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Demonic New World and Wilderness Land: The Making Strange of America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

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The American scholar claims for himself the forgotten wastes and undisclosed lands. Like a character from Cooper, he travels from the walls and academes into the burnings of a prairie, thence to return and publish his message, discovering the horrid and yet holy measures of controls, the ways of fencing the wilds, and the singular terrors of his mind. He demands not the allegory Bunyan offered, nor the timeless locations Bunyan portrayed, but that allegory be stripped, that dream and its terror be held to place, located exactly where the scholar stands. He demands a material, measurement, place—somewhere and sometime in which to describe his crisis. He demands a particular machine, some object foreign enough, lawful enough, against which to measure himself and then destroy himself unto another life. He demands a compulsion to declare compulsion is fatal. He builds control and provides structure and works thereby his irony, tearing apart his devices, declaring his strangeness, his living out of place, his sense of himself as removed, of himself as a holy or at least as a special seer. He conflates history to the point of himself, places a local or even a world economy within himself, locates in his own psychomachia the material history of his culture. His expression of history, whatever the material or “artifact” claimed, is psychological, for the generative force, the historical explanation, is one of terror and of terror's control, of building not from innate designs or material exigencies or clashes of class or movements of world and regional economies but from the terrors of a bewilderment, from horrors to be externalized in the uniqueness of the American place—for Cotton Mather, Satan's home, the most vile and holy of deserts.

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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

NOTES

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29. Rom. 7:20, 15, 17.

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31. Adams, Henry to Hay, John, 11 7, 1900Google Scholar, in Ford, Worthington Chauncey, ed., Letters of Henry Adams (1892–1918) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938), II, 299Google Scholar. And see Samuels, , Henry Adams: The Major Phase, pp. 217 ff.Google Scholar

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33. Reference is made in Volume VI of the proceedings of the Congress of Arts and Science: Universal Exposition, St. Louis, 1904, ed. Rogers, Howard J. (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1906), p. 602Google Scholar, to a paper by Henry L. Gantt, an associate of Taylor, “on the ‘Application of Scientific Methods to the Economic Utilization of Labor’” contributed to the section on mechanical engineering, undoubtedly a paper similar to one that Gantt published in the Stevens Institute Indicator. “The Utilization of Labor,” 24 (01 1907), 1226Google Scholar, from a lecture Gantt delivered in February 1907. The literature surrounding Taylor is extensive. This sketch of Taylor is based on a reading of his works, both essays and books, the sources for which may be found in any number of bibliographies contained in secondary material. For a study of Taylor's personality and its compulsive manifestations, one may consult an uneven work by Kakar, Sudhir, Frederick Taylor: A Study in Personality and Innovation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970)Google Scholar. The definitive biography remains the two-volume work by Copley, Frank Barkley, Frederick W. Taylor: Father of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Bros., 1923)Google Scholar. The best introduction to the “efficiency movement” as a whole in turn-of-the-century America is Haber, Samuel, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964)Google Scholar. And the finest of the case studies is by Aitken, Hugh G. J., Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal: Scientific Management in Action, 1908–1915 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960).Google Scholar

34. Kakar, , Fredrick TaylorGoogle Scholar, provides a variety of examples (see especially pp. 17–27), most of which stem from Copley's biography and the Recollections of Birge Harrison, contained in the Taylor Collection of the Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, N.J.

35. For discussion of Thoreau's railroad cut, see Marx, , Machine in the Garden, pp. 260–65.Google Scholar

36. Weber, Max, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Roth, Guenther and Wittich, Claus, trans. Fischoff, Ephraim et al. (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), III, 1156Google Scholar, the translation based on the fourth edition of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1956).Google Scholar

37. See the psychohistorical study, Mitzman, Arthur, The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1970).Google Scholar

38. Morgan discusses what he has termed the morphology of conversion on pp. 66–73 of his Visible Saints. And see Pettit, Norman, The Heart Prepared: Grace and Conversion in Puritan Spiritual Life, Yale Publications in American Studies, No. 11 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966).Google Scholar

39. Such is the theme of Erik H. Erikson that runs throughout his work, most particularly in the images he draws from “The Meaning of ‘Meaning It,’” the title of a chapter from his Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958), pp. 170222Google Scholar, and a theme to which this essay is indebted throughout.

40. The recollection is from Birge Harrison, quoted in Copley, , Fredrick W. Taylor, I, 5758Google Scholar, Copley providing as well the excerpts from a Taylor letter of 1910 concerning his eyes in his chapter entitled “How He Did Not Become a Lawyer,” I, 74. For an analysis of Taylor's weakness of eyes, see Kakar, , Fredrick Taylor, pp. 2627Google Scholar; and of Taylor's crisis, that his “very entry into industry was linked to a psychological crisis,” see Haber, , Efficiency and Uplift, pp. 56.Google Scholar

41. For perhaps Taylor's clearest discussion of “men of our class,” “the careless holiday look,” see his lecture, apparently to the Harvard Business School, “Workmen and Their Management” (04 20, 1909)Google Scholar, in the Baker Library Archives, CD 823.1, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., especially pp. 15–17.

42. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England” (10 1883), Volume XGoogle Scholar of The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Centenary Edition (1911), p. 329.Google Scholar

43. Copley, , Fredrick W. Taylor, II, 196, 469Google Scholar (from the “Index”); 1, 153; II, 285; I, 88–89. And see Taylor, Frederick Winslow, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Bros., 1915), p. 82.Google Scholar

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45. Excerpts from Taylor's paper, appearing in Copley, , Frederick W. Taylor, II, 194, 193.Google Scholar

46. Copley, , Frederick W. Taylor, II, 186Google Scholar, and, in an excerpt from Taylor's paper, 195. The author is indebted to Daniel T. Rodgers for an introduction to Melville's story, particularly to its use of sexual imagery. And see Fisher, Marvin, “Melville's ‘Tartarus’: The Deflowering of New England,” American Quarterly, 23 (Spring 1971), 79100CrossRefGoogle Scholar, a too literal thesis, however, of Melville “being discomforted by events which so markedly transformed the landscape” (p. 81).

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52. Ibid., p. 59.

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68. Ibid., p. 274.

69. Ibid., pp. 282–83, 283–84.

70. Ibid., pp. 283, 131, 171–72.

71. Ibid., p. 286.

72. Ibid., p. 288.

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80. Ibid., pp. 647, 648, 650, 648, 649.

81. Ibid., pp. 649–50, 651, 653, 655, 655–56, 656, 653.

82. Ibid., p. 653.

83. For a discussion of the uses of anonymity in Cotton Mather's autobiography, see the excellent presentation by Bosco, Ronald A., “Introduction,” to Mather, Cotton, Paterna: The Autobiography of Cotton Mather (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1976), pp. xiiilxiGoogle Scholar, in particular, pp. xliii, liii–lvi.

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86. Marx, , The Machine in the Garden, pp. 277319Google Scholar, Marx speaking of Ahab's “monomania” and “compulsion” and troubles thus of mind, of course in literary, figurative form (pp. 300, 316).

87. Twentieth-century ideologies of work are most thoroughly presented by Bendix, Reinhard, Work and Authority in Industry: Ideologies of Management in the Course of Industrialization, a book in a series from the research program of the Institute of Industrial Relations, University of California (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1956)Google Scholar. The countering theme that came to destroy Taylorism was the work of Elton Mayo, the Hawthorne experiment of his Harvard team, and most interestingly Mayo's focus on the psychopathology of the obsessional neurosis that runs throughout his books and essays, the neurosis he gave as the problem of the twentieth-century industrial character.

88. An excellent discussion of this point is presented by Aitken, , Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal, pp. 107–10Google Scholar, though in the payment plan there, Aitken has argued it was understandable and not as complex or illogical as it might first have seemed (pp. 108–9). An irony possessing Taylor, common, as it were, in obsessive actions, was the expense and elaboration of his drives toward efficiency, his design of a steam hammer, for example, “found to contain, as one man expressed it, ‘several thousand dollars worth of frills.’. … Here appears Taylor's tendency to overdo, to make assurance triply sure.” It was adding again and again to prevent the death of the machine in question. Examples and quotations appear in Copley, , Frederick W. Taylor, I, 198, 380, 382.Google Scholar

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91. The irony is clearest in two articles edited with commentary by Copley, Frank Barkley: Taylor, Frederick W., “Not for the Genius—But for the Average Man: A Personal Message by Frederick W. Taylor,” The American Magazine, 85 (03 1918), 1617, 114–16Google Scholar; and Taylor, Frederick W., “Why the Race Is Not Always to the Swift,” The American Magazine, 85 (04 1918), 4243, 100Google Scholar. For Taylor, 's lecturing on “Success,”Google Scholar see Copley, , Frederick W. Taylor, I, 7779.Google Scholar

92. Hemingway, , The Sun Also Rises, pp. 111, 189, 177.Google Scholar

93. Ibid., p. 68; and Hemingway, Ernest, “Big Two-hearted River” (first published in his In Our Time of 1925), in The Hemingway Reader, pp. 4, 9, 21, 22.Google Scholar

94. Agee, James, Evans, Walker, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1941), pp. 211, 225, 265, 224, 425.Google Scholar

95. It was more than a denial; it was the center of Evans's aesthetic philosophy, as William Stott admirably discusses in his Documentary Expression, particularly pp. 269–70, 284Google Scholar, that for Evans, , “you don't touch a thing.”Google Scholar

96. The photographs as discussed appear only completely, and in the order discussed, in the book as it was republished in 1960: (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press), containing “Foreword: James Agee in 1936” by Walker Evans, dated 1960. With the exception of additions, subtractions, and rearrangements of the photographs by Evans—and for a discussion of the images Evans removed, as well as mechanical alterations of the images themselves, see the excellent discussion by Stott, , Documentary Expression, pp. 278–81Google Scholar—the 1960 edition is a reprint of the 1941 edition. Captions for the photographs, provided by Evans in neither edition of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, are contained in Evans, Walker, Photographs for the Farm Security Administration, 1935–1938: A Catalog of Photographic Prints Available from the Farm Security Administration Collection in the Library of Congress (New York: Da Capo Press, 1975)Google Scholar. The last of the images from the book is entitled “A Gourd Tree for Martins, Hale County, Alabama, Summer 1936.” The grave is that of a child.

97. Agee, , Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, pp. 373, 282, 371, 23, 154, 171–74, 180, 188, 364, 171, 403–4.Google Scholar

98. Ibid., pp. 396, 404, 405, 160, 410, 310–11.

99. Ibid., p. 2.

100. These photographs—of building fronts, “Corner of State and Randolph Streets, Chicago, 1946,” “Shoppers, Randolph Street, 1947,” “Trash Can, New York, ca. 1968,” as well as of the architectonics of Northern simplicity, such as “Jack Heliker's Bedroom Wall, Cranberry Island, Maine, 1969,” as opposed to the overweight and sloppy poses of urban dwellers—are contained in The Museum of Modern Art, Walker Evans (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971)Google Scholar, with an “Introduction” by John Szarkowski; and in Evans, , Photographs for the Farm Security Administration.Google Scholar

101. Agee, , Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, pp. 362–66Google Scholar. The photograph, or one of the photographs, in mention is probably an image that appeared only in the first (1941) edition of the book. In his Documentary Expression, Stott notes that while the second (1960) edition contained twice as many photographs as the original edition, it also failed to contain six that had originally appeared, one because of a missing negative, two because of duplication, and three “plainly cut for reasons of taste,” including one of Margaret Ricketts. In 1960, Evans was altering his text, to Stott's mind properly, for these last three, “made with a Leica,” failed to meet Evans's aesthetic demands, particularly the one of Mrs. Ricketts that seemed in dress and manner of pose to remove from her her dignity, “like the rotten mattress Bourke-White photographed, … pathetic to the point of bathos.” The point is arguable; the image is indeed, or appears to be, as Stott well points out, “untypically” candid; it is certainly more fluid, less architectural, an image, as it were, of one so caught; and it certainly fails to fit with the rest of the Evans corpus—the dignity Stott presents of subjects attacking Evans's camera as much as the camera striking them. Agee chose, seemingly, to lead the reader to believe the larger, 8- by 10-inch camera had been used rather than, in Stott's description, the “gray and blurred” production of the Leica. It is as though the machine itself were collapsing, allowing for a lessening of the rigidity present in Evans's work, an ending, as it were, of the alienation. “Fred was in the lineup, talking over and over about being in the funny papers and about breaking the camera with his face, and laughing and laughing and laughing” (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, p. 365)Google Scholar. And it is an image of what Agee was writing, of the subject and him breaking down (somewhat sexually tinged). But it is not an image in its torn and shattered structures, and in the water-soaked garment worn, without a strength. In the photograph, subject and object are one, a binding together in a certain innocence of charm so very different from the distance of camera and person present in all but the last of the images Evans chose for the second edition. For Stott's outstanding analysis, without which no such other analysis could be attempted, see his chapter on “The Photographs,” and in particular pp. 278–81, his writing on Ricketts, Margaret on p. 279.Google Scholar

102. Agee, , Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, pp. 368, 366.Google Scholar

103. In this matter, see Hall, M. G., ed., “Foreword” to The Autobiography of Increase Mather (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1962)Google Scholar, reprinted from the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society for 10 1961, pp. 271–77Google Scholar; Bosco, , “Introduction” to Paterna, in particular Bosco's third section, “Mather's Literary Method in Paterna,” pp. xliiilxGoogle Scholar; Anderson, Charles R., his chapter “Thoreau and T” on the distancing of author and narrator, in The Magic Circle of Walden (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968), pp. 111Google Scholar; Bercovitch, , Puritan Origins of the American Self, the sections on “Auto-Machia” and “Sola Natura,” pp. 1525, 148–63Google Scholar; and the “Conclusion” to Delany, Paul, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 167–74Google Scholar. The definitive study of early American spiritual autobiography is Shea, Daniel B. Jr., Spiritual Autobiography in Early America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968)Google Scholar. And see Tichi, Cecelia, “Spiritual Biography and the ‘Lords Remembrances,’” in Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed., The American Puritan Imagination: Essays in Revaluation (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 5673.Google Scholar

104. Agee, , Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, p. 370.Google Scholar

105. Ibid., pp. 410–12, 415.

106. Ibid., pp. 380–81, 409.

107. See McLean, Albert F. Jr., “Thoreau's True Meridian: Natural Fact and Metaphor,” American Quarterly, 20 (Fall 1968), 567–79Google Scholar, its direction displayed on the map Thoreau provides of the pond in Walden.

108. McCarthy, Mary, The Seventeenth Degree: How It Went, Vietnam, Hanoi, Medina, Sons of the Morning (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), pp. 269, 261, 269–70.Google Scholar

109. The idea for approaching the essays of Mary McCarthy's book from a pastoral mode stems from a conversation relating a lecture Leo Marx was said to have presented on The Seventeenth Degree.

110. McCarthy, , The Seventeenth Degree, pp. 233, 285, 291–92, 307, 203, 252.Google Scholar

111. Ibid., pp. 203–4, 268–69.

112. Ibid., pp. 7, 235, 7, 16, 15, 26, 27.

113. Ibid., pp. 10, 66, 307, 306, 253, 299, 303, 305.

114. Ibid., pp. 269, 311, 313–14.

115. Ibid., pp. 3–4.

116. Agee, , Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, pp. 11, 455–58.Google Scholar

117. Glassie, , Folk Housing in Middle Virginia, pp. 7, 10, 12, x.Google Scholar

118. Mailer, Norman, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (New York: New American Library, 1968), pp. 3, 4.Google Scholar

119. Glassie, , Folk Housing in Middle Virginia, pp. 160, 171, 175, 12, 14.Google Scholar

120. Castaneda, Carlos, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 30, 2122, 205Google Scholar. As to the matter of the archaeology of Castaneda, see Silverman, David, Reading Castaneda: A Prologue to the Social Sciences (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975)Google Scholar; Noel, Daniel C., ed., Seeing Castaneda: Reactions to the “Don Juan” Writings of Carlos Castaneda (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1976)Google Scholar; and especially as an art in itself, de Mille, Richard, Castaneda's Journey: The Power and the Allegory, 2nd ed., rev. (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra Press, 1978).Google Scholar

121. Dillard, Annie, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper's Magazine Press and Harper & Row, 1974), pp. 3, 12, 6768.Google Scholar

122. Thoreau, , Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, IX, 45Google Scholar, with reference to be made to note 56 of this essay, and Layton, Edwin T. Jr., The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971), pp. 193–94Google Scholar, discussing Herbert Hoover's call for the Federated American Engineering Societies to undertake such a study, and the beginning for Hoover of an efficiency campaign.

123. Melville, , Moby-Dick, chap. 113, “The Forge,” pp. 402–5.Google Scholar

124. 2 Sam. 23:7, and Deut. 3:11.

125. Melville, , Moby-Dick, pp. 160–61, 165–66.Google Scholar

126. Ibid., pp. 459, 469, 452, 459, 389, 390–91. Cohen, Hennig and Cahalan, James provide the needed reference in A Concordance to Melville's “Moby-Dick” (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International, 1978).Google Scholar

127. Melville, , Moby-Dick, pp. 448, 450, 468, 454, 461.Google Scholar

128. Ibid., pp. 461, 468–69.

129. Dan. 2:1, 5, 31, 33, 40–42, 44.

130. Dan. 2:35 and Melville, , Moby-Dick, pp. 454–55.Google Scholar

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