….which is….everyone!
A note on this, inspired by some recent reading.
Look.
No one has to read or watch anything. Cultures shift and sift. The human beings who compose a society pick and choose what they find acceptable, appropriate and meaningful. It’s not all true, beautiful or good. What a society canonizes can be all that, and it can be terrible.
In other words, all of us, as individuals and as part of institutions great and small, make these judgments all the time: who speaks for us, who do we listen to, who do we celebrate, who do we learn from, who deserves our attention.
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Of course the past can be critiqued. It must be. That’s what we do as individuals and as communities – we try to figure out who we are by looking at where we came from. It’s a process that has to be honest and has to be willing to shatter some icons.
It’s okay to take down a statue if we, as a community, determine that it no longer speaks to us, that we think so differently now, we can no longer celebrate the idea embodied there. Of course it is.
And, I’ll just say, perhaps this wouldn’t be so agonizing if we weren’t so quick to make idols out of human beings, even those who’ve achieved much.
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But in any discussion of such matters, what has to be at the foundation is an acceptance of the fact – the fact– that human beings are a mix of good and bad ideas, of brilliance and blindness. It’s just the way it is. That doesn’t mean anything goes, and the casual racism, say, of Ernest Hemingway must go unremarked or uncritiqued. It doesn’t mean that whoever’s in the canon now must remain there, no matter how they make us cringe today.
It’s simply saying that we can’t begin from the assumption or hope of any sort of artistic, intellectual or moral purity. We’re never going to find it.
There’s not a figure, from Aristotle to Martin Luther King Jr., who can’t be found “problematic” for some reason, in some way. Nor is there a golden moment in history in which all was perfectly well. Nor are even the movements we are inspired and formed by perfect or beyond criticism. To attempt to make them so is to live in denial and to refuse to learn.
What inspired these-not-original-at-all thoughts?
Well, it began with an article from the Paris Review on 19th century feminist and writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She is most well-known today for the story “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” a standard in American lit class. But, as the author if this piece notes:
Put bluntly, she was a Victorian white nationalist. When Gilman is described as a social reformer and activist, part of this was advocating for compulsory, militaristic labor camps for Black Americans (“A Suggestion on the Negro Problem,” 1908). Part of this is pleading for racial purity and stricter border policies, as in the sequel to Herland, or for sterilization and even death for the genetically inferior, as in her other serialized Forerunner novel, Moving the Mountain.
These ideas of Gilman’s are hard to reconcile with our current conception of her as a brave advocate against systems of oppression—a political hero with a few, forgivable flaws.
I am glad to see this observation in print, but honestly, students of 19th and early 20th century reform movements are fully aware of the worldview of these “heroes” – how much of “progressive” reform was motivated by anti-Black and anti-immigrant fears: eugenics, social Darwinism and fears of “race suicide,” yes even much of the woman’s suffrage movement.
As Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote:
Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung who do not know the difference between a Monarchy and a Republic, who never read the Declaration of Independence or Webster’s spelling book, making laws for Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott or Fanny Kemble.
and
American women of wealth, education, virtue and refinement, if you do not wish the lower orders of Chinese, Africans, Germans and Irish, with their low ideas of womanhood to make laws for you and your daughters, to be your rulers, judges, jurors-to dictate not only the civil, but moral codes by which you shall be governed, awake to the danger or your present position, and demand that woman, too shall be represented in the government.
Which led me to a quick run through the book Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics and American Reform in the Progressive Era.
The book begins with a survey of the development of the expert-reliant administrative state, especially at the federal level and then turns to the impact of Darwinism, race-theory and eugenics on this area. In essence: all of America’s 19th century white progressives held racist, anti-anyone-but-WASP convictions.
I would have liked to see more specific areas covered, but the author is in particular very enlightening on the origins of the minimum wage, which were, contrary to current popular opinion, not about justice for all workers, but trying to insure that those willing to accept lower wages – mostly new immigrants and women – were, in a way, priced out of the labor market.
Common’s University of Wisconsin colleague Edward A. Ross was another pillar of immigration restriction among progressive economists. In his many years of anti-immigrant agitation, Ross offered his readers a surpassingly crude portrait of immigrant peoples, whom he pictured with “sugar-loaf heads, moon faces, slit mouths, lantern-jaws and goose-bill noses.” The immigrants’ ugliness, Ross concluded, unmistakably proclaimed their inferiority, and threatened to despoil American good looks.
He maligned the new arrivals as “cheap stucco manikins from Southeastern Europe,” “masses of fecund but beaten humanity from the hovels of far Lombardy and Galicia,” the “slime at the bottom of our foreignized cities,” the “Slavs immune to certain kinds of dirt,” who brought to America a “rancid bit of the Old World,” the “hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons” who clearly “belong in skins, in wattled huts at the close of the Great Ice Age,” the childish, frivolous and “cheaply gotten up mañana races,” the “stupid and inert peoples” poaching on “the preserve of the bright and industrious,” “the dullard races … last to abandon the blind fecundity which characterizes the animal,” and the “transients with their pigsty mode of life.”
The blood now being injected into American veins, Ross hardly needed to conclude, was “sub-common.” But among the immigrants’ countless shortcomings—their ugliness, their stupidity, their servility, their politics, their bestial fecundity—the biggest threat was they worked cheap. And immigrants worked cheap, Ross asserted, because living standards were “a function of race.”
…
As Kellogg’s proposal to restrict immigration made clear, progressive labor reformers embraced the minimum wage for its power to exclude as well as to uplift. The minimum wage test would, more efficiently than the literacy test, target the inferior races of southern and eastern Europe by identifying inferiority not with illiteracy but with low labor productivity—the inability to command a minimum wage. Kellogg’s race hierarchy could not have been plainer.
A minimum wage for immigrants, he said, would “exclude [Angelo] Lucca and [Alexis] Spivak and other ‘greeners’ from our congregate industries,” reserving American jobs for “John Smith and Michael Murphy and Carl Sneider.”90 American economists engaged in the minimum wage debate of the 1910s, whether pro or con or in between, agreed that a successful legal minimum would idle the least productive workers. If the law raised the cost of hiring unskilled labor, fewer unskilled workers would be employed.
And along the way, I dipped into this article on the Know-Nothing Party and progressive policies. Of course, the Know-Nothing Party was virulently anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic. But also:
In no state did the American party reap as much success as in Massachusetts. In 1854 the Party captured the governor’s office, the entire state senate, and virtually the entire state house of representatives. The American Party also took over the City of Boston and other municipalities in the Bay State. Once in office, the Party not only passed legislation that reflected the anti-immigrant positions of the national Know-Nothing movement, but the party also distinguished itself by its opposition to slavery, support for an expansion of the rights of women, regulation of industry, and support of measures designed to improve the status of working people. These progressive measures appear to be inconsistent with the anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic stance of the American Party. This article takes a look at the origins and the background of the Massachusetts Know-Nothing movement and the reason for what might appear to be stark contradictions.
Finally, back to Illiberal Reformers, some choice quotes from the artistic end of things:
Jack London plumbed the sensibilities of a very different class, but his work was rife with eugenicist and white supremacist notions. Eugene O’Neill brought hereditarian themes to the American stage, leaving a permanent stamp on American theater. Virginia Woolf confided to her diary that imbeciles “should certainly be killed.” T. S. Eliot studied eugenics closely and agreed that segregating and sterilizing “defectives” was necessary to protect society. The human race, Eliot wrote, can, if it will, improve indefinitely, “by social and economic reorganization, by eugenics, and by any other external means possible to the science of intellect.”
In 1908, D. H. Lawrence, with horrible prescience, indulged in an extermination fantasy:
“If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly, and then I’d go out in back streets and main streets and bring them all in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile at me.”
The full quote from Virginia Woolf?
we met & had to pass a long line of imbeciles. the first was a very tall young man, just queer enough to look at twice, but no more; the second shuffled, & looked aside; and then one realised that everyone in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead, or no chin, & an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed.
This post was all over the place, in a way, because it’s just a brain dump of what I’ve been reading over the past 24 hours. But if you take anything away from it, take this: humility.
For if confronting the limitations and even evil mixed in with the good of the past can teach us anything, it seems it should be, not Memory Hole…but rather, to consider how right all of these people thought they were, how noble their aspirations were seen to be, and indeed, what good did come out of their actions – and, knowing how both right and wrong they were – to bring an acceptance of that same possibility of being both right and terribly wrong to our own actions and views in the present moment.
Charlotte was Both 