The Difficult Art of Giving: Patronage, Philanthropy, and the American Literary Market

Notes

notes Preface. From the Harlem Renaissance 1. For a recent and ironic summary of these debates about patronage in the Harlem Renaissance, see Houston Baker in the ‘‘Questionnaire Responses’’ section of the special issue of Modernism/Modernity, ‘‘The Harlem Renaissance and the New Modernist Studies,’’ 20, 3 (September 2013): 433–35. 2. See, for example, Langston Hughes, ‘‘Slave on the Block,’’ ‘‘The Blues I’m Playing ,’’ ‘‘Why, you reckon?’’ ‘‘Patron of the Arts,’’ and The Big Sea; Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men, Dust Tracks on the Road, Seraph on the Suwanee; James Weldon Johnson , The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Wallace Thurman, Infants of the Spring. Likewise, important works of the post-Harlem Renaissance period in African American letters that both represent and analyze white patronage and philanthropy include Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man; Carter G. Woodson’s The Mis-Education of the Negro; Richard Wright’s Native Son; and Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. 3. See Gordon Bigelow, Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 4. In the past, black intellectuals sporadically or temporarily received such invitations (one thinks particularly of Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles Chesnutt, and Ida Wells-Barnett). 5. For this term, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 7, 29. Naomi Klein likewise refers to neoliberalism as a ‘‘fundamentalist form of capitalism’’ in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 17. This terminology highlights the quasi-religious status the eighteenth-century conception of a free market has achieved in neoliberalism, a status that obscures (purposely or otherwise) liberal and neoliberal reliance on social practices and state institutions to enforce the free market. Introduction Epigraphs: John D. Rockefeller, Random Reminscences of Men and Events (1909; New York: Sleepy Hollow Press, 1984), 156; Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944), 140. Small sections of this introduction have appeared in two essays, ‘‘Capitalism and Philanthropy in the (New) Gilded Age,’’ American Quarterly 60 (March 2008): 201–13 190 Notes to Pages 1–2 (䉷 American Studies Association) and ‘‘Philanthropy and Transatlantic Print Culture ,’’ in Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms , ed. Ann Ardis and Pat Collier (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 83–97. 1. Two terms need to be clarified here: the ‘‘market’’ and ‘‘interventionism.’’ Gareth Dale points out in Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market (Cambridge: Polity, 2010) that one major critique of Polanyi is that he uses the ‘‘market’’ in three different ways: ‘‘as an ideal type (or model)—a system that operates according to its own rules and no others; as a ‘utopian experiment’ carried out by economic liberals but doomed to failure because the goal is unrealizable; and as an actually existing system’’ (73). I would suggest, however, that Polanyi emphasizes the first two notions, which are not in contradiction with each other or the third. In other words, the free and selfregulating market is an ideal in liberal economics, a utopian dream. When it is actually tested it necessarily fails, particularly in terms of the benevolent morality of equal distribution, and therefore intervention becomes central to shoring up the ideal. Second , I use ‘‘interventionism,’’ rather than ‘‘protectionism’’ (as Polanyi scholars more typically do), because I want to emphasize not just the reflexive resistance Polanyi describes to the utopian fiction of the free and self-regulating market, but also what Polanyi calls its ‘‘embeddedness.’’ One of Polanyi’s important insights is that while an ideal is constructed in liberal economics whereby the social and political are separated from the economic, such a separation is impossible. (See my discussion of embeddedness below as well as Dale’s, 193–200.) 2. Polanyi is particularly useful to this book because he emphasizes that capitalists sought to protect society from the depredations of market capitalism through business methods. Nonetheless, he also describes the resistance of socialists, peasants, and colonial subjects through quite alternative methods. This ‘‘paradoxical’’ analysis as Dale calls it, of linking business and government elites, and socialists in terms of an almost reflexive ‘‘countermovement’’ (61) to market capitalism informs my reading of Progressivism (see below). Dale highlights the problems in Polanyi’s conflation of these very different countermovements (84–87), and I do so too when I discuss the forms that intervention takes; nonetheless, Polanyi’s argument is also useful in thinking about...