Lecture 1:
Reconstruction, Reaction, and the Rise of an Imperial America

To Whitman, observing the Civil War was like seeing America "though only in her early youth, already to hospital brought." So he wrote to a friend back in New York and, eventually, in his 1871 essay "Democratic Vistas." In Whitman's poems about the War, he compares its young victims to Christ-like sacrificial victims; his view was widely shared. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, delivered November 19, 1863, called for "a new birth of freedom" and suggested, through an extraordinary metaphor in his brief speech, that the blood of the Union soldiers interred at Gettysburg would inseminate the American soil to make that "new birth" happen. Attempts to understand and rationalize the war between North and South had frequent recourse to elaborate comparisons such as Whitman's and Lincoln's. Whitman had occasionally referred to slavery as a "festering boil" on the body politic of America. In 1861 that boil had burst. Medicating it, healing it, became the cultural work of American writers during this period.

Whitman held a bureaucratic post in Washington, D.C., during much of the Civil War. A federal garrison was billeted there, and the capital mall, with its statues, was home to lines of infantry tents, fortifications, and artillery pieces. Day and night troop convoys entered and left the city; in 1863, when Confederate General Robert E. Lee made his daring dash northward, reaching Gettysburg and nearly cutting off Washington itself, the city was in turmoil. Throughout it all, though, Whitman noted in his journal that Lincoln would pass along the streets in an open carriage, symbol of confidence amidst the confusion. Whitman also observed, however, that the President seemed to age almost daily: the war was clearly exacting a heavy toll on him. When Lincoln was assassinated, a week after the Confederate surrender at Appomatox in April, 1865, Whitman wrote, in the poem entitled "O Captain, My Captain!," of a ship of state that had lost the vision of its leader, that could run adrift if its hands failed to adopt, themselves, Lincoln's exemplary foresight.

Whitman was alternately optimistic, then pessimistic, about the future of America. Six years after the war he began his essay, "Democratic Vistas," with a stunning indictment of the American political and cultural scene. In it he wrote:

The official services of America, national, state, and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, maladministration; and the judiciary is tainted. The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism. In fashionable life, flippancy, tepid amours, weak infidelism, small aims, or no aims at all, only to kill time. in business, the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain . . . . I say that our New World democracy, however great a success in uplifting the masses out of their sloughs, in materialistic development, products, and in a certain highly deceptive superficial popular intellectuality, is, so far, an almost complete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand moral, literary, and aesthetic results. In vain do we march with unprecedented strides to empire so collosal, outvying the antique, beyond Alexander's, beyond the proudest sway of Rome. In vain have we annex'd Texas, California, Alaska, and reach north for Canada and south for Cuba. It is as if we were being endow'd with a vast and more and more thoroughly appointed body, and then left with little or no soul.

Whitman ends the essay, on the other hand, with a rousing call to Americans, who will build (he says) "the superstructures of the future" for world civilization. But why the severe pessimism in that essay? What provoked Whitman's anger and dismay?

Organizing themselves for battle, the states, both North and South, were forced to centralize as never before. Especially in the North, the centralization of industrial production and transportation, involving the creation of new governmental bureaucracies for the management of the war effort, proceeded as never before. Federalism emerged as a dominant force in American sociopolitical life. Centralization in the North had been a major reason for the success of General Grant's campaigns in battle. Yet that centralization had also opened the political and economic system to hucksters, frauds and double-dealers of all kinds.

Writing from Boston, James Russell Lowell called this new America "the land of broken promise." In New York city the so-called "Tweed Ring" dominated borough politics, ruling an empire built on payoffs and cronyism. In Washington, Andrew Johnson would stand impeached before the Senate, charged with "high crimes and misdemeanors" for his mismanagement of the Executive. Ulysses Grant would succeed him in 1869, and Whitman would summarize his character: "good, worthy, non-demonstrative, average to the point of mediocrity." Historians have since documented the patterns of neglect and corruption during his eight years in the Presidency.

Surveying this social landscape, Henry Adams would write: "The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin." But it was Mark Twain who gave this age the name that has stuck. Saying that "the present era of incredible rottenness is not Democratic, it is not Republican, it is national," Twain dubbed it "the Gilded Age," because Americans seemed to worship "Gold, and Greenbacks and Stock--Father, Son, and Ghost of same."

In "Democratic Vistas" Whitman's optimism is pegged to ideas about America's imperial future. An "empire so collosal," as he imagines America, will outdo the ancient empires of Greece and Rome together. Yet what were the origins of that hopeful "vista" on the future?

For Whitman, as for American writers from Bradford in 1620 through Twain in 1870, ideas about America's providential destiny were understood in terms of a westward myth. According to this view of history, the great empires of the ancient Mediterranean world--Babylon, Greece, and Rome--had obeyed a principal of westward and cyclical growth and decay. Greece had risen, climaxed its imperial growth under Alexander the Great, then declined, whereupon the Roman empire of the Caesars had risen in its turn. This westward progress of empire was seen extending through the Holy Roman Empire, then to England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With the rise of the American Republic in the early nineteenth century, many thinkers considered that the cyclical, westward progress of empire was about to complete itself. Americans "Facing West from California's Shores," as Whitman phrased it in a poem of 1860, looked to the cradle of civilization--Asia. America thus seemed to both inherit, and complete the stages of earlier imperial growth.

This common idea had been stated and reformulated in countless ways throughout American history. In 1752 the British philosopher George Berkeley (1685-1753) wrote a poem, based on his sojourn in the American colonies (from 1728-31). His "Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America" concludes with the following quatrain:

Westward the Course of Empire takes its way;
The first four Acts already pass'd,
A fifth shall close the Drama with the Day:
Time's nobl'st offspring is the last.

Bishop Berkeley's concluding stanza contains the line "Westward the Course of Empire takes its way" that was to become a motto for nineteenth-century American expansionism. But what does the rest of that stanza say? Its controlling metaphor is taken from the conventions of drama: History, Berkeley supposes, is like a five-act play. What are the "first four Acts" that have been played out on the world-historical stage? Doubtless Berkeley meant the great Empires of Greece, Rome, the Holy Roman Empire, then his own England. The fifth Act? Clearly it is America, whose citizens have the historical responsibility to "close the Drama with the Day." What day? In that phrase Berkeley invokes the ideal of the Millenium, the Day foretold in the writings of Puritan thinkers like Winthrop, or Bradford, who imagined that the function of this American "vineyard" or Vineland, is to become a field from which the divinity will harvest the souls of His elect, on Judgment Day.

Berkeley's allegory of westward progress thus synthesizes both a lineal and a cyclical view of history. Imperial states are seen, in this view, rising and falling according to cyclical patterns of progress; yet these patterns also move in linear fashion, continuously westward with the setting sun, until at last, the cycle is closed when Americans look across the Pacific to Asia.

Consider as well, however, the burden of history that a view such as Berkeley's places upon Americans. They are, in this understanding of historical time, the culmination of a long, progressive heritage, with the responsibility to usher in that millennial "Day." One clear responsibility history places upon the American, then, is to be different than all prior Empires--and not fall as the others did. On this view imperial America has the responsibility of breaking the cyclical pattern of the rise and fall of Empire.

Against this Ideal, the American writer in the late nineteenth century measures her or his culture and, typically, finds it wanting. The Real, whether it is the facts of slavery and Reconstruction, the increasing calls for equality among the sexes, or the loss of frontier territory as a space in which to continually re-imagine the Ideal, is for American writers during our period a terrain of social and cultural problems.

The history of the period, from 1865 to about 1915, demonstrates the active role of federal government in addressing such problems. These decades saw the first land grant universities, such as the University of Kentucky, made possible under the Morrill Act of 1863. They saw, in addition, the completion of crucial transportation and communication projects, such as the railroads and telegraph systems, all completed with vital support of the federal government. Federal control over currencies, and the passage (in 1913) of a law enabling the first federal income tax, all occurred during this period. Time itself was standardized, in 1883, with the creation of the Time Zones. In the private sector too, immensely significant changes were afoot: the uses of electricity in transportation and city lighting, the development of large corporations such as Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, du Pont, and Ford Motor companies, all created an increasingly centralized and managed labor force, operating out of urban centers. By the turn of the century, about one-half of all Americans lived in cities, and Jefferson's ideal of an agrarian population was, indeed, old history.

With such changes came demands from ethnic minorities and from women's groups for equal shares in the prosperity created by these developments. In this sense, the sociocultural problems we all recognize as aspects of twentieth century experience can be seen in their original forms during the nineteenth. The writers we shall be studying in the assignments to follow approach these three areas--touching on racism and Reconstruction, on the loss of western frontiers, on women's rights--in various ways. Many of these writers have been commonly identified with aesthetic realism, because of the ways they desired to more or less objectively treat the gritty facts of ordinary life, and the institutions that hem in the individual American. Many of them, however, seek to meet these realist objectives in writings that may often be read as allegories of conflict and change.

Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn may thus be approached as an allegory of the War and Reconstruction; Chopin's The Awakening as an allegory of women's struggles; and Crane's "The Blue Hotel" as a fable about the loss of the frontier. We may say, in this tentative conclusion, that American writers thus tended to meet the conflicts of the Ideal and the Real, in their experience, by literary techniques that synthesize realism with the allegorical impulse. And it is the tension between these modes of thinking that creates the dynamic of literary change we are concerned to study, in what follows.