The Mediating Nation

Late American Realism, Globalization, and the Progressive State

Nathaniel Cadle

• Editore: The University of North Carolina Press
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781469618463
• Argomento: Letteratura
• Categoria: Critica letteraria nordamericana

By the early twentieth century, as Woodrow Wilson would later declare, the United States had become both the literal embodiment of all the earth's peoples and a nation representing all other nations and cultures through its ethnic and cultural diversity. This idea of connection with all peoples, Nathaniel Cadle argues, allowed American literary writers to circulate their work internationally, in turn promoting American literature and also the nation itself. Reexamining the relationship between Progressivism and literary realism, Cadle demonstrates that the narratives constructed by American writers asserted a more active role for the United States in world affairs and helped to shift global influence from Europe to North America. From the novels of Henry James, William Dean Howells, and Abraham Cahan to the political and social writings of Woodrow Wilson and W. E. B. Du Bois, Cadle identifies a common global engagement through which realists and Progressives articulated a stronger and more active cultural, political, and social role for the United States.

Chapter One: From Cosmopolitanism to World-Salvation

The Transnational Imaginary and the Idea of the Progressive State

Between 1900 and 1910, the Atlantic Monthly, a magazine that was widely regarded as the epitome of cultural authority in the United States, published eleven articles that, in one way or another, explicitly invoked the concept of cosmopolitanism.¹ Of these eleven articles, seven are, broadly speaking, works of literary criticism, and three specifically name Henry James as the leading exponent of cosmopolitanism in American literature. James’s perceived status as the most cosmopolitan American author of his era comes as no surprise, especially not in a magazine that had once serialized The American (1876–77), The Portrait of a Lady (1880–81), and several of James’s other “international” novels. What is surprising, however, is the relatively ambivalent attitude toward cosmopolitanism that emerges collectively from these articles. In a January 1903 essay entitled “Number 4 Park Street,” Bliss Perry, the magazine’s editor at the time, offered a self-reflective meditation on the Atlantic Monthly’s continued national and international reputation, despite not having relocated from Boston to New York, and he satirized “the publishers of many periodicals [who] have reasoned that the readiest way of acquiring the air of cosmopolitanism was to give their magazine the imprint of the commercial capital of the country.”² This ambivalence over cosmopolitan pretentions extends even to the magazine’s treatment of James. In an April 1905 retrospective overview of James’s career, W. C. Brownell praised James’s fiction because it was “penetrated with the spirit of cosmopolitanism”: “Out of his familiarity with contemporary society in America, England, France, and Italy, grew a series of novels and tales that were full of vigor, piquancy, truth, and significance.”³ Yet only twelve months earlier, in his entry for the column “Books New and Old,” H. W. Boynton took issue with James’s characterization of Thoreau as “provincial” and poked fun at “Mr. James’s cosmopolitanism,” in which “absenteeism would come to be held actually as a state of grace.”⁴

The seemingly contradictory nature of Brownell’s and Boynton’s comments on James’s cosmopolitanism may, of course, reveal certain anxieties that were unique to Perry and his regular contributors, who had seen New York displace Boston as the publishing center of the United States. William Dean Howells, who had edited the Atlantic Monthly during the 1870s and whose criticism had helped to define high U.S. literary culture, had moved to New York in the late 1880s in order to work for Atlantic Monthly’s rival Harper’s, a move that carried symbolic significance at the time (and that the next chapter examines in more detail). Thus Perry’s assertion that, while “the Atlantic has always been peculiarly identified with Boston,” the magazine’s “provincialism is of that honest kind which is rooted in the soil, and hence is truly representative of and contributory to the national life,” may serve as tacit acknowledgement that the Atlantic Monthly faced the possibility of becoming marginalized by the magazines that were headquartered in New York.⁵ In claiming to value “provincialism” as an alternative to “cosmopolitanism,” Perry and his contributors were justifying their own commitment to keeping the Atlantic Monthly in Boston instead of moving it to “the commercial capital of the country.”

This possible anxiety on Perry’s part over the location of the Atlantic Monthly, however, does not explain similarly ambivalent statements about the value of cosmopolitanism that other writers in significantly different contexts also made at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1901, William P. Trent, who had just accepted a professorship of English at New York’s Columbia University and who would go on to serve as editor-in-chief of the influential Cambridge History of American Literature (1917–21), decried “the so-called cosmopolitanism that has afflicted a small portion of our population, that has rendered them unsympathetic with their countrymen, and has driven them to spend their lives abroad.”⁶ Trent’s “so-called cosmopolitanism” would seem to refer to expatriate artists and writers like Henry James, who had already been absent from the United States for nearly twenty years, but Trent immediately and somewhat unexpectedly makes an “exception” for “a few people of artistic temperaments,” including no doubt James himself.⁷ Moreover, against this “so-called cosmopolitanism,” Trent positions what he calls “true cosmopolitanism,” which ends up sounding much like Perry’s notion of “provincialism”: “We shall do our duty to the [human] race, and so prove ourselves to be true cosmopolitans all the better, by doing our intimate, our local, our national duties to the best of our abilities in the land of our birth. Shakespe[a]re is not a whit less cosmopolitan because he was a thoroughgoing Englishman of the Elizabethan period.”⁸

In fact, the comments of Perry and Trent represent part of a much wider effort among American authors and intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century to rethink and, in some cases, redefine the concept of cosmopolitanism and the forms of high art, such as literature, that were perceived to express it most fully. The paradoxes at work in the thinking of both Perry and Trent—that “true” cosmopolitanism somehow arose out of local affiliations and that this locally rooted cosmopolitanism simultaneously benefitted the nation—also characterize contemporaneous discussions of world literature, as I show later in this chapter, and of the use of local color in late realism, which I explore in the next chapter. Importantly, this discourse about cosmopolitanism, which was often though not exclusively literary in nature, sometimes overlapped or intersected with Progressive discourse about the role of the state itself and the relationship of the United States to the rest of the world. These intersections enabled literary figures to participate—and attempt to intervene—in discussions about the state that had overtly social and political implications. In some rare cases, such as Edward Bellamy’s phenomenally popular novel Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1888), these literary interventions were very successful at shaping wider public opinion. More often, their influence was restricted to a relatively elite audience of educated readers. Nevertheless, as historian Frank Ninkovich points out in his study of the growth of internationalism in late nineteenth-century American periodicals, “a relatively small readership should not be equated with modest influence. . . . The nation’s educated elites . . . at the very least framed issues for discussion, even if they did not necessarily decide them.”⁹ The invocations of cosmopolitanism made by Bliss Perry, William P. Trent, and other prominent writers and intellectuals served to remind readers of the important role literature could play in imagining a national identity and circulating that conception abroad. After all, the degree of Henry James’s cosmopolitanism mattered because his ability to represent American literature abroad, meeting and engaging foreign authors on their own terms, might raise the international profile of American literature. At the same time, his lack of engagement with his own national culture also might, as Trent put it, “render [him] unsympathetic with [his] countrymen” and therefore unable to represent his nation adequately abroad.

This chapter examines how the ambivalent deployment of the language of cosmopolitanism at the turn of the twentieth century reflected a certain dissatisfaction with a particular notion of cosmopolitanism among a small but influential group of cultural authorities, including literary writers, critics, and intellectuals. These cultural authorities were aware of the United States’ growing political and economic power and were eager to reframe the concept of cosmopolitanism, particularly as it applied to U.S. literary production, so that it bore more relevance to the emerging discourse of internationalism and world-salvation that Progressives were engaging in their attempt to empower the state within an increasingly global context. In reframing the concept of cosmopolitanism itself, these cultural authorities were suggesting that American literature could work alongside of—and, in some cases, resist—other state institutions and ideological state apparatuses in negotiating the newly global currents of U.S. society and in positioning the United States in global affairs. Thus the literary discourse about cosmopolitanism, which frequently identified the late realism of Henry James as its representative example, constitutes an important “cultural (or aesthetic) formation” that, David Lloyd and Paul Thomas claim, helps to articulate or revise “a certain idea of the state” (original emphasis).¹⁰ That idea—what I am calling the idea of the Progressive state—called for a deep investment in the state itself as the primary locus of cultural as well as social and political aspirations, despite the increased opportunities that economic globalization and various transnational movements provided for turning away from the nation-state to identify alternative forms of social organization. In other words, the transnational imaginary that was emerging and, as subsequent chapters demonstrate through readings of some of its major practitioners, taking shape as late realism continued to hold onto the nation-state as the most practical means of organizing society and cultural production even as it explored the modes of circulation and exchange that were making cosmopolitanism an increasingly viable form of identification.

The paradoxical nature of cosmopolitanism—somehow emerging out of the tension between local (or national) and international affiliations—has been noted by numerous literary critics, sociologists, and philosophers over the years. Ulf Hannerz traces the “cosmopolitan-local distinction” at least as far back as sociologist Robert Merton’s work during the 1950s and concludes that “there can be no cosmopolitans without locals.”¹¹ In his oft-cited essay “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” Kwame Anthony Appiah phrases the paradox as a question: “Where . . . would all the diversity we cosmopolitans celebrate come from in a world where there were only cosmopolitans?”¹² For Appiah, the answer is “straightforward” because the tension that produces this paradox is precisely what his “cosmopolitan patriots” celebrate: being “attached to a home of one’s own, with its own cultural particularities, but taking pleasure from the presence of other, different places that are home to other, different people.”¹³ In valorizing cosmopolitanism as an end in itself, however, Appiah risks obscuring the fact that many other writers have historically deployed the language of cosmopolitanism for particular ends, including the consolidation of a sense of national identity and status and its projection outward onto the world. It is clearly such a nationalist logic that informs Trent’s conception of “true cosmopolitanism,” with its appeals to “national duties” and “the land of our birth.” In a slightly different register, this logic also informs Woodrow Wilson’s vision of the mediating nation: although his April 1915 speech does not contain the word “cosmopolitanism,” Wilson’s assertion that the United States can mediate the world, its various nations and peoples, and their forms of expression because the United States has already achieved a cosmopolitan commingling of ethnicities and voices within its own borders serves to reinforce the geopolitical importance of the United States, not to subsume the nation into a more transcendent category.

Thus while there is a large—and growing—body of literature on cosmopolitanism, internationalism, and various related terms and concepts, my focus in this chapter will be on their historical deployment and the shifts in meaning that that deployment produced in American attitudes toward the role of literature during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹⁴ My discussion centers primarily on three words that seem to have enabled the emerging transnational imaginary to link cultural matters, such as literary production and circulation, to political debates about the role of the state: “cosmopolitanism,” a word with an already rich history; “internationalism,” a neologism that seems to have helped prompt a reconsideration of cosmopolitanism; and “world-salvation,” a much rarer term that nonetheless occupied a surprising number of prominent writers and intellectuals and that, based on its presence in two of the best-selling books of the period, seems to have struck a chord with Americans invested in rethinking the United States’ relationship to the rest of the world. I treat these three terms as keywords, in Raymond Williams’s sense of words “of capital importance” that “acquired new and important meanings.”¹⁵ It is therefore the shifts in—and contestations of—these words’ meanings that matter rather than their abstract meanings or the consistency of their use. As Williams points out, the cultural work that keywords perform—what he characterizes as the “important social and historical processes [that] occur within language” (original emphasis)—depends to some extent upon their dynamic usage or, to be more precise, the ways in which particularly powerful deployments of these words shape their meanings and their perceived relevance to social, economic, and political questions.¹⁶

In approaching these three terms as keywords, I do not mean to discount or supplant the work of recent historians who have offered persuasive evidence of the important role that various notions of cosmopolitanism and internationalism played in fin de siècle Americans’ conceptions of themselves and their place in the world. On the contrary, the next section of this chapter provides a brief survey of this important historical scholarship in order to establish a clearer sense of the particular understanding of U.S. Progressivism I am invoking here as the political and social context in which late realism was embedded and sought to intervene. Nevertheless, in characterizing his own methodology as a commitment “to the study of actual language[,] that is to say, to the words and sequences of words which particular men and women have used in trying to give meaning to their experience,” Williams points to the value of subjecting “what we are in the habit of calling the known facts” to the kind of close scru...