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Up and Down the Great Chain of Being
Progress and Degeneration in Children, Race, and Nation
In 1893, the World’s Columbian Exhibition opened in Chicago, with a congressional mandate to be “an exhibition of the progress of civilization in the New World.” The focal point of that exhibition was the White City, a complex of beaux arts buildings representing seven aspects of civilization’s highest achievements (Manufactures, Mines, Agriculture, Art, Administrations, Machinery, and Electricity) around a central basin named the Court of Honor. The White City was an icon of the superiority of civilized white men and pointed towards the ideal, perfectable future of the race.The White City glorified the masculine worlds by filling the buildings with thousands of enormous engines, warships, trains, machines, and armaments, as well as examples of commerce.1
Despite extensive battling by the women’s committee to be included in the centerpiece, women’s productive labors had been consciously excluded and marginalized to the Woman’s Building, which was located between the White City and the Midway Plaisance.The Midway specialized in spectacles of barbarous races, for example, “authentic” villages of Samoans, Egyptians, Turks, Dahomans, and other exotics, with imported “natives.” Midway visitors experienced the descent from civilization as they moved from the White City to advanced German and Irish villages, to more barbarous Turkish and Chinese settlements, and finally to savage American Indians. “What an opportunity was here afforded to the scientific mind to descend the spiral of evolution,” enthused the Chicago Tribune, “tracing humanity in its highest phases almost to its animalistic origins.”2
The world exhibition can be read as a representation of the established hierarchy of peoples within a long-playing scientific drama. The hierarchy expressed in the architecture and spatial layout of the Columbian Exhibition was widely known as the Great Chain of Being, a rank ordering of species from the least primitive to the most civilized, based on evolutionary theory. The Great Chain of Being located white European men and their societies, norms, and values at the pinnacle of civilization and morality. The Columbian Exhibition materialized the evolutionary, social, hierarchical understandings dominant at the time, as it also tied technical progress to a mythic worldly conquest. White men claimed civilization for themselves; white men stood at the evolutionary pinnacle, with all others on lower rungs.Though still dominant, this societal and individual hierarchy was under siege—both white women and African-Americans had protested the exclusiveness of the White City and its crowning of white men alone as “civilized.” And beyond the borders of the Columbian Exhibition, challenges to the dominance of white men were occurring rapidly and regularly.3
The social contexts, strident messages, and contested evolutionary ordering enacted in the Columbian Exhibition are the topic of this chapter, for these were also the contexts and dramas in which the developing and worrisome adolescent won a major role. Although the White City proclaimed and embodied “progress,” leaders in the realms of labor, politics, social reform, the new sciences of psychology, anthropology, and criminology worried. In the shadows of the White City, fears of degeneration took up permanent residence. Fears of social decay played in numerous venues, for example, within the problem of race suicide and urban contagion; within the middle-class disease of neurasthenia, or insufficient nerve force; and within scientific proclamations on atavistic youth, criminal types, and immoral races.4
Figure 1.1 The White City: Visualizing civilization. Reprinted from Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 1995, University of Chicago Press.
Figure 1.2 The Midway: Descending the evolutionary ladder. Reprinted from Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 1995, University of Chicago Press.
In public spectacles, scientific research, popular ideas of health and disease, and political rhetoric, adolescence—defined as “becoming”—became an embodiment of and worry about “progress” and a site to study, specify, diagnose, and enact the modern ideas for personal and social progress. I argue that adolescent development became a space for reformers to talk about their worries and fears and a space for public policy to enact new ideas for creating citizens and a nation that could lead and dominate the particular problems and opportunities of the modern world. This chapter will describe three central preoccupations in which and through which adolescence became an identifiable, important, but ever worrisome modern construct.The preoccupation with progress switched back and forth across racial, gender, and national progress. As I hope to demonstrate, adolescence became a kind of switching station in which talk of racial degeneration could easily be rerouted to issues of nation or gender. This chapter strives to provide an understanding of those discursive contexts and preoccupations that formed the dramas in which adolescence had a major role.
The Great Chain of Being
Metaphors of progress and gradualism have been among the most pervasive in Western thought. The late 1800s inherited a long and rich set of images and ideas about progress, and the new sciences of physical anthropology, psychology, biology, and medicine offered tools to better understand progress; to rank individuals, groups, and societies as savage, backward, or most advanced; and to diagnose impediments to progress. The Great Chain of Being was a constant reference point in popular and scientific conversations in the late 1800s. The Great Chain of Being refers to the hierarchy of animals, people, and societies that portrayed evolutionary history and a sociological ranking extending from European middle-class males and their republican government on the top, through women to savage tribes, with the lower animals at the bottom. There was also a moral, or spiritual, dimension to this Great Chain of Being, that is, the movement from lower to higher levels also signified the movement from chaos through human law to divine law. Progress was also defined as the “advance from superstition to reason” and “from simplicity to complexity.”5
With the Darwinian revolution, animals and humans could be located on parallel ascending steps of the Great Chain of Being. Evolutionary rankings of groups were frequently expressed in tree diagrams and in charts, with progress marching from bottom to top. While these illustrations pictured progress, they simultaneously spoke of degeneration, of decadence.These images were pivotal in both popular and scientific thinking, and the diagrams could be consumed “at a glance,” which added to their viability.These evolutionary ladders are also central to my analysis of the making of the scientific adolescent.
The concept of progress was inseparable from that of decline, and the fate of societies was similarly linked to that of individuals. “Two binary oppositions dominated sociological discourse in the nineteenth century: progress/decline and social/individual.” As we will see, recapitulation theory, the belief that individuals recapitulated the stages of the development of human races, explicitly linked these two levels of sociological discourse with scientific efforts in biology, medicine, criminology, anthropology, child study, and pedagogy.The explicit race and gender dimensions of the Great Chain of Being and its interwoven fear of decadence are not immediately accessible in the contemporary use of the terms. However, as the White City demonstrated, “civilization,” that moral, political, and national state toward which “we” moved, was defined as the exclusive domain of white men. “Civilization” in 1890s America meant “a precise stage in human racial evolution— the one following the more primitive stages of ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarism.’ Human races were assumed to evolve from simple savagery, through violent barbarism, to advanced and valuable civilization. But only white races had, as yet, evolved to the civilized stage.”6
Gender, too was an essential component of civilization, and advanced races clearly identified the sexes. “Savage (that is, nonwhite) men and women were believed to be almost identical, but men and women of the civilized races had evolved pronounced sexual differences.” Thus the clearly separate spheres of women and men in the Victorian era “were assumed to be absent in savagery, but to be an intrinsic and necessary aspect of higher civilization.”7
These race and gender components of civilization were united to a third Christian belief in and need to work toward the Millennium—the vanquishing of evil from the world and the beginning of a thousand-year reign of Christ. “This millennial vision of perfected racial evolution and gender specialization was what people meant when they referred to ‘the advancement of civilization.’” Thus the discourse of civilization, with its desire for progress and fear of decadence, drew from and cemented middle-class beliefs about race, gender, and millennialism.8
Figure 1.3 The Great Chain of Being figured as a tree. Haeckel’s tree (1874) reprinted from Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, 1977, Belknap Press.
Figure 1.4 The Great Chain of Being charted as cranial capacity. From The Mismeasure of Man, Revised and Expanded Edition by Stephen Jay Gould. Copyright © 1996, 1981 by Stephen Jay Gould. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
The advancement of civilization required strong wills, clear paths of action, and complete courageous involvement. Affect had to be harnessed to the political order and the millennial vision. I understand the strong fear of decline as a central component of the discourse of civilization and its technologies of progress; the multiaccented fears are part of the harnessing of affect, of desire to the political vision. The repetitive graphic representations, as well as verbal discussions within both scientific and popular contexts, indicate the obsessive emphasis on progress and its technologies, among them the productive use of resources, especially human resources. This economistic view emphasizes that enormous social and cultural change required economic, social, and psychological interventions to create a new, modern social order.9
Social change, urbanization, and immigration propelled people into contact with others. Central to the idea of degeneration and the thwarting of progress was the idea of contagion, which stemmed from Victorian paranoia about boundary order. “The poetics of contagion justified a politics of exclusion and gave social sanction to the middle class fixation with boundary sanitation.” Boundary sanitation would become a central task of the new scientists, led by physical anthropology, which inaugurated the sustained scientific effort to measure, record, and rank the differences among human beings in the middle and late nineteenth century. Biology followed, and by the second half of the nineteenth century it was steeped in an atmosphere of evolution, which gave new meaning and a history to the particular facts of anatomy, morphology, and embryology. “Biologists began to study organisms with an eye to their ancestral linkages and to their change and variation over time, as well as to their adaptive fitness in the present.” The social sciences similarly became empirically minded and evolutionary in scope: “models of change and development, usually though not invariably indebted to Darwin, became the backbone of theory and research.” “Historicism” posited that if one wished to understand the true nature of something, one had to understand how it had developed, how it had changed; in this way the ontological view of the Great Chain of Being also provided an epistemology, which can be termed a development-in-time episteme.10
The new sciences aimed at the pursuit of natural laws, which could be easily translated into social and political policies as well. Science and scientists had not formerly garnered much prestige, but with the weakening of religious belief and the growth of social unrest, scientifically established laws offered a new, viable foundation for social and political action.11 Foucault’s insight that the seeming “salvational” and liberating role of modern social sciences and law have constituted a new regime of truth that provides ever closer surveillance of selves will be helpful as we examine the sciences of the adolescent. For now, the evolutionary ladder of the Great Chain of Being and its incitements to technologies of progress are most important.
Social Chance and the Great Chain of Being
The rapidly expanding and industrializing United States of the 1880s and 1890s has been characterized as a nation without a center, without a past, without direction. Historians such as Robert Wiebe and Anthony Platt, for example, argue that the sense of social confusion of that time period cannot be overstated. The Northeast United States was awash in immigrants, with movement of people from rural areas to cities, with changes in middle-class families, and with dramatic changes in work. America was tossed by newness and breaks with traditions and the past, as three revolutions—commercial, transportation, and industrial—affected every realm of life. By way of illustration, the years 1890 to 1910 witnessed:
the introduction of the safety bicycle, then the automobile, and then the airplane; an increase of 1500 percent in the number of telephones and 1000 percent in the number of commercial ice plants; the revolution in the physical sciences which followed the work of Planck, Einstein, and the Curies; a 50 percent rise in population, in part the result of the largest influx of immigrants in the country’s history (13 million); the introduction and distribution of motion pictures and the advent of modernism as an artistic movement; the most violent labor unrest in American history and the establishment of national labor unions; the “closing” of the continental frontier and the beginnings of overseas empire; the quadrupling of the number of married women in the work force; the incorporation of major industries and a vast increase in the governmental regulation of business and social life; the emergence of modern advertising and consumerism; a rise from an average of six hundred books of fiction published annually to an average of twenty-three hundred; a 100 percent increase in the number of cities with a population over one hundred thousand.12
These profound social and cultural shifts were akin to tidal waves that made the economy and many institutions almost unrecognizable. Changed as well were many less tangible dimensions of U.S. social life, such as: “the experience of time and space, the functions, structure, and internal dynamics of the family, [and] gender and generational relations.” Kathy Peiss, for example, details the growing world of leisure for young, single, working-class women as they moved from domestic labor into restaurants, factories, department stores, and offices with shorter work-weeks. The heterosocial world of dancing, silent movies, trips to Coney Island, and gossiping with fellow workers was seen as dangerous by both their immigrant families and middle-class women reformers. The speed and relentlessness of the changes left the newly emerging bourgeoisie grabbing at straws for social cohesion. “Within this unknown and evolving world, few could be certain where they would find either places of power or zones of safety.” But the new middle class struggled to impose order on the social, economic, and domestic chaos. They created new voluntary organizations that aimed to reform society and legitimate their perspectives and values. Many became preoccupied with self-determination and with purity and unity.13
In the South, the perils of the new century for the white middle class were largely attributed to the demise of slavery and the evils of Reconstruction. Segregation of blacks and whites was understood as necessary to preserve order and hierarchy, and Jim Crow laws swept the Southern landscape and crept into the North as well. The evidence of challenges to white-dominated order can be read from the increase in lynchings, the increase in race riots, and the movement of blacks from the rural South to Northern cities. Although lynching declined in absolute terms after 1892,...
