Empire’s Proxy: American Literature and U.S. Imperialism in the Philippines

1. The Alchemy of English: Colonial State-Building and the Imperial Origins of American Literary Study

36 1 The Alchemy of English Colonial State-Building and the Imperial Origins of American Literary Study What alchemy will change the oriental quality of their blood, in a year, and set the self-governing currents of the American pouring through their Malay veins? —Senator Albert J. Beveridge, in a speech delivered before the U.S. Congress, 1900 Our bayonets and rifle balls may force them into subjection but it is left for our public schools to raise and elevate them and put them upon the plane of thinking men and women, capable of governing themselves wisely and well. —Fred W. Atkinson, general superintendent of public instruction of the Philippine Islands, 1902 This chapter tells one story, about the origins of the field of English at the end of the nineteenth century, by way of three shorter stories , each a different episode in the history of English as a language, an academic field, and a literature. Let me begin in August 1898, in Saratoga, New York, where, at a meeting of the American Social Science Association (ASSA), Dr. Holbrook Curtis put forth the idea of forming a special committee of men in literature and the arts. Curtis was not a professional literary man but a throat specialist from New York and an amateur of the arts; approaching the ASSA president on a hotel veranda in upstate New York, he proposed a new committee to assume a role like that of the Académie Française, to stand as “an academic institution of unquestioned origin The Alchemy of English 37 and standard” that might recognize men of literary and artistic achievement and provide the occasion for their fraternity together.1 The next February , in a ballroom rented from the Academy of Medicine in Manhattan, the first annual meeting of the National Institute of Arts and Letters was convened and its charter members selected. That year, the National Institute elected ninety members in literature, forty-five in art, and fourteen in music, and declared its official purpose: to provide for “the advancement of art and literature” and the revitalization of “the traditions of good literature ,” while remaining “hospitable to all discoverers of new worlds.”2 The National Institute got off to a rocky start. The first president, Charles Dudley Warner, was so ill that he could not preside over the institute ’s inaugural meeting in February 1899, and instead had his paper read for him.3 It soon recovered, however; under the tenure of its second president, William Dean Howells, at the height of his popularity as a novelist and editor, the National Institute began to assemble an impressive membership of literary figures like Henry Adams, Hamlin Garland, and Mark Twain. Within a few years, the membership of the National Institute stood at 150; a smaller, even more selective and elite group of 50 members, calling itself the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, had formed as a subgroup of the National Institute, with the self-appointed responsibility to “assist in securing just dignity and importance for refinement, culture, and creative imagination” and “advise the public on matters of taste regarding literature and the fine arts.”4 Its members included many, though not all, of the recognized authors of the time—all male, all white—as well as some “literary men” in politics: President Theodore Roosevelt and Secretary of State John Hay. While writers dominated its ranks, it was not exclusively a fraternity of authors but an assemblage of men with various connections to the literary—journalists, authors, editors, professors, and others. That is to say, it was elite not in the sense that each of its members was an established creative author, but that each was poised, by virtue of class and of cultural training, to recognize and appreciate “good” literature. To some of its critics at the time, the National Institute, as well as the even more elite Academy, had little purpose beyond flattering the vanity of its members. William James declined membership in the Academy on the basis that he had a “lifelong practice of not letting [his] name figure where there [was] not some definite work doing in which [he] was willing to bear a share.”5 William Dean Howells betrayed similar fears in his presidential address before the Academy a few years later, when he opined that 38 The Alchemy of English the American Academy of Arts and Letters could have neither the “authoritative structure...