Intimate and Authentic Economies: The American Self-Made Man from Douglass to Chaplin (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory) (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY OUTSTANDING DISSERTATIONS Edited by

William E.Cain Professor of English Wellesley College

A ROUTLEDGE SERIES LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY WILLIAM E.CAIN, General Editor WORD OF MOUTH Food and Fiction after Freud Susanne Skubal THE WASTE FIX Seizures of the Sacred from Upton Sinclair to the Sopranos William G.Little WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN? Family and Sectionalism in the Virginia Novels of Kennedy, Carruthers, and Tucker, 1830–1845 John L.Hare POETIC GESTURE Myth, Wallace Stevens, and the Motions of Poetic Language Kristine S.Santilli BORDER MODERNISM Intercultural Readings in American Literary Modernism Christopher Schedler THE MERCHANT OF MODERNISM The Economic Jew in Anglo-American Literature, 1864–1939 Gary Martin Levine THE MAKING OF THE VICTORIAN NOVELIST Anxieties of Authorship in the Mass Market Bradley Deane Our OF TOUCH Skin Tropes and Identities in Woolf, Ellison, Pynchon, and Acker Maureen F.Curtin FIGURES OF FINANCE CAPITALISM Writing, Class, and Capital in the Age of Dickens Borislav Knezevic BALANCING THE BOOKS Faulkner, Morrison, and the Economies of Slavery Erik Dussere

BEYOND THE SOUND BARRIER The Jazz Controversy in Twentieth-Century American Fiction Kristin K.Henson SEGREGATED MISCEGENATION On the Treatment of Racial Hybridity in the U.S. and Latin American Literary Traditions Carlos Hiraldo DEATH, MEN, AND MODERNISM Trauma and Narrative in British Fiction from Hardy to Woolf Ariela Freedman WRITING THE CITY Urban Visions and Literary Modernism Desmond Harding THE SELF IN THE CELL Narrating the Victorian Prisoner Sean Grass REGENERATING THE NOVEL Gender and Genre in Woolf, Forster, Sinclair, and Lawrence James J.Miracky SATIRE AND THE POSTCOLONIAL NOVEL V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie John Clement Ball THROUGH THE NEGATIVE The Photographic Image and the Written Word in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Megan Williams LOVE AMERICAN STYLE Divorce and the American Novel, 1881–1976 Kimberly Freeman FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS OF THE 1970s Joanna Russ and Dorothy Bryant Tatiana Teslenko

INTIMATE AND AUTHENTIC ECONOMIES The American Self-Made Man from Douglass to Chaplin

Tom Nissley

Routledge New York & London

Published in 2003 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street NewYork, NY 10001 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE www.routledge.co.uk Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledges’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Copyright © 2003 by Taylor and Francis Books, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nissley, Tom. Intimate and authentic economies: the American self-made man from Douglass to Chaplin/ by Tom Nissley. p. cm.—(Literary criticism and cultural theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-96869-0 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. American literature—History and criticism. 2. Success in literature. 3. Self-actualization (Psychology) in literature. 4. Self-culture in literature. 5. Self in literature. 6. Men in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PS169.S843N57 2003 810.9'.353–dc21 2003014363 ISBN 0-203-50457-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-57996-8 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-96869-0 (Print Edition)

This work is dedicated to my parents and to Laura, and to Lisa Weil, who often convinced me of the unsettling possibility that ideas matter.

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

ix xi

INTRODUCTION Alienable, Intimate, Authentic

3

CHAPTER 1 Free Labor and Intimate Capital: The Postwar Autobiographies of Douglass, Brown, and Washington

22

CHAPTER 2 The Nature Theater of Americana: Horatio Alger’s Earnest Commodities

64

CHAPTER 3 Racial Credit, White Money, and the Novel of Assimilative Lament

97

CHAPTER 4 The Reality Effect in the Film Machine: The Authentic Performances 126 of the Silent Comedies

Notes Bibliography Index

157 165 172

List of Illustrations Plate 1. The opening spread of the serialization of “The Autobiography of an 100 –101 American Jew” in McClure’s Magazine. MSCUA, University of Washington Libraries, negative no. UW 22278z Plate 2. Charlie finds the camera. Modern Times copyright © Roy Export 143 Company Establishment 144 Plate 3. Charlie shares the screen, but not the camera, with his cellmate. Modern Times copyright © Roy Export Company Establishment 147 Plate 4. The gamin’s father can’t quite raise his gaze to the sightline of the camera. Modern Times copyright © Roy Export Company Establishment

Acknowledgments I WOULD LIKE TO THANK MARK PATTERSON IN PARTICULAR FOR HIS HELP through the many stages of this project and for his patient belief in its eventual coherence. Thanks to my friends, writers, and readers, Carrie Klumpar, Jennifer Schulz, and Tamara Kaplan, for their smarts and their senses of humor and proportion. Thanks to Joycelyn Moody, Malcolm Griffith, Ross Posnock, Dana Nelson, Steve Shaviro, and Gregg Crane, who all read and responded to earlier portions of this work and who improved it through their advice or their example. Thanks to my parents, Connie and Peter Nissley, as always, for their unquestioning support and level-headed kindness, to my sister Elinor for her friendship and the example of her brainy curiosity, and to my friends David, Josh, Lee, Peter, and Seth, who don’t know much about this book, but who know about everything else. And thanks indeed to Laura Silverstein, for thinking well of me beyond all call for it, and for just plain thinking well.

INTIMATE AND AUTHENTIC ECONOMIES

Introduction Alienable, Intimate, Authentic AN EMBLEMATIC SCENE IN THE TRADITION OF THE SELF-MADE MAN STORY comes early in Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, when, having run away from his printing house apprenticeship, Franklin arrives as a young man with few resources in a new and unknown metropolis: “I found myself in New York, near 300 miles from home, a boy of but 17, without the least recommendation to, or knowledge of any person in the place, and with very little money in my pocket” (83). It is a scene of arrival that will be repeated in similar terms in such disparate examples of the genre as Frederick Douglass’s late autobiography the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, King Vidor’s film The Crowd, Abraham Cahan’s novel The Rise of David Levinsky, and any number of the stories for boys of Horatio Alger. Douglass’s version, occurring on the first day after his escape from slavery, gives an even more thorough picture of the elements of the scene: I found myself in the big city of New York, a free man, one more added to the mighty throng which, like the confused waves of the troubled sea, surged to and fro between the lofty walls of Broadway…. The bonds that had held me to ‘old master’ were broken. No man now had a right to call me his slave or assert mastery over me. I was in the rough and tumble of an outdoor world, to take my chance with the rest of its busy number. (202) The basic elements of the moment are clear: the urban anonymity, the broken ties to an earlier life, the embrace of risk. The new “free man” exists in relief against the life he left behind, particularly the old labor relations of dominance and immobility. Franklin, though his light bonds can hardly compare to those that held Douglass, is like Douglass an illegal runaway from impressed labor, in his case an indentured apprenticeship to his brother that still had three years to run when he lit out for New York and then Philadelphia. His entrance and Douglass’s into the “outside world” of the anonymous city mark their distance from the inside world of family and household service (in both cases family and service were intertwined: Franklin indentured to his brother by his father and Douglass enslaved by a family that in all likelihood included his white father). By breaking the bonds that held them in their old life they assert their revolutionary right to self-determination; by standing in the crowds of the city with no connection to anyone there, they imply that any success that follows can be accounted solely to their own efforts. This position as an orphan integer—anonymous, self-contained, and without parent or master—may seem to represent the essence of self-making, but an equally emblematic scene occurs a few pages later in both autobiographies. In Franklin’s story, having found

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work in a printers shop and saved money through his “industry and frugality,” he returns to Boston to visit his brother’s establishment and show off his newly earned wealth: “I was better dress’d than ever while in his service, having a genteel new suit from head to foot, a watch, and my pockets lin’d with near five pounds sterling in silver” (89, 91). It’s this final detail, the money that he carries to prove his independence, that is the most crucial. In Douglass’s case, such a material confirmation occurs less than a month after his escape, when he “put[s] on the clothes of a common laborer” and goes looking for work. In exchange for shoveling a pile of coal for the wife of a minister, “the dear lady put into my hand two silver half-dollars. To understand the emotion which swelled my heart as I clasped this money, realizing that I had no master who could take it from me— that it was mine—that my hands were my own, and could earn more of the precious coin—one must have been in some sense himself a slave” (209–10). Again, in Douglass’s account the elements of self-making in this scene are even more explicit than in Franklin’s; if in the first scene his self was made by his break from his enslavement and his step into the crowds of the city, in this one the silver money is necessary to confirm that self and his own mastery of it. While the first scene releases him from his earlier, imposed identity, the second actually begins the process of constructing a new self using the materials at hand. In Douglass’s case, he possesses himself because he can exchange himself, and can continue to exchange himself and thereby “earn more of the precious coin.” If his selfhood is evident in the first scene because he stands as a self-contained integer, in the second that self-hood is represented by the integers contained outside of his self—the silver coins that he holds in his hands, or, in Franklin’s version, that line his pockets. As these latter scenes show, the stories of the self-made man are dramas of alienation. I mean “alienation” not in the broad psychological sense of estrangement and anomie that has been its more common usage in the twentieth century, but rather in its more narrow legal and economic sense, referring to the transfer of one’s property to another. The basis of the self-making process in those stories is the idea of possessive individualism, as famously outlined by C. B.Macpherson, in which the individual is seen, in keeping with the first pair of scenes described above, as “the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them” (3). Rather than owing one’s self and particularly ones labor to the community as a whole or to a hereditary superior, one is thought to own oneself and to be the sole determinant of one’s labor and its products. But property in one’s own labor includes—indeed, in the market system it consists almost entirely of— the right to sell that labor to another. As Macpherson writes, “the more emphatically labour is asserted to be a property, the more it is to be understood to be alienable. For property in the bourgeois sense is not only a right to enjoy or use; it is a right to dispose of, to exchange, to alienate” (214–15). Self-possession, in other words, is defined by the right to contract out one’s labor into the possession of another. In that paradox of possession—you can only own yourself by selling yourself, or at least a part of yourself—lies the tension at the heart of the self-made man narrative; it is what makes the stories dramas of alienation. Alienation as a means of self-making is an anxious and ambiguous process, and the anxieties, in the examples of the self-made man genre I examine in this study, stem from two main sources. One is the problem that when one alienates ones own property, particularly property in labor, that exchange places one

Introduction

5

under the control of another in a way that threatens the very self-possession that the alienated property is supposed to represent. This is the dilemma of the free labor contract. As Brook Thomas has written in describing the “Age of Contract,” what “fascinated” Americans in the late nineteenth century was “the idea of contract as a mode of social organization in which people freely bound themselves to others by binding themselves to the fulfillment of obligations” (1). “Freely binding oneself,” according to the idea of contract, depends on an alienable aspect to property in oneself—that there is a part of oneself, one’s labor for instance, that one can bind over to another—but it depends as well on an inalienable aspect to property in oneself—that there is a limit, in other words, to the extent to which one can bind oneself. To go beyond that limit would be to agree to enslave oneself, and thereby to cross the bounds of “free labor.” The position of that limit, though, has always been a matter of debate, changing over time and frequently depending on the race, gender, or status position of the subject, ever since the idea of free labor first arose in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in response to changing conceptions of individual will and autonomy and in contrast to a system of labor and society that has been broadly termed “traditional” or “status” relations. 1 At the time that free labor became a coherent ideology in the United States, the status system it was conceived in opposition to consisted of the traditional hierarchies of birth in the Old World and, more locally, the slavery of African Americans practiced in the southern United States and the system of indentured servitude that through the 1830s was a major route by which immigrant white laborers were brought to the country. In Robert J.Steinfeld’s genealogy of the idea, free labor, strictly defined, only established itself when indentured service came to be conflated with permanent chattel slavery as forms of unfree labor. While in the eighteenth century, a limited term of indenture was considered to be voluntary—and in that sense not slavery—because it was the result of a “freely” contracted agreement between adults, the perception of indentures changed in the middle of the nineteenth century. The crucial element in defining voluntary employment came to be not the presence of a contract but the employee’s ability to leave the employer at any time, even before the term of the contract was up. As Steinfeld describes the important 1821 decision of the Indiana Supreme Court in The Case of Mary Clark, a Woman of Color, in which a woman sued to be released from a twenty-year indenture that she had signed as a free woman, “labor became involuntary the moment a laborer decided to depart and was not permitted to do so—whatever previous agreement she had made” (147). But just as the presence of contract served for a time to make even long-term indentured servitude appear voluntary, so this new definition of voluntary employment then came to legitimize anything that fell within the bounds of the definition as something that employees had in essence agreed to, because they hadn’t left. “Because employees could leave whenever they decided to,” Steinfeld writes, “if they stayed (and did not contract out of any of the implied legal incidents of employment), their actions could quite naturally be taken to represent their own free decisions to accept the terms of employment” (200). By not leaving, the workers gave their implicit assent to conditions of labor that determined such things as punishment, hours, pay, and bodily risk. In further rounds of reform in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries the line demarcating the voluntary from the involuntary, and the alienable from the inalienable, would be redrawn again and again to account for various coercive conditions in the employment

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relationship by establishing such limits to the labor contract as the eight-hour day and standards of occupational safety. The second source of anxiety in the self-alienation process stems from the problem of the self being represented by something outside of the self—by silver coins, in the cases of Franklin and Douglass. The alienated evidence of the self is necessarily detachable and abstractable from the particularities and the intentions of the individual it is supposed to represent. By using an abstracted universal equivalent such as money to represent a person, might the self that is created by the possession of money lose the very individuality and particularity that makes a self uniquely a self? And might the reliance on such outside evidence allow the possibility of misrepresentation, of willful disguise or inadvertent misunderstanding? And might the accumulated property of the self come to overwhelm and even dominate that self, becoming the undue focus of the self’s aspirations and the confining box to which the self comes to shape itself? From these basic dilemmas of representation we can trace such disparate developments as the crises of confidence and sincerity that Karen Halttunen has described in the Victorian-era United States and the Marxian concepts of reification and the commodity fetish, and, most relevant to the chapters to follow, what I will describe as the market in authenticity, which hinges on the transformation of the particular into the typical, the inalienable properties of the local and individual into the alienable property of a recognizable, consistent type.

ALIENATION AND ALIENABLE PROPERTY Before moving on to describe in more detail these two dilemmas central to the ostensibly liberating project of self-making through self-alienation, I would first like to differentiate the specific concept of alienable property from the far broader senses that have accumulated around the idea of “alienation,” and to point to the ways that the specific economic sense has in some respects led to the broader psychological conception of the term. “Alienation,” in its twentieth-century usage as psychological estrangement or anomie, stemmed largely from the influence of Marx, particularly his early “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” written in 1844 but not published, for the most part, until 1932, in which he explicitly tied the particular legal sense of alienable, exchangeable labor to the wider sociological and psychological effect of alienation, of a “loss of reality” and an estrangement from one’s own self. For Marx in those early manuscripts, the alienation of a worker’s labor “means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently of him and alien to him and begins to confront him as an autonomous power; that the life which he has bestowed on the object confronts him as hostile and alien” (Early 324). 2 Walter Kaufmann, though, has criticized “Marx’s vastly influential restriction of [alienation] to destructive conditions,” and claims that “Alienation is neither a disease nor a blessing but, for better or worse, a central figure of human existence,” arguing instead, as Hegel did, that alienation, in its psychological sense as a feeling of estrangement, is a necessary part of a developing self-consciousness (xiv-xv). Perhaps the most thorough and eloquent advocate of this latter view is Georg Simmel

Introduction

7

in his Philosophy of Money, published in 1900 and revised in 1907. Like Marx, Simmel considers the specific economic sense of alienable property, represented in its purest form by the utterly alienated figure of money, to be crucial to the broader processes of modern consciousness. Unlike Marx, however, he argues that the alienation of private property is the most significant engine of freedom in society. “The money economy,” he writes, “makes possible …a specific kind of mutual dependence which, at the same time, affords room for a maximum of liberty” (295). Possessions that stand outside the self are extensions of the self, at least as far as they obey the self’s impulses; they “form an extension of the Ego which is only the centre from which impulses extend into things” (322). And money, the fruit of alienation, is the form of possession which, by its very formlessness, obeys the self most completely. If one were to construct a scale of objects based on the extent to which the will can take command of them…[m]oney would be located at the extreme end of such a scale. That unattainable entity that other objects, as it were, reserve for themselves and which is denied to even unlimited ownership, has completely disappeared in the case of money. Money lacks that structure by which other specific objects, even if we legally own them, refuse to yield to our will. (325) Money, free from particularity and personality, allows its possessor an unparalleled freedom of action. Simmel’s is a largely ahistorical account—“man is the exchanging animal,” he writes—but he does note the particular restrictions on the liberty available through alienation to the worker in capitalist production (291). Without ownership of the means of production, the worker comes to be separated from his or her own work, and labor power itself becomes a commodity: “The fact that labour now shares the same character, mode of valuation and fate with all other commodities signifies that work has become something objectively separate from the worker, something that he not only no longer is, but also no longer has” (456). Here, of course, he sounds quite a bit like Marx, echoing, for instance, these words from the 1844 manuscripts: “The worker places his life in the object; but now it no longer belongs to him, but to the object. The greater his activity, therefore, the fewer objects the worker possesses. What the product of his labour is, he is not” (324). For Marx, the worker’s alienated labor power, rather than serving as an extension of his self, comes to stand against him and dominate him, turning him into an alienated product no different than the commodities he produces: “[W]e have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity, and moreover the most wretched commodity of all; that the misery of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and volume of his production” (322). Like Simmel, Marx sees the world outside the self as the possible site of the self’s extension—“Nature is man’s inorganic body,” he writes in the early manuscripts (328), and he expands on the thought in the first volume of Capital when he says that “nature becomes one of the organs of his activity, which he annexes to his own bodily organs, adding stature to himself” (285)—but for him the introduction of private, alienable property is the wedge that divides the self from its extension into nature, rather than, as Simmel believes, the very mechanism by which that extension is achieved.

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The self-made man narratives, for the most part, accept and even embrace the alienated world, not merely as a fait accompli, but, as Simmel does, as a productive engine of both extension and independence. The drama of alienation in the self-made man story, then, lies in the attempt to construct an identity within this system of mediation and alienation. For the most part, the stories I will be looking at turn neither to the pure embrace of mediation marked by the flux and indeterminacy of, say, Melville’s The Confidence-Man, with its society of false fronts and untraceable identities, nor, on the other end of the spectrum, to Marx’s “dream of an unalienated society” (Kaufmann xiv). Rather, for these self-made men, their personal economies are mixed ones, in which the mobility, mediation, and alienation that might be supposed to be found within a narrative economy of free labor and freedom of contract are in fact tempered by, or even dependent on, promises of unmediated contact. On one hand, in freely binding themselves to another through the alienation of their labor, the self-made men open themselves up to the threat (or the promise) of the intimate, familial economy represented by household service and traditional status hierarchy. And on the other, the value of the property in themselves that they attempt to exchange is often dependent on assertions of authenticity—of natural identity, of race and culture, of bodily presence—that would seem to be at odds with the impersonal, mediated relations of contract and alienable property.

PATRONAGE AND THE INTIMATE ECONOMY The dilemma of freely binding oneself to another is embodied in many of the self-made man stories by the figure of the patron, the person to whom the self-making subject alienates his labor. 3 That this figure is generally a patron, rather than a mere employer, points to the ambiguous nature of his or her relation to the subject: a patron is one who takes an interest in the subject of patronage beyond the usual impersonal limits of the contractual relationship. Patrons take their subjects under their wing. They make them feel like one of the family. From this perspective the centrality of patrons to many selfmade man stories might be seen to make an oxymoron out of the label of self-making, since a reliance on a helpful authority figure would seem to undermine the hero’s position as an orphan integer, reliant only ones own talent and effort. As John Cawelti has written about the Horatio Alger stories, for instance, “Alger’s heroes are rarely ‘alone and unaided’… From the very beginning of his career, the Alger boy demonstrates an astounding propensity for chance encounters with benevolent and useful friends, and his success is largely due to their patronage and assistance” (109). But what the importance of patrons makes clear is the necessary dependence of any project of self-making based on self-alienation on, at a most basic level, a buyer for the alienated property. Given this necessary dependence, the omnipresence of patrons in the narrative universe of the selfmade man marks the always-present possibility that the process of alienation might spill over into relations that would threaten the integral nature of the self. What the patron often represents, more particularly, is the continued presence of the traditional relations of status in the newer era of contract. For if the patron goes beyond the impersonal limits of contract relations, the relations he threatens (or promises, depending on the narrative) to institute are those of the more intimate hierarchies of the

Introduction

9

family and the household. As Steinfeld has argued, what separated servants or apprentices from wage laborers in early modern England was their inclusion in the household. Rather than receiving wages for their work, servants and apprentices were “maintained” by their masters: given the food and clothes and care during illness they needed for subsistence. The view at the time, Steinfeld writes, was “that servants and apprentices had turned themselves over to their masters completely, had placed themselves in their masters’ hands—both as to control over their movements and persons and as to responsibility for their well-being. Residence with the master resulted in the partial juridical merger of servant into master” (40). As Simmel similarly points out, “It seems unavoidable that, if the servant lives under the same roof with his master, is fed and sometimes clothed by him, his services will be quantitatively undetermined and dependent only upon the changing needs of the domestic situation” (335). This familial merger lasted until the servant married, at which point he or she would leave the household of the master and receive weekly wages rather than maintenance. The servant, then, was in a position much like the master’s wife and children, the other legally dependent members of the household, and the service agreement was much like a marriage contract, with its claims to unbounded responsibilities on both sides. Steinfeld cites Max Weber’s characterization of a broad range of such agreements as “status contracts,” in which “a person was to become somebody’s child, father, wife, brother, master, slave, kin, comrade-in-arms, protector, client, follower, vassal, subject, friend, or quite generally comrade” (56). Unlike the impersonal agreements we associate with the modern idea of contract, which are said to put the contracting parties “at arm’s length,” the status contract holds its parties in a sort of familial, or in the term I will be using, intimate embrace (Atiyah 402). I use the word “intimate” because it carries a broader meaning beyond the more strictly familial and because, unlike “status,” it focuses attention on the putative closeness promised by a patron’s interest. And I use it as well because it carries with it the whisper of barely audible—or even unspoken—agreements made in an informal atmosphere in which emotion, trust, and mutual concern claim to overwhelm the rationalized, arms-length negotiations and self-interest of the modern contract. When Frederick Douglass, for instance, uses his access to the “intimations” of President Rutherford B. Hayes to assure his readers of the president’s good intentions toward African Americans, those informal words, as well as the personal trust that their very informality implies, are offered as insights into the executives very heart (Life 425). Because of the personal relationship that their whispered informality evokes, such intimacies promise a sincerity, an access to true feelings and intentions, that the arm’slength mediations of contract and alienable property threaten to disguise with standardization and formality. The patrons promises of intimacy, in other words, offer a possible solution to the other dilemma of alienation, the problem of mediated representation and detachable property. Intimacy is equated with sincerity; the patron, through his whispers and friendly assurances, claims to reveal his true feelings and intentions to those whom his fatherly power threatens to dominate. And through his access to the same interior feelings in the objects of his patronage, the patron is capable of exercising a mercy and forgiveness that an impersonal (and therefore suspicious) employer would not be capable of. In the Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, Carnegie provides an example of how such mercy

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claims to alleviate some of the anxieties inherent in detachable property, and his lesson is embedded in a passage that provides a fascinating insight into the relations between the intimacies of patronage and free labor thinking. In speaking of his early career in Pittsburgh, he remarks, “At an early age I became a strong anti-slavery partisan and hailed with enthusiasm the first national meeting of the Republican Party.” The Republican Party, the home of free labor ideology, defined its agenda and ideals in direct contrast to the clearly unfree labor system of Southern slavery, and it is hardly surprising to find a representative self-made man such as Carnegie supporting the anti-slavery party from its inception. But this abolitionist sentiment comes only one page after an anecdote in which Carnegie recounts his first days with the Pennsylvania Railroad in a way that alludes to his own figurative enslavement. Though only a young clerk, he receives the “honor” of being invited to tea at the home of Mr. Lombaert, the general superintendent of the railroad. This invitation into the domestic space of the usually “stern and unbending” executive is itself a sign of the intimacy of patronage, but Lombaert makes those close patronage relations even more explicit when he introduces young Carnegie to Mrs. Lombaert, saying, “This is Mr. Scott’s ‘Andy,’” following the common usage that named slaves possessively after their masters. And Carnegie doesn’t shy away from the implications of the phrase, writing, “I was very proud indeed of being recognized as belonging to Mr. Scott,” his more immediate supervisor and patron (64). In sum, while a partisan against the system of slavery in which one person could own another, Carnegie nonetheless welcomes the idea of “belonging” to his employer. Of course the anecdote serves to draw the line between free labor and slavery even as it might seem to blur it; it is vital to Carnegie’s story that he is not literally or legally owned by Mr. Scott. Later in his career, in fact, Carnegie will permanently break with his patron by refusing to endorse a loan on which Scott has overextended himself, thereby showing the reversal in their relative positions. But his aim here in speaking of “belonging” to his patron is nonetheless to imply a relationship that exceeds the supposed impersonality of the labor contract. His rise, he makes clear, is dependent not on a model of strict impersonality, but rather on the opposite, on intimate contact with patrons. As he writes a few pages later, after once again referring to himself as “Scott’s Andy,” “The battle of life is already half won by the young man who is brought personally in contact with high officials” (69–70; emphasis added). And immediately following the story of his introduction to Mrs. Lombaert, he tells another anecdote, the purpose of which is both to dramatize the anxieties of detachable property and to show how personal, intimate patronage such as he benefited from and claims to practice himself can defuse those anxieties. Carrying a package of pay-rolls and checks on the railroad, he realizes that the rough ride has knocked the package loose and out of the train. After convincing the engineer to run the train back along the track, he miraculously finds the package where it came to rest, mere feet from a stream that would have carried it out of reach forever. The package is an especially potent embodiment of the dangers of property that exists outside the body or outside traditional relationships of trust. Like such similar items in other selfmade stories as the bankbooks of Ragged Dick and Ben Bruce in the stories of Alger and the boxes full of their wordly belongings that are carried (and lost) by James Weldon Johnson’s ex-colored man and Karl Rossmann in Franz Kafka’s America, Carnegie’s payroll represents the susceptibility of alienable property to theft or loss, the

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consequences of which could utterly reverse ones fortunes and undermine one’s identity. As Carnegie remembers, his horror perhaps made even greater by his knowledge of the subsequent success that his error might have prevented, “how many years of faithful service would it have required upon my part to wipe out the effect of that one piece of carelessness! I could no longer have enjoyed the confidence of those whose confidence was essential to success had fortune not favored me” by keeping the package out of the water. But rather than merely presenting this episode as a lesson about the horrific, random underbelly of the impersonality of money and free labor, Carnegie instead uses it to show the importance of a patron’s mercy. As he explains, the moral of the story is that he has “never since believed in being too hard on a young man, even if he does commit a dreadful mistake or two” (64–65). In the potentially cold and impersonal economy of free labor, Carnegie offers his own patronage as, by contrast, personal and understanding, claiming to have created a capitalist hierarchy that is more like that of a forgiving family. In the purely intimate economy, money exchanges don’t represent the exchange of payment for specific labor, since all of the worker’s labor is considered to be at the disposal of the patron anyway. The exchanges of the intimate economy, rather, are closer in form to the gift. The patrons gift is not merely given without expectation of return, however; what the patron expects to receive in return is the gratitude of the recipient. That gratitude expresses the recipient’s dependence on the patron, and it constitutes an acknowledgment that the payment was not received as recompense for any specific property. The recipient’s gratitude stands as an exact measure of the extent to which he or she has not earned the gift. The gift is not the result of a negotiation between two wills, but rather the expression of a single will (or whim), that of the patron, and the return of gratitude represents the recipient’s acknowledged obeisance to that will. Simmel, in fact, argues that in this intimate economy even the money exchanged remains inalienable, since it remains within the domain of the will of the one who ostensibly gave it away. “The personal type of property, firmly united with the owner,” he writes, “is exemplified in early German law, which stat ed that every gift could be revoked in cases of ingratitude on the part of the recipient” (333). If a gift can be revoked, to what extent can it be said to be alienable? The danger of the intimacies of patronage, in other words, is that they represent a closed economy of the sort that free labor and the money economy were supposed to break apart. If the exchanges between patron and subject are not payable in money, the subject is left to rely instead on the good will of the patron. And while the apparent lack of boundaries represented by the patron’s close embrace implies a limitlessness to his or her generosity, the intimate economy is in another sense quite bounded. The rewards of patronage are denominated not in dollars but in good will, in “maintenance,” in trust and kind feelings, none of which carry much of a value on the open market. The patronage relationship sets up a sort of company town, in which the employee receives payment not in money but in the scrip of good feelings and assurances, which may be redeemed only within the bounds of the relationship. Such whispered assurances of good will and concern are often, unsurprisingly, not worth the paper they are not printed on. Patricia Williams, in comparing her experience to that of her fellow legal theorist Peter Gabel, who has both advocated and practiced an informal form of contract, makes clear the dangers of informal and personal transactions of the sort that someone known as “Mr.

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Scott’s ‘Andy'” might expect to take part in, and the value of her hard-earned position as an “arms length transactor”: [I]t helps me to clarify boundary…. As black, I have been given a strong sense of myself as too familiar, personal, subordinate to white people. I grew up in a neighborhood where landlords would not sign leases with their poor black tenants…. Unlike Peter, I am still engaged in a struggle to set up transactions at arm’s length, as legitimately commercial, and to portray myself as a bargainer of separate worth, distinct power, sufficient rights to manipulate commerce. (146–47) The threat of the intimate, informal economy is that it is one without rights or recourse. If on one hand it holds out the promise of mercy, of erasing the anonymity and impersonal indifference of the system of alienable property, on the other hand it leaves no room for the idea of inalienable property either. The boundaries it erases between persons are those of the “wall of rights,” in Steinfeld’s words, that protect individual volition by marking the line between the alienable and inalienable property one has in oneself (106).

THE PROPERTY IN AUTHENTICITY The second dilemma of alienable property—the problem of being represented by something that stands outside the self—has often evoked a crisis of authenticity in response to the abstract, impersonal mediation of money and the con tract. As Karen Halttunen has written about the mid-nineteenth-century United States, “In what was believed to be a fluid social world where no one occupied a fixed social position, the question ‘Who am I?’ loomed large; and in an urban social world where many of the people who met face-to-face each day were strangers, the question ‘Who are you really?’ assumed even greater significance” (xv). Contract law, with its “arm’s-length” proscriptions, in a sense codifies such an impersonal society, in which, as Tocqueville remarked about American democracy in the same period, the members “become indifferent and as if strangers to one another” (Atiyah 261). Halttunen’s latter question, “Who are you really?”, gains a particular intensity when the relationship being contracted is one of employment, for the good being exchanged is not merely an existing, already produced item, but the employee herself, or rather the portion of the employee’s person that she agrees to alienate. And since labor contracts are not immediate exchanges, but rather are promises of future labor and compensation, the question becomes only more acute, since the employer and employee must discern a consistent character on which they can depend for the duration of the contract. P.S.Atiyah, in his history of contract law, emphasizes the shift in the eighteenth century from immediate exchange to promises of future action as the basis of contracted exchanges. The “modern contract doctrine,” in his words, “is the idea that a contractual liability can be created—out of nothing as it were—by a promise, or at least an exchange of promises” (139). As many commentators on contract law have noted, in the purest form of the theory of contract, the promises don’t depend on the character of the parties involved, they create that character. Atiyah refers to the instructive discipline of promise-keeping: people don’t keep their promises

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because that is their nature, but rather because they “ought to” (431). The presence of the contract agreement itself forms the trust on which its fulfillment depends; this is what Brook Thomas refers to as the “promise of contract” (xi). But this pure, relativist vision of the contract has hardly alleviated the search for what Thomas calls “transcendent guarantees,” which would ground the contract’s promises in such less provisional measures as natural value, personal sincerity, and authentic identity, as my readings of the self-made man stories will confirm (33). Halttunen’s other anxious question, “Who am I?”, points to the perhaps less obvious dilemma of self-identity created by the contract agreement. For if the promise of a contract creates—rather than merely exposes—the character that will fulfill the terms of the agreement, the self can therefore find its identity defined by that agreement and the obligation to fulfill its terms. Mark Seltzer characterizes this obligation, quoting Christopher Newman in Henry James’s The American, as “the ‘duty’ of ‘resembling oneself,’” which marks the tension within “an individual defined at once by the radical freedom of will that contractual promises presuppose (‘I will’) and by a power over circumstance and over temporal and physical distance, a standing security for the future delivery of ones will, that the making and keeping of promises requires (‘I must’).” The obligation (the “I must”) created by the act of the contract (the “I will”) establishes an identity that then limits the subject’s subsequent freedom of will for the duration of the contract. And rather than finding one’s identity in separation from the property in the self it has agreed to exchange—as an identity from which that property has been removed— the alienated property, the obligated performance, comes to be the identity of the contracting self. The contracting self, in Seltzer’s paraphrase of William James, comes, in a different sense than Marx would mean the phrase, to be “possessed by his possessions” (73). The identity determined by the demands of the market—the identity that carries the most value as exchangeable property—threatens to overwhelm any other conception of self-identity. In the face of these crises of identity, the contracting parties in the self-made man stories, even as they claim to embrace the mediating terms of the free labor contract, often look to various forms of the authentic as “transcendent guarantees” of identity. The most basic of these is the assertion of an individual’s natural or inherent value, in a gesture that recalls the “just price” and the hierarchies of birth of the traditional status economy. The “just price” was thought to be, in Atiyah’s words, “the price at which a bargain, or an exchange, could be fairly carried through without gain or loss to either side” (62). Such a price is not determined by the freely willed agreement between the two exchanging parties, but rather by traditional determinations of justice. An exchange based on what this system considered to be an “unjust” price was thought to be at the disadvantage of one of the parties and could be legally overruled despite their apparent consent to the transaction. A corollary to the just price was the just wage, which was considered in early modern England to be the wage sufficient to keep the worker at subsistence (but no more, since a worker paid any more than subsistence-level was thought to be likely to work less). This idea of the just wage as providing the worker only enough to subsist conflicts directly with the assumptions of free labor, in which the worker expected to be paid enough over subsistence-level to accumulate a store of savings, but that is not to say that some free-labor writers do not have a conception of a

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“just wage” of their own. If such writers do not advocate a limited and traditionally determined price for labor, they still are at pains to claim that the wages earned by free laborers are just, in the sense that they are fully earned. The market, according to this thinking, rewards strictly according to merit. To take the stern words of Frederick Douglass from his most popular speech, “Self-Made Men,” as an example: “When we find a man who has ascended heights beyond ourselves; who has a broader vision than we and a sky with more stars in it than we have in ours, we may know that he has worked harder, better and more wisely than we” (Frederick, 5:554). Such an idea of the market— what Seltzer calls the “fantasy of perfect reciprocity”—which declares that the outcomes of the market are transparent measures of the virtue and effort expended by the rewarded laborer, counters the threat of mediation and false representation of the money econo my by claiming that the price of alienated property is no more or less than what it is worth (57). And if the market can be seen as a transparent measure of merit, then the transparency of individual character would necessarily follow, for how could virtue be rewarded if it could not be readily discerned? The necessity of discerning such virtue, however, given the abandonment of the usual restrictive measures of status, led to a particular concern with physical appearance. The popular nineteenth-century science of physiognomy claimed a strict correspondence between the outer signs of a persons body and the true inner character held within. Against fears of disguise and misrepresentation in the contract systems society of strangers, such claims, which have their narrative equivalents in the thumbnail sketches of physical virtue and evil in the Alger stories, promised that value and reliability were readily apparent, even at arms length. As one advice writer quoted by Halttunen assures, “the habits of the soul become written on the countenance; what we call the expression of the face is only the story which the face tells about the feelings of the heart” (41). And this conflation of face and heart had its correlation in the equally popular science of racial classification, in which, once again, outer appearance was taken as a sign of innate value. In one respect, racial stratification marked a survival of the old relations of status, in which, according to the split system characterized by Pierre L. van den Burghe as “Herrenvolk democracy,” the new rules of mobility, free labor, and contract applied to the white population while blacks, as a race considered unfit for the rigors of democracy and free labor, retained their hereditarily determined position as subordinates (16). But, as free labor’s concern with appearances implies, the signs of race were useful as well under the system of contract, as a means of making quick judgments about the inherent value of strangers. And under the theories of Social Darwinism, this science of racial determinism, which would have seemed a vestige of rigidified status relations, was adapted to the more dynamic theories of evolutionary mobility, in which the “failure to thrive” of particular racial groups in what was claimed as an environment of free movement and rewarded virtue was asserted as a sign of those groups’ natural inability to rise. Racial discrimination could then be, and still is, characterized not as a restriction on the mobility of free labor, but as a “rational“choice made by a freely contracting party on the best evidence available. The stories of free labor and self-making, then, were on one hand narratives of mobility and transformation, but on the other, quite often, they were narratives of immobility and destiny, in which the self was not so much created as revealed and the

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self-made man’s mobility was seen less as an overturning of hierarchies than as the victory of a hierarchy of inherent virtue over the false hierarchy of inherited status. These narratives turned to physical appearances as a source of authentic identity, and to the “natural” and “just” outcomes of the market as a means of authenticating the validity of racial and other forms of discrimination. The “authentic,” in these senses, means a correlation between appearance and essence: the market both is aided by the trustworthy propensi ty of bodies to reveal authentic feelings and is itself evidence of that transparency, by a sort of economic physiognomy that claims that someone’s market value is an authentic measure of “inner,” true worth. The market both relies upon and reveals the authentic. There is a more specific sense in which the authentic itself carries a value on the market, and this sense comes closest to the particular meaning of the word “authentic” and helps to explain why I have chosen to use it as my umbrella term for what might otherwise be called the “natural,” the “real,” or the “true.” Here I refer to the relationship between alienable property, identity, and the authentic, and to “authentic” as a term denoting the connection between a piece of property and a particular or local tradition or identity, as in “authentic Shaker furniture,” or “authentic Delta blues.” The authentic, by this definition, is something at once particular and typical: rooted in the individual and the local, but only recognizable as such by its conformity to repeatable standards of type and tradition. The idea of the authentic presumes that an object is rooted to a particular place and time, or that it bears the impress of an individual mind or hand. But an object’s particularity can often only be identified—or authenticated—by certain repeatable features that mark it not as singular but typical. A table is identifiably—authentically— “Shaker” only because it shares certain features with other tables of its type. The authentic, then, lies somewhere between the singular and the generic. In comparison to the generic, there is no such thing as “authentic furniture” or “authentic music”: the authentic carries no meaning without some more local identification, such as “authentic Shaker furniture,” or “authentic blues music,” or, even better, as “blues” itself comes to carry a more generic meaning, “authentic Delta blues.” And neither can this sense of the authentic refer to something purely singular: if someone, for instance, were to build a table that conformed to no recognizable tradition, it would be difficult for that table to be labeled authentic (unless, in an exception that proves the rule, it could be included in a tradition that claimed singularity and innovation as themselves typically characteristic, as in, say, an “authentic American original” or an “authentic English eccentric”). Even if the maker of that singular table were a member of the Shaker religious sect, her table, if it did not share some recognizable features with standard Shaker furniture, would nevertheless not be recognized as authentically Shaker. But the typical features alone are not enough to mark an object as authentic; they must be accompanied by the assertion of locality, of particularity: that “authentic Shaker furniture,” for instance, was made by Shakers (which is what separates it from “Shaker-style furniture” or, in a common oxymoron, an “authentic Shaker reproduction,” both of which may share the standard Shaker features but not the roots in Shaker locality). It may seem that the authentic stands as the contrary of the alienable, for if the alienable is something that can be separated from its owner or place, the authentic is by comparison inseparable—it only gains its meaning and its value from its connection to a

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particular place or person. But in fact the logic of authenticity is not inconsistent with the logic of alienable property, as the high market value placed on “authentic” products shows. The very reliance on type is what makes it possible for an authentic property to be valued outside of its locality; a purely singular object, because it is not recognizable according to any standard categories, carries little property value. But the value of the authentic is not merely in its adherence to a standard type; the particularity of the authentic carries a value as well. The authentic promises something that the merely typical cannot provide: the originality and the coherence caused by local conditions of production. “Authentic Delta blues” is different from generic “music,” so goes the assumption, because the local conditions of living as an African American in the Mississippi Delta and the existence of a local tradition in blues music have provided the catalyst for a transformation of the generic. Because authentic productions are so concerned with local conditions, it is thought, they resist falling into (or are ignorant of) the patterns of music that have saturated the general, non-local marketplace. And the locality of authentic productions also promises a coherence, an integration into an entire way of life, that the unrooted pure commodities of the marketplace cannot provide. “Authentic Shaker furniture” carries with it the promise of the entire, presumably coherent, Shaker way of life (even, of course, as it is separated from that local life). If the authentic stands at the hinge between the particular and the typical, its particularity made recognizable and valuable by its standardized, typical features, the same might be said about the conditions of identity under the law of contract. For the contract may promise to allow identity to follow its own individual course—you are allowed to be whoever you agree to be—but it also then demands a certain recognizable consistency of identity as well. Contract law presumes a reliability on the part of the individual, a repeatable, recognizable identity who will behave as contracted and to whom the obligations of the contract can be accounted. Contract law may not demand that its parties behave “naturally,” but it does require them to behave authentically, in the sense that a signature at the bottom of a contract is authentic. An individual’s signature can be authenticated by means of its resemblance to other signatures by the same individuals hand, according to the presumption that a person’s individuality lies not merely in a singular difference from others, but in a typical, consistent pattern of behavior. And the signature is that individuals promise to behave reliably and consistently—to fulfill the “duty of resembling oneself”—according to the conditions of the contract. The signature, like the alienable, authentic product that it might be used to sign away, asserts both a recognizable, consistent identity and the original, coherent individual will that has the ability to freely make such agreements. The presence of the “authentic” in relations of contract, in other words, can point both to the tendency to look for “transcendent guarantees” in the face of the crisis of representation threatened by the contract’s mediated society of strangers, and to the adaptability of those very guarantees—of reliability, iden tity, value—to that mediated contract system. The authentic, in its promise of the same consistency and identity that the system of self-alienation through contract threatens to undermine, comes to carry a high value when applied to alienable property.

Introduction

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THE MIXED ECONOMIES OF THE SELF-MADE MAN This book, then, is an examination of the intersection of the alienable with the intimate and the authentic. If the era of contract and free labor is supposed to mark a turn away from the transcendent guarantees of the traditional status system and the economy of “just value,” to what extent do the stories of self-made men return to or attempt to incorporate those sorts of guarantees into the new system of economics and identity? To what extent do the new relations of contracted employment resemble or resist the old familial intimacies of the status system? And to what extent are the promises of the unmediated authentic to be found within the mediations of contracted exchange? In answering these questions I look to a number of literary works (if you define that term broadly) released around the turn into the twentieth century (if you allow that it’s a pretty wide turn). These episodes in the self-made man tradition are drawn from a variety of genres, and in each case the form of the work is inseparable from the self-making that goes on within the story. Because if questions of representation lie at the heart of the contract and the money exchange, the ways in which these stories represent the selves that they make are directly relevant to those questions. And since the stories are themselves products offered for exchange, their position as alienable property reflects on the position of their subjects within the marketplace. Implicit in the narrative styles of the autobiographies of the “representative colored men” in the first chapter, for instance, from the mobile narrative voice of William Wells Brown’s fugitive’s primer to the cagey obsequies of Booker T.Washington’s fundraising book, are the methods by which they claim that blacks in the South should negotiate the terms of the labor contract, while the fictional autobiographies of the third chapter occupy the same mediating position of translating marginal cultural types for the larger cultural economy that their subjects do. Horatio Alger ’s juvenile uplift stories aspire to the position of patronage toward their young readers that the benevolent businessmen within the stories play for the young Alger heroes, but at the same time the stories, as mass-produced objects in an oversupplied market for popular fiction, threaten to become the very sort of market-saturated commodities that the patronage relationships in the stories are meant to transcend. And the attempts of the heroes of the silent comedies of the fourth chapter to individuate themselves within the anonymous, machinic culture of the modern city are mirrored—or even overwhelmed—by the attempts of the stars of those pictures to individuate themselves within the machinic production of film technology. In each of these forms— the autobiography, the juvenile novel, the literary novel, the comedy film—the self-made man story is the terri tory in which the questions of representation and exchange that are crucial for the self-made-man are necessarily worked out. The first chapter focuses on the autobiographical writings of three former slaves in the 1880s and 1890s: Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Booker T.Washington. The autobiographies, written not only after emancipation but after the incomplete revolution of Reconstruction, are stories of individual lives that attempt to exemplify, through both the experiences they relate and the manner of their telling, how African American men should respond to the conditions of “free labor” under a still largely unfree system of racial domination and restriction. Each writer uses his own escape from

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the conditions of slavery to model how the black laborers still mired within the neoslavery of the post-Reconstruction South might establish themselves as freely contracting parties. In his Life and Times, for instance, as in his earlier autobiographies, Douglass presents himself, particularly in his early career as a fugitive slave and abolitionist, as an ideal and earnest free laborer, asserting his right to self-possession through the alienation of his own labor power and marking his distance from the intimate economy of slavery. But as Douglass’s career continues into the Reconstruction era, he claims a new interest in the values of loyalty and stability that he had resisted before, and he becomes invested in the very economy of intimacy, in this case as a loyalist to Republican patronage, that his escape into free labor had been directed against. Brown’s My Southern Home, by comparison, celebrates neither the earnestness of the free laborer nor the later loyalty to patronage of Douglass. Brown embraces instead the mediations and subversions possible in both the economic and narrative acts, writing an autobiography of sorts that creates an identity not out of earnestness and reliability but out of narrative mastery. Finally, Washington, though quite capable of subversions of his own, emphasizes instead in his Up from Slavery the possibilities of service within the labor contract. He takes Douglass’s use of the exhortations of free labor and his investments in the intimate economy of patronage and attempts to transform those intimacies into physical capital, building with patrons’ dollars his Tuskegee Institute as an exhibition hall of the suitability of African Americans for the market in free labor. The second chapter covers much the same time period, but turns to the stories for boys written by Horatio Alger in a career that ran from the 1860s to the 1890s. Like those of Douglass and Washington, Alger’s fables of free labor celebrate class mobility from the lower ranks of society, and like Washington in particular he imagines such mobility occurring by means of relationships of patronage, in which deserving young boys are lifted up into the ranks of the accumulative by the benevolent intervention of kind businessmen. In Alger’s hands, the precarious situation of the orphan adrift in the city of strangers is tempered by the presence of such observant figures, whose attentions adopt the hero into a kind of capitalist family. These intimate relationships are based on money exchanges, but they promise to stretch beyond moneys impersonal bounds, thereby soothing the threats of impersonality in the urban economy of strangers. Similarly, the dangers of false representation in the same economy are countered by the ready visibility of natural virtue. I examine Alger’s early Ragged Dick stories alongside his collaborative biography of the actor Edwin Forrest to show how he reclaims the mediated structures of the theater and the money economy as sites for the display and discernment of natural virtue: the outer body, according to his theories of natural acting, inevitably reveals the inner self, and therefore both the theater and the economic city of strangers are not hotbeds of falsehood but rather arenas where ideal figures can be recognized, rewarded, and imitated. But this idealization of money outcomes is countered by two later examples of the Alger narrative: his later novel Ben Bruce and Nathanael West’s parodic reappropriation of his work in the 1934 novel A Cool Million. In both of those retellings of the standard Alger story, his reliance on narrative formula stands as a threat to the very ideal sincerity that the formula celebrates. The cheap, mass commodities that fill West’s novel have their equivalent in Alger’s own repetitive productions, which he turned out by the dozen and which caused librarians and reformers of his day to denounce him as a

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demoralized and demoralizing creature of the market. The name “Alger” became the mark of a commodity itself, caught between the repetitions necessary to establish a trademarked identity and the mechanical anonymity of mass-market production. The third chapter follows up this question of commodified identity as well as the first chapter’s examination of the construction of racial and cultural capital, by looking at two novels of assimilative lament published in the 1910s: James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky. In both of the novels, a man who has become financially successful in the dominant white world comes to regret his distance from the racial culture he left behind. My reading of the two novels focuses on the idea of race as a market condition or position, in particular on the market value of assertions of racial authenticity. For both narrators “succeed” in one respect by taking on the assimilated identity of “white money,” in the phrase of the ex-colored man. But in both narratives the narrators also find a market value in their positions as mediators between white culture and the “authentic” culture they left behind. In the ex-colored man’s case, this position is represented less by his own career than by his aspirations to be the popularizer of the music of the African American folk, a position he associates with his more racially “earnest” friend “Shiny.” David Levinsky’s “rise,” on the other hand, even while it seems to drive him away from the Russian Jewish culture he was born into, is nonetheless predicated on the market advantages he gains by appealing to his workers’ similar yearnings of exile. The instability of this market position is implied by the narrators’ own laments and in particular by the polarizing racial classifications of Ex-Colored Man, whose central lynching scene brings an end to the narrators mediating career by forcing him to choose between black and white identification and making clear the dependence of even white identity on the brutal embodiment of racial violence. The final chapter turns to the establishment of a market identity within the new technology of film, as seen in the silent comedies of such “persona” comics as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. The films I look at all construct themselves around the narrative frame of the self-making orphan attempting to rise in the city. Their attempts to establish identity, however, are directed not so much within the mediating effects of the money economy as within the mediations of the technology of film. Through the reality effect of his performance, each of the comics asserts his own coherent identity, which exists outside the filmic universe (and distinct from the other performers in the film). Unlike their silent comedy precursors the Keystone Kops, whose identities were blurred into anonymity by their group identification and their reliance on quick editing for their trademark slapstick effects, the persona comics establish their identities by means of filmed performances that allow no doubt as to the physical skills possessed, and actual dangers undertaken, by the comics themselves. In Lloyd’s thrill comedies such as Safety Last, for instance, the thrills come not so much from the narrative within the film, but from the certainty that Harold Lloyd himself is performing the same dangerous stunts his character is (a tension that Keaton brings within the film narrative in his late, self-reflexive comedy The Cameraman). Chaplin’s identity, by comparison, was built around authentic skills rather than thrills; his early innovations in comic style depend on long, unedited, full-body shots that frame his acrobatic pantomimes in a way that asserts their actuality: this performance, they declare, did take

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place in a particular time and space and is not just a construction of the film apparatus. From this perspective, Chaplin’s final silent picture, Modern Times, is as much a battle against the identity-threatening machinery of film (as represented by the techniques of Eisensteinian montage) as one fought against the factory automation within the film narrative. Of course this “identity-threatening,” anonymous machinery of film was the same machinery that allowed Chaplin and the other comics to become some of the most identifiable stars of their day. Like the process of self-possession through self-alienation, their careers were driven by the tension between mediation and authenticity, between the assertion of their coherent, authentic identity, and the lucrative reproduction of that identity in theaters across the world. That same tension between reproduction and identity, however, gets turned on its head in King Vidor’s silent drama, The Crowd, in which the skills of comic performance do not separate Vidor’s hero from the crowd, but rather knit him further into a closed loop of machinic labor and entertainment. The reality effects of performative skills, private emotion, and the filmed “presence” of a star are all revealed as standardized, anonymous effects, and the true reality effect of the film is not that of the star vehicle, but of the artful documentary, which establishes the individuated personality not of the films subject, but of its director Vidor. The image of the young man alone in the crowded city, the central image of The Crowd as it is of the scene with which I began this introduction, implies, as does the title of the genre itself, that the self-made man story will represent a clean break from such traditional structures as family, nature, and loyalty, and an embrace of the provisional, impersonal, mediating agreements of the contract and the money economy. What my examples of the genre show, however, is not only that the traditional structures of intimacy and authenticity retain a vestigial presence within the economy of the contract, but that they are incorporated into that new economy and come to carry a market value of their own.

Chapter 1 Free Labor and Intimate Capital The Postwar Autobiographies of Douglass, Brown, and Washington IN THE LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS (1881), HIS THIRD REVISION of his life story, Douglass recalls that in forty years of public life, I never found myself more widely and painfully at variance with leading colored men of the country than when I opposed the effort to set in motion a wholesale exodus of colored people of the South to the northern states [in 1879] …. It was said of me that I had deserted to the old master class and that I was a traitor to my race—that I had run away from slavery myself, and yet I was opposing others in doing the same. (428) An immediate question might be, how could others still be “doing the same”—in other words, running away from slavery—over a decade after the Thirteenth Amendment had outlawed that institution? The period following the Civil War was supposed to be a time in which slave labor became free labor and relations of status between a master class and a slave class were replaced by relations of contract between freely acting, equal parties. But the persistence of the older system (or, alternatively, the resemblance of the new system to the old) is implied in Douglass’s words, or at least in the words of his critics, and in the events themselves of what was commonly known as the Exodus. The Exodus was a sudden migration of poor African Americans from the lower South to Kansas via the Mississippi River. Following a decade of white violence against blacks across the South, and not long after the Compromise of 1877, which marked the clearest endpoint of Reconstruction by its removal of federal troops from the late insurrectionary states, the Exodus, according to its most thorough historian, Nell Irvin Painter, “registered the first, massive repudiation of the Democratic South” (4). Responding to terrorism and poverty, the Exodusters, as they were popularly known, took flight from the resurgence of the race controls of slavery. As Painter quotes Henry Adams, one of the leaders of what was a relatively leaderless movement, “the Democrats, as the Slave Holders, of the South will fix it so that we can not get from the South to the North unless we run away, for we Believed that not any colored man will be allowed to Leave the South without a Pass” (193). In this sense, the flight of these migrants was the “same” as Douglass’s own escape from slavery, with the “promised land” not Canada or the North in general but Kansas, a new state still being settled, and one with a legacy of freedom violently earned in the bloody 1850s. The Exodusters’ flight was an assertion of perhaps the most basic right of free labor—the right to leave one’s employer—under the threat

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that even that right would be taken away. (And in fact it was a concerted infringement on that right to leave that ended up stalling the Exodus: of the white planters’ many tactics to stem the northward hemorrhaging of their labor supply, the one that was actually effective, according to Painter, was the refusal of steamboats, for a crucial month, to pick up Exodusters along the Mississippi, stranding them on its banks for weeks on end.) The sudden movement of 1879 was just a single episode in a longer pattern of migration to Kansas, but it attracted national attention, in Painter’s words, “completely out of proportion to its actual numbers” (147). As William Cohen has argued, “the historical record is weighted heavily with the opinions of people seeking to interpret and deal with an event that their wishes or fears magnified into an emerging mass migration from the Deep South” (169). Among many blacks it provided a focus for dreams of landownership and self-determination that had been projected for years onto governmentowned lands in the South or emigration to Africa. And in a national political arena still dominated by the struggle for control over the former Confederate states, the Exodus was used by both sides to tar the other: for both black and white Republicans the desperation of the migrants testified to the depredations of Democratic rule in the South, while for the Democrats, in turn, the movement stood as evidence of Republican manipulation and black gullibility, as well as evoking fears of a collapse of the Southern labor system. As Douglass’s remark makes clear, the majority of prominent African Americans supported the Exodus, while he, in general terms, opposed it. That Douglass’s critics would connect his well-known escape from slavery to the current events on the banks of the Mississippi points to the complicated relationship between autobiography and advocacy, between self-representation and a role as a “representative colored man.” That relationship is apparent not only in Douglass’s Life and Times but in two other autobiographies of former slaves also written after the failure of Reconstruction: William Wells Brown’s My Southern Home (1880) and Booker T.Washington’s Up from Slavery (1901). In each book, the writer’s representation of his own life story constructs an implicit or explicit prescription for the laboring black population, as well as an exhibition for a larger, mostly white, public of the qualities that those blacks should be assumed to possess. As William L.Andrews has noted, the stories of these postwar writers could no longer be constructed around the “existential” “ideal of freedom” of the antebellum slave narratives but instead had to be negotiated within and against the more nebulous, but still confining, strictures of Jim Crow (“Representation” 65). As demonstrations of the writer’s own escape from the conditions of slavery, each story claims to be a model by which the laborers of the South might free themselves from the neo-slavery of the postReconstruction era. The conditions of their narrative self-presentation—of intimacy, sincerity, and reputation—are much the same as the conditions that govern the labor contract and the accumulation of capital under the system of free labor, and their narrative positions, no less than their own careers as laborers, stand as representatives for how the freedpeople of the South might negotiate the conditions of their own work. This meaning of “representative” matches its use in the term “representative colored men” by George Washington Williams in his History of the Negro Race in America (1880) (as it also reflects Emerson’s earlier use in his volume of Representative Men): not merely to be an example but to be exemplary. This is clear from Williams’s description of his most representative man, Frederick Douglass, who “came of two extremes—

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representative Negro and representative Saxon” (2:424). To be representative in this sense is to be extreme, to be ideal rather than merely typical. But other meanings attached to “representative” shed light on the complications of such a position, particularly within a system that even at the height of Radical Reconstruction did not provide adequate political representation for African Americans, leaving their leaders to be established by less democratic means. Painter argues that in being raised above those they were said to represent—those whose views, in other words, their own were supposed to equal— leaders such as Douglass lost touch with their supposed constituency: Tucked safely away in the fastness of Northern cities, even former freedom fighters sometimes mellowed…. Whether they resided and worked in Washington or in the capitals of their states, they fell ever further out of tune with the everyday living conditions of ordinary Blacks. Once they no longer lived among the people or attended their local meetings, speaking to them and listening to them, they ceased to represent them. (19, 26) And she points to the way such differences were exacerbated by the importance of linguistic representation, for “the terms [such as ‘leading’ or ‘representative’] served only to label Blacks who spoke to whites in a language they could readily understand. ‘Representative colored men’ were articulate Blacks; rural Black folk were by and large inarticulate. The danger lies in confusing the views or rhetoric of ‘representative colored men’ with the authentic voices of rural Blacks” (16). The majority of African American “leaders” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Douglass and Brown included, faced the dilemma of being residents of the “fastnesses” of the North while claiming to represent a population based overwhelmingly in the South. (Washington is a notable exception here, although even he kept residences in New York and Boston and spent much of his time in the North, drumming up support for his Southern-based projects.) Seen in the light of these difficulties of representation, the presence of these writers’ own histories of enslavement in their books plays the rhetorical role of claiming that they are “authentic voices of rural Blacks.” Their ability to recall (and articulate) their own histories of rural inarticulateness suggests that even from their positions as national leaders (a position that Painter, in arguing that true leaders must be local, calls a “contradiction in terms” [27]) they can represent rural Southern blacks. In that respect, these autobiographies, though written many decades after their writers were last enslaved, are nevertheless staged on the grounds of the old plantation. Douglass, Brown, and Washington use memories of their own enslavement to establish their legitimacy as spokesmen for those of low origins, and they use the antebellum plantation as a site for the reconstruction of their postbellum lives and for negotiating with both the legacy of slavery and the reincarnation of racial domination. While each claims that the progress of his life has placed a distance between his current life and his life as a slave, the continued presence of those plantation origins serves both to measure that progress and to show the lessons learned in slavery that made the progress possible. Each of the autobiographies contains not only the memories of the antebellum plantation but a postwar return to that same territory as well. Douglass’s Life and Times, written in 1881 and revised in 1892, includes as its “First Part” the slightly revised text of

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his 1855 memoir of his life as a slave and fugitive slave, My Bondage and My Freedom, and features as one of its emotional high points Douglass’s visit to his former plantation on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Brown, who had published a slave narrative in 1847 that rivaled Douglass’s original Narrative in popularity, calls the second version of his autobiography, written in 1880 after Brown had spent over forty years in the North and abroad since his escape from slavery, My Southern Home, or, The South and Its People. As its subtitle implies, the book is not an autobiography in the strictest sense—in fact, Brown himself hardly appears at all—but he presents in the first two-thirds of the book a slightly fictionalized version of his old plantation, made up of anecdotes taken from his earlier autobiography. (The final third of the book is a series of reflections from a visit he made to the South in 1880.) The fictionalizing that is done within the text of the book is in large part undone by the book’s main title; by describing the subject of the book as “my home,” Brown embraces the stories and the setting of the book as his personal history. The title of Washington’s more traditional 1901 autobiography, Up from Slavery, alludes as well to the rootedness of his story in his beginnings as a slave, but it also implies his ever-widening distance from that history. For Washington, however, that distance is less a matter of geography than of personal stature. Although he becomes a national figure whose speeches are heard throughout the country, his success is always firmly planted in the South, in the same territory he occupied as a slave. Washington himself may spend much of his time traveling, but his book is as much the story of the building—quite literally—of an institution as it is the story of the making of a man. That institution, his school in Tuskegee, Alabama, is built squarely on the ruins of “an old and abandoned plantation” (Up 128). In the return of each of these former slaves to the territory of the plantation, what has changed is not so much the landscape but the narrator’s position within that space. Washington’s school in Tuskegee may have replaced a farm, but the school is itself a farm, continuing, in its work and its teaching, the agricultural tradition of the plantation that preceded it. But Washington himself is no longer the young son of the plantation cook; he is, as a chapter title in Louis R.Harlan’s biography puts it, “The Master of the Tuskegee Plantation.” Douglass, on the other hand, is not the master of a plantation, his own career in the North as editor, lecturer, and bureaucrat having little to do with agriculture, but the central impression of his visit to his childhood home, as the chapter title “Time Makes all Things Even” makes clear, is his equal, and even convivial, standing with his former masters and their descendants. Brown’s post-Reconstruction position is more difficult to pin down. His changed position on the plantation is apparent in his tours of the South in the latter part of his book, but also in the narrative persona he takes in recounting his antebellum days in the early chapters. The “proprietor of Poplar Farm,” though his name has changed from “Young” to “Gaines,” is still the same old doctor who was featured in his earlier Narrative (119). But Brown, as the narrator of those episodes, no longer appears to be the slave he once was; in fact, it is quite hard to determine just who exactly the narrator is. The roles that had been Brown’s in many of the events in his earlier Narrative are now played, in otherwise similar anecdotes, by characters named Billy, Cato, and Pompey, while the narrator himself hardly participates at all, except in occasional first-person

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pronouns such as “I,” “we,” and “our.” He observes, and at times engages in, private conversations in both the “great house” and the slave quarters and he speaks in the voices of blacks and whites alike. He appears to have an omniscient access to all the rooms of the house and the thoughts of its residents. He returns, in other words, not as the proprietor of the plantation (though, as in his title, he declares a certain proprietary interest in the place) but as the observant, educated author he has become since his escape. In this new occupation he is able to transform even the landscape of his own memory. What each of the narrators attempts to build on the grounds of the old plantation is a way of life that will survive the shifting economies of freedom and the renewed repression of the Jim Crow South and the racism of the larger nation. In particular, each writer has to negotiate the shift not only from slave to free labor, but from free labor to capital. Writing at roughly the same time, and as members of the same generation of former fugitive-slaves-turned-abolitionists, Douglass and Brown recount their lives in strikingly dissimilar ways. In his own self-emancipation and early years of freedom, Douglass presents himself as an ideal free laborer, claiming the right to the value produced by his own hard work and distancing himself from the intimate domination of the slave system. But following the war, Douglass finds himself in an entirely new economy, in which his national reputation translates into success on the lecture circuit and into personal access to the seats of national power. After a career built on mobility and disloyalty, he attempts to find value in stability and loyalty to his Republican patrons (resulting, for example, in the seeming anomaly of his opposition to the Exodus) and becomes invested in intimate economies of gratitude and good will that resemble those he had escaped from forty years before. Brown, on the other hand, in writing an autobiography in which he disperses the events of his own life onto a number of fictionalized characters, is less invested in the values of personal reputation and recognition than he is in the display of narrative mastery. For him, the intimate exchanges of the slave system have left the freedpeople legacies of both servility and subversion, and his strategic appropriation of the discourse of his slave masters implicitly supports his attempt to reclaim the tradition of subversion in support of disloyal migrations such as the Exodus. Washington, writing twenty years after Brown and Douglass, extends both of their narrative directions. Like Brown he strategically appropriates the discourse of white authority, and like Douglass in his postwar career he speaks the language of free labor while investing in the intimate patronage economies of gratitude and good will. But unlike Brown, he extends his appropriation of white discourse to the point that his ironies are largely submerged and he attempts to reclaim slavery’s tradition of service at the expense of its history of subversion. Unlike Douglass, he attempts to translate what I call the executive intimacies of Douglass’s later career into the tangible physical capital of the buildings and endowment of his school, the Tuskegee Institute. In his as in Douglass’s story, the importance of the status economies of patronage and gratitude point to the continued dependence, at least for African Americans in the years after the war, of the system of contract and free labor on credit-worthy performances of loyalty and stability, especially for the accumulation of personal reputation and physical capital. Brown’s alternative narrative of mobility, disloyalty, and misidentification, however, places its

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faith in the economy of the fugitive, whose authority is based less in the immobile relationships of credit and reputation than in the more independent transactions of rhetorical mastery.

“OUTSIDE DE STORE”: FREE LABOR AND SOUTHERN AGRICULTURE AFTER THE WAR The narrative paths of all three men from slavery to ostensible freedom reflect the jarringly immediate shift in labor relations from status to contract following emancipation and the Civil War. A transformation that had taken place over centuries for white Americans and Europeans happened for most black Americans, on paper at least, within the space of a few years. But despite the apparent immediacy of the emancipation granted by Lincoln’s pen, Leon Litwack writes, “the death of slavery proved to be agonizingly slow. The precise moment when a slave could think of himself or herself as a free person was not always clear” (172–173). And though Litwack here is describing the process of actual emancipation in the years from Lincoln’s proclamation in 1863 to the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, the span of the slow and imprecise transformation from slavery to freedom could well be extended to the end of the century and beyond. Even after the outlawing of slavery by constitutional amendment, the terms of freedom remained in contention. The victors in the war, the Northern Republicans, had seen freedom in terms of the idea of “free labor,” based, in contrast to slavery, on the mobility and equality thought to inhere in the right of contract. Many former slaveholders, however, accustomed to their system of forced labor (and their justifications for it according to racial characteristics), saw “free labor,” at least in reference to blacks, as an oxymoron: they had a difficult time believing that “free” blacks would still labor. In Black Reconstruction, W.E.B.Du Bois quotes the New Orleans Picayune in 1862 as fretting that there could be no full crop produced under that system. The earlier processes might be performed in a manner and to some extent; but the later and more arduous, those upon the prompt performance of which depends the production of any crop at all, would be slighted, if not indeed entirely lost. The thriftless, thoughtless Negro would jingle his last month’s wages in the planter’s face and tell him to do the rest of the work himself. (129) “Released from the care and discipline of the master, ‘no longer stimulated by the “Must!”,’” in Litwack’s characterization of planter thought, “the freedman by his behavior revealed how necessary that bondage had been. He refused to work, preferring a life of idleness, dissipation, and vagrancy” (344). According to the claims of these planters, black labor would only occur (at least at the productivity levels of slavery) under slavery-like coercion. On an individual level, planters tried to retain those coercions by keeping the same work rules on their plantations as before the war. On a broader scale, the Southern states enacted “Black Codes” immediately following the war that put into law a system of labor regulation that attempted to reinstate slavery in everything but the name. (And even, at times, in name: according to South Carolina law,

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“Contracting Negroes were to be known as ‘servants’ and contractors as ‘masters’” [Du Bois, Black 170].) The Black Codes went far beyond the vagrancy laws of the North (of which they claimed to be mere extensions) by restricting black mobility; requiring costly labor licenses and registered, continual employment; making it illegal to leave an employer; limiting property ownership; and legalizing whipping by employers. The Black Codes, although often framed, as Brook Thomas has argued, within the “logic of contract” of freely made agreements, were so blatant in their abuse of that logic as to cause outrage in the North and bring on, in part, the heightened federal controls of Radical Reconstruction (175). The new federal Freedmen’s Bureau was given the mandate to manage and mediate labor relations between the former slaves and their former masters. The Bureau brought with it the ideology of “free labor” and the contract: their regulations required that “Negroes must be free to choose their own employers, and be paid for their labor,” and that labor contracts were to “be free, bona fide acts, approved by proper officers, and their inviolability enforced on both parties” (Jaynes 65). But the Northern understanding of free labor (and free black labor in particular) contained its own limits. As Gerald David Jaynes notes, “The northern Republicans excoriated the ‘black codes’ and then, through the instrumentation of the Freedmen’s Bureau, set out to enforce compulsory labor, one-year contracts, and the obedience of labor to management” (60). Stability of labor and of agricultural production were goals for Northern administrators as well as Southern planters, and Bureau agents took on the additional administrative task of inculcating the values of industry, thrift, and reliability, qualities of which free labor advocates had long claimed slavery left its subjects unaware. After all, Lincoln, in the same proclamation by which he emancipated most of the slaves, had also made sure to recommend to them that “they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.” The Bureau, as a decentralized organization in which isolated local agents carried a great deal of power, had a widely varied role from place to place, but in every case the agents had the responsibility of mediating between two principals who had little trust in each other. One of the main emphases in Litwack’s chronicle of the transition from slavery to freedom is to show how under freedom, “pretensions and disguises fell away and illusions were dissolved” in relations between the races—an unmasking, however, that did nothing to remove the mistrust on either side but instead heightened it, by revealing the fissures beneath slavery’s rigidified pantomimes of benevolence and faithfulness. Planters, faced with unprecedented acts of “betrayal” by their former slaves, found “calculating their loyalty” nearly impossible (xi, 152). And former slaves, placed in a position to act on the long-accumulated evidence of their masters’ rapacity, often had little interest in entering into agreements with those who had bought and sold them not long before. Jaynes quotes one Louisiana Bureau agent as saying about the freedpeople, “All or nearly all dread a contract, as it seems too much to them like slavery, as they are bound for a certain time’” (73). The Bureau agent’s mission, in reference to the former slaves, is best expressed by a Mississippi agent who wrote, “The colored people lack confidence in the white man’s integrity; they fear that, were they to hire to him, and work for him, that he would not pay them for their labor…. The more quickly, and the more perfectly, that confidence is restored, the better will it be for all classes” (Litwack 380). As I argue in the introduction, this anxiety about binding oneself to another is endemic

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to the entire system of free labor. But the seeming paradox of freely binding oneself had a particular vividness in the wake of the cutting of slavery’s bonds. The possibility that the coercions of slavery could survive within a system of contract were recognized both by skeptical freedpeople and by planters who, in a phrase commonly used in post-war labor contracts, required their workers “to work in the same manner as they always had done” (Litwack 337). The line dividing the legally alienable from the inalienable—the division between free labor and coerced slavery—which is always in contention, was the subject of particularly intense negotiation in the watershed period of emancipation and Reconstruction. Planters, in their desire for labor stability, particularly during harvest time, sought (or demanded) year-long contracts with strict penalties for leaving before the term was up. If the penalties were strict enough, though, they would become an indenture, a bound servitude for a limited time. The extent to which the Freedmen’s Bureau considered that the freedpeople could (or must) indenture themselves was often informed by a racial paternalism that questioned whether they were fully ready to be free laborers. It was in this environment of mistrust, increased labor mobility, and threats of neoslavery that the sharecropping system came into being. Two recent economic studies, Gerald David Jaynes’s Branches Without Roots and Gavin Wright’s Old South, New South, detail the process by which the share system became the standard for black agricultural workers in the South by the 1870s. Wright argues that the planters’ most extreme attempts to establish what could be called “contract slavery” failed because black workers exercised their new-found right to leave their employers. As a result, he claims, the sharecropping system that developed “was a balance between the freedmen’s desire for autonomy and the employer’s interest in extracting work effort and having labor when it was needed” (85–86). But even if this system was the result of a “balance” of interests, the scales on which that balance was determined were highly skewed by the economic conditions following the war. Both Jaynes and Wright emphasize the importance of the shortage of credit, caused in large part by the planters’ loss of their greatest capital resource: their slaves. Without access to credit, planters were unable to pay money wages until after the harvest. If they had to wait to be paid until after the harvest, black laborers came to prefer working for a share of the crop rather than for promised wages, because a share was more reliable than a wage that could go unpaid after a poor crop. But the share system shifted the burden of credit from the planter to the laborer: instead of the planter borrowing to pay wages or provide subsistence to workers until the harvest, each laborer now had to borrow individually to provide for seed, tools, food, and clothing. The spiral of debt that often resulted from this credit arrangement, in which high interest rates, fraudulent bookkeeping, overpriced goods, and poor crop yields led to a cropper finding him- or herself more deeply indebted to planter and merchant after the harvest than when the year began, is perhaps the best-known aspect of the sharecropping system. A basic assumption of the ideology of free labor, and perhaps the most crucial one for its success as an ideology, was that the laborer was not only horizontally mobile—able to move from employer to employer—but vertically mobile as well—able to move from being employed to being an employer. In his presidential campaign in 1860, Lincoln made this progression, and its applicability to blacks as well as whites, almost mathematically clear: “I want every man to have his chance—and I believe a black man

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is entitled to it—in which he can better his condition—when he may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work for himself afterward, and finally to hire men to work for him. That is the true system” (Du Bois, Black 17–18). The implication of “free labor” is that, after a time, its hard-working subject could be free from labor. The lever on which that progression from being hired to hiring depended, however, was not merely hard work, but capital, as was recognized early on by Andrew Carnegie, who wrote about his first dividend, “I shall remember that check as long as I live…. It gave me the first penny of revenue from capital—something that I had not worked for with the sweat of my brow. ‘Eureka!’ I cried. ‘Here is the goose that lays the golden eggs’” (Autobiography 76). But if capital was lacking even for white planters after the war, it was of course far scarcer for freedpeople. The planters may have lost their wealth in labor, but they still held the land (in Wright’s terms, they went from being “laborlords” to “landlords”). Their labor property was transferred to the laborers themselves, the freedpeople, but that property, newly inalienable in the laborers’ own bodies, was no longer investable capital. Just as the freedpeople could not contract themselves into slavery, they could not offer themselves as collateral for a loan. The Northerners’ veneration of property and mistrust of government support eliminated the other possible sources of capital for blacks by refusing to distribute land to those who had been working it without compensation for two hundred years and by discouraging government-backed loans to freedpeople. The quasigovernmental Freedman’s Savings Bank was typical in its separation of the fruits of labor from those of capital. As Carl R.Osthaus points out in his history of the bank, “From an economic viewpoint, the creation of a simple savings bank for people just released from bondage and in need of every necessity of life might appear paradoxical. It seems evident that a bank for capital accumulation and investment in the black community would have been far more beneficial” (8). Even when the bank’s charter was amended to allow for loans, few of its funds were invested in the black community. This separation of labor from the accumulation of capital was coming to be recognized in the formation of the white wage labor class of the North as well; in Eric Foner’s words, “Reconstruction may be seen as a decisive moment in fixing the dominant understanding of free labor as freedom of contract in the labor market, rather than ownership of productive property” (xxxvi). In the South that separation was only exacerbated by an inability of both Southern and Northern whites to imagine or desire a non-laboring black population. The small amount of credit that was generally available to black laborers—the basic necessities that the landlord or merchant supplied to the sharecropper in anticipation of the harvest—placed a significant restriction on their mobility, not only by enmeshing them in a cycle of debt (which, it should be said, was often as much an incentive to leave as to stay) but by creating a necessity for the laborers to establish themselves as “reliable.” As Wright notes, “credit markets were intrinsically local…. For poor farmers and laborers, the only way to establish creditworthiness was to stay in one locality and develop a track record of reliability. If they were black, the track record had to include not just productivity and attachment to a local area, but deference” (97–98). Jaynes quotes one Mississippi merchant’s description of his close observation of his debtors: on Sunday, he and his clerks would ride out in the country to “‘see how de work is going on;

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and if negro is doing nothing we put them all,’ with a wave of his hand, ‘outside.’” “‘Outside,’” Jaynes writes, “referred to a suspension of credit: a tenant or planter whose crops were not looking good would be placed ‘outside de store’” (44). In contrast to the apparently radical mobility available to free labor, a laborer’s “reliability” would stand as a kind of reassuring immobility for the landlord or creditor (often the same person), a promise that the laborer would behave as contracted (and even behave according to standards beyond the written contract). In that sense, the few opportunities for vertical mobility in the sharecropping system—through access to less expensive credit—were dependent on a horizontal immobility. In a dilemma that would become familiar to Booker T.Washington, the way offered for black farmers to rise was to know their place (and to act it), “to compromise their autonomy in order to gain it” (Wright 107). Further limits on black mobility in the era included legal measures that were survivals or adaptations of the Black Code strategies, such as vagrancy laws that made it illegal for blacks to be without an employer, emigrant-agent laws that outlawed labor recruiters from other states, and systems of convict labor that turned petty crimes (often laborrelated crimes such as contract-breaking and insubordination) into a cheap source of forced labor, as well as the above-the-law vigilantism of the Ku Klux Klan and similar local bands of regulators, whose raids were often motivated as much by economics as by politics. 1 Wright, Jaynes, and William Cohen, however, all emphasize economic forces over legal ones (or show how they worked in tandem, as in the state legislation that gave landlords and merchants lien priority ahead of laborers in dividing the proceeds of the harvest) in their explanations of black labor immobility. Wright describes the South in the late nineteenth century as “not a prison” but still a “separate regional labor market” for blacks and many poor whites (7, 9). Migration took place, but largely within the region— East to West rather than South to North. Movement was limited by debt, poor information about job opportunities, the high cost of transportation, Northern discrimination, kinship ties, and lack of education. The Freedmen’s Bureau reluctantly came to serve as a “gigantic labor agency,” increasing both economical and geographical horizontal mobility by providing information about and transportation to areas of high demand for agricultural labor in the South, but the Bureau had little interest in aiding migration to the high-wage areas of the North (Cohen 44). In this low-wage regional economy, there was a clear disincentive for local white leaders to invest in education for laborers, since “a high-school diploma,” in Wright’s words, “was as good as a ticket to leave” (79). All in all, the encounter of the proponents of free labor with the post-war South resulted in a system that at its best featured some of the basic rights of free labor— the rule of contract and the right to leave an employer—but that abandoned other crucial elements of that ideology, such as the chance to accumulate capital. As Jaynes puts it, “If long-term contracting had the advantage of creating a school for embryonic free workers, it also had the concomitant disadvantage of providing a class of teachers who perceived little personal gain in setting up curricula which would allow for matriculation” (71). By the end of Reconstruction, this “failure to matriculate” on the part of the freedpeople would be used against them, according to the “Root, Hog, or Die!” philosophy of impatient Republicans.

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HARD EARNINGS AND THE INTIMACY OF REPUTATION: FREE LABOR IN THE LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS Beyond the rail-splitting Lincoln perhaps, hardly a better representative of free labor could be found, both as an example and a spokesman, than Frederick Douglass. His career embodied the upward mobility that free labor ideology promised. If free labor defined itself in contrast to slave labor, Douglass was the most famous former slave in the United States. If free labor offered a system in which caste was overturned, Douglass succeeded despite bearing, in his black skin, perhaps the clearest lower-caste marker the nation has recognized. If free labor favored a laborer who had risen under his own steam, Douglass had emancipated himself by means of his self-education, physical strength, and manual labor. If free labor promised an escape from manual labor through property accumulation, Douglass had left his days of farm drudgery and dock work behind to earn thousands a year as an editor, lecturer, and government official. In all of his autobiographies, Douglass’s process of self-emancipation centers around three emblematic conflicts with his masters, in which his status as a slave is further revealed to him and his resolve to free himself is strengthened. The lessons of each of these conflicts closely follow the tenets of free labor: in the first, against Hugh Auld’s prohibition of his reading and writing lessons, he asserts the right of the lowly to selfimprovement through literacy; and in the second, in his physical battle against Edward Covey’s scheming savagery, he claims a right of revolution consistent with the history of American revolutionary republicanism and in opposition to republican fears that, as characterized by David Roediger, “Black oppression was the result of ‘slavishness’ [of the blacks themselves] rather than slavery” (35). The third conflict, in which he negotiates with Hugh Auld over his right to his own wages, is the one most clearly evocative of the producerist spirit of free labor, which claimed, under the influence of David Ricardo, that all economic value was founded in labor. Having been returned to Baltimore, Douglass is hired out to the shipyards by Master Hugh and must bring back his earnings to his master at the end of every week. In essence, Douglass enters the market in free labor while still a slave, working alongside whites and free blacks and receiving wages, and this anomalous position provides the space for yet another wedge in his levered freedom. The “contented slave,” Douglass argues in passages reprinted in the Life and Times from his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, “must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery…. If there be one crevice through which a single drop can fall, it will certainly rust off the slave’s chain.” In this case, the “crevice” is the introduction of money wages, which make the product of Douglass’s labor clearly visible: I was now getting, as I have said, a dollar and fifty cents per day. I contracted for it, worked for it, collected it; it was paid to me, and it was rightfully my own; and yet upon every returning Saturday night, this money—my own hard earnings, every cent of it—was demanded of me and taken from me by Master Hugh. He did not earn it—he had no hand in earning it—why, then should he have it? (186)

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Douglass’s earnings are “hard,” it seems, both in the manual labor that produced them, and in their tangible presence as alienable currency. The wages, in their separation from his body (even as they are the product of that body’s labor), are more evidently Douglass’s than the less tangible products of the usual, uncontracted slave labor. As Douglass points out, the presence of money in their transactions causes even Master Hugh to unconsciously acknowledge Douglass’s property rights to his own labor: Draining me of the last cent of my hard earnings, he would, however, occasionally, when I brought home an extra large sum, dole out to me a sixpence or shilling, with a view, perhaps, of kindling my gratitude. But it had the opposite effect. It was an admission of my right to the whole sum. The fact that he gave me any part of my wages, was proof that he suspected I had a right to the whole of them. (187) In a dialogue in The Columbian Orator that the young slave Douglass had found particularly powerful, the exchange of language between master and slave was taken by the slave “as an acknowledgment that he is a man” (Fishkin and Peterson 191). So in his dealings with Auld Douglass takes this exchange of money as acknowledgment of his right to his own labor. What is particularly interesting is that both exchanges, from the master’s point of view, are spurred by the question of gratitude. Douglass describes Auld’s pinched offering as an attempt at “kindling my gratitude,” while one of the Master’s first impulses in the Orator dialogue is to demand of his Slave, “But are you not a base fellow, a hardened and ungrateful rascal?” (“Dialogue” 240). In both cases, the masters appeal to a different economy than that recognized by the slaves: to the intimate hierarchy of gratitude rather than the more alienated, but possibly more equal, exchanges of language or money. The money economy puts Douglass’s relations with Auld on a less intimate, more individualist plane, and it also provides him a means of shielding his private desire to escape from the suspicions of his master. By passing even higher wages than usual on to Master Hugh, Douglass puts him off the scent. “My object,” he writes, “in working steadily was to remove suspicion…. He probably thought that I was never better satisfied with my condition than at the very time I was planning my escape.” This apparent agreement between them helps to ensure that “the tyrant may not always know the thoughts and purposes of his victim” (192). These hard earnings, in fact, both disguise and justify Douglass’s intentions. The deceit involved in Douglass’s escape, possibly offensive to many readers of the time but already mitigated by, in William Andrews’s words, his “appeals to his reader’s respect for contract and resentment of arbitrary power,” is further tempered by the steady work that Douglass exchanges with his master in preparing for his escape (To Tell 128). Douglass’s ability to contract for work in the free market of Baltimore’s shipyards—“Of course I easily obtained work,” he boasts—is both the means of his escape and the justification for it (192). This stratagem of escaping from slave labor in the guise of free labor is only made more apparent in his actual escape, the details of which Douglass finally provides in his third autobiography after withholding them in his earlier, pre-emancipation books because of their danger to fellow slaves planning to take the same path to freedom. He

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literally does wear the disguise of a free laborer: he carries with him on the train to Philadelphia the sailors papers of a free black friend and he rigs himself “out in sailor style,” relying not upon force or dark of night to protect him but upon “my skill and address in playing the sailor.” In essence, he frees himself from slavery by playing the free laborer that by all rights he should be. In the escape itself, he relies on the “sentiment of the country just then” for “free trade and sailors’ rights,” and in his retelling of the incident he further emphasizes the legitimacy of his escape by underlining the consistency between his disguise and his already established abilities as a free laborer (Life 199). 2 As Booker T.Washington writes in his own biography of Douglass, “He had learned to act the part of a freeman so well that no one suspected him of being a slave” (59). If he is playing a part, it is one, Douglass implicitly argues, that is closer to his true identity than the part he had been forced to play the rest of his life. The danger in Douglass’s bluff is that the papers he holds describe a man who looks very little like him, so to avoid a more intimate physical inspection, he carries on a sort of confidence game with the train conductor in whose hands his fate rests. Perhaps because Douglass carries his freedom so easily, being “apparently calm and self-possessed,” perhaps because he can “talk sailor like an ‘old salt,’” the otherwise suspicious conductor approaches him with the “friendly” presumption that he is a freeman, asking, “I suppose you have your free papers?” And rather than merely hand the papers over to him, Douglass diverts attention to their emblematic authorization, saying, “I have a paper with the American eagle on it, that will carry me round the world,” after which the conductor merely glances at the paper and takes Douglass’s fare. The same American eagle that likely appeared on the coins he gave Master Hugh (as well as on the coins with which he pays his train fare) is once again the means by which Douglass evades closer personal inspection. 3 His emphasis on this emblem as “American” (he mentions it once to the conductor and a second time to his readers) is a nod both ironic and hopeful to the national power that could let such policing of slavery’s laws occur under its jurisdiction but that could also be the means by which the freedoms of persons such as himself might be protected. 4 Once in the relative freedom of the North, Douglass “put[s] on the clothes of a common laborer” and soon finds a day job shoveling coal. On receiving his pay, “two silver half-dollars” he “clasped this money, realizing that I had no master who could take it from me—that it was mine—that my hands were my own” (210). Just as the presence of money in his relations with Master Hugh had made his right to his own body more apparent, so here in New England it seems that the presence of the two silver coins are necessary to confirm his possession of his own hands. When the racism of his fellow calkers prevents him from working in his skilled trade, he takes the setback “lightly” and ends up finding heavy work operating the bellows at a brass foundry. But his adherence to the ideals of free labor is not limited to his willingness to do heavy labor for long hours; he has intellectual aspirations as well. Whereas Benjamin Franklin, the model American free-laborer, read the Spectator in his idle hours at the print shop, Douglass goes him one further by reading while he operates the machinery; he “nailed a newspaper to the post near my bellows, and read while I was performing the up and down motion of the heavy beam.” Like Franklin, his ambitions set him apart from his fellow laborers, who “were all devoted exclusively to what their hands found to do” (212–13). The ideal

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narrative of free labor, once again, is a narrative of progress. The gods of free labor look fondly, not on a laborer who is content to remain a laborer, staring at his hands as it were, but one who looks forward to a point where he will move from manual to mental labor. As Eric Foner has described the ideal, “‘free labor’ meant labor with economic choices, with the opportunity to quit the wage-earning class. A man who remained all his life dependent on wages for his livelihood appeared almost as unfree as the southern slave” (16–17). 5 Of course Douglass’s rapid progress to mental labor caused some well-known consternation among his abolitionist advisors, who worried, as Douglass quotes their advice, that “People won’t believe you ever were a slave, Frederick, if you keep on this way,” and, “Better have a little of the plantation speech than not…it is not best that you seem too learned” (218). His struggles with these advisors, and his later break with the Garrisonians, center on their unwillingness to see him as a mental laborer, as anything beyond a bodily example of the wrongs of slave labor. When John A.Collins would introduce Douglass as a “graduate from the peculiar institution, with [his] diploma written on [his] back,” the implication was not that his labor training in slavery had prepared him to graduate to a career of mental labor, but rather that he had undergone a destructive education in pain (216). For Collins, the writings on Douglass’s back were the wounds of the lash, but Douglass encourages another reading of his body, titling the chapter on his slave labors in Baltimore “Apprentice Life” to emphasize their importance for his later career and directing attention away from his wounds and instead to the muscular intelligence he had accumulated as a skilled worker on the docks. That bodily intelligence was thought to be the natural foundation for even the most rarefied of mental work, according to such philosophers of free labor as Emerson, who wrote, “We must have a basis for our higher accomplishments, our delicate entertainments of poetry and philosophy” (Bromell 70–71). When Douglass decides to make the move into editing his own newspaper, following a path from manual labor laid out by such printers-turnededitors as Franklin and Horace Greeley, though, he is met with “astonishment” from his abolitionist friends: “‘A wood sawyer’ offering himself to the public as an editor! A slave, brought up in the depths of ignorance, assuming to instruct the highly civilized people of the North in the principles of liberty, justice, and humanity!” (260). His quick ascent stirred a racial paternalism to the surface even in such an advocate as William Lloyd Garrison, who wrote, at the height of his newspaper feud with Douglass, that abolitionism “has transcended the ability of the sufferers from American slavery and prejudice, as a class, to keep pace with it, or to perceive what are its demands or to understand the philosophy of its operations” (W.Martin 46). Garrison’s particular form of racism here is consistent with the broader tendency of “labor republicanism” to believe, as David Roediger has characterized its views, “that long acceptance of slavery betokened weakness, degradation and an unfitness for freedom. The Black population symbolized that degradation.” While Roediger also argues that the abolitionist movement “called into question” this “tendency to equate blackness and servility,” Garrison’s tracing of black limitations to their degraded identity as “sufferers” points to how difficult it was even for some of the leaders of that movement to escape the racial logic of republicanism (66–67). Douglass presents his editorial career as an education in self-reliance more effective

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than any traditional institution could have been: “it was the best school possible for me…. [I]t made it necessary for me to lean upon myself, and not upon the heads of our antislavery church—to be a principal, and not an agent. …There is nothing like the lash and sting of necessity to make a man work” (264). But come the end of the Civil War, and an end to the slavery for whose abolition he had labored for twenty-five years, he finds himself at loose ends, his joy “slightly tinged with a feeling of sadness.” For his work, in a sense, was done, “my school was broken up, my church disbanded, and the beloved congregation dispersed, never to come together again.” He presents himself as more lost than even when he first came north: I could not now take hold of life as I did when I first landed in New Bedford…. Rolling oilcasks and shoveling coal were all well enough when I was younger, immediately after getting out of slavery. Doing this was a step up, rather than a step down, but all these avocations had had their day for me, and I had had my day for them. My public life and labors had unfitted me for the pursuits of my earlier years, and yet had not prepared me for more congenial and higher employment. (373–374) Being “unfit” for the physical labor of his earlier years seems to make him unfit as well for the active (and implicitly physical) position of “taking hold of life”; as a mental rather than a manual laborer, his career is out of his hands, in a sense. His language is distinctly passive in describing how his post-war career developed: though he considered investing his accumulated capital from My Bondage and My Freedom in a small farm, on which he might “earn an honest living by tilling the soil,” he finds the “question” of his career “soon decided for me,” by the “invitations [that] began to pour in upon me from colleges, lyceums, and literary societies, offering me one hundred, and even two hundred dollars for a single lecture.” As opposed to the “hard” currency of his manual labor, which because he could hold it in his hands made his hands more apparent, the money he takes in from his new career as a lecturer is fluid and overwhelming, “pouring” over him. It is startling both in its measure of his unaccounted power, his “deeper hold upon the public attention than [he] had supposed,” and in its almost disembodied source: it flows from the intangible “public” rather than his own body (374). Even as Douglass presents his new career in this light, however, he immediately emphasizes the labor that has been the foundation of his mental position: “I had after all acquired…a little more knowledge and aptitude fitting me for the new condition of things than I knew.” He recalls how he had written, even before the end of slavery, two lectures, “Self-Made Men” and “The Races of Men,” and he describes the effort that went into preparing the latter, which “cost me much work.” But his story is consciously a sort of parody of his attempt to “take hold” of this new work in the way that he had taken hold of his dock and factory work. While acknowledging from the start that “The Races of Men,” which he first gave at Western Reserve College in 1854, was “a very defective production,” he details the “many days and nights I toiled” in producing a lecture on a topic outside of the abolition movement. All this effort, however, done in large part in an attempt to meet his college audience with the signs of education he thinks they will expect, is “a great mistake, for my carefully studied and written address, full of learned

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quotations, fell dead at my feet, while a few remarks I made extemporaneously at collation were enthusiastically received” (374–76). The success of his spontaneous speech at the end is one respect a sign of the power of his own words rather than those he has studiously gleaned from others—the power of the remark, as it were, over the quotation—which returns a sort of power to his body that he may have felt was lost in the move away from manual labor. What “power” means on such an occasion, though, is not easily pinned down. For his success with an audience may have depended less on the quality of his oration than on their own expectations and desires for him as a speaker: the professors and students may have been more interested in his remarks than his quotations not because they found learned speeches dull but because they did not expect or want to hear such a speech from Douglass. They may have responded more strongly to his spontaneous remarks because they seemed to emanate from his body, and his body was what they, like the Garrisons, were interested in: in Douglass as an ex-slave, not Douglass as a scholar. John W. Blassingame, however, claims that Douglass was incorrect about the reception of his speech: “his memory played tricks on him. Every newspaper that reported the speech or took notice of the printed version was impressed with the depth of Douglass’s research and the cogency of his thought.” A local newspaper reported that “Douglass commanded the most fixed attention for two hours, on a hot summer afternoon” (2:498). Perhaps Douglass felt that he commanded that attention less because of his scholarship than because of what he acknowledges in the speech as “the novelty of my position” as “a stranger in the halls of learning” “standing in the presence of scholars”; even when doing scholarly work, he is paid attention to because he is a non-scholar (an attitude that he himself encourages by speaking of his own “humble” position three times in the first three paragraphs of the speech) (Frederick, 2:500, 525). If the lesson of this anecdote seems to be the futility of his scholarly labor, Douglass attempts to turn that lesson around by arguing that the labor involved in his failed lecture was in fact “of much value to me,” because it gave him the experience which would allow him to prepare his lecture on “Self-Made Men,” first given in 1859, which far exceeded “The Races of Men” in popularity and became his stock speech and meal ticket for over thirty years of public speaking. But that it was “Self-Made Men,” a speech whose appeal implicitly depends on the presence of Douglass, the former slave, as its orator, that proved so popular, only makes more apparent the tension between the scholarly labor that produced the speech and Douglass’s role as a “novelty” and a “stranger” in giving the speech. “Self-Made Men,” of course, is all about labor: it is a collection of Franklinian maxims whose argument, in its baldest example, is that “we may explain success mainly by one word and that word is WORK! WORK!! WORK!!! WORK!!!!” (Frederick 5:556) In keeping with the claims of free labor, Douglass argues that differences in status are accountable to differences in effort: “When we find a man who has ascended heights beyond ourselves…we may know that he has worked harder, better and more wisely than we. He was awake while we slept. He was busy while we were idle…” (554). He holds up as an ideal the men who have risen from the deepest ranks of the lowly, who “owe little or nothing to birth,” who rise “often in open and derisive defiance of all the efforts of society…to repress, retard, and keep them down,” and who “in a world of schools” are forced “to acquire their education elsewhere” (550).

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Who better to embody that ideal than the speaker himself, whose life story would have been well known to any audience he spoke before? Douglass never mentions his own history, giving instead examples from Elihu Burritt, “the learned blacksmith,” to Lincoln and Benjamin Banneker, but were any other speaker to lecture on the same topic, Douglass—low-born, defiant, self-educated, and hard-working—would have been one of the most obvious models of self-making available. Douglass stood before his audience as both scholar and text, interpreter and emblem. In one respect, this is a measure of the power he has gained: rather than Garrison “taking me as his text,” as he had on his first encounter with Douglass, Douglass now takes himself (implicitly) as his text (Life 215). But seen in another light, it is a measure of the dependence, at least in the eyes of the audiences and lecture bookers who made it his most popular speech, of Douglass’s scholarship on the presence of his own body and his own reputation as a self-made man. As he wrote to James Redpath in 1871, “It is too late now to do much to improve my relation to the public. I shall never get beyond Frederick Douglass the self-educated fugitive slave” (W.Martin 251). Douglass as a speaker was always Douglass the ex-slave, drawing his authority not merely from his scholarly labors in researching his topic but from his audience’s recognition of his personal history. As the embodiment of upward mobility, Douglass was a fitting choice for the administrators of the Freedman’s Bank to represent their distressed institution, which aimed to be a lever by which the blacks of the South might raise themselves out of the laboring classes. And that Douglass would stand as a figurehead for financial confidence as the bank went under points to the tenuous relations between reputation and capital accumulation in his post-war career. When the trustees of the bank, faced with failed loans and dangerous runs on the bank’s assets during the Panic of 1873, chose a new president, they were less interested in financial acumen or banking experience than in a publicly recognizable reputation. As William S.McFeely has described their selection: The trustees then looked around for a new president who could best fill one particular requirement: ordinary black people who had entrusted the bank with their savings had to be made to believe that the bank was sound; they had to have enough confidence in it to refrain from withdrawing their money. To ensure this state of mind, the trustees turned to the most visible African American in the country, Frederick Douglass. (283) Douglass, of course, was not only “the most visible African American,” but the most visible African American example of the sort of free-labor qualities—thrift, industry, and accumulation—that the bank wanted to inculcate. As Douglass himself writes, “There was something missionary in its composition…. Their aim was now to instil into the minds of the untutored Africans lessons of sobriety, wisdom, and economy, and to show them how to rise in the world” (401). John W.Alvord, who preceded Douglass as president of the bank, was in fact a minister rather than a banker by training, as were many of the bank officers. In Douglass’s retelling, the bank episode stands as a lesson in false fronts and empty platitudes. He implicitly contrasts the “hard earnings” of the freed-people, which the bank was supposed to protect and nurture, with the soft promises and exhortations of the

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bank’s agents, fluttering down from above much like the speaking invitations that had “poured” in on him from around the country: “Like snowflakes in winter, circulars, tracts and other papers were, by this benevolent institution, scattered among the sable millions” (401). Similarly excessive are the grand trappings of the bank’s Washington headquarters, “one of the most costly and splendid buildings of the time, finished on the inside with black walnut and furnished with marble counters and all the modern improvements,” which caused him to “feel my very eyes enriched” (401). That only his eyes are enriched hints at the shallowness of this wealth, but at the time he took the apparent prosperity as a sign of the “integrity and wisdom of the management,” and he hoped that such evidence of accumulated wealth might cause “more consideration and respect [to] be shown to the colored people” (402). But soon after taking the position, he discovers the bank’s precarious financial position: “The more I observed and learned the more my confidence diminished” (403). The missionaries of the bank attempted to keep up this confidence by cloaking their institution in the same symbols—the American eagle and the self-made free laborer—that Douglass himself had used in the confidence game of his escape. Tracts and deposit books featured eagles and portraits of Lincoln and other Union leaders, which (falsely) implied that the bank had the backing of the federal government or was even a federal agency itself, like the Freedmen’s Bureau, with which the bank was often (and not unwillingly) confused. “The symbols of freedom,” Carl R.Osthaus writes, “had become the symbols of bank safety…. Small wonder that most freedmen never knew that the only power Congress had over the Bank was the right to inspect the books if it wished—which it didn’t” (55–56). And the tracts themselves focused on the didactic lessons of free-labor mathematics: “The merchant, Billy Gray, of Boston,” one read, “saved his first dollar by carrying bricks. Then he added another and another to that, and saved the interest, and put that on interest, and at last had many millions of dollars” (Fleming 148). Douglass’s own account of his ascent to the presidency of the bank reads as both a specimen and a travesty of these fables of accumulation: So I waked up one morning to find myself seated in a comfortable arm chair, with gold spectacles on my nose, and to hear myself addressed as President of the Freedmen’s Bank. I could not help reflecting on the contrast between Frederick the slave boy, running about at Col. Lloyd’s with only a tow linen shirt to cover him, and Frederick—president of a bank counting its assets by millions. I had heard of golden dreams, but such dreams had no comparison with this reality. And yet this seeming reality was scarcely more substantial than a dream. (402) The contrast between slave boy and bank president could not have occurred only to Douglass, and in that sense, Douglass himself is part of the whole “gold spectacle”—the best-known figure of black ascent standing as a figurehead of the very institution by whose means his fellow former slaves might follow him. As I have noted above, however, the bank, in its emphasis on savings rather than loans and capital investment for blacks (and of course in its disastrous failure in 1874), did little to foster the fulfillment of such “golden dreams.” The bank’s policies were at once

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hamstrung by a patronizing free labor ideology suspicious that loans and federal aid for blacks might encourage profligacy and dependence—even as the government, in its encouragement of rail-road expansion, was participating in the most substantial program of federal capital assistance in the nation’s history—and doomed by ill-advised loans to white speculators. The bank declined to provide the loans to its depositors that might have actually allowed them to translate their savings from the dollars earned “carrying bricks” into a merchant’s millions, and then, by failing, defaulted on even those small savings. Depositors received pennies on the dollar, and despite decades of protests about the bank’s implied government backing, the federal government declined to make up the lost deposits. For Douglass, however, his short-lived experiences with the bank provide a lesson less in the proper accumulation of financial capital than in the management of a reputation. Just as the bank itself translated the hard money of the freedpeople’s labors into what might be called the soft money of ornamental excess and reckless speculation, so Douglass finds that his own work does not result in measurable, expected rewards. As with his speaking career, he finds that his reputation is out of his hands: an episode in which he considers his own behavior to have been entirely honorable has nonetheless “brought upon my head an amount of abuse and detraction greater than any encountered in any other part of my life” (405). And despite his assertions of blamelessness, he introduces the events involving the bank with “a feeling of humiliation,” an emotion founded in a heightened sensation of others’ opinions of oneself (400). He concludes his account with an attempt to reclaim the “fair name for honest dealing” that he had possessed before that name became tied to the bank. Given his vulnerability to what he calls “the malicious and envious assaults” on him that sway the opinions of those who don’t know him, he tries to translate the speculative economy of the bank’s failure (and the threatened collapse of his own reputation) back into the simple arithmetic of personal integrity, claiming that “no man…can say I ever wronged him out of a cent” and offering “to restore fourfold to any from whom I have unjustly taken aught” (405). The failure of the bank occurred in the same year as the failure of Douglass’s last newspaper, the New National Era, the full ownership of which he had taken over a few years before. He refers to both failures as valuable lessons, despite his financial losses, and while he does not say it, the strongest lesson he may have taken from them was to stay away from institution-building, for the bank and the newspaper would prove to be the last such investments he would stand at the head of. But such capital ventures were not the only ones offered to him after the war as a means to cash in on his reputation. After the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution had passed, he found himself “earnestly urged by many of my respected fellow-citizens” to move South and run for elected office. Douglass resisted this call, however, both for reasons of “propriety”— “The thought of going to live among a people in order to gain their votes and acquire official honors was repugnant to my self-respect”—and because, once again, his “life and labors in the North had in a measure unfitted me for such work.” Just as his rise to mental labor had made a return to manual labor unthinkable, so the refinements he had acquired in the North separated him from the voting (and laboring) “masses” of the South: I could not have readily adapted myself to the peculiar oratory found to be most

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effective with the newly enfranchised class. In the New England and northern atmosphere I had acquired a style of speaking which in the South would have been considered tame and spiritless, and consequently he who ‘could tear a passion to tatters and split the ear of groundlings’ had far better chance of success with the masses there than one so little boisterous as myself. (398) His true “ready-made” audience is in the North, where his reputation and abilities had been built with “the labors of thirty years” (399). In explaining why he remained in the North, Douglass in fact makes a double-edged argument about his own reputation. While he might be known most widely as an ex-slave, and therefore a son of the South, he claims nonetheless that his actual public influence is much greater in the North, where he has made his home for the past thirty years. His emphasis on the genteel style of oratory he had acquired in the “advanced civilization” of the North is at once a distancing from the coarser language of the manual laborers he would have represented in the South and an argument about how the capital of reputation is accumulated: in a startling switch from a man who had leapt with alacrity from the South to the North, and then from East to West in his break from the Garrisonians, he now stands for the value of consistency and the accumulations of character. Even if the reputation that is his to exploit is based in the story of his years in the South, it is a reputation that exists in the minds and culture of the people of the North. Whereas in the South he claims he “could not hope to cope with rival aspirants” even for local election, in the North, his longtime home and the real seat of national power after the war, he can aspire to influence the leaders who “control the destiny of the republic” (398–99). His constituency, like his own early history, may lie in the South, among the “powerless” freedpeople who “needed my voice and pen with others to plead for” them, but he chooses to represent them not electorally but rather as their unelected advocate before the powers of the North (378). The two edges of Douglass’s position during Reconstruction—his avowed distance from the “groundlings” of the South even as he claims to be their advocate, and his location of his own time-earned reputation in the loyal North—are even more apparent in his unpopular stance against the 1879 Exodus, the episode with which I began this chapter. His most thorough statement of opposition to the movement came in a paper given before the annual meeting of the American Social Science Association—an organization whose scholarly identity and ties to abolitionism (its founder, Franklin B.Sanborn, had been an ally of John Brown) both place it squarely within the Northern culture among whom Douglass felt he had built his reputation. What is most striking about his paper, much of which he includes in the Life and Times as an answer to “those who accused me of indifference to the welfare of the colored people of the South,” is what an excellent case Douglass makes for the Exodus. Most of the points made by Dr. Richard T.Greener, the Howard professor whose defense of the Exodus followed Douglass’s paper at the meeting, are in fact contained within Douglass’s own argument. Douglass sandwiches his criticisms of the movement between an opening that seems almost gleefully to champion the Exoduster’s “quiet withdrawal of his valuable bones and muscles from a condition of things which he considers no longer tolerable,” and a conclusion that invokes the rebellious slaves Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey in a fierce defense of the freedpeople’s right of movement (Life 429; Frederick, 5:512). He defends

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the Exodusters according to the tenets of free labor, asserting their right of mobility and their history of hard work, and detailing the contract fraud of Southern landowners. But ultimately, and at length, Douglass argues that the blacks of the South, in contrast to his own history of flight, should stay at home and continue working on the farm as they have been. In part he thinks they should not move because they don’t, in fact, fully qualify as free laborers. Accustomed to “the careless and improvident habits of the South,” blacks who move to the North, “to a country where the land owners are able and proud to do their own work,” will, in competition “with white labor,” “be crowded in to lanes and alleys, cellars and garrets, poorly provided with the necessaries of life, and will gradually die out.” The freedpeople, unprepared for such a struggle to the death against the free labor of the North, should instead remain in the South where “climactic, and other natural causes,” as well as “social causes,” “protect the negro from all competition in the labor market” (Frederick, 5:530, 514). But in particular Douglass emphasizes how capital accumulation is threatened by frequent migration: “Three moves from house to house are said to be worse than a fire…. The time and energy expended in wandering about from place to place, if employed in making him comfortable where he is, will, in nine cases out of ten, prove the best investment.” To abandon “a fixed home,” “a familiar neighborhood, and common associations” would be to abandon the “little property” that African Americans have begun to accumulate; the property in that sense is both in physical capital and in the familiarity of personal reputation and credit (527). If Douglass’s critics charged him with the hypocrisy of having “run away from slavery myself, and yet…opposing others in doing the same,” it might be said that although he was criticizing the flights that were consistent with his own past, he was doing it in support of the loyalty to home and consistency of reputation that were consistent with his present. For his urging that the freed-people make an investment in immobility, by staying with those who know them rather than leaving for parts unfamiliar, reflects his own choices during the same period: staying in the North with the audiences who are accustomed to him and whose style of speaking he has adopted, and remaining faithful to the Republican Party that had grown out of the abolition movement (he refers to himself, with both irony and pride, as a “‘fieldhand’ in every important political campaign”) (Life 416). His opposition to the Exodus is itself an expression of that faithfulness: in 1879, after years of declining support for Reconstruction by the Republicans culminating in the Compromise of 1877, in which Republican Rutherford B.Hayes gained the presidency by agreeing to remove federal troops from the South, Douglass could still optimistically claim that “we stand at the gateway of a marked and decided change in the statesmanship of our rulers,” and that President Hayes (who had appointed Douglass as Marshal of the District of Columbia) “has bravely, firmly and ably asserted the constitutional authority, to maintain the public peace in every State in the Union” (Frederick, 5:524). This latter emphasis on federal authority is perhaps Douglass’s most heartfelt argument against the Exodus: that it is “an abandon ment of the great and paramount principle of protection to person and property,” “a premature, disheartening surrender” of faith in Republican promises of federal protection on the part especially of those Northerners who would aid the migration (526). Much of the disappointment with Douglass’s later career, and with his account of that career in his Life and Times, has focused on this too-patient loyalty, as Douglass took on

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patronage positions within successive Republican administrations that in the meantime were gradually abandoning the advances of Reconstruction. Waldo E.Martin Jr. describes Douglass’s appointments as “essentially functionary and symbolic, as distinct from policymaking and decision-making” and quotes the New York Age as claiming that “a fat office gagged him” (82–83). And according to Houston A.Baker, in a comment representative of the critical reception of the Life and Times, Douglass’s rendition of his career as a functionary is no less empty than the offices themselves: “What we have is a verbose and somewhat hackneyed story of a life, written by a man of achievement” (Journey 45). 6 Douglass himself, while mocking racist fears about his appointment as Marshal, makes clear his own recognition of the largely ceremonial nature of his duties: “the most dreadful thing threatened was a colored man at the Executive Mansion in white kid gloves, sparrow-tailed coat, patent-leather boots, and alabaster cravat, performing the ceremony—a very empty one—of introducing the aristocratic citizens of the republic to the President of the United States” (419–20). Douglass’s glee here in recounting the response to his appointment—“To what is the world coming? and where will these things stop? Dreadful! Dreadful!” he writes—is in part due to the absurd racism that could make such a hubbub over an empty ceremony, but it is due as well to the breach of racial decorum signified by the presence of “a colored man at the Executive Mansion” (420). Even as he acknowledges the largely symbolic nature of the ceremony, Douglass wants to make clear his own access to the most intimate of domestic spaces at the seat of national power. Throughout the later sections of the Life and Times, Douglass takes great pleasure, and perhaps solace, in these moments of what might be called executive intimacy. In answer to claims of Hayes’s racism (for he soon removed those ceremonial responsibilities from Douglass’s duties as Marshal), Douglass turns to the authority of his own intimate, domestic exchanges with the president: Never have I heard from him any such declaration or intimation [of racism]. In so far as my intercourse with him is concerned, I can say that I at no time discovered in him a feeling of aversion to me on account of my complexion, or on any other account, and, unless I am greatly deceived, I was ever a welcome visitor at the Executive Mansion on state occasions and all others while Rutherford B.Hayes was President of the United States …I have…never had reason to feel myself slighted by himself or his amiable wife. (425–26) If others claim that he has been kept from his official duties at the Executive Mansion by the president’s prejudice, Douglass can point to his own continued visits to that home, and in particular to his shared “intimations” with the president and his “amiable wife.” In his funeral oration for President Garfield, which he includes in the book, he doesn’t claim “to have been on intimate terms with the late President.” Nevertheless, as with Hayes, Douglass emphasizes his personal contact with the President, recounting his visit to the Executive Mansion, where he “was received very kindly by Mr. Garfield” and given assurances of his “just and generous intentions” toward “the colored people” (476–77). Nowhere does Douglass more strongly evoke these personal relations with national leaders than in his accounts of his meetings with Lincoln. In his first visit to the White

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House, despite finding Lincoln in a room that “bore the marks of business,” he nevertheless meets the president on intimate terms: “I at once felt myself in the presence of an honest man—one whom I could love, honor, and trust without reserve or doubt.” Douglass begins to explain who he is, but Lincoln cuts him off by saying, “I know who you are, Mr. Douglass” (347). This interchange of intimacy and recognition is only heightened at the reception following Lincoln’s second inauguration. In attempting to enter the Executive Mansion to attend the reception, Douglass is at first rebuffed by two policemen, who try to usher him out of the building, saying no colored are allowed inside. But his reputation saves him: being “recognized” by a passing “gentleman” makes it possible for Douglass to enter the building after all. Once inside, he is immediately greeted by Lincoln himself: “Recognizing me, even before I reached him, he exclaimed, so that all around could hear him, ‘Here comes my friend Douglass.’ Taking me by the hand, he said, ‘I am glad to see you. I saw you in the crowd today, listening to my address…. [Y]ou must stop a little Douglass; there is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours’” (366). What is most evident in these exchanges is not merely that Douglass knows Lincoln, but that Lincoln knows Douglass. Douglass’s reputation precedes him: Lincoln knows him even before they have met, and when they meet again, Lincoln spots his “friend” from across the room and tells him how he picked him out of even the great inaugural crowd. What Douglass relates here, and what he presents as being the central form of exchange in his career as political appointee, is what I would call the intimacy of reputation. Douglass’s accumulated reputation in the intellectual and political culture of the North and his faithfulness as a “field-hand” in the Republican party have no greater payoffs than these moments of intimate recognition from the most powerful man in the nation, in which Douglass is informally assured of that man’s good will toward himself and his people. And what is perhaps most galling to critics of the Life and Times is Douglass’s emotional and professional investment in these moments, which cause him to excuse or ignore those leaders’ dwindling interest in the condition of the freedpeople. These investments did not blind him entirely to the limits of Republican benev olence— his boldly hedged eulogy for Lincoln at the unveiling of the Freedmen’s Monument to him in 1876, for instance, makes a striking contrast to those intimacies in its chilly claim that black Americans “are at best only [Lincoln’s] step-children, children by adoption, children by force of circumstance and necessity,” and he freely criticizes both the “sickly conciliation” of Hayes and the “broken promise” of Garfield in the chapters added to the 1892 edition of the Life and Times (485, 524–25). But the importance of these intimate moments in his narrative in the Life and Times, especially in the 1881 edition, make clear the limits of Douglass’s investment strategy in his position as a “representative colored man.” For Douglass, an unelected “representative” with many ceremonial, few executive, and no legislative powers, makes a return in his later career to the sort of intimate economy of trust, gratitude, and recognition that marked his relations with Hugh Auld, and that he had turned to the more impersonal economy of free labor to escape from. In such a relationship, without the protection of contract or of his own elected powers, Douglass can only hope to appeal to the good will of the president, and perhaps as a result is left with only that good will, and little evidence of action resulting from it, to be satisfied

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with. His reputation, his greatest asset in gaining these “symbolic” and ceremonial (and personally lucrative) positions, depends on his recognition by his political patrons; he serves them, as the saying goes, at their pleasure. The capital he has gained by his loyalty to them might in fact be seen as a form of scrip—an intimate currency, payable only to the issuer—rather than the hard, transferable money of his mobile early labors. Gratitude and good will are not alienable assets; they are not separable from the bodies that grant them, nor from the particular relations by which they are established. They are transactions based in immobility—in loyalty and emotional bonds—and their value cannot be transferred or taken on the market. Douglass’s turn back to this economy of intimacy, and its difference from the free labor economy he had entered with those early labors, reaches its climax in what are the most emotionally freighted episodes in the post-war portion of the Life and Times: his visits to the site of his old enslavement on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in the chapter entitled “Time Makes all Things Even.” In that chapter, Douglass shares a visit full of teary forgiveness at the deathbed of his former master Thomas Auld, and he recounts his later tour of the plantation on which he had grown up and his amicable meetings with the descendants of his former enslavers. In one sense—and this is certainly the sense foregrounded by Douglass—his meeting with Auld marks the distance from, and even a reversal of, their former relations of dominance, with “the slave and his master… reduced to the same level” and Douglass, whose fame and station have far eclipsed his former master’s, practicing the benevolence and forgiveness of the powerful for the weak (441). But Douglass’s emphasis, even in this scene of reversal, on the good will of the master, in which an intimation of kindness is taken as an indication of the ever-improving race relations still to come—Auld owns up that “I never liked slavery…and I meant to emancipate all of my slaves”—places this episode well within the economy of good faith and gratitude of Douglass’s executive intimacies (443). This impression is only strengthened in his return to the Eastern Shore two years later, in which Douglass’s distance from his avowed constituency and his investment in the intimacies of power are once again in view. His descriptions of the grandeur of the Lloyd estate, which Baker notes sound “very much like the Plantation Tradition,” are in fact quite consistent with his accounts in the early chapters of My Bondage and My Freedom and the Life and Times, in which he describes the “treat” of “behold[ing] this elaborate exhibition of wealth, power, and beauty” (Journey 46, Life 40). But of course Douglass’s own position in relation to this “wealth, power, and beauty” have changed remarkably and almost overwhelmingly. In the thrill of his grand reception, in which he shares the view from the “stately veranda” of the great house as well as “wine of most excellent quality,” he manages only in passing to spend “a little time” with the colored residents of the estate. His visit with them occupies less than a paragraph of the account and carries little apparent emotional weight; he can only distantly assess their own responses by saying, “They all seemed delighted to see me” (449; emphasis added). By contrast, his exchanges of emotion with his white hosts are far more direct and intimate, and again strikingly evocative of the economy of gratitude that Hugh Auld had attempted to engage his slave in with his gift of twenty-five cents. Here, though, it is Douglass who eagerly participates in that economy, writing about his visit to the great house, “To say that our reception was every way gratifying is but a feeble expression of the feeling of each and

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all of us,” and recalling about his receipt of a bouquet of flowers from a greatgranddaughter of the old patriarch Governor Lloyd, “I never accepted such a gift with a sweet sentiment of gratitude than from the hand of this lovely child” (Life 449–50; emphases added). Again, as with his reunion with Auld, these sentiments can in part be accounted to Douglass’s desire to be gracious and forgiving in his newfound power—as he wrote in his 1848 “Letter to His Old Master,” “There is no roof under which you would be more safe than mine…. Indeed, I should esteem it a privilege to set you an example as to how mankind ought to treat each other” (My 428). But his emphasis on his feeling of “gratitude,” and his use of that feeling to predict better things to come, as in his translation of the great-granddaughter’s “pleasant smile” into a sign that “a new dispensation of justice, kindness, and human brotherhood was dawning not only in the North, but in the South,” makes clear his investment in the intimate economy of good will (Life 450). Douglass’s willingness to interpret personal kindnesses to him as signs of greater progress is evidence of the limited nature of this sort of intimate economy, dependent not only on the continued good will of the patron, but on the individual nature of reputation. For reputation has both its public and intimate aspects; in his role as a model for aspiration and action as well as a living critique of racist stereotype, his reputation has a value in a more public economy. But his emphasis on the exchanges of personal recognition and intimate assurance shows the private, closed side of the accumulated capital of reputation. In that sense, the intimate capital of reputation is inalienable from Douglass’s body itself—it can’t be passed on to others. If, as the saying goes, he is a “credit to his race,” that line of credit, at least within the bounds of the intimate economy, ends with his death.

THE FUGITIVE’S SOUTHERN HOME: WILLIAM WELLS BROWN’S DISPERSED AUTOBIOGRAPHY In 1880, William Wells Brown, a veteran of the abolitionist movement whose slave narrative had rivaled Douglass’s in popularity but whose reputation had never reached Douglass’s national stature, published My Southern Home: The South and Its People, a book in which, as its title implies, Brown’s return to the plantation of his youth is even more central than Douglass’s in his Life and Times. Brown, like Douglass, had spent the years since his escape from slavery living, for the most part, in the North; My Southern Home is at once a reminiscence of his slavery days and a record of his more recent travels back to the South. Like the Life and Times, then, its narrative spans from the antebellum to the post-Reconstruction South. Also like the Life and Times, its composition spans those periods as well: just as the antebellum sections of the Life and Times were taken almost directly from Douglass’s 1855 narrative, My Bondage and My Freedom, so the early chapters of My Southern Home recapitulate episodes and repeat entire passages from Brown’s prewar writings, including his 1847 Narrative of William W.Brown, A Fugitive Slave and his 1858 play The Escape. But Brown’s 1880 autobiography shares little else with the one that Douglass published in the following year. Rather than Douglass’s “story of a life, written by a man of achievement,” with its steadily forward-

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pressing narrative of self-emancipation and accumulation of reputation and accolades, all traceable to the name of Frederick Douglass, Brown’s story has little of Douglass’s direct forward progress, nor are its events or even its narrative persona immediately traceable to the character or reputation of William Wells Brown. My Southern Home opens with a passage that seems to have been written well within the “Plantation Tradition” that Houston Baker cites in his criticism of the Life and Times: Ten miles north of the city of St. Louis, in the State of Missouri, forty years ago, on a pleasant plain, sloping off toward a murmuring stream, stood a large framehouse, two stories high; in front was a beautiful lake, and, in the rear, an old orchard filled with apple, peach, pear, and plum trees, with boughs untrimmed, all bearing indifferent fruit. The mansion was surrounded with piazzas, covered with grape-vines, clematis, and passion flow ers; the Pride of China mixed its oriental-looking foliage with the majestic magnolia, and the air was redolent with the fragrance of buds peeping out of every nook, and nodding upon you with a most unexpected welcome. (119) The welcome most certainly is unexpected; “forty years ago” Brown had been a slave on such a farm, and in his Narrative he had shown none of this apparent sentimentality toward his Southern home. The farm had then been merely “a farm,” and the first detail about it he had provided was the cruelty of its overseer (31). After this welcome, however, Brown’s description of the plantation in My Southern Home turns in a direction hinted at by the “boughs untrimmed” and “indifferent fruit” of the opening paragraph. The first step is tentative. “The tasteful hand of art,” he writes,”… was not seen there, but the lavish beauty and harmonious disorder of nature was permitted to take its own course, and exhibited a want of taste so commonly witnessed in the sunny South.” Here still that “harmonious disorder” might outweigh any regrets over the lack of taste; in the next paragraph, though, what has seemed to indicate fertility and health becomes a sign of death and decay: “The killing effects of the tobacco plant… was to be seen in the rank growth of the brier, the thistle, the burdock, and the jimpson weed, showing themselves wherever the strong arm of the bondsman had not kept them down” (119). “Passion flowers” have turned into “weeds,” and a scene of comfort and leisure has become one of forced labor. These images of the decaying, ill-kept plantation are familiar ones to readers of antislavery and free labor literature, which frequently condemned slavery for its inefficiency; the Life and Times itself opens by setting the scene in Talbot County, Maryland, “thinly populated, and remarkable for nothing that I know of more than for the worn-out, sandy, desertlike appearance of its soil, the general dilapidation of its farms and fences, the indigent and spiritless character of its inhabitants, and the prevalence of ague and fever” (27). Such portraits represented a slave-owning system that was morally corrupt, economically inefficient, and culturally stagnant. What is distinctive about the scene that Brown sets in My Southern Home is his tonal shift, from nostalgia to bitterness; whereas his Narrative spits out its first words in anger—“I was born in Lexington, Ky. The man who stole me as soon as I was born…”—his later memoir first luxuriates in the sorts of romantic Old South memories that minstrel shows and the works

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of writers such as Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page were beginning to popularize, before allowing the first signs of bitterness to seep in (27). This shift occurs repeatedly throughout My Southern Home. In the typical pattern, a chapter opens with a general statement in what William L.Andrews has called, after Bakhtin, the “authoritative discourse” of a “white southerner” (“Mark” 13), which is then undermined by a shift in tone or by the anecdotal evidence the chapter provides. Chapter 8 begins, for instance, with the bald-faced assertion that “Cruelty to negroes was not practised [sic] in our section,” followed by the story of a hunt for fugitive slaves that ends with the matter-offact remark that one fugitive “was finally caught…while the other man found a watery grave” (174–75). This narrative shiftiness, in which the narrator’s perspective on the events he descries is willfully inconsistent from moment to moment, extends even to the narrator’s persona. The events of My Southern Home may be autobiographical—as the preface acknowledges, they “were written out from the authors recollections”—but the autobiographical figure of “William Wells Brown” has disappeared entirely from the antebellum sections of the book. Just as the voice of the narrative seems to shift from that of a nostalgic white to that of a cutting, embittered black speaker (and back), so the narrator himself, the “I” figure who infrequently appears, is almost impossible to pin down. In the early chapters the “I,” by virtue of his beliefs and apparent position in the household, appears if anything to be white, as Andrews has argued. Such racial identifications, though, are implicitly questioned almost immediately, when in the first chapter a visitor “mistakes” a young slave, Billy, for the son of Dr. Gaines, the master of the plantation (the implication being that it is not a mistake at all). And the narrator, while he may at first be “mistaken” for white, has a similarly mobile identity; he is able to relate not only what happens among the white folks in the parlor, but among the slaves in the kitchen as well. He seems to have the run of the entire plantation. Brown’s biographer, William Edward Farrison, has pointed out that Brown had told the same tale of a slave boy’s resemblance to his master in two earlier books, The Black Man (1863) and The Negro in the American Rebellion (1867), but with himself as the slave boy. Similarly, the antebellum chapters retell a number of autobiographical events from Brown’s Narrative, but with other characters taking Brown’s own role. It is “Pompey” in My Southern Home, for instance, who manages to have another man whipped in New Orleans in his place, as Brown himself had done in the Narrative, and it is “Cato” who escapes to the North by using Brown’s tactic of lowering his master’s guard with professions of loyalty. In a sense, this narrative position is an extension of his position in the original Narrative, in which Brown often took the role of the observer. Many of the anecdotes that Brown relates in the Narrative are events that he witnesses rather than experiences himself. He looks on from afar, he listens at doorways, he hears other slaves relate their punishments—generally with sympathy but nevertheless from a certain distance, a situation he captures very early in the Narrative when he describes his position as a house servant, “better fed, better clothed, and not obliged to rise at the ringing of the bell, but about half an hour after. I have often laid and heard the crack of the whip, and the screams of the slave” (28). In My Southern Home, then, he moves from observing the events in the lives of other slaves to observing even the events from his own life from a distance.

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But his narrative position, despite (or perhaps because of) this detachment, remains an intimate one. Released from the Narratives more limited single consciousness, he has access not only to all the domestic spaces of the entire plantation, but to the motivations of the inhabitants of those spaces. He knows Dr. Gaines and Mrs. Gaines, for instance, far better than they know themselves. But the intimate economy he portrays is quite different from the economy of gratitude and loyalty in which Hugh Auld had attempted to implicate Douglass (and in which Douglass himself, as I have argued, later became invested). Early in My Southern Home Brown states, “Slavery has had the effect of brightening the mental powers of the negro to a certain extent, especially those brought into close contact with the whites,” which on its face could be read a number of ways (137). Read within the “authoritative discourse” of the white South, it could be assumed to refer to the sort of civilizing, missionary benefits that Booker T. Washington will later credit, with apparent gratitude, to the “school of American slavery” (Up 16), but that meaning is harder to swallow when looked at in relation to the anecdote that immediately precedes the assertion, in which Billy, the slave boy who has already been identified as the likely son of the master, drinks the communion wine and replaces it in the decanter with sap squirted from his mouth. The communion that the congregants had thought they were sharing with the blood of Christ is shared instead with the saliva of a slave; Billy sits in the church gallery and “wonder[s] if the communicants would have partaken so freely of the wine, if they had known that his mouth had been the funnel through which a portion of it had passed” (137). The anecdote is at once a reminder of the often unwitting or repressed intimacies of the plantation, as well as evidence that this “close contact with the whites” has taught the slaves by giving them, not a model, but a foil. The exchanges of this intimate economy are not the benevolent gifts of gratitude and loyalty, but the sharpened wits and privileged knowledge of domestic competition. My Southern Home is full of these battles of wit, in both its individual anecdotes and its narrative play of voices, creating what Andrews has called a “discursive, rather than… institutional or ideological” authority, in which “Masters…were not born but made—and unmade—and made and unmade again, according to verbal rituals and combats of wit that bonded superior and subaltern in a perpetual competition for mastery of the moment” (“Mark” 6). In Brown’s book, the real discursive master of the plantation (besides Brown the mobile, all-seeing narrator himself) is not Dr. Gaines, the “proprietor,” but the fortune teller Dinkie, who “knows things seen and unseen, an dat’s what makes him his own massa”: “Dinkie hunted, slept, was at the table at meal time, roamed through the woods, went to the city, and returned when he pleased, with no one to object, or to ask a question. Everybody treated him with respect.” Dinkie gains his mastery not through manual labor or physical force, the methods of Douglass—“no one could remember the time when Dinkie was called upon to perform manual labor. He was not sick, yet he never worked”—but through the intimate knowledge of the trickster (166–67). (Brown makes the implied comparison to Douglass particularly acute. In My Southern Home he repeats an anecdote from his Narrative about a new overseer who tries to tame an independent slave, but with a marked difference. In the earlier book, the slave is Randall, “a man of great strength and power,” who has declared “that no white man should ever whip him—that he would die first” [29], recalling Douglass’s claim, after his fight with Covey, that “the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also

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succeed in killing me” [Narrative 113]. In Brown’s Narrative, despite Randall’s boasts, the overseer eventually manages to break him. But in My Southern Home, Randall’s place is taken by Dinkie, who bests the same overseer not by physical strength, but by convincing him that he could call up the devil to avenge any whipping he might get.) Dinkie’s economy—“his trade” in Brown’s words—is based in particular on an intimate knowledge of those who come to him for advice. When Miss Martha Lemmy comes to his cabin, “the conjurer knew the antecedents of his visitor, and was ready to give complete satisfaction in his particular line.” Like Billy’s altered communion wine, there is saliva at the center of their transaction: “Taking the lady’s right hand in his, Dinkie spit into its palm, rubbed it, looked at it, shut his one eye, opened it,” and told her fortune. As Dinkie rubs her “snow-white hand,” he tells her exactly what she wants to hear about the rich young gentleman who will marry her, and in return accepts silver pieces from her purse to sharpen his vision (171). Brown sets this exchange of fortunes as the mirror image of the “close contact with the whites” that has sharpened the wits of the blacks, but in this case, the contact has dulled the wits of the whites, making them susceptible to tales of the supernatural: “Most of the superstition amongst the whites, in our section, was the result of their close connection with the blacks; for the servants told the most foolish stories to the children in the nurseries” (159). These exchanges of discursive mastery transform not only the intimate economy of gratitude on which the rhetoric of slavery depended, but the free-labor economy celebrated by Douglass as well. Just as Dinkie’s mastery is in part signified by his avoidance of manual labor, so does the slave Pompey, in the book’s other episode involving an exchange of money, practice a rhetorical mastery not by manually laboring but by taking advantage of another’s labor. While working for a slave trader in New Orleans, Pompey spills a glass of wine on a gentleman and gets sent off by the trader to the local jail for punishment. The trader gives him a note and a silver dollar, the note to tell the jailer that its bearer is to be whipped and the dollar to pay for the whipping. As with Douglass’s labor earnings, the dollar operates as a wedge in the intimate domination of slavery; in Brown’s words, “it was common in those days for persons who wanted their servants punished and did not wish to do it themselves, to send them to the ‘slave pen’ and have it done.” The slave trader’s unwillingness to do the punishing himself provides the opening for Pompey to avoid it entirely. But for Pompey, the money represents not the product of his own labor, but the ability to hire the labor of another, in this case a free black man who is new to town and looking for work. Pompey tells him, “ef you want a job, whar you can make some money quick, I specks I can help you,” and gives him the dollar and the note and sends him to the jail to pick up a trunk for him (and of course to get the whipping meant for Pompey). The free laborer here is presented as desperate and a little dopey, hungry enough to take the job on faith and not sharp enough to avoid being dominated by Pompey’s manipulations. When he comes back out of the jail, the free man angrily tells Pompey, “here is a piece of paper that he gave me, and told me to give to my master. Just as if I had a master” (196–98). In fact he does give the paper to his master, at least the master of this transaction: Pompey, who buys the note from him to show his own master that indeed he had been punished. To say merely that the slaves were the “true masters” of the plantation, though, would not be to stray too far from the plantation nostalgia tradition itself. N.J.Floyd, for

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instance, in his pro-Ku Klux Klan novel Thorns in the Flesh (1884), makes the typically patronizing claim that the slaves “Mammy and her husband, Uncle George, were the patriarchs of the plantation” (85), and the narrator of Pages Red Rock (1898) fondly admits that the ghost stories of the blacks were believed “perhaps, by some of the whites, too, a little” (2). Just as Pompey often enjoyed “a hearty laugh” in recalling the story of his victim, who “was a free man, an’ could afford to go to bed, an’ lay dar till he got well,” My Southern Home is full of the laughter of slaves, making merry over tricks played on whites or blacks, but, as the narrator points out, it was “a low kind of happiness” (198, 178). The jokes often come at the expense of the pain of another slave, and they seem to cause little actual discomfort for the masters they are supposed to supplant. The narrator remarks that he “often thought that Mrs. Gaines took peculiar pleasure in being misled…and even the Doctor… would allow himself to be carried off upon almost any pretense” (154). That such jokes could themselves be a part of the economy of gratitude and loyalty is clear from one passage celebrating slave humor from the planters’ perspective: “The slave would often get rid of punishment by his wit, and even when being flogged, the master’s heart has been moved to pity, by the humorous appeals of the victim” (178). The injection of humor into this scene of violent domination translates it into an exchange of wit for pity, the pity that is the counterpoint to the slave’s gratitude in the economy of intimate domination. Even as Brown acknowledges the extent to which such verbal mastery could be contained by the dominant relations of slavery, though, his narrative position establishes his own distance from those relations. For while his narrator is intimate in his understanding of the dynamics and personalities of the plantation, he is at the same time an outsider to the events that are taking place. As I have noted, even the events that had once happened to Brown now happen to others. It is as if he were walking through the past as his present self, in the role of the traveling journalist, novelist, and social commentator that he has become in the North, a role that his narrative persona will take on more explicitly in the later sections of the book. If Dinkie is in one sense the discursive master of the plantation, Brown is its true master (it is “his” Southern home, after all), and he has mastered it by escaping it. His return takes place on his own terms— familiar ones, but without the sort of grateful investment that Douglass has in his own return south. Whereas in Douglass’s case the reversal of fortunes seems to have enmeshed him once again in the economy of gratitude and loyalty, Brown, with his layered narrative irony and his cutting of strict autobiographical ties with the events he recalls, steps aside from those entanglements. Douglass may insist that Thomas Auld should call him “not Marshal, but Frederick to you as formerly” (442), but there is no trace of that kind of personal recognition to be found in Brown’s return: there is no “William” (or “Sandford,” as his master preferred) “as formerly,” and there is no “you” to whom such an offer might be made. Dr. Gaines and his slave Sandford are both placed firmly in the past. This narrative position gives Brown a kind of two-sided authority: he demonstrates his familiarity with the plantation while at the same time showing how he has escaped the limitations of that closed community. He at once claims his ties to the South and makes clear how he has cut them. This position becomes even more evident in the later, postwar sections of the book. The pattern of each of the early chapters, in which the white

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authoritative discourse of the opening is shown to be ironic by the events that follow and often replaced by tonal shifts that express dissatisfaction with slavery more directly, is mirrored by My Southern Home’s structure as a whole. As the chapters proceed, the white discourse is featured less and less, and a narrative stance more plainly critical of slavery takes over. The shift, in fact, occurs roughly at the point when the book’s narrative progresses beyond the time period covered by Brown’s original Narrative: by chapter 14, immediately following the story of “Cato’s” escape from slavery, an escape whose details recall those of Brown’s own escape in the Narrative, the narrator speaks directly about the “odious” laws governing free blacks in the South before the war (216). Even given this shift in tone, though, the narrator retains his distance from the black people for whom, by this time, he is clearly an advocate. In chapter 17, for instance, in speaking of the postwar movement for political equality, he still seems to identify himself as white even while making an argument critical of most whites, saying, “just as if the liberating of a race, and securing to them personal, political, social and religious rights, made it incumbent upon us to take these people into our houses” (231). Not until chapter 26 does his use of “our” and “we” finally identify him with black people. In the sections leading up to that chapter, Brown takes the position of an outside, sympathetic observer, touring the South, remarking on the local customs, and conducting interviews that mark his separation from his subjects by the contrast of his standard English with their dialect, as when a former slave responds to his question, “Did you select your wives?” by saying, “Dunno what you mean by dat word” (241). In Brown’s picture of the postwar South, the freedom following emancipation looks a lot like slavery. In an incident that could have come directly out of his antebellum Narrative, for example, he observes a white man knock off the hat of a well-dressed black man to remind him of his manners. The former rebels have retaken political power to be used, he writes, “in the cause of oppression scarcely second in hatefulness to that of chattel slavery” (276). But, in addition, Brown argues that blacks as well as whites are still acting according to the habits of slavery. “The black man’s position as a servant, for many generations,” he writes, “has not only made the other races believe that is his legitimate sphere, but he himself feels more at home in a white apron and a towel on his arm, than with a quill behind his ear and a ledger before him…. [H]is education has entered his blood…. Our people prefer to be servants” (279). And this continued servility, he claims, is in part enforced by the former slaves themselves. He tells a story about a father in the South who “re-converted” his daughter, who had been living in the North, back to the ways of her Southern home. The daughter comes home full of the fashions of Philadelphia, professing Episcopalianism and speaking nearly the same form of standard English that Brown’s narrator uses. But her father converts her back to his own Methodism by, in his words, giving “dat gal sech a whippen” until she cries—in words that echo the “usual sound of ‘Oh, pray, massa! Oh, pray, massa!’” of the whipped slave in the antebellum section of the book—“O! daddy, O! daddy, I is a Methodiss” (247–249, 168). Brown’s narrative distance—he closes the latter anecdote by remarking, “Whether Mingo’s conversion of his daughter kept her from joining the Episcopalians, on her return to Philadelphia, or not, I have not learned”—marks his own distance from this tradition of servility (249). His position can instead be seen as an attempt to rewrite the lessons that

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slavery had taught. For his own implied identity, as one who can trace his home to the prewar Southern plantation but who has at the same time put that place firmly in the past, establishes a precedent for emigration to the North. “The South is the black man’s home,” he acknowledges in a nod to his title, “yet if he cannot be protected in his rights he should leave…. Follow the example of other oppressed races, strike out for new territory” (290). Fairly or not (Farrison calls it “caviling” [450]), he criticizes his fellow blacks for never attempting to “throw off their chains,” but, in support of the 1879 Exodus that Douglass had opposed, he urges that they still have the opportunity to do so: “Want of independence is the colored man’s greatest fault. In the present condition of the Southern States, with the lands in the hands of a shoddy, ignorant, superstitious, rebellious, and negro-hating population, the blacks cannot be independent. Then emigrate to get away from the surroundings that keep you where you are” (291). Despite his criticisms of black servility, though, in Brown’s own memories of the plantation there is on the whole much more subverting than serving going on. But rather than describing Brown’s individual passage from slavery to freedom, as his Narrative does and as do Douglass’s autobiographies, My Southern Home, in which Brown’s narrator is apparently free from the opening page, attempts to describe, or rather promote, the freedom of an entire people. By dispersing the events of the Narrative onto characters such as “Billy,” “Pompey,” and “Cato,” he transforms what was a narrative of a single fugitive slave into a history of an entire fugitive culture. For his narrative position is not only a sign of his distance from slavery; it is, in its tradition of discursive mastery, at the same time a sign of his connection to that legacy. Brown, in returning to his own Southern home, reminds his fellow former slaves that a history of servitude trains for dissent as well as assent, and that an education in dissent can finally lead to the choice to escape. The same forms of subterfuge that Billy and Pompey use to fool their masters are later used by Cato to free himself from his master entirely. The implication of Brown’s entire history is that the sort of narrative authority he, as an educated outside observer who can do the voices of both white and black, has acquired is in fact founded in the sorts of rhetorical skills he learned in slavery. In the closing chapters of My Southern Home, Brown makes a number of policy prescriptions for his fellow blacks that are generally consistent with the sorts of didactic free-labor lessons promoted by Northern reformers during Reconstruction: temperance, self-denial, self-education, imitation of Northern whites, “the cultivation of habits of business,” and, in a tempered version of Douglass’s exhortation, “work, work” (288, 292). Using a term favored by the self-help manuals of the day (and, in years to come, by Booker T. Washington), he writes, “The fact is the world likes to see the exhibition of pluck on the part of an oppressed people” (290). But Brown’s idea of “pluck,” given his celebration throughout the book of the skills of subversion and his advocacy of emigration and independence for freedpeople, has less to do with Horatio Alger’s sense of the word, in which the earnestness of his heroes’ “frank and open” faces appeals to the benevolence of a patron, than with an independence both rhetorical and geographic. In this way, Andrews has argued that the book’s final line, “Black men, don’t be ashamed to show your colors, and to own them,” is a “consummate irony,” given the narrator’s appropriations of racial identity, and should be read less as an argument for racial “authenticity” than one for racial “appropriation” (“Mark” 15). The pluck that Brown’s

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heroes, himself included, exhibit is not that of the loyal and sincere clerk but that of the subversive fugitive, invested not in the immobile relations of identity and reputation but in the mobile authority of the mask and the escape. When Arthur P.Davis writes, “Brown was not a five-talent man like Frederick Douglass; he was a one-talent, at best a two-talent man. But he invested and re-invested his limited capital in every way possible, and it paid off remarkably,” the irony is that Brown’s one “talent” was the theatrical ability to play many roles (viii). Many of the antebellum sections of My Southern Home, after all, are taken directly (stage directions included) from his play, The Escape, which was performed not by a cast of actors but by Brown himself, in dramatic readings in which he played all the parts. And if Douglass’s Life and Times is evidence of his investment, following the war, in the more limited economy of his own reputation, so Brown’s own postwar “autobiography,” in which his own name is to be found nowhere but on the title page, demonstrates his investment in himself, not as a character but as an author. In enumerating the “needs” of “our people,” in fact, he argues that “we should give our principal encouragement to literature,” particularly those “authors…who combine all the graces of style with rare, fascinating powers of language, eloquence, wit, humor, pathos, genius and learning” (288–89). And his own authorial authority is dependent less on the transmission of events and accomplishments from his own life than on his “fascinating powers of language,” powers that he claims to share with all those who have learned in the service of slavery the skills of subversion.

CLEAN BUILDINGS: EXECUTIVE INTIMACIES AND HARD CAPITAL IN BOOKER T.WASHINGTON’S UP FROM SLAVERY In his attempts to frame the lessons of slavery in the decades after Douglass and Brown, Booker T.Washington also evoked those twin legacies of service and subversion. His typical speeches were made up of folk anecdotes and uplift stories that gave an apparently mixed message about the former slaves he claimed to represent, as the trickster elements of the folk tales clashed with the promises of loyalty and respect for whites of the uplift stories. Frederick L. McElroy follows Louis Harlan and August Meier in arguing that Washington was the sort of black hero who “rose to fame and fortune not by cultivating the cardinal middle-class virtues, though in public they paid lip service to those virtues, but by making use of mother wit,” and McElroy goes Harlan and Meier one further by emphasizing the extent to which Washington’s tricksterism is evident not only in his hidden biographical record but in the folk tales he featured in his most public speeches and writings (90). The trickster stories, in McElroy’s judgment, work to undermine the very “lip service” in which they are embedded. Washington’s lip service to middle-class virtues, however, frequently overwhelms any appreciation of subversive wit his trickster tales might convey, and the tales themselves often are framed to confirm those middle-class assumptions. In Washington’s 1895 “Atlanta Exposition Address,” for instance, which stands as the central career-making event of his 1901 autobiography, Up from Slavery, his reference to slave trickery—to their entering into freedom “with ownership here and there in a few quilts and pumpkins

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and chickens (gathered from miscellaneous sources)”—is an allusion less to the sort of discursive mastery practiced by Brown’s heroes than to white stereotypes of petty black immorality (223; emphasis added). The chicken-thief caricature—its parenthetical shorthand a measure of its familiarity—may stand for Washington as a indicator of the distance the freedpeople have come from slavery (since they have now moved on to “the inventions and production of agricultural implements, buggies, steam-engines” etc.) but it also represents an apology for their failings and an acknowledgment of the justifiability of the stereotype of immorality. Washington may blame this minor immorality, which he describes as the sort of black “ignorance and crime” that may “prove a veritable body of death” to the South, on white oppression. But the dominant effect of the anecdote is to imply not black but white mastery, which has the power to make of the black millions either productive hands or “stagnating” criminals (222–223). In this contrast of the deadly threat of continued slavery with the promise of economic freedom, Washington seems to be marking the same distance from slavery evoked by the upward mobility of his title. But just previously in the speech, he has attempted to close that same distance by reminding his largely white audience that “we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing your children, watching by the sick-bed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves” (221). The experience of slavery, then, for Washington as for Brown, is a legacy not merely to be shunted to the past, but rather one that can be rhetorically claimed as both dangerous and useful. In that sense, the “slavery” in his title should be read not only as the state from which he is rising, but the foundation for that rise as well. But Washington reverses the legacies claimed by Brown: while distancing himself from the subversiveness that Brown had championed, he asserts the traditions of loyalty and service against which Brown had cautioned. Like Brown and Douglass, Washington remembers the slave plantation as a stagnant, inefficient system: “fences were out of repair, gates were hanging half off the hinges, doors creaked, window-panes were out, plastering had fallen but was not replaced, weeds grew in the yard” (18). His own “typical” family cabin, a part of “the most miserable, desolate, and discouraging surroundings,” had no windows and only “something that was called a door,” and the walls were filled with cracks and holes that let in the cold and the heat (1–3). But while he acknowledges that no slave preferred slavery to freedom, his family’s situation following emancipation showed little improvement over the conditions of slavery: “Our new house was no better than the one we had left on the old plantation in Virginia…. Our new home was in the midst of a cluster of cabins crowded closely together, and as there were no sanitary regulations, the filth about the cabins was often intolerable” (26). Washington himself, who had been “not large enough to be of much service” during slavery, is hired out after freedom to the salt and coal mines by his stepfather, who, much like Douglass’s master Hugh Auld, takes Washington’s hardearned wages for himself (5). In Washington’s path up from slavery, then, the servitude that he escapes from is not slavery itself, but the slavish and “unclean” work of the mines (38). And he makes his escape, not by emigrating from the South, but by changing the work that he does, moving from unclean to clean, from the mines to the local schools and the household of the mine owner, General Ruffner. If his eagerness for the schoolhouse is shown by his willingness

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to adjust the clock at the mine so that he can leave for school earlier, that recourse to trickery only further marks the mine as a form of neo-slavery, under which the petty deceptions of clock-shifting are excusable (and even admirable), just as he justifies his own mother’s chicken-thievery as a valid response from a “victim of the system of slavery” (5). When he enters the strict household of Mrs. Ruffner, though, he learns a different lesson about what “clean” work is like. Just as the dirty mine encourages deception, so the clean household demands honesty: “I soon began to learn that, first of all, she wanted everything kept clean about her, that she wanted things done promptly and systematically, and that at the bottom of everything she wanted absolute honesty and frankness” (44). These lessons continue when Washington leaves his home for the Hampton Institute, where he is asked to sweep out a room, a task which he recognizes as his admission test to the school. Despite his own filthy state after days “without proper food, a bath, and a change of clothing,” he scours the room until there is not “one bit of dirt on the floor, or a particle of dust on any of the furniture,” leading the head teacher to remark, “I guess you will do to enter this institution” (51, 53). Soon after, he learns “almost the most valuable lesson I got at the Hampton Institute,” “the use and value of the bath” (58). This admission to the school is an act of cleansing, which marks his escape from the virtual slavery of his poverty. In the bath, he washes off the filth of both his journey and his years of enslavement. The aspect of slavery that this examination doesn’t sweep away, however, is its institutionalization of service. If according to Brown slavery bequeathed two legacies, one of service (or servility, in his view of it) and the other of subversion, then what it takes to enter Hampton is evidence of the first and not of the second. It is this history of service that Washington refers to in the Atlanta address, when he attempts to construct a tradition of willing service on slavery’s history of unwilled labor, assuring the white Southerners in his audience that “As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, …so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defence of yours” (221). As this last example shows, service, taken to its limit, implies actual self-sacrifice, an ideal to which Washington pays homage again and again. A clean room in Washington’s narrative can be read in at least two ways. In one sense it is a sign of protection and distance from squalor, both moral and material. The labor involved in cleaning a room translates immediately into a form of wealth; the cleaner the room, the further it places its inhabitant from the filth of poverty and slavery. In another sense, however, the clean room is a means of displaying the cleaner’s willingness to serve. A clean room, then, marks one’s distance from slavery, even as it recalls slavery’s tradition of sacrificial service. For Washington the admissions test is paradoxical: the more he can prove his connection to the tradition of service, the greater his chance of leaving the virtual slavery of poverty by gaining possession of the room he cleans (by being allowed to enter the institution). It is the paradox on which his entire career is based, and as August Meier has written, one inherent in the industrial education movement of the nineteenth century of which Washington was a standard-bearer: “By some, industrial education was viewed as a means for helping the laboring classes to rise in the world, while others viewed it as a type of instruction suitable for adjusting them to their subordinate social role” (86).

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The clean room of Hampton stands in direct contrast to the inefficient domestic spaces of the slave plantation, where “As a rule, there was food for whites and blacks, but inside the house, and on the dining room table, there was wanting that delicacy and refinement of touch and finish which can make a home the most convenient, comfortable, and attractive place in the world.” With the services of so many slaves available, though, why would that “delicacy and refinement” be lacking? As Washington explains, “The slaves, of course, had little personal interest in the life of the plantation” (18). What is important here, then, is not just the service, but the willingness to serve; the slaves must serve, but without their willingness to do so, that “touch and finish” will not be evident. This missing “personal interest” suggests that the tradition of service that extends from slavery through to freedom is in fact not quite continuous, and that in slavery the traditions of service and subversion were inextricably connected, to the extent that the slave’s lack of interest in service is a sign of subversion. Therefore, while blacks may have learned manual skills and discipline in what Washington calls “the school of American slavery,” these attributes can only be tested, and thereby put into service, in freedom, in which service is done willingly and honestly (16). In the cleaning of a room, the subversive strand of the slavery tradition is peeled away, leaving only the honest willingness to serve. In perhaps the clearest example of this separation of service from subversion, Washington uses a conversation with a stock chicken-thief figure to emphasize how in constructing his school he is clearing out the old petty subversions of slavery: I recall that one morning, when I told an old colored man who lived near, and who sometimes helped me, that our school had grown so large that it would be necessary for us to use the hen-house for school purposes, and that I wanted him to help me give it a thorough cleaning out the next day, he replied, in the most earnest manner: “What you mean, boss? You sholy ain’t gwine clean out de hen-house in de day-time?” (130) In building his Tuskegee Institute on the ruins of an “old and abandoned plantation,” Washington enacts such “day-time” clean room tests over and over again (128). For each building that is erected, Washington and his staff and students must demonstrate their willingness to serve—their cleanliness, their diligence, their disinterest in assertive politics—to their patrons before they are given the capital to construct the building that will widen their distance from poverty further still. In this way Tuskegee functions as a sort of permanent exhibition hall, displaying its residents’ willingness to serve, and therefore their rejection of slavery’s tradition of subversion, while Washington himself acts as a mobile representative of the Institute, displaying the same attributes in his speech and actions. The continued success of each extends the double action of the clean room test; with each new, clean building, the distance from both the tradition of subversion and the squalor of poverty increases. Washington’s concern for cleanliness is often summed up as his “tooth-brush philosophy”; Louis Harlan writes, for instance, that “Tooth-brushing was the heart of his doctrine, with its concomitants, hair-brushing, clothes-brushing, and scrubbrushing” (81). But shifting the terms to focus on his “clean room strategy” has the

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benefit of emphasizing the centrality of capital development to his program. His students were expected not only to take care of their own bodies, but of their buildings as well. Washington recognized what his patron Carnegie did: that ownership of capital is the true lever of upward mobility under free labor; and Up from Slavery is as much the biography of an institution as it is the autobiography of a man. The two are intertwined: Washington continually avows that all his work is in the service of his school, even as the buildings of Tuskegee stand as a monument to him. When he, like Douglass, is deluged with offers from lecture bureaus, he replies that “whenever I spoke it must be in the interests of the Tuskegee school and my race, and that I would enter into no arrangements that seemed to place a mere commercial value on my services” (226–27). And his earlier autobiography, The Story of My Life and Work (1900), which reads for the most part as a rough draft of Up from Slavery, conflates the personal with the institutional even more explicitly than the later book. The final chapter of My Life and Work is “A Description of the Work of the Tuskegee Institute,” for, as Washington writes, “in any autobiography of mine, a history of the Tuskegee Institute is unavoidable and necessary. When the history of Tuskegee Institute, since its founding until now, shall be completely written, you will have also a history of my life for the same space of time” (405). And whereas Up from Slavery ends on a moment of personal triumph, as Washington addresses a biracial audience in the former capital of the Confederacy, the final words of My Life and Work give an impersonal account of the architectural details of the Tuskegee chapel that reaches an almost biblical stature in its recitation of the mathematical details of the edifice: One million two hundred thousand bricks were used in the construction, all made and laid by students. All the mouldings, casings and caps used were made by students. The floor is bowled. The height of the walls from top of floor is 24 feet 6 inches; from floor line to highest point of ceiling, 48 feet 6 inches. The height of tower from line of ground to top of cross which terminates it, is 105 feet. The electric lighting is from three main chandeliers, with thirty lights each, ten of two lights each, twelve of one light each, and from a reflecting disc of forty lights over the choir stand. (423) In its emphasis on the details of architecture rather than those of devotion, Washington’s pride in the chapel stands as evidence less of faith in God than of faith in accumulated property (or perhaps of faith in a God who looks favorably on those subjects who can help themselves). It is no accident that Tuskegee’s first major industry is brick-making. The making of bricks may recall the work done by the biblical slaves of Egypt under Pharaoh, but they evoke even more directly the accumulation of property. Washington may emphasize the importance of the bricks as a market commodity—“we were supplying a real want in the community”—but their greatest usefulness comes in building Tuskegee itself, both as an institution and an exhibition. As Washington claims, “The actual sight of a first-class house that a Negro has built is ten times more potent than pages of discussion about a house that he ought to build, or perhaps could build” (Up 153–54). Just as the Tuskegee bricks are less useful in the market than they are in the capital

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economy of building construction, and just as Washington claims he lectures not for “mere commercial” reward but only in the service of his institution, so the economics of his career have less to do with the wages and savings of the free labor market than with the debts, loans, and credit of capital finance. Even when Washington works for wages as a student at Hampton, the money he earns is not enough to pay his tuition and board, and he must depend on loans and Northern benefactors to cover the difference. His labors, rather than translating into hard cash, have their greatest value as an exhibition of his diligence; it is not so much the money that he earns while working that allows him to attend Hampton, but the credit that his patrons extend him based on his exhibitions of labor. The tension latent in this economy, in which free labor’s mistrust of debt runs up against the economy of credit and capital, is clear from conflicting anecdotes that he tells of his financial struggles at Hampton. On one hand, he tells a story of a time when he is trying to drum up some cash by selling his coat, in which a local man’s offer to buy the coat on credit—“I tell you what I will do; I will take the coat, and I will pay you five cents, cash down, and pay you the rest of the money just as soon as I can get it”—is mockingly framed as evidence of black improvidence. But not two pages later, Washington himself pleads a similar poverty to Hampton’s treasurer, who tells him “that he would trust me to pay the debt when I could” (64, 66). The building of Tuskegee, of course, is even more dependent than Washington’s education on credit finance and philanthropic patronage. Washington’s efforts to buy the old plantation that would become the grounds of the Institute are stalled at first because, in words that echo Douglass’s warn ings about the dangers of mobility to capital accumulation, “we had no money, and we were strangers in the town and had no credit” (129). Only when the treasurer of Hampton extends him a loan can he buy the land for the school. In his ambitious plans for the school’s growth, Washington finds himself and the school continually on the nerve-wracking edge of defaulting on promised payments, only to be saved by timely philanthropy or, on one occasion, by the pawning of Washington’s watch. A significant portion of his time is spent in traveling the country, drumming up donations to build his school and establish an independent endowment. He takes pains to emphasize that this fundraising is itself the result of work, both in its dependence on the exhibited labor of the Tuskegee students and in the actual effort that he expends in seeking the funds, on one occasion walking two miles “on an unusually cold and stormy day” to meet with a prospective donor. After recounting the large donation of a railroad mogul, he writes, “Some people may say that it was Tuskegee’s good luck that brought to us this gift of fifty thousand dollars. No, it was not luck. It was hard work. Nothing ever comes to one, that is worth having, except as the result of hard work” (186, 188). This economy of credit gives new meaning to Brown’s phrase “exhibitions of pluck.” Pluck, of course, is a favorite word of Washington’s; he names his first night-school students “The Plucky Class” (105). But Washington also makes clear the importance of exhibiting pluck: pluck is most valuable when someone is there to witness (and patronize) it. His savvy awareness of the importance of publicizing ones industry is consistent with the advice of Benjamin Franklin, who writes in his Autobiography that he “took care not only to be in reality industrious and frugal, but to avoid all appearances to the contrary” (136), and of Andrew Carnegie, about whom Amy Kaplan has written that he

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laments the difference between the younger generation of businessmen who have janitors to serve them and the older who swept the floors themselves. While he concludes that the aspiring young man should therefore occasionally pick up a broom, more important than such homely diligence is that the “rising man must do something exceptional, and beyond the range of his special department. He must attract attention.” Carnegie suggests a difference between performing duties and performing “to show invincible determination to rise.” (126–27) In this sense, “pluck” is a well-chosen word, in its reference both to struggling against the odds and to being pulled out of a crowd. One shows one’s pluck, in other words, so that one might be plucked. And, as both Washington and Carnegie emphasize, this translation of self-publicity into credit takes place not so much on the open market but in the more intimate relations of patronage. As Carnegie the philanthropist argues in an article published around the same time that Washington first appealed to him—unsuccessfully—for support, “Unless the individual giver knows the per son or family in misfortune, their habits, conduct, and cause of distress, and knows that help given will aid them to help themselves, he cannot act properly” (Gospel 69). (Not surprisingly, then, it is only after “ten years of work” of getting to know Carnegie, or rather of getting Carnegie to know him, that Washington is finally “able to secure Mr. Carnegie’s interest and help” [191].) The vital early funds that help get Tuskegee on its feet often come from Washington’s appeals to his friends and patrons at Hampton: General Marshall, the treasurer, who lends him “the amount needed from his own personal funds,” and General Armstrong, the founder of Hampton, who “gave me his personal check for all the money which he had saved for his own use” (129, 146; emphases added). And Washington’s later benefactors take on an almost familial intimacy; a generous railroad mogul, for instance, “not only gave money to us, but took time in which to advise me, as a father would a son, about the general conduct of the school” (189). This combination of the familial and the financial is most evident when one white patron tells him, “in a fatherly way: ‘Washington, always remember that credit is capital’” (146). The implication is that credit is itself a “fatherly” system and that capital can only be accessed through such close, personal relationships. Washington’s program of translating these executive intimacies into the substantial capital of his school’s buildings and endowment takes the intimate economy of Douglass’s postwar career one step further. Like Douglass in the later sections of his Life and Times, Washington in Up from Slavery is heavily invested in his intimate relations with his white patrons, from General Armstrong at Hampton to President McKinley, whose visit to Tuskegee is the highlight of the book’s final chapter. His visits to McKinley’s White House are particularly reminiscent of Douglass’s to Lincoln and Hayes: despite finding “the waiting rooms full of people,” he manages to get access to the President himself, who “kindly thanked [him] for the work which we were doing at Tuskegee.” On a second visit, his closeness to the executive provides him a reassuring glimpse into McKinley’s intimate emotions: “As soon as I saw the President, I perceived that his heart was greatly burdened” by the recent race riots in the South (303–304). But unlike Douglass, Washington attempts to exchange these intimacies for concrete

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capital investment. Kelly Miller’s (critical) account of the Washingtonian view of Douglass aptly characterizes the difference between them: “What did Douglass do? ask the crass materialists. He built no institutions and laid no material foundations” (219). In Washington’s accounts of his relations with President Cleveland he, like Douglass, offers personal assurances of the executives good will—“Judging from my personal acquaintance with Mr. Cleveland, I do not believe that he is conscious of possessing any colour prejudice”—while at the same time keeping an eye on his building funds: “Mr. Cleveland…has always consented to do anything I have asked of him for our school. This he has done, whether it was to make a personal donation or to use his influence in securing the donations of others” (228). Through these donations, Washington attempts to break out of the intimate economy of good will and personal reputation by translating those inalienable assets into more alienable physical capital. Just as these executive intimacies can be translated into physical capital, though, so can Tuskegee’s physical capital be translated into executive intimacy. In the roundabout cycle in which Tuskegee’s growth provides Washington with greater and greater access to the suites of power, which in turn translates into more support for the school, and so on, it is often unclear which is the greater prize. In one instance, he implies that the closeness to a patron is really of greater value than the buildings of a school themselves: “One might have removed from Hampton all the buildings, class-rooms, teachers, and industries, and given the men and women there the opportunity of coming into daily contact with General Armstrong, and that alone would have been a liberal education” (55). But then perhaps such a hyperbolic statement might be designed to flatter the prospective white patrons who would be reading his book, which, after all, was in large part another fundraising project for Tuskegee. Harlan cites a typical effect of the book in a letter from camera baron George Eastman: “I have just been re-reading your book ‘Up from Slavery,’ and have come to the conclusion that I cannot dispose of five thousand dollars to any better advantage than to send it to you for your Institute” (I, 249). The effect of this spiraling economy of physical capital and personal credit is to translate executive intimacies into executive power. And Washington, of course, is as careful to present himself as a figure of power and command as he is one of service. If General Armstrong, for instance, stands as the great figure of adoration for the students of Hampton, so Washington himself becomes that figure at Tuskegee. Just as Armstrong visits the frigid tents that his suffering scholars have been crowded into, only to find that it was comfort enough for them “to know that we were pleasing General Armstrong,” so Washington later visits his own chilled students in their unheated cabins and reports that “They were constantly asking what they might do to lighten the burdens of the teachers” (57, 168). And Washington’s power is expressed as well in his self-positioning as an author. He presents himself, in fact, not as an author at all, but as an executive. In his preface he writes, The greater part of my time and strength is required for the executive work connected with the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, and in securing the money necessary for the support of the institution. Much of what I have said has been written on board trains, or at hotels or railroad stations while I have been waiting for trains, or during the moments that I could spare from my work

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while at Tuskegee. Without the painstaking and generous assistance of Mr. Max Bennett Thrasher I could not have succeeded in any satisfactory degree. (lix— lx) This mention of Thrasher, his ghostwriter, is the most striking example of his executive authorship, for not only is he too busy with his executive duties to write, he has, in what is a stunning transformation of the amanuensis relationship of the slave narrative tradition, the economic power to hire someone (a white man, in fact) to assist him in writing his book. Whereas the first black autobiographers had to negotiate with the system of authentication and patronage that demanded that a white authority either write a certifying preface to the black writer’s life story, or as in the case of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s translation of slave experiences into Uncle Tom’s Cabin, write the entire story herself, Washington here not only writes his own preface, but acknowledges the help of a white employee in the book’s composition. Rather than undermining Washington’s authority by implying that only a white man has the skills to write his story, Thrasher’s presence is instead a sign of that authority. Washington needs “assistance” to write his book not because he cannot command the language but because he has greater demands on his time. Those executive activities have in fact given him the power to command language in another sense, by hiring the skills of a ghostwriter. 7 Such a command over white discourse might be seen as another version, or an extension, of Brown’s ability to deploy the language of whites. Washington, of course, is as capable as Brown of voicing the tones of plantation nostalgia, but whereas Brown directly ironizes those voices and in doing so claims a narrative authority based in language, Washington downplays the irony (without, as McElroy points out, entirely submerging it) and attempts instead to construct a narrative authority based in economics, in the accumulated capital that his modulated tones have provided for him. In so doing he might claim to take the free labor philosophy of Frederick Douglass further than Douglass ever had, by actually making the crucial step from labor into capital, even while playing the role of the loyal laborer throughout. The capital he earned through his cultivation of intimate friendships with his patrons offered a route out of the otherwise closed economy of intimacy, gratitude, and good will. But Washington’s own investment in that economy was not so easy to shake; much of the capital—both financial and political—he earned was spent in administering his own patronage machinery, making sure that any ambitious black figure had to depend on his good will, in much the same way that he had cultivated the good will of his own patrons. It was Douglass after all, perhaps because he didn’t have the burden of an entire institutional machine to uphold, who could in the speeches of his last years turn freely in anger against the Republican patrons whose good will he had suffered under for so long, and thereby leave a legacy, if not an institution, of his own: of a willful and angry old man who knew, perhaps, that the reputation of his that would matter in the long run would not be the one held in the minds of his patrons, but the one left to his descendants and to history.

Chapter 2 The Nature Theater of Americana Horatio Alger’s Earnest Commodities MORE SO THAN WASHINGTON OR EVEN HIS PATRON CARNEGIE, THE most heartfelt exponent of the importance of the patronage relationship to the process of selfmaking in the second half of the nineteenth century was Horatio Alger, Jr., in his series of juvenile uplift stories. Alger’s is certainly the name most associated with the “self-made man” story in our time. We may not have read his books, but there is a direct linkage in our collective memory between his name and the idea of up-by-your-bootstraps selfmaking success stories. When I describe the sort of books I am studying, for instance, I often say, “Self-made man stories, you know, Horatio Alger…” and then trail off, knowing, or assuming, that I will be met by a string of knowing nods. Alger’s name, emptied of any experience of reading his books, is left to carry a purely referential power that leads directly in the thesauri of our minds to the more densely referential and experiential ideas of American “self-making” and “success” stories. On actually reading the Alger whom we know so well, or rather who is so well known, one of the most striking elements of his stories is the dependence of his narratives and his heroes’ successes on the help of patrons and on the sort of intimate economies of gratitude and good will that would seem to be the direct antithesis of the alienated contract economy of free labor, but, as I have argued about Douglass and Washington, are in fact difficult to separate from that economy. The central dramatic engine of the Alger narrative formula is the intervention of a kind, wealthy patron in the career of a poor but worthy boy. And more so even than Washington, for whom such patronage relationships are a means of acquiring the independence of capital, it is the relationships themselves, rather than the financial rewards that accompany them, that are for Alger’s heroes the true aim of their narrative path. The reward held out to the Alger aspirant may be denominated in dollars, but what it really meas ures is his acceptance into a community of trust and good will. For Alger, money does not represent the arms length mediation of contract law, but rather the intimate embrace of sincerity and personal understanding. The Alger hero’s most notable, and noticeable, feature is his visible earnestness, his “frank and open countenance.” His face, rather than presenting the sort of mask of mediation that Douglass offers through his wages to his master and that Brown offers his readers, invites personal inspection and promises access to his authentic, inner self. In Alger’s economy, money is the reward for this sincere and intimate access, and, as I will argue below, it is even a means by which that access into inner character is secured. Given Alger’s investment in sincerity and earnestness, it is notable that two significant frauds were perpetrated on his legacy in the years after his death. Alger died in 1899, leaving behind nearly a hundred novels for boys, which would sell well into the millions

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of copies for the next decade, far more than they had during his lifetime. As early as the 1910s, though, his vogue had passed. His books quickly fell out of print, and by 1932, an editorial in The Nation could note that the centenary of his birth had “passed uncelebrated,” and that a survey of “New York’s juvenile proletariat,” Alger’s usual subject and supposed audience, had revealed that few of those street boys had heard of their erstwhile literary patron, much less read any of the books that the boys of the editorialist’s generation had consumed “with a passionate loyalty” (“Cynical” 186). 1 It was in this period, in which Alger became an unread figure of legend and nostalgia, that the first full-length biography of the writer appeared, Alger: A Biography Without a Hero (1928), by Herbert R.Mayes, a young writer who later rose to become, among other things, the editor of Good Housekeeping. As a few readers were to suspect through the years (perhaps tipped off by the book’s subtitle), however, and as Mayes himself finally admitted almost fifty years after the fact, the biography was almost entirely a hoax. As he described it later, Mayes, claiming to be basing his account on Alger’s nonexistent private diary; “made Alger out to be a pathetic, quite ridiculous character. I provided him with mistresses. I had him adopt and become attached to a little Chinese boy, and then had the boy killed by a runaway horse” (Scharnhorst and Bales, Lost xi). 2 Mayes’s spoof was nonetheless taken as gospel and provided the source for most biographical discussions of Alger until the 1970s. It was perhaps suitable that the author who was becoming a familiar emblem even as his books were going unread would be represented by a biography that ignored the admittedly sketchy details of his actual life. Several years after Mayes’s hoax, and after the early years of the Depression had made Alger’s placid faith in the certainty of economic reward for the deserving even harder to swallow than before, the second fraud on Alger’s memory occurred when Nathanael West published his novel, A Cool Million: The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin (1934), to almost total indifference. Although neither Alger’s name nor those of his best-known heroes ever appear in the text, it was perfectly clear to most of the book’s reviewers that West’s novel was a direct parody of the Alger stories. That Alger was not only a familiar enough figure for his style to be recognized without being named, but also a perhaps overly familiar figure of fun by the time West took his crack at him, is clear from one reader’s dismissive sideswipe in the Saturday Review of Literature. “It is difficult to be very uproarious in a burlesque of something which nobody takes seriously anyhow, and the idea of putting Horatio Alger in reverse is not exactly fraught with subtlety” (Stevens 63). What the reviewers missed, but what later scholars have unearthed, is that West did not merely imitate Alger’s trademark tone of Pollyanna uplift and his already creaky plot devices. 3 In an echo of the forged academic transcripts that had earlier gained him admittance to Tufts and Brown, West actually pasted lengthy passages of text from the Alger books, largely unadulterated and entirely uncredited, into his own. As Gary Scharnhorst has calculated, “over a fifth of West’s novel is vintage Alger,” taken from such titles as Tom Temples Career, Ben Bruce, The Erie Train Boy, Joe’s Luck, and Andy Grants Pluck (“From” 59). Much of what West seems to turn into “Alger in reverse,” then, is in actuality direct Alger, including passages that in the blandness of their naiveté or the grotesquerie of their violence (or even the knowingness of their humor) seem as though they must have been authored by the satirist, not his subject. In this respect, West agrees with his unimpressed reader in the Saturday Review and with Scharnhorst that

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Alger is, in Scharnhorst’s words, “his own best parodist” (65). As that reviewer’s dismissal implies, by that point it was difficult—at least in literary circles—even to refer to Alger with a straight face. The idea of “Alger” seemed then, as it does now, already to contain the unsubtle idea of “Alger in reverse.” In part this was due to the dire economic conditions of the early 1930s, when West was writing. In that vein, Douglas H.Shepard, the first to point out West’s direct borrowings, argues, “what better way to satirize the naiveté of the Algerian myth than to take Alger’s own words and repeat them—but now in the bitter context of the 1930’s?” (28). Alger’s promised equation of hard work and earnest loyalty with economic reward was even less tenable in the depths of the Depression than it had been in his own times. But even more so, what invites such fraud and satire upon Alger and his texts is his earnest investment in their opposite impulses, in the verities of sincerity and frankness. Just as Candide’s wide-eyed optimism seems in itself to bring the floggings down upon his back, so Alger’s and his heroes’ apparently naive trust in the rewards of good character appears to beckon such cruel textual abuses as Mayes’s gleeful offing of Alger’s poor adopted (and invented) son and West’s relentless dismantling of his earnest young hero Pitkin. Alger, to use the term common to both the con man and the unsatisfied reviewer of satire, is an easy mark, and what marks him as such is the same feature, the “frank and open countenance,” that, within his narrative universe, marks his boy protagonists as worthy heroes. Beyond this trust that begs abuse, Alger is further made susceptible to satire by his reliance on formula. An “Alger” story, such as West’s, can implicitly carry his name even when that name is nowhere to be found on or in it, because the characteristic elements of his narratives are so easily recognizable. And in their repetition through his hundred books, those elements—his stock plots, stereotyped characters, and such rote phrasings as that “frank and open countenance”—leave Alger open to ridicule, and appropriation, within a literary culture that values original productions. 4 As The Nation drew the line between “serious” literary work and formula in 1932: [I]t is hard even to remember what [Alger’s books’] charm was or why we did not simply read the same one over again as often as the need to read anything arose. The formula was invariable, and always involved, first, the rescue of the banker’s daughter from a mad dog or a runaway horse, and then a false suspicion of theft which raised its ugly head against our hero. Alger is said to have been distressed all his life with the desire to do “serious work,” but we know of no one who ever revealed less promise, and it is our considered belief that the literary value of his novels is about as near absolute zero as it is possible for anything composed in intelligible sentences to be. (186) The Alger formula, then, is both the means by which his authorial marks might be appropriated, and the object of the appropriators’ scorn. And the importance of formula to his storytelling is traceable to his investment in frankness and sincerity. For frankness, and its assumption of sure reward in Alger’s system, itself depends on formula, on a certain predictability. Frankness is a form of reliability, by which his heroes promise to behave exactly as they say they will. And this reliability, Alger’s narratives promise, will itself be predictably recognized and rewarded. If Alger’s heroes are always described the

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same way and always do the same things, perhaps that is because those are the right things to do and the things they want to do, and if they are always rewarded for those actions, perhaps it is because they deserve to be. The promise of Alger’s economy is based on the very simplicity of these formulae. It is worth investigating, in the context of his later appropriation by others and his own reliance on formula, what Horatio Alger’s own theories of imitation, authorship, and originality were. Facing the relative absence of published criticism, memoir, or manifesto from Alger’s pen, one might turn first to the bulk of stories themselves for more general theories on character and authenticity. But more specific attention to the issues of imitation and originality can be found in two relatively neglected works, one a biography of Edwin Forrest, the American actor, credited to Alger’s cousin, William Rounseville Alger, but thought by some to have been co-written by Horatio, and the other a boys novel, Ben Bruce: Scenes in the Life of a Bowery Newsboy, published in 1892, when Alger was in his most frenzied period of serial story production, as his rep utation receded into the faceless mass market. The Life of Edwin Forrest was published in two thick volumes in 1877 under the name of William Rounseville Alger, a noted minister, but Scharnhorst has argued, based both on textual and circumstantial evidence, that the biography was in fact a joint production between the two cousins, with Horatio writing the bulk of the biographical sections and William contributing characteristically prolix interchapters on the theory and history of the theater (“Note”). 5 The two threads combine to create a book that argues for Forrest’s place as the most American of actors and, even more strenuously, for a truly democratic style of “natural” and “ideal” acting. In so doing, the Algers provide one of the most thorough and fascinating discussions available of the connections between the free labor virtues of earnestness, industry, and character and the imitative arts of the stage. They aim to replace Puritan fears of the theater as the home of falsehood and insincerity with an understanding of a theatricality whose gestures are based in scientific laws of the body and whose imitations transmit universal ideals raised to a height beyond the fragmentation of modern realism. Reading their life of Forrest alongside Alger’s early stories for boys illuminates the importance of both the physical and the ideal in his system of economic sincerity. In those early stories, Alger presents a narrative universe in which natural virtue is recognizable in the bodies of his heroes and in which the money economy, like the stage in the Forrest biography, is presented not as a threat to sincerity and virtue but rather as a theater in which those values might be discerned. If The Life of Edwin Forrest provides a theoretical basis for Horatio Alger’s narrative economies of earnest acting and just reward, Alger’s late novel Ben Bruce, published as a serial in 1892 and 1893 and posthumously in book form in 1901, is an indication of how those economies are threatened by the commodity economy of which Alger’s novels were a part. Written when Alger was under fire as a commodified writer whose formula fictions presented a danger to young minds, Ben Bruce repeats and even exaggerates the themes of the natural theater of the Forrest biography and the Ragged Dick books: the young hero Ben, for instance, succeeds not as an earnest young newsboy but by playing one on stage, with a style of acting that is less the painting of another ’s character onto his own than it is the “natural” effusion of his own ideal self. But in that very exaggeration and in the novel’s uncharacteristic self-reflectiveness about the Alger formula and the

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profession of writing, the processes of commodification and publicity, always a source of anxiety in his stories, threaten to overwhelm the sincere, intimate exchanges around which the Alger economy usually revolves. Ben, unable to accumulate capital as a newsboy because of a slow market in public events, is driven to act a part in an extravagant fraud in which his culpable naiveté outweighs his apparently exculpatory virtue. And the secondary character of Sylvanus Snodgrasse, a hack writer of sensationalist serials, marks Alger’s attempts to distance his own popular fictions from the lurid and subrespectable tales that Snodgrasse churns out, even as his characterization evokes Alger’s own narrative style and position in the authorial market. If Ben Bruce is both a cautionary tale about the commodification of identity and a commodified object itself, Nathanael West’s appropriation of that book and the rest of the Alger legacy in A Cool Million extends Alger’s mass-pro duced formula into a narrative terrain of utter commodification. In his hands, the process of authentication is inseparable from the process of alienation; the “American,” for instance, is immediately available for purchase as “Americana.” The dismantling of his Algerian hero, Lemuel Pitkin, in which the parts of his body are slowly replaced by prosthetic devices, is an enactment both of that thorough alienation and of the inalienable hunger that drives the whole system. Seen from West’s perspective, the Alger formula is not an expression of reliable virtues and natural ideals but rather a function of the typification and standardization inherent in the commodity form. The seed of the commodity economy that threatens individual autonomy can be found in the very repeatability and recognizability of the standard Alger formula.

THE NATURE THEATER OF AMERICA: THE ALGERS’ LIFE OF EDWIN FORREST AND THE RAGGED DICK STORIES Those readers who have discussed Horatio Alger’s role in co-writing The Life of Edwin Forrest have focused on stylistic similarities and the glaring resemblance of such narrative elements as the chapter “Breaking the Way to Fame and Fortune” to Alger’s own fables, but they have paid little attention to the relations between Alger’s narrative universe and the biography’s polemics on the theater and its celebration of Forrest as the representative American actor. 6 But those relations are in fact the best reason for returning to the Algers’ largely forgotten book. For the issues that Alger’s stories worry over—the importance of discerning authentic and reliable character in an increasingly impersonal economy, and the necessity of transmitting ideal behavior to the impressionable—are repeated in the Algers’ claims for Forrest’s art. Just as Horatio attempts to alleviate the anxieties about counterfeit identities and impersonal manipulation caused by the money economy and the anonymous city by positing a universe of readable virtue, intimate business transactions, and chance reencounters, so the cousins Alger argue that the theater, often branded as the arena of false impersonation and sensationalist distraction, actually carries with it the potential for a greater sincerity and the portrayal of unified, ideal types. It might be surprising to one who has read some of Alger’s novels to find that he would have also been involved in the celebratory biography of an actor, since the theater

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is a distraction his young heroes are generally counseled to avoid. In Ragged Dick, the young bootblack Dick at first fritters away his few dollars going to plays: he “was careless of his earnings. Where they went he could hardly have told himself…. He was fond of going to the Old Bowery Theatre, and to Tony Pastor’s,” the famous vaudeville house (43). He soon learns to renounce those pleasures, however, thereby saving the admission price and gaining extra hours for self-culture and rest. By comparison, his foil throughout the Ragged Dick series, the improvident snob Roswell Crawford, is turned to petty crime by the pressure to treat his friend Ralph to a night at the theater. Roswell’s virtue is threatened not only by his crime but by the “fascination” of the theatrical environment itself: after paying for their tickets with money swiped from his employer, “Roswell managed to enjoy the play, although unpleasant thoughts of how the money was obtained by which the tickets were procured, would occasionally intrude upon him. But the fascination of the stage kept them from troubling him too much.” At the end of the evening, all Roswell “had to compensate for the loss of his integrity was a headache, occasioned by late hours, and the warm and confined atmosphere at the theatre” (329– 330). Dick, mean-while, “knew that if he wanted to succeed in life, and win the respect of his fellow-men, he must do something else than attend theatres” (224). The theater is at once a spur to extravagance and even theft, and a waste of time that might be spent improving oneself. At the Newsboys’ Lodge in Mark, the Match Boy, there is a banking device in which the boys deposit their daily earnings in a numbered slit, out of which they may withdraw their savings only one a month, thereby making it difficult for them to “squander” their money on “gambling, cigars, and theatre-going” (293). Alger, one assumes, aimed to have a similar restraining effect on the theatrical urges of his young readers. In the Life of Forrest, a similar stern warning against the temptations of the stage appears. The fourteen-year-old Edwin (the same age as Ragged Dick when his story begins) has a “situation” in a ship-chandlery store, but he can’t keep his head on business and out of the stage lights. His employer says “to him one day, with a shake of his wiseacre head, ‘Ah, boy, this theatrical infatuation will be your ruin! The way to thrive is to be attentive to trade. Did you ever know a play-actor to get rich?’” But in this rags-toriches narrative, the employer’s counsel, so close to the advice that Dick eagerly follows, is mocked by the biographer as the “chill preaching of the shop,” “utterly ineffectual on the strong imaginative bent and passionate ambition it encountered” (63–64). How can this about-face—calling his own usual advice “chill preaching”—be reconciled? It might in part be accounted to Alger’s hack willingness to please his own employer; the biography, after all, had been commissioned by Forrest himself. And it might be argued as well that this is the voice of his cousin William, who after all is the credited author; this passage, however, comes in one of the biographical sections of the book that Scharnhorst assigns to Horatio, a verdict that on style alone seems a correct one. The disjunction can be better explained by understanding how the Algers’ vision of the theater differed from the sort of Bowery entertainments that Ragged Dick and his fellow boys of the street were likely to attend. Dick is drawn to the “excitin’” sensations of the Old Bowery and the attractions of Barnum’s Museum: as he regales a friend with the thrills of the “Demon of the Danube,” “Oh, it was bully seein’ ‘em roll round the stage, cuttin’ and slashin’ at each other,” and he looks forward to seeing “the bearded lady, the

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eight-foot giant, the two-foot dwarf, and the other curiosities, too numerous to mention” at Barnum’s (67, 54). The theater of Forrest, on the other hand, according to his biographers, is the home not of sensation and curiosity, but of the “striking moral lessons” afforded by portrayals of the ideal. The Algers’ avowed aim is “to show what are the elements of good and bad acting both in earnest and in fiction” (23). To them the theater is “a moving and illuminated epitome of mankind. It is a condensed and living picture of the ideal world within the real world” (19). If the theater is generally condemned as a den of falsehood and malign distraction, the Algers turn the tables to argue that such traits are more likely found in the society outside the theater walls, and that it is in the painted performances of the stage, at least those of artists such as Forrest, that the deceptive and fragmented customs of usual society are revealed in their true nature and refined into universal and beneficial ideals: The business of most persons seems to be rather to conceal and hold back, to falsify and distort their inner states, than to reveal and impart them. Their arts are disguise, imposture, and deception, rather than sincerity, sympathy, and frankness. But the practical science of the drama puts all the secrets in our power, and enables us to add to our own inner world or conscious personal kosmos the related inner worlds of others, almost without hindrance or limit. (89) While Ragged Dick and his fellow boys were warned away from the lowly entertainments available to them, the perhaps more refined readers of the biography are encouraged to appreciate a theater that teaches the same qualities of “sincerity, sympathy, and frankness” that Dick learns to cultivate. It is as if the Algers are describing, not the entertainments of the Bowery from which Dick weans himself, but the stories of which he is the hero, the “practical” and ideal dramas of the Ragged Dick series. The Algers lay the groundwork for their argument by claiming that the arts of imitation and counterfeit are natural rather than artificial ones, and that Forrest in particular was, both in his private and his public lives, a natural, sincere, industrious man, according to the free labor ideals. Even the “lower animals,” they say, are natural mimics of each other—“[s]eeing in another creature the signals of a certain state…they interpret the signals accordingly, and enter in to the same state themselves by sympathy”—and all animals are capable of usefully counterfeiting behavior, by “playing ‘possum’” or imitating the calls of their prey (78–79). The mark of the civilized human is to take this natural ability to mimic and direct it toward the “imitative reproduction of superior types of human character”; the advances of civilization, in other words, are disseminated by imitating those who are the most advanced and civilized (82). What makes this imitation so effective, and by extension what founds their “practical science of the drama,” is what Karen Halttunen has termed the “sentimental typology of conduct,” and what, in terms closer to those I have been using, might equally be called the theory of natural earnestness: the necessary correspondence between inner feelings and outer manifestations (40). The gestures and signs you can see, according to the Algers’ “natural law of expression,” directly indicate the drives and thoughts that you cannot see (463). “Creatures who are made alike,” they argue, “have the same inner states of consciousness

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when they are under the same outer conditions. They also reveal these inner states by the same outer signs, namely, attitudes, movements, colors, cries, nervous relaxations or contractions” (78). Not only are these outer signs reliable indicators of their corresponding inner states, but they can even cause those inner states to arise, and this is the key to the process of sympathetic imitation. By imitating the facial expressions, for instance, or the “nervous relaxations and contractions” of another, one also comes to feel what that other is feeling. 7 This correspondence between inner and outer states is, they say, both natural and consistent with the free labor ideals of frankness and sincerity that Forrest himself embodied. For while Forrest was an accomplished mimic, the Algers emphasize, his imitative skills never threatened the integrity and honesty of his true identity. “He was standing refutation of the common prejudice against actors,” they write, “that simulating so many fictitious traits they gradually cease to have genuine ones of their own, and become mere lay figures ready for every chance dress. If any man ever was true to his own fixed type, Forrest was” (21). Inside the theater and outside of it, “[f]or the elaborate forms and conventionalities of the polite world he had a rooted repugnance. He wanted to be free and downright in honest speech and demeanor, making his outer manifestations correspond exactly with his inner states” (115). And this integrity to his own self is, in turn, at the heart of his superior acting style and what separates him from the “mechanical and “artificial” conventions of his lessers: Boldly rejecting the mechanical traditions of the stage, shaking off the artificial trammels of the established schools of his profession, he looked directly into his own mind and heart and directly forth upon nature, and, summoning up the passionate energies of his soul, struck out a style of acting which was powerful in its personal sincerity and truth, original in its main features, and, above all, democratic and American in its originality. (44) And Forrest’s direct self-presentation is not the only “democratic and American” feature he shares with the free-labor ideal embodied by Alger’s boy heroes and by such selfmade mid-century figures as Douglass and Lincoln. Forrest’s “word was as good as his bond,” they fondly recount, and he “toiled in the open ways of self-denial and industry to build his name and position,” having been a “penniless boy, making his money not by easy speculations which bring a fortune in a day, but by hard personal labor” (21, 27). According to the Algers’ system of imitation, this “original,” ideal character can be transmitted by the mimic arts of the theater. To copy from such an original is not merely to repeat, slavishly and mechanically, his gestures and his words, for in mirroring his outer figure, one mirrors and internalizes his independent, original nature. This process of imitation even has a sort of Lamarckian power to span generations with its influence: Not only did the magnetizing signs of [Forrest’s] power so work upon hundreds of men all over the land that he was imitated by them, his habitudes of bearing and voice copied and transmitted, but they also wrought more deeply still on more sensitive imaginations, producing reactions there to be transmitted thence upon their offspring and perpetuate his traits in future generations. (26)

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The Algers even hope, Forrest having “unbosomed himself to [them] without reserve,” that their own biography can perform the same transmittive role. It must be the notoriously verbose William who records his grand desire that each copy of the book will perpetuate a reflex Forrest to repeat in literature on succeeding generations what he did so effectively in life on his contemporaries; namely, strike the elemental chords of human nature till they vibrate with intense sympathy to sublimer degrees than their own of the great virtues of manly sincerity, heroism, honor, domestic love, friendship, patriotism, and liberty, which he illustrated in his chief parts. (20) The great value of an actor such as Forrest is that through the sheer range of his heartfelt mimicry, he can single-handedly expand the range of “unlimited sympathetic fellowships” in his audience through the “varied practice of reason, imagination, and sympathy in assuming inner states and their outer signs,” “the most effective culture and drill there is for freeing human nature from the slavery of routine” (93). The danger of this powerful imitative process, however, is that, rather than witnessing and internalizing the good ideals carried in this “reflex Forrest,” one might instead take on bad examples and habits. Forrest himself was loath to transmit such malign behavior—the Algers note that “he disliked to impersonate essentially bad or ignoble characters”—both for the ill effect it could have on his audience and for what it might do to himself (259). According to the Algers’ laws of transmission, vision leads directly to imitation, which then naturally leads to inculcation, of bad traits as well as good. The stage wields such great power because “when we see the sign of any state in another we at once enter into that state ourselves.” Accordingly, “[e]verything injurious, repulsive, or petty, pains, lessens, and lowers us. The signs of such states therefore are to be withheld.” And for the actor as well, both on the stage and off, to copy the outer manifestations of evil carries with it the danger of becoming evil oneself. Even for the strongest who manage to resist the translation of bad manners into bad lives, such resistance dissipates energy that would be better spent following good examples: “all such acts as biting the nails or lips, taking snuff, smoking a cigar, talking of things destitute of interest save to the vanity of the talker,” they write, can “inflict a severe nervous waste on the sensibility that refuses to be degraded by obeying their signals” (667–668). It was within such an anxious atmosphere of virtually transparent influence that Horatio wrote his practical guides for young boys. As Halttunen has noted about the midcentury sentimental advice culture out of which Alger’s books (and the Algers’ biography) were produced, “influence was believed to be the power by which any person’s character affected the characters of others, for good as well as for evil” (4). And, as she describes, those advice manuals, like the Alger stories, were filled with the dangerous figures of confidence men, characters who would prey on the increasing presence of strangers and of detachable property in urban life to gain the trust of young, earnest newcomers and either influence them toward bad habits or separate them from whatever property they possessed. The Alger narrative path in particular can be seen as a search for good influence, via a process of separating good patrons from bad. Despite frequent characterizations of the Alger heroes as purely self-made and self-reliant, they

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are, as John Cawelti has pointed out, “rarely ‘alone and unaided,’” and instead are dependent for their success not only on avoiding the “grasping,” “tyrannical authority” of bad patrons, but on finding the benevolent hand up provided by a good patron (109, 113). The Alger territory is thickly populated by both of these sources of influence: by the often overwhelmingly generous authority figures, who usually welcome the hero into their business as well as into their family—or into their business as if it were a family— and by two types of bad patrons: some, often stepparents or surrogate parent figures, who baldly attempt to assert their overwhelming power over the hero, and others, usually strangers, who more subtly attempt to gain, and abuse, the trust of the hero. Unlike the former villains, who are quite forthright about their base designs, these latter strangers, confidence men (and women) whose entire role is to be something other than that which they appear to be, would seem to put the lie to those theories about the natural and necessary correspondence between outer appearance and inner essence. Halttunen characterizes the presence of the confidence man, in life and in these advice narratives, as indicative of a general crisis of identification in the new urban communities of strangers. She cites Lyn Lofland’s description of the pre-industrial city, where “strangers were coded largely on the basis of personal appearance,” and argues that in mid-nineteenth-century America, due to the absence of sartorial regulation and the increases in mobility and standardization of manners, such identification was becoming “almost impossible” (36–37). The Algers explain, and combat, this crisis in the laws of natural earnestness in a number of ways. In the Forrest biography, they qualify their “natural law of expression” by saying that such laws are “consistent in an honest and earnest character, incoherent only in a discordant or hypocritical character” (463). In other words, a disjunction between inner and outer is in fact possible; the “hypocritical” confidence man is not so much an impossible being as an unnatural one. This would explain why the authors take such pains to establish that Forrest is an earnest man whose manners transparently reveal his self, when such a transparency would seem to be inevitable according to their “natural laws.” For those laws, it turns out, are “natural” not so much in the sense that they are necessary or unavoidable (although the Algers often imply that they are), but in the sense that the “natural” is the ideal, the way things ought to be, and the way things are in a unified, universal character such as Forrest. The way that Horatio confronts the problem of the confidence man in his stories, however, is to claim that there really is no disjunction at all, because confidence men are in fact readily identifiable, at least by skilled observers such as his heroes, their patrons, and his own narrative eye. Far from being the sort of infinite funhouse of false fronts and illusions that is Melville’s riverboat in The Confidence-Man, Alger’s narratives, while certainly full of confidence men of various kinds, provide easily read tags by which the charlatans can be identified. Alger’s system of identification depends in particular on two methods by which character can be discerned: by the evidence of the body and the use of money. The first method, reading the physical signs of virtue on the body, and particularly the face, of the subject, is the simplest. This identification is most easily made by the narrator himself, who immediately on the introduction of a character deflates any suspense about that character’s intentions. To take the most familiar example, and one repeated almost without fail upon the introduction of his heroes throughout his stories, there is our first view of Ragged Dick. While the first terms used to describe Dick

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are “slowly” and “stupidly,” and while the porter who rustles him awake at the opening of the story dismisses him as a lazy “vagabond,” the narrator is quick to assure us that this dirty and tattered boy is more virtuous and promising than he appears to be. Or rather that, on closer look, his appearance is more virtuous than it had originally appeared to be. For “in spite of his dirt and rags there was something about Dick that was attractive. It was easy to see that if he had been clean and well dressed he would have been decidedly good-looking. Some of his companions were sly, and their faces inspired distrust; but Dick had a frank, straight-forward manner that made him a favorite” (40). Dick’s virtue, in other words, is not really hidden under a false appearance at all. Even without the narrator’s help it should be “easy to see” that Dick looks, in both senses of the word, good. And this example should make clear that being “good-looking” is a function not of ones dress but of ones nature and ones body. The narrator does not say that “if he had been clean and well dressed it would have been easy to see” that he was good-looking, but rather that even though he is not clean and well dressed his attractiveness is still easily identified. This priority of bodily appear ance over dress is shown as well in the talismanic role that the new suit plays in Dick’s stories as it does in so many others. Dick receives two new suits from patrons in the course of Ragged Dick, one from Mr. Whitney early in the proceedings and one at the book’s climax from Mr. Rockwell, who will remain his patron, and then his partner, in the books to follow. Given the importance of the suits as signs of respectability, one might think that dress is as reliable a measure of worth as bodily appearance. But, as the narrators first description of Dick implies, the dress is secondary to the body. Mr. Whitney, for example, only gives Dick the suit after he has already discerned, through his dirt and rags, his virtuous nature. “[H]e looks honest,” he tells his son, for whom he has chosen Dick as a guide to the city. “He has an open face, and I think can be depended upon.” Only when his less discerning son laments that Dick is “so ragged and dirty,” does Whitney suggest outfitting Dick in one of his son’s more gentlemanly suits. He is given the clothes, in other words, not so that they might change him, but because they suit his apparent virtue. Similarly, when Dick receives a suit from Mr. Rockwell as a reward for rescuing his drowning son, the suit is less a transformation than a confirmation of an already-discerned quality. That second suit, while it is the “best he had ever worn,” “fitted him as well as if it had been made expressly for him” (213). The clothes match the boy, rather than making him. This is not to say that everybody can read these bodily signs. When Dick gets his first new suit, his fellow bootblack Johnny Nolan considers him “so transformed in dress that it was difficult to be sure of his identity,” and even after Dick introduces himself Johnny cannot “quite make up his mind whether the neat-looking boy he had been talking with was really Ragged Dick” (60). Perhaps Johnny can’t recognize Dick’s promise because he has so little promise himself; he’s indolent, we are told, without “energy enough to succeed,” and Dick himself shakes his head and says, “That boy ain’t got no ambition…. I’m glad I aint [sic] like him” (48–49). In general, being able to read the inner identity that another’s outer image reveals is itself as much a sign of promise and virtue as having an appearance that honestly portrays one’s own self. Dick, like his patrons and like his narrator, not only is earnest himself, but his superior ability to read the inner states of others, makes everyone else around him earnest too, whether they want to be or not.

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Being good-looking, it seems, correlates with being good at looking. Conversely, it is often the confidence men themselves whose vision is faulty. Dick neatly characterizes the superiority of his vision to those he sees through when he says about one man who owns “a swindlin’ shop,” “That man’s a reg’lar cheat. He’s seen me before, but he don’t know me coz of my clothes” (64). The “cheat” is easily seen through, but can’t himself see the consistency of Dick’s character whether well or poorly dressed. Similarly, what might appear to be an incident of mistaken identity, in which Dick’s friend Frank is accused of stealing by a woman on a streetcar, is in fact a case of easy identification. Dick is amused and hardly threatened by the charge, and the rest of the bus agrees that its a pretty clear case: “the passengers rather sided with the boys. Appearances go a great ways, and Frank did not look like a thief.” His accuser responds with the typical anxieties about confidence men, claiming, “You can’t tell by looks…. They’re deceitful; villains are generally well-dressed,” but a “gentleman” on the bus skeptically tells her, “They don’t look to me as if they would steal.” 8 In fact, as the narrator told us as soon as the accusing woman first appeared, she is the one who is a con artist of sorts, trying, unsuccessfully, to disguise her true nature. She is described as “a middle-aged woman, or lady, as she probably called herself, whose sharp visage and thin lips did not seem to promise a very pleasant disposition” (92; emphasis added). And Dick of course agrees with the narrator’s discernment, refusing to call her a “lady” and even taking the narrator’s skepticism a step further by questioning her very womanhood: ‘You’re a nice female, you be!’ said Dick, ironically. ‘Don’t you dare to call me a female, sir,’ said the lady, furiously. ‘Why, you ain’t a man in disguise, be you?’ said Dick. (94) What is it that these sharp-sighted people see on these bodies? What sort of identifying marks are important in Alger’s system of surveillance? What they see might at first glance be divided in two: nature (the way a body is) and manners (the way a body chooses to act). But in the age of phrenology and physiognomy, the way a body is and what that body chooses to do were difficult to separate. Alger, like many of his contemporaries, accepted the physical determinism of those sciences; Scharnhorst even notes the appearance in one Alger book, Wait and Hope, of a professional phrenologist who claims, with the tacit approval of the narration, that “A phrenologist is never mistaken in character. Nature has stamped her impress upon each one of us, and declares unmistakably what we are” (Horatio 88). And physiognomy, the general science of discovering character by means of visible, physical signs, is, of course, entirely consistent with the Algers’ laws of natural expression, in which outer signs reliably correlate to inner states. With the influence of these sciences in mind, it is even easier to see that what is taken as a sign of a “frank, straight-forward manner” might be more natural than the term “manner,” in its usual, more artificial sense of “custom,” “fashion,” or “style” would imply, much as the clues that the “female” on the streetcar will not have “a very pleasant disposition” are the physical, and apparently unwilled, details of her “sharp visage and thin lips.” In the Algers’ case, this physical determinism often extends beyond the individual to the effects of ancestry. This would seem a counter-intuitive claim, since Alger’s world

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appears to be one in which, consistent with the avowed traditions of free-labor mobility, the orphan and the low-born are championed at the expense of the boy with the fine pedigree. And it is certainly true that in Ragged Dick’s case, his forebears are a negligible narrative presence, his parents having died or disappeared by the time he was three, and his helpful father figures are surrogates whose fatherly patronage he acquires not through hereditary right but by proven, or at least observed, merit. But what is striking as one reads deeper into the Alger canon is the frequency with which the stranger who patronizes an orphan hero does turn out to be that boy’s ancestor after all, making the reward that the hero traditionally comes into at the close of the proceedings nothing more than his due hereditary legacy, deprived from him by spurious heirs. In The Cash Boy (1875), for instance, a Mr. Wharton takes an interest in young Frank Fowler, the lowly, orphaned “cash boy” of the title. When Wharton’s nephew, his putative heir, accuses Frank of theft, he responds, “Such a boy as Frank is incapable of stealing…. His face is sufficient proof” (to which, in characteristic con-artist fashion, the nephew counters, “Appearances are deceitful”) (276). The “proof” in his face turns out to be, however, the glimmer of blood relations, for Frank is actually Mr. Wharton’s grandson and rightful heir. As Mr. Wharton exclaims when the hereditary bond is revealed, “Now I know why it was that I became so much attached to you. It was because of your resemblance to my son—it was the tie of kindred, though I did not believe it” (283). In the Forrest biography, the Algers are quite explicit about the importance of heredity, which they claim has been unduly neglected in an America understandably concerned with throwing off the chains that tied them to the Old World and its rigid class inheritances. While on one hand they celebrate Forrest as “one of those extraordinary men who seem to spring up rarely here and there, as if without ancestors,” they are nonetheless at pains to display his family coat of arms and assure that “He was of good descent.” “He who, in America,” they explain, “plumes himself on mere titular nobility of descent, may be a snob; but the science of genealogy, the tracing of historic lineages and transmitted family characteristics, deals with one of the keenest interests of the human heart, one of the profoundest elements in the destiny of man” (23, 32–33). The “law of heredity” is “at once the fixed fatality of nature and the free voice of God,” and ought to be turned to such avowedly eugenic purposes as ridding the race of “hopeless cripples, invalids, imbeciles, idlers, and criminals” by “the weeding out of the perishing and dangerous classes” (44–45, 47). That such an emphasis on breeding could extend to implicit racial divisions is clear from the first page of Horatio’s 1876 story Tony the Tramp. Fourteen-year-old Tony is walking along a road with the man who claims he is his uncle. “Between the two,” however, the text assures us, “there was not the slightest resemblance.” The man, on one hand, “was tall and dark-complexioned, with a sinister look which of itself excited distrust…. The first impression produced upon those who met him was that he was of gypsy blood, and the impression was a correct one.” On the other hand, “[t]hough browned by exposure to the sun and wind, it was easy to see that the boy was originally of light complexion…. His features were regular and strikingly handsome, though owing to the vagrant life he was compelled to lead, he was not able to pay that attention to cleanliness which he might have done if he had had a settled home.” When Tony complains about their way of life, “tramping round the country all the time,” his “uncle”

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responds by citing his own hereditary legacy, which he claims is Tony’s as well, despite the lack of resemblance that is so telling for the reader: “I’m a vagrant by nature…. I come of a roving stock. My mother and father before me were rovers, and I follow in their steps” (1–2). As it turns out, unsurprisingly, as foretold by the boy’s “easy to see” features, Tony the Tramp is not only not of gypsy blood, he is a legitimate aristocrat, “the Hon. Anthony Middleton, of Middleton Hall,” deprived of and finally reunited with his rightful Old World estate (250). This narrative determinism, by which a character’s outcome is only a confirmation of the physical clues first used to describe him or her, makes any other measures of character secondary. But there is a second important system of identification in the Alger stories, and it circulates around the quantifiable but counterfeitable figure of money. Many recent commentators, in response to the common portrayal of Alger as an apologist for capitalist accumulation, have emphasized instead his concern with character and virtue rather than money and wealth. And in some respects, money, particularly the large rewards usually paid to the hero at the story’s end, functions much like the new suit he often receives at the same time: possessing the money is not what makes the character good; it is merely a confirmation of his already established virtue. For Scharnhorst, for instance, “this moneymaking,” was not so much an indication of a life of eager accumulation to follow, but rather “was symbolic of his initiation into adulthood and was a badge of his innate moral goodness” (Horatio 50). And it is certainly true that, in the early stories at least, the hero’s rewards hardly approach the abundance of riches that would imply that the money is desirable in and of itself, beyond what is necessary for survival and respectability. As Cawelti puts it, “Moderate economic security would best summarize the pecuniary achievements of the typical Alger hero” (110). That phrase “economic security,” in its wider meanings, however, points toward a better way of thinking about the role of money in the Alger moral economy. For money certainly does play a central role in his system: the stories are full of the arithmetic of budgets, salaries, rents, prices, and savings, and often the crucial transactions between characters are exchanges of money, either good money or bad. Mapping the line of the plot would generally produce a graph nearly identical to the line of the hero’s bank account. But if Alger is more interested in respectability and virtue than in wealth, what does money represent in his narratives? More than anything, money stands as the greatest test of respectability and virtue. The possession of great wealth may be a somewhat unreliable indicator of virtue, but what one does with money—particularly money not one’s own—is perhaps the best indicator of all (beyond, of course, the tell-tale look on ones face). And the “security” promised by money, or by the virtuous handling of money, is not just ones own economic survival, but the security of an entire community. Precisely because it carries with it the threat of counterfeit and manipulation, money can serve as a test of one’s willingness to act earnestly in the face of the temptations to falsify. Many readers have noted that Alger’s stories, despite being written during a period of rapid industrialization, have very little to do with industry as it was coming to be known in the second half of the nineteenth century. As Nackenhoff describes it, “Alger’s urban world is full of small shopkeepers, merchants, clerks, errand boys; ‘businessmen’ are bankers or merchants and ‘capitalists’ are usually lenders and hoarders. There are many mercantile establishments and counting houses. Rarely do the businessmen described

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appear to employ manual laborers” (84). This certainly holds true in the Ragged Dick stories, in which Mr. Rockwell hires Dick as a clerk in his “counting-room,” and in which Dick’s young friends Henry Fosdick and Mark Menton are employed by merchants (214). This sort of labor reaches its purest form in the entry-level job of the “cash boy,” which young Frank Fowler becomes in the book by that name, and which Dick and his friend Frank think would be a “very agreeable employment” (66). There is a certain financial abstraction to the work that goes on in the books: once the boys make it off the streets, they enter businesses whose sole activities seem to be the shepherding, exchanging, and counting of money. As the Custom-House, with its accretions of history, stands for Hawthorne as a central institutional image, so stands the counting house for Alger. But the work of the counting house seems less that of counting—of the miserly accretion and accumulation implied by the old nursery rhyme, “The king was in his counting house, counting out his money”—than that of accounting, of the double-entry ledgered bookkeeping that checks that all bills have been paid and transactions traced. If Alger’s economy elides the factories and mechanized labor that were producing railroad cars, steel, and sewing machines, what were his businesses producing? What does a counting house make? What it produces, one might say, is confidence. The counting houses are the regulatory agencies for the entire ideal community of trust that is Alger’s gentlemanly economy. Harry Braverman has noted the increasing necessity in expanding capitalism for entire industries “devoted to the accounting of value.” “As capitalism becomes more complex and develops into its monopoly stage,” he explains, “the accounting of value becomes infinitely more complex. The number of intermediaries between production and consumption increases, so that the value accounting of the single commodity is duplicated through a number of stages” (302). For Braverman this mammoth labor of accounting is indicative of the mistrust that businesspeople hold for each other: “The normal presumption in intercorporate dealings is not one of honesty but of dishonesty; unverified records are not considered adequate or trustworthy.” This endemic dishonesty can only be policed by the system of double-entry bookkeeping, in which “the entire movement of the values that pass through the enterprise is reflected in an interlocking set of accounts which check and verify each other. The falsification of only one single account will usually lead directly to the falsifier” (303). Certainly the centrality of this accounting to Alger’s world, as well as the repeated appearances of counterfeit money and financial con artists, speaks to some anxiety about the possible abuse of money’s alienated nature, but in his system of virtues easy identification, the processes of accounting seem rather to be one more happy opportunity to separate the good from the bad, the faithful from the faithless. That “interlocking set of accounts,” along with the possibility for fraud that necessitates it, provides the means by which the virtue of an unknown employee or economic partner can be easily established. As Frank Fowler’s friend tells him when he worries that a “cashier might steal if he wanted to,” “No, or his accounts would not come straight. The proprietor knows what the sales have been by the returns of the different salesmen, and any deficiency would be discovered at once” (Cash 72). One patron, Mr. Greyson (as it turns out, Dick’s future father-in-law), who is at first incapable of seeing Dick’s virtue through his rags, uses a small monetary transaction as a test of the bootblack’s trustworthiness. Having nothing smaller than a quarter to pay for

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his ten-cent shine, he tells Dick to bring the change to his office later in the day, thinking to himself, “I wonder whether the little scamp will prove honest. If he does, I’ll give him my custom regularly. If he don’t, as is most likely, I shan’t mind the loss of fifteen cents” (43). Dick, of course, does prove honest, and gets invited by Greyson to Sunday school and then into the intimacies of his home (and eventually, by that means, into his family). Many such exchanges in the stories involve the presence, or possibility, of counterfeit money, in what was an era of non-standard bills issued by a variety of banks. In a blandly similar scenario just a few pages later, another of Dick’s customers has nothing smaller than a two-dollar bill, so he sends Dick to a store to have it changed. The clerk there, though, tells Dick, “you young vagabond…. You’ve offered me a counterfeit bill,” and refuses to give him the bill or any change in return. When Dick drags his customer to the shop to support him, their argument attracts the attention of the clerks employer, and it is revealed that the clerks claims that the bill was counterfeit were themselves counterfeit—the clerk was bad, not the bill—and his employer, seeing the results of this test of the clerks character, tells him, “I shall not give you a chance to make such another mistake in my employ” (50–53). The threat of counterfeit here is neatly turned into the means by which a congenitally dishonest employee can be revealed in his true nature. Rather than the wedge by which an intimate, trusting community might be made impersonal, money is the means by which that threat of impersonality is constantly challenged. It is the point of entry into (and exit from) the community of trust. This community of trust interestingly has its reverse reflection in the Madison Club, a private organization for young swells that the snob Roswell Crawford eagerly joins in Mark, the Match Boy. The same pal who encouraged Roswell to abuse the trust of his clerkship in order to take them to the theater follows that scheme by proposing him for membership in the Madison Club, whose stiff membership fee causes Roswell to swipe even more from the till (and ultimately to be found out and dismissed). While Roswell is assured by one of the members of the club that, “Oh, yes, we are very exclusive. We are not willing to admit anybody and everybody,” the first matter of business at his initial meeting is to vote on the acceptance of another new member, the sole criterion of which seems to be whether he has enough money for the initiation fee. “Has he got five dollars?” asks one member, and when his patron in the club assures them that “His father is a rich man,” another member says, “That’s the principal thing,” and his membership is quickly approved, after which the “gentlemen” of the club quickly turn to drinking, gambling, and fighting (and to mocking Roswell’s own aspirations to gentlemanhood) (347, 349). Poor Roswell has obviously misinterpreted the route by which one can use money to join the respectable world. By misappropriating his employer’s funds in order to join this club for which his ability to pay is the only criterion for entry, he has barred himself from the very aristocracy of virtue that he most wanted to join. Significantly, the discovery of Roswell’s crime turns once again on the presence of a counterfeit bill. The theft comes immediately to light because the bill Roswell stole was being saved by his employer, who had noticed that it was a “skilfully executed counterfeit,” so that he might return it to the man who originally spent it in the store. At the very moment that Roswell is attempting to pin the crime on young Mark, the former match boy of the book’s title, the secretary of his club comes into the store to complain that Roswell had paid his membership fee with that same bad bill. The danger here is not

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so much that counterfeit bills might circulate—the “regular customer” who had originally used the bill in the shop easily assures the proprietor, “I know where I took it, and will give you a good bill in exchange for it”—but rather that the employer’s trust might be abused (356). The presence of the counterfeit, in fact, makes the whole series of transactions far more personal and traceable than they otherwise might have been. Rather than cloaking the transactions in an impersonal anonymity, as one might assume with such an alienable, abstracted medium as paper money (and as would be more likely the case with the standardized, difficult-to-counterfeit bills we are familiar with today), the counterfeit instead reveals the web of trust and relation that the exchanges have created and upon which they depend. The shopkeeper knows who used the bill with him, that man knows where he got the bill before that, and the secretary of the club remembers where he got the bill as well. Like the “interlocking set of accounts” that “lead directly to the falsifier” in double-entry bookkeeping, the links of trust made by the bad bill’s transactions leave unmistakable traces pointing to the one person who has abused that trust. The familiar, personal relationship between the shopkeeper and his regular customer, on the other hand, overwhelms any threat that a single counterfeit bill might present. The customer can assure that he’ll “give a good bill in exchange,” and he even leaves the store before the question is resolved, casually promising, “Well, when you find it, I will make it right,” implying his reliable, recognizable presence as a customer (356). These personal assurances speak to the existence of an informal community of trust between gentlemen, the very sort of community that Roswell might have hoped to find in the Madison Club. And the informality of those economic relationships, in the face of the impersonality threatened by the money economy, is an indicator of the sorts of relationships that Alger promotes between patrons and heroes, relationships that center too around exchanges of money. The exchanges between patron and hero are marked by trust, excess, and intimacy. If one type of such exchange is the one that takes place between Dick and Mr. Greyson, in which Greyson rewards Dick’s financial trustworthiness by giving him access to the intimate social spaces of his church and his home, another recurring type is the one that takes place at the end of Ragged Dick, which Dick begins by saving Mr. Rockwell’s young boy from drowning. Rockwell’s first response to Dick’s brave act is to tell him, “I owe you a debt I can never repay.” His gift of the new suit is accompanied as well by a note that says, “Please accept this outfit of clothes as the first instalment of a debt which I can never repay.” Rockwell rewards Dick as well with a position in his firm, at a salary that both he and Dick agree is “more than [he] can earn” at that point, and Dick spends a good portion of the following book, Fame and Fortune, receiving thankful gifts from the Rockwell family. Dick’s rescue of his patrons son has created an intimate bond of gratitude between them that exceeds the impersonal valuations of the money economy, a bond that is closer to the ties of family than to the more alienable ties that a purely monetary—and therefore repayable—debt would represent. Dick, of course, responds to the Rockwells’ gratitude with his own grateful loyalty, promising his patron, “I’ll try to serve you so faithfully, sir, that you won’t repent having taken me into your service” (210–14). Both this relation of familial gratitude and the informal relations of personal trust between the shopkeeper and his customer are varieties of the sorts of intimate economies that Frederick Douglass spends

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his Life and Times first escaping and then cultivating. In Alger’s case, an ambivalence like Douglass’s toward the intimate economy is harder to find. For Alger, the financial rewards at the end of his narratives are not valuable so much for the independence they represent, as mobile, alienable capital, but for the dependence they stand for. The excess of the reward implies the excess of gratitude that the patron holds for the hero (and that the hero in return will hold for the patron), bonding them in a relation much like that between a father and a son.

BEN BRUCE AND THE THREAT OF COMMODIFIED WRITING Alger’s economy, then, seems to represent a victory (or the hope for a victory) of the inalienable—the physical determinism of identity and heredity, the easy legibility of characters’ true nature, and the unpayable debts of gratitude—over the threats of alienation inherent in the urban money economy. But what about the place of Alger’s own work—famed even in its time for its reliance on formula, and churned out at the rate of roughly three book-length stories per year during his writing career—within that same economy? In part it might be said that his books attempt to extend the patronage of his heroes’ benefactors outside the walls of his narrative. Certainly Alger saw himself in this light, both as a patron himself, identifying the hidden virtue behind the dirty faces of certain street boys, and as one who encouraged the patronage of others. As he wrote in the preface to Ragged Dick’s appearance in book form, “The author hopes that, while the volumes in this series may prove interesting as stories, they may also have the effect of enlisting the sympathies of his readers in behalf of the unfortunate children whose life is described” (Scharnhorst, Horatio 34). The books, then, were to have a transmissive effect similar to that of the theater in the Alger cousins’ analysis: they would both extend the sympathetic range of his adult audience and his more prosperous young readers and at the same time provide, through their earnest, ideal heroes, imitative models for his young readers, rich and poor. Even his reliance on formula might be claimed as both a function of his heroes’ ideal nature (they may all act alike and be described alike, but only because the virtuous road is a narrow one), and an aid to the imitation of their model. Nackenoff, citing Jane Tompkins’s resuscitation of the value of stereotypes, argues that Alger’s formula was, in that way, an educational tool: “Lessons in survival were available through ritual repetition…. (Re)readers could become quick studies, watching characters step into pitfalls they themselves have learned to identify” (55). But it should not be ignored that Alger’s books (and Alger himself) were prey to the same market forces of alienation and commodification that his narratives claimed to transcend. And Nackenoff recognizes this as well, writing about authors of popular fiction, “Attempting to survive by their words, these authors were dependent upon publishers and audiences and would seek to please…. Dependence upon the market shaped literary output and popular fiction authorship itself” (208). Scharnhorst points out that even at the time of his greatest success, when he made a name for himself with the Ragged Dick series early in his career, “Alger remained financially insecure” (Horatio 34). In this respect, Alger’s reliance on formula can be seen, and usually has been seen, less as the adherence to a universal ideal than the sign of a hack writer driven by the

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ratcheted-up production schedule of the market in cheap fiction to repeat his early success and establish a recognizable authorial trademark. Reviewers at the time were fully aware that Alger walked a thin line between authorial reliability and machinic repetition. One reader of The Five Hundred Dollar Check (1890) (an apt title for a commodified book) sees Alger’s tired formula as a threat to his authorial name: “There is nothing new about the story…except the cover and the paper and possibly the pictures…. It is such an obvious, worn-out theme for a story that we wonder any author with the instinct of literary self-preservation should employ it.” Another reviewer of the same book, however, while agreeing that it “does not differ in style or construction from the many that have preceded,” laments that Alger’s name is in no danger of dying out as a result: “Inquiry at the public library always brings out the statement that no juvenile books are more persistently read than those of Horatio Alger” (Scharnhorst and Bales, Horatio 39). What might reconcile these two apparently opposed assessments of Alger’s authorship is the difference between the literary and the popular. The second reviewer would likely agree with the first that while Alger’s self-preservation as a widely read author is not threatened by his worn-out formula, his “literary self-preservation” is. In other words, he may continue to accrue readers who know what to expect from his brandname product, but he will also continue to get bad reviews from “literary” people (the second review, in fact, appeared in a periodical called Literary World) such as them. One might not expect Alger to mind such a characterization, since in a letter years before he had explained his own career path as a decision made along similar lines. He writes there that he consciously gave up low-paying, high-prestige literary writing for his “humbler” but better-paid books for boys, saying that he had been compelled “to forsake the higher walks of literature, and devote myself to an humbler department which would pay me better. The decision was made when for an article in the North American Review on which I had expended considerable labor I was paid at the rate of a dollar per printed page. From that time I leased my pen to the boys” (Scharnhorst, Horatio 28). Having “leased [his] pen to the boys,” he might have, despite his aspirations for less humble work, come to be content with being read by them and ignored by those more “literary.” In a letter written over twenty years after the one just quoted, he defended his formula by referring to that popularity: “As to the notice of my own books there is undoubtedly a family resemblance between them but I find this does not seem an objection to readers” (Scharnhorst and Bales, Horatio 42–43). But Alger’s reputation as being formulaic and therefore subliterary came to threaten even his popularity among those boys who didn’t read the highbrow reviews. Beginning in the mid-1870s, an outcry arose among ministers, librarians, and other moral arbiters about the bad influence on young readers wielded by sensationalist dime novels. While the Alger stories, particularly those he had published up to that point, could hardly be called lurid and likely to lead to crime, they were nonetheless caught in the wide net tossed out by reformers, and he was often even cited by name as an exemplar of the authors who should not be read. The campaign focused on removing the offending volumes from libraries, the very seat of Alger’s popularity according to the Literary World reviewer, and by 1894, according to Scharnhorst and Bales, over a third of libraries surveyed had either removed Alger from their shelves or had a policy of not replacing his books when they wore out or disappeared (Lost 120).

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Why were Alger’s books so offensive? Given that he was cited by name in protests about “trashy literature” as early as 1877, one year before he attempted to expand his range toward more sensational topics by writing Joe’s Luck, his first “adventure” story set in the West, it is difficult to claim that his stories were the sort of “blood-curdling” dramas that the reformers tended to decry. When the Rev. James Freeman Clarke, in a speech commemorating the opening of a Boston library in 1877, warned about the “abundance of trashy literature with which we are flooded at the present day,” the description he gives of the “truly valuable reading” that ought to replace that trash seems not far from Alger’s own project of moral improvement through ideals: “the books that lasted, the great books, were those that contained noble characters and ideas, and that lifted us up” (“Public”). Nevertheless, in a letter to the editor the following day that commended Clarke’s message, Alger (and his patron and fellow boy-chronicler William T. Adams, who wrote as Oliver Optic) gets lumped right in with the purveyors of blood and guts: Is it possible that any benefit whatever can arise from the perusal of such works as ‘The Beautiful Fiend,’ ‘The Curse of Clifton,’ ‘Cruel as the Grave,’ The Curse of Gold,’ ‘Mabel’s Mistake,’ Aurora Floyd,’ ‘Felina de Chalkbure, the Female Fiend,’ The Horrors of Paris,’ or from the endless reams of such drivel poured forth by Horatio Alger, Jr., and Oliver Optic! (“Literary Rubbish”) 9 For these reformers, it appears that drivel is equivalent to blood in its corrupting influence on the young, which leads to the conclusion that the most offensive word in the tarring phrase “sensationalist dime novels” may not have been “sensationalist” but “dime.” In other words, Alger’s novels are offensive because they are seen as utter commodities, pure products of the market, corrupting not because of their content but because of their machinic, repetitive nature. Any novel available for the tiny price of ten cents, by this thinking, must be the product of a proletarianized (and demoralized, in both senses of the word) author, who is driven to “pour” out “endless reams” of product just to earn a living, as indeed Alger was. Not surprisingly, Alger attempted to distance himself from his alleged “sensationalist” peers. In a rare public statement on his own work, he warned, much like Clarke, that “Sensational stories, such as are found in the dime and half-dime libraries, do much harm, and are very objectionable. Many a boy has been tempted to crime by them” (“Writing” 37). And in his late novel, Ben Bruce, written in 1892, at the peak of the period shortly before his death during which Alger, according to Scharnhorst, “ground out dozens of juvenile novels with only slight regard for their quality,” he brought the controversy against sensationalism into his own narrative world by introducing a character, Sylvanus Snodgrasse, who writes lurid serial “romances” and “mysteries,” such as “The Ragpicker’s Curse,” for a weekly newspaper, barely making enough to keep his room in the boarding house he shares with the newsboy Ben (Horatio 44). Ben Bruce, in fact, is a useful text in a number of ways for reading the later Alger, combining as it does his typical interests in earnest and natural character, intimate patronage, and the dangers of counterfeit with what might seem to be less characteristic elements of sensation and mystery, the economy of publicity and fame rather than of

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intimate recognition, and the condescended-to but self-reflective character of the hack writer Snodgrasse. If, as Nackenoff argues, Alger’s stories are attempts to “mediate [the] disorder, uncertainty and transition” of the Gilded Age by translating the traditional verities of gratitude and natural virtue into the “currency of the day,” Ben Bruce is a sign of what a difficult stretch that translation could require, particularly as the volatile national economy continued to expand through panics and bubbles, and as Alger’s own career became even more vulnerable to the vagaries of popular taste and the competitive pressure of creating a commodified product for a glutted market (267, 9). The natural virtue of the novel’s hero Ben is trotted out to excuse his participation in a lucrative and spectacularly fraudulent impersonation, and both Ben and his friend Snodgrasse are subject to the wild excesses and contractions of the impersonal market, in a story whose elements of mystery and improbable success come to resemble the very “romances” that Snodgrasse turns out by the pound. The first sections of Ben’s story are standard Alger fare: Ben is a young man whose miserly stepfather demands that he leave school to apprentice at the local shoemaker. Ben’s resistance to this notion is framed according to the traditions of free-labor selfmaking: like his namesake Franklin he runs out on his apprenticeship for an unknown city, and his “fugitive” flight is presented in terms that recall the conventions of the slave narrative. In fact, one of his exchanges with his stepfather, in which the stepfather trades a tiny monetary gift for what he expects will be the hero’s gratitude, resembles Douglass’s exchange with Hugh Auld down to the denomination of the coin. After Ben has valiantly saved his stepfather’s stash of gold coins, the miser attempts to make some acknowledgment of Ben’s “services”: [H]e drew a twenty-five cent piece from his pocket and handed it to Ben with the remark: ‘Benjamin, you have behaved very well. Here is a quarter for you. Be keerful not to spend it foolishly.’ Ben was considerably surprised. It was the first gift he ever remembered to have received from his stepfather, and he hardly knew whether to be amused or grateful. If he accepted it, he knew that Mr. Winter would feel that he had squared up his obligations. But Ben preferred to leave the matter open. So he quickly decided not to accept the money. (42) As with Auld and Douglass, the stepfather’s attempt to settle his debt to Ben is an implicit acknowledgment of Ben’s right to determine his own labor (and to receive more than the mere quarter in return). Ben, of course, chooses to be “amused” rather than “grateful,” refusing to participate in the stepfather’s patronizing exchange. In typical Alger style too, Ben on his arrival in Boston immediately manages to rescue a younger boy from the jaws of a mad dog, and so earns from the boy’s prosperous father a pat on the back and a new suit. What seems atypical however, is his next reward: directly after purchasing the suit, Ben is recognized by a reporter from the Boston Globe who wants to write up Ben’s exploits and take his photograph “to reproduce in our evening edition” (67). Already it is clear that a virtuous act has a much broader currency in this economy; rather than merely bringing him to the notice of a single patron, his

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newspaper photograph spreads his “bright, intelligent face” across the region by the end of the day (1). Similarly, Ben’s first success when he moves to New York comes not from his work as a newsboy, but from when he plays one before an audience of hundreds on the stage. After he fights off two rival newsboys who want to take over his territory, “a tall, well-dressed man, who had watched the fight with interest,” approaches him, buys more papers than he can use as a gesture of his good will, and asks if Ben would like to play the part of a newsboy in the play he has just written, “The Belle of the Bowery” (136). Realizing that acting as a newsboy pays far better than merely being one on the streets, Ben quits his job for the duration of the show’s run and finds himself an overnight success, once again measured not by the intimate embrace of a single patron but by the wide broadcast of his performance. Reviews in all the papers laud the promise of his portrayal, and Snodgrasse proclaims that Ben has “achieved fame at one bound” (156). Ben’s success is short-lived, however, and he returns from being in the newspapers to selling them, and from playing a newsboy to being one. But even this lowly position is dependent on the larger forces of publicity and fame; not his own fame, however, but the larger market in “news” and “events.” Soon after he returns to his street corners, “There came a dull time, so far as news was concerned, and Ben found that the sale of papers fell off” (168–69). Unlike Ragged Dick, who manages to put aside over a hundred dollars in savings while still a newsboy, Ben, faced with this depressed market, can no longer make enough each day to keep from eating into his savings from the theater (168–69). The market in news remains “unusually dull” until nearly all of his savings have been depleted. Just at that point, however, another well-dressed patron observes his work, buys a philanthropic excess of papers, and asks if he’s “a good actor” (179). In this case, however, his patron, a woman, is not a playwright in the traditional sense—she wants him instead “to play a part in a drama of real life” (180). She wants Ben to impersonate her son Edwin, who has recently died and—as we are told but Ben is not—on whose survival her substantial income depends. Were her son to be reported dead, she would lose the income to other heirs (including, we will find, a poor fellow newsboy who has an even harder time at the business than Ben does). Ben, as with his role on the stage, turns out to be remarkably well suited to playing the part of Edwin. His fine new clothes fit him “marvelously well,” and the subterfuge succeeds, allowing Ben’s adoptive mother to continue the lifestyle to which she is accustomed. His great-uncle, the man from whom the legacy flows, while registering a subconscious awareness that this boy may not be his nephew, nonetheless declares his satisfaction with him to his “mother”: “There is something very winning about your son, Maria. Even if there were no ties of blood I think I should like him” (209–11). Eventually, even when the mother dies and the charade is revealed, Ben is received by her family as if he were one of them after all, despite the fraud he half-knowingly perpetrated on them, and he is allowed to inherit his mother’s substantial wealth. When Basil Wentworth, one of the relatives who had been deprived of income by Ben’s impersonation, finally meets Ben, he considers that the fake Edwin is in fact much better than the real one and seems quite satisfied that the switch has been made! As he writes to the great-uncle, “The boy is a fine, manly fellow, and had no idea that he was being used to defeat the ends of justice. So far as I remember Edwin, this boy is much his superior, and I should be pleased to feel that he was a relative” (274).

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Ben’s success in this impersonation and in his short time on the stage can, of course, be easily explained within the Algers’ theories of natural acting. Ben is successful in portraying a newsboy in the theater because he is that newsboy in reality. And he can play a worthy heir so well (indeed even better than the boy whose identity he has taken) because is in fact deserving of all that comes to him. What might seem to be layers of artifice and even fraud are collapsed into a single earnest whole by Ben’s readily apparent virtue. But it must be said that such a collapse, which the novel’s outcome seems to warrant, does not smack as entirely legitimate. For Ben’s impersonation of the deceased Edwin is in fact an unjust fraud, of which he is only “innocent” through a combination of unfathomable naiveté and an incuriosity he thought he owed his benefactor. All that he asks her when she first enlists him is whether “any harm will come” of his acting, and all that he needs to hear her say in reply is that he “will be aiding the cause of justice” (180). He fails to ask further questions because he feels indebted to her for her generosity, for which he feels “sincerely grateful” (255). This gratitude, indeed, serves as a hindrance to his free, earnest acting. At one point when she is giving him a limited explanation of their charade, he thinks that “he would like to have asked why, but did not feel at liberty to do so” (199). This role, rather than being the free exercise of his natural gifts, is instead a constraint on his liberty. Unlike Dick, who easily sees through such frauds at every turn, Ben complacently (to take a favorite and negatively charged word of Alger’s) lets his patron’s largesse (and his own need) blind him to the deceit of which he is the agent. Given such a tale of counterfeit rewarded, one can understand why Alger might be roped in with the morally dangerous dime novelists, and his handling of the character of Sylvanus Snodgrasse shows both his attempt to distance himself from those compromised literary workers and his tacit acknowledgment of the similarity between his own work and the hack work that Snodgrasse grinds out. Snodgrasse is in some respects a familiar Alger type—the good-hearted but improvident friend, always wanting to borrow money from the hero and go to the theater, who rarely rises under his own steam from his position as a marginal worker. And Alger makes it quite clear from the outset that despite his delusions of fame, Snodgrasse is a very marginal literary worker. He can barely afford a room as small as Ben’s, which we already know is one of the tiniest in the house, and when he proudly tells Ben about his serial, “The Ragpicker’s Curse,” which is running in a weekly “literary” paper, Ben, despite his ignorance, is immediately able to separate that work from the truly literary: “Ben was not much of a judge of literature, but it didn’t seem to him that this title suggested a high order of literary merit” (90). The frantic pace at which Snodgrasse must labor to support himself is suggested by his claim that he wrote the forty-chapter serial in only four weeks. And their landlady’s confusion about the work that he does brings to the surface the anxious and precarious separation between his barely “creative” work and the commodified labor of purely machinic imitation: when Ben tells her that Snodgrasse writes stories, she says, “Is that what he does? I thought it was copying.” As the narrator mockingly reminds us, “Sylvanus Snodgrasse would have felt deeply hurt had he supposed that any one took him—a famous author—for a copyist” (112). The narrator’s implication is clear: since Snodgrasse is not actually a famous author, he may well be a copyist. One thing that Snodgrasse’s marginally literary existence shows is that the phrase “a famous author,” in Alger’s economy, is a redundancy. There is really no such thing as an

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author—at least a literary author, a non-copyist—who is not famous. An unknown author is, like Snodgrasse, an oxymoron and an inherent source of comedy, because the entire profession of authorship depends on being widely known. In this way, the literary economy is simply an extreme version of the publicity economy that has buffeted Ben throughout the novel. And one can even have many readers, as Snodgrasse surely does, and still be unknown in the important literary sense, as the condescension of Mr. Wilkins, who is himself called a “well-known dramatist” in the newspaper (155), to Ben’s mention of his “author” friend Snodgrasse shows: ‘I don’t think I know him.’ ‘He writes novelettes for the Weekly Bugle.’ ‘I am afraid I am not familiar with the authors who write for that publication. What is your friend’s best known story?’ ‘I think he prides himself most on “The Ragpicker’s Curse.”’ Mr. Wilkins smiled. ‘I suppose it is hardly in the style of Howells,’ he said. (141) To Mr. Wilkins’s literary ear, Snodgrasse’s “best known” story is both unknown— Wilkins hasn’t heard of it or its author—and utterly knowable—just by hearing its lurid title Wilkins can tell that it is “hardly” literature. And literature, in this case, is defined not by adjectives but by the name of an undeniably known and literary (and well-paid) author; Ben himself may “not [be] much of a judge of literature,” but one thing he does know is that “Howells makes a good deal of money by his novels” (91). An author without a name, on the other hand, has little value in the marketplace, as Alger makes perfectly clear in a lovely comic moment involving an unnamed “young lady…with a look of Bostonian culture” who attempts to pawn her “novel in manuscript” for a hundred dollars. The clerk, who “looked at her sharply as if questioning her sanity,” dismisses her by saying “We have no use for such articles” (123–24). Of course a pawnshop has no “use” for any of the items it pays for, except for their exchange value as collateral for loans, and were the novel by Howells, the clerk might have found a use for it after all. Without a name for herself, though, even if she does have the “look of Bostonian culture,” the young lady writer can expect no value to be placed on her work. But if Alger was attempting to distance himself from Snodgrasse’s anonymous literary labors, what sort of name did he have himself? For Nackenoff, Alger did manage to establish an author’s name of some value in the market. In an industry in which “authors were often treated as interchangeable by publishers” and many pen names “became the property not of a specific author but rather of the publisher,” Alger retained both a name that was known and the ownership of that name, as is shown by his ability to contract with another writer to complete his unfinished work after his death (213). But certainly Alger was no William Dean Howells either—real literary authors didn’t pour out streams of “drivel.” Like the poor lady in the pawn shop, Alger too may have had the “look of Bostonian culture”: a member of the class of 1852 at Harvard, he eagerly penned odes to “Fair Harvard” for alumni club events, and he savored his acquaintances with Longfellow and the elder Henry James. But James, Sr., saw Alger in much the same light in which the playwright Wilkins condescendingly sees Snodgrasse. After Alger met with James to

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discuss James’s old friend Edwin Forrest as part of his research for the biography, the elder James wrote to his novelist son, “Horatio Alger is writing a Life of Edwin Forrest, and I am afraid will give him a Bowery appreciation” (Scharnhorst and Bales, Lost 107). The Bowery is a long way from Harvard Square, and “Bowery appreciations” are exactly what one might expect to see in such cheap weeklies as Snodgrasse writes for. In one sense, then, Snodgrasse can be seen as a self-reflective representation of Alger purely on the external evidence of Alger’s position in the literary marketplace. If on one hand Alger had established a marketable name for himself, his was hardly a name that connoted literary respectability, which left him vulnerable to the charges of being morally hazardous drivel, and his name did not give him a position in the market where he could avoid the pressure to produce serials at a speed similar to Snodgrasse’s. Between 1886 and 1894, Scharnhorst reports, Alger contributed thirty serials, including Ben Bruce, to Frank Munsey’s nickel weekly Golden Argosy, writing “hurriedly, haphazardly, without pride, for the cash” (Horatio 133). And if we are looking for signs of hack work in the text there are at least three types that are evident in Ben Bruce. Alger’s usual reliance on formula, his sloppiness (he has Wilkins encounter the newly prosperous Ben twice, and each time Wilkins expresses surprise at Ben’s transformation and Ben gives him the same explanation of his adoption, a repetition more likely creditable to Alger’s forgetfulness than Wilkins’s), and his sensationalism. It is this latter element that points to Alger’s more conscious use of Snodgrasse as a self-reflective figure. As Scharnhorst has pointed out, even as Alger was smarting from being thrown in with the dime novelists, he was adopting many of their narrative tactics: he moved many of his stories into the more violent terrain of the Wild West, a favorite setting of the dime novels, and his once-modest financial rewards for his heroes became at times exorbitant, reaching the hundreds of thousands of dollars (Horatio 135–36). And many of the features of Snodgrasse’s supposed sensationalist style can be found in the narrative of Ben Bruce itself, a fact of which neither Alger nor Snodgrasse are unaware. Alger may not provide “no less than fifteen murders,” as Snodgrasse is said to in one of his stories, but both the banal and fantastic elements of Ben’s story sound to Snodgrasse as though he himself might have written them (281). When Ben has his bankbook stolen by a fellow lodger, it is Snodgrasse who easily solves the mystery because, as he says, “I introduced an incident like this into my last serial story for the Bugle” (170). (The story, in fact, is repeated from a strikingly similar incident in Ragged Dick.) And when Ben returns to New York, the heir to forty thousand dollars and the friend to English nobility, Snodgrasse immediately spots the sensational trappings of such an improbable and excessive success. “It is truly a romance in real life,” he tells Ben. “Would you be willing to have me weave your story into a serial for the Weekly Bugle?” (281). Ben declines, but of course the “romance” and “mystery” of his story have already been woven into a serial, one of many Alger would publish that year, and one that would largely disappear into the anonymity of the literary marketplace until Nathanael West picked it up in researching his novel of appropriated Alger, A Cool Million, forty years later. What Ben Bruce tells us about Alger’s narrative economies is that as his formula was stretched to meet both the broad reach of the modern publicity economy and the sensational demands of the marketplace in cheap popular fiction, it revealed the fault lines in his faith in the just rewards of the market. Whereas Alger’s formula might carry

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with it the promise of reliable virtue, intimate personal exchanges, and authentic physical identity, it carries as well the possibility of a commodification that would undermine both the intimacy and the identi ty crucial to those exchanges. The market’s pressure for standardization and speed of production can undermine the sense of authenticity and originality implicit in an authors trademark and cause what is presented as sincerity to be read as drivel. For if sincerity is thought to gush directly from the heart, drivel, by contrast, pours from the unthinking, unfeeling, mechanically desiring maw of the digestive tract. How can one trust a patron like Alger whose writing seems dominated, not by his own virtuous, heartfelt concern for his charges, but by his worry about where his next meal will come from?

POSTSCRIPT: ALIENABLE AMERICANA AND “A MUTILATED BOY’S GRATITUDE” The centrality of a similar hunger to Nathanael West’s later reworking of Alger in A Cool Million is hinted at by that book’s epigraph, which it cites as an “old saying”: “John D.Rockefeller would give a cool million to have a stomach like yours” (65). Whatever its “old” meaning (if in fact anyone ever said it before West did), in West’s hands the saying carries the horror of the exchange of the alienable for the inalienable, the money for the vital organ, the cool million for the warm stomach. And, given the story of Lem Pitkin’s dismantling that West tells, it implies that what Rockefeller wants from you—besides your stomach—is the hole in your stomach, your hunger, the kind of elemental need that will force you to work for peanuts and be grateful for it. What is most interesting about A Cool Million in relation to the reading of Alger I have given above is not so much West’s unsubtle “Alger in reverse” of trust betrayed and Candidean naiveté abused, but what might be called his “Alger by extension”: his projection of the Algerian reliance on formula and stereotype into a narrative economy of hypercommodification and purchased authenticity that finds the fault lines present in a novel such as Ben Bruce and pries them wide open. He sets the machinic building blocks of Alger-as-copyist—the stock characters, the hackneyed plots, the rote phrases—in an entire landscape of the mass-produced copy, the cardboard imitation (or the imitation cardboard). For West the greatest threat the money economy presents is not the counterfeit but the commodity. The counterfeit and the confidence man, for him, are only stepping stones on the path of commodification: by opening yourself up to the abuse of your trust, you allow yourself to be used and your most intimate, inalienable possessions to be bought and sold out from under you. And in the relentless downward spiral of the “Alger in reverse” plot, the process of sold authenticity continues until the last thing you (or at least Lem) can sell is the fact that you have nothing left to sell. At the novels close, dismantled Lem is left only to perform his own dismantling, to enact the emptiness and alienability of his own stomach. West wrote A Cool Million during the time of a small wave of revisions of Alger— including Mayes’s hoax biography and F.Scott Fitzgerald’s play The Vegetable, or From President to Postman (1923) (not to mention The Great Gatsby [1925])—and a larger wave of what might be called reclaimed Americana, as exemplified by such books as

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William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain (1925), Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1930), and Constance Rourke’s American Humor (1931) and by the wide-ranging Depression-era return to folk materials that Jonathan Veitch has called “an unparalleled attempt to record, transcribe, or otherwise gain access to the voice and image of the people” (67). West was thoroughly enmeshed in this movement toward authentic homegrown materials: the second issue of the literary magazine he co-edited with Williams, Contact, was organized around the theme of the “American Primitive,” and in the same year he completed A Cool Million, he pitched an idea to producers and agents for a Broadway revue of Americana, “utilizing American folk songs, dances and legends” (J.Martin 248). And he would certainly have seen his Alger project as in some sense consistent with this turn toward popular American materials. Alger for him was, if not a way of contacting the authentic America itself, at least a source of the myths the country told about itself; he variously cited Alger as the “Bulfinch of American fable,” and “to America what Homer was to the Greeks” (J.Martin 218–19). There certainly is a language of authenticity built into some of these rediscoveries of America. Williams’s preface to In the American Grain sets up his collection of essays and artifacts as reclaiming the truth of the past from the false names by which it has been obscured: In these studies I have sought to re-name the things seen, now lost in chaos of borrowed titles, many of them inappropriate, under which the true character lies hid…. Everywhere I have tried to separate out from the original records some flavor of an actual peculiarity the character denoting shape which the unique force has given…. [I]t has been my wish to draw from every source one thing, the strange phosphorus of the life, nameless under an old misappellation. (v) And West himself, in outlining his idea for his musical revue of Americana, wrote, “I feel that the material should be authentic as possible…in no case should it be permitted to deteriorate to the ‘folksy’ or ‘arty’ in a Cape Cod Tea Shop sense” (J. Martin 248). But in some cases the “authentic” Americana questions the very idea of authenticity itself. Rourke’s American Humor, for example, takes as its true national heroes and exemplars those enemies of Victorian sincerity: the confidence man, the backwoods trickster, and the Yankee masquerader. And in A Cool Million, what is proposed as the authentic artifact of Americana is that figure of alienated and debased authenticity, the commodity. That novel, in a sense, details the process by which “American” objects become “Americana”: the added “a” marking those objects whose very assertion of native authenticity renders them desirable and available for purchase. (One might argue that the seed of the commodification embodied in that final “a” is already contained in the national typification represented by the capital “A” that begins the word. The proper name denotes a sort of brand name that asserts both a geographic actuality and a typical, reliable character. The capital letter, in other words, carries with it a kind of capital, based in the property inherent in a proper name.) If Williams’s project is to push aside the false names to find the “actual peculiarity” of American character, Rourke and West might claim, in their different ways, that those “old misappellations” are in fact what constitutes American culture.

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A Cool Million is full to overflowing of the paste and cardboard trinkets of American commodity capitalism—the “toilet paper, painted boxes to keep pins in, key rings, watch fobs, leatherette satchels” against which his Chief Israel Satinpenny hectors—and those mass-produced items are hard to differentiate from the formulaic narrative elements of Alger’s own mass-produced stories (156). Lem Pitkin and his patron Nathan “Shagpoke” Whipple are constructed of the shards of Alger characters, which themselves were formed by a sort of endless self-cannibalization of his own stock figures. As Veitch has pointed out, the Alger hero “is not the organic entity he appears to be. Rather, [he] is a type, and as such he/it is generic, standardized, infinitely reproducible. West makes no attempt to breathe life into this ideological construction. Instead, he foregrounds its status as such” (101). Even Chief Satinpenny, who might be seen, like the Indian on the 1970s television advertisements who shed a tear to shame us into picking up our trash, as an “authentic,” “natural” figure set against the unnatural cardboard depredations of capitalist culture, is himself a cardboard figure, shackled by the tired inevitability of narrative stereotype. His speech takes place surrounded by the trappings of what might be called Native Americana: as he begins to speak, the “warriors of the tribe assembled around a wigwam” and “[s]omewhere a tom-tom began to throb,” and his rousing conclusion raises up a host of war cries, tomahawks, and scalping knives. The chief himself, despite his Harvard education and his allusions to West’s own admired critics of modernity, Spengler and Valery, follows the lockstep of Indian stereotype as he leads the brutal charge, finding poor Lem and “[tearing] the scalp from his head. Then brandishing his reeking trophy on high, he sprang on his pony and made for the nearest settlements, followed by his horde of blood-crazed savages” (157–58). Similarly, West’s apparent expose of the violence of falsehood and commodification— his “Chamber of American Horrors: Animate and Inanimate Hideosities,” a traveling show that features displays of mass manufacture and a pageant of violent episodes from American history—is presented by none other than Sylvanus Snodgrasse, smuggled in from the pages of Ben Bruce and transformed first into a hack nativist poet and front man for pickpockets and then into a stereotypical tool of Communist infiltration (160). He, like Chief Satinpenny, is a cardboard figure protesting, and at the same time embodying, the deluge of cardboard figures. Rather than presenting itself as an authentic heritage reclaimed from the accretions of false names, West’s narrative—even its own apparent critiques of inauthenticity—remains constituted by those false names, unwilling to claim that there is an Americana that can stand clear of them. For West the process of constructing or declaring an authentic heritage inevitably and immediately carries with it the possibility of appropriation and alienation. The same quality that marks an object as recognizably authentic also gives it an appropriable value—the property inherent in its proper name—as West makes clear in the novels opening pages. In his description of the humble yet charming Vermont home of young Lem and his widowed mother, the first detail that confirms the charm of the house is not its architecture along, but that “An antique collector…would have been greatly interested in its architecture.” And what would have interested such a collector would have been its apparently inalienable local and familial heritage as a Revolutionary relic: “Having been built about the same time of General Stark’s campaign against the British, its lines reflected the character of his army, in whose ranks several Pitkins had marched” (67–68).

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The appeal of the building is that it represents the possibility of owning the very “character denoting shape” that Williams was trying to unearth in the American grain. Indeed, it turns out that a collector, Asa Goldstein, has noticed the house, and his interest encourages the local squire to foreclose on the widow Pitkin, thereby depriving Lem of his cultural inheritance and sending him on his self-making travels. When Lem stops by Goldstein’s interior decorating shop in New York to reclaim his childhood home later in the story, he might be said to be taking the role of William Carlos Williams, attempting to “re-name” the “actual peculiarity” within the encrusted American type. Lem finds that his old home stands intact in the window of Goldstein’s Fifth Avenue store, and in response to the clerk’s sales pitch based on the building’s recognizably typical heritage—”You admire the architecture of New England?”—he asserts that he is not after a “New England” type but rather that specific home, to which he meekly claims an (apparently inalienable) birthright: “No,” he tells the clerk, “its that particular house that interests me, sir…. I used to live in it. In fact I was born in that very house” (102; emphasis added). But all that Lem’s assertion of familial particularity leads to is yet another demonstration of the alienable property that stands latent within his heritage. The clerk takes advantage of Lem’s intimate knowledge of the house to ask him where his mother would have typically placed a certain piece of furniture. In exchange for his advice, Lem receives two dollars, which he happily and nonsensically translates into an hourly rate of pay that would bring him “a million in no time” (103). Just as the history of his home carries with it the possibility of commodification as Americana, so Lem’s own knowledge of the house bears the rewards available to one who is willing to turn his memory into money and transform himself from an intimate into an expert. The Americana available in Goldstein’s shop is only a small hint of what can be found at the novel’s most extravagant emporium for authentic native cul ture, the “bad house of Wu Fong,” where both Lem and his hometown pal Betty Prail are inmates at various points in the story (125). Wu Fong had been the proprietor of a “House of All Nations,” which held “a girl from every country in the known world” in apartments furnished “with excellent taste and real historical knowledge” in the custom of the girls home country (93). But in response to the tight economic times, Wu Fong decided to remodel his business in a way that cast the revival of interest in Americana as part of a larger nativism: “He saw that the trend was in the direction of home industry and home talent, and when the Hearst papers began their ‘Buy American’ campaign he decided to get rid of all the foreigners in his employ and turn his establishment into a hundred per centum American place” (126). He hired Asa Goldstein to design all new rooms capitalizing on the authentic recreation of American regional and historical types, with details that evoke West’s own plan for his Broadway revue of Americana. Whereas West’s outline of “traditional American material” included such suggestions as “Nantucket during the great days of the whaling industry,” “Natchez-Under-the-River at the time of the land pirates… full of horse-thieves, gamblers with lace cuffs…river men…Creoles and planters,” “the Erie Canal at the time of its construction,” and “a Harlem rent party, using real scat music” (J.Martin 248–49), 10 Goldstein’s living dioramas include such lavishly detailed types as the following: Alice Sweethorne from Paducah, Kentucky. Besides many fine pieces of old

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Sheraton from Savannah, in her suite there was a wonderful iron grille from Charleston, whose beauty of workmanship made every visitor gasp with pleasure. She wore a ball gown of the Civil War period. Mary Judkins from Jugtown Hill, Arkansas. Her walls were lined with oak puncheons chinked with mud. Her mattress was stuffed with field corn and covered by a buffalo rope. There was real dirt on her floors. She was dressed in homespun, butternut stained, and wore a pair of men’s boots…. Miss Cobina Wiggs from Woodstock, Connecticut. She lived in one large room that was a combination of a locker in an athletic club and the office of a mechanical draughtsman. Strewn around were parts of an aeroplane, T-squares, callipers, golf clubs, books, gin bottles, hunting horns and paintings made by modern masters…. Her costume was an aviators jumper complete with helmet attached. (127–28) As Rita Barnard has pointed out, the gasps of pleasure from Wu Fong’s mostly foreign customers come as much from the recognition of typical folk materials as they do from the possession of the women themselves. With their “painstaking” attention to detail, Wu Fong and Goldstein extend the purchasable intimacy of prostitution to the point of commodity fetishism, in which the bought intimacies promise access not only to the woman’s body but to her putatively authentic American heritage as well, even as their very availability for purchase marks that access as neither intimate nor authentic (128). 11 As a mirror to this heaping up of the commodified forms of American heritage, Lem’s own process of self-making seems to consist of his gradual accumulation of recreated body parts, as his teeth, an eye, a thumb, his scalp, and a leg are removed in succession and replaced with prostheses. Just as he is able to turn his memory of his mother’s decorating tendencies into a quick two bucks, so a benevolent prison warden argues that the extraction of Lem’s teeth has actually resulted in an increase in his working capital: “the set of false teeth I gave you cost twenty dollars new,” he tells Lem, “and is worth at least fifteen dollars in its present condition” (99). According to a logic that pushes the theory of possessive individualism to its limits, the closer Lem gets to having an entirely artificial body, the closer he comes to complete self-possession. As Shagpoke Whipple reminds him, the one “inalienable birthright” of Americans is “the right to sell their labor and their children’s labor without restrictions as to either price or hours”—in other words, the inalienable right to alienate themselves (110). Lem’s prosthetic body stands as a figure of the utter availability of his body to alienation and exchange, giving new meaning to the idea of an “open countenance.” But Lem’s dismantled and reassembled body could equally be seen to represent not his “inalienable birthright” but his inalienable need. What Lem’s sort of open countenance could reveal to his prospective patrons is not so much that he is willing to sell himself, but that he must do so, and in this light his prostheses are signs not of his self-possession but his dispossession: having seen his home, his memory, and his body all alienated from himself, he is left with nothing to offer but their absence and his resulting raw need. His desperation takes him beyond the realm of will or choice and marks him as an utter economic integer, necessarily willing to do whatever the market demands. As Lem’s condition deteriorates, he finds that his missing parts are exactly what make him desirable

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to his prospective employers. An “exceedingly dapper gentleman,” for instance, offers him his first regular employment only on the condition of his bodily absence: “My man, if you can wear this glass eye, I have a job for you.” This patron, like his typical Alger model, has an extraordinary vision for promising youth, but he has an eye not for virtue but for need. Lem appears to him not just as a man without an eye, but as an almost utter object, marked as human only by its desperation. When he makes his offer to Lem, “[t]o anyone but a trained observer, he would have appeared to be addressing a bundle of old rags that someone had propped up on a park bench” (115). What is appealing about such an object/man is that his transformation from a man into a “bundle of old rags” has made him “willing” to do whatever his patron will pay him to do; as Lem is later and more relevantly described, he is a “quiescent bundle” of rags (116; emphasis added). He needs work so badly and is so ill-equipped to stand on his own that his patron can make him an agent of his own will. His career with this patron appears in this respect to be modeled after Ben Bruce’s unwitting fraud with his adoptive mother. Like Ben, Lem considers himself prepared for this drama of real life by the “amateur theatricals” he had participated in back in his home town (121), and like Ben, who is so willing to “accept things as they were” when faced with his patrons “mysterious” arrangements (215, 193), he unquestioningly acquiesces to the vague directions of his generous employer, who tells him, “you may be a little mystified when you read your instructions, but that cannot be helped, for I am unable to give you a complete explanation at this time” (119). His job, it turns out, is to impersonate a wealthy young man who claims to have lost his glass eye in a jewelry shop, as part of what his attorney later calls “using the glim racket to mulct storekeepers” (133). In other words, he repeatedly reenacts his own dismantling, which provides him excellent preparation for his next position, as a vaudeville actor. Once again, what makes Lem desirable for his new job are his bodily absences. The man at the employment agency tells him that a vaudeville comedian had come in looking for a “stooge” for his act: “He wanted a one-eyed man, and the minute he said that, I thought of you.” Another down-and-outer, overhearing the offer, had tried to “pok[e] out one of his eyes so that he could qualify for the job,” but Lem has plenty more gaps in his body, which cinches the job for him: when the agent told the comedian that Lem “also had a wooden leg, wore a toupee and store teeth,…he wouldn’t think of hiring anybody but” him. And once again, desperate Lem will take whatever he can get— he accepts their offer “without quibbling”; he has, as the narrator puts it, a “mutilated boys gratitude” (171–72). Like Ben, in Lem’s theatrical debut his role is essentially to play himself, in this case to perform yet again “The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin” that is his story’s subtitle. The comedians’ act consists of a series of jokes, each punctuated by their attack on Lem with rolled-up newspapers, which continues until they manage to dislodge his toupee, false teeth, or glass eye, which Lem then solemnly replaces. For their uproarious finale, “they brought out an enormous wooden mallet labeled ‘The Works’ and with it completely demolished our hero. His toupee fell off, his eye and teeth popped out, and his wooden leg was knocked into the audience”—an audience made up of “puspockets and fleapits” according to the comics. The spectators too, in other words, are identified by their bodily gaps—their “pockets” and “pits”—and when they are “convulsed with joy” at the sight of Lem’s sham leg, they may be laughing at the veiled recognition of their own status (174, 172). Lem may be, like Ben, a natural actor on the

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stage, just playing himself, but his performance is in fact a revelation of his startling unnaturalness, his artificial, prosthetic body. But from another angle there is a revelation of nature in his act as well; if his nightly dismantling is on one hand a performance of his disembodied artificiality, it is also, and perhaps more vitally, a demonstration of his embodied absence, his inalienable need to alienate himself. 12 It is perhaps the only “authentic” thing about this cardboard character: his desperate willingness to further turn himself into cardboard. It is not such a surprising performance for a character whose heritage can be traced, not only to the American Revolution, but to the market-driven Americana of his literary forebear, Horatio Alger, whose own marginal position in the market for popular fiction led him to churn out hundreds of boys just like Lem.

Chapter 3 Racial Credit, White Money, and the Novel of Assimilative Lament …like I mean this here bond and stock stuff you don’t see anybody you don’t know anybody only in the mail and the telephone because that’s how they do it nobody has to see anybody, you can be this here funny lookingest person that lives in a toilet someplace how do they know, I mean like all those guys at the Stock Exchange where they’re selling all this stock to each other? They don’t give a shit whose it is they’re just selling it back and forth for some voice that told them on the phone why should they give a shit if you’re a hundred and fifty all they… —William Gaddis, J.R.

ROUGHLY A DECADE AFTER THE SUCCESS OF WASHINGTON’S UP FROM Slavery, two purportedly “autobiographical” narratives appeared that made strikingly similar claims about their documentary authenticity in portraying racial types for a white audience. In 1912, the Boston firm of Sherman, French, and Company published an anonymous narrative, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, to little response. The preface of the book, signed by “The Publishers” but composed for the most part by the book’s unnamed author, James Weldon Johnson, promises a “vivid and startlingly new picture” of the conditions of the Negro, “a composite and proportionate presentation of the entire race, embracing all of its groups and elements,” that will “draw aside” the “veil” between white reader and black subject and “initiate” that reader “into the ‘freemasonry,’ as it were, of the race” (xxxiii-xxxiv). Though the book in truth has very few overtly autobiographical elements, publishing it without attribution allowed it to be taken, as Johnson intended, as the life story of its anonymous author. In recalling those intentions in his traditional autobiography, Along This Way, Johnson actually uses the more ambiguous term “human document” rather than “autobiography” to describe how Ex-Colored Man, to his gratification, was received. Without losing the ambiguity of his term, which could be used to describe a novel as well, it is clear that Johnson wants to emphasize its “documentary” nature by contrasting it in the following sentence with the “frank piece of fiction” that it would have been if his name had been “affixed” to it (Along 238). Of course the presence of both “frankness” and “fiction” in the latter phrase implies the entanglement of authority and irony that has been, despite the preface’s carnival-barker call of strict documentary authenticity, perhaps the element of Johnson’s narrative most discussed by its late-twentieth-century readers. A similar disjunction between author and autobiography is apparent in the title of the second narrative, a four-part series that appeared in McClure’s Magazine from April

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through July 1913. The articles were entitled “The Autobiography of an American Jew: The Rise of David Levinsky,” but they were attributed not to “Levinsky” but to “Abraham Cahan.” But while Johnson assumed that such an affixing of authorial identity separate from its subject would be enough to mark an “autobiography” as fiction, McClure’s presents the series as anything but fictional. “David Levinsky,” the preface reads, …has a career more sensational than could be conjured up by any man’s imagination. Levinsky is, in fact, an actual type; his story reproduces actual characters, occurrences, and situations taken from real life. And his intense and complicated struggle shows, as no invention could do, the traits of mind and character by which the Jew has made his sensationally rapid progress in the business world of America. Abraham Cahan, the chronicler of this progress,… has probably the most intimate knowledge of Jewish life of any man in America. (April 92–93) Lest this disavowal of “imagination” and “invention” seem merely rhetorical, the table of contents for volume 40 of the magazine, which has a separate section for “Fiction,” lists Cahan/Levinsky’s “Autobiography” not in that section but in the main body of the contents, alongside such pieces of journalism, memoir, and opinion as “My Experiences as a Progressive Candidate,” by Jane Addams, “Stammering and Its Cure,” and “The Jewish Invasion of America.” What allows this gap between invention and occurrence to be papered over? According to the preface, it is that the subject, while fictional, is nonetheless real; he is an “actual type”—real not as an individual but as a representative of his race (an idea that W.E.B.DuBois would later turn on itself in characterizing his own autobiography, Dusk of Dawn, as “An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Racial Concept”). And Cahan’s authority to tell this story truly, as if it were his own, stems explicitly from his “intimate knowledge of Jewish life” and of the “type” that Levinsky represents. But Cahan bears an implicit authority as well in his own identity, for if the successful American Jew is a type, then Cahan, the “editor of the great Yiddish daily newspaper, the ‘Forward’ of New York,” should be as representative of the type as any (92). The layout of the opening two-page spread of the article only heightens this possible conflation of subject and author. There is, to begin with, the confusion that might occur when the eye follows from “The Autobiography of an American Jew” to the phrase “By Abraham Cahan” that sits centered directly under the words “an American Jew,” thereby missing the subtitle “The Rise of David Levinsky” that stands off to the side in a smaller typeface. But even more evocative are the illustrations framing the bottom half of the spread. On the left is a sketch of a “greenhorn” immigrant, his eyes directed upward, with a caption reading, “With twenty-nine cents in my pocket, I set forth in the direction of East Broadway.” The young man’s stride points him toward the other side of the page, where he might meet the portrait, done by the same artist, of “Abraham Cahan, editor, author, and general counselor of the Jewish East Side of New York.” Cahan waits there, seated and with a slightly downward gaze directed back toward the left side of the page. In one sense, he looks as if he might be ready to provide some “intimate” “counsel” to his

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countryman; in another sense, though, he waits as if he might be the very man that the immigrant will rise to become, the “American Jew” himself. The conflation of author and immigrant is only increased by the resemblance of the illustration of “Cahan” to the portraits in later installments of the mature, successful, Americanized “Levinsky,” the only noticeable differences being “Cahan’s” eyeglasses and more unruly hair, both of which might stand as symbols of an intellectual, rather than a commercial, existence, the very life that Levinsky at the end of his story comes to regret not having followed. Cahan’s “intimate” knowledge of the Jewish “type,” then, comes not only from his role at the center of Jewish society, but from his own identity as an Americanized Jew; he can tell Levinsky’s story because he himself might be Levinsky. That intimate racial knowledge makes it possible to write what in both of these cases might be called a nonautobiographical autobiography, in which the author’s knowledge of his subject is so close that the story might as well be autobiographical. This is why the preface to the second edition of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man strongly resembles the first, even though the acknowledgment of Johnson as the author on the title page of that later edition would seem, according to his own expectations, to mark it as “fiction” rather than a “human document.” The preface, written by Johnson’s white friend Carl Van Vechten, argues that the novel, while “in the matter of specific incident [having] little to do with Mr. Johnson’s own life,” nonetheless “reads like real autobiography. It would be truer, perhaps, to say that it reads like a composite autobiography of the Negro race in the United States in modern

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Overleaf Plate 1. The opening spread of the serialization of “The Autobiography of an American Jew” in McClure’s Magazine. (MSCUA, University of Washington Libraries, negative no. UW 22278z.)

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times” (25). The first prefaces promise to white readers that it will initiate them into the “freemasonry” of the Negro race seems confirmed by Van Vechten’s claim that “when I was writing Nigger Heaven”—his own fictional study of Harlem—”I discovered the

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Autobiography to be an invaluable source-book for the study of Negro psychology” (26). Van Vechten’s use of the word “composite” to describe Ex-Colored Man’s range of revelation, a word the original preface uses as well, points to a particular authority claimed for both of these narratives: they can stand as autobiographies of an entire race in part because of the breadth of their protagonists’ careers, which cross geographical, class, and even racial lines. The prefaces of Ex-Colored Man are more explicit about this “composite” nature of its subject’s progress: as Van Vechten writes, the “young hero, the ostensible author, either discusses (or lives) pretty nearly every phase of Negro life, North and South and even in Europe, available to him at that period” (26). The introduction to Cahan’s “Autobiography” alludes similarly to a broad arc of motion and identity in its breathy description of the Jew’s “sensationally rapid progress” in his adopted land, as well as in the progression from penniless immigrant to established editor implied by the portraits of Levinsky and Cahan. The transformations of identity that allow the narratives to claim to represent an entire race are implicit in their titles. For the phrases “Ex-Colored Man” and “American Jew” contain their subjects’ assimilative trajectories: Johnson’s “Colored Man” becoming an “Ex-Colored Man” and Cahan’s “Jew” becoming an “American Jew.” And here lies a tension at the heart of each of these “racial autobiographies”: while they are presented as revelations of authentic racial identity, the narratives themselves seem to describe paths of identity mobility, in which the autobiographer explains how he became something other than that as which he began. As Walter Benn Michaels has pointed out in reference to the idea of “passing,” however, there may not be any disjunction between a narrative of racial transformation and one of racial authenticity, if the transformation is represented, as it is by both Johnson and Cahan, as a loss. 1 A “lost” racial identity, as figured by the “Ex-” in Johnson’s title, implies that there is an authentic identity to be deprived of—the true identity of the “Ex-Colored Man,” in other words, is that of a “Colored Man,” and that of the “American[ized] Jew” a “Jew.” These novels of racial and cultural transformation, most of their critics agree, are novels of racial and cultural lament, ending as they do on markedly similar notes of longing for identities and affiliations that have been left behind in the process of assimilative success. Ex-Colored Man ends, famously, on its narrator’s regret that beside the “small but gallant band of colored men who are publicly fighting the cause of their race,” he feels “small and selfish. I am an ordinarily successful white man who has made a little money. They are men who are making history and a race…. I cannot repress the thought that, after all, I have chosen the lesser part, that I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage” (154). Similarly, the fourth installment of Cahan’s magazine series concludes with Levinsky return ing to “the loneliness of my beautiful lodgings” after an awkward dinner with a less successful, and less assimilated, countryman, and crying to himself, “Such is the tragedy of my success!,” a lament that becomes even more explicit in the final published version of the work. In 1917, the serial was published in a revised and much expanded version titled The Rise of David Levinsky, the version best known to readers today. On the final page of that book, Levinsky’s earlier identity seems to overwhelm the one by which he is publicly known: “I cannot escape from my old self. My past and my present do not comport well. David, the poor lad swinging over a Talmud volume at the Preacher’s Synagogue, seems to have more in common with my inner identity than David Levinsky, the well-known cloak

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manufacturer” (530). These laments are forms of alienation, of separation from an authentic identity, and in both novels the alienation is explicitly economic. The ex-colored man is not just a “white man”—he is a “white man who has made a little money.” The whiteness and the money are inseparable; in fact he claims to have received them both by the sale of something— his “birthright”—that by its very name should be inalienable. Both halves of the compound “birthright” evoke inalienability: “birth” pointing to the unexchangeable biology of ancestry and to the inseparability of the right from ones very existence, “right” to the basic human liberties promised in American political discourse, the “eternal principles of right” that he evokes in the previous paragraph. “Rights” can also, however, refer to one’s transferable ownership of a piece of property, as in, say, “mineral rights.” As the stories of both the ex-colored man and his biblical precursor in the sale of birthrights, Esau, show, the double meaning of “right” implies that even the most apparently inalienable possessions are prey to exchange. The alienation from original identity that Levinsky feels is based even more strictly on commerce. It is not so much becoming an American that he seems to regret, for he admires fellow immigrants who have become, for example, “the greatest physiologist in the New World” or who hold “the foremost place among American songwriters,” as it is becoming wealthy. As he says, “I often long for a heart-to-heart talk with some of the people of my birthplace. I have tried to revive my old friendships with some of them, but they are mostly poor and my prosperity stands between us in many ways.” Compared to the musicians and artists he meets, he feels “looked down upon as a money-bag striving to play Maecenas” (529–30). For both narrators, then, the alienating process of assimilation is more particularly a process of joining (and succeeding in) the marketplace—of becoming somehow inhuman, a “money-bag” rather than a man. The exchange of property on which the market is based, and by means of which Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown separated themselves from the intimate bonds of slavery, is the engine that threatens to separate these men from what they claim as their more authentic, “inner” or “birth-”given identity. Both novels, however, suggest an economy that does not depend on such a strict separation between economic and “authentic” identity. This economy is based not on the pure “you don’t see anybody you don’t know anybody” anonymity that William Gaddis’s boy capitalist celebrates in the epigraph to this chapter and that the ex-colored man tries for a time to exploit as well, but on an identity that is alienated from but still tethered to its putative authentic foundation. The novels suggest what might be called an economy of longing, in which the very lament for a lost identity is a sign of a potentially valuable position as a mediator between the dominant, assimilative economy and the lost, authentic culture that assimilation and accumulation are said to leave behind. The narrators of the two novels attempt to establish a sort of racial credit, in which the race they represent might be accounted as a viable economic and cultural contributor to the national marketplace, and in doing so they show the dependence of that credit on the proximity to authenticity promised by mediating figures such as themselves. Their claims for the cultural and economic worthiness of their race are based at once in their own embodied membership in that race and in their assimilated distance from it. Such a mediator can, as the ex-colored man aspires to, translate the songs of the Negro camp

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meeting into “classic” music that will move Europeans to admiration, or, as Levinsky does, use his understanding of the desires and skills of immigrant artisans to promise cheap, efficient production of American-style women’s cloaks. It is a position of relative disembodiment in relation to these more raw, unassimilated materials, but one that nonetheless depends as well on the mediators’ own embodiment of the racial material they claim to represent. As the longing at the heart of this relation implies, however, it is by no means a stable position. The ex-colored man’s aspiration to exploit this “mine of material” from his relatively disembodied position as a cultured, racially mobile patron, for instance, is stalled by his witnessing of a lynching—a horrific, paralyzing reminder of the embodiment his racial identification (whether as black or white) depends on (126). And the unsteady relations of embodiment and disembodiment that mark his own experience of mobility (and its limits) can be seen in even more concentrated form in his attention to the multifaceted characteristics of “shininess,” an unstable image of visibility and value he uses to parse the relations between blackness and whiteness and the bodies that bear their marks. Shininess, as embodied by the narrators black schoolmate “Shiny” and by his unnamed, gold-bearing white father, is a feature at once natural and cultured, an inherent property and an alienable one, that as a visible sign of whiteness or blackness highlights the disembodied nature of the former racial identification and its dependence on the relatively embodied sense of the latter. Shiny whiteness is not the same as shiny blackness (in fact they are in some sense the obverse of each other) but the narrator’s emphatic use of the same term to describe them both points to the uneasy and unstable relation between them. They are two sides of the same coin. David Levinsky’s mobile position as an assimilating Jew is not directly threatened by the racial policing of a lynch mob; the racializing assumptions he implicitly does battle with are those that see that mobile, mediating position as, paradoxically, the essential characteristic of the Jew. In opposition to American assumptions of the Jew as a pure creature of the market, a middleman inserted into the previously intimate and familial relations of American capitalism, Levinsky presents his own story as evidence that his mediating position between immigrant labor and American capital is a result, not of his Jewishness, but of his Americanization, of his distance from his Russian Jewish past. At the same time that he rebuts these assumptions, however, his own dissatisfaction with his Americanization, his longing for his people and his past, is what gives him a privileged access to the cheap, loyal labor and artisanal knowledge that he claims as the bases of his American success. He understands the homesickness of his immigrant workers because he is homesick himself. But what is particularly unsettling about his hunger for the past is that it is a hunger for an old hunger, a longing for the longings he felt as a youth. Just as the ex-colored man laments his lost connection to the “raw” camp-meeting spirituals, songs that are themselves laments for a lost home and for a better time to come, so Levinsky’s thoughts of the past return to his own youthful longings and the singsong yearnings of the Talmud scholar for “the world to come” (31). The authentic place from which they measure the distance of their own exile is itself a place of exile and loss.

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“SHINYNESS” AND WHITE MONEY If the preface to the original edition of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man carries with it a promise—of a “glimpse” behind the “veil” that hides the truths of the Negro race from whites—it bears at the same time a threat. For even as it offers to initiate the reader into the “freemasonry” of the Negro race, it also “reveal[s]” the apparently disturbing “unsuspected fact” that race prejudice is “actually and constantly forcing an unascertainable number of fair-complexioned colored people over into the white race” (xxxiv). The unsettling vagueness of the “unascertainable number” of people who are paradoxically both “fair-complexioned” and “colored” and who are becoming “white” counters, and perhaps overwhelms, the answer that the “glimpse behind the scenes” might provide to the riddle of the racial “sphinx.” The implicit miscegenation evoked by the image of “colored” being “forced…into the white race” will of course be explicitly carried out by the end of the book, in the narrators own marriage with a white woman and their production of fair-complexioned, apparently white children. This threat of “unascertainable” race is embodied by the anonymous but implied author himself, for to the extent that his narrative is taken as a “human document,” an honest record of an actual life, it must be also taken as a record of racial deceit, at least according to the standards of custom and law in the United States. If the narrator is telling the truth about his life, in other words, then he must at the same time be living a lie. This threat is extended in the novel’s opening paragraphs, in the narrator’s protoEllisonian confession of his “savage and diabolical desire” to play a “practical joke” on (white) society. He sets himself up as an “un-found-out criminal” taking his reader into his “confidence,” but as in the preface, those revelations are as much a confidence game as they are a confession, for he remains in a basic sense “un-found-out.” The narrator is “playing with fire” by offering both confession and deception, divulging the “great secret” of his life even as he refuses to identify himself (1). But this diabolical desire is tempered somewhat by the narrator’s own deflated glee. Rather than reveling in the untraceable identity games of Melville’s Confidence-Man, Johnson’s narrator harbors a “vague feeling of unsatisfaction, of regret, of almost remorse,” the same feeling he will return to at the close of his narrative (1–2). It is as if the narrator is as disturbed by the threat of his identity mobility as he expects his audience to be. While at the same time reserving the right to play his narrative joke, he offers up the wish that he could identify himself. By these threats and jokes, Johnson’s narrator posits a white audience anxious about the sorts of identity mobility and subversion that William Wells Brown celebrated in My Southern Home, the same anxious audience that Booker T.Washington attempted to assuage with his promises of black loyalty. And Johnson plays both sides of the coin: for if he holds out the threat of a trickster’s confidence game such as those played by Brown and his surrogates, he also offers the olive branches of his “regret” at being “forced” to play that game and his aspiration to become a figure more like Washington. The catalyst of his final lament is, after all, a public speech by Booker T.Washington himself. He presents Washington as evoking the “interest” of the audience not by his “eloquence”—in other words the rhetorical skills that a confidence man might possess—but rather by his

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“earnestness and faith,” his visible trustworthiness. Unlike the racially mobile ex-colored man, Washington, as one of the “colored men who are publicly fighting the cause of their race,” makes an appealing display of racial honesty before what can be assumed as a largely white crowd (including the “white” narrator) (154; emphasis added). His encounter with Washington stands as an echo of an earlier, more detailed evocation of a racially earnest black speaker before a white audience: the speech that his classmate “Shiny” gives at their graduation from grammar school. It is in the narrators characterization of “Shiny” that the terms of what might be called the contract in racial earnestness become most clear. That the relations between black orator and white audience at the turn of the century can be considered a form of implicit contract is perhaps most evident in the conditions of Washington’s career-making 1895 speech at the Atlanta Exposition, which he presents as a sort of negotiated labor agreement between himself and his largely white audience through such details as his awareness of the delicate parameters of black-white discourse, his “desire to say something that would cement the friendship of the races,” his characterization of his white audience as employers and his own race as their employees, his promise of his race’s loyalty and service (accompanied by a veiled threat of the destruction that a rejection of that loyalty might bring), and, finally, his lengthy, posed handshake with Georgia’s white Governor Bullock at the close of the speech (Up 217). The conditions of “Shiny”’s speech are in many ways similar to Washington’s; while his speech is given to a Northern “crowd of parents and friends” that might be expected to be more friendly than one in Atlanta, the narrator still imagines that “Shiny” must have felt like a “gladiator tossed into the arena and bade to fight for his life,” much as Washington, on his way to Atlanta, had “felt a good deal as I suppose a man feels when he is on his way to the gallows” (Autobiography 30–31; Up 213). And their receptions are identical: just as the climax of Washington’s speech brought his audience to their feet in an “uproar of enthusiasm” and a “delirium of applause,” so the “magical” effect of “Shiny”’s words are “like touching an electric button which loosened the pent-up feelings of his listeners. They actually rose to him” (Up 240; Autobiography 31). The most noticeable difference between the speeches is their content. For whereas Washington’s is infamously conciliatory, “Shiny” chooses to recite “Toussaint L’Ouverture,” abolitionist firebrand Wendell Phillips’s celebration of the black Haitian revolutionary. But more notable than the differences between the texts is the extent to which the revolutionary content of “Shiny”’s speech is muted by the narrator’s account. To begin with, the speech itself, unlike Washington’s inclusion of the full text of his Atlanta address in Up from Slavery, is not quoted at all, with the exception of the repetition of Toussaint’s name. In addition, its contemporary relevance is tamed by the narrators dismissal of it as “a speech which may now be classed as rhetorical—even, perhaps, bombastic” (31; emphasis added). However fiery Phillips’s oration might once have been, it is the product of another time, a time to whose “defiance” “Shiny”’s New England audience might look back fondly even as they accept the racial oppression of their own post-Reconstruction era. What were once fighting words have “now” become merely “rhetorical.” And the actual words of the speech are even further downplayed by the narrator’s emphasis on the sensory and emotional details surrounding them: the “striking picture” “Shiny” makes, his “black face alight”; his “loneliness” as a “solitary

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black figure”; and the sound of his words. For what, apparently, stirs the “pent-up feelings” of his audience during the “famous peroration” are not the words he is saying but the “voice, trembling with suppressed emotion” that, rising “higher and higher,” speaks them (30–31). The narrator makes both the elision of the speech’s content and its connection to Washington’s famous oration complete by grouping it within the general category of “colored speakers who have addressed great white audiences. In each of these instances I believe the men were stirred by the same emotions which actuated ‘Shiny’ on the day of his graduation; and, too, in each case where the efforts have reached any high standard of excellence they have been followed by the same phenomenon of enthusiasm.” And his description of these exchanges of emotion and enthusiasm paints a clearer picture of the terms of the contract in racial earnestness. In a phrase that evokes the “level playing field” ideology of the contract, the narrator accounts the audience’s enthusiasm for “Shiny” to their “basic, though often dormant, love of fair play,” which would allow them to recognize and reward excellence wherever it appears. But the terms of that “fair play” are already implicitly colored by the narrator’s placement of “Shiny” in the overmatched position of a “gladiator,” and he soon makes the unevenness of the fight explicit in his image of the “boy gallantly waging with puny, black arms so unequal a battle.” The “fair play,” in other words, that the audience finds so appealing is actually a stacked fight, in which the earnest struggle of the underdog against great odds somehow stands as a demonstration that the playing field is level, that the great odds against him are at the same time somehow even (31–32). Part of what makes “Shiny” an “earnest” participant in this exchange is that he embodies its terms so vividly. He is earnest in one respect because his race is so clearly visible; unlike the narrator, who can’t be racially classified by his appearance or at least would be classified incorrectly according to society’s standards of blood, “Shiny” is undeniably, self-evidently “black as night” (9). He looks outside the way he is (again, according to society’s standards) inside. (In this respect, it is worth noting that the text of his speech, at least as Phillips gave it in 1861, takes the existence of “compar[able] and weigh[able]” racial traits as a given, and presents Toussaint himself as an “unmixed” and earnest representative of the Negro race, about whom it could be said, “He never broke his word” [Phillips 468, 487].) “Shiny” also looks the part of the physical underdog, with his “little black figure” and his “puny, black arms,” phrases in which size and race are conjoined—it is as if his blackness is itself “little” and “puny” (31–32). The effect of the embodiment of these attributes is to naturalize the conditions of the unequal battle; the excessive obviousness of “Shiny”’s race and size shifts the site of those conditions of inequality away from the relationship between the speaker and the audience and places them onto the speaker’s own body. His disadvantages appear to come not from the playing field but from himself, from his own nature. “Shiny”’s struggle, then, is on one hand a natural one, but it has a particular appeal for his audience as a struggle against nature, to overcome his apparently natural disadvantages, even as he appears to accept the terms of the battle as fair. Mark Seltzer’s analysis of the interest that such a display can hold for a more disembodied white observer is relevant here:

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it is not merely that the privilege of relative disembodiment requires the more deeply embodied bodies (in consumer society: the female body, the racialized body, the working body) against which this privilege can be meas ured. Beyond that, it requires those more visibly embodied figures that, on the one hand, epitomize the tensions between the typical and the individual and between the artifactual and the natural and, on the other, are the figures through which these tensions can be at once recognized and displaced or disavowed. (64) To rephrase Seltzer’s words in the terms of “Shiny”’s performance: the audience’s interest in watching “Shiny” does not come only from the privileged pleasure of watching the physical battle of a “gladiator” from a position in which one’s own body is not threatened. It comes as well from the way that “Shiny” demonstrates the “tension” between what Seltzer calls the “artifactual” and the natural through his own struggle against the “natural,” embodied disadvantages of his puny blackness, even as those tensions are disavowed by the assumption that the gladiatorial arena is a field of “fair play.” What separates “Shiny”’s battle against nature from the narrator’s own racial masquerade is “Shiny”’s racial earnestness; the contrast between them marks the difference between “polish” and the mask. “Shiny” earned his nickname from the narrator because his black face “shone as though it were polished,” and polish comes to stand for the acquisition of class: when the narrator encounters “Shiny” late in the novel, he admires the “polish of his language,” and the narrator himself reflects that his travels in Europe among the upper class have made him “a polished man of the world” (9, 148, 104). 2 But according to the logic of this image, class mobility is not necessarily the same thing as racial mobility, for polishing is not a process of masking or covering up, but rather of letting the “natural shine” of an object come through. One can, as “Shiny” does, acquire the polish of high culture without losing one’s race. In fact, such a polish can serve to make one’s race more evident (and more valuable). “Polish” and “shininess,” then, seem to have a double value: on one hand an intrinsic value revealed to have been there all along, and on the other the finish added (or discovered) by the process of polishing. These two aspects, which could be said to represent the natural and the cultural (the latter of which, under the logic of “polish,” is not separate from the natural but rather an improved version of it), are combined in the narrators theory of production, as applied to ragtime music. Ragtime, he argues, was originated by “Negro piano players who knew no more of the theory of music than they did of the theory of the universe, but were guided by natural musical instinct and talent.” For this raw material to be transformed into high art, however, it must be polished or, to shift the image, distilled, by a “master” who “runs it through the alembic of his genius” (72–73). When the narrator makes his own abortive attempt to play the role of such a master by transforming the spirituals into high art, he turns once again to a lapidary metaphor: coming upon a “big meeting” that displays “the spirit of the Negro in his primitive state,” he happily accounts it as a “mine of material,” material, he implies, that would be polished by his own genius (126). This theory of cultural polish founded in natural value would seem to comport well with the narrator’s apparent faith in the workings of “natural” markets in culture. For he

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claims that it is impossible to suppress the sheer force of desire that demands (and will reward) ragtime music. “It was music that demanded physical response,” he writes, and just as the body must respond to it, so must the world: “In spite of the bans which musicians and music teachers have placed upon it, the people still demand and enjoy ragtime.” When the songs were first published, “[t]hey sprang into immediate popularity and earned small fortunes” (72–73). Were such a belief in the responsiveness of world desire to inherent quality strictly held to, it would be entirely consistent with the theories of the day that naturalized racial competition and assented, with a shrug or a selfcongratulatory pat, to the fait accompli ascendancy of the “most gifted” races. If the market is a kind of irrepressible measure of racial worthiness, then who is to argue with the status quo? Any claims for racial value would have to be proven on the “level playing field” of the gladiatorial arena. But Johnson’s narrator provides a number of complications to this strict faith in the market as a racial measure. Most directly, there is the latter sentence that I quote in part above; while it may at first seem to express a direct relation between value and reward—the “immediate popularity” that “earned small fortunes”—that relation is quickly complicated by the modification that of those “fortunes…the Negro originators got only a few dollars” (72). The market, it seems, can recognize the value of such productions, but it cannot reliably reward their creators. The reliability of the market’s “natural” measures of racial value is further complicated by the narrator’s discussion of the market in “marriage selection” among blacks. He notes a “tendency toward [marrying those with] lighter complexions, especially among the more active elements in the race,” and then allows that “Some might claim that this is a tacit admission of colored people among themselves of their own inferiority judged by the color line”—in other words, that a negative judgment by the market in marriage partners might be seen as a sign of a naturally low racial value. The narrator disagrees with this strict judgment, though, and he does so by turning the value of the word “natural.” What might be considered an inconsistency—for blacks to choose those among them who are most white—he argues, “is, after all, most natural.” But what is “natural” about this tendency is not that it reflects a lower intrinsic value for blacks, but rather a lower market value, based in particular on employment discrimination against those with darker complexions. As one man he cites puts it, “It’s no disgrace to be black, but its often very inconvenient.” In an echo of Albion Tourgee’s argument in his brief in the Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896 that the appearance of whiteness was a form of property possessed by the legally black plaintiff, the narrator notes the “greater premium on color, or, better, lack of color” in the United States. In essence, while arguing that the response of blacks to these conditions is only a “natural” expression of their self- (if not their racial) interest in response to “economic necessity,” the narrator denaturalizes the equation of market value with intrinsic value (113–14). This denaturalizing of market value, which divorces the value of one’s appearance from any measure of one’s ability or achievement, points to the possible complications in the very idea of “shininess.” In Walter Benn Michaels’s account of the era, adherents to the idea of the “gold standard” in late-nineteenth-century economics responded to anxieties about the possible gap between exchange value and use value by arguing for the intrinsic value of the precious metals traditionally used for money. “[S]tories about the origin of money,” he writes, “tend to be stories about the remarkable physical properties

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of gold and about the natural ‘instinct’ that leads men to appreciate them”; without such a foundation of monetary value in natural value, they feared that the entire economy would be counterfeit (Gold 154). Perhaps in response to those very fears about the gap between representation and value, that “natural ‘instinct’” had led the “original” minters of gold money to choose an object that, like “Shiny,” appeared particularly earnest, in that its inner value was clearly displayed on its surface. A nugget of gold, sliced through the middle, is as golden on the inside as it is on the outside. Shininess, in this respect, is taken as an assurance that appearances do not deceive, that they in fact go all the way through an object. But the quality of shininess in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man can at times be hard to trace to the object it is supposed to represent. For “Shiny” is not the only “shiny” character in the book. The narrators white father, in his rare appearances in the narrator’s life, is shiny as well, although he is described, unlike “Shiny,” less by the characteristics of his body—we only hear of his height, his “dark mustache,” and a vague handsomeness—than by his clothes and his often ornamental possessions. The narrator’s “distinct mental image” of his father is pointedly indistinct about his skin color; what are distinct are the details that “his shoes and boots were always shiny, and that he wore a gold chain and a great gold watch with which he was always willing to let me play” (3). Similarly, when the father visits later in the narrators youth, the narrator “looked at him from head to foot, but he was an absolute blank to me until my eyes rested on his slender, elegant polished shoes” (22). Shininess and polish, in this case, are decisively separated from the body; rather than earnestly representing what is in the body, they overwhelm the narrator’s perception until the body of his father is no longer visible at all. The fathers shininess has the opposite effect of “Shiny”’s. Instead of heightening his embodiedness, it deflects (or reflects) attention away from his body, and marks him as highly disembodied. His shininess both mystifies and represents his whiteness. On one hand, the sheer visibility of his possessions seems to make the color of his skin, like his body in general, invisible. But this disappearance, this disembodiment, is the very characteristic of whiteness. Like the whiteness that the narrator discusses as a market “premium” rather than an intrinsic value, the father’s shininess is an alienable possession, its value concentrated in objects detachable from his own body: in his “gold chain” and “great gold watch,” and in the “bright coin[s]” that he gives to the narrator (3). Those coins are given in exchange for the “service” of bringing the father his slippers and “shiny” shoes, and the narrator’s mother teaches him “to promptly drop [the coins] in a little tin bank.” But despite this apparent free-labor lesson in the accumulation of alienable wages, the most valuable coin that the narrator’s father gives him is pointedly not alienable, nor is it a wage. In his last visit before sending the narrator and his mother to the North, his father “laboriously drill[s] a hole through a ten-dollar gold piece, and then tie[s] the coin around [the narrator’s] neck” (3). As many readers have noted, the gold piece evokes the “collars, shackles, and nooses” of slavery and stands as a “yoke or restraint by means of which [the father] continues to exert his control” (Stepto 102; V.Smith 93). But given the complex narrative weight that “shininess” carries in the novel, as I have outlined above, the gold coin seems most particularly relevant as a figure of embodiment and disembodiment, of alienable and inalienable possessions. For the effect of the father’s “laborious” drilling is not only to allow the coin to be yoked around his

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son’s neck, but also to make the coin no longer exchangeable. As the narrator himself grumbles, “more than once I have wished that some other way had been found of attaching it to me besides putting a hole through it” (3). What the father does is to take alienable property and make it inalienable, and as a result, the non-negotiable coin bears the imprint of two economies: the impersonal, disembodied economy of alienable property in which the white father moves and in which the coin had circulated as money, and the intimate, embodied economy of inalienable property in which his colored son resides and in which the coin, taken out of circulation, is attached to his body. The coin marks the ability of the father to alienate himself from his own paternity, while leaving the son unable to at least turn that alienation to his own advantage by exchanging his inheritance on the open market. This economy between father and son, both intimate and impersonal, is echoed, or perhaps amplified, in the narrator’s later relations with his patron, the millionaire who hires him as his personal piano player in New York and Europe. While their relationship appears in some respects to follow the impersonal relations of free labor—the narrator considers his employment a contract by which he “could not be the loser,” and the patron treats him, at least in Europe, “as an equal, not as a servant”—the conditions of the narrator’s labor more often distinctly evoke the bondage of gratitude and gift of the intimate economy (88, 95). The narrator agrees to work for no one other than his patron, except when the patron “loan[s]” him to a friend, and the patrons “languid” authority comes to seem a sort of tyranny, the conditions of which are worth quoting at length: I soon learned that my task was not to be considered finished until he got up from his chair and said: ‘That will do.’ The man’s powers of endurance in listening often exceeded mine in performing—yet I am not sure that he was always listening. At times I became so oppressed with fatigue and sleepiness that it took almost superhuman effort to keep my fingers going; in fact, I believe I sometimes did so while dozing. During such moments this man sitting there so mysteriously silent, almost hid in a cloud of heavy-scented smoke, filled me with a sort of unearthly terror. He seemed to be some grim, mute, but relentless tyrant, possessing over me a supernatural power which he used to drive me mercilessly to exhaustion. But these feelings came very rarely; besides, he paid me so liberally I could forget much. There at length grew between us a familiar and warm relationship, and I am sure he had a decided personal liking for me. On my part, I looked upon him at that time as about all a man could wish to be. (88) The patron, disembodied behind a haze of cigarette smoke and “making scarcely a motion” while listening, nonetheless pushes the narrators performance beyond the point of bodily exhaustion; in exchange for this domination, the narrator receives “liberal” payments (the implication being that they go beyond fair value for his labor and therefore are a form of gift) and the warmth of his patron’s “decided personal liking.” Despite this “personal” affection, or rather as a condition of it, the narrator, much like Frederick Douglass banking on his executive intimacies, must nonetheless depend on his patrons good will and whim, getting up to play in the middle of the night or packing up and

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moving from city to city in Europe, according to his patron’s desires. And even though this patronage does not overtly depend on racial hierarchy—the narrator claims, “Between him and me no suggestion of racial differences had ever come up. I found that he was a man entirely free from prejudice”—it is worth remembering that the patron had originally discovered the narrator playing ragtime at a colored club while he was “slumming” (84, 106). While he may urge the narrator not to return to the United States and “make” himself a Negro, what he may have actually preferred would have been for the race of his employee to remain a private, intimate matter, known and enjoyed only by himself (106). His pleasure seems to come from the contemplation of his relative disembodiment, in the responsiveness of the narrator’s body to his own listless, scarcely motile commands. As Jennifer Schulz has argued, “The narrator…functions as a reflection of the patrons self-possession: his ability to purchase and control his interpersonal relationships,” and in this sense his position relative to the narrator directly mimics that of the narrator’s father (212). The narrator’s decision late in the book to pass as white, to become an “ex-colored man,” appears, in this light, to be an attempt to disembody himself much like his father and his patron, to plug the hole in his inheritance and cash in on his heritage of whiteness. Rather than participating in the intimate, embodied economy of patronage, he sets up a strict line between his public and private selves, a line marked in his narrative by his sudden, acknowledged reticence at the point of his passing: “I have now reached that part of my narrative where I must be brief and touch only on important facts; therefore the reader must make up his mind to pardon skips and jumps and meager details” (140). His reticence here is much like his patrons “reserve,” a resemblance that allows Maurice O’Sullivan to speculate that his patron is himself “possibly another black who has successfully passed” (86; 64). His public identity becomes explicitly that of a market self, in which value is determined from without, not from within; it is not so much that he asserts his whiteness, he argues, as that he accepts the racial identity that society gives him: “I finally made up my mind that I would neither disclaim the black race nor claim the white race; but that I would change my name, raise a mustache, and let the world take me for what it would” (139). If he is not dishonest about his race according to this formulation, since he doesn’t explicitly lie about his background, neither is he in earnest about it in the way that “Shiny” is. Earnestness goes beyond mere honesty; it implies an eagerness, an active willingness to not only tell the truth, but provide it without being asked. Having become this figure of supremely alienated self-possession, the narrator sketches his career as an ex-colored man as a thumbnail fable of free-labor accumulation. He takes business courses and practices domestic frugality, and when he finds a position as a clerk, works faithfully and saves money even out of his meager earnings. Soon the carefully tended fruits of his labor allow him the pleasures of capital (taken at the expense of such self-denied vices as smoking and drinking): calculating his interest and investing in real estate. He takes satisfaction that his money, unlike the “fairy godmother’s gifts” he had received from his patron, has been “earned by days of honest and patient work” (142–43). But to say that this attempt to found his identity in the more alienated exchanges of hard earnings and capital frees him entirely from the strictures of embodiment would be to go too far in a number of respects. To begin with, his

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explanation that he “would neither disclaim the black race nor claim the white race” is disingenuous, for he could be sure “the world would take” him as white; as his patron had told him, “you are by blood, by appearance, by education, and by tastes a white man” (105). In a process of both mystification and representation much like that enacted by his fathers disembodied shininess, his apparent assertion of his lack of a race is in fact a tacit acceptance of whiteness. Similarly, as he acknowledges, his decision to accept the verdict of the market in determining his race is inextricably tied to the very event that drove him “out of the Negro race”: the lynching that he witnesses while collecting black folk music in the South. For if he becomes white by “let[ting] the world take [him] for what it would,” he does so to avoid the “unbearable shame” of being taken by the world as black, of “being identified with a people that could with impunity be treated worse than animals” (139). To accept the given terms of disembodied whiteness is to accept at the same time its terms of embodied blackness, in the utterly embodied body of the lynching victim, the horror of which had caused the narrator such unbearable shame. In describing the lynch ing victim, the narrator turns once again to the metaphors of coinage and representation, calling him, “a man only in form and stature, every sign of degeneracy stamped upon his countenance.” This image of the man who is not a man outlines in its horrible terms the flip side of disembodied white money. For if white money, like the shiny gold coins of the narrator’s father, represents alienable possessions that can stand for the owner’s person even as they are separable from his body, the stamping of “degeneracy”—literally, the loss or corruption of a race or kind—represents both the bodily impress of racial control and the pure embodiment, without “a single ray of thought,” that the system of racial violence both presumes and, by its horror, creates. The witnessing narrator himself becomes a body without thought or will for the duration of the terrible event, “fixed to the spot where I stood” and unaware of the passage of time (136). This affiliation of his own disembodiment with a system of embodiment appears again, if in perhaps not such stark terms, in his relations with his unnamed wife. At first her appearance in his life seems to mark an end to his disembodied Impersonation; as he says, after meeting her, “what I had regarded as a joke was gradually changed into the most serious question of my life” (144). He struggles with the question of “whether to ask her to marry me under false colors or to tell her the whole truth,” and finally, after a chance encounter with “Shiny,” decides to “cast the die of my fate” and reveal his secret to her—an act of racial earnestness that he equates, in an echo of “Shiny” standing before the white audience, with taking “the place of a gladiator” (146, 148). But what originally attracts him to her are the signs of relative embodiment that have appealed to disembodied patrons throughout the novel. Like “Shiny,” she herself is racially earnest, to an extent that no other white person in the book is: “She was as white as a lily, and she was dressed in white. Indeed, she seemed to me the most dazzlingly white thing I had ever seen.” And also like “Shiny,” she is physically overmatched, with her “delicate beauty” held in “so fragile a body” (144). When the narrator sees her later, the fact that she “seemed a trifle paler” and the “suggestion of haggardness in her countenance” “only heightened her beauty” (151). Her appeal, then, seems based in her relative embodiment as a delicate white woman in relation to his position as an apparently white man. One effect of their union, despite his private racial earnestness with her, is to confirm

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his public whiteness. But another, perhaps unexpected effect is to embody his own whiteness, to give him a sense of his own racial immobility by giving him children for whom he cannot bear to consider being thought of as anything but white. He says, “It is to my children that I have devoted my life…. [T]here is nothing I would not suffer to keep the brand from being placed upon them,” and as their father he too can no longer, either to them or to the public, present himself as anything but white, as position that reveals to him the embodiment on which his disembodied whiteness depends, which makes him “fixed to the spot where I stood” as much as when he witnessed the lynching (153). It is from that hemmed-in position that the ex-colored man laments that he is not taking part in “making history and a race” (154). While Michaels reads this as an essentialist lament for his lost racial identity, I read it instead as an understanding that even “chosen” racial identifications, when they are denied as such in the way that the ex-colored man must deny that he has chosen to be white and must instead claim implicitly that he is naturally so, cannot help but function as assents to the essentialist structure of race in the United States. It is easy to see how the narrator, having been shown the deep structures of embodiment on which even his chosen whiteness depends, might regret his separation from work that would attempt to break down those structures. In some respects, the narrator’s aspiration to mine the cultural productions of the Negro folk can certainly be seen as a turn toward the “primitive” “racial authenticity” that Michaels describes as the aim of what he calls “nativist modernism” (Our 113). Part of the narrators project is indeed to reassign the “old slave songs” from the ranks of the primitive to that of the “classic,” from the “uncivilized” to the “civilized,” in Michaels’s terms, and thereby make a claim for what I am calling racial credit, for the acknowledgment of the black race as a valuable cultural contributor to the national marketplace (Ex 103–104; Our 113). As he puts it, he wants “to voice all the joys and sorrows, the hopes and ambitions, of the American Negro, in classic musical form” (108). And when he finds his “mine of material” in the Negro “big meeting,” it certainly carries all the hallmarks of the authentic. For it is not merely a musical performance; it is embedded in a locality and a way of life: it is a “social as well as a religious function,” and the narrators “amus[ed]” description of the “rustic” congregants is full of the exotic details of local color (126–127). His reception of the sermon of the preacher John Brown reads like a conversion experience into the ranks of the race: “I was a more or less sophisticated and non-religious man of the world, but the torrent of the preacher’s words, moving with the rhythm and glowing with the eloquence of primitive poetry, swept me along, and I, too, felt like joining in the shouts of ‘Amen! Hallelujah!’” It is an experience so tied to the authenticity of locality that he admits that his description “may sound ridiculous” to his equally sophisticated readers and argues that its real power could only be felt “under the circumstances” of moment and place (129). But the narrator doesn’t aspire to be John Brown or the other admirable leader of the meeting, “Singing Johnson.” To give him a name that ties him to his story’s author, whose position his more closely resembles, he wants to be not “Singing Johnson” but “Writing-Down Johnson.” The position he would like, as miner and translator of the spirituals into “classic music,” is one that separates him from these local productions even as it is founded on them. He stands at the point at which the authentic acquires

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market value; if he is not authentic, he is instead the authenticator, collecting and collating the local productions and making them understandable as valuable and characteristic Negro art even to those to whom the original productions might “sound ridiculous.” And all this is consistent with Michaels’s idea of the nativist modernist project in which “the beliefs and practices associated with the uncivilized character of the primitive could be immediately redescribed as the beliefs and practices associated with the civilization of the Negro” (113). The ex-colored man immerses himself in the “primitive poetry” so that he can redescribe it to his fellow sophisticates as both civilized and characteristically Negro. But this position as authenticator does not completely encompass the project of a narrator whose own process of racial self-authentication is far more cagey and mobile. For if one authentic characteristic of the race are these primitive performances, another is indicated by his visit to Boston, where he meets many blacks who were also “genuine Yankees.” “It is remarkable, after all,” he notes, what an adaptable creature the Negro is. I have seen the black West Indian gentleman in London, and he is in speech and manners a perfect Englishman. I have seen natives of Haiti and Martinique in Paris, and they are more Frenchy than a Frenchman. I have no doubt that the Negro would make a good Chinaman, with the exception of the pigtail. (112) Another typical characteristic of Negroes, in other words, is their ability to take on the typical characteristics of any other race, a demonstration of which, it might be added, could be seen as the entire project of Johnson’s novel. The introduction to the first edition, after all, takes care to emphasize that the novel will “reveal” that many “faircomplexioned colored people” have adapted the characteristics of whites so completely as to make their actual numbers (and, implicitly, their actual race) “unascertainable” (xxxiv). And “Shiny”’s acquisition of the “polish” of the refined white culture of the Eden Musee shows that this adaptability is, at least as far as culture goes, not only a characteristic of “fair-complexioned” blacks. As the novel clearly argues, this adaptability, this ability to cross over—to pass—into the cultures assigned to various other races, is as much an authentic racial characteristic as is the “primitive poetry” of the songs and orations of the big meeting, and Johnson’s project is not merely to lament his narrator’s separation from that primitive culture (though he does include that regret) but also to celebrate the paradoxically inherent racial characteristic of the Negro to take on the racial characteristics of any other race (and thereby undermine the solidity of those racial classifications). If in some of Johnson’s other works, such as his poetic adaptations of what he calls the “primitive material” of “the old-time Negro preacher” into the “strict metric form” of God’s Trombones, he takes on the clearly nativist modernist project of translating the racially primitive into examples of the “civilization of the Negro,” the Ex-Colored Man is more concerned with portraying the more paradoxical characteristic of racial adaptability (Along 336). When he writes that a “novel dealing with colored people who lived in respectable homes and amidst a fair degree of culture and who naturally acted ‘just like white folks’” presents, exactly because it would be seen as a “comic” absurdity in the

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mind of the reading public, “the opportunity of the future Negro novelist and poet to give the country something new and unknown,” he could as well be describing his own book, whose narrator is “naturally” quite capable of acting white (123). This seems to be the true lament of the narrator at the close of his story: not merely that he has been deprived of his primitive racial nature, but also that he has been deprived of the opportunity to display, as William Wells Brown does in My Southern Home and as James Weldon Johnson does in writing the book that contains this lament, his natural racial mobility. And this understanding of his lament points to the double-sidedness of his project of “making a race”: on one hand establishing a sort of racial credit by showing the value of the original culture that the race has produced, and on the other by revealing, through the equally natural ability to imitate and adapt, the unnaturalness of the racial divide: that race doesn’t intrinsically exist but must be made. His lament is not for his lost immersion in authentic black culture, but for his discarded ability to move between cultures, to be a man naturally acting “just like white folks” who nonetheless avows his own blackness.

THE CAPITAL OF YEARNING The story of David Levinsky’s rise is from one perspective the story of the acquisition of credit, not only Levinsky’s individual discovery that he has a “credit face,” but the literal establishment of good financial credit for the entire group of Russian Jews of which he is representative. Levinsky, near the close of his narrative, is reminded of this development by a visit to his “magnificent” new factory and offices from the American merchant “who had been the first to grant me credit when I was badly in need of it.” That credit had come at a “time when woolen-mills would even refuse to bother with a check of a Russian Jew; he had to bring cash…. By hard work, perseverance, thrift, and ingenuity, however, we had completely changed all that. By the time I moved to the avenue our beginners could get any amount of credit” (445). 3 Just as Levinsky’s “autobiography” can be presented by the editors of McClure’s as a composite autobiography of the Russian Jewish type, so his individual “hard work” and financial success are taken by the holders of capital to represent the characteristics of his entire race. In that respect, Abraham Cahan’s two Levinsky narratives, “The Autobiography of an American Jew,” as published serially in McClure’s in 1913, and The Rise of David Levinsky, as collected and expanded in novel form four years later, make a claim for racial credit for the newly Americanized Russian Jews, for their financial reliability and their productive contribution to their adopted country. As Levinsky proudly argues, “Foreigners ourselves, and mostly unable to speak English, we had Americanized the system of providing clothes for the American woman of moderate or humble means…. The average American woman is the best-dressed average woman in the world, and the Russian Jew has had a good deal to do with making her one” (443–44). This claim would be in keeping with an article that had appeared in the March 1913 issue of McClure’s, one issue before Cahan’s Levinsky series began: “The Jewish Invasion of America,” by journalist Burton J.Hendrick. Despite its scare headline, the article is a largely admiring—one might even say awed—account of the rapid American success of “this indomitable people” (125). The Jews, Hendrick writes, “have already shown infinitely

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greater capacity for economic progress than any of the other great immigrating peoples,” and they have come to dominate not only the clothing trades, as Levinsky does, but real estate, department stores, cigar-making, whiskey, railroads, and theater and moving pictures (126). Hendrick’s account of the typical Jew’s success follows in some respects the traditional Yankee tenets of free-labor accumulation through hard work and selfdenial: “He economized in every direction, saved every penny, and cheerfully subjected himself and his family to every privation in his determination to succeed” (134). But these all-American qualities, in the very extremity to which Hendrick’s Jews take them, spill over into the almost inhuman traits of self-deprivation and infestation implied by the article’s title. Hendrick’s Jew “can start on the smallest possible scale, live almost indefinitely on credit, finance himself for months in hand-to-mouth fashion, save in picturesque ways that would never occur to the average man, gradually get a grip, which he slowly tightens day by day, and ultimately emerge with a large and profitable business in his control” (127). His method for taking over New York real estate has been to lease a tenement, and then move “himself and his family into the least expensive flat, and…cut expenses in every possible direction” (139). His family takes over all the hired maintenance positions, until he has saved enough capital to buy a tenement of his own, into which his family once again moves and repeats the process. Hendrick’s depiction of this racial “type” is reinforced by the illustrations that accompany the article, whose captions present them as portraits of, for example, “A pure type of Arabian Jew,” “a type that produces many New York school-mistresses,” or “A distinctive type—the successful, aggressive Jew” (125, 127, 140). This interest in physical typing was extended in the next article that Hendrick published in McClure’s, “Fitting the Man to His Job: A New Experiment in Scientific Management,” which appeared in the June 1913 issue alongside the third installment of the Levinsky series. In that article, Hendrick credulously relates the theories of an “expert in human nature” employed by a “great Western manufacturing plant” to assess job applicants according to their physical traits. Alongside photos of hands and faces that reveal typical characteristics such as “a frank, active nature—the type of man who is good at putting through another man’s plans,” or “a vital type—the type that makes the best executives,” are the theories of Dr. Katherine M.H.Blackford, a “chemist of human qualities” (50, 57, 52). Unlike some employers who “content them selves” with hiring “according to carefully nourished prejudices, frequently of race or religion” or merely by “‘feeling the muscles’ of applicants,” Dr. Blackford rates her job-seekers by such apparently raceprejudice-free measures as concavity or convexity of profile, physical build, and coloring, the last “a determinant element in character” (52–53). While acknowledging that this system is “seriously subject to controversy” and of unsure scientific basis, Hendrick nonetheless asserts that “the fact remains that these analyses, in the vast majority of cases, are accurate,” and that previously skeptical employers “now accept them on their face value” (59). In Hendrick’s account of the “Jewish invasion,” the most typical characteristic of Jewish immigrants, however, is not a particular physical attribute (although the close-up portraits of Jewish “types” implicitly support such a reliance on “face value”) but their economic position. For in nearly every case he lists of Jewish domination of a business sector, their control has stemmed from their position as a “middleman,” from their

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“talents for buying and selling” (128, 157). Into economic relations that once took place without mediation, he claims, the Jewish middleman has inserted himself and thereby come to control entire industries. In the clothing trade, for instance, “With the employment of the Jew…a new figure rapidly forged to prominence in the clothing industry. The middleman wedged himself between the artisan and his employer” (128). Similarly, the Jews “break into the ownership of real estate just as they break into the clothing business—as middlemen. Until the appearance of the Jews, there were only two parties concerned in the control and management of landed property—the landlord and the tenant” (139). In both cases, the Jew stands as a third, mediating party between two parties who had once dealt face to face. In the clothing industry, which had formerly been run under the “family system,” “The workman, who for years had maintained rather close and friendly relations with the manufacturer, now never saw him” (128). The middleman is a disruption in what was previously a rather intimate—a “close and friendly,” a “family”—economy, and in that sense the Jew stands for Hendrick as a figure of alienation and mediation—of the market, modernity, and the impersonal money economy. Because of the mediating figure of the Jew, who has “squeezed himself” between artisan and employer and between landlord and tenant, those two formerly intimate parties can no longer “see” each other (139). In other words, the essential, one might say inalienable, characteristic of the Jewish racial type, is that he is a figure of alienability, exploiting and widening the arm’s-length separation between contracting parties. The portraits of Jewish types that illustrate the article include one of Cahan himself, and Hendrick closes his account by pointing to Cahan’s series of articles to follow in subsequent issues of the magazine, which he says will analyze “the racial traits and training that have made possible this success” and “show, by concrete example, the minute workings of that wonderful machine, the Jewish brain” (165). One would expect Cahan’s “autobiography,” then, to continue this account of the success of the middleman, of the Jew as the mechanism of the complete marketization of the American economy. And in some respects he does so, in providing an inner glimpse of, in the words of one of Hendrick’s captions, the “successful, aggressive Jew[, the] class of Jew that dominates the clothing business,” and in pointing to the revolution that Russian Jews in particular had wrought in American industry (140). But, as Jules Chametzky has pointed out, Cahan took a topic that “might [have] expose[d] Jews to an anti-Semitic backlash” and “transformed it” (127). Because the process that Cahan details in David Levinsky looks not so much like the Jewish marketization of America, as the American marketization of the Jew. When the young David Levinsky arrives in New York, still wearing his side-locks, he is met on every side by assertions that America is the land of the dollar. Just off the boat, he tells a more assimilated Jew who asks him his occupation, “I read Talmud,” only to find that “that’s no business in America” (91). Homeless, he goes to spend his first night in a synagogue, but is told by a worshiper there, “One does not sleep in an American synagogue…. I wish I could take you to my house, but—well, America is not Russia. There is no pity here, no hospitality” (96). That same worshiper tells David how he too had read Talmud in Russia, supported by his wife, but in America she “persisted in sending him out to peddle” (97). And Levinsky describes his first Election Day as a frank

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market between politicians and “their ‘customers’”: “Traffic in votes was quite an open business in those days…. I saw the bargaining the haggling between buyer and seller…. [A] vote was something to be sold for two or three dollars” (132–33). In America, the “greenhorn” Jew learns, social, religious, and political relations are all saturated by the market. Levinsky soon reluctantly takes to peddling too, but he is by no means a natural at the business. “I hated the constant chase and scramble for bargains,” he says, “and I hated to yell and scream in order to create a demand for my wares by the sheer force of my lungs.” Rather than requiring a “Jewish brain,” in Hendrick’s term, to Levinsky’s mind the “talent for buying and selling” is a purely physical one: a peddler who was more successful than he, “a half-witted, hideous-looking man,” was “a veritable engine of imbecile vitality,” screaming incoherently and literally foaming at the mouth, but “it produced results…. One could not help pausing and buying something of him” (107– 108). By comparison, Levinsky idly dreams of going to college, his secular American “temple,” while “passively awaiting customers at [his] cart” (119). He reads Dickens “with voluptuous abandon” until he finds himself “literally penniless” (139). When Levinsky finally does start to accumulate some pennies, it is not as a peddler or a trader, but as someone with a trade, a “cloak-operator,” stitching together garments in a shop (151). His early experiences in the shop follow those, not of the pure market middlemen described by Hendrick, but of the self-creation through labor and education of Franklin, Douglass, and the rest. He is drawn to garment work by the promises of his more prosperous friend Gitelson, who describes one fellow operator who, like Franklin and Douglass, turns the factory shop into the source and site of self-education: “He never comes to work without some book,” Gitelson says. “When there is not enough to do he reads. When he has to wait for a new ‘bundle,’ as we call it, he reads. Other fellows carry on, but he is always reading…. He is saving up money to go to college.” Levinsky follows this familiar example, and sees the trade “as a stepping-stone to a life of intellectual interests” (150). But to do even the cloak-making well, he comes to realize, takes more brain power than the “imbecile vitality” required to sell goods: “I perceived that Joe, who was accounted a fast hand, would take up the various parts of a garment in a certain order calculated to reduce to a minimum the amount of time lost in passing from section to section…. I was making a science of it. It was not merely physical exertion. It was a source of intellectual interest as well” (157). And this intellectual and physical labor bears tangible fruits that are for him, as they had been for Douglass, a sign of his own self-possession: “As the jackets that bore my stitches kept piling up, the concrete result of my useful performance would become a source of moral satisfaction to me. And when I received my first wages—the first money I had ever earned by the work of my hands—it seemed as if it were the first money I had ever earned honestly” (153). But of course the money that Levinsky accumulates through his labor does not pay for his college tuition. Rather it provides the small capital on which, like Hendrick’s Jews, he builds his business empire. But again, his choice to become a capitalist is not a natural “talent” that he has imported from abroad; rather it is spurred by a racial insult. Just as his first interest in emigrating to America came as the direct result of his mother’s murder at the hands of an anti-Semitic mob—and just as the ex-colored man’s decision to join the world of white money was driven by the shame of witnessing a lynching—so Levinsky’s

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first impulse to become one of the shoestring capitalists that Hendrick describes is immediately inspired by his rage at racial humiliation, in this case an insult from his boss, Jeff Manheimer, a German Jew born in America. In a way, as Levinsky himself says, the incident is “an unimportant accident, a mere trifle,” particularly in comparison to the murders of his mother and the Ex-Colored Man’s lynching victim, but nonetheless at the heart of it is the same shame at public racial insult. Manheimer likes to complain to his immigrant workers that the “Russians were not rushin’ at all,” and Levinsky grumbles that “Altogether he treated us as an inferior race.” When Levinsky spills a bottle of milk over some coats, Manheimer rages at him, “Where were you brought up? Among Indians? …Did you ever see such a lobster?” Manheimer manages both to tag Levinsky both as a clumsy newcomer—a “lobster”—and to display his own superior Americanness by referring to that most native of pariah races, the Indians. The mark of an “inferior race” in this formulation is that it, like the American Indians, can’t be assimilated to the “rushin’” of America. The “race” that Levinsky’s Russians (and the Indians) are inferior to, Manheimer implies, is the American race. In return, Levinsky’s revenge on Manheimer will come from proving himself more capable in business—and therefore more of an American and less of a “lobster” or an “Indian”—than he. Only in his fury at Manheimer’s insult does Levinsky come upon the idea of stealing away Manheimer’s Russian Jewish designer, Chaikin, the “actual master” of the firm though he is too passive to reap his true worth, to start his own cloak-making company (187–88). Even as Levinsky steps into the role of the capitalist, he argues that his successes and those of his fellow Russian Jews are founded, not on their role as middlemen, as pure buyers and sellers, but rather on their labor experience as tailors and operators in the clothing industry. “The German-American cloak manufacturer,” such as Manheimer, he tells one department store buyer, “was primarily a merchant, not a tailor; …he was compelled to leave things to his designer and a foreman, while his Russian competitor was a tailor or cloak-operator himself, and was, therefore, able to economize in ways that never occurred to the heads of the old houses” (337). The Russian Jewish merchant, in other words, was no mere merchant; if he played the role of a middleman, it was based on his own intimate knowledge of the labor processes and the laborers themselves. But at the same time that he claims this knowledge founded in labor, he is equally aware that his position and his credit are dependent on non-intimate relations as well. In his first meeting with the designer Chaikin and his wife, in order to convince them he has the capital to start a business with them, he speaks in vague, misleading terms of his own funds and engages in “some sham figuring,” and acknowledges to the reader that “We are all actors, more or less. The question is only what our aim is, and whether we are capable of a ‘convincing personation’” (193–94). His mentor, Meyer Nodelman, has an even more sophisticated understanding of the extent to which the economy is based on “convincing personations.” Much as Donald Meyer has pointed out that the “sincere smile” of Dale Carnegie’s success manuals was less an expression of some true inner sincerity than it was a sign of the smiler’s “allegiance to the system of smiles,” so Nodelman explains that those people with “credit faces,” while they are “not more honest than some other fellows,” are nonetheless good financial risks because their “credit face” will be recognized by other bankers or merchants, which means they’ll always have access to enough money to pay their debts (Halttunen 209; 202). Their credit face is less

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a promise of inner integrity than it is a sign of their acceptance by the larger system of credit. But if the process of acquiring such a credit face is in some respects a process of establishing the worthiness and reliability of Russian Jews as a group, it is in other respects one of erasing traces of Russianness and Jewishness. While Levinsky’s entry into American capital does not require him to “pass” in the strict sense that it requires of the ex-colored man, he does respond to the pressure to Americanize by becoming less outwardly Jewish. The conditions of this process, one of Americanization through deracination, are most clearly apparent in Levinsky’s experiences as a traveling salesman of his own cloaks. The com peting salesmen whose paths he crosses work for more established firms and are more Americanized than he, and they hold him in joking contempt for it. One salesman in particular, Loeb, a fellow Jew but one born in America, needles him for his “Talmud gesticulations,” which Levinsky says “worried me like a physical defect. It was so distressingly un-American. I struggled hard against it. I had made efforts to speak with my hands in my pockets.” Loeb mocks him, saying that he can’t communicate on the telephone because “the fellow at the other end of the wire couldn’t see your hands.” Levinsky pleads, “Aren’t you a Jew yourself?” but Loeb replies laughingly, “Of course I am. And a good one, too…. But what has that got to do with it? I can speak on the telephone, all right.” Levinsky’s physical Jewishness here cuts him off both from the social acceptance of the American and from the mediating technology of modern communication: his reliance on gestures, according to Loeb, suits him only for more primitive, intimate face-to-face relations, but not for the modern form of mediated speech in which wires replace physical presence. Levinsky ends up going to exhausting lengths to repress his own physical motion when dining with three other salesman, speaking “with exaggerated apathy, my hands so strenuously still that they fairly tingled with the effort, and, of course, I was so conscious of the whole performance that I did not know what I was talking about” (327–29). Paradoxically, at the same time that Loeb and the other salesmen are chiding Levinsky for his too-Jewish embodiment, they cut him as well for copying their cloak designs. In other words, he is at fault for copying their samples too well and at the same time for not copying their American gestures (or lack thereof) well enough. For Levinsky, though, they are both part of the same process of salesmanship. His credit depends upon them equally. Levinsky’s story, then, implicitly argues, contra Hendrick, both that the success of the Russian Jew is founded on labor experience rather than mere market acumen, and that the process of marketization is a process of Americanization, not one that the Jews have somehow “wedged” into the American system. Fully entering into a modern, market existence is not the nature of the Jew, but rather one imposed on him by the conditions of America and of Americanization. One might argue, then, that Levinsky’s laments for his lost home and his lost youthful identity, which come to dominate the final sections of his narrative, point to an idyll that predates Americanization and market existence. As Miles Orvell has written about American society as a whole at the turn of the century, the “culture of consumption…was also generating a sense of the ‘real’ self as a remnant one left behind” (71). Levinsky’s homesickness in the American marketplace would in that sense be an expression of a lost, authentic identity. And that idyll might be imagined to center in the person of Reb Sender, from Levinsky’s synagogue in Russia, whom he often

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recalls in America. For Reb Sender attempts to create a unworldly world centered around the study of the Talmud and utterly separate from the marketplace. “Men of his class,” Levinsky says, “are described as having ‘no acquaintance with the face of a coin.’” And for the young Levinsky (and the old one as well, looking back), Reb Sender offers an intimate relationship not dependent on the “convincing personations” of the credit market: Reb Sender considers him a son of sorts, and Levinsky remembers, “I warmed to him and he reciprocated my feelings. He took me to his bosom…. I accepted his services with gratitude” (29–30). As David Engel has argued about the world that Reb Sender represents, “Although Cahan does not idealize this traditional life, it clearly manifests the unity of experience which Levinsky’s American experience so damagingly lacks” (44). But what is perhaps most notable about Reb Sender is that just as Levinsky describes himself at the end of his success story as “yearning” and “lonely,” so he remembers Reb Sender himself as “a yearning, lonely man” (525–26, 32). In other words, Levinsky, in his separation from the “traditional” Talmudic past that Reb Sender represents, has in fact become like Reb Sender. And the young Levinsky himself was swept up by the same longings when he was most thoroughly immersed in his own reading of the Talmud: “I was either in an exalted state of mind or pining away under a spell of yearning and melancholy—of causeless, meaningless melancholy” (37). The spell of the Talmudic singsong even causes in him the same sort of identity disjunction that he later experiences dining with the Americanized salesmen. With the salesmen on the train, the confluence of Levinsky’s conscious performance as a non-gesticulating American and his presence among the “easy urbanity of the three well-dressed Americans gave [him] a sense of uncanny gentility and bliss” that causes him to wonder, “Can it be that I am I?” Similarly, reading Talmud out loud among the “symphonic” voices of the temple leads David to consider the “mystery of my own singsong. Who is there—I seemed to be wondering, my tune or recitative sounding like the voice of some other fellow. It was as if somebody were hidden within me. What did he look like?” (330, 38). It is as if the ecstatic yearning of the synagogue wells out of this gap between song and self. It seems clear that if Levinsky comes to yearn for his past identity at the end of his story, what he is yearning for is actually his own yearning. As Cahan wrote in the Jewish Daily Forward over a decade before he wrote Levinsky, “I yearn for my greenness of old. I yearn for my yearnings of twenty years ago” (Howe 526; emphasis in original). Levinsky makes this nearly as explicit on the first pages of the book, when he says, “I love to brood over my youth. The dearest days in ones life are those that seem very far and very near at once. My wretched boyhood appeals to me as a sick child does to its mother” (3–4). It is as if he wants to be both patron and protégé, to play Reb Sender to himself, clasping his former self to his own bosom. Given this continuity of yearning from his youth to his adulthood, it seems unjustified to lay his late laments strictly at the doorstep of identity-wrenching Americanization. What he may in fact be lamenting about America is that it did not Americanize him enough—at least according to the image he first had of America. As he says of the time when he began to think of emigrating, “The United States lured me not merely as a land of milk and honey, but also, and perhaps chiefly, as one of mystery, of fantastic experiences, of marvelous transformations” (61). From the heights of his American career, he regrets that he has been changed by the experience to the extent that he feels cut off from his old countrymen and -women: “I

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often long for a heart-to-heart talk with some of the people of my birthplace. I have tried to revive my old friendships with some of them, but they are mostly poor and my prosperity stands between us in many ways” (529). But at the same time, he seems to regret not being changed enough by America, which, rather than being the place of “marvelous transformations” he had hoped for, has left him unable to “escape from [his] old self”: “when I take a look at my inner identity, it impresses me as being precisely the same as it was thirty or forty years ago” (530, 3). What has been changed in him, by America or by the sheer process of time, is his belief that he can change. Whereas once he might have yearned for an American “adventure” to transform him, he now yearns to have once again the hope—a hope he no longer believes in—that such a transformation is possible (61). In a compelling Bourdieuian reading of the novel, Phillip Barrish has argued that through these structures of yearning Levinsky accrues a sort of capital, that there is a value to his homesick acknowledgment of a gap between his present consciousness and the “raw material” of his past (644). In one respect, he argues, Levinsky’s protestations of his own abased “insignificance,” of the emptiness of his success, in fact function as a sign of that success, “a cultural mark of distinction that complements and represents the accumulation of capital” (643). By avowing his own lack of desire for the trappings of his success, he genteelly suggests the same sort of distance from the marketplace that the excolored man’s disembodied patron claims, even while his ability to establish such a distance is itself founded on the marketplace. He learns “the sorts of profits disinterestedness can earn,” which, as Barrish notes, Cahan ties directly to the genteel civil service reforms of the post-Reconstruction era through the person of Bender, the loyal Democrat who partisanly accuses the Republicans of partisanship (652). Levinsky also reaps a more specifically economic reward from positioning himself as both connected to and separate from his history as an observant Jew and a greenhorn laborer, which “enables him, for instance, to acquire a cohesive, union-proof group of skilled employees” (654). He can hire Russian Jewish workers at below-union wages because he allows them to follow their traditional, orthodox practices in his shop. As he tells one department store buyer, It is a fact that the best ladies’ tailors are old-fashioned, pious people, green in the country, who hate to work in big places, and who keep away from Socialists, anarchists, unionists, and their whole crew. They need very little, and they love their work. They willingly stay in the shop from early in the morning till late at night…. They are used to it. In Russia a tailor works about fourteen hours a day. Of course, I don’t let them overwork them selves. I treat them as if they were my brothers or uncles. We get along like a family…. (323) He positions himself for this buyer, in other words, as both intimate with these immigrant workers—as “family”—and as their differentiated, more Americanized employer, who makes this whole pitch “with an affected Yankee twang” (323). This, then, is the position of the “American Jew”: standing at the point at which the authentic carries a market value, at which what is typical of the “Russian Jew” becomes valuable in the American economy. This is the point at which racial credit is available,

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when the characteristics of a race become typified and translated into the terms of the American marketplace. And while this mediating position is seen by such writers as Hendrick as the very characteristic of a Jewish race of middlemen who bring the wedge of alienation into the previously intimate, face-to-face economy of Americans, much of the weight of David Levinsky is directed toward showing the extent to which that mediating position is not a characteristically Jewish one, but rather an American one. But like The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Cahan’s novel declines to offer up a vision of pure authenticity as an alternative to the alienating American market. Levinsky’s yearning for his old yearnings, for the hoped-for “marvelous transformations” he had once projected on America, seems not so much a nostalgia for a static past or an authentic identity, as a longing for a kind of absolute mobility. For the American marketplace both promises this mobility, in its desire for the new, and at the same time prevents it, in its desire for the typical, the creditable, the recognizable. The Rise of David Levinsky may be a narrative of transformation, but it is at the same time a narrative of immobility, in which the transformations of Levinsky’s rise do not present him with further opportunities for change, but rather reveal to him the extent to which his adaptations and impersonations have driven him into the corner of his fixed identity, mediating between cultures, but unable to move freely between them himself.

Chapter 4 The Reality Effect in the Film Machine The Authentic Performances of the Silent Comedies From Shirtsleeves to Shirtsleeves in one generation is just as true an American legend as from Ploughboy to President or from Poland to Polo. Moreover, we, who are without ambition, prefer it. Mack Sennett went from boilermaker to president of the Keystone Company. The Keystone Company is finished and so is Mack Sennett. This fact should make everyone but Gilbert Seldes feel a little better. —Nathanael West, “Soft Soap for the Barber”

IN 1912, THE YEAR BEFORE CAHAN’S “AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN AMERICAN JEW” appeared in McClure’s Magazine, a young English actor named Charlie Chaplin arrived in New York to embark on a tour of North America as part of a troupe of musichall comedians. It was his second trip to the United States, and this time he would stay for forty years, never becoming an American citizen but embracing the American mythology of class mobility and Levinsky-style “marvelous transformations.” 1 At home within the strict class system of England he had “reached the limits of [his] prospects,” he writes in his autobiography: “I loved England, but it was impossible for me to live there; because of my [low-born] background I had a disquieting feeling of sinking back into a depressing commonplaceness” (118, 133–34). In America, by comparison, despite feeling “alien to [its] slick tempo” on his first arrival in New York, he soon leapt headlong into what he saw as its celebration of confident self-reinvention. It was a revelation that he says came not from immediate success but rather from failure. After his imported show failed to rouse American audiences he realized, with a sort of liberating vertigo, that there was no reason he had to stay in the particular business he had set out in. “The American,” he writes, is an optimist preoccupied with hustling dreams, an indefatigable tryer. He hopes to make a quick ‘killing.’ Hit the jackpot! Get out from under! Sell out! Make the dough and run! Get into another racket! Yet this immoderate attitude began to brighten my spirit. Paradoxically enough, as a result of our failure I began to feel light and unhampered. There were many other opportunities in America. Why should I stick to show business? I was not dedicated to art. Get into another racket! I began to regain confidence. Whatever happened I was determined to stay in America. (123)

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It was an idea of self-remaking that he took to the point of seriously contemplating dropping out of show business when the going got particularly tough out in the American provinces and becoming a hog farmer in Arkansas. In this atmosphere of transformation, he came to believe that his status as a newly arrived immigrant made him more typical an American rather than less. When he returned to America to stay in 1912, he “felt at home in the States—a foreigner among foreigners, allied with the rest” (134). And having transformed himself once already in his journey across the Atlantic, he was a ready consumer of perhaps the basic text of American self-making: “Then I discovered Emerson. After reading his essay on ‘Self-Reliance’ I felt I had been handed a golden birthright” (134). This American “birthright,” as he reads it, is granted to anyone who chooses to call themselves American, whether they were American by birth or not. Within a year of that second trip to the U.S., after suffering through the “bleak and depressing” “tedium” of the cross-country vaudeville circuit, he indeed got into another racket—though not one so alien as hog-farming—by signing a contract with Mack Sennett’s Keystone Company to leave the vaudeville stage and go across the country to make motion picture comedies in Los Angeles. This new industry would be the arena in which many men, and some women, of lower class and often immigrant origins would, like Chaplin the Englishman and Sennett the Irish Canadian, accumulate significant fortunes and cultural authority within a few short years. It also would become, both because of the stories of quick fortunes made by such stars and producers as Chaplin and Sennett and because of the new mediums built-in capacity for indulging and provoking fantasy, the arena in which many more millions of men and women would project their own dreams of self-transformation and upward mobility, seeing in the movies’ characters, and more particularly in their stars, a vision of the new and golden people that they might become. It is not surprising, then, that when the silent comedy shorts that Sennett and Chaplin had a hand in creating expanded into the longer narrative form of the feature-length picture in the 1920s, many of the most significant comedies turned to the basic elements of the self-made success story for the structure of their plots. Films such as Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last (1923) and Feet First (1933), Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman (1928), and Chaplin’s own Modern Times (1936) are all constructed around the familiar formula of the self-making orphan attempting, with varying degrees of success, to rise in the city of strangers. These men on the screen all begin as anonymous outsiders, in a position with which the members of their crowded, passive audiences might identify. Their narrative trajectories are driven by the tension between joining the crowds and machines of the city and establishing a coherent, individual identity separate from the anonymity threatened by those same mass forces. But what is most noteworthy about these particular narratives is that this tension within the film story between anonymity and identity is mirrored within the film stars’ personas between the mediating technology of film and the authenticity of their performances. Just as their comic heroes attempt to individuate themselves from the machinic masses around them, so the comic actors worked to assert the bodily reality and the individual, unrepeatable skill of their performances, against the impersonal threats of rapid film editing and mass reproduction that might dissipate the personal force of those performances. Their particular ambition was to reap the lucrative benefits of the widespread production of their performances,

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while retaining, within the frames of the motion picture, the reality effects that tied those reproductions to their individual, and suddenly highly recognizable, bodies. The images that were distributed across the globe would assert the incontrovertible and singular reality of the comics’ performances even while the bodies whose reality they represented were nowhere to be found. This is a version of reality that shares its structure with the forms of alienable, marketable authenticity examined by West, Johnson, and Cahan. Just as the authentic carries its value because of its ties to a particular locality even though to reap that value on the market it must become divorced from that locality, so these filmed performances attempt to establish their ties to a real physical moment and a real, individual body even as they are reproduced and repeated across the world. Most early films did not evoke these individuating effects, however. The first years of film did not make stars out of their subjects; rather, they presented anonymous types and impersonal action. Many early motion pictures were just that: pictures of motion, products of a fascination with the views of the physical mechanics of movement that the new technology provided. Eadweard Muybridge’s famous photographic studies of animal and human motion in the 1870s, taken with a camera that could record multiple photographs per second, are not moving pictures in our sense—they weren’t meant to create the illusion of motion but rather to look behind that illusion—but they are prototypes of the frame-by-frame incremental capturing of motion later perfected by the movies. His subjects are not presented as individuals, but rather as species or gender types, as examples of, to use the title of one of his collections, Animals in Motion. He may have in some cases used as his models exemplars of physical culture whose bodies were far from average, but they are presented merely as ideals of their type, as “Man Walking.” A bodybuilder such as Eugene Sandow appears without the star billing he would have received on the vaudeville stage. The vivid musculature of these models is not a sign of their singular identities, but rather merely a means by which the hidden structure of the ordinary and average human body can be observed. Muybridge’s photographs, arranged in series, function as a form of ultra-slow motion, attempting to capture bodily motion by freezing it, slowing it down to the point where the human eye can comprehend the mechanics of its own body. In this way, the machinery of the photographic series is used to establish the body itself as a machine, as merely a vehicle of movement. As such a machine, the body has little agency. By reducing the interval between images to a minimum, the series appears to remove the possibility of volition from movement. There is no image that does not appear to be the inevitable, mechanically determined result of the image that precedes it; the images come too quickly for the mind to change the body’s direction. Motion seems to occur without thought. Early motion picture comedy similarly presents the body as an unthinking and anonymous machine. In the pure slapstick of Mack Sennett’s Keystone comedies, the body stands largely as a site of reflex, desire, and instinct. A pretty girl walks by and a boy’s head turns. If you want something you take it. You slap my face, I’ll slap yours. All of which, inevitably, leads to a chase. As Gilbert Seldes describes the plot of one Sennett short, “two men meet a pretty girl near a river and they find a huge mallet” (21). Again, in this form the body becomes machinic in its rote reflexiveness, like a frog’s leg jerked by an electrical charge. Being new to the film-making machinery, you might say, Sennett

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and his Kops succumb to it and become machines themselves. Charlie Chaplin writes that when Sennett signed him off the vaudeville stage, he was “not terribly enthusiastic about the Keystone type of comedy,” their “crude melange of rough and rumble” (138–39). But in some respects he found this new technology less machinic than the vaudeville industry he had left behind. Rather than playing the same routine day in and day out, in town after town, the film company made up new comedies on the spot, and when one was sent to the distributor, they moved on to the next. As Chaplin writes, “Creating this way made films exciting. In the theatre I had been confined to a rigid, non-deviating routine of repeating the same thing night after night; once stage business had been tried out and set, one rarely attempted to invent new business” (154). In this way the mechanical reproduction of film substituted for the repetitions of the road; the film comic could send copies of his image out across the world—as represented by the cutouts of his tramp character that announced outside theaters everywhere, “I am here to-day”—while the comic himself moved on to create his next performance (Seldes 35). But performance, in Chaplin’s way of looking at it, was something that the Keystone method did its best to destroy. “Personally I hated a chase,” he writes. “It dissipates one’s personality.” Walter Kerr, in his book The Silent Clowns, agrees: “Though Sennett could detect talent, it was enormously difficult for that talent to ripen under him in any personal idiosyncratic way. The films did not allow pauses for individual identifications. The clowns were, in effect, masked blurs racing from entrance to exit, knocking over indoor tables and outdoor pedestrians along the way” (70). And individual personality is not only undermined by masks and by the action within the film, but by the technical aspects of the quick-cutting Keystone style. In his autobiography, Chaplin fights constant battles with his directors, particularly Sennett’s top director, Henry “Pathé” Lehrman, whom Chaplin mocks as “very conscious of the fact that he had made some successful comedies of a mechanical nature; he used to say that he didn’t need personalities, that he got all his laughs from mechanical effects and film cutting” (144–45). (Sennett admits in his own autobiography that Lehrman was “incapable of understanding that Charlie Chaplin was not an automaton” [160)].) Significantly, Chaplin’s account of the discovery of his film personality, the tramp character, centers around such a battle. The tramp’s first scene was nearly ten times the length of the usual Keystone scene, and Chaplin had to talk Sennett and Lehrman out of mutilating it in the cutting room. “If it ’s funny,” he argued, “does length really matter?” (146–47). Of course length, in this case, did matter; it’s only when Chaplin was given the time to perform that he could establish the character of the tramp, and, with it, his own identity as a recognizable and individual performer. In fact, in his telling, it was the comic force of his uninterrupted performance, which drew a laughing crowd of stagehands, carpenters, and actors around the set, not his debating skills in the cutting room, that overcame the director’s reflexive urge to cut. Eventually, it was that performance that brought an end to the Keystone era of comedy. This tension between the actor’s performance and the machinery of film, however, did not disappear with the waning of the Keystone shorts. In many early analyses of the medium of film, in fact, the sort of arguments that Chaplin made against Lehrman were painted as anachronisms in the natural maturing process of the cinema. His desire for long, static shots showcasing his own performance was seen as a throwback to the

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theater, in contrast to the more truly “cinematic” techniques of editing and camera movement. Soviet director and theorist V.I.Pudovkin, for instance, in describing the “whole host of denunciations, protests, even indignant swear words” thrown by unhappy stage actors at their film directors, sounds like he has heard arguments like Chaplin’s before: Actors maintain that…they deliver themselves bound into the hands of the director and his assistants, becoming will-less automata, executing in obedience to a series of shouts and orders a mechanical task the purport of which is incomprehensible to them…. Actors further hold that they lose every possibility of feeling the unity of the image, every possibility of preserving during the process of shooting a sense of live continuous individuality…. The image created by the actor is split into minutest particles, only later to be gathered together, and, horrible dictu, this gathering is effected not by him but by the director. (2:32–33) The cinema, in Pudovkin’s view, is a director’s, not an actor’s art. Nevertheless, the postKeystone era of silent comedies was marked by the sorts of performances that Chaplin championed, in the “persona comedies” built around such recognizable stars as Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and others, who were often both the stars and the directors of their own films, and who are generally considered “authors” of the films, or “auteurs” in the usual film usage, even when they are not credited with the films direction 2 (Maland 114). In these films, the “live continuous individuality” of the performer is established not merely by the trademarks of his persona—the mustache and bowler, the glasses, the stone face—but by the assertion of the performer’s own bodily presence within the frames of the film. Tom Gunning has recently argued that early film should be seen as a “cinema of attractions,” based less on classical narrative structure than on “the alternation of presence/absence that is embodied in the act of display,” and that the attraction is not merely an evolutionary vestige of the live theater erased by the discovery of true narrative cinema but a function in continually dynamic relation to the forces of narrative that came to dominate the cinema by the 1920s (“Now” 74). 3 In that respect, the presence of the performer’s body—the displays of physical risk and acrobatic and pantomimic skills—functions as a reality effect within the film narrative and within the machinery of filmmaking itself: the film is as much about the promise, the attraction, of the actor’s “reality” as it is about his character’s filmed story. But the reality effect of that presence is not just that of any old body; the body presented in the persona comedies is an extreme one, separated from the anonymous, machinic masses by rare physical skills and daring risks. The body on display, then, is not merely present but individuated, separated from the bodies that, like the masked blurs of the Keystone Kops, are mere bodies in a machinic sense. The performer’s body is a body with agency, a body not merely authentically present, but one self-consciously—and selfdefiningly—so. The comedies’ narratives of presence and absence depend on that tension between the anonymous and individual body. Harold Lloyd’s “glasses character,” for example, is in his Clark Kent-ish appearance an “average recognizable American youth”—recognizable, in other words, in his averageness, his anonymity (Lloyd 59). But

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in Lloyd’s “thrill comedies,” Safety Last (1923) and Feet First (1930) in particular, the narrative inadvertence of the character’s stunts—his unwilling and unplanned skyscraper scaling—comes to be overwhelmed by the unmistakable reality of the risks taken and skillful acrobatics performed by Harold Lloyd, the actor. Similar claims might be made about the daredevil comedies of Buster Keaton, such as the waterfall rescue in Our Hospitality (1923), but the relationship between the body and the anonymity threatened by the machine in his films is an ambiguous one. While on one hand his films, like those of Lloyd and Chaplin, use risk and acrobatic skill to assert the real and individuated presence of his body, his character is more likely than theirs to join the machines that threaten his body and identity, just as Keaton as a filmmaker is more willing to use the machinery of film in ways that might undermine the reality effect of his presence. This tension of a body working within the machine is perhaps best seen in his late feature, The Cameraman (1928), which points out the centrality of reality “thrill” effects to film reception even as it presents few of these effects itself. The performer’s bodily presence in Chaplin’s films is established not through risky stunts—the rare appearance of “thrills” in his comedies in the house-on-the-edge-of-acliff sequence in The Gold Rush (1925) is clearly done with models—but through the lengthy, uncut shots described above that show-case his acrobatic and pantomimic skills. His battles for a bodily identity against the mechanics of filmmaking are perhaps most evident in his 1936 film Modern Times, made over twenty years after his struggles against Pathé Lehrman and his cutting-room scissors. Modern Times sits as an archetypal expression of “the man caught in the machine” in our culture; a still of Charlie stuck in the giant factory gears remains the reliable stock photo for any magazine article with a beef against automation. But Charlie not only struggles in that film narrative as an individual within the factory machine, but as a performer within the machinery of filmmaking. It is as a performer that he establishes his agency, presenting himself in static, theatrical shots rather than the quick cutting of Keystone slapstick or of montage style of Sergei Eisenstein; the lengthy, framed shots leave no doubt as to the authenticity of Chaplin’s physical skills, allowing him to present himself as a coherent “personality,” to use his own term, within the new technology of film. But even as Chaplin establishes his performer’s identity in opposition to the techniques of montage, elements of montage survive in Modern Times, in the alternation of Charlie’s comic performance with the more material storyline of the “gamin” that threatens to undermine the effectiveness of his performing identity. The tension between anonymity and performance that drives these persona comedies operates as well in King Vidor’s 1928 drama The Crowd, but in that film, the comic performance just feeds back into a closed loop of machinic labor and entertainment. The reality effects that might otherwise be achieved by the presentation of acrobatic skills, the revelation of private moments, and even the presence of a film star are all eviscerated by their very standardization; those things usually considered most individual and intimate are revealed as anonymous and public. The film does not deny a reality effect and a form of individuation of its own, however: the film’s promise of the real is in its very revelation of the statistically average and anonymous, its documentary “vivisection” of the man in the crowd, and if this approach does not individuate its actors or its subject, it does do so for its director, marking him as an artist separate from his machinic subject

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and society.

THRILLS AND THE AVERAGE BOY Harold Lloyd came to the “average” persona that would make him anything but anonymous only after trying his hardest to look anything but average. When Lloyd, having failed to make his mark at Keystone, began in 1915 to make shorts for a small company started by Hal Roach, the first thing he knew he had to do was establish a screen character with a distinctive get-up. “Chaplin was going great guns,” he writes, “his success was such that unless you wore funny clothes and otherwise aped him you were not a comedian.” Lloyd, in aping Chaplin, decided to “reverse the Chaplin outfit” with his character Lonesome Luke: “All his clothes were too large, mine all too small. My shoes were funny, but different; my mustache funny, but different.” Even a reversal of Chaplin, though, was still, as he admits, “purely imitative and was recognized as such by audiences” (53–54). His breakthrough came in 1917 when he traded in the imitative outfit for what would become known as the “glasses character,” so called because his comic equipment was limited to a pair of horn-rimmed glasses: “The glasses would serve as my trade-mark and at the same time suggest the character—quiet, normal, boyish, clean, sympathetic, not impossible to romance. I would need no eccentric make-up, ‘mo’ [mustache] or funny clothes. I would be an average recognizable American youth” (59). The new costume, in other words, was innovative in its minimalism, separated from the anonymity of its tendencies toward the “normal” and “average” only by the horn-rimmed glasses, which themselves give little hint of the eccentric or theatrical. Lloyd carries this guise of normality through even to the full-length thrill comedies he made, the best-remembered of which is Safety Last, whose final third consists of Harold scaling a thirteen-floor building, capped by the shot we all know him by (or at least the shot we all know, whether we know who he is or not), in which he hangs by his finger tips on the hand of a clock face high above the city. As Walter Kerr describes it, the laughter in thrill comedy “depends not so much on the quality of the joke as on the fact that it occurs when an audience’s nerves are so titillatingly ravaged that response comes on the double” (197). Kerr points out that thrill comedies were in fact a Keystone staple—they were by no means invented or cornered by Lloyd—but he also notes that the apparent victims of a car’s tumble down a cliff in a Keystone short were likely to bounce out of the wreckage unscathed. With such cartoon violence, Sennett undermined what Kerr calls the “integrity of the instrument,” the cameras promise of the real (64). In Lloyd’s extended climbing stunts, however, that promise is kept. Though Lloyd too emerges unscathed, the real danger of his near misses establishes an “integrity” to his performance that asserts the presence of his body within the frames of the film. In both Safety Last and Feet First Harold begins the story as a lowly but ambitious shop hand in a modern retail store and spends the final sequence of the film climbing the outside of a giant city building. The climbs are made out of both ambition and inadvertence—Harold wants desperately to “succeed,” but he doesn’t plan on doing it the hard way. In Safety Last, after concocting a human spider trick as a publicity stunt for his

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department store, he is forced to perform the stunt himself, with quivering reluctance, when the friend who has promised to do it gets detained. And his climb in Feet First is even more unplanned and unwilling: after hiding himself in an airmail bag to deliver an important contract bid in time, he finds himself, in the bag, suspended halfway up the side of a Los Angeles skyscraper. Within the film narrative, then, he is a reluctant daredevil; unlike Keaton, for instance, with his unflinching forward gaze, Harold flinches from start to finish, looking down at the ground in horror, looking up at the wall above him in despair. His “climb” in Feet First is in fact hardly a climb at all: he spends most of time screaming “Get me down!” and finally sets his feet down at the bottom, rather than the top, of the building. In Safety Last, as Harold’s climb begins, you can’t believe that he is doing it (and he can’t either); his surprising ascent takes place almost in spite of his own volition. His arms and feet seem to have a will of their own, reaching up for hand- and toeholds even as he looks around for help. His trademark glasses, which seem to mark him as a thinker rather than a bodily doer, are at odds with what his body is doing. As his climb continues, and it becomes apparent that no one is going to come to his rescue, he still looks anguished and unbelieving, but what increasingly demands the viewer’s attention is the uninterrupted presence of the distant city below in the background. Any interest in the fact that Harold, the reluctant daredevil, is making this climb becomes gradually overwhelmed by the realization that Harold Lloyd, the quite conscious daredevil, is actually making this same climb, and taking these heart-wrenching pratfalls, as far up in the air, or nearly so, as he appears to be. As Kerr puts it, “Lloyd climbing was Lloyd climbing” (116). The mild thrills of the character’s amusing climb vanish in the face of the vivid thrills of the actor’s sheer risk in making the film. Safety Last, Feet First, and the thrill shorts that preceded them predated any sort of process photography that could impose a city background complete with moving street-cars and pedestrians on a soundstage stunt—a technique that was clearly used, for example, when Lloyd attempted similar ledge acrobatics in his failed 1947 comeback The Sin of Harold Diddlebock. The only “tricks” that Lloyd and his crew had to heighten the illusion of danger were camera angles, a building on a hill that made the streets below look even farther away than they were, and a small platform out of camera view two or three stories below the action. As Lloyd himself points out, “at no time could I have fallen more than three stories, but who wants to fall three stories for that matter?” (86). The apparent conflict between his “average” glasses and his daredevil body, seen in this light, is less an incongruity than the sign, like Chaplin’s bushy eyebrows and mustache, of his identity as a performer, an identity that rises out of the tension between individual body and machinic anonymity that his stunt performance enacts. For if part of the audience’s tension in watching his climb stems from his characteri zation as “normal” and “average”—as someone who wouldn’t and couldn’t make such a climb—our concurrent awareness that Lloyd is deliberately and skillfully performing the risky stunt marks him as anything but normal or average. 4

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THE DAREDEVIL AS CIVIL ENGINEER Although the “thrill” comedy is considered a Lloyd trademark, Buster Keaton put his body at risk for his comedies as much as any clown. After a childhood apprenticeship spent in a family act that he recalls had “a reputation for being the roughest in vaudeville,” which largely consisted of Buster being thrown around the stage by his father Joe, Keaton would find that his “long career as a human mop proved most useful from the start of my work as a movie actor” (12, 93). The material effects of the filmmaking process on his body, almost as thorough as the dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin, are clear from the comments of his business partner in later life, Raymond Rohauer: I would say, weren’t you ever hurt in any of these things. He said, “Oh,” he said, “all the time.” He said, “You see this thing here on the top of my head, well I got that from Seven Chances.” He said, “You see this thing on my leg,” and he pulled up his pant leg, you see, “you see this scar here, you know, I got that from Sherlock Jr.,” he says, “and then you see this one here,” and he pulls up his shirt. “Well, I got that one from Battling Butler, you know,” and it was something from every film on his body. (Buster, vol. 1) And some of his stunts do assert the same sort of individuated, visibly risk-taking bodily presence that Lloyd’s do in Safety Last, in particular his stunning waterfall rescue sequence at the climax of his early feature Our Hospitality (1923), in which he swings on a rope to catch Natalie Talmadge (or rather the dummy dressed in her clothes) just after she tumbles over the edge of the falls. But perhaps more typical for Keaton than those heroics is his most famous stunt, from the hurricane sequence in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), in which he stands unaware as the wall of a building falls over him from behind, sparing him from being crushed only by an open window that allows the wall to fall flat around him and leave him untouched. It is not that the stunt is not risky—Keaton claimed that even his cameramen could not bear to watch, and crewmember Dean Riesner recalls that the wall “must have weighed a thousand pounds, the damn thing, and if Buster was six inches out of position one way or the other, it would’ve driven him into the ground like a little tent peg”—but that the stunt is as much about the wall as it is about Keaton (Buster, vol. 1). His risk-taking success depends as much on his understanding of the structures around him as it does on his own bodily presence. His stunts often approach the status of schematic diagrams, as in Sherlock, Jr. (1924), when he removes the wall of a building so that a particularly complicated gag can be appreciated in all its archi tectural intricacy. He is the daredevil as civil engineer (the profession, in fact, he thinks he would have followed if he hadn’t gone on the stage). Tom Gunning, in comparing Keaton to Chaplin, seems to have the falling-wall stunt in mind when he writes, “Keaton projects not the freedom of the open road, but the plight of modern man trying to find, within a chaos of fast-moving traffic and demonic machinery, a spot where he won’t get hurt” (“Buster” 14). In finding this spot, Gunning argues, Buster’s body often becomes machinic itself, “a ricocheting, impassive body within a

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larger comic scheme” (15). While this may bring him close to the anonymous, instinctive “masked blurs” of the Keystone system, what separates Keaton from the blurs is his evident consciousness within the works of the machine, his attempt to find “a spot where he won’t get hurt.” The blurs are as likely to get hurt as not, and to learn nothing from their pain. Keaton, on the other hand, after a lifetime of being hurled across the room, has learned a few things about engineering: for example, that when “you start to go through the air your head is your rudder—it steers you” (Keaton 149). The fact that the safe spot for Keaton is often not outside the machine but moving—or standing—machine-like within it causes Gunning to connect him to those in the European avant-garde of the Twenties who saw a way out of the alienation of modern life not through the romantic oppositionalism of the later Chaplin but through the machine itself. As one of those European theorists, Siegfried Kracauer, would write in 1925 about the Tiller Girls, a troupe of Rockette-style precision dancers “whose movements are mathematical demonstrations”: “The process leads directly through the mass ornament [his term for machinic, anonymous entertainment], not away from it” (67, 76). Unlike Chaplin, who seems to use his frequent glances at the camera to step outside the film itself, Keaton’s attention is directed entirely within the frames of the film. “No intimacy;” Kerr writes, “he will not confide in us, not tell us what he is thinking, not even smile. We are not related to him because we are not inside the screen, as he is…. There is no ‘you’ in Keaton films, only ‘he’ and ‘it’” (118, 131). The machine that Keaton joins most thoroughly, then, is that of film-making itself. When he first stepped onto a film set, Keaton writes, his mentor Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle “took the camera apart for me so I would understand how it worked and what it could do” (93). And his continuing fascination with the mechanics of film can best be seen in the well-known examples of Sherlock, Jr., in which his dreaming projectionist steps from the movie hall into the screen, and his 1922 short The Playhouse, in which Buster plays up to nine men on the screen at the same time. At its most extreme, this foregrounding of the camera could be seen as falling into early cinemas absorption in the instrument itself, at the expense of individual performances, in what Eric Smoodin has called the “reification of the apparatus,” “as a product independent of human labor” (deCordova 26). As Tom Gunning has shown, in the early years the machinery of “the cinema itself” was the main attraction, not only in the trick films of directors such as Melies, but in the more realist “actualities” that made up the balance of the pre-narrative cinema as well: the excitement of watching an anonymous baby being fed onscreen, for instance, lay not in the identity of the baby or in the drama of feeding but in the marvel of the instrument that could record and replay that image (“Cinema” 58). Keaton’s own use of film is closer to the actualities than the trick films of the early cinema; as Kerr has pointed out, despite the “tricks” of Sherlock, Jr. and The Playhouse, Keaton respected the “integrity of the frame…. It was Keaton’s notion that cutting, valuable as it was in a thousand ways, must not replace the recording function of the camera, must not create the happening” (123). He may have marveled at the new technology he had at his disposal, but he never let it put into question the physical skills and risks involved in his own performance. In this he resists what Soviet theorists such as Pudovkin considered the most purely cinematic: a film art based not on recording but on editing. Pudovkin argued that the recording function is a primitive one: “In the earliest

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years of its existence the film was no more than an interesting invention that made it possible to record movements…. Cutting was the development that first transformed the cinema from a mechanical process to a creative one” (51, 171). Keaton, on the other hand, despite his apparent willingness to become one with the machine, was as concerned as Chaplin and Lloyd with retaining the reality effect granted by an uncut shot. And what is established most distinctly as “real” in those uncut shots is Buster himself. In this respect, his most showily edited sequence—the series of jarring cuts when he first steps into the film screen in Sherlock, Jr. that sends him from garden to rocky ledge to lion’s cage to snow bank—is the exception that proves the rule. The persistence of Buster’s body across the cuts—the background changes but Buster remains—implies an uneasy relationship between the editor’s scissors and the actor’s body; it might even be seen as an actor’s response to directors such as Pudovkin who aspired to “photograph… only short bits of separate actors, and…to make out of the short bits a whole, a living figure” (142). Although the effect was indeed a film illusion achieved only through the meticulous matching of body and camera location, in the film it appears as if Buster’s body stubbornly survives untouched across the splices in the film stock that change the background behind him. “You can chop up the film,” he seems to be saying, “but you can’t chop up me.” And when Keaton the director, later in the same film, removes the wall of a building to show a gag—Buster diving through a window wearing a suit and coming out the other side wearing a dress—his aim is to establish that the stunt, unrealistic as it might seem, actually took place in real time and space. The full effectiveness of the gag depends on its promise of the real—that what appears on the screen actually took place at some uninterrupted space and time. Keaton himself, in trying “to figure out what made movie fans laugh,” alludes to this promise of the real when he critiques a largely forgotten silent comic named Larry Semon: Chaplin, Lloyd, and myself just couldn’t make two-reelers as packed with laughs as Larry’s. But when an audience got half a block from the theatre, after being convulsed by Semon’s whammios, they couldn’t have told you what they had laughed at. I would say this was because they were impossible gags. Only things that one could imagine happening to real people, I guess, remain in a person’s memory. (176) Despite his apparent willingness to join the machine, then, Keaton nonetheless asserts the real presence of his body within that machine. And the bodily authenticity of these stunts don’t merely mark Keaton as real, but individuate him as well. They were things that no one else could do. Harvey Parry, a stuntman, recalls, “To my knowledge, Buster Keaton never used a double. I don’t believe I could have done them like he wanted them…. His fall was a different fall. He didn’t just slip and fall down, he did a lot of things before he fell down, you know” (Buster, v. 1). His particular skill, his “different fall,” becomes an authorial mark. After working as an adviser on the production of his movie biography The Buster Keaton Story, for instance, he can report with some pride that Donald O’Connor, the agile actor playing him, had to admit that “he could not do my teacup roll” (276). And perhaps most telling about the process of individuation even deep within the machine is that Buster’s face, his impassive dead pan, is both the clearest sign of his

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absorption in the machine and his most valuable and recognizable individuating asset as a performer: the Great Stone Face. “People may talk it up or talk it down,” he writes, “but my face has been a valuable trade-mark for me during my sixty years in show business” (11). The sign, then, of Keaton’s machine-like resistance to emotion and to direct audience appeals is what in fact most separates him from the anonymous, machinelike crowd. This tension in Keaton’s work between body and machine, in which the spectacle of the cinema depends in part for its effect on the presence of real bodies in its manufactured product, is perhaps most self-consciously displayed in a late film, The Cameraman (1928), his penultimate silent feature and his first production as an employee of the gigantic film-factory of MGM. The Cameraman was his first made under the rationalized control system of Irving Thalberg and his first time working from a prepared script. 5 The restrictive effects of the MGM system on the film are visible less in the quality of the final product—by all accounts its one of Keaton’s most successful features—than in the place of daredevil reality effects within the film. The storyline of the film is all about bodily risk: as an opening title card reads, “When acclaiming our modern heroes, let’s not forget the News Reel Cameraman…the daredevil who defies death to give us pictures of the worlds happenings,” followed by shots of cameramen cranking on the battlefield and perched high on skyscrapers. But this movie about daredevils was one of the safest for his own body that Keaton ever made. His new employer considered it too risky for its highly paid star to do dangerous stunts himself. As stuntman Gil Perkins remembers, “Yes, he could do the acrobatic stuff, because they knew he was capable of it, but no, they wouldn’t let him do anything else, if there was anything concerned with horses, or automobiles, or anything like that, that entailed any danger” (Buster, v. 2). In The Cameraman, as a result, the bodily danger and its reality effects are moved from the making of the film into the narrative within the film. Buster’s character takes risks, but Buster himself takes relatively few. Within that film narrative, Buster follows the familiar lines of self-making ambition: playing a tintype photographer selling stills on the street who falls for the secretary at a newsreel company and tries to work his way up to become a newsreel photographer. He’s a bumbling disaster at the job, until he records two events on a reel that becomes his entree into the business. The first is of a piece with the battle footage that accompanies the opening paean to the daredevil cameraman: Buster is lucky enough to get a tip on a foreign war happening right inside his own city limits, a “Tong War” that erupts at a New Year’s celebration in Chinatown. He stands in the heat of the battle, cranking his camera all the while, trading shots for machine-gun fire, knocking men over if they block his line of sight. At a number of points, though, his frantic cranking rattles the camera so hard that it is inconceivable that the resulting images could be at all useful—at those moments the importance of his sheer bodily presence on the scene seems to overwhelm any actual camera work he might be doing. What makes the pictures he takes impressive, in other words, is not so much what they show, but that they show he was there, risking himself in the middle of the action. And that emphasis on the body of the cameraman is only heightened in the second event: he sets up his camera on a lakeshore to shoot a regatta, but what he ends up recording is his own rescue of Sally, the secretary, after she is thrown from her beau’s speedboat. The actual cameraman is not Buster at all, but his

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trained monkey, who has been imitating Buster’s cranking motions throughout the movie and who dutifully cranks while Buster swims. When the boss of the news-reel company, after seeing the footage, exclaims, “That’s the best camera work I’ve seen in years! Get that man in here quick!”, its clear that Buster’s great camera work has little to do with his eye and everything to do with his body. He takes the idea of the cameraman as daredevil so far that he leaves the actual camera behind. The great “camera work” that proves Buster’s daring stands in contrast with the first reel of film he had brought in to show the boss. That reel consists of street scenes and athletic events shown in reverse, on split screens, and in double exposure. It gets him laughed out of the screening room, and Sally reminds him, “You must always grind forward…never backward.” What is particularly striking about his “bad” camera work is its resemblance to a film released the following year, Dziga Vertov’s 1929 classic of the Soviet cinema, Man with a Movie Camera, a documentary celebration of the bodies and machines of modern Moscow that features images of athletics, industry, and crowded streets, often in split screens, in reverse, and in double exposure. Vertov’s film is quite similar to The Cameraman in its glorification of the intrepid documentary cameraman, who places himself underneath train tracks and on precarious perches on bridges and buildings and moving streetcars to get his shots. But Vertov glorifies the film editor as well, showing an editor snipping heroically at her desk, and this is the function that Keaton attempts to edit as much from the film process as possible. Buster’s route to film success is based not on a machinic assemblage of footage, but on the reproduction of an authentic bodily performance. The narrative within The Cameraman, then, follows the lines of Lloyd’s thrill comedies, which are dependent for their full effect on their authentication of the star’s risking his neck. Perhaps as commentary on MGM’s corporate nervousness, though, which reduced the actual thrills that the film provided by limiting the risks their star could take, the narrative ends by undermining the extent of Buster’s public acclaim. After the successful screening of his reel, Sally finds him on the street to tell him, “Everybody’s talking about you! They’re all waiting to give you a great reception!” Together they stroll down the street as huge crowds form and ticker tape falls from above. Buster waves at the onlookers and basks in their cheers. Their attention, however, is directed elsewhere: inserted into the film is a short clip of the man they are actually cheering, a true dare-devil, Charles Lindbergh, riding through a crowd in a shower of confetti. Lindbergh stands in the film as a reality effect that trumps Buster’s heroics not only in his status as a non-actor and in the audience’s awareness of his daring flight—the most famous conjunction of technology and risk in the modern age—but in the form of the film itself. For it’s not as if Lindbergh had made a cameo appearance on the actual set of The Cameraman; the clip of his parade is obviously taken instead from newsreel footage. The film stock is noticeably different and, more importantly, the shot is framed without the narrative authority of the rest of the film. Lindbergh doesn’t face the camera—he doesn’t appear to know that it’s there—and he is often hidden from view behind his police escorts. He glides past our vantage point too quickly—we hardly have time to recognize and acknowledge him before he is out of view. The cameras perspective is exactly that of the newsreel cameramen we have seen bustling and shoving for a shot

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throughout the movie: separated from the newsworthy object by crowds, security, and the ineluctable passage of time, even as these same barriers mark the recorded event as “real.” 6 The reality effect of Lindbergh’s appearance extends beyond the memory of his stunt to his actual documentary, non-narrative presence in the film itself. And his presence in the picture, which so overwhelms Buster’s own presence, testifies in part to Keaton’s usual self-deprecating tendency to pull the rug out from under his own feet, but perhaps even more to his frustration at the limits placed by the studio on his own risktaking and therefore on his ability to establish the reality and the individuality of his performance.

EISENSTEIN AND THE “CHAPLINESQUE” The reality effects central to Charlie Chaplin’s comedies are, by comparison, not dependent on the scenes of bodily risk so important to Keaton and particularly to Lloyd. Even in the “thrill” scene in The Gold Rush, in which Charlie’s cabin teeters on the edge of a cliff, and which Chaplin biographer Kenneth S.Lynn argues was an “all but mandated response” to the huge success of Safety Last, the tension is created not by the incontrovertible image of Chaplin in actual danger, but by the pantomimic skills of Chaplin (and the actor with whom he shares the scene, Mack Swain). The cliff is only seen in long shots that are clearly done with models—an effect that Lynn calls “primitive” (279). The vertiginous feeling of the scene is achieved instead by Chaplin and Swain’s masterful imitation of the effects of gravity, as they slide, crawl, and tumble from one end of the see-sawing cabin to the other. As the importance, and the impressiveness, of these “desperate acrobatics” imply, the reality effect of Chaplin’s performances is as dependent as Keaton’s and Lloyd’s on the absence of editing, on the static shots that assert the physical authenticity of his acrobatic performance (Lynn 280). Chaplin has been traditionally criticized for his stubborn adherence even in his later sound pictures to the old stationary camera of films early days. As Eric L.Flom quotes Karl Struss, his cameraman on The Great Dictator (1940) and Limelight (1952), I wanted to use two cameras for every shot [in Limelight], which we had done on Dictator, but [Chaplin] wouldn’t let me do that the second time. I thought I’d help him, give him something to cut, because he had no knowledge of camera direction, his films were completely ‘theater.’ It was routine work with him; you’d just set up the camera and let it go and he and the other actors would play in front of it. (199) Similarly, for Robert Florey, an established director whom Chaplin asked to assist on Monsieur Verdoux (1947), Chaplin proved to be “the irreconcilable enemy of all that is photographic composition,” especially when it involved ‘daring camera shots.’ Only shots from a certain distance from an immobile camera consistently met with his approval, and the ones he liked best were those that focused head to foot on

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himself; everything else he was apt to dismiss as ‘Hollywood chi-chi.’ (Lynn 448). The value of these retrograde shots for Chaplin was in their faithful recording of his pantomimic performance, a performance whose authenticity might be undermined by “daring camera shots” or rapid editing. This battle between performance and editing, which Chaplin fought from his very first Keystone shorts to his late sound features, is perhaps most clearly seen in his 1936 film Modern Times. Along with Limelight and The Circus (1928), Modern Times is one of his most self-conscious examinations of his own performer’s identity, an examination perhaps spurred on by the invasive threat of a new technology, the talking picture. Modern Times, while including sound and even some speech, is told largely in pantomime and title inserts and is generally considered the last film of the silent era, appearing nearly a decade after The Jazz Singer revolutionized film production with its introduction of synchronized speech. But Chaplin’s sallies against the advances in film technology and technique in Modern Times are not only directed against sound; as in the rest of his work, but more explicitly than in any other film, he fights against the close editing that might undermine the reality effect of his own performance. The individuating effects of his performance, framed as it is in the uncut, full-body shots that leave no doubt as to his singular acrobatic skills, can be seen perhaps most vividly when compared to the distinctly anti-individuating effects of one of the best known examples of close editing in the early cinema, Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike (1924). The opening credits of Modern Times are followed by a rapid series of shots: a screenful of sheep viewed from above, which dissolves into a shot of workers pouring out of the subway, which is then succeeded by overhead views of workers crowding across a street toward a factory in the background and swarming around the time clocks in an interior hallway. Julian Smith describes this montage as “a busy, clanking, mechanical, efficient, and most un-Chaplinesque force-feeding of images” (100). Gerald Mast calls it “obvious Eisenstein,” with clear “echoes of Strike” (110). The “mechanical montage style of Eisenstein, a tennis partner and admirer of Chaplin, then, can be seen as the definition of the “un-Chaplinesque,” and in many senses that is true. There is, as I have mentioned, Chaplin’s abhorrence of editing, which Eisenstein, along with his fellow Soviet directors Pudovkin, Vertov, and Lev Kuleshev, championed as the most cinematic of techniques. In addition, the thematic titles that introduce both Strike and Modern Times point to an apparent ideological split between the two. Strike opens with the declaration that “The strength of the working class is organization. Without organization of the masses, the proletariat is nothing. Organized, it is everything,” while Modern Times presents itself as “a story of industry, of individual enterprise.” Mass organization, then, versus the individual—indeed, this is the usual characterization of Chaplin’s film: the man caught in the machine (a drama evoked by Chaplin’s very use of the word “industry,” which carries conflicting connotations of nineteenth-century “individual enterprise” and of twentiethcentury mass organization). And of course, there is a clear connection between form and ideology here, between Chaplin’s individualism and his distaste for cutting that would undermine his individual identity on one hand, and between Eisenstein’s emphasis on the masses and his use of a montage style that, at least in his hands, strengthens group

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identification at the expense of individual performances, on the other. But despite this (quite valid) opposition, elements of montage survive in Modern Times. If the film celebrates the individual identity of its director and star, in particular his identity as a comic performer, it nonetheless juxtaposes that comic performance with the more material struggles of the “gamin” played by Paulette Goddard, cutting back and forth between the storylines in a way that doesn’t undermine the reality effect of Chaplin’s physical performance, but that questions the efficacy of that performance within the context of 1930s mass industry and mass unemployment. It’s a contrast that has led critics to point to the films political “ambiguity” or “ambivalence” and to describe it as “more at odds with itself than any other picture of the decade”: the film ends in a sort unresolved montage, a dialectic without synthesis as it were, between the identification with the material need of “The Masses” (the original title for the film) and the individuating reality effect of Chaplin’s performance (Maland 150; Lynn 379). But the individuating effects of Chaplin’s performance can be seen even in the film’s first “Eisensteinian” shot, where Charlie can be spotted, as Smith shows, as “the single black sheep that stands out in the middle of the flock like Chaplin’s mustache in the middle of his white face” (98). He has the generic name of “A factory worker” in the titles, but he is not just any worker. He is the oddball, the one who doesn’t get it. In the opening segment in the factory, he is the only worker who has any trouble with the machinery. No one else has to scratch an itch, no one else is driven insane. His itch and his insanity are marks of his “humanity,” which his fellow workers do not share, and he squirts them with oil to remind them of this. Later, he pushes through a crowd to get a job at a department store, and then when the factories reopen he slides through the applicants massed outside the gate and is the last one let in to work. The masses of people are only another organized, inhuman machine, another obstacle in his way. He only joins the crowd by mistake, when he picks up a flag and a labor march overtakes him from behind. He’s misidentified as the leader, because it’s apparent there’s something different about him (his hat, for instance, and the fact that he carries a flag rather than a stick like the other men). He escapes the clash with the police by finding a way underground, but he pops up out of the sewer and he’s nabbed because he is still holding the flag, unaware of its significance. He doesn’t understand the language of unity, or unidad, as the marchers’ signs say. When someone comes by at his second factory job to let him know that a strike has been called, he can only scratch his head. Whereas the workers in Strike plot in the bathroom, Charlie just goes back there for a smoke. In Strike, crowds fill the screen. For most of the movie, it seems, a crowd is either rushing right or rushing left or standing and waiting. But when those crowds march into Chaplin’s film, they undergo a change, even though they might keep the same name in the newspapers. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari attribute to Eisenstein a “very special” approach to crowds: “a crowd must be fully individuated, but by group individuations that are not reducible to the individuality of the subjects that compose the crowd” (550, 341). While the members of Chaplin’s crowds look straight ahead without speaking to each other, the workers in Eisenstein’s film break up into small groups to discuss the strike. Speakers are hoisted onto shoulders and then drop back into the mass. Individuals give their opinions and are shown reacting to events, but always as workers. Even the

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ones who disagree don’t get up and leave, and they’re not kicked out. They remain with the crowd like the rest. They never forget where their identification lies. True, some individuals in the crowd in Strike are not identified as workers, and like Charlie, they are tramps, ragged marginal characters. Their “king” even wears a bowler hat. Tramping in Strike is not an honorable assertion of humanity, however; these tramps are inhuman. They crawl out from holes in the ground, they laugh and declare that “None of us has a conscience” and hire themselves out to the agents of the factory owners, they “worm[ ] their way in” to the crowd of workers in order to sabotage them. To remain outside of organized labor is to leave yourself open to use by the powers in control of society (as Charlie, “The Tramp,” does in Modern Times when in a drug frenzy he thwarts a jailbreak). Workers have a stake in society and in social life; dropping out is an option available only to the “unconscionable ones.” The “reason to strike” given by the film, the catalyst for worker action, is that a worker, after being falsely accused of stealing, has hanged himself because he “cannot leave the factory with the stigma of a thief.” Charlie, on the other hand, at one point falsely accuses himself of theft. Charlie’s only sense of the social is in the immediate. He sizes up each situation anew and plots the threats to his being and his possible escapes with no sense of a larger fabric of social life. Being labeled a thief, just like finding himself leading a march for labor, is either momentarily useful or not useful. The immediate threats that drive Charlie to see jail as an escape are the conditions of the Depression and the mechanized speed of modern life. When he is released from the hospital, “cured of his nervous breakdown but without a job,” he is sent back out into the mechanized society that caused his breakdown in the first place. His doctor cautions him to “avoid excitement” but as he steps outside, in another example of “obvious Eisenstein,” or perhaps Vertov in this case, images of machinery and the city are superimposed over him—a power tool, a tilted shot of fire trucks, shots of traffic and rushing crowds skewed at right angles to each other. Charlie’s claim to individual identity is threatened not just by the content of these images—the faceless crowds and speeding machines—and their intellectual content as montage—the implication that the crowds themselves are machines and that the various streams of traffic are at cross purposes with each other—but by the actual technique of montage as well, which threatens the authentication of what Wes Gehring has called “real Chaplin skills” (82). For Charlie’s (as well as Chaplin’s) strongest claim to indi viduality is his identity as a performer, founded in these “real Chaplin skills.” Smith describes the sense of relief and recognition he feels when the “un-Chaplinesque” opening montage ends and the first long-take set piece of the film begins: “Not until Chaplin appears as Charlie are we allowed to savor and digest the comic and human sustenance of the main course Chaplin puts in front of us” (100). As this comment implies, Charlie’s identification lies not only in his “real Chaplin skills” but in our recognition of him as “Charlie,” as a star, a continuing character beyond the particular film and, most importantly, beyond the threatening situation he finds himself in within the film narrative. In Brian Gallagher’s words, Charlie’s figure becomes the centre of comic tension between the diegetic (story) plane and the extradiegetic (film) plane: on the outskirts of a crowd, but dominant in the frame; on the periphery of action, yet its determining, centering

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force; threatened, struck, buffeted, chased for naive miscalculations and endless intrusions, but fully and completely known to viewers at every moment. (166) We recognize Charlie in the crowd, in other words, not only because he goes against the grain and fails to observe its rules but because he is Charlie, or, rather, “Charlie,” “the Tramp.” In nearly every set piece in the film, Charlie reinforces this recognition by glancing directly out at the camera and, through it, at the audience. After a rebuke or under the threat of physical danger, his glance establishes solidarity with the audience in his struggle and reminds us that his character will certainly survive this particular incident. “The advantage within the narrative might belong to the villains,” writes Gallagher, “but the filmic universe depicted is clearly Charlie’s” (166). Charlie has an eye for the camera—even in prison, when the camera looks through a doorway from behind the shoulders of two detectives and Charlie is just a blurry figure in the distant corner of the mess hall, you can see his face turned toward you as his fellow prisoners bow their heads toward their food. His glances separate him from the crowd and provide a route of escape from the materiality of the bodies and objects that surround him. The looks he shares establish a bond with the audience—he is a performer only because we are watching him—and in that sense his individuality is not an isolation. But since it is predicated on his special talents, on his identity as a star, it is not an equal relationship, nor is it available to everyone. He plays to the audience in a way permitted to no other character in the film.

Plate 2. Charlie finds the camera. Modern Times copyright © Roy Export Company Establishment.

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Plate 3. Charlie shares the screen, but not the camera, with his cellmate. Modern Times copyright © Roy Export Company Establishment.

Perhaps the greatest threat to Charlie’s body in the film comes not from a great hulking Eric Campbell bully, but from a feeding machine at the factory, for which Charlie is selected as a guinea pig. It appears to be a marvelous machine—we hear the inventor’s spiel—but for a number of reasons we, as the audience, can be sure that it will in fact be a disaster, one of which, of course is the sheer excess of the claims made for it. A second clue is that Charlie is the one chosen to demonstrate the machine. We know, from this film and from his continuing character, that Charlie is the one who doesn’t get along with machines. When the machine begins to malfunction, its creator doesn’t know what to do. It always worked before. It’s as if Charlie’s excess of “humanity,” his individual resistance to organization, is too much for the machine. At first, however, when the feeding begins, it seems that all is well. The soup pours easily into his mouth, unlike the mess that Charlie had made of his fellow workers bowl of soup minutes before, and the “hydro-compressed sterilized mouthwiper,” well, it wipes his mouth. But after the mouthwiper ticks away from his face, Charlie shoots us a look. The camera is not facing him straight on—it’s over to the side a little—but Charlie knows where to find us, and with a wide-eyed glance and a lift of his eyebrows he lets us know that there is something wrong. The look is not just a clue for his audience, however; it is also an escape for Charlie from the enveloping metal arms of the momentary threat, because it is a reminder of his indestructible nature as a performer, a reminder that the machine is, after all, just a gag in a series of gags. When the machine starts to sputter and spark and assaults Charlie with a cob of corn, the abuse is too great for him to keep his eyes open, but his eyebrows bob up with each impact of the vegetable. The eyebrows, thick and black with stage make-up and popping up as a clue to our laughter, remind us

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again that even this is a gag, and that it too will pass. The comic rests in this tension between threat and escape that exists even at the height of the assault, a tension that is resolved even as it is begins by Charlie’s identity as a performer. When Charlie plays set pieces against people rather than objects, these people, while they are members of Chaplin’s troupe and so of course performers themselves, are not identified as such because they do not have the same relationship with the camera and audience that Charlie has. Rather than being “performers,” they are “extras,” or members of the crowd, stuck in the machinery of the film without the route of escape held open to Charlie. In a sketch in the mess hall at the jail, Charlie and his cellmate are seated at a table facing the camera. As they play against each other, or rather as Charlie plays against his cellmate, only Charlie looks straight at the camera; only Charlie is in on the gag. His cell-mate looks at Charlie or down at the table or off to the side. At one point he gets a close-up all to himself, but it seems that he can’t bear to face us. He looks to each side, he looks down, he looks everywhere but straight ahead. While we can be sure that Charlie will be released from jail at some point, this character appears to be a lifer. When Charlie has accidentally ingested some cocaine and is playing not against his cellmate but against this unseen drug, the lifer finally does glance at the camera. His eyebrows don’t bob up, however. His look is not a performance in itself—it’s not a knowing look. It appears, rather, that he has noticed Charlie’s glances at us and realizes he has some special relationship with the audience, and he looks to us for some sort of explanation, for a clue about how he might escape as well. If we could talk to him, we might say, “Raise your eyebrows!” In Strike, a glance at the camera, while it is again the mark of a performer, has quite a different value. The only characters in that film who look at the audience in the same way that Charlie does are the agents of the factory owners—the “Fox,” the “Owl,” and so on. Early in the film, a shot of the face of a blind man dissolves to reveal the face of one of the agents beneath the disguise, looking at us and laughing. His look establishes a relationship of performance with the audience, but it is founded not on the “realist” long takes that Gehring attributes to Chaplin. These performers, more than any other figures in Strike, are defined by montage, which demonstrates to us their dual nature. This performance is one of deceit, and their laughing looks remind us that although we know their “true” nature, we are powerless to stop its effects within the narrative of the film. Their looks, rather than providing an escape route from the conditions of the narrative, establish their dominance within that narrative and declare the impossibility of escape. 7 For most of Modern Times, Charlie is identified as a performer only through these glances at the camera and our knowledge of his identity as a star. Within the film narrative, he remains a factory worker or a tramp or a prisoner, at least until the final sequence of the story, when he reluctantly takes a job as a singing waiter in a cafe. Here his story seems to come to a kind of resolution. His identity as a performer, which we as his audience have known all along, is finally recognized within the narrative of the film as well. Even a crowd is no longer an obstacle to him, and in fact they are his support. The same crowd that thwarts his every move when he is a waiter applauds his singing and dancing. The audience that his glances throughout the film have been appealing to has moved within the frame of the film. In one sense, then, this resolution appears to be a nostalgic move toward his old music hall days and a resistance to the mediating

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technology of film. Smith notes the similarities between the factory of the opening sequence and the machinery of film: “Look again at the assembly line Charlie is working on: the little squares of metal moving on the belt in front of him resemble the individual frames in a piece of film. And the machine into which the ‘frames’ (and Charlie) disappear looks suspiciously like the innards of a camera or a projector” (99). He has moved from the cold, indifferent technology of filmmaking to the warm, personal response of a cafe audience. Significantly, however, the crowd that applauds him is nearly invisible, pushed off to the sides of the stage. Charlie directs his look and his performance not to them but to the camera, to his film audience. 8 He has not merely shifted the stage of his performance from the cinema to the theater, but rather to what Andre Bazin calls “filmed theater” (76). Bazin claims that in such a performance, film goes “beyond” the theater: “the stage… eggs him on, forces him indeed to exaggerate. Only the screen could allow Charlie to attain mathematical precision of situation and gesture” (79). From this perspective, the film machinery that threatens Charlie in the opening sequence is not film in general, but rather the specific techniques of rapid editing and camera movement that would have undermined the display of his physical skills. The factory can be seen as producing the very “busy, clanking, mechanical, efficient, and most un-Chaplinesque” montage images that are used to introduce it. His performance is based not on the “tricky” double nature that Strike’s montage describes, but on his assertion of an authentic and uninterrupted presence. Charlie, according to the resolution of this line of narrative, wants the perfection of performance that “filmed theater” allows him to achieve, but not at the expense of any technological imposition that would undermine the recognition of his distinct talents as a performer. 9 But this line of narrative, focusing on Charlie’s career as a performer, is not the only story the film has to tell. For the first half of the movie, Charlie’s comic encounters with machines and institutions are intercut with scenes from the gamin’s life, which play as melodrama rather than comedy. Charlie’s unemployment is an opportunity for gags, while at the same time the gamin’s father’s unemployment brings only sorrow and struggle. “When someone shoots at Charlie, we laugh,” Smith points out, while “in the very next scene, there is nothing funny about the shots that kill the Gamine’s father” (102). Smith also notes the parallel between Charlie’s bumbling passive imprisonment and the law’s wrenching of the gamin’s newly orphaned sisters from her. The same conditions that the indestructible Charlie can good-naturedly shrug off—most plainly when he yawns at a newspaper headline he sees in prison that reads, “STRIKES AND RIOTS”—cause material harm to the gamin and her family. Her father is particularly unable to take Charlie’s usual route of escape. In his only close-up, he raises his eyes nearly to the sightline with the camera, but then he falters and his gaze drops and he covers his eyes with his hand. Resigned to anonymity, the next time he appears he has joined the faceless crowd of unemployed marchers, where he is shot down by the police. His daughter, on the other hand, like Charlie, goes against the crowd. When her father is shot, the marchers scatter and she runs through them, against their current, and goes to his body in the middle of the street while they watch from the margins. Like Charlie, too, she does not shy from thievery. Her stealing, however, is not a clever trick to get back into jail; it is a direct response to her hunger. She is introduced to us as a thief,

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enthusiastically slicing bananas off a bunch in the harbor and throwing them to laughing urchins on the dock. When the law shows up, she clenches the knife in her teeth like a pirate played by Chaplin’s old friend Douglas Fairbanks, grabs a bunch for herself, and scam

Plate 4. The gamin’s father can’t quite raise his gaze to the sightline of the camera. Modern Times copyright © Roy Export Company Establishment.

pers off to safety. Her pride in her loot when she brings it home is directly opposite the spirit of Eisenstein’s strikers, who face down their hunger and that of their children as a necessary sacrifice to the victory of the group. While the gamin, like her father, does not use a glance at the audience to escape her predicament, she is anything but resigned. When we are introduced to her, she makes no attempt to look at us. Her eyes instead dart from side to side, constantly checking her surroundings. Unlike Charlie, who only perceives a threat when it has him in its grip, the gamin keeps a vigilant watch for possible dangers and opportunities. We know she will escape, not because she is our indestructible star, but because she knows the territory. She looks out for herself. While Charlie is occupied doing comic business with one of the other passengers in the paddy wagon where he and the gamin are finally united, she has her mind on escape and springs up just in time to take advantage of the crash that sets them free. Once she and Charlie have joined forces, the montage effect of their juxtaposed stories does not disappear; it just moves within the frame. They stop to rest by the side of the road after their escape, and Charlie weaves a domestic fantasy of their future life together, in a parody of the bourgeois couple they have been watching in the house

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behind them. When the fantasy ends, the camera shows Charlie in profile, smiling and talking—his performance has shifted its audience, from us behind the camera to her alone. The shot then pans to the gamin, who looks straight at the camera and rubs her stomach. She sees the material success that Charlie has been making light of as an answer to her real physical desires. Later, when Charlie works as a night watchman at a department store, he and the gamin are like playful kids, living out a fantasy like the one he had dreamed up by the side of the road. The camera cuts from one to the other as they lace up roller skates and laugh with each other, but once Charlie is ready to skate, the camera zooms back strikingly, as if to set the stage for another of Charlie’s theatrical performances. He gracefully zips across the floor into another room, and then calls out to her, in a bravura performer’s gesture, “Look! I can do it blindfolded,” and begins tracing blind, sweeping figures, unaware that with each circle he skirts the lip of a drop-off to the floor below. The gamin, who is no performer and who skittishly makes her way on skates to the other room, finally arrives and shouts out to Charlie to save him from a plunge. In both scenes, the collision of their characters has the same result as the cross-cutting storytelling beforehand: the gamin’s attention to the material grounds Charlie’s comic flights of fancy. In the department store, however, the gamin goes a step further by saving Charlie from the dangerous excess of his identity as a performer. They walk out of the room together, he now as skittish as she. As he becomes grounded through her, though, she also learns to perform like him. During his last stint in jail (he is never in for long), she is shown dancing in the street for a group of children. She has not danced before in the film; previously she leapt and sprang with a marvelous athleticism, but always for an immediate purpose, to evade or to capture. Never before has she moved for the eyes of others. Her performance is not directed at the camera—the children in the street are her audience—but a cafe owner watches from a doorway and suddenly the shot of her dancing in rags in the street dissolves into the final bow of her dance in the cafe. Now, suddenly, she is looking straight at us, smiling, accepted as a performer, which apparently has been a more effective escape from poverty than any her street smarts have been able to provide. Following her success, she arranges for Charlie’s performance at the cafe, and thereby for the resolution of his story as I describe above, just as hers has apparently come to a similar end. They embrace each other in the dressing room: artists both recognized by and separated from the crowd, and holders of steady jobs. As an earlier cut to a police station has shown, however, the remnants of an unfinished storyline remain. A warrant for her arrest for vagrancy is shown being prepared, and the photo on the warrant is a return to her days on the street. She is dressed in her old rags, and rather than looking at us and smiling from the photo as if it were a head shot for her new career, her eyes are directed sharply off to the side, observant and wary of danger. When she goes to take the stage after Charlie’s own triumph, two detectives grab her before she can begin her performance. Despite her protests that she has a job now, the detec tives declare that she is still a vagrant, and they move to take her away. The threats from her past have proved too strong for her new role as a performer to dispel. Despite the performances of Charlie and the gamin, the murder of the gamin’s father in a demonstration of the unemployed survives in memory, just as Strike, which ends with the slaughter of workers at the hands of mounted soldiers, commands the viewer in its

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final title to “Remember!” the massacres that lay “like bloody unforgettable scars…on the body of the proletariat.” The gamin only became a vagrant because of her fathers murder: as an orphan she was left in the unacceptable hands of the law. Her dancing and the admiration of the audience cannot erase the fact that she is still living in flight from the police. Similarly, Charlie’s repeated lighthearted and agile evasions of the law throughout the film distract from but cannot quite erase the violent images of the mounted police clashing with the unemployed in shots reminiscent of those in Strike. As Gerard Molyneux writes, “Even the comic business of getting Charlie into the paddywagon is set against the background of the cops wading into the crowd of men and swatting them with clubs” (112). Charlie and the gamin manage to escape the detectives, however, and we see them next sitting by the side of the road in a scene strikingly similar to the scene that followed their first escape from the police. As in that first scene, the gamin looks at the camera, not as a performer to her audience but in a fearful appeal to fate. She cries and asks, “What’s the use of trying,” if all their struggles and successes have only brought them to the same place along the road as before, where a cop is likely to come along at any minute? And as in that first scene, Charlie looks not at the camera but at her and tells her a fanciful story. “Buck up,” he says. “Never say die!” He may as well have said, “The show must go on!” They get to their feet and prepare to set off down the road. Charlie stops and gets her to smile, and they face the camera as troupers—as united artists, you might say—arm in arm, ready, perhaps, to start their own company, as Chaplin and his pal Fairbanks had. The warrant for her arrest, however, is still outstanding, the images of violence still linger, and “Charlie,” “the Tramp,” would never appear on film again. Their union is itself a montage, a collision of the comic and the material. In that sense the theatricality of Chaplin’s performance in Modern Times is twice-tethered: to the reality effect of his bodily skills on which his performer’s identity depends, and to the materiality of the gamin’s intercut needs, which threatens to overwhelm his performer’s flights of fancy.

PERFORMANCES OF ANONYMITY Another late silent film, King Vidor’s The Crowd (l928), while not a comedy, is similarly concerned with performance and individuation within the machinic anonymity of modern urban life. In The Crowd, the performers flights are tethered not by the reality effects of the star’s physical skills, nor by a montage collision with the material needs of a nonperformer, but by the film’s question ing—or rather obliteration—of the individuating effects of performance. For the “star” of The Crowd is not a world-famous “persona” actor, but an unknown, James Murray, selected for his very obscurity, a state to which he returned shortly after the films release, And while his character, John Sims, stakes much of his self-identity on small-time versions of the sorts of comic and acrobatic bits that are the foundation for the stardom of Keaton, Lloyd, and Chaplin, he is notable not for his particular, individuating talents, but for his sheer averageness, his anonymity as “One of the Mob,” a title Vidor once considered for the picture (Vidor, Tree 145). The Crowd, in a manner concurrent with both Kracauer’s idea of the “mass ornament” and Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s analysis of the “culture industry,” frames the comic

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gesture and the aspirations toward individuating creativity as parts of the closed loop of mass culture’s machinic anonymity, in which individual idiosyncrasies and private entertainments are as standardized as the mechanized labor from which they are thought to be a respite. From the first, John is presented as a representative man; representative, though, not in Emerson’s or George Washington Williams’s sense as exemplary, but in the statistical sense, as the mathematical average of the population. His birth, on July 4, 1900, might carry portents—his father declares, “There’s a little man the world is going to hear from all right”—but those portents are themselves well-worn clichés, their ambition hollowed out by familiarity and vagueness. That his father makes his prophecy less out of pride or determination than by default, out of an inability to think of anything else to say, is clear from his wide-eyed, nervously overwhelmed expression at the blessed event, the same expression that John himself wears when he learns of his father’s death twelve years later, and for much of the rest of his life. Similarly, when John enters New York harbor for the first time, he optimistically—and unoriginally—speaks of “opportunities,” but the film is quick to do the math and remind us that he is “one of the seven million that believe New York depends on them,” and then to show what must be a large fraction of those seven million in an extended series of distant crowd shots. Despite this statistical marking, John seems at first to be somewhat individuated in the manner of Charlie at the factory. When the camera finds him at his office desk in the midst of a grid of a hundred identical desks, he is not mechanically processing his papers like the men around him, but rather working dreamily on ideas for a slogan contest for a new motor fuel. When the clock strikes five and the workers rush in crowds into the washroom, John walks in alone, with a little idiosyncratic hop. And when a series of fellow workers slaps his back and greets him with variations on the same tired gibe— “Washin’ ‘em up, Sims?”—he complains, “You birds have been working here so long that you all talk alike!” But his performance is nevertheless marked as anonymous in ways that overwhelm these individuations, in particular as compared to Charlie’s performance in a similar situation. Murray, unlike Chaplin or the other comics, wears no identifying makeup or costume; when you seem him in a crowd, he is difficult to pick out until the camera picks him out for you. And also unlike Chaplin, he never looks at the camera. In his childhood optimism he looks above the camera, but after his father’s death he glances shiftily to either side. (And unlike Keaton his gaze is usually not focused on the workings of the machine around him but out into some hazy distance.) His relationship to his observers is less that of performer to audience than subject to documentarian. And as that documentary relationship might imply, what most clearly marks him as a non-performer is that neither we nor his 1928 theater audiences have ever seen him before or heard of his name, except perhaps in reading about the film beforehand in critical summaries or contemporary film publicity and journalism that would themselves have labeled Murray as an unknown. That the publicity surrounding the film focused on defining Murray in that way is clear from the reviews that Vidor quotes in his autobiography, which speak in almost identical language of Murray’s career as a longtime film extra and “a doorman in this same Capitol Theatre” where the film had its premiere (Tree 154). And Vidor himself writes at length about his aims in choosing such

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an anonymous star: We thought if we could put an unknown actor in the leading part the film would carry much more conviction and present the documentary flavor we hoped to achieve. In my mind I formulated a picture of an average young man who, though not unattractive in appearance, was ‘just one of the crowd.’ I started to search for a physical counterpart of this mental image. I kept a roving eye open in drugstores, downtown cafeterias, on buses, and streetcars…. [Finally,] I caught a momentary glimpse of a young man whose image seemed somehow familiar. Then I knew he was the exact prototype of the character for whom I had been searching. (146–47) Murray represents, in other words, a rare sort of anonymity: somehow both unknown and familiar, “one of the crowd” and yet immediately recognizable (as such). And his unwillingness to leap at the chance Vidor offers him gives him an air of almost willed oblivion. When Vidor first asks Murray to come see him, the actor never shows up. Then when Vidor desperately tracks him down three days later, Murray says first that he is too busy and finally comes to the studio only when Vidor offers to pay him. When Vidor asks him, “Can you act?” and he replies, “I don’t know,” Vidor says he “was now quite sure of my instinct about him.” After his screen test, Vidor and Irving Thalberg agree that he is “one of the best natural actors we had ever had the good luck to encounter” (148). “Natural actor” in this case seems to represent the same ambiguity that made Vidor notice Murray in the first place: just as he is somehow recognizably unknown, so he has the ability to, in the familiar oxymoron, “act naturally,” to perform as if he were the anonymous figure that in fact he is. But although his performance is clearly one of anonymity, Murray’s character, John, nevertheless clings to a store of little theatrical “tricks,” not unlike the bits of stage business that are the stock of the persona comic’s trade, which he performs in moments of leisure throughout the film. He juggles, he strums the ukulele, he does little parlor illusions. When he first meets Mary, his future wife, he does a trick for her of passing his hand in front of his face and changing his expression, from a grin to a Keatonish stone face. These little theatrical skills appear to be set in contrast to the machinic anonymity of mass labor: John does them while lounging around their apartment and to amuse his girl. He plays his ukulele and sings while Mary does her drudge work around the house and prepares a picnic at the beach. When her dour, hard-working family visits their apartment, Mary tells them, “Johnny’s invented another new trick. Coax him to do it for you.” When Johnny does the trick—it’s a horrifyingly mediocre illusion in which he appears, just barely, to “break” his arm—he says, “That’s it.” “That’s what?” they say. “The trick.” To which his mother-in-law replies, “Before you attempt any more tricks, young man, I’d like to know if you got your raise yet.” These sorts of gags and minor acrobatics, though, are connected to the work that John appears to really want to do, work that is, or seems, closer to play: the creative, individuating labor of making up ad slogans, the “big ideas” that will give him his big break. When he finally does come up with a contest-winning phrase, it is the direct result of, literally, horsing around: after a desultory day at the beach, John’s kids scream that

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they “want to ride horsey-back.” Shuffling along on all fours in the sand with his baby on his back, John sheds his frustrations in a fit of joy and declares, “This must be my day! I feel another advertising slogan coming on!” And indeed, while juggling for his children soon after, he does come up with one; fittingly, it refers to the very sort of labor-masking bodily performance he has aspired to throughout the picture: “Sleight-o’-Hand! The Magic Cleaner.” But the slogan, like the little gags, doesn’t actually get him much of anywhere, even though it wins the contest. In a concrete sense, this lucky break leads directly to the family’s downfall: the windfall from winning the contest leads to a spending spree that directly results, in the film’s narrative brutality, in the death of their baby, which itself leads to John losing his office position out of grief-stricken distraction. And in a more abstract sense, winning the contest is credited by the film not to John’s particular ability but to the anonymous workings of chance: a title card deflates his victory by reminding us that “Everybody wins a prize once in their lifetime…somehow,” words that evoke Horkheimer and Adorno’s later critique of the culture of chance and the “hit”: “Increasing emphasis is laid not on the path per aspera ad astra (which presupposes hardship and effort), but on winning a prize…. Chance and planning become one and the same thing, because, given men’s equality, individual success and failure— right up to the top—lose any economic meaning.” John is one of the workers who, in Horkheimer and Adorno’s words, “take the hint” from the culture that the prizes offered by chance, rather than effort or skill, provide the economy’s rewards; his mistake, however, is then to misinterpret his lucky break as a sign, nonetheless, of his effort and skill (146). Out of work, John, like Charlie in Modern Times, answers cattle calls for workers— “100 men wanted,” reads one blackboard—but unlike Charlie, anonymous John can’t at first break through the crowd to get hired. When those jobs are filled, however, a man comes back out and asks, “Who can juggle balls …to attract attention to a sign?” and John leaps at the chance to show off his skill. And he is in fact hired, to walk through the crowded streets in a clown’s outfit, juggling three balls and wearing a sandwich board that reads, “I am always happy because I eat at Schnieder’s Grill.” What his performing skills get him, then, is not a big break as an individuated star, but a place back in the crowd. As a title card instructs when John loses his job, “We do not know how big the crowd is, and what opposition it is, until we get out of step with it.” In regaining a position, John is only rejoining the crowd, not transcending it. While it is now quite easy to find his costumed body in the anonymous masses, what actually makes him visible, like Lemuel Pitkin performing his own dismantling on the vaudeville stage, is the thoroughness of his anonymity, the desperate lack of agency that forces him to take such a “subproletarian” job and at the same time, as the main activity of his job, proclaim his constant happiness (Hansen, “Ambivalences” 103). As he himself had sneered about a similar sandwich-board clown early in the movie, “The poor sap! And I bet his father thought he would be President.” That relation between performance and anonymity becomes even more clear when John, with the money he has earned as a clown, takes his family to the vaudeville theater, where they see John’s ad slogan in the program (the image chosen to illustrate “Sleighto’-Hand, the Magic Cleaner” is, yes, a juggling clown) and laugh uproariously at clowns on stage—one dressed in a costume much like the uniform John wears every day to

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work—kicking and jumping on each other in Pitkinesque comic violence. In the films stunning final image, the camera pulls back from a tight shot of John and his family laughing and rocking in their seats to longer and longer shots of the crowd around them, dressed all alike and laughing and rocking in the same machinic, anonymous rhythms. The audience’s rocking bodies evoke the images of machinic, physical entertainment that fill the rest of the movie: the merry-go-rounds and funhouses of Coney Island, where John and Mary (and the rest of New York) go on their first date; the incessant gumchewing; even Mary’s jubilant rocking in her chair as she counts up how they might spend the prize from the slogan contest. The film presents a closed loop of labor and entertainment, in which after a day of working as a clown, John goes to watch other clowns perform, and in which the crowds machinic mass pleasures mimic their standardized labor. Again, a quote from Horkheimer and Adorno reads almost as if it were a title card from Vidor’s film: Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an escape from the mechanized work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at the same time mechanization has such power over a man’s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably afterimages of the work process itself. (137) This closed loop operates not only between labor and leisure, but between the public and the private, which can be seen nowhere as clearly as in the Tunnel of Love at Coney Island, where the intimate moment of John and Mary’s first kiss is not only spurred on by the cultural inevitability of the ride, in which all couples are expected to take advantage of the temporary privacy of the darkness. Their kiss is also then displayed for public amusement: in its last feet the tunnel is made up of a retractable awning, labeled on the outside in huge letters, “DO THEY NECK? WATCH.” The awning is pulled back to reveal the couples’ “private” moment to a crowd of onlookers, themselves dressed and coupled in the same way as the couples they watch and laugh at. The fact that these men and women follow the most publicly standardized norms in what are traditionally thought of as their most private moments—when you are riding in the Tunnel of Love, you are supposed to neck—is what makes those moments available for public consumption. In this respect John and Mary’s later honeymoon train ride to Niagara Falls is just a more advanced version of the Tunnel of Love. Everyone in their Pullman car, from the porter to two older men who can’t stop laughing at John’s nervous “dolling up” before going to bed, seems to be aware that this is their wedding night, and also aware, as the discovery by one of the older men that John is reading a book called What a Young Husband Ought to Know only confirms, that for the sanctification of their private existence together they have chosen the most standardized of ceremonies, the Niagara Falls honeymoon. The attraction and the entertainment of both of these moments, then, is their revelation, not merely of the private, but, more specifically, of the saturation of the private with the public, of the individual with the standard. If a glimpse into the private and intimate can be seen as a reality effect, in the way that an unveiling carries with it the promise of truth, then these mass exhibitions undermine

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the “reality” of those revelations, by pointing out the very public derivation of even the most private of moments, just as the bits of physical comic business that for the persona comics are framed as emanations of the real are for John only part of the closed loop of mechanical labor and entertainment. And even Niagara itself, which in its sublime revelation of nature’s power is perhaps the nation’s greatest reality effect (or at least its best known and most visited), finds its “reality” similarly diminished by its very popularity, its standardization as the natural wonder of the eastern continent, and by the sheer number of young men who, like John, are driven to declare to their brides, as they stand on its misty banks, “You’re the most beautiful girl in the world!” But this all is not to say that The Crowd carries with it no revelation of the real. As Vidor’s comments above about finding his star imply, the reality effect asserted by his film is not that of the individual performance but of the documentary. The film replaces the real constructed as private and individual with the real as statistically average. To cite again the reviewers quoted by Vidor: “it is a story of real life. It is a cross-section of the life of one of the crowd, his joys, trials, and troubles,” “Vidor is a mental vivisectionist. He has developed the theme of mediocrity with X-ray cruelty. Don’t miss seeing The Crowd?” “The happy-go-lucky attitude of a majority of persons who never think of the future save in optimistic fashion has not been expressed before on the screen” (Tree 154, 156). Vidor himself relates, “Many times I have heard it referred to as a semidocumentary” (King 186). And this effect of documentary realism was achieved not only by finding a lead actor who could represent the “majority of persons,” but by camera work as well. Many of the street scenes were shot in New York by a camera hidden in a delivery truck, and Vidor recalls that “In about ten days of shooting we employed no extras for the street scenes, nor do I recall that anyone detected what was happening” (22). Alongside the more unobtrusive camera work of these street scenes, though, there are a number of scenes that call attention to the camera and direction in a way that heightens the feeling of the director as a “vivisectionist,” particularly in the pictures best known shot, in which the camera, beginning at street level, tracks up the side of a mammoth skyscraper before zeroing in on a single window. After a barely noticeable dissolve to an overhead view of a room full of scores of identical desks, the camera then tracks inexorably over rows of identical workers until it picks John out of the mass. John doesn’t himself rise out of the crowd; rather, the camera finds him. (As Chip Rhodes points out, unlike Lloyd’s human-spider stunt in Safety Last, in The Crowd it is the camera that scales the skyscraper [117].) Similarly, the effect of two scenes influenced by German expressionism, in which the set design is noticeably altered to reflect John’s state of mind following his fathers death and his child’s birth, further demarcates the division between inspecting camera and examined subject. Vidor’s realism, in this respect, is closer to that of Pudovkin’s theories of the higher realism of montage (or to, say, the naturalism of Stephen Crane’s Maggie, a Girl of the Streets) than it is to the reality effects of Lloyd’s thrills or Chaplin’s full-body pantomime. Pudovkin, like Vidor, speaks of film as a “director’s medium” and of the director as a sort of vivisectionist, whose job is the “dissection [of each event] into parts or elements,” and who achieves a “maximum mastery of reality” through the methods of montage (Vidor, King 31; Pudovkin, 1:66, 2:48).

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This separation between camera and subject points to the limits to which the film should be seen as commenting on its own role in the closed loop of machinic entertainment. For while Rhodes argues that “The final tableaux [sic] self-reflexively comments on the film’s own complicity with mass culture. For the Sims family could just as easily be at the movies, the most influential mass cultural apparatus of the time,” it is clear that The Crowd doesn’t think of itself as that kind of movie (123). Unlike the more unabashedly machinic productions of the Keystone factory, Vidor’s film attempts to separate itself from the subjects it critiques. That separation is apparent in the distance marked by the masterful camera work; in the instructive title cards, which are as didactic as Dreiser’s authorial interventions (or, for that matter, as Horkheimer and Adorno’s cultural critique); and in the discourse surrounding the films reception, as the reviewer’s use of the term “vivisectionist” should imply. For that same reviewer, the film’s realism is exactly the thing that separates it from the usual product of the studio machine: “Coming from the Hollywood mill, where one Cinderella story is turned out after another, The Crowd is a picture that will leave an impression long after you have seen it” (155). And Vidor himself participates in the same discourse in explaining why he has included the laudatory reviews in his autobiography: “I include the foregoing excerpts with mingled pride and purpose. The pride can be easily understood, but the purpose is, I hope, implicit in the theme of the book…. When is a creative artist’s work expressing the quality that he alone can give it?” (Tree 158; emphasis added). In this sense, while the picture undermines most any individuation within its narrative, it reserves that individuation for the artist himself, the director Vidor. And the film has remained central to Vidor’s reputation as a successful artist within the dehumanizing machine of MGM, the very studio that broke Buster Keaton’s will. As film historian Richard Koszarski relates it, Vidor’s “long and fruitful relationship with MGM…provides a model for the accommodation of a strong-willed director to the requisites of big-studio production…. Vidor would trade off projects by agreeing to two of the studio’s projects as long as he could direct one of his own. The most spectacular example during this period was The Crowd” (234). The Crowd is separated from the machinic productions of mass movie culture by its status as a “prestige” picture, just as its “vivisectionist” narrative eye holds itself apart from its anonymous subject. 10 This relationship between artist and subject might explain Murray’s hostility toward Vidor when the director encountered him several years after The Crowd, hoping to cast him in his new prestige picture, Our Daily Bread. Murray, an alcoholic, had fallen back into obscurity soon after The Crowd, and Vidor found him when Murray hit him up for meal money near Hollywood and Vine. In Vidor’s account: Over a glass of beer, I told him about the new picture and asked him if he could pull himself together if I gave him the part. He said he thought he could. I pointed out that he had gained a lot of weight, would have to go into training and cut out all liquor. He lowered his beer mug, glowered at me, and asked who the hell I thought I was? I said, ‘Take it easy, Jimmy, you’re a wonderful actor. You gave a great performance in The Crowd and I know you can do it again.’ ‘Just because I stop you on the street and try to borrow a buck,’ he said, ‘you

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think you can tell me what to do. As far as I am concerned, you know what you can do with your lousy part.’ With that he wiped his mouth on his sleeve, slid off the stool, and stalked out. I never saw him again. (Tree 150) Murray in fact would die within a year or two of their meeting, having jumped or fallen off a bridge, mirroring the railroad-bridge suicide that John Sims contemplates and declines in The Crowd. Vidor, in turn, perhaps in an attempt to individuate the man he had once picked out of the crowd—or to fit him into a different type—spent his last years in the late 1970s trying to raise money for a film entitled The Actor, based on the life of James Murray. Were Murray around to do so, he likely would have resisted taking that part as well, and thereby trading in his particular life and identity for that of a widely distributed type, according to the laws of exchange of the market in reality.

Notes NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

1

Sir Henry Maine famously articulated this movement “from Status to Contract” in 1861 in his Ancient Law (141). Useful recent surveys of the development of contract law and free labor ideology include Atiyah, Steinfeld, Horwitz, Roediger, and Foner. 2 It is worth noting here that in Marx’s original German, he uses two different terms, Entfremdung and Entäusserung (or Veräusserung), that are both commonly translated into English as “alienation,” as Joachim Israel and Walter Schacht have pointed out. Entfremdung could instead be, and sometimes is, translated as “estrangement,” and it generally refers to the sociological and psychological sense of the word, while Entäusserung and Veräusserung refer more specifically to the legal transfer of land or property. This conflation of the two meanings, economic and psychological, of course, is convenient rather than confusing in reading Marx, since he claims that the two meanings are in fact part of the same process, that Entäusserung leads to Entfremdung. Schacht notes additionally that in Middle High German Entfremdung also carried a sense within property law, but whereas Entäusserung describes the willful transfer of one’s property to another, Entfremdung, in that now-obsolete usage, was applied to the unwillful transfer of property: to the “robbing, taking, stripping of” one’s property by another (5). This further double meaning of the translated “alienation,” which blurs the line between willful and unwillful transfer, is again consistent with Marx’s own understanding, given his sense of the overwhelming presence of coercion in the worker’s “voluntary” alienation of his or her labor. 3 When referring to self-made man stories in general, I will follow the gendered language of the genre’s familiar name. This is not to say that there are no examples of self-made women that draw on the same tradition—Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie come immediately to mind—although none are included in this version of my study. By including such works, a wider-ranging study than mine would certainly be able to give the questions of a woman’s position within the intimate, status contract of marriage and the authentic embodiments of labor contracts more attention than I am able to in my cursory treatments of the subjects in chapters three and four.

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NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

1

On convict labor, debt peonage, and other systems of forced labor, see Cohen 201– 247, Mancini, and Daniel. 2 Douglass makes his escape at a time in which explicit comparisons were being made of the conditions onboard ship to those of slavery, for example in Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years before the Mast (1840). 3 Douglass’s ability to pay his fare can itself be seen as a sign of his suitability for free labor, given his implication that his funds have been accumulated by his thrifty habit of “lay[ing] by a small sum at the end of each week” during the time that Master Hugh has let him hire his time (190). What he does not mention is that, according to William S. McFeely, “In the privacy of the [Douglass] family, it was always said that Anna [Douglass’s first wife, and a freewoman in Baltimore at the time of his escape] sold a featherbed to finance the journey” (70). 4 In Martin Delany’s Blake: Or the Huts of America, Henry Blake turns this use of American emblems on its head. By passing the buck to the higher national authority a ferryman on the Mississippi excuses his unwillingness to take Henry’s party of runaways across the river, saying “Yer see yez can’t blame me, as I mus’ ‘bey the laws of Congress I’ll swong it be’s hardly a fair shake nuther, but I be ‘bliged to ‘bey the laws, yer know.” Henry replies by reminding him of the autonomy that that same national power, through its impersonal coinage, allows him, “‘Have you not yet learned to attend to your own interests instead of theirs? Here are our free papers,’ holding out his open hand, in which lay five half eagle pieces” (140). Money, in this case, becomes a means to reduce the national authority of the Fugitive Slave Law down to the personal “interests” of the ferryman and the runaway slaves. 5 Nicholas Bromell argues that in My Bondage and My Freedom, “Douglass deliberately structures his history as a laborer in terms of an ascent (thwarted at times, to be sure) from manual to mental labor. But one can never be entirely sure whether he is accepting and employing, or mocking, this paradigm.” Bromell claims that Douglass complicates the distinction between mental and manual labor by his acceptance of the embodied nature of his identity and intellect (195). I would argue, however, that in the Life and Times, Douglass’s anxieties about his labor are less tied to the manual/mental axis than to his shift from being an independent producer (whether as dock worker or newspaper editor) to an object of political patronage. 6 On his appointments, see also Chesnutt 119 and McFeely 289–292; on the Life and Times see De Pietro 395 and McFeely 311. 7 And in a confirmation that physical capital is the coin of Washington’s realm, Thrasher was rewarded for his service by the naming, following his premature death in 1903, of “one of the smaller buildings on campus…Thrasher Hall” (Harlan, 1:246).

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NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

1

Carol Nackenoff notes the “short-lived” heyday of Alger’s reprinted novels, and quotes from the New York Tribune that “to-day the name of Horatio Alger, Jr., has almost completely disappeared from the rolls of American writers” (257). 2 Gary Scharnhorst outlines the sordid history of Alger’s biographers (not only Mayes, but those who followed him and took his work as fact and took numerous liberties of their own with Alger’s life story) in his own authoritative biography, The Lost Life of Horatio Alger, Jr., written with Jack Bales. 3 Douglas H.Shepard was the first to point out West’s cribbings from Andy Grant’s Pluck and Joe’s Luck, and Gary Scharnhorst followed up by noting four more Alger novels from which West appropriated (“From”). That Scharnhorst’s name appears in these opening paragraphs nearly as much as Alger’s is a measure of my debt to his indefatigable textual work as the leading scholar of Alger’s work and his legacy. 4 This is not to say that the line between “formulaic” authors such as Alger and “original” literary authors is easily drawn. Just as the idea of the authentic within market culture, as I argue in the introduction and in the section below on A Cool Million, depends both on the particular and the typical, so an author’s identity (even, or especially, that of an “original” author) requires both originality and repetition. For the establishment of a recognizable (and in that sense undeniably formulaic in some respect) style is as important for the creation of a canonical literary reputation as it is for the acquisition of a reputation as a hack, as exemplified by the recent popularity of contests for the best (or “worst”) imitations of such canonical authors as Hemingway, Faulkner, and Chandler. Those contests, I would argue, are in fact anxious celebrations of the thinness of that line: on one hand marveling that the authentic trademarks of the “original” presence of the master’s touch can be recreated by others, while on the other hand demarcating that line by selecting as winners entries that are recognizable both in their repetition of the author’s style and in their measurable difference from that style. The winners of the Hemingway contest, for instance, are not readable as “Hemingway,” but as “bad Hemingway,” and therefore as even more reliant on the Hemingway formula than Hemingway himself was. In a related recent article, Susan A.Glenn has rediscovered the fascinating games of imitation and originality that female vaudeville performers played in the early years of this century, pointing up the extent to which skilled imitation was itself seen as a form of originality. She cites Bergson’s contemporaneous dissection of the comic as that which “expose[s] the repetitious, machine-like behaviors of human beings” (Glenn 56). And using Bergson’s separation of the machinic and the human, as in his formulation of the comic as “Something mechanical encrusted on the living,” we might argue that what marks a winner of the Hemingway contest both as a winner and as non-Hemingway is its focus on the “mechanical”—the repetitive, formulaic tics—in Hemingway’s style, and its neglect, willful or otherwise, of what is “living” or original about his

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authorship (Bergson 36). Bergson’s separation of originality from the mechanical is best seen in his claim that “The truth is that a really living life should never repeat itself. Wherever there is repetition or complete similarity, we always suspect some mechanism at work behind the living” (34). But as both Glenn’s demonstration of the importance of imitation for stage personalities and the general process of recognizable literary authorship reveal, an identity as an authentically creative personality, what this culture holds up as an ideal of a “really living life,” must to some extent rely on repetition and similarity for that identity to be recognizable. The audiences ability to recognize an author, at least enough to call her works and her style—even if a particular sentence or gesture was not authored by her hand—by her name, depends on a certain amount of mechanical repetition. As with the market in authenticity, the system of authorship that attaches cultural objects to their producers requires that those objects conform to that author’s type of object for it to understood and celebrated as hers. 5 Louis Menand has recently argued, in an article that came to my attention as this study was being completed, that Horatio did not in fact have a hand in writing the Life of Forrest, reasoning that the most concrete piece of evidence pointing to his authorship, a letter from Henry James, Sr., to his son the novelist describing a research visit that “Horatio Alger” made to his home, which is quoted in the son’s autobiography, is actually a result of Henry James, Jr.’s faulty memory. Menand points out that “his own late insanity” that the elder James describes as Alger’s eager topic of conversation better fits the circumstances of William Alger’s life, rather than Horatio’s. Menand does cast some doubt on the already tenuous assumption of Horatio’s authorship, but another detail in James’s letter—that he is “afraid [Alger] will give him a Bowery appreciation”—reads to me as a nod toward Horatio’s reputation as a chronicler, in the cheap Bowery style, of the boys of the Bowery (Scharnhorst and Bales, Lost 107). Regardless of the answer to these questions, my use of the Forrest biography is not dependent on a strict argument as to Horatio or William Alger’s full authorship. In either case, it can be read fruitfully for providing a defense of a natural and sincere theater against fears of theatrical mediation, just as Horatio’s stories suggest a natural and sincere economy against similar anxieties about mediation and manipulation. 6 Scharnhorst’s original argument for Horatio’s co-authorship (“Note”) is largely concerned with establishing the details of its composition, and his biography of Alger doesn’t expand on those points. Nackenoff gives more attention to the biography and its thematic relationship to Alger’s work as a whole, but concentrates on Forrest’s nationalist feud with English actor William Charles Macready. 7 The Algers are hardly the originators of this theory; it is, for instance, the favored method of detection of Poe’s Dupin in “The Purloined Letter”: When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is any one, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or my heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression. (202)

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8

Whereas confidence men, like Melville’s “cosmopolitan” attempting to talk the barber out of the “fell suspiciousness” of his “NO TRUST” sign, typically operate by encouraging confidence, the confidence men (and women) of the Alger stories instead are the suspicious ones, continually trying to undermine the confidence that others place in the stories’ young heroes (233). 9 Scharnhorst and Bales name Clarke as the one who specifically cited Alger and Optic and their “drivel,” but they have conflated the original article and its anonymous response (Lost 118). 10 As much as West stresses that he is after “authentic” material in his revue, his comment after detailing a slew of possible subjects—“I could keep this sort of thing up forever”—immediately reduces his authentic knowledge to a sort of fetishized fluency that makes the revue’s similarity to Wu Fong’s Americana seem even less coincidental. West appears concerned less with the reality of the whaling industry or the rent party than with the pleasurable rattling-off of recognizable types (J.Martin 249). 11 The implication of foreigners buying (and selling) American might be that only true “Americans” can have real access to “America,” but since Lem and the widow Pitkin—not to mention the “Native” Americans Chief Satinpenny and Chief Jake Raven—are themselves just stock figures from the storehouse of cardboard Americana, it is impossible to say what is the true America whose alienation we are to lament. 12 In a nod to the traditional free-labor pattern of self-development practiced by Franklin and Douglass of combining manual labor and self-education, Lem is allowed to unroll the newspapers he is beaten with and read them after his performances. But he has become so debilitated by his treatment both on the stage and off that, as the narrator laments, he can barely pick out a few words: “The mental reactions of the poor lad had been slowed up considerably by the hardships he had suffered, and it was a heart-rending sight to watch him as he bent over a paper to spell out the headlines. More than this he could not manage” (174).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

1

See Michaels’s Our America for his refutation of Judith Butler’s assertion that under the logic of passing, race is “performative” (that, in other words, you are merely who you appear to be): “if being legible as black counted as becoming black, if the race you appeared to belong to determined the race you in fact belonged to, then there could be no such thing as passing—what you passed for would be what you were” (174). 2 One is reminded here of William Wells Brown’s slaves “brightened” by their contact with whites. In the sense of being brightened by abrasion, Brown’s figure is consistent with the idea of becoming polished. But Johnson’s idea of polish does not carry Brown’s implied sense of racial mixing; polish and shininess in Ex-Colored

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Man, as figures of racial earnestness, mark racial identity and division rather than undermining such divisions. 3 Unless otherwise noted, all further references to the Levinsky narratives will be to Cahan’s full-length novel, The Rise of David Levinsky.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

1

Chaplin’s status as an American was never stable, however. On one hand he was celebrated as an immigrant-made-good and an exemplar of the great new American industry of motion pictures, but on the other, perhaps because of his insistence on playing marginal tramp characters, his racial identity and his loyalty to the United States were often under question and finally resulted in his virtual deportation in 1952, when he left the U.S. for Europe, not to return for another twenty years. In the 1940s he was summoned by the Committee on Un-American Activities (though he did not appear), and he was finally interviewed by immigration authorities prior to his 1952 departure, an interview whose opening questions turned directly to the twin suspicions about his racial identity and his political loyalty. As he recounts the episode in his autobiography, ‘Is Charles Chaplin your real name?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Some people say your name is—’ (here he mentioned a very foreign name) ‘and that you are from Galicia.’ ‘No. My name is Charles Chaplin, the same as my father, and I was born in London, England.’ ‘You say you’ve never been a Communist?’ (450).

2

Harry Langdon is the exception among the major silent comics to this auteur status, as his most successful comedies came under the strong direction of Frank Capra, and his popular and critical failure occurred after he fired Capra and attempted to direct his own pictures. But as Kerr points out, one of Capra’s strengths as the director of Langdon’s films was his willingness to give his star the same uninterrupted opportunity to perform that Chaplin had demanded for himself: Capra, obviously entranced by his star, gives him extraordinary ‘monologue’ room, holding the camera on him and letting him improvise while guarding him against monotony by the growing narrative pressures of the fable. Harry can use as much footage as he likes, in long-shot, trying to shoo away an adventuress who is bent on luring him into her apartment building. (277)

3

That this relation between attraction and narrative continues into the present is clear from the outtakes that appear at the end of recent films starring Jackie Chan and Jim Carrey, which serve as documentary proof of their stars’ physical bravery, in Chan’s

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case, or improvisational comic skills, in Carrey’s. 4 One feature of Lloyd’s body that might have made him appear anything but “normal” and “average” were the two fingers missing from his right hand, which he had lost in 1919 in what would have seemed to have been one of his less risky stunts: posing for photographs with a prop bomb lit in his hand. The bomb he held, however, had been meant for an explosive gag, and it came within inches of killing him. But although the accident itself was widely reported, Lloyd never mentioned the loss of the fingers to the public. His autobiography, for instance, appears to give a detailed, almost confessional, account of the accident but mentions only the damage to his face. In his films and in public he wore prosthetic fingers and a flesh-colored glove, with a garter to keep the glove on even during the most strenuous stunts. Revealing his permanent injuries to his audience would in one respect have violated what Kerr calls silent comedy’s “fantasy of fact,” that “a clown…never gets hurt” (154). In another respect, it would have undermined the glasses character’s assertion of utter normality; it would have shifted Lloyd’s risk-taking from being exemplary of, or in tension with, his all-American identity to marking him as the sort of sideshow freak that his performance as a “human spider” threatens to reveal him as. 5 Keaton titles the chapter of his autobiography concerning his career at MGM, “The Worst Mistake of My Life,” because it was the point at which he gave up creative control over his films (199). The success of The Cameraman only encouraged MGM to tighten its controls over Keaton’s work, and his films and his stardom declined as his character was cut to fit MGM’s house style of sentiment and musical comedy. Keaton himself declined into alcoholism and was fired by the studio in 1933. 6 That the ticker tape parade is itself a staged event, divorced from the actual scene of risk that made Lindbergh famous, perhaps provides its own commentary on the machinery of newsreel authenticity and star-making. It should be said, though, that the overwhelming presence of the forces of security around Lindbergh—the mounted police who almost dwarf the bare head of the young pilot—serves as a reminder of the filmed motorcade image that the documentary clip most strongly evokes for audiences of our time—the Zapruder film—and of the very real risks inherent for a star in merely being present in public—a star in this case whose baby would be famously kidnapped and murdered within five years. 7 In this respect these villainous, Iago-like asides resemble those whose importance in sixteenth-century theater Jean-Christophe Agnew has seen as a sign of the cultures suspicion of the concealed intentions of the rising market system: Since soliloquies and asides were perfectly suited to signal various forms ofduplicity, playwrights placed them chiefly in the mouths of their villains. Verbalasides, grimaces, and other facial expressions became ways in which characterscould represent their ‘role distance,’ that is, their detachment from a self or situation to which other characters (and the audience) might presume them to becommitted. (114) 8

This impulse toward theater performed before a film audience is only heightened in Limelight, the semiautobiographical story of an aging clown, Calvero. Calvero’s

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story transposes Chaplin’s own career from film onto the stage, as he is a music hall comedian a generation older than Chaplin. But the prospective audience for his stage routines is not the theater audience within the film, which is strangely silent even during his most successful comic bits, but the audiences in the film houses where the movie will be projected. Eric Flom quotes his assistant Jerry Epstein as recalling that “During dubbing Charlie refused to put any audience reaction to the ChaplinKeaton scene. I couldn’t understand why. He said the real audience watching the film would supply the laughter” (215). 9 Chaplin’s use of one of the assets of filmed performance—the opportunity to do multiple takes of the same scene—to reach this level of perfection would become legendary: in the best known example, an acceptable version of the scene in City Lights in which the tramp encounters the blind flower girl played by Virginia Cherrill came only after hundreds of takes stretching over nearly 22 months of shooting. 10 Nathanael West, in a review of a biography of Mack Sennett, placed The Crowd above the crowd in the very same way. After noting with disdain Sennett’s obeisance to the unimaginative, anonymous mass-market audience represented by “the man for whom the pictures are made—‘the barber in Peoria,’” he writes, with his usual inverted irony that manages to tar Vidor with a little of the dirt he flings at Sennett, “Other Hollywood directors and supervisors never seem to learn this lesson. Every year one of them gets a little punch-drunk, goes highbrow and forgets ‘the barber.’ A picture like The Crowd’ is the result” (“Soft” 23). The Crowd, it should be mentioned, “forgets ‘the barber’” by being about the barber.

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Index

acting: natural acting, 35, 67–8, 70, 84, 95, 152, 156–7; “convincing personations” 121; acting vs. film editing, 130–1, 136 Adams, Henry, 22 Addams, Jane, 98 African Americans, 9, 11; distance of Brown’s narrator from, 51–3; Ex-Colored Man as portrait of, 97–8, 103; folk materials, 19, 115–6; freedpeople after emancipation, 26–31, 38, 55; role models for, 16–7, 22–4, 38 Agnew, Jean-Christophe, 166n Alger, Horatio, 3, 8, 14, 17, 53, 64–6, 68, 72–3, 76–8, 81–2, 86–, 94–5, 165n-165n, 165n; Ben Bruce , 10, 18, 65–8, 81, 83–, 91, 93–4; The Cash Boy , 76, 78; The Five Hundred Dollar Check , 82; Fame and Fortune , 80; Joe’s Luck , 83; Mark, the Match Boy , 69, 78–9; Ragged Dick , 10, 18, 67–9, 73–6, 78, 80–1, 85, 88; Tony the Tramp , 76, 77; Wait and Hope , 75; “Writing Stories for Boys,” 75 Alger, William Rounseville: Life of Edwin Forrest , 12, 66–73, 76, 85, 88, 165n alienation: economic, 4–, 10–6, 19, 29, 32–3, 47, 62, 64, 68, 80–1, 89, 92, 93–4, 104, 111, 114, 118, 124, 128, 162n; psychological, 4, 6, 103, 162n Alword, John W., 38 Americana, 89–95, 165n Americanization, 98, 103, 105, 116–7, 119–24, 127, 165n–166n Andrews, William L., 23, 33, 47–8, 53 anonymity, 128–33, 135, 137, 141, 145–7, 150 –7 Arbuckle, Roscoe “Fatty”, 136 assimilation, 103–5, 119 –20 Atiyah, P.S., 12–3, 162n Auld, Hugh, 32–4, 44–5, 49, 55, 84 authenticity, 6, 8, 12–6, 19–20, 53, 64, 68, 89–92, 94, 97, 103–5, 115–6, 122, 125, 128, 132, 137,

Index

173

140, 147, 164n-165n autobiography, 97–9, 117 Baker, Houston A., 43, 45 –7 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 48 Barrish, Phillip, 124 Bazin, Andre, 147 Bergson, Henri, 164n Black Codes, 27–8, 30 Blackford, Katherine M.H., 118 blackness, 105, 108–9, 111, 114, 116 –7 Blassingame, John W., 37 blues music, 150 –16 bodily appearance, 35, 73–5, 108, 110, 114, 117–9, 122 Bourdieu, Pierre, 124 Braverman, Harry, 78 Bromell, Nicholas, 163n Brown, William Wells, 17, 23, 55, 64, 104; The Black Man , 48; The Escape , 46–7, 54; My Southern Home , 17, 22, 24–6, 46–54, 106, 116, 165n; Narrative of the Life of William Wells Brown , 24–5, 46–9, 51–3; The Negro in the American Rebellion , 48 The Buster Keaton Story , 137 Butler, Judith, 165n Cahan, Abraham, 119, 123; “Autobiography of an American Jew,” 97–103, 116, 127; The Rise of David Levinsky , 3, 18, 103–5, 116, 119–24, 127, 128, 165n Campbell, Eric, 145 capital: financial, 23, 28–30, 38, 39–40, 67, 113, 117, 121, 123; physical, 18, 26, 36, 42, 57–61, 64, 118, 163n; and reputation, 40, 42, 44, 46 Capra, Frank, 166n Carnegie, Andrew, 58, 59–60, 64; Autobiography , 9–11, 30 Carnegie, Dale, 121 Carrey, Jim, 166n “Case of Mary Clark, The,” 5 Cawelti, John, 8, 73, 77 Chametsky, Jules, 119 Chan, Jackie, 166n chance, culture of, 152 –3 Chaplin, Charlie, 19, 127, 130–, 132–3, 135–7, 140, 143, 150–1, 156, 165n–166n; The Circus , 141; City Lights , 166n; The Gold Rush , 132–40;

Index

174

The Great Dictator , 140; Limelight , 140–1, 166n; Modern Times , 20, 128, 132, 141–50, 153; Monsieur Verdoux , 140; My Autobiography , 127, 130; “Tramp” character, 130, 133, 143, 145, 150 Chesnutt, Charles, 163n Clarke, James Freeman, 83, 166n cinema of attractions, 131 cleanliness, 55 –7 Cleveland, Grover, 61 Cohen, William, 23, 163n The Columbian Orator , 33 commodification, 7, 16, 18, 68–, 81, 82–3, 86, 89 –92 confidence, 6, 11, 34, 38, 78 confidence men, 72–6, 78, 165n Contact , 90 contract, 4–5, 8–, 11–4, 16, 20, 22, 23, 26–8, 30–1, 33, 42, 44, 64, 107–8, 112, 119, 162n–163n counterfeit, 77–9, 86, 89 Crane, Hart: The Bridge , 89 Crane, Stephen: “Maggie, Girl of the Streets,” 155 credit: credit face, 121–3; financial, 28–30, 59, 117; and loyalty, 26, 30, 42, 58–61; racial credit, 46, 104, 115, 116, 121, 124; in sharecropping system, 29 –30 Dana, Richard Henry: Two Years Before the Mast , 163n Daniel, Pete, 163n Davis, Arthur P., 54 Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari, 142 De Pietro, Thomas, 163n Delany, Martin: Blake, or the Huts of America , 163n dime novels, 68, 82, 86 – disguise, 6, 14, 33, 38, 70, 75, 85, 105–6, 109, 146 documentary, 132, 139, 151, 155, 166n Douglass, Frederick, 22–3, 32, 53, 55, 58, 59, 62, 64–, 71, 79, 84, 104, 112, 120–; Life and Times , 3, 9, 18, 22, 24–6, 32–5, 38–46, 48, 51, 54, 60, 81, 164n; My Bondage and My Freedom , 24, 32, 35, 45–6, 163n; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass , 24, 49; New National Era , 40; “The Races,” 35–6; “Self-Made Men”, 13, 35 –7

Index

175

Dreiser, Theodore, 156; Sister Carrie , 162n drivel, 83, 87, 89, 165n Du Bois, W.E.B., 27–8, 29; Dusk of Dawn , 98 earnestness: natural, 70, 72–3, 75; racial, 106, 108–9, 113 –4 Eisenstein, Sergei, 20, 132, 141–2; Strike , 141–2, 146–8, 150 embodiment, 35, 36–8, 70, 74, 105, 108–9, 111 –4 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 23, 35, 128, 151 Engel, David, 123 Exodusters, 22, 26, 42–, 52 Fairbanks, Douglas, 148, 150 family, 3, 8–, 11, 16–8, 60, 79, 80, 85, 105, 118 Farrison, William Edward, 48, 87 fathers, 9, 60, 76, 80, 104, 111–2, 123 film, 19, 127–32, 133–6, 141, 146 film editing, 128, 130, 132, 136, 139–41, 142, 147 filmed theater, 147 Fitzgerald, F.Scott: The Great Gatsby , 89; The Vegetable , 89 Flom, Eric L., 140 Florey, Robert, 140 Floyd, N.J.: Thorns in the Flesh , 50 folk materials, 90, 93 Foner, Eric, 30, 35, 162n formula, 66–8, 81–2, 88–9, 91, 164n Forrest, Edwin, 18, 67–71, 73, 76, 88 Franklin, Benjamin, 37; Autobiography , 3, 34–5, 59, 83, 119 –20 frankness, 64–6, 70, 73, 97 Freedman’s Savings Bank, 30, 38 –40 Freedmen’s Bureau, 28, 31, 39 free labor, 4, 8, 9–11, 13–4, 16–7, 22–3, 26–35, 36, 38–9, 41–2, 44, 47, 50, 53, 57–8, 62, 64, 70, 76, 83, 111, 113, 118, 163n, 166n fugitives, 26, 37, 48, 53, 83 Gaddis, William, 97, 104 Gallagher, Brian, 143 Garfield, James, 43 –4 Garrisonians, 35, 36–7, 41 Gehring, Wes, 143

Index

176

Glenn, Susan A., 164n–165n Goddard, Paulette, 142 good will, 10–1, 26, 43–5, 61–2, 64, 84, 112 gratitude, 11, 26, 33–, 44–5, 49–51, 62, 64, 80–1, 84–6, 94, 112, 123 Greeley, Horace, 35 Greener, Richard T., 41 Gunning, Tom, 131, 135 –6 Halttunen, Karen, 6, 12, 14, 70, 72, 121 Harlan, Louis R., 25, 54, 57, 61 Harris, Joel Chandler, 48 Hayes, Rutherford B., 9, 42–4, 60 Hendrick, Burton J.: “Fitting the Man to His Job,” 117–8, 120; “The Jewish Invasion of America,” 97, 117–9, 122, 124 heredity, 76, 77 Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno, 151, 153–4, 156 Horwitz, Morton J., 162n Howells, William Dean, 87 – imitation, 70–1, 81, 86, 89, 116, 122, 133, 140, 164n–165n immigration, 98, 103, 105, 117–8, 120, 123–4, 127, 154 intimacy, 9–, 18, 23, 26, 42–6, 48–50, 60–2, 64–, 67, 78, 81, 83, 89, 91–3, 98, 105, 111–2, 118, 121, 123, 124, 136, 154, 163n Israel, Joachim, 162n James, Henry, 13, 87, 165n James, Henry, Sr., 87, 165n James, William, 13 Jaynes, Gerald David, 28, 30 –1 The Jazz Singer , 141 Jews, 18, 97–8, 103, 105, 117–22, 123 –4 Johnson, James Weldon: Along This Way , 97, 116; Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man , 10, 19, 97–8, 103–16, 120–1, 123–4, 128, 165n; God’s Trombones , 116 just value, 13–4, 16, 67, 109 Kafka, Franz: America , 10 Kaplan, Amy, 59 Kaufmann, Walter, 6 Keaton, Buster, 19, 131, 134–7, 140, 151–2, 156; The Cameraman , 19, 127, 132, 137–9, 166n; Our Hospitality , 132, 134; The Playhouse , 135–6; Sherlock, Jr. , 135–6; Steamboat Bill, Jr. , 135

Index

177

Keckley, Elizabeth: Behind the Scenes , 162n Kerr, Walter, 130, 133–, 136–, 166n Keystone Company, 19, 129–33, 135, 141, 156 Koszarski, Richard, 156 Kracauer, Siegfried, 136, 151 Ku Klux Klan, 31 Kuleshev, Lev, 141 labor: mental, 35, 40, 163n; Southern system of, 22, 27–31, 42, 164n Langdon, Harry, 166n Lehrman, Henry (Pathé), 130, 132 level playing field, 108 –9 Lincoln, Abraham, 27–8, 32, 38, 43–4, 60, 76 Lindbergh, Charles, 139, 166n Litwack, Leon, 27 –8 Lloyd, Harold, 19, 131–3, 137, 139–40, 151, 166n; Feet First , 127, 132, 133; Safety Last , 19, 128, 132, 133–4, 140, 155; The Sin of Harold Diddlebock , 133 Lofland, Lyn, 73 longing, economy of, 104–5, 123 –4 lynching, 114, 120 Lynn, Kenneth S., 140, 142 Macpherson, C.B., 4 Maine, Sir Henry, 162n Maland, Charles J., 142 Mancini, Matthew J., 163n marriage, 9, 106, 110, 114, 163n Martin, Waldo E., Jr., 43 Marx, Karl, 6–8, 13, 162n mass ornament, 136, 150 Mast, Gerald, 141 mastery, narrative, 25–6, 48–51, 53–5, 62 Mayes, Herbert A., 65, 89, 164n McClure’s Magazine , 98–103, 117 McElroy, Frederick, 54, 62 McFeely, William S., 38, 163n McKinley, William, 60 machinic, the, 70, 82, 86, 128–32, 134–9, 141–2, 145, 147, 150–, 152–5, 164n–165n mediation, 14, 16–20, 64, 104–5, 115, 119, 121–2, 123–4, 128, 146 Meier, August, 54, 56 Méliès, Georges, 136 Melville, Herman: The Confidence-Man , 8, 77, 106, 165n

Index

178

Menand, Louis, 165n mercy, 9–11, 18 Meyer, Donald, 121 Michaels, Walter Benn, 103, 110, 115–6, 165n Miller, Kelly, 61 Molyneux, Gerard, 150 money, 3, 6–7, 11, 14, 17, 29, 32–4, 36, 38–40, 45, 50–, 55, 59, 64–, 68–9, 73, 77–81, 84–, 89, 92, 103–4, 110–1, 113–4, 119–21, 163n montage, 132, 138, 141–3, 147–50, 155 Munsey, Frank, 88 Murray, John, 150–2, 156 –7 Muybridge, Eadweard, 129 Nackenhoff, Carol, 77, 81, 83, 87, 164n–165n nature, 7, 13–155, 18, 68, 70, 72–4, 75–6, 95, 108–9, 117, 151 O’Connor, Donald, 137 Optic, Oliver, 83, 165n oratory, 35–7, 40–2, 106–8, 115 orphan integer, 3, 8, 18, 19 Orvell, Miles, 122 Osthaus, Carl R., 30, 39 O’Sullivan, Maurice, 113 Page, Thomas Nelson, 48: Red Rock , 50 Painter, Nell Irvin, 22 –4 Parry, Harvey, 137 passing, 103, 105, 113, 116, 121, 165n patronage, 8–, 17, 31, 43, 44, 53, 57–62, 64–, 72–4, 76, 81–, 83–5, 89, 93, 111–4, 123 – performance, 128–33, 139–41, 143, 146–7, 149–53, 155 Perkins, Gil, 138 persona comedies, 131, 150, 152 Phillips, Wendell, 107 –8 physiognomy, 14–150, 75 Plessy v. Ferguson, 110 pluck, 53, 59 Poe, Edgar Allan: “The Purloined Letter,” 165n polish, 48, 109–11, 116, 165n possessive individualism, 4, 93 publicity, 84, 87, 88, 128–9, 133, 13, 153 –4 Pudovkin, V.I., 131, 136, 141, 155 race, 8, 11, 14, 18–9, 25, 31, 35, 42, 48, 53, 76, 97, 103, 104–5, 108–9, 113–6, 118, 121, 165n reality effects, 128, 131–5, 137–41, 150, 155 –6 representative colored men, 22–3, 44 Republican Party, 10, 18, 23, 26–8, 31, 42–4, 62, 124

Index

179

reputation, 23, 26, 38, 40–2, 44–6, 54, 61–2, 66 –7 revolution, right of, 3, 32 Rhodes, Chip, 155 –6 Ricardo, David, 32 Riesner, Dean, 135 Roach, Hal, 133 Rockefeller, John D., 89 Roediger, David, 32, 35, 163n Rohauer, Raymond, 135 Rourke, Constance: American Humor , 89 –90 Sandow, Eugene, 129 Schacht, Walter, 162n Scharnhorst, Gary, 65, 67, 69, 75, 77, 82–3, 164n-165n Schulz, Jennifer, 113 Seldes, Gilbert, 127, 129 self-made man tradition, 3, 4, 7–8, 9, 14, 16–7, 19–20, 37, 64, 127–8, 138, 162n self-possession, 3–6, 13, 17, 19, 112–3, 120 Seltzer, Mark, 12–3, 108 –9 Semon, Larry, 137 Sennett, Mack, 127, 129–30, 133, 167n-167n service, 55–7, 61, 107, 111 servility, 52–3, 56 servitude, indentured, 3–5, 29 Shakers, 150 –16 sharecropping, 29 –31 Shepherd, Douglas H., 66 shininess, 105, 106–9, 110–1, 114, 116 Simmel, Georg, 6–7, 9, 11 sincerity, 6, 9, 13, 23, 43, 64–7, 70, 89, 121 skill, 128, 131–2, 134, 136, 140, 143, 150, 152 –3 slave narratives, 23–4, 62, 84 slavery, 5, 10, 18, 22–, 24–5, 27–8, 32–4, 47, 49, 50 –6 Smith, Julian, 141, 143, 147 Smoodin, Eric, 136 social Darwinism, 14 status relations, 5, 8–, 14, 20, 27 Steinfeld, Robert J., 5, 9–, 12, 162n Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 62 Struss, Karl, 140 subversion, 26, 53–4, 56 –7 Swain, Mack, 140 Thalberg, Irving, 138, 152 theater, 18–20, 67–9, 79, 81, 85, 93–4, 127, 130–1, 133, 140, 147, 154 Thomas, Brook, 5, 13, 28 Thrasher, Max Bennett, 62, 163n

Index

180

thrill comedies, 131–4, 137–40, 156 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 12 Tompkins, Jane, 81 Tourgee, Albion, 110 Toussaint L’Ouverture, Pierre Dominique, 107 –8 trust, 64, 66, 78 –80 Tuskegee Institute, 18, 25–6, 56–9, 61 types, 68, 70, 89, 97–8, 118, 124–9, 157, 164n van den Burghe, Pierre, 14 Van Vechten, Carl, 99, 103 Veitch, Jonathan, 90 Vertov, Dziga, 141, 143; Man with a Movie Camera , 138 –9 Vidor, King, 151, 155–7; The Crowd 3, 19–20, 132, 150–7, 166n-167n; Our Daily Bread, 156 Washington, Booker T., 24, 31, 53, 64, 106, 163n; “Atlanta Exposition Address,” 54–6, 58, 107; Frederick Douglass, 34; The Story of My Life and Work, 57–8; Up from Slavery, 17, 22, 24–6, 49, 54–62, 97 Weber, Max, 9 West, Nathanael, 127, 129, 165n, 167n–167n; A Cool Million, 18, 64–6, 68, 88–95, 164n, 165n whiteness, 104–6, 110–6; white audiences, 26, 36, 54–5, 57, 61, 97, 99, 105–9; white discourse, 26, 48, 51, 62 Williams, George Washington, 23, 151 Williams, Patricia, 11 Williams, William Carlos: In the American Grain , 89 –91 Wright, Gavin, 29 –31 Zapruder film, 166n