Underground Movements: Modern Culture on the New York City Subway

4. Underground Assimilation in Ethnic Drama

[ 110 ] ChAPter 4 UndergroUnd AssIMIlAtIon In etHnIC drAMA • • • • The Bridge ends with a retrospective look at the Brooklyn Bridge, imagining that the interborough icon unifies the poem and, Hart Crane suggests, the country’s history. In order to gain that syncretic perspective, the poem has to abandon the subway car and the habit-driven working-class physicality that it found there. The fantasies of cultural connectivity that the poem locates in the Brooklyn Bridge were commonly ascribed to other nineteenth -century innovations like the telegraph and the long-distance telephone . According to Carolyn Marvin, scientific experts at the turn of the century believed that new media could bridge cultures without decentering them (192). We might understand the extension of the subway under the Dual Contracts system in the same way: immigrants who had previously lived in overcrowded slums could now rent spacious apartments in Brooklyn and the Bronx while maintaining their (now technologically mediated) connection to the center of the city, Manhattan. The cultural rhetoric of the modern New York subway calls upon the ideals of cultural pluralism while maintaining the implicit hierarchy be- [ 111 ] Underground Assimilation in Ethnic Drama tween (American) center and (ethnic) periphery. The subway has long been understood as a miniature version of the melting pot. Editorial cartoons of the 1920s, woodcuts of the New Deal era, even action films of the 1970s like The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (Sargent) depend on the common understanding of the New York City subway crowd as a cross-section of the city as a whole. The trope of the subway as melting pot implicitly congratulates the city for its openness to different cultures and suggests that the shared experience of the subway ride forges common identity among them. The counterargument to this claim suggests that the only common identity is a shared sense of isolation. In a 1917 article in which he claims to go, as the title puts it, “In Search of the American Soul,” Joseph McCabe declares that “the fires of the great melting pot are too clement” (231). He uses the multiplicity of ethnic newspapers as evidence that Americanization isn’t working: “As I sit in the subway, I read, to right and left of me, journals in Yiddish, Italian, Greek, German, French, Hungarian, and Spanish ; and over each journal broods the familiar face of each country, alien and inflexible” (231). The assimilation of races into an American whole will never take place, McCabe implies, when even their reading materials maintain staunch divides from one another. Although his language is nativist in tone, it evokes a model of cultural pluralism and cultural isolation that is maintained on the subway to this day. We can see this process at work in a similar way in the best-known visual emblem of the subway as a provisional amalgamator of ethnic difference, Reginald Marsh’s “Subway Sunbeams” cartoon titled “The Melting Pot,” which was published in the New York Daily News in 1923 (fig. 1).1 What we see in Marsh’s sketch is a group that strikes a tenuous balance between ethnic differentiation and the power of a unified crowd. From the fashionable white flapper standing at the left edge of the panel, to the shawled immigrant woman holding onto the pole, to the bowler-wearing African American man on the right, the image compresses a wide range of typical New Yorkers into its narrow frame. Though the passengers face in different directions, each head wears a hat, and each face is easily legible as a signifier of an urban type, whether ethnic, racial, or class based. There is no “melting ” going on here. Instead, it is at the level of the crowd’s bodies that we see amalgamation among riders, as well as between riders and the subway itself. Only the three passengers who stand in the foreground of the image have visibly delineated bodies: the shawled woman, a short woman who [ 112 ] CHAPTER FOUR clutches a purse with one hand, and the wriggling child she clutches with the other. Even those two women blend together, with their draping white sleeves furrowed by cross-hatching. The flapper blends into the subway itself, with her upward-curving arm echoed by a downward-sloping pole. Signifiers of ethnicity and gender operate in tension with Marsh’s loose, sketchy line, which seems to imply that regardless of background, these New Yorkers are cut from the same...