4 - Vicious gregariousness: White City, the nation form, and the souls of lynched folk

Summary

In June 1893 The Atlantic Monthly ran an article entitled “A National Vice” in which the essayist (and later biographer of Bret Harte) Henry Childs Merwin reprehends Americans for their “undue gregariousness.” Citing various trends of “modern life” – railroad travel, apartment dwelling, urban migration, the predominance of clubs, and so forth – Merwin then settles on a few of the very worst signs of this vice: “To dine in a crowd; to be charitable in a crowd; to go out in a crowd to view the face of nature; and, perhaps greatest absurdity of all, to read poetry in a crowd, – such are the ambitions of a typical American.” Merwin worries that gregariousness, though necessary at an earlier stage in human history for the protection of the species, now promotes imitativeness; it “dulls the higher intellectual powers,” and “prevents men from attaining their proper individuality of mind and of character.” While conceding that the “social instinct” beneficially “fosters sympathy and pity and charity,” the bane of modern life is urbanization, according to Merwin; it threatens to render extinct the “man of genius,” the man who “becomes a law unto himself.” Such men, he rues, “seldom arise in large cities.”

While disparagement of urban crowdedness appears regularly in nineteenth-century social commentary, Merwin amplifies the sense of peril by rendering gregariousness a “national” problem.