Creating a World on Paper: Harry Fenn's Career in Art

6. Challenges and Triumphs—The 1890s and Beyond

 217  6 Challenges and Triumphs— The 1890s and Beyond A s the end of the nineteenth century approached, the United States was greatly changed since Fenn’s arrival in 1857. It was now one of the most prosperous and powerful nations on earth. Its population of more than seventy million, which stretched from coast to coast, was in closer contact than ever before thanks to the railroads, the telegraph, and the telephone. Experiments with a new mode of transportation, the automobile, were also under way. Cities located on railroad lines in the middle of the country were booming, and much of the nation’s wheat, corn, and cotton was being shipped overseas.1 More people now worked in manufacturing and mining than in agriculture. The American steel industry had outstripped England’s, and, with the Bessemer converter and open-hearth process, it was poised to supply the necessary material to build infrastructure, from bridges and skyscrapers to water lines and sewer pipes.2 As one American trade official would boast in 1900, “It seems almost incredible that we should be sending cutlery to Sheffield, pig iron to Birmingham, silks to France, watch cases to Switzerland . . . or building sixty locomotives for British railroads.”3 The 1898 Spanish–American War set the United States on the road to empire, and, after it secured territories that could serve as fueling stations across the Pacific, business interests pushed to expand trade with China, Korea, and Japan.4 Yet the growing materialism and widening divide between rich and poor troubled many people, especially as the numbers of immigrants increased; more than five million arrived between 1880 and 1890, many from southern and eastern Europe.5 Workers organized to demand higher wages, but their efforts foundered against the power of big business, as when hired guards battled employees in the 1892 Homestead strike against the Carnegie Steel Company. The Pullman 218  Challenges and Triumphs strike of 1894 against the Great Northern Railway was squelched only when President Grover Cleveland sent in federal troops. Such disruptions challenged confidence in inevitable progress , humanity’s intuitive moral sense, and the ability of science and technology to improve the lives of all citizens, just as they raised fears that radical elements would overturn the social order. In these years, Fenn continued to prepare works that celebrated scenery, promoted travel, and depicted not only aspects of history but also new initiatives in agriculture and transportation. He also took on assignments that publicized America’s growth and expansion and provided glimpses of faraway lands and different cultures, such as China and Indonesia. Despite the great changes and problems troubling society, many of the attitudes that Fenn’s art had always helped promote or reinforce were still current, including interest in experiencing Europe and the Middle East, whether through lectures, travel clubs, or actual travel, and especially pride in the American landscape and travel to see it.6 Clearly, the mission of Picturesque America and similar projects had been effective. Indeed, in F. Hopkinson Smith’s book American Illustrators, one speaker calls on artists to stop globetrotting and paint “American life and characteristics,” for doing so will show that the country has “GOT the things to paint from.” It proclaimed: “With a mountain and river scenery unrivaled on the globe; with rock-bound coasts breaking the full surge of an ocean; with forests of towering trees compared to which in girth and height the trees of all other lands are but tooth-picks; with plains ending in films of blue haze and valleys sparkling with myriads of waterfalls ; with every type of the human race blended in our own . . . with a history filled with traditions the most romantic—Aztec, Indian and Negro . . . what do we want to go away from home to find something to paint?”7 Similarly, a ten-part series titled “Through Picturesque America, in One Hundred Views of Scenic Magnificence” occupied the centerfold of the Ladies’ Home Journal for most of 1900. Each month the double-page spread was filled with ten photographs of notable places, with brief text by journalist and travel writer Luther L. Holden.8 Although the technology, format, and audience were vastly 6.2. “Greetings from Picturesque America,” detail of “private mailing card” from the series published by Arthur Livingston, New York. (Private collection.) 219 The 1890s and Beyond  different, the message was similar to that of Picturesque America...