Colorado State Pioneer Museum

The Colorado State Pioneer Museum (CSPM) is housed in the old El Paso County courthouse that was built in 1903. It is free to the public and well worth the time. Guests will learn about Colorado Springs and the American West. 

One of the museum staff told me that decision to convert the courthouse to a museum was done to save the building from being razed to make room for a parking garage. That would have been a terrible shame! It is a beautiful example of the architecture and style of the Progressive Era city beautiful movement. There is a recreated courtroom on the third floor and functioning 1906 Otis elevator, which moved a lot quicker than I thought it would. There are numerous items representing the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

General William Jackson Palmer was the founding spirit of Colorado Springs. He was a Civil War cavalry officer who won the medal of honor in 1865. After the war Palmer became a railroad executive, industrialist, and, in 1871 founded the settlement that would become Colorado Springs. As a wealthy man and town leader, Palmer attracted much attention from newspaper writers and gossips. Unsurprisingly, many myths and legends emerged about the Palmer family. CPSM has an entire room focused on separating Palmer family fact from fiction. 

Author Helen Hunt Jackson lived in Colorado Springs. Her house is partially rebuilt in the CPSM. In addition to A Century of Dishonor 1881), her ground-breaking work on American treatment of Native Americans, Jackson also wrote poems and other stories. 

Colorado Springs became known as a playground for rest and recuperation, especially for those suffering from tuberculosis (TB). A room with replica doctor's offices, TB patients, a pharmacy counter, and explanative plaques tells this prominent part of early Colorado Springs history. There is a small exhibit on women's suffrage, which Colorado granted in 1893. In my humble opinion this could have been expanded upon. An exhibit entitled "Any Place North and West" examines the life of African Americans in Colorado Springs. Although there as no de jure (legal) segregation in Colorado, there was de facto (practiced) segregation. I think it is always important to remind people that segregation was not a strictly southern phenomenon. There were many examples of segregation practiced in northern and western cities. And not just small ones like Colorado Springs. Chicago was a heavily segregated city through the use of public housing money and restrictive covenants to ghettoize African Americans. 

There were several different collections of Native American artifacts. The most impactful to me was the work of guest curator Gregg Deal who used the photographs of Roland Reed taken around 1910 to show how the camera distorted native life. Deal's exhibit is divided by theme with about five or seven Reed photographs in each theme. For example, one theme was entitled Romanticism and showed how Reed's staged and posed photographs and the use of scenery and costume, were designed to best appeal to white Americans who felt pressured by the pace and demands of modernity and industrial capitalism and longed for a primitive life. Here Reed gave it to them. The larger point that I think Deal was making is that this was appropriating Native American images and then using those photographs to define their lives without their own agency for the gratification of a white audience. Yet, another example of appropriated Native American culture. However, I should mention that Deal is not overly didactic in his presentation. After a brief five minute introductory video, the emphasis is on the creation and organization of the themes around the very large images, not explanations. The point is to let the guests do their own thinking about this. Ironically, I was wearing my St. John's University t-shirt and hat. Their sportsteam used to be called the Red Men. Although this was probably more  because of the school color, it did, nonetheless, appropriate the image of Native Americans. When I was a master's student there in the early 1990s, St. John's renamed their teams the Red Storm. It is long overdue for others to follow.  

Samuel Gompers

In honor of Labor Day, here is an entry I wrote on Samuel Gompers for the Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice, edited by Gary Anderson and Kathryn G. Herr. Thousand Oaks, Calf: Sage Publications, 2007.

Samuel Gompers(1850-1924). American labor leader and president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), 1886 to 1895 and 1896 to 1924.

Samuel Gompers was born in London, England to a Jewish family of laborers. In 1863 after spending the first thirteen years of his life on the tough London streets, Sam immigrated to the United States with his family. They settled in the tenements of the lower east side of Manhattan and became cigar makers. In 1864 Sam joined local 144 of the United Cigar Makers Union. In 1866 Gompers married Sophia Julian, also a Jewish émigré from London. The couple had over a dozen children.

Gompers continued to roll cigars, but he increasingly devoted more time and energy in the capacity of union organizer. The cigar industry was thrown into disarray by the introduction of the cigar mold which turned the skilled cigar makers into unskilled machine operators. In 1875 Gompers became president of Local 144. The following year he called a strike in New York City against companies who utilized the cigar mold. Initially, he was successful in gaining wage increases. Part of the reason for his success rested in his use of a benefit system for striking workers financed by union dues. However, independent cigar rollers who worked out of their tenement flats also went on strike and the companies took a harder line. Unable to control the situation, the strike fizzled out in early 1878. Gompers was blacklisted and had a difficult time finding decent work. These were hard times on his growing family. Disillusioned, Gompers resigned his position in Local 144 and moved his family to Brooklyn in order to gain a fresh start. 

Two years later, he returned to the union movement and dedicated his life to the cause of improving the working and living conditions of laborers. In 1880 he was once again elected president of Local 144 and he began a battle against the unskilled tenement rollers who, he believed, were damaging the livelihood of the skilled cigar makers who worked in the factories. The wretched pay and conditions of the tenement rollers degraded the condition of all labor. His aggressive lobbying led New York State to pass a law effectively abolishing tenement cigar manufacturing. The state supreme court, however, eviscerated the law. Later the legislature passed a revised bill that met the court’s objections, but almost no municipality in the state enforced it. 

Gompers learned four key lessons during these early years of union leadership. First was the limitation of political action. Instead of obtaining laws, he focused his efforts on improving the lives of workers by gaining concrete benefits from employers through collective bargaining. As an adjunct to his belief in the near futility of political action, he believed that the labor movement needed to avoid direct political affiliation. Labor, he argued, should not mingle with politics or form a separate workingman’s party as the socialists professed. Gompers believed that political action should only occur after workers had first leveled the economic playing field. Moreover, the political crusades for causes outside of the workplace, such as the free coinage of silver, as advocated by the Knights of Labor, distracted from the central mission of improving the lives of the workers. When he did take a strong position on a political issue, such as support of Chinese exclusion, it related directly to the condition of labor. Second, his strategy required stronger unions with a benefits system to support strikers, centralized control over when a strike would be called, and a required consensus among union members approving a strike. Strikes, according to Gompers, should he planned, rational events, not a spontaneous and emotional measure. Third, he bitterly opposed dual unionism. A fractured and divided labor movement created a gap that hostile business owners could exploit. Fourthly, Gompers became convinced that trade unionism, focusing on the conditions of the skilled laborer, was the best way to lift all workers. In response to his four lessons, he proposed a federation of labor unions. The first attempt, begun in 1881, proved too weak and failed. He had better success in his second effort. In 1886 he organized the American Federation of Labor and was elected president.

His first objective as president of the AFL was the eight hour day and he called for a nationwide strike on May 1, 1886. The disaster at Haymarket square hurt the cause dearly.  The depression of 1893-1896 hit workers hard. Depression induced unemployment deprived Gompers of the dues he needed to fund his strike benefits system. Gompers received criticism for his failure to provide greater support to the Homestead and Pullman strikes and it briefly cost him the presidency of the AFL.    

After his return to the AFL presidency in 1896 he moved the union headquarters from Indianapolis, Indiana to Washington, DC to better his lobbying efforts. He became a fixture on Capitol Hill advancing the cause of labor to individual Congressman and before committees. Gompers remained president until his death in 1924. He used the force of his personality and patronage to build a reliable and effective political machine inside the AFL. To keep his fingers on the pulse of the membership, he traveled frequently, logging as much as 50,000 miles in rail travel in a year. 

After 1896 Gompers shifted attention from the eight hour day to the right of collective bargaining and increasing the membership of the AFL. He negotiated directly with business leaders and worked closely with Mark Hanna and the National Civic Federation. This course increasingly distanced him from the growing ranks of socialists and radicals. Playing on the emotions and ideals of the progressive era, Gompers presented himself to the business leaders as a sane third choice between immoral wage slavery and the radical International Workers of the World (IWW). In 1906 he supported a boycott against the Buck’s Stove Company and was charged with contempt. He refused to back down or accept a lesser charge. This act of martyrdom improved his standing among the workers and counteracted the tendency some who viewed Gompers as being too conservative. 

Despite his efforts, Gompers could not contain the growing popularity of the radical IWW or of the Socialist Party. The AFL opposed the IWW-managed strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts which lasted from 1912 to 1914.

In 1906 Gompers put fourth a Bill of Grievances. His intention was that the federal government would create something like a labor bill of rights. In 1912 Gompers welcomed the friendly overtures of Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic candidate for president. His support of Wilson paid off when the president signed the Clayton Anti-Trust Act in 1915. Although this embodied a small part of the Bill of Grievances, he proclaimed the Clayton Act “the magna carta” of labor because it exempted unions from prosecution under the restraint of trade clause in the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890. 

Despite the fact that Gompers had advocated pacifism his entire life, he supported American entry into World War I in April 1917. Gompers held important positions in Wilson’s war-time government. As a member of the National Council of Defense and other committees, Gompers brokered a deal in which labor agreed to an unwritten no-strike pledge in return for an eight hour day provision, increased pay, and a minimum wage. During the war union membership skyrocketed from 2.4 million to 3.3 million workers. At the same time the radical unions who spoke out against the war became increasingly marginalized. Gompers supported prosecution of radical labor leaders under the Sedition Act. The success Gompers enjoyed and the defeat of his enemies within the labor movement seemed to vindicate his strategy and ideals. He was at the apex of his career. 

Success, however, was short lived. The end of the war also meant the end of labor’s gains. Gompers did not support the strikes of 1919 and correctly predicted that the labor movement as a whole would suffer a backlash in the court of public opinion. The election of Republican Warren G. Harding as president in 1920 marked a conservative revival and the restoration of a pro-business atmosphere in Washington. At the same time, businesses undercut unions by offering company-sponsored alternatives.  

The last four years of Gompers’s life were painful ones. The death of his wife Sophia in 1920 filled him with grief. His second marriage was an unhappy one, and, he had begun divorce proceedings before he died. He completed his autobiography, Seventy Years of Life and Labor which was published posthumously in 1925. Gompers’s one great initiative of the decade was an unsuccessful drive to create a federation of unions representing the nations of the Americas. The radicalism of the Latin American unions frustrated his attempts at moderation. He died in 1924 of Bright’s Disease while returning from a trip to Mexico.  

Review of Jeffrey Rosen's William Howard Taft

If Americans remember William Howard Taft (1857-1930), the twenty-seventh president of the United

States, for anything it is for being stuck in a bathtub. In part, Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia (which I cannot recommend highly enough for a visit), seeks to rescue Taft from this infamous place in popular memory by reminding the reader in this contribution to the American Presidents series that Taft was a great American with a long list of unparalleled accomplishments, that included service as solicitor general, circuit court judge, high commissioner of the Philippines, secretary of war, president of the United States, and chief justice of the United States. Taft was certainly not a passive character. He was a striving, ambitious man, who was thin-skinned to the point where he became capable, as Theodore Roosevelt recognized, of intense hatred. As a young man he thrashed a report who had written a story critical of his revered father, Alphonso Taft.  

Rosen positions Taft as the anti-Theodore Roosevelt, a man who famously changed his political positions throughout his career. Instead, Taft was remarkably consistent from his earliest legal cases through his presidency and as chief justiceship. Both men had very different perceptions of the presidency. While Roosevelt believed that he could do anything that was not expressly forbidden by the constitution, Taft argued that he could only do what was expressly permitted. For example, Taft felt that under article 2, section 3, he could only recommend items for Congress to consider, and not to try to persuade legislators either individually or collectively toward adopting specific measures. Roosevelt, of course, saw no such barrier to the president exerting as much influence as he could to shape legislation. Finally, unlike the Roosevelt who selectively prosecuted the Sherman Anti-Trust Act according this his own definition of good and bad business combinations, the conservative Taft followed the dictates of the statutes and his administration filed more suits than his progressive predecessor. 

Taft seems bland and overshadowed by both his predecessor Roosevelt and his successor Woodrow Wilson, two of the most important and progressive presidents in American history. The fact that Taft suffered the worst return of any president seeking re-election in the history of our nation, only adds to this perception. Taft is considered to be one of the unhappiest of our chief executives. The signature issue of his administration, the Payne-Aldrich Tariff, is traditionally portrayed a complete fiasco that Taft compounded with one of the biggest presidential gaffes of the twentieth century. Rosen presents an alternative view. He argues that Taft was an exceptional administrator who wanted the federal government to function efficiently. This is certainly an underappreciated attribute in evaluating presidents. We certainly could use someone with Taft’s sensibilities in the oval office today! Rosen devotes considerable time to the tariff revision and makes the case that it was significant accomplishment, even claiming that Taft successfully tackled an issue that Roosevelt dared not touch. While there is a certain element of truth in this, Roosevelt was a master politician who wielded threats of tariff revision to build legislative majorities and support for his administration on issues that concerned him. In truth, he really did not care about the tariff. In tackling such a complex issue with a fractured party (thanks in some part to Roosevelt), the borderline politically inept Taft put his own administration on the defensive from day one and struck a fault line that continued to divide his party right through the 1912 election and beyond. Instead of seeing Taft as out of place between two progressives, Rosen points to some continuities. One example, is Rosen’s argument that some of Taft’s foreign policy initiatives like the World Court and the reciprocity treaty with Canada (although it was not ratified by Canada) were harbingers not only of Wilsonianism but much more broadly of American policy later in the twentieth century. Admittedly, it seems that Rosen does overreach in some of his claims. Personally, I wish he would have addressed Peri Arnold’s claim in Remaking the Presidency(2009) that Taft’s difference from his progressive predecessor and successor was somewhat due to the fact that he had a antiquated nineteenth century concept of the presidency, whereas Roosevelt and Wilson recognized how the office had changed in the early years of the twentieth century. Rosen is much more convincing in describing Taft’s reformist tendency to the institution of the Supreme Court. His innovative reforms, which he aggressively lobbied Congress to pass, substantially altered the focus of the federal judicial system. 

Circling back to where I began this short review, Rosen notes that Taft was at his heaviest when he was in

the White House. He was a classic stress eater who put on the pounds during his unhappy term. The stress and weight gain contributed to his sleep apnea, which caused him to fall doze off in embarrassing situations. But, in biographical terms, this was an aberration. While it is true that Taft struggled with his weight throughout his life, for the most part he exerted his strong will and self-control that allowed him to master his eating. He shed all the weight he had gained during his presidency as soon as he left the office. It serves Rosen’s interpretation to highlight this fact because Taft firmly believed that self-control was the one essential character trait necessary to a democracy. Taft lived this through his own daily battle with food and his waistline. 

Hetchy Hetchy classroom discussion

We had a very interesting discussion about the Hetch Hetchy dam controversy in my HIS 207 American Environmental History class last night at FRCC. Each student had a two page excerpt of a primary source document surrounding the public debate, including comments by the Marsdon Manson, James R. Garfield, John Raker, William Colby, John Muir, and several magazine editorials that favored or opposed the dam. Three main points of consensus emerged among the students by the end of the class.

 
1. They responded well to the dam proponents who generally supported their arguments with facts, especially dollar estimates of costs and benefits. While they liked John Muir’s salty attack on the dam proponents, they generally dismissed his writing as emotional and lacking the same objectivity of the proponents. The unique natural beauty argument did not hold sway.

2. As was clear from our National Park Service Hetch Hetchy timeline there was a direct connection between the dam and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Two months before the earthquake, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to abandon the pursuit of Hetch Hetchy. The devastating earthquake and its fires gave the project new life. Students found this both interesting, because they were unaware of the connection before, and compelling, because it provided a sound claim in their view that the city needed an accessible water supply quickly. They were a little more than chagrinned to see at the end of the time line that it took 20 years to get the water flowing to San Francisco!


3.They definitely sensed some elitism in the arguments of dam opponents. Protecting a valley that relatively few would see did not compare favorably to the benefit gained by the entire city, in their opinion.

I was a little surprised how much the class seemed to tilt in favor of the advocates of the dam.

Granted, this was hardly a deep dive into the event. Nor did I supply any photographs that might have won them over. In most books that I have read, and with most other historians with whom I have discussed the Hetch-Hetchy controversy, it is self-evident that Muir was on the right side, so I was a little taken aback. The lesson for me is to not count out the ghost of Gifford Pinchot!

Best reads of 2015

I read so many good books this past year. Here are some of my favorite reads from 2015. 

Best book: 

James Morton Turner, The Promise of American Wilderness (2012). This is my kind of book! Turner does not give an intellectual discussion of wilderness. Instead, he examines how political process of the 1964 Wilderness Act shaped the definition and concept of wilderness. From this angle, wilderness has had many diverse and varied meanings over the last fifty years. Coming from an urban/suburban environment, I have always had great difficulty identifying with very precise meanings of wilderness. As a kid growing up in Queens, Forest Park felt as much like wilderness to me as Hetch-Hetchy Valley did to John Muir. The fact that the Act left some wiggle room in a definition of wilderness, essentially putting it in the eye of the beholder, gave it great strength and flexibility. This, however, created some conflict, which is at the heart of The Promise of American Wilderness. Turner chronicles not only the debate between those who wanted to protect wilderness and those who did not, but also the complex disagreements among different environmental groups and as well as between national and local organizations. There needs to be more work like this. The Promise of American Wilderness was my best read of 2015.  

Honorable mentions:

Leon Fink, The Long Gilded Age (2015). So much for Rebecca Edwards etal. and the Long Progressive Era. Fink reminds us that the economic system of the Gilded Age was hotly contested ground between labor and management. Their struggles shaped the socio-economic system as it emerged. He makes a case for contingency in that outcomes could have varied. In my humble opinion, Fink's workers had much more of a fighting chance than say those that Steven Fraser depicts in The Age of Acquiescence (2015). Fink also shines an international perspective on the era, and makes the case that labor would have benefited from doing so as well. For example, he argues that during the Homestead strike, American workers should have sought allies with British unions. Denying Andrew Carnegie his respectable safe haven in Skibbo Castle and applying public pressure on him in Great Britain could have yielded positive results. This is just one example of Fink's use of contingency that will surely generate thought.  

Elizabeth Sanders, The Roots of Reform (1999). I see this as something of a complement to David Sarasohn's The Party of Reform (1989). Both seek to turn the Progressive Era on its head. In the latter case, the author roots the reform spirit of the era in the Democratic Party, not the Republicans. Sanders further roots the reform movement in the agrarian/populist tradition, not the urban middle class. It was the farmers, she argues, who drove the Progressive movement. They had a broad vision for a democratic society, which was at odds with the much more narrow, restrictive, and conservative scope of the Gompers labor movement. 

Richard White, Railroaded (2011). Long ago I read an essay by Ayn Rand in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966) that argued that among the transcontinental railroads, only the Great Northern was a success because it did not accept any subsidies from the Federal government. The other railroads were corrupt, poorly managed boondoggles that survived only because the government propped them up. Rand was making a libertarian case against state interference in business. White likewise argues that the railroads were nothing more than a fraudulent scheme, although he comes at it from the left with a strong post-2008 perspective. Playing with house money and supported by public bailouts, White argues that the transcontinental railroad system was nothing more than a Ponzi scheme to route money from the public treasury into the pockets of select investors. And they were select investors who conned others (including their former pals) when it suited them. The amoral, apolitical railroads backed whatever best served the financial interests of their investors. As where previous generations of historians saw the completion of the transcontinental railroad as a triumph of American progress, White sees a complicated, bloated, unnecessary, and unsustainable system that sapped the treasury for decades. It was, in short, a national tragedy in his telling.     

Mark W. Summers, Ordeal of the Reunion (2015). Summers is one of my favorite historians. He is a master dealing with sources and he has a great sense of humor. Summers is one of the few historians who really does make me chuckle out loud.  Summers makes a case that Reconstruction was more of a success than we tend to view it. He argues that the primary purpose of Reconstruction was to bring the union back together after the war without slavery or a slave power. In this, he stresses, it succeeded. There really was little political will even at the height of Radical Reconstruction to completely re-make southern society. Ordeal of Reunion examines the importance of the west (as a source of conflict and investment that drained the north of political and economic will), the economy (especially the Panic of 1873 which devastated the south, especially freedmen), and corruption (which was a real problem in some Reconstruction governments). This will give me a new perspective for when we get to Reconstruction in class much later this spring. 

Lastly, non-History:

Thomas Merton, The Seeds of Contemplation (1962). I picked this up in September after seeing Pope Francis's speech before Congress. As a Catholic I had some passing knowledge of Merton, but I had not read anything he had written. Seeds is a powerful book. It is not something one reads start to finish. Instead, one reads it slowly a paragraph at a time. I have spent weeks contemplating a single paragraph in this remarkable book. 

The Wright Brothers

If one message comes out clearly in David McCullough’s latest book, Wright Brothers, it is that Wilbur and Orville had balls! They risked their lives trying to master controlled, powered flight, and persisted through betrayal, crashes, failure, ridicule, and skepticism to become the first humans to soar with the birds. Honestly, I knew very little about these inventive brothers prior to reading McCullough’s book – or, I should more accurately state, listened to it on audible. The best feature of the audio book was McCullough’s narration.

The most startling thing for me in this book is that the brothers Wright had very little mechanical background.

They tinkered with things, but had no experience building complex machines or with engines prior to building one from scratch for their airplane. Showing their inexperience, the first one cracked the day they made it, and they had to wait several weeks before receiving another aluminum block from ALCOA to manufacture a second motor.

They knew almost nothing about flight when they started their experiments. Of course, it was a concept in its very infancy, but others around the globe had been working on it. The death of German pioneer aviator Otto Lilienthal in 1896 captivated the Wrights. It seems ironic that a fatality in Europe would draw two bicycle shop owners in Ohio into the risky venture of flight. Having resolved to enter the aviation race, Wilbur wrote to the Smithsonian Institution to request all the information they could provide. Later they contacted the Weather Bureau to find a perfect location to test their flying machine. They wanted a windy, sandy, out-of-the-way place, which is how they wound up in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Experiments with gliders in Kitty Hawk convinced the brothers Wright that all that had been written before about the “science” of flight had been total bunk. Throwing out the book of knowledge as it existed; they had to reformulate almost every theory about flying. From practical experiments at Kitty Hawk and more theoretical work with a noisy wind tunnel simulator that they created in their Dayton bicycle shop, they discovered that the wings and how they were configured, shaped, and manipulated were the most important aspect of flight. This was their critical contribution to aviation.    

Armed with this information, they returned to Kitty Hawk in 1903 and made their historic flight that is immortalized on the North Carolina license plate, among other places. It was only 12 seconds! With some modifications, they managed to sustain a flight of 59 seconds before packing it up for the year and returning to Dayton. The world took no notice of their accomplishment.  It was their public flights in Ohio, France, New York, Germany, Italy, and around Washington, D.C. between 1904 and 1911 that drew large crowds, press acclimation, and established their fame as pioneer aviators. Along the way they established records for distance and speed, took the first passenger, and later took the oldest person as a passenger (their 80+ year old dad), and the first female (their sister), as well as some celebrities of the day. Less fortunate, they also were involved in the first aviation passenger fatality when Orville crashed one of their flying machines at Fort Myer, Virginia in 1908. The passenger, Lt. Thomas Selfridge died, and this led to the first accident investigation in aviation history. Orville spent months in recovery.  

The Wright brothers had no wealthy backers. They spent about $1,000 of their own money developing a flying machine. Compare this to Samuel Pierpont Langley, the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, who enjoyed the backing of the U.S government. Langely spent nearly $70,000 with few tangible results. While the Wrights developed their flier in the obscure setting of Kitty Hawk, N.C., Langely’s public experiments around the nation’s capital generated headlines. McCullough suggests the possibility that the War Department was slow to work with the Wrights (other governments were much more interested) because they felt burned by their experience with Langely.

McCullough shows that the Wrights were products of their environment. He describes how entrepreneurial, inventive, and industrial atmosphere of Dayton shaped them. More importantly, he masterfully tells the story of their family life. Their father and sister are almost as big a part of this story as Orville and Wilbur. Thus McCullough gives us a valuable glimpse into Gilded Age life. Wilbur died of typhus at 45 in 1912. Orville died at age 77 in 1948, but had stopped flying in 1918 because of the injuries he had sustained in the Ft. Myer crash.

Review of Shulze, The Degenerate Muse

[This review appeared in the January 2015 issue of Environmental History.]

The Degenerate Muse: American Nature, Modernist Poetry, and the Problem of Cultural Hygiene. By Robin G. Schulze. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 309 pp. Illustration, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $65.00.

Published in 1895, Max Simon Nordau’s Degeneration argued that over-civilization, progress, and wealth were destroying Western culture. He found examples of such decadence in the work of western artists, correlating what he perceived to be a decay of their vigor with mental illness. In the early years of the twentieth century, fears of such dangers inherent in industrialization triggered a back-to-nature movement in the United States that many historians have attributed to a rejection of the artificial, modern world of smoke-belching factories, undesirable immigrants, and stultifying cities that left their inhabitants feeling detached from any meaningful interaction with the real natural world. Through a careful analysis of the published and unpublished works and correspondence of modernist poets Harriet Monroe, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound, Robin Schulze argues an alternative interpretation of the back-to-nature movement in The Degenerate Muse. Her three main subjects were not romantic pastoralists who hoped to educate or inspire their readers with rousing literary vistas of natural wonders. Instead, as Schulze concludes, they argued for a hard-boiled back-to-nature aesthetic that embraced — not rejected — modernity by using the natural world as an antidote to degeneration. They appreciated the benefits that industrialization bestowed on society, but sought to mitigate its negative cultural and racial effects with an invigorating dose of nature. There was no need, in their eyes, to throw out the progressive, prosperous, modernist baby with the degenerative bathwater.

The trio may have shared a broad understanding of how nature could invigorate art and solve Nordau’s dilemma, but Schulze skillfully delineates the considerable nuances and diversity among them. For example, each of the three arrived at the conclusion that nature could solve the predicament of degeneration from very different points. Monroe’s epiphany occurred as the result of trips to Europe in 1897 and Arizona in 1899. Following a path charted earlier by Thomas Jefferson, she concluded that the raw nature of America could save it from the advanced cultural decay evident in Europe. Pound, who made, it seems, almost no personal attempt to commune directly with the outdoors, understood the importance of nature after he witnessed degeneration occurring in London before his own eyes. He viewed the heart of the British Empire as an artificial place that turned its inhabitants into mindless automatons. Moore was influenced by Charles Darwin and how evolution drew humans into the animal kingdom. This newfound brotherhood with other species inspired her appreciation of the natural world. Pound focused more on racial decline and “hygiene,” the ugly underside of theory of degeneration, than the other two poets, a perspective that led him to praise Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s policies in the 1930s. Moore, on the other hand, appreciated the importance of diversity and individuality, which put corporate concepts like race beyond her ken. It is interesting to note that they did not always see each other as allies in a common cause. For example, Monroe, the editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, never believed that she and Moore occupied any common ground, an assumption that Pound attempted unsuccessfully to disabuse her of.  Whatever their differences, their effort, Schulze concludes in the final sentence of The Degenerate Muse, “made nature modern.” (p. 239)

By expanding the scope of the back-to-nature movement beyond the physical and educational experiences found in bird days, camping, hunting, and primitive crafts, and into artistic intellectual expression, Schulze has demonstrated how profoundly deep the concerns about the growing gap between urban life and nature were in the first two decades of the twentieth century.  The Degenerate Muse is well argued and the main points are clear and convincing. In keeping with an academic work published by a scholarly press, it contains lengthy end notes, complete with historiographical comments and dialogues on the works of others. However, a few illustrations would have been a nice addition. Cultural, intellectual, and environmental historians with a strong interest in the literature and poetry of period will find this book useful. 

Mira Lloyd Dock and the Progressive Era Conservation Movement

This review of mine was published in the July issue of the Pennsylvania Magazine of History & Biography:

Mira Lloyd Dock and the Progressive Era Conservation Movement.  By Susan Rimby. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012. 224 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $64.95.)

The women of the conservation movement are beginning to earn their due attention from biographers and historians. To the work of Jack Davis, Dyana Furmansky, Tina Gianquitto, Nancy Unger, and others, we can add Susan Rimby’s admirable biography of Pennsylvanian Mira Lloyd Dock.

            Rimby argues that Dock played a pivotal role in the Progressive Era conservation movement by serving as a bridge between the male professional conservationists and the largely female urban reformers who implemented many of the experts’ policies on a local level throughout Pennsylvania. As a university trained botanist, Dock enjoyed gravitas with the professionals. She carried on an extensive correspondence with many of the leading conservation figures of her day, and was particularly close to fellow Pennsylvanian Gifford Pinchot. Her appointment to the Pennsylvania Forest Commission in 1901 affirmed her standing. Dock was not mere window dressing. She conducted intensive outreach to amateur groups, and made significant contributions to the success of the Pennsylvania State Forest Academy. As a circuit lecturer and influential force in the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, Dock translated the concepts of the professional conservationists into the concrete reform objectives implemented throughout Pennsylvania in the early decades of the twentieth century. Her work in her home city of Harrisburg served as an inspiration in both the Keystone State and the nation.

            Despite impressive credentials, gender defined Dock’s life and career, a consideration that Rimby gives ample attention. The early death of her mother thrust Dock, the eldest child, into the maternal role for her siblings, a position she did not relinquish to pursue her own interests until she was forty-two years old. She possessed a hardboiled utilitarian view of natural resource management and was on constant guard against being perceived of as “sentimental,” a somewhat derogatory code word at the time that implied overly emotional feminine sensibilities. Dock did not always resist gender stereotypes, however, and Rimby argues that although her subject was a suffragist, she was not exactly what we would describe today as a feminist. For example, Dock subscribed to gender defined professional roles, and believed that only men could be foresters. While she broke a glass ceiling in obtaining appointment to the Pennsylvania Forest Commission (perhaps the first woman in the world to hold such a position), she was deprived a seat on many other boards and commissions, including the Harrisburg Park Commission, simply because she was a woman.

            This is a solid work of primary research based on Dock’s papers in the Library of Congress, various collections from the rich holdings of historical societies scattered throughout Pennsylvania, and other manuscript collections. It is firmly grounded in the current historiography of both the Progressive Era conservation movement and women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Any historian studying these areas would improve their understanding the era by reading Susan Rimby’s Mira Lloyd Dock and the Progressive Era Conservation Movement