American Abyss: Savagery and Civilization in the Age of Industry by Daniel Bender (review)

In his wonderfully sardonic Education Henry Adams wrote of trying to come to terms with Darwin and of discovering that for some Darwinians ‘Natural Selection seemed a dogma to be put in the place of the Athanasian creed; it was a form of religious hope; a promise of ultimate perfection.’ And so it was for many of the characters we meet in Daniel Bender’s provocative book American Abyss.

More specifically, Bender has attempted a ‘cultural and intellectual history of industrialization’ at the turn of the twentieth century by focusing on how industrialization, erupting like a force of nature in American life, came to be understood as a process of evolution. Not metaphoric evolution, mind you, but as part of the real, Darwinian thing. In this view, industrialization represented nothing less than the highest stage of the ‘natural’ development of civilization.

But immediately a conundrum: while Anglo-American civilization had achieved its highest stage, the white race itself, in the view of many, seemed on the verge of imminent eclipse, overwhelmed by an immigrant invasion of inferior, over-breeding races.

Bender explores the way some Americans wrestled with that paradox – how the ‘unfit’ managed to survive and thrive – by examining how they constructed the concept of ‘degeneration.’ By surveying the American cultural landscape widely, he discovers that there was a fixation with degeneration, and degenerates, in all sorts of places.

At the turn of the century, Americans became fascinated with cavemen and savages and what they might tell us about contemporary conditions; likewise, they recast the act of immigration, once undertaken only by the hale and hardy, as a way for the weak and feckless to relocate themselves now that steamships had made it so easy to make the journey. Degeneration became the lens, Bender argues, through which Americans understood the new urban ‘jungles,’ home to industrial savages. Even those who sought reform, as Bender sees it, did so through these understandings of racial evolution and racial decline. The book culminates with the logical outcome of this near-obsession with degeneration: eugenics.

Much of what Bender has uncovered is simply fascinating, but not all of it necessarily coheres. Further, by trying to fit so much into the analytic frame he has built, Bender’s argument here can sometimes feel unremitting. In the end, the argument Bender has made is that progressivism culminated primarily in nativism, immigration restriction, and eugenic sterilization. Some readers may not be persuaded by that.

Take the image on page 187 for example. It is a dual-columned cartoon titled ‘Milk: Dirty! / Clean!’ and was produced by the New York Milk Committee as part of its campaign to purify the milk supply. One column shows us ‘dirty’ milk as it moves from unsanitary barn to tenement and ends with a dead baby; the other column shows ‘clean’ milk and a happy, healthy baby. Bender reads the imagery as relying on ‘visual suggestions of degeneration – from dirty tramp to rodents and flies to dying baby – to encourage the use of milk stations.’ Fair enough. But Bender does not mention that thousands of infants died every year in New York from ‘cholera infantum,’ much of it traceable to milk contaminated with all sorts of bacteria. Or that bovine tuberculosis spread from cow’s milk to people at alarming rates in the early twentieth century. Whether or not they relied on the trope of degeneration, sanitary milk stations really did save lives.

This is a complicated, ambitious book. That is its great strength and simultaneously its major problem. It is about race and immigration, about gender and imperialism, about reform and social control, about science and social policy. Hovering over all of this, however, are the ham-handed attempts made by many Americans of the period to turn the biological science of Darwin into the social science of Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner. Henry Adams was far from the only American who could not fully...