The Rise of Multicultural America: Economy and Print Culture, 1865-1915

THREE: Cosmopolitanism

3 cosmopolitanism The borders of the American nation were flexible in the late nineteenth century both for those who sought entry and for those who sought exile.∞ This was due in part to the expansion of the American economy and workforce and the growth of tourism among the middle and upper classes. At the same time, migration and resettlement became increasingly common within the country. Some of the most prominent American literature of the period was inspired by these human displacements. The writings examined in this chapter represent a variety of encounters among di√erent types of people in the national and international crucibles where mixing, antagonism, and Darwinian struggle took place. American social life demanded a disposition of cosmopolitanism, which might be characterized as openness to other cultures and to cultural others, as well as to the global interconnectedness that such others implied. As William Dean Howells put it, ‘‘The world was once very little, and it is now very large.’’ Moreover, there was growing awareness that the most profound interdependencies of the emerging modern world were undetectable. Such recognitions incited trepidation as well as wonder, and I will be as much concerned in the following pages with anticosmopolitanism as with its embrace. One sign of resistance is the Jewish characters that arouse such vitriol in the fictional worlds of Frank Norris and Edith Wharton, among others, recalling the ‘‘rootless cosmopolitans’’ derided in capital cities across Europe in the postEnlightenment era. The most consistent form of cosmopolitanism is that conceptualized through the global consumer goods that give, in the words of Karl Marx, ‘‘a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption’’ cosmopolitanism :: 77 everywhere, drawing ‘‘from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood.’’ And the ideal type of cosmopolitanism is exemplified by the heaven of Mark Twain’s Captain Stormfield, where earthlings confront their insignificance and begin to appreciate the radical di√erences a√orded by a galactic humanity.≤ Cities were especially conducive to cosmopolitan consciousness, and major novelists immortalized the ways in which urban environments expanded thought: Frank Norris, San Francisco; Henry James, London, Venice , Paris; Kate Chopin, New Orleans; Abraham Cahan and Edith Wharton, New York. Yet they also revealed regions more remote (the infinite whiteness of Helen Keller; the hyperconsciousness of Henry James’s ‘‘life after death’’; the heaven of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps) as productive of their own kind of worldliness. The human characters introduced in these works are memorable, usually for their peculiarity or excessiveness. These are people incapable of simply ‘‘adjusting’’—often distinguished by their adventurousness or marginality. Some are suicides (Lily Bart, Edna Pontellier); some murder victims (Trina McTeague); some die of disease (Milly Theale, Alice James); many endure as fragments of their original selves (Yekl, Merton Densher, Vandover). The works discussed in this chapter include classic novellas, immigrant novels and letters, social scientific studies of immigration and religious extremism, autobiographies, biographies, and classic American novels. These writings o√er intimate explorations of a central American theme of mobility and self-transformation during a time when the country was triumphing over competitors like Argentina, Brazil, and industrializing western Europe in the international competition for cheap immigrant labor and averaging more than 5 million newcomers each decade between 1880 and 1920. Due in part to extensive industrialization and technological innovation (and the jobs, housing, and modern transportation systems they produced), the nation’s total urban population during the 1880s increased by 56.4 percent. Twenty farmers moved to the city for every urbanite who moved to the land (where recurrent depressions and mechanized farming reduced job opportunities), while ten farming o√spring became urbanites for every one who remained a farmer. In 1860, immigrants comprised 40 percent of the populations of major American cities, including New York, Chicago, and San Francisco; by 1910, the population of immigrants and their American-born children had risen to 70 percent in major cities like New York, Chicago, Boston, and Detroit. The result of this rapid expansion and diversification was the fragmentation of urban social life, which however charged with opportunity, could seem vast and unsettling to native, migrant, and immigrant alike. 78 :: cosmopolitanism These urban landscapes proved a critical testing ground for the new science of sociology, which specialized in studies of immigration and urbanization . The German sociologist Georg Simmel, whose writings were translated and published in the American Journal of Sociology during the 1890s...