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Seven: Turbans and Capitalism, 1893–1930
- The University of North Carolina Press
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chapter 7 .................................................................................................................. Turbans and Capitalism, 1893–1930 W hat happened to the persona of the wise man of the East with the rise of modern mass consumerism among the middle and working classes? Once he had been a fixture of American fraternal orders and a standing joke among Shriners critical of the Gilded Age commercialization of masculine mysticism. Yet by the turn of the century, he became newly relevant to female consumers, and he made American men very nervous. Women already had limited access to actual men from the Eastern world as immigrants and traveling entrepreneurs. Yet between 1893 and the 1930s these men would be joined by a group of highly controversial Hindu and Sufi emissaries, Indian nationalists and university students, and plenty of native-born and foreignborn imitators, all of whom would crowd together in the domestic marketplaces for entertainment and spirituality. A new generation of urban women consumers sought these men out in order to gain worldly, modern experiences of spiritual Eastern masculinity in the flesh. This chapter is about why and how that happened and how Americans commented on the phenomenon in order to talk about the relationship between manhood and economic failure in the years leading up to the Great Depression. We must begin when Indian religious leaders first arrived in the United States when the Columbian Exposition in Chicago hosted the World’s Parliament of Religion in 1893. In the preceding years, American media coverage of South Asia had been limited since the region was not a major American tourist destination nor did it figure into American cultural history like the Middle East as Holy Land, so most people knew far less about India than Egypt or Palestine .∞ South Asian Hindus, Buddhists, and others attended the parliament, the only meeting of its kind in world history, in order to speak about Eastern spiritual traditions to an audience of mostly a√luent Anglo-Americans, some of whom took up the Eastern philosophies of the visiting swamis and yogis themselves . This process of adaptation was complicated when predominantly male Indian migrant workers began arriving on the west coast in significant num- 206 ...Turbans and Capitalism bers in the early 1910s, inflaming xenophobic feeling among some observers. Thereafter, two constituencies of native-born and foreign-born men created a proliferation of domestic wise men of the East in the country: South Asian migrants who worked as swamis and yogis in the United States and homegrown mediums and carnival fortune-tellers who Easternized themselves in order to pass as wise men of the East, be they saints or scoundrels. The early twentieth-century newspaper ‘‘Swami’’ might employ a persona drawn from any part of the Eastern world, sometimes in eccentric combination, creating a colloquially ‘‘Hindoo’’ or ‘‘Oriental’’ wise man of the East who was not specifically Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist. Yet like the actual spiritual emissaries of the 1890s, he also attracted an overwhelmingly female audience. A decade later, when the desert romance fad began overflowing from American theaters, newspapers, and movie magazines, many people would conflate the Indian migrant and the desert sheik into a more sexualized, generically Eastern man who particularly sought out white women. This development reshaped and bolstered the idea that the Indian turban would replace the white headdress of Valentino’s ‘‘Sheik,’’ as far as many Americans were concerned, as the marker of a newly predatory and opportunistic Eastern masculinity that threatened to break up marriages, empty bank accounts, and upset the social order. Critics worried that it was not Eastern religions that were so persuasive to American women but the masculine Eastern persona symbolized by the turbanclad swami. A unique alliance of men including clergy, police, the press, some sincere Eastern spiritual leaders, professional stage magicians (many of whom performed a type of magical Eastern manhood themselves), as well as perplexed husbands together decried the turban-wearing man as a ne’er-do-well. All American men found themselves in the di≈cult position of needing to achieve ‘‘success’’ because the United States had always been a highly competitive place, Scott Sandage tells us, ‘‘a commercial democracy, [in which] commodity and identity melded.’’ Native-born and foreign-born men struggled to navigate a cultural contrast Americans internalized between ‘‘the ‘couldn’t-do-it’ and the ‘can-do-it’ men’’ that left those men who stumbled in their careers at risk of coming across as inconsequential failures.≤ The disreputable swami was a person unable to succeed in the...