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“THIS MOST DEMOCRATIC PROVINCE OF THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS”:
AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND PERIODICAL PUBLISHING IN
TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY AMERICA
By

Anthony M. Dykema-VanderArk

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

1998

Copyright by
Anthony M. Dykema-VanderArk
1 99 8

ABSTRACT
“THIS MOST DEMOCRATIC PROVINCE OF THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS”:
AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND PERIODICAL PUBLISHING IN
TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY AMERICA
By

Anthony M. Dykema-VanderArk

This dissertation investigates the conjunction of periodical publishing,
autobiographical expression, and cultural “democratization” at the turn of the
twentieth century in America. By examining a range of texts originally published
in leading American periodicals, this study seeks to appraise the social relevance
and literary signiﬁcance of autobiographical writing at a time when William Dean
Howells proclaimed autobiography “this most democratic province of the republic
of letters.” While the democratization of both the form of autobiography and the
forum of American periodicals opened the way for many who aspired to national
publication, this study contends that such access was circumscribed and shaped by
the problematic democracy that characterized American life and letters at the turn
of the century.

This dissertation also proposes and applies a critical method that combines
the theoretical questions of periodical studies and autobiography studies. Critical
questions regarding authorship, reading, and publishing, mediation and

immediacy, and authority and authenticity guide this study’s examination of

autobiographical expression at the turn of the century. Chapter One considers a set
of brief autobiographical texts originally published in the New York Independent
and later collected and reprinted as The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans:
As Told by Themselves (1906). This chapter argues that, by privileging
authenticity of the autobiographical subject over traditional notions of authorship,
the editors of the Independent contributed to new conceptions of autobiography
itself. Chapter Two examines a series of life stories from the Independent that
directly addressed America’s “race problem” from what W. E. B. Du Bois called
“the Negro point of view.” Fusing personal and editorial points of View, “human
interest” and political interests, these stories put autobiography to the service of
cultural critique in unique ways. Finally, Chapter Three investigates the social
signiﬁcance of Native American autobiographical expression in American
periodicals at the turn of the century. Focusing on Charles Alexander Eastman’s
“Recollections of the Wild Life,” this chapter contextualizes such narratives of
Indian childhood by engaging contemporary assumptions about Native Americans
as a “child race” and by examining the popular children’s pastime, “Playing

Indian.”

To Melissa
For sustaining faith and inspiring hope

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to Michigan State University and the Graduate School for awarding
the fellowship that enabled me to commence and complete this project. I also wish
to thank the members of my guidance committee, Dr. Jenifer Banks, Dr. Barry
Gross, Dr. Gloria Randle, and Dr. Sheila Teahan, without whose aid and
encouragement this study would not have been completed. My special thanks go
to Dr. Gross, whose enthusiasm for the work of his students and commitment to

their success has provided a model to which I will aspire.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................... 1
Autobiographical Expression, Periodical Publishing, and the
Democratization of American Culture

CHAPTER ONE ................................................................................................... 38
“A New Form of Literature”: Autobiography and The Life Stories
of Undistinguished Americans

I Autobiography and The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans
11 Authorship, Authenticity, and “Autobiography of

an Unconventional Kind”
III Autobiography, Immediacy, and (Mass-)Mediation

CHAPTER TWO ................................................................................................... 85
Answering the Unasked Question: African-American
Autobiographical Expression at the Turn of the Century

I The Independent, the Race Question, and “the Negro Point of View”

11 Sanctioned to “Speak with Authority”: Two Narratives of Neo-Slavery

III Private Experience, Public Truth-Telling: African-American
Autobiography and the Race Problem

CHAPTER THREE ............................................................................................. 147
Childhood in (Native) America: American Indian Autobiography
at the Turn of the Century

I “Is it right for St. Nick?”: Charles Alexander Eastman’s
“Recollections of the Wild Life”
II The Indian as Child, the Child as Indian:
Metaphor and Stereotype at the Turn of the Century
III The Problem and Possibilities of Indian Childhood:
Publication and Charles Eastman’s Early Autobiographical Writing
IV “Playing Indian,” Playing “White Man”:
Eastrnan’s “Recollections of the [Real] Wild Life”
V The Problem of the Self, the Problem of the Indian:
Charles Eastman, Francis La Flesche, and Zitkala-Sa

WORKS CITED .................................................................................................. 2 1 7

vii

INTRODUCTION

Autobiographical Expression,
Periodical Publishing, and the
Democratization of American Culture

“Although everyone cannot be a Gargantua-Napoleon-Bismarck and walk
Off with the great bells of Notre Dame,” Henry Adams wrote in the early years of
the twentieth century, “every one must bear his own universe, and most persons
are moderately interested in learning how their neighbors have managed to carry
theirs” (4-5). Adams’s own probing, prophetic interest in his American
contemporaries and his singular manner of examining his “life and times” mark
The Education of Henry Adams as a unique intellectual project and literary product
of the turn of the century. Many of Adams’s American contemporaries, however,
satisﬁed a more-than-moderate interest in the lives of their “neighbors” not
through private intellectual contemplation but by indulging in the simple pleasures
of the “human interest” stories that ﬁlled the era’s newspapers and magazines.
Nationally circulated periodicals in America at the time, and the weekly or
monthly magazine in particular, offered to readers less cultivated than Adams a
more democratic and more expedient, if less reﬁned, means of learning how their
neighbors “managed to carry” the universe. By catering to this interest (and

creating it, in turn), American magazines ﬂourished at the end of the nineteenth

century in an altogether new fashion, experiencing “a more spectacular
enlargement and increase in effectiveness” than any other mass medium and
becoming the primary source of information and entertainment for reading
Americans (Mott 4: 2). By the turn of the century, magazines had become the
means by which Americans Of all types satisﬁed “interests” of almost any
description, not least of which was an interest in how other Americans lived,
worked, and gave shape and meaning to their lives.

Among the myriad journalistic and literary forms and formulas invented to
cater to that interest, autobiography acquired a particular resonance among
American readers as a form which combined presumably truthful reporting of the
events of a life with the inherent interest of the ﬁrst-person narrative voice.I “An
autobiography must be very ill conceived indeed,” wrote William Dean Howells in
1904, “not to interest, not to please, not to delight” (“Editor’s” 478). In the same
essay, Howells asserts that an autobiography need not be based upon an “extreme”
or a “distinguished” life to please and delight but may be rooted instead in “that
easy ground which we explore for ourselves in the affairs and characters of our
neighbors when our neighbors do not invite us to join them in it” (478). From just
this “common” ground, autobiography ﬂourished at the turn of the century, written

in a variety of forms and styles by well-known public ﬁgures as well as by

 

' For contemporary commentary on the veracity enabled by the form of
autobiography (and the related issue of the individual autobiographer’s capacity for
truthfulness), see Gill, “The Nude in Autobiography”; Burr, “Sincerity in

unknown and “undistinguished” American individuals.2 Indeed, in his
commentary on autobiography, Howells quips that he will leave it to the reading
public to determine “whether we have not of late been having rather too much of a
good thing” (478).

Yet Howells also urges “intending autobiographers” to embrace “a true
sense of their ofﬁce in its highest effects”: Only by dispensing with unnecessary
“modesty” as well as the desire to indulge in distracting “reminiscences” of other
lives, Howells contends, can the autobiographer provide to his or her reader an
“unmixed” story of the life of a single individual and an opportunity to delight in
“that precious intimacy” between writer and reader that only autobiography affords
(482). This curious suggestion that the sublime appeal of autobiography may
derive in no small part from the form itself—a form intrinsically qualiﬁed, as it
were, to draw profound “human interest” out of even the most humble lives—
offers one compelling interpretation of the prevalence and signiﬁcance of
autobiographical writing at the turn of the century. But Howells was not alone in
noting the prominence of autobiographical expression at the time; many other
cultural commentators, on both sides of the Atlantic and in hi gh-brow as well as
popular periodicals, heralded “‘this autobiographical age of ours’” and announced

“the vogue of ‘reminiscences’” that characterized it (Gill 72; “Vogue”).

 

99, u

Autobiography , The Charm of Autobiography”; and Howells’s “Editor’s Easy
Chair” columns of 1904 and 1909.

2 See Holt, The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans; Slosson,
“Undistinguished Americans.”

A number of these cultural observers, notably, had more serious
reservations than Howells about the “increasing multitude” of autobiographers at
the turn of the century (482), and their critiques highlight an intriguing connection
between autobiography and periodical publishing at the time. In “The Decline of
the Memoir,” an essay reprinted in June 1900 in the American Living Age aﬁer it
appeared initially in the British Spectator, the essayist begins by noting that “on
every hand there are signs that an age of memoirs is upon us” but goes on to argue
that “the memoir has become too common and too careless” (“Decline” 651, 653).
“For one thing,” the writer continues, “there are too many”: “The smallest notable
in any walk of life must have this tribute to his merits,” while more and more
memoirs are sought out by editors and publishers as “a sop to public curiosity”
(652). But more ruinous to the literary quality of the autobiographical form, the
writer contends, is that memoirs have become altogether too commercial, too
hastily and crudely drawn, too much imbued, in short, with “the atmosphere of
journalism” (653). The reading public’s “habit” of demanding such “pithless
memoirs,” the writer suggests, derives from the same “vulgar curiosity which
gives personal journalism its vogue; and, indeed, this type of memoir is simply a
systematized and padded journalism” (652-53). In this interpretation,
autobiography becomes the ground on which the author seeks to distinguish
sharply between the journalistic impulse—crude, hasty, and “commercial”——-and
the literary impulse, marked by “distinction, conscience and a nice discrimination”

(652-53). Notably, while Howells expresses at least tacit egalitarian approval of

the “increasing multitude” of aspiring autobiographers at the turn of the century,
this writer perceives in the diffusion of autobiographical writing a “decline” from
the literary to the merely journalistic, a trend that “corrupts the whole art” by
degrading the aesthetic integrity of the form of the memoir itself (652).

Two other essays that appeared a decade later in leading British periodicals
underscore a connection between periodical publishing and the considerable
expansion of public interest in autobiographical writing at the turn of the century.
In the ﬁrst essay, published in Blackwood ’s Magazine of December 1911, a
cultural observer contends that “the supremacy of the novel” as “an article of
public consumption” has encountered a new “adversary” in autobiography: “This
confectionary is known by many names, Memories, Recollections, Reminiscences,
and the like,” the essayist notes, “but whatever name it assume, it is always
inspired by the same purpose—to excite the curiosity of the humble reader . . .”
(“Musings” 840). As this writer interprets it, the new autobiographical writing
duplicates the ephemeral and unreﬁned qualities of newspaper and magazine
writing; like that writing, the essayist predicts, the vast majority of new memoirs
will not “survive the season’s close” (840). The same ephemeral qualities of
“periodical literature” are noted by another commentator writing during the same
year in the Edinburgh Review, but in this case autobiography, in its more classic
manifestations, is positioned in direct Opposition to those forces (“Famous” 332).
Arguing that “the interest of a good newspaper is past in a week or two” while “the

interest of a good book is permanent,” the writer highlights six “celebrated”

autobiographies as works that represent a unique cultural stay against the passing
fads and impermanent values of newspapers and magazines (332). Autobiography
represents, to this essayist, an abiding source of insight into human motives and
“sentiments” that “the student of human nature” cannot ﬁnd in the “more
ephemeral, less solid, and therefore less valuable” writing provided by the
periodical press (332-33).

Each of these cultural critics seeks to contextualize the increased public
interest in autobiographical expression at the turn of the century within the broader
cultural frame of periodical publishing, albeit in a variety of ways: Autobiography
is associated by the ﬁrst two writers with periodical literature’s journalistic
excesses and literary failings, invoked by the third as the antithesis of those
excesses. None, to be sure, express the enthusiasm of Howells for the range and
variety of new autobiographical writing. But these and other commentators,
including Howells himself, unite in their desire to explain the cultural signiﬁcance
of both the rise of periodical literature and the contemporary emergence of new
forms of autobiographical writing. Their essays originate from the common
recognition that both autobiography as a literary form and periodicals as a
publishing medium were undergoing real transformations at the turn of the
century. Though some Observers express greater skepticism or suspicion about
those changes than others, decrying the “decline” of autobiography and the

“vulgarity” of popular periodicals, each perceives that the developments in both

arenas represent signiﬁcant and meaningful changes in what Howells calls the
“republic of letters” in America (“Editor’s Easy Chair” 1909: 798).
Transformations in the social signiﬁcance of both autobiography and
periodical publishing at the turn of the century also, as these essays implicitly
afﬁrm, made the boundaries between the “literary” and the “journalistic” more
difﬁcult to distinguish sharply. The clear distinction drawn by one essayist
between the “substantial reading” that good books offer and the superﬁcial
information provided by “periodical literature” became impossible to sustain at the
turn of the century, and especially so in America. Most observers of American
periodical publishing, in fact, testiﬁed that the astonishing increase in the quantity
of periodicals had not occurred without a corresponding increase in quality. An
essayist in the Dial, for example, takes note of the “vulgar ephemera” among
popular periodicals but contends that the prevailing “tendency of periodical
literature in our day is towards the satisfaction of a distinctly higher and ﬁner
standard than was dreamed of by most of the magazines and weeklies of twenty
years ago” (Nelson 350, 352). Howells, too, challenges the notion that periodical
literature could be clearly distinguished from literary production in America: “In
belles-lettres at least,” he asserts, “most of the best literature now sees the light in
the magazines, and most of the second-best appears ﬁrst in book form”;
magazines, he continues, are “ephemeral in form, but in substance they are not
ephemeral” (qtd. in Mott 4: 41). Finally, in the ﬁrst edition of the Cambridge

History of American Literature (1917-21), a scholar appraising the changes in

periodical publishing of two decades earlier maintains that “it is hardly an
overstatement to say that the rise of the magazine has been the most signiﬁcant
phenomenon in the development of American publishing” (Cairns 299).
Afﬁrming Howells’s claims about magazine literature, the writer notes that much
of the best literature produced in America during the previous ﬁfty years appeared
initially in magazines: “The patron of the newsstand” at the turn of the century, he
concludes, could “procure, sometimes for so small a sum as a dime, a periodical
that contained the work by the best living authors” (299-301).

Notably, the commentator on American magazines in the Cambridge
History offhandedly provides an explanation of the disquiet expressed by some
cultural observers at the turn of the century about the expansion of periodical
literature: “These changes,” he notes, “have been accompanied by the good and the
questionable effects that always accompany the democratization of culture” (300).
The latter phrase suggests that the changes that occurred at the turn of the century
posed a challenge not only to conventional aesthetic distinctions and generic
deﬁnitions but also to established social and political categories. The expansion of
American periodicals to meet the desires of every conceivable “interest group” (a
term coined in 1908), together with the marked reduction in the price of all
periodicals after advertising replaced subscriptions as a source of revenue (Mott 4:
20-22), inevitably opened the “republic of letters” to a wider range of the
American reading public than had ever before participated in it. “An immense

reading public has sprung into being,” noted a contributor to the Atlantic Monthly

(“New Conditions” 572), while a British observer asserted that recent “social
changes” bring “literature as a whole within the reach of nearly everybody”
(“Famous” 332). Whereas “Forty years ago writers were literary men and women,
. . . and readers were people of their own kind,” the Atlantic essayist continues,
“To-day, the readers are the people, the masses, and writers are in the main those
who supply them with what they want” (572). Such comments highlight a

,9 6‘

growing awareness that designations such as “readers, writers,” and the
“literary” had become more difﬁcult to apply, less self-evident in their cultural
signiﬁcance, with the rise of periodical publishing at the turn of the century.

This “democratization” of the reading public clearly distressed those who
considered themselves “literary men and women,” and many raised alarms about
the threat to “literary life” posed by such changes (“New Conditions” 572, 574).
Others, however, saw in these developments not danger but promise,3 a
progressive movement toward greater democratization throughout American
society. At a time when social critics heralded a new “spirit of democracy” in
America marked by “the discovery of the importance of the average man” (Slosson

3), a number of cultural observers explicitly linked American democracy and

civilization and American literature in social commentary. In an essay on “The

 

3 See, e.g., George Pellew’s commentary in the Critic in 1891: “In France,
England, and the United States, the most obvious recent changes are the result of what
may be called the democratization of literature. Never before has reading been so
general; never have so many people been able to write so variously and so well. . . .
Literature and journalism have joined hands as never before . . .” (qtd. in Mott 4:

110)

New Literature” in the Atlantic Monthly, for example, Bliss Perry contended that
“It is this unadvertised majority, this unheralded multitude, that walks quietly to
the polls and renders a common-sense verdict, which holds the key to the literary
as well as to the political future” of America (7). In thus perceiving a connection
between political representation and literary representation, this commentator and
others also provide a powerful means of interpreting the rise of both periodical
literature and autobiographical expression at the turn of the century. Another
essayist in the Atlantic noted, for example, that “the interest in the individual,
everyday man has grown with the growth of the democratic spirit, which involves
a passion for biography” (“Modern” 574). Edwin E. Slosson linked the “spirit of
democracy” and the form of autobiography even more explicitly in his
introduction to The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans: As Told by
Themselves (1906), maintaining that “the ordinary man under ordinary
circumstances” had come to represent not only the “controlling vote in the
governmental ﬁrm” but also the principal subject of contemporary literature (3, 5).
“In politics he has gained his rights,” Slosson continued, “and in history and
literature he is coming to be recognized” (3). The implication in such essays that
cultural representation and political representation might be closely connected, that
biographical or autobiographical writing might intrinsically express a “spirit of
democracy,” underscores the particular signiﬁcance of autobiography in American

social life and letters at the turn of the century.

10

Together, the rise of periodical literature and the prominence of
autobiographical expression contributed to a broad movement of democratization
within the republic of letters in America not only by admitting new readers,
creating an “immense reading public,” but also by making that republic more
accessible to new writers. Eager to satisfy the reading public’s desire for ﬁrst-
person accounts of ﬁrst-hand experiences, magazine editors printed full-length
autobiographies in serial form even as they sought out brief autobiographical
essays to publish independently. F urtherrnore, responding to what Slosson called
“the discovery of the importance of the average man,” progressive editors solicited
personal narratives from “average” or “undistinguished” American citizens as a
way of representing—one “vote” or one “voice” at a time, as it were—American
democracy itself. Representatives of various professions, classes, regions, ethnic
groups, and immigrant populations, in turn, responded to expanded opportunities
for publication in mainstream periodicals by seizing the agency of public
expression, often in the form of autobiographical narratives. Many individuals
who, before the turn of the century, might never have found an opening for their
voices in such periodicals, now found occasions to present their experiences of
American life to a national audience. As representatives of an “unadvertised” and
“unheralded multitude” of American citizens, these individuals presented lives that
had remained until the turn of the century largely unheard of—and entirely

unheard from—within the American republic of letters.

11

To the degree that autobiography enabled this new access to print for
previously excluded Americans, it was justly declared, in Howells’s authoritative
and enthusiastic phrasing, “this most democratic province in the republic of
letters” (“Editor’s Easy Chair” 1909: 798). To the extent, too, that “ordinary
speciﬁcations for authorship” were set aside in the case of autobiography,
requiring of even the most “obscure or humble” aspiring writer merely the “sincere
relation of what he has been and done and felt and thought” (798), autobiography
at the turn of the century embodied the “spirit of democracy” in America. Without
a doubt, that spirit guided the production and reception Of much of the
autobiographical writing of the period: Not before the turn of the century, one
imagines, would a reviewer in the Ladies ’ Home Journal have presented the
autobiographies of an African-American ex-slave and an immigrant—Booker T.
Washington’s Up from Slavery and Jacob Riis’s Making of an American—as “Two
Books of Real American Life,” “not only autobiographies of very interesting men”
but “also in a very real sense autobiographies of a nation . . .” (Mabie 17). At the
same time, however, the democratization of literature at the turn of the century was
by no means complete, the new openness of the republic of letters by no means
unlimited or unrestricted. The enthusiastic zeal of some observers at the time
about the triumph of democratic principles in American life and letters easily
embraced ﬁgures such as Washington and Riis, individuals who, in the words of
the Ladies ’ Home Journal review, “formed themselves on American models and

developed themselves by means of American opportunities” (17). Individuals who

12

did not experience such striking “American opportunities” or live such exemplary
American lives, and those whose life stories posed more signiﬁcant challenges to
“American models” of identity, community, and success, encountered greater
difﬁculties in seeking access to the avenues of publication and circulation that
constituted the republic of letters in America.

In The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in
Eighteenth-Century America, Michael Warner contends that “No one had a
relation to linguistic technologieswspeaking, reading, writing, and printing—
unmediated by such forms of domination as race, gender, and status” (17). In spite
of immense changes in the forms of American publication as well as in its public
sphere between the eighteenth century and the turn of the twentieth, much the
same argument might be made about the latter period. When Howells proclaimed
in 1909 that “we would not restrict autobiography to any age or sex, creed, class,
or color,” he could not have lost sight of the myriad extraliterary restrictions on
publication that remained in place at the turn of the century—restrictions
maintained, in a sense, by the very “we” of which Howells counted himself a part.
The newly democratic republic of letters heralded by many observers at the turn of
the century, in short, was still characterized by a number of aristocratic tendencies.
To be sure, the spectacular rise of both autobiographical expression and periodical
publishing during this period greatly expanded the opportunities available to those
who aspired to write for a national audience and, in the process, permanently

altered the meaning of print and publication in America. Finally, however, the

13

advances in the democratization of American literature and culture during this
period must not be isolated from the contradictions and tensions that marked and
circumscribed those advances. A critical examination of periodical publishing and
autobiographical expression at the turn of the century requires an attentiveness to
both aspects of the republic of letters of the day, its capacity to forge new,
democratic relations among the American population as well as the enduring

limitations of that capacity.

As the preceding overview suggests, autobiography and periodical
publishing can be fruitfully examined as cultural forms that functioned, to a
considerable extent, in dynamic relation to each other at the turn of the century.
The precise nature of that relation, its consequences for individual
autobiographers, forms the primary subject of the three chapters that follow, and
the social and literary transformations outlined above represent the common
historical context for those separate discussions. But the theoretical issues at stake
in the following chapters might also be said to unite autobiography and periodical
publishing as subjects of critical analysis. The critical questions involved in
reading autobiography, that is, overlap in signiﬁcant ways with the questions
raised by reading periodicals, and an examination of either form illuminates some
of the particular challenges posed by both. While the rise of autobiographical
expression and periodical publishing at the turn of the century represents the

common historical context of the following chapters, then, the critical questions

14

involved in reading and interpreting autobiography and periodicals constitute the
theoretical thread that uniﬁes those chapters.

The ﬁrst question raised by a study of autobiography and periodical
publishing—why study them at all?—is answered to some degree by the
discussion above: In American literary history, at least, periodicals and
autobiographical expression deserve critical attention because each played a key
role in literary production and cultural expression in America and contributed to
developing notions of authorship, publication, culture, and national identity. But
the question that follows—how are they to be read?—raises more challenging
issues of method and interpretation. To be sure, both autobiographies and
periodicals often present an appearance of interpretive transparency, the former by
establishing that sense of intimacy between author and reader noted by Howells,
the latter by conveying the image of the periodical as a neutral mediator between
writers and readers. This notion of a direct and easily discernible correspondence
between the periodical or the autobiography and the reality that each documents
may account for the lack of critical attention given to both forms. But another
source of such critical oversight may be the particular barriers to close critical
analysis that each form presents. Autobiography, for example, may be “the least
complicated of writing performances,” but it is at the same time, as James Olney
asserts, “the most elusive of literary documents”:

In talking about autobiography, one always feels that there is a great

and present danger that the subject will slip away altogether, that it
will vanish into thinnest air, leaving behind the perception . . . that

15

there is no way to bring autobiography to heel as a literary genre
with its own proper form, terminology, and Observances. (3-4)

Impossible to conﬁne within clear boundaries as a distinct genre, autobiography
belies its own self-evidence, forcing the critic who seeks the ﬁrm interpretive
ground of generic deﬁnition to proceed, as Olney quips, “by an act of faith” alone
(4)-

Periodicals pose a similar challenge to the critical reader. In one sense,
periodicals seem to offer direct access to another time, its social and cultural
forms, its distinct ways of seeing, knowing, and feeling. Furthermore, their
“overwhelming empirical presence,” as B. E. Maidment writes of Victorian
periodicals, “the sense that they had something to say on everything,” makes them
“a crucial and obvious resource” (144). Yet, as Maidment continues, “it is just this
bagginess, this variety, this hugeness, which makes precise attention to periodicals as
a genre, or hierarchy of genres, with their own logic, rules and determinants, so
difﬁcult to sustain” (144). The correspondence between Maidment’s observations
on periodicals and Olney’s discussion of autobiography is striking: Both assert the
richness of their respective ﬁelds but also highlight the fundamental challenge of
deﬁnition and classiﬁcation, of sufﬁciently pinning down the objects of their
analysis to allow analysis to proceed. In Olney’s portrayal, autobiography is an
untrained “creature” among more well-behaved literary genres, impossible to “heel”
to “its own prOper form, terminology, and Observances” (4); periodicals, in

Maidment’s depiction, similarly resist classiﬁcation as a “genre” or set of genres

16

with “their own logic, rules and determinants” (144). What both descriptions
suggest is that the critic who would read both autobiography and periodicals in
conjunction must remain alert to “proper” as well as improper forms, general “rules”
as well as frequent exceptions, broad “Observances” as well as unconventional cases.
The critic who would read American autobiographies and periodicals in
conjunction, meanwhile, encounters additional challenges. First, the sheer
profusion of both forms in America is staggering: Louis Kaplan’s Bibliography of
American Autobiography includes over 6000 titles written before 1945, while
Frank Luther Mott’s History of American Magazines estimates that in the year
1900 alone, 5500 periodicals were in publication (4: 11). The content of both
periodicals and autobiographies, furthermore, resists any unifying or overarching
classiﬁcation. Albert Stone suggests, for example, that “the range of personality,
experience, and profession reﬂected in the forms of American autobiography is as
varied as American life itself” (“Autobiography” 23); Robert Sayre, likewise,
rhapsodizes about American autobiographies “in all their bewildering number and
variety” and proposes that, taken together, they constitute a “catalogue . . . as great
as one of Whitman’s own” (“Proper” 241). Comprehending the full extent of
American autobiographical writing of even a limited period requires, as a result,
not only the arduous work of recovery but also the more daunting task of
identifying some sense of generic continuity and coherence. An inclusive
approach to reading periodical literature, meanwhile, is manifestly impossible: A

single weekly magazine published over a ten-year period, for instance, might

17

exceed 30,000 pages of text and advertising. More signiﬁcantly, as Maidment
asserts, a working sense of the “range, interconnectedness, and consciousness of
each other among periodicals . . . can never be recovered from ranks of bound
volumes in a library stack” (145). Neither the single salvaged issue nor an entire
run of a given periodical, in other words, can transparently reveal to the scholarly
researcher those myriad associations and allusions that gave the periodical its
unique position in the social and cultural life of its time.

Nevertheless, the enduring sense that both autobiographies and periodicals
offer, in Sayre’s words, “a broader and more direct contact with American
experience” than any other literary or cultural forms has made them attractive to
scholars of various disciplines—though generally as secondary, not primary,
sources. The apparent promise of transparency (or “direct contact”) that these
forms project, together with the impression of comprehensive coverage—the sense
that “everybody” in America has written an autobiography (Sayre, “Proper” 263)
and that periodicals “had something to say on everything” (Maidment l44)—mark
them as ideal sources of “background” information for a variety of scholarly
projects; the same characteristics, however, have led scholars to ignore
autobiographies and periodicals as subjects of primary research and analysis. By
this critical logic, periodicals and autobiographies have been relegated to the roles
of a supporting crew for the literary critic’s or the historian’s main-stage show,
invoked merely to provide supplementary information on the person, product, text,

or event under primary investigation.

18

In recent decades, however, critical attention has increasingly challenged
the assumptions and methods of previous scholarship on both autobiographies and
periodicals. Albert Stone notes that scholarship on autobiography, for instance,
has moved from a “purist criticism” that “insisted upon testing for the ‘true
autobiography’” to “more inclusive expectations and looser deﬁnitions”
(“Introduction” 7). Olney describes the transformation within autobiographical
criticism as a widespread “shift of attention from bios to autos—from the life to
the self”: that is, from reading autobiography as a direct representation of the
events of a life to reading for those “philosophical, psychological, literary, or
historical implications” of the “I” that informs every autobiographical text (19,
20). In periodical studies, likewise, critics have attempted in recent years “to shift
attention from journalism as a source for other studies and to treat it as a subject in
its own right,” challenging those who would limit periodicals only to “evidential
and illustrative uses.”4 In both ﬁelds, scholars have called for new modes of
reading that do greater justice to the breadth and complexity of autobiographies
and periodicals and to the particular critical challenges inherent in reading them.

Few if any of those scholars have examined autobiographical expression
and periodical publishing in conjunction, in spite of considerable correspondence
between them and the possibility that the two ﬁelds of study might prove mutually

informative. In “Towards a Theory of the Periodical as 3 Publishing Genre,” for

 

‘ Brake, Jones, and Madden, “Introduction” xii; Maidment 153. See also Pykett;
Beetham; and Smith and Price.

19

instance, Margaret Beetham’s formal analysis of periodicals clearly parallels
contemporary discussions of autobiography: “The concept of open and closed
forms,” Beetham writes, “provides a way of explaining the relationship between
the forms of texts, the psychic structures in which the individual self constructs
meaning, and the structures of the social world” (27). Notably, Albert Stone
argues that autobiography might be read through a similar framework, examined
both for its “individual stories”—-those “psychic structures in which the individual
self constructs meaning”—and for its “cultural narratives,” the ways in which
those stories invoke and interpret “the structures of the social world”
(“Introduction”). In spite of such critical overlap, however, scholars of
autobiography or periodical publishing have not explicitly addressed the nature of
autobiographical texts published in periodicals or the critical issues such texts
might raise.

The new modes of reading and research suggested by these and other
scholars of autobiography and periodical publishing might be summarized in a
phrase of Paul John Eakin, who urges scholars of autobiography to pursue
“authoritative account[s] of actual autobiographical practice” in place of isolated
readings of individual autobiographies (7). Such a focus on the “generic practice”
of a particular period is, Eakin continues, “a relatively new development, and
highly signiﬁcant”:

Whereas before the literary historical space of autobiography

was a largely unvisited terrain, . . . now a working sense of
the life of texts and a concomitant sense of the tastes and

20

expectations of the reading public in particular periods is
beginning to emerge. (14)

What Eakin characterizes as a “new development” among scholars of
autobiography can also be found, as suggested above, among scholars of
periodical publishing. The common desire for “a working sense of the life
of texts,” whether those texts be autobiographies or periodicals, reﬂects a
similar commitment in both ﬁelds not only to new theoretical models of
reading but also to renewed efforts at “empirical description” (Maidment
145). The work Of producing authoritative accounts of the actual
autobiographical or periodical “practice” of a given period, these scholars
agree, requires critical methods that can engage the profusion of individual
autobiographies and periodicals—some method of empirical description,
though inevitably limited—as well as theoretical approaches that illuminate
the social and cultural position, the literary signiﬁcance, and the ideological
implications of individual texts.

Applied to the turn of the century period, the method suggested by
Eakin and others offers a powerful means of examining not only the
autobiographical and periodical practice of the time but also the extent and
meaning of the contemporary democratization of American literature and
culture. As illustrated above, even a brief examination of the former reveals
its correlation and relevance to the latter: Clearly, an “authoritative

account” of the democratization of American culture at the turn of the

21

century cannot be achieved without some recognition of the role of
periodicals and autobiographical expression in those changes. An account
that limits that role to one of secondary comment, ﬁnding evidence of
democratization only in its invocation as editorial topic or literary theme,
overlooks the importance of periodical and autobiographical forms as
primary sites of those changes and, furthermore, as tangible illustrations of
both democratization and its limits.

In an essay written to introduce a volume of essays on American
autobiography, Eakin commends the fact that “in several essays well-
known, lesser known, and virtually unknown autobiographers ﬁgure in
relation to each other for the ﬁrst time in criticism, as they once did in the
day of their original publication” (15; emphasis in original). At the turn of
the century, notably, many of those known and unknown autobiographers
ﬁgured quite literally in relation to each other within the pages of American

magazines.5 Restoring that relation, reading the “marginal” literature of

 

5 A fascinating example of autobiographies read “in relation to each other” can be
found in a letter of Charles Chesnutt to Walter Hines Page, then editor of the Atlantic
Monthly, in 1899: “My dear Mr. Page, I have been reading the March Atlantic, and
haven’t found a dull line in it. The contrast between slavery struggling for existence
in an essentially free democracy, and liberty struggling vainly for life in a despotism,
is strongly marked in Mrs. Howe’s “Reminiscences” and Prince Kropotkin’s
autobiography . . .” (Chesnutt, “To Be an Author " 120). Beyond offering a concrete
illustration Of Eakin’s thesis, Chesnutt’s reading of the autobiographies in terms
directly related to “democracy” and “despotism” reinforces my own linking of
autobiographical expression and the issue of democratization. Chesnutt’s comment
on not ﬁnding “a dull line” in the entire issue of the Atlantic Monthly may also

22

unknown autobiographers back into “the practice of mainstream
autobiography,” can illuminate not only the impact of the dominant culture
on those it marginalizes but also the “reciprocity of inﬂuence” between
mainstream and margin (Eakin 8-9).

In a suggestive sentence, Eakin goes on to propose that “the true
history of American autobiography and the culture in which it is produced
and consumed may turn out to be the history of identiﬁable groups within
the culture and of the network of relations among them” (12). Whether or
not Eakin’s prediction proves accurate, it is particularly suggestive for
reading tum-of-the-century autobiographical expression, not least of all
because of its close connection to periodical publishing. Periodicals at the
turn of the century represented, more explicitly than book publishing or any
other medium, the place at which literary production and consumption met:
The typical editor ﬁrnctioned in one sense as both collaborative producer,
inﬂuencing and editorially shaping the writing of contributors, and
representative consumer, seeking out material that would appeal to the
periodical’s subscribing audience and, if possible, attract new readers.

At the same time, the broad social questions surrounding the very
idea of “identiﬁable groups” were marked by a particular urgency at the

turn of the century. During that period, as Philip Gleason notes, “ethnicity

 

underscore the signiﬁcance of “human interest” to periodical publishing at the turn of
the century.

23

assumed greater salience as an element in the national identity than it has
had at any other time before or since”: The “ethnic factors of ‘race,’
nationality, language, and so on,” Gleason continues, “were the issues that
sprang immediately to mind when Americans asked themselves, ‘What does
it mean to be an American? What kind of Americanism do we want?’”
(46). Furthermore, while ethnic and national identity became increasingly
problematic concepts, the question of the proper “relations” between
“identiﬁable groups” became the source of considerable social commentary
and contention: Vigorous debates about “the Negro Problem” or “the Indian
Problem,” for example, derived in part from widely divergent notions about
whether social relations between distinct groups and classes ought to be
based on traditional social structures, on new scientiﬁc theories of human
evolution, on measures of educational or intellectual ability, or on ideals of
universal social and civil rights. Within these broad social discussions,
national magazines functioned in various ways as arbiters of American
national identity, while autobiographies offered a useful form for probing
the relation of individual and ethnic identity to national identity and for
distinguishing the actual practice of democratic ideals in America from their
theoretical articulations.

In the following chapters, then, the questions that guide my
discussion of autobiographical expression and periodical publishing

resonate not only with questions that predominated in social discourse at the

24

turn of the century but also with questions that preoccupy theorists of both
autobiography and periodicals today. In seeking to produce an “accurate
account” of the “actual autobiographical practice” in America at the turn of
the century, I am aware of the unique challenges posed by the form of
autobiography and by the publishing medium of the periodical. I am also
aware that the conjunction of autobiography and periodical publishing is, in
Eakin’s terms, “largely unvisited terrain” in scholarly work on this period.
But as I have maintained above, and as the following chapters illustrate, that
conjunction offers a unique way of perceiving the literary expression and
the broader cultural conditions of tum-of-the-century America, including
the nation’s halting progress toward what some contemporary observers

termed “democratization.”

In making a case for “the centrality of the study of periodicals as a
scholarly project,” B. E. Maidment notes that “one obvious task for
periodicals research . . . is to re-think modes of empirical description so
that, however modest we may feel confronted by the size and complexity of
the subject, we might at least have a chart or a map of major tendencies”
(145). Nancy Glazener, meanwhile, in a full-length study of the “literary
institution” of Realism as it gained legitimacy in a set of magazines she
calls “the Atlantic [Monthly] Group,” concedes that the sort of literary

history she is proposing “is necessarily a collaborative project in which the

25

limits of individual studies provide the preconditions for other work” (7).
In presenting the dissertation that follows, I want to begin by echoing the
sentiments of these scholars: The chapters that follow, in short, are by no
means intended as exhaustive studies but rather as modest efforts at drafting
“a chart or a map” of a few “major tendencies” in autobiographical
expression and periodical publishing at the turn of the century. These
chapters should be read as initial (and, I hope, initiatory) forays into an
immense and complex ﬁeld, small contributions to a broadly collaborative
critical project.

Each of the chapters that follow addresses a similar conjunction of
autobiographical expression, periodical publishing, and the relation of
margin and mainstream in America at the turn of the century, but each
begins from the vantage point of distinct critical questions about that
conjunction. In Chapter One, I examine the ways in which
autobiographical expression in national periodicals contributed to changing
conceptions of authorship and authenticity, focusing my attention on a
series of short life-stories published in the early years of the twentieth
century in the New York Independent. A selection of these
autobiographical essays was collected and published in 1906 as The Life
Stories of Undistinguished Americans: As Told by Themselves, a title that
points to the democratic ideals underlying the procurement and publication

of the essays. But the stories served the purposes of the Independent as

26

much as they fulﬁlled the desires for self-expression or for “authorship” on
the part of various “undistinguished” subjects. The essays reveal the
unusual ways in which the magazine’s editors compromised traditional
notions of authorship in favor of the appearance of authenticity, mediating
the individual agency available to the unknown autobiographers. Yet the
essays also illustrate the sense of immediacy that the form of autobiography
offered: While the Independent clearly capitalized on the appeal of “human
interest” stories in publishing the brief essays, I maintain that the subjects of
the life stories were also enabled by the medium of the national magazine
and the immediacy of autobiography to communicate their individual
experiences of American life to a national American audience.

Chapter Two also centers on the Independent but shifts attention
from the broad range of autobiographical writing by “undistinguished
Americans” published by the magazine to the particular contributions of
African-American autobiographers and essayists. After brieﬂy outlining
the magazine’s engagement in the national discussion of America’s “race
problems,” and the so-called “Negro problem” more speciﬁcally, I turn to
an examination of several individual autobiographical essays by African-
American contributors. Those essays reﬂect a wide range of experiences,
class positions, and political points of view, but all of them illuminate
aspects of the tum-of-the-century relationship between autobiographical

expression by marginalized Americans and mainstream periodical

27

publishing. In two essays that invoke the trope of a “new slavery” at the
turn of the century, for example, a former peon and a nurse present life-
stories that combine personal narrative with editorial argument in
compelling ﬁrst-person commentaries on the “Negro Problem.” The partial
literacy of both autobiographical subjects, however, limits the extent to
which they can seize the agency of free expression, and I conclude that only
the nurse succeeds in achieving what William Andrews terms “a distinctive
authorizing voice” (T 0 Tell 99). Turning to the personal essays of two
educated, middle-class African-American women (presented in the
Independent with two essays on the “race problem” by white women), I
maintain that these women use the form of autobiography and the forum of
periodical publication to advance not only forceful “individual stories” but
also challenging “cultural narratives” (Stone, “Introduction”).

Chapter Three investigates both the problems and the potential that
the genre of autobiography and the forum of mass-media publication
presented to Native American writers at the turn of the century. Focusing
primarily on the early autobiographical writing of Charles Alexander
Eastman, I explore the curious (if seemingly innocuous) fact that Eastman
and other contemporary Indian autobiographers chose to write primarily
about Indian childhood at a time when Native Americans were widely
conceived of as a “child race.” By examining closely the prevailing notions

of the day regarding Native Americans, childhood as a discrete period of

28

development, and the curious contemporary pastime, “Playing Indian,” I set
the work of Indian autobiographers at the turn of the century in a richer
cultural context in order to more fully appreciate their “bi-cultural” position
in American life and letters.

At the same time, by considering at some length the autobiographical
writing of a single, widely recognized writer, I hope to illustrate in Chapter
Three the usefulness of reading individual autobiographical texts not only
against the backdrop of a speciﬁc cultural context but also in conjunction
with research on a single periodical. In this case, I support my reading of
Eastman’s “Recollections of the Wild Life” (and its later incarnation,
Indian Boyhood) with my analysis of the periodical in which it ﬁrst
appeared, St. Nicholas, even as my reading of Eastman’s text informs my
understanding of that inﬂuential children’s magazine. Furthermore, my
effort to delineate the complex negotiations required of Eastman as a
mediating ﬁgure—positioned, in a sense, between the Native American
world of his childhood and the white American world of his adult years,
between “savage” and “civilized”—corresponds to my interest in the
powerful mediating function of periodicals such as St. Nicholas. I contend
that both the editorial efforts of St. Nicholas to make Eastman’s writing
more palatable to its audience and Eastman’s own autobiographical
negotiations participate, albeit to divergent ends, in the related cultural

preoccupations at the turn of the century with the life of the Indian and the

29

life of the child. Chapter Three concludes by positioning Eastman’s
autobiographical writing next to that of two other Native American writers,
Zitkala-Sa [Gertrude Simmons Bonnin] and Francis La F lesche, each of
whom used autobiography to express powerful and provocative responses
to white America’s fascination with the “vanishing” Indian.

My focus in much of this study on ethnic American writing reﬂects
my conviction that the recovery and reconsideration of ethnic American and
African-American literature in recent decades has signiﬁcantly enriched and
expanded traditional conceptions of the American literary canon. The small
oeuvre of Zitkala-Sa, for example, has in recent years inspired considerable
critical commentary and attained a secure position in two leading
anthologies of American literature, changing in the process the ways in
which tum-of-the—century American literature is conceived.6 My primary
aim in the following chapters, however, is not to further the work of
reconceiving or reconstructing the American canon. In reading texts that
have been largely unknown or uninteresting to scholars of American
literature (and of American autobiography in particular), I am not primarily

interested in recovering texts for possible canonization, evaluating those

 

" For recent critical commentary on Zitkala-Sa, see Bemardin; Okker; J. Smith;
Sidonie Smith, “Cheesecake”; and Wexler, esp. 173-83. Zitkala-Sa’s
autobiographical essays are excerpted in the Heath Anthology of American Literature
and reprinted in their entirety in the Fifth Edition of the Norton Anthology of
American Literature (1998). Okker offers several compelling suggestions about how

30

texts in terms of aesthetic accomplishment, or deﬁning any new standards
of literary merit. Instead, my interest lies in exploring new ways of reading
American autobiographical expression and American periodical publishing
and in discovering the potential for critical insight that might be achieved
by reading both forms in conjunction. Though my subject clearly intersects
with issues of canonization, insofar as I address the initial production and
reception of American autobiographical texts, my principal aim is not to
valorize or revalorize particular texts but to understand the complex ways
by which texts ﬁrst become eligible for critical consideration through the
stages of writing, publication, circulation, and reception.

The particular opportunities and obstacles encountered at each of
those stages by ethnic American and African-American autobiographers
make their writing especially compelling as the subject of such critical
analysis. In his early essay on “Autobiography and the Making of
America,” Robert Sayre defends his exclusive focus on “famous
autobiographies” by noting that, in contrast to both “the memoir of the
public person,” who is “perhaps too much a citizen,” and “the private
experience of the uncelebrated person,” who “takes his citizenship more or
less for granted,” the celebrated American autobiographers treat citizenship

as “a major issue in their total development” (168). Sayre suggests at the

 

Zitkala-Sa’s writing conforms to as well as challenges traditional conceptions of the
American literary canon.

31

close of his essay that the autobiographies of American women need to be
read “to tell the rest of the story—of what went on in the House” (168), but
he overlooks the wealth of autobiographical expression by “uncelebrated”
American individuals who by no means took citizenship for granted,
individuals for whom citizenship was “a major issue in their total
development” often through no choice of their own. Autobiography can
indeed provide signiﬁcant material for telling “the rest of the story” of
American life, but that story ought to include what went on not only in the
House but also in the southern labor camp, the western farming community,
the northern factory, the eastern tenement. Autobiographical writing by
marginalized Americans can expand the outlines of American social and
cultural as well as literary history, telling of aspects and arenas of American
life that have remained unrecognized.

That writing is noteworthy, however, not only for its content but also
for its form, for what it reveals about the practice of autobiography at the
turn of the century as well as the particular characteristics of periodical
publishing. Many marginalized American individuals, as Olney notes of
African-American writers in particular, have “entered the house of literature
through the door of autobiography” (15), perhaps especially, as suggested
above, at the turn of the century. Yet even as it admitted large numbers of
uncelebrated or undistinguished individuals, that doorway to the “house of

literature” remained a contentious site, and a site at which the vaunted

32

democracy of American life and letters was tested and deﬁned. In the
following chapters, an examination of the ways in which marginalized
Americans sought to enter that house of literature through the form of
autobiography and the forum of periodical publishing reveals the unique
opportunities as well as the real obstacles that enabled and prevented such
access.

Because my interest centers on the autobiographical expression of
marginalized Americans published by nationally circulated American
periodicals, I do not consider in the following chapters the profusion of
foreign-language periodicals established by various immigrant groups7 or
the continued development of African-American periodicals at the turn of
the century—though such periodicals clearly exerted a powerful inﬂuence
within particular communities and, in ways that need to be ﬁIrther
investigated, on the nation as a whole. Presumably, too, autobiography and
other generic forms functioned in distinct ways in such periodicals, and the
conjunction of autobiography and “marginal” American periodicals might
offer further insight on the autobiographical and periodical practice of the
turn of the century. The following study also focuses primarily on Native
American and African-American autobiographical expression while

overlooking the contemporary writing of other ethnic or racial groups in

33

America. In part, this choice reﬂects the preponderance of autobiographical
writing by Native American and Aﬁican-American individuals, itself
perhaps the result of larger populations (and immigration restrictions such
as the Chinese Exclusion Act) as well as the greater visibility of those
groups at the height of national debate over the so-called “Negro Problem”
and “Indian Problem.” My sustained attention to the writing of two
marginalized groups is intended to be representative of a kind of critical
approach that might be applied to others at the turn of the century for whom
“democratization” was both a promise and a problem. But clearly much
work remains to be done before the range of experiences and expressions of
American life can be fully appreciated, before the “actual autobiographical
practice” of this period can be recognized and read in all its wealth and
variety.

One way in which the following study seeks to contribute to that
larger, collaborative critical project is by advocating for a new attention to
shorter autobiographical texts published in the inherently ephemeral
medium of the periodical. To be sure, my interest in the brief
autobiographical essay derives in part from the cultural signiﬁcance of short
forms at the turn of the century, when brevity was associated with

efﬁciency and the acceleration and increasing automation of American life:

 

7 Ashley notes that “the inﬂux of immigrants” at the end of the nineteenth century
“led to an increase in the foreign language press from 315 newspapers in 1880 to

34

The New York Independent, for example, in an editorial entitled “Scientiﬁc
Management in Reading,” touted itself as “the busy man’s magazine,”
providing “what is most important to be known of what the world is doing
and thinking” but insistently “boiling [it] down” to “save . . . the reader’s
time” (76). Walter Hines Page, likewise, noted in 1902 that “Effective style
is changing” and that “the man who would write convincingly and
entertainingly of things of our day and our time must write with more
directness, with more cleamess, with greater nervous force” (qtd. in Mott 4:
13). These transformations in “effective style” clearly inﬂuenced the shape
of autobiographical writing at the turn of the century, when a brief essay
might be termed an “Autobiography.”8 One of my aims in this dissertation
is to expand and amend the predominant emphasis of autobiographical
criticism on full-length, independently published texts by taking seriously
such uses of generic classiﬁcation at the turn of the century, approaching
the period’s autobiographical practice “inclusively and inductively” rather
than through any “prescriptive” or “essentialist” deﬁnitions of the genre
(Eakin 7).

At the same time, I am less interested in the following study in
seeking a new and inclusive deﬁnition of autobiography as a genre than in

examining the intersection of autobiographical expression, periodical

 

1,150 in 1900” (xii).
8 See, e.g., De Cora; “New Slavery”; “Race Problem”; and Williams, “Northern.”

35

publishing, and the question of American democratization, and my
emphasis on brief autobiographical forms also reﬂects this primary concern.
Marginalized Americans at the turn of the century clearly had wider access
to the “house of literature” through short forms of literary expression such
as poetry, short stories, and autobiographical essays than through longer
forms such as novels or full-length autobiographies, just as they had greater
access to the newspapers and magazines that specialized in short forms than
to the publishing houses that printed only full-length volumes. The short
autobiographical essay, in particular, opened the door to the house of
literature in a way that other forms could not, appealing to the interest of
American readers in the lives of other, largely unknown American
individuals and enabling those individuals to bring unrecognized lives and
points of view before a national audience. For many marginalized
Americans at the turn of the century, the conjunction of autobiographical
writing and mainstream publication created a new and powerful means of
public expression, a way of representing, in both a political and a literary
sense, their own experiences and perspectives as well as those of a larger
class or group.

Critical consideration of the shorter, more ephemeral forms of
autobiographical expression that ﬂourished at the turn of the century in
American periodicals enables, ﬁnally, not only a more accurate account of

the autobiographical practice of the period but also an informed evaluation

36

of Howells’s appraisal of autobiography as “this most democratic province
of the republic of letters.” Notably, citations of Howells’s statement have
become ubiquitous in recent years in critical commentary on American
autobiography, but few critics have read the phrase as anything more than
transparent description.9 Yet Howells’s comment clearly encapsulates deep
contradictions that marked the republic of letters and, indeed, American
culture in its entirety at the turn of the century. Scholarly reappraisals of
turn-Of-the-century autobiography must come to terms with both the
possibilities and the limitations of “this most democratic province of the
republic Of letters.” Assessing the complex negotiations required of those
who entered the “house of literature” by way of autobiographical expression

and periodical publication is the primary aim of the chapters that follow.

 

9 See, e.g., Couser (31, 253); Egan (70); McKay (27); Sayre, American
Autobiography (443); Stone, “Introduction” (2) and Autobiographical Occasions (2);
and Foster (34-35). Only Couser (253) and Foster (35) take explicit exception to
Howells’s characterization of the democratic openness of autobiography.

37

Chapter One

“A New Form of Literature”:
Autobiography and The Life Stories
of Undistinguished Americans

American autobiographical writing from the turn of the twentieth century is
generally represented in criticism by a few exceptional texts. Henry Adams’s
Education, for example, has often been elevated as the zenith and culmination of
the period’s efforts in the genre. But as Paul John Eakin contends, recent interest
in the “literary historical space of autobiography” in America has fostered a desire
to replace a narrow critical focus on selected monumental texts with a more richly
nuanced and broadly conceived sense of the “actual autobiographical practice” of
particular periods (14). Such an approach seems ideally suited for the period
surrounding the turn of the twentieth century in America, a time when the
monumental autobiographies of ﬁgures such as Adams and Henry James shared
the cultural stage with a profusion of autobiographical expression and
experimentation by lesser-known and, indeed, unknown ﬁgures. As an age proud
of its “democratic spirit” and its “interest in the individual, everyday man”
(“Modern” 574), tum-of-the-century America opened the doors of literary
opportunity to individuals and “types” never before represented in the American

republic of letters. In addition, while Henry Adams privately distributed just one

38

hundred copies of his Education to select ﬁiends and family, the vast majority of
literary expression at the time was published initially (and often solely) in a
manner more suited to the much-vaunted democratic spirit of the age: that is, in
daily newspapers or weekly and monthly magazines. Understanding the “actual
autobiographical practice” of this period, then, requires a shift in focus to include
not only the classic autobiographical texts of the period, the permanent ﬁxtures of
autobiographical criticism, but also the more common, more conventional, more
popular, and more ephemeral texts of the period.

A curious collection of just such texts was published in 1906 (the same year
Adams “lent out” his book to friends such as Henry James for “correction,
suggestion, and amendment”) with the suggestive title, The Life Stories of
Undistinguished Americans: As Told by Themselves.‘ Culled ﬁom approximately
eighty short autobiographical texts ﬁrst published in the New York Independent,
the sixteen “life stories” offer an intriguing counterpoint to the more traditional
autobiographies of the period. These “lifelets,” as one reader dubbed them,
introduced the national readership of a popular weekly magazine to the lives of
unknown and “undistinguished” Americans of various occupations and “races”
who made up the “composite nationality” of the United States at the turn of the
century (Slosson 4). Containing the stories of a Greek peddler, a French

dressmaker, an Irish cook, a Swedish farmer, and a Japanese servant, to name a

 

' For Adams’s comments on his Education, see his letter to James, 6 May 1908
(Monteiro 76).

39

few, the collection represented immigrants of both the “desirable” and
“undesirable” variety; at the same time, the collection accounted for various
“native” American lives by including the life stories of “a farmer’s wife” from
Illinois, an “itinerant minister” from the South, 3 Native American nurse and an
African-American peon. As a curious and diverse set of autobiographical texts,
The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans provides a unique Opportunity for
an examination of the range of American autobiographical practice at the turn of
the century.

I

Autobiography and The Life Stories
of Undistinguished Americans

As the managing editor of the Independent, Hamilton Holt was responsible
for both the ongoing magazine series and the 1906 collection of life stories—
projects he pursued, in the words of one of his associates, “with the object of
ultimately presenting in this way a complete picture of American life in all its
strata” (Slosson 4). The inﬂated idealism of the latter claim reﬂects, certainly, the
self-congratulatory rhetoric with which many periodicals of the day vied for
readers and advertisers. But such self-promotion aside, it is clear that Holt and the
Independent presented the series of brief autobiographical essays as a new use of
the genre and a vital, important contribution to the literature of the day. Perhaps
prompted by such exalted aims, readers of the collection responded favorably to

both its form and its “value.” Rebecca Harding Davis, for example, in a review

40

commissioned by the Independent itself, notes the freshness of Holt’s conception
with the assertion, “As far as I know, Mr. Hamilton Holt, in compiling this book,
has struck an absolutely untrodden path in the ﬁeld of literature” (458). Davis
goes on to compare Holt to Thomas Edison as a “discoverer of every day
wonders,” a note voiced also by several other reviewers (458). Many of these
readers comment on the volume’s surprising “weight” and signiﬁcance in spite of
its commonplace subject matter, its curious sense of distinction in spite of its
“undistinguished” subjects. Holt’s collection drew considerable praise from
reviewers in a wide variety of periodicals as a “unique,” “decidedly unusual”
volume, marked by “a naive charm,” and “not less entertaining than curious.”2
Furthermore, while the reviewer for the Dial felt obliged to hold the high ground
by noting that, “As literature, the volume has but slight value” (Rev. of Life
Stories), others recognized in both the individual stories and in Holt’s conception
of the whole something fresh and vital. Several reviewers compared the stories to

contemporary ﬁction, generally to the advantage of the Life Stories.3 Particularly

 

2 These comments can be found in contemporary reviews collected in Scrapbook
#33 of the Hamilton Holt collection held at the Rollins College Archives. Because
many of the original citations in Holt’s scrapbook are unreadable or incomplete,
volume numbers, dates of publication, and page numbers for many of these reviews
are impossible to determine. The latter two phrases quoted above are found in the
Brooklyn Times 12 May 1906: up. and Critic July 1906: n.p., respectively.

3 The Annals of the American Academy found the stories “as interesting as any
novel with the additional advantage that they are stories of actual life”; the reviewer
for the Brooklyn Eagle (20 Aug. 1906) went further, declaring them “far more
entertaining than the average run of ﬁction”; Brooklyn Life asserted that “there is little
ﬁction that is as good reading as these narratives”; and the Boston Congregationalist

41

amidst the tepid, predictable popular ﬁction of the day, the “intensely simple,
intensely vital and convincing” stories in Holt’s collection stood out for their
revelation of “life at ﬁrst hand, without romanticism, sentimentalism, didacticism,
or generalization” (Hackett).

In nearly every review of Holt’s collection, however, questions about
literary value held less importance than assertions about the social (or
“sociological”) value of the autobiographical stories. The reviewer for the Dial,
for example, while discounting even the suggestion that the stories deserve
recognition as “literature,” notes that “many of the tales are of vital human
interest” as “social studies” (Rev. of Life Stories). Beyond their acknowledged
appeal “simply as stories,” the “lifelets” gathered by Holt garnered considerable
attention for their realism, expressive power, and timeliness. Many reviewers
called attention to the surprising directness and truth of the stories, applauding
their “revelation of the actual.” Further, if the stories expressed greater vitality and
force than much contemporary ﬁction, they also compared favorably to scientiﬁc
studies of the day in detailing the conditions of life among immigrant populations
and the native American lower- and middle-classes. As a source of sociological
data, according to one reviewer, “the book is worth a score of volumes dealing

with general conditions.”4 Finally, the collection earned praise for its timeliness

 

(2 June 1906) contended, “they are better worth reading than most of the ﬁction
which attempts to do its work on the same ground” (Holt, Scrapbook).

‘ Rev. of The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans, ed. Hamilton Holt, Times
(Brooklyn, NY.) 12 May 1906: up. (Holt, Scrapbook).

42

because of its implicit as well as explicit commentary on American social
problems. The very act of gathering together from the “undistinguished” classes
representatives of “American life in all its strata” constituted an unspoken social
critique, while the speciﬁc charges voiced by individual narrators explicitly
challenged American social and political arrangements. Reviewers noted along
these lines those stories concerning labor and management conﬂicts in Chicago,
sweatshop conditions in New York, the system of peonage that was effectively re-
enslaving African-Americans in the South, and, most of all, the presence in
America generally of increasing numbers of “new immigrants” from eastern and
southern Europe.

The latter development represented a particularly charged issue in 1906, as
the number of immigrants from these areas reached its highest level and fears and
stereotypes about their negative traits were widespread in American society.5 In
this context, the value of ﬁrst-hand accounts from immigrants themselves is
repeatedly afﬁrmed in reviews of Holt’s collection, although a noteworthy tension
can be detected between those who read the stories as predominantly “cheerful”
and those who see in them “a rather melancholy disallusion” of the American
promise (Holt, Scrapbook). As a contribution to the discussion of these social
“problems,” however, Holt’s series in the Independent and the resulting volume of

life stories received widespread critical approval.

43

A similar, late-twentieth-century interest in the social relevance and
sociological revelations of Holt’s collection might be said to have inspired two
slightly modiﬁed reprints of The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans in
recent years. In 1982, two social historians returned to Holt’s original series of
stories to assemble a new collection, organized under four headings: “Men at
Work,” “Women at Work,” “The Question of Labor and Capital,” and “The
Question of Race.” As their headings suggest, and as an explanatory note
conﬁrms, David M. Katzman and William M. Tuttle, Jr. decided to reprint a new
selection Of Holt’s “lifelets” in order to illustrate a few prominent themes from the
turn-of-the-century period of American history, not merely—as they interpret
Holt’s intention—“to have each type of ‘race’ represented with little or no concern
for the larger themes that their experiences illustrated” (xi, n3). In addition,
Katzman and Tuttle engage the life stories through the prism of issues particularly
relevant in the early 1980s, following the social movements of the 19605 and
1970s and heightened interest in ethnic-group identiﬁcation: namely, questions of
immigration, assimilation, and the value of preserving cultural traditions. The two
historians approach the texts as ﬁrst-hand expressions of the “tensions of the
adaptive-resistance process,” representations of the struggle by new immigrants

(and, indeed, all Americans) to come to terms with a rapidly changing America

 

5 Katzman and Tuttle note that the “new immigrants” from countries such as Italy,
Russia, Austria-Hungary, Greece, Rumania, and Turkey “comprised eighty-one
percent of all immigrants in the peak year of 1907” (xiii).

44

(xviii). Katzman and Tuttle read the life stories, that is, strictly as useful and
intriguing examples of oral history, not as examples of “autobiography” in any
imaginative or literary sense of that term.

Werner Sollors, the scholar of literature and ethnicity who edited the 1990
reprint of Holt’s collection, presents The Life Stories of Undistinguished
Americans in a slightly different guise. Sollors considers his edition more strictly
a reprint than the Katzman and Tuttle collection: He retains Holt’s prefatory Note
and Edwin E. Slosson’s original Introduction (and credits Holt as the editor of the
volume), and he maintains the original contents and order of the collection.

Sollors does, however, add four stories to the end of the collection, “chosen with
the intention of rounding off the panorama,” including stories of a Florida sponge
ﬁsherman, a Hungarian peon, a “southern white woman” and a “southern colored
woman” (ix). Sollors’s brief “Note on the Second Edition” points to the guiding
impulse of his return to the Life Stories, his primary interest not in American social
history but American ethnic identity. While the social historians Katzman and
Tuttle were drawn to the stories through the prism of cultural pluralism, Sollors—
perhaps most often cited for his controversial essay, “A Critique of Pure
Pluralism”—approaches the stories for their representations of ethnic identity after
massive immigration and social upheaval had refashioned America into an
increasingly “modern” and “polyethnic” nation (xiii). Sollors does brieﬂy address
7 the “literary value” of the collection, and his Introduction reveals an interest in and

sensitivity to literary theme and language absent from Katzman and Tuttle’s

45

 

edition. The editors of neither edition, however, locate in the form of
autobiography a key to the persistent interest of the Life Stories, instead
approaching autobiography primarily as a point of access to other concerns. For
Katzman and Tuttle, the autobiographical stories present “an accurate, insightful,
and suggestive portrait” of turn-of-the—century America (xii); Sollors, likewise,
values the collection of texts as “a rich and unsurpassed resource for an
understanding of the inward experience of how social and individual forces may
interact” (xi). Neither edition approaches the lifelets as examples of autobiography
per se or probes the signiﬁcance of the collection for a study of autobiography
more generally (and generically) during this period of American letters.

Despite the obvious importance accorded to Holt’s original collection of life
stories by two separate reprints in recent years, few scholars have responded to the
scholarly call issued both by Katzman and Tuttle and by Sollors. In fact, with the
exception of a few scattered reviews,‘5 neither reprint has inspired any scholarly
attention. Much of this critical neglect may be the result of the curious form that
the life stories take, individually and collectively: For different practical and
theoretical reasons, the stories might be seen as troubling texts for scholars of
history and literature alike. First, as autobiographies of a sort, the life stories stand

between the territory claimed by scholars of each discipline, inspiring what Eakin

 

° See Namias; Morris. It might be noted that Namias critiques the form of the
more-faithful Sollors reprint, arguing that “this collection of pieces does not cohere as
a form” (90); and that Morris addresses the issue of literary value by asserting, “At

46

has referred to as “the long-standing perplexity of both historians and literary
critics about a kind of imaginative literature that claims a basis in referential fact”
(5). But the particular nature of Holt’s collection of life stories raises other
questions as well. For historians, even those attracted to oral history as a powerful
source of historical information, the authenticity of the stories must be of central
concern: Most were recorded or “procured” not by anthropologists or other social
scientists (whose objectivity itself is often questioned), but by reporters for a
popular weekly magazine. Furthermore, the role of the editor in the shaping of
each narrative is often impossible to gauge; in spite of repeated editorial claims by
the Independent for the authenticity and veracity of the stories, it is clear in at least
a few cases that editorial intervention has effectively eliminated the signiﬁcance of
the texts as historical documents.7

In many ways, the life stories raise more troubling issues for scholars of
literature. First, while historians are primarily concerned with issues of
authenticity, literary critics often ground their work in questions about authorship:
Theoretical claims about the “death of the Author” notwithstanding, most literary
scholarship focuses on individual authors and draws on knowledge of an author’s
oeuvre, intention, biography, or cultural context to make assertions about a text.

The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans obviously disrupts such an

 

least two ‘Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans’ transcend the primitive and, by
means of their grace and poignancy, qualify as lasting literature” (102).

47

approach, as it gives priority to the “authors” of the individual texts only insofar as
it relates their “lives,” their “stories.” (In many cases, in fact, the name of the
autobiographical subject is not published, presumably for the sake of a protective
anonymity.) Additionally, literary scholars typically confer critical attention on
writers who “made a living” from their writing, ﬁguratively if not ﬁnancially, and
writers who wrote a series of works over a period of time. By contrast, the
subjects represented in the Life Stories were anything but literary professionals,
each one chosen, in part, precisely because they “made a living” in an
“undistinguished” fashion: as a peddler, a bootblack, a cook, a dressmaker, or a
sponge ﬁsherman. Further, as documents explicitly intended (by the Independent)
to be “representative” of particular classes, races, and occupations, the life stories
accentuate the sociological and the personal aspects of life far more than the
aesthetic and universal aspects traditionally privileged by critics of literature.
Finally, these short, autobiographical texts, so clearly implicated in the economic
determinants of the commercial marketplace, simply do not conform to the
traditional preferences of most literary critics for extended, self-consciously
literary works of ﬁction.

Employing a form of autobiographical criticism would appear to be a way

to resolve the “perplexity” of both historians and literary critics in the face of a text

 

7 Cf. the comments of one reviewer of Holt’s original collection on several stories
that ought to be “discounted,” including one that appears to be “too well edited”
(Hackett).

48

as difﬁcult to deﬁne or approach as The Life Stories of Undistinguished
Americans. But in spite of the convergence of the two reprintings of Holt’s
collection and a rising critical interest in autobiography, those theorizing and
practicing new versions of autobiographical criticism also have shown no interest
in these stories. This neglect, too, may reﬂect an inability to reconcile the unusual
form and circumstances of the Life Stories with most “common sense” deﬁnitions
of what constitutes autobiography, generally or generically. They do not record
the lives of ﬁgures celebrated for public or literary accomplishments, or indeed
any distinguishing deeds; most are thoroughly grounded in present struggles, not
restricted to reminiscences of early triumphs or tragedies; nearly all represent
individuals at the economic, political, and cultural margins of American society,
not those at its center; and, ﬁnally, each life story is narrated in several pages, not
chapters or volumes. Moreover, as noted above, the unstable and ambiguous
nature of authorship in Holt’s collection challenges theorists of autobiography
perhaps more than other literary critics, as it disrupts the very “authority of
autobiography” (Couser). For various reasons, it seems, one might be justiﬁed in
excluding these life stories from the category of autobiography altogether, just as
they might be eliminated from consideration by historians and literary critics.
Most reviewers of Holt’s original collection, however, recognized the life

stories precisely as “autobiographies,” even (as the New York Times headlined its

49

review) “Genuine Autobiographies.”8 Edwin Slosson, meanwhile, in his
introduction to Holt’s volume, takes pains to herald autobiography as the most
likely candidate for “the literature of the ﬁrture” and the autobiographical “lifelet”
as “likely to become a distinct type” of that literature (3). Following Eakin’s
phrasing, readers in 1906 clearly recognized the life stories as part of the
“autobiographical practice” of the day; consequently, critics who are interested in
the outlines and varieties of that practice need to include texts such as Life Stories
in any broad investigation of the uses and function of autobiography at the time. A
comprehensive account of the autobiographical practice in America at the turn of
the century should be able to encompass such marginal voices as well as the era’s
most impressive literary texts. To achieve what Eakin calls “a working sense of
the life of texts and a concomitant sense of the tastes and expectations of the
reading public” during this period (14), one might begin by confronting directly
the complications and questions raised by a text such as The Life Stories of

Undistinguished Americans.

 

8 Reviews referring to the life stories as autobiographies include those in the
Critic, Boston Transcript, Brooklyn Citizen, Boston Congregationalist, Springﬁeld
City Library Bulletin, and Brooklyn Eagle (Holt, Scrapbook), and Rebecca Harding
Davis’ review for the Independent. The full headline for the New York Times review
reads “Humble Folks. Genuine Autobiographies of Men and Women Who Live and
Suffer in This Country in the Present Hour” (“Humble”).

50

II

Authorship, Authenticity, and
“Autobiography of an Unconventional Kind”

In a trenchant analysis of the myriad complications attending “The
Autobiography of Those Who Do Not Write,” the French theorist Philippe Lejeune
begins with the obvious but fundamental question, “Who Is the Author?” Citing a
French law of 1957 that declares, “The quality of author belongs, save proof to the
contrary, to the one or ones under whose name the work comes out,” Lejeune
probes the ways in which ghostwriting, collaboration, and the use of interviews in
autobiography complicate and disrupt any such straightforward attempts to
identify authorship (265n15). Indeed, Lejeune argues that these common methods
of composing autobiographies, when ﬁIlly understood, threaten to upset even the
bedrock assumptions most readers hold about the responsibility and identity of the
author (as a writer and a “real person”): The notion of the author, he suggests, is
“in a certain way the fundamental message that the autobiographical genre
conveys” (194). As Lejeune goes on to address, however, such ambiguities in the
notion of authorship only intensify and increase when the subject of a ghostwritten
or collaborative autobiography is not a culturally prominent public ﬁgure but a
culturally marginal ﬁgure who, even if he or she is able to write, has little or no
access to “the networks of communication of the printed wor ” (200). Access to
one such network of communication is precisely what the editors of the

Independent offered to various “undistinguished” Americans at the turn of the

51

century, and the nature of their “authorship” of autobiographical works can only be
understood within the context of that medium and the particular limits and
liabilities of their access to it.

The role of magazines such as the Independent in the cultural life of
America at the turn of the century can hardly be overstated. Before the mass-
media explosion of the twentieth—century, magazines held the cultural position and
power later shared by periodicals, radio, television, ﬁlm, and the intemet as
sources of entertainment, education, information, and commentary. As cultural
messengers and mediators, magazines were more timely and less expensive than
books, not as ephemeral and “cheap” as many newspapers, and generally
recognized as the primary source for informed, intelligent “comment” on the topics
of the time. Though related to newspaper journalism, American magazines
garnered far more respect than the daily “journals” as a vital force in American
life. In politics and social reform, the role of magazines in this period is well-
known: The era’s powerful “muckraking” magazines such as McClure ’s, for
example, helped to bring about pure food and drug standards, railroad regulations,
child labor laws, and anti-trust measures (Ward 325). But the signiﬁcance of the
periodical press was also frequently noted in contemporary discussions of
American literature. William Dean Howells, among others, saw in magazines the
leading edge of literary production in America, asserting that, “in belles-lettres at
least, most of the best literature now sees the light in the magazines, and most of

the second-best appears ﬁrst in book form”; magazines, he continued, are

52

“ephemeral in form, but in substance they are not ephemeral” (qtd. in Mott 4: 41).
As networks of communication, then, the leading national magazines in tum-of-
the-century America held an important mediating role not only in politics or
popular culture but in the broad cultural arena. In this light, the intention of
Hamilton Holt (as suggested by Edwin Slosson) to present “a complete picture of
American life in all its strata” expresses a sort of grandiose idealism beﬁtting a
magazine like the Independent, conceived of as a powerful mediating force among
those various strata and as a sanctioned voice both of and for the American people
as a whole.

Autobiography as a genre takes on a particular resonance and relevance in
such a conception of magazine literature. To be sure, part of its resonance must be
attributed to the frantic journalistic quest at the turn of the century for “human
interest” and “timeliness” in reporting, two elements believed to be essential for
increasing circulation and thereby increasing advertising revenue. (The
signiﬁcance of both of these factors in the reception of Holt’s collection can be
noted in the subtitle of the New York T imes’s review: “Genuine Autobiographies
of Men and Women Who Live and Suffer in This Country in the Present Hour.”)
In addition, stories like those published by the Independent appealed to the
prevailing enthusiasm for realism in literature, the desire to witness “life at ﬁrst
hand, without romanticism, sentimentalism, didacticism, or generalization”

(Hackett). But magazines that felt “a sympathy for democracy,” like the

53

Independent, may also have recognized in the genre of autobiography what
William Dean Howells expressed in 1909:
. . . we will only intimate to any hesitating autobiographer that he
need not forbear because he does not seem to meet the ordinary
speciﬁcations for authorship. Let him be ever so obscure or humble,
it needs but the sincere relation Of what he has been and done and
felt and thought to give him a place with any other in this most
democratic province of the republic of letters.9
This “province,” one might say, became more democratic than ever before in the
ﬁrst decade of the twentieth century with the help of magazines like the
Independent. But of course, Howells’s blithe rendering of the “republic of letters”
as a whole masks the obstacles in the way of such access to leading networks of
communication: In fact, a “sincere relation” of a life did not guarantee the relaying
of that story to the public, did not automatically secure the subject “a place with
any other” in print. Howells’s vision of immediacy aside, gaining an audience for
the telling of one’s life story in fact required the mediation of a magazine or an
individual “distinguished” in the republic of letters.
The special role of autobiography in magazine literature and the inﬂuence
of that role on conceptions of authorship during this period might be illustrated by

the work of Hutchins Hapgood, a journalist whose writing connects in several

intriguing ways with the Life Stories series in the Independent. In 1903, one year

 

9 The Independent’s “sympathy for democracy” was noted by a contemporary
observer, George Perry Morris, in The Congregationalist and Christian World (9 Dec.
1905), qtd. in Kuehl 29. Howells’s commentary on autobiography appeared in his
“Editor’s Easy Chair” of October 1909 (798).

54

after the Independent initiated its series, Hapgood published The Autobiography of
a Thief, a full-length volume depicting the common life of crime and eventual
reform and moral regeneration of the ex-thief “Jim.” Hapgood explains his role in
the writing of this “autobiography” in his “Editor’s Note”:
The method employed in composing the volume was that,
practically, of the interview . . . . I took voluminous notes, often
asking questions, but taking down as literally as possible his story in
his own words; to such a degree is this true, that the following
narrative is an authentic account of his life, with occasional
descriptions and character-sketches of his friends of the Under
World. Even without my explicit assurance, the autobiography bears
sufﬁcient internal evidence of the fact that, essentially, it is a thief’s
own story. (12)
Hapgood’s “explicit assurance” and “internal evidence” aside, the necessity for
such insistent pledges of authenticity highlights the unusual character of this
volume as autobiography. Considering the French law cited by Lejeune, by which
“The quality of author belongs . . . to the one or ones under whose name the work
comes out,” this ambiguity only heightens, as the title page of the volume reads

thus:

The Autobiography of
a Thief

 

Recorded by
HUTCHINS HAPGOOD
Author of “The Spirit of the Ghetto, " etc.

Nowhere is “Jim’s” name given to attest that the autobiography is indeed his “own

story.” Indeed, though the overt moral of his life story is, on the one hand, that

55

“crime does not pay” and, on the other, that even the criminal can effect a (secular)
redemption and become an honest citizen, Jim’s authorship remains grounded in
his status and identity as “a Thief.” Hapgood’s identity as “author,” meanwhile, is
reinforced by his record of previous authorship (neatly captured in “etc.”).
Furthermore, if initiative—the desire to tell one’s life story—is understood as a
key element in autobiography (Lejeune 193), Jim’s role as autobiographer
becomes increasingly ambiguous, as Hapgood proudly asserts his own role as
initiator: After he “became morally certain that [Jim’s] reform was as genuine as
possible” and that the ex-thief would “remain honest,” Hapgood “proposed to him
to write an autobiography” (11-12).

Hapgood’s unusual conception of the relationship of autobiography and
authorship ﬁnds explicit expression in a 1905 essay for the Bookman magazine
entitled “A New Form of Literature.” Citing a recent complaint by Gertrude
Atherton that American literature lacked “force and vitality,” Hapgood suggests
that the solution to this cultural anemia lies in a “new form” of literature that
would draw its inspiration from the prevailing methods of the newspaper, and
speciﬁcally, from the interview. Hapgood acknowledges that the “art” of the
interview is undeveloped, and is unlikely to develop in the newspapers; however,
he continues, “why not carry on the method outside the newspaper, until the
interview is developed into the autobiography, but into the autobiography of an
unconventional kind?” (424). This new form of autobiography would, Hapgood

suggests, breathe new life into American literature by “go[ing] directly to the lives

56

of the people,” answering the demands of a “democratic age” while simultaneously
replacing exhausted literary conventions with “the drama of real life” (424—25).
The subjects for such unconventional autobiographies would be “expressive”
individuals who happened to be not merely “interesting” in themselves but also
representative of a class, thus assuring that the resulting autobiographies might not
only tell “a human story” but also portray an entire “section” of American life
(424). The work of writing such autobiographies, therefore, would require “taking
only what ﬁts into the picture and . . . rejecting what is untypical and superﬂuous”
(425). And the author of such autobiographies, ﬁnally, would not be the subject
but the interviewer: As the one responsible for seeking out an individual,
conducting interviews, capturing the “accent” and the “very language” used by the
subject, selecting what ﬁts and eliminating what does not, the journalist becomes
“the literary artist,” the interviewer becomes the “author” (425).

Hapgood obviously intends his essay to justify the work he had already
been engaged in (e.g., The Autobiography of A Thief) as well as to claim credit for
what was fast becoming a cultural trend (“The novelty of my idea . . .” [425;
emphasis added]). In addition, Hapgood clearly directs his argument not only to
writers of ﬁction befogged by “romantic and historical conventions” but also to
newspaper journalists (at the height of the era of “yellow journalism”) who aspire
to a more socially respected role as writers of “literature” (425). But more
signiﬁcant to an understanding of the relation of authorship and autobiography at

this time is Hapgood’s claim that his “new form of literature” is in fact

57

“autobiography,” albeit “of an unconventional kind.” Indeed, the “convention” of
individual authorship in autobiography seems to concern Hapgood not at all:
Though he consciously aligns his writing with autobiography as a genre, he does
not hesitate to divide “autobio-” from “graphy,” the “self” and the “life” from their
expression in writing.

Of course, Hapgood’s splitting of the subject of an autobiography from its
author produced one enormous convenience for the literary aspirant who still
retained the journalist’s drive: Such an writer could “author” as many
autobiographies as he or she could locate suitable subjects.lo But Hapgood’s
approach was not without certain inherent difﬁculties as well. The ease with
which Hapgood claimed responsibility for both the initiation and production of
another individual’s autobiography might always come into conﬂict with the
desires of the subject: The perfect candidate, once located, might simply refuse
Hapgood’s proposal. In fact, Hapgood records just such a refusal in The Spirit of
Labor (1907), his volume on “the world of the workingman” in Chicago
(published thirteen months after Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle had exposed, in
ﬁctional form, the conditions of the meat-packing industry in that city). In his
Preface to the volume, Hapgood reports that his original intention had been to

repeat his earlier experiments with autobiography in order to express both the life

 

'° Lejeune makes a similar point in contrasting the professional “ghostwriter” to

the “amateur ‘ethnobiographer . While the former must be chosen, in effect, from
many at the disposal of the famous individual, the latter can choose from “hundreds of

58

of an individual and the “ideals and conditions” of a “whole class,” but that his
intentions had been thwarted by the unwillingness of the individual he had selected
to be the subject of an autobiography. Hapgood attempts various sociological
explanations of the distinct lack of interest among the workingmen of Chicago to
have their life stories told in autobiography: He suggests, for example, that “the
active impersonality and seriousness of a laborer lacks the pleasure in subjective
contemplation and in the recherche of the ego which is of prime necessity in
autobiography” (15). But he cannot mask his own disappointment in being
“compelled to choose the more circumstantial, comprehensive, if slower, less vivid
and less exciting form of biography” (19). “The man and the subject” he had
selected, Hapgood concludes, “was at once too interesting, too signiﬁcant and too
inexpressive” (19; emphasis added). In his zeal for pioneering a “new form of
literature,” Hapgood had overlooked the inconvenient fact that, without the
consent of the interviewee, the author would be forced to opt for two less-
appealing forms: the ﬁctional autobiography, which drew on a similar

ethnographic gathering of information but employed an imagined protagonistl 1; or

 

thousands of possible models, and the model chosen should consider himself happy to
attain a notoriety for which he was in no way destined” (196).

” That ﬁctional autobiographies constituted a recognized type in the publishing
world of the time—and that autobiographies composed from interviews were
recognized as autobiographies—might be illustrated by a comment in The Critic
following the publication of Hapgood’s Autobiography of a Thief: “This is not, as one
might suppose, a bit of ﬁction. It is really an autobiography taken down by Mr.
Hapgood from the lips of an ex-convict. It is as interesting as ﬁction, but being true
its lesson is more salutary” (Rev. of Autobiography; emphasis added).

59

the biography, which portrayed an individual’s life story in its milieu but sacriﬁced
the immediacy and “excitement” of the ﬁrst-person narrative.

Hapgood’s curious conception of the subject of autobiography, it should be
noted, coincides perfectly with Hamilton Holt’s in The Life Stories of
Undistinguished Americans: “The aim of each autobiography,” Holt asserted, “was
to typify the life of the average worker in some particular vocation, and to make
each story the genuine experience of a real person” (Note xxix). Both editors
conceived of autobiography, it seems, as the perfect vehicle for achieving these
two ends, and for appealing to two different desires of their readers: First, the
desire for genuine knowledge of how fellow Americans—and those of “the other
half” in particular—lived their lives; and second, the desire for the personalized
knowledge that only ﬁrst-hand accounts and ﬁrst-person narratives seemed
capable of supplying. Hapgood and Holt privileged—no doubt, because they
believed their readers to privilege—authenticity over authorship, and thus both
fearlessly explored “unconventional kinds” of authorship in an effort to procure
compelling stories of actual lives.

Hapgood’s explicit commentary on his experiments with autobiography
during the years of the Independent’s series of life stories helps to illuminate the
ideals and intentions Of the magazine’s editors in procuring those stories, motives
that are difﬁcult to discern fully from the life stories themselves. In contrast to the
more self-consciously “authored” autobiographies produced by Hapgood,

however, the life stories published in the Independent complicate the role of the

60

editor by the sheer number and variety of autobiographical subjects. Holt’s
collection of sixteen stories alone includes some written by educated and literate
individuals (including one by “A Farmer’s Wife” and a literary aspirant, “printed
exactly as she penned it”) as well as several others transcribed from interviews.”
Transcription in this case, of course, must be understood as a markedly different
process than it became when recording devices were readily available and
portable: Some of the ambiguity surrounding authorship noted above, in other
words, derives from technological factors more than from literary conventions or
expectations. However, as an editorial comment at the head of “The Life Story of
an Indian” indicates, many of the stories written by the subjects themselves were
also “aided” by the editors “to the extent of some very slight rewriting and
rearrangement” (124). It is, in fact, impossible to read the The Life Stories of
Undistinguished Americans without questioning the authorship Of the stories at
various points. Yet, as even the more skeptical reviews of Holt’s collection reveal,
it is equally impossible to dismiss the stories entirely as, for example, merely
ﬁctional autobiography or as sociology-in-the-ﬁrst—person.

Indeed, the fact that ﬁrst-person narration inevitably masks the work of
transcribers, editors, and others involved in the production of those narratives may

be the key to both the appeal and the limitations of the form of the “lifelet” as an

 

'2 Holt, Life Stories 93. All further references to individual stories are taken from
this edition (1990), unless otherwise noted, and will be cited by page number within
the text.

61

example of autobiographical expression. One example from the Life Stories
clearly illustrates both tendencies as well as the difﬁculty of weighing the
limitations of the form against its “conditions of possibility” (Lejeune 202). “The
Life Story of a Syrian,” one of the more compelling tales in Holt’s collection,
narrates a young man’s childhood in Lebanon, his awakening interest in America
and his eventual immigration, and his successful establishment of a Syrian-
language newspaper in New York. The narrator’s recollections of childhood
include commentary on the religious and political tensions in Syria as well as
memories of boyhood games and fear of graveyard “ghouls” (150). He recalls his
education in Syrian schools as narrowly religious while celebrating his move to an
American mission school (in which, ironically, “the American teacher never talked
. . . about religion”) as the beginning of his real enlightenment, opening his eyes to
the narrowness and corruption of his own country in marked contrast to the
freedoms of American life (152). His awakening to a powerful sense of America’s
promise is dramatized in a key scene in which another boy—“a bold, wild boy”—
mysteriously directs him to a hiding place under the roots of “a great tree,” where
he ﬁnds Arabic newspapers written by Syrians living in New York (152). The
papers advocated revolution in Lebanon and Syria, and the ﬁightened narrator
“quickly put them back where I had found them and ran away from the place, for I
thought that if any priest found me with them I might lose my life” (153). The
scene neatly illustrates the life-and-death contrast between the freedom of

expression and the press enjoyed by Syrians in America and the restrictions on

62

such expression in Lebanon, and it celebrates as well the power of the American
press to circulate American principles around the world. But the impact of this
scene is heightened by the conclusion of the story, where the frightened Syrian boy
appears transformed into the conﬁdent New York newspaper editor, self-assured
and outspoken in spite of an order by the ofﬁcials of the Turkish Government
condemning him to death. Between these two points, the narrator recounts his
arrival in New York and his fascination with all that was “strange and new and
suggestive of life and power” in the immense cityscape, which he observes with
awe from the center of the Brooklyn Bridge every day for a week after his arrival
(154).

The story of the successful young Syrian illustrates many of the attractions
of the brief life story as developed by the Independent: It includes pleasant
memories of childhood exploits and education, afﬁrming recollections of arrival in
America, commentary on the lack of (American) freedoms elsewhere in the world,
and an introduction to the Syrian-American community (“The little Syrian city
which we have established within the big city of New Yor ”) with “its distinctive
life and its distinctive institutions” (157). But the story also exposes the
nonchalance of the magazine’s editors with regard to the notion of authorship.
Reprinted in Holt’s collection of life stories, “The Story of a Young Syrian” was
prefaced by this editorial headnote:

The following chapter is a composite. Three young Syrians of
Washington Street, New York, each lent a part of his life to the

63

making of it, in order that the story might be nearly representative of
the average Syrian immigrant. (147)

This brief editorial confession of sorts suggests the bizarre lengths to which editors
such as Holt might go to procure vivid life stories, producing what can only be
called (borrowing a coinage of Lejeune) “heterobiography in the ﬁrst person”
(264n10). Perhaps more shocking is the absence of such a confession in the
original headnote accompanying “The Story of a Young Syrian”: It is difﬁcult to
surmise why the editors felt justiﬁed in publishing the story initially without any
explanation of its “composite” origins, then opted to reveal this information—with
no suggestion of apology—in republishing the story as one of many “life stories”
“told by” the subjects themselves.13

A number of possible explanations for this editorial nonchalance on the part
of the Independent ﬁnd expression in Lejeune’s discussion of collaborative writing
and “the autobiography of those who do not write.” He suggests, ﬁrst of all, that
the reading public often ﬁnds itself both eager to challenge authenticity and
uncover “scandal” and “prepared to lend itself to the games of illusion and not see
through the transparent veils” that hide the realities of production behind any text
(194). What excites the indignation of the general public, Lejeune argues, is

generally not collaboration per se but the concealment of it—perhaps the reason

 

'3 The Independent ﬁrst published the story with this headnote: “The following
article is the result of an interview with a very well-known local Syrian who is under
sentence of death for his utterances against Turkish misrule. He was assisted by two

friends, and his political views are fairly representative of young Syria . . .” (“Story”
1007; emphasis added).

64

that Holt felt comfortable revealing the composition of the Syrian’s (or more
properly, perhaps, the Syrians’) life story (195). Furthermore, Lejeune notes that
the concern over the nature of authorship may be more pressing for the intellectual
than the common reader (195), a point echoed by the American critic Albert E.
Stone in remarking the “monumental unconcem” of readers of popular American
autobiographies about the fact of collaborative authorship (Autobiographical 2).
Perhaps Holt recognized a similar tendency in the readers of the Independent at the
turn of the century, a willingness to suspend judgment about the individual subject
of autobiographical expression as long as the life story’s content satisﬁed a certain
threshold of authenticity and the ﬁrst-person voice of the story “spoke” to them
with a certain authority.

As their comments suggest, both Stone and Lejeune advocate critical
approaches that recognize autobiography as not only as a literary genre but a form
of “cultural narrative” (Stone, “Introduction”), not solely a private, contemplative
art of personal recollection but a socially situated, culturally determined act.
Approaching The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans in this way requires
critical sensitivity not only to the motives of autobiographical subjects in seeking
public expression of their life stories, but also to the desires of readers (prompting
them to subscribe to the magazine, read the life stories, and, very often, respond to
them with their own stories) and to the interests of magazine editors (prompting
them to seek out the former and appeal to the latter, all the while attempting to

express a coherent “picture of American life in all its strata”). The unusual uses of

65

autobiography and the shifting values of authorship and authenticity examined
above are best understood, ﬁnally, not in the terms of traditional autobiographical
criticism—as innovations of independent literary artists working in an autonomous
literary genre—but rather as literary developments grounded in particular cultural
settings, circumstances, and associations, those “cultures of letters” that connected

writers and readers at the turn of the century (Brodhead 1-12).

111
Autobiography, Immediacy, and (Mass-)Mediation

A critical approach that seeks to ground the study of autobiography as a
genre in the particular “cultures of letters” that supported its production and shaped
its consumption must examine not only the form of autobiographical texts but also
the forum in and through which those texts were presented to the public. As noted
above, the prevailing literary and cultural forum at the turn of the century was the
nationally circulated magazine, in many ways (as Howells suggested) a more
signiﬁcant force in the literary production and distribution of the day than books.
As a “mass-medium” before that term came into common usage, magazines during
this period expanded enormously in numbers, circulation, and variety, driven by
reductions in the cost of paper and printing, advances in illustrating techniques,
and, more than any other factor, the rise of advertising as the primary source of
magazine revenue (Mott 4: 5, 20-24). With sometimes-drastic reductions in the

price of weekly and monthly magazines, the market for magazines increased

66

exponentially, new periodicals emerging to satisfy the curiosities of every
imaginable American reader from religious and philosophical devotees to cat- and
dog-lovers, from architects who worked with brick to women interested in
“Bicycle Fashions.”14 But the more signiﬁcant periodicals of the age were those
that envisioned their role as mediators not in the limited sense of conveying
information between two parties but in the broadest sense of acting as
“intermediary agents” in American culture: Such periodicals sought to effect
societal reform by intervening between conﬂicting parties or points of View and
promoting resolution, reconciliation, or compromise (“Mediate”; “Mediation”).
Editors of “leading” magazines such as the Independent self-consciously located
their periodicals not merely as a conduit between writers and readers, but as a
mediating force in the American body politic, interceding between citizens and
politicians and actively participating in the fray of societal reform and progress.
Indeed, the concept of mediation and the corresponding notions of mediacy and
immediacy provide a useful perspective not only on the cultural position of
magazines such as the Independent but also on the cultural work of a series Of
autobiographical essays such as that initiated by the Independent.

First, the role of the magazine editor was inherently one of mediation, not

only in providing a forum that might unite readers and writers but also in

 

'4 See Mott, vol. 4, esp. 276-305, 323, 379, and 382, for discussion of religious
and philosophical magazines as well as such turn-of—the-century upstarts as Dogdom
and Cat Journal, Brickbuilder, and Bicycle Fashions.

67

controlling what passed between the two parties. Richard Ohmann describes the
mass-circulation magazine of the late-nineteenth century as “a gate-keeping
medium,” responsible for “admit[ting] ideas and feelings into the arena of the
discussable” but always doing so within the limits established by the nature of
their relationship to subscribers (151). Granted, the role of editors as genteel
censors of a sort had, by the beginning of the twentieth century, largely given way
to the new trends of sensationalized journalism and “muckraking” magazine
reporting. However, the role of the magazine editor as a cultural mediator also
took on new importance during this period as even the most distinguished
magazines—including the Atlantic Monthly, Century, and Scribner ’s, magazines
known for their aloofness from passing concerns of the moment—increasingly
turned their attention to “timely” issues of contemporary relevance (Mott 4: 8-9).
Lengthy, learned treatises were replaced during this period by articles on
signiﬁcant social issues and by symposia in which two or more writers would
respond to a single pressing question (Mott 4: 13-14), thereby increasing the
responsibility of magazine editors to act as moderators if not mediators. The
Independent in particular devoted itself to the publication of not only various
points of view on important issues but also editorial commentary on those matters.
In a 1908 essay, Hamilton Holt noted with pride that “In the ‘Survey of the World’
[the Independent’s section Of unsigned news stories] we aim to present to the jury
of our readers the evidence uncolored and unbiased; in our signed articles we let

the plaintiffs and defendants argue the case, and in our editorials we assume the

68

omniscient air and deliver judgment” (“Our Contributors” 1429). Holt’s telling
courtroom metaphor elucidates the authoritative role assumed by the Independent
as a judicial branch of the nation’s social and cultural leadership, self-appointed
but also “elected” by subscribers to mediate between the various contending
parties and points of view in America.

By declaring their judgment on all of the pressing concerns of the nation,
the Independent envisioned their mediating role in broad social and cultural terms.
But the magazine’s interest in autobiography as a form might also be interpreted in
terms of mediation and, relatedly, in terms of a tension between “mediacy” and
“immediacy.” First, autobiography as conceived of in the manner of Holt and
Hapgood might be said to mediate between groups deﬁned by their differences:
between, for example, middle-class readers and working-class subjects, “native”
Americans and “new” immigrants, white Americans and ethnic or black
Americans. Holt’s interest in ﬁnding “representative” individuals from “the
humbler classes,” from a variety of occupations, and from “the ﬁve great races of
mankind” to “typify” the lives of entire groups of people points to the presumed
capacity of autobiography to mediate the experiences of many by way of the
“genuine experience” of one (“Note” xxix). At the same time, as Holt’s emphasis
on “genuine” experience suggests, the form of autobiography appears to promise a
certain immediacy—more direct, un-mediated access to the lives of these “other”
Americans than either ﬁction or sociology can offer. (Thus the several reviews of

The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans that point out the vitality, freshness,

69

and charm of the stories by contrasting them with the overly conventional ﬁction
and overly academic ethnographic studies of the day.) Autobiography, that is,
seems to guarantee an “insider’s voice,” a voice unmediated by the intrusive
presence of the novelist, the biographer, or the sociologist—those generally
middle-class ﬁgures who represented much the same class and position as the
average magazine reader, and thus would have been considered similarly removed
from the real lives of marginalized Americans.

The autobiographical narratives published in the Independent also pose
questions about mediation and immediacy that complicate any individual or
collective reading of the stories. First, as examined above, the authorship of the
life stories is mediated by peculiar conditions of composition and publication: The
Independent compromises the notion of individual authorship in the name of
projecting a certain authority in the life stories. At the same time, the magazine
clearly succeeds on some level in the more fundamental sense of mediation, that of
simply establishing a conduit between unknown or undistinguished Americans and
their fellow citizens throughout the nation. As Werner Sollors asserts, the various
expressions of selﬂrood in the life stories represent “gestures of mediation between
the private self and the public realm, often made in the hope of achieving higher
esteem for the speaker’s past and improving his or her social lot” (xxviii; emphasis
added). However compromised their “authorship,” the subjects of the life stories
are enabled by the medium of the magazine to communicate their stories and their

lives, in some fashion, to the rest of the country. Though this access to print

70

carries with it certain limitations, it clearly also creates “conditions of possibility”
that otherwise would not be available to undistinguished Americans.

Indeed, several of the life stories point to an awareness on the part of
individual narrators of the Opportunity as well as the responsibility to serve a
mediating function of their own. Many of the stories, especially those by
representatives of “undesirable” immigrant groups, can be read as efforts by the
narrators to act as cultural interpreters for a predominantly white, middle-class
American readership. Lee Chew, for example, the narrator of “The Life Story of a
Chinaman,” explains various Chinese and Chinese-American ways to his readers
in order to dispel stereotypes or resentrnents about everything ﬁ'om the idea that
the Chinese eat rats to the dress and social customs of Chinese in America (182).
“The Life Story of a Syrian,” likewise, in spite of the difﬁculties noted above,
serves to illuminate “the distinctive life and its distinctive institutions” of Syrians
in America, explaining to the rest of America, in a sense, the social signiﬁcance of
“the little Syrian city . . . established within the big city of New York” (157). At
the same time, the story assuages the contemporary charge that many of the new
immigrants maintained ties to their countries of origin that compromised their
American-ness: As a newspaper editor and advocate for Syrian independence, the
narrator’s vocal celebration of American freedoms of speech and the press
mediates to a certain extent his potentially threatening involvement in “foreign”

politics.

71

However, if a number of narrators embrace the role of cultural mediator,
many also use their life stories to indict America precisely for failing to live up to
its democratic ideals, not only in its treatment of recent immigrants but in its
blindness to the ill-treatment of the working classes, African Americans, and
women. Thus, while Lee Chew’s life story functions in part to bridge the gulf
between native Americans and immigrant Chinese-Americans and to prove the
value of Chinese labor, Chew also includes stinging commentary on American
racism against the Chinese and concludes, “Under the circumstances, how can I
call this my home, and how can any one blame me if I take my money and go back
to my village in China?” (185). Mike Trudics, the “Hungarian Peon,” tells a more
tragic story of life in America as a series of reversals of his expectations,
concluding his tale, like Chew, with powerful questions: “Shall I become a citizen?
Why should I?” (207). While several of the stories by immigrants illustrate a
relatively easy assimilation to American ways of life (and, often more to the point,
ways of business), many others contain unmitigated anger, bitterness, and
complaint against America.

It is noteworthy that much of the bitterness expressed by immigrant and
other narrators of these life stories is targeted to ethnic groups other than the
narrator’s own. In this sense, the Independent series might also be said to mediate
(though not, in this case, mitigate) the tensions among ethnic groups in America at

the same time that it mediates the tensions between ethnic and “native” Americans.

72

Lee Chew’s story once more provides a telling example. After answering several
charges against the Chinese and refuting various stereotypes, Chew writes:
Irish ﬁll the almshouses and prisons and orphan asylums, Italians are
among the most dangerous of men, Jews are unclean and ignorant.
Yet they are all let in, while Chinese, who are sober, or duly law
abiding, clean, educated and industrious, are shut out. (185)
In challenging American laws that prohibited Chinese immigration, Chew seeks to
reverse one set of cultural stereotypes by invoking several others. Similarly,
Charles Chesnutt, a well-educated Aﬁican-American novelist and social critic
(and, it might be noted, a strong supporter and occasional contributor to the
Independent), expressed his own abhorrence of the inequities and inconsistencies
of American race distinctions in a 1903 letter to Booker T. Washington:
To my mind it is nothing less than an outrage that the very off-
scourings of Europe, and even of Western Asia may pour into this
Union almost by the millions annually, and be endued with full
citizenship after a year or two of residence, while native-born [black]
Americans . . . must be led around by the nose as members of a
‘child race,’ and be told that they must meekly and patiently await
the result of an evolution which may last through several thousand
years, before they can stand upon the same level of citizenship which
any Sicilian, or Syrian or Turk or Greek or any other sort of
European proletarian may enjoy in the State of Alabama. (195)
These disconcerting examples furnish important reminders of the extent of racial
and ethnic hostility and alienation at the turn of the century, not only between
whites and others but among various groups. They also point to the symbolic
resonance of Holt’s attempt to gather, serially and then in book form,

representatives of “the ﬁve great races of mankind” in an effort to mediate the

conﬂict that many saw at the heart of American society at the time. The effect of

73

Holt’s undertaking, like the effect of many of the individual life stories, was to
show America to itself: to reinforce the nation’s sense of itself as a land of
freedom and opportunity that welcomed new immigrants, yet at the same time to
reveal the distinct lack of freedom or opportunity (or welcome) experienced by so
many of America’s marginalized citizens and immigrants.

It is interesting to note that the reviewers of Holt’s collection, while almost
universally pointing out the “human interest” of the stories, tend to focus on one or
the other of these two themes. The reviewer for the New York Evening Post, for
example, concludes that “The prevailing note of these tales is, indeed, a cheerful
one,” and Rebecca Harding Davis praises “this little unpretentious volume” as “the
ﬁrst effort to show in detail how the experiment [of American independence] has
succeeded”; another reviewer, on the contrary, reads in the stories “a rather
melancholy disallusion” of the idea that America represents “a sanctuary for the
oppressed of all nations.”15 But what stands out in nearly all contemporary
reviews of The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans is the ease with which
readers perceived the stories as commentaries on American society, whether
positive or negative. In the terms suggested by Albert Stone, readers of the life
stories engaged them as both “individual stories and cultural narratives”
(“Introduction”), as vital stories of individual lives as well as important sources of

sociological “data.”

 

'5 See “Humble Confessions,” New York Evening Post (Holt, Scrapbook); Davis
460; “The Looker-On,” Brooklyn Life (Holt, Scrapbook).

74

As cultural narratives, the stories (and especially those from “new”
immigrants) offered crucial information about the real conditions of life of many
unknown Americans, information required for the effective implementation Of
social reform. In the curious phrasing of a reviewer for the Dayton Religious
Telescope, “information is the mother of interest and the grandmother of helpful
activity” (Holt, Scrapbook). In this reading, the human “interest” of the stories is
grounded in explicitly reformist concerns, and Holt’s collection is praised
speciﬁcally as a volume “calculated to do so much of Christian and patriotic
good.” As individual stories, on the other hand, the series of “lifelets” appealed to
a desire on the part of readers for “human interest” of a different kind, unrelated to
the broader social or sociological value of the stories. This interest might be said
to reﬂect, in the elevated rhetoric of Edwin Slosson, a new “spirit of democracy,

the discovery of the importance of the average man” (3); but more to the point, the

9, 6‘

life stories appealed to readers and reviewers for their “directness, poignancy,”
“naive charm”—that is, for representing individual lives genuinely and concretely.
As “intensely simple, intensely vital and convincing” texts, the life stories seemed
to offer a unique immediacy: “Between the reader and that rare and wonderful
thing, the truth, there stands no intruder with a theory or a preachment,” no

“would-be interpreter of life.”16

 

'6 See “Humble Folks”; Hackett.

75

As these two divergent readings of Holt’s collection illustrate, one can
speak not only of the uses of autobiography by writers at the turn of the century
but also the uses that readers had for the genre: In this case, where one reviewer
saw “sermons of real value for our people, rich in lessons” (“Transformation”
329), another celebrated the simple revelation of life without the overlay Of a
particular “preachment.” These twin approaches to the life stories might also
reveal something about the varied uses of autobiography recognized by the editors
of the Independent. On the one hand, the magazine’s life stories promised
progressive reformers an especially direct sort of sociological data and, further, a
series of ﬁrst-person objections to many of the prevailing stereotypes of the day
regarding the lives of the working classes and the “traits” of various new
immigrant groups. On the other hand, these autobiographical texts appealed to
readers as ﬁrst-hand reports, in a sense, of life itself—“life” with no interpretation
offered, “the truth” with no intermediating theory. To these readers, the fact that
these stories were both “genuine autobiographies” and the expressions of “humble
folks” seemed to guarantee a proximity to the sources of life—not life merely
“realistically” portrayed, that is, but real life. If the former approach to the life
stories might be grounded in the growing concern at the turn of the century over
broad social questions about the constitution of the American body politic, this
latter reading might be said to reﬂect a more fundamental concern that the

meaning and signiﬁcance of life itself were becoming increasingly elusive. At a

76

time when, as T. J. Jackson Lears writes, “both physical and moral life began to
seem suffocating in their ease, weightless in their lack of signiﬁcance” (45), access
to “real life” seemed to many Americans increasingly mediated by the overlay of
middle-class convention. Stories of unignorably “real” lives narrated in a direct,
seemingly unmediated fashion would have held, for such Americans, an inherent
appeal.
The expectation that a certain immediacy of experience might be found in
autobiography—and in the autobiographies of unknown ﬁgures in particular, who,
having no public life to speak of, would presumably be left with only the private
life to write of—resonates in some of the contemporary commentary on the genre.
Howells, for example, after issuing his invitation to “any hesitating
autobiographer” to enter “this most democratic province of the republic of letters,”
goes on to speculate on what such a humble autobiographer might accomplish:
For once we should like to have such an autobiographer wreak
himself upon the very truth, and we should not join any detective
force in compelling him to put off his mask, if he should choose to
remain anonymous . . . . His book would not be one that could be
put into all hands, and we should not desire general circulation for it;
but for the student of man, in and out of one’s self, it would be a
manual such as has never yet been supplied. (798)

Howells expresses what might be called a dream of complete self-exposure, a

desire to see the “very truth” so freely expressed that it would require (ironically)

that the author’s name remain hidden and that the text be kept from “general

circulation.” Howells, the early champion of realism in America sometimes

accused of a facile and outmoded gentility, here playfully imagines what true

77

(even scandalous) autobiographical realism might provide: a lesson in life so vivid
and revealing that it would satisfy the most basic quest, answer the most
ﬁrndamental questions, of the “student of man” and the student of self. Howells’s
suggestion that the author of such a “manual” of life might be “some entirely
unknown person” and might remain anonymous, and his advice to such an
autobiographer to aspire to “brevity” as well, may illuminate the underlying
desires of those who sought in The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans “that
rare and wonderful thing, the truth.”

This fascination with discovering the truth of human life beneath the
concealments of convention similarly inspires an intriguing series that began in the
June 1893 inaugural issue of McClure ’s Magazine, the periodical that would go on
to become a central player in the muckraking era. Entitled “Human Documents,”
this popular feature printed several portraits of a few famous individuals (Howells
was among those featured in the ﬁrst issue), taken at various points in their lives,
with the intention of chronicling the progression of a life in pictures. Sarah Ome
Jewett, in the essay that introduced the series, explains its appeal this way: “To
give to the world a collection of the successive portraits of a man is to tell his
affairs openly, and so betray intimate personalities” (16). Jewett goes on to defend
the reader’s interest in such “intimate” information by distinguishing between the
indecorous “curiosity” that fuels the “public press” and a “noble” and “honest

interest” in other lives, the latter deriving, according to J ewett, largely from the

78

autobiographical desire to understand one’s own “former selves” (16-17). Finally,
J ewett catalogues all that might be read “in any Human Document”:
. . . the look of race, the look of family, the look that is set like a seal
by a man’s occupation, the look of the spirit’s free or hindered life,
and success or failure—they are all plain to see. If we could read
one human face aright, the history not only of the man, but of
humanity itself, is written there. (18)
Here J ewett sounds the same note that Howells would voice several years later, the
dream of transparency, of seeing through to the very depths of human life. In this
case, of course, the “lines” that tell a life story are the lines of the face, the
language of the “text” is “the sign-language of faces”—but as Jewett contends,
“Who cannot read faces?” (17). Where Howells imagined one complete
autobiography, written with nothing concealed, J ewett posits “one human face,”
read “aright.” In each case, the dream of unmediated access to the truth of life, of
ﬁnding “the look of the Spirit’s free or hindered life . . . plain to see,”
simultaneously points to the elusiveness of such knowledge: J ewett’s imaginary
insight falls to the conditional in her ﬁnal sentence (“If we could read . . .”), while
Howells cedes that a “perfectly candid and complete autobiography” is “very
likely . . . impossible of realization” (798). But the popularity of the “Human
Documents” series in McClure ’s, the “Life Stories” series in the Independent, and
autobiography in general during this period suggests that the desire to discover the

truth of human life, unmediated and documented, inspired both writers and readers

at the turn of the century.

79

It is worth noting, in this light, that several reviewers of Holt’s collection of
life stories agreed (in the words of one) that “These are surely ‘human documents’
in the real sense of that term, and they have the fascination of such documents.”17
Just what “the real sense” of this curious phrase might have amounted to in 1906 is
difﬁcult to recover fully, but its popular usage may very well stem from the series
inaugurated thirteen years earlier in McClure ’s.'3 As that series suggests,
“documents” need not refer to written texts: If a series of portraits can qualify as a
“human document,” then perhaps the New York T imes’s reviewer may have
wished to point to the textual quality of the life stories by distinguishing them as
human documents “in the real sense of that term.” But of course the phrase is
ﬁgurative, not literal, in any sense: A text can be no more “human” than a series of

photographs. The resonance of the phrase appears to be grounded, rather, in the

idea of documentation, a newly emergent term at the end of the nineteenth century

 

'7 See “Humble Folks.” Other reviews that refer to the life stories as “human
documents” can be found in the Brooklyn Life, Brooklyn Times, New York Democrat,
and one unidentiﬁed periodical (Holt, Scrapbook).

'8 The Oxford English Dictionary gives 1892 as the earliest recorded use of the
collocation “human document,” 1896 (in Badminton Magazine!) as the next
(“Human”), overlooking its prominent and regular use in McClure ’s beginning in
June 1893 and at least one earlier American use in the Critic of January 1891: “The
scientiﬁc spirit of the age has popularized the love of accurate description, of ‘human
documents’” (qtd. in Mott 4: 110). J ewett, in her introduction to the McClure '5 series,
credits novelist and poet Alphonse Daudet as the author of the phrase (17). As
implied by its repeated use in reviews of Life Stories, the phrase was in common use
at the turn of the century; by 1931, a writer for American Speech could include
“human document” (with tongue in cheek) among a list of frequently used
commendatory phrases in “The Book Reviewer’s Vocabulary” (Clough 181).

80

corresponding to the rise of Realism as a literary and artistic movement.19 In this
sense, the Independent’s life stories represent “human documents” insofar as they
faithfully document—offer evidence, explain, prove——that which is constitutive of
human life, in contrast to the merely natural or mechanical (“Document”;
“Human”). The phrase captures in miniature the two approaches to the life stories
outlined above, what might be termed the sociological and the humanistic. More
broadly, it highlights two dominant strains of thought in turn-of-the-century
America: on the one hand, the scientiﬁc drive of the age to document not only the
natural world but also the human world, both sociologically and psychologically;
and on the other hand, the wavering and waning of conﬁdence in human
understanding and the old ways of knowing and living. In the context of both
broad cultural inclinations, at least some readers looked to the autobiographies Of
unknown, “undistinguished” individuals to discover the “trut ” of human life, to
ﬁnd “real life” documented.

The considerable appeal of The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans,
then, might be said to derive (as Jewett would have it) from “an honest interest” in

other lives “which is as noble a thing as curiosity is contemptible” (16). Both

 

'9 The Oxford English Dictionary dates the use of documentation to refer to
faithful reproduction of historical and objective facts (as in realistic ﬁction) to 1888,
citing an example from the Athenteum that links the term to the realist movement: “Is
art simply an affair of documentation, as the phrase of the day goes?”
(“Documentation”). The use of the term documentary (and related terms) to refer to a
work of literature, photography or ﬁlm did not emerge until several decades later,
with the development of documentary recording (and a corresponding methodology)
during the 1930s and 19403.

81

Slosson and Rebecca Harding Davis concur that the collection of life stories
“means something higher” than the mere “gratiﬁcation of the curiosity . . .” (Davis
459; cf. Slosson 5). In fact, however, both honest interest and corrupt curiosity
clearly contributed to the appeal of the autobiographical “lifelets” produced by the
Independent and consumed by its readers. The magazine’s editors capitalized on
precisely the type of voyeuristic curiosity about “how the other half lives” that
Jewett and Davis disdained, and at times they “mediated” in a calculated way the
purported immediacy of individual life stories. The headnote to “The Life Story of
a Japanese Servant,” for example, begins this way:
Those who have wondered what was behind the uniform politeness
and unreadable face of a Japanese servant will be interested in this
very frank confession of one, whose preconceived ideal of America
as a land of opportunity and equality has been disproved by his
experience here. (159)
Such a prefatory note seeks to conﬁrm that the subject of the story is an
“authentic” spokesman for “Japanese servants” as a group but does so by
reinforcing stereotypical notions about Japanese immigrants as “uniformly” polite
and, more pointedly, as “unreadable.” The story of the Japanese servant is
presented by the Independent, that is, to appeal not simply to a “noble” human
interest but also to the curiosities of readers about what lies “behind” the polite
face of such a servant (“Those who have wondered . . .”). Recalling Jewett’s
rhetorical query, “Who cannot read faces?,” the lighthearted description of the

‘6

Japanese immigrant’s unreadable face” serves as a corroboration of the

82

impenetrable and unintelligible nature of his “type” and unsettles the high-minded
reception of his story as one of many “human documents.”

What this and other examples illustrate is a certain blindness—or, perhaps,
a simple lack of “interest”—in the actual selves at the heart of these life stories.
Caught between the broad sociological signiﬁcance and the equally broad human
interest of the stories, that is, are the various undistinguished individuals whose
lives provide the material for these texts. As a result, the life stories must be read
as autobiographical texts of a unique but also limited sort——compelling for what
they reveal about the conditions of life and of literature at the turn of the century,
but compromised in signiﬁcant ways by the assumptions of magazine editors and
Of the readers for whom the stories were produced. In much the same way that the
early slave narratives were edited to satisfy the interests of readers about the
conditions of slavery rather than the unique identity of the individual narrator,20 the
life stories were “procured” by the Independent’s editors with the needs and
desires of their subscribers in mind, not the desires—for self-expression, for
conventional authorship, for truth-telling—of the undistinguished subjects
themselves. Though the magazine invited representatives of underrepresented
groups into what Howells termed “this most democratic province of the republic of

letters,” that access did not guarantee those individuals free expression or the

 

2° William Andrews develops this argument at the beginning of his foundational
study of slave narratives, To Tell A Free Story (6). See Chapter Two, below, for
further discussion of this connection between antebellum slave narrative and African-
American autobiography at the turn of the century.

83

reception they desired, just as life in America did not guarantee (in the words of

one Lithuanian immigrant) “life, liberty, and the getting of happiness” (10).

84

Chapter Two

Answering the Unasked Question:
African-American Autobiographical
Expression at the Turn of the Century

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question:

unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the

difﬁculty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, ﬂutter around it . . . .

How does it feel to be a problem?

—W. E. B. Du Bois
With these words, ﬁrst published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1897 and

reprinted in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois limned the lived
reality of the “Negro problem” in America at the turn of the century, a problem
that divided not only the two “worlds” of the “nation” and the “Negro people” but
also, and more pointedly, individual white and black Americans (“Strivings” 194-
95). Throughout his essay in the Atlantic, Du Bois powerfully merges the third-
person objective voice of the sociologist and historian, invoked to document the
literal, physical “strivings of the Negro people” over three decades since
Emancipation, and the ﬁrst-person subjective voice of the autobiographer, invoked
to document his own psychological strivings. Du Bois continually modulates his

editorial point of view, shifting freely from “me” to “he” to “one,” “they,” and

“we,” a range that allows him to speak of the “strivings” of an entire “people” even

85

as he recalls his own “early days of rollicking boyhood” and the moment when the
“revelation” of the color line ﬁrst swept over him in a New England schoolhouse
(194). By reckoning the “Negro problem” as not merely a sociological or
historical problem but also a profoundly psychological one, and by deﬁning his
people’s quest for freedom less in material terms than in terms of the “strange
experience” and “peculiar sensation” of being “both a Negro and an American,”
Du Bois joins a long tradition of African-American response to the “unasked
question” of white America (194). For many of those respondents, the genre of
autobiography in particular has proved a compelling form for answering that
question and, at the same time, for making broader social and individual claims.
African-Americans have found in autobiography—in the stories told and in the
telling itself, in the content as well as the form—a way to express the freedom of
individual agency and to assert that “true self-consciousness” consistently denied
to them “in this American world” (Souls 5).

As a result, autobiography “holds a position of priority,” as William
Andrews contends, “indeed many would say preeminence, among the narrative
traditions of black America” (Introduction 1). Critical attention to the tradition of
African-American autobiographical expression, however, has until recently
focused on two signiﬁcant subsets of that tradition by granting primary importance
to the slave narrative and secondary consideration to the profusion of twentieth-
century autobiographies by African-Americans. Of the period between the end of

the Civil War and the Great Depression, Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery

86

holds a certain priority as the towering representative example of the
autobiographical writing that emerged after emancipation to take the place of the
antebellum slave narrative. But as Andrews has noted repeatedly,
autobiographical writing ﬂourished throughout this “vast middle period,”
representing a wide range of experiences and outlooks among Aﬁican-American
teachers and ministers, institutional ﬁgures, women, and working-class
individuals.l “Black autobiography of this era,” Andrews concluded in 1986,
“remains another country to most of us” (“F orgotten” 21).

In the decade since that pronouncement, critics responding to Andrews’s
call have begun to investigate and map that other country of African-American
literary expression at the turn of the century. Joanne M. Braxton published Black
Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition within a Tradition in 1989, setting the
stage for further attention to this period by tracing “common themes and
archetypal ﬁgures” through a variety of autobiographical texts by African-
American women (17). Frances Smith Foster, who had already written brieﬂy on
“Post-bellum Inﬂuence” in her 1979 study Of antebellum slave narratives
(Witnessing Slavery 142-54), extended the range of her subject to the end of the
nineteenth century in Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American

Women, 1 746-1892. But this work of reclamation and examination has largely

 

' Andrews, Introduction 5; “Forgotten Voices” (22, 26). On the variety and range
of autobiographical writing during this “vast middle period in the history of African
American autobiography,” see also Andrews, “Representation”; Andrews, “Toward”
82; and Foster and Yarborough, 468-69.

87

been limited to single, full-length autobiographies. Following a trend common to
literary critics generally and critics of autobiography in particular, Andrews and
others have focused their analyses on separately published, full-length texts from
this period, texts that support sustained literary analysis in part because they are
sustained textual performances. In doing so, critics have largely overlooked those
texts that had a more ephemeral existence—~though not necessarily a more limited
circulation—in the public sphere of the turn of the century.2

In the introduction to her study of black women’s autobiography, Joanne
Braxton posits a useful corrective to an overemphasis on textuality by African-
American critics, urging critical attention to the “unwritten [oral] literature” that
inspires and “informs written literature on many levels” (5). In the same spirit, one
might also call attention to that range of writing that exists between, as it were, the
poles of oral expression and formal, full-length texts. What place, for example,
might sermons, speeches, song lyrics, and folk-tales hold in a critical examination
of African-American literature? And in an analysis of Aﬁican-American

autobiography in particular, what place ought to be accorded to the vast range of

 

2 In the ﬁnal sentence of his essay on “Forgotten Voices of Afro-American
Autobiography,” notably, Andrews suggests that the full-length texts he has
considered need to be studied in their “interaction with other groups of black
memoirists between 1865 and 1930” such as “black women and black working-class
people” (26). In a similar vein, Foster, in her “Introduction to the Second Edition” of
Witnessing Slavery, acknowledges that her initial “choice to focus on separately
published and relatively straightforward texts effectively excluded virtually all the
narratives written by women” (xxii). The extent to which other autobiographical
voices have been similarly excluded from critical consideration largely remains to be
discovered.

88

autobiographical expression that appeared in the guise of printed sermons or
speeches or songs as well as in the pages of the periodical press? Not unlike
antebellum slave narratives, which were published not only as separate texts but
also in “newspapers, magazines, anthologies, court records, church documents, and
state and federal reports” (Foster, Witnessing ix), postbellum autobiographical
writing by African-Americans appeared in a wide variety of forms and forums.
Much of this material, to be sure, remains hidden from critical view, difﬁcult not
only to locate but also to classify neatly within the critical categories and
conventions of past scholarship. But as Andrews remarks in his call for a new

9’ ‘6

“Poetics of Afro-American Autobiography, we need to take an inclusive
approach to the study of Afro-American autobiography[,] . . . to put in abeyance
our normal expectations about what should and should not happen in a text or
between a text and its reader” (88). If critics of African-American autobiography
have, in the past, “theorized about the function of black autobiography as marginal
to white autobiography,” the “knottier problem” of identifying and reading the
marginal within the African-American tradition remains largely unsolved (84).
Approaching African-American autobiographical writing at the turn of the
century through the framework suggested by Andrews requires an awareness of
the different kinds Of autobiographical texts that appeared in print and the
conditions of publication that enabled the circulation of those texts to a wide range

of American readers. Attention to both the forms and the forums in and through

which Aﬁican-American autobiographical writing appeared at the turn of the

89

century is necessary to yield a dynamic sense of the “actual autobiographical
practice” of the period (Eakin 14). This understanding should, in turn, include not
only the range of motives that inspired writers of personal narratives and the ways
in which those narratives appealed to (or appalled) readers of the day, but also the
signiﬁcant role played by the periodicals and editors that mediated between the
two parties. To borrow Du Bois’s phrasing, between every aspiring
autobiographer and that “other world” of his or her audience there was not only an
“unasked question” but also a medium of communication that enabled and
mediated the ways in which that question might be answered. A close examination
of one such medium—the New York Independent—and of the forms of self-
expression that it sponsored offers a compelling illustration of the intersections of
African-American autobiographical expression and the “Negro problem” in tum-

of-the-century America.

I

The Independent, the Race Question,
and “the Negro Point of View”

As if to announce anew each week its lofty aspirations as a cultural
mediator, the New York Independent opened each issue at the turn of the century
with a news column entitled “Survey of the World.” Given its self-proclaimed
international scope, the American “Negro problem” could occupy only a small part
of the magazine’s coverage; however, as a magazine established in 1848 in part to

express Opposition to slavery, and nearly brought down a few years later by its

90

advocacy of armed resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act (Mott 2: 368-69), the
Independent at the turn of the century had a long tradition behind it of comment on
America’s race questions. Furthermore, as a periodical dedicated to printing
various points of view on the pressing questions of the day, allowing the ﬁgurative
“plaintiffs and defendants” of a given debate to present opposing arguments, the
Independent differed both from partisan newspapers and magazines and ﬁ'om the
popular periodicals that feared to take a stand on any controversial topic (Holt,
“Our Contributors” 1429). As a result, the magazine represents better than most of
its contemporaries the range of “informed” opinion on the nation’s “race
questions.” Finally, because managing editor Hamilton Holt actively sought out
short autobiographical essays for the magazine during the ﬁrst decade of the
twentieth century, including many by African-American individuals, the
Independent represents a useful starting-point for an investigation of Aﬁican-
American autobiographical expression within the context of America’s struggle to
comprehend and resolve its intractable “Negro problem.”

Of course, this singular “problem,” like the more generic “race question,”
was in fact made up of a plurality of contentious social issues including suffrage,
education, and crime. The progressive Independent addressed these issues at the
turn of the century in occasional essays, editorials, and news columns, often in
response to current events or to provocative articles in other magazines. In 1889,
for example, an essay in the Forum on “Race Antagonism in the South,” written by

a Senator from Louisiana, prompted the Independent’s editors to publish ﬁrst a

91

response, then an entire symposium on the question, “Shall the Negro Be Educated
or Suppressed?” The respondents universally approved the former course of
action but also agreed more broadly on two points, summarized in novelist George
W. Cable’s response: First, “that it is folly for the South and shame for the North
to call the negro question less than national”; and second, that “the difﬁculties of
the problem demand that it be subjected to the most careful, dispassionate,
studious discussion, a discussion purged of personalities, partisan rallying cries
and unauthenticated conjectures and recriminations, especially a progressive
discussion” (225; emphasis in original). Such discussion, Cable goes on to
suggest, will be carried on primarily in the nation’s magazines, forums not only
more “literary” but also more “dispassionate” than those “devoted primarily to
news” (225)—forums, that is, such as the Independent itself.

In the two decades following Cable’s pronouncement, the Independent in
fact pursued such a course, seeking to “bring into the clear light and air of a calm,
friendly and faithful national literary debate” the issue of the civil, social, and

political rights of all Aﬁican-Americans (Cable 225).3 The magazine frequently

 

3 One especially notable example of the Independent’s engagement with issues of
civil rights is an article that appeared following a riot in Springﬁeld, Illinois in August
1908. William English Walling’s “Race War in the North” (3 Sept. 1908) inspired a
meeting of concerned American citizens, white and black, on the 100th anniversary of
Lincoln’s birth, a meeting which led directly to the establishment of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People. William H. Ward, editor of the
Independent, and Hamilton Holt, managing editor, both participated in the initial
meeting along with Du Bois, William Dean Howells, Jane Addams, and many other
leading ﬁgures of the time. Rayford W. Logan suggests that, in light of its eventual

92

spoke out against the denial of suffrage to Aﬁican-American voters in the South,
against inequities in public education for black and white children, and against the
horriﬁc incidents of lynching in both the South and the North that peaked in the
18905. However, much of the Independent’s commentary on these issues shared
the common premise, implicit in the 1889 symposium, that the “race question”
would be answered by the combined efforts of the nation’s intelligent,
sympathetic, white men. An editorial on “The Psychology of the Race Question,”
for example, after contrasting the psychology of Southern “Feeling” with Northern
“Reason,” concludes that “the hope of the negro lies in the growth of . . . feelings
of humanity” that are “consistent with the conclusions of abstract reason” and thus
agreeable to both the white North and the white South (1939-40). The author of
“Solving the Race Questions,” meanwhile, views the issue of race conﬂict from
the detached perspective of a theory of “universal evolution” and the
“development of mankind from the earliest days” (1994). Notably, however, the
latter editorial concludes with a return to hard and fast material realities:
It is time for both North and South, with mature purpose and sound
judgment, to co-operate man-fashion in the great work of making the
negro race not merely an endurable but even a highly useful element
in our great industrial population. (1994-95)

Clearly, in thus proposing the terms on which “the negro race” might become part

of the nation’s social, political, and (especially) economic life, the responsibility

 

impact, Walling’s brief but contentious essay in the Independent “must be counted as
one of the more important articles in the history of American magazines” (3 52).

93

for “making the negro race” into a “useful element” of the American population
rests entirely with those already assured of their own place in that national life: No
consideration is given to the point of view of the individuals who collectively
represent the “problem” under discussion.

In light of the Independent’s stated intentions of opening its columns to a
variety of viewpoints, however, it is noteworthy that several African-American
individuals did in fact contribute to the magazine’s ongoing discussion of the race
question. In 1889, for example, several months after the symposium on Negro
education, the Independent published Charles W. Chesnutt’s ﬁrst essay, a
thoroughly provocative discussion of the question, “What Is A White Man?”
Though the editors did not identify Chesnutt as a person of mixed race, the article
clearly differs from others in the magazine in its sharp analysis of the ironies and
paradoxes of American public opinion and laws opposing racial intermingling:
Chesnutt suggests, for example, that “the purity of the white race” might be “as
well preserved by the exercise of virtue, and the operation of those natural laws
which are so often quoted by Southern writers as the justiﬁcation of all sorts of

9”

Southern ‘policies (6). Similar expressions of an alternate point Of view on the
race question appear with greater frequency in the Independent at the turn of the
century, in essays such as Ida B. Wells Barnett’s “The Negro’s Case in Equity.”
Like Chesnutt, Wells Barnett challenges white Americans not merely to take

responsibility for the solution of the race question but also to admit responsibility

94

for the problem itself. At the same time, she charges the nation’s media
establishment with refusing to hear the voices of the negro in their own defense:
“The columns of the powerful dailies, religious periodicals and thoughtful
magazines have printed these charges [against the negro] wholesale until the
civilized world has accepted them, but few wish to consider the refutation of them
or give space for the possible other side” (1010). Expressions of that “other
side”—“the thought of the things themselves,” in Du Bois’s biting phrase—
increasingly found a place in national magazines at the turn of the century,
answering a growing national interest in the point of view of individuals whose
ﬁrst-hand experience of the race question went far beyond the limited knowledge
of the white editorialist (“Of the Training” 289).

The Independent was not alone in responding to that interest among readers
by welcoming the contributions of African-American commentators. The North
American Review, for example, one month after printing Thomas Nelson Page’s
essay, “The Lynching of Negroes: Its Cause and Its Prevention,” allowed Mary
Church Terrell to respond with “Lynching from a Negro’s Point of View.”4 But
such access to publication was never guaranteed. When McClure ’s Magazine
published a series of three similar essays by Page, Du Bois wrote S. S. McClure to
express his dismay that “a magazine which has stood so clearly for the problem as

McClure’s (sic) has hitherto” would “lower itself to the small narrow anti-Negro

 

‘ See Logan 382, 428n35-36. Logan notes that Page’s essay “suggested
emasculation of the Negro as an ultimate means of preventing lynching” (428n30).

95

propaganda of Thomas Nelson Page” (Correspondence 128). Du Bois continued,
“. . . will you not permit the other side to be heard? Will you not let me write you
an article on Social Equality from the Negro point of view—a perfectly frank
article?” (128). Notably, though Du Bois eventually submitted such an article, the
magazine rejected it—perhaps ﬁnding it too “perfectly frank,” even for one of the
most vigilant and outspoken of muckraking periodicals (128).

An early incident in the literary career of Charles Chesnutt illustrates a
similar combination of fascination with and fear Of “the Negro point of view”
inﬂuencing the editors of leading American magazines at the turn of the century.
In 1889, Chesnutt sent an essay he had composed “on the Negro question” to
George W. Cable, a nationally recognized writer of ﬁction and nonﬁction on the
race question and a recent acquaintance of Chesnutt’s. In his response, Cable
praised Chesnutt for writing “a noble essay,” volunteered his assistance in placing
the article with a national magazine, and suggested that Chesnutt “call it ‘The
Negro’s View of the Negro Question’” (Chesnutt, “To Be an Author” 29, 3ln1).
In spite of Cable’s repeated efforts, however, Chesnutt’s article (eventually titled
“The Negro’s Answer to the Negro Question”) never appeared in print: The editor
of the Forum responded with praise for the article but noted that he had just
recently “secured a paper from a Negro” (33n1); Richard Watson Gilder, editor of
the Century, wrote to Cable that “Mr. Chesnutt’s . . . is a timely political paper—so
timely & so political—in fact so partisan-that we cannot handle it. It should

appear at once somewhere” (3 8n] ); and, ﬁnally, the North American Review, after

96

keeping the essay “an unconscionably long time,” in Chesnutt’s words, returned it
to him “with the usual polite regrets” (40). Chesnutt—who had written to Cable in
February of 1889 expressing optimism that “the Negro question . . . will become a
more and more prominent subject of discussion”—wrote again in May to express
his “fear” that “the public, as represented by the editors of the leading magazines,
is not absolutely yearning for an opportunity to read the utterances of obscure
colored writers upon the subject of the Negro’s rights; a little of it I suspect goes a
long way” (31, 40).

The tone of Chesnutt’s comment, at once bitterly ironic and candidly
disappointed, suggests a growing awareness on his part that writing from the
“Negro point of view” appealed to the nation’s desire for stories of “human
interest” more than its devotion to human rights. Whether both ends might be
pursued simultaneously—whether writing could satisfy the appetite of white
readers for stories of feeling and humanity while urging those same readers to
reconsider their racial prejudices and preconceptions—represents a fundamental
question behind the work of many Aﬁican-American writers at the turn of the
century, including the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, the nonﬁction of Du Bois
and Washington, and the ﬁction of Chesnutt and Pauline Hopkins. In her preface
to Contending Forces, for example, Hopkins optimistically declares that “it is the
simple, homely tale, unassumingly told, which cements the bond of brotherhood
among all classes and all complexions” (l3). Chesnutt, likewise, writing in his

personal journal in 1880 at the age of twenty-two, already felt certain that it was

97

“the province of literature to open the way” for the negro seeking “social
recognition and equality,” to “accustom the public mind to the idea; and while
amusing them to lead them on imperceptibly, unconsciously step by step to the
desired state of feeling” (Journals 140). But ﬁnding an audience at the turn of the
century for even a “simple, homely tale, unassumingly told” seemed to require that
claims for social recognition and equality remain muted, understated, mediated to
ﬁt the preconceptions of most white Americans at the time.

Such was certainly true of the most spectacularly successful text by an
African-American writer at the turn of the century, Washington’s Up from Slavery,
a text praised widely for being “unassuming” in both its style and its political
substance. William Dean Howells, for example, reviewing Up from Slavery in the
North American Review, praised Washington for “the smiling good humor” and
the “constant common sense” with which he narrates his life story, a story “told . .
. so simply and charmingly that one could not add to or take from it without
marring it” (“Exemplary” 288, 283, 282). The reviewer for the Nation, likewise,
noted Washington’s “simple and direct” style, his “keen” humor, and his “scant
attention to race problems” (Rev. of Up from Slavery 281). Such simplicity and
charm, one might deduce from the positive reviews and the overwhelmingly sales
of Up from Slavery, was deeply satisfying to those American readers who were
interested in the “Negro point of view” but uncomfortable with frank or explicit

“attention to race problems.”

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In fact, Lyman Abbott, who offered to publish a serialized autobiography in
The Outlook magazine if Washington could ﬁnd time to compose it, approached
the project in just such a light. Writing to encourage Washington to provide
detailed description of his “boyhood life in slave days” and during Reconstruction,
Abbott noted that the latter period
is generally looked upon wholly from the white man’s point of view,
sometimes the Southern white man’s, sometimes the Northern white
man’s. How did it seem then to the Negroes, how does it seem now
to one who has the interest of his race at heart and sympathizes with
their point of view? (qtd. in Washington 159)
In another letter, Abbott made explicit the appeal of presenting that point of view
in the form of an autobiography, suggesting that “in no better way” might
Washington’s “constituency be enlarged”: “Writing as you would necessarily do in
an anecdotal and reminiscent mood, your articles would be read by a great many
who are not greatly interested in the problem as a problem, and whose interest
would be awakened by such a story as you could tell . . .” (qtd. in Washington
157). That Washington’s autobiography did in fact awaken interest and widen his
“constituency” among white Americans is indisputable: Within a year of the
appearance of Up from Slavery, to cite just one example, Theodore Roosevelt
invited Washington to the White House and solicited his thoughts on the South and
the race question (Harlan 3-6). But Abbott’s two letters also point to, in effect,
two divergent deﬁnitions of interest—ﬁrst, the “interest of his race” that

Washington is presumed to have “at heart”; and second, the “interest” of his white

readers that must be “awakened” by presenting the picturesque details of his early

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life (159). These two distinct uses of interest are closely connected, in turn, to two
equally distinct ways of reckoning point of view: One, an inherently political
deﬁnition of point of view as an individual’s perspective or position on a disputed
question; the other, an inherently personal, subjective notion of point of view,
perhaps best exempliﬁed by the ﬁrst-person narrative voice of autobiography.
These are the twin notions of interest and point of view that Aﬁican-
American writers struggled to bring together at the turn of the century, the two
notions so profoundly captured in Du Bois’s attempt to answer the question, “How
does it feel to be a problem?” In his efforts to yoke solidly intellectual
commentary on the race question with deeply personal reﬂection on his own
“strange experience” of being “both a Negro and an American,” Du Bois insists
that his autobiographical point of view not be isolated from his social or political
point of view. And he insists, likewise, that the most profound “interests” of
African-Americans can and must appeal to the deepest “human interest” of white
Americans:
Herein the longing of black men must have respect: the rich and
bitter depths of their experience, the unknown treasures of their inner
life, the strange rendings of nature they have seen, may give the
world new points of view and make their loving, living, and doing
precious to all human hearts. (“Of the Training” 297)
Into the contentious debate about the race question in magazines such as the
Atlantic Monthly and the Independent, Du Bois proposes a new and profound

sense of what the “Negro point of view” might give to America. His proposition is

grounded in a vision of the unity of “all human hearts” that is fundamentally

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opposed to the base materialistic interests of those concerned with “making the
negro race . . . a highly useful element in our great industrial population.”

It is noteworthy that Du Bois contributed at least a dozen articles to the
Independent during the ﬁrst decade of the twentieth century, including not only
scholarly commentaries on crime, suffrage, and education but also two of his most
powerful and impassioned writings: “Credo,” a profession of public and personal
faith that was reproduced and circulated widely after its publication; and “A Litany
of Atlanta,” a prayer expressing bewilderment, despair, and condemnation in the
wake of a “massacre” of Aﬁican-American citizens in that city.5 It is equally
noteworthy, however, that during the same period the Independent also began
publishing short autobiographical essays by Aﬁican-American individuals with
none of Du Bois’s reputation or recognition. The titles of some of these brief
essays—“The Race Problem—An Autobiography”; “The Negro Problem: How It
Appeals to a Southern Colored Woman”; and “The New Slavery in the South—An
Autobiography”—point to a provocative merging of individual and social interests,
a curious blending of personal and political commentary. Like Du Bois’s best

writings, these essays bring together autobiographical expression and the idea of a

 

5 Du Bois’s “A Litany of Atlanta” appeared in Independent 61 (11 Oct. 1906):
856-58; the magazine also covered the events in “The Atlanta Massacre,” 61 (4 Oct.
1906): 799-800, written by an unnamed “educated negro” of the city. Du Bois’s
“Credo” was published in Independent 57 (6 Oct. 1904): 787 and, as Herbert
Aptheker documents, was widely reprinted both in other periodicals and on cards and
posters suitable for framing (Du Bois, Correspondence 82). As a result, the brief
essay “had a great impact upon both the white and the Afro-American worlds” (78n2),

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“Negro point of view” on the race question in intriguing and illuminating ways.
While some of the essays slight the autobiographical element for the editorial, and
others reveal limitations of the forum of periodical publishing at the turn of the
century, together these narratives illuminate the ways in which Aﬁican-American
individuals seized opportunities to express both “true self-consciousness” and

“new points of view” through autobiographical narratives on the race question.

II

Sanctioned to “Speak with Authority”:
Two Narratives of N eo-Slavery

At the end of his review of Washington’s Up from Slavery, Howells
remarks that, while “it is not well to forget slavery,” “it is not well to forget that
slavery is gone, and that the subjection of the negro race which has followed it
does not imply its horrors” (288). To be sure, Howells’s comment is rooted in
what might be called an “eventualist” position on the negro problem, an assurance
that the problem was, in his view, “slowly but surely modifying itself” (288). But
as William Andrews has noted, most Aﬁican-American autobiographers at the turn
of the century were similarly interested in putting slavery behind them, eager to
convince white readers that the slave past should not be viewed as a sign of

degeneracy or shame but as a “school” through which the race had passed and

from which it had emerged stronger and better prepared to make a contribution to

 

a fact suggestive of the sort of broad “circulation” enabled by a magazine such as the
Independent.

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American economic life (“Representation” 77, 83). Exemplifying this power of
positive thinking, Washington even “entertain[s] the idea” in Up from Slavery that
“the black man got nearly as much out of slavery as the white man did,” having
emerged from bondage with certain marketable skills and neither “ashamed” nor
“unwilling” to work (14). Many of Washington’s contemporaries, however,
questioned whether the essential dynamics of the slave system had not been
preserved, or at least restored, in spite of the nation’s granting of freedom and
citizenship to all Aﬁican-Americans. For instance, in marked contrast to the
optimistic invocation of slavery as a “school” in autobiographies by Washington
and others, two autobiographical narratives in the Independent use the same trope
to describe conditions of life hardly distinguishable from actual bondage. How
that trope functions within the narratives of these two anonymous individuals
points to the continuing resonance at the turn of the century of the “horrors” of
American slavery, even as those narratives highlight new ways in which the form
of autobiography and the forum of periodical publishing offered African-American
individuals access to a powerful means of public expression.

The ﬁrst of these narratives of neo-slavery appeared in February 1904,
“dictated” by “a Georgia Negro Peon” to “a representative of THE INDEPENDENT
specially commissioned for this wor ” (“The New Slavery” 409). Like many
antebellum slave narratives, this story begins with an explanation of why the
narrator cannot begin with the primary biographical details of his life, such as his

father’s name and his date of birth, because both are unknown to him. His account

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of childhood commences instead with his memories of a time soon after the end of
the Civil War and the death of his mother when he was left to the care of his uncle.
The narrator’s ﬁrst lesson in the economic realities of the post-emancipation South
comes when, tired of his uncle “drawing” all of his wages, he “made a break for
liberty” by hiring himself to a white man on a neighboring plantation (409). When
the ﬁrst plantation owner, “Captain __,” arrives with “some kind of ofﬁcer of
the law,” the narrator learns that he is not free to make such economic
arrangements on his own: Asserting that “He belongs to me until he is twenty-one,
and I’m going to make him knew his place,” the Captain returns the narrator to his
plantation and gives him “thirty lashes with a buggy whip” (409).

This opening recollection of hopes dashed and the status quo restored sets a
pattern for the rest of the narrator’s story, in which every effort to make “a break
for liberty” is thwarted by the superior position and power of white men who have
the additional resource of “some kind of ofﬁcer of the law.” After the narrator
completes his term of indenture at twenty-one, he marries another of the Captain’s
servants and willingly agrees to contract with the Captain annually for lodging and
wages. But after the Captain’s death, his son, “the Senator,” turns the plantation
into a camp for convicts—black prisoners “leased” to him by the state to be used
as farm laborers (410). Soon it becomes clear to the “free laborers” on the
plantation that very little separates them from the convicts. Because the power of
interpreting and administering the “contracts” that they had signed rests entirely

with whites, who controlled “all the courts, all the guns, all the hounds, all the

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railroads, all the telegraph wires, all the newspapers, all the money, and nearly all
the land,” the narrator and his fellow free laborers have little recourse but to “shut
[their] mouths, say nothing, and go back to wor ” (411). “In other words,” the
narrator concludes, “we had sold ourselves into slavery” (411).

The narrator eventually becomes a peon himself, forced to work for an
additional three years to repay a debt contrived by the Senator. By the time he
leaves the plantation he has lost both his son, who had been “given away” to a
neighboring family, and his wife, who “was living in fairly good shape” after
giving birth to two children “by some one of the white bosses” (412). Like so
many slave narratives, this brief life story indicts the white society that allowed the
narrator’s virtual enslavement as well as its attendant abuses against fundamental
principles of justice, equality, and humanity. Unlike most slave narratives,
however, this story ends not with a courageous bid for freedom and a reassertion
of personal pride but with the same anticlimax that marked the narrator’s ﬁrst
“break for liberty”: Having joined a “gang” of laborers bound for Birmingham, the
narrator “reckon[s] that [he will] die either in a coal mine or an iron furnace”
(414).

The metaphor of slavery in this brief life story, that is, invokes an image of
perennial enslavement, not the slavery-to-freedom trope of the typical antebellum
slave narrative or the slave-to-success story of the typical postbellum narrative.
Though the “Georgia peon” ends up a South Carolina laborer, his condition clearly

remains unchanged in its essentials: Exploited by the same capitalist forces

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(merely embodied in a different white man), he ends his story with only the
appearance of employment altematives—the coal mine or the iron furnace, either
of which promises little besides death—and in his own words, “It don’t make
much difference which” (414). Indeed, the contrast between the peon’s story and
Washington’s in Up from Slavery could not be more clear than in this ﬁnal image,
as the narrator ends his story just where Washington begins his own—struggling to
satisfy his “intense longing to learn to read” while working in a West Virginia salt-
fumace (18). What Washington portrays as merely the ﬁrst of many obstacles to
his ascent “up from slavery,” the Georgia peon depicts as the end of all “intense
longing” and the end, more pointedly, of both his life and his life story.

To be sure, such “neo-slave narratives” as this one found publication for
markedly different reasons than antebellum slave narratives, most of which were
published to aid in the cause of abolition, or postbellum narratives written to assert
an individual’s transcendence of a slave past. Within this life story, the trope Of
slavery represents the stasis of the narrator’s life, not the starting-point for an
experience of life-altering change and movement. And the title given to the story
by the Independent—“The New Slavery in the South—An Autobiography”—
suggests that its appeal to the magazine’s editors and readers derived primarily
from the topic of the essay, the conditions of the convict lease system in the South,
and only secondarily from the individual who purportedly provides the ﬁrst-hand
point of view of those conditions. Published in a progressive magazine committed

to reforming inequities throughout American society, the article might have been

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read in much the same fashion as many early slave narratives, which employed the
ﬁrst-person narrator primarily to lend emphasis and veracity to the revelation of
the truth about a shameful social institution. As a forceful indictment of the
convict lease system in the South, the article functions as an editorial urging action
against an institution, not unlike slavery per se, that denies the fundamental
humanity of its victims.

Perhaps because of the force of the article’s presentation of the outrages of
the convict lease system, Hamilton Holt, managing editor of the Independent,
selected the Georgia peon’s story for inclusion in The Life Stories of
Undistinguished Americans: As Told by Themselves, a collection of sixteen
“lifelets” originally published in the magazine. But in spite of the compelling
content of the essay, its status as “life story” remains more tenuous. One reviewer
of Holt’s collection, after challenging the authenticity of a few other selections,
dismisses the story of the Georgia peon as “nothing but an article on the peon in
the ﬁrst person” (Hackett). Though the reviewer likely meant that the essay
revealed too clearly the work of the transcriber to whom the peon dictated his
story, her comment might also be interpreted more broadly to indict the essay as
nothing but an article on the peon question, in which the purported, ﬁrst-person
speaker of the narration has, ﬁnally, little importance save as a narrative “voice.”
The autobiographical nature of the essay, in other words, appears at least to this
reviewer as an editorial ﬁction, and the form of the essay something qualitatively

distinct from autobiography—“nothing but an article.”

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Several aspects of the article do, indeed, suggest its failure to merge an
editorial on “The New Slavery in the South” and “An Autobiography.” First,
though an editorial headnote seeks to reassure readers that the “representative” of
the Independent who “secured” the article merely “took the liberty to correct the
narrator’s errors of grammar and put it in a form suitable for publication” (409), in
fact the language of the article points to more signiﬁcant “liberties.” The essay’s
opening line, “I am a negro . . .,” seems an unlikely expression in a one-on-one
interview and belies the purported immediacy of a “dictated” narration, suggesting
that from the start the concerns of the magazine (for representativeness,
“typicality”) will outweigh the individual’s actual voice. Furthermore,
inconsistencies in diction (for example, a charge that “court ofﬁcials are in
collusion with the proprietors or agents” followed by a description of a county
“‘way down in the turpentine district”) strongly suggest the editor’s hand (413),
particularly given the peon’s admitted illiteracy: Though he “can read a little,” he
is unable to write his own name, and he signs his contracts with his white
employers by making his “mar ” (410). Finally, then, the editorial note that
prefaces the peon’s “autobiography” unwittingly reveals an irony at the heart of
the story: In putting the peon’s story “in a form suitable for publication”—both
“shaping it up,” one might say, and shaping it into “autobiography”—the
representative of the Independent “took the liberty” of literate expression that the
narrator himself could not claim and thus could not control. Even as his story

reveals his absolute lack of control over his own life, labor, wife, and child, it

108

reveals as well his inability to exert any authority over the authorship of his own
“autobiography.”

Because he gains neither freedom nor literacy, those twin essential elements
of the antebellum slave narrative, the Georgia peon cannot present a story of neo-
slavery that expresses a powerful, individual, autobiographical point of view.
Robert Stepto writes of the antebellum slave narrator, Henry Bibb, that his lack of
complete control over his text ﬁnally “relegates him to a position of partial
literacy,” while Frederick Douglass, in contrast, “both sophisticates and
authenticates his posture as a participant-observer narrator” through his mastery of
literacy and thereby “controls the presentation of his personal history” (10, 25).

As a “neo-slave narrative,” the life story of the Georgia peon loses force as a
presentation of his personal history in part because of his lack of control over that
presentation, his position of nearly complete illiteracy. Finally, the narrator’s
attempt to make his “mark” in the form of a personal narrative—not unlike his
attempt to “[make] a break for liberty”—is ineffectual because of the exploitation
of his position by those with greater social power, those enabled by their own
social position to “take liberties” with his life-story just as others took liberties

with his life.

Eight years after the story of the “Georgia Negro peon” appeared, the
Independent published “More Slavery at the South, by a Negro Nurse.” The title

given by the magazine’s editors explicitly links the article to its predecessor with

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the common trope of a “new” slavery; the headnote prefacing the nurse’s story,
moreover, suggests a more signiﬁcant continuity with the peon’s story both in
editorial technique and in a curious sort of collaborative authorship:

[The following thrilling story was obtained by a representative of

THE INDEPENDENT specially commissioned to gather the facts. The

reporting is, of course, our representative’s, but the facts are those

given by the nurse—EDITOR] (196)
As with the peon’s story, the extent to which “the facts” or “the reporting” are
responsible for the “thrilling” quality of the story cannot be determined by even
the close reader: The juxtaposition of the narrated events and the narrating voice
conceals the process of composition that the magazine freely discloses in the
headnote, thereby obscuring as well the speciﬁcally autobiographical nature Of the
text. As with the life story of the anonymous “Negro peon,” then, this story of “a
Negro Nurse” illustrates some of the signiﬁcant limitations imposed on African-
American autobiographical expression by publication in a leading American
periodical at the turn of the century. However, in contrast to the peon’s story, the
nurse’s narrative also exempliﬁes how the same form and forum might be
exploited for its possibilities, how the expression of an autobiographical point of
view might be achieved in spite of “partial literacy,” limited textual control, and
narrowly-deﬁned notions of authorship and autobiography.

To be sure, “More Slavery at the South,” like its predecessor, appears to

present an editorial argument as much as a personal narrative in describing the

deplorable conditions of life and labor of “perhaps a million” “poor colored

llO

women wage-earners in the South” (200). The nurse who narrates the article
reviews her personal history briskly and, even more than the Georgia peon, she
downplays any sense of her life story as a meaningful progression of events. What
she presents instead is a series of observations about the long working hours, low
wages, and deceptively contrived oral contracts by which her labor is compelled,
along with pointed commentary on the inhumanity and injustice of her treatment at
the hands of Southern whites. At the same time, the narrator frequently
subordinates her own personal experience to that of the “servant class” generally,
that “vast host of poor colored people” whose condition, she concludes, is “just as
bad, if not worse than, it was during slavery” (196). “Tho (sic.) today we are
enjoying nominal freedom,” she maintains, “we are literally slaves” (196).

Here, as in the peon’s story, the trope of slavery functions as a sign of
stasis, invoked to represent conditions of life and labor that remain “just as bad” as
slavery itself in spite of forty-ﬁve years of “nominal freedom.” Moreover, the
stasis of perpetual slavery marks not only the condition of the race as a group but
also the individual existence of African-American servants in the South: “1 live a
treadmill life,” the narrator states at one point; “You‘might as well say that I’m on
duty all the time—from sunrise to sunrise, every day in the week. I am the slave,
body and soul, of this family” (196-97). But in spite of parallel uses of the trope of
slavery, the “lifetime bondage” described by this narrator differs qualitatively from
that of the peon. The nurse’s active, impassioned engagement with her cause, for

example, contrasts sharply with the passivity of the Georgia peon—who, after his

111

ﬁrst ineffectual “break for liberty,” exhibits little personal agency of any kind—
and her activist, reformist vision seems to belie the inevitability and inassailability
of her “treadmill life.” As represented in their autobiographical narratives, the
peon’s life might be said to exemplify inertia of a sort, insofar as his condition
remains static unless “acted upon by some external force,” while the nurse
embodies potential energy, that form of possibility exempliﬁed by “a raised
weight, coiled spring, or charged battery” (“Inertia”; “Potential energy”).
Furthermore, while the peon at the end of his story can merely compare the
horrors of his present employment to the “hell” of peonage (414), the nurse who
narrates “More Slavery at the South” clearly understands her position in society in
complex, dynamic ways. If, for example, the ﬁrst line of her story—“I am a negro
woman . . .”—parallels that of the Georgia peon’s narrative in its suggestion of an
editor’s hand, the nurse nevertheless manages to assert throughout her narrative
something of the meaning and signiﬁcance of her identiﬁcation as an Aﬁican-
American and as a woman. From this position of social cognizance, she can
address speciﬁc affronts to her dignity not only by white men but also by white
women and by Aﬁican-American men, and she can appeal to each of these groups
in turn on behalf of her class for greater “sympathy” and “a chance to breathe for
once while alive as free women” (200). She interprets the “facts” of her condition,
that is, in direct relation to her position in society, revealing a keen sense of the
ironies of that position (as so many antebellum slave narrators did): She notes, for

instance, that in spite of frequent commentary on the “unreliability,”

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“untrustworthiness,” and other “vices” of African-American women, Southern
women continue to trust her and others like her with the most intimate care of their
children and Southern men continue to take “undue liberties with their colored
female servants” (198). The nurse recognizes that the law provides no protection
to Aﬁican-Americans in the South and that “labor unions or organizations of any
kind” could do little to increase their wages (197); more personally, she sees that
her perpetual service to a white family, as “handy-andy,” governess, playmate,
nurse, and common laborer deprives her own children of the comforts and beneﬁts
her employers enjoy (196).

Though she invokes the metaphor of a “new slavery” to suggest the stasis in
her conditions of life and labor, then, the nurse-narrator counteracts that sense of
stasis in her vigilant awareness of all that is withheld from her by her enforced
position in Southern society. One of the striking characteristics of “More Slavery
at the South,” in fact, is its narrator’s knowing tone, discernible even as she
laments what she does not know because education has been denied to her and
others of her class. When she remarks, “I don’t know what it is to go to church; I
don’t know what it is to go to a lecture or entertainment or anything of the kind,”
her profession of ignorance reveals her aspiration to the solidly middle-class
virtues of piety and education and challenges the injustice of denying her the
opportunity to pursue them. When the narrator notes that “negro household
servants” in the South “do not cook according to scientiﬁc principles because we

do not know anything about scientiﬁc principles,” likewise, she not only exhibits

113

an awareness of one of the latest topics of discussion among middle-class
homemakers of the North and a corresponding desire to be trained as a
“professional” in her ﬁeld of work, but also indicts Southern whites for their
willingness to be “perfectly satisﬁed” with the less-than-“efﬁcient” servants their
system produces (197). Taken together, the nurse’s personal and social aspirations
and her candid appraisal of Southern white society controvert the theories of racial
inferiority used to justify a “new slavery” in the South.
In presenting her knowledge and experience in this fashion, the nurse makes

a claim not only for just and equitable treatment in her life and her labor in the
South but also for full recognition of her humanity. Yet the nurse’s outspokenness
on a range of issues is ﬁnally less signiﬁcant than the simple fact of her speaking
out at all. The nurse presents her ﬁrst-hand knowledge of Southern society,
notably, as the basis not only of her candid critiques but also of her right to express
a point of view before the national audience of the Independent:

. . . I have been able to become intimately acquainted not only with

the lives of hundreds of household servants, but also with the lives Of

their employers. I can, therefore, speak with authority on the so-

called servant question; and what I say is said out of an experience

which covers many years. (196)
On the surface, this statement functions as an expression of the nurse’s
qualiﬁcations for speaking on the “servant question”: She comes to the question,
the nurse informs her readers, with certain ﬁrst-hand “facts” to report. But

asserting her ability to speak with authority implies a broader claim, one founded,

moreover, on the premise of an attentive audience: An individual with no social

114

standing can speak as freely as any other, but authority depends upon social
recognition and respect. To be sure, the nurse’s social position—both in Southern
society and in relation to the editors of the Independent—places signiﬁcant
limitations on her individual agency and her cultural standing. In Stepto’s terms,
the nurse, like the peon, can achieve only “partial literacy” insofar as the control of
the text of her personal expression is in the hands of others. But in stating a claim
to the authority of speaking publicly, she asserts a certain social value not only for
her unappreciated labor but also for her “experience,” her knowledge, her point of
view.

In small but signiﬁcant ways, then, the nurse’s article about “More Slavery
at the Sout ” conveys something beyond “the facts” of her life and labor,
something of the person behind the article’s editorial voice and point of view.
When the nurse refers, in the passage quoted above, to “the so-called servant
question,” she intensiﬁes her commentary in a subtle but signiﬁcant way, not
unlike what Du Bois achieves in his reference to the “half-named Negro problem”
(Souls 9). When she claims to be “intimately acquainted” with the lives of her
fellow servants and their employers, likewise, the nurse plants a suggestion that
her understanding of Southern society extends beyond “the facts” to include
private, perhaps even dangerously personal, knowledge. This slight but subversive
style reﬂects the tradition and legacy of the slave narrative and, more speciﬁcally,
as Andrews describes them, those slave narrators who “resisted the fragmenting

nature of objective autobiography, which demanded that a black narrator achieve

115

credence by objectifying himself and passivizing his voice” (T 0 Tell 6-7). In a
small way, the nurse achieves what Andrews ﬁnds lacking in the early, dictated
slave narratives but powerfully expressed by narrators such as Douglass: She
expresses, albeit implicitly and editorially, the “sense of an individual authorial
personality, the sound of a distinctive authorizing voice” (98-99).

To the extent that she “speak[s] with authority” and thereby achieves that
“distinctive authorizing voice,” the nurse inﬁrses what might be called an
autobiographical point of view into her article on the labor conditions of “poor
colored women wage-eamers in the South.” All writers of autobiography,
according to Albert Stone, “stand outside as well as within their own experience”
(Autobiographical 7); the most powerful slave narrators, Stepto argues similarly,
occupy the “posture” of the “participant-observer,” a posture that “obliterate[s]”
the distinction between autobiographical and editorial “modes of narration” (65).
To be sure, the brief essay “by a Negro nurse” does not approach the aesthetic
magnitude of Douglass’s Narrative or Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, the subjects
of Stepto’s argument, nor can the nurse claim any of the textual or editorial control
enjoyed by such ﬁgures. Her voice depends on the forum of the Independent for
editorial approval and authentication as much as for its public circulation. But
through the limitations imposed by those conditions of publication, the nurse
ﬁnally succeeds in presenting her “personality” as well as her point of view,
belying her own report of a static life as a “new slave” in the South by speaking in

an active, “free” voice.

116

III

Private Experience, Public Truth-Telling:
African-American Autobiography and the Race Problem

In March 1904, three weeks after publishing the Georgia peon’s story of
“The New Slavery in the South,” the Independent printed three more ﬁrst-person
essays on the “negro problem,” essays clearly selected to represent a set of distinct
points of view on the Southern problem: “The Race Problem—An
Autobiography,” by “a Southern Colored Woman”; “Experiences of the Race
Problem,” by “a Southern White Woman”; and “Observations of the Southern
Race Feeling,” by “a Northern [White] Woman.” Notably, according to an
editorial headnote that appeared several months later, the three essays “called forth
more replies than any other articles . . . recently published” by the magazine
(Williams 91). Responding to the obvious interest of their readers, the
Independent published one of those replies—“A Northern Negro’s
Autobiography,” by Fannie Barrier Williams—as a supplement to the original
series and a commentary on “a phase of the negro problem not touched upon by
the three anonymous women” (91). The four articles “taken together,” the
editorial comment noted, “picture the negro problem from the feminine standpoint
in the most genuine and realistic manner shown in any articles we have seen in
print” (91).

Each of the four brief essays in the Independent’s series might be read as a

compelling narrative in its own right, revealing not only what Andrews describes

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as a “sense of an individual authorial personality, the sound of a distinctive
authorizing voice,” but also a suggestive portrait of a time and place: Each essay
presents, in Albert Stone’s terms, both an “individual story” and a “cultural
narrative” (“Introduction”). As essays intended to be “taken together,” however,
the series points to more signiﬁcant questions about autobiographical writing at the
turn of the century, particularly the autobiographical writing published in national
magazines such as the Independent. What implications for reading and
interpretation, for example, follow from the editorial suggestion of the Independent
that the essays “together picture the negro problem”? When those essays present
cultural narratives that implicitly and explicitly contest each other, furthermore,
how might the reader construct a coherent “picture” of the problem under
discussion? Finally, in the context of publication in a national magazine such as
the Independent, are the four commentators on the race question to be accorded
equal weight or authority, their equivalence as published essayists interpreted as a
textual testament to “social equality” of a kind?

A curious essay by one of the editors of the Independent, written as an
introduction to Holt’s collection of The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans,
offers an intriguing clue to the resonance of such questions at the turn of the
century. Attempting to explain the appeal of short, autobiographical essays such
as those collected and published by the Independent, Edwin E. Slosson notes three
primary “forces” leading to the development of such “new forms of literature”:

First, an impatience with “any detectable deviation from trut ”; second, an interest

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in “the concrete” over “the abstract” and the “individual” over the “generalized
types of humanity”; and third, “the spirit of democracy, the discovery of the
importance of the average man” (2-3). Slosson suggests that these forces coalesce
in the form of autobiography, and he goes so far as to nominate autobiography as
the primary genre of “the literature of the ﬁrture” (3). All prognostication aside,
however, Slosson’s formula provides a useful guide to the motives of the
progressive-minded Independent in procuring personal narratives by both white
and black Americans as a means of addressing the nation’s race question. More
signiﬁcantly, his comments illuminate the ways in which readers might have
responded to the short autobiographical essays published in the magazine as well
as how the writers of those essays—as readers of the Independent themselves—
may have conceived of their private, personal experience as a source of
commentary and insight on a national “problem.”

Each of the four essays on the race question published by the Independent
might be said to satisfy Slosson’s assertions about the appeal of autobiographical
writing at the turn of the century. Composed by “average” or “undistinguished”
Americans,6 the articles present ﬁrst-hand, forthright narratives grounded in the
concrete details of individual experience. Furthermore, each reﬂects the peculiar
tension between the private and the public, and between privacy and publicity, that

characterizes autobiography as a genre. Merging the details of personal experience

 

° The author of the fourth essay, Fannie Barrier Williams, is perhaps an exception
to this characterization; see below for a discussion of her public reform work.

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with commentary on a public debate and presenting private lives for public
examination and interpretation, the articles highlight the dual nature of
autobiographical writing as both individual truth-telling and social performance.
First, as essays that draw ﬁom autobiographical forms such as the confession, the
articles purport to present sincere, candid life stories: Picking up on this aspect of
autobiography’s appeal, the Independent praised the ﬁrst three essays as
“remarkable for their extraordinary frankness” and later noted the “genuine and
realistic manner” of all four (“Race Problem” 586; Williams 91). Indeed, like
witnesses protected from retribution after providing testimony, the names of the
ﬁrst three writers are withheld by the Independent “for reasons that will be evident
to the reader and that concern their social if not personal safety” (“Race Problem”
586).7 At the same time, an awareness of the personal risk of truth-telling is
matched in each of these essays by a sense of autobiography as public
performance, a regard not only for “social safety” of the narrator but also for the
social relevance of the narrated experience. Each of the writers presents a story of
personal experience, in other words, as a form of public gesture and social

commentary, an individual story as cultural narrative.

 

7 Several other editorial headnotes in the Independent point to a contemporary
presumption that truth-telling requires anonymity and that anonymity attests to
veracity. See “Free Speech in the South” (Independent 55 [15 Jan. 1903]: 137-39):
“The author of the following article is denied the freedom of signing her name in
order that she may have the freedom of writing freely . . .” (137). See, too,
“Memories of an Early Girlhood” and “Memories of an Early Boyhood” (Independent
55 [7 May 1903]: 1071-80): “As both autobiographies are true ones, the authors
naturally did not wish to have their names printed” (1071; emphasis added).

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While the four essays on the race question share certain fundamental
elements and appeal to similar interests among contemporary readers, however,
their bylines alone establish a clear line of separation by distinguishing the articles
by the “Southern Colored Woman” and the “Northern Negro” from those by white
women. In the context of tum-of-the-century America, racial identiﬁcation shaped
not only social relations but also textual ones: Neither all individual stories nor all
cultural narratives enjoyed the same reception and respect among all American
readers. To be sure, as the example of Washington’s Up from Slavery illustrates,
an individual story by an African-American might be received with praise and
encouragement if its accompanying cultural narrative found favor with the
majority of white Americans. But short of masking one’s racial identiﬁcation,8 no
African-American writer could write at the turn of the century as a truly
“undistinguished” American: The particular distinction imposed by even a single
“colored” grandparent or great-grandparent determined, to a considerable extent,
one’s position in American life as well as in American letters. More speciﬁcally,
in the context of that distinction, both the personal revelation and the public
gesture of autobiographical writing take on added resonance for the Aﬁican-

American writer. Truth-telling, in the charged atmosphere of the turn of the

 

8 Chesnutt, for example, successfully published his earliest stories in the Atlantic
Monthly without revealing his racial identiﬁcation (see Sedgwick 176, 235).
McElrath and Leitz argue that Chesnutt thereby “established his claim to fame as the
ﬁrst African-American prose ﬁction writer to penetrate the sanctum sanctorum of
Bostonian, and thus American, high culture” (7). For a sustained analysis of “Charles

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century, clearly endangered not merely the social but also the personal safety of
African-American individuals—a fact neatly symbolized in repeated incidents of
African-American newspaper presses being burned to the ground after the
publication of editorials that challenged white supremacy.9 Public expression,
meanwhile, inevitably engaged the individual Aﬁican-American writer in the role
of speaking both from and for “the race.” As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y.
McKay have noted, Aﬁican-American writers and their works have often been cast
in the role of synecdoche, a part standing for the ethnic whole,
signifying who “the Negro” was, what his or her “inherent”
intellectual potential might be, and whether or not the larger group
was entitled to the full range of rights and responsibilities of
American citizenship. (xxxiv)
Such peculiar “extraliterary burdens” on the Aﬁican-American writer,
furthermore, could only have been exacerbated by the interest at the turn of the
century in the concrete experience of a single individual as “representative” of a
group deﬁned by social position and ethnic or racial identiﬁcation (xxxiv).

That the contributions of the two Aﬁican—American women to the

Independent’s series on the race question were perceived in ways distinct from

 

Chesnutt, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Intersection of African-American Fiction and
Elite Culture,” see Price.

9 Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s editorials for the aptly titled newspaper, the Memphis
Free Speech, for example, incited a mob to burn her press and issue a death threat (D.
Hine 1144). Another casualty of “free speech” on the issue of lynching and white
supremacy was the Wilmington Record, burned to the ground during the Wilmington,
North Carolina race riot of 1898 (the event that inspired Chesnutt’s 1901 novel, The
Marrow of Tradition). A photo of a large group of white men posing in front of the
Record’s bumed-out press building appeared in Collier ’s Weekly soon after the riot
[26 Nov. 1898: 4], accentuating the public, symbolic nature of the action.

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those of the Northern and Southern white women can be inferred, ﬁrst, from the
titles given to the articles by the magazine’s editors. In spite of the similarities
among the four essays noted above, their presentation by the Independent implies a
qualitative difference inform, a difference grounded in distinctions of position and
point of view: The Northern white woman, one step removed from the South in
spite of several visits, can offer only “Observations” on Southern race relations;
the Southern woman, more intimately acquainted with the problem, can write of
more personal “Experiences”; but only the two Aﬁican-American women are
presumed to have the kind of ﬁrst-hand knowledge and experience necessary to
offer commentary on “the race problem” in the form of “autobiography.”

The latter assumption clearly requires examination, as it conﬂates—like the
“unasked question” isolated by Du Bois, How does it feel to be a problem?—
identity and racial identiﬁcation, individual lives and a communal “problem.” If,
however, such an assumption threatens to reduce the meaning of an individual life
to a synecdoche of a group’s experience or a commentary on a social problem, the
same limited conception also offers a unique opportunity to the African-American
autobiographer: Sanctioned by a representative of mainstream American culture,
the individual can write of his or her life in social, even national terms, claiming
the agency to be found in public truth-telling as well as in the social gesture of
publication. In this sense, the two African-American women who contributed to
the Independent’s short series on the race question had an opportunity to exploit

the possibilities of autobiography and publication at the turn of the century,

123

“authorized” by the magazine’s cultural authority to speak publicly and candidly
of personal experience and to personalize a national problem.
a: a: a:

In marked contrast to both the Peon and the Nurse who told their stories for
the Independent, the Southern Colored Woman who narrates “The Race
Problem—An Autobiography” takes pains to differentiate her life-story from that
of the slave, “new” or old. As if to declare immediately her relation to the legacy
of slavery, she begins her narrative not with the ﬁrst-person pronoun (cf. “I am a
negro . . .,” “I am a negro woman . . .”) but with an extended narrative of her
father’s proud life as a slave and his subsequent rise from slavery to self-
supporting and manly independence. Even before emancipation, the narrator
reports, her father had become “an expert blacksmith” and a self-respecting
husband and father; when the war ended and his former master offered to hire the
former slave as an employee, “he refused because the wages were too small” and
left the plantation with his wife and child in “a wagon he had made with his own
hands” (586). This scene, dramatized by the narrator to accentuate the ex-slave’s
ﬁgurative escape from slavery and embrace of freedom, contrasts sharply with the
story of the Georgia Peon: As if to highlight the latter’s mistaken actions and
assumptions, the narrator underscores her father’s savvy rejection of disingenuous
hospitality, his determination to work independently rather than contract with
former slave-holders, and his desire to educate and support his family free from the

intrusions of dominating or degenerate whites. As a child of this successﬁrl, self-

124

respecting entrepreneur—this larger-than-life patriarch who “was slave in name
only”—the narrator aligns her own life story with the pride of independence and
rejects the ignominious imagery of enslavement (5 86).

The narrator also casts her own life story as a continuation and a carrying-
forward of her father’s approach to life, identifying herself by many of the same
principles of hard work, capitalistic ingenuity, thrift, and self-reliance. The
narrator’s pride and sense of self clearly derive in part from her success in
adopting and applying these F ranklinian virtues: It is because of “most ﬁ'ugal
living and strict economy,” she asserts, that she has only once “lived in a rented
house,” has never attended a public school, and has achieved a level of comfort
and satisfaction in her living standards (5 87). Though at times the narrator
projects certain “manly” virtues onto her husband and father in order to uphold an
image of her own feminine virtue and decorum, it is clear that her portrayal of
worldly success and ﬁnancial security is intended as an attestation of her own
selﬂrood and integrity. She sets out to prove her social and individual worth, in a
sense, by exhibiting her economic worth, and by documenting her successful
application of quintessential “American” principles.

Read as a representative of her race, synecdochically signifying the
potential and worth of the larger whole, the narrator’s declaration of independence
and industriousness clearly works to challenge widely held assumptions about the
inherent deﬁciency and inferiority of African-Americans as a group. Indeed, in

contrast to the narratives of “new slavery” published by the Independent, this

125

narrator casts Aﬁican-American existence as anything but static, while she
characterizes Southern whites as insidiously clinging to the ways of the past. Her
story implies, ﬁnally, that the race problem persists in American society through
no fault of the African-American descendants of slaves but rather because of the
enduring, even increasing hatred of those descendants by whites. “The Southern
whites dislike more and more the educated colored man,” the narrator asserts, even
as they ignore the virtues of individuals in stereotyping the entire race: “The

9”

respectable, intelligent colored people are ‘carefully unknown, she notes, while
“the ignorant and vicious are carefully known and all of their traits cried aloud”
(5 89). In writing “an autobiography” of “the race problem,” the narrator clearly
seeks to make known the “good traits and virtues” of many Aﬁican-Americans.
But autobiography also serves the narrator as a powerﬁrl form of social
critique, a means of personalizing the prejudice and racism that undermine not
only Aﬁican-American industriousness and self-reliance but also personal integrity
and selfhood. Just as economic worth comes to signify and afﬁrm personal worth
in the narrator’s life story, so too does the economic threat of white supremacy
parallel the more profound challenge to emotional well-being that results from a
system of institutionalized inequality and insult. The narrator again looks to her
father’s life for an example of Aﬁican-American determination to resist and
overcome economic intimidation: Though his small store was “burned out once”

and threatened in other ways, he “ﬁnally” established “a large grocery store and

feed store attached,” a symbol, along with “his coveted white house with green

126

blinds,” of success and security in the face of racial persecution and prejudice

(5 86-87). But the narrator turns to her own experience to document the emotional
trials that attend the African-American experience of “the race problem.” Her
narrative increasingly moves from the practical details of her “frugal living and
strict economy” to the more complicated, painful, and inexpressible feelings of her
life as a “Southern Colored Woman,” directing her brief autobiography to that
unasked question named by Du Bois: How does it feel to be a problem?

In a treatment of that question not unlike that of Du Bois, the narrator
grounds her answer in the initial discovery, as a child, “that being ‘colored’ made a
difference” (588). Du Bois’s representation of the moment when the “shadow” of
racial distinction ﬁrst “swept across” him portrays the sudden realization of racial
difference as a loss of childhood innocence, a shock that interrupts an otherwise
“merry” childhood exchange of “gorgeous visiting-car ”(Souls 4). The narrator
of “The Race Problem—An Autobiography” invokes a similar childhood variation
on an adult social ritual—“play dinners”—as the setting and source of her “very
ﬁrst humiliation” (588). Where Du Bois recalls only a dismissive “glance” from a
white classmate (4), however, this narrator reconstructs the utterance of her young

playmate:

“I like to come over to your house to play, we have such good times,
and your ma has such good preserves; but don’t you tell my ma I eat

over here. My ma says you all are nice, clean folks . . . . I know she
would whip me if I ate with you, tho, because you are colored, you
know.” (588)

127

This recollected moment of childhood disunion is noteworthy in the context of
racial antagonism and violence at the turn of the century for its lack of explicit
hostility or physical brutality. The searing humiliation that the narrator recalls
feeling is not the explicit and intentional humiliation of the Jim Crow railroad car,
which she experiences as an adult, but rather a product of the playmate’s very
innocence and na’r‘veté. The childhood game of “keeping a secret” here makes the
young “colored” girl the secret itself, an embarrassment and a violation of some
unspoken rule, while the presumption of her inferiority appears self-evident, a
secret to no one (“. . . you are colored, you know”). Like the schoolroom scene
that Du Bois recalls, this moment does not dissolve the bond between the two
playmates but does permanently alter the grounds on which they associate: “The
little girl came often to play with me after that,” the narrator notes, “and we were
ﬁiends again, but we never had any more play dinners” (588). Unable to make
sense of the event as a child, unsatisﬁed with her mother’s “explanation—or,
rather, lack of explanation” (588), the narrator presents the scene as a nagging,
irreconcilable moment in her life story, a source of continuing disillusionment and
psychic distress.

But this brief, deeply personal recollection also presents, in miniature, a
cultural narrative of the production and reproduction Of social inequality and racial
prejudice in America. Notably, the only threat of violence in the recorded scene is
the whipping feared by the young white girl should her clandestine “play

dinners”—those naive childish enactments of social equality—be discovered. The

128

violence increasingly used to enforce white supremacy at the end of the nineteenth
century, so much a part of the discussion of the race problem at the turn of the
century, was unknown to the narrator as a child: Her ﬁrst encounter with racial
distinction came not through an experience of “the real horrible things,” things that
she would learn of later, but rather through her exposure to the implicit threat of
violence that reinforced white supremacy among Southern whites. The
inconceivable and inexplicable notion that her ﬁiend would be punished if their
association were known, in other words, supports the narrator’s basic assertion that
the roots of racial division lie in the hatred of Aﬁican-Americans by whites. At
the same time, the narrator advances a particular cultural narrative through this
scene to explain the generation—and the generational nature—of racial prejudice
in American society.

Notably, the Southern Aﬁican-American woman’s treatment of the race
problem by way of childhood recollections connects her narrative not only to Du
Bois’s Souls of Black Folk but also to the article that follows hers in the
Independent. In “Experiences of the Race Problem,” by A Southern White
Woman, scenes of childhood play once again personalize the race issue even as
they naturalize a particular cultural narrative. Like her “colored” counterpart, this
narrator begins her narrative by describing her father, in this case not a slave but
“the son of a Southern gentleman,” a Confederate soldier, and a Ku Klux Klan
member (590). The narrator’s wide-ranging article on the race problem presents,

in predictable formulae, nearly all of the prevailing stereotypes of the white South

129

at the turn of the century regarding the “degeneracy” and “the almost universal
depravity of negroes” (593). But her recollections of childhood in particular serve
a more speciﬁc function: asserting that the white Southemer’s appreciation of
racial distinctions (and white racial superiority) develops “naturally” during
childhood.

When she was a child, the narrator reports, her only playmates were “the
little black girls” on her father’s plantation, and her memories of childhood center
on the nature of their play together (591). Though she recalls believing as a child
that her “companionship” with the girls was entirely “free from restraint,” the
narrator recognizes in hindsight that “it was really controlled by the instincts and
customs of our respective races” (591). She recalls the kind, protective treatment
she bestowed upon her playmates, but she also makes it clear that “there was no
question of ‘fair play’ between us; for quite naturally I took all the advantages
there were to be had”:

If we played “keeping house,” I was the father and the mother of the
family, they the children, subject to the most stringent discipline.
But we never played “come to see” one another, because they were
negroes, and we felt the social impropriety of such a situation as that
fact involved. (591)
These recollections of simple childhood games, like the “play dinners” recalled by
the African-American woman, clearly serve to advance a particular cultural
narrative about the proper, “natural” relations of the races in American society.

Writing at a time when childhood play “was perceived to have an important role in

socialization and education” (Mergen 403), the two Southern narrators both invoke

130

their own childhood games—and in particular those that imitated the social rituals
of the adult world—as incipient scenes in their stories Of the “race problem.” But
the cultural narratives implied by the two articles, not surprisingly, diverge
profoundly: What the African-American narrator presents as a humiliating
violation of the natural affection of two children, an affront forever irreconcilable
with her deepest sense of common humanity, the white narrator offers as a natural
outgrowth of childhood “instincts.” Furthermore, while the former presents a
suggestion of violence at the heart of white society, the latter presents violence and
social control as inevitable and necessary components of interracial relations, even
as those are imitated by children: Physical violence against Aﬁican-Americans is
as natural, the narrator implies, as the “discipline” used by a parent to correct a
wayward child. Finally, the white woman also implies that the “instinct” of race
distinctions emerges without prompting in children of both races, suggesting that
her childhood playmates unconsciously perceived, as clearly as she did, the
“impropriety” of enacting social equality even in a childhood game.

One imagines that the Aﬁican-American woman who narrated her story of
the race problem might reply that the feelings of the white woman’s childhood
playmates were, in this case, “carefully unknown,” both as a result of and in the
interest of the South’s ideological conviction of ﬁrndamental, biological difference
between the races. And in fact, revealing gaps in the white woman’s cultural
narrative of “natural” race distinctions appear in her recollection of another

childhood incident. The narrator recalls that as a child, though unaware of “why

131

one negro was black and another yellow,” she “conceived a violent antipathy” for
“a little mulatto boy” on the plantation (591). Acting on that seemingly natural
abhorrence, the narrator seized the boy, “held him against the wall,” and sprayed
his face with ink “until it was of a uniform, legitimate blackness” (591). The boy
appealed to the narrator’s mother for redress, but she, “with a face that expressed
no more emotion than a mask,” banished the boy from the house and told his
mother that “he is nearer the right color than I ever saw him before” (591). This
brief narrative undermines, ﬁrst, the narrator’s claim that she was “never tempted
to treat [her “little black companions”] unkindly”; but more signiﬁcantly, the scene
unwittingly offers another cultural narrative about the sexual and psychological,
not “natural,” sources of interracial animosity in the South. The narrator fails to
disguise entirely what the mother veils behind an emotionless “mask”: the
implication that her own father (whom she describes at the start of her article as a
typical Southern philanderer) likely fathered as well the little boy that she
tormented as a child. The narrator does not explore the possibility that her “violent
antipathy” for the mulatto boy arose not from any unconscious revulsion at an
“unnatural” mingling, represented by his “yellow” skin, but rather from her
unconscious awareness of a natural bond uniting her and the boy—and the
obligation of “fair play” that such a bond would imply.

Instead, the Southern white woman maintains throughout her article that she
“was not taught these race distinctions” but rather “was born with them,” and she

suggests, further, that “they are intensiﬁed in each succeeding generation of white

132

children” (213). She implies, that is, that the awareness of race distinctions is not
only innate but evolving, at least among whites—African-Americans, she argues,
having “no sense of race integrity” themselves, also have no strong sense of
natural race distinctions (592). The contrast with the Aﬁican-American woman’s
commentary on the race problem, once more, could not be more striking: While
both women observe an exacerbation of racial antipathy on the part of whites, one
advances biological and evolutionary reasons for that growth, the other social and
psychological motives. Indeed, the African-American narrator draws on a similar
notion of natural evolution to come to a antithetical conclusion: “In the natural
order of things,” she notes, “our children will be better educated than we”; should
the hatred of whites for “the educated colored man” grow correspondingly, she
concludes, “I shudder to think of the outcome” (5 89).

Finally, however, the autobiographical content of the Aﬁican-American
woman’s article belies her stated conviction that educational achievement and
economic advancement are at the root of the race problem, as her personal
reactions to racial persecution undermine any such cultural narrative that seeks to
justify or explain racial prejudice and violence. In contrast to the Southern white
woman, who invokes her childhood self-assurance as proof of the self-evidence of
race distinctions, the Aﬁican-American woman presents childhood experiences
and emotions that could not then—and still cannot—be “reconciled”: All attempts
to resolve them are, in the end, no more satisfying or sufﬁcient than her mother’s

“explanation—or, rather, lack of explanation” (588).

133

What emerges from the Aﬁican-American woman’s commentary on the
race problem, ﬁnally, is a sense of the profound tension in her own life between
two individual stories and between two cultural narratives. Her autobiography
includes, on the one hand, a life-story marked by clear aims and clean living, by
faith in the success that comes of “frugal living and strict economy”; and, on the
other hand, a narrative of thwarted ideals, public humiliation, inexplicable events
and inexpressible feelings. The ﬁrst story presumes that a life regulated by a self-
imposed, “iron-bound rule” of hard work and thrift will prosper and advance
(587); the second story records incidents of humiliation and insult that the narrator
can “never get used to,” that are “new each time,” that ﬁt into no satisfactory
narrative (5 88). The social implications of each of these stories, likewise, reveal
the disjunction of two competing cultural narratives within one autobiography: The
ﬁrst, a narrative of African-American progress, achieved through education,
economic advancement, and the application of quintessential American virtues; the
second, a disjunctive, senseless narrative that seeks in vain to explain the
escalating violence and hatred directed against Aﬁican-Americans at the end of the
nineteenth century.

These two cultural narratives, it might also be noted, imply two distinct
appeals on the part of this narrator to the audience of the Independent. The ﬁrst
form of appeal—as old as the tradition of Aﬁican-American autobiography
itself—asks for individual and social recognition from white America by testifying

to the essential humanity, intellectual capacity, and commitment to the ideals of

134

American citizenship of African-Americans. In making such an appeal, this
narrator portrays her acceptance and adherence to the dominant values of white
America, particularly those F ranklinian virtues repeatedly invoked by Washington
in Up from Slavery; on a more elementary level, meanwhile, she reinforces her
intellectual ability and her engagement in the cultural community represented by
the Independent’s audience by including several intertextual references in her
autobiography to other life stories published in the magazine. Clearly, the narrator
of “The Race Problem” conceives of her story’s broader social signiﬁcance in
presenting a portrait of African-American virtue, intellect, and ability. But her
autobiography also incorporates an appeal of a very different sort, petitioning a
white audience for sympathetic identiﬁcation with a victim of racial injustice. In
making this appeal, the narrator fulﬁlls the role of the true autobiographical
subject, rejecting the self-effacing role adopted by Washington and other Aﬁican-
American autobiographers at the turn of the century (Andrews, “Forgotten” 23).
By refusing to limit her report on the race problem to the outlines of what might be
called her social identity,10 and by incorporating into her narrative a profoundly
“problematic” sense of self, this “carefully unknown” Aﬁican-American woman
seizes the personal agency and enacts the public gesture of autobiographical truth-

telling.

 

‘° Writing of Up from Slavery, Sidonie Smith argues that Washington “is
ultimately imprisoned in his social identity” because he narrates “a two-dimensional
tale of the facts of his education and his work, not a self-conscious or self-analytical
(three-dimensional) tale. . .” (228).

135

The third and fourth articles in the Independent’s series on the race
problem—a Northern white woman’s “Observations of the Southern Race
Feeling” and “A Northern Negro’s Autobiography”—share a sense of critical
distance from the race question that is lacking in the ﬁrst two contributions.
Insofar as the race problem was perceived at the turn of the century as primarily a
Southern problem, of course, the two women address the issue from a certain
geographical remove; more speciﬁcally, both women assert that they remained
largely ignorant of the race question until they ﬁrst visited the South as adults.
The Northern white woman claims that she “hardly knew that there was a negro
question until [she] went to the South to live” (595); Fannie Barrier Williams
(author of “A Northern Negro’s Autobiography”), likewise, declares that until she
“became a young woman and went South to teach [she] had never been reminded

7”

that [she] belonged to an ‘inferior race (91). Furthermore, within the context of
the Independent’s series, the two articles by Northern women are distinguished
from those by Southern women by the element of intertextuality: The northern
white woman responds directly to “one of the preceding articles” (595), while
Williams frames her essay as an explicit reply to the initial series. While the two
essays function independently as ﬁrst-person statements on the race problem, then,
they lack something of the direct and unmediated quality of the initial two essays

insofar as they work to rebut or “supplement” those earlier statements (Williams

91).

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The Northern white woman’s essay, in particular, is clearly intended (by its
author and, perhaps, by the Independent) to function as editorial comment rather
than autobiographical expression. The narrator employs childhood recollections,
for example, only to disclaim any “sectional prejudice” and to position herself with
regard to the race issue (595). The “Race Feeling” in the article’s title is not her
own, but merely the subject of her “observations”—a term whose twin meanings
neatly capture the narrator’s position as a direct witness of Southern ways (i.e., an
observer of) but also as an author of deliberative commentary about what she saw
(i.e., her observations on). As a reasoned comment from a purportedly
disinterested party, the Northern woman’s report on “the southern race feeling”
powerfully controverts the conclusions of the Southern white woman: She asserts,
in short, that “the Southerner, no less than the Northerner, has a collection of negro
theories, and upon all occasions he brings them out draped in the same lurid
rhetoric” in order to “conceal his relentless purpose to deny the negro every right
and pleasure which resemble those of the white man” (597). Given the intertextual
nature Of the Northern woman’s article and the force with which she challenges the
ideological bases of the southern woman’s narrative, it seems probable that the
Independent deliberately sought out an individual who might offer a third point of
view to complement those of the two Southern women and to advance a liberal,
progressive critique of Southern ideology on the race question. Her commentary
tips the scales, as it were, in favor of African-American civil rights if not complete

social equality. More broadly, the Northern woman’s article afﬁrms the

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progressive arguments of the day that “education naturally inclines” the “negro” to
a peaceable and civilized life and that the race problem will, in a context of
equitable and just treatment, “work itself out naturally to the good of both races”
(599).

If the article by the Northern white woman appears to have been solicited
by the Independent to advance a particular viewpoint, the “Autobiography” by
Fannie Barrier Williams is explicitly presented as one of many “replies” that the
magazine received, selected because it “discusses a phase of the negro problem not
touched upon” by the others (91). That “phase” is, presumably, the inﬂuential
movement for reform led by African-American women at the end of the nineteenth
century, a movement to which Williams contributed in signiﬁcant ways. At the
start of her public career in the early 18903, for example, Williams established an
interracial hospital and training school for nurses; in 1893, she was one of the few
African-American women to present a lecture to the World’s Congress of
Representative Women during the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago,
where she spoke on “The Intellectual Progress and Present Status of the Colored
Women of the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation.” At the turn of
the century, Williams contributed to a volume of essays entitled A New Negro for
a New Century (largely credited to Booker T. Washington), in which she is
introduced as “The Famous Club Woman, Writer and Author” (MacBrady 1). In
her essay for that volume, Williams presented a chronicle of the inﬂuential “club

movement” among African-American women, an association of women across the

138

United States “pledged to the serious work of a social reconstruction of the negro
race” “Club” 402). As one of the leading ﬁgures in these reform movements,
Williams envisioned herself as one of “a race of women” rapidly creating “public
faith” in their virtue and ability and justly earning a “place in the classiﬁcation of
progressive womanhood in America” (402). The Independent, meanwhile, surely
recognized in Williams an important voice concerning this signiﬁcant new “phase”
of the race problem and an individual uniquely qualiﬁed and positioned to write “a
Northern Negro’s Autobiography.”

Williams opens her article with a narrative of childhood that engages the
earlier essays on the issue of the “natural” origin of racial distinctions. A child of
free parents and grandparents, Williams spent her childhood and adolescence in a
western New York town in which her’s was for some time “the only colored
family” (91). Describing her social interactions as a child with white “associates,
schoolmates and companions,” Williams writes that “these relationships were
natural, spontaneous and free from all restraint” (91). “We went freely to each
other’s houses . . . and joined on equal terms in all school entertainments with
perfect comradeship,” she continues, all the while “liv[ing] in blissful ignorance of
the fact that we were practicing the unpardonable sin of ‘social equality’” (91).
Echoing the words of the Southern white woman, who maintained that her
childhood interracial companionship had only the appearance of being “free from

restraint,” Williams parodies the notion that children unconsciously heed an innate

sense of race distinctions. Later, describing her return to her home town for her

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wedding, Williams again notes that, though she and her husband and family “were
the only persons to lend color to the occasion,” “it seemed all a simple part of the
natural life we lived” in which racial distinctions carried no essential signiﬁcance
(92). It was only in the South, Williams provocatively contends, that “for the ﬁrst
time” she “began life as a colored person, in all that that term implies” (91).
Confronted by a society rigidly “divided into white and black lines,” where all the
verities and certainties and “rules of conduct” learned in her childhood had to be
“discounted,” Williams experiences “a shattering of cherished ideals” like that
which affected Du Bois and the anonymous Southern African-American woman at
an earlier age (92, 91). In presenting her own autobiographical portrait of a
childhood free from racial prejudice and hatred, like the latter narrators, Williams
offers an idyllic vision of racial harmony as a powerful counterpoint to her adult
experiences of the “tyranny of a dark complexion” in the American South (92).
Williams writes Of the lasting personal impact of racial prejudice in a
manner reminiscent of the Southern African-American woman’s narrative,
professing, for example, that she has “never quite recovered from the shock and
pain” of her “ﬁrst bitter realization” of what it means to be “a colored woman” in
America (92). However, as her narrative moves from childhood recollections to
adult experiences, Williams modiﬁes the tenor of her article as well, moving away
from the depiction of her private, emotional reactions to the race problem and

toward a description of her public, reform-minded responses to it. Williams

continues to draw from personal experiences throughout the essay, but her focus

140

shifts from the psychological “shock” and “pain” and bitterness of her experience
of racism to her social “interest in various reform wor ” (92). This subtle but
signiﬁcant modulation begins early in Williams’s essay when, after expressing her
horror at Southern race distinctions, she concludes: “But, in spite of all this, I tried
to adapt myself to these hateful conditions” (92). Through the remainder of her
brief autobiography, Williams highlights her various encounters with the “hateful
conditions” of racism and her efforts to ameliorate them as a public ﬁgure, but
sidesteps the more personal issue of her own feelings as an object of hatred and a
victim of prejudice. Williams also frequently depicts her own small triumphs over
unjust laws and prejudices, as if to highlight her self-reliant, individualistic
responses to racial prejudice. At one point, for example, Williams describes a
successﬁrl attempt to avoid the “Jim Crow” car by speaking in French to the
conductor, a small deception that she justiﬁes by arguing that the South’s
“barbarous laws did not allow a lady to be both comfortable and honest” (95).
While she admits that she “carried an abiding heartache for the reﬁned and
helpless colored women who must live continuously under these repressive and
unjust laws,” Williams tempers her own critique of those laws by emphasizing her
frequently successful evasions of them.

Notably, Williams tempers the autobiographical content of her article even
as she mitigates her condemnation of racial prejudice. “It is only just to add,” she
notes near the close of her essay, “that I have traveled in the ﬁrst-class—that is,

white——cars all through the South . . . but I have never received an insult or

141

discourtesy from a Southern white man” (96). Williams pulls back, as it were,
from depicting her most profound and personal experiences of the race problem,
focusing instead on how she has “adapted” to racist environments and, equally,
how she has helped other, less fortunate women adapt to even more “hateful
conditions.” Indeed, in light of Williams’s commitment to “various reform”
causes and to ameliorating the “many inequalities suffered by young colored
women” in particular, it is perhaps not surprising that even in writing an
autobiography she deﬁnes herself largely in terms of her engagement on behalf of
others. However, her autobiographical diplomacy might also reﬂect an awareness
of the social recognition that attends publication, something that the three
anonymous writers whose essays preceded hers would not have shared to the same
extent. Cognizant that her “social if not personal safety” would not be protected
by anonymity and that her public image would be grounded not only in her words
and her racial identiﬁcation but also in her name, Williams recognized the danger
of publicly expressing unguarded feelings or unrestrained emotions on the race
question. To be sure, Williams presents in her recollections of childhood a
powerful critique of the ideology of “natural” racial distinctions and a vision of
genuine, unconstrained bonds of affection between the races. But by accentuating
what might be termed “experiences” and “observations” of the race problem over
personal recounting and psychological accounting, Williams writes a life-story that

effaces her private sense of self in favor of an autobiography of her social identity.

142

In contributing to the Independent’s brief series on the race problem, Fannie
Barrier Williams and the anonymous “Southern Colored Woman” did not seize the
agency of publication or the opportunity for public truth-telling in the same fashion
or to identical ends. However, the publication of their autobiographical narratives
in a leading, national American magazine lends to both narratives a signiﬁcance
beyond their explicit content as individual stories or their implicit assertions as
cultural narratives. As forceful personal responses to the unasked question, How
does it feel to be a problem?, the two autobiographical essays can be read as
contributions to a broader expression of “the Negro point of view” in American
periodicals at the turn of the century. Appealing to a desire for human interest
stories on the part of American readers even as they appeal for human rights and
full social, political, and personal recognition for African-Americans, the authors
of these (and other) autobiographical essays exploit the opportunities for public
truth-telling that the Independent afforded them. Taking advantage of both the
form of the personal narrative and the forum of the nationally-circulated
periodical, they compose individual life stories that also advance powerful
readings of American national life, cultural narratives of Aﬁican-American ability
and achievement, commitment and contribution.

Writing not only to express a “Negro point of view” but also “from the
feminine standpoint,” these African-American autobiographers inevitably fashion

their personal narratives within clear social parameters limiting free expression.

143

Desiring not only to protect personal and “social safety” but also to be regarded as
exemplars of Aﬁican-American propriety, virtue, and reﬁnement, both women
recognize that they cannot be “perfectly fra ” (in the sense that Du Bois intends
in his challenge to S. S. McClure) in writing of their private experiences of the
race problem. The Aﬁican-American woman writing from the South, for instance,
offers a few prurient details about the “advances” of white men of her region, but
her examples—a cashier holding her hand while “utter[ing] some vile request”; a
“shoe man” taking “liberties”—function as much to attest to her untainted
Victorian standards of decency and virtue as to reveal the depths of Southern male
depravity (587). Williams, too, as noted, considers it “only just” to clear the
Southern white men that she had encountered of any impropriety or offense. Both
writers, to be sure, raise the more troubling issue of the sexual assault and
oppression of Aﬁican-American women in the South: The Southern woman
expresses “dread” about the future her daughters might face (589), while Williams
notes that “the moral feature of this problem has complications that it would seem
better not to dwell on” (96). But they address this aspect of the race problem
obliquely, indirectly, avoiding a “perfectly frank” discussion of subjects perhaps
deemed too salacious or unseemly for public commentary.

However, the “feminine standpoint” also offers these and other African-
American women a powerful position from which to speak with authority and to
challenge prevailing cultural narratives about the race problem. Presenting

narrative representations of the personal and familial experience of the race

144

problem and, more speciﬁcally, of its speciﬁcally domestic aspects, they bring the
problem both literally and ﬁguratively “closer to home.” In doing so, these
narrators reverse two prominent uses of domestic imagery at the turn of the
century: ﬁrst, the image of the sacred domestic sphere of the Southern white womn
invaded by the “black beast,” a frequently invoked stereotype of Aﬁican-American
male criminality and savagery; and second, the image of an equally hateful
invasion of the domestic sphere should “social equality” become the rule of
American society. In writing personal, emotion-ﬁlled narratives such as those
published by the Independent, these autobiographers wrench the imagery of the
domestic sphere from those who use it against them and wed that imagery instead
to powerful representations of African-American humanity.

These autobiographical narratives by African-American women also issue a
more general but more signiﬁcant claim on white American readers at the turn of
the century that, once acknowledged, can not be entirely revoked. By publishing
individual representations of both a “Negro point of view” and a “feminine
standpoint” on the race problem, these Aﬁican-American women write
themselves, in effect, into the discussion of a national problem. In her account of
“The Club Movement among Colored Women of America,” published in 1900 in
A New Negro for a New Century, Fannie Barrier Williams praises that movement
for “helping to give respect and character to a race of women who had no place in
the classiﬁcation of progressive womanhood in America”: For the ﬁrst time, she

suggests, “the terms good and bad, bright, and dull, plain and beautiful are now as

145

applicable to colored women as to women of other races” (402). In this curious,
seemingly modest achievement Williams discems a profound advance for African-
American women at the turn of the century, a growing recognition of their
ﬁrndamental humanity and a gradual but signiﬁcant alteration of the very language
of the discussion surrounding the race problem. That simple, profound alteration
as well as that growing recognition must be credited in part to those Aﬁican-
American individuals, both women and men, who contributed autobiographical
narratives to periodicals such as the Independent at the turn of the century and, in
so doing, claimed the agency to be found in answering questions too long unasked

by white America.

146

Chapter Three

Childhood in (Native) America:
American Indian Autobiography
at the Turn of the Century

It is one of the paradoxes marking the study of Native American literature
that autobiographical narratives, so signiﬁcant to any reckoning of that literature,
have no direct antecedent in traditional American Indian cultures. Indeed, as
Arnold Krupat notes, “Strictly speaking . . . Indian autobiography is a
contradiction in terms,” given that the most fundamental elements of
autobiography as it is typically conceived—“egocentric individualism, historicism,
and writing”—simply do not have direct parallels in pre-contact native cultures
(For Those 29-30). Nonetheless, critical interest in Native American
autobiography has increased exponentially during the last decade, spurred in part
by Krupat’s own groundbreaking theoretical work on the subject.1 Much of this
work has focused on autobiographical texts that feature Indian subjects but are not

independently “authored” by those subjects in any conventional sense. Marked by

 

‘ See, for example, Krupat’s For Those Who Come After (1985), The Voice in the
Margin (1989), “Native American Autobiography” (1991), and Native American
Autobiography (1994). The parameters of the study of Native American
autobiography in the past decade have been set, to a considerable degree, by Krupat
and a handful of other scholars: See Brumble (for bibliographic and literary-historical
work); Bataille and Sands (for studies of Indian women’s autobiography); and Wong
(for suggestive work on pre-contact “oral and pictographic autobiographical
narratives” and their resonance in later Native American literature).

147

’what Krupat terms “original bicultural composite composition,” these texts reﬂect
the “original” contribution of an Indian subject (i.e., not merely tribal stories or
legends) as well as the work of a collaborator, in most cases white, who
“translates, transcribes, compiles, edits, interprets, polishes, and ultimately
determines the form of the text in writing” (F or Those 30-31). In spite of (or
perhaps because of) the complications that such texts introduce into traditional
(Western) conceptions of authorship and autobiography, critics have been drawn to
them as sites at which “two cultures meet,” “the textual equivalent of the frontier”
(31).

Such bicultural, collaborative autobiographies were produced and published
with increasing frequency at the turn of the twentieth century, one result of the
marked upsurge of professionalized ethnographic study of Native American
cultures a century ago. But the simultaneous expansion by the U. S. government
of the national campaign to educate the remaining Indian population enabled more
and more Native Americans to produce written narratives in English without the
aid of any translator or transcriber. Educated Indians at the turn of the century,
some armed with advanced degrees from respected “white” institutions Of higher
learning, began not only to compose but also to publish autobiographical narratives
without the aid of “editors, ghosts, and amanuenses” (Brumble, American 72).
These narratives, as many critics have noted, are “bicultural” in their own way,
representing not only textually but often thematically the experience of individuals

who know two worlds, two languages, two ways of life—individuals who, in a

148

sense, embody both the “native informant” of the ethnographer’s study and the
ethnographer him- or herself.2 If such ﬁgures can more easily be read as
autobiographers in the conventional sense, having produced individual, not
composite, compositions, they also point to a paradox at the heart of the bi-cultural
experience. Belonging fully to neither an Indian nor a “white” world, such
individuals write their personal narratives in order to represent one world to the
other; they negotiate the distance and the barriers between “savage” and
“civilized” within texts composed in the language of “civilization.” As Indians
who have submitted, voluntarily or involuntarily, to the discipline of white-run
schools, to the dominance of the English language, and to the conventions of the
autobiographical form, these writers produce narratives that, perhaps even more
than ethnographic “composite compositions,” represent “the textual equivalent of
the frontier.”

The painful predicament that such a cultural position created for educated
Indians at the turn of the century resonates in the autobiographical writing they
produced. Charles Alexander Eastman, Zitkala-Sa, and Francis La Flesche, three
of the best-known Native American writers of the period, all probe this
predicament in their personal narratives, though with varying degrees of regret:

Eastrnan’s enthusiastic embrace of “civilization,” for example, contrasts sharply

 

2 Wong makes a similar suggestion when she argues that Charles Alexander
Eastman “incorporated the collaborative process into himself, combining the
functions of both white editor and Indian informant” (141).

149

with Zitkala-Sa’s articulation of psychic dislocation. But the disparity among their
responses only highlights the similarity of the means of expression that each
selects. Even by writing their experiences independently and in English, ﬁrst of
all, these three writers reveal a certain submission to the dominance of a Euro-
American, text-based culture. Likewise, by choosing to write autobiography in
particular, they highlight their status as individuals, isolated, by choice or by
coercion, from a primary identiﬁcation with their tribe and forced, as it were, into
a sense of themselves framed by what Krupat terms “egocentric individualism”
and “historicism.” That all three autobiographers published their writing for a
primarily white, eastern audience, ﬁnally, points to their similar positioning as bi-
cultural mediators of a sort, engaging “civilization” without leaving behind their
“savage” pasts.

But perhaps the most intriguing correspondence among these three and
many other Indian autobiographers at the turn of the century is the common choice
of childhood as a primary topic of their autobiographical writing. Such a choice
may appear to be self-evident in light of the simple correspondence of their
experience of “Indian life” and their childhood years as well as the Western
preoccupation with childhood as fundamental to the shape of one’s life story. But
as H. David Brumble notes, this latter conception, like those outlined by Krupat,
does not have a parallel in most Native American cultures, in which “the story of
one’s life is the story of one’s deeds, one’s adult deeds” (American 49).

Conversely, then, the choice of childhood as subject might be said to reﬂect the

150

extent to which these autobiographers had “assimilated” Western cultural
assumptions. This implication inspires, for example, Bemd Peyer’s argument that
Eastman portrays “a somewhat idealized, nostalgic childhood . . . made to
correspond to values adopted in the course of his later Christian upbringing”
(“Charles” 233). But this assertion, too, raises troubling questions: Why, for
example, would Native American writers seek to mediate the distance between
white and Indian cultures by focusing on childhood at a time when Indians as a
group were widely perceived as a “child race,” requiring supervision and aid as
“wards” of the superior white “civilization”? One might expect, rather, portraits Of
Indian adulthood, and Indian manhood in particular, in all its complexity and
particularity and self-sufﬁciency. Instead, most Native American autobiographers
at the turn of the century opted to focus their narratives on the period of childhood,
a choice that seems curiously limited and limiting in light of the social, political,
and emotional distance separating Indian and white worlds.

However, in the autobiographical narratives of Eastman, La Flesche, and
Zitkala-Sa, at least, childhood does not represent merely an occasion for
“idealized, nostalgic” reveries; on the contrary, recollections and representations of
childhood constitute a signiﬁcant and enabling element of their bi-cultural
expressions. But no arbitrary measure Of their allegiance to tribal identity or their
“assimilation” to “white civilization” can illuminate the artistic choices made by
these autobiographers. Instead, a historically sensitive consideration of their bi-

cultural position requires an attentive reading of both the autobiographical form of

151

their narratives and the forum—speciﬁcally, mainstream American publishing
houses and periodicals—through which they reached an audience. Such
attentiveness to both the production and the consumption of their texts, both the
content and the context, illuminates the uses of childhood as topic and theme in so
many Indian autobiographies at the turn of the century and, at the same time,
uncovers the signiﬁcance of leading American periodicals as another “frontier” of
sorts where “two cultures meet.” Beginning with Charles Eastman’s earliest
autobiographical narratives, published in the children’s magazine St. Nicholas,
then brieﬂy setting Eastman’s work next to that of two of his contemporaries, La
Flesche’s book-length story of boyhood in The Middle Five and Zitkala-Sa’s series
of personal narratives in the Atlantic Monthly, this chapter examines the various
ways in which these Indian writers engaged American “civilization” at the turn of

the century on the social and discursive “frontier” of American childhood.

152

I

“Is it right for St. Nick?”:
Charles Alexander Eastman’s “Recollections of the Wild Life”

In 1916, after establishing himself not only as a medical doctor and a
spokesperson for Indian affairs but also as a writer of some repute, Charles
Eastman published From the Deep Woods to Civilization: Chapters in the
Autobiography of an Indian.3 In that text, his second ﬁrll-length book of
autobiography, Eastman recalls the fortuitous beginning of his literary career:

While I had plenty of leisure, I began to put upon paper some of my
earliest recollections, with the thought that our children might some
day like to read of that wilderness life. When my wife discovered
what I had written, she insisted upon sending it to St. Nicholas.
Much to my surprise, the sketches were immediately accepted and
appeared during the following year. This was the beginning of my
ﬁrst book, “Indian Boyhood,” which was not completed until several
years later. (139)

This straightforward, conventionally modest account of early literary aspirations
offers a number of clues to Eastman’s self-conscious narrative persona in his
autobiographical writing. (As his wife, Elaine Goodale Eastman, notes in her
Foreword to the volume, “much that cannot be told may be read ‘between the

9”

lines [xviii].) First, the account begins with all the marks of Eastman’s

,9, cc

successful transition “from the deep woods to civilization . plenty of leisure”; the

nostalgic “recollections” of middle-age; thoughts of his posterity and the legacy of

 

3 For a biography of Eastman, see Wilson. Eastman’s modest but genuine
reputation as a writer at the turn of the century might be suggested by his attendance,
along with many of the leading literary ﬁgures of the day, at Mark Twain’s seventieth
birthday party in 1905 (Wilson 150).

153

his “wilderness life”; and the ability to “put upon paper” those reﬂections, to
manipulate written language. Eastman documents, that is, not only his distance
from the life of the “woods” but also his readiness to take on the “civilized” role of
the Author, in the most conventional (even old-fashioned, by the late nineteenth
century) sense of a man of leisure recording his recollections for the ediﬁcation of
future generations. Eastman also downplays the aid of his wife in writing and
publishing his recollections; in her own autobiography, Elaine Eastman notes that
she “carefully edited” what her husband had written, “placed” it with St. Nicholas
(a magazine to which she had once contributed poetry as a young girl), and
“collaborated more or less” on all Of his later books (Sister 173). Finally,
Eastman’s brief account of the start of his writing career glosses over the
signiﬁcance of St. Nicholas itself as the vehicle of his initial forays into
professional authorship.

Most of Eastman’s readers in 1916, however, would not have missed his
casual reference to the periodical that, no doubt, many of them had relished as
children. Though its prominence had faded somewhat by the time of Eastrnan’s
second autobiography, at the turn of the century St. Nicholas, along with its only
considerable rival, Youth ’s Companion, far exceeded the general circulation of all
of the leading “adult” magazines—Atlantic, Harper ’s, Century, and Scribner ’s—
combined. During this “golden age” of children’s literature generally, periodicals
such as St. Nicholas held enormous cultural inﬂuence, not only devoured each

month by child readers but also read by parents and teachers and read to children

154

by them (Gannon). Under the commanding editorship of Mary Mapes Dodge
(author of the popular children’s book Hans Brinker; or, The Silver Skates), St.
Nicholas ﬂourished during the last quarter of the nineteenth century by taking
advantage of new advances in printing and illustration as well as the talents of
nearly all of the best-known writers of the day, including Alcott, Longfellow,
Kipling, Stevenson, Tennyson, Howells, and Twain (Saler and Cady 165). St.
Nicholas serials such as Francis Hodgson Bumett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy,
eventually adapted for the New York stage, kindled national interest in a single
ﬁctional character (Gannon 165-75); and the magazine’s St. Nicholas League,
founded in 1899, encouraged the juvenile literary efforts of some of the most
notable writers of the next generation, including Edna St. Vincent Millay, E. B.
White, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, and William Faulkner (Gannon and
Thompson 22, 167n32). In short, the cultural inﬂuence of St. Nicholas, both in
American culture at large and on the careers of individual contributors such as
Eastman, can hardly be overestimated.

Eastrnan’s reported “surprise” at the magazine’s acceptance of his sketches,
then, perhaps reﬂects more than merely self-effacing modesty. Those sketches
appeared serially between December 1893 and May 1894, sharing the pages of St.
Nicholas with contributions by several respected contemporaries, including T om
Sawyer Abroad by Mark Twain and several stories by Rudyard Kipling that would
become The Jungle Book and the Just-So Stories. Whether or not 1894 qualiﬁes as

“the annus mirabilis” of St. Nicholas’s lengthy run, as one account suggests (Saler

155

and Cady 165), the magazine certainly ﬂourished during the 18908; Eastman’s
surprise was no doubt warranted, as St. Nicholas was in a position to be editorially
selective. As editor, Dodge closely controlled all of the contributions to the
magazine (she did not hesitate, for example, to take her editorial scissors even to
Twain’s work, albeit “with a reverent hand”), and she forthrightly responded to
many submissions with the phrase, “But is it right for St. Nick?” (Gannon and
Thompson 147, 138). Given this context, it is interesting to speculate about the
particular qualities that made Eastman’s autobiographical narratives, in Dodge’s
consideration, “right for St. Nick.”

The title of Eastman’s series of sketches, whether chosen by Eastman, his
wife, or Dodge, suggests one aspect of its appeal. “Recollections of the Wild
Life,” like the title of its later incarnation, Indian Boyhood, highlights not the
individual subject or “self” of the autobiographical narratives but the facts of his
existence, the “life” itself rather than the one who lived it. Perhaps not unlike
other tum-of-the-century accounts such as The Autobiography of a Thief; a
considerable part of the appeal of Eastrnan’s narrative for readers of the time
stemmed not from the particular facts of his life story but from the generalizable
fact of his Indian identity. For a predominantly white, Eastern American
readership, Eastrnan’s memories of “wild” life revealed ﬁrst-hand knowledge of
both the “vanishing” Indian tribes and the “closing” frontier. For young readers,
his recollections of Indian boyhood in particular presented that knowledge from a

readily accessible point of view, not unlike other St. Nicholas articles such as “A

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Boy in the White House” or “A Boy’s Recollection of the Great Chicago Fire”
(Erisman 381-82). Such an approach to the subject of Indian life made Eastman’s
sketches “right” for St. Nicholas insofar as it brought together instruction and
entertainment in a way that might appeal to children, satisfying Dodge’s desire to
provide knowledge suitable for young readers but free of the stern (and “adult”)
moralizing of the majority of American children’s magazines before St. Nicholas
(Kelly 4).

Additionally, Eastman’s “Recollections” correspond at least broadly to
much of the nonﬁction selected by Dodge for publication. In a descriptive essay
on St. Nicholas, Fred Erisman divides the magazine’s nonﬁctional contents into
ﬁve categories, including the travel or geographical article, the biographical
article, the historical article, the scientiﬁc article, and, the largest group, articles
concerning “practical matters” of all kinds (381-83). Erisman mentions Eastman’s
“Recollections” as one example of the biographical article, typically revealing “the
‘human’ side” of its subject; but in fact Eastman’s series might also be classiﬁed as
historical, geographical, practical (in its indirect relation to the national discussion
of the “Indian problem”), and even scientiﬁc (in its ethnographic analysis of the
“games and sports” and the “training” of Indian children).4 In this sense, though
Eastman in no way follows a formulaic model in his “Recollections,” his sketches

satisfy the broad requirements of the magazine’s usual nonﬁction contents.

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In a curious way, furthermore, Eastman’s life story fulﬁlls some of the
prominent themes in the largely formulaic ﬁction published in St. Nicholas.
Eastman’s emphasis on life in the wild and on the training of Indian children
parallels the rural or schoolhouse settings of many contemporary stories; the death
of his mother, “the handsomest woman of all” the tribe (129), gives his story a
sentimental poignancy; the ﬁrm but gentle instruction of his grandmother and
uncle, Eastman’s surrogate parents, recalls the parent-child scenes in so many
domestic tales; and ﬁnally, the surprise reunion of Eastman and his father, long
presumed dead, forms a suitably dramatic ending to a children’s story. In addition,
Eastman’s account of his early life can be read as conforming to prevailing
conceptions of childhood as a difﬁcult, painful, but also profoundly formative
period in one’s life. In the ﬁction of juvenile magazines such as St. Nicholas, as R.
Gordon Kelly notes, “Experience is a school for character: a basic form of
legitimation found in the stories is the deﬁnition of life as an educational process”
(152). Eastrnan’s description of his “Early Hardships,” both personal and
communal or tribal, clearly conveys the sense that his character has been shaped
by his early “instruction,” especially the instruction of “Nature—the greatest
schoolmistress of all” (129). At the same time, the text itself, written in English

and without apparent aid, attests to Eastman’s transcendence of the “wild” life

 

" “Games and Sports” is the title for Part III of the “Recollections”; Part IV is
titled “An Indian Boy’s Training” (306, 437). Further references to Eastrnan’s text
will be cited parenthetically.

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under the stronger inﬂuence of his schooling in “civilization.” While American
Indians were to be classiﬁed in toto as “war ” of the nation by the time he
composed his recollections, Eastman makes it clear that he gleaned from his
boyhood “training” the very virtue heralded above all others in magazines such as
St. Nicholas: self-reliance (Erisman 386).

Thus, while Eastman’s “Recollections of the Wild Life” is no rags-to-riches
story (of. Andrew Camegie’s “How I Served My Apprenticeship,” published just
two years later in the rival Youth ’s Companion), it is a success story of a sort, the
“savagery-to-civilization” story also popular at the turn of the century. Like “the
familiar Victorian ‘waif’” stories in St. Nicholas in which a poor, uncivilized child
is rescued by a kind, civilized benefactor (Gannon 162), Eastman’s story ends with
his “rescue” from the wildlife by his long-lost father, who had been “prompted”
by “his Christian love” to pass “through the vast wilderness” in search of his son
(“Recollections” 610). And just as those stories frequently include a “ﬁnal hint
that the assisted waif could one day become an adult empowered to help others”
(Gannon 165), Eastman’s sketches include such a hint in the repeated byline, “By
Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman.” Of course, the aid that Eastman had already
brought to American Indians as a government physician is indisputable——a few
years earlier, for example, while serving at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, Eastman led
a search for survivors after the massacre at Wounded Knee—but his life story in
this case corresponded neatly with the demands of certain ﬁctional formulas

prevalent in magazines such as St. Nicholas. Insofar as his life itself represented

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an American success story, Eastman’s “Recollections” would likely have appealed
to Dodge as “right for St. Nick.”

And if the moral or instructional element of Eastman’s “Recollections”
satisﬁed St. Nicholas’s adult readers, its entertainment value no doubt answered
the demands of the magazine’s younger readers. Clearly, Eastman revised (if he
did not compose) his sketches for this audience in particular. Many of the scenes
from his early childhood must have fascinated children living in rapidly
industrializing eastern cities who would have known little of the “wild” life
themselves. Eastman describes, for example, being wrapped tightly as an infant in
an “Indian cradle” (helpfully illustrated by St. Nicholas), then hung in trees where
birds and chipmunks would visit him, or pulled behind dogs in a rawhide-and-pole
travois (129-30, 226). Older children might have been drawn to the Indian stories
and legends that Eastman heard from his uncle and grandmother, or to the various
lessons that Eastman learned “direct from Nature” rather than in a conﬁning
schoolhouse (129). Such children would surely have envied Eastman’s life as “a
prince of the wilderness” and a “master of his time,” with few obligations but his
“games and sports” (306). Eastman shapes his recollections of those activities,
furthermore, with these readers in mind: He notes, for example, that the “mud-and-
willow” game is played “as boys throw apples from sticks,” that Indian wrestling
matches are “fully equal to the American game of foot-ball,” and that playing
“‘Medicine Dance’” was, to Indian children, “almost what ‘playing church’ is

among white children” (307). Such cross-cultural comparisons would have

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encouraged imaginative identiﬁcation on the part of Eastman’s young readers,
lessening the distance between the “wild” and the “civilized” life even as that
distance constituted much of the appeal of the “Recollections.”

Though the exact nature of Eastman’s composition of his “Recollections” is
unknown, such examples indicate the extent to which he shaped those sketches for
the audience he would reach through St. Nicholas. To be sure, Eastman claimed in
his later autobiography that he had begun to write his stories for his own children
before even considering publication.5 But the idea of presenting his “recollections
of the wild life” to perhaps one hundred thousand American children and parents
would, no doubt, have altered Eastman’s presentation of that life—perhaps even
shaped his recollections Of it.6 A more challenging question remains, however: If
Eastman consciously composed his autobiographical narratives for publication in
St. Nicholas, to what ends did he do so? That is, what did Eastman hope to
accomplish in reaching a wide audience of American parents and children with his
“Recollections of the Wild Life”? Did he hope to instruct those readers ﬁrst and

foremost, or entertain? Challenge their views of Indian ways of life and Indians

 

5 Eastman probably began writing after the birth of Dora, his ﬁrst child, in May
1892; he and Elaine would have ﬁve other children, including Ohiyesa II, the son to
whom he dedicates Indian Boyhood.

‘ Any shaping of the text by Elaine Goodale Eastman as she “carefully edited”
Eastman’s writing remains, unfortunately, impossible to specify beyond critical
conjecture—of which there is plenty (see, e. g., Miller). For an analysis of the editing
that may have been done by Dodge, prior to publication of the “Recollections” in St.
Nicholas, see below.

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themselves, or cater to their expectations? Confront their misconceptions and
stereotypes, or conﬁrm their prevailing beliefs?

The answers to these questions, as suggested already, must not rest simply
on an ahistorical measure of Eastman’s presumed “assimilation” to prevailing
ideologies about Indians. But neither is close textual analysis of the
“Recollections” alone sufﬁcient: Instead, questions regarding Eastman’s aesthetic
principles and ideological motives, about the form and content of his
autobiographical writing, should be examined in the context of the forum through
which his writing was circulated and the audience to whom it was directed. What
other images of Indians and the “wildlife,” for example, did St. Nicholas choose to
publish? And what were the widely held preconceptions and stereotypes of the
magazine’s audience that would have shaped their reception of Eastman’s
portrayal of Indian life? The ﬁrst of these questions is more easily answered than
the second: In the February 1894 issue of St. Nicholas, for example, the story
immediately following Eastman’s third installment relates the adventures of a “true
scion of the brave Pilgrim stock” who, while on his way to deliver an urgent
message, encounters “a band of savages who seemed to have sprung out of the
earth” (Hamilton 311-12). The Indians capture the boy and brandish their knives,
but, fortunately for this clever and resourceﬁrl young man, the “savages” have
never encountered ice skates, and in the process of illustrating how the strange
“white-face moccasin[s]” are used, he manages to escape a “shower of arrows”

and complete his mission (311, 313). In this story, Indians are represented as little

162

more than an amalgam of stereotypes and a convenient foe for a courageous young
boy, whose superior mental agility triumphs over the simple brute force of an
entire “band of savages.” Young readers of St. Nicholas are encouraged to admire
and emulate the boy’s bravery, but at the same time, if they are adept at both
speaking and skating, the fairly ridiculous efforts of the Indians to master “pale-
face talk” and “ice-moccasins” provide a bit of innocent entertainment (312-13).
Challenging such simplistic and, in some sense, “empty” images of Indians
certainly inspired Eastman’s desire to offer a ﬁrller, more accurate portrait by
publishing his own ﬁrst-hand recollections of Indian life. (Even a simple comment
that “Shinny [a variation of hockey], such as is enjoyed by white boys on ice, is
now played by the Western Sioux” (307), forms an interesting if unintentional
contrast to the slapstick illustrations, a few pages later, of Indians on ice skates—
proud braves quite literally “brought low” [312].) But Eastman’s text also engages
broader, far more complex discourses surrounding the Indian at the end of the
nineteenth century, discourses that allied the Indian and childhood in provocative

and unsettling ways.

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II

The Indian as Child, the Child as Indian:
Metaphor and Stereotype at the Turn of the Century

In his own autobiography of childhood years, A Boy ’s Town, serialized in
Harper ’s Young People in 1890, William Dean Howells draws on a popular
metaphor used to describe the American Indian in order to characterize American
children:

The Young People may have heard it said that a savage is a grown-
up child, but it seems to me even more true that a child is a savage.
Like the savage, he dwells on an earth round which the whole solar
system revolves, and he is himself the centre of all life on the earth.
It has no meaning but as it relates to him; it is for his pleasure, his
use; it is for his pain and his abuse. It is ﬁll] of sights, sounds,
sensations, for his delight alone, for his suffering alone . . . . (714)
Howells’s concern throughout A Boy ’s Town centers on the latter, inverted
metaphor regarding the “savagery” of the child; he does not elaborate upon the
child-likeness of the Indian except as it serves his own mock-etlmography Of the
American boy’s savage-like “Manners and Customs” (756). The nonchalance of
Howells’s appeal to each of these metaphors (“[children] may have heard it said . .
.”; “it seems to me . . .”) corresponds to the easy-going, avuncular tone of A Boy ’s
Town generally; but his blitheness belies the darker side of prevailing notions
about the nature of both Indian life and childhood. Howells’s linking of the two
metaphors masks a more fundamental connection between two prominent issues at

the end of the nineteenth century, two broad social discussions around which two

separate discourses converged: the Indian and the child. Fully appreciating the

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uses to which childhood was put by Native American autobiographers such as
Eastman requires an examination of the connections between these two discourses
and the structure of metaphor and stereotype that linked Indian identity and
childhood at the turn of the century.

Howells’s assumption that “The Young People” who read Harper '3 Young
People magazine “may have heard it said that a savage is a grown-up child”
suggests just how widespread such a notion was at the end of the nineteenth
century. Grounded in Social Darwinist beliefs prevalent at the time, this view of
the Indians as a “race” judged them to be not merely inferior to the white race or
simply uneducated, ignorant of “civilized” manners and customs, but rather
ﬁrndamentally child-like. Seen through the racial ideologies of the time, Native
Americans appeared to be frozen in an early stage of development, no more
advanced than the children of the “advanced” races: improvident, generous to a
fault, unable to comprehend the cause-and-effect of either science or capitalism,
unwilling to grasp the higher understanding of white civilization. Like infants,
Indians seemed to exhibit “an absorption in sensations and perceptions,” as the
renowned sociologist Herbert Spencer noted (qtd. in Brumble 160); for the Indian,
as Howells assented, the world “is full of sights, sounds, sensations, for his delight
alone, for his suffering alone” (714). Just as a boy believes himself to be “the
centre of all life on the earth,” the world having “no meaning but as it relates to
him,” the Indian embodies this fundamental selﬁshness, a trait that Obviously

makes him unﬁt for participation in society as an equal, if at all. No wonder, then,

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that as independent survival became increasingly unlikely toward the close of the
nineteenth century, the prevailing “civilized” sentiment toward Indians conceived
of them as “wards” of the nation.

To be sure, one prominent line of thought regarding the Indians imagined
them as anything but helpless, emphasizing instead the need to eliminate this
ferocious enemy before civilization could complete its work on the recently closed
frontier. Theodore Roosevelt, for example, reviewing two studies of “Indian
Warfare on the Frontier” in 1892, praised the past work of the American military
in subduing the “powerful tribes of singularly warlike and bloodthirsty savages”
and pushing “the frontier of civilization” westward. Without their efforts, he
concluded, many areas “would still be in the possession of hostile Indians, and the
work of settlement could not have reached its present point” (255). This rhetoric
of the Indian as “singularly,” unredeemably savage, it should be noted, might also
link childhood and Indian identity, but to support quite a different argument:
speciﬁcally, that because the Indian was by nature a savage, the Indian child was
no less a savage than the adult. Roosevelt drew on this imagery in his multi-
volume nationalistic drama about The Winning of the West:

Anyone who has ever been in an encampment of wild Indians, and
has had the misfortune to witness the delight the children take in
torturing little animals, will admit that the Indian’s love of cruelty for
cruelty’s sake cannot possibly be exaggerated. The young are so

trained that when old they shall ﬁnd their keenest pleasure in
inﬂicting pain in its most appalling form . . .. (qtd. in Brands 323)

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What is civilization to do, Roosevelt’s portrayal implicitly asks, with such a race in
the way of its advance? When even the children of the “wild Indians” exhibit such
sadistic “delight” in their savagery, what options does civilization have but to
confront this stubborn obstacle and trust in that contemporary dogma, “the survival
of the ﬁttest”?

Such a conception of the Indian child-as-savage, however, contended with
the more benevolent and sympathetic (if similarly reductionistic) view of the
Indian-as-child. One fascinating example of such a view appeared in the Atlantic
Monthly in January 1899 under the heading, “The Wild Indian.” Written by
George Bird Grinnell, the editor of Forest and Stream and a leader, with
Roosevelt, of the “Boone and Crockett Club” (Hoxie 84), the essay begins with the
premise that “the Indian problem remains a problem . . . because we have no
sufﬁcient knowledge of the people we are striving to teach” (Grinnell 20).

Grinnell makes it clear that his own ﬁrst-hand knowledge of Indian life qualiﬁes
him to address the problem: Having “lived with the plains people in their homes,
engaging in their pursuits, sharing their joys and sorrows,” Grinnell assures his
readers that he has “thus learned to think and feel as an Indian thinks and feels, and
to see things as he sees them and from his point of view” (20). This remarkably
audacious statement of credentials prefaces a lengthy discussion intended to prove
to the readers of the Atlantic that “if [the Indian] is a savage, he is also a man”
(21). Throughout, Grinnell counters several popular stereotypes and offers

examples of social forms and customs among the Indians that parallel those of

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“civilization,” noting, for example, that “the family relation among the buffalo
savages of the plains . . . is essentially the same that holds good among civilized
people” (27). Nevertheless, he concludes that “the Indian of to-day,” like the
“wild” Indian of old, “reasons like a child”: “Most of the processes of civilization
are as obscure to him as is the art of writing to a four-year-old child and, like a
child, the Indian must have instruction—often repeated—before he can
comprehend these processes, and much practice before he can perform them” (28).
This analogy captures in miniature the double-bind in which Native Americans
were locked in the late-nineteenth-century “scientiﬁc” discourse used to
characterize them. Full humanity and equality with the “more advanced races”
required the comprehension and “performance” of the “processes of civilization,”
including writing, but the Indian was by deﬁnition a “a man . . . in the child stage
of development,” to whom writing would remain “obscure” and civilization a far-
off ideal (21, 28).

Howells’s literary use Of the metaphor of the Indian-as-child participates in
the same broad set of images, beliefs, and stereotypes regarding the racial traits of
Native Americans as Grinnell’s “scientiﬁc,” sociological application. But where
Grinnell claims a remarkable afﬁnity with the Indian, having “learned” not only to
think and feel but to see as the Indian sees, Howells repeatedly asserts the
impenetrable, incomprehensible quality of both the “savage” life and the child’s
life. While Grinnell attempts to bring Indian life closer to home, in a sense—

emphasizing details of domestic arrangement and child-rearing among the Indians,

168

for example—Howells, looking at the “world” of the child, makes of it a far-off
wilderness, a strange and alien place no adult can hope to enter:
His world is all in and through the world of men and women, but no
man or woman can get into it any more than if it were a world of
invisible beings. It has its own ideals and superstitions, and these are
often of a ferocity, a depravity, scarcely credible in afterlife . . . . No
doubt it will be civilized in time, but it will be very slowly . . . .
(757)
Howells clearly exaggerates his description of the “ferocity” and “depravity” of
children for comic effect—he is describing, of course, his own boyhood. But just
as clearly, Howells uses as the vehicle of his metaphor the portrait of Indian
savagery presented by Roosevelt and others, positing a savagery “scarcely
credible” to a civilized onlooker just as Roosevelt asserted that “the Indian’s love
of cruelty for cruelty’s sake cannot possibly be exaggerated.” By invoking the
widely held notion that “a savage is a grown-up child,” Howells reinforces that
belief; by suggesting that “it seems . . . even more true that a child is a savage,” he
makes it clear that the truth of the metaphor which he modiﬁes will not be
questioned or challenged by his playful development of its inverse (714; emphasis
added). Howells can hyperbolize the savagery of the child, furthermore, because
of the obvious corollary that the child will inevitably grow up—there is, indeed,
“no doubt it will be civilized in time.” The Indian, by contrast, is destined to
remain a “child” even as a “grown-up.”

If Howells contributed in this way to the broader discourse characterizing

the Indian, however, his autobiography engages even more fully in contemporary

169

social and cultural discussions surrounding childhood. Thomas Cooley cites
Howells’s A Boy’s Town as one example of “the boy’s book” of this period, a
“subspecies of autobiography” that reﬂected a general “fascination” with children
and childhood as well as new scientiﬁc theories regarding childhood development
(65). Those new theories, as Cooley summarizes, held that “each period of growth
in a human life constituted a distinct phase of development; infancy, childhood,
and adolescence came tO be seen as discrete, though connected, stages in a long
process” (19). (Thus, when Grinnell notes that Indians need insistent instruction
in order to comprehend the “processes” of civilization, the image is of a race ﬁxed
in an early stage of development, unable to advance “naturally” as the children of
civilized peoples did.) The new science of “child-study” advanced quickly at the
end of the nineteenth century, stimulated by widespread interest in psychology
generally and the subjective life of the mind in particular. The belief in the
existence of a “unique culture” of children, for example, became popular among
middle-class Americans (Cooley 19), a fact that helps to explain the staggering
circulation ﬁgures for magazines such as Youth ’s Companion and St. Nicholas: As
parents sought to provide their children with instruction and entertainment
designed to meet the particular needs of childhood, periodicals were created to
cater to that desire.

Henry Mills Alden, writing in his “Editor’s Study” column for Harper ’s
Monthly in 1904, reveals something of this contemporary enthusiasm for scientiﬁc

“child-study” at the end of the nineteenth century. Examining American

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achievements in the short story by invoking an evolutionary metapor, Alden offers
“the child-story” as one promising new “species” in American ﬁction:
What different types of stories it has brought forth under the very
eyes of our readers from month to month! It is as if a new continent
had been discovered . . . . [S]uddenly, as the result of our growing
habit of psychical research and subjective analysis, we came to an
appreciation of what is going on spontaneously, beneath the surface,
in a child’s mind—and we watched and listened for intimations from
this newly found kingdom of the Naive. (316; emphasis added)
Notably, Alden’s fascination with the “spontaneous” activity of the child’s mind,
hidden from adult view, parallels Howells’s image of the child’s inaccessible
world of “ideals and superstitions,” despite the contrast between Howells’s
“savage” world of childhood and Alden’s “kingdom of the Naive.” Their two
responses, furthermore, suggest something of the dual nature of contemporary
interest in childhood. On the one hand, Americans during the late nineteenth
century heralded the triumph of “civilization” over the ignorance and uncontrolled
violence of the primitive and the savage, using the metaphor of the “childhood of
the race” to signify all that civilization had advanced beyond in reaching
“adulthood.”7 On the other hand, as T. J. Jackson Lears argues compellingly,
Americans at the end of the nineteenth century also began to fear the effects of
“overcivilization”—the debilitating decline of spontaneity, vitality, and vigor
brought on by the rise of modernity, materialism, and luxury (4, passim).

Unsettled by this ambivalence with regard to civilization itself, Americans sought

in images of childhood a certain innocence and ease, a sense of wonder and

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mystery unconcerned with the dictates of rationality, an expression and
embodiment of freedom from overcivilization and repression.

This dual perspective on childhood is neatly captured in Alden’s description
of the world of the child as “this newly found kingdom of the Naive.” The various
connotations of the latter term are, it might be noted, somewhat at odds: “Naiveté ”
suggests not only “an unaffected simplicity,” a directness of expression
unmediated by calculation or sophistry, but also credulity, ignorance of social
custom, a deﬁciency of “worldly wisdom” (“Naive”). Applied to the “kingdom”
of childhood, the term functions, ﬁrst, to reinforce an image of childhood as
innocent, ingenuous, unaffected, simple. But marking the world of childhood as
“naive” also distances it from the province of “adult” American civilization, a
province whose dominant characteristics at the turn of the century were craft,
calculation, vigorous competition—in short, capitalistic savvy. The “naiveté” of
childhood represented, thus, both a sign of the progress of civilization away from
primitivism and an ideal against which civilization might be judged. Lears,
highlighting a similar pairing of the “social uses” of childhood, explains their
apparent contradiction this way: “On the one hand, an exaltation of childishness
pointed to a critique of adult conventions; on the other hand, it accommodated

adults to those conventions by providing a brief, imaginary escape from them”

(144). In this way, childhood stood for no single ideal or idea but rather ﬁgured a

 

7 On the conception of the “childhood of the race,” see Lears 92, 144-49.

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variety of potentially contradictory social beliefs, images, and anxieties.

It is on this ground that conceptions of the “Naive” and the “Native”
intersect and, at times, converge. As ingenious and off-handed as Howells’s
inversion of the “Indian-as-child” metaphor appears, it draws from two broad
social discussions and two separate discourses that already shared some common
ground. Notably, the connection that Howells seems to draw merely as a starting-
point for his mock-ethnography of childhood returns several times throughout A
Boy’s Town: The metaphor functions too well to ignore, it seems, as Howells can
draw from so many associations already attached to the Indian in his description of
children.8 After establishing the metaphor, in fact, Howells can appeal to it
without explicit reference, as when he describes the boys’ “instinct of getting, of
hoarding” as the “motive for all their foraging; they had no other idea of property
than the bounty Of nature; and this was well enough as far as it went, but their
impulse was not to share this bounty with others, but to keep it each for himself . .
.” (855). Here one veiled reference to the Indian piles atop another, without any
mention of a parallel between the children Howells describes and the
(stereotypical) Indians who provide the details of his description. Howells
continues by noting the strange systems of exchange that operate among boys,
their curious hoarding (then wasting) of “nuts and acorns,” the peculiar value they

attach to marbles and tops and mussel-shells, and the absolute lack of a “sense of

 

8 For examples of Howells’s use of the Indian-child analogy, see pp. 714-15, 757,
812-15, and 856.

173

proﬁt or saving” among boys “too wildly improvident for anything of the kind”
(856). Only after this litany of primitive ways does Howells again make explicit
his metaphor, noting, “They were savages in this as in many other things, but
noble savages . . .” (856).

If Howells attempts in A Boy ’s Town to reconstruct imaginatively the actual
“manners and customs” of the boy “natives” of his town (856), he does so in part
by drawing ﬁ'om a stock set of images of the Indian, using stereotype as the
vehicle for his recurring metaphor. He does not base his ideas about the Indian on
any ﬁrst-hand knowledge of Native American life, as Grinnell so proudly claims;
in fact, on one of the rare occasions during Howells’s narrative of childhood when
“genuine Indians” appear in his Boy’s Town, they are portrayed shooting their
arrows “at cents and bits and quarters that anybody could stick in the ground”—
performing, that is, in the role of Indians. But both Grinnell and Howells ﬁnally
agree on the nature of the relation of Indians to civilization: Grinnell’s depiction of
the remarkable honesty and generosity of the Indians, however well-informed or
well-intentioned, ﬁnally amounts to the same conclusion as Howells’s description
(by way of metaphor) of the “wildly improvident” ways of the Indian. Indians are,
in a word, naive: too simple, innocent, ingenuous, too childlike, to ever compete
with the “adult” races in the highly advanced, civilized, capitalist economy of
America.

This conclusion—portrayed by both Grinnell and Howells as more or less

incontrovertible, a foregone conclusion—forms a part of the intersecting

174

discourses surrounding the child and the Indian at the turn of the century to which
many Native American writers responded. Autobiographers such as Eastman,
Zitkala-Sa, and La Flesche composed their writing in a second language, the
language of American civilization, the language in which ﬁgures such as Grinnell
and Howells held respected and culturally powerful roles as writers and editors.
They also engaged, from a peculiarly bi-cultural position, the two discourses of the
Indian and the child as they intersected within their own lives: In writing personal
narratives, in contrast to ﬁction or poetry or even Indian legends, each of these
writers confronted the beliefs, images, and stereotypes embedded in the very

language of American “civilization” with the evidence of their own life stories.

III

The Problem and Possibilities of Indian Childhood:
Publication and Charles Eastman’s Early Autobiographical Writing

In a theoretical review of the “Conditions and Limits Of Autobiography,”

Georges Gusdorf notes that the autobiographer
commences, in a manner of speaking, with the problem [i.e., of the
self, the life, the text] already solved. Moreover, the illusion begins
from the moment that the narrative confers a meaning on the event
which, when it actually occurred, no doubt had several meanings or
perhaps none. (42)

The shape of an autobiography, its speciﬁc inclusions and exclusions, Gusdorf

continues, reﬂects the particular imperatives of “the writer who remembers and

wants to gain acceptance for this or that revised and corrected version of his past,

his private reality” (42). Gusdorf’s characterization of the autobiographical

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narrator unwittingly points to both the potential and the difﬁculties that
autobiography entailed for tum-of-the-century Native American writers such as
Charles Eastman. On the one hand, Eastman indeed sought to “gain acceptance”
for a certain “revised and corrected version” of the past, a version that recognized,
even valorized, the admirable traits and virtues of Indian tribal life. On the other
hand, Eastman did not have the option of writing solely about “his past, his private
reality.” He could not, that is, write an autobiography with the “problem” of his
existence already solved, because the particular problem of his “self” was bound
up—for himself and certainly for his American audience—with the larger, societal
“problem” of the Indian. Likewise, any textual version of the self that he crafted
would be most readily understood by his audience through the discourse already
formulated around America’s “Indian problem.”

Furthermore, by writing about his recollections of an Indian childhood and
by publishing those recollections in St. Nicholas, Eastman again achieved certain
possibilities of expression and circulation at the expense of deﬁnite limitations on
that expression and on its reception. Eastman’s earliest attempts at writing about
his life as a child were edited, perhaps considerably, both by Elaine Eastman, his
wife, and by Mary Mapes Dodge, the editor of St. Nicholas—each of whom no

doubt recognized potential uses of the “Recollections” that differed somewhat

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from Eastman’s own intentions.9 Furthermore, Eastman recognized that his
audience would likely read his writing through several frames of reference,
bringing to the text certain expectations and preconceptions about the “wildlife”
of the Indian as well as about the nature of childhood. (Indeed, whether the
audience of St. Nicholas would be willing to apply what they believed about
childhood generally to the particular childhood of an Indian is certainly one of the
underlying questions of Eastman’s “Recollections.”) In seeking to craft his
personal sketches in such a way that they appealed to children as well as adult
readers and, at the same time, informed them about the actual conditions of Indian
life as he had known it, Eastman had to accept the peculiar limitations imposed by
the language in which he wrote, the forum through which he published his writing,
and the preconceptions of his audience. An examination of these constraints
illuminates the ways in which Eastman chose to negotiate in his writing the
possibilities and liabilities of an autobiographical account of an Indian childhood.
As Eastman notes in his 1916 autobiography, the sketches published in St.
Nicholas constituted “the beginning” of his ﬁrst full-length book, Indian Boyhood,
“not completed until several years later” (139). The exact nature of Eastman’s
composition of both the “Recollections” and Indian Boyhood is, of course,

impossible to ascertain from the published texts alone; however, a close

 

9 Wilson notes that, according to one of Eastman’s grandsons, Eastman “deeply
resented the way Elaine would rewrite and change the meaning of his manuscripts”
(1 64).

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comparison of the two texts reveals clues about the editing that may have occurred
before Eastrnan’s “Recollections” was printed in St. Nicholas. While such analysis
remains speculative, patterns of internal evidence combined with a record of
considerable textual editing by Dodge suggest that at least a few signiﬁcant
alterations were made to Eastman’s text before publication. Because Eastman
retained most of what he wrote for St. Nicholas in its original form when he
included it in the considerably longer Indian Boyhood, the points at which the two
texts diverge raise questions about the origin of the changes. Some of the variation
between the two texts suggests that Eastman did not merely expand or elaborate on
his earlier “Recollections” to create Indian Boyhood but may also have restored
parts of his original composition that were altered by Dodge’s exercise of editorial
license.

That Dodge considered it her duty to exercise that privilege is well-
recorded. Susan Gannon and Ruth Anne Thompson report, for example, that in
addition to editing contributions for objectionable language, scenes, or behavior,
“Dodge turned down for publication anything that in her view was overly didactic,
sectarian, lachrymose, politically divisive, or morally dubious” (139).10 She also
did not hesitate to shape contributions to resemble more closely the digniﬁed and

genteel tone of St. Nicholas’s parent magazine, Scribner ’s Monthly (145). Hints of

 

‘° Gannon and Thompson base their assertions on contemporary comments of St.
Nicholas contributors as well as “a close examination of Dodge’s editorial
correspondence and a comparative study of corrected manuscripts and their published
versions” (13 8).

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such shaping of Eastman’s texts emerge from a comparison of “Recollections” and
Indian Boyhood. Minor syntactical and grammatical variations, for example, such
as the use of far more exclamation points in “Recollections,” suggest an editorial
approach (and perhaps a house style) that sought to cultivate interest and
enthusiasm on the part of young readers. Another minor alteration seems to have
been made to the language used by Eastman’s uncle in his role as educator in “An
Indian Boy’s Training”: His instruction in Indian Boyhood, “Hakadah, look closely
to everything you see” (44), for example, appears in “Recollections” as “Hakada,
watch everything closely and observe its characteristics” (43 8).“ It seems unlikely
that Eastman would have altered the latter, more genteel phrasing into the former;
Dodge, on the other hand, worked hard to avoid printing not only vulgarisms but
any “models of less-than-standard speech that young readers might imitate”
(Gannon and Thompson 144).12 Particularly because Eastman’s uncle was
speaking in the role of an educator, offering lessons that might fruitfully be
followed by the child readers of St. Nicholas as well as by an Indian boy, Dodge

no doubt wished to satisfy the stringent demands of parents and teachers for

 

” Eastman explains in his ﬁrst installment that his name as a child was Hakada,
meaning “the pitiful last,” given to him when his mother died soon after his birth. He
was given the name Ohiyesa, meaning “the winner,” after his band of Sioux defeated
another in a lacrosse-like game at the tribe’s Midsummer Feast (Indian Boyhood 37).

'2 This editorial precaution does not seem to apply, it might be noted, to the speech
of the “band of savages” in “A Skater’s Stratagem,” the story noted above: In such
cases, the adulterated English of the Indians works to reinforce their distance from
“civilization” as well as their comic ignorance.

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strictly grammatical expression even at the expense of a certain local-color
realism.

A much more signiﬁcant variation between “Recollections” and Indian
Boyhood also seems to reﬂect Dodge’s editorial imperatives, speciﬁcally her
antipathy to anything that appeared to be “morally dubious.” In his description of
the “Games and Sports” of Indian children, Eastman notes, “Sometimes we played
‘Medicine Dance,”’ an activity he compares to “what ‘playing church’ is among
white children” (307). Two paragraphs in “Recollections” describe the children’s
“sacrilegious” mimicry of the “real dances” performed by adults; but several more
paragraphs of description, printed in Indian Boyhood, appear to have been excised.
While Eastman may have expanded his description of the games for the later
publication, it seems more likely that Dodge found the section “morally dubious,”
at best, and “sacrilegious” indeed, at worst: As depicted by Eastman, the mock-
ceremony involves not only the killing of several birds, but also the feigned ritual
slaying, burial, and resurrection of several Indian children (59-60). If Dodge
expressed editorial concern over nonstandard English usage, she would certainly
have disapproved of the graphically “heathen” quality of this scene—not to
mention the possibility of impressionable young readers attempting the ritual
slaughter of neighborhood sparrows for their mock-Indian “games.”

Along with the “morally dubious,” commentary of a “politically divisive”
nature also appears to have been altered by the editorial pen (and scissors) of St.

Nicholas. In describing his “Early Hardships” in Indian Boyhood, for example,

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Eastman writes of his tribe’s ﬂight to Canada after the “Minnesota massacre”—an
event that led to the imprisonment of Eastman’s father, later spared from execution
along with several hundred other Sioux by the intervention of Abraham Lincoln
(see Wilson 15-16). Eastman’s version of these events in Indian Boyhood
highlights the desperation of the Indians of his tribe, deprived of food, water, and
sleep and relentlessly pursued to the border of Canada by “great numbers” of
heavily armed “Wasechu (white men)” (12). In St. Nicholas, Eastman’s account
only brieﬂy describes that journey, highlighting his “ﬁrst experience with a
civilized vehicle,” a stolen “white-man’s team” and wagon (226). Clearly,
Eastman’s longer account represents a more coherent narrative and more fully
explains the title applied to both versions, “Early Hardships.” But it also
represents a more “politically divisive” outlook on the conﬂict between the United
States military and the Indians in the 18608 and after; and, though Eastman makes
no direct or intemperate accusations of any kind in the longer account, it seems
evident that the material was deemed too contentious for St. Nicholas.

Ironically, apparently excised along with this scene is a comment that
suggests Eastrrran’s generally (and sometimes remarkably) accommodating stance
throughout his early autobiographical writing: “I was now an exile as well as
motherless; yet I was not unhappy. . .” (13-14). It is almost as if the personal
details of Eastman’s experience intersect too clearly at this moment with the
details of the violence between the Sioux (and Indian tribes, generally) and the

American military, and thus become as inﬂammatory as overtly political rhetoric:

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“Exile” carries all of the emotional weight that Eastman downplays in
documenting a “journey [that] is still vividly recollected by all our family” (326;
emphasis added). A similar slighting of personal expression as it relates to the
historically speciﬁc events of Eastman’s life recurs, if on a smaller scale, in his
ﬁnal installment, “First Impressions of Civilization.” That sketch begins, “I was
scarcely old enough to know anything deﬁnite about the ‘Big Knives,’ as we called
the white men, when the terrible Minnesota massacre occurred, and I was carried
into British Columbia” (607). When the passage appears in Indian Boyhood,
however, the sentence concludes, “. . . when the terrible Minnesota massacre broke
up our home, and I was carried into exile” (239; emphasis added). Again, it seems
unlikely, given the repetition of the term “exile” as well as other internal evidence,
that Eastman altered this text when preparing Indian Boyhood. Rather, the avowed
interest of Dodge and St. Nicholas in avoiding any suggestion of political
partisanship offers a more plausible explanation of the textual variations between
the two versions, between the emotionally laden language of Indian Boyhood and
the far more neutral description in “Recollections.”

If Dodge indeed edited Eastman’s text as suggested, it should be clear that
precisely in the excision of that which is historically speciﬁc in Eastrnan’s original
text, she diminished that which is autobiographical. In downplaying the reasons
for the tribe’s movement, for example, but maintaining Eastman’s lighter
description of “the mode of traveling” or the “innocent fun” of the Indian boys

along the way (226), Dodge subtly but substantially altered the balance that

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Eastman had crafted between the personal and the tribal and historical, the
autobiographical and the more-broadly documentary. To be sure, both the
“Recollections” and Indian Boyhood downplay Eastman’s “autobiography” in any
conventional sense, perhaps because Eastman recognized, as noted above, that the
primary appeal of his Indian childhood derived from his Indian-ness, not his
unique, personal history. But even brief hints, suggestive descriptions of “home”
and “exile,” ground his description of the games, sports, training, and hunting of
Indian boys in a broader social and historical context. Lifting the descriptive and
documentary parts of Eastrnan’s text from a concrete historical setting, slightly
drawn as it is, alters the impact and meaning of his “recollections” of the “wild
life.”

Highlighting the apparent editorial limitations on Eastman’s expression,
however, only points to the broader, more signiﬁcant limitations imposed by the
expectations and preconceptions of the readers of St. Nicholas. While the myriad
choices made by a magazine editor may express his or her deeply held personal
vision, the editor’s primary role always remains that of catering to the needs and
desires of a reading public. Dodge, even as the powerful “Conductor” of St.
Nicholas (Gannon and Thompson 104), always understood that the “moral
mission” of her magazine should never be pursued at the expense of afﬁrrrring and
entertaining her readers: In short, whatever needs she may have perceived among
her youthful readers, Dodge never neglected their desires. By all accounts, Dodge

exhibited from the inception of St. Nicholas a keen sense for the tastes and

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expectations of her readership, both children and their parents, and her editorial
choices need to be understood in the context of her attempt to satisfy what those
readers wanted to ﬁnd in a children’s magazine.13
In the case of the representation of the Indian, what those readers wanted to
ﬁnd (and what St. Nicholas supplied) included both documentary and imaginary
portrayals of Indian life but excluded the politically charged, historically speciﬁc
aspects of the Indian’s existence. In the children’s “pleasure-ground” that St.
Nicholas sought to create (Dodge 29), the Indian would appear only in isolation
from suggestions of the “problem” that attended discussions of the Indian in
“adult” publications.l4 Documentary information about tribal ways and customs,
reﬂecting the increasing interest among anthropologists and sociologists in the
“vanishing” Indian tribes, offered young readers a purportedly “neutral,”
“scientiﬁc” picture of Indian life, not altogether unlike natural-history studies of
the animal life of America. (One of Eastman’s installments appeared in the same
issue as a study of “Our Wolves and Foxes” in which the author remarks, “It is
really wonderful the way the Red Fox clings to civilization, and utterly refuses to

be exterminated, even in the most populous portions of the United States . . .”

[488; emphasis added].) At the same time, imaginative representations of Indian

 

'3 See Dodge’s 1873 essay, “Children’s Magazines,” for an early statement of her
principles regarding the proper form and content of the juvenile periodical. This
essay, generally considered Dodge’s prospectus for the creation of St. Nicholas,
contains her often-quoted assertion that “the ideal child’s magazine. . . is a pleasure-
ground” (29).

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life, largely empty of any historically speciﬁc reference, offered readers an
Opportunity to experience that life vicariously or enter it as imaginary participants.
Both the documentary and the imaginary portrayals of Indian life, moreover,
worked together to encourage this sort of imaginative engagement—a response
sanctioned in American society at large by a curious and widespread association of

the Indian and childhood play.

IV

“Playing Indian,” Playing “White Man”:
Charles Eastman’s “Recollections of the [Real] Wild Life”

The imaginative identiﬁcation with the Indian that St. Nicholas offered its
readers corresponded to a broader cultural fascination at the turn of the century,
neatly captured in a popular phrase of the time: “Playing Indian.” In the Ladies ’
Home Journal during the summer of 1902, for example, Ernest Thompson Seton
(also a contributor to St. Nicholas) informs his boy readers of all the secrets of
“Playing ‘Injun’”:

I suppose that every boy in America loves to ‘play Injun.’ It was one
of my greatest pleasures and I often wished for some one who could
teach me about it. That does not mean I wanted to be a cruel savage,
but rather that I wanted to know how to live in the woods as he does
. . . . These papers are being written to teach every boy to do this and

to get the most pleasure possible out of playing Red Man. (15)

Clearly, by 1902 “playing Injun” constituted a popular pastime among American

 

‘4 For representative examples of forty years of editorials on the “Indian Problem”
from the New York Times, see Hays.

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boys; Seton’s lessons in how to ﬁnd or assemble “a tribe of the right kind of boys,
woods, one or more teepees, bows and arrows, [and] a head-dress or war-bonnet
for each” simply expand the range of activities and outﬁt the boys in the proper
attire (15). Seton also reassures the mothers reading Ladies ’ Home Journal that
“We do not wish our boys playing ‘Injun’ to do any of the dreadful things that
might win a feather for the ferocious Sioux brave,” and he suggests eleven
alternate activities—including running, rowing, paddling, jumping, and
swimming—for which the boys might be awarded “grand coups” (17). “Playing
Injun” does not imply, as Seton makes clear, that one wants “to be a cruel savage,”
but rather simply “to know how to live . . . as he does” (15; emphasis added).
Seton was not alone in advocating such games for children as a way of
building strength and conﬁdence, maintaining health and vigor, and learning about
the environment. Interest in the relation between play and education generally, in
fact, was widespread at the end of the nineteenth century. The rise of scientiﬁc
“child-study,” in particular, inspired scholarly publications on topics such as
Games and Songs of American Children, Self Education Through Play, and
Aspects of Child Life and Education (Mergen 401, 402, 408). These examples
suggest that, as Bernard Mergen contends, “Play was perceived to have an
important role in socialization and education” at the end of the nineteenth century
(403). Furthermore, while the educational beneﬁts of play in general were widely
heralded, the particular virtues of “playing Indian” also received considerable

attention. A study by the president of the National Recreation Association, entitled

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Play in Education, went so far as to isolate a “Big Injun” stage of childhood
development during which “impersonation . . . survives, not as an accessory of
some other form of play but as a primary object” (qtd. in Mergen 414). Interest in
“playing Indian,” like the interest in childhood itself during this period, found
expression in a variety of scientiﬁc as well as popular contexts in the late
nineteenth century as a subject of interest to academics and “Seton’s Boys” alike.
A fascinating example of the ways in which this interest in the educative
value of “playing Indian” found application by white Americans appears in The
Outlook of October 1906. Entitled “An Indian Summer,” the essay relates the
efforts made by one father to satisfy the “raging fever” of his young boy for all
things Indian (L. Hine 503). Written as a lighthearted but well-intentioned plea for
“a more intelligent use of our children’s vacations,” the essay recounts a summer
of entertaining activities, “physical building up,” and school work (continued
during vacation “to keep the mind in wholesome condition not attained by the
usual desultory vacation activities”)——all designed around the imaginative notion
of “playing Indian” (503). This imaginative contrivance, that is, supported the
hard work as well as the “real play” of his son during the summer: “It was not all
play, this Indian summer,” the author notes with some pride. Instead, as his essay
suggests, education and play were properly regulated to function perfectly
together, with the various branches of knowledge and the various “instincts” of the
child coming into productive play through the process of pretending to live as an

Indian.

187

It is difﬁcult to determine just how “playing Indian” came to be conceived
of as a useful pedagogical stratagem, a clever and entertaining means of teaching
healthy and virtuous living. To a certain extent, this fascination with “playing
Indian” clearly derived from (and contributed to) a broader contemporary recasting
of the Indian in American society, what Alan Trachtenberg describes as “a fabric
of fantasy, nostalgia, and idealization” created as “a kind of shroud for the
‘vanishing American.”’15 A photograph from 1899, for example, portrays a group
of Washington, DC, school boys playing a game called “Indian club relay”
(Mergen 409): Such a game, one imagines, could only have been devised after the
actual “Indian club” and other weapons of war had been effectively taken out of
the hands of Indian warriors, and a certain nostalgia had been cast over both those
warriors and their weapons. But this association of children’s games with Indian
ways also stems from the prevailing notions about childhood examined above.
Childhood games based on Indian life, as the studies connecting education and
play imply, had less to do with the actualities of Indian life than they did with the
“processes” of civilization. Imitation of “savage” ways, that is, prepared children
to be “civilized,” to fulﬁll the demands of the world of work and of adulthood. In

this sense, “playing Indian” had a function similar to that which Lears identiﬁes in

 

'5 See Trachtenberg, Incorporation 37. In a more recent essay, Trachtenberg
traces this recasting of the “vanishing Indian” into the ﬁrst decades of the twentieth
century, in particular through the “educational” projects of the famed Wanamaker
department stores. Trachtenberg quotes a letter of appreciation from one young boy
who, after seeing a movie version of Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” in

188

the period’s general fascination with images of childhood: It offered “a brief,
imaginary escape” from the world of “adult conventions,” but “accommodated”
children to those conventions in the process (144). The father who provided “An
Indian Summer” for his son makes this aspect of Indian play clear near the end of
his essay, when he describes his son’s gradual appreciation of the need to “take
more responsibility upon his own shoulders, and thus to feel that he was in charge
of himself”: Though the boy neglected his “duties” initially, “soon he learned to do
business upon a business basis, and realized that laws are to be obeyed” (L. Hine
506)

Eastman’s “Recollections of the Wild Life,” published in St. Nicholas
during the last decade of the nineteenth century, inevitably intersects in myriad
ways with these broad cultural ideas. Far from reﬂecting merely nostalgic
reminiscing or a simple wish to tell stories to children, Eastman’s writing about his
childhood and for a primarily juvenile audience grounds his text in the widespread
interest of American society in childhood as a discrete period of development, in
the Indian as a vanishing “child-race,” and in the potential of “playing Indian” for
the socialization of “civilized” children. As noted earlier, Eastman clearly
composed or at least edited his sketches with the audience of St. Nicholas in mind,
and much of what he writes might be interpreted as catering to the preconceptions

of an audience with little direct exposure to the real lives of American Indians. To

 

Wanamaker’s two-thousand-seat auditorium, bought “Indian suits” in the store for
“playing Indians in the little park before our house” (“Wanamaker Indians” 7 ).

189

what extent Eastman wrote to conform his expression to those expectations, and to
what extent he merely conﬁrmed ideas that he fully accepted, remain the most
difﬁcult questions for readers and critics of Eastman’s work. Certainly, writing
after almost seventeen years in American schools and universities beyond his
ﬁfteen years in the “wild” (Wilson 37), Eastman might be expected to have felt
some conviction about both the virtue and the necessity of the Indian’s transition
“from the deep woods to civilization.” But a close analysis of his initial efforts to
write of his early life and to reach a wide audience through publication illuminates
the ways in which Eastman also sought to negotiate between those two worlds,
maintaining a peculiarly bi-cultural position and attempting to mediate between his
“civilized” readers and the world they deemed “savage.”

3|! * *

Eastman’s direct appeal to young readers, and to young boys in particular,
emerges much more clearly in the opening paragraph of Indian Boyhood than in
“Recollections,” though the same appeal characterizes both texts: “What boy,” he
writes, “would not be an Indian for a while when he thinks of the freest life in the
world? This life was mine . . .” (3). Here Eastman engages his readers
immediately on the level of imaginative identiﬁcation, suggesting the position that
they ought to take with regard to all that will follow. His question is rhetorical, of
course, since “every boy,” at least according to Ernest Thompson Seton, “loves to

’99

‘play Injun (15; emphasis added). But the question hinges, it should be noted, on

the small phrase “for a while”: Actually being an Indian, as Seton also noted, does

190

not appeal to a young boy at all. Instead, knowing how they live, ﬁnding someone
to “teach . . . all about” their lives, allows a boy “to get the most pleasure possible
out of playing Red Man” (15). Eastman playfully engages here the notion of white
boys “playing Indian,” humorously suggesting that the laws of nature might be
momentarily suspended and Indian identity might be interchangeable with white.
At the same time, the Opening sentence is implicitly political—given that the life
Eastman describes as “the freest life in the world” no longer exists in any form—as
well as autobiographical, given that the Indian life “was” his, in fact, only “for a
while” (even as he, of course, remains an “Indian” by “blood”).
The opening paragraph of Indian Boyhood continues this way:
Every day there was a real hunt. There was real game. Occasionally
there was a medicine dance away off in the woods where no one
could disturb us, in which the boys impersonated their elders . . . .
They painted and imitated their fathers and grandfathers to the
minutest detail, and accurately, too, because they had seen the real
thing all their lives.

We were not only good mimics but we were close students of
nature. We studied the habits of animals just as you study your
books. We watched the men of our people and represented them in
our play; then learned to emulate them in our lives. (3)

The explicit appeal of this passage for Eastman’s boy readers rests in the romance
of the world of Indian boys, their proximity to that which was so distant to
“civilized” boys who had to study the natural world in “books” (and read about
Indian chiefs in dime novels). But the passage is also remarkable for the balance

Eastman creates between the “real” and the “imitation”: He depicts, on the one

hand, the “real hunt,” “real game,” and the Indian boys’ unmediated access to

191

nature and to their elders, “the real thing”; and, on the other hand, he names the
boys “good mimics” and describes how they “impersonated,” “represented” and
“imitated their fathers and grandfathers.” He depicts the life of the Indian boy, that
is, as a life ofplay——or more speciﬁcally, perhaps, a life of “playing Indian.” The
boys dress up as Indians, paint themselves to resemble “the real thing,” stage
mock-medicine dances—indeed, even the “real hunt” for “real game,” as Eastman
reveals later, refers mostly to the hunting of small game such as chipmunks in
training for the “real” hunting done as adults. If Eastman begins by asking, “what
boy would not be an Indian for a while,” he goes on to suggest that Indian boys
themselves are, in a certain sense, merely “playing Indian.” In this way, Eastman
encourages and reinforces the imaginative identiﬁcation that the ﬁrst line invites:
“Civilized” boys—those who, perhaps, “love to play ‘Injun”’ by following Seton’s
directions on making a war-bonnet out of painted turkey feathers—can more easily
identify with Eastman’s “real” Indian boyhood because the boys he depicts are
themselves ﬁrst seen dressing up and painting their faces.

At the same time, of course, Eastman makes it clear that those boys will
eventually be “the real thing.” When he notes ﬁnally'that the boys “learned to
emulate” the men of the tribe through their “play,” the subtle shift from imitation
to emulation points to the importance of this boyhood play in shaping the boys into
adults. As Eastman writes in the “Recollections,” the Indian boys’ “games and
sports” were “molded by the life and customs of our people—indeed, we practised

only what we expected to do when grown” (306). But the suggestion that play and

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instruction work hand-in-hand to form the character of Indian boys would not have
been an alien idea to the readers of St. Nicholas, particularly to adult readers.
Indeed, as noted above, much of the era’s psychological and anthropological study
of children’s habits of play asserted that childhood play represented perhaps the
best means of education for adulthood. Eastman’s portrayal of Indian childhood
negotiates, it seems, between the desires of boy readers for imaginative
identiﬁcation and the desires of their parents and teachers for proﬁtable lessons in
socialization. At the same time, that portrayal reﬂects Eastman’s own desire to
draw Indian life in terms that would validate, even endorse, that life: Even as he
stands apart at times to Observe Indian existence with a condescending “civilized”
eye, his general attitude is one of admiration and afﬁrmation. Eastman does not
merely appeal to the expectations of his dual audience of adults and children, then,
but does so in order to revise those expectations with unexpected images of Indian
childhood.

Eastrnan’s depiction certainly contradicts the image of Indian children as
“witnessed” by Roosevelt, “so trained” that they take “delight . . . in torturing little
animals.” In “The Boy Hunter” (in Indian Boyhood), for instance, Eastman
describes an incident in which he and four friends capture a young deer, then bring
their pets—including a dog, a fox, and a bear—to “see what they will do” with the
fawn (81). When the animal drops dead from ﬂight, the boys gather around with
“repentance and regret,” ashamed of their cruel intentions, and then quietly part,

embarrassed by their tears. The slight scene neatly illustrates Eastman’s varied

193

appeal to his readers: What begins as a description of the colorful exploits of
Indian boy hunters ends with a touching illustration of “universal” boyhood
humanity. Just as Roosevelt portrays the sadistic glee of Indian children only to
alienate white readers from any identiﬁcation with the “wild Indians” blocking
frontier settlement, Eastman uses the ground of childhood to draw his readers
closer, to encourage cross-cultural identiﬁcation. To be sure, the scene draws what
force it has from sentimental appeal, asking readers to recognize the boys’
humanity insofar as they sympathize with the boys’ emotional response to the
situation; but even such a modest entreaty challenges much of the contemporary
discourse surrounding the Indian.

Eastman again appeals to the American fascination with “playing Indian” in
his description of the Indian child’s “Games and Sports,” in which, as noted above,
he draws several connections between the games of white children and those of
Indian children. But the chapter also includes a brief description of a game that
Eastman’s readers might have been surprised to discover as a part of the “wild
life”:

Occasionally we also played “white man.” Our knowledge of the
pale-face was limited, but we had learned that he brought goods
whenever he came, and that our people exchanged furs for his
merchandise. We also knew, somehow, that his complexion was
white, that he wore short hair on his head and long hair on his face,
and that he had coat, trousers, and hat, and did not patronize blankets

in the daytime. This was the picture we had formed of the white
man . . . . (“Recollections” 308)

194

Eastman and his ﬁiends simulate the white man’s appearance by painting faces
with white clay, constructing birchen hats, attaching “a piece of fur” for beards,
and using white birchbark in place of white shirts; once they are outﬁtted, the
trading begins:
Their merchandise consisted of sand for sugar, wild beans for coffee,
dried leaves for tea, pulverized earth for gunpowder, pebbles for
bullets, and clear water for dangerous “ﬁre-water.” We traded for
these goods with skins of squirrels, rabbits, and small birds. (308)
This curious counterpoint to the white children’s game of “playing Indian” is the
subject of no additional commentary by Eastman, but it offers a compelling
instance of the kind of apparently neutral description in Eastrnan’s writing that in
fact resonates on a number of levels. Most notably, the passage functions as a
moment in Eastman’s sketches when the “savage” object of the “civilized” gaze
turns that gaze back upon civilization: While the text’s primary motive, here as
elsewhere, appears to be to depict Indian life for a white audience, in this case that
audience gets a “picture of the white man” from the Indian’s point of view. That
the picture is woefully inadequate as a characterization of “the white man” might
be read as a humorous illustration of the Indians’ ignorance of the real meaning
and signiﬁcance of “white civilization,” but might also be read as a comment on
the equally absurd representation of Indian ways in the popular pastime of
“playing Indian.” Eastman’s admission that “knowledge of the pale-face” among

Indian boys was “limited” to external details such as complexion and clothing

implies the same limitation in the cooptation of Indian customs by white

195

“civilization” for use in childhood games. By describing what amounts to a
mirror-image of white boys “playing Indian,” Eastman quietly poses a challenge to
those who, like Seton, not only advocated those games but also claimed a basis for
their suggestions about how to “get the most pleasure possible out of playing Red
Man” in purported ﬁrst-hand experience of Indian life (Seton 17).

At the same time, this brief passage also illustrates the way in which
Eastman attempts to skirt the ground of political or cultural critique in order to
establish, instead, common ground between Indian and “American” worlds.
Notably, while Eastman’s “Recollections” includes at least occasional references
to the armed conﬂict between Indian tribes and the American military, Eastman
recalls his childhood exploits playing “white man” only in terms of material, not
military, “exchange.” Indeed, bullets and gunpowder become, in the boys’ play,

9”

mere pebbles and pulverized earth (and the “dangerous ‘ﬁre-water, clear water);
and the munitions constitute “goods,” not the materiel of warfare. Eastman’s
simple description of the Indian boys’ playful substitutions functions, in a sense, to
neutralize even imaginary conﬂict between whites and Indians. Furthermore, in
contrast to Howells’s description of the “hoarding” and improvident wasting of
“the bounty of nature” by boys and Indians alike, Eastman portrays Indian boys
engaged in an earnest imitation of real trading. Where Howells expresses surprise
at the apparently random values that children attach to shells and marbles and

other trinkets, and portrays children (and Indians, by metaphorical extension) as

incapable of actual, proﬁt-driven trade, Eastman and his fellow Indian boys appear

196

9

to understand perfectly the real-life equivalents of their imaginary “merchandise.’
Eastman reverses not only the game of “playing Indian,” it seems, but also the
common images of conﬂict between whites and Indians: Howells’s boys, it might
be noted, play games of warfare between “settlers” and “Indians” (814).

In this unlikely passage and others like it, then, Eastman not only disputes
the common image of the Indian (and the Indian child) as irredeemably savage,
irrational in trade and incapable of civilized existence, but also suggests that the
“wild life” of the Indian is pursued on much the same plane of existence as the
“civilized” life. Indian boys play “white man” just as white boys “play Indian”;
Indian children feel the same range of emotions, whether mourning the death of
family members or ﬁiends or delighting in the freedom of childhood life, as white
children do; and Indian parents, at least “the true and loving parents,” are “as
ambitious and hopeful for their children as any civilized and educated parents
could be” (437). Eastman uses the common ground of childhood to mark off a
broader common ground between Indian and white worlds, two worlds that are
brought together in his narrative by mutual curiosity and (at least imaginatively) in
fair exchange, not in war or exploitation. Regardless of the fact that white boys
“playing Indian” and Indian boys playing “white man” fail equally at realistic
representation, the games illuminate Eastman’s attempt to bring “savage” and
“civilized” children together on the ground of cross-cultural imaginative

identiﬁcation.

197

This is not to suggest that Eastman believed the two worlds he had occupied
to be equivalent, in historical or cultural terms, or that he imagined a future in which
the two worlds might in fact share common ground in America. Nor, indeed, can
one conclude that Eastman wished to dispute the widely held ideas about Indian
improvidence that Howells had drawn from in A Boy's Town: One need only read
Eastman’s description of Indians as “children of Nature,” “forgetﬁrl and careless,”
and his assertion that “much of their suffering might have been prevented by a little
calculation” (227), to upset the conclusion that Eastman envisioned Indian ways as
equal to “civilized” ways. It is clear, on the contrary, that Eastman shared many of
the ideas of his day regarding the status and traits of the Indian “races,” including a
belief in the inevitable decline and eventual disappearance of the Indian peoples in
America. As Brumble argues compellingly, Eastman’s account in Indian Boyhood
reﬂects throughout the “Romantic Racialist and Social Darwinist assumptions” of
the turn of the century (148), assumptions most clearly evident in his prefatory note
to Indian Boyhood:

The North American Indian was the highest type of pagan and
uncivilized man. He possessed not only a superb physique but a
remarkable mind. But the Indian no longer exists as a natural and free
man. Those remnants which now dwell upon the reservations present
only a sort of tableau—a ﬁctitious copy of the past. (iv)
This is, as Brumble observes, “a rather remarkable passage” (147), particularly to
readers trained in the late-twentieth-century pieties of ethnic pride and cultural

relativism. Eastman’s use of the past tense alone points to his distance ﬁom the life

that he will describe in Indian Boyhood, a life he characterizes as both “natural and

198

ﬁ'ee” and “pagan and uncivilized.” His simultaneous responses of praise and
censure reﬂect his deeply felt memories of childhood life (“the freest life in the
world”) as well as his deeply held belief, acquired through two decades of education
in civilization, that the passing of that “natural and free” Indian life was as inevitable
as the development of a child into an adult (Brumble 164).

Another interesting disjunction in this prefatory note offers a ﬁnal clue to
Eastman’s representation of Indian childhood in his earliest autobiographical
writings. In the ﬁrst half of his note, quoted above, Eastman speaks of reservation
life at the turn of the century as “only a sort of tableau—a ﬁctitious copy of the
past,” highlighting the authenticity of his own experience of Indian life even as he
expresses his disapproval of the reservation system as a means of incorporating
Indians into American civilization. ‘6 But the conclusion of Eastman’s note depicts
his own Indian childhood as another tableau vivant of sorts: “I have put together
these ﬁ'agmentary recollections of my thrilling wildlife,” Eastman writes, “expressly
for the little son who came too late to behold for himself the drama of savage
existence” (iv; emphasis added). In a curious way, Eastrnan’s characterization of
reservation life as merely a “ﬁctitious copy of the past” and his own past life as a

“drama of savage existence” foreshadows his description, at the start of Indian

 

'6 Eastman’s comment reﬂects his support of the 1887 Dawes Act and its guiding
premise that if Indians were to survive and ﬂourish in American civilization, they must
survive not as communal “remnants” on reservations but individually and within the
bounds of civilization, as independent home-owners, land-owners, and laborers. On
Eastman’s support for the Dawes Act and its underlying principles, see Wilson 33-36,
139; Brumble 150.

199

Boyhood, of the Indian boys’ “imitation” of the “real thing.” For his young son, for
his white readers, even for himself after his successful transition to civilization, the
free, natural “wildlife” of his youth is transformed in his recollections into a
“thrilling” drama, a “living picture” for interested onlookers to “behold.” To the
extent that Eastman believes that “the Indian no longer exists as a natural and free
man,” he can hold up his own childhood experience of Indian life as an
autobiographical window on the “real thing.” And insofar as he offers his
“recollections of the wildlife” as a “dramatic” subject for the entertainment of
juvenile and adult audiences of St. Nicholas, Eastman participates in and contributes
to the cultural fascination of the day for all things Indian.

While it is too reductive to conclude that Eastman merely depicted “a
somewhat idealized, nostalgic childhood . . . made to correspond to values adopted
in the course of his later Christian upbringing” (Peyer, “Charles” 233), it is clear
that Eastman did in fact craft his recollections to “correspond” to certain
expectations and attitudes on the part of his audience. Eastman’s avoidance of any
suggestion of military conﬂict in the Indian boys’ “white man” games, for example,
suggests his participation in the same evasion of historical speciﬁcity that Dodge
appears to have enforced in editing Eastrrran’s “Recollections” for publication. (Of
course, had Eastman not assented to prevailing expectations to some degree, it is
unlikely that his ﬁrst autobiographical writings would have been accepted by St.
Nicholas or any other leading periodical of the time.) But Eastman’s early

autobiographical writing might also be read as an attempt to mediate between two

200

distinct worlds, to explore the possibilities for cross-cultural understanding and
identiﬁcation that might exist on the common ground of childhood, that “newly
found kingdom of the Naive.” Eastman is clearly less interested in expressing a
singular, autobiographical vision or a “version of his past, his private reality” than
in using the familiar Western form of autobiography and the current fascination
with childhood to celebrate the compatibility of Indian life and American
civilization (Gusdorf 42). Childhood—characterized in part by its distance from
the adult concerns of politics, broken treaties, bloodshed, allotment, citizenship,
rights—allows Eastman the neutral ground he needs to act as bi-cultural mediator,
representative Indian and civilized American embodied in one spokesperson,
offering his recollections of the wildlife as entertaining opportunities for
imaginative identiﬁcation even as he offers alternative, positive images of Indian
life.

It is worth noting that several years after the publication of Indian Boyhood,
Eastman began a long association with the Boy Scouts of America, a group founded
by Ernest Thompson Seton and based, not surprisingly, on a back-to-nature program
not unlike the earlier “playing Indian” craze that Seton had contributed to with his
Ladies ’ Home Journal articles (Wilson 151). According to Eastman’s biographer,
Raymond Wilson, Seton “held Eastman and his works in high esteem” and “was
extremely happy at having a national ﬁgure like Eastman participating in the
movement” (151). In addition, after several years of involvement with the Boy

Scouts as a spokesperson, camp director, and National Councihnan, Eastman and his

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wife Elaine founded their own camp (tellingly named “the School of the Woods”),
advertising the fact that their camp’s Indian activities were taught by a “Real Indian”
(Wilson 151). In this institutionalization of the tum-of-the-century fascination with
“playing Indian,” Eastman again expressed his conviction in the value of Indian
ways for the ediﬁcation of the children of “civilized” Americans, even as he saw no
viable ﬁrture for the Indian “as a natural and free man.” His continued efforts to
represent the ways of the “Real Indian” to children in spite of his own successful
transition to “civilization” point to his abiding faith in the common ground to be
found in childhood, where Indian and civilized worlds might be brought together in

imaginative identiﬁcation, education, and enrichment.

V

The Problem of the Self, the Problem of the Indian:
Charles Eastman, Francis La Flesche, and Zitkala—Sa

Charles Eastman was not alone at the turn of the century in composing
autobiographical narratives of childhood Indian life without the aid of a translator
or transcriber or in seeking publication for that writing. Self-written narratives by
Indian students in white-run schools, to give just one example, proliferated during

this period, many published in promotional school newsletters or magazines.17 But

 

'7 Many of the Indian schools at the turn of the century published institutional
periodicals, including Carlisle (The Red Man), Haskell (Indian Leader), Chilocco
(Indian School Journal), and Chemewa (Chemewa American) (see Peyer, Tutor ’d
Mind 287). One intriguing example of the Indian “education” narrative is “Angel
DeCora—An Autobiography,” published in The Red Man in 1911. DeCora was
educated at Hampton after she was essentially kidnapped from her reservation by “a
strange white man” (DeCora 280); she continued her education by choice and became

202

fewer Indian writers achieved the national circulation that publication by a leading
American periodical or publishing house might provide. Two contemporaries of
Eastman in particular, Francis La Flesche and Zitkala-Sa, successfully published
autobiographical narratives that offer compelling counterpoints to Eastman’s early
writings. All three writers chose to center their autobiographical writing on Indian
childhood; all three published their work for a national, largely white readership.
But the uses to which each writer put the topic and theme of childhood varied
considerably, just as the opportunities of publication differed for each. Together,
the autobiographical narratives published by Eastman, La Flesche, and Zitkala-Sa
point to the range of possible responses of Native American writers to both the
cultural fascination with childhood and the conditions of publication at the turn of
the century.

Francis La F lesche’s literary career in the years just before and after the
turn of the century parallels Eastman’s in a few telling ways. In 1900, La Flesche
submitted his ﬁIll-length manuscript, The Middle Five: Indian Schoolboys of the
Omaha Tribe, to Doubleday and McClure Company, two years before McClure,
Phillips and Company (an offshoot of the former house) published Eastman’s
Indian Boyhood. La Flesche also submitted at least one short story to the Youth ’s
Companion, the only children’s periodical that far exceeded St. Nicholas in

circulation. But the “surprise” that Eastman felt upon acceptance of his ﬁrst

 

an artist and an art teacher at Carlisle. As a professional artist, DeCora illustrated
Zitkala-Sa’s Old Indian Legends in 1901.

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submission was not enjoyed by La Flesche: Youth 's Companion did not publish his
story, and Doubleday and McClure rejected The Middle Five, believing the book to
lack a strong market appeal (Parins and Littleﬁeld xii, xvi). Doubleday’s editor H.
W. Lanier suggested to La F lesche, in fact, that the book’s focus on Indian boys at
school ought to be downplayed, that “the burden should be thrown upon the other
wilder existence” in order to reveal to “the outside world what the life of the
Indians actually was and is” (qtd. in Parins and Littleﬁeld xii). In the same letter,
Lanier suggested to La Flesche “that it is just in the diﬂ'erence between the life of
the Indian boys and the life of other boys that you could make your work so
superior to that of any one else, from your better knowledge” (xiii; emphasis
added). When another publisher accepted La F lesche’s book, Lanier reiterated that
Doubleday was holding out for a book about the “wild life” that “would make a
stir” (qtd. in Parins and Littleﬁeld xiii).

This brief scene from La Flesche’s literary career illustrates the problematic
nature of the access to print that was available to Indian writers at the turn of the
century and points to the real limitations on what those writers were free to explore
in their writing—even in autobiographical writing—if they wished to reach a
mainstream American audience. Shortly after La Flesche’s exchange with Lanier,
an editor at the Macmillan publishing house responded to a story submission by La
F lesche by noting that her company was especially interested in “‘legends’ that
were ‘simply told’ as someone by a ﬁreside might tell to children,” stories, that is,

like the “‘lovely legends of the darkies’” in the Uncle Remus stories (Parins and

204

Littleﬁeld xv). This telling comment might help to explain the publication of Old
Indian Legends by Zitkala-Sa in 1901 and Wigwam Evenings by Eastman and his
wife Elaine in 1909—the latter complete with aged storyteller, simple and
entertaining legends, and even “a generous ﬁre of logs” (4). What these examples
suggest is not merely that Indian writers catered, willingly or unwillingly, to the
prevailing expectations of readers and publishers, but that they (like all writers of
the time, to varying degrees) wrote and sought publication of their writing within
the particular limits and liabilities of the literary marketplace. The fact that
Eastman succeeded throughout his career in ﬁnding a forum for his writing while
La Flesche turned from literary to anthropological work soon after his ﬁrst book
was published reveals less, ﬁnally, about distinctions in the two writers’s literary
abilities than it does about differences in the ways each negotiated the channels of
publication at the turn of the century.

It is clear from a reading of The Middle Five why Lanier was unsure of its
appeal to readers interested in the “wilder existence” of Indians and in “the
difference between the life of the Indian boys and the life of other boys.” In his
portrayal of a band of ﬁve Indian boys at a Presbyterian boarding school in
Nebraska, based largely on his own childhood experience, La F lesche accents the
similarity of Indian boys and other boys in his depiction of the emotional ties of
boyhood friendship, the stirring of romantic affection, the pain of separation,
loneliness, and loss. He dedicates his autobiographical narrative “To the Universal

Boy,” and—though his Preface notes that “the object of this book is to reveal the

205

true nature and character of the Indian boy”—La F lesche makes it clear that his
portrayal will not accentuate the “wilder existence” that Lanier hoped to ﬁnd in it
(xv). La F lesche is not interested in catering to a desire on the part of white
readers for vivid portrayals of the uncivilized and pagan “wildlife.” On the
contrary, he takes aim at “the misconception of Indian life and character so
common among the white people” by which “every aspect of the Indian and his
manner of life has always been strange to the white man” (xviii-xix). This
“strangeness,” La F lesche contends, “has been magniﬁed by the mists of prejudice
and the conﬂict of interests between the two races” (xix), as well as by “an
ignorance of the Indian’s language, of his mode of thought, his beliefs, his ideals,
and his native institutions” (xviii). As his Preface makes abundantly clear, La
Flesche does not evade commentary that might cause discomfort to his white
readers, ascribing in part or wholly to white Americans the “misconception[s],”

9’ “

“ignorance, prejudice,” and “conﬂict of interests” responsible for discord
between Indian and white peoples.

At the same time, The Middle Five as a whole dwells far less on indictment
of white civilization than on endorsement and afﬁrmation of the Indian’s language,
mode of thought, beliefs, ideals, and native institutions. In the Preface, La Flesche
makes his homage explicit, noting with pride that Indian children (speciﬁcally,
those of the Omaha tribe of his childhood) are “taught respect and courtesy toward

our elders,” etiquette in manners and speech, and “grammatical use of [our] native

tongue” (xvi). He praises the “beauty and picturesqueness, and euphonious

206

playfulness” of the Omaha language as uttered by native speakers, then notes the
pain of the “native American” who must hear “the utterances of his father . . .
constantly belittled when put into English,” their thoughts “travestied and their
native dignity obscured” (xix). Notably, La F lesche highlights not only the
aesthetic value of native language and expression but also the difﬁculty and
frequent insufﬁciency of cross-cultural expression, the “belittlement” of both the
content and the form of native expression. When he notes that some elements of
native speech and diction “are all but impossible to be given literally in English,”
the inadequacy clearly rests with the English-language interpreter and with the
English language itself.

When La Flesche turns to his memories of bOyhood schooldays, then, he
does so not with Eastman’s interest in ﬁnding common ground between Indian and
white worlds but with a desire to illuminate the nobility and integrity of native
cultures against the baseness and corruption of white society. The representatives
of white “civilization” in The Middle Five show little appreciation for the aesthetic
qualities or the dignity of the “savage” ways that they seek to eradicate by way of
education. When visiting supervisors ask the Indian students to sing “an Indian
song,” for example, the boys ﬁrst hesitate, then join in singing the “Victory song”:

We understood the song, and knew the emotion of which it was the
expression. We felt, as we sang, the patriotic thrill of a victorious
people who had vanquished their enemies; but the men shook their
heads, and one of them said, “That’s savage, that’s savage! They
must be taught music.”

So it came about that every afternoon after this visit we spent
an hour on a singing lesson . . . . (100)

207

In this scene and others, La Flesche inspires in his readers both imaginative
identiﬁcation with the children and corresponding condemnation of the white
men’s deafness to their artistic and emotional expression. It is worth noting,
however, that La Flesche does not attempt to inspire such recognition by
translating what the boys sang, instead emphasizing “the emotion of which it was
the expression.” By contrast, when Eastman represents an Indian “lullaby” in his
“Recollections,” he transcribes the song into that Western formal pattern, complete
with rhyme and poetic repetition (130), as if to insure ﬁgurative cross-cultural
identiﬁcation on the part of his readers by ensuring that they will be able to
identify, literally, the Indian language and expression he wishes to portray.

In his effort to elevate Indian language, customs, and beliefs above and
beyond those of white “civilization,” furthermore, La Flesche draws strength from
his portrayal of the world of childhood, accenting a nobility and integrity that
appear to be lost to the adult world. In contrast both to Howells’s portrayal of the
“savage” world of childhood and to Roosevelt’s depiction of Indian children as
sadistically cruel, La Flesche portrays his boyhood friends as fundamentally pure
in heart. His best friend Brush, who makes Bible stories real to young Frank and
whose death marks the end of the “middle ﬁve,” represents the nobility and purity
of youth most clearly. In a brief but signiﬁcant scene in The Middle Five, in which
the ﬁve boys are appalled by the cruelty of the headmaster, “Gray-beard,” towards

a helpless Indian child, Brush reports the incident to the superintendent and gains

208

an apology from Gray-beard (140). The scene is clearly intended to indict white
civilization through its most visible representative, the headmaster of the Indian
school. More speciﬁcally, the scene exposes the physical advantage and violence
that operates beneath the expressedly benevolent efforts of white civilization to
educate the Indian children. (The infamous educational philosophy of the founder
of Carlisle, General Richard Henry Pratt—“Kill the Indian and save the man!”—
makes explicit what La Flesche dramatizes here [qtd. in Hertzberg 16].)

Finally, La F lesche does not attempt, as Eastman does, to ﬁnd compatibility
between Indian and white worlds but rather to defend the value and integrity of
one while indicting the hollowness and violence at the heart of the other. To be
sure, La Flesche rests his appeal to white readers in the widespread cultural
fascination with childhood and builds his defense of Indian ways on the ideals and
virtues of “civilization,” as his emphasis on the proper speech and polite manners
of Indian children signals. But if he writes to communicate the “true nature” of
Indian life to white readers in terms that they can understand, he does so with a
ﬁrndamental belief in the value and dignity of Indian life on its own terms, not
merely as a rich source of education or entertainment for white children. La
Flesche’s failure to reach the same wide audience reached by Eastman over several
decades may ﬁnally reﬂect the unfortunate incompatibility of his vision of the
beauty and integrity of Indian life and the preconceived vision of the “strangeness”
of that life, “magniﬁed through the mists of prejudice,” on the part of many white

editors and readers.

209

If La F lesche used his autobiographical sketches of childhood to reconstruct
an imagined wholeness and integrity in Indian life even under the inﬂuence Of the
white-run mission school, Zitkala-Sa composed her “Impressions of an Indian
Childhood” to point toward a wholeness forever lost through her education in
“civilization.” In a series of three autobiographical essays published in the
Atlantic Monthly in 1900, Zitkala-Sa writes of her early years on a Sioux
reservation, her traumatic move to and her years of schooling at a Quaker
missionary school in Indiana, her continuing education at Earlham College, and a
brief stint as “An Indian Teacher Among Indians” at the Carlisle Indian Training
School.18 Like Eastman and La Flesche, Zitkala-Sa appeals to her predominantly
white, middle-class audience by grounding her autobiographical sketches in an
examination of childhood and in a pseudo-ethnographic representation of Indian
life. But Zitkala-Sa’s use of childhood as topic and theme differs markedly from
that of her contemporaries, just as the publication of her sketches in the prestigious
(and by no means juvenile) Atlantic Monthly distinguishes her literary efforts from
those of Eastman and La Flesche. In her interrogation of what she has lost by

becoming “civilized” and the psychic damage that she has suffered in that

 

'8 Zitkala-Sa’s three autobiographical essays, entitled “Impressions of an Indian
Childhood,” “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” and “An Indian Teacher among
Indians,” were published between January and March of 1900 in the Atlantic Monthly.
The essays were reprinted in Zitkala-Sa’s American Indian Stories in 1921; all further
references are to the latter text, and will be cited parenthetically.

210

transition, furthermore, Zitkala-Sa invokes her Indian childhood in far more
personal, explicitly autobiographical terms than either Eastman or La Flesche.
Two brief comments at the end of Eastrrran’s “Recollections” offer a telling
illustration of the distinct ways in which Eastman and Zitkala-Sa make use of both
the matter of childhood memories and the mode of autobiography. After
Eastman’s father arrives to bring him out of the “wild life” and into civilization,
Eastman describes his experience of that journey this way:
I felt as if I were dead, and traveling to the Spirit land; for now all
my old ideas were to give way to new ones, and my life was to be
entirely different from that of my past. Still, I was eager to see some
of the wonderful inventions of the white people . . . . (610)
After relating a humorous anecdote about his terriﬁed reaction upon ﬁrst seeing a
train, Eastman turns to a description of his father’s morning devotions, which he
witnesses with incomprehension until his father explains “the word Jesus”:
. . . my father then told me that Jesus was the Son of God who came
on earth to save sinners, and that it was because of him that he had
sought me. This conversation made a deep impression on my mind.
(61 1)
These scenes are characteristic of Eastman’s autobiographical writing throughout
his “Recollections” insofar as they paint his inner, emotional life only in broad
strokes, glossing over the precise nature of the “deep impression” left by
signiﬁcant childhood experiences. Eastman frequently accentuates the positive
virtues of activity and self-reliance at the expense of personal reﬂection; even on

the realization that “all my old ideas were to give way to new ones, and my life

was to be entirely different from that of my past” (emphasis added), Eastman

211

quickly turns his attention to the wonders of the white world, embracing with
optimism the “new” ideas that it offers him. The “deep impression” made by both
the story of Jesus and the story of his father’s motivation to seek out his son
receives no clariﬁcation or elaboration, perhaps considered too individual, too
personal, to ﬁt within Eastman’s limited autobiographical design in
“Recollections.”

Zitkala-Sa grounds her “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” on the other
hand, in precisely those individual, psychological “deep impressions” that Eastman
evades. Her narrative begins, like Eastman’s “Recollections,” by depicting the
“wild freedom” of the Indian child’s existence (8); but in carrying her narrative
through the transition to civilization and in probing the resulting ambivalence and
dislocation, Zitkala-Sa does not isolate that life of freedom in a world apart from
her life as an adult. Her narrative persona, like Eastman’s, combines the naivete of
the child with the wisdom and judgment of the adult; but Zitkala-Sa represents her
childhood life as wholly tied up with her adult identity, in no way discrete or
isolated from her experience of adult life. Signiﬁcantly, while Eastman records
how he “gazed” with “lively interest” upon ﬁrst reaching an outpost of white
civilization (610), Zitkala-Sa recalls the experience of ﬁrst feeling the gaze of that
civilization upon her, during her journey to the Eastern school, as white women
“scrutinized” her, “large men . . . riveted their glassy blue eyes” on her, and
children turned “their bold white faces toward [her]” (47-48). And while Eastman

highlights his own (sometimes humorous) lack of comprehension of white culture,

212

Zitkala-Sa, like La Flesche, accents the vulgar curiosity of white Americans about
Indian life and their utter lack of sympathetic or intelligent understanding of that
life.

Like La F lesche, too, Zitkala-Sa expresses an awareness in her
autobiographical writing of the limits and liabilities of cross-cultural expression.
When she was sick as a child at the Indian school, Zitkala-Sa did not report her
illness because “it was inbred in [her] to suffer in silence rather than to appeal to
the ears of one whose open eyes could not see [her] pain” (66). Likewise,
“however tempestuous” her memory of childhood was to her as she composed her
narratives, she remarks, “it comes out as the low voice of a curiously colored
seashell, which is only for those ears that are bent with compassion to hear it” (68).
Both a commentary on the deaﬁress too often met by Indian writers and a meta-
textual appeal to the readers of the Atlantic Monthly to bend their ears “with
compassion” to her “low voice,” this powerful image is also just one of many that
Zitkala-Sa draws to signify her sense of self, the embodied self behind the
speaking voice of the text. She ﬁlls her narratives of childhood with sensory
details and vivid images not only to intensify her portrait of Indian life in general
but also to represent in concrete equivalents the metaphorical “impressions” made
upon her body by the process of civilization. Thus harsh lights and sounds
accompany bewildering or humiliating events in her narration; and, when the

9, 6‘

process seems complete, Zitkala-Sa imagines herself “a slender tree, uprooted”

and “shom of [her] branches,” stripped of “the natural coat of bar ” and left “a

213

cold bare pole . . . planted in a strange earth” (97). Eastman imagines his transition
from the wilderness to civilization in terms of death and resurrection, the body
renewed, it seems, along with the acquisition of a new way of life; Zitkala-Sa
suggests, on the contrary, that the body that survives that transition wears all Of the
scars and “impressions” of the process.

In the penultimate section of “An Indian Teacher Among Indians,” Zitkala-
Sa portrays her mother’s mute “curse” upon the neighboring white settlers, holding
“her outstretched ﬁngers toward the settler’s lodge, as if an invisible power passed
from them to the evil at which she aimed” (94). In a curiously parallel image,
Zitkala-Sa writes in the closing section of the same essay of her hope that “a day
would come when [her own] mute aching head, reared upward to the sky, would
ﬂash a zig-zag lightning across the heavens” (97). This latter “dream of vent for a
long-pent consciousness” neatly draws together the voiceless protest of the
“primitive” Indian mother and the literate expression of the “civilized” Indian
daughter, whose autobiographical essays perfectly combine both pointed social
critique and poignant personal narrative. Indeed, Zitkala-Sa’s life story appears to
culminate in a merging of the personal and the political. At the end of her third
essay, she recalls “one weary day in the schoolroom” when “a new idea presented

” “

itself to me, a new way of solving the problem of my inner self” (97). The
countours of that solution remain hidden to her readers; she goes on, instead, to

recollect the “many specimens of civilized peoples” who visited her classroom at

Carlisle, “gazing upon the Indian girls and boys” at their studies, “afterward to

214

boast of their charity to the North American Indian” (98-99). Zitkala-Sa’s
concluding comment—“But few there are who have paused to question whether
real life or long-lasting death lies beneath this semblance of civilization” (99)—
represents an unlikely summation to an explicitly autobiographical narrative, but in
fact points to her new-found solution to “the problem of [her] inner self.” By
composing her impressions of an Indian childhood and presenting them through
the forum of leading national periodical, Zitkala-Sa herself stretches out her
ﬁngers toward white Americans both to invite a compassionate response and to
vent “a long-pent consciousness” of the wrongs done to her and to other Native
Americans. Writing of her own Indian childhood for anyone compassionate
enough to listen, she explores both the “real life” and the “long-lasting death” that
are the painful products, for the Native American child, of the processes of

civilization itself.

Zitkala-Sa’s reaching toward “a new way of solving the problem of [her]
inner self” in the form of autobiographical writing recalls the assertion by Georges
Gusdorf, quoted above, that every autobiographer “commences, in a manner of
speaking, with the problem already solved” and writes in order to “gain acceptance
for this or that revised and corrected version of his past, his private reality” (42).
What the literary careers and the autobiographical writings of Eastman, La

Flesche, and Zitkala-Sa illustrate is something more complicated, a difﬁcult and

215

compromising negotiation of the preconceptions and desires of readers, the
editorial demands of periodicals and publishing houses, and the writer’s own
interest in revealing the “true nature” of Indian life as well as his or her true self.
That all three writers chose autobiography as a form in which to engage in this
complex negotiation, leading periodicals and publishing houses as their forum, and
childhood as a prevalent topic and theme unites their literary efforts at the turn of
the century. That each favored a different response to both the “problem” of the
inner self and the broader “problem of the Indian” in American society points to
the depth of the challenge of confronting those problems in autobiographical

narratives of Indian childhood.

216

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