Contesting the Past, Reconstructing the Nation: American Literature and Culture in the Gilded Age, 1876-1893

Notes

Notes Preface 1. See “Advertising Uncle Tom.” 2. Harris“hasten[s] to say”that Stowe had“attacked the possibilities of slavery with all the eloquence of genius,” but nonetheless reiterates that “the same genius painted the portrait of the Southern slave-owner, and defended him” (39). 3. The autobiography as a whole both critiques and endorses unifying American myths, illustrating “the dynamic interplay between the marginal and dominant in cultural forms and power structures” (Scheckel,“Home” 223). 4. For models of such scholarship, see Levin; Henderson; Hughson; Mizruchi; Cowart ; Wesseling; David Price; Rody. 5. For my terms, see Bakhtin; Todorov; Bal. For voice and American literature, see McKay; Nettels; Wald; Looby; Donaldson; Levander, Voices; Gavin Jones; Elliott; Holmes; Minnick. Introduction 1. Ingram’s description of the Indian exhibits, for example, is located between, and indistinguishable from, reports on “The Fishery Resources of This Country” and the “Patent Office” (147–52). 2. Quoting more nostalgic sections of Whittier’s Hymn, Badger contends that the Exposition “turned its face from the new age and searched with Whittier for lost innocence in the American past” (27); but nostalgia for a glorious past was actually perfectly compatible with (and often a corollary to) such visions of a glorious future. Most assess- ments of the Exposition depict it as forward-looking; see Cawelti 324–34; Greenhalgh 127–30; Schlereth 267–77. 3. Throughout this study, I use “progressive” to refer to this particular (and conservative ) vision of America and its history. I know that the similarity to the later liberal reform movement might be confusing, although Progressivism has often been seen as related to this progressive historical perspective. Regardless, the centrality of progress to the vision in question makes the term too apt to be discarded. 4. Conn argues that the vision’s progressive element often overshadowed the religious ones, that in fact progress is“the American faith”(209–10); Saum similarly traces a postbellum “Waning of Providence” and waxing of nationalist faith. 5. For the merging of “social criticism” with “the errand” (Jeremiad xi, xiv), see also Bercovitch, Rites 63; Lears; Ernest 6–8. Hofstadter articulates this duality most succinctly : “The United States was the only country in the world that began with perfection and aspired to progress” (Age 35–36). For certain “cataclysmic” jeremiads as distinct from the millennial view, see Jaher; Painter, Standing. 6. Bercovitch emphasizes this philosophical combination’s enduring nature, arguing that rituals of consensus constitute “the forms and strategies of cultural continuity” (Rites 30). See also the many editions of Davis, ed.; Samet. For a critique of consensus scholarship, see Ellis. 7. For veterans’ groups, see McConnell; Logue 82–130; Blight, Reunion 171–210; Grant. For war memories as hindering consensus and needing to be “live[d] down” by both sides, see Current. 8. Timothy Smith argues that memorials truly began to serve this unifying purpose after the 1889 founding of the national Memorial Day holiday. 9. “The war was thus the source of a new American confidence to achieve” (Dawes 68). For the shift in understandings of historical time, see Conn 25–26; this progressive vision was at once historical and historiographic, could“be both America’s historical fate and the way Americans would come to understand their history” (Conn 26). For changing notions of time in the period, see Stephen Kern. 10. For the Women’s Committee and Pavilion, and “the cultural interplay between womanhood and sisterhood” (114), see Cordato. See also Weimann 1–4; Greenhalgh 174– 97; Schlereth 275–76. For the July 4 protest, see Coté 115; for the text of the “Declaration,” see Scott and Scott, eds. 90–95. 11. See Greenhalgh 100. 12. Rydell, like most Exposition historians, replicates its emphasis on material progress by focusing on national economics and America’s place in world markets; his readings of the Native American exhibits are convincing but tied to those topics. Even more exemplary of this tendency is Goodheart’s argument that “many groups aspired to participate as producers in the Centennial . . . those who failed did so because they failed as capitalists” (76). 13. Earlier figures such as Lydia Maria Child and Catherine Maria Sedgwick produced such alternative histories, but sectional crisis and Civil War eradicated the Indian 240 Notes to Pages 2–7 Question from the public consciousness. And while they did bring the issue back into the national dialogue, Helen Hunt Jackson (whose advocacy began a few years...