A Pint-Sized Public Sphere: Compensatory Colonialism in Literature by Elite Children During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Abstract

During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, thousands of middle-class youths published their own amateur newspapers. These periodicals were printed using the so-called toy (or “novelty”) press, a portable tabletop device that helped democratize word processing. Children often used their presses to compose miniature novels and short stories. They then shared their prose with a national community of fellow juvenile writers collectively known as “Amateurdom.” Adolescent fiction explored an array of subjects, but the frontier, territorial expansion, and empire in the West became some of its particular fixations. All that imperial storytelling, however, possessed a rich subtext. Boys and girls, reacting to late-nineteenth-century changes in the lived experience of childhood, used their printing presses to challenge various constraints imposed upon them. But in so doing, they both perpetuated and reinforced a pernicious culture of settler colonialism that celebrated the subjugation of American Indians. Ultimately, the amateur publications of children remind us that fiction is not exclusively an adult enterprise. The creative output of young people provides important insight into an underexplored realm of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era’s literary world.

The story begins in Texas. 1876. Dashing Dick, a teenaged boy, rides across the prairie. “He is armed with a light rifle, a brace of revolvers stuck in to a broad belt along with a deadly looking bowie knife.” “Altogether the youth is well prepared for any danger.” Good thing, too, for in the distance Dashing Dick’s adversaries suddenly appear. “‘Camanches! sure as I live!’” he cries. “‘Well I’ve a particular hate against the treacherous villains, and I think I’ll take the conceit out of a few of them.’” The Indians clearly relished a fight too. They “saw him and urged their horses the faster as though eager to capture their living prey.” “Fierce war whoops” soon filled the air. Until, that is, Dashing Dick unslung and leveled his firearm. “Crack! Crack! Crack! The death-dealing reports rang out in rapid succession, and at every shot a red rider went down.” In terror, they attempted a retreat. But to no avail. “Suddenly the savages found they were pursued. The youth had started his horse and was coming down upon them like a tornado.” “Again sounded forth those whip like reports and in spite of all they could do, warriors kept continually dropping to the earth.” Soon only a solitary American Indian remained. Dashing Dick tied up the man he knew as “Night Hawk” and proceeded to question him. Do you “remember how the peaceful family of Mr. Dallon was broken up and all of them murdered and scalped?” the interrogator inquired. A stony silence in reply sure sounded like a confession. It was all Dick needed to hear. The boy cast a strange spell that would leave his captive dead in a week’s time. “Seven days thereafter ‘Night Hawk’ mysteriously disappeared, and Dashing Dick’s revenge was complete.” The end. ¹

At first glance, one might assume that these events unfolded within the pages of a Gilded Age and Progressive Era dime novel. With its simplistic plotting, hackneyed conclusion, inelegant writing, and borderlands setting, the tale seems to tick all of the genre’s boxes. Thousands of similar stories were published in the three decades following the Civil War. They appeared in standalone volumes and as serials in cheap periodicals. Collectively, dime fiction (so named to signify both its low price and tawdry content) represents one of the most wildly popular literary phenomena in American history. It was, without exaggeration, almost everywhere. Sold in the streets and stores, circulating through corner newsstands and at train stations, one could not crawl out from under the blanket of pulp paper that covered the nation. Particularly important was the dime novel’s characteristic transportability and fungibility. Unlike heavier hardback volumes, mass-produced stories were designed to be rolled up and stuffed inside pockets. A low price, meanwhile, made them seem disposable. Readers often exchanged editions with one another or discarded their fiction for others to find. That pass-along effect only increased their vast circulation. Historians and literary scholars have therefore extensively mined the genre as a means to comprehend Gilded Age and Progressive Era culture. Their conclusions reveal a popular press that, due to its omnipresence, collectively encapsulated the national conversation about such diverse issues as industrialization, political reform, masculinity, race, and empire. ²

All of this would seem to make Dashing Dick! a rather unexceptional text, save for one thing: the author, Edgar Slade, was a self-published teenaged boy from Indiana. The story was six pages, printed on sheets of scrap paper about three inches long and two inches wide, and left riddled with the spelling and typographical errors common in adolescent prose. To tell his tale, Edgar utilized a tabletop press. These small and portable devices, first mass-manufactured in 1867, made word processing far more broadly accessible. Production no longer required heavy machinery and a large investment of capital. As one enthusiast exclaimed, “a few dollars now enabled every boy and girl who wished it to rush into print.” And it was indeed Gilded Age and Progressive Era youth who seemed to most heartily embrace this new invention. The toy (or “novelty”) press became a Christmas present craze among America’s middle-class families. Manufacturers sold untold numbers of the gadgets—advertised as a means to make “Every Boy a Ben Franklin”—in a few short years. Demand skyrocketed once parents embraced amateur printing as a wholesome hobby that promoted literacy and educated young people in a respectable trade. By the 1870s, children in all parts of the country were churning out massive piles of printed matter, typically in the form of two- to six-page mock newspapers. It became, as the New York Times diagnosed, a “new epidemic among the boys” (Figure 1). ³

Figure 1. Small tabletop presses like the one pictured here were popular among middle-class children during the 1870s and 1880s. The devices were used to print amateur fiction. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, Division of Photography, SI photo 89-5512.

The era’s young people called the collective result of their efforts “Amateurdom,” or sometimes, more affectionately, “the ’Dom.” It consisted of thousands of adolescent storywriters loosely organized beneath the banners of the National Amateur Press Association (NAPA) and a variety of regional Amateur Press Associations (APA). The purpose of those organizations was to help authors connect with one another. “Amateur journals are printed for the benefit of receiving exchanges,” one novice publisher noted, and Amateurdom itself formed “a vast literary society whose members express their opinions, state their arguments upon topics under discussion, expound their theories, and thus improve their composition.” Youths used their presses (and the postal system) to solicit feedback and engage with critics. Stories often included prefatory remarks reminding readers that the author “would be pleased to exchange copies of this book for other amateur publications.” Participants, in other words, considered the ’Dom a collective endeavor, and as such, the means to foster a kind of national adolescent community. ⁴

This pint-sized public sphere—America’s littlest republic of letters—proved remarkably prodigious. It stretched from California to Maine and included both boys and girls ages ten to twenty. It remained largely in the hands of the white bourgeoisie, though there existed some important corners of Amateurdom occupied by adolescents of color. The combined output of these children, meanwhile, varied wildly in both content and tone. Some youths reported on local news and neighborhood gossip. Others editorialized about national political events. And still more adolescents, the focus of this article, utilized their tabletop presses to produce fiction. Edgar Slade’s Dashing Dick! was merely one drop in a rather large bucket of youth-authored literature written during the late nineteenth century.

An overview of juvenile storytelling in the archives, however, reveals a particular obsession with the frontier hardly unique to that Indiana boy’s violent revenge fantasy. Significantly, when white and middle-class young people were offered complete creative control over their own print machinery, they regularly indulged in bloody fictions of imperial conquest. In short story and tall tale, adolescent writers slaughtered Indians, captured bandits, and rescued friends and family from certain death.

This is not to say, however, that these child authors merely mimicked the frontier-themed dime literature surrounding them. There was something deeper at play in the pages of these amateur stories. By inserting themselves into a broader narrative of U.S. territorial expansion, American children insisted upon their own instrumentality to the attainment of so-called national greatness. Scholars in several disciplines have spent decades detailing a “literary culture of U.S. imperialism.” Less well known are children’s active contributions to that narrative enterprise. This article seeks to position adolescent writing as an important (if underexplored) component of Gilded Age and Progressive Era prose. Amateurdom’s archives represent a potential gold mine for scholars studying the era’s fiction, and it is hoped that the authorial efforts of youths will begin to receive more attention for what they can reveal about the country’s broader cultural trends. ⁵

In part, it is a story about middle-class entitlement and changes reshaping the lived experience of childhood during the later nineteenth century. Young people rehearsed settler colonial scripts as part of a bid for respectability and political relevance at a moment when the surrounding culture began to insist that its juvenile citizenry was fundamentally infantile. In fantasizing about the extermination of Indigenous peoples, the country’s boys and girls signaled their readiness to assume the mantle of maturity. They positioned themselves as suitable heirs to the republic that colonization in the borderlands had built. As such, their literary output also reveals how fictions of empire remained so deeply rooted in America’s national self-conception. It was difficult to dislodge the ideology of manifest destiny when so many young people continually rejuvenated that myth for their own purposes. Amateur writing, when collectively considered, becomes a testament to the ways by which imperial habits of thought were transferred from one generation to the next. Empire-building in the postbellum West required not only guns, germs, and steel, but also the investment of a rising generation convinced as to the nobility of the endeavor and eager to perpetuate it. The ’Dom helped ensure that outcome by providing a forum for the enactment of the frontier’s mock conquest, transforming an otherwise brutal process into something both fun and noble for young white writers.

Fun, in part, because of the opportunity for playacting. Each amateur author seemed to glory in the selection of an alter ego. Despite the fact that many lived a great distance from the West, they sought to imaginatively insert themselves into an imperial arena. Thomas Kerr for example, a youth from Rockland, Maine, published a tiny novel about Border Jack, “skillful frontier’s man” and “inveterate foe of the Red man.” As with so many of these stories’ heroes, he was described as “quite young.” Juvenile authors sought to stress that youth should not be equated with incapacity. Rather, in a playful inversion of the age-graded hierarchy then coming into existence, amateur novels usually showed boyish protagonists leading while adults followed. And so, when individuals like Border Jack stoically announce the presence of “Injin Sign,” it was “the men” who “exclaimed with terror in their faces.” While grownups cowered, boys were busy “dealing death at every blow” and “fighting with almost superhuman power.” Their “wild fury and reckless bravery … baffle[d] all description.” In a frenzy, Border Jack was said to lash out at the Apaches. As “knives flashed in the bright sunlight,” the “blood flowed freely.” Soon the Indians lay dead in a pile, “over-matched” by a young man who channeled “a wilder and deeper energy than did the haughty sons of the forest.” “The Savage” would never “roam so fearlessly” again. Civilization triumphed thanks to the intervention of its youngest champions (Figure 2). ⁶

Figure 2. The Amateur Reporter, March–April 1876. Measuring only a few inches on each side, novice publications like the Lawrence, Kansasm, Amateur Reporter usually featured serialized short fiction, news items, and editorials. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Others joined Dashing Dick and Border Jack on frontier battlefields. Jack Johnson, “Wild Man of the Plains,” a New Jersey teen’s creation, spent about ten pages massacring his enemies. He “vowed eternal hate toward the entire race of Indians” and desired “nothing but their utter extirpation.” A Brooklyn lad, meanwhile, dreamed up the drama of “Scalping Sam.” The protagonist, as usual, was described as a boy whose “every friend on earth has been murdered by the indians.” To retaliate, Sam sat near a watering hole. Any “savages who came within two hundred feet” fell victim to his rifle, so that in a short amount of time, the corpses were stacked high. The “Silent Slayer” then “crept forward and scalped the dead indians.” By the end of the story, he had used the bounty money to retire and support his family. Cornelius Shea from Tottenville, New York, fantasized about something similar. Two boys, Hal and Frank, wandered the West seeking combat with “scores of blood-thirsty savages.” Their secret weapon was a companion trained in the art of pyromancy. This “magician of the plains” could command “deadly balls of orange fire” to such effect that “but few indians left the battlefield alive!” In most cases, then, young writers used their novelty presses to imagine the annihilation of Indigenous peoples. To them, the West was nothing less than “a war to the death between white and red man.” ⁷

Even when American Indians did not appear in the crosshairs of a young adventurer’s gun, they often became objects of scorn. They were portrayed as impediments to what adolescent writers called progress. Stories celebrated when the “overpowering hand of civilization” transformed places “where a few centuries ago, the untutored savage held the ruling power.” Novice novelists boasted about the retreat of “wild beasts and wilder men” in the face of white pioneers. Juvenile authors who inserted characters of their own creation into the West could then claim to have “subdued the savage border to civilization.” Boys of “bone and muscle” populated their pages, teens who “conquered the Indian” by “gigantic blows,” and avenged the “outrageous slaughter of whites in the far west.” Amateurdom’s heroes “look[ed] forward to the time, not far distant, when the red race shall be extinct.” Or as young “Bert Barton” proclaimed at the end of a short story set in “Arazona,” it was high time to “EXTERMINATE THE INDIANS.” ⁸

Eliminationist rhetoric seemed justified to amateur authors given the “atrocious outrages and barbarities” heaped upon “poor and defenseless settlers” by “depredating Indians.” Teenaged editors hectored those who defended the “‘noble red man’”: if “the Indian ever possessed noble traits,” they intoned, “he has irrevocably lost them.” Given that “civilization is alien to his composition, the march of progress is not to his taste, and he can never feel anything but eternal enmity towards the caucasian race,” American Indians had to be annihilated. After all, “the development of the country is a duty.” To “denounce our settlers, who are hastening this work, as persecutors of the Indian” was to become a “race traitor” guilty of “sickly sentimentality.” The so-called “noble savage,” many juvenile novelists concluded, was nothing more than “a filthy and degraded brute.” White children put things plainly when they announced that “we do not grieve the fate of the Indian.” ⁹

The response of American Indian youths to all this creative writing is harder to find. It does appear that some students at the country’s various Indian boarding schools operated their own amateur presses and corresponded with white counterparts. For example, Samuel Townsend, a Pawnee pupil at the Carlisle Indian School, contacted a youth outlet in Massachusetts to correct the historical record. Genocidal violence, he argued, was hardly necessary given the possibilities presented by education. Townsend pointed to his own success as evidence that “those who thought at first that the Indians could not be taught to learn” were wrong. And while admitting that cultural assimilation would take time to achieve, the snail’s pace of progress could not be attributed to Indigenous inferiority. The problem, he argued, was endemic poverty on the reservation. “I am sure white children would be as slow to learn under the same circumstances.” The little surviving evidence in institutional archives suggests that some Indigenous amateur authors countered the ’Dom’s relentless settler colonial sensationalism with literature of their own. They wrote autobiographies, told tribal histories, and recounted their people’s mythologies. As one Crow youth, Harry Hand, insightfully observed, “we have read of many adventures of white people among Indians, but we never read of adventures told by Indians among white people.” This was because until recently, Indigenous people had “no newspaper through which to let the reading public know their side of many stories.” The appeal of the novelty press, to Hand and other Indian youths who aspired to publish, was precisely its liberatory potential. Some American Indians could now afford access to both the printing process and the broader communication networks that new technology enabled. By providing opportunities for self-expression, Amateurdom helped usher in an early twentieth-century efflorescence of Indigenous letters led by luminaries like Zitkala-Ša. ¹⁰

Juvenile publishing was neither exclusively a white domain nor strictly a boys’ club. The storytelling skewed male, of course, as boys heavily outnumbered girls within the movement. This should not be surprising, given that novelty presses were mostly advertised to young men, the print profession (like so many others) was dominated by men, and many adolescent newspapers made their hostility to female editors apparent. The archives, however, reveal that despite those impediments, a considerable number of girls made their voices heard. From their point of view, frontier fiction did not adequately foreground the experiences of young women. Thus female-authored micro-novels, drafted for publication and circulation among the same youth networks that disseminated material written for boys, positioned girls closer to the center of the action. In challenging male storytelling convention, their efforts might best be characterized as an act of reclamation. The first few dime novels after all—such as Ann S. Stephens’ Malaeska—were written by women and featured female protagonists. When, during the 1870s and 1880s, firms slashed the number of Western stories composed by (and focused on) women and attempted to steer girls toward romance fiction, some female fans revolted. As “authoresses” disappeared from the covers of mass-produced frontier fiction, girls rushed to fill the breach, expressing the same genocidal passions as their brother writers, but with a twist. ¹¹

For example, in one amateur tale titled “Fred’s Adventure,” the more “traditional” arc of the damsel in distress rescued from Indian captivity was inverted. Instead, a young man on the verge of death at the hands of “savages” is saved by the timely intervention of a “maiden.” Rather than the woman being instantly smitten with her savior, roles reversed. “Bowing to the young lady,” the man “poured out his whole heart in thanks to the one who had saved his life.” Another story, “Mad Betsy,” introduced the protagonist as the “scourge of the Apaches.” No sacrificial victim or object of affection, Betsy instead became “a terror” along the frontier; even the American Indians’ “bravest warriors tremble at the sound of her wild laugh.” She scalps, dismembers, and brutalizes the tribesmen who had slaughtered her family. Yet another tale told of “Patty, the Girl Rifle Shot,” who saved a prospecting party of imperiled men by “dealing out death shots” and “emptying saddles” of their Indian occupants “like a winged spirit of destruction.” In the process, a fascinating transposition takes place wherein the type of character—a wife and mother—whose death ordinarily drove male revenge fantasies instead becomes herself the avenger of lost loved ones. Even as boys’ stories featured sentences that spoke admiringly of “bands of white men fighting for their lives and the lives of their wives and sisters against hordes of howling Indians,” figures like “Mad Betsy” unsubtly undermined stereotypes regarding the passive or silent frontier-dwelling female. It is much harder to find similarly proto-feminist themes and fixations in stories drafted by boys. ¹²

War, conquest, and genocide, in fiction by girls, were not exclusively masculine pursuits. This flew in the face of contemporary assessments, which claimed to see a strict gender bifurcation in adolescent reading habits. One observer, for example, thought that, given women’s “slight experience with fire-arms and rough riding, it can hardly be supposed that the Girl Dead-Shot” and other “unfeminine” frontier figures “appeal to them with the fascination that might be exercised by something more nearly within the ordinary possibilities of imitation.” Female readers “must even be puzzled,” the appraisal continued, “at such ideals, and wonder at the boys’ admiration of them.” Even a cursory review of the archive of amateur authors, however, suggests the purely wishful nature of such thinking. What actually seemed to “puzzle” some of the supposedly gentler sex was the absence of pioneer protagonists who looked like them. But they compensated for those silences by drafting their own tales of women’s achievements beyond the domestic realm. As Zelda Arlington announced in her periodical, Amateurdom could be a refuge for “young lady friends who tire of their crocheting, crazy-quilts and similar occupations.” ¹³

Settler colonial storytelling as a whole may have been fairly conservative in its gender politics, but the genre was sometimes seized upon and reformulated by those critical of the limited range offered to female protagonists. In doing so, the era’s “New Girls”—precursors to the liberated New Women—lodged a subtle but striking protest of their culture’s circumscribed gender roles. Still, it is telling that in these stories, the principal manner by which empowered women demonstrate their worth is by killing Indians, and their primary reward for doing so is white male affection. Girl writers blunted the transgressive possibilities of their prose by ideologically allying themselves with imperial triumphalism. Adolescent protest was built atop Native American suffering. In this way, the girls often ended up sounding a lot like the boys. The expression of what might now be called “white feminism” depended, in some cases, upon settler colonialism. ¹⁴

Amateurdom, however, was never entirely of the same mind. Disagreements and disputes of all varieties plagued the exchange of papers. Youths argued with one another about most of the era’s politically charged subjects. Some male editors complained when their female counterparts overstepped the supposed bounds of propriety. Sectional tensions likewise ran rampant. NAPA was thrown into crisis after Herbert Clarke, a Black boy from the Midwest, won election as one of the organization’s vice presidents. A good deal of ink was spilled concerning this development, which transformed from quarrels about one campaign’s outcome into a larger conflict about the extent to which amateur authors ought to honor a policy of racial segregation. Many white Southern youths, having been raised in Jim Crow communities, eventually seceded from the original organization in order to exclude their African American colleagues. One boy declared himself “unalterably opposed to the admittance of negroes because they are not the social, intellectual, or moral equals of the Caucasson race.” Such appeals must have been persuasive, because Amateurdom eventually rewrote its constitution so as to formally exclude nonwhites from the group’s governing body. ¹⁵

Among the more contentious subjects taken up by authors dealt with the type of literature young people ought to produce. A majority of the country’s tabletop presses did not shy away from the racist, violent, and titillating content exemplified by Dashing Dick, Scalping Sam, and their ilk. There was a vocal minority, however, who fought for what they considered to be a more substantive sort of juvenile writing. Self-appointed cultural gatekeepers channeled the rhetoric of purity crusades to denounce cheap fiction as printed poison. “Why should not the selling of ‘Dime Novels’ to minors be prohibited in the same manner as the selling of liquor?” one sensitive lad asked. “Does not the reading of such account for the sensational crimes by little folks committed?” Amateurdom, these moralists asserted, ought to “suppress sensational literature” and “cultivate a desire for pure reading” among the nation’s youth. Therefore they offered their audiences poetry and wholesome melodrama. The repetitiveness and ridiculousness of frontier storytelling, in their estimation, was not only absurd but deeply pernicious. ¹⁶

That sense of disenchantment was most capably expressed by an adolescent author’s parody piece entitled “Plots.” A sarcastic send-up of his fellow amateur writers, the page-long essay mocked their pretensions to originality. Referring to other junior novelists, he observed that “they begin to write without the least forethought whatever.” But planning was never necessary, he continued, when scripting “a story of the western wilds.” Instead, one needed only to follow a simple recipe. “The plot,” the wag waxed, “invariably is, as follows: a wagon train is crossing the plains” and encounters “a band of howling savages.” Afterward, “the emigrants, with three exceptions, are killed.” The boy hero and an old trapper flee, “while the heroine, who is a rare beauty, is borne into captivity.” Finally, “after the slaying of countless indians,” the prisoner is rescued. It “all winds up with the happy marriage of the couple while the honest old fellow who helps in the escape leans on his rifle and blesses the nuptials.” Such fiction of the “blood and thunder kind,” these indictments read, were “improbable, revengeful,” and aimed at “the baser passions of the reader.” ¹⁷

It was a scathing indictment of most amateur stories circulating in Gilded Age and Progressive Era America. And the observations, moreover, were largely accurate. This humorous skewering of the “stories of the western wilds” aptly summarizes the vast majority of juvenile literary output. It also resembles, for that matter, the plots of most adult-authored novels. The junior satirist’s thoughts signal some recognition on the part of young people themselves that the West looked increasingly drained of originality and excitement. For one thing, the final military defeats suffered by Indigenous people seemed to diminish interest in the frontier as any rationalization for the slaughter of Indians waned. While miners, loggers, and homesteaders busily stripped the region of its resources by the turn of the twentieth century, some kids seemed to believe the same could be said about its potency as a source of genuine artistic inspiration. Other literatures—including ethnocentric burlesques of the immigrant community, sentimental tales of teenaged romance, and action-packed accounts of the War of 1898—soon supplanted the borderlands on the pages produced by amateur authors. This development paralleled similar thematic shifts among adult authors of children’s reading material. The frontier, of course, never disappeared from view. But it was forced to compete with new fields of juvenile creative enterprise. ¹⁸

For much of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era however, the fiction produced by young Americans revealed an obsession with the West. But even with that throughline, the ’Dom is difficult to characterize in any coherent way. One enthusiast, when asked to summarize the era’s youth publishing, could only conclude that “the style of these papers is so varied, and the papers themselves so numerous, that one is at a loss where to begin.” The few scholars to tackle this immense publishing arena have struggled with a similar problem. The writing is staggeringly varied in both format and content. And the participants themselves were a fractious bunch, constantly challenging one another’s ideas and output. Those disputes regularly revitalized Amateurdom by drawing new voices into the conversation and diversifying the papers’ content. The lack of anything approaching orthodoxy, however, makes a neat assessment impossible. But when one looks exclusively at the short stories and serialized novellas that children produced, a few key points emerge. ¹⁹

A keen interest in the frontier is, of course, one obvious theme. But this is not the same as saying that youth-authored literature mindlessly mimicked that of adults. The era’s popular culture—with its dime novels, Wild West shows, and world’s fairs—remained fixated on territorial expansion. It is therefore unsurprising that young people would be similarly obsessed. Intriguing, however, is the way in which total freedom of action on the part of youth publishers still led them back to the borderlands. The novelty press offered children complete creative license. They could have printed virtually anything for their peers. And yet, what they chose to do was reproduce the stagnant tropes of settler colonialism. Kids gloried in the wholesale slaughter of so-called savages. They cheered as protagonists of their own making shot and scalped Indigenous peoples in service of America’s imperial mission. A contemporary survey of Amateurdom conducted by St. Nicholas—arguably the most “respectable” literary magazine for children—shuddered to discover that “we can not find a single story which can properly be reproduced here.” It was all too inhumane. There was such an abundance of blood-soaked colonialist brutality amongst the ’Dom’s publications, the appraisal continued, that the stories ultimately resembled “poor imitations of the dime novel.” Concerned adult readers had a hard time distinguishing between the two formats. The only difference was that youth-authored literature somehow seemed more violent than the mainstream. ²⁰

This meant that young people must have found something particularly ennobling and energizing about narrative fiction set in the West. The bombastic embrace of an expansionist ethos suggests as much. Much of this fixation connects to what was then the emerging concept of adolescence. Psychologist G. Stanley Hall would later popularize the term, but by the nineteenth century’s last decades, many middle-class youths were already aware of the broader social changes that would eventually become the subject of academic research. The United States had sorted itself into an age-graded hierarchy. New rules and regulations, even if fitfully enforced, began to mandate prolonged school attendance, limit children’s work hours, and redefine the chronological boundaries of legal sexual relations. Many reformers (not to mention youths themselves) perceived those laws as freeing. They carved out opportunities for children, who were no longer required to endure horrendous labor conditions or sexual exploitation. The more elite white adolescents comprising Amateurdom, however, were often individuals whose race and class privileges had already shielded them from era’s worst abuses. Their editorializing, as a result, often chafed at what they saw as emerging threats to their entitlement. Bourgeois boys—who previously faced few barriers to entry into workplaces, marital relations, and politics—were now offered what they saw as a circumscribed set of choices in life. The Gilded Age and Progressive Era, in other words, accelerated a process known to historians as the “sacralization of childhood.” And this fact did not sit well with the ’Dom’s mostly advantaged constituency. ²¹

Delayed maturation was the name of the game. More prosperous white-collar families faced enormous pressure to replicate their social status by providing offspring with opportunities for socioeconomic advancement. Childhood became, as a consequence, a more protracted period in one’s life, reserved for mental development and unburdened by wage-earning and other “grownup” responsibilities. Parenting advice guides and new middle-class ideals recommended sheltering the young from adult society. Privileged youths therefore began to lead increasingly regulated lives in which both parents and the state asserted their mutual right to determine the course of a child’s development. An earlier historical moment, characterized by pell-mell cross-generational contact and rampant age-mixing, was coming to a close. Political rallies, public spaces, apprenticeships, and other venues shut their doors to unaccompanied minors. Amateurdom was in part a leading indicator of the ways that elite youths would progressively spend more time interacting with their peers and less with the grownup mainstream. After all, NAPA connected people who were mostly around the same age. But the organization also became an outlet by which adolescents might vent their frustration with this changing state of affairs. Myriad juvenile editorials decrying compulsory education statutes as a species of slavery are revealing for that reason. ²²

“Boys and young men [are] systematically suppressed” went one lament. “The women and the darkies” were not “half so badly used as the boys” griped another youth. “To be a boy,” editors moaned in near unison, “is to be somebody without a right in the world.” Amidst such self-pity, Amateurdom looked like an antidote. It provided a public platform where exasperated children could indulge in fantasies of their own empowerment. They utilized their tabletop presses to remind readers that children formed a crucial political constituency, no matter how quickly American society seemed to be bifurcating along a border separating consequential adult affairs and frivolous kids’ stuff. “Be considerate, old fogies, of the boys,” boasted one Washington lad, “for [they] are the very life of the land.” “Upon the young men of to-day,” went another characteristic refrain, “rests the hope of the future.” Implicit in all of these pleas, of course, was a blinkered perspective on which boys, specifically, were expected to assume positions of authority in the United States. The white and middle-class mainstream of Amateurdom rarely considered American Indians, African Americans, immigrants, or the working class as victims. Instead, it was believed, those individuals would remain on the political and socioeconomic ladder’s bottom rungs because they belonged there. ²³

It is in this context that amateur fiction—actuated as it was by both a youthful insecurity about their seemingly diminished stature and the urge to express the prerogatives of class privilege—proves an invaluable window into the expectations and supreme sense of entitlement exhibited by elite boys. Proving that one could publish a story, no matter how shoddy the product and poor the plotting, was in and of itself a claim to capacity. And there is abundant evidence to show that some adolescents, adopting the aspirational upward mobility of the middle classes, expected to “rise through the ranks,” à la Horatio Alger, by putting their editorial skills on public display. But the content of all this print mattered, too. Frontier fixations ran rampant exactly because the imagined West existed “out there,” beyond the reach of doting parents, educational bureaucracies, and all of the constraints that increasingly characterized adolescent life in modernizing America. ²⁴

Hence the swagger and bravado of the characters created by amateur authors. The Dashing Dicks, Scalping Sams, and Mad Betsys populating the pages of kids’ Gilded Age fiction provided a necessary outlet for young people frustrated with their own diminishing range of domestic action. No less an authority than infamous culture warrior Anthony Comstock recognized as much when he complained, after surveying the adolescent literary scene, that “the hero of each story is a boy who has escaped the restraints of home.” Figuratively roaming the continent’s wild places and grappling with “savage” foes became an act of self-emancipation for more elite boys and girls chafing against constricting pressures. Adolescent imaginations acquired an imperial inflection, at least in part, as a reaction against social changes that restructured childhood during the late nineteenth century. What scholars have called an American habit of empire, therefore, could develop early in the life of many citizens. Vicarious expansionist exploits proved attractive exactly because of the regenerative possibilities they presented to junior citizens dissatisfied with “modern” childhood’s enervating aspects. Consider their publications a sort of compensatory colonialism. Elite white boys—the bulk of Amateurdom—clearly expected to ascend into the country’s ruling class. And they prefigured those future responsibilities by imagining a West where their alter egos dominated American Indians and other supposed racial subordinates. ²⁵

The curtains that usually cover obscure historical processes sometimes part. Amateur fiction offers one such analytic opportunity during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. It provides a perch from which to view the thoughts and artistic sensibilities of young people, a subject difficult to detect in the archives. Likewise, Amateurdom reveals how ideology is transmitted across generational lines. As youths replicated the tropes that defined a good deal of adult sentiment regarding the West, they continually breathed new life into old ideas. There were always a few challenges to this orthodoxy around the edges of the adolescent community. But the amount of conformity is striking. Constructs fundamental to America’s national self-conception—the “savagery” of the continent’s original inhabitants, the virtues of territorial expansion, and the beneficence of “civilizing missions” into the wilderness—were regularly repeated and thus reified by the ’Dom. Children’s literary work lauded settlers for exterminating hostile Indians and redeeming the region for the United States, thereby demonstrating young America’s devotion to those same people and the state policies their lives embodied. “There never was a hardier, braver, more self-sacrificing set of men on the face of the earth,” one such juvenile verdict read, than those who “penetrated the dark woods” and transformed them into “fertile lands.” ²⁶

Children’s imperial discourse, then, was never simply the rote recitation of what they had read or heard elsewhere. It was, instead, a political claim unto itself. As such, Amateurdom was riddled with a rich irony. These miniature newspapers were actuated by a revolt against emergent ideas about children’s innocence and incapacity. But the means youths used to counteract that infantilizing onslaught ultimately reinforced some of the country’s worst cultural impulses. To establish their “adult” credentials as writers and journalists, young authors in effect announced an alliance with the prevailing settler colonial ideology. And in so doing, they demonstrated the importance of juvenile assent as a social force. Sometimes scholars can become overly fixated on moments of youthful disruption, disjuncture, and defiance. It is as if young people only become historical actors when they choose to challenge the ideas of adults. Amateurdom, on the whole, gestures to a different process at work. It reveals the significance of junior citizens’ consent and compliance.

Children, that is, were hardly passive participants in their own politicization. Sometimes young people are more formidable while acting as cultural conservators. Agency should not necessarily be conflated with resistance to the predominant power structure. Rather than swimming against the cultural tide, most young novelists ultimately chose to become co-producers of the broader discourse of American aggrandizement. In so doing, they helped to both perpetuate the rhetoric of racism and justify empire-driven disparities of wealth and authority that would characterize the country’s relationship to the wider world into the present day. The tabletop press, therefore, was never quite the wholesome, harmless toy about which its boosters boasted. In many hands, it became a weapon used to justify and prolong the immiseration of supposedly subaltern peoples. Paradoxically, the adolescent urge to defy adult expectations resulted in the reproduction of settler colonial sentiment. ²⁷

The opportunity to peek at the literary proclivities of Gilded Age and Progressive Era adolescents, however, remained short-lived. Tabletop printing was a fad after all, and soon enough, the enthusiasm began to die out. “The craze subsided,” lamented one of the ’Dom’s devotees, “and most of the papers and magazines soon disappeared.” Amateurdom’s archives extend well into the twentieth century, but by then its membership rolls had been severely diminished. Those who remained active were adults. They had, for whatever reasons, failed to age out of the hobby as so many other young people did. The storytelling stayed interesting, but into the 1890s and 1900s, its perspective was less and less identifiably “youthful.” The heyday of amateur publishing however, during the 1870s and 1880s, stands as a testament to the need for expanded analytical horizons in the study of fiction. Literature is too often presumed to be an adult pursuit. When kids are entered into the equation, it is almost always as an audience. The term “children’s literature” is implicitly used as a reference to books written for (rather than by) youths. ²⁸

The extraordinarily prodigious authorial output among America’s youngest citizens during the late nineteenth century, however, offers an important corrective. Junior novelists reveal the important writing being done at the lowest reaches of the age scale. They also highlight the dynamic relationship that exists between the consumers and producers of narrative prose. Many children elected to replicate the style and form of their favorite frontier-themed dime publications. Other young people—girls and Native Americans most notably—took hold of a number of the era’s most popular genres, and subtly reshaped them to suit their own needs and desires. Both stasis and change in literary form over the years are, among many other factors, undoubtedly the result of pressures bubbling up from the rising generation. Choices made by children can help shape the world of fiction, and beyond. Sometimes—as in the case of the ’Dom— an archive of artifacts captures that process as it plays out. ²⁹