Multicultural "American" Literature during the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Numerous studies have documented the massive social and cultural change in the US during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as new immigrants, New Women, and racial minorities struggled for social justice and equal opportunity. That quest, of course, was waged in the literary as well as the political and economic arenas. The books under review here by Aviva F. Taubenfeld and Susan Mizruchi make important contributions to American (i.e., US) literary history and American studies as they explore how women and minority authors of the period contested and tried to expand the dominant culture's definition of progress and "true Americanism."

"True Americanism" is, of course, one of Theodore Roosevelt's best-known essays. His influence on American and world political history is well established, but he also exerted a significant influence on American literary history. Writing to Francis Parkman in 1889, young Roosevelt confessed that while he enjoyed politics, "literature must be my mistress perforce" (Letters and Speeches 29). That mistress prompted him to generate more than fifty volumes of writing, two of which have been included in the Library of America. Excerpts from "True Americanism" as well as "The Strenuous Life" are now included in The Norton Anthology of American Literature. But what distinguishes Roosevelt from other literary-minded presidents was his passionate and strenuous efforts to shape the American literary canon according to his ideology. For example, in 1891, he urged his close friend Brander Matthews, professor of drama and literature at Columbia University, to write an anthology of American literature that would promote their progressive American ideals; after it was published (1896), he extolled it in a review published in The Bookman.¹

In Rough Writing: Ethnic Authorship in Roosevelt's America (2008), Taubenfeld documents the "surprising place and implications of the immigrant and of ethnic writing in Roosevelt's America and American literature" (4). Surprising, of course, because Roosevelt believed that the influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe threatened to destroy what he believed to be a supreme and exceptional culture established by the country's northern and western European forefathers. The result of Taubenfeld's research is a fascinating account of how the epitome of manly American nationalism and opponent of hyphenated Americans championed works by Israel Zangwill, Jacob Riis, Elizabeth Stern, and Finley Peter Dunn. These writers, in turn, publicly praised Roosevelt, dedicated their books to him, and even revised their works to please him. Yet Taubenfeld shows that the relationship between Roosevelt and these four writers was complex and sometimes tense, as they, unlike Matthews, resisted and even undermined the nationalist, masculinist, and racialist ideas that Roosevelt trumpeted. Though he tried to control them and perhaps exploit them for his political purposes, they "push[ed] him and the nation he represented to confront the realities of their [multicultural] America" (11). Taubenfeld's Roosevelt, one might say, was an accidental multiculturalist.

Scholars have commented on Roosevelt's literary relationships with Zangwill, Riis, and Dunne (but not Stern), but Taubenfeld's in-depth study is rich in new information and insights. She begins by sketching Roosevelt's neo-Lamarckian views on race and genetics. As is well known, social scientists such as Nathan Shaler taught Roosevelt at Harvard that psychological and physical characteristics were shaped by the cultural as well as physical environment and then transmitted genetically to offspring. According to this theory of "racial evolutionism," to use Joshua Hawley's term, the millions of southern and eastern European immigrants—but not racial minorities—could be assimilated into the American "melting pot" and then literally pass traits developed in the US to their children. Thus it was imperative to Roosevelt and other progressives that the immigrants absorb the "true" American ideals, and literature was a major vehicle for instilling the ideals. Which is to say that what is today called "political correctness" is at least a century...