Contesting the Past, Reconstructing the Nation: American Literature and Culture in the Gilded Age, 1876-1893

Introduction: An Ahistorical Exposition and a Historicist Argument

Introduction An Ahistorical Exposition and a Historicist Argument The 1876 Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia was, above all, a celebration of America’s material progress and prowess. Of the Centennial’s ten categoriesof exhibits,nineweredirectmanifestationsof materialculture (“I. Raw Materials,” “V. Tools, Implements, Machines, and Processes”); only the tenth, “Objects illustrating efforts for the improvement of the Physical, Intellectual, and Moral Condition of Man,” pointed toward other aspects of culture, and there the reference to improvement was a telling one (McCabe 221–23). The nominal subject of any Centennial— the events of a hundred years ago—was here so buried beneath the accumulated stuff that there was an “almost complete absence . . . of any reminder of the event it was designed to commemorate” (Goodheart 55). The Exposition’s official accompanying text, J. S. Ingram’s The Centennial Exposition Described and Illustrated, reiterated this emphasis, consisting of a catalogue of especially impressive items, “a popular presentation of only those things possessing . . . superior attractions” (5), with virtually no discussion of the historical or cultural issues to which those items or their exhibits might relate.1 And such elision of the past in favor of America’s present and future glories occurred not only implicitly in the Exposition’s materially focused exhibits but also explicitly in one of its central texts: John Greenleaf Whittier’s Centennial Hymn, performed at the May 10 opening ceremonies, expressed the fervent hope that “the new cycle shame the old!” (Cawelti 325–26).2 2 Introduction This material and progressive focus exemplified the overall tenor of the year’s celebrations and reflections.3 The most prominent such reflection was a text published late in the year entitled The First Century of the Republic: A Review of American Progress. As the Publisher’s Advertisement notes, the book focuses not on official affairs of state, but rather on “the part taken by the American people in the remarkable material progress of the last hundred years”; its goal is to “connect the present with the past, showing the beginnings of great enterprises, tracing through consecutive stages their development, and associating with them the individual thought and labor by which they have been brought to perfection ”(7–9). The move toward perfection is indeed the book’s central image : of its seventeen chapters on subjects as wide ranging as agriculture, jurisprudence, and humanitarianism, nine include the word “progress” in their title and four others the word “development.” The point is obvious : the first century has all been prelude to the present pinnacle, and things can only get better from here. Such an attitude would seem to preclude any sense of the past, any vision of history as a distinct and meaningful entity. Indeed, Michael Kammen, the foremost historian of American cultural memory, argues that the 1876 events “tended to celebrate the present at the expense of the past,”and that in such cases“we must be careful not to confuse commemoration with genuine remembrance”(135–37).Yet it is more accurate to argue that a central belief in progress requires a particular construction of history, one which sees the past as part of a reverse linear trajectory and which moves backward from the present’s accomplishments to their foundations. This triumphalist take on history’s meaning is nicely delineated by Kammen’s distinction between commemoration—an act of celebration significantly shaped by present cultural value systems— and the more ostensibly value-neutral concept of remembrance. The commemorative historical construction does not discount the value of nor entirely elide the past—First Century’s chapters are full of historical facts, figures, and events—so much as exclude those details which do not fit into the linear progression and portray the rest as almost typological precursors of the present perfection. My reference to the commemorative model’s use of typology is deliberately suggestive of religious historical perspectives; the progressive Ahistorical Exposition and a Historicist Argument 3 historical visions which dominated the 1876 celebrations can be seen as a postbellum reincarnation of a Protestant millennialism that had been essential to virtually every important act of American national selffashioning , from Winthrop’s Arabella sermon to the Prospect Poems to the Gettysburg Address. Apropos of the latter occasion, Ernest Tuveson, whose Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (1968) remains this view’s definitive history, argues that the Civil War represented the millenial historical narrative’s apotheosis, but adds...