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A Chicago Architect in King Arthur's Court: Mark Twain, Daniel Burnham and the Imperialism of Gilded Age Modernity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2013

TIMOTHY A. HICKMAN
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Journal of American Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , February 2014 , pp. 99 - 126
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

In addition to the journal's anonymous readers, I would like to thank Nicola Caldwell, Alexander Scott and Yoke-Sum Wong for their contributions to this article. The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and the Department of History at Lancaster University funded archival research at the Art Institute of Chicago that appears here.

References

1 Twain, Mark, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Norton critical Editions, ed. Ensor, Allison R. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982Google Scholar; first published 1889), 10. Subsequent references to the novel will appear parenthetically within the text.

2 Turner, Frederick Jackson, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1920), 38Google Scholar.

3 Van Brunt, Henry, “The Columbian Exposition and American Civilization,” Atlantic Monthly, 71, 427 (May 1893), 577Google Scholar.

4 For a discussion of Twain's historical sources see Williams, James D., “The Use of History in Mark Twain's A Connectiut Yankee,” PMLA, 80 (1965), 102–10Google Scholar.

5 Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams, Riverside Editions, ed. Samuels, Ernest (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973Google Scholar; first published 1918), 382.

6 Ibid., 381.

7 Wister, Owen, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains, Oxford World's Classics, ed. Shulman, Robert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998Google Scholar; first published 1902), 6–7.

8 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, “The Solitude of Self,” in Hollinger, David and Capper, Charles, eds., The American Intellectual Tradition, Volume II, 1865 to the Present, 3rd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 48–53, 52Google Scholar.

9 Carnegie, Andrew, “Wealth,” North American Review 148, 391(June 1889)Google Scholar, 653.

10 Du Bois, W. E. B., The Souls of Black Folk, Norton Critical Editions, ed. Gates, Henry Louis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999Google Scholar; first published 1905), 33.

11 Hofstadter seems to be the first to use the phrase “cultural crisis” in his discussion of the Spanish–American War. See Hofstadter, Richard, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964), 148Google Scholar. See also Wiebe, Robert H., The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967)Google Scholar; May, Henry F., The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our Own Time, 1912–1917 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959)Google Scholar; Lears, T. J. Jackson, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981)Google Scholar; Cott, Nancy, The Grounding of American Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Livingston, James, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994)Google Scholar; and Bush, Clive, Halfway to Revolution: Investigation and Crisis in the Work of Henry Adams, William James, and Gertrude Stein (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For further applications of the crisis model particularly in terms of race, class and gender difference see Bederman, Gail, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hale, Grace Elizabeth, Making Whiteness: Southern Segregation, 1890–1940 (New York: Random House, 1999)Google Scholar; and Lee, Robert G., Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999)Google Scholar. On the limitations of the crisis model, see especially Bederman, 11.

12 My critique is influenced by Jameson, Frederick, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 1992)Google Scholar.

13 Calinescu, Matei, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 1–92Google Scholar. See also Berman, Marshall, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988)Google Scholar; Kosselleck, Reinhart, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Presner, Todd Samuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lowenthal, David, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar. My sense of modernity is strongly indebted to Jean-François Lyotard's description of postmodernity as the latest instance of the modern. See Lyotard, Jean-François, “Answer to the Question: What Is Postmodernism?”, in Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Bennington, Geoff and Massumi, Brian (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 71–82Google Scholar.

14 Rowe, John Carlos, “How the Boss Played the Game: Twain's Critique of Imperialism in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court,” in Robinson, Forrest G., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 175–92Google Scholar. See also Wandler, Steven, “Hogs, Not Maidens: The Ambivalent Imperialism of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court,” Arizona Quarterly, 66, 4 (Winter 2010), 33–52Google Scholar; and O'Neill, Jennifer A., “Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and U. S. Imperialism,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 9, 3 (2007)Google Scholar, available at http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol9/iss3/3.

15 “King Arthur or Jay Gould?”, London Daily Telegraph, 13 Jan. 1890. Reproduced in Twain, 328. The Norton edition contains several further examples of reviewers who understood the novel as an attack on English institutions.

16 Pope Leo X commissioned the images and had them shipped to Belgium, where they were used as models to weave a series of tapestries for the ground floor of the Sistine Chapel. The British royal family bought the cartoons in 1623 and in 1865 Queen Victoria loaned them to London's South Kensington Museum, which is where they remain. The museum was renamed the Victoria and Albert in 1899. See “The Rafael Cartoons: History of the Cartoons” at www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/t/raphael-cartoons-history-of-the-cartoons.

17 Daniel H. Burnham, “The Uses of Expositions” (1895), Manuscript Box 58, Folder 58.13, Daniel H. Burnham Collection, Ryerson and Burnham Archives, the Art Institute of Chicago, 45–46. The comprehensive source on Burnham's life and career is Hines, Thomas S., Burnham of Chicago: Architect and Planner (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979)Google Scholar. Burnham's most significant piece of written work, with many plans and drawings included, is Burnham, Daniel H. and Bennett, Edward H., Plan of Chicago, ed. Moore, Charles (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993Google Scholar; first published 1909).

18 Burnham, “The Uses of Expositions,” 46. The Town of Lake was a working-class and immigrant district that lay near Chicago's Union Stockyards. Formally annexed by the city in 1896, it would become much better known as the setting for Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle. Whitechapel is the east-end borough that in 1888 became infamous as the location of London's Jack the Ripper murders.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid., 5.

21 Ibid., 44.

22 Ibid., 49.

23 Ibid., 45.

24 Ibid., 3.

25 Ibid., 48.

26 In addition to those works cited below, see Badger, Rodney Reid, The Great American Fair: The World's Columbian Exposition and American Culture (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1979)Google Scholar; Harris, Neill, de Wit, Wim, Gilbert, James and Rydell, Robert W., Grand Illusions: Chicago's World's Fair of 1893 (Chicago: Sewall Co., 1993)Google Scholar; and Muccigrosso, Robert, Celebrating the New World: Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993)Google Scholar.

27 Burnham to Messrs. Van Brunt and Howe, 10 Feb. 1891. Quoted in Hines, Burnham of Chicago, 94.

28 Notes of an interview between Daniel H. Burnham, Charles Moore and E. H. Bennett, “Burnham's Reminiscences of Fair and Developments in Chicago since the Fair: With Pencil Sketch of Plan by DHB,” Manuscript Box 58, Folder 58.15, Daniel H. Burnham Collection, Ryerson and Burnham Archives, the Art Institute of Chicago, 5–6.

29 Sullivan, Louis H., Autobiography of an Idea (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1956Google Scholar; first published 1924). Quoted in Trachtenberg, Alan, “The White City,” in The Incorporation of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 225Google Scholar.

30 Burnham, 1908 interview, 7.

31 My use of “containment” is influenced by May, Elaine Tyler, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 2008)Google Scholar.

32 Trachtenberg, Alan, “The White City,” in, , Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 208–34Google Scholar.

33 Rydell, Robert, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984)Google Scholar. See also “Contend, Contend!”, editor's introduction to Wells, Ida B., Douglass, Frederick et al. , The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition, ed. Rydell, Robert W. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Christopher Gair, “Whose America? White City and the Shaping of National Identity, 1883–1905,” available at http://artsweb.bham.ac.uk/citysites. For an analysis of the way that gender was an integral component of the construction of race and “civilization” at the fair see Bederman, Manliness and Civilization.

34 Burnham, “The Uses of Expositions,” 45.

35 Ives, Halsey C., ed., The Dream City:A Portfolio of Photographic Views of the World's Columbian Exposition (St. Louis, MO: N. D. Thompson Co., 1893–94)Google Scholar. Available online at http://columbus.iit.edu.

36 Plato, , The Republic of Plato, Book VI, trans. Cornford, Francis Macdonald (London: Oxford University Press, 1945)Google Scholar, 195.

37 Siculus, Diodorus, The Library of History, Book 4, trans. Oldfather, C. H. (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1935Google Scholar, available online at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/4A*.html#2.

38 Flaccus, Valerius, Argonotica, Book 3, trans. Mozley, J. H. (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1934)Google Scholar, available online at www.theoi.com/Text/ValeriusFlaccus3.html.

39 Ives.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid.

42 This was necessary because placing a real battleship on Lake Michigan would have violated the Rush-Bagot treaty with Great Britain and Canada, which demilitarized the Great Lakes after the War of 1812.

43 Bancroft, Hubert Howe, The Book of the Fair (San Francisco: The Bancroft Company, 1893), 62Google Scholar.

44 Ives.

45 Ibid.

46 Wolters, Timothy S., “Recapitalizing the Fleet: A Material Analysis of Late Nineteenth-Century U. S. Naval Power,” Technology and Culture, 52 (Jan. 2011), 103–26, 104CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid., 111.

49 Connery, Christopher L., “Ideologies of Land and Sea: Alfred Thayer Mahan, Carl Schmitt, and the Shaping of Global Myth Elements,” boundary 2, 28, 2 (2001), 173–201, 183CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid.

52 Morely, Ian, “The Cultural Expansion of America: Imperialism, Civic Design and the Philippines in the early 1900s,” European Journal of American Culture, 29, 3 (2010), 229–51, 237Google Scholar. Among Burnham's most prominent plans were the redesigns for Washington, DC (1901–2), Cleveland (1903), San Francisco (1905) and the Chicago lakefront (1909).

53 Morely, 239. See also Hines, Thomas S., “The Imperial Façade: Daniel H. Burnham and American Architectual Planning in the Philippines,” Pacific Historical Review 41 (1972), 33–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 Burnham and Bennett, Plan of Chicago, 123, quoted in Morely, 237.

55 Zwick, Jim, Confronting Imperialism: Essays on Mark Twain and the Imperialist League (West Conshohocken, PA: Infinity, 2007), 110Google Scholar.

56 Rowe, “How the Boss Played the Game,” 176.