters alike in contemporary capitalism, inflected and disguised by a residual Puritan morality. At the same time, James does make one distinction between horizontal and vertical philanthropy. Horizontal social reform philanthropy is violently destructive in its aims and results, while vertical cultural philanthropy may be violently destructive in its aims but has potentially constructive results that exceed its aims. I also argued at the beginning of this chapter that James’s inconsistency is connected to the predicament of the artist and intellectual, as philanthropy increasingly becomes central to both social reform and asethetics. James has to imagine art as escaping not so much from the necessity of the market (though that is indeed important) but more immediately from the necessity of the gift. This predicament can be described in two ways. First of all, James’s inconsistency can be linked to what Lawrence Rainey calls the ‘‘cultural economy’’ of high modernism. Rainey and Paul Delany have argued that members of the rentier class (like James) were the crucial funders of high modernism, and that this funding shaped the modernist belief in the autonomy of the artist and art. However, Delany and Rainey read the impact rentier patronage had on the thematic of autonomy in quite different ways. Delany argues that rentier patrons and patronesses did indeed provide modernist writers with ‘‘relative autonomy’’ (346, his emphasis) within market society, which allowed for ‘‘searching critiques of market society’’ (346). By contrast, Rainey argues that rentier patronage

74

Chapter 1

simply worked within a market logic to establish cultural capital through an ethos of scarcity and rarity. I follow Delany in suggesting that James’s attempt to imagine art objects as autonomous, as ‘‘themselves organiz[ing] and furnish[ing] their world’’ (Scene, 354), is both a product of and provides a scandalized critique of the Protestant ethic, the spirit of capitalism, and the form of philanthropy that emerges from them. As a member of the rentier class himself and as an artist, James’s desire to describe how the intentions of cultural philanthropy are non-homologous with its effects suggests how deeply critical he is of capitalism’s effects on what should be an admirable trait—generosity. At the same time, James’s inconsistency links his thought to contemporary political economy. James’s argument for the autonomy of art in capitalism depends on an unmitigated scapegoating of social reform and horizontal philanthropy. James never suggests that horizontal philanthropy could exceed its own will to power as vertical cultural philanthropy can. As noted earlier, there is clearly an intra-class, inter-gender competition expressed in James’s unrelenting attack on social reform philanthropy (albeit an also strangely self-referential aspect). At the same time, we see here embedded the discourses of political economy—the anxiety about philanthropy or the ‘‘injurious giving’’ (Carnegie, ‘‘Fields,’’17) that interferes with the naturalized and brutal workings of the market—but only in terms of the gift that tries to change social relations. In this sense, political economy is embedded in James’s own moral economy.47 Put another way, critics have frequently read freedom as central to James’s ethics.48 In his novels, James levels his critique at the selfcongratulatory notion of the inherently democratic nature of American generosity that philanthropy represents. Yet at the same time, his melodramatic imagination (as Peter Brooks calls it) borrows from popular political economy in seeing freedom and goodness as radical nonintervention. But finally, the serious artist or intellectual can accept philanthropic interventionism because art (if not fully the artist) thereby gains autonomy from the market. In the imagination that any financial intervention in the social world is by necessity ‘‘evil,’’ in the imagination also that financial intervention in art may finally be redemptive for both the donor and his/her recipients, we have the contradictions of the modernist’s disavowal of politics, but also indebtedness to the politics of political economy.

chapter 2

‘‘Livin’ on My Money’’: The Politics of Gratitude and Ingratitude in Howells

ince it appeared in 1890, William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes has been read as an analysis of Gilded Age capitalism and, more specifically, of the expansion of the U.S. literary market. Howells’s central character, Basil March, leaves Boston and his quiet life as an insurance man to try his fortunes as a literary editor in the competitive magazine world of New York. Recent studies of Howells have convincingly argued that, in his portrayal of both the move from Boston to New York and the class and ethnic strife witnessed by his middle-class characters in that move, Howells’s realist novel responds to the changes in capitalism at the turn of the century, and concomitantly the transformation of literary production and values.1 Building on these studies, I nonetheless seek to shift the debates about the social and economic transformation that Howells’s novel charts by focusing not on the expansion of a ‘‘free’’ and competitive market, but on sponsorship. The exclusive critical attention on the development of the market—literary or otherwise—and on Howells’s own career as a selfsupporting ‘‘professional’’ novelist has obscured what Hazard usefully highlights—both the promises and the challenges that artists like Howells saw in an emergent philanthropy.2 In the last chapter, I showed the ways James ends up endorsing American cultural philanthropy as an expression of a newly puissant empire—engaged in an envious and violent act of appropriation that will nonetheless redistribute art more fairly and protect it. In Hazard Howells explores the relation between a broad international context, American philanthropy, and creative and intellectual work in a quite different way. He asks what happens to the contemporary intellectual’s historical commitment to a disinterested ‘‘cosmopolitanism’’ under the regime

S

76

Chapter 2

of corporate-based philanthropy, and he focuses, not on the art object generally, but on print culture specifically. Howells’s novel has two central conflicts: one between March and Jacob Dryfoos, the ‘‘natural gas millionaire’’ turned real estate and commodities speculator, who finances the magazine on which March works, and the other a labor strike by streetcar drivers. The former conflict is resolved through an onstage anticlimax, the latter by an offstage climax; nonetheless, Howells loosely links the two. The result is that critics have read Dryfoos as symbolic of capital and March as symbolic of labor.3 But if the novel has been read as representing the ways in which intellectuals can be alienated laborers, Howells also complicates such a reading by depicting Dryfoos as an ‘‘angel,’’ a sponsor who remains throughout the novel indifferent to, even contemptuous of, the potential profitability of the magazine, and who seems to allow the staff to transcend what are described as entrenched market hierarchies.4 Howells’s novel thus captures an important dilemma in print culture of the time, about how to challenge, on the one hand, the political patronage that still controlled the content of newspapers, and on the other hand, the business interests that had come to control magazines (either through advertising or through ownership). For example, Progressive magazine and book editor Walter Hines Page, who succeeded Howells at the Atlantic Monthly (and whom I will discuss in Chapter 4), believed an independent press had been stymied in the United States by political patronage, the dictates of magazine owners, and the interference of advertisers.5 Page particularly recorded his frustration with ‘‘the limitation’’ that ‘‘ownership’’ caused, saying that as a result of it, print media could ‘‘but half serve the public’’ (Cooper, 110). Page therefore wrote to Andrew Carnegie in 1893, proposing that the latter provide an independent endowment for a magazine that would do serious investigative reporting for progressive purposes. Carnegie made sense as a choice, both because of his philanthropy and because he had purchased nearly twenty poorly selling newspapers in England in the 1880s that supported the Liberal party’s policies.6 Perhaps, however, since a controlling ownership is not the same as creating an endowment that frees up editorial policy, Carnegie declined Page’s request. In the years ahead, Page continued to explore the funding of a Progressive magazine by wealthy philanthropically inclined capitalists but failed to find a sponsor. In 1914 when The New Republic was founded, with the financial backing of heiress and social reformer Dorothy Payne Whitney and her

The Politics of Gratitude and Ingratitude in Howells

77

husband Willard Straight, Page sent his congratulations to the magazine’s editor, Herbert Croly. Howells seems to have both print culture’s dilemma and Page’s solution to it in mind in writing Hazard. In his depiction of a ‘‘natural gas millionaire’’ who brutally crushes strikes among his workers, while also generously funding a literary magazine that is not required to make a profit, he seems to be thinking of both Carnegie and Rockefeller. The incidents at Carnegie’s Homestead Steel (1892) and at Rockefeller’s Ludlow coal mines (1914) had yet to occur; nonetheless, Carnegie was a figure of minor fascination to Howells.7 As I will discuss at more length in the next chapter, Carnegie had funded not only newspapers in England but also numerous other literary endeavors in the 1880s and 1890s, and had written a number of wellpublicized books and essays. Carnegie was in fact so involved with print culture at the turn of the century that his recent biographer argues that Carnegie saw himself more as a literary man than a businessman.8 But whether or not Carnegie and Rockefeller were on Howells’s mind, his analysis of Dryfoos’s patronage captures the ways in which businessmen and artists/intellectuals were forging new connections at the fin de sie`cle. The explosive dinner at Dryfoos’s house therefore works not only to illustrate the class divisions and the intra-class contests over cultural capital of the time, as critics argue, but also the struggles between businessmen and artists/ intellectuals as new financial connections were unevenly established.9 In Howells’s fictional exploration of the dilemma of print media, then, the market challenges artistic and intellectual creativity and integrity, but a newer challenge is the capitalist sponsor, the philanthropist, who mediates the relation of the intellectual to the market and who seems to allow her/ him to bypass the market. Pierre Bourdieu has argued that in capitalism, the class and educational level of artists and intellectuals create ‘‘distance’’ from economic necessity and likewise their belief in their own disinterestedness, detachment, and autonomy. Bourdieu argues that ‘‘Culture is the site, par excellence, of misrecognition, because . . . the sense of investment secures profits which do not need to be pursued as profits; and so it brings to those who have legitimate culture as a second nature the supplementary profit of being seen (and seeing themselves) as perfectly disinterested, unblemished by any cynical or mercenary use of culture.’’10 Bourdieu’s account of the profits that accrue to cultural producers because of their putative disinterestedness has shaped some of the most powerful readings of Howells and of the realist ethos in recent years. These critics have argued

78

Chapter 2

that Howells’s work embodies Bourdieu’s analysis of intellectual misrecognition; however, they have focused on market capitalism, class conflict, and elite anxiety about both.11 Instead, I explore Howells’s depiction of the emergence of corporate philanthropy, an issue Howells makes central. More specifically, Howells elaborates the conception of intellectual distance and disinterestedness through a notion of the cosmopolitanism that has since the Enlightenment been connected, as Amanda Anderson says, to ‘‘the position and role of the intellectual and intellectual enterprise . . . in relation to new geopolitical configurations and within the context of destabilizing experiences of intercultural contact and exchange.’’12 In Hazard, amid the class and ethnic conflict that Howells charts, what often creates ‘‘cultivated detachment from restrictive forms of identity’’ (Anderson, 266) for the intellectual is sponsorship. However, Howells suggests that sponsorship so clearly reveals the grounds on which such detachment has been enabled that it fundamentally undermines any conception of detachment.13 The intellectual misrecognizes but also recognizes him/herself—a recognition that can have a variety of outcomes. Howells further suggests that if sponsorship makes visible the grounds of a claimed historical disinterestedness to cultural producers, it thereby forces us to call into question any form that disinterested love of humanity can take. Any action that seems to recognize or seek to remedy injustice or inequality becomes suspect as a result of sponsorship. Rethinking Dryfoos as a figure of an emergent philanthropy generally, and in print media specifically, helps us understand better the novel’s thematics of compromise and purity—or what Howells also maps out as the politics of gratitude and ingratitude. At the heart of the novel is the economic sponsorship of a literary magazine by a wealthy financier. But if the focus of the novel is literature, the novel analyzes such sponsorship as reconfiguring the possibilities (and impossibilities) of social relations across class, ethnic, and gendered lines. Dryfoos is thus just one figure—the central and illustrative one, but still only one figure—around whom the issue of sponsorship swirls. From Basil and Isabel March’s relation to Basil’s socialist German friend Berthold Lindau; from the sexual shenanigans of art editor Angus Beaton with Alma Leighton and Christine Dryfoos to Colonel Woodburn’s solution to the ‘‘Labor Problem’’; and from the relation of the old money Margaret Vance to the nouveau riche Dryfooses and to the ‘‘poor’’ of the Lower East Side, Hazard analyzes the significance of different, interlocked forms of sponsorship or philanthropy in contemporary capitalism. Howells does not focus

The Politics of Gratitude and Ingratitude in Howells

79

on a world in which the ‘‘free’’ market rules; rather, he analyzes a market in which ‘‘free’’ competition is mediated by sponsorship. This does not mean, however, that Howells abandons the ideal of disinterestedness. A qualified but genuine disinterestedness, he argues, can be achieved and is necessary for a critique of the status quo. In three of his novels of the 1880s, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), The Minister’s Charge (1886), and Annie Kilburn (1888), Howells had explored from different angles what Annie Kilburn describes as ‘‘the offensive word’’ ‘‘philanthropy’’— ‘‘what every one ought to do for others’’—in relation to the political economy of capitalism.14 Howells particularly examined the relation of the sponsor to sponsored, outcomes, and significantly the question of returns in the culture of corporate capitalism.15 In Hazard for the first time, however, he explicitly examines the workings of the ‘‘offensive word’’ not just within the culture of capitalism but as the product of it, and more specifically, its effects on print culture. The result of this new focus is that Howells hesitantly but unmistakably suggests that ingratitude becomes a form of morality. The novel gains special power when we think of it in relation to Howells’s own sponsorship of the many writers who have replaced him in the canon of American literature. Howells’s sponsorship of aspiring writers led Theodore Dreiser to describe him as ‘‘the great literary philanthropist’’ (144)—even as Dreiser—indeed ungratefully—dismissed Howells’s contributions as a thinker and writer.16

‘‘A Certain Eclat’’: Spoils System Patronage and the American Cosmopolite To begin discussing the politics of gratitude and ingratitude in Hazard, I want first to examine the central forms of sponsorship Howells himself experienced as a writer, and how his changing responses to them may have shaped his most famous novel. Howells’s career as a successful editor, author, and critic was largely enabled by the spoils system of state-based patronage and the cosmopolitanism it created for the provincial, selfeducated, and impoverished journalist from Ohio. Despite Howells’s later nationalist narrative about the warm welcome proffered by the Eastern literary establishment to the aspiring Western man of letters, the written record suggests that Howells’s eventual success had less to do with his status

80

Chapter 2

as a Westerner than with his status as a well-traveled cosmopolitan intellectual. Howells’s career began, he tells us and literary historians have dutifully repeated since, with the pilgrimage he made from the West to the East to pay homage to the Boston literary establishment in 1860.17 His trip was so successful, Howells says in his memoir Literary Friends and Acquaintances (1900), that Oliver Wendell Holmes stated that the meeting of the literary elite with the young aspirant represented an ‘‘apostolic laying on of hands.’’18 This nation-based narrative of literary, geographical, and generational transfer, however, deserves a bit more scrutiny. Howells’s first trip to Boston, the record suggests, actually led nowhere. While he met many literary lions and courted the favor of James T. Fields, he gained no particular encouragement or help from them.19 What really began Howells’s career was spoils system patronage, a fact Howells always minimized because of his later support for civil service reform.20 As a result of Ohio political and journalistic connections, Howells wrote Abraham Lincoln’s campaign biography, and after the election, again as a result of Ohio connections, he was rewarded with a consulship in Venice.21 It is not surprising, then, that in the years immediately following the ‘‘apostolic laying on of hands’’ and during his consulship in Venice, Howells still had difficulty publishing his writing in the premier literary journals in the United States, particularly in the Atlantic. He wrote to his father in 1863, in a tone that has little of the respect of his published accounts of the Boston literary establishment, ‘‘I have great contempt for the people who manage [the Atlantic], but I can’t do without them altogether . . . I am still kissing hands’’; and the ‘‘kissing of hands’’ involved remaining in Italy rather than returning to America.22 When his father wrote asking him to return to Ohio to work in the always precarious family business, Howells refused, responding that Europe gave him ‘‘a certain e´clat,’’ by which ‘‘I must profit at once.’’ ‘‘A three months’ residence in Ohio would dissipate’’ (Selected Letters 1, 198) that e´clat, he concludes. Howells’s status as a Westerner and the pull of national unity may have been useful factors in his later career success, but spoils system patronage and European travel were necessary. Spoils system patronage not only provided Howells with cosmopolitan credentials, but also entailed a variety of other crucial benefits. It provided him with the subject matter as well as the key social contacts and connections he needed to become established as a man of letters. In recent years, critics have shown the significance of travel for the development of American literature. Paul Giles, for example, has demonstrated how nineteenth-century

The Politics of Gratitude and Ingratitude in Howells

81

American literature was always comparative and transnational. The very quest for a national literature, he shows, was informed by and depended on British politics and literature. In a different vein, William Stowe has argued that nineteenth-century American literature was travel literature; to be an American writer was to be of the traveling class, and vice versa.23 Both Giles’s and Stowe’s arguments are useful for understanding Howells: his European travel became the subject of the first book that brought him widespread attention, Venetian Life (1866), and he continued to use travel and the tensions that inhere in ‘‘destabilizing experiences of intercultural contact and exchange’’ (A. Anderson, 268) to structure his fiction throughout his career. To list all of Howells’s texts that depend on travel for structure or content is essentially to list his oeuvre. At the same time, European travel enabled him to meet other literary men of the traveling class who could help further a career in letters. As consul in Venice, Howells met Charles Hale, editor of the Boston Advertiser, who in 1864 published the travel sketches that were to constitute the bulk of Venetian Life. In Venice, Howells also met James Lorimer Graham, who gave him the letter of introduction that enabled him to place Venetian Life with the British publisher Trubner & Co. Trubner, however, agreed to publish the book only if Howells could get an American company to take on half the publishing costs. As luck would have it, on the trip back from Venice Howells met Melancthon Hurd of the American publishing firm Hurd & Houghton. Without having read the book, but because of their shipboard friendship based on daily shuffleboard and nightly euchre games, Hurd agreed to share the costs of publication with Trubner.24 Examining the early years of Howells’s career, we can see the ways state-sponsored distance from economic need and from the nation linked Howells to the literary elite ideologically and institutionally. The ‘‘apostolic laying on of hands,’’ therefore, actually occurred only after Howells’s letters on Venice had been published in the Boston Advertiser and he had returned to the United States, having proved his cosmopolitan mettle. In early 1866, Fields, who had rejected all of Howells’s writings when Howells was abroad, invited him to become assistant editor of the Atlantic.25 After Howells accepted the Atlantic’s offer, his European travels continued to stand him in good stead, enabling him to join the Dante Club, which met at Longfellow’s house and counted on the membership of many of the most prominent Boston literary men. As James Woodress says, ‘‘The fortune of public office which sent Howells to Italy instead of Germany [his

82

Chapter 2

first choice] . . . was one of the luckiest accidents of his career. . . . He could not consciously have planned a better campaign to storm the literary citadel at Cambridge’’ (102). Spoils system patronage created for Howells the distance from need, the cultural capital, the connections, and the subject matter that facilitated his admission to American publishing houses and thereby the support and endorsement of other literary men. Howells’s early work can be read at least in part through this experience of patronage. His complacency with the status quo, his optimism, even the form his cosmopolitanism took suggest his acceptance of the terms of the state’s patronage. Illustrative of this complacency is the infamous definition he propounded of American realism as focused on the ‘‘more smiling aspects of life.’’ Although cited frequently, the definition and the context in which he published it are worth lingering on in order to think through Howells’s relation to his former patron. In September 1886, at the end of a year of violent strikes in the U.S., and just months after a bomb exploded in Haymarket Square in Chicago, Howells reviewed Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, arguing cheerfully that while the novel was powerful, the larger perspective generated by being an American in a free republic helped the reader realize its parochialism. He writes that the novel was ‘‘the natural expression’’ of Dostoevsky’s ‘‘life and . . . conditions’’: But it is useful to observe that while The Crime and the Punishment may be read with the deepest sympathy and interest, and may enforce with unique power the lessons which it teaches, it is to be praised only in its place, and its message is to be received with allowances by readers exterior to the social and political circumstances in which it was conceived. It used to be one of the disadvantages of the practice of romance in America, which Hawthorne more or less whimsically lamented, that there were so few shadows and inequalities in our broad level of prosperity; and it is one of the reflections suggested by Dostoievsky’s book that whoever struck a note so profoundly tragic in American fiction would do a false and mistaken thing. . . . Whatever their deserts, very few American novelists have been led out to be shot, or finally exiled to the rigors of a winter at Duluth . . . in a land where journeyman carpenters and plumbers strike for four dollars a day the sum of hunger and cold is certainly very small, and the wrong from class to class is almost inappreciable. We invite our novelists, therefore, to concern themselves with the

The Politics of Gratitude and Ingratitude in Howells

83

more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American, and to seek the universal in the individual rather than the social interests. It is worth while, even at the risk of being called commonplace, to be true to our well-to-do actualities. . . . It will not to do to boast, but it is well to be true to the facts, and to see that . . . the race here enjoys conditions in which most of the ills that have darkened its annals may be averted by honest work and unselfish behavior.26 The infamous phrase ‘‘more smiling aspects of life’’ thus appears in the context of Howells’s comparison of the situation of the American novelist with that of the Russian novelist, and that of the American working class with that of the Russian working class. Appealing to the long tradition in American letters in which the ‘‘exceptional’’ history of American democracy reveals the ‘‘universal’’ possibilities of humanity, Howells places himself and his reader in a location above and beyond the messy circumstances of the Russian writer and his subject matter (Americans are ‘‘exterior to the social and political circumstances [of Russians]’’). He minimizes and conflates the constraints of the American novelist and the constraints of the American working class by joking, first, about the impossibility of statebased political executions or the rigors of exile in ‘‘Duluth,’’ and then, by analogy, about America’s well-paid working class. He thus advises novelists to focus on a broader viewpoint than Dostoevsky’s parochial one, ‘‘the universal in the individual.’’ The American novelist should have a cosmopolitan recognition of American ‘‘well-to-do actualities’’ and ‘‘facts,’’ as opposed to Russian oppression. Howells indeed acknowledges that there is conflict in American society, as witnessed by the strikes of working men; nonetheless, he asserts confidently that American working men’s perspective of reality is simply wrong (given their high pay and the benign nature of the American state), and that the correct view is the one the American intellectual has, in which one can see the universal possibilities of humanity demonstrated by the exceptional case of American political freedom and prosperity. However, while the state’s patronage of Howells made possible his career and shaped his cosmopolitanism, we should avoid reading his work according to a simple deterministic narrative. The trial and subsequent executions of the Haymarket anarchists shifted his view of his patron—the state—and thereby also his cosmopolitan perspective. Privately he agitated

84

Chapter 2

for the anarchists, and finally he protested their hanging publicly. His modest public protest on 4 November 1887, was received with such hostility that he returned to his private protests, composing a response on 12 November 1887, which presents a strikingly different view of the American state and what constitutes universal humanity from the review of Dostoevsky one year earlier.27 Here he asks, ‘‘All over the world where civilized men can think and feel, they are even now asking themselves, For what, really, did those four men die so bravely? Why did one other die so inexorably?’’ The answer is that ‘‘They died, in the prime of the freest Republic the world has ever known, for their opinions’ sake’’ (Selected Letters III, 201). He argues that the state’s attorney ‘‘has shown gifts of imagination that would perhaps fit him better for the function of a romantic novelist than for the duties of official advocate in a commonwealth.’’ Instead, of ‘‘seek[ing] the truth,’’ the state has appealed to ‘‘heated passions’’ and to ‘‘fear . . . hate . . . resentment’’ (202), and relies on ‘‘medieval principle[s]’’ and ‘‘mystical number[s]’’ (203). Providing an analogy that will be important to Hazard, he cites the long history of abolitionist dissidence, stating that everyone from John Brown and Wendell Phillips to Henry David Thoreau ‘‘and the other literary men whose sympathy inflamed Brown’’ could have been executed by the medieval principles used to execute the anarchist workers. What Howells insists on, and builds up to, in this private meditation is that ‘‘we had a political execution in Chicago yesterday. The sooner we realize this, the better for us’’ (204). In other words, in an exact reversal of his review of Dostoevsky, Howells sees the trial of the Haymarket anarchists as revealing how profoundly circumscribed the freedom of both intellectuals and the working class is because of the state. A new kind of cosmopolitanism emerges out of Haymarket for Howells, in which he sees himself linked not with the American state, but with the American anarchists, the American intellectual dissidents of the past, and ‘‘civilized men’’ ‘‘all over the world’’ whose universal humanism calls into question the actions of the American state. One of the effects of Haymarket then is to undermine Howells’s affiliation with his patron. If spoils system patronage had created Howells’s career, and if he continued to use that system to help family and friends, Haymarket made him reevaluate this patron and the set of ideas that had expressed his affiliation with and gratitude toward it. In Hazard, Howells meditates on the significance of the emerging form of corporate sponsorship of artists and intellectuals within the context of class and ethnic strife caused by the excesses of Gilded Age capitalism. On

The Politics of Gratitude and Ingratitude in Howells

85

the one hand, Howells posits that the capitalist sponsor, through an act of largesse, removes the intellectual from the world of economic necessity and enables him to gain the distance to pursue a detached or disinterested analysis of that world. On the other hand, the very visible nature of the transaction between patron and patronized reveals the grounds on which the intellectual’s putative distance has been purchased. The transaction renders the intellectual unconcealed. The visibility of the transaction calls into question the very grounds of intellectual work—its status as autonomous, disinterested, cosmopolitan. As the machinery of disinterestedness is rendered visible by sponsorship, all forms of disinterested or benevolent action are likewise called into question. Nonetheless, this novel that meditates indirectly on the events of Haymarket, and imagines forward to Homestead and Ludlow, refuses to let go of the notion of disinterestedness, suggesting that both the ideal itself and some forms of relative disinterestedness provide useful analytical and critical tools.

Philanthropy and Cosmopolitanism In the early scenes of Hazard, Basil and Isabel March, middle-class Bostonians, are forced to confront the poverty and ethnic heterogeneity of New York while searching for a ‘‘home.’’ One of the most puzzling moments in the Marches’ extended quest to feel at home in the disconcerting environment of New York occurs after they have viewed from a coupe the ‘‘poverty as hopeless as any in the world, transmitting itself from generation to generation’’ (56). Mrs. March has proposed that they must not ‘‘sentimentalize’’ what they see, which means they must not assume that the poor suffer: ‘‘I don’t believe there’s any real suffering—not real suffering—among these people; that is it would be suffering from our point of view, but they’ve been used to it all their lives, and they don’t feel their discomfort so much’’ (60, Howells’s emphasis). In the wake of committing themselves to this rigorously relativist and self-interested perspective of reality, the Marches are arrested by the sight of a ‘‘decent-looking man,’’ a ‘‘workman,’’ searching the gutters for food. March spontaneously ‘‘put a coin in his hand,’’ at which the man caught the hand of this almsgiver in both of his and clung to it. ‘‘Monsieur! Monsieur!’’ he gasped and tears ran down his face.

86

Chapter 2

His benefactor pulled himself away, shocked and ashamed, as one is by such a chance, and got back to his wife; and the man lapsed back into the mystery of misery out of which he had emerged. (61) The scene dramatically clashes with the Marches’ recently stated philosophy, but despite the discrepancy, March’s act and his shock and shame are left unanalyzed by this usually garrulous and highly analytical couple. Howells underlines the opaqueness of this moment by having it precipitate Mrs. March’s sudden and unexplained return to Boston. Phillip Barrish helpfully reads this scene as demonstrating Howells’s argument that women are too literal-minded and lack sufficient irony to have the ‘‘realism’’ that creates intellectual distinction (44). And Barrish is certainly right in that Mrs. March is Howells’s scapegoat for the kind of limited and parochial perspective the novel criticizes. But Barrish’s reading does not explain March’s sudden shock and shame—neither of which he nor Mrs. March had experienced moments before in a coupe when they saw ‘‘poverty as hopeless as any in the world.’’ In the coupe, their emotions ranged from ‘‘disgust’’ to ‘‘dreamy irony’’ (56–57), but there was no shock or shame; the Marches even had discussed the profit March could make by writing up his dreamily ironic reflections on poverty (57). So we are forced to ask, why this sudden and spontaneous sympathy (if it is sympathy) one scene later in the novel? What has (momentarily) changed their perspective on poverty? Amy Kaplan argues that the man’s ‘‘decent’’ clothes, which link him to them, make for the different response (Construction 52). We could also argue that this moment of shock and shame suggests that March is revolted by his own and his wife’s previous ironical indifference to poverty, shocked by a world in which their ‘‘chance’’ empathy is all that keeps another human from starving to death on the streets of New York. But shock and shame do not appear as they watch the man; instead, the words appear syntactically after March gives money and is positioned as a ‘‘benefactor.’’ Because of the profound detachment with which the Marches usually view poverty, because of Mrs. March’s screed against sentimentality, we cannot help but wonder whether March’s shock and shame stem from the act of benefaction itself. We think here of the popular Spencerian political economy’s notion of ‘‘injurious giving.’’ Particularly we think of Carnegie’s anecdote in ‘‘Gospel of Wealth’’ (1889) (discussed in the Introduction), in which a ‘‘professed . . . disciple of Herbert Spencer’’ nonetheless once thoughtlessly gave a ‘‘quarter of a dollar’’

The Politics of Gratitude and Ingratitude in Howells

87

to a ‘‘beggar,’’ thereby causing ‘‘more injury than all the money . . . [he] will ever be able to give in true charity will do good’’ (‘‘Gospel,’’ 11). March is explicitly associated in the novel with quarter giving. He spends much of Book I deciding whether or not the janitors, who show the couple available apartments, are worthy to receive a quarter as a tip or not, and much later in the novel, in what can’t help but be an allusion to Carnegie, we find out that March in fact gave the starving man a ‘‘quarter’’ (382). Reading the Marches in relation to debates within contemporary political economy and an emergent capitalist philanthropy makes sense for an author whose books of the 1880s repeatedly trace his middle-class characters’ anxiety about ‘‘the offensive word’’ ‘‘philanthropy,’’ which paradoxically is also ‘‘what every one ought to do for others’’ (Annie Kilburn, 736), an author who also then later wrote substantially on a country called Altruria.28 Nonetheless, we have numerous questions to ask. Is March’s shock and shame the result of breaking with his and his wife’s stated policy of antisentimental and implicitly laissez-faire economic beliefs? Or is it an expression of spontaneous revulsion at such antisentimentality and economics? Or is it, yet again, shock and shame at his own self-interest (as Spencer or Carnegie might describe it)—of engaging in an ineffectual, sentimental, self-aggrandizing act that pretends to be charitable? Does March’s act reveal to him a spontaneous disinterestedness and empathy or a spontaneous interestedness and egotism? Or is it both, and is it the mixture of motives itself that causes shock and shame? Which is worse—to be unmoved by a ‘‘poverty as hopeless as any in the world,’’ to be moved to act from a selfish and self-aggrandizing motive, or to believe you have been moved by an unselfish and disinterested motive that may also be interested? The issue is left unresolved, but in a characteristic Howellsian juxtaposition, in the next pages of the novel, March learns that his livelihood, even his position as ‘‘benefactor’’ of the starving French immigrant, also depends on a benefactor—Jacob Dryfoos, the natural gas millionaire, turned speculator, from Moffatt. A variety of reasons are given for Dryfoos’s funding of the magazine: as a training ground for his son (79, 188–89), as creating cultural capital to make his family ‘‘social leaders’’ (78, 191). No reason is denied or validated by the text, but March’s immediate distaste and suspicion underline the point that all philanthropic or seemingly generous or kindly acts across class lines cannot help but be viewed as interested in the era of corporate-based philanthropy. And thus every action is scrutinized in the light of the self-interest it involves.29

88

Chapter 2

The novel is structured loosely, as the incident with the French beggar and the Marches suggests, by the social and economic reverberations from Dryfoos’s sponsorship. The two central and parallel sets of reverberations Howells traces are not, however, primarily through the poor or working classes, but through March, the magazine’s literary editor, and Angus Beaton, the art editor. To describe March and Beaton as parallel structuring devices may seem at first glance a perverse reading of the novel. Jonathan Freedman, for example, has usefully argued that Beaton represents what Howells saw as the amorality and hypocritical anticommercialism of fin de sie`cle aestheticism, against which Howells poses the moral and thoughtful March. Freedman’s argument coincides with the critical tendency to assume March is Howells, an assumption which continues to be a dominant one today.30 This alliance of March with Howells, especially Freedman’s version of it, is useful to mine in the sense that the antitheses Howells outlines between March and Beaton—the serious, professional family man who serves as the magazine’s literary editor and the frivolous, dilettantish philanderer who serves as its art editor—only emphasize the striking structural parallels Howells also draws between them from the beginning of the novel. These parallels, despite outward differences, are mutually illuminating and help us better understand Howells’s analysis of the structural effects of corporate-based philanthropy. Hazard begins with the ‘‘syndicate man’’ (11), Fulkerson, explaining the new, cooperative literary magazine he is putting together and his reasons for wanting March as its editor. Fulkerson says the new magazine represents a ‘‘beautiful vision of a lot of literary fellows breaking loose from the bondage of publishers and playing it alone’’ (11). Howells signifies here one of the attractions of philanthropy in capitalism—that it offers freedom from entrenched market hierarchies, from an unfair and unequal, and putatively free market. It is this independence from the market that enables Fulkerson to ask the inexperienced March to join him: ‘‘I want you. I might get a man of more experience, but I should probably get a man of more prejudice and self-conceit along with him, and a man with a following of literary hangerson. . . . I want to start fair’’ (8, Howells’s emphasis). However, after saying that they will be ‘‘start[ing] fair’’ and ‘‘playing it alone,’’ he also tells March, ‘‘I don’t stand alone on it’’ (14). There is an escape from the market posited here, an escape described through the language of slavery, of becoming free from the ‘‘bondage of publishers.’’ I will return later to the way the memory of slavery and the Civil War haunts the novel. Here, however, I simply

The Politics of Gratitude and Ingratitude in Howells

89

want to note the paradox outlined—that playing it alone, ‘‘start[ing] fair,’’ beginning a cooperative rather than competitive endeavor, by necessity must mean not standing alone, must mean having a sponsor. In an unfair and unfree market, structured by entrenched hierarchies, to stand alone and challenge market logic means to have an ‘‘angel’’ (18), someone who helps one transcend the economics of capitalism but does so, paradoxically, because he has been profoundly successful within capitalism. Howells makes March remarkably incurious about the financial arrangement of the magazine, though he is told there is an ‘‘angel.’’ It is only after he has accepted Fulkerson’s offer and is in the process of moving to New York that Fulkerson explains that Dryfoos is the ‘‘angel.’’ March’s incuriosity is accounted for by Howells in one central way: that he acts under the compulsion of necessity. March has at first refused Fulkerson’s offer because the endeavor is so hazardous, but when he is demoted at work, and it is clear he will eventually be fired, he has ‘‘little choice’’ (84) but to accept the work on the magazine. Howells suggests that because March refuses to recognize the grounds of necessity that dictate his acceptance, he does not want to know how the magazine is financed until it is too late to back out. When Fulkerson finally explains who Dryfoos is and his relation to the new literary endeavor, March is filled with distaste for the whole affair (72–86). This scene, and this dynamic, are repeated in abbreviated form and with a few variations when Fulkerson later approaches the future art editor, Beaton. Fulkerson repeats many of the sentiments to Beaton that he has expressed to March. ‘‘I want you’’ (107, Howells’s emphasis), he says with precisely the emphasis he had used with March, giving us our first reason to read March and Beaton’s stories in tandem. And as with March, Fulkerson appeals to Beaton by describing the magazine as standing outside the economics of the current market system. The magazine will disrupt entrenched market hierarchies, he tells Beaton: ‘‘Names! Names! Names! In a country that’s just boiling over with literary and artistic ability of every kind the new fellows have no chance’’ (108). Again, Howells highlights that the market operates neither freely nor fairly but with the entrenched hierarchies of closed social networks. Howells furthermore enforces the parallel between March and Beaton by having Beaton at first refuse Fulkerson’s offer, and this explains Beaton’s incuriosity, comparable to March’s, about the funding of the magazine. ‘‘I’m not your man, Fulkerson,’’ Beaton says to Fulkerson, ‘‘I’m getting further and further away from this century

90

Chapter 2

and its claptrap. . . . I can’t sell myself out to a thing I don’t believe in’’ (108–9). When Fulkerson leaves an advance, Beaton reflects on the sums of money he owes his working-class father, and as for March, necessity apparently prompts his acceptance. Because, like March, Beaton refuses to recognize the grounds of necessity (if in a self-conscious and selfaggrandizing fashion), Beaton, also like March, does not inquire into how the magazine is funded. And like March, when Beaton meets the Dryfooses, he is disgusted at having been ‘‘bought . . . up’’ (145). If both March and Beaton are incurious about the funding of the magazine because they misrecognize themselves as free agents, this fact is accounted for by their investment in the notion of themselves as intellectuals and artists—cosmopolitan, disinterested, distinguished from those around them by their broader perspective of the world. Thus of the Marches, Howells writes: They liked to play with the romantic, from the safe vantage ground of their real practicality, and to divine the poetry of the commonplace. Their peculiar point of view separated them from most other people, with whom their means of self-comparison were not so good since their marriage as before. Then they had traveled and seen much of the world, and they had formed tastes which they had not always been able to indulge, but of which they felt that the possession reflected distinction on them. (22–23) What has been ignored in the many debates over the degree to which Howells is endorsing or criticizing the Marches’ ‘‘peculiar point of view’’ is how travel, and the presumption of cosmopolitanism, constitute the grounds of the Marches’ sense of distinction. This sense, Howells suggests in this description, is a misrecognition. Although the Marches had traveled in the past, their ‘‘means of self-comparison’’ (22) are quite limited, and rather than having a broad experience of the world, they are ‘‘very much wrapped up in themselves and their children’’ (23). The ‘‘danger’’ they face, Howells says, ‘‘was that they should grow too well satisfied with themselves, if not with each other’’ (22). The danger of self-enclosure rather than expansiveness of view is so great, he suggests, that their self-satisfaction does not necessarily even enclose each other. At first, it appears that the Marches’ misrecognition of themselves will potentially be disrupted by the shift in perspective required by the move

The Politics of Gratitude and Ingratitude in Howells

91

from the provinces of Boston to the metropolis of New York. Howells makes clear, however, that travel is not enough to shift one’s viewpoint, especially not travel funded by Dryfoos. Throughout the book, Howells places the Marches in a series of public conveyances to elaborate this point. In these conveyances the Marches are ‘‘taken out of themselves’’ (34), made to think about ‘‘forces’’ and ‘‘fates’’ (67, also 160). While Howells interestingly describes the possibility of moving beyond the self, of becoming truly cosmopolitan through what Jackson Lears, relying on Nietzsche, has called the weightlessness of nineteenth-century train travel, weightlessness finally is not enough to create a truly cosmopolitan viewpoint. Writes Howells of one of March’s train expeditions, the city’s heterogeneity and brutality begin to make their ‘‘dumb appeal [to] the consciousness of a man who had always been too self-enwrapt to perceive the chaos to which the individual selfishness must always lead.’’ Nonetheless, Howells concludes, ‘‘There was still nothing definite, nothing better than a vague discomfort’’ (160). An ‘‘appeal’’ is made to March’s consciousness by the inequality he witnesses, but he does not see how his own ‘‘individual selfishness’’ might contribute to that inequality because, in a circular fashion, he is too ‘‘self-enwrapt.’’ Even when March begins to have ‘‘a sense of complicity’’ (265) as he observes the conflicts in New York, he and his wife only get a ‘‘laugh out of it . . . with some sadness at heart and with a dim consciousness that they had got their laugh out of too many things in life’’ (265). The Marches are therefore associated in the book with an inability to move beyond the personal, beyond their self-enwrapped perspective, and to see the impersonal, even if the Marches think of themselves as escaping the personal through their cosmopolitanism. On hearing German Socialist Berthold Lindau’s views on capitalism, for example, Howells writes that March is unable to think about the ‘‘impersonal significance of [Lindau’s] words,’’ but only about ‘‘the light they cast upon Lindau himself’’ (168, see also 138). The Marches therefore characterize those who actually engage the world outside themselves, those like Conrad Dryfoos or Lindau, as tasteless ‘‘cranks’’ (311, 315). Beaton is likewise described as misrecognizing himself as cosmopolitan. The tone Howells uses to describe Beaton’s cosmopolitanism is more parodic than he uses for March, but the parallels between the two are nonetheless striking. Beaton, like the Marches, is a traveler. A ‘‘rich’’ ‘‘Syracusan amateur of the arts’’ gave Beaton ‘‘the money to go and study abroad’’ (405), and ‘‘it had taken only three years in Paris to obliterate many traces

92

Chapter 2

of native and ancestral manner in him’’ (92). Beaton impresses his pupils as speaking ‘‘epigrammatic and sententious French’’ (92) even when speaking English. His studio is littered with medieval silk, Japanese dresses, and foreign periodicals (104)—attesting to his putatively cosmopolitan status. What Beaton specifically obliterates is the fact of his working-class background as the son of a Syracusan tombstone maker of Scottish descent. In addition, he refuses to think about impersonal ‘‘social questions,’’ instead wanting to think only about the ‘‘psychical problems that young people . . . debate so personally’’ (345). Howells suggests that Beaton’s personalism, as opposed to March’s, is a way of distancing himself from his own class status and taking on the manners and mores of the bourgeoisie: ‘‘Son of the working people as he was, Beaton had never cared anything about such matters; he did not know about them or wish to know; he was perhaps too near them’’ (345). Nonetheless, if Beaton’s personalism emerges from a different social context from that of the Marches, the effect is the same. Like the Marches, Beaton sees those engaged in social questions as narrow, saying of Conrad Dryfoos that ‘‘the man of one idea is always a little ridiculous’’ (346).31 Beaton’s concordance with the Marches on this topic again illuminates Howells’s critique of the putative ‘‘distance’’ of the cosmopolitan intellectual. Cosmopolitan ‘‘distance’’ in the case of these intellectuals is actually self-enwrapped personalism. If misrecognition of the self as free, cosmopolitan, and therefore above the messy degradation of social and economic questions renders the two editors of the magazine comparable, such misrecognition in Howells’s schema necessarily turns into recognition when they become objects of Dryfoos’s sponsorship. One way this is made evident is in Howells’s exploration of the process by which March and Beaton become sponsors in their own right, and in the fantasies they have about, and conflicts they have with, their objects of sponsorship. March’s fantasies about his old German friend Lindau and Beaton’s about Alma Leighton attest to an emotional investment the two editors have in the objects of their sponsorship that exceeds the bounds of their actual interactions with them and illuminates their self-recognition within their misrecognition. March’s and Beaton’s fantasies, which show Howells illuminating what Marjorie Garber calls the ‘‘libidinal economy’’ (xi) of the patronage relation, have the same basic structure, while the differing content is mutually revealing.32 When confronted with the necessity that has shaped their acceptance of Dryfoos’s sponsorship and the sense of degradation that it

The Politics of Gratitude and Ingratitude in Howells

93

entails, both March and Beaton imagine dramatic acts of beneficence toward their objects of sponsorship, which entail profound and dramatic expressions of gratitude from those whom they sponsor. In one of March’s fantasies just after he has learned of Dryfoos’s role in the magazine, he meditates on the impossibility of resigning because he is ‘‘the servant of those he loved.’’ ‘‘In the pathos of this conviction,’’ writes Howells, ‘‘he dwelt compassionately upon the thought of poor old Lindau’’ and ‘‘resolved to make him accept a handsome sum of money—more than he could spare, something that he would feel the loss of.’’ The fantasy continues, ‘‘after that he got Lindau employment on Every Other Week and took care of him till he died’’ (86). Beaton’s philanthropic fantasies, like March’s, occur when the issue of sponsorship is most visible. Soon after Beaton accepts his advance from Fulkerson, for example, he visits his neglected object of sponsorship and love interest, Alma Leighton. When Leighton refuses to be ‘‘patronize[d]’’ (117) by him, Beaton imagines a number of scenarios in which his true disinterestedness is revealed. In one he dies, much to her regret (117); in another, his life becomes ‘‘one of renunciation, of self-forgetting, an oblivion tinged with bitterness’’ (118); in yet another he remakes Every Other Week into a ‘‘high grade’’ journal leading alternately to ‘‘the unavailing regret of Alma Leighton, and now his reconciliation with her.’’ The latter fantasy culminates in a marriage in ‘‘Grace Church, because Beaton had once seen a marriage there and had intended to paint a picture of it sometime’’ (118–19). What March’s and Beaton’s repeated ‘‘fervid fantasies’’ (119) attest to is their desire, first of all, to be truly disinterested. In their imagination, they give freely to Lindau and Leighton, not from Dryfoos’s largesse, but from their own.33 March will ‘‘feel the loss’’ of the money he plans to give to Lindau; Beaton’s merit will be revealed through his own actions, not indirectly through dispensing Dryfoos’s money. Howells suggests that such fantasies of philanthropy function as wishful desires for disinterestedness rather than interestedness. From another angle, however, the fantasies reflect, as March later says of Dryfoos’s actions toward the dead Lindau, a deep sense of guilt and thus a desire for ‘‘atonement’’ (395). These fantasies provide consolation from the reality of self-compromise and self-interest. Finally, though, Howells makes clear that the desire for atonement is so closely linked in these fantasies to the desire for self-aggrandizement that it negates the ideal of disinterestedness. So if there is a desire for atonement

94

Chapter 2

here, it reveals, as March later says in relation to Dryfoos, ‘‘the hopeless absurdity of [the] endeavor of atonement’’ (395). In addition, the fantasies are juxtaposed to the actual help Lindau and Leighton receive from March and Beaton, which is negligible, given that it is the result not only of Dryfoos’s wealth, but also, in both cases, of Fulkerson’s prompting. Finally and most important, however, these fantasies are juxtaposed to Lindau’s and Leighton’s absolute and explicit refusal to be grateful for the patronage they receive from March and Beaton, or to provide March and Beaton with the sense of atonement they desire. Lindau expresses no gratitude for the work March provides, and in the end, throws the money he has been paid back into March’s face.34 Leighton, for her part, denies she owes Beaton anything as a result of his sponsorship. She rejects his marriage proposal, and in the end, forbids him to visit her ever again. In March’s and Beaton’s conflicts with their objects of sponsorship, as in their fantasies about them, their misrecognition of themselves as disinterested is linked to the unsavory recognition of themselves, by others and eventually by themselves, as interested. Likewise in March’s and Beaton’s conflict with their own sponsor, misrecognition is closely linked to recognition. In the case of March, his desire to misrecognize himself in fact precipitates the conflict with Dryfoos and results in a transformative recognition. In an allusion to Haymarket, Dryfoos asks March to fire Lindau for his political opinions as a ‘‘red-mouthed labor agitator’’ (301), or, as Dryfoos explains more directly the logic of sponsorship later in the book, ‘‘I didn’t want to hear that kind of [socialist] talk from a man that was livin’ on my money’’ (388). However, when March refuses to fire Lindau at Dryfoos’s behest, he does so on the grounds that he and Lindau are cosmopolitan gentlemen who stand outside the system that Dryfoos embodies. He says to Fulkerson, ‘‘I’m not used to being spoken to as if I were the foreman of a shop, and told to discharge a sensitive and cultivated man like Lindau as if he were a drunken mechanic. . . . He [Dryfoos] doesn’t own me’’ (305). But this misrecognition, while galvanized as an interesting protest against necessity, hides a deeper, abject recognition. ‘‘He realized as every hireling must, no matter how skillfully or gracefully the tie is contrived for his wearing that he belongs to another whose will is his law.’’ March’s ‘‘indignation was shot with abject impulses’’ (306). March’s misrecognition of the way his class status and cultural capital protect him from necessity is transformed in this moment, as he sees

The Politics of Gratitude and Ingratitude in Howells

95

how he too is ‘‘livin’ on [Dryfoos’s] money’’ and therefore is no different from ‘‘every hireling’’ (307). In the case of Beaton, his desire to misrecognize himself does not lead directly to a conflict with Dryfoos; nor does it lead like March’s to a transformative recognition. Beaton does, however, have a more intense conflict with Dryfoos, one that leads to a more abject recognition than March’s. If Dryfoos’s confrontation with March hinges on Dryfoos’s ownership of his labor, with Beaton it goes further and involves not only the ownership of his labor but the ownership of his body. Howells anticipates a trope central to modernist male writing in figuring sponsorship as forcing the intellectual or artist to prostitute himself.35 When Dryfoos has Mrs. Mandel tell Beaton to stop his flirtation with Christine Dryfoos, Beaton decides that he will ‘‘have to give up his place on Every Other Week’’ (351). This is a revision of March’s conflict with Dryfoos as one of ‘‘every hireling’’ (307) with his boss. In Beaton’s case, however, it is put in terms of sexuality and is dramatized more fully in that Howells juxtaposes it directly to the striking streetcar workers on the streets of New York. In fact, it is through Beaton, overheated in an ‘‘idiot fur overcoat’’ (352), a coat that links Beaton even more closely to Howells than to March, that we first learn of the streetcar strike that precipitates the final conflicts of the novel.36 But Howells implies that Beaton, as opposed to March, refuses the connection between the strikers and himself: ‘‘What do the infernal fools expect to live on?’’ (353), he asks a police officer in a rage. It is therefore no real surprise that when Dryfoos later returns to the negotiating table with Beaton and offers him his millions if he will marry Christine, Beaton is intrigued by the offer and does not reject it. When Beaton finally does decide against the offer, however, the light it throws on his actions is so ‘‘low and coarse and vulgar’’ that Beaton ‘‘grovel[s] . . . inwardly’’ and attempts suicide (427). If artists or intellectuals in the era of capitalist philanthropy are forced to recognize the grounds on which their misrecognition constitutes itself, Howells nonetheless ends both March’s and Beaton’s stories in anticlimax. For March and Beaton, there is no clear or direct outcome from their respectively transformative and useless recognitions. In March’s case, Howells has Lindau quit the magazine, rendering the conflict between Dryfoos and March moot. March, he writes, is filled with a sense of ‘‘sneaking’’ ‘‘impermanency’’ (316, 328, 330), not dignified clarity or resolution. Likewise, Beaton’s attempt to dignify his confrontation with Dryfoos through

96

Chapter 2

suicide fails, and Beaton recognizes ‘‘that he had got his punishment in the right way and that his case was not to be dignified into tragedy’’ (427). Amy Kaplan has argued that the ending of the novel represents Howells’s failed attempt at containing the conflicts the novel has analyzed. Building on but differing from Kaplan, Thomas Peyser contends that the ending reveals Howells’s despair at the ways such conflicts have become an amusing and reified aspect of daily life (101–2); Barrish writes that the novel privileges at the end March’s ‘‘special, and often paralyzing, insight regarding the unfixable brokenness of the world’’ (47); and Christianson asserts that the novel ‘‘retains a primary commitment to redeeming capitalism in the form of middle-class cultural values’’ (185). By contrast, I see something that is politically more productive than what these critics do, emerging at the end of the book. At one level, and in relation to March and Beaton, Howells analyzes how philanthropy can function to enforce capitalist hegemony, despite the recognitions it enables. In March’s and Beaton’s different but finally unresolved conflicts with sponsorship, Howells suggests that such sponsorship can undermine the notion of intellectual disinterestedness, and at the same time, have no useful critical outcome. Indeed, if the book begins with Fulkerson’s hope that Every Other Week can disrupt the entrenched hierarchies of an unfair and unfree market, by the end of the novel, Fulkerson and March have bought the magazine from Dryfoos and are hoping the market will enable them to escape sponsorship. Howells suggests at a first level of analysis, then, that philanthropy can effectively work to enforce the status quo. But Howells’s analysis does not end here. While disinterestedness is thoroughly undermined for March and Beaton in the book as a result of Dryfoos’s sponsorship, Howells nevertheless argues at another level that disinterestedness is not a bankrupt concept. Here, we need to return, first of all, to the way slavery serves as a lens through which to read the events of the novel, a lens (as I noted) that appears in the first pages, when Fulkerson describes the magazine as ‘‘a lot of literary fellows breaking loose from the bondage of publishers’’ (11). Lindau most obviously functions to focus our attention on the way slavery elucidates contemporary events, as he loses a hand fighting in the Civil War, and then the same arm, and finally his life in the workers’ strike that ends the novel. Howells suggests that the war to free the slave from the slaveowner has now become the war to free the laborer from the capitalist. The strikers and Lindau are ‘risking all they have in the world for the sake of justice’ (366), as Margaret Vance puts it.

The Politics of Gratitude and Ingratitude in Howells

97

Lindau and the striking streetcar workers become models of disinterested action. Their stand is not turned into an anticlimax, as March’s and Beaton’s confrontation with Dryfoos is. The conflict between capital and labor is described as sharp and left literally unmediated or arbitrated in or by the novel (355). In addition to the unresolved conflict of labor and capital, Howells also posits a promising form of disinterestedness that emerges even in the mediated space of capitalist philanthropy. This form of disinterestedness is again connected, although loosely, to slavery and the war to end it. Howells suggests that the paternalism as well as the economic violence that inhered in the ideology of slavery inheres likewise in the ideology of sponsorship and can be usefully contested only by what we can figure as ingratitude. The only article that Dryfoos reads in Every Other Week, according to Fulkerson, is Colonel Woodburn’s article on ‘‘responsible slavery’’ (324, 175), in which Woodburn argues that if slavery had been left alone to develop ‘‘in the mild patriarchalism of the divine intention’’ (152), all would have been well. Howells thus links Dryfoos, the Northern capitalist speculator and patron, to Woodburn, the Southern apologist of slavery, through the notion of the father acting for the best interests of those beneath him—a linkage we will explore in greater depth in Charles Chesnutt’s work (Chapter 4 below). They are also linked by their critique that socialism—as opposed to slavery or capitalism—is a form of ‘‘paternalism’’ (299, 388), a position that Howells directly ironizes through the two men’s self-evident paternalism. Again, as Dryfoos says to March when retrospectively explaining why he wanted Lindau fired, ‘‘I didn’t want to hear that kind of talk from a man who was livin’ on my money’’ (388). Analogizing to the union he had busted in previous years, Dryfoos says he doesn’t want ‘‘the men dependent on me to manage my business for me’’ (389). At the same time, one reason given for Dryfoos’s engagement in Every Other Week is that Dryfoos has decided on his own son Conrad’s career—that Conrad must be a businessman, rather than a minister. Capitalist paternalism in Hazard is figured in terms of the father’s control and then murder of the ‘‘ungrateful’’ child or children (Conrad, Lindau, and more broadly the striking streetcar workers). Also interestingly, however, in Hazard, if the son[s] die, the women continue to live to challenge such paternalism that inheres not only in the ideology of slavery but in that of capitalism and that requires both dependence and, more important for Howells, gratitude. Alma Leighton and Margaret Vance have survived the events of the novel and are relatively

98

Chapter 2

uncompromised by the system of sponsorship, and thus Howells poses them as relatively disinterested (as opposed to March and Beaton, who also survive). This is not to say Leighton’s and Vance’s freedom or disinterestedness is to be read unproblematically, either within the logic of the novel or outside it. In terms of the novel’s logic, disinterestedness is necessarily always put into question; nonetheless, there are more or less worthy attempts at the ideal. Leighton benefits via Beaton from Dryfoos’s patronage, just as March and Beaton do. She nonetheless rejects the logic of gratitude by refusing to marry Beaton, as recompense for sponsorship. When Beaton tells her that as her husband he would ‘‘serve’’ her talent, ‘‘would be its willing slave, and yours,’’ she responds, ‘‘I don’t want any slave—nor any slavery. I want to be free—always’’ (338). The language of slavery through which Howells frames Leighton’s rejection of Beaton seems notably out of place. Leighton is associated neither with abolitionism nor with the radical politics of Lindau, and yet Howells’s use of this language suggests the hope (unusual for him) that the new woman may break the logic of paternalism that inheres in both slavery and capitalism.37 Vance likewise rejects the logic of paternalism. Even while the novel continuously insists on the ‘‘ludicrous’’ (347) and suspicious features (376– 77) of this heiress’s involvement in social activism, Vance nonetheless rejects the notion that her benevolent activities can be used to make her a more marketable commodity in the marriage market. She does not ‘‘end by marrying a prosperous banker . . . leavening a vast lump of moneyed and fashionable life, with her culture, generosity, and goodwill’’ (219), as is predicted early on in the novel. While she accedes for most of the novel to the social ‘‘authority’’ (217) that plots out her role, she finally rejects this logic when she joins the Sisters of Charity and steps outside the paternalistic formation of both dependency and gratitude of a marriageable heiress. Leighton and Vance are the beneficiaries of paternalism, and yet through them Howells suggests it is nonetheless possible to reject the logic of affiliation with sponsorship and thus gain a relative freedom, a relative autonomy. We may find Howells’s idealization of these ‘‘new woman’’ figures problematic in a variety of ways. He himself did so just a few years later in the Altrurian romances that followed Hazard, in which he repeatedly highlighted the impossibility for women to step outside an economic system that naturalizes self-interestedness—despite the culture’s claims that they can and do. Nonetheless, Howells’s hope about rejecting a logic of affiliation in Hazard is useful to think through and suggests the novel does

The Politics of Gratitude and Ingratitude in Howells

99

not simply attempt to contain, mourn, or deny the possibility of a critical politics. In this sense, we can furthermore understand Howells’s commitment to and sponsorship of a wide range of artists and intellectuals, particularly the outsiders (Cahan, Chesnutt, Dunbar, Freeman, Jewett) who in many ways have displaced him in the American canon. While Hazard suggests that he was well aware of the self-aggrandizement that tempts the sponsor, the conscious or unconscious paternalism and coerciveness such sponsorship implies—and which he himself enacted in relation to some of the writers he sponsored—the novel also suggests that he did not presume that those he helped needed to affiliate with him or be grateful.38 ‘‘The great literary philanthropist,’’ as Dreiser called him, refuses in Hazard the paternalistic logic that has been assumed by some critics, that the sponsor (whether as a specific individual or as the market generally) absolutely creates the possibilities in which the sponsored functions. Howells’s very displacement in the canon suggests that his argument is well worth thinking about.

chapter 3

‘‘The Gospel of Self’’: Philanthropy and Political Economy in Mark Twain

t goes without saying that Mark Twain was one of the most successful American authors of the nineteenth century. This success, as Theodore Dreiser pointed out, involved both ‘‘great fame and acclaim.’’1 Twain’s books and stories sold well, apparently to all classes of readers, and over the course of his career he gained increasing critical approval in the United States and abroad. He was seen as the quintessential American writer, or as his friend William Dean Howells resonantly put it, ‘‘the Lincoln of our literature.’’2 This latter phrase deserves the scrutiny it has received: it captures the myths of essential American identity that have woven themselves around Twain’s authorship—that of the self-made man, both deeply committed to and an exemplary product of democracy, unpretentious yet preternaturally eloquent, imbued with an innate sense of justice and humanity, who proves and is also recognized for his worth. At the same time, by citing Lincoln, Howells also gestures to the tragic side of this equation, to the kind of heroic martyrdom for democracy that is also part of the Twain story. Dreiser’s version of this tragedy has been a particularly influential one in literary criticism: namely, that Twain’s success on the literary market led to his accession to convention. While some of his published writings register the unconventional and revolutionary thinker underneath his conventional exterior, Dreiser argues that we ‘‘Mark the Twain’’ in Twain’s published but especially his unpublished writings. Like Dreiser, critics have noted the complex, multilayered, and rich thematic of doubleness throughout Twain’s work and have tended to link it biographically to Twain’s self-division.3 Also like Dreiser, critics have frequently gendered this selfdivision. The ‘‘Iron Madonna’’ and the ‘‘genteel tradition,’’ represented by

I

Philanthropy and Political Economy in Twain

101

Olivia Langdon Clemens and William Dean Howells, so the argument goes, bowdlerized and feminized Twain to make him acceptable on the market.4 I too am interested in the thematic of doubleness in Twain, specifically as it relates to the ‘‘market,’’ but I have a differently gendered story to tell about literary economics. My story focuses not on femininity but on masculinity: on men’s relations to each other within the expanding culture of corporate capitalism and the promises and compromises those relations entailed. Analyzing Twain’s involvement in what E. Anthony Rotundo has called the ‘‘fundamentally social’’ and recreational ‘‘male culture of the workplace,’’ I show the way this male culture helped establish new, but structurally familiar economic links between the realm of business and that of intellectual or aesthetic work.5 These connections resemble traditional patronage relationships, as defined in the Introduction, linking elite men across vocational and monetary hierarchies in terms of mutual selfinterestedness. I also argue, however, that these patronage relationships serve to mark a shift to the institutional philanthropy that came to fund much intellectual and aesthetic work in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and that Twain’s writings register this shift. More than any other author in this study, Twain seems to confirm what Gordon Bigelow describes as the expressivist and democratizing myths of the market that literary historians have adopted from political economy, myths in which consumers freely express their choices through their consumption patterns, thereby undermining the judgment and power of cultural elites and opening up the literary field to a broader and more diverse range of producers and products (Fiction, 1–2). However, this chapter argues that Twain’s authorship, as well as his imaginative writings, undermines the expressivist and democratizing myths of the market, by highlighting instead interventionist social practices that construct the market: namely, patronage and modern philanthropy. Relying on recent work in masculinity studies and the extensive scholarship about Twain’s closest male friendships, this chapter examines how elite male social networks help us rethink our notion of the ‘‘literary market’’ at the fin de sie`cle. Friendship, as Ivy Schweitzer puts it, is not ‘‘merely a form of or vehicle for sensibility and sympathy,’’ but an important ‘‘cultural practice and institution.’’6 Twain’s life and career demonstrate this clearly. His friendship with Henry H. Rogers, the vice-president of Standard Oil who not only helped Twain out of bankruptcy in 1893 but also invested Twain’s money for him so successfully that Twain never had to worry about

102

Chapter 3

finances again, demonstrates that Rogers served as a patron and philanthropist for Twain. This relationship helps us think about how success in the modern literary market continued to be shaped by patronage and an emergent philanthropy. The two social practices, as I argued in the Introduction, became closely linked to the legitimation efforts made by corporate capitalism during the economically and socially tumultuous late nineteenth century. The ‘‘Lincoln of our literature,’’ the self-made exemplar of American democracy and its outspoken advocate, sustained a career as a writer not simply through merit, but through the help of an infamous robber baron, who was his friend. Recently, historians and critics have pointed out that aid of all kinds— financial and otherwise—is always a component of self-making in liberal capitalism. Even more important, as Bruce Robbins demonstrates, the Horatio Alger type narrative of self-making, one often applied to Twain, always acknowledges the help of others. Hence, Robbins shows how nineteenth- and twentieth-century self-help narratives which seem to confirm the myths of the autonomous individual of liberal capitalism are usually expressions of an emergent (albeit imperfectly realized) welfare state.7 This ‘‘counterintuitive’’ argument, as Robbins calls it, has implications for interpreting Twain’s life and work. Twain’s closest friendships, Peter Messent argues convincingly, were with men who could help him.8 To say this is not to presume that Twain always had utilitarian aims in his friendships. Instead, I want to point to the ways that the elite male friendship of the time fostered a system of intra-class philanthropy across vocational and monetary lines. Extending but complicating Robbins’s insight, such philanthropy encouraged a racial and gender exclusive, deeply felt intra-class loyalty, and private (rather than, as Robbins suggests, public) forms of welfare. For Twain, intellectually and politically committed to democracy, the result was a profound sense of internal contradiction that inflected his work in fascinating ways. Twain seems to have seen his friendship with Rogers both as a necessity in his career and life and as undermining his political commitments and his standing as a social critic. But whether he believed this personally or not is less central to my argument than that his imaginative writings demonstrate an important engagement with the complexity of the social practice and discourses of patronage and philanthropy—as kinds of welfare that create both loyalty and self-division—within the culture of managerial (or corporate) capitalism. This chapter begins with a short discussion of Twain’s financial predicaments in the 1870s and 1880s. I argue that these

Philanthropy and Political Economy in Twain

103

predicaments led him to search for a sponsor but simultaneously encouraged him to think more critically about capitalism, and, more to the point, the forms that capitalist self-legitimation was taking. Reading Twain’s career in the context of the development of the elite male clubs of the time, in which Twain was an active figure both as a member and as a speaker, I examine how these clubs consciously worked to establish and cement links between the worlds of business and intellectual/aesthetic work, and the ethos of loyalty that such relations fostered. I then turn to A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (1889) as exemplary of the ways Twain begins to examine fictionally the forms of ‘‘doing good’’ that corporate capitalism was both claiming and developing. Particularly in Yankee, but also in his later dream writings, and especially in his unfinished novel Which Was It? (1899; 1901–2, published posthumously in Which Was the Dream?), he explores how contemporary political economy justifies philanthropy and links it to corporate capitalism. Thus, along with Rogers, two central figures provide touchstones for this chapter: Herbert Spencer and Andrew Carnegie. Twain satirizes the philosophy of both, invoking Spencer’s thinking on ‘‘altruism’’ and Carnegie’s in ‘‘The Gospel of Wealth’’ through what Twain renames ‘‘The Gospel of Self.’’9 Twain furthermore criticizes not just the elite, but all classes of Americans, for accepting ‘‘The Gospel of Self’’ and its forms of philanthropy. I want to make clear that the point of investigating the paradoxes of Twain’s thought in relation to his experience of the social practices of corporate capitalist patronage and philanthropy is not to indict Twain or to denigrate the significance and power of his social criticism. As he grew older, and became more thoroughly enmeshed in the social networks of elite America, his criticism of domestic politics and foreign policy became increasingly scandalized and angry.10 It also became increasingly despairing. And despair in its turn came to structure his response to corporate capitalism and its forms of philanthropy. The anger of Twain’s social criticism, juxtaposed with its frequent hopelessness, reveals an important response of critical intellectuals and writers like Twain to the culture of corporate capitalism as it increasingly sought to legitimate itself to artists and intellectuals —in part through patronage and philanthropy. ‘‘Crushing Obligations’’: Men’s Clubs and Philanthropy In considering Twain’s long critical engagement with the social practices of patronage and philanthropy, we might well begin with two different

104

Chapter 3

statements made thirty years apart, the first in The Innocents Abroad (1869), the second in the unpublished ‘‘A Tribute to Henry H. Rogers’’ (1902): We visited the Louvre . . . and looked at its miles of paintings by the old masters. Some of them were beautiful, but at the same time they carried such evidences about them of the cringing spirit of those great men that we found small pleasure in examining them. Their nauseous adulation of princely patrons was more prominent to me and chained my attention more surely than the charms of color and expressions which are claimed to be in the pictures. Gratitude for kindnesses is well, but it seems to me that some of those artists carried it so far that it ceased to be gratitude, and became worship. If there is a plausible excuse for the worship of men, then by all means let us forgive Rubens and his brethren. But I will drop the subject, lest I say something about the old masters that might as well be left unsaid.11 I owe more to Henry Rogers than to any other man whom I have known. . . . His character is full of fine graces, but the finest is this: that he can load you down with crushing obligations, and then so conduct himself that you never feel their weight. If he would only require something in return—but that is not his nature. . . . He is not only the best friend I have ever had, but is the best man I have known.12 On the one hand, Twain’s populist critique of high art in The Innocents Abroad, levels itself at a number of targets, most pointedly at what he calls the ‘‘nauseous adulation’’ (96) by European artists of their patrons. While Twain claims here that he will ‘‘drop the subject,’’ he in fact recurs to the topic later in the book, describing European artists as ‘‘prostitut[ing] their noble talents to the adulation of such monsters as the . . . Princes of two and three hundred years ago.’’ There is no excuse, he continues, for an artist ‘‘to drag his pride and his manhood in the dirt for bread,’’ even if ‘‘the princes and potentates . . . [were] the only patrons of art’’ (187). On the other hand, in a no doubt heartfelt but nonetheless revealing ‘‘Tribute to Henry H. Rogers,’’ Twain begins by discussing his bankruptcy and how he was rescued by Rogers. In this unpublished text, Twain lists quite openly the sums of money that Rogers invested for him and the extraordinary

Philanthropy and Political Economy in Twain

105

returns Twain receives before calling Rogers his ‘‘best friend’’ and ‘‘the best man I have known.’’ On the manuscript envelope of the tribute Twain writes, ‘‘Add it to the Judge’s verdict in the Boston Gas Case—’nothing illegal or dishonest’.’’ Twain refers here to a case in which Rogers and his partners tried to monopolize the market for gas in the city. Rogers was eventually judged guilty and lost half his fortune on the case.13 While it could seem that Twain’s tribute to Rogers is simply an expression of gratitude to a financially savvy friend, rather than the ‘‘prostitut[ing] . . . [of] noble talents to the adulation of . . . monsters’’ in artistic form, Twain’s friendship with Rogers led to complex negotiations from the 1890s onward in which Twain struggled to provide a ‘‘return’’ on the ‘‘crushing obligations’’ Rogers ostensibly did not load down on him. As Peter Messent argues in his detailed and thoughtful analysis of the Rogers/Twain friendship, Twain’s ‘‘return’’ to Rogers came in the form of expressing ‘‘tacit— and even . . . overt—approval and support’’ (150) of the ‘‘WASP hierarchy’’ (149). Twain never fully ‘‘abandoned his political and social conscience’’ (151), says Messent, but after he met Rogers, Twain’s ‘‘ironic distance from an American business culture . . . lessened,’’ while Twain had ‘‘little apparent sense of self-compromise’’ (152). I want to build on Messent’s analysis of Twain’s friendship with Rogers, which Messent describes as joining a ‘‘new ‘club’,’’ in which Twain was required to ‘‘pay for his membership,’’ by becoming ‘‘something of a defender of capitalist business values’’ (153, 152). Messent’s point here is that Rogers’s and Twain’s friendship has to be historicized within the larger context of elite male friendship at the time, and he focuses metaphorically and literally on the male clubs, their racial and gender exclusivity, and the close bonds and networks they created between members. Such a context is central to my analysis of Twain as well, but I want to suggest that the friendship must also be read as part of a larger effort to create networks of support between the worlds of business and of intellect/aesthetics in the tumultuous economic and social climate of the post-bellum period— support that served both sides.14 Furthermore, unlike Messent, I argue that Twain’s imaginative writings reveal his awareness of the price artists and intellectuals—and, Twain suggests, white Americans of all classes—paid for membership in this ‘‘new club,’’ and the ‘‘self-compromise’’ involved. The road Twain traveled between his analysis of the ‘‘groveling spirit’’ of European artists and his ‘‘Tribute to Henry H. Rogers’’ was a long one; nonetheless, what links the two is the seemingly commonsense notion of ‘‘Gratitude

106

Chapter 3

for kindness,’’ as Twain puts it, gratitude that is complicated, as we saw in Howells, because it occurs within the culture of corporate capitalism. The story of Twain’s bankruptcy and his friendship with Rogers has been so thoroughly documented that I will only discuss a few features of it. Thirty years before his career ended, Twain was ready to give up his successful work as an author. On his marriage, Twain’s father-in-law had provided him and Olivia with the surprise gift of a mansion in Buffalo. Twain writes at the time of feeling ‘‘drowned in gratitude.’’15 This is a telling phrase and, as Twain biographer Justin Kaplan points out, is suggestive of how Twain had been placed in an ‘‘indenture to maintain a scale of living inconceivably far above the boarding house’’ (113) existence he had planned for himself and his wife. By the 1880s the pressure became unbearable to Twain. Kaplan thoughtfully analyzes his exasperation with the financial precariousness of the business of writing, even for this successful American writer, whose wife was a wealthy heiress. We read in Twain’s letters of the mishandling of publicity and of the release of his works, of his belief he is being bilked by publishing firms, and, most important, of the periodic recessions of the period that cut into his anticipated profits and investments. Twain’s letters, until Rogers began to manage his money, reveal a man in a perpetual state of exasperated rage with almost everyone involved in the production and selling of his books. His rage encompasses himself, the writers’ block that bedeviled him, and the breakdowns in health that followed his bouts of intense literary productivity. There may be some self-dramatization in Twain’s writing to Howells, among others, that A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court would be his ‘‘swan song’’ (270), or in the statement his daughter Susy records in 1886, that ‘‘he was ready to give up work altogether, die or do anything’’ (280). Nonetheless, he had real reasons for wanting out of his career as a writer, and increasingly turned to his investment in the Paige typesetting machine as a way to escape. Twain thought if the Paige machine succeeded, he would never need to write again. In the late 1880s, his journals record the various wealthy and supra-wealthy individuals whom he not only imagined he could interest, but whom he actually approached.16 Among them were Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould and his son, and John D. Rockefeller.17 Twain’s search for a wealthy investor for the Paige typesetting machine, and thus an exit from the financial precariousness of his career as a writer, finally landed him Henry H. Rogers in 1893, who was introduced to Twain by a fellow member of the Players Club (Rogers and Twain, Correspondence, 11, 742).18

Philanthropy and Political Economy in Twain

107

That Twain imagined he could meet, and then indeed was introduced to, the supra-wealthy needs some explanation. Throughout the nineteenth century, E. Anthony Rotundo writes, ‘‘male work and sociability mixed promiscuously’’ (197), but it is particularly in the last third of the century that male sociability gained ‘‘real power’’ (199) and found its home in the recreational institutions of ‘‘restaurants and exclusive saloons, in fraternal lodges and elite men’s clubs, and in the new athletic clubs’’ (200). Rotundo argues, in a statement particularly illuminating for a writer like Twain who focused in some of his greatest works on boys, these clubs were a continuation of one of ‘‘the great passions of nineteenth-century boys—the formation of clubs’’ (38–39). Central to all these recreational institutions is their gender and racial exclusivity. Rotundo focuses particularly on the former, arguing that gender exclusion ‘‘linked the bitterest of rivals in the solidarity of a male profession,’’ giving the clubs ‘‘real power’’ (199). Racial exclusion, however, was also central and will be engaged more extensively in the next chapter, on Charles Chesnutt. I want to extend Rotundo’s reading of the role these elite all-male clubs played by pointing out that they also frequently described themselves as intellectual or aesthetic in orientation and worked to create networks of association between the worlds of business and culture, in quite familiar ways through older forms of patronage, and in new ways through an emergent philanthropy.19 The Century and Union League clubs, for example, were central to the founding of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a prime example of the way patronage was merging into a new systematic philanthropy, while the Century was furthermore associated with the Century magazine.20 Histories of these clubs written by their members help us trace out some common patterns in the ways such clubs linked businessmen and intellectuals and artists. An 1856 history of the Century club explains, The proposal to form an association, to be composed of artists and men of letters, and of others interested in the promotion of a taste for the Fine Arts, and which should also unite in its purposes a facility for social intercourse among gentlemen of cultivated and liberal pursuits, was made at a meeting of the members of the Sketch Club, by Mr. John G. Chapman, in the month of December, 1846. The utility of such an association, with permanent rooms for its meetings, where artists and men of letters would be able to become better known to each other, and where strangers of distinction

108

Chapter 3

would always find a welcome, was admitted by all who took an interest in the subject. The necessity of such an association was more particularly felt by the artists, as the city afforded but few facilities for their frequent intercourse.21 The Century’s self-description is typical of the founding documents of other ‘‘cultivated and liberal’’ clubs of the time that sought to promote ‘‘social intercourse among gentlemen of cultivated and liberal pursuits.’’ While the Century’s 1856 historian focuses on the need for ‘‘artists and men of letters’’ particularly to meet and socialize together as professionals, the Century’s 1897 history highlights the variety of its membership: not just ‘‘authors, poets, historians, and novelists,’’ but also ‘‘judges,’’ ‘‘leading lawyers,’’ ‘‘shining lights of the pulpit,’’ ‘‘merchant princes,’’ ‘‘governors and other officers of the state’’ (53). Likewise, the 1895 history of the Lotos Club, one of the clubs to which Twain belonged and at which he frequently spoke, says its aim is ‘‘to promote social intercourse among journalists, literary men, artists, and members of the musical and dramatic professions, and such merchants and professional gentlemen of artistic tastes and inclinations as would naturally be attracted by such a club.’’22 Histories of the clubs and commentaries on them, furthermore, make clear that the new networks being created between the worlds of business and intellect/aesthetics are a necessity, given the financial precariousness of the times. In the case of the Lotos Club, the club’s historian tells how in 1872 a controversy broke out over the number of businessmen in the club. The Club decided that 50 percent of the membership could be businessmen.23 The Club historian says that the new percentage ‘‘secured a conservative element which in every emergency has proved a guarantee of strength and permanence’’ (Elderkin, 22). In 1873, the year after the controversy erupted, the historian records that the club became debt-free and even had surplus revenue (23). Likewise, in a 1905 survey article of ‘‘Literary Clubland’’ by Arthur Bartlett Maurice, a noticeable amount of time is spent on discussing the scrupulous care with which Andrew Carnegie was screened before he was admitted to the Authors Club (500). Maurice then proceeds to record Carnegie’s ‘‘appreciation of being one of the literary guild’’ in his funding of an Authors Club Fund for needy members, while another document of that club’s history records that Carnegie became its ‘‘foremost financial benefactor,’’ not only in terms of needy members, but also in terms of the club’s real estate.24 However carefully Carnegie was screened

Philanthropy and Political Economy in Twain

109

as an author worthy to join the club, he also was a businessman who created a financial safety net for the club and its members. What most consistently reveal the monetary necessity for a connection between the worlds of business and intellect/aesthetics are the continual allusions in club documents to financial solidity. While an 1876 article in the Galaxy is extreme in this regard, in that it lists costs for initiation fees and operating the clubs, as well as real estate assets and surplus funds, most of the club documents discuss openly or indirectly finances through references to decorative or luxury items purchased. Building on Rotundo’s insights about the way all-male recreational institutions sought to extend ‘‘the solidarity of male profession’’ (199) against the incursion of women, and Dana Nelson’s comparable insight on the ways business culture created a national fraternity of white men, it seems likely that in the financially precarious post-bellum period, elite clubs helped foster the exchange of different kinds and forms of capital, as well the social networks which were to become important to twentieth-century philanthropy.25 This exchange was personal in the post-bellum period, as Twain, Howells, and other literary men mixed with Carnegie, Rogers, and Gould, but it later became institutionalized in the philanthropic foundations of the early twentieth century. I will return in a moment to these philanthropic foundations.26 By no means do I want to reduce the meaning of these clubs to pure instrumentality. ‘‘Friendship,’’ argues Richard White in describing the relations between railroad executives and politicians at the turn of the century in America, ‘‘was a code: a network of social bonds that could organize political activity. Affection was not necessary.’’27 Nonetheless, to read these clubs and the friendships that resulted from them only functionally is to miss an important part of the story. Given White’s account of the meaning of friendship as collusion, as signifying closed insider networks fostered by the all-male recreational culture of the workplace in the post-bellum period, it is nonetheless true that the clubs can also be seen as creating deeply felt emotional ties which are significant in understanding the history of masculinity and capitalism.28 While such emotions cannot be divorced from the economic context in which they occurred, they nonetheless reveal how that context was felt and experienced. For the purposes of this chapter, I am interested in an emotion that is also an ethos: loyalty. Rotundo highlights ‘‘loyalty’’ as the sentiment at the heart of the boys’ clubs (38–39).29 He argues that this central commitment to loyalty carried over to the ‘‘serious business’’ of men’s workplace culture,

110

Chapter 3

dependent as it was on ‘‘dense networks of collaboration, contest, and mutual influence’’ (205). White, emphasizing pragmatics with his politicians and railroad executives, nonetheless highlights this ethos as well, writing, ‘‘When friendship faltered, the ensuing denunciations focused on honor and loyalty’’ (100). Likewise, Rotundo points out that loyalty was exclusive, a central feature of the ‘‘male defense of gender turf’’ (209), and we could add racial and class turf.30 The exclusivity of this cultural ethos of loyalty for these ‘‘dense networks’’ was crucial to the ‘‘serious business’’ of men’s work in corporate capitalism. At the same time, it is important to note that such loyalty can also signify the desire for some kind of human solidarity and connection that extends beyond the necessity of exchange. For example, in Thomas Lawson’s Frenzied Finance (1905), the muckraking history of Twain’s friend Henry H. Rogers and the Amalgamated Copper Mining Company, from which Twain came to benefit financially through Rogers, loyalty and treachery are central motifs. Standard Oil was the company most associated with Amalgamated because of Rogers’s as well as William Rockefeller’s involvement in it. Lawson describes loyalty as crucial to the culture and power of that company: The success of Standard Oil is largely due to two things—to the loyalty of its members to each other and to ‘‘Standard Oil,’’ and to the punishment of its enemies. Each member before initiation knows its religion to be reward for friends and extermination for foes. Once within the magic circle, a man realizes that he is getting all that any one else on earth can afford to pay him for like services, and still more thrown in for full measure. Moreover, while a ‘‘Standard Oil’’ man’s reward is always ample and satisfactory, he is constantly reminded in a thousand and one ways that punishment for disloyalty is sure and terrible, and that in no corner of the earth can he escape it, nor can any power on earth protect him from it.31 Lawson’s metaphorical use of the notion of a secret society, of a ‘‘magic circle’’ with rites of ‘‘initiation,’’ interestingly links Standard Oil corporate practices to the highly popular all-male secret lodges and societies, the middle- and working-class analogues to the elite all-male clubs. Lawson’s analysis assumes the ways in which men’s recreational and work culture interacts and dramatizes the economic rewards for following that ethos, as well as the punishments for ignoring it.

Philanthropy and Political Economy in Twain

111

Even more telling, however, are Lawson’s mixed feelings about producing his expose´ of Amalgamated and especially Rogers’s involvement in it. While one could argue that his mixed feelings stem from moving (or being forced) outside the ‘‘magic circle,’’ his ambivalence exceeds such a reading. Indeed, these mixed feelings make Frenzied Finance somewhat confused as an expose´, compared to Ida Tarbell’s History of Standard Oil (1904), and perhaps explain its lesser fame in the canon of modern journalism. From the beginning of the text to the end, Lawson perpetually defends himself against charges that he is being treacherous, whether to ‘‘the niceties of the business code’’ (x) or more personally to Rogers. Lawson likewise insists on his loyalty to Rogers throughout the narrative, writing that the ‘‘seal on our friendship’’ was never broken in ‘‘the financial hells we jointly passed through in the after-nine years’’ (123). It is only because ‘‘the procession of convicts and suicide’’ become so numerous, Lawson writes, that he is forced to turn to his pen against Rogers for ‘‘righteous retribution’’ (116).32 Even then, however, Lawson’s anxiety about appearing disloyal results in his alternately indicting Rogers quite directly, and then contrarily arguing that ‘‘the man and the machine he served might stand for different things’’ (247). Equally significant, the charged and polymorphous erotics of all the interchanges between Rogers and Lawson (as Lawson describes them) muddle the clarity of his putative indictment of Rogers. Part of the story’s drama resides not only in its account of economic wrongdoing but in that of love betrayed—a love sometimes described as that between boy and boy, boy and man, son and father, woman and man, man and man, mortal and god.33 In the case of Twain’s and Rogers’s friendship, loyalty is inextricably tied to gratitude. ‘‘Ingratitude,’’ writes Twain to Rogers on Twain’s birthday in 1894, ‘‘is a crime—and the meanest one there is’’ (Rogers and Twain, Correspondence, 100–101). Twain’s letters to Rogers throughout the 1890s drive home this point, as Twain repeatedly expresses his and his wife’s gratitude for Rogers’s assistance in their financial problems. However, Twain and his wife are filled with anxiety, that the ‘‘tremendous debt of gratitude . . . can never be paid . . . even a tenth of it’’ (52). Gratitude in an exchange economy, therefore, requires continual expression, and such expressions merge into those of deeply felt loyalty. Writes Twain to Rogers in 1894: Notwithstanding your heart is ‘‘old and hard,’’ you make a body choke up. I know you ‘‘mean every word you say,’’ and I do take it

112

Chapter 3

‘‘in the same spirit in which you tender it.’’ I shall keep your regard while we two live—that I know; for I shall always remember what you have done for me, and that will insure me against ever doing anything that could forfeit it or impair it. I am 59 years old; yet I never had a friend before who put out a hand and tried to pull me ashore when he found me in deep waters. (Rogers and Twain, Correspondence, 112) The inextricable relationships between gratitude and loyalty we find in these letters are also central to Howells’s depiction of Twain. Always a ‘‘youth,’’ with the ‘‘heart of a boy’’ (Twain, 5), Howells writes, Twain was ‘‘a most faithful soul,’’ filled with ‘‘tender loyalty’’ (10) to his friends and family. This theme is repeated throughout Howells’s memoirs (42, 47, 57, 88–90), along with the correlative that Twain’s ‘‘resentments’’ for ‘‘trust betrayed’’ lasted beyond the deaths of his putative enemies (68–69; see also 130, 135, 145, 176). ‘‘His memory for favors,’’ writes Howells, was as good as for injuries’’ (71). Howells, much like Lawson, worries that he is not as loyal as Twain and suggests strongly that political disagreements undermine his fidelity (42, 43, 47). This shamed but also insistent account by Howells of his disloyalty to Twain suggests how emotionally important the ethos of loyalty was to men of this class and generation. The loyalty inculcated in the culture of the workplace and in the clubs is central to the Rogers/Twain friendship and is cemented by the deep gratitude Twain feels for Rogers for ‘‘pull[ing] me ashore when he found me in deep waters.’’ While gratitude and loyalty are central components of Twain’s understanding of the friendship, Rogers’s understanding is less clear, in part because most of his personal papers were apparently destroyed. We do, however, have intriguing hints throughout his letters with Twain. On the one hand, there is clearly an instrumental part of the friendship. Rogers’s relationship with Twain promotes the ‘‘sociable’’ and friendly connections to the media that help Rogers ‘‘spin’’ Standard Oil’s actions during the years it was under intensive attack. As Ida Tarbell wrote, Rogers might be regarded ‘‘as the first public relations counsel of the Standard Oil Company,’’ and in the letters between Rogers and Twain we see him working with care and subtlety to protect the reputation of Standard Oil through Twain.34 Most famously, on December 26, 1901, Rogers requests an introduction to Tarbell, whose muckraking history of Standard Oil was currently being prepared. He writes to Twain that he would take it as ‘‘a kindness to

Philanthropy and Political Economy in Twain

113

Mr. McClure as well as myself’’ if Tarbell would seek to ‘‘verify statements which may be made through his magazine, whether affecting corporations or individuals’’ (Rogers and Twain, Correspondence, 478–79). Rogers appeals to Twain’s loyalty to him, but also to other men in their social circle—it will be a ‘‘kindness’’ also to Mr. McClure to make sure he is not shamed in public by the misrepresentation of Standard Oil. Rogers ends the letter with a postscript joke about Christmas gifts: ‘‘I got a stocking full of water. I hope you fared better’’ (479). Perhaps as interesting as Rogers’s request to Twain for help with Standard Oil’s public relations is Twain’s answer. Responding to Rogers’s postscript about watered stock, Twain records the profits he has made on Rogers’s investments for him, before acceding to Rogers’s request: Ah, the luck is with . . . me!—a just reward for virtue. There’s no water in my Xmas presents. . . . There is a profit of 27 per cent on my U.S. Steel—I don’t remember what I paid for it; do you? And my Amalgamated is nearly 70 points above what it cost me. These things make me thankful. I am writing Jaccaci of McClure’s to come out and dine with us Monday next, or Tuesday or Thursday, and talk over a private matter. (479) Here Twain’s gratitude is linked directly to investments Rogers has successfully made for him, including that in the Amalgamated Copper Company whose manipulation of the market Lawson was later to expose; and this gratitude leads directly to his assisting Rogers with the media and its portrayal of Standard Oil. Highlighting the inextricable relation between the work and recreational worlds of the time, Twain arranges a dinner at the Players Club, where he had first met Rogers, and where he stayed while in New York, and to which Jaccaci as well as Twain belonged (480). Twain situates the easily granted ‘‘kindness’’ in the framework of the monetary ‘‘kindness’’ Rogers has done for him. If the outcome of Twain’s mediation with Jaccaci and thus Tarbell was perhaps not quite the one Rogers had hoped for, it was nonetheless the result of exchanged favors. But equally interesting to the direct forms of ‘‘payback’’ Rogers requests of Twain are the men’s ambivalent negotiations over payback, which signal some of the complexity of men’s friendships of the time. We only have Twain’s half of an exchange that according to the editors of the Rogers/

114

Chapter 3

Twain letters probably refers to ‘‘A Tribute to Henry H. Rogers,’’ cited at the beginning of this section. Apparently Twain sought to publish his encomium in 1903, but Rogers demurred that such homage would look like a ‘‘payment’’ for services. Twain apologizes: You are the last man I should ever select to pay with printed acknowledgments for a service done for affection’s sake. But now and then the newspapers mention the kindnesses you have done me, and I have often been troubled by the thought that I was wrong in leaving these kindnesses unendorsed and unconfirmed. But I shan’t degrade our friendship again, but keep it up in the high place where it belongs; and I want you to forget this mistake. (530) A complex and fascinating emotional terrain is evident in this letter. Is Rogers carefully ‘‘spinning’’ their friendship, as an innovative public relations man? Is he ensuring that their friendship is not perceived publicly and cynically as mere debt/payment? Or does he imagine and hope for a relationship deeper than debt/payment? Is he, as Susan K. Harris puts it, like ‘‘many Victorian-American men reject[ing] purely business models, [and] instead creating new affiliations based on friendship’’?35 Relatedly, as a friend, is Rogers seeking to protect Twain’s reputation, as he frequently did, realizing that too direct an association with him in these years would taint Twain? Or are all of these possibilities evident here? Finally, while Justin Kaplan points out that Twain was ‘‘a lifelong guilt seeker’’ (148), why is Twain so deeply ashamed that Rogers finds ‘‘A Tribute’’ too explicitly a ‘‘payment’’ on a debt? What set of implicit emotional norms sustain the protocols of this friendship?36 There is much more that can be done to discuss the economics, ethos, and emotions of male friendship revealed by the documented as well as incompletely documented exchange of letters between Rogers and Twain. For now, however, it is enough to underline that the dense networks of interdependent friendships enforced by men’s culture of the workplace occur within the history of capitalism and its changes. The friendships created across the vocational divides of business and intellectual/aesthetic work, like other such friendships more generally, were often a necessity in the financially precarious post-bellum period, and worked as an informal intra-class system of philanthropy, helping to establish the emotion and ethos of loyalty. These friendships were also closed and exclusive, creating

Philanthropy and Political Economy in Twain

115

and enforcing privilege. They therefore could potentially create a complex sense of self-division in a democracy, whether for a businessman like Thomas Lawson, or for an intellectual and social critic like Twain. From the 1880s onward, as Twain searches for an investor and finds a patron and friend, he meditates on capitalism broadly, but more important, on the way it legitimates itself through the discourse and practice of philanthropy, the kinds of loyalty and gratitude, and the ethical and political problems that result. A central text in which Twain begins to explore such legitimation efforts is A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court. Jackson Lears has written that at the turn of the century, elites in the United States were in crisis—deeply divided among themselves and under threat from the social movements of the time. He writes that ‘‘to maintain legitimacy in a democratic culture . . . elites had to disguise their inherited privilege and embrace a meritocratic standard—or at least appear to embrace it.’’37 Twain’s novel, following the logic Lears lays out, analyzes managerial capitalism’s attempt to justify itself as a kind of social reform philanthropy by claiming it creates a meritocratic democracy. ‘‘We fifty-four were masters of England’’: Corporate Capitalism and Scientific Philanthropy in A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court Why does a Yankee with stated commitments to democracy end up a genocidal murderer? Why also, after carefully planning and then systematically electrocuting and machine-gunning to death twenty-five thousand people with a small cohort of followers, does this Yankee decide to ‘‘see if any help can be afforded the wounded’’?38 And why does he apparently see no contradiction between these actions? In recent years, Amanda Claybaugh has focused on Yankee as a ‘‘serious and sustained inquiry into what reform entails,’’ an inquiry that both criticizes the bad faith of reformers and explores at multiple levels ‘‘the potential—and limits—of institutional reform’’ (176). Claybaugh’s astute analysis, however, generalizes what kind of reform is enacted by the text. Twain focuses particularly on what historians have since termed ‘‘scientific philanthropy,’’ that is, corporate capitalist social reform of the kind Carnegie and Rockefeller were developing. Such philanthropy coincides with but is not fully accounted for by the term ‘‘vertical’’ philanthropy that I used in Chapter 1. Judith Sealander defines ‘‘scientific philanthropy’’ as focused on systematic ‘‘top-down reforms’’ (229)

116

Chapter 3

dependent particularly on expert analysis.39 Twain’s book articulates the conflicts between democracy and ‘‘scientific philanthropy,’’ even through the latter’s attempt to deflect such tensions through the notion of meritocratic expertise. In his 1910 memorial to Twain, Andrew Carnegie says Twain told him that ‘‘the idea of ‘A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur’ came from reading my first literary outburst written at high noon when the sun casts no shadow, ‘Triumphant Democracy’.’’40 Carnegie continues, ‘‘I was young then and greatly flattered that the business man should be hailed as fellow author’’ (827). Whether or not this anecdote is true, Twain and Carnegie attended the same men’s clubs and were friendly, and Carnegie elicited Twain’s deep interest as a personality and as a corporate capitalist philanthropist. Twain owned Carnegie’s Triumphant Democracy (1886), which was apparently an international sensation.41 Since Yankee plays with the argument of that text and others by Carnegie, a brief summary of its argument will be useful. The opening paragraph of Triumphant Democracy provides both the gist of Carnegie’s polemic and a handy outline of the book: The old nations of the earth creep on at a snail’s pace; the Republic thunders past with the rush of the express. The United States, the growth of a single century, has already reached the foremost rank among nations, and is destined soon to out-distance all others in the race. In population, in wealth, in annual savings, and in public credit; in freedom from debt, in agriculture, and in manufactures, America already leads the civilized world. (1) Each chapter of the book thus provides a statistical analysis of American productive superiority to aristocratic Britain in the above-named fields, and hence the superiority of American democratic institutions to British ones based on inherited wealth and privilege. Carnegie thus defines democracy in Triumphant as inseparable from the aggressive pursuit of free trade. Democracy combined with free trade promotes a meritocratic system of wealth building that, Carnegie argues, homogenizes all races into peaceful productivity (as opposed to the system of inheritance in Britain that results in heterogeneity and social conflict) (17–20).42 Such a definition of democracy helps us better understand Carnegie’s ‘‘scientific philanthropy’’ and its reliance on the notion of ‘‘top-down

Philanthropy and Political Economy in Twain

117

reforms’’ created by meritocratically identified experts, as well as Twain’s critique of it. As noted in the introduction, the solution to class conflict in Carnegie is administrative; philanthropy is a form of administration. Importantly, however, philanthropic leadership is based on the meritocracy evidenced by wealth: The ‘‘MAN’’ with ‘‘talent for organization and management’’ will necessarily be the philanthropic leader because of his talent, but also because ‘‘It is a law that men of this peculiar talent for affairs, under the free play of economic forces, must of necessity soon be in receipt of more revenue than can be judiciously expended upon themselves’’ (‘‘Gospel,’’ 3–4). Based on his merit, evidenced by his money, ‘‘the millionaire’’ by necessity should ‘‘be . . . a trustee for the poor; intrusted with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself’’ (‘‘Gospel,’’ 12; see also 9 and ‘‘Fields,’’ 21). But merit is crucial in another direction as well. The object of the philanthropist’s interest must also be meritorious. Philanthropy has one ‘‘main consideration,’’ namely, ‘‘to help those who will help themselves (‘‘Gospel,’’ 11; see also ‘‘Fields,’’ 17, 21), ‘‘to place within its reach the ladders upon which the aspiring can rise’’ (‘‘Gospel,’’ 12). The philanthropist emerges meritoriously from the ‘‘free play of economic forces’’ and must likewise discover the meritorious who can help themselves (with a little help), leaving the ‘‘worthless’’ to the government (17). In Carnegie’s argument, ‘‘meritocratic standards’’ (Lears, ‘‘Managerial,’’ 193) are used to identify both the managerial leader and the object of his philanthropic concern. Scientific philanthropy is thus doubly legitimated as a form of democracy. Twain, however, suggests that by claiming to promote democracy through meritocracy, the ‘‘scientific philanthropy’’ of managerial capitalism authorizes its most violently antidemocratic acts.43 Hank Morgan of Yankee, very much like Carnegie in Triumph, engages in an unrelenting critique of England’s ‘‘antiquated monarchical system’’ (Triumph, 488) in comparison to modern American democracy and capitalism. However, as critics have noted, what Twain’s book nonetheless suggests is that the violence at the heart of sixth-century English feudal hierarchies—brutal as it is—is finally ‘‘childish’’ compared to the violence at the heart of Morgan’s nineteenth-century managerial capitalism. The reason for this is, first, that Morgan’s managerial capitalism is actually in conflict with democracy and creates new kinds of hierarchy; and second, because Morgan imagines managerial capitalism as coterminous with democracy, he can pose the most violently hierarchical acts as social reform

118

Chapter 3

philanthropy. What always surprises readers, and what has sustained critical debate about the narrative for so long, is that Morgan’s kindness and humanity, his consistently stated commitment to democracy, and his insights into inequality are juxtaposed without explanation to his blindness about the devastating impact of the systematic policies of his ‘‘scientific philanthropy.’’ Indeed, what Twain carefully highlights at the beginning of the novel is not Morgan’s commitment to democratic social reform but his commitment to managerial capitalism as social reform. His first reforms are not political but economic, and primarily involve the creation of experts: In various quiet nooks and corners I had the beginnings of all sorts of industries under way—nuclei of future vast factories, the iron and steel missionaries of my future civilization. In these were gathered together the brightest young minds I could find, and I kept agents out raking the country for more, all the time. I was training a crowd of ignorant folks into experts—experts in every sort of handiwork and scientific calling. (101) In these early pages of the novel, Morgan notes the ‘‘curious’’ (87) hierarchies of the society he has entered, but he only notes them. His main goal is to ‘‘boss the whole country’’ (50), so his social reform specifically involves systematically seeking ‘‘the brightest young minds’’ and ‘‘training’’ them ‘‘into experts,’’ who will help him manage the ‘‘future vast factories.’’ Only when Morgan believes that his ‘‘system and machinery’’ (101) of training ‘‘experts’’ is well established does he begin to travel the country, expressing his outrage at the unequal and unjust social and economic relations of feudalism. Democracy is secondary to managerial capitalism, and to Morgan the former is an outgrowth of the latter. Twain, by contrast, argues that the two are in conflict. Morgan’s ‘‘man-factory,’’ where ‘‘groping and grubbing automata [are turned] into men’’ (159) demonstrates this conflict clearly. While managerial capitalism’s commitment to meritocracy suggests it is the same as democracy, it is not, since in that economic system only some ‘‘automata’’ can be trained to become men (experts). The rest of the automata remain automata, whom the trained expert must lead. In addition, the notion of a man-factory itself reveals the foundational tautology at the heart of managerial capitalism, a tautology that puts it again in conflict with democracy. The expert decides who qualifies to become expert

Philanthropy and Political Economy in Twain

119

and produces and manages expertise through mass duplication. Automata are the leaders of other automata. The assumptions undergirding such a social structure seem little different from the authoritarianism at the heart of feudalism.44 As mentioned in Chapter 1, feudal discourse was deployed critically by Progressives as an analogue to contemporary capitalism and its ‘‘robber barons.’’ Twain borrows from this discourse in Yankee. Morgan does not recognize the contradictions at the heart of the managerial capitalist’s theory of persons, and increasingly Morgan uses a claim to creating democracy simply as a rationale for what John Carlos Rowe calls ‘‘free-trade imperialism.’’45 In a passage linked to Morgan’s description of the ‘‘merits’’ of his carefully selected and trained West Point officers, Morgan criticizes old-fashioned political imperialism and therefore defends the capacity of all humans to govern themselves: There is a phrase which has grown so common in the world’s mouth that it has come to seem to have sense and meaning—the sense and meaning implied when it is used: that is the phrase which refers to this or that or the other nation as possibly being ‘‘capable of selfgovernment’’; and the implied sense of it is, that there has been a nation somewhere, sometime or other, which wasn’t capable of it—wasn’t as able to govern itself as some self-appointed specialists were or would be to govern it. The master minds of all nations, in all ages, have sprung in affluent multitude from the mass of the nation, and from the mass of the nation only—not from its privileged classes; and so, no matter what the nation’s intellectual grade was, whether high or low, the bulk of its ability was in the long ranks of its nameless and its poor, and so it never saw the day that it had not the material in abundance whereby to govern itself. (229–30) Here Morgan’s outrage focuses on aristocracy as a system of ‘‘selfappointed specialists,’’ arguing that it is these specialists who prevent the human capacity for ‘‘self-government’’ to emerge—at home or abroad. At the same time, and without any seeming sense of contradiction, Morgan describes the ‘‘master minds of all nations’’ as rightly standing over the ‘‘mass of the nation,’’ even as they emerge from it. Morgan does not see the comparably antidemocratic structural logic of both ‘‘self-appointed specialists’’ and ‘‘master minds,’’ and believes he is making a defense of ‘‘selfgovernment.’’ Equally striking is that the ‘‘master minds’’ in this case are

120

Chapter 3

West Point cadets, trained in the ‘‘science of war’’ (231), prefiguring the violence meritocratic expertise enacts at the end of the novel. Morgan’s belief that a commitment to managerial expertise is exactly the same as a commitment to democracy, and the blind violence inhering in such a belief, are likewise evident when Morgan proclaims the advent of a republic. In his self-deluded formulation, he returns ‘‘all political power . . . to its original source, the people of the nation’’ by ‘‘the executive authority vested in me’’ (389, emphasis added). The violence that undergirds the authoritarianism of managerial capitalism, but also the exclusive intra-class loyalty that is thereby also created, are evidenced by the strange numbers Twain carefully juxtaposes at the end of the novel: the ‘‘fifty-four [who] were masters of England!’’ and the ‘‘Twenty-five thousand men [who] lay dead around us’’ (404–5). Fifty-two boys (besides Clarence and Morgan) are chosen because they are the only ones whose ‘‘faithfulness under whatsoever pressure’’ is proven (386). The faithfulness of these boys reminds us of the loyalty fostered by the intraclass welfare of the men’s clubs of the time. Such faithfulness indeed ensures that these boys will live, in contrast to the twenty-five thousand who die. They save each other and themselves. But in driving home his critique of the kind of intra-class loyalty managerial capitalism creates, Twain also shows that such faithfulness also assures that these boys have destroyed themselves. Twain spells out the ambiguities of the loyalty inculcated in these carefully trained boy experts. As the boy ‘‘spokesman’’ of the fifty-two says to Morgan, ‘‘Oh, sir, consider!—reflect!—these people are our people, they are bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, we love them—do not ask us to destroy our nation!’’ (393). Twain highlights how Morgan prepares in advance for exactly this appeal. He knew that ‘‘I must be ready with an answer at that time—an answer well chosen and tranquillising’’ (393). His ‘‘tranquillising’’ answer makes a democratic appeal—only knights will be killed, he tells the boys. This democratic argument is apparently a lie (394), but interestingly Twain does not dwell on that. Instead, he highlights how an appeal to democracy enables Morgan to convince the boys that systematically electrocuting, drowning, and machine-gunning to death the ‘‘bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh’’ is the right thing to do. Clarence describes the result at the end, ‘‘We were in a trap, you see—a trap of our own making’’ (408). Such a trap is literal—they are surrounded by all the dead of ‘‘our nation,’’ whom they have efficiently killed. But it is

Philanthropy and Political Economy in Twain

121

also figurative. They are trapped in the contradictions and tautologies of the ethos of expertise of managerial capitalism in its relation to democracy, and they are trapped together by their loyalty to each other. The laudable ethos of loyalty destroys them and any possibility of the democracy they claimed to bring to the nation. Morgan not only is blind to what he does, but also believes to the end of the book that he is working to ‘‘help’’ (405) the people of England, and has convinced the other trained experts that this is what they are doing as well. Perhaps the most terrifying point that Yankee makes, and what differentiates it from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), which it anticipates, is not simply that irrationality and violence are at the heart of rationalized managerial or bureaucratic capitalism, but that managerial capitalism justifies and legitimates such irrationality and violence as a form of social reform, as scientific philanthropy.46 Its lethal combination of kindness and blindness authorizes systematic violence. One sees in nightmare form Twain’s linkage of the ethos of loyalty and intra-class philanthropy that united elite men to a broader analysis of the expert classes, as patronage shifts to philanthropy. This analysis deepens in Twain’s later unpublished writings, as he focuses on the political economy that undergirds both managerial capitalism and its emergent philanthropy. In Which Was It? Twain demonstrates not just the contradictions in the conflict between managerial capitalism and democracy and the violence that ensues, but also how crime and violence can be rationalized as benevolent philanthropy through the ‘‘Gospel of Self’’ (Which Was It? in Which Was The Dream?, 379).

‘‘Loaded with Emptiness’’: Character and Political Economy In Yankee, Twain’s treatment of political economy is direct. Political economy, in Marxist terms, seeks to ‘‘conceal’’ the violence of managerial capitalism and its philanthropic social reforms.47 One way Twain highlights this is through a debate over free trade between Morgan and some peasants he meets on his travels. Morgan insistently explains the benefits of free trade, but the villagers equally insistently defend ‘‘ ‘protection’ ’’ (Yankee, 302), revealing to Morgan the irrationality at the heart of what he sardonically calls ‘‘Sixth-century Political Economy.’’ However, Morgan’s own rage at this moment is excessive and highlights the problem with his own adherence to nineteenth-century political economy: ‘‘I was smarting under a

122

Chapter 3

sense of defeat. . . . And to think of the circumstances! the first statesman of the age, the capablest man, the best informed man in the entire world, the loftiest uncrowned head that had moved through the clouds of any political firmament for centuries . . . apparently defeated in argument by an ignorant country blacksmith!’’ (303). Morgan’s inexplicable rage at the peasants here and throughout this section, which leads in the end to violence, is embodied by one of the new inventions he discusses with the peasants, a ‘‘miller-gun.’’ ‘‘The gun,’’ says Morgan, ‘‘was a purse; and very handy, too’’ (310). The ‘‘handy’’ purse that is also a gun is an apt symbol of a political economy that claims free markets democratize while concealing the actual authoritarianism and violence in its imperialist aims. Which Was It?, begun in 1899 but mostly written in 1901–1902, represents a quite different critique of the political economy of the time from that in Connecticut Yankee, with its very direct invocation of the ideas of Herbert Spencer and Andrew Carnegie. At times, this unfinished manuscript seems all too transparently autobiographical in its depiction of an individual who, under the pressures of ‘‘money difficulties,’’ discovers how quickly his character disintegrates, and who, while celebrated publicly as the best of men, is ‘‘swim[ming] chin-deep in shames and sorrows’’ (213, 260).48 Whether or not such a deep sense of private shame and sorrow juxtaposed to public ‘‘fame and acclaim’’ was the result of Twain’s bankruptcy and the intra-class privatized philanthropy that came to his rescue, the narrative poses itself as an autobiography that focuses on the discrepancy between public moral acclaim and monetary success, on the one hand, and private immorality and monetary failure, on the other. At the same time, however, even as it is presented primarily as autobiography, the narrative generalizes this discrepancy as working across all classes of (white) Americans in the novel. A quick summary of the plot will help clarify both the issue of public morality and private immorality and the way Twain focuses on autobiography but generalizes from it. Which Was It? takes place in a small Southern hamlet, Indiantown, during the era of slavery. Twain’s attitude toward Native Americans is notorious, but his understanding of the history of colonialism and imperialism was changing at this time. The town’s name therefore suggests a double meaning: it highlights the savagery at the heart of a putative civilization, even as the utter absence of Native Americans in the text gestures to the theft of land central to U.S. history. That Twain intends to convey both

Philanthropy and Political Economy in Twain

123

such meanings is evidenced in the historical names of two of the novel’s central characters, Andrew Independence Harrison and his son George Louisiana Purchase Harrison. These two are members of a family of ‘‘wealth and high character’’ (185), whose names highlight the virtues of independence and legitimate ‘‘purchase,’’ but as the story progresses a history of forgery, theft, murder, and rape is uncovered. Which Was It? begins, as many of Twain’s so-called dream writings do, with a frame story, describing the blissful love, marriage, and family life of George Harrison and his wife Alison.49 ‘‘What a boon and a blessing is life! What a joy it is!’’ (181), Alison writes in the ecstatically cliche´d opening pages of the narrative. However, immediately after writing those pages, she and two of the Harrison children die in a fire. The narrative is then picked up by George, and the autobiographical note is struck definitively. George tells us he cannot write the narrative ‘‘in the first person’’: I must spare myself that shame; must is the right word; I could not say in the first person the things I ought to say, even if I tried. I could not say ‘‘I did such and such things;’’ it would revolt me, and the pen would refuse. No, I will write as if it were a literary tale, a history, a romance—a tale I am telling about another man, a man who is nothing to me, and whose weak and capricious character I may freely turn inside out and expose, without the sense of being personally under the knife. I will make of myself a stranger, and say ‘‘George Harrison did so and so.’’ (183) Moral compromise and shame are revealed as the book’s central themes, while disguised autobiography is the central form. Quickly, we discover the cause of George’s shame, a shame that involves money and that comes to be nearly universal in the text. George’s father has counterfeited money to pay off a debt. Ruminates George: There must be something fearfully disintegrating to character in the loss of money. Men suffer other bereavements and keep up; but when they lose their money, straightway the structure which we call character, and are so proud of, and have such placid confidence in, and think is granite, begins to crumble and waste away, and then . . . the granite that had been sand once is sand again! (195)

124

Chapter 3

Character, George suggests, is fundamentally undergirded by money. Equally important, he uses a naturalized analogy. Character is granite with ‘‘money’’; without it, it is sand. One night after George meditates on character, and operating under both financial duress and also the fear that his father’s dishonest actions will be revealed to the shame of the family, George’s own character reveals itself to be sand. George plans first to set a mill on fire to collect the insurance money, then to commit a robbery. During the robbery he ends up inadvertently murdering a man. George himself remarks, ‘‘Oh, I am amazed to see how far I have come in this little time! Yesterday I despised my father in my private heart, because his honor had a limit; and so soon as this I am finding that mine has one also’’ (219). As the narrative progresses, we discover that there is an even more deeply horrifying crime hidden in his father’s past, mysteriously referred to but never named (250, 282–83). Furthermore, the narrative suggests that George will become truly wealthy as a result of money left him by his father’s brother, a brutal slaveowner, who has sold the mother of his child down river, and twice stole his own child’s freedom. From Independence through the Louisiana Purchase, we have a family and implicitly a national history of crime that has served to establish both ‘‘wealth and high character’’ (185). Morally compromised character is transhistorical, flowing evenly from ‘‘Independence’’ through the ‘‘Louisiana Purchase.’’ The naturalized metaphor of sand and granite enforces such an account of human character through time. This transhistorical and naturalized account of morally compromised character in a family of ‘‘wealth and high character’’ (185) is supported by the biographies of a wide range of characters of other classes and ethnicities. George, whose character is early on established as sand, is of the elite class in town: his face is ‘‘refined and intellectual’’ and is marked by ‘‘some decision and much kindliness in it, and anyone would concede that it was a face to be trusted’’ (192). But the characters of the two working-class immigrants in town, the Irish Bridget and her German husband Jake Bleeker, are likewise revealed to be sand. Like George they plan to steal money, and Twain has them try to ennoble this plan by pretending they are doing it to gain revenge on the elites in town: ‘‘hunger for money was getting precedence over thirst for revenge—if, possibly, it hadn’t been the real motive from the beginning, with revenge doing duty as a pretext salve for . . . conscience’s protesting dignity’’ (223). Likewise, the middle-class

Philanthropy and Political Economy in Twain

125

Mrs. Milliken’s character is sand. After losing her husband, she becomes impoverished, and the hardships of poverty lead to crime. As she puts it, ‘‘two years of hard work, hard usage, miserable wages, often hungry—oh, often!—hungry and cold, and always friendless and forlorn; a hideous life, an odious life, and filled to the lips with bitterness and humiliation. . . . in such cases, one learns to long for money—for therein lie comfort, peace, the world’s respect one’s own respect, every precious thing nameable in language.’’ (319, Twain’s emphasis) Money has morally compromised the rich and poor, the immigrant and the native-born alike. Twain makes the case that immigrants and the poor have more reason to ‘‘long for money’’ to the point of criminality. As George puts it to his son, he knows of many instances of ‘‘the most honorable man you ever knew, and the firmest and sternest in his principles . . . caught cheating,’’ but ‘‘they were not educated men! It palliates it . . . it even excuses it’’ (213); but whether morally trained and educated or not, everyone in the novel has a character of sand. Moral compromise is thus central to the narrative. Exemplary of this, as always, is George. To commit his robbery, George cuts eyeholes out of a handkerchief. When he realizes that the handkerchief he has used has his initials on it, he hides the first mask and makes a second one. However, he forgetfully puts on the mask with initials and accidentally drops it at the crime scene. A leitmotif of the book, therefore, is that someone has discovered his mask and will reveal him (242, 244, 246–48, 254–55, 257, 259). Here Twain plays with that great theme of nineteenth-century culture— how the (masked) social self reveals (or does not reveal) the authentic self. However, instead of resulting in a thematic of suspicion, of ‘‘painted ladies and confidence men,’’ the novel focuses on the self, on the profound discrepancy the individual feels and sees between society’s perception of him/ her as moral and his/her knowledge of compromised morality. This discrepancy is particularly analyzed in terms of George, whose shame is kept activated by Twain at every moment in the text to a squirminducing level for a reader. Twain spends most of the text torturing George, not primarily through depicting agonies of conscience, but instead through describing George’s shame about the contradiction between society’s perception of him and his own self-knowledge. Everything George does is

126

Chapter 3

misinterpreted as a sign of his deep morality, and the more he is misinterpreted as moral, the more shamed he is. Thus in a classic version of this, the townspeople’s sympathy for him at his father’s funeral is a misery to him: They really thought they knew what he felt, and all he felt, but it was not so. He was busy with miseries and pangs and self-reproaches which were outside the pale of their guesses. While they were praising him for a good son who had never cost his father a grief or a regret, he was mentally adding another bitter ‘‘fruit’’ to his tree of crimes and labeling it ‘‘patricide.’’ They could not know this, poor souls; so they went innocently on with their deadly compliments— each in its turn a knife in his heart—and when at last one said ‘‘He couldn’t do a dishonorable thing, and has left behind him a son that can’t even think one,’’ he felt the knife turn in the wound. (261–62) The presumption of personal as well as familial morality, within the context of a history of continuous criminality, is ‘‘deadly,’’ is ‘‘the knife turn[ing] in the wound.’’ The narrative presents two competing philosophies that seek to explain such discrepancy and the morally compromised status of all the characters: theology and political economy. The former is instantly dismissed, the latter both denied and confirmed. The theological view is presented and promoted by the Reverend Swinton Bailey, who preaches ‘‘the Universal Brotherhood of Man; Unselfishness; Self-Sacrifice; Man’s God-given Supremacy over the Beasts that Perish; the Wonder and Mystery of his Construction; the Nobility of his Character; his final crowning endowment, the Moral Sense—granted to him alone of Created Beings’’ (375). This world view is presented specifically to George: ‘‘[George] listened like one entranced. . . . As pictured now, how nobly endowed [man] was, with sweetness, love for his enemy, compassion, forgiveness of injuries; in the golden grace of unselfishness how imperially enriched’’ (375). Twain’s irony is thick here. Theology is simply evasion—given the criminality of every character in the novel. This theological account is instantly undermined by the second philosophy, that of the Reverend’s brother, Sol Bailey, who has been given the nicknames Hamfat and the Idiot Philosopher by the townspeople.50 The IP

Philanthropy and Political Economy in Twain

127

is the voice of the popular Spencerian political economy of Twain’s time, which opposed itself to theological views of human nature. Twain’s depiction of the IP’s philosophy is divided: at first, it is savagely satirized; then, surprisingly, it is endorsed. The IP is first introduced to us as an anomaly in this book, filled as it is with people who are morally compromised and ashamed of themselves. By contrast to most of the characters, the IP is ‘‘destitut[e] in the sense of shame.’’ In these early pages, the IP’s anomalousness does not demonstrate a refreshing or honest authenticity, for Twain describes him as ‘‘loaded to the eyes with every worthless quality . . . that can be named; that is to say . . . loaded with emptiness’’ (276). He is parasitical, perpetually borrowing money from his brother, and more tellingly by Twain’s sexual standards, has ‘‘tuckered out a wife or two . . . and distributed children around wherever they would be handy to his brother’s pocket’’ (277). Like George, he is a figure of the intellectual, albeit a parodic one. He is filled with a ‘‘serene and immense conceit of himself’’ (277), and while he has ‘‘a smart intellect . . . it was of small use to him, for it was under no mastership, and it capered around everywhere and generally landed him nowhere in particular’’ (278). Furthermore, he has failed at everything, so the only way he consistently makes money is through religious charities. ‘‘Religions,’’ for the IP, ‘‘came and religions went,’’ but he remains always true to his ‘‘charity,’’ namely ‘‘the Oriental Missions of the Presbyterian Church,’’ because ‘‘It always brought money, regardless of the condition of the financial weather’’ (278). The IP’s philosophy parodically mixes Spencer’s The Data of Ethics with Carnegie’s ‘‘Gospel of Wealth.’’ Like everyone else in the book, the IP turns to ‘‘crime’’ because he needs money. Like the Bleekers and Mrs. Milliken, he is ‘‘very poor’’ (302), but the difference between them is that the IP seeks to justify his criminal actions philosophically. Currently serving in the ministry, he decides to return to a ‘‘former position’’ (302), that of a laissezfaire political economist. ‘‘Arranging his mind . . . to fit the new circumstances,’’ the IP believes like Spencer that altruism is self-interest: ‘‘all motives are selfish,’’ and therefore ‘‘a man needs only to choose between selfish high motives and selfish low ones’’ (302). Here Twain satirically invokes Spencer’s notion that altruism represents a ‘‘higher egoistic satisfaction,’’ and egoism a ‘‘lower egoistic satisfaction’’ (Spencer, 282). Furthermore, like Spencer, the IP claims these are natural laws that render his philosophy empirical: this ‘‘isn’t a philosophy, it’s a fact’’ (309).

128

Chapter 3

Having rearranged his mind, the IP easily convinces an impoverished young man who hopes to marry, that all human action is driven by selfinterest, but that the crime they are choosing is one with ‘‘high’’ rather than ‘‘low’’ motives. The illustration that the IP uses to convince the young man that all motives are selfish is that of the beneficent gift of twenty-five cents a man gives to an old impoverished woman. Here Twain, like Howells in Hazard, comments on the notion of ‘‘injurious giving’’ which is repetitively figured in the political economy of the time. Twain, however, particularly parodies Spencer’s notion of altruism and egoism as high and low ‘‘egoistic’’ satisfactions and Carnegie’s anecdote of how a ‘‘professed . . . disciple of Herbert Spencer’’ nonetheless once thoughtlessly gave a ‘‘quarter’’ to a ‘‘beggar,’’ thereby causing ‘‘more injury than all the money . . . [he] will ever be able to give in true charity will do good’’ (‘‘Gospel,’’ 11). Thus the IP proves that the twenty-five cents is motivated by pure selfishness, but describes it as high selfishness ‘‘the impulse which moved the man to succor the old woman was wholly selfish, utterly selfish. But there was nothing base about it, nothing ignoble’’ (308). As Twain writes wryly of how the young man is convinced by the IP’s examples, ‘‘[he] was thinking, or thought he was thinking’’ (309). The IP and the young man become in Twain’s resonantly oxymoronic phrase ‘‘benevolent conspirators’’ (311) in a set of multilayered crimes.51 But if Spencer is invoked, even more striking is Twain’s use of Carnegie’s rhetoric to sum up the popular political economy of the time that undergirds ‘‘benevolent’’ conspiracy and crime. When the IP repeats these ‘‘facts’’ about the innately selfish origins of all acts, he calls it the ‘‘Gospel of Self’’ (379), comically playing phonetically, thematically, and structurally with the ‘‘Gospel of Wealth.’’ Thereby, Twain suggests how self-interestedness and crime can be rationalized, even rendered sacred, particularly through political economy’s notion of a necessarily selfinterested Economic Man. This parody of Spencer’s and Carnegie’s thinking, however, is modified by the fact that even while the IP’s reasoning is fallacious, he alone rightly accuses George of murder: ‘‘For instance, consider this fact—these related facts. Almost every man in the world has temper. It follows that almost every man in the world is a murderer. . . . Aren’t you a murderer, George Harrison, and don’t you know it?’’ (279). While it does not follow that temper leads to murder or, more specifically, that temper led to the murder George committed (for it didn’t), the IP is nonetheless correct. George is a murderer, and ‘‘in an agony of misery,’’ George admits to himself that the

Philanthropy and Political Economy in Twain

129

IP ‘‘is saying the truth’’ (280). Indeed, the characters in the novel generally enact the IP’s ‘‘Gospel of Self’’ through their crimes of ‘‘avarice’’ (326). Twain’s mixed feelings about the IP are evident, furthermore, in that when we next meet the IP, he is not the sexually promiscuous man of the early pages; instead, he suddenly has a kind-hearted, smart wife of thirty years to whom he is devoted and who is devoted to him. Equally important, many of the arguments that the IP uses are repeated verbatim in ‘‘What is Man?’’ of which Twain was quite proud and which he published privately in 1906.52 Nonetheless, if Twain satirizes the IP’s philosophy, yet also affirms it more generally through the majority of his characters, there is one main character who stands out from such a ‘‘fact’’ based account of human selfinterestedness—the free black gardener, Jasper. Jasper’s history reveals him to be disinterestedly compassionate and selfless, until forced to be otherwise by the ‘‘madness’’ of ‘‘avarice’’ (326, Twain’s emphasis) that white men and women alike equally display. Mrs. Milliken tells us that Jasper has been bilked of his freedom three times: first as a slave, and second as a free man who had bought his freedom through ‘‘unremitting energy and industry— talent, too’’ (320), and third, by her. In the second case, his master, who is also his father and is George’s uncle, not only enslaves Jasper and sells his mother down the river, but denies the bill of sale he himself later has written out to Jasper. Mrs. Milliken tells her son that she met Jasper in ‘‘his second slavery’’ (319) when he befriended her: ‘‘Jasper was not then what he is now; not idle and shiftless, not sour and vengeful and ungentle—no, just the opposite. He would do anything for you he could; and many’s the kindness he did me when it was a brave thing to venture it, and many’s the comfort he gave me in my need when no other would have risked it. . . . [He] was the cheerfulest soul, and the gayest, on the place, and the most indomitable worker. . . . I never saw a sign that he hated anyone but Harrison [his father/George’s Uncle].’’ (319–20) Implicitly, Jasper’s ‘‘native’’ character is driven by ‘‘kindness,’’ not by avarice or selfishness. It is only after he is robbed twice by his father and a third time by Mrs. Milliken of his freedom that he becomes ‘‘vengeful.’’ It is in this sense that Jasper in Which Was It? suggests that the ‘‘Gospel of Self’’ is not a transhistorical explanation of human nature, but is ubiquitous to the historically specific and closed system of white capitalist culture

130

Chapter 3

and the Economic Man it creates and legitimates. Jasper acts in the book not from the madness of avarice, but from a genuine desire for revenge, which, as we have seen with the Bleekers, the book posits (albeit ironically) as a step up morally. His actions are structural; they are directed not simply towards those who have hurt him, but to the entire culture of whiteness. Thus, he ‘‘brood[s] vengeance,’’ and ‘‘he curs[es] the whole white race without reserve, out of the deepest deeps of his heart . . . rejoicing that in fifteen years he had spared no member of it a pain or a shame when he could safely inflict it’’ (315–16, also 337–38). It is Jasper who ‘‘knows’’ the discrepancy between the public performance of morality among the whites and their private criminality. It is Jasper, therefore, who symbolically discovers George’s ‘‘mask’’ and dramatically unmasks George to George: ‘‘You’d like to find de man [who murdered Jake Bleeker],’’ Jasper says to George, and then, ‘‘In an instant Jasper snatched [George] by the shoulders and whirled him in front of the mirror. ‘Dah he is!’ ’’ (410, Twain’s emphasis). As opposed to the whites in the novel, Jasper not only knows George’s character and is witness to his crime, but can also force George to recognize himself. Jasper is the ideal reader of the story; he can interpret ‘‘literature’’ as autobiography. Literally and figuratively, Twain suggests that African Americans stand culturally outside white capitalist exchange and thus white character, and so have insight into both. Despite Twain’s moments of affirming the transhistorical and universalizing notion of self-interestedness at the bottom of any benevolent act, Jasper serves to highlight that political economy’s rationalization of self-interestedness and criminality as philanthropy is a naturalization of what is actually culturally and historically specific. In other words, Twain suggests that political economy’s foundational arguments need to be understood through the history of race relations in capitalism, rather than in class relations. In the harrowing last pages of the unfinished manuscript, Twain focuses on intra-white moral affirmation, as George is praised by the whole community for his philanthropic benevolence in rescuing (the already-free Jasper) from being enslaved for a fourth time by the whites from whom he has repeatedly had to buy his freedom. The ‘‘compliments’’ heaped on George for his benevolence again work to shame George, but in a new way. First of all, George’s philanthropic act is neither philanthropic nor his own. Universally esteemed as ‘‘kind-hearted,’’ he is as vicious to Jasper as his uncle because of ‘‘custom, [and] the habit of the time’’ (408), until Jasper blackmails him into benevolence, having

Philanthropy and Political Economy in Twain

131

witnessed his crime. At the same time, white celebration of philanthropy turns, so to speak, to black parody. Jasper listens in on the ‘‘compliments’’ to George ‘‘because his listening sharpened his slave’s [George’s] miseries.’’ And ‘‘toward midnight . . . Jasper . . . [would] serve them up, in a new edition revised and improved’’ for ‘‘sarcastic use’’ (429). White philanthropic benevolence that is the result of white economic criminality is the object of Twain’s satire here. Jasper is, however, an overdetermined figure in Twain’s narrative. He sometimes appears to be a product of Twain’s romantic racialism in his inexplicable original transcendent ‘‘kindness’’ (319). At other times, he becomes a figure of white racial terror, the resentful and revengeful slave of Nietzsche, or the Hegelian slave who is actually the master—despite visible white power. Most important, Jasper functions as the embodiment of white shame. He serves as the figuration of the public morality and private immorality of white capitalist culture. This transhistorical shame suggests that ‘‘The Gospel of Self,’’ the notion of Economic Man, fallacious and selfserving as it is, is indeed the truth of (white) character.

‘‘I have got to buy Carnegie’’: Philanthropy and World History My version of Twain’s doubleness has thus far focused on one part of the equation: his critique of the culture of corporate capitalism, but also his sense of deep moral compromise as it rationalizes itself indistinguishably through philanthropy and as philanthropy within political economy.53 This moral compromise is multifaceted. There is his own biography, as his bankruptcy leads to the elite intra-class philanthropy based on an ethos of (morally compromising) loyalty. There is, at the same time, his more dispassionate analysis, as that intra-class philanthropy expands its reach and claims to work democratically through recognizing merit and trained expertise, which likewise creates (morally compromising) loyalty. And there is additionally his analysis of how philosophically intellectuals, but also Americans more generally, have begun to legitimate such moral compromise, as political economy popularizes Economic Man and ‘‘The Gospel of Self’’ as expressions of altruism and benevolent philanthropy. The abstractions of Twain’s final years about a transhistorically compromised (white) character enable, oddly enough, a despairing conciliation of sorts with

132

Chapter 3

managerial capitalism and its discourses of philanthropy, especially within political economy. I want to conclude, however, by providing yet another account of Twain’s despairing conciliation with corporate capitalism and its forms of philanthropy, one we can contextualize specifically through the U.S. commitment to a putatively benevolent ‘‘free-trade imperialism’’ during and in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. In this case, philanthropy does not simply highlight a transhistorically compromised human character, but instead is used to show how, comparatively speaking, philanthropy is benign, even relatively promising. In ‘‘King Leopold’s Soliloquy’’ (1905), for example, Twain’s passionate denunciation of Belgian imperialism, King Leopold describes a ‘‘madman’’ who ‘‘wants to construct a memorial for the perpetuation of my name, out of my 15,000,000 skulls and skeletons’’ (54). Leopold worries, ‘‘If he should think of Carnegie—but I must banish that thought out of my mind! it worries my days; it troubles my sleep. That way lies madness. [After a pause] There is no other way—I have got to buy Carnegie.’’54 In this passage, Carnegie appears as a threat to Belgian imperialism. At one level, such a threat makes sense in that Carnegie, like Twain, was an active and vocal member of, as well as a central contributor to, the Anti-Imperialist League, and furthermore sponsored the publication of Twain’s pamphlet. At another level, such a threat diminishes Twain’s critique, in that one could argue that Carnegie’s anti-imperialist activities were funded in part, not only through brutal labor practices, but also through lucrative contracts to supply an expanding U.S. navy with steel. From a different angle, however, here is another of Twain’s number problems. The 15,000,000 of King Leopold make the ‘‘Twenty-five thousand men [who] lay dead around us’’ (404–5) of Yankee’s Hank Morgan seem like small potatoes. In Yankee, Morgan himself implicitly creates a comparable equation. Early on his travels through sixth-century England, Morgan praises the ever-memorable and blessed [French] Revolution, which swept a thousand years of . . . villainy in one swift tidal-wave of blood—one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. (127)

Philanthropy and Political Economy in Twain

133

In the longue dure´e of world history (rather than the specific context of Arthurian England), managerial capitalism’s violence and its efforts at legitimation through philanthropy come to seem relatively benign. The internal contradictions of philanthropy make it relatively innocuous, perhaps even promising, compared to Leopold’s concentrated and unilinear actions. Thus in ‘‘What Is Man?’’ Twain rethinks his parody of the ‘‘Gospel of Self’’ and renames it the ‘‘Gospel of Self-Approval’’ (in What Is Man?, 148). This is clearly yet another (revised) allusion to Carnegie. Carnegie’s philanthropy, Twain privately explained, was an extension of his vanity, of keeping ‘‘his name . . . famous in the mouths of men for centuries to come’’ (DeVoto, Eruption, 39). ‘‘It is possible but not likely,’’ Twain writes, ‘‘that Carnegie thinks the world regards his library scheme as a large and unselfish benevolence; whereas the world thinks nothing of the kind. The world thanks Mr. Carnegie for his libraries and is glad to see him spend his millions in that useful way, but it is not deceived as to the motive’’ (40). The change from ‘‘The Gospel of Self’’ to that of ‘‘Self-Approval’’ reveals yet another version of Twain’s despairing conciliation with philanthropy. ‘‘Love, Hate, Compassion, Avarice, Benevolence’’ are all described in ‘‘What Is Man?’’ as ‘‘forms of self-contentment, self-gratification.’’ Therefore also, the ‘‘Sole Impulse’’ that drives humans is not simply self-interest, but the ‘‘necessity of securing [one’s] own approval’’ (What Is Man?, 147– 48). This revision suggests that, while self-interestedness is the primary impulse of human beings, such self-interestedness can be disciplined by the ‘‘Moral Sense’’ so that ‘‘self-sacrifice’’ (154–56) or benevolence can lead to self-satisfaction. Hailed by the new corporate philanthropy that is emerging, highly critical of how it helps justify what he sees as a moral compromise with corporate capitalism of not just the elite but all classes, Twain in yet another doubling back—comes to terms with such philanthropy. He suggests that corporate-based philanthropy is the best that can be expected, given the scandal that is (white) human character and the longue dure´e of world history.

chapter 4

‘‘That Friendship of the Whites’’: Patronage and Philanthropy in Charles Chesnutt

n a letter of 7 December 1897 to Walter Hines Page, editor of the Atlantic Monthly and a consulting editor at Houghton Mifflin, Charles Chesnutt writes, ‘‘I felt in a somewhat effusive mood the other day, and I sat down to write a long letter, in which I was going to tell you something about my literary plans.’’1 In extensive detail, Chesnutt summarizes the contents of this planned letter, describing his systematic ‘‘preparation,’’ his philosophical commitments as a writer, and the racism and isolation he faces in his chosen vocation. Concluding his summary, Chesnutt says he decided not to send his ‘‘long letter,’’ but instead to compose a ‘‘simple business letter’’ because he knows ‘‘it would be in better taste to reserve personal confidences until I might have gained your friendship and interest.’’ He nonetheless immediately acknowledges that ‘‘I have written a long letter, in spite of my disclaimer—because I do not want you to forget me.’’ Quite directly, Chesnutt says to Page, ‘‘I wish to secure your interest and your friendship as well in furtherance of my literary aims, and I do not think you will find it amiss that I write and tell you so, and tell you why’’ (103). What is striking about this letter is both how deeply personal it is and how directly it describes itself as staging the personal. Everything Chesnutt says here about his ambition and frustrations can also be found in his private journals of the 1870s and early 1880s. At the same time, he states that this is a ‘‘business letter,’’ and that he hopes to gain Page’s assistance ‘‘in furtherance of my literary aims.’’ The letter, in other words, leans heavily on two meanings of the word friendship: on the one hand, as representing rich possibilities of intellectual and affective community made through

I

Patronage and Philanthropy in Chesnutt

135

‘‘confidences,’’ and on the other hand, as instrumental, necessary for the ‘‘furtherance of my literary aims.’’ As such, the letter maps out a thematic that appears throughout Chesnutt’s journal entries, letters, speeches, and fiction. Again and again, Chesnutt returns to these two kinds of friendship—one he terms elsewhere ‘‘true friendship’’ and one he describes as instrumental.2 Friendship, we saw in the last chapter, is not ‘‘merely a form of or vehicle for sensibility and sympathy,’’ but an important ‘‘cultural practice and institution’’ (Schweitzer, 9). Chesnutt’s distinction between two kinds of friendship provides us with an opportunity to reexamine these social practices in the culture of corporate capitalism, their relation to literary economics, and the difference that race makes to them. In the wake of Richard Brodhead’s important work, Cultures of Letters, the ‘‘Northern literary economy’’ has been seen as a crucial factor in reading Chesnutt. Brodhead argues that in order to achieve literary success Chesnutt manipulated white Northern bourgeois ideology and literary conventions that he had imbibed during his education at and later his principalship of a school backed in part by the Peabody Fund, a white Northern philanthropy. Brodhead argues that because of his education Chesnutt could consciously shape his stories of the South to please a white Northern audience by ‘‘feeding . . . [their] appetite for consumable otherness.’’3 However, when Chesnutt rebelled against the exoticizing conventions that appealed to this audience, he alienated his readers, and his career ended. Multiple points of Brodhead’s analysis have been challenged, but the white Northern audience Brodhead describes as making and then breaking Chesnutt’s career has implicitly remained an uncontested factor in our understanding of the literary economics that shaped his work.4 By contrast, this chapter rethinks the assumptions from classical economics on which Brodhead relies in his notion of the determining power of a white Northern audience.5 While he does not suggest a connection between markets and democratic diversity, as so many literary historians do, he does assume that ‘‘demand’’ directly creates ‘‘supply,’’ and that consumers freely express their choices (or in this case their prejudices) through their consumption patterns. To challenge expressivist as well as democratizing arguments about markets, I focus again on the ways the social practices of corporate capitalism complicate the foundational fictions of classical economics. In the last chapter, I examined the inextricably affective and instrumental implications for Twain of the male friendships fostered in the recreational ‘‘male culture

136

Chapter 4

of the workplace’’ (Rotundo, 195). As an African American, Chesnutt was excluded from that culture and the friendships that emerged from it. Chesnutt’s writings register his careful observation of that culture, with its racially exclusive friendships, and his (sometimes successful, sometimes unsuccessful) attempts to create alternate ways of activating such friendships for his literary career.6 At the same time, he also consistently provides a critical analysis of these social practices, both for African Americans and more generally. I begin by contextualizing Chesnutt’s distinction between ‘‘true friendship’’ and instrumental friendship through his debates with Booker T. Washington about the impact the social practices of corporate capitalism were having on African American life. I then examine Chesnutt’s nonfiction writings and his neglected ‘‘white life’’ fiction before turning to his important novel, The Colonel’s Dream (1905).7

Corporate Capitalism and Friendship Returning to Chesnutt’s 1897 letter to Walter Hines Page, we have an obvious question at hand: why does Chesnutt as an aspiring black writer particularly use the discourse of friendship to establish a working relation with a Southern-born white editor whose racial attitudes and politics were often more than a little troubling?8 Examining a different angle of the patronage and philanthropy connection from that in the last chapter, we can say that patronage—as the collusion of white businessmen with the state or with each other—tended to be racially segregated in this period, involving what Dana Nelson has usefully described as a national fraternity of white men (see especially 131–32). The emergent corporate-based philanthropy, however, was distinctly more complex. Chesnutt’s education, as Brodhead himself points out, was sponsored by the Peabody Fund, an early white Northern philanthropy, created by banker George Peabody in the aftermath of the Civil War. But shaping African American education more profoundly in the South during the years Chesnutt was writing was John D. Rockefeller’s philanthropy and the institutional form it eventually took as the General Education Board (GEB), officially founded in 1902.9 Eric Anderson and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., show that the turn of the century was the high point of Northern white philanthropic involvement in the South, and Rockefeller’s GEB, because of its size and wealth, dominated philanthropic policy.10 Moss and Anderson argue that the GEB’s internal

Patronage and Philanthropy in Chesnutt

137

records reveal a genuine commitment to equal education for blacks and whites and a belief that public funding for such education would be part of the solution to racial conflict in the South. These records also reveal, however, that to gain white Southern support, the GEB was willing to accept segregation and the white control and systematic underfunding of black education.11 Here the practices of corporate patronage—of white Northern and Southern businessmen colluding with the state and with each other— shape modern bureaucratic philanthropy.12 The aim was to help Southern blacks achieve equality. The effect was to enforce state-mandated segregation.13 Northern and Southern blacks, including Chesnutt, tracked these developments closely and debated them actively.14 Equally important, philanthropy, social reform, and print culture were inextricably connected to each other philosophically and institutionally at this time.15 Such connections were important for Progressive intellectuals generally, but of particular significance for minority intellectuals. In Chesnutt’s case, his relation to print culture and his relation to the new corporate philanthropy were intertwined. One of the GEB’s allies and philanthropic precursors was the Southern Education Board (founded in 1901), on whose board Walter Hines Page, Chesnutt’s main editor, served. As I have said, Chesnutt highlights two meanings of friendship in his letter. The first—instrumental friendship—is the more important one for this chapter (though ‘‘true friendship’’ provided him with valuable critical leverage, which I will also explore). Therefore, when Chesnutt uses the term friendship in his 1897 letter, we hear first of all the echo of one of the most famous contemporary black statements on corporate capitalism, Booker T. Washington’s 1895 ‘‘Atlanta Exposition Address.’’ ‘‘As I remember it now,’’ Washington writes of the speech in Up from Slavery, published also by Walter Hines Page, ‘‘the thing that was uppermost in my mind was the desire to say something that would cement the friendship of the races and bring about hearty cooperation between them.’’16 The ‘‘cement’’ here presumes that friendship and cooperation, rather than institutionally enforced inequality, are norms of black/white relations, and that Washington simply hopes to prompt more ‘‘hearty’’ versions of those friendly, cooperative relations. The speech itself depends on this same presumptive affective rhetoric. Washington thanks the Exposition’s managers for the ‘‘recognition that will do more to cement the friendship of the two races than any occurrence since the dawn of freedom.’’ He uses a famous metaphor of the ‘‘friendly vessel’’ and the vessel ‘‘lost at sea,’’ explicating the metaphors as the need

138

Chapter 4

for blacks and whites to ‘‘cultivat[e] . . . friendly relations’’ with each other (219). What constitutes these friendly relations is at first unclear, since friendliness usually implies informal sociability and affective connection, but in this speech Washington famously precludes such sociability and connection: ‘‘In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress’’ (221– 22). However, Washington goes on to argue that in the realm of business, of rational self-interest, friendly relations can occur: ‘‘when it comes to business, pure and simple . . . the Negro is given a man’s chance’’ (220). ‘‘No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world,’’ he emphasizes, ‘‘is long in any degree ostracized’’ (224). Of course, the most prevalent discourse of capitalism at the turn of the century was not one of friendship. Instead, it was one of the survival of the fittest, of naturalized laissez-faire economics. While Washington borrows some inflections from that discourse, he relies on a less common, but nonetheless emergent one of the time—the sociable and rational cooperation of corporate capitalism. As I noted in the Introduction, John D. Rockefeller, for one, preached the virtues of cooperation rather than naturalized competition: The struggle for the survival of the fittest, in the sea and on the land the world over, as well as the law of supply and demand, were observed in all the ages past until the Standard Oil Company preached the doctrines of cooperation, and it did cooperate so successfully and so fairly that its most bitter opponents were won over to its views and made to realize that rational, sane, modern, progressive administration was necessary to success. (quoted in Chernow, Titan, 154) While Rockefeller does not give up the foundational fiction of the beneficent, free, and self-regulating market of liberal capitalism, he links it to rational administration rather than to the competitive struggles of nature. In addition, the language is illuminating for the case I am making. If Rockefeller never goes quite so far as to call corporate capitalism the same thing as friendship, the implicit suggestion is there. His ‘‘bitter opponents’’ become cooperative allies when they see that the methods of Standard Oil lead logically to ‘‘success.’’ Or, as Rockefeller puts it even more tellingly, ‘‘the very men who were desperately opposed to anything the Standard Oil

Patronage and Philanthropy in Chesnutt

139

Company might suggest . . . when they met us face to face . . . they readily joined us and never had occasion to regret’’ (quoted in Chernow, 164). He thereby emphasizes friendly sociability, enlightened self-interest, and success based on mutualism. Given that naturalized laissez-faire economics was intimately linked with the scientific racism of the time, it is no surprise that Washington prefers the corporate capitalist discourse of sociable cooperation. Such discourse, however, was as obfuscatory as the ones it replaced. After all, the term ‘‘cooperation’’ does not typically connote the exploitation of public resources and a weak state, nor does it usually encompass the creation of shadow companies, secret rebates, and cartels. However, such a discourse also has a kernel of truth to it, if we read ‘‘cooperation’’ as signaling what the Progressives called patronage, the complex workings of friendly, ‘‘faceto-face’’ collusion and sponsorship that obtained between the state and corporations as well as between various interlocking corporate interests. Perhaps the appeal of this rhetoric to Washington was not only the way it avoided a connection to scientific racism but also its opaquely constructed truths about a ‘‘face-to-face’’ system of patronage in the United States.17 Washington’s reliance on this opaque rhetoric of cooperative friendship was, however, precisely the grounds on which Chesnutt frequently figured his fundamental disagreement with Washington, both privately and publicly. We know now that Washington did not merely rely on the kindness of ‘‘cooperative’’ capitalism but was secretly funding legislative change. Furthermore, his philosophy and complex performance of self cannot be simply reduced to an accession to corporate capitalism’s imperatives and values. Nonetheless, Chesnutt found Washington’s public reliance on the discourse of friendly and cooperative capitalism dangerous in what it assumed and implied. He wrote privately to Washington in 1903, ‘‘I appreciate all you say and have written about education and property; but they are not everything. There is no good reason why we should not acquire them all the more readily because of our equality of rights. I have no confidence in that friendship of the whites which is to take the place of rights, and no expectation of justice at their hands unless it is founded on law’’ (Author, 182). For Chesnutt, whatever benefits may accrue to blacks through friendly collusion or patronage, the fundamental human claims to rights and justice have still been left unaddressed. And, significantly, Chesnutt repeatedly in all his responses to Washington—private and public—describes this fundamental disagreement in terms of ‘‘friendship’’ with ‘‘whites.’’18

140

Chapter 4

For Chesnutt, therefore, we can say friendship is important because it is a destructively misleading discourse of corporate capitalism that uses the screen of cooperative friendship (which is no more than a closed system of collusion or patronage) to deny fundamental questions of human rights and justice. Even more important, Chesnutt, like Twain, disputes this language’s evocation of inherent beneficence, its philanthropy. If Twain’s work particularly criticizes the way this philanthropic discourse legitimates violence and crime, Chesnutt focuses instead on how corporate capitalism obscures questions of rights and justice through its description of patronage and collusion as sociable friendship. He highlights how such friendship is imagined as replacing laws with voluntaristic good will which ‘‘take[s] the place of rights.’’ Rockefeller again provides a useful angle on this. ‘‘Cooperation,’’ writes Ron Chernow, was simply part of a larger rhetoric of Standard Oil as a ‘‘philanthropic agency or an angel of mercy’’ (145). Rockefeller needed to justify what was ‘‘astonishing . . . knavery, grand-scale collusion such as American industry had never witnessed’’ (Chernow, 136). Rockefeller, for example, remembered telling other oil manufacturers in the 1870s, ‘‘We will take your burdens. We will utilize your ability; we will give you representation; we will unite together and build a substantial structure on the basis of cooperation’’ (quoted in Chernow, 145). For Chernow, this desire ‘‘to be both rich and virtuous’’ (152) sets Rockefeller off from his fellow robber barons. But Chernow is wrong here. As discussed in the Introduction, from Adam Smith onward, theorists of capitalism have sought to defend it as both a morally and economically efficacious system. And as I have been arguing, as the ‘‘incorporation of America’’ and resistance to that process intensified, big business sought to legitimate itself as an expression of the ‘‘love of mankind.’’ Sometimes the claim was that business was philanthropic because it provided work, a higher standard of living, and/or leisure to the masses of people. Sometimes the claim was that it was philanthropic because it created huge organizations devoted to redressing social ills scientifically, and did so voluntarily out of its inherent morality and as a result of its economic effectiveness. Both these claims are made simultaneously in Andrew Carnegie’s ‘‘Gospel of Wealth’’ and in Rockefeller’s less famous but still illuminating notion of ‘‘the benevolent trust.’’19 If Chesnutt therefore links friendship to the obfuscations of corporate capitalism, particularly to its evasion of questions about human rights and justice, he nonetheless (and intriguingly) does not simply dismiss this kind

Patronage and Philanthropy in Chesnutt

141

of friendship out of hand. Instead, he seems to see such friendship as raising important subjective possibilities that exceed mere obfuscation. In a rich and testy exchange of letters with Washington on the subject of Andrew Carnegie, Chesnutt criticizes in no uncertain terms the political positions of both Carnegie and Carnegie’s mentor on racial matters, Washington. He writes in a memorably comical locution that Carnegie’s address of 1907, ‘‘The Negro in America,’’ is ‘‘worthy of all commendation, except that I do not agree with him, or with you, if you are correctly quoted [in the speech]’’ (Exemplary 35). Taking on Carnegie in a different way from Twain, Chesnutt particularly opposes what he sees as Washington’s (and Carnegie’s) refusal to ‘‘resist the current of events’’ or to ‘‘protest against steadily progressing disfranchisement and consequent denial of civil rights.’’ ‘‘But,’’ he continues, ‘‘while I differ from you very earnestly and deeply . . . I must congratulate you on having won over to such active friendship for the Negro, so able and influential a citizen of the world as Mr. Carnegie’’ (Exemplary 35). Later he signs on to a project in which the ‘‘Committee of Twelve’’ will present Carnegie with a leatherbound copy of Carnegie’s revised address. Chesnutt states his support of this project by saying, ‘‘It was a friendly address, not as advanced a position as . . . I would take,’’ but ‘‘the mere fact that Mr. Carnegie aligns himself as a friend of the race is extremely significant and valuable’’ (Exemplary 39). Chesnutt thus expresses profound disagreement, and yet he repeatedly notes Carnegie’s friendliness and describes the public performance of it as ‘‘extremely’’ important. One could argue that this is Chesnutt at his most instrumental. He frequently emphasizes how important it is to shape public opinion, not because it is central to the fight for justice, but because it is the only tool currently available.20 Carnegie is ‘‘friendly’’ in the sense of providing publicity for the cause as an ‘‘able and influential citizen of the world.’’ However, Chesnutt’s language suggests that such friendship has something more ‘‘valuable’’ inhering in it. Elsewhere, for example, he writes to W. E. B. Du Bois explaining why he will criticize, but not attack, Washington, ‘‘I have always believed that the Negro in the South will never get his rights until there is a party, perhaps a majority, of southern white people friendly to his aspirations. If Mr. Washington can encourage the growth of such a feeling in the South, he will have done a good work even though he should fall short in other respects’’ (Exemplary, 83–84). Here, Chesnutt gestures to a terrain of potential ‘‘feeling’’ shaped by, but not fully reducible to, the culture of

142

Chapter 4

corporate capitalism. It is primarily with Chesnutt’s fictional analysis of corporate philanthropy, as well as his speculations about this terrain of feeling, that the rest of this chapter deals. It is important to note here that philanthropy as a friendly social practice is nevertheless always distinguished in Chesnutt from a second kind of friendship, what he calls ‘‘true friendship.’’ While for Chesnutt, instrumental friendship can be historicized in terms of corporate capitalism and its philanthropy, true friendship is tied to what Ivy Schweitzer describes as a ‘‘radical’’ tradition of thought about friendship. Emerging in the eighteenth century and closely allied to the revolutionary ideals of the period, this radical tradition imagines and represents ‘‘a universal though nominally masculine form of friendship and democracy through the notion of equality’’ (10). Schweitzer describes the ways this elite model of friendship depends on notions of similitude to figure equality, thereby excluding difference from its purview; however, she argues that nonelites effectively appropriated this model of friendship for politically empowering purposes. Indeed Chesnutt repeatedly invokes this radical tradition of thought on friendship to critical ends. For example, he glosses the motto of the French Revolution. ‘‘Liberte´, Egalite´, Fraternite´,’’ as ‘‘liberty to all, on equal terms; equality to every man as soon as he shall have won it—nay, more, for every man at all times equality with those who are in no wiser or better than he; fraternity for only with this can equality or true friendship exist’’ (Essays, 167, his emphasis).21 To Chesnutt, only in the context of democratic political structures can there be true friendship. Chesnutt therefore never describes in his own life or in his fiction an actual manifestation of true friendship between black and white.22 As Chesnutt works to activate the instrumental friendship of the culture of corporate capitalism, he also uses for critical leverage the potential of the older tradition of radical friendship. His work asks if this radical model of friendship can be found in residual traces in contemporary philanthropy, and if it can be regalvanized so as to transform friendly ‘‘feelings’’ into ‘‘true friendship.’’

Philanthropy and Justice Before turning to Chesnutt’s most famous exploration of the affective terrain of black/white philanthropy in capitalism, The Colonel’s Dream (1905),

Patronage and Philanthropy in Chesnutt

143

I want to look briefly at three works that precede that novel and help demonstrate the development of Chesnutt’s thinking on this topic. The first, ‘‘The March of Progress,’’ was a story accepted by Walter Hines Page in 1897 for the Atlantic Monthly, but it did not appear until 1901 in The Century, for reasons that are not documented. The other two works, A Business Career and Evelyn’s Husband, were rejected for publication in 1898 and 1903 respectively and did not appear in Chesnutt’s lifetime. ‘‘The March of Progress’’ focuses on the abolitionist-inspired philanthropy of Northern whites that was at work in the antebellum and Reconstruction periods of the previous years. In A Business Career and Evelyn’s Husband, Chesnutt debates how to represent contemporary corporate-based Northern white philanthropy in literature. All the stories explore the psychological motivations behind philanthropy in capitalism and to some degree its effects. Together these stories prepare the ground for Chesnutt’s analysis of the motivations and effects of corporate capitalist philanthropy in The Colonel’s Dream, and particularly his analysis of justice. ‘‘The March of Progress’’ focuses on Northern philanthropy of the past, and thus resurrects the figure of the New England schoolmistress of Reconstruction, a figure who, as Kenneth Warren has shown, was pivotal in both literary and political debates in the post-bellum period.23 Chesnutt divides his analysis into two perspectives: that of the New England schoolmistress herself, Henrietta Noble, and that of the Southern black community whom she has taught. The story calls upon sentimental associations about symbolically feminized New England reform traditions (Noble’s ‘‘unselfish labors’’ prove ‘‘her nature did not belie her name’’) to refute, as Chesnutt often did, contemporary discourse about the corrupt ‘‘carpetbaggers’’ of Reconstruction.24 Nonetheless, Chesnutt also depicts Noble’s own perspective as self-interested and limited. She has been reared in a ‘‘New England household by parents who taught her to fear God and love her fellow-men’’ (770–71). Her family’s religiously based, universalist philanthropic creed is exemplified by her father, who died in the Civil War fighting for the Union cause. At the same time, however, if Noble and her family have a proven commitment to a ‘‘love’’ of one’s ‘‘fellow-men,’’ she is also an orphan and must support herself. Chesnutt makes clear that Noble clings ever more tightly to her job as she ages, not because of her family’s creed, but because she has no other options. This characterization of Noble as embodying genuinely philanthropic principles, but also as having limitations, is enforced by Chesnutt’s depiction of her relation to the black community.

144

Chapter 4

Her vocation, based in part on that creed, has alienated her from Southern and Northern whites alike, and has resulted in a closer affective relation with the black community. When she visits the North, ‘‘she had felt so lonely that she had longed for the dark faces of her pupils . . . [and she] had welcomed with pleasure the hour when her task should be resumed’’ (772). Chesnutt’s narration here, however, retains its chilly quality. The black community is metonymically Noble’s ‘‘pupils’’; her work a ‘‘task.’’ She is described as having ‘‘many friends and supporters’’ (773) in the black community, but in Chesnutt’s account of Noble’s perspective, he highlights her self-interest as well as the religious principles of equality and justice that inform her life’s work, her separation from the black community as well as her close relations with it. Chesnutt’s depiction of the black community’s perspective is equally complex. The story’s crisis is precipitated by two events: first, the black community has fought, finally successfully, for the appointment of a ‘‘committee of themselves to manage the colored schools in town’’ (770); and second, a black candidate, Andrew J. Williams, has emerged in competition for Noble’s place as headmistress. A former student of Noble’s, Williams has attended college through ‘‘considerable sacrifice’’ of his parents and his own ‘‘diligent . . .’’ hard work (773). The more ‘‘progressive element’’ (775) of the black community wants Williams to run the school, and the rhetoric used to support him is one of naturalized laissez-faire capitalism and selfhelp: the ‘‘march of progress requires that we help ourselves, or be left forever behind’’ (775), says one supporter; this is ‘‘not a matter of feelin’, but of business,’’ says another (776). Chesnutt glosses this more ‘‘progressive element’’ as both the wealthier members of the black community and the element most assimilated into modern discourses of contemporary capitalism. As Kevin Gaines has argued, the discourse of uplift as capitalist selfhelp at the turn of the century was promoted most extensively by middleand upper-class blacks. Unsurprisingly, then, Chesnutt has the poorest member of the committee, Abe Johnson, refute these discourses and carry the day in favor of Noble. Johnson’s argument focuses on history and basic humanity. He castigates the town’s ‘‘po’ mem’ries’’ and then describes ‘‘de things dat Miss Noble done fer de niggers er dis town’’ (778), and how she ‘‘has libbed ‘mongs’ us an’ made herse’f one of us, an endyoed havin’ her own people look down on her.’’ History, to Johnson, is also linked to imaginative sympathy and to the notion of universalist philanthropy: ‘‘Whar would we ‘a’ be’n ef her folks at de No’th hadn’ ‘membered us no bettuh.

Patronage and Philanthropy in Chesnutt

145

. . . De man dat kin fergit w’at Miss Noble has done fer dis town is unworthy de name of nigger!’’ (778). The chilly quality of the narrative dissipates in the ‘‘tears’’ (779) that the black community shed as Chesnutt describes their memories of the sometimes heroic, sometimes simply human role the schoolteacher played during crucial moments of life and death in the community. But Chesnutt’s story, despite its critique of a bourgeois black discourse of self-help and progress as a problematic assimilation, also challenges what Hazel Carby has called a ‘‘sycophantic’’ reading of New England philanthropic traditions.25 Not only is Noble’s perspective rendered in fairly hardheaded terms, not only are her sacrifices posed against the profound sacrifices of her black rival and his parents, but also, and symbolically, when Noble learns she has been chosen by the committee as their teacher, she has a heart attack and dies, and her former pupil ‘‘took charge of the grammar school, which went on without any further obstacles to the march of progress’’ (780). This formulation cites ironically the discourse of naturalized laissez-faire capitalism and self-help that it has criticized, while nevertheless also suggesting that whatever the virtues of the particular kind of New England philanthropy that Noble represents, it is dying out. The New England schoolmistress historically represents a kind of religious-based, universalist philanthropy based on ‘‘love’’ of one’s ‘‘fellow-men’’ (771) and thus on the possibility of what Chesnutt describes as ‘‘true friendship,’’ of affective relations grounded in conceptions of human equality, albeit within a self-interested capitalist culture. Nonetheless, Chesnutt also acknowledges in the story that the realities of the South are such that the discourse of laissez-faire capitalism and self-help might well be used to important ends: ‘‘Ever since the war we have been sendin’ our child’n to school an’ educatin’ ‘em . . . [and] The white people won’t hire ‘em,’’ so ‘‘we [must] help ourselves’’ (775) and ‘‘stand by our own people’’ (776). But of equal importance (and ironically), Noble’s philanthropy has enabled precisely what it should—a situation in which white philanthropic friendship can be dispensed with. She got ‘‘de money f’m de [Freedmen’s] Bureau to s’port de school. . . . An’ when dat was stop’ . . . [she] got de money f’m de Peabody Fun’ ’’ (777), but now the community no longer needs her assistance. Her work, indeed, should be memorialized, as it is by Chesnutt in the story, precisely because it did what it aimed to do—‘‘to help them,’’ as Chesnutt writes almost a decade later in a careful modification of Sumner, Carnegie, and Rockefeller, ‘‘to a condition in which they might be in less need of

146

Chapter 4

help.’’26 In short, whatever the relations between black and white, and whatever the need all individuals have for aid, Noble has helped make white philanthropic friendship less necessary. Indeed, the black community can express their own philanthropic friendship for the aged, ill, white schoolmistress—extending help to her—and that as much as anything may represent the ‘‘march of progress.’’ The ironies implicit in Chesnutt’s use of that term, however, are deepened when we think through the story’s abstraction and unreality. The power of black school boards over white teachers, or the fate of the New England schoolmistress, were not the central issues in Southern education in 1897 when ‘‘The March of Progress’’ was written. Corporate-based institutional Northern philanthropy, as Anderson and Moss show, was already displacing ‘‘the supposedly outmoded methods of the neoabolitionist Protestant missionary societies’’ (40–41) of the Reconstruction period. Modern, expert, pragmatic policy was likewise displacing the ‘‘idealist’’ or ‘‘sentimental’’ advocacy of the past (39–41, 54, 96, 215), an advocacy which the New England schoolmistress embodies, as Kenneth Warren has shown. ‘‘The March of Progress’’ implicitly argues that whatever the self-interested limitations of the Northern idealist philanthropy of the past, it was principled. It did not concede away conceptions of equality or justice, and thus worked effectively (and affectively) to create a community who no longer needed its philanthropy. The ‘‘March of Progress,’’ written when it was, suggests that the motivations behind philanthropic action within capitalism may always be problematic; nonetheless, there are important distinctions to be made between the principled philanthropic friendship of Reconstruction and the new corporate-based model. If ‘‘The March of Progress’’ analyzes the motivations and effects of a past model of Northern religiously based, universalist philanthropy, two peculiar ‘‘white life’’ (Roediger, 8) novels that follow debate what motivates the new Northern philanthropy. The ostensible subject of these unpublished novels is heterosexual romance. The romances, however, are refracted through the lens of male business friendship and its forms of loyalty, allowing Chesnutt to meditate on the psychic investments of capitalist philanthropy divested of religious universalism. Both novels begin with the same narrative problem: the predicament of young bourgeois women whose fathers’ moral or intellectual failures have resulted in death as well as financial ruin for their families. In addition, in both novels the former business partners/friends of these fathers have acted philanthropically,

Patronage and Philanthropy in Chesnutt

147

stabilizing the finances of the widows and daughters left behind, out of loyalty to their late partners. Finally, in both novels, such philanthropy is posed as meriting gratitude in the form of sexual payback by the daughters. The only real difference in these strange novels—differences that suggest Chesnutt was debating how to represent white psychic investments in philanthropy—is that in the first novel the sexual payback is ambiguously normalized, while in the second, it is pathologized. In A Business Career, neither Stella nor her mother Alice Merwin knows that the Rockefeller-like oil baron Wendell Truscott has been keeping them afloat financially. Indeed, Alice blames Truscott for their financial woes, and when Stella ends up accidentally working as a stenographer for Truscott, Alice has Stella vow revenge. Stella comes to discover, however, that her father was weak and dishonest and that she and her family have been ‘‘living on [the] charity’’ and ‘‘bounty’’ of Truscott.27 Meanwhile, Truscott had originally planned to propose marriage to Matilda Wedderburn, a woman of his own age, but she happens to raise the topic of Stella, and at the thought of his partner’s child, Truscott realizes he finds Wedderburn old and physically repulsive. When Truscott later discovers that Stella is his partner’s daughter—now grown up—he is filled with a ‘‘distinct thrill of pleasure’’ and notes delightedly her physical resemblance to his partner. Despite his old partner’s moral failings, Truscott thinks of his partner as his ‘‘friend and benefactor’’ (209). This circuit of financial philanthropy ends with Truscott asking Stella to ‘‘Come back to me, dear child’’ (218), and presumably also with a marriage. A number of issues, however, trouble this traditional ending to the heterosexual courtship novel. In Business, the homoerotic and incestuous plot line is linked to broader questions about the significance of philanthropy. It is not just that Truscott is the beneficiary of Mr. Merwin and that Merwin’s daughter becomes the beneficiary of Truscott in a kind of closed system of exchange, but also that a central topic of discussion is the philanthropy of Truscott’s class. Alice takes Stella on a walk to see the houses of the wealthy and argues that philanthropy and wealth partake of the same logic of theft (82–84). Of one Mr. Jewitt, for example, who was introduced earlier in the novel as being ‘‘as charitable as he is rich’’ (36), Alice instead says that ‘‘he robs the poor with one hand and drops the nickel in the contribution box with the other.’’ In what appears to be an allusion to Rockefeller, Alice says that Jewitt ‘‘ ‘holds up’ the commerce of a nation, and out of the millions stolen from the teacups of the poor endows a seminary to teach his own

148

Chapter 4

narrow creed and glorify his name’’ (83). Philanthropic or charitable actions, Alice suggests later, are always undergirded by ‘‘powerful motive[s]’’ and ‘‘deep-laid scheme[s]’’ (128). Chesnutt’s conventional ending uneasily glosses over larger, abstract questions that the book raises about the white business elite, their philanthropy, and its affective and libidinal investments. Evelyn’s Husband duplicates many details of A Business Career, but the questions raised in the latter novel are directly answered in the former one. Evelyn Thayer and her mother, again named Alice, are close friends rather than enemies with Edward Cushing, the former business partner of the dead Mr. Thayer. However, Alice Thayer, unlike Alice Merwin, knows that Cushing has supported the family after Mr. Thayer bankrupted them. Cushing falls in love with and proposes marriage to Evelyn, but Evelyn is repelled by the offer. She thinks of him as ‘‘old enough . . . [to be] her father,’’ and as one whom ‘‘She had regarded . . . nearly all her life, in a light not very difference [sic] from that of a parent.’’28 Nonetheless, she dutifully accepts his proposal, but she soon falls in love with a brash young man from a lower-class background, Hugh Manson. Alice, realizing that Evelyn may break her engagement with Cushing, tells her daughter the secret of Cushing’s charity in precisely the same language as that used in Business. We have ‘‘live[d] on [Cushing’s] bounty,’’ says Alice, adding that ‘‘Since you have grown up, I have hoped to repay, through you . . . these heaped up gifts’’ (86). In no uncertain terms, she tells Evelyn that she cannot ‘‘disappoint . . . and wound . . . our benefactor’’ (86). When Evelyn elopes with Manson, Cushing is humiliated and enraged. Chesnutt then stages two shipwrecks at sea whereby Cushing and Manson end up alone together on a desert island, but since Manson has been temporarily rendered blind, he does not recognize Cushing. Cushing is thus forced to hear Manson’s perspective on Cushing’s actions—of his ‘‘monstrous’’ act of ‘‘coolly propos[ing] to make that child [Evelyn] his wife . . . to make her the nurse of his decrepitude’’ (191). To Cushing, Conscious of the generosity of his dealings with the widow and family of his dead friend, Cushing had found no little self-satisfaction in the knowledge of his magnanimity. He was fond of appreciation, and valued his own approval . . . .The suggestion, from this blunt, blind savage who had been thrust upon him by a freakish fate, that his conduct had been mere aesthetic selfishness . . . [made him]

Patronage and Philanthropy in Chesnutt

149

uncomfortably conscious that . . . his conduct . . . might be open to such construction. (193) Cushing begins to reevaluate his putative ‘‘generosity’’ and sees himself in a new light, and at the end of the novel marries the age ‘‘appropriate’’ (191) Alice, while Evelyn is reunited with Manson. The desert island motif enables Chesnutt to explore at an abstract level the issues he had also raised in Business, namely the complex relation between the affective and libidinal investments of wealthy whites and their philanthropy. Cushing is forced by a ‘‘blunt, blind savage’’ to reevaluate the links between his ‘‘magnanimity’’ and his ‘‘monstrous’’ sexuality. At first, this savage’s blindness means he is totally in Cushing’s power, and Cushing can decide whether to let him live or die. Cushing decides to help Manson because that is an ‘‘elementary duty’’ of ‘‘civilization’’ (177), to ‘‘feed and shelter and tend this man, because he was a man’’ (178). While he will go no further than that, he is willing to do ‘‘justice’’ (178). Writes Chesnutt of Cushing’s emotions, ‘‘He was bound to his enemy by considerations of humanity. He had succored Manson, not for Manson’s sake, but for his own. He neither merited nor cared for gratitude’’ (205). One cannot help but read this story in part as a reflection from an African American perspective on both the pathology and the promise of white Northern philanthropy. That Manson is a lower-class ‘‘savage,’’ who has attended the mixed race Berea College, reinforces such a reading.29 On the one hand, Northern capitalist philanthropy is depicted as motivated by a ‘‘selfish’’ desire to gain self ‘‘approval’’ as well as ‘‘gratitude’’ (32) from dependents within a closed class and race system. This pathological desire is thus linked to incest, anticipating Ralph Ellison’s famous account of white Northern philanthropy in Invisible Man (1952).30 On the other hand, Chesnutt imagines that if issues can be rendered abstract (as for example, on a desert island), then another and better impulse behind such philanthropy can be found—the ‘‘elementary duty’’ to do ‘‘justice’’ ‘‘by considerations of humanity’’ in which the philanthropist neither ‘‘merit[s] nor care[s] for gratitude.’’ As in ‘‘The March of Progress,’’ such philanthropy is self-interested—Cushing acts ‘‘not for Manson’s sake, but for his own’’—but it nonetheless proves his humanity, which Chesnutt suggests moves Cushing beyond pathology. Both Business and Husband rely on what David Leverenz has helpfully identified as a central narrative form of corporate capitalism at the turn of the century: the incestuously and/or homoerotically inflected ‘‘Daddy’s

150

Chapter 4

Girl’’ or ‘‘Daddy’s Boy’’ genre. Leverenz has argued convincingly that these narratives are ubiquitous in this period and are expressions of what he describes as the lingering paternalism within the culture of corporate capitalism. Less convincingly, Leverenz argues that ‘‘Daddy’s Girl’’ and ‘‘Daddy’s Boy’’ narratives manipulate corporate capitalist paternalism to progressive ends. Booker T. Washington is, to Leverenz, a prominent example of how such affective codes can be effectively manipulated. As must be evident by now, Leverenz’s reading of such narratives (and of the inherently progressive nature of corporate capitalism more generally) is not the one Chesnutt takes. As ‘‘The March of Progress,’’ Business, and Husband all suggest, Chesnutt distinguishes between kinds of ‘‘friendly’’ philanthropy (or in Leverenz’s terms, paternalism) in capitalism: one motivated by a pathological libidinal need for dependence and gratitude within a closed class and race system that leaves the social and economic terrain unchanged, the other motivated by ‘‘elementary’’ religious or humanist notions of justice in which social and economic relations might well shift.

‘‘The Best of Intentions’’: Corporate Philanthropy in The Colonel’s Dream The Colonel’s Dream, which was published by Walter Hines Page in 1905, is Chesnutt’s most famous novel on philanthropy. As in ‘‘The March of Progress,’’ Chesnutt analyzes the perspective of both the philanthropist and his recipients; however, in Colonel, he focuses on the newer corporate-based philanthropy and its affective and libidinal investments, as he did in Business and Husband. Chesnutt thus examines the ‘‘good friend’’ from the North and the characteristic forms his ‘‘good will’’ (6, 308) takes. At the same time, Chesnutt examines the beneficiaries of such philanthropy—a black and white community in the South—providing a carefully contextualized account of their feelings and responses. By analyzing both the philanthropist and his beneficiaries, and furthermore by exploring how feelings are part of history and become embodied in social forms, Chesnutt provides a nuanced account of the disaster that results from the ‘‘best of intentions’’ (252). Central to Chesnutt’s account is the failure of corporate philanthropy to engage questions of justice and thereby its failure to deal productively with a feeling that has become institutionalized in law and government in the South: namely, white ressentiment or envy. And yet, even

Patronage and Philanthropy in Chesnutt

151

while chronicling the failures of white Northern philanthropy, Chesnutt also explores whether the residual ideas that inhere in it could potentially be regalvanized toward useful ends. Chesnutt carefully describes Colonel French and what has shaped his philanthropy. French is ‘‘A man of well-balanced character . . . quickly responsive to a generous impulse, and capable of a righteous indignation,’’ and even more important, ‘‘a good friend, [and] a dangerous enemy; more likely to be misled by the heart than by the head’’ (6). His ability to be a friend, however, is situated within the culture of corporate capitalism, for French is also described as eminently pragmatic and conservative, a rational ‘‘man of affairs’’ (6). In the takeover of French’s company (a takeover whose profits enable French to become a philanthropist), he is ‘‘between the devil and the deep sea—a victim rather than an accessory’’ of corporate capitalism. ‘‘Mr. French may have known . . . or guessed,’’ writes Chesnutt, that the ‘‘trust’’ which takes over his company will ‘‘crush’’ the competition, while ‘‘labour must sweat and the public groan in order that a few captains, or chevaliers, of industry, might double their dividends’’ (7). But whether French knows it or not, he ‘‘must take what he could get, or lose what he had’’ (7). French is limited by the imperatives of corporate capitalism. Even at his most idealistic, therefore, his expressions of friendship, his ‘‘dream’’ of a better world, never ‘‘stray beyond the bounds of reason and experience’’ (293). At the same time, Chesnutt insists on the genuine and serious motives that guide French’s philanthropy, in short, on his friendliness and its historic roots. A surprisingly large portion of the novel is devoted to a subplot that creates the expectation that French will marry a beautiful young girl, Graciella Treadwell. Relying on the ‘‘Daddy’s Girl’’ form he used in both Business and Husband, Chesnutt very carefully divorces French from the pathological paternalism of such narratives. Instead of marrying Graciella, French proposes to Graciella’s aunt, Laura Treadwell, whom the entire town sees as a ‘‘hopeless old maid’’ (188), and refers to Graciella as a ‘‘bright child’’ (187). French’s affiancing himself to the ‘‘old maid,’’ on the one hand, reveals a limitation of French—he is a former Southerner himself and has profound nostalgia for the old South.31 He tells Laura that she represents ‘‘all that is best of my memories of the South’’ (187–88). On the other hand, by having French propose to Laura instead of Graciella, Chesnutt links him to anachronistic social formations that appear to have elements of disinterestedness embedded within them.32 Laura is described as

152

Chapter 4

having ‘‘lived upon a plane so simple, yet so high, that men not equally high-minded had not ventured to address her’’ (187). French’s choice to marry Laura rather than Graciella seems to suggest that his philanthropy is motivated not solely by the pathological paternalistic desires of corporate capitalism for dependence and gratitude that Chesnutt explored in Business and Husband, but also by a usefully residual, albeit also problematic, Southern ‘‘high-mindedness.’’33 Nonetheless, as critics have argued, the book emphasizes that French is limited—both by his residual Southern high-mindedness and even more by the ethos of self-interested instrumentalism he has imbibed in the North.34 When a Southern preacher, for example, tells French that ‘‘there is no place in this nation for the Negro, except under the sod’’ (167), French replies at first with moral outrage, ‘‘And therefore, O man of God, must we exterminate him?’’ (167), but he then goes on to say, ‘‘I am no lover of the Negro, as Negro. . . . Perhaps we could not do them strict justice, without a great sacrifice upon our own part. But they are men, and they should have their chance—at least some chance’’ (168, Chesnutt’s emphasis). French is morally outraged by the genocidal impulse implicit in contemporary Southern white racism, and yet accedes that whites are unable to do ‘‘strict justice’’ because that would be too ‘‘great’’ a sacrifice to white self-interest. His philanthropy argues only for ‘‘some chance’’ for blacks, a chance that is hedged in by the closed patronage system of the white ‘‘we’’ of Northern corporate capitalism. As in Chesnutt’s exchanges with Washington, Chesnutt highlights here the way friendly Northern corporate capitalism and its closed patronage practices evade questions of justice. This evasion becomes central to Chesnutt’s analysis of the failure of such philanthropy. However, while Chesnutt maps the limitations of this kind of philanthropy, he also seeks to demonstrate that even the ‘‘some chance’’ it provides is too much of a chance for the white community of Clarendon. French engages in all kinds of activities in the South, some that are merely personalized gestures of high-mindedness, like rescuing his former slave, as well as the husband of his fiance´e’s servant, from the convict labor system. The most significant activities, however, are rooted in corporate capitalism’s conviction that it is efficacious as both an economic and moral system. Thus, French’s first major effort in the town is reviving the old mill. Writes Chesnutt: To a man of action, like the colonel, the frequent contemplation of the unused water power, which might so easily be harnessed to the

Patronage and Philanthropy in Chesnutt

153

car of progress, gave birth, in time, to a wish to see it thus utilized, and the further wish to stir to labour the idle inhabitants of the neighborhood. . . . And so he planned to build a new and larger cotton mill where the old had stood; to shake up the lethargic community; to put its people to work; and to teach them habits of industry, efficiency and thrift. This, he imagined, would be a pleasant occupation for his vacation, as well as a true missionary enterprise—a contribution to human progress. (108–9) This ‘‘missionary enterprise,’’ so much like the Connecticut Yankee’s in Arthurian England, runs into active resistance, not simply because of Northern capitalism’s limited conception of democracy, but because French hires ‘‘a coloured man, who was the best workman in the gang’’ to replace the white foreman who has proven incompetent. The white bricklayers refuse to work for a black foreman. French’s arrogant belief that he can solve the South’s problems over his ‘‘vacation’’ through ‘‘missionary’’ capitalism is thereby satirized. Nonetheless, Chesnutt also emphasizes the context in which French fails. While French imagines that the mill will create employment ‘‘for the benefit of Clarendon’’ (153), white Clarendonians will resist even economic benefits to themselves if they involve any change in the closed racial system. French’s instrumental arguments (‘‘even in the old slave times Negroes made the best of overseers; they knew their own people better than white men could and got more out of them’’ [195]) have no effect against ‘‘unreasonable prejudice’’ (195). Chesnutt shows that white racism represents a set of feelings whose power and virulence exceed the logic of self-interested ‘‘cooperation.’’ Whites are willing to destroy themselves (and everyone else) in order to keep the racial system intact. The ‘‘friendly vessel’’ of Washington (if we gloss it as white) is not simply unfriendly, but would rather sink itself than extend any help to the vessel ‘‘lost at sea’’ (if we gloss it as black). Corporate philanthropy has no tools for understanding the history of these feelings. Chesnutt further extends this argument by making French himself a Southerner by birth. While French at first makes certain assumptions based on his experiences in the North, he also can ‘‘almost understand’’ why even ‘‘prominent citizens’’ ‘‘let their feelings govern their reason and their judgment’’ because he knows the institutionalized violence that is brought to bear even on whites who step outside the closed racial system: ‘‘social

154

Chapter 4

ostracism and political death, or . . . [the] even more complete form of extinction’’ (197–98). In the closed, ‘‘unreasonable’’ racial system of the South, self-interest and instrumentalism have little leverage, not only because white Southerners would rather destroy themselves than change the racial system, but also because, by a reverse logic, they have created a disciplinary system in which it is not in the self-interest of whites to accept the capitalist version of self-interest and instrumentalism. Chesnutt describes French as understanding all this, as knowing he must be ‘‘patient’’ and ‘‘prudent’’ (198). But even this understanding is not enough to protect him from failure. Chesnutt argues that French’s understanding fails because white resistance to giving even ‘‘some chance’’ (168) to blacks is specifically grounded in a feeling produced by the history of slavery and the Civil War, a feeling that expresses itself through institutions, namely ressentiment. Just as the ‘‘friendly’’ feeling of the Colonel, rooted in his past and present, expresses itself through philanthropy, so we could say the ‘‘unfriendly’’ feeling of whites for blacks, their historically based ressentiment, expresses itself through the political and legal institutions of the South. Ressentiment, as noted in Chapter 1, is a central thematic in the late nineteenth century and characteristically works to reduce the struggles for justice of various social groups to the psychological emotion of envy. Chesnutt rethinks ressentiment to emphasize the way this emotion is rooted in past and present struggles and characterizes the powerful more than the powerless. Avoiding psychological reductionism, he further argues that the powerful maintain their status through the institutionalization of this emotion. Thus, early in the novel, French meditates on the social readjustment of the times, in which ‘‘It was inevitable . . . that poor white men, first, and black men next, should reach a level representing the true measure of their talents and their ambition. But it was perhaps equally inevitable that for a generation or two those who had suffered most from the readjustment, should chafe under its seeming injustice’’ (38–39). Here French associates ressentiment explicitly with the powerful who have ‘‘suffered most’’ under ‘‘seeming injustice.’’ But French’s first impression is wrong. Both the powerful and the powerless are chafing under a sense of injustice, but only the powerful can institutionalize this emotion. Writes Chesnutt: The situation was complicated by a sense of injury on both sides. Cherishing their theoretical equality of citizenship, which they could

Patronage and Philanthropy in Chesnutt

155

neither enforce nor forget, the Negroes resented noisily or silently, as prudence dictated, its contemptuous denial by the whites; and these [whites] viewing this shadowy equality as an insult to themselves had sought by all the machinery of local law to emphasise and perpetuate their own superiority. (272) The powerless and the powerful are locked together in an endless battle over ‘‘a sense of injury,’’ but the powerful have the mechanisms to enforce their ressentiment. The threat to the powerful is real, in the sense that if the closed racial system is opened up, if the powerless are given even the highly limited ‘‘some chance’’ (168) that friendly corporate philanthropy enables, they will be able to disprove the superiority of the powerful. At the same time, the threat to the powerful is unreal, since there can be no insult in a ‘‘theoretical’’ equality that has been effectively rendered ‘‘shadowy’’ by ‘‘all the machinery of local law.’’ Chesnutt provides multiple enactments of black/white ressentiment. I will only chart one here because it has a direct bearing on how Chesnutt analyzes corporate philanthropy’s evasion of questions of justice and therefore its necessary failure. This is the story of Bud Johnson and Bill Fetters, or more broadly Chesnutt’s redaction of the convict labor system. We are first introduced to Bud Johnson in prison, where the white constable has been bribed to incite him to violence and thereby lengthen his term with Fetters’s labor gang. But the constable incites Johnson ‘‘much more so, indeed, than he had really intended’’ (63) and is, in turn, injured slightly, and so takes ‘‘pleasure in repaying, in overflowing measure, any arrears of revenge’’ (63, emphasis added). Chesnutt thus represents for us, as he does again and again in the novel, the explosive cycle of white/black injury and resentment, in which a ‘‘theoretical equality’’ is not just ‘‘contemptuous[ly]’’ denied by whites, but which when resented and resisted by blacks becomes the grounds on which an inexplicably ‘‘overflowing’’ and institutionalized white revenge enacts itself. But, again, this is not to say that revenge is not on the mind of blacks for the real, rather than ‘‘shadowy,’’ injury done to them.35 As is evident here, Johnson is quite aware of the systematic injustice done him, and to gain justice of some sort, he resorts to guerrilla warfare.36 His physical resistance in the jail scene prefigures the way in which, even after French has helped him escape the labor gang, he will nonetheless return to Clarendon in an attempt to shoot Fetters in order to gain justice. He is willing to gamble with his freedom and risk capture

156

Chapter 4

and lynching (which indeed ensue) in an attempt to redress the institutionalized violence directed against him. French’s friendly intervention, no matter how well intended, has little to do with addressing the fundamental issue of justice, and hence inadvertently helps fuel rather than end the closed cycle of ressentiment. The New South is the world of ‘‘Fetters,’’ in which in one nightmarish set piece, whites and blacks, the arbitrarily differentiated ‘‘criminals’’ and the ‘‘free,’’ are riding in the same train, segregated in different cars, and yet all fettered together (231). Even the deeply limited French begins to see that his philanthropy is not only inadequate to the task at hand, but also actually exacerbates the situation. Referencing the link between enlightenment rationality and the instrumentalism of corporate capitalism, Chesnutt writes of French, ‘‘It was becoming clear to him that the task he had undertaken . . . of leavening the inert mass of Clarendon with the leaven of enlightenment’’ ‘‘was no light one’’: With the best of intentions, and hoping to save a life, he had connived at turning a murderer loose upon the community. It was true that the community, through unjust laws, had made him a murderer, but it was no part of the colonel’s plan to foster or promote evil passions, or to help the victims of the law to make reprisals. His aim was to bring about by better laws and more liberal ideas, peace, harmony, and universal good will. (252) French’s actions have become morally ambiguous at best. Who is a murderer keeps slipping in this passage: is it Johnson, the ‘‘community,’’ or French, or all of them? And when Johnson is lynched, the number of murderers grows geometrically as the moral ambiguity deepens: there are now ‘‘a hundred murderers where there had been one before’’ (290). Despite what Chesnutt continues to depict as the ‘‘best of intentions,’’ by the end of the novel French’s philanthropic projects have only exacerbated the violent conflicts in the South. Seeing the bad effects of ‘‘the best of intentions,’’ French himself begins to change as a character and to think outside his limited notions of his ‘‘missionary enterprise’’ of bringing cooperative capitalism to Clarendon: The colonel had reached the conviction that the regenerative forces of education and enlightenment, in order to have any effect in his

Patronage and Philanthropy in Chesnutt

157

generation, must be reinforced by some positive legislative or executive action, or else the untrammeled forces of graft and greed would override them; and he was human enough . . . to wish to see the result of his labours, or at least a promise of result. (235) So the philanthropist changes and becomes a political activist. He begins to lobby the national government for legal action, particularly against peonage. But his lobbying also fails. His reports of conditions in the South cause ‘‘a sensation in the highest quarter,’’ but owing to ‘‘the exigencies of national politics’’ (236), the federal government refuses to act. Therefore, the question that the book leaves on the table is not: is friendly corporate philanthropy effective? Such philanthropy, even in its nonpathological version and even in the eyes of the Colonel himself, is worse than ineffectual. Rather, the question is: is it right for the Colonel to abandon his philanthropy, as he does, when the only potential solution to the problems in the South named by the novel (intervention by the federal government) is not available? This question is dramatized by the novel’s culminating tragedy. At the very beginning of the novel, French is filled with ‘‘remorse’’ (20) for his neglect of the South after the Civil War.37 In the novel’s overdetermined ending, French’s black servant, Peter, ‘‘unwittingly lured’’ French’s beloved son, Phil, ‘‘to his death and then died in the effort to save [Phil]’’ (305).38 What French recognizes at this moment, however, is that he is himself ‘‘unwittingly the cause’’ (270) of Phil’s death. Phil, the key root in philanthropy, is a boy on whom ‘‘all his [the colonel’s] hopes had centred’’ (279), but French ‘‘had neglected his child,’’ just as he had neglected the South, ‘‘while the bruised and broken old black man . . . had given his life to save him’’ (270). French at first rededicates himself to his phil-anthropy in the wake of his son’s death; however, when Peter’s body is ghoulishly dug up from the all-white cemetery in which he was buried next to Phil, French instantly abandons the South and moves North. Chesnutt underlines how voluntaristic philanthropy crumbles instantly when faced with the pathology of white ressentiment that has become institutionalized in the South. At the same time, in a classic double bind, Chesnutt has argued that it is ‘‘neglect’’ by French and the North that has helped enable such excessive ressentiment. Nonetheless, if Chesnutt’s novel provides a complex account of the failure of corporate philanthropy, he finally refuses to give up completely on the potential within the concept of philanthropy. The ending suggests that,

158

Chapter 4

in the absence of intervention by the federal government, philanthropy can be galvanized to useful ends, but it must be rooted in something deeper than a problematic Southern high-mindedness or a voluntaristic and selfinterested instrumentalism. In a plot twist that is otherwise inexplicable, Chesnutt has Laura Treadwell render judgment on French’s decision to abandon his philanthropy. As French plans his departure from Clarendon, Treadwell breaks their engagement and says she will stay in the South, as ‘‘one . . . who will try, in her poor way, with such patience as she has, to carry on the work which you have begun.’’ Invoking a premodern model of philanthropy rooted in the religious imperative to love others, Treadwell says, ‘‘God would not forgive me if I abandoned [this work]’’ (299). More important, however, than this invocation of premodern philanthropy, a now-discredited philanthropy is reimagined in the last lines of the novel, not through the temporality associated with corporate capitalist friendship, but through a temporality associated with the model of friendship that Chesnutt elsewhere calls ‘‘true friendship.’’ While Chesnutt does not use the word friendship here, he nonetheless invokes a revolutionary democratic past to model a different kind of friendship or philanthropy. Chesnutt writes of a time when ‘‘our whole land will be truly free, and the strong will cheerfully help to bear the burdens of the weak, and Justice, the seed, and Peace, the flower, of liberty, will prevail throughout all our borders’’ (309). Here Chesnutt again establishes the promise of philanthropy, of the ‘‘strong’’ who help the ‘‘weak’’ (309), not so as to give them ‘‘some chance,’’ but because to do so is to return to the principles of democratic liberty and justice. It is only with a historically grounded and systematic attention to ‘‘strict justice’’ (168) that philanthropy can be an expression of ‘‘true friendship’’ and hence begin to address (rather than exacerbate) the violent racial inequities and conflicts of the time.

Literary Economics and the Market I have argued that to understand the market in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States, we need to take account of ‘‘friendship,’’ of the social practices of patronage and philanthropy, and the ways such practices undermine the foundational fictions of liberal economics about free markets. I want to return now to Chesnutt’s representation of

Patronage and Philanthropy in Chesnutt

159

his own career to suggest some of the implications for rethinking the literary market. In his important essay ‘‘Post-Bellum—Pre-Harlem’’ (1931), Chesnutt provides a reading of his career that is in stark opposition to Brodhead’s reading of a Northern white audience who makes and then breaks Chesnutt’s career. Chesnutt writes: ‘‘Thomas Dixon was writing the Negro down industriously and with marked popular success. Thomas Nelson Page was disguising the harshness of slavery under the mask of sentiment. The trend of public sentiment at the moment was distinctly away from the Negro . . . there was a feeling of pessimism in regard to his [the Negro’s] future’’ (Essays 545). Chesnutt argues here that he was an author with no audience at all; none of his work would appeal to the consumer preferences of the time. According to Chesnutt, therefore, it is his publishers who enabled his career, not an audience. ‘‘Publishers,’’ he continues, ‘‘are human, and of course influenced by the opinions of their public. The firm of Houghton Mifflin, however, was unique in some respects’’ (545). Using the language of friendship that I have tracked throughout this chapter, Chesnutt explains his publishers’ uniqueness in terms of philanthropic commitments rooted for the most part in an abolitionist past rather than a corporate capitalist present. Chesnutt writes of Francis J. Garrison’s ‘‘inherited . . . hatred of slavery and friendliness to the Negro’’ and the ‘‘liberal’’ ‘‘gener[osity]’’ of George Mifflin, who was ‘‘trained in the best New England tradition.’’ Chesnutt says of Garrison and Mifflin, in the redundant rhetoric we have tracked, ‘‘They were both friendly to my literary aspirations and became my personal friends.’’ A note of hesitation creeps in, however, with Page, who is carefully detached by Chesnutt’s syntax from both abolitionism and friendship, but who is nonetheless described as ‘‘the member of [Houghton Mifflin’s] . . . staff who was of most assistance to me in publishing my first book,’’ and ‘‘as broad-minded a Southerner as it was ever my good fortune to meet’’ (545).39 The hesitation here is significant for Chesnutt, one of whose gifts as a writer is resonant restraint, and hints at his disagreement with Page’s racial politics in the variety of forms they took. In any case, Chesnutt’s retrospective analysis of his career underlines both his editors’ differently inflected philanthropic friendship with him and the problems that inhere even in these different kinds of friendship. His account of his ‘‘friends,’’ almost as much as that of a uniformly hostile public, renews our sense of how embattled black writers were at the time. Suggesting that he disagreed with his publishers in the negotiations over his

160

Chapter 4

first book of conjure stories but was relatively powerless, Chesnutt writes, ‘‘I was in the hands of my friends, and submitted the collection. After some omissions and additions, all at the advice of Mr. Page, the book was accepted. . . . Mr. Page, Mr. Garrison and Mr. Mifflin vied with each other in helping to make our joint venture a literary and financial success’’ (545– 46). In Chesnutt’s formulation, to be in the ‘‘hands of my friends’’ is necessary to gain the ‘‘help’’ that leads to publication and ‘‘success’’; yet that necessity underlines the extraordinary doubleness of both ‘‘friends’’ and ‘‘submitted.’’ A page later, Chesnutt remarks on the continuity of these troubling power differentials in the social practices that shape the literary market during the Harlem Renaissance. Chesnutt describes Carl Van Vechten, the controversial white patron and author of the infamous Nigger Heaven, as ‘‘One of the first of the New York writers to appreciate the possibilities of Harlem for literary purposes’’ (Essays 547). Chesnutt’s citation of Van Vechten’s appreciation for and use of Harlem’s ‘‘possibilities’’ in literature again has a doubled inflection and gestures toward the complexity of the ‘‘joint venture’’ of both publishing and authorship, as patronage and philanthropy continue to be social practices that matter for the market in literary modernism. In the same year that The Colonel’s Dream appeared, Walter Hines Page described his publishing ethos, also using the rhetorical frame of ‘‘friendship.’’ A Publisher’s Confession (1905) argues one central thesis: ‘‘Every great publishing house has been built on the strong friendships between writers and publishers. There is, in fact, no other sound basis on which to build it.’’40 Page’s continual repetition of this thesis about friendship is part of his polemic that an unseemly new ‘‘commercialism’’ threatens to undermine such crucial affective relations. Page’s emphasis on friendship could therefore simply be read as an attempt to distinguish (in a Bourdieuvian sense) the field of publishing from other fields. And Page does insist directly on this distinction in Confession, describing his profession as comparable to preaching and teaching. Nonetheless, as I have shown, attempts to establish distinction are not unique to the literary world. The discourse of friendship cannot be separated from Rockefeller’s notion of ‘‘cooperation,’’ the ‘‘benevolent trust,’’ or Carnegie’s ‘‘Gospel of Wealth.’’ This discourse crosses domains and fields, which after all were also linked. This chapter might, therefore, seem to imply that as we rethink the expressivist and democratizing fictions of literary markets that we have inherited from liberal economics, we must focus solely on editors and

Patronage and Philanthropy in Chesnutt

161

publishers. We might then re-read Chesnutt’s career as made and destroyed by the ‘‘friends’’ to whom he ‘‘submitted’’ his work, rather than by a white Northern audience. However, such a reframing of the literary market presents a new set of theoretical problems. Chesnutt was attentive to issues of audience, and to focus only on editors and publishers in the modern literary market would be to replace the fictions of liberal economics with the perhaps even more problematic ‘‘trickle-down’’ fictions of neoliberal supplyside economics, in which elites simply control production and consumption for the good of all.41 This is as false a model of the market as one based solely on expressivism. Instead, therefore, I conclude with two main points: first, as literary historians, we need to scrutinize continuously the liberal as well as neoliberal economic fictions about how markets work, fictions which are so much part of our daily lives that we write them into our literary histories almost unconsciously. One way in which to enact such scrutiny is to focus, as I do in this book, on the range of social practices, including patronage and philanthropy, that are crucial to markets. Second, we need to examine these practices as they are inflected by the changing social formations of class, race, and gender. Third, when we do this kind of critical work on markets, new issues open up. In the case of Chesnutt, his work and his career teach us to think through the historical continuities, but also discontinuities, that inhere in modern patronage and philanthropy. Chesnutt’s hope, that instrumental friendship had embedded within it residual traces of radically democratic ‘‘true friendship’’ that could be regalvanized to transform race relations, was a hope that at least The Colonel’s Dream argued would be frustrated. Providing corporate philanthropy with the most carefully nuanced, even generous, reading of its friendly feelings nonetheless led Chesnutt to an analysis of that philanthropy’s necessary failure in terms of questions of justice—whether they involved race or not. It is only in a renewed commitment to democratic ideals that Chesnutt finds possibility. Chesnutt’s thoughtful analyses of philanthropy help us to think through not only the past but also our contemporary scene, as neoliberalism increasingly leaves a ‘‘love of mankind’’ to corporate capitalism and its forms of philanthropy.42

chapter 5

‘‘Inexplicable Tangles of Personality’’: Patronage, Philanthropy, and Progressive Irony in Theodore Dreiser

n a famous passage from The Financier (1912), Theodore Dreiser sums up the success of thirty-four-year-old Frank Cowperwood, describing him as ‘‘Like a spider in a spangled net, every thread of which he knew, had laid, had tested, he had surrounded and entangled himself in a splendid, glittering network of connections, and he was watching all the details.’’1 Emphasized here is the ‘‘network of connections’’ Cowperwood has brilliantly ‘‘laid’’ for himself and which create for him ‘‘prospects’’ of ‘‘wealth which might rival that of any American’’ (Financier, 140). A page later Dreiser compares Cowperwood to a modernist writer, describing him as ‘‘one of those early, daring manipulators’’ who transform the market through ‘‘fictitious buying’’ and ‘‘fictitious demand’’ (141). Seven pages later, however, he contrasts this portrait of individual volition, carefully fostered personal connections, and modernist innovation with the seemingly agency-free financial panic that will lead to Cowperwood’s failure and imprisonment. Emphasizing the apparently impersonal forces that are working beyond Cowperwood’s control, Dreiser metaphorically describes the Chicago fire and resulting financial panic as a ‘‘storm’’ that ‘‘burst unexpectedly out of a clear sky, and bore no relation to the intention or volition of any individual’’ (147–48). Many critics have read this set of scenes as revealing Dreiser’s reliance on the philosophical and generic conventions of naturalism (Cowperwood is a spider; the financial panic is a ‘‘storm’’). This chapter, however, takes a different tack by refocusing on individual agency and particularly ‘‘the

I

Patronage, Philanthropy, and Irony in Dreiser

163

network of connections’’ in Dreiser’s ‘‘Trilogy of Desire.’’2 After all, the web Cowperwood weaves and the ‘‘storm’’ that overtakes him in The Financier do not reveal as much about the market as a natural force as they do about the work of individual personalities and longstanding social practices Cowperwood exploits. Cowperwood fails, not because of the panic, but because his ‘‘network of connections’’ or—in a discourse we have already explored in Chapters 3 and 4—‘‘friendship’’ fails. From the beginning of the book, he knows that ‘‘I have to have friends—influence’’ (70), and he has cultivated a friendship with the powerful politician Edward Malia Butler. Butler, early in his career, had likewise depended on ‘‘a councilman friend’’ (64) to gain influence, and now has even more ‘‘political and financial friends’’ (65) than Cowperwood. But, having ‘‘been befriended by Butler,’’ Cowperwood’s affair with Butler’s daughter Aileen is seen by Butler as a betrayal of this ‘‘friendship’’ (349). Therefore even Cowperwood’s ‘‘best friends’’ (347) give up on him, knowing that Butler has encouraged his ‘‘friends’’ (348) to make Cowperwood a scapegoat. In short, the ‘‘network of connections,’’ or ‘‘friendship,’’ is what makes and breaks Cowperwood in The Financier; the Chicago fire and the market panic that ensue only precipitate events that reveal the significance of the social practice of friendship. Nonetheless, it is also true that individual agency has little to do with final outcomes in Dreiser’s work. The trilogy, for example, perpetually touts Cowperwood’s business acumen rhetorically, but his successes are always actually failures to obtain what he really wants (as is apt in a ‘‘Trilogy of Desire’’). Irony, in short, is the central mode Dreiser relies on to treat the question of individual agency in these historical fictions about the Progressive period. At one level, this is not surprising. Hayden White long ago argued that, since the end of the nineteenth century, historical narrative has necessarily been ironic because of the ‘‘realist’’ revelation that evidence can be read from very different perspectives.3 Richard L. McCormick, whose work I discussed in the Introduction, demonstrates how this is true in contemporary historiography on Progressivism. While Progressives emphasized their ‘‘discovery’’ that ‘‘business corrupts politics’’ (311) and tried to disentangle them, contemporary ‘‘organizational’’ historians argue that Progressives instead ‘‘accommodated’’ the state to ‘‘large-scale business organizations and their methods’’ (313). These historians rely on readings of Progressivism as ‘‘conspiratorial,’’ ‘‘irrelevant,’’ or ‘‘insincere’’ (354), all of which highlight irony. Interestingly, however, McCormick counters these

164

Chapter 5

ironic readings of Progressivism with his own ironic thesis. He agrees with contemporary historians about the effects of Progressivism; nonetheless, he asserts that such effects were ‘‘unexpected and ironical’’ (315, see also 354) because ‘‘political action is open-ended and unpredictable’’ (355). Seeking to reinvigorate discussions of human agency in the face of structural change, he criticizes the ironic mode of contemporary organizational history, while reinstating that mode of narration through an account of the unpredictability of political action. The conflict and overlap between organizational and political histories of Progressivism evidenced in McCormick’s work characterizes not just contemporary historiography but the Progressives’ own narratives.4 Lincoln Steffens, for example, in The Shame of the Cities (1903, 1904) creates an early version of the ironic ‘‘organizational’’ thesis in his account of Charles Tyson Yerkes, whose life was to become the central model for that of Dreiser’s fictional Frank Cowperwood. Political corruption, writes Steffens, was so ‘‘unbusinesslike’’ in Chicago previous to Yerkes’s arrival that ‘‘business men went into the City Council to reduce the festival of blackmail to decent and systematic bribery. These men helped matters some, but the happy-golucky spirit persisted until the advent of Charles T. Yerkes from Philadelphia, who, with his large experience of Pennsylvania methods, first made boodling a serious business.’’5 Disorganized carnivalesque pillaging of the state becomes ‘‘decently’’ systematized by businessmen; furthermore, Yerkes brings new ‘‘methods’’ of systematization that make pillaging ‘‘serious business.’’ But Steffens doubles back on this version of an ironic organizational thesis by countering it with an ironic political one. He says that instead of successfully organizing pillaging, Yerkes incites the ‘‘people’s’’ resistance, and they create their own counter-organization, the Municipal Voters’ League (165–67). At the same time, Steffens, like McCormick, undermines any triumphalist political irony, as evidenced in the title of the essay: ‘‘Chicago: Half Free and Fighting On.’’ Dreiser’s trilogy also relies on aspects of both an ironic organizational and an ironic political thesis about Progressivism. On the one hand, Cowperwood’s ‘‘buccaneering’’ methods (Titan, 111, 112, 203) and his inability to ‘‘brook opposition’’ (205) are described by Dreiser as driven by a desire ‘‘to organize something which would make him much money’’ (Financier, 396). His piracy relies on streamlining and systematizing the relation between the state’s resources and his own. But Cowperwood’s desire to

Patronage, Philanthropy, and Irony in Dreiser

165

control state resources for his own profit ironically works against him, inciting what Dreiser describes as a naı¨ve and incoherent, but sometimes effective democratic resistance.6 A version of the ironic organizational thesis of Progressivism in Dreiser is matched by and frequently undermined by a version of the ironic political thesis. Dreiser’s reliance on political irony has particular relevance for understanding how he reads aesthetic and social patronage and philanthropy. Indeed, these social practices become the central tools Dreiser uses to evaluate Cowperwood’s legacy. In this regard, Cowperwood’s prime directive, ‘‘I satisfy myself,’’ has three ironic outcomes by the end of the trilogy. His legacy in Chicago is democratic resistance. In New York, and through his wife Aileen, his legacy is ‘‘nothing,’’ as his estate is eaten up by debt and his art collection—intended for a free museum open to the public—is sold off (Stoic, 283). But his last, unanticipated legacy, the result of rerouting through his mistress, is the transformation of his money into ‘‘charity,’’ specifically the creation of ‘‘a hospital for the poor’’ (305, 306). When dying, Cowperwood is described as feeling ‘‘not only a little weary, but a little bored and spiritually dubious of the import of life itself’’ (262), but his sense of the futility of all his calculation is overturned, and one of his legacies becomes the notion of ‘‘Do[ing] good for its own sake’’ (291)—or philanthropy. This ironic ending to the trilogy has felt embarrassingly tacked on to many—an inexplicable or perhaps all too explicable attempt by Dreiser as he was himself dying—to give moral meaning to an otherwise amoral narrative about modern capitalism. Nevertheless, the ending highlights a juxtaposition that runs throughout the trilogy about the relation between Cowperwood’s self-interestedness (expressed through the business/political patronage relationships he fosters) and his aesthetic and social patronage and philanthropy. Bruce Robbins has usefully summed up a question that is perpetually debated in relation to Dreiser’s work—‘‘Does Dreiser suggest that pure selfinterest is a viable life philosophy, that one can live and should live without any overriding commitment to others. . . . Or does he judge self-interest from the outside . . . ?’’7 But such a framing of the question elides the issue of aesthetic and social patronage and philanthropy, especially the notion of ‘‘Do[ing] good for its own sake,’’ with which Dreiser, embarrassingly or otherwise, ends the series. The question thus might be reframed this way: is Cowperwood’s aesthetic and social patronage and philanthropy to be understood simply as continuous with the self-interestedness of the culture

166

Chapter 5

of capitalism, or as standing outside that economic system? My answer builds on but differs from Walter Benn Michaels’s important one. Michaels argues that economics are naturalized in Dreiser, in the sense that finance capitalism, like nature, is represented not as ‘‘an organizing force dedicated to the survival of the fittest but as the ultimate measure of life’s instability.’’8 Focusing on the naturalization of chance and mutability, Michaels asserts that for Dreiser both nature and capitalism are characterized by excess, by ‘‘the economy of the gift’’ (78).9 Art and the philanthropy that sponsors it are thus both inextricably linked to capitalism in Dreiser (78–79), so that whatever the writer’s stated ‘‘personal hostility’’ (58) to capitalism, his fiction legitimates that economic system. Demonstrating his commitment to the same ironic thesis that characterizes organizational historians’ accounts of Progressivism, but extending his thesis beyond theirs, Michaels concludes that by associating art and philanthropy with capitalism, Dreiser’s work is not simply ‘‘inside’’ that economic system, but aggrandizes it, even seeing it as creating ‘‘Paradise’’ (83). Like Michaels, I see unpredictability as central to the ‘‘Trilogy of Desire.’’ By contrast with him, however, I see Dreiser as emphatically denaturalizing capitalism by showing how carefully planned and constructed social networks create the market. Dreiser, like McCormick, imagines that because the broader results of individual volition within carefully constructed social and political networks cannot be anticipated, the most carefully spun and ‘‘tested’’ plans can have effects opposite to those intended. ‘‘At the top, in large affairs,’’ writes Dreiser, ‘‘life goes off into almost inexplicable tangles of personality’’ (Titan, 107). Indirect, unanticipated, and ironic forms of justice— through philanthropy—emerge from carefully spun plans of self-interested ‘‘buccaneering.’’ In short, patronage and philanthropy are imagined as working within the system of capitalist self-interest; however, they can have effects that exceed self-interest. While this argument entails a more limited conception than Chesnutt’s of the nexus of philanthropy and justice, it is a conception that has had broad appeal in debates about philanthropy throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

American Heiresses and the Artist Dreiser’s analysis of aesthetic and social patronage and philanthropy is by no means limited to his fiction, but must be read alongside his intellectual

Patronage, Philanthropy, and Irony in Dreiser

167

biography. Like many American writers who felt unappreciated by the American ‘‘public,’’ Dreiser was obsessed throughout his career with the question of how ‘‘serious’’ art could be funded in a market economy, and there are features of Dreiser’s account of aesthetic patronage and sponsorship that are characteristic of American male modernism generally. As a young man, Dreiser imagined a solution to the funding dilemma artists faced in the patronage of the supra-wealthy—particularly, their wives and daughters, whose money and sexuality he felt should be made available to the American artist. Thus in 1895 he comments critically on the marriages of ‘‘American heiresses’’ to European ‘‘noblemen’’ and recommends that ‘‘instead of fluttering after vain titles and alien honors . . . [American women] might gather about them the children of talent in their own land, and while aiding them in their efforts, use them to grace the functions of the hour.’’10 Dreiser writes that, unfortunately, wealthy American women ‘‘do not know the meaning of the word ‘patron’ ’’ (Uncollected, 37). In 1896, he elaborates further on this idea: ‘‘There is many a brilliant young nobody, who . . . imagines that he is dying unrecognized because he has not attained fame, nor the love of some bright, dashing, beautiful and wealthy girl’’ (53). The ‘‘genius,’’ he insists repeatedly in this essay, dreams of ‘‘the possession of the love of a young queen of fortune’’ (53) rather than an indifferently portioned girl, and ‘‘wish[es] to obtain a society belle, without money,—to scale the heavens without a ladder’’ (53–54). The ladder, a metaphor so central to self-help narratives (as Carnegie’s ‘‘Gospel’’ shows), is not for the genius who has better things to do than to painstakingly climb. Likewise, in the semi-autobiographical The Genius (1915), one of the most hopeful moments for Eugene Witla occurs when he falls in love with eighteen-year-old heiress Suzanne Dale. For Witla, eighteen is the perfect age for a woman, while an heiress has the ideal economic status. With a youthful heiress’s money, he can return to serious painting, instead of continuing his successful but trivial career in advertising, while also escaping his unsuccessful and sexually unsatisfying marriage.11 His romance with Dale fails, and he is simultaneously fired from his advertising job for his involvement with her, so that the failures of serious painting and commercial work are linked as a result of Witla’s attempt to embrace the siren solution of marrying an eighteen-year-old heiress. Nearly thirty years after The Genius was published, in the novel that was to make him successful financially and critically, Dreiser extends this depiction of a desire for monetary and sexual sponsorship beyond the

168

Chapter 5

figure of the artist to a generalized desire of every American [male].12 In An American Tragedy, Dreiser recasts the American dream not as the belief that hard work will result in upward mobility, but as a desire for sponsored upward mobility. As he writes in ‘‘I Find the Real American Tragedy’’ (1935), the ‘‘upbuilding of the great American fortunes’’ in the post-Civil War period led to a specific ‘‘American madness’’ for money, ‘‘And one of the quickest ways to get money was to marry it, not develop oneself and so have money come honestly. In short, we bred the fortune hunter de luxe’’ (Uncollected, 292). Clyde Griffiths’s attraction to the rich Sondra Finchley, like his repulsion toward and murder of the impoverished Roberta Alden, is inextricably monetary and erotic. The book brilliantly depicts all the social and economic hurdles that make it impossible for Griffiths to enter the world of the wealthy on his own merits, and thus shows how Finchley emblematizes his linked desires, and would enable him to bypass those hurdles. Because the economic and social barriers between classes are so high, the American dream of hard work and upward mobility is impossible to achieve without the magical erasure of real barriers by a wealthy patron[ess].13 Griffiths is in this sense, Dreiser writes, a perfectly ‘‘conventional’’ American (Uncollected, 298), ‘‘really doing the kind of thing which Americans should and would have said was the wise and moral thing for him to do had he not committed a murder’’ (297, Dreiser’s emphasis). The striking features of Dreiser’s redaction of the American dream in An American Tragedy are important for my larger argument about the significance of patronage and philanthropy in this period. Dreiser does not argue that upward mobility requires aid of some kind, as discussed in Chapter 3; instead, he argues that the dream has necessarily become the desire for sponsorship. Nonetheless, for the purposes of this chapter, I simply want to note that the general motif of wealthy heiresses who lure men (especially male artists) to their death or failure is fairly common in American male modernism. Such heiresses typically embody the potential of bypassing the compromised market (or in American Tragedy, the fundamentally dishonest assumptions undergirding the free market), but also paradoxically embody the compromised market itself.14 In Dreiser’s case, this symbolic logic seems connected to the fact that women were indeed central to mediating his relation to the market. From his construction of an apparently fictional narrative in which Mrs. Doubleday serves as the powerful Mrs. Grundy who ruthlessly suppressed Sister Carrie, to his success editing and writing for the Butterick Publishing Company (which his

Patronage, Philanthropy, and Irony in Dreiser

169

biographer notes was devoted to a discourse about women’s fashion and moral sense that Dreiser sought to undermine in his ‘‘serious’’ writing), to the many women friends, lovers, and wives who typed, edited, promoted, and even ghost-wrote ‘‘his’’ work—women clearly played a central role in the story Dreiser narrated (as well as what we know) about his relation to the market.15 But if Dreiser is somewhat typical as a male modernist in figuring wealthy heiresses as potential patrons, who symbolize both escape from the market and somehow the destructive forces of the market itself, there are other features of his account of patronage and philanthropy for the intellectual and artist in America that bear examination. After all, the Cowperwood trilogy is about a ‘‘man’’ (Uncollected, 194), as Dreiser pointedly said, and likewise about male patronage and philanthropy. While Dreiser’s relation to female sponsorship (imagined and real) follows familiar paths charted by other male modernists, his relation to male sponsorship (imagined and real) provides us with new avenues to explore. Certainly in Dreiser sexuality is as crucial to his depiction of male/male as to female/male patronage. With mind-numbing frequency in the Cowperwood trilogy, businessmen and politicians negotiating sponsorship are described as ‘‘genial.’’ Cowperwood has, writes Dreiser early in the trilogy, ‘‘the gift of geniality’’ (Financier, 60). As the OED reminds us, the first definition of genial is ‘‘Of or pertaining to marriage, nuptial; also, pertaining to generation, generative . . . genial bed.’’16 So it is no surprise that Dreiser has a fine time describing the male quest for male sponsorship in erotic terms, as bankers, politicians, and businessmen succumb regularly to ‘‘the swimming wonder of his [Cowperwood’s] eyes’’ (Titan, 27). But while erotics are always part of male-to-male sponsorship in Dreiser, they move beyond the reassuring scapegoating mode of modernist misogyny to something more contestatory. It is Dreiser’s examination of a kind of male-to-male patronage and philanthropy in his own intellectual biography that I turn to now in order to consider this contestatory mode. ‘‘A New and Inviting Door to Life’’: Pittsburgh and the Carnegie Library In Dreiser’s autobiographical text, Newspaper Days, Andrew Carnegie’s philanthropy is central to the narrative of his intellectual development. Newspaper Days, published in 1922, was written during 1920, the same year

170

Chapter 5

Carnegie’s autobiography was posthumously published. And while Pittsburgh and all its steel and banking magnates are clearly on Dreiser’s mind, Carnegie is the figure to whom Dreiser devotes the most attention. According to Newspaper Days, Dreiser arrived in Pittsburgh in 1894, ‘‘fifteen months’’ after the ‘‘battle’’ at Carnegie’s Homestead plant and with that event very much on his mind.17 Walking the city streets, Dreiser is shocked by a realization that will haunt him: ‘‘Truly, never in my life, I think, neither before nor since, either in New York, Chicago or elsewhere, was the vast gap which divides the rich from the poor in America so vividly and forcefully and impressively brought home to me’’ (501). Ruminating on ‘‘the domination of money in a democracy’’ (499), Dreiser describes himself as particularly aware of the gap between the suffering and poverty of the workers and the wealth of the rich and their massive expenditures on themselves. As we saw with Twain, he recurs to feudal imagery to describe the enormous disjunction, in which the magnates presume themselves to be ‘‘royal’’ and ‘‘address [as if] from the throne’’ their ‘‘vassals’’ with a ‘‘self-importance . . . beyond measure’’ (524). The ‘‘genuflective and bootlicking’’ attitude of the ‘‘press, pulpit, [and] officials’’ is senseless to him, because Pittsburgh ‘‘seemed not to profit to any great degree by the presence of these magnates’’ (524). But while Dreiser says that the people of Pittsburgh do not profit, he is nonetheless fascinated not only by the magnates’ expenditures on themselves but also by their philanthropy. In one beautifully flat sentence, he writes, ‘‘I knew that Carnegie had become a multimillionaire out of his profits as had Phipps and others, and that he was beginning to give libraries as Phipps had already given several floral conservatories, and that their ‘lobbies’ in Congress were even then bartering for the patronage of the government on their terms’’ (500–501). Here Dreiser juxtaposes the gifts of libraries and floral conservatories to the system by which elites compel the government to act ‘‘on their terms’’ as their patron so that the gifts seem oddly pointless. And this pointlessness fuels Dreiser’s outrage in this section. Describing at length the terrifying working conditions of Homestead laborers and the appalling tenements in which they live (526–31), he says that these conditions exist so that ‘‘Mr. Carnegie might give the world one or two extra libraries with his name plastered on the front’’ (532; see also 502, 505). A few libraries cannot justify or legitimate the living and work conditions of the masses of Pittsburghers.

Patronage, Philanthropy, and Irony in Dreiser

171

But Dreiser’s outrage about such philanthropy, for all its sharpness, is somewhat modified, for his own intellectual growth in Pittsburgh comes not only on the city streets but also in the Allegheny Carnegie Library. He writes of the library and its free organ concerts that they ‘‘pleased me greatly and somehow qualified, if [they] did not atone for, in part at least, Mr. Carnegie’s indifference to the living welfare of his employe[e]s elsewhere’’ (514). Dreiser goes on to describe the library as a kind of haven. Lingering in his description of the Carnegie Library’s beautiful physical space and the number of books available, he is uncharacteristically ecstatic: ‘‘Thinking of reading as a pleasure as well as a development, I can neither imagine nor wish any reader any greater joy and inspiration. . . . Idyllic days—dreamy days—poetic days—wonderful days, the while ostensibly I did police and city hall in Allegheny. The like for pleasure I scarcely ever saw again’’ (517). But poetic ecstasy and refuge from the contemptible political and economic spectacle of Pittsburgh is not all Dreiser finds in the library. Dreiser, likewise, dramatizes his call to vocation as occurring there: ‘‘I was sitting in this charming alcove, beside this window, reading. And it was as if a new and inviting door to life had been suddenly thrown open to me’’ (517–19). While critics have emphasized Dreiser’s training in marketing through his career as a journalist as crucial to his career as a novelist, his analysis of the importance of philanthropy has been ignored.18 By placing his call in the space of the Carnegie Library—a philanthropic institution that has come at a cost Dreiser has described as outrageous—it seems at first that Dreiser is toying with a depiction of himself as an intellectual who has been bought off. His critique of ‘‘the domination of money in a democracy’’ (499) has been ‘‘qualified’’ (514) by a philanthropy that presents art so transcendent that it links the Paris of Balzac with the Pittsburgh of Carnegie: ‘‘Taillefer, Nucingen, Valentin were no different to some of the immense money magnates here. . . . Great books might be written here’’ (516–17). But if Dreiser suggests he has been bribed, he also insists that there is more to the picture than that. He writes that in reading Balzac he ‘‘obtain[s] a new and more dramatic light upon the world in which I found myself here’’ (517). His new understanding of the world ‘‘here’’ is formed in the Carnegie Library not only by Balzac, but also by ‘‘another god’’ (517), Herbert Spencer. Spencer, as discussed in the Introduction, was seen as providing the ethical, scientific, and philosophical justification for laissez-faire capitalism

172

Chapter 5

and was much favored by Carnegie and the other Pittsburgh magnates. If every reading is a misreading, one might add as well that the history of comparative and staged [mis]readings presents interesting sites for critical scrutiny. Carnegie’s longest encomium to Spencer appears in his autobiography, which, as noted above, was published in the same year that Dreiser was writing Newspaper Days. Carnegie describes how as a young man his Spencerian revelation provided him with an orderly, unified, and beneficent account of all phenomena: When I . . . was in this stage of doubt about theology . . . I came fortunately upon Darwin’s and Spencer’s works. . . . I remember that light came as in a flood and all was clear. . . . ‘‘All is well since all grows better’’ became my motto, my true source of comfort. Man was not created with an instinct for his own degradation, but from the lower he had risen to the higher forms. Nor is there any conceivable end to his march to perfection. His face is turned to the light; he stands in the sun and looks upward.19 This reading of Spencer is clearly a self-serving one, missing as it does the gloomy features of ‘‘survival of the fittest,’’ of ‘‘the miseries everywhere being suffered’’ that Spencer, whatever his faults, never dismissed as cheerfully as Carnegie does.20 By contrast to Carnegie, in Newspaper Days Dreiser describes how his reading of Spencer in Pittsburgh of the 1890s ‘‘blew me to bits intellectually’’ (610). Writes Dreiser: Indeed I was really months in getting over it [Spencer] (I never did wholly)—getting to a place where I could believe in the importance of anything. Up to this time there had been a blazing and unchecked desire to get on and the feeling that in doing so we did get somewhere. Now in its place there was the definite conviction that spiritually one got nowhere, that there was no hereafter, that one lived and had his being because he had to, and that it was of no import, no more so than that of any bug or rat. . . . There were also always before my eyes here those selfsame regions of indescribable poverty and indescribable wealth previously mentioned . . . and yet when I read my Spencer I could only sigh . . . the cause of the ordinary numbskull workingman seemed trebly well-based. His case was

Patronage, Philanthropy, and Irony in Dreiser

173

indeed hopeless. All I could think of was that since nature would not or could not do anything for man, he must, if he could, do something for himself. But of this I saw no prospect, he being a product of these selfsame accidental and so indifferent and hence bitterly cruel forces. (611–12) While Dreiser’s memory in the 1920s of his response to Spencer does not fully accord with the written record of what he said about Spencer in the 1890s, which sometimes partook of exactly the same ecstatic rhetoric as Carnegie, it is also not completely inconsistent.21 The main point is that Dreiser’s response to Spencer, as well as the long-term effect of Spencer on Dreiser, is described in a profoundly different way from that in Carnegie’s autobiography. Specifically, Dreiser remembers Spencer as forcing him to question the American dream, its formula for upward mobility, and its definition of success. It is this formula that Carnegie and other corporate capitalists ceaselessly trotted out as a central justification for laissez-faire capitalism. Dreiser knew this formula well from his numerous interviews with corporate capitalists in Success magazine, in which every interviewee ascribes his own achievements to an ethic of hard work and moral living, while also propounding selfless philanthropy as the real goal.22 Spencer undermines not only Dreiser’s ‘‘blazing and unchecked desire to get on,’’ but also any teleology about human effort, that in ‘‘getting on’’ we get ‘‘somewhere.’’ Furthermore, Spencer provides no solution to the ‘‘vast gap’’ between ‘‘indescribable poverty and indescribable wealth’’ that Dreiser finds so appalling in Pittsburgh. One could argue that Dreiser’s revelation provides no real contrast with Carnegie’s, in that Dreiser seems to accept passively the Spencerian contempt for the ‘‘unfit’’ victims of social evolution. Dreiser’s despair, however, is far removed from the triumphal glow in which Carnegie basks in his Autobiography, and opens up a quest for more sustaining and satisfying answers. In short, in Dreiser’s account of his intellectual development in Pittsburgh, Carnegie’s libraries play a crucial role, but not the role that is expected. Dreiser sees Carnegie as aiming at glorifying himself and conciliating an already abject public through his libraries, but the effect for Dreiser is precisely the opposite. Carnegie’s libraries provide the tools to demystify the Carnegie myth of upward mobility and success used to legitimate laissez-faire capitalism, and those tools become the source of his vocation.23

174

Chapter 5

This is precisely the kind of irony that structures the Cowperwood narrative, whereby ‘‘I satisfy myself’’ is transformed beyond Cowperwood’s intention into social philanthropy.

‘‘This Florence of the West’’: Patronage and Philanthropy in the ‘‘Trilogy of Desire’’ Early in The Titan, Dreiser conflates the city of Chicago and Cowperwood, linking them both to Florence: ‘‘The city of Chicago, with whose development the personality of Frank Algernon Cowperwood was soon to be definitely linked! To whom may the laurels as laureate of this Florence of the West yet fall?’’ (25). The ‘‘Florence of the West’’ is evocative, setting out a historical precedent and challenge for Dreiser as a hopeful laureate. After finishing The Financier, Dreiser traveled to Europe to research The Titan. This trip, he records in A Traveler at Forty, involved a ‘‘very able patron,’’ who attends ‘‘to the financial part and arrange[s] affairs with both an American and an English publisher.’’24 His own experience of patronage thus sets the stage for his interest in Florence, a high point of his trip because it is ‘‘so identified with the Renaissance, so suggestive of the influence and the patronage which gave it birth’’ (Traveler, 383). He explains how he prepares himself for the city by delving into ‘‘historic reading . . . from the lives of the Medici and Savonarola to that of Michelangelo and the Florentine school of artists’’ (371). He is particularly fascinated by the Medicis. ‘‘Great men,’’ he writes, ‘‘make great times—and only struggling, ambitious, vainglorious men make the existence of the artist possible, however much he may despise them. They are the only ones who in their vainglory and power can readily call upon him to do great things and supply the means’’ (386). Vainglorious men now (rather than heiresses) help the artist, both because ‘‘their vainglory and power’’ force the artist to ‘‘do great things,’’ but also, interestingly, because they provide ‘‘the means’’ for art through economic patronage.25 Dreiser’s metaphor of ‘‘this Florence of the West’’ thus provides us with clues to the way The Titan thematizes the close connection between political/business patronage and aesthetic patronage and philanthropy. Central to quattrocento Florence, as Dreiser reminds us in A Traveler but also in the trilogy, was patronage. Such patronage relied, as Paul McLean

Patronage, Philanthropy, and Irony in Dreiser

175

puts it, on the ‘‘art of the network.’’ The ‘‘discursive strategies’’ of patronage that made networking an ‘‘art’’ in the Renaissance state, economy, church, and art are likewise crucial to the history Dreiser seeks to tell about modern Chicago (McLean, 4–5). Rather than describing modern capitalism as socially disembedded, Dreiser insists, through his metaphor of the ‘‘Florence of the West,’’ that it is as embedded as when it emerged from that city.26 ‘‘Friendship,’’ a term as complexly resonant in quattrocento Florentine networks (29) as in Dreiser’s Chicago, is thus carefully depicted. How people become ‘‘friends,’’ how they network, the ‘‘discursive strategies’’ they employ, drive the trilogy’s narrative. Dreiser is at his most delighted and delightful in describing the formalism of ‘‘talk,’’ which creates networks of patronage. By formalism, I mean that the relation between the signifier and signified is arbitrary (even simply decorative or aesthetic), but nonetheless meaningful. Such formalism, in Dreiser’s account, with its shifting relations between surface and depth, can lead to unpredictable results. It is not simply that conversations in the novels reveal that, while people are behaving and talking in one way, they are thinking and doing something else, though that is certainly the case. Nor is it simply that the dynamics of conversation require a convincing display of conventional and cliche´d language that has nothing to do with the subject in hand, though that too is true. What is most intriguing about the formalism of talk in Dreiser is that cliche´d language often also makes its hidden meaning clear even though it has nothing to do with the subject in hand. This too makes for unpredictable outcomes. For example, when Cowperwood seeks the patronage of John J. McKenty, the ‘‘patron saint of the political and social underworld’’ (Titan, 99) of Chicago, so that he can bribe the City Council in regard to franchises, the two men ‘‘smile’’ (102, 103, 105) repeatedly at each other. They speak ‘‘softly’’ (102), ‘‘sweetly’’ (106), ‘‘almost innocently’’ (104). On the one hand, such sweetness disguises a hardscrabble struggle in which each man must conceal both the limits and the extent of his knowledge to gain advantage in the patronage relationship. On the other hand, such sweetness in fact marks a convergence of knowledge. While Frank Cowperwood is, as Dreiser puns ‘‘not quite frank, but safe’’ in explaining his plan to McKenty, McKenty does understand the larger significance of this ‘‘strange, able, dark, and very forceful man’’ (104) and how advantageous it will be to be involved with him. This formalism is even thematized conversationally through the notion of sympathy. Cowperwood tells McKenty, ‘‘I am not

176

Chapter 5

coming to you with any vague story concerning my troubles and expecting you to be interested as a matter of sympathy’’ (103), and indeed bribery is rarely treated in terms of ‘‘sympathy.’’ And yet this conversation is also about sympathy, for, writes Dreiser, there emerges ‘‘a kind of mutual sympathy, understanding, and admiration between the two men’’ (106). If Cowperwood is characteristically genial and artistic, McKenty is likewise ‘‘genial, almost artistic’’ (101). With the usual erotic touch Dreiser lends such scenes, the two men ‘‘looked into each other’s eyes as they shook hands,’’ and McKenty ends the conversation saying ‘‘sympathetically’’ that ‘‘I’m not sure but you haven’t hit upon a very good idea here’’ (106). Dreiser delights in the multiple relations of surface to depth in these conversations and the resulting unpredictability of outcomes. Particularly in The Titan, he cannot resist sometimes pointing out in parenthetical asides the gaps between what politicians and businessmen say and what they are really thinking and doing, as well as the polite cliche´s they use as they seek to outwit, undermine, or destroy each other financially. But he is also delighted in how often it is precisely by being ‘‘not quite frank’’ and using cliche´s and circumventions that meaning is also conveyed and understanding reached. The volatility of outcomes that is a result of the formalism of talk in political/business patronage structures the way Dreiser reads aesthetic and social patronage and philanthropy. Cowperwood is figured, throughout the trilogy, as a patron of art and culture who also begins to work as a philanthropist. His patronage quite often achieves what he wants it to—creating appearances of financial power and success. At the same time, the results are often quite different from what he has planned, as both he and others interpret and misinterpret what he sponsors and why. As with the de Medicis of Florence, Cowperwood’s main activity as a patron is in terms of architecture, though scholarship and painting are also important. In The Financier, the young Cowperwood is impressed by the ‘‘general tendency toward a more cultivated and selective social life’’ (55) that emerges in post-Civil War Philadelphia. His desire to emulate and compete apparently results in his patronage of architects. Cowperwood meets a young ‘‘architect’’ who is also ‘‘an artist,’’ Wilton Ellsworth, and an ‘‘interesting friendship’’ (56) ensues, ‘‘one of those inexplicable inclinations of temperament’’ (56). Ellsworth is described as educating Cowperwood’s taste, teaching him about ‘‘art in general’’ (56; see also 96) as he builds houses and offices for him. The alliance of Cowperwood and Ellsworth

Patronage, Philanthropy, and Irony in Dreiser

177

enables the former to be educated in the process whereby aesthetics can be used formally, as conversation is, to forward social and financial agendas. Thus, the office Ellsworth designs for him has an outside appearance of the ‘‘early Florentine,’’ while inside touches borrow from ‘‘old Venice’’ and ‘‘early Roman’’ models. This me´lange of the styles of former financial capitals enforces a sense of Cowperwood and Co.’s ‘‘reserve and taste’’ and its ‘‘inestimably prosperous, solid and assuring’’ business (94–95). Dreiser insists also on the way the patronized artist interprets and seeks to create an expression of his client formally. Thus the second house Ellsworth designs for Cowperwood is ‘‘chaste, soothing, and delightful’’ with hints of the ‘‘Tudor school’’ (95) and the ‘‘French renaissance’’ (97), combined in such a way that it represents ‘‘something new’’ (96), in the spirit of Cowperwood’s ‘‘new world’’ (97). Dreiser goes on to explain the importance of the relation of the artist and his patron: The effect of a house of this character on its owner is unmistakable. We think we are individual, separate, above houses and material objects generally; but there is a subtle connection which makes them reflect us quite as much as we reflect them. They lend dignity, subtlety, force, each to the other, and what beauty, or lack of it, there is, is shot back and forth from one to the other as a shuttle in a loom, weaving, weaving. Cut the thread, separate a man from that which is rightfully his own, characteristic of him, and you have a peculiar figure, half success, half failure, much as a spider without its web, which will never be its whole self again until all its dignities and emoluments are restored. (98) In this complex formulation, whereby subjectivity becomes the product of the object world and vice versa, the relation between the architect and his patron is key, as the architect seeks to express the character of his patron, even as the patron’s character is created by the architect. The metaphor of the spider interestingly foreshadows Cowperwood as a spider in a ‘‘splendid, glittering network of connections’’ (140) and makes analogous the relation between political/business patronage and aesthetic patronage. Soon Cowperwood will be without his ‘‘web,’’ deprived of social connections and the objects that inextricably constitute him as himself. But it is precisely from this relation between an architect, the building he designs for his patron, and the character of the patron himself that

178

Chapter 5

unpredictable results ensue. At one level, the offices and houses do what they are supposed to do: create a sense of ‘‘inestimably prosperous, solid and assuring’’ business success for both Cowperwood and others. ‘‘The sight of his new house going up,’’ Dreiser continues, ‘‘made Cowperwood feel of more weight in the world’’ (98). Even more important, the city treasurer, George W. Stener, is so impressed by Cowperwood’s ‘‘new house, [and] beautiful banking office’’ and what they signify (139) that he is easily manipulated by Cowperwood to engage in financial actions beyond those approved by his political patrons. In short, the appearance of probity, wealth, and taste works to create itself. Likewise, if Cowperwood’s public office does this, so do the ‘‘private’’ houses: ‘‘There was some talk about the value of entertaining—that he would have to reach out socially for certain individuals who were not now known to him’’ (98). The ‘‘value of entertaining’’ is both ‘‘financial’’ and ‘‘social’’ (108), and the reception Cowperwood holds on the completion of the new houses is intended not only to mark his achievements thus far, but also to create the possibility for future successes. Just as the offices and houses of Cowperwood lead to the financial relationship of Cowperwood and Stener, so also do they lead to the sexual relationship of Cowperwood and Aileen Butler. Cowperwood’s relationships to both Stener and Aileen seem at first important markers of success, but they also enable the conditions of his downfall. Dreiser particularly focuses on this irony in terms of Aileen. Like Stener, Aileen is seduced by Cowperwood because of his houses and offices. At the reception the Cowperwoods have at their house, Aileen realizes how attracted she is to Cowperwood, a sentiment depicted as indistinguishable from what she thinks of as the way ‘‘his . . . home and office were so beautiful’’ (110). In a different sense, the house also has its effect on Cowperwood and his relation to Aileen. The ‘‘something new’’ (96) with which Ellsworth imbues the house, and which embodies Cowperwood’s ‘‘new world’’ (97), leads Cowperwood to flirt actively with Aileen at the reception that marks the completion of his house. It is at this reception that he ‘‘contemplate[s] perhaps a very treacherous thing. Under the current code of society he had no right to do it. It was against the rules’’ (119). Nonetheless, Cowperwood watches how, ‘‘despite his involved social and financial position,’’ he ‘‘deliberately and even calculatingly . . . pump[s] the bellows that tended only to heighten the flames of his desire for this girl’’ (120). The ‘‘new’’ house creates a new morality that works against the financial and social ambitions he has for the future.

Patronage, Philanthropy, and Irony in Dreiser

179

The ways the patronage of architects and artists leads to ironic results are demonstrated even more clearly in The Titan. Cowperwood is older now, married to Aileen Butler, and described as planning his financial and social assault on Chicago more consciously than he did his earlier one on Philadelphia. He tells Aileen that his ‘‘plan is to wait a little while and then build a really fine house so that we won’t need to rebuild. We’re going to go to Europe next spring, if things go right, and we may get some ideas over there. I’m going to put in a good big gallery’’ (49). He discovers another architect, Taylor Lord, who builds them a house based on ‘‘some chateaux’’ they have seen in France (76), adding ‘‘Roman’’ and ‘‘Pompeiian’’ touches (87), and again, as in The Financier, the Cowperwoods hold a reception to enact their social and financial needs and hopes. While Dreiser does not linger on the architect/patron relation as he did in The Financier, he suggests that Lord’s attempt to express the Cowperwoods’ personality is successful in the sense of satisfying them, but unsuccessful in the sense that, precisely for that reason, upper crust Chicago rejects them. The house and their art collection are deemed ‘‘shocking’’ and ‘‘showy’’ (84), and Aileen is likewise ‘‘almost too good-looking’’ (88). The result is ‘‘jealousy’’ (84, 85), not admiration. While Dreiser makes clear that aesthetic and sexual jealousy are not the only causes of the Cowperwoods’ social failure in Chicago, in the social formalism of life (as in that of talk), between reading signs arbitrarily and meaningfully, outcomes and effects cannot be predicted. Chicago apparently understands the cliche´s of the French ‘‘chateau’’ Lord has built for the Cowperwoods, as well as those of the art they have purchased. The unpredictability of outcomes as a result of the social formalism of life is evidenced not only by Cowperwood’s office and homes, but also by his art collection. In two books of the trilogy, The Financier and The Stoic, all that Cowperwood collects is subsequently sold. Such dispersion is thematically important because what Cowperwood’s art collecting finally seeks to express is the desire to establish a ‘‘memorial’’ or ‘‘monument’’ (378) to himself. Collecting—the attempt to organize, control, and stabilize the world in the aesthetic realm—like the attempt to organize, control, and stabilize ‘‘a network of connections’’ in the financial world, simply results ironically in its opposite—dispersion. Likewise, the ‘‘art’’ itself is described as having a destabilizing quality. Characteristically, Dreiser undermines any simple notion of the ‘‘art’’ object as serving the purpose for which it is intended. In The Financier, for

180

Chapter 5

example, Dreiser describes the art and sculpture Cowperwood has collected ‘‘with great care’’ (405) ‘‘as having ‘real merit,’ ’’ as established by those ‘‘architects and art dealers on whose judgment and taste he had relied’’ (404). This ‘‘real merit,’’ however, is the result of highly contingent expert opinion, and ‘‘things which would be smiled at thirty years later . . . were of high value then.’’ Additionally, and equally comically, at the auction that follows Cowperwood’s bankruptcy, the public evinces a ‘‘lack of appreciative understanding’’ of the sort the experts demonstrate, and Cowperwood’s art objects ‘‘were disposed of at much too low a figure’’ (405). Whether Cowperwood collects ‘‘art’’ because he intends to establish financial and social superiority, to invest in objects that grow in value, or to experience transcendent aesthetic pleasure—all his intentions are foiled by the instability of the ‘‘value’’ of the art object. Likewise, while Cowperwood, as noted above, has a ‘‘personality’’ that inclines toward art, he purposely builds ‘‘a good big gallery’’ (Titan, 49) in Chicago purely to gain social and financial predominance. But, as we have seen, the gallery has precisely the opposite effect on Chicago. In fact, its main purpose seems to become purely consolatory. When Cowperwood ‘‘was weary after a strenuous day, he would enter . . . his now silent gallery, and . . . he would sit and wonder at the vision and skill of the original dreamer, exclaiming at times: ‘A marvel! A marvel!’ ’’ (Titan, 378). Cowperwood is thus the central character who misreads what ‘‘art’’ signifies, telling Aileen in The Stoic that his collection represents ‘‘the beauty which is entirely outside of cities and business’’ (256). A few pages later, this irony is driven home as his second collection is promptly sold off to many of his former financial and social enemies. The unpredictability of outcomes in Cowperwood’s patronage and philanthropy, linked to the formalism of social life, is evidenced also in the sponsorship of scholarship. Dreiser at first seems to describe intellectuals simply as pawns and dupes of robber barons who gain their own ends and legitimate capitalism through philanthropy; however, as he extends his account, he suggests philanthropy always represents a contest of will between the philanthropist and his/her recipient that in the end cannot easily be read one way or another. Cowperwood’s intellectual philanthropy is the product of the difficulties he begins to have in raising money because of both public and banking hostility (Titan, 360). Invoking a broader philanthropic context and the real relation that Yerkes had to Rockefeller’s University of Chicago, Dreiser describes how a ‘‘humble Baptist college’’ is transformed into a ‘‘great university’’ ‘‘through the beneficence of a great

Patronage, Philanthropy, and Irony in Dreiser

181

Standard Oil multimillionaire’’ and causes ‘‘a stir throughout the length and breadth of the educational world’’ (364). The fictional Cowperwood, inspired by the ‘‘beneficence’’ of the Standard Oil multimillionaire, decides that to create a receptive atmosphere for raising money and obtaining franchises for his new elevated line he will donate a telescope and observatory to the university. Such a gift will be ‘‘a mere salary item’’ to Cowperwood, while ‘‘on such a repute (the ability to give a three-hundred-thousanddollar telescope out of hand to be known as the Cowperwood telescope) he could undoubtedly raise money’’ (367). And indeed, ‘‘The gift was sufficient to set Cowperwood forth in the light of a public benefactor and patron of science. Not only in Chicago, but in London, Paris, and New York, wherever, indeed, in the great capitals scientific and intellectual men were gathered, this significant gift of an apparently fabulously rich American became the subject of excited discussion’’ (368). Interestingly, Dreiser makes clear that the financial world is as easily fooled as the ‘‘intellectual men’’: ‘‘Banking men, among others, took sharp note of the donor. . . . A man who could give three-hundred-thousand-dollar telescopes in the hour of his greatest difficulties must be in a rather satisfactory financial condition’’ (369). But Dreiser also undermines this reading of Cowperwood’s philanthropy as solely duping intellectuals and bankers while furthering his own plans and profits. The bankers’ hostility to Cowperwood is bypassed through the ploy of the telescope, and intellectuals applaud him, but ‘‘Public sentiment . . . was still against him’’ (392). Securing public franchises, rather than finding bankers to fund him, becomes the problem with which Cowperwood wrestles for the rest of the novel. Philanthropy, in this case and surprisingly, has no effect in changing public sentiment. Likewise, without elaborating in any way, Dreiser suggests that Cowperwood’s gift in the long term may well serve other purposes than helping him gain funds from banks. Describing President Hooper of the university as filled with ‘‘buoyant, self-delusive self-respect,’’ Dreiser suggests that the president is an easily manipulated tool of Cowperwood, whose ‘‘broad-gage examination [of the world] . . . sees even universities as futile in the endless shift of things’’ (366). But at the same time, Dreiser writes, it may equally well be that the president’s ‘‘faith in the balance for right,’’ has a broader validity, in which ‘‘even great personal forces, such as financial magnates, serve an idealistic end’’ (366).27 While the short-term results of the ‘‘seeming gift’’ (392) are not what Cowperwood planned, the long-term effects are also unclear.

182

Chapter 5

Of course, the most unpredictable outcome of Cowperwood’s patronage comes through his mistress Berenice Fleming. Cowperwood is a patron of many aesthetic-minded mistresses throughout the book, but Fleming is the one through whom the unpredictability of outcomes becomes most clear. However, to say that Fleming is Cowperwood’s mistress needs some qualification because from one vantage point Fleming is simply Cowperwood. Within what has been described as the ‘‘masturbatory economy of production’’28 in the novel (‘‘I satisfy myself’’), he creates her, even ‘‘growing’’ her himself like ‘‘a wondrous orchid’’ (Titan, 434). She is also Cowperwood in a semi-incestuous sense, figured as his daughter (458). But whether onanistically, incestuously, or both, Cowperwood and Fleming are described as having ‘‘one god in common—art’’ (Titan, 434), and Cowperwood becomes the sponsor of Fleming’s artistic ambitions. Having become obsessed with her picture, Cowperwood offers his ‘‘help’’ (347) in paying for Fleming’s schooling and later her ‘‘pleasures and entertainments’’ (434). Here again we have what David Leverenz calls the ‘‘Daddy’s Girl’’ narrative in the same form that we saw in Chesnutt’s unpublished white life novels. When Fleming realizes that ‘‘the money we have been spending is Mr. Cowperwood’s’’ (450), she at first casts about for work in which she can express her artistic and social ambitions and support herself without his patronage, but she fails. So she decides she can best realize her ambitions as Cowperwood’s mistress, through his sponsorship, and thereby also repay her ‘‘debt’’ to him (488–89). But again, Fleming’s aesthetic and social ambitions are not realized through Cowperwood, nor are his realized through her. After his death, her concern ‘‘with the beauty of life, and such creative achievements as tended to broaden and expand its experiences’’ is transformed into a ‘‘spiritual’’ (Stoic, 275–76) quest, and then finally, solely into social philanthropy. Thinks Fleming in the last chapter of the book: ‘‘one must live for something outside of one’s self, something that would tend to answer the needs of the many as opposed to the vanities and comforts of the few, of which she herself was one. What could she do to help? . . . the thought of Cowperwood’s hospital crossed her mind. Why couldn’t she herself found a hospital? After all, he had left her a large fortune. . . . she could easily realize a considerable sum of money, which, added to what she already had, might enable her at least to start the project’’ (Stoic, 306).29 And thus, from the Cowperwood story of self-interested capitalism, via the ‘‘inexplicable tangles of personality’’ involved in both political/business and aesthetic/

Patronage, Philanthropy, and Irony in Dreiser

183

intellectual patronage, Dreiser narrates the emergence of social philanthropy, or the love for others that is figured both as an ironic reflection on the Cowperwood legacy through his aesthetic-minded mistress, but also, since Berenice is Cowperwood, through himself. As mentioned earlier, many critics have found The Stoic’s ending embarrassing—inconsistent and weak—and therefore ignore the book. Some have even argued that the ending works against the intentions of Dreiser. Dreiser was dying at the time he wrote The Stoic, and his wife Helen was the typist and editor of the manuscript. The book’s philosophic swerve, Jerome Loving argues, represents Helen’s explorations in eastern religions and may have been written by her ‘‘from notes by Dreiser’’ (Loving, 394–99). But if Helen Dreiser did indeed tamper with the manuscript, against or even according to Dreiser’s intentions, such an ironic reversal is perfectly consistent with a central thematic of the trilogy. Intentions and volition are frequently redirected as a result of the ‘‘inexplicable tangles of personality’’ that constitute the ‘‘networks of connection’’ not only in markets, but also in the patronage and philanthropy that stem from such networks and markets. I have argued that the ‘‘Trilogy of Desire’’ explores the relation between political/business patronage and an emergent philanthropy in relation to intellectuals and artists. Instead of depicting American corporate and finance capitalism as a naturalized ‘‘free’’ market system, or, as Walter Benn Michaels would have it, as a naturalized economy of excess and philanthropic gift-giving, Dreiser depicts an economic system that works through carefully constructed and nurtured patronage systems, or ‘‘networks of connection,’’ which in turn are constituted by ‘‘inexpressible tangles of personality.’’ Likewise, in Dreiser’s account, cultural and intellectual endeavors are also the result of patronage or philanthropy. Therefore, just as the ‘‘networks of connection’’ in business and politics involve ‘‘inexplicable tangles of personality’’ and create unpredictable outcomes, so does aesthetic patronage or philanthropy. Such an account seems linked to Dreiser’s own intellectual development, in which he figures patronage as a necessity for the businessman and the artist or intellectual, despite the discourse of hard work and meritocratic success. While Dreiser toys with the notion of himself as bought off by Carnegie’s patronage and philanthropy, the opposite effect from what Carnegie intended occurs. Instead of providing him with the ‘‘the ladders upon which the aspiring can rise’’ (‘‘Gospel,’’ 12), Dreiser’s reading in the library provides him with the tools with which he can

184

Chapter 5

highlight the falsity of such a metaphor and of self-help rhetoric more broadly. The Progressive irony on which Dreiser relies, expressive of an individualist reading of personality while also denaturalizing the notion of the ‘‘free’’ market, has been one of the central ways modern philanthropy has been interpreted. William Dean Howells captures this interpretive mode early in A Hazard of New Fortunes, when March contemplates expenditures on the literary magazine funded by Dryfoos: ‘‘it went through his mind that this was a strange end for all Dryfoos’ moneymaking to come to. . . . It was an honorable use that Fulkerson was putting it to in Every Other Week; it might be far more creditably spent on such an enterprise than on horses, or wines, or women, the usual resources of the brute rich; and if it were to be lost, it might better be lost that way than in stocks’’ (248). The irony is ethical here—the ‘‘strange end’’ of money earned through brutal labor practices and market speculation, but a strange end that is ‘‘better’’ than expected. Such irony, of the ‘‘better’’ than expected ends of corporate-based philanthropy, appears in the surprising developments that historians and sociologists like to chart: for example, how the Rockefeller Foundation, many years after its deeply religious founder’s death, funded the Kinsey Report, providing tools that were invaluable for the feminist and queer movements of the 1960s; or how the Ford Foundation, many years after its anti-Semitic founder’s death, sponsored the development of African American and Chicano Studies programs. These surprising developments can also of course be read in other, nonironic ways, as this book has shown. Nevertheless, the combination of ironic reversal and ethical judgment remains a popular way to analyze philanthropy, creating fascinating and illuminating tensions in mainstream analyses of corporate capitalism. David Cannadine’s Mellon: An American Life, for example, meticulously charts Andrew Mellon’s manipulation and exploitation of government resources when he was secretary of the treasury to expand his already significant wealth, even as he preached the virtues of the free market and attacked what he saw as incipient forms of interventionist social welfare programs (for the poor, that is). Nonetheless, Mellon’s philanthropy, Cannadine argues, redeems him and his life. Describing Mellon as an ‘‘unimaginative’’ and ‘‘chilling’’ person (605), Cannadine is nonetheless awed by Mellon’s gift of the National Gallery. It was ‘‘in its way a noble gesture’’ (606), writes Cannadine, that has benefited the nation’s citizens in untold ways. Philanthropy works beyond

Patronage, Philanthropy, and Irony in Dreiser

185

the philosophy, volition, or even intentions of the philanthropist here. Particularly, one finds sociologists and historians describing aesthetic and cultural philanthropy as working for good and ironically redeeming the philanthropist.30 What is particularly fascinating about such an ironic account of outcomes, however, is the ethical judgment that is tied to it. Such judgments highlight the unequal distribution of opportunity or social capital in markets, even as they reveal the redemptive power of such markets. Justice is thus clearly at stake in such ironic narrations, but it occurs inadvertently, without intention, through philanthropy. In contrast to a writer like Chesnutt who directly criticizes philanthropy for its inadequacy in relation to issues of justice, narratives of ironic reversal like that which Dreiser and others create have clear limitations. Nonetheless, through the tortuous routes that patronage and philanthropy follow, through the sheer inefficiency of the process by which social good is belatedly and indirectly achieved, there are questions about justice that even such narratives force us to ask.

afterword

his book has highlighted the importance of patronage and the significance of an emerging corporate-based philanthropy for American literature at the turn of the twentieth century. I have argued that the largescale philanthropy that increasingly comes to matter in both social reform and aesthetics in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is part of the crisis in liberal economics over interventionism in the ‘‘free market.’’ Defenders of liberal capitalism, as well as corporate capitalists, realized that ‘‘the miseries everywhere being suffered’’ (Spencer, 285) in the economically and socially volatile post-bellum period, threatened to undermine the system in which they believed and from which they benefited. Relying on both old social practices and new rationales, these thinkers and businessmen sought to intervene in this crisis while shoring up an ideology of nonintervention. The ‘‘art of giving’’ was ‘‘difficult’’ because it highlighted, as it sought to address, the ‘‘catastrophic dislocation’’ (Polanyi, 33) that capitalism was causing. At multiple levels, patronage and philanthropy foregrounded the fiction at the heart of the concept of the ‘‘free market,’’ a fiction those practices nonetheless sought to enforce. I have further argued that the importance of social practices like patronage and philanthropy profoundly shaped the literary field and its representations. By investigating the writings and careers of Henry James, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, and Theodore Dreiser, we can call into question pieties we rely on unconsciously about the ‘‘free market’’: especially how ‘‘supply’’ creates ‘‘demand,’’ thereby democratizing both production and consumption. What unites the authors in this book and their very different texts is how carefully they scrutinized the kinds of sponsorship that intervene in the market, and the economic, political, and ethical implications of such (necessary) interventions. Patronage and philanthropy, I have also argued, remain relatively underexamined in studies of modern literature. As I noted in my Preface,

T

Afterword

187

some work has been done in terms of the Harlem Renaissance (though unfortunately in ways that separate that movement from the broader history of those social practices). In addition, individual author biographies have always described—if not analyzed—the role these social practices play in a writer’s work, while the work of Paul Delany and Lawrence Rainey has inspired new work on patronage and philanthropy in modernism. Finally, Mark McGurl’s important book on the postwar rise of creative writing programs and ‘‘the patron institutions’’ of universities and colleges that have sponsored contemporary fiction in the United States breaks new ground in its analysis of how literary form is productively shaped by institutional philanthropy.1 However, still more can be done. As I suggested in the Introduction, there are important comparative questions to ask about how patronage and philanthropy are changed by and change in relation to historical shifts in class, race, and gender. Furthermore, there are questions to ask about how these social practices work in different institutional frameworks in publishing and the media. Examining practices such as patronage and philanthropy in more detail will help us think more clearly about the relation of economics to print culture and particularly that useful but problematic term ‘‘the literary market.’’ At a broader level, however, by examining these social practices in more detail we can contribute to the critique of the neoliberal ‘‘free market fundamentalism’’ of our own ‘‘New Gilded Age’’ (Uchitelle and Cox) and its relation to intellectual and creative work. Patronage and philanthropy have played an important role in neoliberal fundamentalism. Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine has perhaps most dramatically described the profoundly disaster-oriented and disastrous consequences of accepting the doctrines of free market fundamentalism in intellectual work and the complex part an unacknowledged philanthropic intervention plays. Klein begins her book with the oft-told story of how Milton Friedman and the ‘‘Chicago Boys’’ jumpstarted the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s in Pinochet’s Chile. Klein describes the important involvement of the Ford Foundation in this historical moment. The Foundation sponsored the Center for Latin American Economic Study at the University of Chicago, which provided the funding to train Chilean economists, who when they returned home used brutal state and CIA-backed violence and repression to instate Friedman’s purified (53) free market policies. When the tragic human cost of the Pinochet regime’s free market fundamentalism became clear to the Foundation, it reversed track, sponsoring the effective lobbying efforts that pushed Congress to cut

188

Afterword

military support to Argentina and Chile. Klein carefully spells out the ‘‘contradictions’’ of this mixed ‘‘philanthropic legacy’’ (124)—one of inspiring state and U.S. sponsored violence and repression, but also of support for human rights. Even more interestingly, however, she points out that the latter legacy, no matter how useful it was, obscured the first: The Chicago Boys’ ideas—which depended on philanthropy and the use of state-backed violence—were never held publicly accountable. Since their ideas were never scrutinized in relation to Pinochet’s regime, Klein argues, the fictions of neoliberal free market fundamentalism were allowed to continue their work of devastation around the globe. The Difficult Art of Giving has taken on far narrower terrain than Klein’s in challenging free market fundamentalism in intellectual work. Nonetheless, through its account of patronage and philanthropy, it has argued that as literary critics we both need to and can think more carefully about the fictions of free markets in our own work and the ‘‘interventionism’’ that seeks to prop up those fictions. The authors in this book lead the way in helping us to ask new questions about the fictions of the free and democratizing market.

notes

Preface. From the Harlem Renaissance 1. For a recent and ironic summary of these debates about patronage in the Harlem Renaissance, see Houston Baker in the ‘‘Questionnaire Responses’’ section of the special issue of Modernism/Modernity, ‘‘The Harlem Renaissance and the New Modernist Studies,’’ 20, 3 (September 2013): 433–35. 2. See, for example, Langston Hughes, ‘‘Slave on the Block,’’ ‘‘The Blues I’m Playing,’’ ‘‘Why, you reckon?’’ ‘‘Patron of the Arts,’’ and The Big Sea; Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men, Dust Tracks on the Road, Seraph on the Suwanee; James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Wallace Thurman, Infants of the Spring. Likewise, important works of the post-Harlem Renaissance period in African American letters that both represent and analyze white patronage and philanthropy include Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man; Carter G. Woodson’s The Mis-Education of the Negro; Richard Wright’s Native Son; and Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. 3. See Gordon Bigelow, Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 4. In the past, black intellectuals sporadically or temporarily received such invitations (one thinks particularly of Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles Chesnutt, and Ida Wells-Barnett). 5. For this term, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 7, 29. Naomi Klein likewise refers to neoliberalism as a ‘‘fundamentalist form of capitalism’’ in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 17. This terminology highlights the quasi-religious status the eighteenth-century conception of a free market has achieved in neoliberalism, a status that obscures (purposely or otherwise) liberal and neoliberal reliance on social practices and state institutions to enforce the free market. Introduction Epigraphs: John D. Rockefeller, Random Reminscences of Men and Events (1909; New York: Sleepy Hollow Press, 1984), 156; Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944), 140. Small sections of this introduction have appeared in two essays, ‘‘Capitalism and Philanthropy in the (New) Gilded Age,’’ American Quarterly 60 (March 2008): 201–13

190

Notes to Pages 1–2

(䉷 American Studies Association) and ‘‘Philanthropy and Transatlantic Print Culture,’’ in Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms, ed. Ann Ardis and Pat Collier (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 83–97. 1. Two terms need to be clarified here: the ‘‘market’’ and ‘‘interventionism.’’ Gareth Dale points out in Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market (Cambridge: Polity, 2010) that one major critique of Polanyi is that he uses the ‘‘market’’ in three different ways: ‘‘as an ideal type (or model)—a system that operates according to its own rules and no others; as a ‘utopian experiment’ carried out by economic liberals but doomed to failure because the goal is unrealizable; and as an actually existing system’’ (73). I would suggest, however, that Polanyi emphasizes the first two notions, which are not in contradiction with each other or the third. In other words, the free and selfregulating market is an ideal in liberal economics, a utopian dream. When it is actually tested it necessarily fails, particularly in terms of the benevolent morality of equal distribution, and therefore intervention becomes central to shoring up the ideal. Second, I use ‘‘interventionism,’’ rather than ‘‘protectionism’’ (as Polanyi scholars more typically do), because I want to emphasize not just the reflexive resistance Polanyi describes to the utopian fiction of the free and self-regulating market, but also what Polanyi calls its ‘‘embeddedness.’’ One of Polanyi’s important insights is that while an ideal is constructed in liberal economics whereby the social and political are separated from the economic, such a separation is impossible. (See my discussion of embeddedness below as well as Dale’s, 193–200.) 2. Polanyi is particularly useful to this book because he emphasizes that capitalists sought to protect society from the depredations of market capitalism through business methods. Nonetheless, he also describes the resistance of socialists, peasants, and colonial subjects through quite alternative methods. This ‘‘paradoxical’’ analysis as Dale calls it, of linking business and government elites, and socialists in terms of an almost reflexive ‘‘countermovement’’ (61) to market capitalism informs my reading of Progressivism (see below). Dale highlights the problems in Polanyi’s conflation of these very different countermovements (84–87), and I do so too when I discuss the forms that intervention takes; nonetheless, Polanyi’s argument is also useful in thinking about a broad-based phenomenon, in which some characteristics are shared and others are not. 3. Olivier Zunz, Philanthropy in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), 294. 4. Scott Sandage’s Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005) provides support for my larger argument. One of Sandage’s archives for his history of ‘‘failure’’ is the trove of ‘‘begging letters’’ written to Rockefeller and Carnegie. Sandage analyzes the letters as a ‘‘vernacular stab at political economy.’’ The letters characteristically argue that the ‘‘rational market’’ has failed the letter writer, despite his/her moral worth, and thus that a ‘‘little boost’’ is necessary to avoid failure (250). 5. In Why the Wealthy Give: The Culture of Elite Philanthropy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), Francie Ostrower explains this in a slightly different

Notes to Pages 2–3

191

way: ‘‘Philanthropy is a social institution that takes on meaning in the context of a cultural emphasis on individualism and private initiative and a mistrust of governmental power and large scale bureaucracy’’ (8). While I agree with Ostrower’s analysis, I would argue that philanthropy works hard to confirm liberal myths of individualism and purely private initiatives despite its violation of such myths. Ostrower eventually makes this point (113–19), but she doesn’t highlight the market fundamentalism such a contradiction reveals. For a perfect contemporary example of this contradiction at work and of the fundamentalism it represents, see Zoltan J. Acs’s Why Philanthropy Matters: How the Wealthy Give, and What It Means for Our Economic Well-Being (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013). 6. Throughout this book, I use the capitalized term Progressivism to describe the social and political movement at the turn of the twentieth century, which I define more fully below (32–35). The uncapitalized term is used to describe more generalized ideals or conceptions of of progress. 7. Andrew Carnegie, ‘‘The Gospel of Wealth,’’ reprinted in The ‘‘Gospel of Wealth’’ Essays and Other Writings, ed. David Nasaw (New York: Penguin, 2006), 4; hereafter cited as ‘‘Gospel.’’ 8. In this sense, my book shares an interest in political economy with Frank Christianson’s useful Philanthropy in British and American Fiction: Dickens, Hawthorne, Eliot, and Howells (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007); however, it differs in that Christianson sees political economy as aligned purely with laissez-faire economics, while philanthropy’s ‘‘ideological alignment was multifarious and dynamic’’ (12). I am focusing on corporate-based philanthropy and see it as inextricably aligned with political economy. 9. Examples of the failure to account for this relation more broadly occur in Marjorie Garber’s Patronizing the Arts (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), which argues that the ‘‘profession of ‘writer’ ’’ has meant that sponsorship is not as important in modern literature as it is in the visual arts (13); Stanley Kutler, ed., Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century, Culture (New York: Scribner’s, 1996), in which neither the useful entry ‘‘Patronage in the Arts,’’ by Kathleen D. McCarthy, nor the entry ‘‘Literary Culture,’’ by David Hollinger, discusses patronage or philanthropy in terms of modern literature. Only in ‘‘African American Cultural Movements,’’ by Kenneth Warren, is the relation between literature and sponsorship discussed at any length. Even more interestingly, in Carl F. Kaestle and Janice Radway’s impressive edited collection Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), ‘‘gate-keeping procedures’’ that are ‘‘habituated, ritualized, and increasingly integrated’’ (20) are described as central to print culture, yet not one essay in the collection is devoted to those procedures. 10. Geoffrey Turnovsky’s argument in The Literary Market: Authorship and Modernity in the Old Regime (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) focuses on the ways ‘‘commerce’’ represents a ‘‘stylized image,’’ which literary historians have adopted uncritically (5). He also makes the astute point that the ‘‘elusiveness’’

192

Notes to Pages 3–5

of the shift from patronage to market can be evidenced by how often scholars push the advent of the market back in time, even as few authors can make a living even today (15–19). Thus to Turnovsky the literary market can be seen as a utopian fiction, which scholars and authors rely on to imagine authorial critical independence. For another critique of the ‘‘standard narrative’’ see Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in The New Economic Criticism, ed. Osteen and Woodmansee (New York: Routledge, 1999), 8–12. 11. See for example Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky, Willa Cather’s The Troll Garden and The Song of the Lark, Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven and The Country of the Pointed Firs, Zitkala-Sa’s Impressions of an Indian Childhood, Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country and Age of Innocence, Anzia Yezierska’s, Hungry Hearts and Bread Givers. 12. Polanyi’s influential critique of the fiction of the free and self-regulating market was itself completed under the auspices of a Rockefeller foundation grant. (See ‘‘Author’s Acknowledgment,’’ The Great Transformation, xiii.) 13. Scott Shershow, The Work and the Gift (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 85, 86. Likewise, Harry Liebersohn argues in his useful survey, The Return of the Gift: European History of a Global Idea (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), that gift-giving theory had been written about continuously in the West until the nineteenth century, when there is a ‘‘near-silence’’ (3) on the topic. This silence can be linked to ‘‘Possessive individualism that respected the individual maximization of profit and guarded private property rights, and bureaucratic power earned through merit on the job and exercised through the impersonal application of rules,’’ so that gift giving as reciprocal and as creating mutual obligation came to ‘‘seem irrelevant’’ (5). By contrast, this book argues that nineteenth-century literature demonstrates that—given the hardening ‘‘creed’’ of liberal economics and the continuation and transformation of gift-giving practices—such practices are very much on the minds of intellectuals. 14. Buffett is quoted in Landon Thomas, Jr., ‘‘A Bequest Between Friends,’’ New York Times, 27 June 2006. 15. See for example Acs’s account of the varied responses to the 2010 ‘‘Giving Pledge’’ initiated by Buffett and Gates that challenged the world’s wealthiest individuals to donate half their wealth to philanthropic causes during their lifetimes (1–3). 16. An influential article on growing economic inequality, the mega-rich, and philanthropy that highlighted this term is Louis Uchitelle and Amanda Cox, ‘‘Age of Riches: The Richest of the Rich, Proud of a New Gilded Age,’’ New York Times, 7 July 2007. It was also an article and term approvingly cited and used by the Nobel Prizewinning economist, Paul Krugman, in his blog for the New York Times, The Conscience of a Liberal, ‘‘Proud of a New Gilded Age,’’ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/ 01/27. A number of recent scholarly books also rely on the term to describe the parallels of our era with turn-of-the-century America; the most useful to me has been Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).

Notes to Pages 5–6

193

17. See Robert F. Arnove, ed., Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980); Lawrence J. Friedman and Mark D. McGarvie, eds., Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Joan Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003); Zunz. 18. See David Hammack, ‘‘Patronage and the Great Institutions of the Cities of the U.S.: Questions and Evidence, 1800–2000,’’ in Thomas Adam, ed., Philanthropy, Patronage, and Civil Society: Experiences from Germany, Great Britain, and North America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 79–100. Zunz provides important evidence for this argument, citing statistics from 1974, which show the almost equal financial contributions of government and private giving to nonprofits (234–36). Likewise, Kathleen McCarthy shows that the government’s funding of art has always exceeded that of philanthropic foundations (in Kutler, ed., 1738). 19. Letter from President David Boren to the faculty at the University of Oklahoma, 27 June 2012, email. 20. Christopher Newfield, Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880–1980 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 3. 21. Private funding by the oil industry of university-based studies of the environmental impact of fracking provides a particularly dramatic contemporary example of these challenges and debates. See the AAUP 2012 report, Recommended Principles and Practices to Guide Academy-Industry Relationships, http://www.aaup.org/file/industry all.pdf. 22. Unsurprisingly then, academics have long had an interest in philanthropy. Benjamin Whitaker, The Foundations: An Anatomy of Philanthropy and Society (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974) provides a fascinating list of important books from the 1930s to 1960s by intellectuals that critically analyze the relation of philanthropy to the university (25). Zunz likewise lists all the universities that have programs devoted to the study of the nonprofit sector (247). In the interest of full disclosure, my own education and career is the product of primarily state funding, but also corporatebased philanthropy, and the close mixture between the two. In addition, my retirement will come partially from a (much weakened) state retirement fund, but primarily from funds invested in TIAA-CREF, founded in 1918 by Andrew Carnegie. 23. For an understanding of ‘‘gift’’ theory and its history, see Liebersohn and Shershow. See also Osteen and Woodmansee on the use of gift theory for literary studies (28–32). For a Derridean inflected application of gift theory to American literature, see Hildegard Hoeller, From Gift to Commodity: Capitalism and Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2012). 24. See, for example, David Leverenz, Paternalism Incorporated: Fables of American Fatherhood, 1865–1940 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003) and Garber. Leverenz and Garber see progressive possibilities in the paternalism of philanthropy and patronage, while Whitaker does not (14), nor does Jackson Lears in ‘‘Managerial Revitalization of the Rich,’’ in Fraser and Gerstle, eds., 192–93.

194

Notes to Pages 6–8

25. See Karl Julius Holzknecht’s classic study, Literary Patronage in the Middle Ages (1923; New York: Octagon Press, 1966). 26. For a thoughtful analysis of the continuity of patronage in modernity, see Dustin Griffin, Literary Patronage in England, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For an example of the use of patronage as indistinguishable from philanthropy, see Roelofs. Patronage as a term tends to be resuscitated particularly to describe sponsorship of art and culture. See, for example, Judith Huggins Balfe, Paying the Piper: Causes and Consequences of Art Patronage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 73–74; Garber; and Kathleen D. McCarthy, in Kutler, Encyclopedia, 1725–41. Mark Rectanus likewise uses the term ‘‘corporate sponsorship’’ interchangeably with ‘‘patronage’’ in Culture Incorporated: Museums, Artists, and Corporate Sponsorship (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 2002). Michael Foss in The Age of Patronage: The Arts in England, 1660–1750 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971) argues that artists simply shifted patrons over time from the King to the aristocracy to the public. Adam’s edited collection, Philanthropy, is particularly useful in highlighting these definitional problems, as the essays actively contest each other’s definitions. 27. See especially Richard L. McCormick on this use of the term patronage in The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). The ‘‘Gilded Age’’ has also been called the ‘‘era of national subsidy’’ (see Kevin J. Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich [New York: Broadway Books, 2002], 242), a phrase that captures equally well the sponsorship relation of government to business. 28. Oxford English Dictionary, Web, ‘‘Philanthropy,’’ Def. 1. 29. Some scholars play on this historical disjunction between old and new meanings of the term, as when Barbara Ehrenreich in Nickel and Dimed (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001) describes the ‘‘working poor’’ as ‘‘the major philanthropists of our society . . . a nameless benefactor, to everyone else’’ (221). 30. Robert Gross, ‘‘Giving in America: From Charity to Philanthropy,’’ in Friedman and McGarvie, eds., 29–48, 37. 31. I discuss the problems with this distinction more in Chapter 4. 32. Zunz raises this question particularly well, in relation to the Ford Foundation which began as a ‘‘tax dodge’’ (174), but also in terms of tax incentives to the middle class (176–77); however, he then surprisingly sidesteps the implications of this question. For a useful account of the public relations efforts corporations used to define themselves as benevolent, see Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 33. The close relation between the CIA and especially the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations during the Cold War provides a perfect example of the inextricability of the two. See Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cold War (London: Granta, 1999); Whitaker (157–66); and Donna M. Binkiewicz, Federalizing

Notes to Pages 8–11

195

the Muse: U.S. Arts Policy and the National Endowment for the Arts, 1965–80 (Chapel Hill: University North Carolina Press, 2004). See also Robert Allen’s critical analysis of the Ford Foundation’s sponsorship of black political activism in Detroit in the 1960s as working to ‘‘encourage economic development of a neocolonial nature’’ (64) in A Guide to Black Power in America (London: Victor Gollancz, 1970). Zunz provides a completely different reading in Chapter 7 of his book from that of Saunders, Whitaker, and Binkiewicz of the CIA/philanthropy connection and of Allen’s of the Ford Foundation. (An interesting footnote to Saunders’s own book is that Granta Books was rescued by the leftist philanthropist Sigrid Rausig in 2005.) 34. As Amy and Douglas Koritz point out, the notion of Economic Man has inflected left and right thought alike, as evidenced by the similarities they find in Gary Becker’s conception of ‘‘utility’’ and Pierre Bourdieu’s of ‘‘distinction.’’ Their brilliant analysis of the problems with Bourdieu’s reduction of human motives to ‘‘maximizing, self-interested, [and] rationally calculating’’ has been helpful to my own thinking. See Koritz, ‘‘Symbolic Economics: Adventures in the Metaphorical Marketplace’’ in Osteen and Woodmansee (408–19). Scott Shershow provides a comparable analysis of the appropriation of left economic theory to right aims (104–5). 35. For a quick summary of the critique by both the left and the right, see Roelofs, 10–11. 36. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Anchor, 1969), 513. 37. See, for example, Joel Fleishman, The Foundations: A Great American Secret (New York: Public Affairs, 2007); Gross; and Zunz. Acs takes a slightly different tack in arguing that American philanthropic voluntarism and exceptionalism stem from the unique entrepreneurial form of American capitalism; nonetheless de Tocqueville makes his usual appearance in Acs’s argument as well. 38. See Adam, ed., Philanthropy and Buying Respectability: Philanthropy and Urban Society in Transnational Perspective, 1840s to 1930s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); Christianson; Sawaya, ‘‘Transatlantic.’’ While Amanda Claybaugh in The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007) and Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998) do not discuss philanthropy per se, they demonstrate how social reform ideas and institutions crossed the Atlantic. 39. Sinclair Lewis satirized this dynamic of Rockefeller’s medical philanthropy fairly comprehensively in his Pulitzer Prize novel, Arrowsmith (1925). 40. For helpful analyses and comparisons of forms of imperialism by literary critics, see John Carlos Rowe, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) and John Eperjesi, The Imperialist Imaginary: Visions of Asia and the Pacific in American Culture (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth University Press, 2005). Among the works I have relied on to think about the relation of philanthropy to imperialism are Arnove, ed.; Erica Bornstein, The Spirit of Development: Protestant

196

Notes to Pages 11–13

NGOs, Morality, and Economics in Zimbabwe (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005); Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877– 1920 (New York: HarperCollins, 2009); Klein; Roelofs; and Saunders. For an extremely useful, but also strangely unproblematized analysis of American philanthropy as creating a ‘‘global civil society’’ (7) and ‘‘global welfare’’ (296), rather than as (also) connected to economic or cultural imperialism, see Zunz (especially chaps. 5 and 9). 41. Dale points out that Polanyi’s framework has received renewed attention at this moment of neoliberal economic crisis (207), and indeed the two accounts of neoliberalism and its free market fundamentalism on which I have most relied (David Harvey, Klein) depend on Polanyi’s argument. 42. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘‘The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed,’’ in The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 29–73. 43. See, for example, Georg Luka´cs’s essay, ‘‘Narrate or Describe,’’ in Writer and Critic (New York: Universal Library, 1971), 110–48. For useful new readings of these problems, see Kenneth Warren, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 43–45; and Jennifer Fleissner, Women, Compulsion, Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 10–12, 37–40. 44. In Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), Bruce Robbins similarly argues that the nineteenth century’s self-help narratives insistently reveal a reliance on the help of others. He writes that these texts’ ‘‘display of patrons, mentors, and benefactors’’ is a form of ‘‘reverse ostentation,’’ one which demonstrates that ‘‘whatever the official ideology of individualism may say, this has not been a story of heroic self-reliance alone’’ (xv). For literary writers who depended on social networks and aid to achieve success on the market, such ‘‘reverse ostentation’’ in their lives and works put in question the notion of a free and self-regulating market. 45. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1984), Part IV, chap. I, para. 10. 46. Polanyi; Gordon Bigelow, ‘‘Let There Be Markets: The Evangelical Roots of Economics.’’ Harper’s (May 2005): 33–38; Thomas Dixon, The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meaning in Victorian Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 47. For notions of Smith’s complexity, see Liebersohn and Polanyi. Nevertheless, following Liebersohn’s own historical account of the idea of the ‘‘invisible hand’’ from Hobbes onwards, we can see this idea was important to classical economics and became even more so for laissez-faire economics. David Harvey makes an argument comparable to mine about Smith’s relation to laissez-faire economics and neoliberalism (20). 48. See Leverenz, and James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolultion, 1850–1890 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

Notes to Pages 13–21

197

49. Marchand puts this in a complementary way, though from a different angle. He argues that in their public relations efforts to prove they were not soulless (as popularly charged), corporations created welfare programs; however, these welfare programs had to be linked to business, not to ‘‘philanthropy,’’ because corporations did not want to concede that their workers had the right to make claims on their benevolence or that their practices were unbusinesslike (15). I am arguing likewise that corporate philanthropy, even more intensively than corporate welfare, could not afford to make such concessions. 50. On Spencer’s popularity with corporate capitalists, see David Nasaw, ‘‘Gilded Age Gospels,’’ in Fraser and Gerstle, 129–33. 51. Herbert Spencer, The Data of Ethics (New York: Hurst, 1879), 285. 52. On the eighteenth-century discussion, see Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005). 53. William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883; New York: Harper and Brothers, 1911), 12, 8. 54. Cited in Whitaker, 20–21. 55. See, for example, William Dean Howells’s critical commentary on ‘‘the plutocratic mind’’ (277) in The Altrurian Romances, gen. ed. Edwin H. Cady (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968). 56. For the various private exchanges on philanthropy between Rockefeller and Carnegie, see Whitaker, 67, and David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie (New York: Penguin, 2006), 766–67. For Rockefeller’s public response to criticism, see John D. Rockefeller, Random Reminiscences of Men and Events (1909; New York: Sleepy Hollow Press, 1984), v–vi, 176, 183–84. 57. Carnegie begins the letter by encouraging Spencer not to complain publicly about a lack of appreciation: ‘‘When have the Prophets not been stoned, from Christ down to Wagner. Crazy, enthusiastic, or madmen all of them. Take the philosophers, from Socrates or before Socrates time, Plato to Spencer, the martyrs to Science from Bruno, Galileo, Copernicus.’’ The letter then describes Carnegie’s Christ-like sufferings as an analogue to Spencer’s: ‘‘I remember you once said to me, that you did not understand how I could forward building Libraries, Halls and Museums for the working masses of Pittsburgh, when these had publicly requested City Councils to reject the gifts. If I had entered upon the work with the desire to win popular applause, I should have richly merited the punishment that their action would have inflicted upon my vain nature, but I was sustained by the knowledge that they know not what they did, and so rendered only more steadfast, if possible, in my determination to give them the precious gifts’’ (6 January 1897; Carnegie Collection, Library of Congress). Likewise, Carnegie wrote to Henry Frick, his partner, as early as 1892 and then again in 1894, ‘‘I wish to see the ‘Robber Baron’ completely exterminated’’ (quoted in Nasaw, Carnegie, 482). 58. For Mellon’s fundamentalist reading of Spencer, see his autobiography, Thomas Mellon and His Times: Printed for His family and Descendants Exclusively

198

Notes to Pages 21–28

(Pittsburgh: Wm G. Johnson, 1885), 542–63. For Mellon’s critique of Carnegie’s philanthropy, see David Cannadine, Mellon: An American Life (New York: Knopf, 2006), 69, 90–95. Carnegie claimed that his own autobiography was inspired by Mellon’s. See The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, ed. Cecilia Tichi (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986), 1. For the critiques of journalists on the contradiction between Carnegie’s labor policies and his philanthropies, both before and after Homestead, see Nasaw, Carnegie. 59. See Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Senior (New York: Random House, 1998), 154. 60. ‘‘Fields,’’ like ‘‘Gospel,’’ is reprinted in Nasaw, ed., ‘‘Gospel.’’ 61. J. A. Hobson’s analysis of what he calls the ‘‘socially injurious’’ charity of ‘‘model millionaires’’ in Work and Wealth: A Human Valuation (New York: Macmillan, 1914) demonstrates how commonplace this discourse was and also how a more radical thinker could transform it. Thus Hobson revises both Carnegie’s and Rockefeller’s individualized arguments against ‘‘indiscriminate charity’’ by arguing that ‘‘every act of charity, applied to heal suffering arising from defective arrangements of society, serves to weaken the personal springs of social reform. . . . These public gifts of millionaires debauch the character of cities and states more effectively than the private gifts of unreflecting donors the character of individuals’’ (296–97). 62. Susan M. Ryan, The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), 58. 63. See Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (1950; New York: Norton, 1990). 64. For different versions of this legitimation crisis for corporate capitalism, see Lears, ‘‘Managerial Revitalization’’; Marchand. 65. For important dates in the founding of these two philanthropies, see Whitaker, 41–42. For a summary of the testimony of some of the major figures involved in the Walsh hearings from different ends of the political spectrum, see Barbara Howe, ‘‘The Emergence of Scientific Philanthropy,’’ in Arnove, ed., Cultural Imperialism, 33–48. 66. Two central characteristics associated with Progressivism and evident in philanthropy are the aggrandizement of professional expertise, and the use of such expertise for social control rather than social justice (McCormick, 281). 67. For a handy summary of these debates, see McCormick, 263–68, 312–15. 68. McCormick never cites Polanyi, though he uses similar language and formulations. 69. Brett Fairbairn makes an argument similar to mine in ‘‘Self-Help and Philanthropy: The Emergence of Cooperatives in Britain, Germany, the U.S., and Canada from Mid-Nineteenth to Mid-Twentieth Century,’’ in Adam, ed., Philanthropy: 55–78. Recipients of philanthropy, Fairbairn shows, can effectively reshape middle-class philanthropic practices meant to discipline them. See also Bruce Robbins, ‘‘The Village of the Liberal Managerial Class,’’ in Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture, ed. Vinay Dharwadker (New York: Routledge, 2001), 15–32. Some

Notes to Pages 28–31

199

of the scholars/activists in INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, ed., The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2007) argue for critical alliances with the philanthropic and nonprofit worlds in the fight for social justice; others argue that such alliances necessarily co-opt radical perspectives. 70. This book has particularly benefited from the important Bourdieuvian studies by Adam (Philanthropy; Buying) and Ostrower. Leverenz also highlights in ‘‘philanthropic paternalism’’ the role of intra-class shaming and disciplining (Chapter 6). Adam does describe philanthropy as competing with other ‘‘organizational models’’ of the economy by social democrats and labor organizers, but his Bourdieuvian framework means that he does not show how those competing models themselves shape philanthropy (Introduction and Chapter 1, Philanthropy.) 71. Some prominent examples would include William Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America: 1800–1870 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968); Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927); June Howard, Publishing the Family (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001); and Christopher Wilson, The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985). However, this appears as a general assumption in most studies of the period. 72. David Dowling, for example, shows how the Knickerbockers, Transcendentalists, Garrisonians, and Fitzhughians created networks and opportunities for each other; nonetheless, he still describes them as selling their work on the ‘‘free’’ or ‘‘open’’ market. See The Business of Literary Circles in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 4–5. 73. See Bigelow, Fiction; Osteen and Woodmansee. 74. Leon Jackson, The Business of Letters: Authorial Economics in Antebellum America (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 5, 15, 22. 75. Jackson’s critique of standard narratives of the expansive democratization of the ‘‘literary market’’ has been supported by a number of studies of the nineteenthcentury literary field. See especially Bigelow, Fiction; Susan Coultrap-McQuin, Doing Literary Business (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), Meredith L. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), and Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saraceno Zboray, Literary Dollars and Social Sense: A People’s History of the Mass Market Book (New York: Routledge, 2005). 76. Greta Krippner, ‘‘The Elusive Market: Embeddedness and the Paradigm of Economic Sociology,’’ Theory and Society 30, 6 (2001): 775–810, 781. 77. While I am exploring the question of the potential differences between mass and elite publishing through the very broad categories of embedded and disembedded economies, much more textured readings of these differences could be provided. For example, Jonathan Freedman in The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism

200

Notes to Pages 31–35

in Literary Anglo-America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) points out that one of the noteworthy features of the publishing revolution from the teens to the 1930s is the ethnicity and class status of the publishers. Knopf, Liveright, Simon and Schuster, and Random House were all founded by Jewish immigrants (168–69). 78. See Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (New York: Verso, 1996) and also his ‘‘Diverging Paths: Books and Magazines in the Transition to Corporate Capitalism,’’ in Print in Motion, ed. Kaestle and Radway, 102–15; Walter Hines Page, A Publisher’s Confession (1905; reprint New York: Doubleday, Page, 1923); Donald Sheehan, This Was Publishing: A Chronicle of the Book Trade in the Gilded Age (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1952); John Tebbel, Between Covers: The Rise and Transformation of Book Publishing in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). From another angle, Linda Marie Fritscher describes the emergence of the modern literary agent as taking charge of the ‘‘business’’ angle of writing and as accumulating a stable of writers, and thus as a new form of personalized patronage. See ‘‘Literary Agents and Literary Traditions: The Role of the Philistine’’ in Balfe, ed., 54–72. June Howard in Publishing has used the problem of periodization to discuss the difficulty in analyzing the putative democratization and diversification of publishing (Chapter 2). 79. Richard Ohmann’s work supports such a surmise, especially in ‘‘Diverging Paths’’ in Kaestle and Radway, as he insists on the difference between the family-run firms of book publishing and corporatized magazine publishing. He argues that book publishing was ‘‘a niche product’’ (115) until the 1960s, whereas magazine publishing was central to integrating a nationalized corporate culture as early as the turn of the twentieth century. That the social practices of a family-run firm and a corporatized firm would be different (as well as overlapping) therefore follows logically. 80. See Paul Delany, ‘‘Who Paid for Modernism?’’ in Osteen and Woodmansee, eds., 335–48, and Lawrence Rainey, ‘‘The Cultural Economy of Modernism,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson (1999; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 33–69. 81. See Paul D. McLean, The Art of the Network: Strategic Interaction and Patronage in Renaissance Florence (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), especially 223–28. 82. While I have emphasized how economic narratives shape our literary histories, Bigelow in Fiction shows how our literary histories shape our economic narratives, and so how difficult it is to extricate one from the other. 83. See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1977). 84. The term ‘‘canonical’’ is arguably exhausted at this point. Nonetheless, most of the figures I focus on here have remained consistently important in debates about American literature since the 1920s, and one register of this might simply be how well documented their careers and lives are. 85. For the history of the term, see McLean, 8–11; and Pamela Laird, Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

Notes to Pages 35–41

201

Press, 2006), 3–10. For helpful analyses of the closed and exclusive social networks that are central to ‘‘connectability,’’ see Laird; Fraser and Gerstle, eds., Ruling America; Peter Dobkin Hall, The Organization of American Culture, 1700–1900 (New York: New York University Press, 1984); and Phillips, Wealth. 86. Brook Thomas, in American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), argues that American realist writers criticized the failure of contract in the post-bellum period, but also highlighted how contract was better than status. I am likewise arguing that these writers saw contract as a failure because it was closely tied to status—status defined not only as entrenched hierarchies of class, race, and gender, but also as entrenched social networks. Furthermore, I am arguing these writers saw their own imbrication in a contract culture that was nonetheless status based. 87. Likewise, I have not focused on women’s philanthropy that also emerges out of corporate America. For some of the important work on this topic, see Kathleen D. McCarthy, Women’s Culture: American Philanthropy and Art, 1830–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Molly H. Mullin, Culture in the Marketplace: Gender, Art, and Value in the American Southwest (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001). 88. In terms of literature, some examples include Shirley Marchalonis’s Patrons and Prote´ge´es: Gender, Friendship, and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988); Nancy Milford, Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay (New York: Random House, 2001); Jayne E. Marek, Women Editing Modernism: ‘‘Little’’ Magazines and Literary History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995). In art history, see Kristen Swinth’s extremely useful Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 89. E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic, 1993), 195. Chapter 1. American Generosity: Philanthropy in Henry James 1. To see other definitions of the distinction between philanthropy and charity, see, for example, Acs; Kathleen D. McCarthy, American Creed: Philanthropy and the Rise of Civil Society, 1700–1865 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Ostrower. 2. Judith Sealander, ‘‘Curing Evils at Their Source: The Arrival of Scientific Giving,’’ in Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History, ed. Lawrence J. Friedman and Mark D. McGarvie (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 229. Adam in Buying argues that Anglo-American scholars tend to read philanthropy only as a vertical phenomenon, while German scholars make distinctions between a variety of phenomena and their differing power relations (182), as I am doing here. 3. My terms may seem like misnomers, especially horizontal philanthropy (which is, after all, also vertical). I hope that by using the word philanthropy I make clear its difference from grassroots activism.

202

Notes to Page 41

4. Ostrower argues that philanthropy is not the same as generosity or altruism (6–8) because it works within an organizational framework and provides a normative form of endeavor for elites; however, in James generosity and philanthropy are indistinguishable. This attests to the fact that philanthropy was not yet fully organizational at the time he was writing. Furthermore, as a novelist, James represents abstract conceptual categories through specific characters, rendering sociocultural phenomenon (philanthropy) as individual personality (generosity). 5. In his very first novel, Watch and Ward (serialized in 1871), James explores the relations between his American hero who adopts a working-class, twelve-year-old girl—taking on the guise of ‘‘charity’’—while actually aiming to create a sense of indebtedness so deep that she will marry him (as she does); in Roderick Hudson (1875), he analyzes the relationship of a wealthy American patron and the impoverished artist he envies, loves, sponsors, and renders indebted and dead; in The American (1877), the titular, representative hero generously offers to rescue two impoverished French women of different classes through financial largesse, and the novel’s central tension is whether he can remain as morally generous as he is financially openhanded when his offers are refused; in The Portrait of a Lady (1881), the plot revolves around two acts of generosity—the disastrous effects of a generous American legacy and the misguided attempt by an American woman to ‘‘do good’’ with that legacy by sponsoring (marrying) an aesthete; in The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima (1885–86), elite American women’s involvement in, and their financial aid to, the women’s rights movement and class revolution respectively are the source of havoc; in The Wings of the Dove (1902), as in The American and Portrait, James depicts the surprising effects that an apparently morally and financially generous American legacy has on its central English characters; in The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904) the characters and actions of wealthy American patrons of art are key to an analysis of the ethical issues; even in James’s final, unfinished novel The Ivory Tower (1917), both the generous act of an heiress and the generous legacy of an uncle will apparently lead to disastrous consequences. 6. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. Walter Kauffman; trans. Walter Kauffman and R. J. Hollingdale (1887; New York: Vintage, 1989). 7. While there is no record that James read Nietzsche, members of his circle (including William James) wrote on Nietzsche. See Stephen Donadio, Nietzsche, Henry James, and the Artistic Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 16–22. Equally important, as Henry McDonald and Donadio argue, to read James and Nietzsche together is to find striking philosophical convergences. See McDonald, ‘‘Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and the Tragic Henry James,’’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language 34, 3 (Fall 1992): 403–49. In addition, there is an earlier tradition of the critique of altruism and philanthropy in American letters, indebted to Emerson. In short, James responds to transatlantic debates about ‘‘altruism,’’ siding primarily with what Thomas Dixon calls the ‘‘anti-altruists’’ (321).

Notes to Pages 42–45

203

8. Virginia Woolf, ‘‘The Patron and the Crocus,’’ The Common Reader: First Series (1925; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935), 211. 9. On the beginnings of James’s career I have relied on Michael Anesko, ‘‘Friction with the Market’’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), esp. chap. 3. Anesko highlights the importance of James’s rentier status and connectability. More recently, Andrew Lawson has usefully focused attention on James’s rentier status in relation to his literary representations in ‘‘Perpetual Capital: Roderick Hudson, Aestheticism, and the Problem of Inheritance,’’ Henry James Review 32, 2 (Summer 2011): 178–91. 10. Robert C. Holub, Friedrich Nietzsche (New York: Twayne, 1995). 11. ‘‘Jealousy’’ and ‘‘envy’’ have different definitions. Peter Stearns argues in Jealousy: The Evolution of an Emotion in American History (New York: New York University Press, 1989) that by the twentieth century the former term is typically used to describe either psychological state (12). But clearly the blurring of the terms began earlier as The Princess Casammasima shows. 12. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 202. 13. Like Jameson, Eve Sedgwick in Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) argues that ressentiment is an autoreferential strategy of European and American intellectuals emerging at the fin de sie`cle, but she links it to the ‘‘regime of heterosexual male self-pity.’’ The ‘‘main target of its scapegoating projections’’ (145), she says, is ‘‘the all too predictable tears of women, of gay men, of people with something to cry about’’ (146). Combining Jameson and Sedgwick, Jean Gregorek shows the complex imbrication of class and gender anxieties that galvanize fin de sie`cle theorists of ressentiment. Gregorek argues, in ‘‘The Odd Man: Masculinity and the Modern Intellectual in George Gissing’s Born in Exile,’’ Nineteenth-Century Studies 21 (2007): 199–216, that ressentiment is ‘‘the available narrative of the rationalization of failure’’ for ‘‘dissident’’ male intellectuals as they faced the bankruptcy of Victorian narratives of upward mobility. Both the bourgeois and the working-class New Woman, Gregorek demonstrates, became the scapegoat for the ‘‘real social humiliations’’ that dissident male intellectuals experienced as they tried to challenge the class system. Sianne Ngai in Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005) focuses on the way ressentiment and envy are described as lack or narcissism and thus coded as female in the twentieth century. While Ngai does see envy as autoreferential, she suggests we also work to recuperate it as an expression of ‘‘potential critical agency—as an ability to recognize, and antagonistically respond to, potentially real and institutionalized forms of inequality’’ (129). Susan Matt, without referring to these debates about ressentiment, provides a very useful addendum to them in her history of envy in the United States, Keeping Up with the Joneses: Envy in American Consumer Society, 1890–1930 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). Matt argues that by criticizing ‘‘envy,’’ late nineteenth-century moralists and

204

Notes to Pages 45–51

conservatives relied on a venerable tradition of religious critique to deplore both labor activism and the way a consumer economy promotes this formerly ‘‘deadly sin.’’ By contrast, a theorist who embraces Nietzsche’s theory of ressentiment, rather than reading it symptomatically, is Wendy Brown in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995). 14. Philanthropy is also part of Jameson’s account of ressentiment. He argues that for ‘‘serious artists’’ (197) at the fin de sie`cle, the ‘‘philanthropic mission’’ (192), because of its individualizing and palliative features, was understood as bankrupt and thus becomes folded into the broader ideologeme of class ressentiment. Jameson is dismissive of philanthropy, which he conflates with charity (192); the result is that his comments on philanthropy are suggestive but attenuated. 15. It is partly in this sense that we can read the seemingly inconsistent sentence that appears early on when Nietzsche defines ressentiment: ‘‘Human history would be altogether too stupid a thing without the spirit that the impotent have introduced into it’’ (33–34). While typically that sentence is used to show that Nietzsche’s antiSemitism is surpassed by his anti-Germanism, we could also add that he recognizes here the intelligence and efficacy of the ‘‘will to mutual aid’’ of horizontal philanthropy. Jameson notes this feature of Nietzschean ressentiment as well, arguing that in George Gissing’s novel Thyrza there is a kind of ‘‘primal envy’’ toward a character engaged in acts of ‘‘philanthropic altruism’’ toward the ‘‘poor,’’ ‘‘a longing to appropriate that class solidarity from which he [the intellectual] must himself eternally remain excluded’’ (199). 16. Mark Seltzer, Henry James and the Art of Power (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 19. 17. Lionel Trilling famously historicized the novel in terms of anarchist rather than socialist politics in The Liberal Imagination (1950), but James calls the topic of his book ‘‘militant socialism’’ (44) and blurs the lines between anarchism and socialism by rendering vague and self-serving the beliefs of his characters, as discussed below. 18. Henry James, The Princess Casamassima (1886; New York: Penguin, 1987), 476. 19. See Carolyn Betensky’s account of this context in Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Novel (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 163–66. While she focuses primarily on the English and European social reform scene, her account is nonetheless helpful. 20. Respectively, for example, Lionel Trilling in The Liberal Imagination, Mark Falcoff, and Carolyn Betensky. However, it seems to be particularly favored, as Irving Howe pointed out long ago in Politics and the Novel, by modern conservative thinkers. As Falcoff argues in ‘‘Revolution for the Rich,’’ New Criterion 7 (March 24, 2006): 21–26, the novel is ‘‘James’s great conservative political novel’’ (21). 21. Roderick Hudson, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl are other prime examples of this interest. 22. I am borrowing from Lears’s description in No Place of Grace of the bourgeois sense of ‘‘weightlessness’’ (a term he borrows from Nietzsche).

Notes to Pages 52–61

205

23. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, and the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). 24. In The Bourgeois and the Bibelot (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1984), Saisselin discusses James’s style as bibelot-influenced (69–71). Saisselin’s overall argument, however, represents a puzzling contemporary analogue to James’s in Princess (see Saisselin, chaps. 5 and 7). 25. See Bill Brown’s A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), especially 184–88. Brown focuses primarily on The Spoils of Poynton and The Golden Bowl, rather than the The Princess Casamassima. 26. See Jane Addams, ‘‘The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements’’ and ‘‘The Objective Necessity for Social Settlements’’ in Philanthropy and Social Progress: Seven Essays, ed. Henry Carter Adams (1893; Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, 1970). 1–56. 27. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1889; New York: Signet, 1953), 229, 220. 28. See Alfred Habegger, Gender, Fantasy, and Realism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), chap.7. 29. For critics who focus on the thematic of intra-class competition in James, see Phillip Barrish, American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880–1995 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Nancy Bentley, The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, Wharton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 30. Henry James, The Golden Bowl (1904; New York: Penguin, 1985), 54. 31. Hont, Jealousy of Trade. 32. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (1902; New York: Cosimo, 2005), 11, 46. Hobson describes a sudden shift in U.S. policy from isolationism to expansionism in this period led by the economic interests of the elites of the time (73–80). 33. Neil Harris, Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 251. See also Adeline R. Tinter, The Museum World of Henry James (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1986), 225–27. 34. Harris focuses on J. P. Morgan, but others who could be included would be Henry Clay Frick (Andrew Carnegie’s business partner), Collis and Henry Huntington, Andrew Mellon, and Charles Tyson Yerkes. Other works on the nineteenth-century collecting mania are Saisselin; Neil Harris, The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790–1860 (New York: George Braziller, 1966). On the topic of art patronage and collecting as linked to national propaganda and imperialist aims, see also Binkiewicz; Nathaniel Burt, Palaces for the People: A Social History of the American Art Museum (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977); and Francis K. Pohl, Framing America: A Social History of American Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002). 35. Martha Banta and John Carlos Rowe have both described the way contemporary competition over empire was posed in the Anglo-American scene as that between

206

Notes to Pages 61–63

the United States and Great Britain. See Banta’s Barbaric Intercourse: Caricature and the Culture of Conduct, 1841–1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) and Rowe’s ‘‘Nationalism and Imperialism’’ in Henry James in Context, ed. David McWhirter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 246–57. Rowe, as well as Jonathan Freedman, in The Temple of Culture, helpfully analyze the discourse of British imperial decline important to James. However, both Americans and British also saw a possible rapprochement between the two empires on the basis of racialized imperialism itself, as Freedman briefly (134) and Susan K. Harris at length, in God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898–1902 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) (chap. 5) demonstrate. 36. In ‘‘Transatlantic,’’ I have shown how describing the contest between the empires of England and America through the language of jealousy is not unusual. An early and condensed version of my reading of The Golden Bowl also appears there. 37. Thomas Galt Peyser and Freedman’s helpful readings of the novel both focus on the question of assimilating ‘‘others’’ into the U.S. empire; see respectively ‘‘James, Race, and the Imperial Museum,’’ American Literary History 6, 1 (Spring 1994): 48–70 and Temple. Mark Seltzer links the discourse of sympathy, benevolence, and care in Golden to the ‘‘medical tutelary complex’’ of Western imperialism (James, 85). Finally, Nancy Bentley shows how elite gift-giving in James coincides with anthropological accounts of gift-giving, particularly those of Mauss, and contextualizes James’s work in terms of the relation of Western empires to others (Bentley, 142–58). But both Margery Sabin and Stuart Burrows have pointed out that what complicates James’s account of cultural imperialism is America’s own history as an English colony and James’s depiction of Adam’s purchase of European art, rather than his imposition of American culture on Europe. See Sabin, ‘‘Henry James’s American Dream in The Golden Bowl,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, ed. Jonathan Freedman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 204–23; and Burrows, ‘‘The Golden Fruit: Innocence and Imperialism in The Golden Bowl,’’ Henry James Review 21, 2 (Spring 2000): 95–114. My reading of cultural imperialism in Golden coincides with that of Sabin and Burrows, in that I see James depicting American philanthropy as emerging from its former status as a colony and thus from its attempt to surpass primarily European empires. In this sense, Rowe’s argument that James was not interested in the ‘‘imperial peripheries,’’ only in ‘‘the historical conflicts within Europe for imperial power’’ (‘‘Nationalism,’’ 247), is useful to my argument. However, Rowe’s point must be modified to a degree, since, as recent work on Golden and The Ivory Tower make clear, the history of Asian empires was also of interest to James. 38. For other discussions of violence in James, see Bentley; Peter Brooks, ‘‘The Melodrama of Consciousness,’’ in Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1994), 15–38; Sharon Cameron, Thinking in Henry James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Seltzer, James; and the conclusion to this chapter. 39. Tinter provides support for such a reading, arguing that James associates Adam with Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild and the gift of his collections to the British

Notes to Pages 63–71

207

Museum (209–19). Such an association of Verver with Rothschild would reinforce James’s ambivalent linkage of Americans as also figuratively Jewish upstarts and philanthropists. 40. She is later also figured variously as a ‘‘Creole’’ (64), and as an oriental or African (296). In short, she is associated with the racial mixing of America, rather than the putative racial purity of Europe. 41. Adam is the primary gift-giver, but gift-giving switches hands continually throughout the book, and whoever ‘‘gives’’ always does so to the debt of the receiver. Thus, for example, Charlotte and the Prince propose their love affair is a ‘‘gift’’ to Maggie and Adam, a fulfillment of the need ‘‘to give back . . . all one can’’ in the name of ‘‘one’s decency and one’s honour and one’s virtue’’ (263; see also 278). Maggie interprets Charlotte and the Prince’s gift as a scheme for ‘‘not wounding her’’ by having ‘‘built her in with their purpose,’’ placing her ‘‘in the solid chamber of her helplessness as in a bath of benevolence artfully prepared for her, over the brim of which she could but just manage to see by stretching her neck’’ (355). This set of images, borrowing freely from both Poe and Spencerian political economy, figures benevolent generosity as walling in and drowning a gift-giver, who is now the recipient. Indeed, the image of drowning in a bath was originally the Prince’s in relation to the Ververs (48). Charlotte and the Prince’s affair thus represents the revenge of the recipients against life-destroying generosity—by giving back. 42. There is also a close connection between misanthropy and philanthropy in The Princess as well as Golden Bowl; however, what is interesting is how it is validated in the latter and critically exposed in the former. The Prince says to Maggie, ‘‘Everything’s terrible, cara, in the heart of man’’ (566). It is this sentiment, which the novel more than amply confirms, that makes Adam’s misanthropy so much more understandable than the Princess’s. Here my reading differentiates itself from James Salazar’s engaging analysis of the dialectic of philanthropy and misanthropy in Herman Melville’s Confidence Man in Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America (New York: New York University Press, 2010). Instead of setting these terms in opposition to each other, while blurring the boundaries between them, as Salazar says Melville does (41–62), I am arguing that James suggests that it is Adam’s misanthropy that leads to his philanthropy, in his desire for ‘‘impersonal whiteness.’’ 43. On Nietzsche’s essay, see Jaap Van Der Tas in ‘‘Dilettantism and Academies of Art: The Netherlands Example,’’ in Paying the Piper: Causes and Consequences of Art Patronage, ed. Judith Huggins Balfe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 37. Likewise, Bernard Berenson, a friend of Wharton and James, argued that the expert connoisseur was as great as the artist (Saisselin, 149–51). James, who bases the main hero of The Outcry on an expert connoisseur like Berenson seems to be responding to as well as criticizing these sets of arguments. 44. For a completely different reading of American Scene, see Ross Posnock, ‘‘Affirming the Alien: The Pragmatist Pluralism of The American Scene,’’ in Freedman, ed., Companion, 224–46.

208

Notes to Pages 71–76

45. Henry James, The American Scene (1907; New York: Scribner’s, 1946). 46. See David Leverenz on this discourse (127); see also my Chapter 3. 47. I adapt this term from Wai-Chee Dimock (who adapts it from E. P. Thompson) and her discussion of economic equations in regards to suffering in the realist novel in ‘‘The Economy of Pain: Capitalism, Humanitarianism, and the Realistic Novel’’ in New Essays on the Rise of Silas Lapham, ed. Donald Pease (New York: Cambridge University Press), 67–90. 48. In recent years, Peter Brooks and Sharon Cameron have focused on the thematics of tyranny and freedom in James. Building on J. A. Ward’s analysis that evil in James is the ‘‘improper intervention in the life of another’’ (30), Brooks states that in James, ‘‘evil . . . means denying to someone the means to free realization of his . . . full potential as a moral being,’’ while good is ‘‘the refusal to betray, a full awareness of the independence of other beings’’ (30). Likewise, Sharon Cameron argues that in James ‘‘consciousness desires to be sovereign in a world where other persons . . . are . . . also represented as resisting that desire.’’ This, she says, explains the ‘‘violence’’ (30) of James’s texts. Finally, for a helpful account of both James’s account of freedom for his characters and the critical tradition on freedom in James, see Seltzer, James, 88–89, 94–96. Chapter 2. ‘‘Livin’ on My Money’’: The Politics of Gratitude and Ingratitude in Howells 1. See Barrish; Daniel Borus, Writing Realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the Mass Market (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford, Calif..: Stanford University Press, 1990); Nancy Glazener, Reading for Realism (Durham, N.C..: Duke University Press, 1997; Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Thomas Galt Peyser, Utopia and Cosmopolis: Globalization in the Era of American Literary Realism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998); and Christopher Wilson, Labor. 2. On Howells’s self-supporting professionalism and earning power, see Edwin Cady, The Road to Realism: The Early Years of William Dean Howells, 1837–1885 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1956). 3. Howells’s famous 1893 essay, ‘‘The Man of Letters as Man of Business,’’ which links intellectual work to labor, is often used to support such a reading of Hazard; however, rethinking the latter forces us to rethink the former. While an alliance between intellectuals and the working class is the tentative solution Howells proposes in ‘‘Letters,’’ the majority of the essay is devoted to tracing out all the hurdles and barriers that make it impossible for authors to support themselves on the market. Mark Twain (‘‘an author whose name is known everywhere’’ [300]), and whose financial struggles and quest for a patron are the subject of the next chapter, is apparently used by Howells in the essay as a prime example. In other words, both the essay and novel show the ways the myth of the free and beneficent market is untrue in print

Notes to Pages 76–78

209

culture and seek solutions to the dilemma. See ‘‘The Man of Letters as Man of Business,’’ in Criticism and Fiction and Other Essays, ed. Clara Marburg Kirk and Rudolph Kirk (New York: New York University Press, 1959), 298–309. 4. William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (New York: Penguin, 1980), 18; see 183–85 for Dryfoos’s lack of interest in the magazine’s profitability. 5. For this summary of Page’s struggles, his request to Carnegie, and its outcome, see John Milton Cooper, Jr., Walter Hines Page: The Southerner as American, 1855– 1918 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 51–53, 64–65, 72–75, 110–12, 132–33, 186–87. For a more general account of the battles over journalistic objectivity at the turn of the century, see Jean Chalaby, The Invention of Journalism (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998); Francesca Sawaya, Modern Women, Modern Work: Domesticity, Professionalism and American Writing, 1890–1950 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), chap. 4, and Michael Schudson, Discovering the News (New York: Basic Books, 1978). 6. For details of the history of Carnegie’s syndicate, I have relied especially on Joseph Frazier Wall, Andrew Carnegie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 429–43; and Nasaw, Carnegie, 235–36. 7. Howells apparently did not meet Carnegie in person until 1892, after Hazard was published, when he wrote to his father, ‘‘I liked him. Still, I would rather not be one of his hands.’’ See Selected Letters, vol. 4, 1892–1901, ed. Thomas Wortham, Christoph K. Lohmann, and David J. Nordloh (Boston: Twayne, 1981), 12. ‘‘The Gospel of Wealth’’ makes a satirical intertextual appearance in Hazard, as I show below. Later, a direct critique of Homestead appears in ‘‘Letters of an Altrurian Traveller’’ in 1893–94 (Altrurian, 184–85). Finally, in Through the Eye of the Needle (1907), Howells’s critical analysis of the ‘‘plutocratic mind’’ and its philanthropy responds directly to Carnegie’s claims in ‘‘The Gospel of Wealth’’ (Altrurian, 276–77). Christianson also notes that Howells criticizes Carnegie in Annie Kilburn, 177–79. 8. See Nasaw, Carnegie, xii. 9. Howells’s interest in the sociocultural phenomenon of both public and private dinners is worth a longer investigation than I can provide here. See Silas Lapham, Hazard, Altrurian, and My Mark Twain (New York: Harper, 1910). 10. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 86. 11. See Barrish and Glazener, and implicitly, if not explicitly, Kaplan in Realism. My argument, as will become clear, is particularly indebted to but also seeks to challenge Barrish’s and Kaplan’s differently compelling and influential arguments. 12. Amanda Anderson, ‘‘Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity’’ in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 268. 13. Peyser also focuses on Howells’s cosmopolitanism in Utopia; however, he defines it in a way quite different from mine, emphasizing how it destabilizes the grounds of knowledge and creates a postmodern sense of contingency (98–99). He

210

Notes to Pages 78–80

does note that Howells’s characters also demonstrate cosmopolitan ‘‘detachment’’ (106), but that is not central to his definition of cosmopolitanism. By contrast, relying on both Barrish’s argument about the importance of cultural capital in Howells, and Anderson’s definition of cosmopolitanism as ‘‘cultivated detachment,’’ I emphasize the intellectual authority that Howells links to the term. 14. William Dean Howells, Annie Kilburn, in Novels, 1886–88, ed. Don L. Cook (New York: Library of America, 1989), 643–865, 736. 15. Hildegard Hoeller’s analysis of The Rise of Silas Lapham in Gift to Commodity is useful in terms of its focus on the question of returns, though it poses it through the question of the ‘‘gift’’ rather than philanthropy in corporate capitalism. 16. See ‘‘The Real Howells’’ in Theodore Dreiser: A Selection of Uncollected Prose, ed. Donald Pizer (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977), 141–46. To say Howells is no longer canonical may seem a bit of an overstatement; nonetheless, Howells was excised from the seventh edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature and restored with two short, minor selections in the eighth edition, while new space has been made for the many different writers whose careers he helped sponsor or promote (Stephen Crane, Abraham Cahan, Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mark Twain, among others). 17. Even Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson’s informative biography William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) focuses on a national narrative, rather than a cosmopolitan narrative, finding his interest in international literature ‘‘paradoxical’’ (xiv; see also 58, 74, 102). Edwin Cady, by contrast, in Road to Realism shows how Howells consistently used his powerful position as an editor to promote a cosmopolitan literary culture in the United States (173–78). 18. Literary Friends and Acquaintances: A Personal Retrospect of American Authorship (1900; New York: Harper, 1901), 37. 19. The alternately bold and sycophantic letter that Howells sent to Fields after his trip to Boston makes clear how little the Cambridge literati had helped him and how much he hoped they could and would. See letter to James T. Fields, August 22, 1860, Fields Collection, FI 2319. Huntington Library. 20. See Cady, Road to Realism, 82, 90. 21. Goodman and Dawson, 48–49, 68–71. 22. See Selected Letters of William Dean Howells, vol. 1, 1852–72, ed. George Arms, Richard H. Ballinger, Christoph K. Lohmann, and John K. Reeves (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 173. The editors of Howells’s letters, as well as other critics, have pointed out Howells’s ‘‘genius for forming new friendships and maintaining old ones’’ (Selected Letters 1: 246); see also Melissa McFarland Pennell, ‘‘The Mentor’s Charge: Literary Mentoring in Howells’s Criticism and Fiction,’’ in American Literary Mentors, ed. Irene C. Goldman-Price and Melissa McFarland Pennell (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999), 34–46.

Notes to Pages 81–95

211

23. See Paul Giles, Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and Transatlantic Imaginary (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002); William Stowe, Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). For other versions of these two arguments about the nineteenth century, see Bruce A. Harvey, American Geographics: U.S. National Narratives and the Representation of the Non-European World, 1830–65 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001); and Larzer Ziff, Return Passages: Great American Travel Writing 1780–1910 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000). Peyser in Utopia usefully demonstrates the ways globalization shapes realist and utopian fiction at the turn of the century, while from a different vantage point, Kaplan in The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002) argues that American imperialism shapes American literature of the period. 24. The full story of the publication of Venetian Life is narrated effectively by James Woodress in Howells and Italy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1952), 20–55. 25. On the book’s popularity and its effect on the Boston literati, see Cady 142–46; Goodman and Dawson 116–17. 26. Selected Literary Criticism, vol. 2, 1886–1897, ed. Donald Pizer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 35–36. 27. On the public criticism he received, see Selected Letters of William Dean Howells, vol. 3, 1882–91, ed. Robert C. Leitz, III, with Richard H. Ballinger, Christoph K. Lohmann (Boston: Twayne, 1980), 145–46, 200–201. 28. See the Introduction for the importance of political economy’s use of the term ‘‘altruism’’ at the time. 29. See, for example, Mrs. March’s analysis of every person’s behavior toward the Dryfooses at Mrs. Horn’s musical soiree (236–41). 30. Freedman in Professions; Goodman and Dawson; Kaplan Realism; and Barrish. 31. By comparing the ways both March and Beaton criticize radical activism, I am arguing that Howells is distancing himself from their position. For a different reading, see Barrish, 34. 32. While Garber focuses on this ‘‘libidinal economy’’ in terms of actual patron/ client relations in Chapter 1 of her book, Howells analyzes something perhaps even more interesting: the psychology of the fantasy of sponsorship in the era of corporate capitalism. 33. For repetition of these fantasies, see 131, 404–5. 34. Even more striking in relation to Howells’s own history of state patronage, Lindau has refused his pension from the government and has a history of refusing to be bought off or be ‘‘grateful’’ (276–77). 35. See Chapter 5 of this book for my discussion of how heiresses in misogynist male modernist texts are figured both as the siren call of the market to which the male author prostitutes himself and yearningly as a solution to the problem of funding.

212

Notes to Pages 95–102

36. In a famous letter to Henry James right after the Haymarket anarchists had been hanged, Howells wrote, ‘‘I’m not in a very good humor with ‘America’ . . . after fifty years of optimistic content with ‘civilization’ and its ability to come out all right in the end, I now abhor it, and feel that it is coming out all wrong in the end, unless it bases itself anew on a real equality. Meantime, I wear a fur-lined coat, and live in all the luxury my money can buy’’ (Howells, Letters, 3: 231). 37. While I agree with Barrish and also Michael Davitt Bell in The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) that much of Howells’s work can potentially be linked to a misogynist realist ethos, Hazard seems to present an exception to his usual portrayal of women. One cannot help but wonder if Howells’s greater sympathy to the new woman here than in any other of his novels has to do with the death of his own daughter Winny under the violent paternalistic ‘‘rest cure’’ treatment of S. Weir Mitchell, a cure Howells and his wife approved and then apparently regretted. Winny’s death occurred while Howells was writing Hazard. 38. See, for example, Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., ‘‘William Dean Howells and Race: Charles W. Chesnutt’s Disappointment of the Dean,’’ Nineteenth-Century Literature 51, 4 (1997): 479–99, which charts Howells’s aggressive disciplining of Chesnutt, and Chesnutt’s critical response to it. Chapter 3. ‘‘The Gospel of Self’’: Philanthropy and Political Economy in Mark Twain 1. ‘‘Mark the Double Twain,’’ English Journal 24, 8 (October 1935): 616. 2. William Dean Howells, My Mark Twain (New York: Harper’s, 1910), 101. 3. See Susan Gillman’s use and critique of this phenomenon in Dark Twins: Identity and Imposture in Mark Twain’s America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 4. See Richard Lowry’s thoughtful analysis of these debates in ‘‘Littery Man’’: Mark Twain and Modern Authorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 6–12. 5. Rotundo, American Manhood, 195. 6. Ivy Schweitzer, Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 9. See also Pamela Laird, who argues that the language of mentoring and social networking does not occur in business until the mid-twentieth century, while ‘‘the language of family and friendship prevailed’’ (22). 7. Robbins, Upward, xvi, 8. Pamela Laird also discusses the way the Horatio Alger stories actually emphasize patronage and friendship, though we have misread their significance (36–38). Kevin K. Gaines provides a different angle on misreading the Alger narrative by discussing the ‘‘self-lacerating’’ distortions and ‘‘internalized racism’’ that resulted from the late nineteenth-century, middle-class black discourse of

Notes to Pages 102–106

213

uplift that borrows from white self-help narratives. See Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 1–6. 8. Peter Messent, Mark Twain and Male Friendship: The Twichell, Howells, and Rogers Friendship (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 32–33, 135. 9. Which Was It? In Which Was the Dream? And Other Symbolic Writings of the Later Years, ed. John S. Tuckey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 379. 10. I am making an argument somewhat comparable to Harris’s in God’s Arbiters. She argues that Twain’s ire late in life has usually been linked to personal and economic failure, whereas she sees it ‘‘at least as much’’ as a response to his sense of national betrayal as America’s imperialist adventures intensified (7). I am arguing that these are not contrary possibilities, but in fact are linked in Twain. Twain’s sense that the nation had betrayed its ideals is connected to his own imbrication in the culture of corporate capitalism and thus American imperialism. 11. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (1869; New York: Penguin, 2002), 96. 12. Henry Huttleston Rogers and Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Correspondence with Henry Huttleston Rogers, 1893–1909, ed. Lewis Leary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 709–11. 13. Messent, 134. 14. In an article written before his book, Messent, like me, examines the ways ‘‘the worlds of literature and business intersect’’ (60) through an examination of the Rogers/Twain friendship; however, he does not focus on patronage or philanthropy, as I do. Instead he focuses particularly on how business/sentiment and masculinity/ femininity are not as divided as historians and critics have presumed. Nonetheless his conclusion complements my overall argument in that he highlights Twain’s anxiety about his ‘‘dependency’’ on Rogers (76), as evidenced in another of Twain’s dream writings Which Was the Dream? See Messent, ‘‘Mark Twain, Manhood, the Henry H. Rogers Friendship, and Which Was the Dream?’’ Arizona Quarterly 61, 1 (Spring 2005): 57–64. 15. Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (1966; New York: Touchstone, 1983), 114. 16. On the wealthy, see Twain’s Notebooks and Journals, ed. Frederick Anderson, Michael B. Frank, and Kenneth M. Sanderson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 240, 548, 561, 584, 600, 609; see also Justin Kaplan, 286–87, 317–19. 17. Sandage in Losers makes Twain an important figure in his chapter on the genre of ‘‘begging letters’’ to rich philanthropists, like Rockefeller. Sandage reads Twain, as I do, as having ‘‘failed’’ as a writer and thus needing to find a sponsor (see Intro., note 4). Messent in ‘‘Manhood’’ disputes Sandage’s reading of Twain’s ‘‘begging letters,’’ reading the men as being on ‘‘equal terms’’ (61), but Messent’s overall argument about Twain’s anxiety about his economic dependency on Rogers undermines such a disputation.

214

Notes to Pages 106–110

18. Twain remembered the meeting with Rogers as occurring earlier in 1891 on a yacht (Rogers and Twain, Correspondence, 11). Either way, whether on a yacht or in a hotel, Rotundo’s larger point holds. 19. Peter Clark’s history of British men’s clubs, British Clubs and Societies, 1580– 1800: The Origins of an Associational World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) describes them as a form of voluntary association that contributed to modernity by including ‘‘preindustrial’’ forms of sociability in a new commercial context. These forms of sociability include ‘‘heavy drinking, ceremony and ritual, client-patron relationships and selectivity’’ (471). 20. See Adam, Buying Respectability, 14–18. See also Nathaniel Burt, Palaces for the People (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977), 88–89. For a useful analysis of the continuing relationship between elite clubs and cultural philanthropy today, see Ostrower. 21. Cited in Century Club, The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Founding of The Century (New York: Century Association, 1897), 7. 22. John Elderkin, A Brief History of the Lotos Club (New York: Lotos Club, 1895), 8–9. See also Arthur Bartlett Maurice, ‘‘Literary Clubland,’’ The Bookman, 21, 4 (June 1905): 392–406; 21, 5 (July 1905): 496–514; and Cosmos Club, The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Founding of the Cosmos Club of Washington D.C. (Washington, D.C: Cosmos Club, 1904). 23. That these new links were also controversial is evident in the fact that Elderkin records that the more ‘‘literary’’ members left the club in protest and formed the Arcadia Club. 24. Rossiter Johnson, James Howard Bridge, Clinton Scollard, eds., Liber Scriptorum: The Second Book of the Authors Club (New York: Authors Club, 1921), 234. 25. Dana Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), especially 131–32. 26. Twain, as a popular member and speaker at these clubs, noted and came to excoriate these links—often in speeches in the clubs themselves. See Bernard DeVoto, ed., Mark Twain in Eruption (1922; New York: Harper, 1940), 70–77. 27. Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: Norton, 2011), 100. 28. Mark Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989); Leonard Ellis, ‘‘Men Among Men: An Exploration of All-Male Relationships in Victorian America’’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1982); Messent; Rotundo. 29. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer can be seen as exemplary in this regard. Tom explains the initiation process to Huck for his all-boy robber gang, ‘‘to swear to stand by one another, and never tell the gang’s secrets, even if you’re chopped all to flinders, and kill anybody and all his family that hurts one of the gang.’’ See Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, ed. Beverly Lyon Clark (1876; New York: Norton, 2007), 168. 30. I am assuming in this chapter, without analyzing at length, the defense of racial and gender turf in men’s clubs. Indeed, if there is one consistent feature of all

Notes to Pages 110–116

215

the club manifestoes, it is the panicked defense of clubs as single-sex institutions. In different ways over time, the documents seek to defuse charges of misogyny, homosexuality, alcoholism, and immaturity. As for race, the whiteness and class status of the membership of the clubs is simply presumed. Pamela Laird discusses the issue of loyalty, particularly in terms of what she calls ‘‘authority’’ and ‘‘peer networks’’ (28– 31) as does Cannadine (105–6, 231–32, 285–96). 31. Thomas Lawson, Frenzied Finance: The Crime of Amalgamated (New York: Ridgway-Thayer, 1905), 12. 32. Indeed, one of Lawson’s footnotes cites Rogers’s friendships with Twain and Lincoln as proving Rogers is a ‘‘resolute friend’’ (14). Likewise, Pamela Laird cites Andrew Carnegie’s lifelong guilt for ‘‘refusing to help my friends’’ (J. Edgar Thomas and Thomas Scott) after they had made bad investments in the panic of 1873 (30–31). 33. Such erotics complicate David Leverenz’s reading of masculinity in corporate capitalism, which focuses solely on ‘‘Daddy’s’’ relations to sons and daughters and is more in line with Robbins’s reading in Upward, which sees a variety of sexualities at play in the discourses of liberal capitalism. 34. Tarbell is cited in Rogers and Twain, Correspondence, 5. See also Messent, 152–53. Lawson likewise describes the importance of publicity and the cultivation of the media generally in his expose´ and usefully highlights the inextricable relation between media, corporate capitalism, and men’s recreational culture: ‘‘Public opinion is made through the daily press, through financial publications of various kinds, and through ‘news bureaus.’ Every great daily has a financial editor and a corps of experts in finance who spend their days on ‘‘the Street’’ cultivating the friendship of the financiers. At night they are round the clubs and hotels where the brokers and promoters congregate, debating the events of the day and organizing those of the morrow’’ (219). For the larger public relations context, see Marchand. 35. Susan K. Harris, ‘‘Mark Twain and Gender,’’ in A Historical Guide to Mark Twain, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 179. 36. The editors of the Rogers/Twain letters note that even after Rogers’s death ‘‘how to memorialize Henry Rogers and his goodness remained for Clemens a conscience-rending problem’’ (Rogers and Twain, Correspondence, 665). 37. Lears, ‘‘The Managerial Revitalization of the Rich,’’ 193. 38. Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (1889; New York: Penguin, 1971), 405. 39. In this sense, ‘‘scientific philanthropy’’ could be seen as a misnomer in that the notion of science is used to obfuscate antidemocratic logic. Thus Sealander argues that Rockefeller and Carnegie ‘‘cared deeply about democracy,’’ but nonetheless concedes they were ‘‘not democrats’’ (229). Zunz describes American philanthropy as representing an alliance between corporate elites, reformers, and the middle class, and while he notes tensions, argues that ‘‘de´tente’’ was achieved between the groups to the benefit of all (17–26). By contrast, Roelofs and Whitaker see such ‘‘de´tente’’ as cooptation of reformers and the middle class to antidemocratic ends.

216

Notes to Pages 116–122

40. Andrew Carnegie, ‘‘Tributes to Mark Twain,’’ North American Review 191, 655 (June 1910): 827. 41. Andrew Carnegie, Triumphant Democracy (New York: J.J. Little, 1886). See James D. Williams on Twain owning Triumphant Democracy in ‘‘The Use of History in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee’’ PMLA 80, 1 (March 1965): 102–10. I would add that while ‘‘Gospel of Wealth’’ was a transatlantic sensation, Triumphant was only apparently one, since Carnegie instructed his secretary to ‘‘deluge’’ Great Britain with free and cheap copies of the book (Nasaw, Carnegie, 276). Carnegie was throughout his life the patron of his own publications, providing them gratis to political parties and the public in the hopes of shifting public opinion on key economic and political issues (222–23, 697). 42. David Leverenz calls this ‘‘incorporative whiteness’’ (142). 43. James Salazar’s useful analysis of Yankee in Bodies of Reform also describes the novel as criticizing the ‘‘counterfeit of philanthropic character’’ (65). He is interested primarily in Twain’s analysis of the ‘‘bad boy’’ character and the new disciplinary formations that use that character for imperialist adventures. I am less interested in the formation of ‘‘character’’ than in how Twain describes the self-deluded logic of managerial capitalism and its forms of philanthropy. 44. Likewise in Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), Northern expertise ends up enforcing or worsening race-based hierarchies. 45. Both Rowe in Literary Culture and Harris in God’s Arbiters argue that Twain’s critique in Yankee anticipates ‘‘free-trade imperialism.’’ As opposed to both, I am arguing that Twain does not just anticipate, but analyzes ‘‘free-trade’’ imperialism, of which there were plenty of examples at the time. Furthermore, I want to keep ‘‘freetrade imperialism’’ in quotation marks, because this term is necessarily a problematic one. 46. In terms of Morgan’s violence, Twain describes it in much the same way Adorno and Horkheimer describe bureaucratic violence. Morgan is described as having been a blacksmith and horse doctor, who then ‘‘went over to the great arms factory and learned my real trade . . . learned to make everything—guns, revolvers, cannon, boilers, engines, all sorts of labour-saving machinery’’ (36). Morgan is an efficiency expert who ‘‘saves’’ labor in two senses: first, in the sense of human work; second, in terms of more efficiently killing people. Thus, in the end of the novel, Clarence’s plan for killing the largest amount of men is judged ‘‘too expensive’’ (387) by Morgan, who argues for a more economically and energy efficient plan of genocide. 47. Karl Marx, from ‘‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,’’ in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 73. 48. The autobiographical content of Twain’s dream writings has been frequently noted. Particularly interesting to my argument is Gillman’s, that they all depict ‘‘a writer writing and then somehow losing control over his own literary creation’’ (179). While Gillman does not analyze sponsorship in relation to this loss of control, she

Notes to Pages 122–135

217

shows how it is connected to various other economic and social predicaments of the time for authors. 49. For a general summary of the structure of Twain’s dream writings, see Justin Kaplan, 344. 50. Twain also plays with the IP’s given name, Solomon, and his nickname Sol, emphasizing the emptiness of both the human soul and its putative wisdom. 51. While I am focusing here on the similarity of Twain’s oxymorons to Carnegie’s, one could also think of Rockefeller’s ‘‘benevolent trusts.’’ 52. Interestingly, Twain apparently had this essay, with no authorship information, sent to Carnegie, who equally interestingly, privately wrote that ‘‘it doesn’t go much deeper than usual.’’ See The Works of Mark Twain: What Is Man? And Other Philosophical Writings, vol. 19, ed. Paul Baender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 17. 53. Shershow argues this dynamic still holds in postmodern political economy, which appropriates Mauss and Bataille to argue that giving is at the center of a capitalist economy (91–93). 54. In Twain, Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War, ed. Jim Zwick (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 57. Chapter 4. ‘‘That Friendship of the Whites’’: Patronage and Philanthropy in Charles Chesnutt An earlier and shorter version of this chapter appeared as ‘‘ ‘That Friendship of the Whites’: Patronage, Philanthropy, and Charles Chesnutt’s The Colonel’s Dream,’’ American Literature 83 (December 2011): 775–801, reprinted by permission. 1. ‘‘To Be an Author’’: Charles Chesnutt’s Letters, 1889–1905, ed. Robert C. Leitz, III, and Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 102–3. 2. These two kinds of friendship have been theorized in other ways that can be linked to Chesnutt’s thinking. See Kevin Gaines’s account in Uplifting of two conflicting conceptions of ‘‘uplift’’ in the black community at the turn of the century (xiv), and Ross Posnock’s account of fin de sie`cle black intellectual ideals of ‘‘democratic citizenship’’ and the ‘‘kingdom of culture’’ (12) in Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). For examples of how Chesnutt’s conception of these two kinds of friendship spans his career, see his journal entry of 7 March 1882 in The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt, ed. Richard Brodhead (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 171–72, and his 1916 speech, ‘‘Social Discrimination’’ in Essays and Speeches, ed. Jesse S. Crisler, Robert C. Leitz, III, and Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 423–36. For other, more diffuse versions of his conception, see An Exemplary Citizen: Letters, 1906–1933, ed. Jesse S. Crisler, Robert C. Leitz, III,

218

Notes to Pages 135–136

and Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 234–36; also Journals 141. 3. Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 206. Brodhead emphasizes the determining outcome of the ideology of white Northern philanthropy for Chesnutt’s psyche, career, and representations in both Cultures and Journals (8–14), despite the fact that he himself notes that the school Chesnutt attended was also supported by the Freedman’s Bureau and private black contributions (5–7). 4. See, for example, Dean McWilliams, Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002); Matthew Wilson, Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2004). In McElrath’s ‘‘William Dean Howells and Race,’’ McElrath usefully highlights how Howells—through his reviews—promoted and then eventually stymied Chesnutt’s career. McElrath, however, also assumes that Howells expresses the views of a larger white audience. By contrast, I am highlighting the social practices that even allow Chesnutt to have the opportunity to address an audience. 5. Another interesting problem in Brodhead’s analysis of Chesnutt’s ‘‘career’’ is that he apparently never was a success in the sense Brodhead implies—that of being able to support himself on the literary market as a professional writer. While numerous biographies cite a letter from Chesnutt to Page in 1899 in which Chesnutt says he is retiring from his remunerative law career to pursue writing full time, and most claim he returned to that career after the financial failure of The Marrow of Tradition sometime after 1901, McElrath and Leitz in Author suggest it is improbable that Chesnutt ever actually did retire (133–34). In other words, it may be that neither Chesnutt’s ‘‘success,’’ as Brodhead calls it, nor his failure can be linked to an audience or a market. Nonetheless, as I discuss in the conclusion to this chapter, I do not want therefore to suggest that audience is an unimportant factor in Chesnutt’s career; rather, I simply want to highlight the continuing work we need to do to clarify what we mean by the ‘‘literary market.’’ 6. I have focused on the problematic but relatively successful Page/Chesnutt friendship, rather than two other even more problematic and relatively unsuccessful friendships, with George Washington Cable and Albion Tourgee. These deserve more scrutiny than I can provide here. 7. I borrow the term ‘‘white life’’ novel from David Roediger, who uses it to characterize African American writing about whiteness in Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (New York: Schocken, 1998), 8. 8. John Milton Cooper provides examples of these troubling racial politics in Walter Hines Page: The Southerner as American, 1855–1918 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977): Page regularly used the word ‘‘nigger’’ at the Atlantic, despite Francis Garrison’s protests (110); in addition, he was not only Washington’s and Chesnutt’s publisher, but also Thomas Dixon’s, a fact that Garrison, among others, protested (168–69); furthermore, Page advocated for Anglo-American racial unity

Notes to Pages 136–137

219

through imperialism, not only during the Spanish-American war but later, and even more controversially when he became ambassador to England and used that racial logic to promote America’s entry into World War I (137–39; Chapter 8). 9. As I noted in the Introduction, Rockefeller’s philanthropic giving preceded the institutional form it took—including in the South. Among his other Southern initiatives was the underwriting of Spelman College (named after his wife) from the 1880s onward. Furthermore, Chesnutt moved to Cleveland in 1883 in part because he knew that Rockefeller’s companies hired African American stenographers (McElrath and Leitz in Author, 14–15). 10. In addition, many of the Northern philanthropies had interlocking directorates. According to Cooper, three-quarters of the members of the Southern Education Board were members also of the General Education Board, as well as the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission (207). Page served on the Southern Education Board, the Jeanes and Slater Funds, and the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission (191). Page’s career also exemplifies the close relation between the state, philanthropy, and imperialist policy. After serving as Ambassador to England, Page introduced Rockefeller Foundation board members to British officials, resulting in Rockefeller-funded programs in Asia and Africa (226–28). Such interlocking directorates and close relations among philanthropists and the state continue to be common today. See Mary Anna Culleton Colwell, ‘‘The Foundation Connection: Links Among Foundations and Recipient Organizations,’’ in Arnove, 413–52. 11. Eric Anderson and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., Dangerous Donations: Northern Philanthropy and Southern Black Education, 1902–1930 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999). 12. Ralph Ellison, in his stunning essay on the important and problematic relation of social science and Carnegie’s and Rockefeller’s philanthropy in the United States to American race relations, ‘‘An American Dilemma: A Review’’ (1944), describes this dynamic in a fascinating way: ‘‘the planning of the Northern ruling groups in relation to the South and the Negro has always presented itself as non-planning and philanthropy on the surface, and as sociological theory underneath’’ (335). Ellison defines ‘‘sociological theory’’ as the use of the ‘‘scientific method with its supposed objectivity’’ by the North and the South to agree on ‘‘the Negro’s biological, psychological, intellectual, and moral inferiority’’ (329). Here the collusion of Northern and Southern white elites in black oppression is implemented by Northern philanthropy in its sponsorship of an agreed-upon sociology of black inferiority. See The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1944), 328–40. 13. Zunz adds statistics to Anderson and Moss’s analysis of the impact of the GEB on Southern black education. He writes that in 1890, Alabama’s expenditure for whites was 18.4 percent higher than for blacks. As a result of the impact of Northern corporate-based philanthropy, by 1911 expenditure for whites was 459 percent higher. In contrast to Anderson and Moss, Zunz nonetheless argues that such statistics belie the fact that eventually there were ‘‘tangible results,’’ proving that such philanthropy is marked by ‘‘moral integrity’’ (43), despite what the statistics seem to suggest.

220

Notes to Pages 137–147

14. See Anderson and Moss; Chesnutt criticizes this new Northern philanthropy directly in his essay ‘‘The Disfranchisement of the Negro’’ (1903) in Essays. 15. The close relation between social reform, philanthropy, and print culture has most recently been emphasized by Claybaugh, Rodgers, and Ryan. 16. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (1901; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1986), 217. 17. If patronage was a term used by Progressives, another term that might capture the relationships here is ‘‘crony capitalism,’’ a term that Carnegie’s biographer David Nasaw uses (106–8). According to the OED, the word ‘‘crony’’ originates in the 1640s and means ‘‘An intimate friend or associate; a ‘chum’ ’’ (Web, Def. 2) a term that changed so that by the 1840s, and particularly in the United States, ‘‘cronyism’’ comes to mean ‘‘The appointment of friends to government posts without proper regard to their qualifications’’ (Web, Def. 1b) hence ‘‘crony capitalism.’’ See ‘‘crony,’’ ‘‘cronyism.’’ 18. See, for example, his review of Up from Slavery (1901), ‘‘The Negro’s Franchise’’ (1901), and ‘‘The Disfranchisement of the Negro’’ (1903) in Essays. 19. See my Introduction. 20. As a lawyer, Chesnutt was always painfully aware of the impossibly constricted political and legal terrain on which blacks operated in the post-bellum period. See especially ‘‘The Disfranchisement of the Negro’’ (1903) in Essays. 21. Schweitzer cites this slogan as exemplary of this radical model of friendship. This aspect of Chesnutt’s thinking complicates Brook Thomas’s reading of his work as linking moral progress with capitalism, as did the Republican Party of the time (178–80). In Chesnutt’s work, capitalism is an improvement from what he describes as a feudal Southern culture, but he also consistently holds up politically radical ideals (whether from the past or present) to demonstrate the limitations of capitalism for progressive race politics. 22. See also McElrath and Leitz on Chesnutt’s critical accounts of his white ‘‘friends’’ (Author, 13–14). 23. I am indebted here to Warren’s reading of how white realists and politicians used the New England schoolmistress to discredit the abolitionist legacy as well as its characteristic literary form—sentimentalism (89–103). 24. Charles Chesnutt, ‘‘The March of Progress,’’ in Stories, Novels, and Essays, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: Library of America, 2002), 772. For Chesnutt’s rereading of Reconstruction and the carpetbagger, see Essays (60, 105, 164–65, 189); for praise of an older New England humanist philanthropy, see Essays 102. 25. Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 130. 26. Charles Chesnutt, The Colonel’s Dream (1905; reprint, New York: Harlem Moon, 2005), 165. 27. A Business Career, ed. Matthew Wilson and Marjan A. Van Schank (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 199–200.

Notes to Pages 148–161

221

28. Evelyn’s Husband, ed. Matthew Wilson and Marjan A. Van Schank (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 31. 29. Chesnutt wrote elsewhere about Berea’s struggle to remain integrated (Exemplary, 56). 30. However, Ellison does not provide an antidote for white capitalist philanthropic pathology, while Chesnutt imagines there is one that lies in careful analysis of what kind of aid is due to others, whether enemies or friends, ‘‘by considerations of humanity.’’ 31. See McWilliams, Race, but especially Wilson, Whiteness, on how Chesnutt criticizes post-Reconstruction nostalgia about the Old South. 32. While Chesnutt is clearly critical of French, he interestingly frames French and Treadwell’s partnership in terms comparable to the narratives of black women writers of the time, as analyzed by Ann DuCille and Claudia Tate, where marriage signifies shared political aspirations and commitment to uplift. However, French and Treadwell end up divided on their commitment and do not marry. See DuCille, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) and Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 33. Chesnutt analyzes the problems as well as benefits of residual Southern ‘‘highmindedness’’ most directly in his portrayal of Mr. Delamere in The Marrow of Tradition (1901). 34. See also McWilliams, Race, and Wilson, Whiteness. 35. A parallel and equally extended account in the novel of the closed and circular cycle of violent white ressentiment, which leads to a black quest for ‘‘revenge’’ (286), but which ends in death for both black and white (in ‘‘nothing!’’ [287]) is the story of Viney and old Dudley. 36. Here Sianne Ngai’s recuperation of the usually denigrated emotion of ressentiment or envy and her re-reading of it as ‘‘an ability to recognize, and antagonistically respond to, potentially real and institutionalized forms of inequality’’ (129), mentioned in Chapter 1, is highly useful. Ngai focuses on gender as particularly linked to ressentiment historically. It would be interesting to trace out its relation to race as well. 37. For Chesnutt’s critique of contemporary Northern disengagement with the South, see also Essays 106–7, 119–20, 161–62. 38. More can be said about this complex and layered ending than I can include here, including how it responds to and comments on Albion Tourgee’s A Fool’s Errand (1879) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851–52), but also how, with the sacrifice of the ‘‘friendly’’ but limited Northern white capitalist cum philanthropist’s child, it anticipates Richard Wright’s Native Son. 39. See note 8 above. 40. Page, A Publisher’s Confession, 55. 41. Chesnutt is perpetually concerned in his letters to his publishers about how little they are advertising his books and thus attracting an audience. But he also solicits

222

Notes to Pages 161–166

his publishers’ advice on how best to address his audience without alienating them. See Author. 42. Touted by Bill Clinton, Matthew Bishop and Michael Green’s Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), for example, asserts that in a neoliberal globalized economy ‘‘big government’s’’ ‘‘ability to raise taxes is constrained, not least by the need to generate economic growth, which means attracting investment and wealthy residents’’ (10). With a despair comparable to Spencer’s, the authors therefore claim that since governments can no longer effectively tax their citizens, philanthropy by the wealthy is the only hope for dealing with the massive social and environmental crises the world now faces. Acs’s argument also follows this same argument about taxation. Chapter 5. ‘‘Inexplicable Tangles of Personality’’: Patronage, Philanthropy, and Progressive Irony in Theodore Dreiser 1. Theodore Dreiser, The Financier (1912; New York: Meridian, 1995), 140. 2. The ‘‘Trilogy of Desire,’’ includes The Financier, as well as The Titan (1914; New York: Dell, 1959) and The Stoic (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1947). 3. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). 4. A recent account of the importance of irony for the early twentieth century is Matthew Stratton’s The Politics of Irony in American Modernism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). While Stratton does not link irony to Progressivism, he does link it to the philosophical pragmatism of many Progressives. His argument is useful to mine in that he sees irony as ‘‘a rhetorical staging area for the relationships between aesthetic and political problems’’ (24). He furthermore sees useful political possibilities in this period’s use of irony, possibilities about which White is deeply skeptical, and about which I am somewhat less so. 5. Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities (1904; New York: Hill and Wang, 1966), 165. 6. Such resistance is not necessarily ‘‘the triumph of right,’’ since the public is itself treated ‘‘ironically’’ (Pizer 196); nonetheless, it is resistance. See Donald Pizer, The Novels of Theodore Dreiser: A Critical Study (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976). 7. Bruce Robbins, ‘‘Can There Be Loyalty in The Financier? Dreiser and Upward Mobility,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser, ed. Leonard Cassuto and Clare Virginia Eby (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 114. 8. Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 76. David A. Zimmerman makes an argument comparable to Michaels’s in Panic! Markets, Crisis, and Crowds in American Fiction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), chap. 5.

Notes to Pages 166–173

223

9. Michaels’s argument is characteristic of a contemporary political economy that appropriates postmodern theory to legitimate capitalism through gift-giving, as Shershow describes (91–93). 10. Dreiser, Uncollected Prose, 36. 11. Theodore Dreiser, The Genius (1915; Cleveland: World, 1963), 700, 672. 12. One could argue that Dreiser’s second most famous novel, Sister Carrie (1900), represents the same phenomenon, through the figure of a young woman who moves upward, not through hard work, but through the sponsorship of wealthy older men. But this book did not have the same impact as American Tragedy, perhaps because it involved a young woman and depended only on revising the standard woman’s upward mobility narratives through marriage. 13. Dreiser thereby radicalizes the ‘‘vernacular stab at political economy’’ (250) that Sandage finds in ‘‘begging letters’’ to wealthy philanthropists discussed in the Introduction and Chapter 3. Sandage says such letters suggest that a little help is necessary in capitalism; Dreiser suggests that Americans now realize that it must be full and continuous sponsorship. 14. Henry James’s The Ambassadors, Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, The Ivory Tower, Ernest Hemingway’s ‘‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro,’’ and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night are characteristic examples. This heiress can also be linked to the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scapegoating discourse of the female reader as an ‘‘Iron Madonna.’’ See Sawaya, Modern Women, Modern Work, chap. 3. 15. See Jerome Loving, The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) on Sister Carrie (150–85); on the Butterick publications (187–89); on the women who helped him (185, 219–20, 378–95). 16. OED, Web, ‘‘Genial,’’ Def. 1. 17. Theodore Dreiser, Newspaper Days (1922; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 499. 18. See for example, Amy Kaplan’s useful analysis in Social Construction, Chapter 5. 19. Carnegie, The Autobiography, 327. 20. T. J. Jackson Lears in No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture (1981; New York: Pantheon, 1983), describes Carnegie’s reading of Spencer as characteristic of the ‘‘evasive banality’’ with which economic questions were treated generally in the United States (21–22). While this is true, I also see it as purposeful evasion. 21. Loving says that Dreiser first read Spencer in college (36), rather than in Pittsburgh. On Dreiser’s early and conflicting views on Spencer, see Pizer, Uncollected, 107–8, 109–16. 22. Dreiser wrote for this magazine in 1898–1902. If Dreiser’s Butterick work caters to women’s desire to see themselves as fashionable and moral, as Loving argues, I would argue that Dreiser likewise caters in Success to his presumably male audience’s

224

Notes to Pages 173–185

desire to see themselves as upwardly mobile and moral. These articles repeatedly demonstrate that, first, success is solely a matter of hard work and effort, and second, that successful men really only work hard in the interest of bettering the human race (rather than for the purpose of making money). See interviews with Philip D. Armour (129), Marshall Field (137), and Carnegie (167). For Dreiser’s Success articles, see Selected Magazine Articles of Theodore Dreiser, vol. 1, ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Press, 1985). Marchand also highlights how philanthropy was central to the discourse corporate leaders used, arguing that it worked to secure ‘‘moral legitimacy for themselves and their corporations, a legitimacy they feared they had not secured through their . . . business activities’’ (45). 23. Willa Cather’s famous story ‘‘Paul’s Case’’ (1905) relies on a similar dynamic. Paul finds an escape from capitalist reproduction and heteronormativity in the ‘‘theater and at Carnegie Hall,’’ where he ‘‘really lived’’ (110). Carnegie Hall is particularly important to the narrative (104–5). Paul’s ‘‘revolt against the homilies by which the world is run’’ (120), the world of the capitalist ‘‘iron kings’’ (107), is ironically sponsored by these kings. Paul’s revolt but also his failure calls into question the ‘‘sagacity’’ (109) of these iron kings’ myths of upward mobility and success. See Willa Cather, The Troll Garden, ed. James Woodress (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). 24. Theodore Dreiser, A Traveler at Forty (1913; New York: Century, 1914), 11, 5. For Dreiser’s relation to Grant Richards, his patron, see Loving (229–31). 25. Michelangelo for Dreiser, as in James’s The Golden Bowl, is the exemplary instance of the complicated struggle between the patrons and the artist (377). Dreiser likewise records his struggles with his patron, Grant Richards (508–10). 26. According to Yerkes’s biographer, he saw himself as a de Medici in a modern Florence, and newspapers friendly to him called him ‘‘Lorenzo the Magnificent’’ (148, 150). See John Franch, Robber Baron: The Life of Charles Tyson Yerkes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). 27. President Harper of the University of Chicago ended up working against Yerkes in the battle over franchises in Chicago, despite the gifts the university received from him, but Dreiser was told not to include Harper’s actions in his novel (Franch, 298); nonetheless, he clearly hints at Harper’s stand against Yerkes. 28. Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), 31. 29. Apparently a public hospital, open to the poor of all races, was actually something Yerkes’s wife had hoped he would found, but she was disappointed in him (Franch, 151). 30. In terms of ironic reversal in aesthetic philanthropy, see Balfe, Part 2, chap. 4; Part 4; and Conclusion; Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life: 1876– 1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 10, 19–20; Friedman and McGarvie, ‘‘Philanthropy in America: Historicism and Its Discontents,’’ Friedman and Saunders, 258–59, 275–76, 345. Use of such irony, but also the critique of it in architecture, appears in Deyan Sudjic’s The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful— and Their Architects—Shape the World (New York: Penguin, 2006), 11–12. The ironic

Notes to Pages 185–187

225

reversal that Dreiser charts is, of course, a different form of redemption than that James imagines, which comes from the art object itself. Afterword 1. Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 4.

This page intentionally left blank

bibliography

AAUP. Recommended Principles and Practices to Guide Academy-Industry Relationships. 2012. http://www.aaup.org/file/industryall.pdf. Acs, Zoltan. Why Philanthropy Matters: How the Wealthy Give, and What It Means for Our Economic Well-Being. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013. Adam, Thomas. Buying Respectability: Philanthropy and Urban Society in Transnational Perspective, 1840s to 1930s. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. ———, ed. Philanthropy, Patronage, and Civil Society: Experiences from Germany, Great Britain, and North America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Addams, Jane. ‘‘The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements’’; ‘‘The Objective Necessity for Social Settlements.’’ In Philanthropy and Social Progress: Seven Essays, ed. Henry Carter Adams. 1893. Reprint, Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, 1970. 1–56. ———. Twenty Years at Hull-House. 1910. Reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Agnew, Jean Christophe. ‘‘The Consuming Vision.’’ In Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ruth Yeazell. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1994. 190–206. Allen, Robert L. A Guide to Black Power in America. London: Victor Gollancz, 1970. Anderson, Amanda. ‘‘Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity.’’ In Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. 265–89. Anderson, Eric and Alfred A. Moss, Jr. Dangerous Donations: Northern Philanthropy and Southern Black Education, 1902–1930. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999. Anesko, Michael. ‘‘Friction with the Market’’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Arnove, Robert F. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad, ed., Robert F. Arnove. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980. 1–49. Baker, Houston. ‘‘Questionnaire Responses.’’ Modernism/Modernity: ‘‘The Harlem Renaissance and the New Modernist Studies’’ special issue 20, 3 (September 2013): 433–35.

228

Bibliography

Balfe, Judith Huggins, ed. Paying the Piper: Causes and Consequences of Art Patronage. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Banta, Martha. Barbaric Intercourse: Caricature and the Culture of Conduct, 1841–1936. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Barrish, Phillip. American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880–1995. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Bell, Michael Davitt. The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Bellews, Henry W. Historical Sketch of the Union League Club, New York, Its Origin, Organization, and Work, 1863–79. New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1879. Bentley, Nancy. The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, Wharton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Betensky, Carolyn. Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Novel. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. Bigelow, Gordon. Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ———. ‘‘Let There Be Markets: The Evangelical Roots of Economics.’’ Harper’s Magazine (May 2005): 33–38. Binkiewicz, Donna M. Federalizing the Muse: U.S. Arts Policy and the National Endowment for the Arts, 1965–1980. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Bishop, Matthew and Michael Green. Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008. Boren, David. ‘‘Letter from President David Boren to the Faculty at the University of Oklahoma.’’ 27 June 2012. Email. Bornstein, Erica. The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality, and Economics in Zimbabwe. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005. Borus, Daniel H. Writing Realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the Mass Market. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984. ———. ‘‘The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed.’’ In The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. 29–73. Brodhead, Richard. Cultures of Letters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Brooks, Peter. ‘‘The Melodrama of Consciousness.’’ In Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ruth Yeazell. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1994. 15–38. Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Brown, E. Richard. ‘‘Rockefeller Medicine in China: Professionalism and Imperialism.’’ In Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad, ed. Robert F. Arnove. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980. 123–46. Brown, Wendy. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Bibliography

229

Burrows, Stuart. ‘‘The Golden Fruit: Innocence and Imperialism in The Golden Bowl.’’ Henry James Review 21, 2 (Spring 2000): 95–114. Burt, Nathaniel. Palaces for the People: A Social History of the American Art Museum. Boston: Little, Brown, 1977. Cady, Edwin H. The Road to Realism: The Early Years of William Dean Howells, 1837– 1885. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1956. ———. The Realist at War: The Mature Years of William Dean Howells, 1885–1920. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1958. Cameron, Sharon. Thinking in Henry James. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Cannadine, David. Mellon: An American Life. New York: Knopf, 2006. Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Carnegie, Andrew. The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie. Foreword Cecilia Tichi. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986. ———. The ‘‘Gospel of Wealth’’ Essays and Other Writings, ed. David Nasaw. New York: Penguin, 2006. ———. Letter to Herbert Spencer. 6 January 1897. 噛68. Carnegie Collection. Library of Congress. ———.‘‘Tributes to Mark Twain.’’ North American Review 191, 655 (June 1910): 827. ———. Triumphant Democracy. New York: J.J. Little, 1886. Carnes, Mark. Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989. Cather, Willa. The Troll Garden. Ed. James Woodress. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Century Club. The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Founding of the Century. New York: Century Association, 1897. Chalaby, Jean. The Invention of Journalism. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. Charvat, William. The Profession of Authorship in America: 1800–1870. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968. Chernow, Ron. Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Senior. New York: Random House, 1998. Chesnutt, Charles. A Business Career. Ed. Matthew Wilson and Marjan A. Van Schank. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. ———. The Colonel’s Dream. 1905. Reprint, New York: Harlem Moon, 2005. ———. Essays and Speeches. Ed. Jesse S. Crisler, Robert C. Leitz, III, and Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999. ———. Evelyn’s Husband. Ed. Matthew Wilson and Marjan A. Van Schank. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. ———. An Exemplary Citizen: Letters, 1906–1933. Ed. Jesse S. Crisler, Robert C. Leitz, III, and Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002. ———. The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt. Ed. Richard Brodhead. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993.

230

Bibliography

———. Stories, Novels, and Essays. Ed. Werner Sollors. New York: Library of America, 2002. ———. ‘‘To Be an Author’’: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1889–1905. Ed. Joseph McElrath, Jr., and Robert C. Leitz, III. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997. Chesnutt, Helen M. Charles Waddell Chesnutt: Pioneer of the Color Line. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952. Christianson, Frank. Philanthropy in British and American Fiction: Dickens, Hawthorne, Eliot, and Howells. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Clark, Peter. British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Claybaugh, Amanda. The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the AngloAmerican World. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007. Colwell, Mary Anna Culleton. ‘‘The Foundation Connection: Links Among Foundations and Recipient Organizations.’’ In Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad, ed. Robert F. Arnove. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980. 413–52. Conn, Steven. Museums and American Intellectual Life: 1876–1926. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Cooper, John Milton. Walter Hines Page: The Southerner as American, 1855–1918. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977. Cosmos Club. The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Founding of the Cosmos Club of Washington D.C. Washington, D.C.: Cosmos Club, 1904. Coultrap-McQuin, Susan. Doing Literary Business. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Dale, Gareth. Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market. Cambridge: Polity, 2010. Delany, Paul. ‘‘Who Paid for Modernism?’’ In The New Economic Criticism, ed. Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee. New York: Routledge, 1999. 335–48. De Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. Ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence. New York: Anchor, 1969. DeVoto, Bernard, ed. Mark Twain in Eruption. 1922. Reprint, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940. Dimock, Wai-Chee. ‘‘The Economy of Pain: Capitalism, Humanitarianism, and the Realistic Novel.’’ In New Essays on the Rise of Silas Lapham, ed. Donald Pease. New York: Cambridge University Press. 67–90. Dixon, Thomas. The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meaning in Victorian Britain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Donadio, Stephen. Nietzsche, Henry James, and the Artistic Will. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Dowling, David. The Business of Literary Circles in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Dreiser, Theodore. The Financier. 1912. Reprint, New York: Meridian, 1995.

Bibliography

231

———. The Genius. 1915. Reprint, Cleveland: World, 1963. ———. Hey Rub-A-Dub: A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920. ———. ‘‘Mark the Double Twain.’’ English Journal 24, 8 (October 1935): 615–27. ———. Newspaper Days. 1922. Reprint, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. ———. Selected Magazine Articles of Theodore Dreiser. Vols. 1, 2. Ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Press, 1985, 1987. ———. A Selection of Uncollected Prose. Ed. Donald Pizer. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977. ———. The Stoic. Garden City: Doubleday, 1947. ———. The Titan. 1914. Reprint, New York: Dell, 1959. ———. A Traveler at Forty. 1913. Reprint, New York: Century Company, 1914. DuCille, Ann. The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Edel, Leon. Henry James: A Life. New York: Harper and Row, 1985. Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickel and Dimed. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001. Elderkin, John. A Brief History of the Lotos Club. New York: Lotos Club, 1895. Ellis, Leonard. ‘‘Men Among Men: An Exploration of All-Male Relationships in Victorian America.’’ Ph.D. dissertation. Columbia University, 1982. Ellison, Ralph. ‘‘An American Dilemma: A Review.’’ In The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan. New York: Modern Library, 1995. 328–40. Eperjesi, John R. The Imperialist Imaginary: Visions of Asia and the Pacific in American Culture. Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth University Press, 2005. Fairbairn, Brett. ‘‘Self-Help and Philanthropy: The Emergence of Cooperatives in Britain, Germany, the U.S., and Canada from Mid-Nineteenth to Mid-Twentieth Century.’’ In Philanthropy, Patronage, and Civil Society, ed. Thomas Adam. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. 55–78. Fairfield, Francis Gerry. The Clubs of New York. 1873. New York: Arno Press, 1975. Falcoff, Mark. ‘‘Revolution for the Rich.’’ New Criterion 7 (March 24, 2006): 21–26. Fleishman, Joel. The Foundations: A Great American Secret. New York: Public Affairs, 2007. Fleissner, Jennifer L. Women, Compulsion, Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Foss, Michael. The Age of Patronage: The Arts in England, 1660–1750. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971. Franch, John. Robber Baron: The Life of Charles Tyson Yerkes. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Fraser, Steve and Gary Gerstle, eds. Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in Democracy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. Freedman, Jonathan, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Henry James. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

232

Bibliography

———. Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990. ———. The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary AngloAmerica. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Friedman, Lawrence J. and Mark D. McGarvie, ‘‘Philanthropy in America: Historicism and Its Discontents.’’ In Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History, ed. Lawrence J. Friedman and Mark D. McGarvie. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.1–21. Fritscher, Linda Marie. ‘‘Literary Agents and Literary Traditions: The Role of the Philistine.’’ In Paying the Piper: Causes and Consequences of Art Patronage, ed. Judith Huggins Balfe, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. 54–72. Gaines, Kevin K. Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Garber, Marjorie. Patronizing the Arts. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008. Giles, Paul. Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and Transatlantic Imaginary. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002. Gillman, Susan. Dark Twins: Identity and Imposture in Mark Twain’s America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Glazener, Nancy. Reading for Realism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997. Goodman, Susan and Carl Dawson. William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Goldman-Price, Irene C. and Melissa McFarland Pennell, eds. American Literary Mentors. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. Griffin, Dustin. Literary Patronage in England, 1650–1800. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Gregorek, Jean. ‘‘The Odd Man: Masculinity and the Modern Intellectual in George Gissing’s Born in Exile,’’ Nineteenth-Century Studies 21 (2007): 199–216. Gross, Robert A. ‘‘Giving in America: From Charity to Philanthropy.’’ In Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History, ed. Lawrence J. Friedman and Mark D. McGarvie. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 29–48. Habegger, Alfred. Gender, Fantasy, and Realism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Hall, Peter Dobkin. The Organization of American Culture, 1700–1900. New York: New York University Press, 1984. Hammack, David C. ‘‘Patronage and the Great Institutions of Cities of the U.S.: Questions and Evidence, 1800–2000.’’ In Philanthropy, Patronage, and Civil Society: Experiences from Germany, Great Britain, and North America, ed. Thomas Adam. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. 79–100. Harris, Neil. The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790–1860. New York: George Braziller, 1966. ———. Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Bibliography

233

Harris, Susan K. God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898–1902. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. ———. ‘‘Mark Twain and Gender.’’ In A Historical Guide to Mark Twain, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 163–93. Harvey, Bruce A. American Geographics: U.S. National Narratives and the Representation of the Non-European World, 1830–65. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. 2005. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Harwood, W. S. ‘‘Secret Societies in America.’’ North American Review 164, 486 (May 1897): 617–24. Hobson, J. A. Imperialism: A Study. 1902. Reprint, New York: Cosimo, 2005. ———. Work and Wealth: A Human Valuation. New York: Macmillan, 1914. Hoeller, Hildegard. From Gift to Commodity: Capitalism and Sacrifice in NineteenthCentury American Fiction. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2012. Hollinger, David. ‘‘Literary Culture.’’ In Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century, vol. 4, Culture, ed. Stanley I. Kutler. New York: Scribner’s, 1996. 1435–60. Holub, Robert C. Friedrich Nietzsche. New York: Twayne, 1995. Holzknecht, Karl Julius. Literary Patronage in the Middle Ages. 1923. Reprint, New York: Octagon Press, 1966. Hont, Istvan. Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Perspective. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. Howard, June. Publishing the Family. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. Howe, Barbara. ‘‘The Emergence of Scientific Philanthropy.’’ In Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad, ed. Stanley Arnove. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980. 25–54. Howe, Irving. Politics and the Novel. 1951. Chicago: Irving R. Dee, 2002. Howells, William Dean. The Altrurian Romances. General ed. Edwin Cady. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968. ———. Annie Kilburn. In Novels, 1886–88. Ed. Don L. Cook. New York: Library of America, 1989. 643–865. ———. A Hazard of New Fortunes. New York: Penguin, 1980. ———. Letter to James T. Fields. August 22, 1860. Fields Collection, FI 2319. Huntington Library. ———. Literary Friends and Acquaintances: A Personal Retrospect of American Authorship. 1900. New York: Harper Bros., 1901. ———.’’The Man of Letters as Man of Business.’’ In Criticism and Fiction and Other Essays, ed. Clara Marburg Kirk and Rudolph Kirk. New York: New York University Press, 1959. 298–309. ———. My Mark Twain. New York: Harper’s, 1910. ———. The Rise of Silas Lapham. 1885. New York: Penguin, 1983.

234

Bibliography

———. Selected Letters of William Dean Howells. Vol. 1, 1852–72. Ed. George Arms, Richard H. Ballinger, Christoph K. Lohmann, and John K. Reeves. Boston: Twayne, 1979. ———. Selected Letters of William Dean Howells. Vol. 2, 1873–81. Ed. George Arms and Christoph K. Lohmann. Boston: Twayne, 1979. ———. Selected Letters of William Dean Howells. Vol. 3, 1882–91. Ed. Robert C. Leitz, III, with Richard H. Ballinger, and Christoph K. Lohmann. Boston: Twayne, 1980. ———. Selected Letters. Vol. 4, 1892–1901. Ed. Thomas Wortham, Christoph K. Lohmann, and David J. Nordloh. Boston: Twayne, 1981. ———. Selected Literary Criticism. Vol. 2, 1886–1897. Ed. Donald Pizer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, ed. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2007. Jackson, Leon. The Business of Letters: Authorial Economics in Antebellum America. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008. James, Henry. The American Scene. 1907. New York: Scribner’s, 1946. ———. The Golden Bowl. 1904. New York: Penguin, 1985. ———. The Outcry. London: Methuen, 1911. ———. The Princess Casamassima. 1886. New York: Penguin, 1987. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981. Johnson, Rossiter, James Howard Bridge, and Clinton Scollard, eds. Liber Scriptorum: The Second Book of the Authors Club. New York: Authors Club, 1921. Kaestle, Carl F. and Janice A. Radway. ‘‘A Framework for the History of Publishing and Reading in the United States.’’ In Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940, ed. Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway. History of the Book in America 4. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 7–21. Kaplan, Amy. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. ———. The Social Construction of American Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Kaplan, Justin. Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain. 1966. New York: Touchstone, 1983. Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007. Koritz, Amy and Douglas Koritz. ‘‘Symbolic Economics: Adventures in the Metaphorical Marketplace.’’ In The New Economic Criticism, ed. Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee. New York: Routledge, 1999. 408–19. Krippner, Greta. ‘‘The Elusive Market: Embeddedness and the Paradigm of Economic Sociology.’’ Theory and Society 30, 6 (2001): 775–810. Krugman, Paul. New York Times blog, The Conscience of a Liberal. ‘‘Proud of a New Gilded Age.’’ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/27.

Bibliography

235

Kutler, Stanley I, ed. Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century. Vol. 4, Culture. New York: Scribner’s, 1996. Laird, Holly. Women Coauthors. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Laird, Pamela. Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. Lawson, Andrew. ‘‘Perpetual Capital: Roderick Hudson, Aestheticism, and the Problem of Inheritance’’ Henry James Review 32, 2 (Summer 2011): 178–91. Lawson, Thomas. Frenzied Finance: The Crime of Amalgamated. New York: RidgwayThayer, 1905. Lears, Jackson. ‘‘The Managerial Revitalization of the Rich.’’ In Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in Democracy, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. 181–214. ———. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture. New York: Pantheon, 1983. ———. Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920. New York: HarperCollins, 2009. Leverenz, David. Paternalism Incorporated: Fables of American Fatherhood, 1865–1940. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003. Liebersohn, Harry. The Return of the Gift: European History of a Global Idea. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Livingston, James. Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850– 1890. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Loving, Jerome. The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Lowry, Richard. ‘‘Littery Man’’: Mark Twain and Modern Authorship. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Lukacs, Georg. ‘‘Narrate or Describe.’’ In Writer and Critic, trans. Arthur Kahn. New York: Universal Library, 1971. 110–48. Marchalonis, Shirley, ed. Patrons and Prote´ge´es: Gender, Friendship, and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988. Marchand, Roland. Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Marek, Jayne E. Women Editing Modernism: ‘‘Little’’ Magazines and Literary History Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995. Marx, Karl. From ‘‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.’’ In The MarxEngels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: Norton, 1978. 66–125. Matt, Susan J. Keeping Up with the Joneses: Envy in American Consumer Society, 1890– 1930. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Maurice, Arthur Bartlett. ‘‘Literary Clubland,’’ The Bookman 21, 4 (June 1905): 392–406. ———. Literary Clubland,’’ The Bookman 21, 5 (July 1905): 496–514.

236

Bibliography

Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Trans. W. D. Halls. 1950. Reprint, New York: Norton: 1990. McCarthy, Kathleen D. American Creed: Philanthropy and the Rise of Civil Society, 1700–1865. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. ———. ‘‘Patronage of the Arts.’’ In Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century, vol. 4, Culture, ed. Stanley I. Kutler. New York: Scribner’s, 1996. 1725–42. ———. Women’s Culture: American Philanthropy and Art, 1830–1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. McCormick, Richard L. The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. McDonald, Henry. ‘‘Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and the Tragic Henry James.’’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language 34, 3 (Fall 1992): 403–49. McElrath, Joseph R., Jr. ‘‘William Dean Howells and Race: Charles W. Chesnutt’s Disappointment of the Dean,’’ Nineteenth-Century Literature 51, 4 (1997): 479–99. McGill, Meredith L. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009. McLean, Paul D. The Art of the Network: Strategic Interaction and Patronage in Renaissance Florence. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. McWilliams, Dean. Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002. Mellon, Thomas. Thomas Mellon and His Times: Printed for His Family and Descendants Exclusively. Pittsburgh: Wm. G. Johnson, 1880. Messent, Peter. Mark Twain and Male Friendship: The Twichell, Howells, and Rogers Friendship. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. ———. ‘‘Mark Twain, Manhood, The Henry H. Rogers Friendship, and Which Was the Dream?’’ Arizona Quarterly 61, 1 (Spring 2005): 57–84. Michaels, Walter Benn. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York: Random House, 2001. Mullin, Molly H. Culture in the Marketplace: Gender, Art, and Value in the American Southwest. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. Nasaw, David. Andrew Carnegie. New York: Penguin, 2006. ———. ‘‘Gilded Age Gospels.’’ In Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in Democracy, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. 123–48. Nelson, Dana D. National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998. Newfield, Christopher. Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880–1980. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003.

Bibliography

237

Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Ed. Walter Kauffman, trans. Walter Kauffman and R. J. Hollingdale. 1887. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1989. Ohmann, Richard. ‘‘Diverging Paths: Books and Magazines in the Transition to Corporate Capitalism.’’ In Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940, ed. Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway. History of the Book in America 4. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 102–15. ———. Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century. New York: Verso, 1996. Osteen, Mark and Martha Woodmansee. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In The New Economic Criticism, ed. Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee. New York: Routledge, 1999. 1–40. Ostrower, Francie. Why the Wealthy Give: The Culture of Elite Philanthropy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995. Page, Walter Hines. A Publisher’s Confession. 1905. Reprint, New York: Doubleday, Page, 1923. Parrington, Vernon Louis. Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927. Pennell, Melissa McFarland. ‘‘The Mentor’s Charge: Literary Mentoring in Howells’s Criticism and Fiction.’’ In American Literary Mentors, ed. Irene C. Goldman-Price and Melissa McFarland Pennell. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. 34–46. Peyser, Thomas Galt. ‘‘James, Race, and the Imperial Museum.’’ American Literary History 6, 1 (Spring 1994): 48–70. ———. Utopia and Cosmopolis: Globalization in the Era of American Literary Realism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998. Phillips, Kevin. Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich. New York: Broadway Books, 2002. Pizer, Donald. The Novels of Theodore Dreiser: A Critical Study. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976. Pohl, Francis K. Framing America: A Social History of American Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 2002. Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944. Posnock, Ross. ‘‘Affirming the Alien: The Pragmatist Pluralism of The American Scene.’’ In The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, ed. Jonathan Freedman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 224–46. ———. Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. Rainey, Lawrence. ‘‘The Cultural Economy of Modernism.’’ In The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson, 1999. Reprint, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 33–69.

238

Bibliography

Rectanus, Mark W. Culture Incorporated: Museums, Artists, and Corporate Sponsorship. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Robbins, Bruce. ‘‘Can There be Loyalty in The Financier? Dreiser and Upward Mobility.’’ In The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser, ed. Leonard Cassuto and Clare Virginia Eby. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 112–16. ———. Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Towards a Literary History of the Welfare State. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007. ———. ‘‘The Village of the Liberal Managerial Class.’’ In Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture, ed. Vinay Dharwadker. New York: Routledge, 2001. 15–32. Rockefeller, John D. Random Reminiscences of Men and Events. 1909. New York: Sleepy Hollow Press, 1984. Rodgers, Daniel T. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998. Roediger, David R., ed. Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White. New York: Schocken, 1998. Roelofs, Joan. Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Rogers, Henry Huttleston and Mark Twain. Mark Twain’s Correspondence with Henry Huttleston Rogers, 1893–1909. Ed. Lewis Leary. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Rotundo, E. Anthony. American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era. New York: Basic Books, 1993. Rowe, John Carlos. Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. ———. ‘‘Nationalism and Imperialism.’’ In Henry James in Context, ed. David McWhirter. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 246–57. Ryan, Susan M. The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003. Sabin, Margery. ‘‘Henry James’s American Dream in The Golden Bowl.’’ In The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, ed. Jonathan Freedman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 204–23. Saisselin, Remy. The Bourgeois and the Bibelot. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1984. Salazar, James. Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Sandage, Scott. Born Losers: A History of Failure in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. Saunders, Frances Stonor. Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. London: Granta Books, 1999. Sawaya, Francesca. Modern Women, Modern Work: Domesticity, Professionalism and American Writing, 1890–1950. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

Bibliography

239

———. ‘‘Philanthropy and Transatlantic Print Culture,’’ in Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms, ed. Ann Ardis and Pat Collier. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 83–97. Schudson, Michael. Discovering the News. New York: Basic Books, 1978. Schweitzer, Ivy. Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Sealander, Judith. ‘‘Curing Evils at Their Source: The Arrival of Scientific Giving.’’ In Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History, ed. Lawrence J. Friedman and Mark D. McGarvie. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 217–39. Sedgwick, Eve. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Seltzer, Mark. Bodies and Machines. New York: Routledge, 1992. ———. Henry James and the Art of Power. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984. Sheehan, Donald. This Was Publishing: A Chronicle of the Book Trade in the Gilded Age. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1952. Shershow, Scott Cutler. The Work and the Gift. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1984. Spencer, Herbert. The Data of Ethics. New York: Hurst, 1879. Stearns, Peter N. Jealousy: The Evolution of an Emotion in American History. New York: New York University Press, 1989. Steffens, Lincoln. The Shame of the Cities. 1904. New York: Hill and Wang, 1966. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, and the Collection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Stowe, William. Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994. Stratton, Matthew. The Politics of Irony in American Modernism. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Sudjic, Deyan. The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful—and Their Architects—Shape the World. New York: Penguin, 2006. Sumner, William Graham. What Social Classes Owe to Each Other. 1883. Reprint, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1911. Swinth, Kristen. Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870- 1970. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Syrett, Nicholas L. The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Tate, Claudia. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Tebbel, John. Between Covers: The Rise and Transformation of Book Publishing in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Thomas, Brook. American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

240

Bibliography

Thomas, Landon, Jr. ‘‘A Bequest Between Friends.’’ New York Times, 27 June 2006. Tinter, Adeline R. The Museum World of Henry James. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1986. Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination. 1950. New York: New York Review of Books, 1978. Turnovsky, Geoffrey. The Literary Market: Authorship and Modernity in the Old Regime. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Ed. Beverly Lyon Clark. 1876. New York: Norton, 2007. ———. A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court. 1889. New York: Penguin, 1971. ———. The Innocents Abroad. 1869. New York: Penguin, 2002. ———. Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the PhilippineAmerican War. Ed. Jim Zwick. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1992. ———. Notebooks and Journals. Ed. Frederick Anderson, Michael B. Frank, and Kenneth M. Sanderson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. ———. The Works of Mark Twain: What Is Man? And Other Philosophical Writings, vol. 19. Ed. Paul Baender. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. ———. Which Was the Dream? And Other Symbolic Writings of the Later Years. Ed. John S. Tuckey. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. Uchitelle, Louis and Amanda Cox. ‘‘Age of Riches; The Richest of the Rich, Proud of a New Gilded Age.’’ New York Times, 7 July 2007. Van Der Tas, Jaap. ‘‘Dilettantism and Academies of Art: The Netherlands Example.’’ In Paying the Piper: Causes and Consequences of Art Patronage, ed. Judith Huggins Balfe. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. 1889. New York: Signet, 1953. Wall, Joseph Frazier. Andrew Carnegie. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. Warren, Kenneth. ‘‘African American Cultural Movements.’’ In Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century, vol. 4, Culture, ed. Stanley I. Kutler. New York: Scribner’s, 1996. 1593–1607. ———. Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. 1901. Reprint, New York: Penguin, 1986. Wharton, Edith. The Custom of the Country. 1913. Reprint, New York: Random House, 2001. Whitaker, Benjamin. The Foundations: An Anatomy of Philanthropy and Society. London: Eyre Methuen, 1974. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. White, Richard. Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America. New York: Norton, 2011. Williams, James D. ‘‘The Use of History in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee.’’ PMLA 80, 1 (March 1965): 102–10.

Bibliography

241

Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. London: Oxford University Press, 1977. Wilson, Christopher. The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Wilson, Matthew. Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2004. Woodress, James. Howells and Italy. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1952. Woolf, Virginia. ‘‘The Patron and the Crocus.’’ In The Common Reader: First Series. 1925. Reprint, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935. 211–15. Yeazell, Ruth Bernard, ed. Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1994. Zboray, Ronald J. and Mary Saraceno Zboray. Literary Dollars and Social Sense: A People’s History of the Mass Market Book. New York: Routledge, 2005. Ziff, Larzer. Return Passages: Great American Travel Writing 1780–1910. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000. Zimmerman, David. Panic! Markets, Crises, and Crowds in American Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Zunz, Olivier. Philanthropy in America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012.

This page intentionally left blank

index

Adam, Thomas, 10, 194 n26, 199 n70, 201 n2 Addams, Jane, 7, 39–41, 45, 47, 54 altruism, 14–18, 50, 103, 127–29, 131, 202 nn4, 7, 15 anti-altruists, 16, 202 n7 anti-Semitism, 63–70, 204 n15, 206–7 n39 Barrish, Phillip, 86, 96, 205 n24, 208 n1, 209 n11, 209–10 n13, 212 n37 Bentley, Nancy, 205 n29, 206 nn37, 38 Bigelow, Gordon, viii, 32, 101, 200 n82 Bourdieu, Pierre, 11–12, 28, 77–78, 160, 195 n34, 199 n70 Brodhead, Richard, 135–36, 159, 218 nn3, 5 Buffet, Warren, 4–5, 192 n15 Cahan, Abraham, 4, 99, 192 n11, 210 n16 Carnegie, Andrew, 5, 7, 13–14, 39–41, 76, 108–9, 122, 131–32, 145, 169–71, 183; Carnegie Hall, 224 n23; Carnegie Libraries, 21, 37, 133, 169–73, 183–84, 197 n57; and Homestead Strike,77, 170; parodied, 17, 23, 103, 127–29, 197 n55; quarter-giving, 23, 86–87, 128; relation to Herbert Spencer, 21, 197 nn50, 57. Works: The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, 170, 172; ‘‘The Best Fields for Philanthropy,’’ 21–26, 74, 117; ‘‘The Gospel of Wealth,’’ 2, 3, 21–24, 26, 86–87, 103, 117, 121, 127–28, 140, 160, 167, 183, 209 n7, 216 n41; ‘‘The Negro in America,’’ 141; Triumphant Democracy, 116–17, 216 n41 Carnegie Corporation, 9, 26, 33 Cather, Willa, 4, 224 n23 Chesnutt, Charles, 35–37, 97, 99, 107, 166, 182, 185, 186. Works: A Business Career, 143, 147–50; The Colonel’s Dream, 37, 136, 142, 150–58; Evelyn’s Husband, 143, 148–50; ‘‘The March of Progress,’’

143–46, 150; The Marrow of Tradition, 218 n5, 221 n33, ‘‘Post-Bellum-Pre-Harlem,’’ 159–60 charity. See philanthropy Christianson, Frank, 96, 191 n8, 209 n7 collecting, 51–53, 56–57, 59–62, 65, 67–69, 72–73, 165, 179–80, 205 n34, 206 n39 connoisseurship, 66–69; and Bernard Berenson, 207 n43 cosmopolitanism, 10, 32, 36, 43, 62, 75, 77–79, 80–85, 90–94, 209–10 n13, 210 n17 Dialectic of Enlightenment, The, 121, 216 n46 Dreiser, Theodore, 79, 99, 100, 186; relation to Andrew Carnegie, 169–73, 183. Works: An American Tragedy, 168; A Traveler at Forty, 174; The Financier, 162–63, 174, 176–80; The Genius, 167; Newspaper Days, 169–74; Sister Carrie, 168, 223 n12; The Stoic, 165, 179, 182–83; The Titan, 164, 166, 169, 174, 175–76, 179–82; ‘‘Trilogy of Desire,’’ 37, 69, 163, 166, 169, 183 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 99, 189 n4, 210 n16 Ellison, Ralph, 149, 189 n2, 219 n12, 221 n30 Ford, Henry, 27 Ford Foundation, 184, 187–88, 194 n32, 194–95 n33 Freedman, Jonathan, 63, 65, 88, 199–200 n77, 205–6 n35, 206 n36 friendship, 36–37, 60, 81, 101–2, 104–6, 163, 175–76, 212 n6, 213 n14, 215 nn32, 34, 217 n2, 218 n6, 220 n17; and loyalty, 109–15, 120, 214–15 n30; instrumental and true, 134–39, 141–49, 150–61 Garber, Marjorie, 92, 191 n9, 193 n24, 194 n26, 211 n32

244

Index

Gates, Bill, 4–5, 192 n15 General Education Board, 9, 136–37, 219 n13 gift theory, 4–6, 30, 67,72, 166, 181, 183, 192 n13, 193 n23, 210 n15 Gilded Age, 34, 75, 84, 194, n27 Gilded Age, New, 5, 187, 192 n16 Gregorek, Jean, 45, 50, 58, 203 n13 Gross, Robert, 7–8, 39–41, 73 Harlem Renaissance, vii–ix, 35, 159–60, 187, 189 nn1, 2 Harris, Susan K., 114, 205–6 n35, 213 n10, 216 n45 Harris, Neil, 60–61, 205 n34 Harvey, David, 189 n5, 196 nn41, 47 Hobson, J. A., Works: Imperialism: A Study, 60; Work and Wealth, 198 n61 Howard, June, 199 n71, 200 n78 Howells, William Dean, 35–36, 100–101, 106, 109, 112, 186; relation to Andrew Carnegie, 209 n7. Works: A Hazard of New Fortunes, 35–36, 75–79, 85–99, 128, 184; Altrurian Romances, 87, 98, 197 n55, 209, n7, n9; Annie Kilburn, 79, 87, 209 n7; Literary Friends and Acquaintances, 80; My Mark Twain, 209 n9, 212, n2; ‘‘The Man of Letters as Man of Business,’’ 208–9 n3; The Minister’s Charge, 79; The Rise of Silas Lapham, 79, 208 n47, 209 n9, 210 n15; Venetian Life, 81, 211 n24 Jackson, Leon, 29–31, 199 n75 James, Henry, 10–11, 35, 75, 186. Works: The American, The Portrait of a Lady, Watch and Ward, 202 n5; The Ambassadors, 202 n5, 204 n21, 223 n14; The American Scene, 43, 45, 70–73, 207 n44; The Bostonians, 47–49, 51, 58, 202 n5; The Golden Bowl, 10, 35, 43, 45, 46, 59–70, 204 n21, 205 n25, 206 nn36, 37, 207 n42, 223 n14; The Ivory Tower, 202 n5, 223 n14; The Princess Casamassima, 10, 35, 45–59; The Outcry, 69, 207 n43; Roderick Hudson, 68, 202 n5; The Spoils of Poynton, 205 n25; The Wings of the Dove, 202 n5, 223 n14 Jameson, Fredric, 44–45, 58, 203 n13, 204 n14, n15 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 4, 99, 192 n11, 210 n16

Kaplan, Amy, 86, 96, 209 n11, 211 n23, 223 n18 Klein, Naomi, 187–88, 189 n5, 196 n41 Laird, Pamela, 34, 200–201 n85, 212 nn6, 7, 215 nn30, 32 laissez-faire economics, 12–20, 27–28, 87, 127, 138–39, 144–45, 171, 173, 191 n8, 196 n47. See also liberal economics Lawson, Thomas, 110–13, 113, 115, 215 nn32, 34 Lears, Jackson, 91, 115, 117, 193 n24, 196 n40, 223 n20 Leverenz, David, 149–50, 182, 193 n24, 199 n70, 208 n46, 216 n42 liberal (classical) economics, viii–ix, 8, 24, 26, 30–32, 102, 135, 138–39, 158, 160–61; crisis in, 2–6, 11, 12– 21, 28, 186; and injurious giving, 15, 20, 22–23, 42, 62, 74, 86, 128. See also laissez-faire economics literary canon, vii, 34, 79, 99, 200 n84 literary market, vii, 29–38, 42–43, 75, 100–102, 135–36, 159–61, 168–69, 186–87, 191–92 n10, 199 n75, 208 n3, 218 n5 loyalty. See friendship Marxism, 4, 32, 121 men’s clubs, 33, 36, 103–16, 120, 214 nn19, 20, 23, 26, 214–15 n30, 215 n34 Messent, Peter, 102, 105, 213 nn14, 15 neoliberalism, ix, 11, 161, 187, 189 n5, 196 nn41, 47 Newfield, Christopher, 5 Ngai, Sianne, 45, 58, 203 n13, 221 n36 Nietzsche, Friedrich, ressentiment, 16, 35, 41–46, 131, 203–4 n13, 221 n36; in The American Scene, 70–73; in The Colonel’s Dream, 154–56; in The Golden Bowl, 59–70; in The Princess Casamassima, 46–59 Page, Walter Hines, 76–77, 134, 136–37, 143, 150, 159–60 paternalism, 6, 97–98, 149–50, 151–52, 182, 193 n24, 212 n37 patronage, 27–28, 76, 79–84, 103, 137–39, 194 n26; and modernism, 31–32, 95,

Index 73–74, 167; definition of, 6–9, 33, 194 n26. See also collecting; philanthropy Peabody Fund, 135–36, 145 Peyser, Thomas, 67, 96, 206 n37, 209–10 n15, 211 n23 Philanthropy, 56–58, 73, 76–79, 103, 105–10, 143–46, 186–88, 193 n22, 197 n49, 199 n70, 207 n42; and generosity, 41, 73, 202 n4; and imperialism, 10–11, 59–74, 132, 195–96 n40; and lady bountiful, 47, 49–51, 53–55; cultural philanthropy, 59–74; definition, 6–10, 33, 39–41, 115–16, 190–91 n5, 204 n14; social philanthropy, 39–41, 46–59, 73–74; versus charity, 7, 39–40, 201 n1; versus patronage, 6–9, 191 n9, 194 n26. See also patronage Polanyi, Karl, 15, 186, 189 n2; embeddedness and disembeddedness, 30–31; interventionism, viii, 1–3, 8, 37–38, 188, 189 n1 Progressivism, 26–29, 163–65, 191 n6 ressentiment. See Nietzsche, Friedrich Robbins, Bruce, 102, 165–66, 196 n44, 215 n33 Rockefeller, John D., Sr., 1–2, 5, 9–10, 13–14, 21–27, 77, 106, 115, 147–48, 180, 190 n4, 192 n12, 195 n39, 197 n56, 219 n9; and cooperative capitalism, 21, 138–40, 156, 160; and General Education Board, 9, 136–37, 219 n10; and Ludlow Massacre, 26, 77. See also Standard Oil; University of Chicago Rockefeller Foundation, 26, 33, 184, 194–95 n33, 219 n10 Rogers, Henry H. See Mark Twain Rotundo, E. Anthony, 101, 107, 109–10, 136 Sandage, Scott, 190 n4, 213 n17, 223 n13 Sawaya, Naima, 9, 18 Schweitzer, Ivy, 101, 135, 142, 220 n21 Sedgwick, Eve, 45, 58, 203 n13 Seltzer, Mark, 47, 206 n37, 38, 208 n48 Shershow, Scott, 4–6, 192 n13, 195 n34, 217 n53, 223 n9 Smith, Adam, 1, 12–13, 60, 140 social capital, 34–35, 185, 200–201 n85

245

Southern Education Board, 137, 219 n10 Spencer, Herbert, 13–23, 86–87, 122, 127– 28,171–73, 186, 197 nn57, 58, 207 n41, 222 n42, 223 nn20, 21 Standard Oil, 26, 36, 101, 110–13, 138, 140, 181 Steffens, Lincoln, 164 Sumner, William Graham, 13, 18–25, 145 Tarbell, Ida, 111–13 Thomas, Brook, 201 n86, 208 n21 Turnovsky, Geoffrey, 3, 29, 191–92 n10 Twain, Mark, 36–37, 135, 140–41, 170, 186, 208 n3, 213 n17, 214 n26, 216 n48, 217 n49; friendship with Henry H. Rogers, 101, 104–6, 111–15, 213 n14, 215 n36; relation to Andrew Carnegie, 106, 115–17, 133, 216 n41, 217 n52. Works: A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court, 36, 103, 106, 115–21, 132–33, 153; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 214 n29; The Innocents Abroad, 104; ‘‘King Leopold’s Soliloquy,’’ 132–33; Pudd’nhead Wilson, 216 n44; ‘‘What Is Man?,’’ 129, 133; Which Was It?, 36, 103, 121–31 University of Chicago, 181–82, 187–88, 224 n27 upward mobility, 32, 102–3, 168, 173, 196 n44, 203 n13, 212 n7, 223 n12, 223–24 n22, 224 n23 Washington, Booker T., 136–47, 150, 152–53, 218–19 n8; relation to Andrew Carnegie, 141 Warren, Kenneth, 59, 143, 146, 191, n9 Wharton, Edith, 4, 69 White, Richard, 109–10 Woolf, Virginia, 42 Wright, Richard, 189 n2, 221 n38 Yezierska, Anzia, 4, 192 n11 Zitkala-Sa, 4, 192 n11 Zunz, Olivier, 7–8, 40, 193 nn18, 22, 194 n32, 194–95 n33, 195–96 n40, 215 n39, 219 n13

This page intentionally left blank

acknowledgments

he writing of this book has amply, perhaps redundantly, proven its own thesis that philanthropy—in all possible meanings of the word—is a necessity in intellectual work. My family has always embodied for me the original meaning of and real possibilities in the word philanthropy. I cannot thank Josh Piker and Naima Sawaya enough or in words that are adequate. Josh read and re-read the book and improved the conception and expression of everything in it. Naima did many other things than read the book, and her joy in all those things provided both inspiration and motivation. They are the best, funniest, and wisest companions anyone could hope for. The same is true of my parents, Ann Rosa and Fares Sawaya, and my sister, Marie. Their intellectual and personal generosity in the world, in their work, and to family and friends has meant everything to me. Without them, the book would never have been completed. Thanks also for all the kindness and help of the members of my extended family—Rosas, Sawayas, Prestandreas, Pikers, Ryans, Egans, and Portillos—with special appreciation for Barbara, Therese, Peter and Sherri, Paul and Fernanda, Miguel and Tracy, Matthew, Steve, Jeff, Ellie and John. Friends—in the best sense of the word—have been crucial. I have relied in this book (as in everything else) on Jean Gregorek’s brilliance, funniness, and generosity. She continues to be, as everyone knows, the greatest one. My conversations with Catherine John about intellectual, pedagogical, and life matters more generally have inspired and sustained me for the decade I have known her. Tamar Katz’s virtuoso writing has been an ideal to aspire to since graduate school, while her combination of exceptional kindness and incisiveness as a thinker and reader has made my work far better than it would otherwise be. In many long walks and even longer park dates with our kids, Danyelle O’Hara shared not only much wisdom and many good laughs but also her experience and insights into the non-profit and philanthropic worlds. Dan Cottom was endlessly kind and funny, while also

T

248

Acknowledgments

always providing speedy and helpful feedback. For their support, I also want to thank Susanah and Charles Romney, Jen Frost and John Herron, Sandie Holguin and Bob Rundstrom, Cathy Kelly and Rich Hamerla, Megan Elwood Madden and Andy Madden, Saralinda Subbiondo, Tina McGinnis-Subbiondo, Toni Lombard, Stacy Burton, Francesca Polletta and Ed Amenta, Julie Vandivere, Rita Keresztesi, Melissa Homestead, Jim Zeigler, Susan Kates, Tim Murphy, Wendy Gram, Marc David, Catherine Tufariello and Jeremy Telman, Julie Gozan and Tom Keck, Mary Dinger, Julia Abramson, Ari and Lesley Kelman, John Heins and Margaret Gonglewski, and of course, all their kiddos. Finally, I want to thank a number of colleagues and institutions for their support in writing this book. Ann Ardis, David Mair, and as always Mark Seltzer have been gracious, generous, and helpful mentors. I also want to express my deep gratitude to the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, and the University of Oklahoma, which together provided me with the time and financial resources necessary to research and write. Two interdisciplinary conferences convened by Richard Dunn and Mary Maples Dunn, and sponsored by the American Philosophical Society and the Humboldt Foundation, expanded my thinking as did the Midwest Nineteenth-Century Americanists’ writing group. Susi Krasnoo and Roy Ritchie kindly provided office space at the Huntington Library during a happy year of work. I also need to thank two anonymous readers for the University of Pennsylvania Press for their detailed, encouraging, and thoughtful feedback. I feel exceptionally lucky that Jerry Singerman has been my editor for two books and thank him, Carolyn Hayes, and Alison Anderson for all their work on and for this book.