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The Galaxy and American Democratic Culture, 1866–1878

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Robert J. Scholnick
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Extract

During the post-Civil War decades, the major Eastern literary magazines – the Atlantic, Scribner's, Harper's – came to serve, in Malcolm Cowley's phrase, as the “principal voices of the genteel era.” The business of the magazines – with Boston's Atlantic at the head – was delivering “culture” to the middle class. As Walt Whitman wrote in his essay “Personalism,” published in The Galaxy in May 1868, “The writers of a time hint the mottoes of its gods. The word of the modern, say these voices, is the word Culture.” But in pointing out that the culture everywhere advocated by American writers was based largely on European models, Whitman exposes a pathetic irony: “Never, in the Old World, was thoroughly upholster'd exterior appearance and show, mental and other, built entirely on the idea of caste, and on the sufficiency of mere outside acquisition – never were glibness, verbal intellect, more the test, the emulation – more loftily elevated as head and sample – than they are on the surface of our republican States this day.” In their slavish worship of European models and consequent devaluation of the native, American writers had become the high priests of a thin and bloodless “culture” that was distributed abroad through the magazines.

Whitman shrewdly recognized, as Alan Trachtenberg has written, that genteel culture had become an instrument of “social control.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , April 1982 , pp. 69 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

Robert J. Scholnick is Professor of English at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia 23185. A version of this essay was delivered at the Eighth Biennial Convention of the American Studies Association at Memphis, Tennessee, in October 1981.

1 Cowley, Malcolm, After the Genteel Tradition, rev. ed. (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1964), p. 10Google Scholar.

2 Whitman, Walt, The Prose Works (New York: New York University Press, 1964), 2, 395Google Scholar.

3 Ibid.

4 “Introduction,” Democratic Vistas: 1860–1880, ed. Trachtenberg, Alan (New York: George Braziller, 1970), p. 22Google Scholar.

5 The Prose Works, 396.

6 Nation, 2 (04 26, 1866), 534–35Google Scholar.

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8 Stedman, Laura and Gould, George M. M.D., Life and Letters of Edmund Clarence Stedman (New York: Moffet and Yard, 1910), 1, 380Google Scholar.

9 Letter to F. P. Church, 4 June 1868. Quoted in Mott, Frank Luther, History of American Magazines (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938), 3, 360Google Scholar.

10 Ottarson, F. J., “New York and Its Peoples,” Galaxy, 3 (1 05 1867), 53, 64Google Scholar.

11 Ibid., 60, 64.

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13 Speech reprinted in The Army and Navy Journal, 24 Jan. 1903, 509–10.

14 Galaxy, 5 (April 1868).

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18 Ibid. (15 July 1866), 487.

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20 Ibid., 3 (15 April 1867), 872, 876.

21 Letter, Eugene Benson, to W. C. and F. P. Church, 6 Jan. 1867, Church Collection, New York Public Library. Quoted by permission.

22 Letter, W. D. Howells to Titus Munson Coan, New York Historical Society.

23 Galaxy, 8 (Nov. 1869), 617.

24 Ibid., 7 (March 1869), 381–82.

25 “What To Do With Wealth,” Ibid., 8 (Nov. 1869), 706.

26 Ibid., 5 (June 1868), 757–61.

27 Ibid., 7 (April 1869), 492.

28 Nation, 10 (2 June 1870), 355.

29 Galaxy, 7 (March 1869), 433.

30 Crapsey's articles ran from February 1871 through April 1872.

31 See “The Mormon Commonwealth,” Galaxy, 2 (15 10 1866), 351–64Google Scholar, and “Brigham Young and Mormonism,” ibid., 4 (Sept. 1867), 541–49.

32 Ibid., 7 (March 1869), 446.

33 Ibid. (March 1869), 367.

34 Ibid., 8 (July 1869), 33.

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36 Waiting for the Verdict ran from 15 Feb. 1867 through Dec. 1867.

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38 Carl Benson, “Galaxy Miscellany,” ibid. 9 (March 1870), 415.

39 Ibid., 17 (April 1874), 466.

40 Youmans, Edward L., The Culture Demanded by Modern Life (New York: D. Appleton, 1867), p. 2Google Scholar.

41 For a full discussion, see Pearson, pp. 290–95.

42 Pearson, pp. 296–97.

43 See Bigelow, Donald Nevius, William Conant Church and “The Army and Navy Journal” (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1952)Google Scholar.

44 Letter, Eugene Benson to W. C. Church, 30 July 1866. Quoted in Mott, , History of American Magazines, p. 370Google Scholar.

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46 Frothingham, O. B., “Democracy and Moral Progress,” North American Review, 137 (07 1883), 32, 34Google Scholar.