Abraham Cahan, Auguste Comte, and the Positivist Future

The social realist literary movement in America in the latter part of the nineteenth century was, like the Condition of England movement that preceded it, in large part an attempt to come to grips with the changes wrought by industrialization, incorporation, and "the pervasive sense of imminent upheaval and turbulence" that accompanied these changes (Trachtenberg x). This movement was primarily a production of the white middle class, which felt increasingly sidelined by what Henry Adams would call the "whole mechanical consolidation of force" that had "ruthlessly stamped out" the hegemony of the establishment (301). Novels often became sites in which writers attempted to work out the degree to which their commitment to traditional or democratic values could survive the pressure to sell out. Social realist novelists sought to answer pressing questions, such as to what extent could anyone born into, or aspiring to, economic stability retain allegiance to values such as liberty and equality in an age in which everything and everyone was being co-opted; and if resistance was to be imagined, what would it look like—what form would it take?

However, not everyone who participated in this debate was firmly ensconced within a bourgeois milieu. One of its participants was Abraham Cahan, an immigrant from an educated, if impoverished, Russian Jewish background who, although championed by William Dean Howells and other members of the literary establishment, remained enough of an outsider throughout his life to offer perspectives on Gilded Age life and values that were not widely visible to those in the mainstream. Over the course of his literary and journalistic career, most of it devoted to his Yiddish newspaper The Daily Forward, Cahan published four major English-language works and several uncollected stories. Many of these works cast a critical eye on the American aspiration to upward mobility and assimilation into the middle class, but the 1898 collection, The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto, is the one that outlines the most substantive alternative to these aspirations and to the pressures of assimilation and incorporation that the white middle class was so feebly resisting. Like Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896) and The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), The Imported Bridegroom addresses "the naturalized costs of American citizenship" (Schlund-Vials 51), but it also examines the possibilities opened up by competing models of citizenry.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, The Imported Bridegroom is also the Cahan work that, with the exception of the historical novel, The White Terror and the Red: A Tale of Revolutionary Russia (1905), has received the least scholarly attention. Its lead story, "The Imported Bridegroom," which, at over a hundred pages, could more accurately be termed a novella, deserves more recognition than it has heretofore received for its attempt to anatomize the specific modes of citizenship and sociopolitical activity available within the industrial capitalist framework. These alternatives to the status quo were perhaps not as clear to the literary establishment as they were to someone writing from the margins of American middle-class life while at the center of an emerging form of global identity. "The Imported Bridegroom" leverages Cahan's education in early forms of socialism and positivism, particularly those described in the writings of Auguste Comte, to create a picture of a world that transcends not only the imaginings of the American literati but also Comte's own utopian vision of the future. In Cahan's version of the positivist future, American citizenship—and by extension, global citizenship—entails neither an allegiance to greed cloaked in empty liberal values nor an escape from the entanglements of modern life into isolation on the prairies. Instead, it involves an ongoing commitment to cultivating individual marks of diversity, maintaining integrated communities, and promoting scientific, philosophical, and political advancement through both action and critique.

Matthew Frye Jacobson, one of the foremost voices in Cahan criticism, has insisted that Cahan's texts, which were also (and usually initially) published in Yiddish, are primarily concerned with "the possible fates to be met by Jews" in diasporic communities rather than with the larger question of identity in America and...