Jackson Lears - Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920

Dreaming of Rebirth

The Long Shadow of Appomattox

The Mysterious Power of Money

The Rising Significance of Race

The Country and the City

Crisis and Regeneration

Liberation and Limitation

Empire as a Way of Life

Dying in Vain

Dreaming of Rebirth

A ll history is the history of longing. The details of policy; the migration of peoples; the abstractions that nations kill and die for, including the abstraction of the nation itselfall can be ultimately traced to the viscera of human desire. Human beings have wanted innumerable, often contradictory thingssecurity and dignity, power and domination, sheer excitement and mere survival, unconditional love and eternal salvationand those desires have animated public life. The political has always been personal.

Yet circumstances alter cases. At crucial historical moments, personal longings become peculiarly influential in political life; private emotions and public policies resonate with special force, creating seismic change. This was what happened in the United States between the Civil War and World War I. During those decades, a widespread yearning for regenerationfor rebirth that was variously spiritual, moral, and physicalpenetrated public life, inspiring movements and policies that formed the foundation for American society in the twentieth century. As daily life became more subject to the systematic demands of the modern corporation, the quest for revitalization became a search for release from the predictable rhythms of the everyday. Few figures embodied this yearning more vigorously than Harry Houdini, the modern magician who was famous for one big trick: escape. Limitation coexistedat least vicariouslywith liberation. Dreams of rebirth kept boredom at bay.

Still, the dreamers had always wanted more than mere relief from routine. Longings for rebirth had a rich and complex history: rooted in Protestant patterns of conversion, they also resonated with the American mythology of starting over, of reinventing the self. After the Civil War, the entire country was faced with the task of starting over. The idea that the Union had reaffirmed its very being through blood sacrifice promoted a postwar dream of national renewal through righteous war. This militarist fantasy animated key developments in postCivil War politics, beginning with the reunion between the white North and the white South. After Reconstruction, political leaders in both sections redefined the war as an epic expression of Anglo-Saxon martial virtue. Racism, often with scientific legitimacy, reinforced militarism. Dreams of rebirth involved renewal of white power, especially in the former Confederacy. Elite white Southerners who called themselves Redeemers recaptured state governments, and their successors solidified white rulepurifying electoral politics by disenfranchising blacks (and many poor whites), recasting social life by codifying racial segregation, and revitalizing white identity through the occasional blood sacrifice of lynching.

Rituals of racial superiority fueled imperial ambition. The color line, said W. E. B. DuBois in 1906, belts the world. The triumph of white supremacy at home accompanied the conquest of dark peoples abroad. The mythologies of race and empire were intertwined; both reinforced the worship of force. Americans, no less than Europeans, were afflicted by that faux religion. U.S. leaders favorite dreams of regeneration involved military violence. Militarist fantasy runs like a red thread from the Civil War to World War I, surfacing in postwar desires to re-create conditions for heroic struggle, coalescing in the imperialist crusades of 1898, overreaching itself in the Great War and subsiding (temporarily) thereafter. The core of this fantasy might well be described by the phrase the economist Joseph Schumpeter used to characterize capitalism: creative destructionthe notion that a dynamic future best emerges from devastation.

The high tide of regenerative militarism came at the turn of the century. In 1900, after a quarter century of class strife had ended in the acquisition of an overseas empire, Indiana senator Albert Beveridge announced that God had marked us as His Chosen People, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world. Progress and Providence converged in the rhetoric of empire, whether it was inflected with the schoolboyish bellicosity of Theodore Roosevelt or the schoolmasterish moralism of Woodrow Wilson. Militarism was flagrant in Roosevelt, who never abandoned his adolescent faith in the tonic effects of combat; it was less apparent but still present in Wilson, who finally decided that only American entry into the Great War could usher in the Peace Without Victory he craved. The very intensity of longings for rebirth opened up intoxicating possibilities to men with power, and left them peering into an abyss of grandiosity. Roosevelt promoted U.S. hegemony in the name of stability throughout the Western hemisphere and parts of the Far East. Wilson declared a war to end war, aimed at nothing less than the regeneration of the world. No wonder they both stirred up so much trouble.

But violence was not the only instrument of revitalization. Other voices spoke in other idioms, evoking other visions. Progressive reformers targeted corruption in all its forms, hoping to cleanse individual and society alike. The melding of political and personal animated Raoul Walshs film of 1915, Regeneration. It told the story of Owen Conway, an Irish street kid turned gangster, who is redeemed by Marie Deering, a socialite turned settlement-house worker. The film is sentimental and formulaic but powerful in its evocation of the urban working-class world in the early twentieth century. It is a world of people just scraping by, staying a step ahead of the eviction notice or the arrest for vagrancy, of tenements teetering toward collapse and alleyways littered with garbage, of undernourished babies crying for milk and unsupervised urchins swarming in the streets. Mothers are always fretting about the next months rent; fathers are often swilling beer in buckets from the local saloon. Wives and children get periodic beatings. Owen learns to survive in this world through swaggering toughness but soon reveals a larger heroism when he rescues a boatload of children from fire and drowning.

Marie and her colleagues at the settlement house have opened up a new and more humane set of possibilities for Owenliteracy, civic engagement, and the chance to look out for other people beyond himself. Touched by Maries expectations, Owen quits drinking, and it is not long before he is cradling babies and learning to read in the settlement-house schoolroom. The idyll is interrupted when Marie is fatally wounded by Owens old pal Skinny, who has been trapped into a shootout by the police. Marie dies quoting Scripture to OwenVengeance is mine, saith the Lordand Owen renounces any reprisal against Skinny, vowing to continue Maries work.

Though Regeneration elevated nurturance over vengeance, it would be a mistake to see the film as merely a feminine counterpoint to conventional manliness. To be sure, many settlement-house workers were affluent young women like Marie Deering, seeking a moral purpose amid a life of aimless ease. ( Jane Addams, the founder of the pioneer settlement Hull House, was one.) But many young men were equally distressed by poverty, and equally determined to do something about it. Most Progressives, male and female, were motivated by their own vision of ChristianitySocial Christianity, as they called it. They redefined rebirth as unselfish devotion to the commonweal. In popular melodrama, social reform (like military heroism) might require blood sacrifice, as it did for Marie. Yet more commonly the reformers practiced a different sort of heroism, what one might call the heroism of everyday life.