Notes
notes Introduction 1 Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches and Essays, 1891–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1992), 362. The essay was published in Harper’s Monthly, one of the era’s most prominent magazines. 2 Twain’s essay predated by only a few years Max Weber’s famous study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), which used a familiar American , Benjamin Franklin, to stand for the capitalist prototype. Weber’s book, published in German, was not translated into English until 1930, but it was widely read in America. Werner Sombart’s The Jews and Modern Capitalism (1911) was translated into English in 1913. 3 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro in Business (Atlanta University Publications, 1899; reprint, New York: Arno, 1968), 15; see also 7–39, which show how the refusal of whites to bury black people provided blacks with a business exclusive. Du Bois also notes that the taboo was not always observed in reverse: some whites engaged black undertakers, thus enabling the further enrichment of blacks in this industry. His points are echoed by sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton in their 1945 study, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harcourt, Brace), 456–67, and also by Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton in their 1993 study, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), esp. 40. 4 Michael Schudson, Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 232. Capitalism involves private property, entrepreneurial opportunity, technological innovation, respect for contracts, widespread use of money, and the availability of credit. Above all, capitalism is future-oriented—an economic drama of aspiration and struggle. 292 :: notes to pages 2 – 3 As Joseph Schumpeter pointed out, ‘‘Stabilized capitalism is a contradiction in terms.’’ See Thomas K. McCraw, ed., Creating Modern Capitalism: How Entrepreneurs , Companies, and Countries Triumphed in Three Industrial Revolutions (Cambridge , Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 2–7. 5 The two ads are analyzed in chapters 5 and 7, respectively. 6 McCraw, Creating Modern Capitalism, 306–7. McCraw points out that by the start of the twentieth century, ‘‘most Americans were either nonwhite, immigrants , or the children of at least one immigrant parent.’’ The ‘‘notable exception ’’ in terms of other countries with comparable rates of immigration was ‘‘the multicultural makeup of the business community in London. But even so, only 6 percent of London’s total population in 1890 had come from outside the British Isles. By contrast, 80 percent of New York’s citizens were immigrants or the children of immigrants, 87 percent of Chicago’s, and 84 percent of Detroit’s and Milwaukee’s. By 1900 there were more people of Italian descent in New York than in any Italian city except Rome, and probably more Jews than in any other city anywhere’’ (307). 7 There were additional distinctive features: North America’s extraordinarily rich natural resources, the deliberate diversification of the national economy away from agriculture and toward manufacturing, mining, and services, and a government unusually supportive of entrepreneurial risk-taking. 8 See John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New York: Athenaeum, 1966); Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America : Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982); and McCraw, Creating Modern Capitalism. 9 See Werner Sollors, ed., Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1998). 10 James’s letter is reproduced in Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed. Philip Horne (New York: Penguin, 1999), 162; see also 177, 228. 11 In making this claim, I draw on Talal Asad’s suggestion that ‘‘political supremacy . . . works e√ectively through institutionalized di√erences.’’ ‘‘Neither the invention of an expressive culture,’’ Asad goes on to point out, ‘‘nor the making of hybrid cultural forms . . . holds any anxieties for defenders of the status quo. On the contrary, such developments are comfortably accommodated by urban consumer capitalism.’’ Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 263–64. While Asad’s powerful polemic focuses on ‘‘multiculturalism’’ in late twentieth-century Britain, his theoretical assertions are, I believe, relevant to the specific period and culture, and the debates surrounding it, with which I am concerned. 12 However, according to some historians, America’s veritable multiculturalism extends at least as far back...
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