Editor's Page

Membership Has its Benefits

Surprise! Your summer issue of the JER has mailed one month ahead of our usual schedule. And the reason? To bring you a new benefit of membership in SHEAR—the program for our annual conference, hot off the press and included in this mailing. Thanks to the sterling efforts of both the Program Committee headed by Cathy Kelly and Amy and Zelini at the SHEAR office, we've expedited the compilation and production of the annual program, thus giving our loyal and paid-up members a heads-up on the intellectual, cultural, and social extravaganza we'll be enjoying in Montreal this July, as well as a head start on organizing travel and accommodations. O Canada—hie thee thither.

Early American Quizzo

When I came across this passage in the recently published autobiography of a notable American, I thought the JER's readership might find it of some interest while being surprised by the identity of this nascent early Americanist author. Any guesses?

I couldn't exactly put in words what I was looking for, but I began searching in principle for it, over at the New York Public Library, a monumental building with marble floors and walls, vacuous and spacious caverns, vaulted ceiling. A building that radiates triumph and glory when you walk inside. In one of the upstairs reading rooms I started reading articles in newspapers on microfilm from 1855 to about 1865 to see what daily life was like. I wasn't so much interested in the issues as intrigued by the language and rhetoric of the times. Newspapers like the Chicago Tribune, the Brooklyn Daily Times and the Pennsylvania Freeman. Others, too, like the Memphis Daily Eagle, the Savannah Daily Herald and Cincinnati Enquirer. It wasn't like it was another world, but the same one only with more urgency, and the issue of slavery wasn't the only concern. There were news items about reform movements, antigambling leagues, rising crime, child labor, temperance, slave-wage factories, loyalty oaths and religious revivals. You get the feeling that the newspapers themselves could explode and lightning will burn and everybody will perish. Everybody uses the same God, quotes the same Bible and law and literature. Plantation slavecrats of Virginia are accused of breeding and selling their own children. In the Northern cities, there's a lot of discontent and debt is piled high and seems out of control. The plantation aristocracy run their plantations like city-states. They are like the Roman republic where an elite group of characters rule supposedly for the good of all. They've got sawmills, gristmills, distilleries, country stores, et cetera. Every state of mind opposed by another . . . Christian piety and weird mind philosophies turned on their heads. Fiery orators, like William Lloyd Garrison, a conspicuous abolitionist from Boston who even has his own newspaper. There are riots in Memphis and in New Orleans. There's a riot in New York where two hundred people are killed outside of the Metropolitan Opera House because an English actor has taken the place of an American one. Anti-slave labor advocates inflaming crowds in Cincinnati, Buffalo, and Cleveland, that if the Southern states are allowed to rule, the Northern factory owners would then be forced to use slaves as free laborers. This causes riots, too. Lincoln comes into the picture in the late 1850s. He is referred to in the Northern press as a baboon or giraffe, and there were a lot of caricatures of him. Nobody takes him seriously. It's impossible to conceive that he would become the father figure that he is today. You wonder how people so united by geography and religious ideals could become such bitter enemies. After a while you become aware of nothing but a culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, evil for evil, the common destiny of the human being getting thrown off course. It's all one long funeral song, but there's a certain imperfection in...