York Tribune Research Articles

Foreign Correspondence in the Early Telegraphic Era: The Herald, the Tribune, and the 1848 Revolutions

In 1848, political revolutions were breaking out all over Europe simultaneously while new technological advancements were having significant and profound impacts on news gathering practices abroad. New forms of communication and transportation, including the telegraph, the railroad, and the ocean-going steamship, meant the faster transmission of news and a wider spirit of cooperation between competing, penny press newspapers that resulted in shared telegraphic dispatches. This study examines the foreign correspondence published in the New York Tribune and the New York Herald, and how the breaking news came in telegraphic dispatches that the two papers shared. This study reveals how correspondence became a way for both of publications to provide readers with unique material because both James Gordon Bennett of the Herald and Horace Greeley of the Tribune thought European letters were valuable sources of an American perspective on world events that gave readers an eyewitness account.

The Critical Reception of Mark Twain's Introduction to English as She is Taught

The Critical Reception of Mark Twain's Introduction to <i>English as She is Taught</i>

“WHY WE SHOULD ANNEX”: Reprints and Repercussions of Twain’s New York Tribune Letters on Hawai‘i

Abstract The December 1872 death of Hawaiian monarch Kamehameha V spurred renewed interest among U.S. citizens and politicians alike in the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands. To satisfy the public’s increased curiosity about Hawai‘i, in January 1873 the New York Tribune sought testimony in the form of two letters from a well-known expert on the islands: Mark Twain, who had gained nationwide fame based his popular comic lecture “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands,” which he delivered across the United States and abroad between 1866 and 1873. Between January and March of 1873 at least seventy newspapers and magazines reprinted excerpts of Mark Twain’s Tribune letters. This article considers how these reprinted excerpts decontextualize or mischaracterize Mark Twain’s insights as well as what they reveal about the American reading public’s views of Mark Twain as both a comedian and as a serious expert on Hawai‘i in the early 1870s.

HOW THE SUPREME COURT DISTORTED TEXT, IGNORED HISTORY, AND GASLIGHTED THE BOLD PROMISE OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1866 A Comcast Case Study

HOW THE SUPREME COURT DISTORTED TEXT, IGNORED HISTORY, AND GASLIGHTED THE BOLD PROMISE OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1866 A <i>Comcast</i> Case Study

In Memoriam

I first met Joel Myerson in an elevator at an American Literature Association Conference in Boston: he was wearing his famous Hawaiian shirt. Thereafter, I recognized his presence at various Alcott venues at ALA conferences: he always had something significant to remark upon after the talks were given. When I became more involved with the Alcott Society, I realized how sociable, warm, witty, and helpful he was at Alcott sessions and dinners. I remember an organized outing from an ALA meeting in Boston to the Alcott Orchard House in Concord, and he was clearly the life of the party.In terms of my scholarship on Louisa May Alcott, I could not have done as much without his co-edited collections (with Daniel Shealy) on Alcott’s letters and journals. This also holds true for his significant work on Margaret Fuller: I found his Margaret Fuller, Critic: Writings from the New York–Tribune, 1844–1846 (co-edited with Judith Mattson Bean) indispensable to several articles I wrote on Fuller. He knew and wrote so much about the Concord circle I admire, and he will forever be missed.Monika Elbert, Montclair State University One sheer delight of academic conferences was to come upon Joel Myerson, of course for conversation and commentary but to see what ghastly Hawaiian shirt he would be wearing. I think it actually glowed, but I may be wrong.Joel has done so much for so many. I recently came across Studies in the American Renaissance for 1994, which I believe he began to edit in 1983, and was staggered by the number of scholars within its pages. It is probably his monumental contribution to American Studies in all its many shapes and sizes and will remain a major repository of critical thinking. I gasped when I found an article I’d written, and he’d accepted, “The Romance of Mesmerism: Hawthorne’s Medium of Romance,” which helped launch me deeper into Hawthorne studies and beyond.Joel was a convivial and sharp-eyed mentor, good-humored and helpful. So many of us owe him so much. Here’s to you, Mr. Myerson. We couldn’t have done it without your thoughtfulness, patience, perspective and assistance. Thank you. You done real good!Sam Coale, Wheaton College Dr. Joel Myerson was an acclaimed editor and critic of nineteenth-century American literature. In Hawthorne Studies, Myerson edited an important work of Hawthorne’s collected writings, The Selected Letters of National Hawthorne (Ohio State UP, 2002). The titular collection he donated to the University of South Carolina Library includes early editions of Hawthorne’s works, as well as signed letters. Despite Myerson’s scholarly achievements, though, I most remember him because he helped solidify my career trajectory in American literature studies. As an MA student at the University of South Carolina, I signed up for his American Transcendentalism seminar one semester after doing poorly in a Renaissance Literature course. I wasn’t sure if graduate school was right for me. Myerson’s class only had doctoral students enrolled. This experience was the first time I had to collaborate and compete with them. From the moment the course started, I was transfixed. Everything he taught about Thoreau, Emerson, Alcott, and other nineteenth-centuryists spoke immediately to me—and I held my own in that course. After class, we would hold conversations on Thoreau’s theory of plant crystals or discuss how far south both Emerson and Thoreau had traveled. His compliments to me on my work were not liberally dispersed, but I hung on to every such word, including when he noted my “eloquence.” He had other acolytes in that class, several of whom, including myself, have gone on to become full-time English faculty. His guidance led to that success.Myerson eventually became my MA thesis advisor and provided general advice on that project, one that argues for Emerson’s unacknowledged influence on Proust, the latter whom Myerson seemed to dislike in the context I placed him. Later, he composed a letter of recommendation that ensured my admission to doctoral programs. I want to emphasize how powerful he was as a pedagogue and educator, at least immediately to us students, more so than his role as a scholarly editor. I had never known him to refuse a graduate student asking for mentoring or help. He left an indelible mark at the University of South Carolina; I can’t disassociate Myerson from my thoughts of that institution.Michael S. Martin, Nicholls State University

Samuel Clemens on Capital Punishment: A Recovered Note

“I believe in capital punishment,” Samuel Clemens announced in a letter to the editor of the New York Tribune in the spring of 1871. “I believe that when a murder has been done it should be answered for with blood. I have all my life been taught to feel in this way, &amp; the fetters of education are strong.”1 To be sure, he concluded the letter tongue-in-cheek by urging anyone who disagreed with him to recruit a volunteer to take the place of a condemned killer; and to avoid confusing the public with his comic pseudonym he concealed his identity by signing the letter “Samuel Langhorne.” The next year, his views on capital punishment had begun to shift. As Jarrod Roark observes, Clemens “wove his anti-gallows and anti-jury sentiment” throughout the travelogue Roughing It (1872),2 especially in the lynchings of the highwayman Jack Slade by vigilantes in chapter 11 and of the bully Bill Noakes by Captain Ned Blakely in chapter 50. Clemens indulged in a bit of gallows humor in chapter 69 of Following the Equator (1897), where he morbidly joked that when the arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes received his just desserts “I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake.”3Clemens’ mature opposition to capital punishment was nowhere more evident, however, than in his answer to an inquiry he received in the fall of 1904 from the Maynard Shipley (1872–1934), a socialist and principal of the Palo Alto academy. Shipley had been commissioned by the Department of Economics at Stanford University to prepare a history of international criminal law in general and a comparative study of how capital punishment in particular is administered across cultures. In the course of his research Shipley sent a battery of letters to such prominent public figures as President Grover Cleveland, President Porfirio Díaz of Mexico, the mikado of Japan and king of Siam, Italian criminologists Cesare Lombroso and Enrico Ferri, physician and author Max Nordau, eugenicists Francis Dalton and Havelock Ellis, historian and political theorist William E. H. Lecky, jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Samuel Clemens. More to the point, Shipley asked Clemens whether in light of his strong views on other social issues he shared the opinion that the death penalty for murder should be abolished and replaced with incarceration or prison detention until a criminal is rehabilitated or “cured” of anti-social behavior.4 In a marginal gloss on Shipley's letter, Clemens has scribbled, “I agree to this S L Clemens.”5 An article about Shipley's project in the San Jose Mercury revises Clemens’ quote to read “I heartily agree with your views as expressed.”6 In any case, Clemens in 1904 explicitly expressed his opposition to capital punishment.Shipley failed to complete, or at least to publish, his proposed four-volume The Development of Criminal Law. However, between 1905 and 1910 he contributed a series of articles on the topic that cast doubt on the death penalty as a deterrent to crime in such magazines as the Annals of the American Academy, American Law Review, Harper's Weekly, Popular Science, and Publications of the American Statistical Association.7My thanks to Robert H. Hirst, general editor of the Mark Twain Project and curator of the Mark Twain Papers at the University of California, Berkeley, for his assistance.

Feminist Demands in the Victorian Period The Novel “Jessie Phillips” by F. Trollope

The 1850s marked the beginning of the Feminist Movement. Feminism till that time had been an individual issue and even an indirect protest. After 1850, the Feminist Movement strengthened more and more and was bypassing the grievances expressed from time to time. There were a number of reasons for this: women's suffrage, women's admission to higher education, marriage and property laws, and the demands and prospects of unmarried women. These bold attitudes of this decade manifested themselves through three kinds of writing, controversy, and treatments. The basis of Harriet Taylor's observation was the report published in the New York Tribune on the "Convention on the Rights of Women" which called for equality in education, employment in industry and political rights. This American example of women's rights later influenced the Feminist Movement in England. It is interesting that Taylor's attitude was uncompromising. The novel "Jessie Phillips" is one of the first interesting novels that brings a benevolent story about the fate of stigmatized women, including elements of class consciousness and sexual policy.

‘Slavery Dies Hard’: A Radical Perspective on the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica

ABSTRACT After playing a leading role in opposing Jamaica's largely white plantocracy and the island's English governor, both as a journalist and a politician, mixed-race Jamaican Robert A. Johnson (1825–1899) migrated to New York in July 1865, where he joined the editorial staff of the New York Tribune. A few months later, news reached New York of an outbreak in Morant Bay and the violent government suppression that followed. Johnson covered these events from New York, with deep personal knowledge of Jamaica and an ability to read against the grain of the newspaper accounts arriving by steamship. This article recovers Johnson's body of writing on Jamaica published in the Nation, the Evening Post, the New York Tribune, and Hours at Home in 1865–1866 and locates it within a public debate then taking place about what lessons should be drawn from Jamaica for race relations in America. Pointing to the legal mechanisms of planter power, Johnson warned his readers, ‘the whole of this bloody affair … shows also how unsafe it is to intrust the keeping of negro rights to the hands of men bred in the school of slavery or inheriting its traditions.’

“Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that is how he spells his name—seems to think that plagiarism begins at home”: A Reading of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’s “Friend Husband’s Latest”

Abstract This article examines Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’s “Friend Husband’s Latest,” her 2 April 1922 New York Tribune review of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned. The article focuses on three aspects of the review: (1) an apparent textual inconsistency with regard to Gloria Gilbert Patch’s birthday; (2) the literary acumen of the review itself, as it marks Zelda’s first mature publication and no critic has analyzed the review in the detail it deserves; and (3) Zelda’s now-famous quip, “Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that is how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.” These three issues—a textual discrepancy, an authorial debut, and an alleged plagiarism—compel further investigation into this underappreciated and provocative text.

Bakhtin and Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland: Beyond Allegory and Realism

Olive Schreiner’s novella Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897) has been variously considered to be a political pamphlet, an allegory or at the very least a piece of moralising Victorian realism. Certainly at its centre there is the powerful proclamatory voice of the Christ figure, ventriloquized by both the Cape preacher and later Peter Halket himself. As most critics have acknowledged – from its early reviewer in the New York Tribune in 1897 to most recently Rajendra Chetty and Matthew Curr in 2016 – the figure of Christ expounds an ethic or ideology associated with the author herself. However, these critical approaches tend to ignore the conflicting ideas and ideological outlooks held in some of the other voices in the text. In this article, I consider whether these opposing voices are illustrations of Mikhail Bakhtin’s ontology of the dialogic novel with its centripetal and centrifugal ideological forces. If in fact these voices can be considered to be dialogical, then the sublation of the voice of the author/Christ cannot be complete and the novella’s allegorical nature can at the very least be questioned.

Electoral Capitalism: The Party System in New York’s Gilded Age

It is heartening to welcome new work that takes Gilded Age American politics seriously. Progressive-Era political scientists and historians wrote the first draft of the history of the period’s politics. Their interpretation—heavy on sham partisan battles, the absence of principles, and corruption—providing the before to the after of Progressive-Era redemption, has had remarkable staying power.Broxmeyer does not minimize self-dealing, patronage, office seeking, and other sordid features that were the sum of Gilded Age politics in the Progressive caricature. Rather than decrying corruption (indeed, he asks good questions about what the term means) or, like an earlier literature on machine politics, finding it merely functional in cities with great need but no welfare state, he turns it into a key piece of a transformation in American political development. During the Gilded Age, covering roughly 1870 through the early 1890s, electoral capitalism—the fusion of private property, government, and parties—took shape. Politicians were not the toadies of big businessmen. They were in business—real estate and transportation especially, since these enterprises directly involved government—and many became rich in the process. Their business was turning votes into capital.The book uses New York’s state Republican machine and New York City’s Tammany Hall to demonstrate the links between property, officeholding, and policy. Four chapters present case studies within the larger case study. They cover Tammany, the Republican machine (fed by the supremely important New York Customs House) under Senator Roscoe Conkling, party-provided “poor relief,” the Henry George 1886 mayoral campaign, and anti-monopoly. Historians of New York politics are not likely to find much new in his account; the literature about Tammany, including its members’ business dealings, was already wide and deep, as is that on the state Republican Party. Indeed, historians might find the absence of references to those literatures frustrating. Broxmeyer’s treatment of parties, patronage, and the money to be made in politics before the Gilded Age is also thin. Although the scale of the economy and government in the late nineteenth century certainly made for enhanced economic opportunities, political professionals before that period knew how to take advantage of inside information to speculate in real estate and how to field both entitled and desperate appeals for office. Further precision about what changed later in the nineteenth century would have been welcome. Political scientists might also have appreciated a stronger statement about the book’s place in the literature about American political development and in older analyses of party development. Broxmeyer’s method, historical and archival, might leave those of a more economic and analytical bent wishing for a more abstract treatment of politics and capital.That said, bypassing the well-worn paths, Broxmeyer is able to offer a series of fascinating observations. In one of the few attentive readings of what comprises the bulk of the papers of nineteenth-century politicians and their associates (letters asking for jobs or financial assistance), he finds a public poor-relief system. In an original twist, he builds on that claim to argue that civil-service reform was of a piece with budgetary austerity measures championed by well-heeled anti-party independents. Notwithstanding that both historians and political scientists have conferred considerable attention on labor politics in the Gilded Age, Broxmeyer focuses less on the ins and outs of labor parties than on the peculiar appeal of anti-monopoly to upper-class reformers as well as to labor reformers who lost trust in the party system and, lacking the access that wealth offered, had to develop alternative tactics. The boycott of the New York Tribune once it made a hard turn toward respectability after Horace Greeley’s death is a case in point.Electoral Capitalism will provide historians and political scientists the erudition and inspiration to re-think the re-organization of party politics after the Civil War.

Mortimer Thomson’s “Witches of New York”: Undercover Reporting on the Fortune-Telling Trade

During the 1850s, undercover journalists broke new ground by covering slave auctions, Northern uprisings, and fraud. In 1857, Mortimer Thomson, a comedic writer for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, went undercover. For the series, “The Witches of New York,” he visited New York fortune tellers who advertised regularly in the newspapers. They sold tonics, offered to find stolen property, helped with matchmaking, and claimed they could tell the future. The series also took the reader to the seedier parts of Lower Manhattan to debunk tricksters and frauds. Later, his works were chronicled in a book, The Witches of New York. His work predates the turn of the twentieth century “stunt journalists” such as Nellie Bly, who wrote first-person narratives about their adventures to actively expose social injustice.

“The Great Work of Mutual Education”: Class, Popularity, and the Position of the Intellectual in Margaret Fuller’s Literary Journalism

“The Great Work of Mutual Education”: Class, Popularity, and the Position of the Intellectual in Margaret Fuller’s Literary Journalism Clemens Spahr (bio) In 1844, Margaret Fuller took a leap into popular journalism. Two years before she would embark on the journey to Europe that would eventually turn her into a political radical, Fuller accepted a position as the cultural critic at Horace Greeley’s influential New-York Daily Tribune. Responses among her peers ranged from encouragement to outright rejection of her attempt to popularize Romantic reform. In a letter to James Freeman Clarke from 14 August 1845, Fuller used the occasion to reassess the position of the public intellectual and intellectual labor: “I was pleased with your sympathy about The Tribune; I do not find much among my old friends. They think I ought to produce something excellent, while I am well content for the present to aid in the great work of mutual education in this way. I never regarded literature merely as a collection of exquisite products, but as a means of mutual interpretation. Feeling that many are reached and in some degree aided the thoughts of every day seem worth writing down, though in a form that does not inspire me.”1 The editors of Fuller’s Memoirs, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Henry Channing, and James Freeman Clarke, present the letter as evidence that Fuller’s turn to journalism, and popular journalism at that, prevented her [End Page 481] from producing something truly valuable during her post-New England years: “it hindered her free action to aim at popular effect.”2 While Fuller’s diction displays a similar unease about popularizing her ideas—she is “content for the present” to write in a “form that does not inspire” her—her letter simultaneously undermines the distinction between popularity and literary autonomy on which the editors insist. Fuller’s letter exemplifies how in the mid-1840s she began to reconsider literature as a comprehensive cultural practice rather than a small elite’s “collection of exquisite products.” By redefining literature as a “means of mutual interpretation” Fuller confronts the tension between philosophical idealism and institutionalized practice inherent in transatlantic Romanticism. The Romantics sought to establish the poetic life as the organizing principle of human relations. Philosophically, they could link individuality and collectivity by proclaiming the universal validity of the individual’s aesthetic experiences. As Emerson famously declared in “The American Scholar,” Man Thinking, the true Romantic, “learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.”3 But Fuller insisted that self-reliance first needed to become a cultural practice available to everyone, and that this practice could be established comprehensively only through “the general education of the people.”4 I will argue that Margaret Fuller’s turn to popular journalism forced her to address Romanticism’s “neglect of popular education.”5 The more concrete her conceptualization of education becomes in her literary journalism, the more pronounced her emphasis on social class. Fuller reconsidered Romanticism in her New York journalism and, more importantly, in her European dispatches, as an ideal whose realization was prevented by the exclusionary mechanisms underlying the educational system. Her literary journalism develops a class-inflected Romanticism that reconsiders both the idea of Romantic education and the intellectual’s role [End Page 482] in realizing the Romantic ideal of self-reliance and poetic social practice. Fuller’s conceptualization of the exclusionary mechanisms underlying the educational system and her Romantic ideal is much more central to her later writing than has henceforth been acknowledged. While her earlier pedagogical activities, from her positions at Amos Bronson Alcott’s Temple School and Hiram Fuller’s Greene Street School to her Boston conversational circles for women, sought to “ascertain what pursuits are best suited to us in our time and state of society, and how we may make best use of our means for building up the life of thought upon the life of action” (L, 2:87; emphasis added), these educational efforts, although comprehensive in principle, were limited to the middle class. Fuller’s writings for the New York Tribune and her European dispatches theorize Romanticism as an...

The Third Revolution

The Third Revolution

The Spark of Kindness: The Rhetoric of Abolitionist Action in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

The Spark of Kindness:The Rhetoric of Abolitionist Action in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Kasey J. Waite (bio) Fugitive slave Harriet Jacobs vents, in her 1853 letter to the editor of the New York Tribune, her frustration with the inaction of American Christians against the institution of slavery. She writes: "Oh ye Christians, while your arms are extended to receive the oppressed of all nations, while you exert every power of your soul to assist them to raise funds, put weapons in their hands … while Americans do all this, they forget the millions of slaves they have at home, bought and sold under the very peculiar circumstance" (Jacobs Norton Critical 170). In this text, Jacobs describes the American Christians as physically embracing, emotionally laboring, monetarily supporting, and actively protecting unknown peoples in foreign countries, while the wretched American slaves do not benefit from the same charity. Focusing specifically on the tendency of American Christians to offer help to everyone except to slaves at home, Jacobs argues that slavery endures in America, not because the horrors of slavery are unknown (even by the North), but because these Christians refuse to act benevolently towards those enslaved around them. Eight years later and now free, Jacobs continued her call for action in her self-published memoir of her anguish in slavery under the pseudonym of Linda Brent. In the preface, she writes that she wishes her narrative to "arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South" (3, emphasis mine). She also uses the paratext of her narrative as a call to action, including a verse from Isaiah: "Rise up, ye women that are at ease!" (Jacobs 1, emphasis mine). Just as in the letter, her language underscores her narrative's objective and her answer for defeating slavery: positive abolitionist agency from the white women in the North. However, in order to persuade her audience to take up her cause, Jacobs does not structure the narrative around classical notions of pity or nineteenthcentury discourses on sympathy as might be anticipated, but rather [End Page 163] on kindness, the only emotion that invokes real action. Furthermore, Jacobs displays throughout the narrative the limits of abolitionist action based on pity or sympathy and constructed solely on an ocular (real or imagined) identification with the slave; it can never provide the activist response that she desires. By writing her story, Jacobs offers up her own "imperfect effort in behalf of my persecuted people" (3). Famously reluctant to publicize her own trauma, Jacobs models for her audience her version of true abolitionist practice, both in the construction of her own narrative and through the story she crafts within it: benevolent action undertaken via kindness. While scholars have noted how Jacobs seemingly constructs her text to elicit sympathy/pity as well as how she seeks to subvert the necessity of these emotions, they continue to disagree on why Jacobs does so and whether she is effective in her attempts to elicit sympathy from her readers. Moreover, these arguments have overlooked the importance of kindness to Jacobs's text. I argue that Jacobs solicits pity and sympathy while she shows their limits, thus providing readers with examples to emulate that require neither emotion. By focusing on Jacobs's use and reliance on kindness, I suggest a third way of reading her narrative that does not fall into simple dichotomies. While it is true that Jacobs often describes the sympathy of white women characters and directly asks her readers to pity her throughout the narrative, she ultimately demonstrates their failings, offering kindness as a solution for fulfilling the purpose for her memoir that she establishes in her paratext and preface. Simply put, neither sympathy nor pity can drive white women readers to action; therefore, neither can be used as the basis of Jacobs's abolitionist rhetoric. To make this case, I will first examine how Jacobs refutes pity and sympathy as meaningful calls to action, before showing how she provides the readers a model for action through kindness. Terms and usage Even though in contemporary usage, sympathy, pity and, to...

Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and U.S. Modernism

Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and U.S. Modernism

Iconoclast in Ink: The Political Cartoons of Jay N. "Ding" Darling by Richard Samuel West

Reviewed by: Iconoclast in Ink: The Political Cartoons of Jay N. "Ding" Darling by Richard Samuel West Paul V. Murphy Richard Samuel West, Iconoclast in Ink: The Political Cartoons of Jay N. "Ding" Darling. Columbus: The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, 2012. 194 pp. $24.95. Jay Norwood "Ding" Darling began his nearly fifty-year career as a cartoonist in 1900 when he joined the staff of the Sioux City Journal. Newspapers of that era were in transition, still at the center of partisan politics but also part of an emerging mass media that played an important role in integrating the towns and cities scattered across the country into a national popular culture. Darling contributed to both projects. He gained a national following, eventually earning two Pulitzer Prizes, while advancing a progressive political vision fostered by two prominent and gifted [End Page 179] Republican newspapermen. The first of these, George Perkins, initially hired Darling for the Journal. Gardner Cowles later lured him to the Des Moines Register and Leader in 1906, where Darling spent the bulk of his career. Darling perfected the gentle but biting single-panel, front-page political cartoon, using homey and charming images to bring public figures down to size and to translate complex issues into "everyday terms that anyone could understand" (5). He eventually gained a national audience through syndication by the New York Tribune. In collaboration with The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, Richard Samuel West has produced a handsome, large-format, and copiously illustrated volume attesting to Darling's abilities. West pairs a knowledgeable, well-illustrated eighty-page survey of Darling's art and politics with a selection of over one hundred cartoons, presented on a scale that almost matches the six-by-eight-inch format in which many originally appeared. Read together, they give a glimpse of a political world lost. Born in the tiny lakeshore village of Norwood (from which his middle name derived) in the upper stretches of Michigan's lower peninsula in 1876, Darling moved throughout Michigan and Indiana before his family settled in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1886. He was an energetic, irreverent youth, expelled from Yankton College in South Dakota for commandeering the president's horse and buggy and suspended from his next school, Beloit College, due to poor attendance and scholarship. At Beloit, he drew satirical drawings of his professors, signing himself as Ding, from "D'ing", a contraction that had become a habit with his father and brother. "Ding" Darling became the name by which he was known. He first attracted national notice as a cartoonist in 1907 with a fine panel featuring President Theodore Roosevelt sitting at the end of a makeshift diving board over a rural stream, splashing idly in the water, unsure what to do, while seven would-be rivals for the 1908 Republican presidential nomination—from William Howard Taft to Robert La Follette—lined up impatiently behind him. Darling exemplified a type of progressivism almost unknown in the Republican Party of today. He was skeptical of trusts and the business selfishness they embodied, optimistic regarding the regulatory power of government (to end child labor and regulate railroads, for example), and passionate in his belief in international government to prevent the scourge of war. He idolized Herbert Hoover and generally criticized Democratic policies, but he supported Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt when they advanced progressive aims, particularly in foreign affairs. He often [End Page 180] assumed the stance of a gentle prophet, skewering the inattentiveness, emotionalism, irrationality, hypocrisy, and alarmism that led to unjust and destructive policies. He hailed, instead, the enlightened, forward-thinking, disinterested, and fraternal impulses that promised a better future. In one wartime fantasy, Darling depicted a businessman and workingman becoming solicitous brothers in the trenches despite their mutual hatred in peacetime. Darling wrote a remarkably sober-minded assessment of the Soviet Union after a brief visit there in 1931. It revealed much about his temperament, condemning authoritarianism but issuing a biting warning as well. "If you are … afflicted with conservatism, one dose of Russia will make you well," Darling wrote. "Every American ought to make a trip to Russia at least once...

Fabricating Value between Mint and Studio

Fabricating Value between Mint and Studio Maggie M. Cao (bio) in 1903, a cache of forged paintings was discovered during an investigation of an otherwise insignificant civil lawsuit. Although the group of canvases included imitations of works by such American greats as Winslow Homer and George Inness, it was the falsification of the name Ralph A. Blakelock that most captivated the public. Blakelock, the New York Times explained, was "a victim of incurable dementia, brought on by privation suffered in his struggle for recognition. His pictures once disposed of for a mere song, now fetch high prices, while his wife and several children are having a hard struggle for existence" (1903, 9). Adding insult to injury, the New York Tribune reported that among the forgeries apprehended were paintings by the artist's daughter, Marian Blakelock, which "have had 'R.A.' substituted … in the signature in order that they may seem to be genuine works" (1903, 9). This exposé was just the first of many discoveries of fraudulent Blakelocks that would surface time and again in the press until the artist's death in 1919. The forgeries became so rampant that they eventually prompted an investigation by the New York district attorney. Now largely forgotten, the name Ralph Blakelock was once legendary. Arguably the most famous artist in America during the first two decades of the twentieth century, Blakelock was, according to the print media, as "well known as Rembrandt and Da Vinci" (Atlanta Constitution 1919, 12O). The painter was so respected that when he died, it was reported that even President Woodrow Wilson sent his regrets for not being able to pay his respects in person (New York Times 1919, 11). Blakelock's signature works were nocturnes—dusky or moonlit [End Page 837] scenes executed with a dramatic palette of rich hues and shimmering brushwork. The best of these rose in value during the first years of the twentieth century to become the most expensive paintings by a living American artist ever sold. Brook by Moonlight (Fig. 1), for example, auctioned in 1916 for a record-breaking $20,000, which no doubt invigorated the already active counterfeiting attempts within the art world's criminal underground (Davidson 1996, 195–211). Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Ralph Albert Blakelock, Brook by Moonlight, before 1891. Oil on canvas. Toledo Museum of Art, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Edward Drummond Libbey, 1916.4 [End Page 838] As perhaps the most counterfeited artist in American history, Ralph Blakelock has much to teach us about the history of cons and scams. He was a target for such crimes not because his paintings were necessarily worthy of Rembrandt or Leonardo as his fans proclaimed, but because of the public intrigue surrounding the rapidly changing monetary value of his work and its attendant implications. The case of Ralph Blakelock's brief celebrity is revealing of a period-specific fascination with the trustworthiness of representation, both artistic and monetary. Indeed, it would be impossible even to tell Blakelock's story without consideration of economic contexts—both the ways in which markets determined his fate and the ways in which the artist himself was obsessed with matters of money. Blakelock's tale of cons and scams offers a window into the intersection of artistic and economic duplicity that has long been with us. Blakelock's career as a landscape painter began in New York City in the mid-1860s. As a young man, he traveled to the American West in attempts to replicate the success of expeditionary painters who were making huge sums on their grand views of distant places. Unable to cash in on frontier pictures, Blakelock began painting eerie nocturnes, sometimes Western themed, but they received little attention from critics, leaving the artist with few buyers during his most productive years. In 1899, penniless and desperate with a large family to support, Blakelock suffered an emotional breakdown and committed himself to the Middletown Homeopathic Hospital in upstate New York, where he lived for the next 17 years. While confined, his reputation took a dramatic turn. He was branded the "American Van Gogh" (a shorthand for mad genius), and the National Academy of Design inaugurated...

Man's Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War by Philip F. Gura

Reviewed by: Man's Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War by Philip F. Gura John Burt Man's Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War. By Philip F. Gura. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. [x], 315. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-674-65954-4.) Philip F. Gura's book concerns a cluster of antebellum reform movements that seem disparate to modern readers but were felt in their own time to be tightly interwoven if eccentric. These movements connected the utopian dreams of the Transcendentalists and the Fourierists and the mystical union of science and religion in the poetic speculations of Emanuel Swedenborg with notions such as Grahamite dietary reform, homeopathic medicine, phrenology, mesmerism, currency reform, and sexual liberation. These movements were also tied together as a response to the crash of 1837 and by a common picture of human possibility. By providing searching, sympathetic biographies of the leading projectors of these reforms, Gura brings into high relief their common values, the inner logic of their ideas, and the nobility of their ambitions, making clear their gullible attraction to pseudoscience and their deeper limitations without portraying them as cranks and hucksters. Recognizing the attractiveness of this vision of reform, to make possible a humane restructuring of economic and political life, Gura sees it as hampered by its inward and individualized turn, which made private changes of heart the necessary precondition and the limit of public social reforms. The reformers' insistence on inward purity made them incapable of entering the political world and led them to choose an increasingly severe ethos of impatient separation. Gura also faults many of these reformers for failing to trace many of the ills of their society to slavery, although some embraced abolition and others endorsed John Brown's revolutionary violence. Gura's biography of George Ripley provides the main themes. Shocked by the destitution of his working-class congregation brought on by the collapse of 1837, Ripley sought in Brook Farm a model for a new economic order in which [End Page 747] labor was not exploited, work and life were not alienated, and all persons could simultaneously enlarge their capacities for enjoyment and meaningful endeavor. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, unlike Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, joined the commune, captured the sad comedy of its failure in The Blithedale Romance (1852). But Gura is right not to reduce Brook Farm to a caricature. Its founding ideals were noble, and its cultural critique was accurate. If Ripley's measures were inadequate, he at least saw, in the inward moral dignity of all people, what Emerson called "'the infinitude of the common man'" (p. 25). Horace Greeley, who embraced Fourierism, phrenology, a Grahamite diet, abolition, and labor reform, connects almost every figure in this book. The progress of all of these proposals were featured in his New York Tribune. In Gura's view, Greeley made an accurate diagnosis of the chief social ills of his age, although his prescriptions often seem ineffective. Albert Brisbane, Henry James Sr., Orestes Brownson, and Theodore Parker also connect many of the book's subjects. Brownson, in particular, would seem to deserve a more extended treatment. Gura gives a nuanced account of now mostly forgotten figures, including currency reformer William B. Greene and phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler. Gura's chapter on phrenology is of particular interest, since he sees it as something more than a peculiar enthusiasm, indeed as a way of connecting the body and the spirit, which in its own day had something of the cachet that psychoanalysis had in the mid-twentieth century. Also of particular interest is Gura's account of the feminist and sexual reformer Mary Gove Nichols. Many of her views on health reform and sexual passion only entered the mainstream a generation ago and are still contested. She and her husband, Thomas Nichols, maintained their arguments with a great deal of integrity and consistency. Nichols deserves to be remembered more widely and sympathetically, and Gura is capable of telling her story with insight. The terminus of this model is the revolutionary violence of John Brown. The reader might have...

The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History by Anne C. Bailey

Reviewed by: The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History by Anne C. Bailey Randy J. Sparks (bio) The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History. By Anne C. Bailey. ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. 206. Cloth, $79.99; paper, $24.99.) In March 1859, 436 enslaved men, women, and children went on the auction block in Savannah, Georgia, the single largest slave auction in the [End Page 532] long, tragic history of slavery in the U.S. South. The event is tailor-made for the sort of microhistory that Anne Bailey, a historian of African American history at SUNY Binghamton, set out to write. That sale resulted from the financial difficulties of Pierce Mease Butler, who garnered over $300,000. The extensive Butler family papers are housed at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and historians including Malcolm Bell and William Dusinberre have demonstrated their historical value. Add to those records the diary of Fanny Kemble, the British actress who married Butler in 1834, whose diary of the time she spent on the Butler plantations is one of the most perceptive firsthand accounts of plantation life ever published. Some of the enslaved men and women Kemble met stood on that auction block in 1859. Bailey has organized her book into three parts: "The Breach," focused on the auction itself; "Linked Fates," which explores the intertwined histories of the Butlers and their chattel; and "Healing the Breach," which follows the efforts of descendants of the Butler slaves to trace their families' histories. A reporter for the New York Tribune, Mortimer Thomson, disguised himself as a buyer and mingled with the crowd during the auction, providing a detailed and chilling record of the proceedings as potential buyers shouted and joked among themselves, immune to the human tragedy playing out before their very eyes. Bailey identifies only a few of the individuals sold over the two-day auction, honing in on families divided by the sale. Butler's grandfather, Major Pierce Butler, a British army officer, acquired the plantations, located on isolated sea islands off the coast of Georgia, in 1774. Those plantations produced rice and Sea Island cotton, and the plantation communities established there remained remarkably stable until the 1859 auction. On the islands, the distinctive Gullah-Geechee culture flourished. Bailey does not explain what took the Butlers to Philadelphia, but the proceeds from their plantations allowed them to live there in high style. Smitten with Kemble when he saw her on stage, Pierce Mease Butler embarked on a whirlwind courtship, where he flouted his wealth in grand, romantic gestures that hid his growing gambling debts. Kemble was ignorant of those debts and of the plantations that formed the basis of the Butler fortune when the two wed. Butler and his brother inherited the plantations in 1836, and Fanny begged her husband to take her to visit them, a request he denied until 1838, when he agreed to a visit, a trip that deeply shocked Fanny and doomed their marriage. Bailey's discussion of rice and cotton cultivation is overly generalized and oddly divorced from the Butler plantations. Her descriptions of cotton culture, for example, are drawn from the Cotton South, where green-seed [End Page 533] cotton was king, a far different crop from Sea Island cotton. She claims that Eli Whitney's cotton gin enabled the Butlers to "make a healthy profit margin" (68), but the long, silky threads of Sea Island cotton could not be ginned with Whitney's machine. She focuses on music and religion as fixtures of the rich Gullah-Geechee culture on the islands, home to the strongest African retentions in the South, though her analysis of both lacks depth and overlooks important scholarship like Margaret Washington Creel's foundational work on Gullah religion and community. The Civil War brought dramatic change to the Sea Islands, and two of the enslaved men sold in 1859, Noble Walker and Thomas Baker, served in the United States Army. The Sea Islands fell to the United States early in the war, and the Federal government launched an experiment to transition former slaves to freedom, an effort historian Willie Lee...