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s n l jp 1 Hamlin Garland The discussion of Garland’s attitude toward the Jews that follows, I hasten to state at the beginning, is not an effort to paint him as an anti-Semite in any conventional sense of the term. Garland was not deeply preoccupied by the Jewish presence in American society for much of his career, and his comments about Jews lacked the rabid vehemence of the full-scale anti-Semite. Indeed, with the exception of his diaries and his last series of autobiographies (which themselves often derive from his diaries), his writings contain few direct references to Jews.1 (As I will shortly seek to demonstrate, it is largely by his failure in two key contexts to discuss issues pertaining to Jews that he most reveals his beliefs.) Nevertheless, he shared with many Americans of the period various misgivings about the role of Jews in American life, and like most who were not convinced anti-Semites, he for the most part expressed these strains of concern either privately or obliquely. Garland’s beliefs about the Jews are thus of considerable interest both because they reflect almost all the major threads in the makeup of late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury American anti-Semitism and because he neither shouted these beliefs from the rooftop nor actively sought to promote them as public policy. He appears to have been like many Americans of his day—responsive to negative interpretations of the “problem” presented by the American Jew but unwilling to pursue his concerns into overt expression or social activism. An exploration of the element of anti-Semitism in his career and expression is therefore of considerable interest because it suggests the widespread presence and nature of similar beneath-the-surface strains in the belief of his era. i-xviii_1-90_Pize.indd 1 4/10/08 11:37:49 AM s n l jp 2 . american naturalism and the jews I examine two phases of Garland’s attitude toward the Jews: the first deriving from his participation in the farmers’ revolt of the early 1890s and culminating in his Populist novel A Spoil of Office (1892); the second deriving from his residence in New York during the 1920s and culminating in his meetings with Henry Ford in the late 1920s. Garland was converted to a faith in Henry George’s single tax theory in late 1887, after returning to Boston from a trip home to the prairie west.2 The poverty and hardship of Iowa and South Dakota farmers appeared to him to be both explainable and remediable in relation to George’s assertion that the private ownership of land, often for speculative purposes, was the cause of the paradox of extreme poverty in a nation blessed with bountiful natural resources and an eager workforce. A second journey west, in the summer of 1888, in the midst of a deepening agricultural depression, confirmed him in this conviction, and for the next several years he gave much time and effort to furthering the single tax cause by frequently speaking on the subject, both in Boston and on western lecture tours, and by incorporating single tax themes into his western farm fiction. During these years, from the late 1880s to early 1892, western farmers’ organizations had become increasingly politicized. The loosely connected Grange associations of the post–Civil War decades were devoted principally to educational and social activities. By the late 1880s, the Farmers’ Alliance began to supplement and then replace the Grange as a farmers’ organization, but now one committed to speaking out on issues of importance to western farmers and to fielding political candidates in local and congressional elections under Alliance sponsorship, as it did with considerable success in 1890. During 1891 and 1892, leading up to the presidential election of 1892, the Farmers’ Alliance reshaped itself, in a series of conventions, into a national political party, the People’s Party (or Populists), with both presidential and congressional candidates. Garland’s own political sympathies and activities during 1887–92 mirrored what was occurring in the western farmers’ revolt in general, a history that is indeed also reflected to a considerable degree in the career of Bradley Talcott, the autobiographical protagonist of A Spoil of Office. Initially, single taxers took a dim view of the Alliance and the Populists both because their traditional allegiance, following the lead of George himself, was with the Democratic party, and because of a realization that farmers looked askance at any reform that threatened, as...

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