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American Abyss: Savagery and Civilization in the Age of Industry
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American Abyss: Savagery and Civilization in the Age of Industry
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Overview
American industry was contrasted with the supposed savagery and primitivism discovered in tropical colonies, but observers who made those claims worried that industrialization, by encouraging immigration, child and women's labor, and large families, was reversing natural selection. Factories appeared to favor the most unfit. There was a disturbing tendency for such expressions of fear to favor eugenicist "remedies."
Bender delves deeply into the culture and politics of the age of industry. Linking urban slum tourism and imperial science with immigrant better-baby contests and hoboes, American Abyss uncovers the complex interactions of turn-of-the-century ideas about race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Moreover, at a time when immigration again lies at the center of American economy and society, this book offers an alarming and pointed historical perspective on contemporary fears of immigrant laborers.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780801445989 |
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Publisher: | Cornell University Press |
Publication date: | 12/10/2009 |
Pages: | 344 |
Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d) |
Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 Cavemen in the Progressive Era: From Savagery to Industry 15
2 Mapping Civilization: Race, Industry, and Climate in the American Empire 40
3 The Other Colonies: Immigration, Race Conquest, and the Survival of the Unfit 69
4 Cave Girls and Working Women: The White Man's World of Race Suicide 99
5 Exploring the Abyss and Segregating Savagery: Abroad at Home in the Immigrant Colony 132
6 Dredging the Abyss: Babies, Boys, and Civilization 161
7 Of Jukes and Immigrants: Eugenics and the Problem of Race Betterment 191
8 Following the Monkey: Blond Beasts and the Rising Tide of Color in War and Revolution 214
9 Failing of Art and Science: The Abyss in a New Era 247
Notes 257
Bibliographic Essay 313
Index 319
What People are Saying About This
American Abyss is a brave, stimulating exploration of the intersections of evolution, industry, empire, race, and work in modern American culture and politics. With the raw energy of Jack London, Daniel E. Bender plunges into the abyss of fears about degeneration in industrial America and emerges with an astute mapping of Progressive-era thought.
Daniel E. Bender sets out to understand how evolution influenced American scholars, writers, and activists from the 1880s to the 1920s.... This book is less an intellectual history of what philosopher Daniel Dennett termed 'Darwin's dangerous idea' than an intellectual history of pseudo-science. Bender surveys the enthusiastic application and proliferation of Social Darwinist ideas.... Bender finds that efforts to contrast the past, present, and future of humanity generally confirmed their authors' biases, weaving into evolutionary language the rhetoric of civilization and savagery.... Bender does an excellent job in tracing the myriad applications of pseudo-evolutionary thought. It deeply influenced how radicals, reformers, and conservatives understood not only the industrial workplace but also the woman question as well as the role of immigration in American society and world history.
In American Abyss, Daniel E. Bender traces the ways in which the supposed mastery of racial knowledge helped to constitute and validate the idea that large industrial enterprises and empires could be successfully managed. Bender leavens his account with the cultural, political, and social, and especially with the history of gender. His book shows how similar scientific ideas could undergird paeans to capital and some strains of revolutionary socialism and give rise to immigrant baby contests as well as campaigns for sterilization.