That Busyness that Is Not Business: Nervousness and Character at the Turn of the Last Century

Michael O’Malley That Busyness that Is Not Business: Nervousness and Character at the Turn of the Last Century THE NOTION OF “BUSYNESS” CALLED UP CONFLICTING IMAGES FOR Americans. It denoted the scuriy and bustle o f a dynamic civiliza­ tion; it also suggested pointless and unproductive nervousness, and even degeneracy or decline. Americans related “busyness” to technol­ ogy, to industrial innovation and change. But they also tended to view “busyness” through the same lens of racial difference, as a problem of biology. This essay argues that while technological change helped produce a feeling of nervous busyness, Americans also experienced “nervousness” over the dual character of individualism in the period. Americans construed the self as essential, fixed, discrete, and as plastic and endlessly potential. They celebrated both the “American dream” of boundless self-making and the idea of fixed, stable, “natural” character. They sought the real while loving the artificial, deplored pretentious­ ness while recognizing it as the heart of ambition. Americans recast nervousness and busyness as a problem of racial degeneracy to avoid confronting the contradictions within their notion of individualism. FROM 189 7 TO ABOUT 1912, FILM PRODUCERS WOULD SHOOT THEIR footage and then make a contact print o f the entire film on a roll of photographic paper. Mailed to the Library of Congress, these rolls of social research Vol 72 : No 2 : Summer 2005 371 paper established copyright. The more than 3,000 films in the paper print collection are practically the only record we have o f what early films looked like (Niver, 1985; Musser, 1991). The films document a veiy busy world indeed. They show people thronging streets, working, shopping; they show crowds shuffling through gates at Ellis Island or welcoming returning war heroes. More than just documentary, the films include satire and commentaxy on the nature of life at the turn of the last century. In these early films, which almost never run much longer than two or three minutes, the camera rarely moves—no zooms, pans, or fast cuts or clever editing. But the screens are never still but full of action and movement. They document great disasters and everyday events, the dynamic world o f the turn of the last century. These very early films played almost entirely to a working-class audience. Indeed, when middle-class observers began noticing this new phenomenon—the “movies”—sweeping working-class neighborhoods, they saw it as fast paced, as a “get thrills quick” medium that played magical games with time and space, and also as a dangerous soporific. “You wonder how it can be possible, in an alleged busy world . . . to assemble daily, for long blank periods, so many people who have noth­ ing to do and who are obviously not worrying about it" (Harper’s, 1913: 20; O’Malley, 1990: chap. 5). They show a busy world, but they show confusion about what “busy” means. The Library o f Congress has placed a small selection ofthese films online. One collection highlights films of early New York City; the films capture the bustle and energy o f the period. One, Move On (1903) shows a policeman accosting a street vendor. Daniel Bluestone has pointed out how urban planners and middle-class reformers saw “the pushcart evil” as an unsanitary impediment to the smooth flow of traffic, an atavistic source of “congestion” that also competed with more respect­ able (and taxable) storefront businesses. Bluestone argues persuasively that pushcarts seemed intolerably disorganized and old fashioned in a city based on streamlined, modernized, rationalized commerce. Social science discourse linked street vendors to “congestion,” clogging circu­ 372 social research lation and making it less efficient (Bluestone, 1992: 287-314). But the paper print films, on the whole, delight in the crowding, the visual busyness of immigrant neighborhoods and crowds. They also show fascination with the speed of m odem life. Star Theater (1902) uses time-lapse photography to show about 30 days in the process of demolishing a building. In the film antlike workers race over the building and wear it down; in theaters, projectionists could reverse the film and the audience watched it rise back up magically. The film took the workaday world ofbusy life and made...