Believing in Darwin

The following comments were prepard for my school's first Darwin Day symposium,  February 21, 2013. I was asked to revise them, but declined to do so. I run the piece here largely as written.

            As far as I can tell, all human beings have to grapple with two internal struggles. The first is a struggle to understand the world as it is. The second is a struggle to make sense of the gap between the world as it is and the world as we would like it to be. People in different times and places have dealt with that second struggle in varying ways. Sometimes, it’s been a matter of trying to accommodate with the world as it is – which often involves a belief that if we actually understand the world better, we will be able to come to terms with it more effectively. Other times, it’s been a matter of trying to change the world and bringing it closer to the ideals we imagine. This notion of changing the world is the one we pledge allegiance to here at Fieldston. It is literally our mission.

            But 21^st century Fieldstonites aren’t the only people who have had this mission. Actually, the world in which Charles Darwin came of age – the world of 19^th century Great Britain – was also a time when people believed they could change the world, a time when people spoke confidently of “progress” with a capital P. The reasons for this confidence were obvious: the railroad and telegraph were conquering time and space; factories were mass-producing goods in ways that promised to abolish scarcity (and, with it, slavery, something Britain did decades before the United States). The source of this technological mastery was modern science, which unlocked the secrets of steam, and electricity, and iron, allowing human beings to manipulate them toward desired ends.

This was the context in which The Origin of Species was published in 1859, a world in which Darwin was a product of knowledge as much as he was a producer of knowledge. In constructing a fact-based story about rocks and birds with great explanatory power, Darwin has helped a great many people understand the world as it is.

            But in offering an explanation of the world as it is, Darwin created manifold problems for those trying to understand the gap between this world and the one we wish it to be. As many of us know, Darwin himself was deeply troubled by the religious implications of his work, so much so that he sat on his findings for many years until it became clear the world was going to learn what he had discovered anyway. But I am here to tell you that Darwin’s work remains a problem for a great many more people than those who happen to believe the world was created by God in seven 24-hour days. In the late 19^th century, some people took Darwin’s ideas – over Darwin’s own objections – and used them to explain the fate of the poor and weak as a function of their own inferiority, a concept that has come to be known as Social Darwinism. Social Darwinists argued that phenomena like poverty were explained by maladaptive genes that made some people unable to function, much less compete, in modern society. Some of the people who are today regarded as heroes of the modern contraception movement sincerely believed that we’d better off if people of some races and ethnicities were never born.

            We know better. Or, I should say, we “know” better. Today the tales we tell based on Darwin’s facts are harnessed for the use of liberal rather than conservative ends. Instead of focusing on the grim determinism of genetic inheritance, we prefer to dwell on the sunny side of environmental adaptation. We speak of “plasticity” and “learned behavior.” We like to think there’s an affinity between the sustainability language ecological diversity of and the progressive education language of multicultural diversity. We tend not to dwell on the random components of evolution, because we want to believe that that we are agents, if not masters, of our own futures. So we speak of our identities as chosen, and refuse to accept the proposition that biology is destiny.

            I’m not saying any of this is wrong. I am saying that the very logic of the Darwinian evolution specifically, and the scientific enterprise generally, rests on the interpretation of evidence that is always contingent. As I understand it, the paradigmatic scientific proposition goes like this: “We used to think x; now we know y.” The facts don’t necessarily change – new ones may appear – but what we interpret those facts to mean is subject to ongoing revision. Newtonian of laws of gravity were fixed, until Einstein came along and they weren’t. Evolution tells us that things change gradually – until, as the fossil record shows, something cataclysmic happens and they don’t. What you, know is really a matter of what you believe at any given time.

            Let me tell you some of the things I believe at this time:

•     I believe, based on an ample historical of sea and air travel, that the earth is, for all practical purposes, round.
•     I believe, based on written authority I trust and what Paul Church has told me, that this earth is billions and billions of years old. 
•       I believe, based on first-hand evidence, that there is no direct correlation between gender and intellectual capacity.
•       I believe, largely because I want to and because I can’t keep the studies straight, that coffee and chocolate won’t kill me.
•       I believe, at least in part because I’m her father, that my daughter is adorable.
•       I believe, because I’m not aware of any conclusive evidence to the contrary, that there really is an intelligent design that can explain evolution and all the rest, and that Jesus Christ has something to do with it.

I myself have not tested any of these beliefs scientifically. I happen to spend my time chasing other truths. But I’m not aware that any of these assertions are demonstrably scientifically false.  (Of course they’re not scientifically true, either, because they they don’t rest on positivistic, falsifiable propositions.) I invite you to share my beliefs. But I don’t take for granted that you will embrace all of them. Actually, I’m a little awed by how much I don’t know.

            So that’s what I believe. What do you believe? And how strong is your faith?

G.W. 2/22/32

In honor of President's Day, an annual tribute to #1.   --J.C.

He was born into a small-time aristocracy—and let’s put more emphasis on “small-time” than “aristocracy,” if indeed a self-proclaimed elite on the edge of the world can be called aristocratic. Having lost his father as a child, the family’s status was insecure, and the boy was forced to rely on his older brother for his education. But there is little doubt he was ambitious. He picked up the useful skill of surveying, handy for the real estate speculation that would so decisively shape his fortunes. He also showed a penchant for making useful political connections, managing to get himself named a non-commissioned officer in the army, only to endure a series of military blunders in the French and Indian War. He’d never be a real gentleman or a true officer in the British empire. Still, a provincial American Dream – marry into money, get some land, get some slaves – was more than within reach. Had he been run over by the proverbial wagon in 1772, when the portrait to the left was painted by Charles Willson Peale, you’d have to say: This guy did all right for himself.

In the end, as we know, he did more than all right, and more than for just himself. There are three reason why that I’d like to point out as we shop, vacation, nap, or all those other good things a President’s Day holiday is for.

Courage. He was brave in the most literal sense—multiple accounts testify to his bravery under fire. But it took other forms, too. It’s easy enough to understand that leading an insurrection against the greatest empire in the world is not for the faint of heart, whether or not you happen to wield a gun. But I’m struck by some of the more subtle manifestations later in his life. For example, he pretty much knew that Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom served in his cabinet and hated each other, were smarter than he was, and he knew that they knew it, too. That was all right with him, as long as they did good work. Which, as was true of many of the people who served under him, they did. There’s no doubt he was vain, and worried—you might say obsessed—about his reputation. But over and over again over the course of his career, whether as a young soldier or as an old lion who reluctantly lent his name to a new Constitution, he risked that reputation. He wasn’t quite flawless in this regard (for example, he kept his mouth shut about slavery for a very long time), but even these limits—and the limits of those limits—are in their own way impressive.

Patience. You can see it over and over again: In working his way out of debt and making Mount Vernon economically self-sufficient; in waiting out the British in defeat after defeat in 1776 before finally pouncing at Trenton that Christmas (or at Yorktown five years later); in enduring severe privation at places like Valley Forge along with his men; in simply enduring a Congress that acted in ways that he regarded as beneath contempt in keeping him supplied in war and carping about his diplomacy in peace. There is no doubt the man had a temper, and it was not one you’d particularly care to have focused on you. (God help a runaway slave.) But that iron discipline could also bend toward justice, as in the will he wrote that was implacably crafted to keep grasping family from denying his slaves their freedom.

Passion. This might seem like a joke. Him? That grim, seemingly unknowable visage in all those portraits, like the one we use to buy candy bars and cans of soda? But there’s finally no other way to understand a man who made the choices he did in transforming an abstraction into a nation. It wasn’t only courage and patience. You can see it in that blazing address he made to the officers who contemplated mutiny in the Newburgh Conspiracy – are you out of your minds, he asked in a white-hot fury, reducing them to tears – and in his desperation to leave the presidency before he died (no, I will not be King George, he said explicitly at Newburgh and implicitly and for the rest of his life). A red-blooded love coursed through the man’s arteries.

He wasn’t a saint. He was a man. A great man. If we lack the imagination to see that, to feel that, then we no longer deserve the freedom he made possible. This is a recurring fear in the tributes. And, alas, a justified one.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Washington. And thank you.

Frustrating ambitions

Some thoughts on homework, and the existential angst it reflects

It’s a basic tension I’ve seen in my entire career as a high school teacher, but one that seems to have become more pronounced lately: the desire of my students to perform well combined with complaints about academic workload that peaks at predictable junctures in the school year (the week leading up the holidays, the one leading up to spring break, and the looming end of the school year, among others). My school does more than most to provide circuit breakers to reduce the tension, among them homework bans during vacations, prohibitions against due dates major assignments shortly after returning from vacations, and a test calendar that limits how many assessments they can have on any given day.  Despite such strategies (or perhaps because of them – pushing down pressure at one point may just displace it to others) the anxiety never seems to go away, and indeed seems to become a topic of conversation not just among students, but also their parents, school administrators, and faculty.

I tend to react to such conversations with impatience. Sometimes this is a matter of disdain for my students’ lack of stamina; they seem to regard more than about 15 pages of homework reading, for example as excessively onerous. (I think of one’s appetite and pace for reading as akin to being in good physical shape: the more you do the easier it gets.) But since I often hear a subtext of blame in such expressions of anxiety – you teachers just assign too much work, seeming to forget students have other classes and real lives beyond what goes on in any given course – I also tend to mentally push back.  You think I like assigning homework? I silently ask. Nothing would make me happier to not have to grade that set stack of papers I’m obliged to assign before vacation and then read during that vacation. (I chuckle grimly when a student writes “Enjoy!” in an email when handing one in.) Everybody seems to want me to challenge students and coax them into a meaningful form of excellence, but nobody seems to like the cost excellence imposes. Indeed, some think they can wish it away, believing progressive educators like myself are those that allow students to do what they want without even knowing they’re working hard. Sorry: it doesn’t work like that. There’s lots of different ways to work hard, but hard work is . . . hard. If it’s easy, it doesn’t mean much. That’s not to say that hard work is always meaningful, either. Indeed, one of my toughest intellectual challenges as a teacher is coming up with assignments that have some sense of larger value.

Of course, I’m bound up in a system I deplore, too. The main reason why I assign essays and tests is that I’m paid to assign, read and grade them. If I didn’t assign them, I’d fail to afford students opportunities to learn, much of which happens as a result of the ineluctably solitary effort to express themselves, notwithstanding the legitimate coaching of teachers, parents, or (less legitimately) professional tutors. And if I didn’t read them, I’d have little information on where my students actually are, which is the most obvious measure the way I’m assessed by parents and supervisors.  And if I didn’t grade them, I wouldn’t be doing my part in performing the larger work of sorting students into tiers of perceived quality, a process nobody much professes to like, but which identifies those most likely to compete effectively in the college process.

 The college process: that, finally, is what this is all about. We fight it, we deny it, but we can’t escape it at my school and thousands of others, public or private, urban or rural. School is typically experienced by a student at a time, in a classroom at a time, in a school at a time. But education always happens in a much wider context, consciousness of which gradually encroaches on a family the closer it gets to a student’s graduation. Once upon a time, that context was statewide or national. Increasingly, it’s global. That’s true even at cash-starved second tier schools, hungry for foreign students willing to pay full tuition. There are few better ways to exhaust oneself mentally than to think about how small one’s achievements are in a world that grows ever vaster the more it shrinks.

For a long time, I ascribed the pervasive anxiety surrounding college admissions to the vicissitudes of coming of age in a declining empire. Like British youth a century ago scrambling for places in an ever-shrinking Colonial Office, today’s students lack the luxury of their parents or grandparents, who could afford to regard their schooling with an air of detachment, confident that a robust national economy would find a place for them. A major reason that economy is less robust, of course, is foreign competition, which takes the form of everything from cheap products to plentiful engineers pouring out of foreign universities (and domestic ones). Under such circumstances an ambitious high school student can scarcely afford to take it easy, no matter how desperate that student was to do so.

I still think there’s some truth to this analysis. But it now seems much too insufficient.  A thirst for distinction seems to be universal. I don’t mean to say that everyone has it (many a parent has flailed in the face of this reality, not certain about whether to accept it as final – some of those lollygagging students of previous generations really did get their act together). But at any given time, in any given population, there will always be people who want to excel and such people will tend to congregate at schools like mine.

The rub, of course, is what excel means. It is academic excellence? An intellectual bent? Superior social skills? Of course it’s any of these, and more. We’re all endowed with different levels of such indicators, which blend in different ways to constitute a standard of success in the world beyond the school. The world is big in this regard: there are lots of ways to be successful. But it’s also true that for any given form of success, there are always more people who desire it than there are places, and even those who occupy such places are typically restless about where they are and want something more.

This is our blessing; this is our curse. Having a goal sustains us, gives us a sense of purpose, allows us to believe the pains we endure may yet be part of a successfully realized larger design. But it breeds continuous discontent and persistent fears that we’re simply not good enough. What’s even worse is the suspicion – and eventually knowledge – that those fears are justified. Sometimes they stalk us even when we have attained our goals (“attainment” proving to be surprisingly difficult to define unless it’s unambiguously out of reach). So it is that we remain ever restless, boats against the current.

A. Lincoln, 2/12/09

An annual tribute to my hero. --J.C.

He's right there when I enter the classroom first thing in the morning, his gentle smile directly in my line of sight. That's just the way I wanted it. The photograph is in the public domain, and so I could have gotten it for free, but I was glad to pay an online poster company for an image that's about 3 feet tall and 2 feet wide. It came shortly before his hundred 199th birthday. Now I celebrate every day.

It's a pretty famous picture. One of about a half-dozen we have engraved in our collective memory, trotted out by retailers for Presidents’ Day sales. It was taken by Alexander Gardner, former assistant of the famed Matthew Brady, who got tired of Brady getting credit for his pictures and struck out on his own. Gardner had been out in the field taking pictures at the front, but came back to Washington and had secured an appointment with the president. Though there's some dispute about the dating, the consensus is that was taken on April 10, 1865, about four days before he died. This was just after the fall of Richmond, one of the few truly happy days of his presidency. Earlier that week, he'd gone to the Confederate capital itself and swiveled in Jefferson Davis’s desk chair (he had a rebel five dollar bill in his pocket that night at Ford’s Theater). He had the good grace to be embarrassed when a group of former slaves threw themselves at his feet on the street, thanking him for their freedom. It was God, not I, who freed you, he said. Only one day earlier, Lee had surrendered to Grant; for all practical purposes, the war was over.

One of the things I love so much about the picture is that smile on his face, slight but unmistakable. That's very rare. People tend not to smile in 19th-century photographs because exposure times were relatively prolonged, and such expressions seem fake if you have to sustain them for more than a moment. Of course, there was also the matter that he didn't have a whole lot to smile about in those terrible days. The fact that he was doing so here, just after his gargantuan task was accomplished and just before he became another casualty in the struggle, seems almost unbearably moving.

Indeed, the smile, real as it is, does not hide the deep sense of sorrow etched into his face. He fingers his glasses with a kind of absent-minded gentleness. His bow tie is slightly off-center; to the last he never lost his rumpled quality. He managed to retain a full head of jet black hair and beard, only slightly touched with gray. Yet there's something almost steely about them. Though his face seems about as soft as the bark on a tree, I find myself wishing I could run my hand across it. Walt Whitman had it right -- he's so ugly that he's beautiful.

But it's the eyes that haunt me. His right eye is a socket; he looks like he's half dead already. His left eye is cast downward slightly. It does not seem focused on anything in the room, but seems instead to be gazing within, saturated with a sadness that nothing will ever take away. They say he had a great sense of humor and loved cracking jokes to the very end, and I believe it. Surely there was no man on the face of the earth who could have savored a good laugh more. A look into those eyes could leave no doubt.

But the strongest impression conveyed by the photograph is one of compassion. Kindness as a form of wisdom. That's my aspiration. On Monday morning, this room will be filled with hungry, well fed adolescents. Some will be laughing, some will be content. But surely it will do someone some good to have him there. He'll be gazing out for the discussion of Little Big Horn, the Pullman Strike, the New Deal, the request for an extension on the research essay, and lunch. Long after I'm gone, he will remain.

Happy 204th, Mr. Lincoln.

The Strange Career of "Birth of a Nation"

The long road from D.W. Griffth to Steven Spielberg

The follwing  post went up today on the Oxford University Press blog

Today represents a red letter day – and a black mark – for U.S. cultural history. Exactly 98 years ago, D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation premiered in Los Angeles. American cinema has been decisively shaped, and shadowed, by the massive legacy of this film.

D.W. Griffith (1875-1948) was one of the more contradictory artists the United States has produced. Deeply Victorian in his social outlook, he was nevertheless on the leading edge of modernity in his aesthetics. A committed moralist in his cinematic ideology, he was also a shameless huckster in promoting his movies. And a self-avowed pacifist, he produced a piece of work that incited violence and celebrated the most damaging insurrection in American history.

The source material for Birth of a Nation came from two novels, The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden (1902) and The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), both written by Griffith’s Johns Hopkins classmate, Thomas Dixon. Dixon drew on the common-sense version of history he imbibed from his unreconstructed Confederate forebears. According to this master narrative, the Civil War was as a gallant but failed bid for independence, followed by vindictive Yankee occupation and eventual redemption secured with the help of organizations like the Klan.

But Dixon’s fiction, and the subsequent screenplay (by Griffith and Frank E. Woods) was literally and figurative a romance of reconciliation. The movie dramatizes the relationships between two (related) families, the Camerons of South Carolina and the Stonemans of Pennsylvania. The evil patriarch of the latter is Austin Stoneman, a Congressman with a limp very obviously patterned on the real-life Thaddeus Stevens. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Stevens comes, Carpetbagger-style, and uses a brutish black minion, Silas Lynch(!), whose horrifying sexual machinations focused, ironically and naturally, on Stoneman’s own daughter –  are only arrested by at the last minute, thanks to the arrival of the Klan in a dramatic finale that has lost none of its excitement even in an age of computer-generated imagery.

Historians agree that Griffith, a former actor who directed hundreds of short films in the years preceding Birth of a Nation, was not a cinematic pioneer along the lines of Edwin S. Porter, whose 1903 proto-Western The Great Train Robbery virtually invented modern visual grammar. Instead, Griffith’s genius was three-fold. First, he absorbed and codified a series of techniques, among them close-ups, fadeouts, and long shots, into a distinctive visual signature. Second, he boldly made Birth of a Nation on an unprecedented scale in terms of length, the size of the production, and his ambition to re-create past events (“history with lightning,” in the words of another classmate, Woodrow Wilson, who screened the film at the White House). Finally, in the way the movie was financed, released and promoted, Griffith transformed what had been a disreputable working-class medium and staked its power as a source of genuine artistic achievement. Even now, it’s hard not to be awed by the intensity of Griffith’s recreation of Civil War battles or his re-enactments of events like the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

But Birth of a Nation was a source of instant controversy. Griffith may have thought he was simply projecting common sense, but a broad national audience, some of which had lived through the Civil War, did not necessarily agree. The film’s release also coincided with the beginnings of African American political mobilization.  As Melvyn Stokes shows in his elegant 2009 OUP book D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, the film’s promoters and its critics alike found the controversy surrounding it curiously symbiotic, as moviegoers flocked to see what the fuss was about and the fledgling National Association for the Advancement of Colored People used the film’s notoriety to build its membership ranks.

Birth of a Nation never escaped from the original shadows that clouded its reception. Later films like Gone with the Wind (1939), which shared much of its political outlook, nevertheless went to great lengths to sidestep controversy (the Klan is only alluded to as “a political meeting” rather than depicted the way it was in Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel). Today Birth is largely an academic curio, typically viewed in settings where its racism looms over any aesthetic or other assessment.

In a number of respects, Steven Spielberg’s new film Lincoln is a repudiation of Griffith. In Birth, Lincoln is a martyr whose gentle approach to his adversaries is tragically severed with his death. But in Lincoln he’s the determined champion of emancipation, willing to prosecute the war fully until freedom is secure. The Stevens character of Lincoln, played by Tommy Lee Jones, is not quite the hero. But his radical abolitionism is at least respected, and the very thing that tarred him in Birth – having a secret black mistress – here becomes a badge of honor. Rarely do the rhythms of history oscillate so sharply.  Griffith would no doubt be bemused. But he could take such satisfaction in the way his work has reverberated across time.

Skittish giant

In China Goes Global: The Partial Power, political scientist David Shambaugh portrays an uneven giant

The following review has been posted on the Books page of the History News Network.   

Here's a book that has its title right -- a statement worth making because so many stretch or bend them for marketing purposes. And that's only the beginning of the elegant distillation George Washington University political scientist David Shambaugh provides in this useful volume, which offers a detailed yet concise portrait of a nation widely perceived as on the cusp of what the Chinese government often ascribes to its American rival: hegemony.

But not that that fast, Shambaugh says. While it's clear that China's rise has been wide, deep and rapid, it has a long way to go before it's truly a global rival for the United States. An effective response to that rise, he says, requires one to understand its contours, which are surprisingly jagged.

Shambaugh surveys China's place in the world by a series of metrics: diplomacy, economics, culture, and military prowess, among others. In every case he notes that the nation has made tremendous strides since Deng Xioping's transformative changes following 1978, reforms whose impact appears to be accelerating. And yet for a variety of reasons China falls far short of global dominance or influence. So, for example, its goods are flooding the world -- but not in elite, high-tech products. Its navy has been growing by leaps and bounds -- but its impact is largely limited to the western Pacific. It has an increasingly visible profile in international institutions, but its role tends to be passive, if not contradictory.

A big part of the reason for this, as Shambaugh explains, is a deep-seated sense of national ambivalence. Nursing a lingering sense of grievance for its century and a half of humiliation at the hands of Japan and the West from the early 19th to the mid 20th centuries, the Chinese government and its people view the prevailing international order with the skepticism, even hostility, of Third World Nation, even though such a label hardly describes it. At the same time, China's millennial understanding of itself as the Middle Kingdom makes it reluctant to push far beyond its territorial frontiers -- or to interact with other nations on a basis of genuine reciprocity.

These tendencies are only intensified by a Communist regime fretful of its grip on power at home, and inclined to fret about the domestic implications of any given foreign policy decision. Such a stance interferes with its stated goal of pursuing cultural influence along the lines famously described by Joseph Nye in his now-classic 2004 book Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. Since the essence of soft power is extra-governmental, and the Chinese government tends to filter as much as it practically can through the Communist Party's institutional apparatus, this goal is ever at cross-purposes with reality. The result, as Shambaugh explains, is a belief that "not to agree with Chinese official policy or to be critical is seen as misunderstanding China." As in so many other domains, insecurity breeds truculence -- a stance that has always roiled China's relations with its neighbors, and which sometimes roils its relations with the rest of the world, as indeed it has since the global Great Recession, which the Chinese government viewed as more of turning point in geopolitics than it has turned out to be, at least in the short term.

Under such circumstances, Shambaugh believes that the most practical approach to dealing with China is a constructivist one. Since "China is only shallowly integrated into the norms of global order, and it possesses little consciousness of global public goods or social 'responsibility,'" it's foolish to think it will accept long-prevailing Western protocols. It's even more foolish to believe that China can be contained, given its undeniable and growing economic and military might. Instead, Shambaugh believes, China must be pragmatically conditioned toward integration as a form of self-interest, with compromise as its most realistic option in achieving its goals. Actually, this sounds a little like a (soft power) version of containment as George Kennan originally imagined it -- a flexible instrument of adaptation rather than a knee-jerk reaction of opposition.

What of course no one can know is how long China will remain a partial power. Actually, a portrait of the United States in 1913 would in many ways be similar: an economically powerful, culturally marginal, and diplomatically ambivalent power that rest of the world was waiting for to grow up -- and dreading at the same time. Shambaugh has sifted through a lot of data to draw a complex but discernible trajectory. History suggests, however, that unexpected events have a way introducing fresh angles in the destinies of nations.

Happy (4th) birthday to AHN

Monday marks the fourth anniversary of this blog. To commemorate it, I'm re-running my first post of February 4, 2009. I'm very grateful for the almost 100,000 visits American History Now has received since its launch, and hope it will have many more. Thanks for coming.

--Jim Cullen

Outlaw Pete:

Springsteen Makes a Western

Among the many virtues in Bruce Springsteen’s music is a rich sense of history. And like many of those virtues, that sense of history has emerged organically over the course of his career. Springsteen’s first albums, Greetings from Asbury Park and The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, were marked by a powerful sense of immediacy; to a great extent, they’re records of the present tense. Beginning with the release of Born to Run, a consciousness of history – principally in the form of a growing awareness of past failure, and a desperate desire to avoid similar mistakes – begins to suffuse the consciousness of his characters. This consciousness is deeply personal, typically expressed, for example, in generational tensions between fathers and sons. That’s what I mean by “organic.”

By about 1980, Springsteen’s sense of history begins to get broader. It emerges in a series of forms, ranging from his decision to perform songs like Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” (reading 1980 Joe Klein’s biography of Guthrie as the suggestion of his manager, Jon Landau, seems to have been a watershed experience) to recording original songs like “Wreck on the Highway,” avowedly patterned on the style of country & western singer Roy Acuff. His 1982 album Nebraska is saturated with a sense of the 1930s (his 1995 album The Ghost of Tom Joad even more so), and even deeply personal songs like “Born in the U.S.A.” connect the private struggles of their protagonist to much larger historical ones. This trajectory is a striking, and impressive testament to an artist’s power to grow and integrate everyday life into a broader human drama.

One of the less remarked upon aspects of Springsteen’s body of work is his fascination with the West. This is, of course, counterintuitive – Springsteen is nothing if not the voice of New Jersey, an embodiment of urban, ethnic, working-class values and culture typically associated with the Northeast Corridor. But the western signposts are there, as early as “Rosalita,” which climaxes with a vision of triumphant lovers savoring their victory over paternal repression in a café near San Diego. That’s a fleeting reference. But beginning with Darkness on the Edge of Town – think of the “rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert” of “The Promised Land” – the West becomes a vivid and indispensable setting for a number of songs. Springsteen being Springsteen, he’s not always content simply to invoke or use such settings in conventional ways. So, for example, the gorgeous yearning that marks his 1995 song “Across the Border,” redolent with music, instrumentation, and language of the Southwest, is purposely ambiguous which side of the border its protagonists long to go. Springsteen’s mythic tendencies are often marked by creative friction with the concrete details and ironic realities of everyday life.

“Outlaw Pete,” the leadoff track on Springsteen’s latest album, Working on a Dream, represents the next turn of the wheel in a way that’s somehow predictable, surprising, and inevitable all at once. Superficially, the song, like the album as a whole, is something of a throwback, a return to the dense, lush, melodic pop songs that were once Springsteen’s stock-in-trade. At eight minutes long, it’s also the first time in decades that’s he’s recorded a mini-epic on the scale of “Incident on 57th St.” or “Jungleland.” For thirty years now, the overall trend in Springsteen’s work has been toward more sparse, even minimalist songs that approach spoken-language records, though the approach here was first broached on Magic in 2007.

It’s almost jarring to hear his eager embrace of melodic hooks and multi-track harmonies. It’s also almost jarring in that “Outlaw Pete” so willfully introduces us to a protagonist who seems like a cartoon figure from an imitation John Ford movie, who “at six months old” had “done three months in jail” and “robbed a bank in his diapers and little baby feet.” Pete’s signature question, “Can you hear me?” seems like a childish insistence for attention. Some might be amused by such a description; others might dismayed, even irritated by its triviality. One could be forgiven for perceiving that Springsteen is slipping into superficiality in his advancing age, perhaps trying to recapture the sense of popular appeal that once seems so effortlessly his.

But appearances are deceiving. More specifically, our perception of Outlaw Pete is deceiving. After hearing the seemingly requisite description of a horse-stealing, heart-breaking scoundrel – rendered in an amused voice that suggests the narrator views him as a figure closer to a rakishly charming Jesse James than a hard, frightening, Liberty Valance – the story turns on a dime (the music, which shifts to a declining phrase of repeating notes, indicates this) as Pete gets a vision of his own death that prompts him to marry a Navajo and settle down with a newborn daughter on a reservation. Yet in some sense the story is only getting started. A vindictive lawman – another staple of western mythology – is determined to bring Pete down and precipitates a confrontation. “Pete you think you have changed but you have not,” Dan tells him, in so doing posing the existential question at the heart of the song, which is to what degree we have agency over our characters and thus our fate. In the showdown that follows Pete is nominally the victor, yet Dan literally gets the last word in observing before his death that “we cannot undo these things that we’ve done.” The question “Can you hear me?” is turned on its head, as Dan speaks to Pete instead of Pete speaking to the world.

Pete, now a fugitive from the law, makes an ambiguous disappearance from the story. Is it to be understood that his encounter with Dan demonstrates the fixed nature of his personality and the impossibility of any lasting mortal redemption? Or is it an act of abnegation that protects his wife and daughter from the wickedness that surrounds him? The final verses of the song depict Dan’s daughter braiding Pete’s buckskin chaps in her hair – original sin and grace at once – with the question “Can you hear me?” now completely reversed, as we listeners seek the vanished Pete. Like Alan Ladd in Shane or John Wayne in any number of westerns, Pete catalyzes action that leads to resolution, but pushes him beyond the frame.

Like a great many works of art, “Outlaw Pete” asks many more questions than it answers. But there are at least two things it does clarify. The first is the ongoing vitality of western mythology (now nicely updated with a multicultural accent) as a vehicle for exploring the complexities of American life. The second is the ongoing vitality of Springsteen himself, 37 years into an enormously broad and deep body of work, to reinvent himself through reviewing and revising our cultural traditions. He hears us, and we see ourselves.

Mixed media

In Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times, McGill Professor Andew Piper explores the happy pluralism of print

The following review has been posted on the Books page of the History News Network.    

A Facebook friend of mine recently posted a dilemma: a lover of books, she received an Barnes & Noble Nook for Christmas. She was intrigued by the prospect of dipping into the world of e-books, but somehow felt it would be an act of disloyalty -- or, at any rate, a prescription for a messy bibliographic life. I responded by telling her that having both kinds of books was akin to having running shoes and boots in your closet: each has its advantages. A bound book is still my default setting, all things being equal. But if the reading in question is highly disposable, or is most easily and rapidly acquired electronically, I go that route.

Andrew Piper, who teaches German and European literature at McGill University, has clearly been thinking longer and harder about such things. The conclusions he reaches in this evocative little book are similarly pragmatic -- his analysis toggles between cold type and hot type, refusing to condemn the former to oblivion or the latter to inferiority, attentive to their convergences as well as divergences -- but he has a remarkable feel for the textures of reading as an experience, and the ways it has, and hasn't, changed over the centuries.

I choose the noun "feel" advisedly. The first of the seven essays that comprise Book Was There -- the title comes from the ever-quotable Gertrude Stein -- focuses on the tactile dimensions of reading, the way it literally and figuratively becomes an object of our attention. Interestingly, Piper shows that this is no less true of electronic reading, which is always delivered to us in some form that engages our hands (think of the swipe or tap as the digital analogue of turning a page). Reading is not only intensely tactile; it's also deeply visual in more than a lexicographic way; another chapter, "Face, Book," shows how a fascination with faces in the print medium long preceded Mark Zuckerberg's innovations in social networking.

One of the more important insights that animates Book Was There is Piper's recognition that the book has always represented a minority presence on the literary landscape since the codex displaced the scroll almost two millennia ago. Books beguile us because they frame text into mirroring images in the form of pages. But other kinds of print sprawled (think here of nineteenth century "mammoth" news- and storypapers), and in this regard the flow of scroll of text on a computer screen is less an innovation than a recrudescence earlier reading experience.

But Piper is not content simply to explain away the new in terms of the old. He's also intrigued by new ways of thinking about reading and writing. A chapter on the role of marginal note-taking explores the interplay of handwriting and electronic annotation and what each has to offer. Another chapter, "In the Trees," describes new ways of rendering books in terms of numerical data that can be quite striking (if a little elusive, at least for those of us with thoroughly conventional notions of what it means to read a text). So it is that we learn, for example, that Stein's 1925 novel The Making of Americans is marked by some intriguing symmetries (the phrase "any such thing" appears exactly ten times in the chapters Stein deploys it, and the longest string of words in the book appears exactly at its midpoint, suggesting a cyclical architecture girding a presumably horizontal narrative. Another illustration of Walter Benjamin's classic essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" literally flowers on the page when sorted into stems that represent the length of sentences and buds that stand for different categories of words.

A child of the computer age, Piper, who was born in 1973, mentions attending a computer camp as a child, and programming the TS-80 -- what might be termed the Model T of personal computers. As such, his background seems closer to a Gates or a Jobs than it does a future professor of literature. But his, measured, polished, suggestive prose leaves little doubt that his range is good deal wider than binary.

In a recent blog post, Piper confesses that he's less confident than he used to be that print books will continue jostle alongside electronic media indefinitely. I was a little disappointed to hear him say that; my working analogy has been books are to plays as e-books are to movies. But if the book is mortal, as all media are, it seems unlikely to disappear entirely any time soon. Book Was There is a reminder that we should savor this world of textual diversity and celebrate its possibilities rather than simply fret about the end of a world.

1776 is so ... 1775

1775: A Good Year for Revolution Political analyst Kevin Phillips makes another (bulging, uneven, but intriguing) foray in to American History

The following review has been posted on the Books page of the History News Network.    

Kevin Phillips is now well into this third career, all of which have showcased a way with words. His first, as a young man, was a politico of the Atwater and Rove variety: he was an architect of Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" in 1968. In the 1990s, however, Phillips grew disenchanted with the Republican Party, and began writing a series of books that included Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (2002) and American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (2004). He became a particularly acute analyst of the financialization of the U.S. economy, and the growth in inequality that has accompanied it. Part of what has made his work so acute is a striking depth of historical consciousness -- in Wealth and Democracy, for example, he drew apt analogies between what is happening to the American economy in the twenty-first century, the British economy in the twentieth, and the Spanish economy in the seventeenth.

In 1999, Phillips moved avowedly into the field of history. His massive study The Cousins Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America, drew a striking, yet highly nuanced, pair of demographic trajectories between the Cavaliers of the English Civil War/Tories of the American Revolution/Confederates of the U.S. Civil War on on side, and Roundheads, Patriots, and Unionists on the other. It was a book closer in spirit to David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed than Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? While Phillips perhaps stretched his argument farther than an academic historian would, there was no mistaking his erudition or the breadth of research he brought to the project.

The same is true of Phillips's latest work of U.S. history, a foray he describes in his preface as "welcome refreshment in this era of political disappointment." The title, 1775: A Good Year for Revolution, may sound like a more modest undertaking, though its size -- well over 500 pages -- indicates otherwise. In some sense, the argument is simple: 1775, not 1776, was the real hinge of American history, the moment when independence transformed from a possibility to a reality. The Declaration of Independence was more epilogue than prologue. Indeed, it was only the tremendous sense of momentum that came out of 1775, especially in terms of the string of victories Phillips dubs "the Battle of Boston," that allowed the Patriot cause to absorb the many military blows that followed the Declaration, years in which the "rage militaire" of '75 largely dissipated, especially in the South. "The spirit of '76," by contrast, was a bicentennial marketing device.

But the scope of the book is in fact much wider. Phillips offers a sweeping interpretation of the coming of the Revolution that encompasses familiar topics like politics and economics as well as more less familiar ones, like the logistics of international gunpowder supply and naval tactics. He also foregrounds the interplay between culture and geography, paying special attention to the dynamics of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia and South Carolina, whose role he sees as pivotal (Connecticut and South Carolina too often overlooked). There's also a fine chapter on the geopolitics of the Revolution, notably the role of Spain, which temporarily arrested its decline enough to make a decisive contribution to the cause and its own imperial prospects.

But near the heart of Phillips's analysis is a subject that typically gets short shrift in modern historiography of the revolution these days: religion. He picks through the often complicated sectarian politics of eighteenth century North America, in which ethnicity and geography were also tangled. So it is, for example, that he explains Virginia Anglicans tended to be Whigs, while Massachusetts Anglicans tended to be Tories. He affirms, as many previous observers have, that the Congregationalist heirs of the Puritans dominated New England politics, the cockpit of Patriot fervor. But he locates strands of revolutionary ardor in New Jersey Presbyterians and Pennsylvania Lutherans as well -- and considers them important. As Phillips notes, such arguments, once the staple of Victorian histories like those of Thomas Babington Macaulay and John Lothrop Motley, have long fallen out of favor. "Did these men have a better sense of the  religiosity of eighteenth century than more recent chroniclers?" he asks. "Probably. Were they correct in painting a dour, predestination-minded culture as a progressive political force. Probably ... Modern cultural biases cannot wholly rewrite a prior American reality: that the Calvinist denominations central to those old battles ... bulked larger in the thirteen colonies of the 1770s than any major European nation."

Phillips is particularly skeptical that secular ideology was as important as its recent champions (think Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood) have asserted. He doesn't deny its prevalence in Revolutionary discourse, but he sees it as one element in a more complex fabric, and one that was probably secondary to trading interests. As he distills his view in his chapter on the subject on the birth of American politics: "economic motivations, constitutional rhetoric." In this regard he's closer to younger historians like Woody Holton, whose work is frequently cited.
 
The core point in any case is that the crucible of the American Revolution was the period between the fall of 1774 and the end of 1775. It was in these months that the rebels did not declare independence, but actually implemented it: they seized control of governments, formulated economic strategy, and actually fought a series of battles that stretched from Canada to the Carolinas.  The Declaration of Independence was literally an afterthought.

Phillips is persuasive in making this case. But he's not alone in making it. Actually, T.H. Breen stakes out similar turf in his 2010 book American Insurgents, American Patriots (see my review here). Oddly, though Phillips lists two of Breen's earlier books in his bibliography, this most recent one is not mentioned.

That's not the only problem. As you can probably tell even from this brief summary, 1775 sprawls in ways that are not always felicitous. It's not clear, for example, why we need two separate chapters, in two separate sections, on the Canadian campaign. Or two separate chapters Britain's first efforts to contain the Revolution of the South. Figures like the colorful Lord Dunmore certainly have a place in this story, but probably not as frequently as he pops up. One suspects that Phillips has become susceptible to the syndrome of the highly successful author not getting, or accepting, an editorial razor.

But of course there's a reason why he so successful. 1775 is a grab bag, but it's one that stuffed with welcome prizes (and one that you can pick your way through). Phillips can be a highly entertaining writer, as when he describes the notorious Duke of Alba executing Dutch Calvinists "as easily as frontier Texans barbecued beef" or suggests that the imprecations of the international indentured servant market was a form of virtual slavery, "lacking only some mittel europaisch Harriet Beecher Stowe to pen Uncle Hans's Barracks."

In short, 1775 is not Phillips's best work, as perhaps is inevitable when a writer turns to history as a form of escapism. But for that very reason it's highly readable -- and informative. Anybody who's as talented as he is good company.

Freedom rider

Frederick Douglass took the self-made man to a whole new level

 The following post is part of a series on the rise and fall of the self-made man in American culture.

It is perhaps a measure of the unique reach of the early nineteenth century version of the self-made man that it was finally able to breach a barrier that had once seemed impossible to overcome: slavery. Henry Clay suspected that slavery inhibited his attempts to champion the self-made man; Abraham Lincoln acted decisively to end it for that reason. But only African Americans themselves could truly realize the possibilities of emancipation. As would soon become apparent, this would not be easy, even after slavery was destroyed. But the nation, and the idea, now seemed big enough to contain such a possibility.

The most impressive demonstration of what a self-proclaimed self-made man could be was Frederick Douglass. Born in bondage circa 1818 – “slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs” he notes at the start of his famous autobiography – Douglass began his life on a plantation on the eastern shore of Maryland, the child of a mother he barely knew and an unknown white man. And yet, as he and others were keen to note, the deprivations he suffered as a slave were relatively mild. He spent a significant stint of his childhood in Baltimore – once again, city as greenhouse of self-making – under the tutelage of a white woman who taught him to read. Douglass continued to practice his skills while working as an assistant in a local shipyard before being sent back to work as a plantation hand (where he tried to teach his fellow slaves to teach until he was ordered to desist). Rented out to a notorious slave breaker named Edward Covey, Douglass was brutalized until he finally stood up and asserted himself. After being jailed for failed attempt to escape to freedom in 1836, he returned to Baltimore, gaining a number of skills, among them caulking, that allowed him to become quite valuable to his owner. But his determination to escape to freedom was finally realized in 1838, after which he chose the name that made him famous (based on a character in a Sir Walter Scott novel), married, and settled in Massachusetts. Douglass eventually moved to upstate New York and founded a newspaper that became an important instrument in the struggle against slavery.

But it was Douglass’s own life story, made legend in his now classic slave narrative, which proved to be his most important weapon. First published in 1845 – longer editions were issued in 1855 and 1888 – the pointedly titled Life Story of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself – catapulted him to the forefront of the abolitionist movement. Douglass had a great story to tell, and he told it with prose that was stirring in its eloquence.

It is, in a number of decisive ways, a story of gender identity. While the myth of the self-made man tends to view manhood as the pre-existing foundation for success, Douglass’s manhood was itself a product of his own manufacture. Indeed, the essence of slavery was precisely the lack of such an identity. In his deepest misery at the hands of Covey, Douglass noted, “I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, my disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed upon me; and behold a man was transformed into a brute!” Conversely, freedom meant reclaiming that identity. “You have seen how a man was made a slave,” he declared in the famous line of chiasmus from the most dramatic scene in the book, “[now] you shall see a slave made a man.”

This act of self-construction is presented as an act of will, and yet it was one that echoed generations of earlier Americans, white and black, who declined to claim complete agency. Douglass acknowledged a destiny delivered by a higher power. “From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace,” he writes early in the autobiography, “and in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom. This good spirit was from God, and to him I offer thanksgiving and praise.” Douglass was much criticized for pointing out the religious hypocrisies of slave owners, so much so that he felt compelled to include an appendix in the book disclaiming any intention of apostasy. But a deep vein of spirituality animated Douglass’s writings, notwithstanding the superstitions among slaves he lamented in the text and the rage he occasionally directed at those he believed acted in bad faith.

This helps explain the missionary fervor of Douglass’s career as an abolitionist, one that was expansive enough to include ardent advocacy of woman suffrage as well as Irish rights in the face of British oppression. Like Emerson, Douglass was a public intellectual. But he was much more what we would consider a social activist. And yet he also reflected the tenor of his time in his belief that freedom was an act of individual emancipation no less than a collective and political one. “Let the black man get upon his person the brass letters ‘U.S.’; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States,” Douglass wrote, advocating the use of African American soldiers in the Civil War (initially forbidden, they eventually became a significant factor in the outcome). In another piece at the time, he asserted that black Americans were fighting “for principle, and not from passion,” and that these soldiers were achieving “manhood and freedom” of their own making.

To the end of his life – he lived until 1895 – Douglass remained a committed American integrationist. This wasn’t always easy. Though he was an important functionary in the Republican Party in the decades following the Civil War, Douglass was disappointed by its ebbing commitment to freedpeople and its increasing graft and corruption. But even as some of his contemporaries, notably Martin Delany, began advocating what we might call an early form of black nationalism, Douglass continued to believe in the United States as a place were Americans could, should, and ultimately would be masters of their own destinies. He would arguably be vindicated, but it would take a very long time.

Douglass was not only facing stiff racial winds. The bold sense of civic purposes that had characterized the United States in the decades before the Civil War, and which had animated a wide array of social movements, had stalled. Insofar as there were such movements – the Populists come to mind as an important example – they were marked by more of a sense of mass organization, or, alternatively, a growing emphasis on scientific management (Douglass’s protégé Ida B. Wells, who had a similar fiery spirit, relied on statistics and reporting in leading an attack on the epidemic of lynchings that occurred in the South in the 1890s). The self-made man remained a fixture on the American landscape. But his profile was shifting, away from the civic orientation that marked an era that stretched from Franklin to Lincoln. More than his predecessors, the new one had a pecuniary flavor.

Jodie Foster's Singular Journey

A Hollywood Star gets a lifetime achievement award

The following piece is adapted from my new book, Sensing the Past
 

Tonight Jodie Foster will be precocious once more. The native Angeleno who began her acting career at age three will be the relatively youthful recipient of a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes, having just turned 50. The span of her career has been truly remarkable; her collaborators stretch from Helen Hayes, born in 1900, all the way to Abigail Breslin, born in 1996. Filmographically, at least, Foster qualifies as a grande dame.

This would have been hard to imagine back in the seventies, when she made her mark in movies like Freaky Friday. Foster’s persona—bright, confident, impatient with the strictures of authority—was perfect for the post-sixties zeitgeist. One of the first people to recognize this was Martin Scorsese. Scorsese cast Foster in a small part as a tough-minded tomboy in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974).

But the turning point in her career as an actor—and a touchstone for her preoccupations as an artist—was her second Scorsese project, Taxi Driver (1976), in which she plays a child prostitute. While Taxi Driver seems to reflect a vaguely countercultural critique of American life common in the films of the 1970s, it is animated by a powerful vision of evil—atavistic, unexplained, palpable evil—that suffuses Manhattan like the vapor rising up into the street in the unforgettable opening shot of the movie. Though lacking an overt theological or philosophical framework, this notion of implacable, unexplained malice has shaped Foster’s career, a vector that presses down on most of her films and gives many of them the melancholic weight that has always made her a bit unusual even as she went on to become an artist who would operate in the heart of the Hollywood mainstream.

In pursuing this vision, Foster has made her cinematic journey alone. To a striking degree, she plays single women, and even in those cases where her characters experience romance, these relationships are severed by death or other forms of separation.  On those occasions where Foster is a parent, it’s as a single mother. Even her most recent film, The Beaver (2011), a movie that one could regard as an exception because Foster is in a troubled but legally valid marriage, ends with her character on the edge of the frame, observing husband and son from a distance.

            Foster tends to live alone in another important respect as well: to a degree that’s singular among actors of her generation, her characters try to live their lives independent of public institutions, particularly government institutions. At best, institutions are ineffectual in meeting their stated aims; at worst, they’re dangerous. In her signature role as Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs, she must confront the frightening Hannibal Lecter, and the serial killer whose staircase she descends in a state of pure terror, all by herself.

This state of autonomy tends to be a pragmatic choice, not a deeply-held principle or grievance. Clint Eastwood characters often have chips on their shoulders, even as they try to form communities. Foster characters are tougher: less hostile than guarded, with little inclination to bond. Even in those cases where they do work within institutions (like the nun of The Secret Life of Altar Boys), they tend to work on their own. They not anti-institutional so much as non-institutional.  As such, they’re both harder to resist and harder to embrace.

In an ironic yet apt way, Foster is like Ronald Reagan: compelling in her institutional skepticism and the instinctive confidence with which she embodies it. Fate twined Foster’s life with Reagan’s in 1981 when a lunatic tried to impress her by shooting him. This history has been her burden (as history often is, one reason we go to the movies). It’s the singular way Foster has interpreted the world we have shared with her that has made her one of the most distinctive—and, in all likelihood, durable—figures in American culture.

My New Book

It's official: January 9 is the publication date for Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions. Here's the back cover copy: "How do perceptions of the past -- not just of particular events, but of the trajectory of history as a whole -- shape our experience of the world? Sensing the Past tackles this question with an unlikely source of historical insight--the work of six major Hollywood stars: Clint Eastwood, Daniel Day-Lewis, Denzel Washington, Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, and Jodie Foster. By focusing on the career choices made by these iconic actors, Cullen uncovers a discrete set of historical narratives, revealing the surprising ways historical forces shape our understanding of the world."

This project's roots go back to my first days as a high school teacher a decade ago. But the actual writing process began in the spring of 2010 and continued for the next two and a half years. Early drafts of individual chapters appeared on this blog. My post on Daniel Day-Lewis and Gangs of New York, "Native American Study," has been viewed thousands of times and remains among my most popular.

Thanks to those of you who have had a look over the last couple years. I'm hoping that a few of you will be willing to have a look at the finished product. You can buy it here. Thanks. 

--Jim Cullen  

Self-made songwriter

Walt Whitman, solitary universalist

 The following post is part of a series on the rise and fall of the self-made man in American culture.

 

Perhaps the man who more than any other out-Emersoned Emerson in publicly declaring an authentic relation to the universe was Walt Whitman. Born to a yeoman family in rural Long Island in 1819, with less education than Emerson or Thoreau, Whitman migrated to urban Brooklyn and worked for twenty years as a typesetter and journalist, part of what Emerson famously described as a “long foreground” that culminated in the publication in the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855. In that poetry anthology and the many editions that followed, Whitman trampled over established conventions of rhyme, meter, structure and content in forging a unique poetic vision. Endlessly self-referential, Whitman was also insistently dialogical, drawing his reader into his work and asserting their communion in a mystical national, even global body, typified by this passage in his famous “Song of Myself”:

These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they
are not original with me,
If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing,
If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,
If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing. 

It was Whitman’s ambition to be noting less than the poet laureate of the United States, and he was tireless a self-promoter in his quest to realize that goal (Emerson was appalled when Whitman took a private letter of praise and used it to trumpet the publication of a second edition of Leaves of Grass). During the Civil War he went to work as a nurse in Washington, soaking up blood and transubstantiating it into Drum Taps (1865), a collection of poems eventually folded into Leaves of Grass that sought to represent a universal canvas of perspectives. Though he had begun to develop an international following by the time of his death in 1891, Whitman did not achieve his civic ambitions in his lifetime. He attained it in the decades that followed, in large measure through a body of work that smashed through the walls that separate private and public (his poems discussed masturbation and homosexuality, and spoke from the perspectives of women and slaves), making the concept of inclusion synonymous with American.

Next: Final installment of this set -- Frederick Douglass