These Days of Large Things: The Culture of Size in America, 1865-1930
336
These Days of Large Things: The Culture of Size in America, 1865-1930
336eBook
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Overview
The United States at the turn of the twentieth century cultivated a passion for big. It witnessed the emergence of large-scale corporate capitalism; the beginnings of American imperialism on a global stage; record-level immigration; a rapid expansion of cities; and colossal events and structures like world's fairs, amusement parks, department stores, and skyscrapers. Size began to play a key role in American identity. During this period, bigness signaled American progress.
These Days of Large Things explores the centrality of size to American culture and national identity and the preoccupation with physical stature that pervaded American thought. Clarke examines the role that body size played in racial theory and the ways in which economic changes in the nation generated conflicting attitudes toward growth and bigness. Finally, Clarke investigates the relationship between stature and gender.
These Days of Large Things brings together a remarkable range of cultural material including scientific studies, photographs, novels, cartoons, architecture, and film. As a general cultural and intellectual history of the period, this work will be of interest to students and scholars in American studies, U.S. history, American literature, and gender studies.
Michael Tavel Clarke is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Calgary.
Cover photograph: "New York from Its Pinnacles," Alvin Langdon Coburn (1912). Courtesy of the George Eastman House.
"A fascinating study of the American preoccupation with physical size, this book charts new paths in the history of science, culture, and the body. A must-read for anyone puzzling over why Americans today love hulking SUVs, Mcmansions, and outsized masculine bodies."
---Lois Banner, University of Southern California
"From the Gilded Age through the Twenties, Clarke shows a nation-state obsessed with sheer size, ranging from the mammoth labor union to the 'Giant Incorporated Body' of the monopoly trust. These Days of Large Things links the towering Gibson Girl with the skyscraper, the pediatric regimen with stereotypes of the Jew. Spanning anthropology, medicine, architecture, business, and labor history, Clarke provides the full anatomy of imperial America and offers a model of cultural studies at its very best."
---Cecelia Tichi, Vanderbilt University
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472024988 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 12/18/2009 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
Read an Excerpt
THESE DAYS OF LARGE THINGS
The Culture of Size in America, 1865-1930By Michael Tavel Clarke
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS
Copyright © 2007 University of MichiganAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-09962-7
Chapter One
Representing the "Pygmies"
In 1862, Paul Belloni Du Chaillu, a naturalized American citizen, set out on the second of two journeys into the interior of equatorial Africa. While his reports of gorillas and cannibals helped make the narrative of his first journey a financial success and a popular sensation, his earlier travels were also the subject of controversy. Inconsistencies in the chronology of his book Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, the absence of precise geographical measurements, and other oversights led scientific authorities to question the authenticity of his journey. In this second trip, he hoped to substantiate his earlier reports and further his investigations in natural history, including the search for the missing link between apes and humans that would help justify Darwinian theory.
The second trek ended disastrously-or so he believed at first. In 1865 he fled to the coast when one of his guides accidentally shot and killed a man, losing virtually all of his equipment along the way, including material that would be instrumental in validating his earlier journey. Before fleeing, however, he encountered a village of Obongos, a group of very small peoplewhom he labeled "pygmies." Although Du Chaillu devoted only nine pages out of five hundred to his encounter with the Obongos in the narrative of this second journey, his reports of pygmies immediately captured the popular and scientific imaginations, proving to be the major contribution of his second trip to Euro-American knowledge about Africa. In the ensuing years, additional reports of very small people living in the interior of Africa confirmed and supplemented Du Chaillu's reports. These reports merged with knowledge of the small Bushmen (or San) of southern Africa and increasing knowledge of small people in the Andaman Islands, New Guinea, the Philippines, and elsewhere to produce a growing conviction among Americans and Europeans that pygmies, regarded for centuries as mythical, did indeed exist.
Forty years after Du Chaillu's journeys, and a year after Du Chaillu died, Samuel Phillips Verner triumphantly returned from central Africa accompanied by several pygmies, including one man purchased from African slavers for a pound of salt and a bolt of cloth during the brutal Belgian occupation. Verner brought the young men to St. Louis, where, as the first pygmies to be seen directly by masses of Americans, they delighted fairgoers with their performances in the world's fair of 1904. At the same time, visitors to the fair had the opportunity to observe a functioning replica of a pygmy village of the Philippines, complete with authentic Aeta villagers. The exhibit was part of a larger representation of the various communities of the Philippines meant to inform fairgoers about the latest acquisition to the U.S. empire and to bolster the contemporary self-image of Americans as the culmination of social and evolutionary progress. Two years after the St. Louis World's Fair, one of the central African men, Ota Benga, appeared in the Bronx Zoo, where he performed in a cage with an orangutan in an exhibit designed to convince visitors of the close affinity between the two.
In the time intervening between Du Chaillu's encounter with the Obongos and Ota Benga's performances, anthropologists and ethnologists used the accounts of travelers like Du Chaillu to classify and hierarchize the existing races of man and to develop theories about the origin and evolution of humans. Stature became an increasingly important element in American and European racial classifications as awareness grew of populations of small people scattered throughout the world. Debates erupted over whether pygmies were degenerated versions of taller races or remnants of an early, primitive form of humanity. They ended with ethnologists and anthropologists agreeing unanimously that groups of small, dark-skinned peoples as disparate as west central Africa and the Philippines belonged to the same primitive branch of the family tree. Pygmies were consigned to the bottom of the evolutionary hierarchy, succeeded in a progressive history first by taller Negroes and then by the Mongolians and the Caucasians. As people "thrown into the side eddies of the great stream of evolution" and weak contestants in the high-stakes struggle of the races, the pygmies were destined for extinction, claimed the scientific authorities.
As these first two chapters will argue, prevalent notions of race affected the acquisition and deployment of knowledge about physical stature at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth in profound ways. At the same time, myths and assumptions about stature affected the development of ideas about race. Influenced by travel writers, anthropologists used small bodies to bolster assumptions about the competition of races, the inevitable extinction of inferior races, and the origins of humanity; in this sense, physical characteristics were clues to the human past and the evolutionary future. World's fairs helped solidify an American national self-image predicated on progressive expansion and conducive to imperialism. All of these discourses shared a number of assumptions: that the small body was a sign of degeneration and the large body, within limits, was a sign of progress; that physical traits were signs of moral ones; and that evidence of the Darwinian struggle among the races was written on the body.
First Encounters: Du Chaillu and the Pygmies
In 1892, the American Geographic Society awarded Paul Belloni Du Chaillu a silver cup in honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his return from Africa and for discovering the gorilla, the equatorial forest, and the pygmies. While the honor recognized, in part, the social and scientific impact of Du Chaillu's travel narratives, Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa (1861) and A Journey to Ashango-Land (1867), his widespread notoriety derived principally from the conversion of these narratives into lectures for American children and a series of five children's books, Stories of the Gorilla Country (1867), Wild Life Under the Equator (1868), Lost in the Jungle (1869), My Apingi Kingdom (1870), and The Country of the Dwarfs (1871). Through these works, Du Chaillu ushered in more than a century of fascination with the pygmies and helped shape narrative treatment of the group for decades to come.
Du Chaillu wrote the first of his books, Explorations and Adventures, after traveling approximately eight thousand miles around the western coast of Africa between 1855 and 1859 with the support of the Boston and Philadelphia natural history societies. The narrative was an immediate success, selling over ten thousand copies in two years despite its large size and high price. Its success can be attributed in part to the fact that it was published shortly after Darwin's The Origin of Species and self-consciously participated in the raging debate over Darwin's view that humans descended from apes. Its popularity may also have been due to its wide appeal to a diverse audience. To the general public, Explorations and Adventures offered numerous enticements: it confirmed racist notions of the barbarity of Africans and the superiority of Europeans and Americans through its titillating accounts of customs such as cannibalism, the sale of women, and the execution of witches; it provided thrilling and exaggerated accounts of gorilla hunts; and it appealed to the virtues of Christian charity by addressing the possibilities of missionary work in Africa. For those with an entrepreneurial bent, it suggested ways of making money in Africa and bringing American industry to the continent. For ethnologists, it examined theories of the relationship between humans and gorillas, offering detailed comparisons between the skulls and skeletons of the two and confirming the work of the celebrated American craniologist Samuel G. Morton.
Throughout his book, Du Chaillu emphasizes the similarities between primates and humans, and we learn in the ethnological chapter near the end of the text that, like so many of his contemporaries, he had hoped to discover a connecting link between the two. Ultimately he admits his failure to find a link between Africans and gorillas in regions where the two live in close proximity; in spite of the stories he heard of African women being carried off by gorillas and of women giving birth to a variety of animals, Du Chaillu admits, "I found not a single being, young or old, who could show an intermediate link between man and the gorilla.... I suppose from these facts we must come to the conclusion that man belongs to a distinct family from that of the ape."
Although Du Chaillu was reluctant to press the claim in his second book that the Obongos were the secret he had sought on his first expedition, A Journey to Ashango-Land nevertheless suggested to many readers that he had in fact found the much anticipated missing link. As described in the book, his encounter with the Obongos was a relatively simple affair. Yet it is evident, given his increased emphasis on the similarities between the Obongos and apes, how his contemporaries may have come to such a conclusion. Du Chaillu describes his approach to the pygmies as a hunt, relying on his readers' familiarity with the frequent descriptions of gorilla hunts in Explorations and Adventures to enhance the resemblance between the Obongos and primates. "The Ashangos ... told me ... I had better take with me only a very small party, so that we might make as little noise as possible," he writes. "We approached with the greatest caution, in order not to alarm the wild inmates ... but all our care was fruitless, for the men, at least, were gone when we came up." The woodcut accompanying Du Chaillu's description of the Obongo village closely resembles a depiction of "gorillas surprised in the forest" from earlier in the text, a connection that is unlikely to be lost on a reader, especially since images of other Africans differ from both dramatically (see figs. 1 and 2). Du Chaillu depicts the Obongos, like the gorillas he had hunted, as extremely shy, the majority never remaining in the village long enough for interaction. When an old woman consents to speak to him, his first impulse is to measure her height and head, and he produces a measuring tape previously used only on apes. On a subsequent visit, he finds a woman mourning her recently deceased husband. Hoping to profit by collecting a pygmy skeleton, he asks his Ashango guides if they will inquire about where the Obongos bury their dead. The translators tactfully refuse. Du Chaillu makes several visits to the village and takes several additional measurements of its inhabitants, all of which he lists in the text of his narrative. He briefly records what little he knows of the Obongos' physical appearance, dietary customs, and language.
Du Chaillu made several significant changes to this episode in the children's book he published four years after the publication of A Journey to Ashango-Land. Capitalizing on popular interest in his reports about the pygmies, he titled his children's book The Country of the Dwarfs. Consistent with this shift in emphasis, he expanded the section on the pygmies; while the entire discussion occupied little more than nine pages of a chapter entitled "Ashango-Land" in A Journey to Ashango-Land, the passages on the pygmies expanded to approximately thirty-three pages in the children's book. He fleshes out the encounter with more dialogue and repeats the stories of the pygmies told by Herodotus and Homer. References to such ancient authorities would become commonplace in later writings about pygmies, serving primarily to establish the ancient lineage of the group, to illustrate the lack of progressive development relative to Euro-American culture, and to add additional evidence to theories that pygmies were among the first races.
The most significant change, however, is the addition of an invented episode in which the entire Obongo village is present for a feast that Du Chaillu supplies. In this passage, Du Chaillu includes an imagined conversation with the Obongos to acquire their unwitting assent to three racial theories about the group. The first theory explained the short stature of the pygmies as a sign of degeneration. The second explained the residence of the pygmies in the recesses of the equatorial forest as a consequence of competition with superior races. The third categorized the pygmies in the hierarchy of races. Although the first theory would encounter some resistance before finally being rejected in the 1890s, the opposing theory would share many of the same premises. Du Chaillu's second and third theories would predominate as the explanatory myths of the pygmy peoples for the Western world.
As one might expect, theories explaining the height of pygmies immediately proliferated in the United States and Europe after Du Chaillu's reports were publicized. Two explanations were most common. According to one argument, pygmies and other short races had degenerated from a more developed race. This was the view of Du Chaillu, who suggested in A Journey to Ashango-Land that inbreeding within the small, isolated communities of the Obongos was the cause of the "physical deterioration of their race." In the fabricated conversation with the Obongos in The Country of the Dwarfs, Du Chaillu asks the villagers about their marriage customs, and they confirm his theory that "Generation after generation we have lived among ourselves, and married among ourselves."
The second most common explanation for the shortness of pygmies, like the first, was based on a Darwinian model of progressive evolution. In The Land of the Pygmies (1898), Guy Burrows maintains that pygmies were not degenerate but were specimens of arrested evolutionary development. "They are a well-proportioned race, and, with the exception of their remarkably short stature, may be regarded as normal and well developed, not degenerate, as has often been stated, though socially inferior to other tribes."
The debate over whether pygmies were a degenerate branch of ordinary Africans or a more primitive racial group was the most important controversy after the existence of the group became widely accepted. Both theories shared common premises: that height was a sign of intellectual and social development; that an increase in height reflected evolutionary progress and a decrease represented degeneration; and that groups of short people deserved special attention for the lessons that they might teach about the differential survival of human races. As an editorial in the New York Times of 1906 expressed it, "Whether they are held to be illustrations of arrested development, and really closer to the anthropoid apes than the other African savages, or whether they are viewed as the degenerate descendants of ordinary negroes, they are of equal interest to the student of ethnology, and can be studied with profit."
Du Chaillu also used the contrived conversation with the Obongos in The Country of the Dwarfs to confirm a second theory explaining the nomadic lifestyle of the pygmies and their residence in the Congo forest. "If we had villages," the Obongos explain, "the strong and tall people who live in the country might come and make war upon us, kill us, and capture us." The rain forest offered a kind of protective evolutionary cul-de-sac for a race that should have disappeared long ago. It was a theory that played an important role in an era of aggressive European and American imperialism. It naturalized warfare and expansionism, borrowing Darwinian theory to turn imperialist violence and colonialist oppression into biological law. "Racial extinction, even genocide, was a result of biology, not history"-this is how Nancy Stepan explains the view. The theory also transformed the social process of imperialism into a biological one by rendering aggression not as one nation against another but as one race against another. While races were founded in blood and heredity, nations were contrived, mutable constructs; and while the imperialist success of a nation might be based on luck or circumstance, the success of a race revealed the superiority of a people bound by blood and a common descent.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THESE DAYS OF LARGE THINGS by Michael Tavel Clarke Copyright © 2007 by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission.
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