American Abyss: Savagery and Civilization in the Age of Industry (review)

In the decades following the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, American writers and activists gave nearly every aspect of the human condition an evolutionary interpretation. Politics, aesthetics, economics, technology, philosophy, history, geography, literary and theatrical productions, and the new disciplines of sociology, psychology, criminology, and anthropology all took an evolutionary turn. Or rather a plunge, into a dark anxiety-filled “abyss” where malformed, unwashed, and in many cases nonwhite evolutionary primitives lurked and proliferated, threatening to overwhelm the “better,” more evolutionarily advanced races, and “menace” their civilization. Philanthropists, reformers, and academics mobilized evolutionary discourse to respond to the rise of the industrial city, the mass immigration, “the labor question,” colonialism, gender relations (“the new woman”), and modernity itself. “In the abyss,” progressive reformer Robert Hunter lamented, the masses “become merely breeders of children, who persist in the degeneration into which their fathers have fallen” (Poverty [1904], quoted in Bender, p. 132).

Such lamentations are the subject of Daniel Bender’s American Abyss, an illuminating tour of American evolutionary discourse. Much of the story is familiar (Richard Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Thought was published in 1944), but Bender gives it new detail and nuance. Through a close reading of textual and visual sources, Bender evokes the fin-de-siècle evolutionary imaginary: throwback cavemen, cavewomen, apes, and monkeys; demographic tidal waves, invasions, floods, and eruptions; and a time-traveling geography of urban and exotic primitivism.

Strangely, while Darwin’s works played a vital role in implanting the evolutionary idée fixe, the resultant evolutionary discourse was not particularly Darwinian. Spencer’s reformulation of Darwin, “the survival of the fittest,” was continually invoked, but for many commentators the problem was that the fittest were unfit, reproductively and physically, to compete against their inferiors. And, Darwin notwithstanding, there was no articulated discussion of what was an adaptive or nonadaptive trait and how such traits were transmitted: in applying evolutionary discourse to the immigrant poor, the “yellow races,” or even the educated upper and upper middle classes, a fuzzy Lamarckianism usually prevailed. Somehow, environment affected “germ plasm.” “Positive eugenics,” Bender argues, largely supplied the logic of progressive reform. The Irishman, the southern Italian, the Jew, the native, cleaned up, educated, and morally instructed might never attain the evolutionary excellence of the native Anglo-Saxon or “Teutonic” elite, but could be improved, and these eugenic traits would somehow be transmitted to their children and grandchildren, so long as they submitted to the tutelage, discipline and hygienic regimes of their betters.

Perhaps it was this capacious elasticity that enabled evolutionary discourse to travel so widely. One of Bender’s best chapters, “Following the Monkey,” shows how avant-gardists and socialists—Jack London foremost among them—turned the dominant evolutionary narrative upside down. In the laissez-faire world of dog-eat-dog, the tramp/laborer was a survivalist and upholder of an altruistic, evolutionarily advanced, moral code: all for one and one for all. The banker and the industrialist were cannibals, primitives who metaphorically feasted on human flesh. Civilization was barbarous. The lower-class wilds were a cruel but beautiful place where authentic life is lived, the physically and mentally fit survive, and an ethos of collective responsibility, honor, modesty, self-reliance and sacrifice is forged. Thus did evolutionary discourse provide rhetorical salience, left, right and center.

American Abyss has many pleasures but could have benefited from a sharper editorial hand: it is in places hyperbolic, unmusical, and repetitive. It is also too narrowly focused: Bender entirely ignores contemporary accounts of self-making and subject formation, which applied the evolutionary maxim “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” to pedagogy, child rearing, psychology, and “personality”: even or especially among the middle and upper classes, there was an abyss within. And it might have taken a peek at rougher places and venues in which evolutionary discourse circulated: vaudeville, dime novels, patent...