Week 2 – Progressivism, Industrialization, and the Arts

Question 1

The New Century

Answer 1

• The first three decades of the 20th century are characterized by what has been called political and economic “Progressivism.”
• The strong individualism that had characterized the rather rural American scene gives way to the demands of an interdependent and impersonal industrial society.

Question 2

Progressivism

Answer 2

1. The founding of the Republican Party
2. The political hegemony what has come to be known as WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants).
3. The cautious retreat from the ruling laissez-faire tradition of federal economic government (“least government is the best government”).

Question 2

The New Industrial Age (1893–1907)

Answer 2

• In spite of the panics of 1893 and 1907, the US enjoys a period of economic growth.
• The GNP (Gross National Product) rises from 37.1 billion in 1900 to 104.4 billion in 1929 – the year of the Stock market Crash – and thus increases threefold in three decades.
• A motor for this expansion is the automobile industry. In 1900, 4192 cars are produced; in 1929, some 4.9 million (!!!) roll off the assembly lines.
• The assembly line becomes the symbol for the new and efficient industrial mass production of goods.

Question 3

Who were the “Godfathers of Progress”?

Answer 3

Henry Ford and Frederick W. Taylor

Question 4

Frederick W. Taylor

Answer 4

• In 1911, Frederick Taylor – who has been a steel foreman closely analyzing every job in the mill – publishes a book on “scientific management” that becomes powerfully influential in the business world.
• The purpose of what has become known as “Taylorism” is to make workers interchangeable, able to do the simple tasks that the new division of labor require.
• In the face of the millions of unskilled immigrants entering the US, Taylorism offers an opportunity to integrate them into the workforce easily and efficiently.

Question 5

From Taylorism to Fordism

Answer 5

• Henry Ford applies the insights of Taylor to his new automobile factory.
• On long assembly lines, every worker has just to perform a single task – thus increasing to a unprecedented degree what Karl Marx has called the “estrangement” of the worker from his job.
• The streamlining of production, however, allows Ford to pay wages above average.
• It is his professed aim to enable workers to buy what has become an icon of industrial mass production – his own Ford T-Model (‘Tin Lizzy’)

Question 6

The New Prosperity

Answer 6

• Before the Great Depression, there exist over 23 million cars (almost one per household!), 10 million radios, 6.8 million vacuum cleaners, and 5 million washing machines in America. That is, what enters US economy with a vengeance is one thing: debt.
• The economic boom and the new capitalist society lead to the invention of another aspect of modern life without which our world would seem hardly conceivable today: that of advertisement and PR.

Question 7

New Technology of the early 20th century

Answer 7

• The radio
• The telephone
• The telegraph
• The railroad
• The first airplanes
• The first “highways”

All of these reduce time and space dramatically

Question 8

New Architecture in NYC in beginning of 20th century

Answer 8

• Soaring real estate prices in Manhattan, as well as new construction strategies and materials (glass and steel), give New York and other urban centers a new face, as the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and other skyscrapers are built.
• Btw, Manhattan has learnt from one city specifically: Geneva! Geneva was the first city to built ‘high’ because the city couldn’t expand.

Question 9

New Faith

Answer 9

• Beside all technological and economic progress, there is a strong religious impetus in politics.
• Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Herbert Hoover are all convinced that America by manifest destiny and God’s providence is designed/“destined” to lead the world.

Question 10

Trusts, Parties, and Government

Answer 10

• It has become clear that traditional government structures are unfit to deal with the new realities.
• Laissez-faire economic politics has led to trusts and monopolies that are abusing their powers, setting up prices, manipulating tax systems, destroying small businesses, and generally warping politics.
• Parties have become, at the local level, more and more pressure groups for specific economic and corporate interests. A ‘new’ political phenomenon arises: Lobbyism.
• What is needed is a government that intervenes into, and regulates, a rampant capitalism and wildcat banking.
• This, however, goes straight against one of the most dearly held convictions in the US: That the State should keep out of anyone’s pursuit of happiness.’

Question 11

What are The Muckrakers?

Answer 11

• Many of the abuses of local politicians and the robber barons are brought to public attention by the so-called “muckrakers.”
• These are journalists bent on exposing the corruption and abuses of power of politicians and industrialists.
• Their influence is considerably enlarged by an ever-more widely distributed, syndicated press system.

Question 12

Who are Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell?

Answer 12

• Muckrakers & crusading Journalists
• Ida Tarbell’s The History of the Standard Oil Company (1914) – serialized before in McClure’s magazine – leads to an unprecedented government antitrust suit against the firm
• Upton Sinclair’s account of the conditions in the meat-packing industry in The Jungle (1906) instigates new laws on the hygiene and working conditions in this branch of the industry

Question 13

Socialism in the early 20th century US

Answer 13

• Due to strong class divisions, and mainly imported by the new wave of European immigrants, socialist ideas gain ground
• Many of the prominent writers of the time – Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, and Frank Norris – are either active socialists, or at least heavily criticize the capitalist system.
• Many of them do so by means of a new literary style: Social Realism or “Naturalism”

Question 14

The American Canon

Answer 14

• “What is America?” or “What does it mean to be an American?”
• There is no other nation on the earth whose canonized texts deal so intensely, if not manically, with the question and problem of national identity
• The predominating genres/literary styles had been the romance, the historical novel, the short story, and the poem.

Question 15

James Fenimore Cooper

Answer 15

• The Leatherstocking Tales (1823-1841): The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, Deerslayer
• In line with the historical novel, James Fenimore Cooper tacks the westward expansion across the continent.

Question 16

Henry David Thoreau

Answer 16

• Walden (1854)
• “Civil Disobedience” (1849)
• Belonging to the school of Transcendentalism, Thoreau can be considered the godfather of ‘eco-criticism’ in the US, as well as a predecessor of the principle of non-violent protest that Martin Luther King will resort to.

Question 17

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Answer 17

• In his main essays “Self-Reliance,” “Nature,” “The American Scholar” and “Experience” (all written in the 1830s and 40s), Emerson, also belonging to the school of Transcendentalism, argues for an aggressive individualism and the end of European cultural predominance.

Question 18

Walt Whitman

Answer 18

• Leaves of Grass (1855-1892) / “Song of Myself” / “Pioneers, O Pioneers!”
• Due to his path-breaking style of free verse, Whitman is considered an important precursor of Modernism, and something like the ‘poet laureate’ of American democracy.

Question 19

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Answer 19

• Short stories: “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Birthmark,”
• Novels: The Scarlet Letter (1850) and House of the Seven Gables (1851)
• Hawthorne sheds light on the dark underbelly of US American optimism and future-orientedness

Question 20

Herman Melville

Answer 20

• Together with Hawthorne, Herman Melville constitutes what has become known as Dark Romanticism.
• Novels: Moby-Dick (1851), Benito Cereno, Pierre or The Ambiguities, Billy Budd, White Jacket, Typee, The Confidence Man.
• Short Stories: “Bartleby, the Scrivener”

Question 21

Naturalism

Answer 21

• insists on the determinism of the environment on the individual
• Strongly influenced by the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer, which transfers the principle of the “survival of the fittest” from the zoological to the social realm.
• inherits some traits of the Dark Romanticists, who question both Romanticism’s belief in an inherently benevolent nature, as well as Enlightenment’s belief that it is man’s task to control and dominate it.
• tries to get to the reality of the American experience, focusing on subjects that Romanticism usually does not deal with: Prostitutes, thieves, poor people. However:

Question 22

Who are the influential Naturalists?

Answer 22

• Stephen Crane
• Bret Harte
• Jack London
• Theodore Dreiser
• Frank Norris

Question 23

Stephen Crane

Answer 23

• Stephen Crane is one of the most influential naturalists of his time.
• His works include the novels Maggie, a Girl From the Streets (1893), the civil war novel The Red Badge of Courage (1895), and the famous short story “The Open Boat” (1905), which depicts a shipwreck he himself was part of as he returned reporting from the Cuban War.

Question 24

Bret Harte

Answer 24

• combines Local Color Literature and Naturalism in some of his famous short stories, such as “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” (1869) and “The Luck of Roaring Camp” (1868).
• His stories partly demystify the frontier.

Question 25

Jack London

Answer 25

• Many of London’s most important works describe the fight of survival of man in nature, such as The Call of the Wild (1903), The Seawolf (1904), and The Iron Heel (1908), or this most famous short story, “To Build a Fire” (1908).

Question 26

Theodore Dreiser

Answer 26

• In contrast to the works of Crane and London, Dreiser’s novels are set in urban environments, which exert an influence as overpowering as that of nature.
• Among his most important works are Sister Carrie (1901) and An American Tragedy (1925)
• In both, it is not the fittest who make it, but those who are lucky

Question 27

Frank Norris

Answer 27

As Dreiser, Frank Norris sketches the (unwholesome) influences of capitalism on the individual, as he does in McTeague (1899) and The Octopus (1901).

Question 28

Realism

Answer 28

• In contrast to Naturalism’s rather bleak and deterministic outlook, Realism strives to represent – and negotiate – the reality of American life mostly in the form of a dialogic structure and an educational agenda.
• Influenced also by the upcoming psychoanalysis, Realism often offers close psychological studies of its protagonists.

Question 29

Who are the known realistic authors?

Answer 29

• Henry James
• William Dean Howells
• John William De Forest

Question 30

William Dean Howells

Answer 30

• editor, critic, novelist
• Among his most influential works are A Modern Instance (1882), The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890).
• In his essay “Criticism and Fiction”, he argues for a realistic as well as a local color fiction, urging American authors to “leave our studies, editorial or other, and go into the shops and fields to find the ‘spacious times‚’ “ – times, that is, when the language was direct and natural – “again.”

Question 31

Henry James

Answer 31

• The Undisputed Master of Realism, the most influential
• Among his most important works are novels such as The American (1877), Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Ambassadors (1903), The Wings of the Dove (1902), as well as short stories such as “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896) and “Daisy Miller” (1878)