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• 138 • chapter 6 sS “Stone-Age Individuals” The Clan Betrays The renegotiation of self that Cornelia James Cannon performed in the 1920s found an outlet, as we have seen, in intense reform activities and a volley of essays on major social and political issues of the day. Their common denominator was the racial composition of the future America, and the racial phobias she expressed, the eugenic solutions she prescribed, brought her widespread public acclaim. This enthusiastic response of so many fellow white Americans encouraged Cannon to move beyond the essay toward the genre she most admired: the novel. Novel writing had always been on her life’s itinerary. Now, in this difficult and inspiring postwar decade, she remembered this dream—during these years when, on a personal level, she and her husband were struggling with their memories and silences; when Cornelia’s need for mobility clashed with family duties; when, on a broader scale, dread of racial displacement , fear of political and social disruption, the longing for continuity, and progressive reformism coexisted side by side. “Privately, I confess the world is moving so fast that I am terrified to find myself on the conservative side!” she admitted to her mother on 7 August 1919. It was an expression of self-doubt exceptional in her correspondence, for as a rule her letters of those years continued to affirm her role as the manager-woman. But obviously there was also a powerful urge to move beyond that smooth surface; consequently she needed to develop modes of communication that would enable her to deal with issues she found incompatible with the persona of her construction. Adhering almost naïvely to a nineteenth-century differentiation between fact and fiction, she felt that, under the guise of fiction, she t h e c l a n b e t r a y s • 139 could roam freely in new territories. Not only would fiction enable her to raise issues too intimate for her correspondence, but also it would attract an even larger and more heterogeneous audience to the vital eugenic message she had to convey. As it was for Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Kingsley in the England of the Industrial Revolution, and Harriet Beecher Stowe in the slavery controversy, the novel would be her medium for warning the nation of racial decline and designing viable alternatives to the dreaded race apocalypse. The historical earthquake which had transformed her and her world provided the material for her first exercise as a novelist. In the early 1920s she began to write The Clan Betrays, a text she continued to rework for more than a decade. It remained unpublished. Cannon set out to write a novel on the tribulations of an American couple during the war and its aftermath. Approximately half of the manuscript ’s 427 pages center on this issue. The narrative she produced is a thought-provoking, multidimensional representation of war and its transformational impact on women and men. Unfortunately Cannon made the beginner’s mistake of trying to say all that was important to her in a single text. Instead of concentrating on the war novel, she actually ended up juggling four potentially different novels: a novel on World War I, a novel on intermarriage, a novel on machine politics, and, unavoidably, a novel on immigration and Americanization. She could not help losing control over her material, and finally, after several vain attempts at rewriting—the last one in the 1930s, after the success of Red Rust—she gave up. The manuscript ended up in the attic in Franklin, unknown to her heirs, and perhaps forgotten even by herself.1 As we saw earlier, the novel’s heroine is Justine Chase, an educated white woman from New England. During the war she volunteers in a Hostess House, where she meets Lieutenant Peter Burns, an officer of Irish descent. When Peter receives his deployment orders, they marry, and after the war Justine finds herself the wife of a virtual stranger. They move to the city where his Irish kin live; problems of class and differences in religious background and education surface, and husband and wife must face these issues in the midst of a hostile Irish American Catholic environment. The Irish ward boss manipulates Peter’s leadership qualities, popularity, and skills, but when the leaders of the machine force on Peter conduct incompatible with his values, he defies them. They destroy his political career: the clan betrays. The first novel within The Clan Betrays...

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