Highbrow/Lowbrow Chapter 3, Lawrence Levine,
THE CHILD BORN in 1900 would, then, be born into a new world which would not be a unity but a multiple." This terse comment, appearing only toward the end of Henry Adams's Education, was in fact a central thread that Adams embroidered throughout the third-person narrative of his life and times. "He had become an estray; a flotsam or jetsam of wreckage," Adams wrote of himself "His world was dead. Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow ...still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs-but had a keener instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer hand than he-American of Americans, with Heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots behind him ...he was no worse off than the Indians or the buffalo who had been ejected from their heritage by his own people." Shortly before Adams had his autobiography privately printed and circulated among a small group of friends in 1907, the period's other famous Henry-Henry James-visited his native land after almost a quarter of a century of self-exile. Like Adams, James was seeking to recover "some echo of the dreams of youth, the titles of tales, the communities of friendship, the sympathies and patiences ..." Like Adams, he was to find "among the ruins" of his country, not the "New England homogeneous" he remembered, not the unity he sought, but rather "multiplication, multiplication of everything. ..multiplication with a vengeance." 1 For James, as for Adams, the word "multiple" came to symbolize the new world. For James, as for Adams, the immigrant was a convenient and tangible sign of a transition that left him with "a horrible, hateful sense of personal antiquity," with a numbing sense of being an alien in his own land. He visited Ellis Island and came away like a person "who has had an apparition, seen a ghost in his supposedly safe old house." He toured New York's Lower East Side and felt "the 'ethnic' apparition again sit like a skeleton at the feast. It was fairly as if I could see the spectre grin." He rode on the electric cars and gazed upon "a row of faces, up and down, testifying, without exception, to alienism unmistakable, alienism undisguised and unashamed," which made him "gasp with the sense of isolation." He walked the streets and found that "face after face, unmistakably, was 'low' -particularly in the men." Even in Boston, where he stood on Beacon Hill one late winter Sunday afternoon, close to the State House and the statues, observing the strolling crowds of workers "of the simpler sort" dressed in their Sunday best, he discovered that "no sound of English, in a single instance, escaped their lips; the greater number spoke a rude form of Italian, the others some outland dialect unknown to me. ..No note of any shade of American speech struck my ear, ...the people before me were gross aliens to a man, and they were in serene and triumphant possession." The general movement, he lamented "was away-away always and everywhere, from the old presumptions and conceivabilities."2 It was not only the immigrants, their numbers and manners, that filled James with "the dreadful chill of change," but the general tone and tenor of his native land, where "the will to grow was everywhere written large, and to grow at no matter what or whose expense." He was shocked by the "vision of waste" that left rows of houses "marked for removal, for extinction, in their prime." There was no better symbol of the "profane overhauling" that had left America a "hustling, bustling desert" than the "insolent" skyscrapers, those "vast money-making" structures, those "impudently new. ..payers of dividends," those "monsters of the mere market," which now overwhelmed such aesthetically and spiritually satisfying landmarks as New York's Trinity Church or Castle Garden, from whose stage the young Henry James had heard the young soprano Adelina Patti "warbling like a tiny thrush even in the nest." Today this "ancient rotunda" was "shabby, shrunken, barely discernible." Worse still, Boston's Athenaeum, "this honored haunt of all the most civilized-library, gallery, temple of culture," was now "put completely out of countenance by the mere masses of brute ugliness. ..above the comparatively small refined facade. ..It was heart-breaking." It was not merely tradition that was in danger but taste itself. James complained that "the huge democratic broom" had swept away the old and ushered in an age of "the new, the simple, the cheap, the common, the commercial, the immediate, and, all too often, the ugly." are everywhere in this "vast crude democracy of trade" James was assaulted by the "overwhelming preponderance" of idIe businessman. In this "heaped industrial battlefield" James was "haunted" by a "sense of dispossession." Constantly he was forced to tighten his "aesthetic waistband," to protect himself against "the consummate monotonous commonness, ...in which relief, detachment, dignity, meaning, perished utterly and lost all rights."3 The lament that the two Henrys sang, almost in chorus, though it had grown in intensity and significance by the turn of the century, was not unique. Men of their class had been fashioning this particular jeremiad for decades. Philip Hone and George Templeton Strong, two of the century's great chroniclers, filled pages of their fascinating diaries with a sense of loss, looming disorder and chaos. Sitting alone at night recalling the day's events, Hone made note again and again of riots, civil disturbance, political fanaticism, public corruption, horrible disasters, frightening excesses of "the vulgar and uneducated masses," all of them constituting what he termed in 1839 "the vile disorganizing spirit which overspreads the land like a cloud and daily increases in darkness." He greeted the year 1840 by observing that "riot, disorder, and violence increase in our city; every night is marked by some outrage committed by the gangs of young ruffians who prowl the streets insulting females, breaking into the houses of unoffending publicans, making night hideous by yells of disgusting inebriety, and-unchecked by the city authorities-committing every sort of enormity with apparent impunity." In May of that year he complained of "the overwhelming flood of vulgarity which is sweeping over our land." Election day found him witnessing "scenes of violence, disorder, and riot" and concluding that "the heterogeneous mass of vile humanity in our population" had put "unrestrained power in the hands of a mob of political desperadoes." Disorder followed Hone wherever he roamed. In the spring of 1842 he traveled to Long Island to witness a horse race. The day was lovely, the race exciting. Un fortunately for Hone and his companions, "tens of thousands of the sovereign people" wanted to see the race as well. When they found that the trains were not sufficient to carry them they "became riotous, upset the cars, placed obstructions on the rails, and indulged in all sorts of violence!" The "crowd and the dust and the danger and difficulty of getting on and off the course with a carriage," Hone concluded, "are scarcely compensated by any pleasure to be derived from the amusement." There seemed to be no escape from the chaos that surrounded him. Even in the privacy of his own home the daily papers brought him a steady diet of railroad and steamboat accidents. "I never take up a paper that does not contain accounts of loss of life, dreadful mutilation of limbs, and destruction of property, with which these reckless, dangerous, murderous modes of locomotion are attended, " he wrote in 1847. Hone refused to believe that these disasters were really accidents; they stemmed from the anarchic streak increasingly evident in his countrymen: "We have become the most careless, reckless, headlong people on the face of the earth. 'Go ahead' is our maxim and password; and we do go ahead with a vengeance, regardless of consequences and indifferent about the value of human life." "1 think the world is worse than it used to be," Hone moaned in 1840. Nothing occurred before his death a decade later to change his mind.4 From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ray Harrell Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2012 2:42 PM To: 'Keith Hudson'; 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' Subject: Re: [Futurework] The end of growth? And England had all of those resources from America, Asia and Africa to run their little kingdom.. Comparing Poland to the resources from America is strange. Did Poland have an Empire? I realize they did some amazing things with Lithuania predicting all of the Constitutional monarchies etc. the second or third written constitution ever etc. Having listened to Europeans for so long I finally decided to go to Europe last summer and was struck by how small the countries were and how old fashioned the cities. I think it's amazing that a country the size of Italy could be a "world" economy and how much the governing of California and New York with their graft and cronyism reminds me of Europe. California is the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world according to Charlie Rose the other night on the TV. The world is a really interesting place not given to simple description. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2012 12:26 PM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] The end of growth? Tyler Cowan agrees with me about the probability of stagnation and about the importance of consumer goods but he doesn't explain the uninterrupted downwards cascade of consumer goods that was required to keep economic growth going during the last 300 years (and the counterflow of social status upwards). Also he sounds very America-biased. Why didn't Europe succeed as well? Russia and Ukraine had (have) equally large regions of grain-growing soil (more fertile than America's). Poland and Germany had (have) vast coal mines. Why should England, a pokey little island with relatively modest agriculture and coal, start the industrial revolution at least a century before anywhere else? Well, I'd tell him if asked. England had a high density of merchant banks in London (echoed in no more than a half-a-dozen other northern European ports and two ports in the Mediterranean). England also had provincial banks which existed nowhere else in Europe or Asia. It was the to-ing and fro-ing of finance between these two types of banks, and the sophisticated development of bill-broking which enabled the earliest industrial projects to get off the ground. Also the industrial revolution never really got into its stride until a fierce 100 year debate had ended with the decision in 1844 that the pound had to be gold-backed in order that credit was generous but also kept within bounds. America has all the virtues that Cowan ascribes to it but, most of all, America was able to copy our model of provincial banks very early on (long before they developed in Europe) and was able to tap into large loans from the London merchant banks (via New York) to get major industrial projects and the railways off the ground. Keith At 13:47 13/09/2012, Ed wrote: Interesting review by Andrew Coyne in today's Ottawa Citizen of Tyler Cowan's "The Great Stagnation". In part, Coynes says the following: ... Cowen argues that slow growth is more the old normal than the new: Median incomes in the United States have been moving sideways for the better part of four decades, as have most measures of productivity. While others have made much the same point, Cowen locates that decades-long slump in a still larger historical frame. Indeed, it may not be the era of stagnation that is the anomaly, but the long period of rapid growth that preceded it. For the first three centuries or so of European settlement, he argues, America enjoyed the benefits of a number of "low-hanging fruit." It had an abundance of arable land, for starters, which settlers could claim for free - and not only land, but resources. As the Industrial Revolution took hold, it had access to a similar abundance of labour, as millions left the farms for the cities; as, later, it could call upon seemingly endless re-serves of skilled labour, as more and more of these new workers went on to get an education. And, perhaps most critically, it profited from a truly astonishing series of inventions, from electricity to the light bulb to the automobile to the telephone. Much the same story could be told of other industrial countries, of course. But nowhere did land, labour and technological progress combine to produce such enormous wealth as in America. Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/What+slow+growth+wasn+result+cause+cri sis/7233960/story.html#ixzz26LvAUCJ9 Reminds one of Keith Hudson's argument that growth is based on new consumers goods that everyone wants, but it would appear that Cowan's argument is much broader. Must buy the book. Ed _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com <http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/>
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