Standards of Value: Money, Race, and Literature in America

3. The Gold Standard of the Passing Novel: Exploring the Limits of Strategic Essentialism

80 – Jacksonian aBolitionism the gold standard of the passing novel Exploring the Limits of Strategic Essentialism Meantime there was feverish activity in Harlem’s financial institutions. At the Douglass Bank the tellers were busier than bootleggers on Christmas Eve. . . . A long queue of Negroes extended down one side of the bank, out of the front door and around the corner, while bank attendants struggled to keep them in line. Everybody was drawing out money; no one was depositing. In vain the bank officials pleaded with them not to withdraw their funds. The Negroes were adamant: they wanted their money and wanted it quick. Day after day this had gone on ever since Black-No-More, Incorporated, had started turning Negroes white. george s. schuyler, Black No More The Coinage Act of 1834 initiated a slippage between the face value and material worth of silver dollars that minstrel performers riffed upon and Reconstruction-era politicians sought to resolve. This slippage eventually became the subject of the money question of the 1890s, which, like its antecedent during Reconstruction, pitted free silver Populists against gold bug fiscal conservatives and corporate liberals . The Populists, who hoped to capitalize on the disparity between the face value and material worth of silver currency, fought to lift restrictions upon the coinage of silver imposed by the Bland-Allison Act. Fiscal conservatives, meanwhile, sought to eliminate the slippage upon which the Populists’ platform depended by abandoning bimetallism altogether . The Gold Standard Act of 1900 marked the consolidation of the conservatives’ power, and effectively ended the Populist revolt by abolishing the double standard that made it possible. The monetary politics that gave rise to the gold standard era share an evolutionary path with the racial politics of the same period. A close resemblance therefore exists between the struggle to define the source of money’s value and the ideological contest over the meaning of ra3 Money, Minstrelsy, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin – 81 cial difference. As the former hinged upon the inflationary disparity between face value and material worth, the latter pivoted upon the slippage between racial signifiers and the inherent qualities or essences they supposedly signified. Racial progressives, like their Populist counterparts , sought to capitalize on what this slippage afforded, namely the performative dislocation of value from the site of its inscription. Social conservatives, in turn, worked to reinscribe race in the body by revising the standards of racial identification just as the gold bugs revised the standards of monetary value to relocate the dollar’s value in gold. As sites for the articulation of monetary and racial discourses, passing novels are informed by both the cultural politics of race and the monetary politics of the gold standard. As the genre’s name suggests, every passing novel chronicles the experience of at least one normatively black character who passes for white—that is, who is taken at face value despite his or her legal racial status. Contrary to contemporary critical assessments of the genre, however, the passing novel did more than just shift from critiquing fixed racialized subject positions at the Allegorical cartoon depicting the monetary platforms of presidential candidates William Jennings Bryan and William McKinley titled “The Rival Circuses,” from the Overland Monthly. Exploring the Limits of Strategic Essentialism – 81 82 – Jacksonian aBolitionism turn of the century to celebrating the fluidity of racial identity during the Harlem Renaissance.1 It also traces the transformation of what Gayatri Spivak calls strategic essentialism, the deconstructive strategy of using a reader’s investment in essentialism—the belief in intrinsic value and its stability—to critique that investment. Most, if not all, passing novels employ strategic essentialism in some form or another. But an examination of the monetary metaphors that anchor these texts reveals how passing novel authors shifted their focus from critiquing essentialist definitions of racial difference to demonstrating the limits of strategic essentialism. This chapter traces the coevolution of the passing novel and the gold standard from 1900 to 1933. In the process, it demonstrates how authors’ use of strategic essentialism mirrors, and is in many cases a function of, the shifting logic of U.S. gold standard policy. Specifically, this chapter examines how pre-WWI passing novels serve strategic essentialist ends by conforming to the logic of the classical gold standard, and how the conflicting imperatives of postwar gold standard politics and Federal Reserve policies mirror the contradictory logic of Harlem Renaissance consolidation of and investment...