REFORM

Throughout the fifty-year span from 1870 to 1920, American authors sought increasingly to link their writing to the mission of social reform. For many members of the literary generation that came of age during the 1860s, the carnage of civil war created a crisis in representation, in which forms of literature that were popular before the war now seemed increasingly evasive and banal. To better link writing more directly to emerging social realities, a coterie of younger authors embraced the techniques of literary realism developed by European authors in the first half of the nineteenth century. A literature of the real, they argued, would shake popular American writing out of its tendency toward escapism and would reorient the audiences that dominated the antebellum literary marketplace. One was the audience of women readers who frequently favored writing that the realists found melodramatic, sentimental, and out of touch. Another was the growing genteel middle-class readership that equated literature with a sense of refinement and decorum, seeking to isolate itself from the gritty realities of American life. Literary realism, this new generation argued, would embrace this grittiness—and by so doing alter the goals of American writing. By representing the realities of poverty (rural and urban), prejudice (racial and ethnic), and financial malfeasance (municipal and corporate), these writers sought to elevate their role within American society. Not only would they instruct, entertain, and sell through their writing, but they would also impel social action and political reform.

IMPORTANT DATES FOR REFORM, 1870–1920

1870: John D. Rockefeller founds the Standard Oil Company

1873: Financial panic of 1873

1874: Tompkins Square Labor Riot in New York

1877: Federal and state troops crush nationwide railroad strike

1879: Henry George publishes Progress and Poverty

1882: Thirty thousand workers march in the first Labor Day parade in New York City

1884: William Dean Howells publishes The Rise of Silas Lapham

1886: In Chicago 350,000 workers demonstrate for the eight-hour workday

1887: Seven anarchists sentenced to death for the Haymarket bombing

1888: Edward Bellamy publishes Looking Backward

1889: Jane Addams opens Hull-House

1890: William Dean Howells publishes A Hazard of New Fortunes

Jacob Riis publishes How the Other Half Lives

1891: People's (Populist) Party formed Homestead, Pennsylvania, steel strike Hamlin Garland publishes Main-Travelled Roads

1893: Depression begins Stephen Crane publishes Maggie, A Girl of the Streets

1894: Coxey's Army of the unemployed marches on Washington, D.C.

Labor Day becomes an official U.S. holiday

1900: Theodore Dreiser publishes Sister Carrie Frank Norris publishes The Octopus

1902: Ida Tarbell publishes The History of the Standard Oil Company

Upton Sinclair publishes The Jungle

Lincoln Steffens publishes The Shame of the Cities

W. E. B. Du Bois publishes The Souls of Black Folk

1903: Department of Commerce and Labor created by Congress

1905: Industrial Workers of the World founded in Chicago

1906: Upton Sinclair publishes The Jungle

1909: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People founded

1910: Jane Addams publishes Twenty Years at Hull-House

1911: Fire kills 146 workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City

1913: U.S. Department of Labor established

1915: Van Wyck Brooks publishes America's Comingof-Age

1916: Congress passes Federal Child Labor Law Eight-hour day becomes federal law

1917: United States enters World War I Abraham Cahan publishes The Rise of David Levinsky

1919: Postwar strikes sweep across the nation Communist Party of America founded

THE ARRIVAL OF REALISM

Edward Eggleston (1837–1902), one of the more popular American writers of the 1870s, articulated as well as any member of his generation the desire to use postwar writing as a vehicle for social change. Reflecting in 1892 on his forty-year career as an author, minister, and social activist, Eggleston wrote: "Two manner of men were born in me, and for the greater part of my life there has been an enduring struggle between the lover of literary art and the religionist, the reformer, the philanthropist, the man with a mission." The link Eggleston draws between religion and social reform is instructive. American literary realists were often people of deep faith who sought to reproduce in postwar America the altruistic "Christian capitalism" they associated with their antebellum youths. They often combined this desire with an urge to re-create the moral universe (a universe more often imagined than real) of prewar republican-ism—the idealized values of personal and local autonomy, civic participation, and moderation in economic and civic affairs. Not all realists shared this vision of reform, nor for that matter did they share the desire to reform society at all. Some, such as Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, and Henry James, were indifferent, skeptical, or contemptuous of the reformist impulse. But others, such as William Dean Howells and Hamlin Garland, consistently claimed that writers had an ethical duty to confront social reality, particularly the turbulent forms of industrial capitalism emerging throughout the period. They felt their mission as writers was both aesthetic and social. On the one hand, they sought to elevate American writing to "art," and on the other, they desired to propel their readers toward active, participatory citizenship. "Realistic" accounts of American life, they argued, would revivify sentiments for the equitable system of economic and social relations they believed were passing from everyday American life. Once again, Eggleston said it as well as anyone: he insisted that this new American writing should represent "facts bearing on the subtle principles of social development" ("Social Science at the West," p. 4). Postwar writing, he continued, should chronicle the "very unformed and plastic state of society," so that "the principles of its development shall be understood [and] remedies for its evils shall be known and applied" ("Western Correspondence," p. 4).

Henry George (1839–1897) is a central figure for both American reform and American writing in the late nineteenth century. An occasional neighbor of Howells, and much admired by him and Garland, George shared with them a desire to maintain a system of values and virtues they saw corrupted by commercial capitalism's ability to amass and concentrate extraordinary wealth into the hands of the few. George's influence can be seen throughout the fiction of the period, but is perhaps most vividly invoked in Eggleston's Mystery of Metropolisville (1873). In its desire to unravel the mysterious economic processes at work in Gilded Age America, the novel functions as a companion piece to George's Progress and Poverty (1879), one of the most influential books of the period. Like George, Eggleston saw in the speculation and "concentration" of land major causes of the growing inequalities within American life. The story concerns corrupt land speculators in a small Minnesota town, which, as the title of the novel suggests, is being absorbed into the metropolitan system of commercial capitalism making inroads throughout the period into the hinterlands. After the Civil War, speculative financial panics, which were once localized and thus minimally disruptive, tended to intensify and cascade throughout the increasingly interconnected national economic matrix. These economic disruptions lead to the further consolidation of previously semiautonomous local economies as smaller localized producers were unable to maintain their market position against larger, more efficient, national firms.

In the aftermath of war, an economy of scale emerged that was literally unimaginable to most Americans ten years earlier. Through speculation and industrial consolidation, enormous personal fortunes and new economic entities—trusts, corporations, combinations—began to control the national economy. George was one of the most forceful and influential critics of the emerging order. He wrote in a vocabulary that resonated with the prewar memories through which many members of the postwar generation processed the extraordinary and often inexplicable changes reshaping American life in the 1870s. His solution for economic problems was a "single tax" on land used for speculation rather than homesteading. George surmised that a heavily progressive tax on speculative land purchases would restore order and a human scale to the economy. George's call for a single tax was unrealistic politically and economically (Karl Marx called him a "panacea monger"), yet as much as any literary realist, he articulated the aesthetic credo at the very heart of realistic reform. Consider, for example, this passage from George's "Our Land and Land Policy" an essay from 1872 that anticipated the main arguments of Progress and Poverty, published seven years later:

When the monopolization of land is not permitted, where a man can only take land which he wants to use, unused land can have no value, at least none above the price fixed by the state for the privilege of occupying it. But as land becomes occupied, most of it would acquire a value either from the possession of natural advantages superior to that still unoccupied, or from its more central position as respects the population. This we may call the necessary or real value of land, in contradistinction to the unnecessary or fictitious value of land which results from monopolization. (P. 35)

George's setting of real value against fictitious value captures an issue at the heart of realistic literary reform. The realists knew, of course, that they were writing fiction, but it was a fiction that alluded constantly, almost compulsively, to its grounding in the "real." It rarely interrogated the idea of the "real" as the product of a particular cultural point of view, a social construct, so to speak, that could possibly have different valences depending on the class, ethnicity, or gender of the observer. This considerable blind spot aside, George's sense of real value touches upon the tendency among literary reformers to condemn a set of postwar cultural values many of them considered false and misguided. The issue of land proved an effective means through which to discuss questions of cultural value, providing a vocabulary of sorts through which Americans of the 1870s and 1880s debated the future of their society.

THE REVOLT OF THE PROVINCES

In spite of the ascendancy of industrialization, Gilded Age America remained predominantly an agrarian nation. The promise of accessible land resonated deeply within the Jeffersonian-Lincolnian vision of a moral social economy comprised of small agrarian shareholders. But this was also an economy increasingly overwhelmed by the forces of rapacious overaccumulation, fueled particularly by railroads and the postwar settlement of the Far West, where monopolistic ownership of land provided greater economic efficiency than the more egalitarian settlement patterns of the older Midwest. Monopolistic land ownership, frequently by the railroads, allowed carriers to fix rates for shipping goods to market, usually to the detriment of the small farmer, and gave rise to one of the most powerful reform movements in American history—populism. Populism produced a number of literary works, the most noteworthy being Ignatius Donnelly's dystopian novel Caesar's Column (1890). The stranglehold railroads held over rural societies aroused populist—and popular—outrage throughout the Gilded Age, receiving its most in-depth literary treatment in Frank Norris's (1870–1902) California novel The Octopus (1901). Although not usually viewed as an example of local color writing, The Octopus draws upon a major impulse within regionalist writing that prevailed within American literature for four decades after the Civil War. Widely divergent in scope and intention, both local color and regionalist writing often focused on the symbolic force of land—and communities based on landed economies—as besieged vestiges of "authentic" cultural values. Though local color writing could be ineffectual nostalgia, at its most powerful it used accounts of rural space to critique the "fictitious" values of corporate consolidation and commercial capitalism emanating from the metropolis. This is certainly true of Eggleston's Mystery of Metropolisville but also of the work of Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Hamlin Garland—and at times even Mark Twain.

GENTEEL SOCIALISM

William Dean Howells, Twain's friend and champion, took some of the most thoughtful and courageous political positions assumed by mainstream writers throughout the 1880s and 1890s. Near the end of his career, Howells's reputation suffered at the hands of a new generation of writers and critics led by H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis, who resented his generation-long hold upon American letters. Their critique of his work was haphazard, and tended to harp upon an essay he wrote in 1886 in which he observed that American novelists "concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American" ("Editor's Study," p. 642). Yet in his own novels and social practice, Howells was quick to confront many aspects of American life he found increasingly disturbing, although to many of his later critics he tended do so in a register that was overly tame. Nonetheless, few novelists of the era articulated as clearly and consistently as Howells the idea that the drive toward economic expansion and accumulation had led post–Civil War middle- and upper-class Americans to replace civic and religious responsibility with the pursuit of personal gain. The corruption of middle-class values was a central theme of Howells's most successful novels: The Minister's Charge (1887), The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). It also informed his utopian tract, A Traveller from Altruria (1892). Howells also displayed extraordinary personal integrity and courage when he bucked popular middle-class and elite opinion by defending the group of immigrant anarchists falsely convicted of inciting the Haymarket labor riot in 1886, which left eight Chicago policemen dead.

Howells's public defense of the anarchists marked a quickening in the relationship between writers and reformist politics unknown in America since the days of abolitionism. By the late 1880s, tensions between labor and capital had reached unprecedented levels, with many Americans imagining a new civil war based on class rather than race and geopolitics. The tension over class and industrialization shaped Howells's most mature work and also explains the reception of the most popular novel of the postwar period, Edward Bellamy's utopian story Looking Backward (1888). Bellamy's novel of a future society that had solved the problems of the present provided comfort to a population increasingly haunted by strikes, labor violence, and the growth of urban poverty. Told from the imaginative vantage point of the late twentieth century, Looking Backward offered in prescient detail the promise of a future industrial utopia in which the "shocking social consequences" of "the modern industrial system" were solved through a combination of statist planning and spirituality (p. 93). Bellamy called this solution nationalism, a civic and emotional force fueled by an almost mystical sense of social comity he termed the "the religion of solidarity." Remarkable in its own right for its anticipation of many of the social and material technologies of modernist America (and, in some ways, fascism), Looking Backward was also remarkable for another reason: it was one of the few novels in American history to initiate a political movement.

Acting on the phenomenal success of the novel, Bellamy and his readers (who now became followers and converts) established the Nationalist magazine and nationalist clubs, which sprang up throughout the country. The magazine and the clubs championed a social vision that was to form the basis of the modernist liberal state: centralized planning and statist mechanisms for wealth redistribution, desires that fueled both the rise of progressivism in the early twentieth century and the New Deal of the 1930s. The nationalist clubs and magazine were, in fact, part of a larger cultural movement through which writers, cultural critics, and social reformers assumed active roles in political life. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, writers engaged in the Social Gospel movement, Christian socialism, populism, and the settlement house movements produced an array of fiction and nonfiction works that imagined a society based on principles of religious altruism, social equality, and shared wealth, most prominently Jane Addams's Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910). Another major figure in this movement was the Boston-based socialist B. O. Flower (1858–1918), one of Hamlin Garland's earliest mentors. Flower's journal the Arena became one of the leading literary and political organs for reformist and at times radical politics. He understood the uses of literature in making his case for social reform, and he urged Garland to explore through his short stories the social contours of contemporary American life. Many of the chapters of Garland's Main-Travelled Roads (1891) first appeared in the Arena. Arena clubs also appeared around the country, fostering Flower's brand of socialist reform and like Bellamy's nationalist clubs paving the way for progressivism, which was less radical but deeply informed by the visions of Flower and Bellamy.

Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000–1887 was the most popular American book of the second half of the nineteenth century. Bellamy's vision of a future industrial utopia clashed with the everyday realities of his contemporaries, who feared that industrialism was producing a social cataclysm, pitting rich against poor, capital against labor.

Living as we do in the closing year of the twentieth century, enjoying the blessings of a social order at once so simple and logical that it seems but the triumph of common sense, it is no doubt difficult for those whose studies have not been largely historical to realize that the present organization of society is, in its completeness, less than a century old. No historical fact is, however, better established than that till nearly the end of the nineteenth century it was the general belief that the ancient industrial system, with all its shocking social consequences, was destined to last, with possibly a little patching, to the end of time. How strange and wellnigh incredible does it seem that so prodigious a moral and material transformation as has taken place since then could have been accomplished in so brief an interval! The readiness with which men accustom themselves, as matters of course, to improvements in their condition, which, when anticipated, seemed to leave nothing more to be desired, could not be more strikingly illustrated. What reflection could be better calculated to moderate the enthusiasm of reformers who count for their reward on the lively gratitude of future ages!

Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000–1887.

PROGRESSIVE LITERARY REFORM

By the 1890s the tradition of literary reform established after the Civil War—and intensified by the breakdown of labor-capital relations throughout the 1880s—experienced a "second wave," as a new generation of writers (novelists, journalists, social critics) began to emerge who would prove enormously influential in fueling progressive reform in the early twentieth century. From a purely literary standpoint, first and foremost among them was Stephen Crane, whose short novel Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893) provided a "stylistic leap" that marked a major turning point in the history of American representation, popular taste, and political reform. Although far more interested in aesthetics than social change, Crane influenced a coterie of Progressive Era novelists whose interest in reform went far deeper than his own. Crane's work affected the writing of Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair (1878–1968), whose novel of the meatpacking industry, The Jungle, provided one of the most explicit and politically influential exposés of the abusive labor practices of the period. Sinclair later ran unsuccessfully as a Socialist for governor of California. Crane also influenced the muckrakers, journalists such as Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Jacob Riis, whose exposés of corporate corruption and urban mismanagement created the new field of investigative journalism, and in Riis's case, investigative photojournalism.

The shift in representation that occurred in the 1890s was part of a larger moment of change within the decade. The historian Paul Boyer has noted that in the 1890s a major transformation occurred in the way many Americans viewed reform. Previously, many citizens adhered to a strictly individualist religious model he calls "coercive reform." Coercive reform held people fully responsible for their problems and actions, denying the role that social forces might play in an individual's success or failure. Churches and missionary societies following this model sought to coerce "sinners" to change their lives by changing their behavior—by developing the "character" to reform themselves, which in the Christian vocabulary of coercive reform meant accepting Jesus into their lives. However, to some members of a younger generation of reform-minded writers, many of whom were raised in the church, this model seemed increasingly ineffective against mounting systemic urban social ills. In response, they developed a new model—environmental reform—which argued that in order to change behavior, society needed to change the circumstances in which people lived.

Churches would still play a role in reform activities, but duties previously assumed by the church would shift, following Bellamy's argument in Looking Backward, to a much larger, more effective instrument of social change: the national, secular state. Instead of concerning itself with individual moral degradation, the state (and a good deal of literary realism) would focus on the degraded environments inhabited by both the urban and rural poor. This attitude was a cornerstone of progressive political and literary reform, and although earlier intimations of it could be found in state-run charity boards that began to appear in the 1870s, it was only in the 1890s that this model came to dominate national reformist thinking. By the first decade of the twentieth century, environmental reform and statism began to take hold. During the Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson administrations, the federal government passed hundreds of laws regulating business and commerce. This transfer of cultural authority from the churches to the state was neither sudden nor absolute but rather part of a larger cultural shift that sought to combine in the spirit of Bellamy's Looking Backward a sense of national consensus built upon a secular "religion of solidarity." The Social Gospel movement of the 1890s and the rise of Christian socialism were complementary movements to progressivism. All three drew upon values derived from religious sentiments and sought to use government as a vehicle for applying these values to social reform. Influenced by the work of Tolstoy, Howells, for example, identified himself as a Christian socialist and understood his novels to be something more than literature: they were part of a larger political movement for social justice. At the same time, the Social Gospel movement around the turn of the century produced a spate of novels and tracts, the most influential among them Charles Sheldon's enormously popular work In His Steps (1896), which asked readers to consider contemporary social inequalities as spiritual and religious dilemmas. Sheldon's work presented familiar social problems to its readers and asked them to consider a question that for many of them was both compelling and timely: "What would Jesus do?"

A pairing of texts from the 1890s uncannily chronicles the tensions and transitions within literary reform (both secular and religious) during this period: Crane's Maggie and an obscure text published two years later, The Story about "Meg," a vignette concerning "Meg of the street" that appeared in Reverend T. De Witt Talmage's (1832–1902) book Evils of the Cities (1892). Similar in title and subject, the stories are radically different in presentation, and together they highlight the multifaceted nature of reform and representation in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Crane's short novel was influential and innovative, whereas Talmage's work was popular and prosaic, a literary dead end. Yet both stood at the crossroads of reformist sensibilities and demonstrate the transition between coercive and environmental reform Boyer has in mind. Like Crane's Maggie, Talmage's Meg becomes a "lost wanderer of the street" (p. 270), a young woman overwhelmed by the attractions of the urban world, easily seduced by the promise the city holds for her. Crane's Maggie dwells in a Darwinian social universe at once harshly cruel and indifferent to human longing; Talmage's Meg lives in a tragic world of individual suffering, yet one guided by spiritual transcendence and redemption. In Maggie, Crane creates another kind of world, pioneering the genre of literary naturalism, an offshoot of realism in which social forces dominate the action of the novel, becoming in effect the driving force of plot and character. Maggie's world is an urban world of grinding poverty, alcoholism, violence, degraded labor, lust, and unbridled desire, forces that consistently trump the individual's ability to triumph over misery and despair. It is a bleak world lacking in moral or spiritual transcendence. For Talmage, on the other hand, social forces seem to exist hardly at all; it is not as if they are entirely absent from the story of Meg, but they are presented with a startling lack of detail, all but reducing Meg to a stock figure in a timeworn morality play. There is nothing real or natural about her. In Meg's world, an ossified sense of moral certitude prevails; the reader gets no sense of her motivations or psychology, no sense of her relation to the social universe she inhabits. In this world, abstract selves simply choose to succeed or fail through wise or poor choices; it is a world in which death always has a higher meaning and a moral lesson attached to it. It is a worldview increasingly at odds with progressive reform and literary realism, but one that many reform-minded Americans still held to fastly and devoutly. Scorned by her family, Crane's Maggie dies a fallen woman, a prostitute who wanders off into the darkness of the New York Harbor to meet death without redemption. Talmage's Meg dies a saved woman, redeemed by her family and by "a pardoning Jesus" who takes "back one whom the world rejected" (p. 272).

Crane initiated a form of stark, detailed, militantly antisentimental literary representation that would prove useful, indeed necessary, for mainstream political writers and reformers. Yet arguably, at the century's turn the most significant relation between writing and reform occurred within subaltern populations: blacks, immigrants, and women, who often found themselves the objects of mainstream white male realist representation, but who had little political or cultural power to represent themselves outside of dominant literary conventions. For example, Pauline E. Hopkins's Contending Forces (1900), Frances Harper's Iola Leroy (1892), and Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901) moved the African American literary tradition to new ground. Drawing upon the slave narrative tradition, they moved black writing beyond it, issuing powerful cultural critiques of race relations within black culture and between whites and blacks. Additionally, white women, many of whom pointedly felt their second class status even as members of the white cultural elite, used fiction to plot positions of feminist resistance to patriarchal power: for example, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (1899) and Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899). And immigrant writers such as Anzia Yezierska, Mary Antin, and Abraham Cahan detailed the lives of ethnic minorities from a position far more politically informed—and politically charged—than Crane's rendering of Maggie, which is at once sympathetic and contemptuous.

RACE AND RECOIL

Within this upsurge in turn-of-the-century subaltern writing, the most significant and far reaching work was W. E. B. Du Bois's magisterial The Souls of Black Folk (1902). Deeply embroiled in the politics of contemporary African American life, Du Bois (1868–1963) was the first African American to receive a PhD from Harvard. A sociologist by training, Du Bois felt powerfully the burden of living and being between cultures. Central to this feeling is Du Bois's complex and slippery concept of double consciousness, one of the most significant rhetorical constructs of the twentieth century, with implications for psychology, anthropology, sociology, literary modernism, and later in the century, postcolonialism. "It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness," Du Bois wrote in understated fashion:

This sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (P. 3)

Double consciousness, Du Bois argued, was both a gift and a curse. On the one hand, it internalized the racist gaze of the dominant white culture and required African Americans to see themselves as constant objects of racial scrutiny. On the other hand, it gave African Americans an ability to see white culture more clearly than did whites themselves; it gave them insights into the workings of white dominance to which whites were often indifferent or oblivious. It was simultaneously a form of painful self-scrutiny and powerful social critique. Indeed, Du Bois's writing was both deeply personal and deeply political and was meant first and foremost to serve as a vehicle for social transformation. In 1909 along with the black activist Ida Wells-Barnett, the white publisher of the Nation, Oswald Garrison Villard, and a group of other advocates for racial justice, Du Bois played a key role in founding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), one of the more significant American reform organizations of the twentieth century.

Van Wyck Brooks's essay America's Coming-of-Age (1915) provides a useful end point for plotting the entanglement of literature and reform that marked the period between the Civil War and World War I. The period of war and Wilsonian internationalism that accompanied it marked a redirection of progressive energies that left many older writers and reformers fatigued, disillusioned, or at loose ends. Brooks (1886–1963) pioneers in this cultural manifesto a new social role that was soon to become a commonplace: the cultural critic who uses the American literary tradition as a means for waging debates about contemporary American life. Through his critiques of American life, Brooks sought what he called "a usable past," a sense of a shared cultural tradition that might enrich and direct social energies more productively and profoundly than social reform movements. "Movements of Reform," Brooks argued, are "external" and "superficial." "The impetus of reform," he added "is evidently derived from the hope that a sufficient number of reformers can be trained and brought into the field to match the forces of business—the one group canceling the other group. The ideal of reform, in short, is the attainment of zero" (p. 30). Redirecting the energies of the public reform movements that began with Reconstruction and later fueled progressivism, Brooks argued that the only serious approach to society is the personal approach, and that more than economic justice or social equality, what "the majority of Americans" need is "an object of living," a shared sense of individual and national purpose (p. 34).

In a retreat from two decades of activist social reform, Brooks claims that "the center of gravity in American affairs has shifted wholly from the plane of politics to the plane of psychology and morals." "So long as we fail to realize this," he adds, "politics can only continue to the old endless unfruitful seesaw of corruption and reform" (p. 168). Like Ralph Waldo Emerson almost one hundred years earlier, Brooks chose self-help over social action. In terms of literature, the search for self-fulfillment that Brooks championed led many of the best American authors of the 1920s to leave America—and led them to produce in a short span of time the finest collection of American writing since the 1850s. Yet this writing had little consequence for American political life. And when Americans did produce a politically powerful literature, Brooks seemed unable to see it. He missed entirely the work toward racial justice—"an object for living" if ever there was one—that produced the Harlem Renaissance. For most of the citizens and writers he had in mind, the decade-long depression that began in 1929 redirected energies away from a counterfeit form of self-fulfillment—Jazz Age hedonism—and toward the "catchpenny realities" of economic deprivation (p. 7). The Great Depression led many writers back to politics and reform and in many cases took them even further into political radicalism. Indeed, the momentary breakdown of global capitalism led many writers during the depression toward socialism, communism, and anti-fascism. In charting new political territory, these writers tended to disavow the generation of mainstream literary reformers who came before them—and on whose books they were raised. Yet it was these generations—the generations from 1870 to 1920—that, in fact, created part of the "usable past" for which Brooks longed. It was a guiding tradition for the ways in which literary reformers and the literature of reform might begin the work of creating a new kind of reader-citizen, one who would equate the personal with the political and come to see that self-realization and social justice are inseparable goals.

See alsoThe Jungle; Jurisprudence; Muckrakers and Yellow Journalism; Poverty; Presidential Elections; The Souls of Black Folk; Temperance; Women's Suffrage

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull-House, with Autobiographical Notes. New York: Macmillan, 1910.

Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward, 2000–1887. 1888. Edited by John L. Thomas. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967.

Bellamy, Edward. The Religion of Solidarity. Edited by Arthur E. Morgan. Yellow Springs, Ohio: Antioch Bookplate, 1940.

Brooks, Van Wyck. America's Coming of Age. New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1915.

Chesnutt, Charles Waddell. The Marrow of Tradition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1901.

Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. Chicago: H. S. Stone, 1899.

Crane, Stephen. Maggie, A Girl of the Streets. New York: Appleton, 1896.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903.

Eggleston, Edward. The Mystery of Metropolisville. New York: O. Judd, 1873.

Eggleston, Edward. "Social Science at the West." Independent, 7 May 1868, p. 4.

Eggleston, Edward. "Western Correspondence." Independent, 25 December 1968, p. 4.

Garland, Hamlin. Main-Travelled Roads: Six Mississippi Valley Stories. Boston: Arena, 1891.

George, Henry. Our Land and Land Policy. San Francisco: White and Bauer, 1871.

George, Henry. Progress and Poverty: An Enquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions, and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth—the Remedy. San Francisco: H. George, 1879.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wall-Paper. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1899.

Hopkins, Pauline E. Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South. Boston: Colored Cooperative Publishing Company, 1900.

Howells, William Dean. "Editor's Study: Dostoyevsky and the More Smiling Aspects of Life." Harper's Weekly 73 (1886): 642.

Howells, William Dean. A Hazard of New Fortunes. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1890.

Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York. New York: Scribners, 1890.

Steffens, Lincoln. The Shame of the Cities. New York: Peter Smith, 1901.

Talmage, T. De Witt. Evils of the Cities. Chicago: Rhodes and McClure, 1891.

Tarbell, Ida. The History of the Standard Oil Company. New York: McClure, Phillips, 1904.

Secondary Works

Boyer, Paul. Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Dombroski, James. The Early Days of Christian Socialism in America. New York: Octagon Books, 1977.

Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

May, Henry F. Protestant Churches and Industrial America. New York: Harper, 1949.

Pizer, Donald, ed. The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: From Howells to London. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Thomas, John L. Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demerest Lloyd, and the Adversary Tradition. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983.

Wiebe, Robert. The Search for Order, 1877–1920. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967.

Bruce Levy