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RESISTANCE TO THE GILDED AGE: ROBERT HERRICK'S RADICAL MIDDLE CLASS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 March 2017
Extract
Often overlooked, Robert Herrick (1868–1938) was an experimental novelist who produced a sustained and critical engagement with the economic, political, and aesthetic effects of unregulated capitalist expansion in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on The Web of Life (1900) and Together (1908), this essay argues that Herrick's novels forcefully document a radical middle-class political position and demonstrate how the middle class was capable of apprehending and resisting the functionings of capitalism—especially its fragmentation of lived experience and its foreclosure of any practical exterior to the social totality. Given how recent economic trends toward deregulation and privatization have resulted in a precarious situation for the middle class worldwide, Herrick's depiction of the emergence of the modern middle class in 1890s Chicago also presents a dynamic foil from which to view our present moment. Though his genre-bending and politically ambiguous literary and political experiments have long contributed to critical confusion and even dismissal of his work, today Herrick's novels are a powerful tool for rethinking the long-accepted understanding of the relationship between literary realism, the struggles surrounding the emergence of corporate capitalism, and the political standpoint of the professional middle class.
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- The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , April 2017 , pp. 143 - 162
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- Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2017
References
NOTES
1 Herrick wrote twenty-one novels and three collections of short stories between 1897 and 1933. Only two of his novels have been reprinted, and only one has been widely available in a scholarly edition: Herrick, Robert, The Memoirs of an American Citizen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard/Belknap Press, 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Herrick, , The Web of Life (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Literature House, 1970)Google Scholar.
2 Herrick, Robert, The Web of Life (New York: Macmillan, 1900)Google Scholar; Herrick, , The Common Lot (New York: Macmillan, 1904)Google Scholar; Herrick, , The Memoirs of an American Citizen, ed. Aaron, Daniel (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Herrick, , Together (New York: Macmillan, 1908)Google Scholar.
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5 Looking back over Herrick's reception throughout the twentieth century, one is struck by the disharmony among critics: In 1930, V. L. Parrington called Herrick a naturalist because of the strong political stance of his novels, while in 1933, Granville Hicks disparagingly called Herrick a liberal because his characters did not take a direct stand against industrial capitalism. In 1947, Malcolm Cowley makes the opposite claim, that Herrick, like Edith Wharton, allowed his characters too much moral freedom to be a naturalist. In the postwar period, Blake Nevius successfully recast Herrick as a conservative humanist, describing him as someone longing for a more authentic (and more culturally and racially homogeneous) past. This reading is reflected in others, like Walter Fuller Taylor and Kenneth Lynn, who read Herrick as a nostalgic humanist whose political position was an implicit endorsement of moral individualism against Marxist, or collectivist politics. More recently, Herrick has been described as a failed realist by Christophe Den Tandt, as a surprisingly good novelist by George Carrington, and as a mean-spirited sexist by Paul Lauter. Gordon Hutner summarizes Herrick in What America Read as a “reputable novelist” whose books never sold well because readers where just not that interested in his focus on “the dilemmas faced by the modern professional man in a culture not nearly as accommodating as the first phase of the Gilded Age.” See Parrington, V. L., “Naturalism in American Fiction,” reprinted in Documents of American Realism and Naturalism, ed. Pizer, Donald (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1998), 213Google Scholar; Hicks, Granville, “Robert Herrick, Liberal,” The New Republic 47 (June 17, 1937): 129–30Google Scholar; Cowley, Malcolm, “‘Not Men’: A Natural History of American Naturalism,” The Kenyon Review 9:3 (1947): 429Google Scholar; Nevius, Blake, Robert Herrick: The Development of a Novelist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962)Google Scholar; Taylor, Walter Fuller, “The Humanism of Robert Herrick,” American Literature 28 (1956): 287–301 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lynn, Kenneth, The Dream of Success (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1955)Google Scholar; Tandt, Christophe Den, The Urban Sublime in American Literary Naturalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Carrington, George C., “Robert Herrick, Clark's Field, and the Underlying Farce,” Literary Realism 1870–1910 23:1 (1990): 3–19 Google Scholar; Lauter, Paul, Canons and Contexts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; and Hutner, Gordon, What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 110CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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12 The historiography of this period documents a long and vigorous debate about the relationship between the middle class and the progressive movement, and the social and political effects of political reform during this period. For a recent discussion about the continued difficulty in defining the progressive movement, see Gendzel, Glen, “What Progressives Had in Common,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 10:3 (Jul. 2011): 331–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an overview of the debates concerning the democratic nature of progressive reform, see Johnston, Robert D., “Re-Democratizing the Progressive Era: The Politics of Progressive Era Political Historiography,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 1:1 (Jan. 2002): 68–92 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Steven J. Diner's method of combining political and social history without losing sight of the power and influence of economic and political organizational forces is particularly helpful for understanding how diverse individuals resisted both economic oppression and progressive reforms. See Diner, Steven J., A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998)Google Scholar; Diner, , “Linking Politics and People: The Historiography of the Progressive Era,” OAH Magazine of History 13:2 (1999): 5–9 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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14 McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, 8.
15 McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, xiv.
16 Johnston, “Re-Democratizing the Progressive Era,” 71–76.
17 Diner, “Linking Politics,” 7.
18 Diner, “Linking Politics,” 7.
19 Gutman, Herbert, Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America (New York: Knopf, 1976), 12Google Scholar.
20 Gutman, Work, Culture and Society, 32.
21 Johnston, Radical Middle Class, 76.
22 Lipin, Producers, 2–6.
23 Gutman, Work, Culture and Society, qtd. in Lipin, Producers, 2. See also Gutman, Work, Culture and Society, 234–60. The relationship between the middle class and the development of the labor movement is reflected in the “intensely ideological” split within the American labor movement of the time. Hattam describes the emergence of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in the 1890s as a victory over the “producers' vision” embodied in organizations such as the Knights of Labor. The AFL “ended up accepting a class structure with corporate capitalists at the top and a proletariat below” while “republicans such as the Knights of Labor sought to unite those who could maintain a middling propertied independence (whether in the form of skilled trade or petty productive capital) against the emerging corporate elite” (Hattam, Labor Visions, qtd. in Johnston, Radical Middle Class, 75). Thus, allied with the ideals of those who developed the labor movement throughout the nineteenth century, middle-class politics in the Gilded Age expressed a standpoint between the traditional idea of the independent merchant and the more recognizable ideals of market socialism. William H. Simon claims that “it would be a difficult task to disentangle” the standpoint of the middle class “from socialist rhetorics in the many political movements [of] the middle- and late-nineteenth century” and describes the middle class as a major actor in the fight against emerging corporate capitalism. See Simon, William H., “Social-Republican Property,” UCLA Law Review 38 (1991): 1338Google Scholar.
24 In 1910, Rudolph Hilferding argued that the development of the corporation had transformed much of the bourgeois class by absorbing and combing previously independent capitals. In a corporate organization, formally independent bourgeoisie and professionals became a privileged class of wage laborers. Hilferding defines this “new middle class” as the managers and professionals that organize production as well as design and develop the corporate systems in which they work. Though this class will tend to identify with the corporation and with capital more generally, over time the mechanization of the process of production will extend to managerial and professional labor with the result that this highly paid work will become a more mechanized form of wage labor that requires less qualified workers. Hilferding, Rudolph, Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development, trans. Watnick, Morris and Gordon, Sam (London: Routledge, 1981), 337–50Google Scholar. For a commentary on how the development of the corporation in the nineteenth century transformed the work of the professional into a form of wage labor, see Swenson, Brynnar, “‘From the Prostitute to the King’: The Corporate Form, Subsumption, and Periodization,” Cultural Critique 89 (Winter 2015): 61–82 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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26 Kaplan, Social Construction of American Realism, 8.
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29 The corporation emerged in its modern form in the 1890s in the United States. At this time the corporation was transformed from a public entity established and strictly regulated by the federal government into a free, private organization that was regulated primarily by business practices. Prior to this time, a corporate charter was, at least in theory, only to be granted to organizations that provided a benefit to the public. As such, early corporations were granted for “improvements” such as canal building and the rail and communication industries that dominated the economy from the 1840s to the 1890s. The most dramatic proof of the corporation's effect on U.S. society is the “corporate revolution” of 1893–1903, when the New York Stock Exchange's capitalization grew from thirty-three million in 1893 to seven billion in 1903. See Roy, William G., Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Scale Industrial Corporation in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Berle, Adolf A. and Means, Gardiner C., The Modern Corporation and Private Property (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968)Google Scholar; Dahms, Harry F., ed., Transformations of Capitalism: Economy, Society, and the State in Modern Times (New York: New York University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; and Hurst, James Willard, The Legitimacy of the Business Corporation in the Law of the United States 1780–1970 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1970)Google Scholar.
30 Gutman, Work, Culture and Society, 13.
31 E. P. Thompson, qtd. in Gutman, Work, Culture and Society, 12.
32 Herrick, Web of Life, 33.
33 Herrick, Web of Life, 33–34.
34 Herrick, Web of Life, 35, 39, 40, 40–41.
35 Herrick, Web of Life, 53, 54.
36 Gutman, Work, Culture and Society, 54.
37 Herrick, Web of Life, 63, 64.
38 Phillip Barrish, “The Sticky Web of Medical Professionalism,”“The Sticky Web of Medical Professionalism,” 587.
39 Barrish, “The Sticky Web of Medical Professionalism,” 587–88.
40 Barrish, “The Sticky Web of Medical Professionalism,” 587.
41 Barrish, “The Sticky Web of Medical Professionalism,” 594.
42 Herrick, Web of Life, 116, 117, 124.
43 Herrick, Web of Life, 119, 122.
44 Herrick, Web of Life, 92.
45 Herrick, Web of Life, 244, 259, 247.
46 Herrick, Web of Life, 56, 56–57, 264, 264–65, 265.
47 Herrick, Together, 47.
48 Romero provides a necessary correction to traditional understandings of the political potential inherent in domestic fiction. Reading domesticity and the home as fluid categories within larger economic and political struggles, Romano provides a model for reading domestic fiction as representative of larger “theoretical assumptions about power and resistance underlying contemporary debates about dominant and oppositional cultures.” Romero, Lora, Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 4Google Scholar.
49 Herrick, Together, 82, 83.
50 Herrick, Together, 89, 87, 89–90, 91.
51 Herrick, Together, 521.
52 Kaplan, Social Construction of American Realism, 6.
53 Gutman, Work, Culture and Society, 67.
54 Neoliberal economic policies have eliminated a significant portion of the middle class in the United States since the 1980s, and contemporary studies by economists and sociologists clearly show that the middle class is particularly threatened by similar economic policies in emerging markets around the world. For examples of scholarship on the relationship between neoliberalism and the global middle class, see Cahn, Peter S., “Consuming Class: Multilevel Marketers in Neoliberal Mexico,” Cultural Anthropology 23:3 (2008): 429–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cahn outlines how the recent emergence of multilevel marketing companies reveals how the Mexican middle class has responded to the negative economic impact of neoliberal policies. Dickey, Sara, “The Pleasures and Anxieties of Being in the Middle: Emerging Middle-Class Identities in Urban South India,” Modern Asian Studies 46:3 (2012): 559–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Dickey argues that “For each positive aspect of a middle-class identity that emphasizes security and stability, there is a negative ramification or consequence that highlights the precariousness and potential instability of middle-class life.” Amy Bhatt, Madhavi Murty, and Priti Ramamurthy analyze the impact of neoliberal policies on middle-class women in “Hegemonic Developments: The New Indian Middle Class, Gendered Subalterns, and Diasporic Returnees in the Event of Neoliberalism,” Signs 36:1 (2010): 127–52CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
55 Marx, Karl, Capital: Volume III, trans. Fowkes, Ben (New York: Vintage, 1981), 567–68Google Scholar. Marx is a much more nuanced reader of the economic and political position of the professional middle class than most of those writing in the Marxist tradition. Stanley Aronowitz's reading of the Homestead Steel Strike of 1892 is a good example of how leftist intellectuals have traditionally conflated the professional managerial class directly with capital. See Aronowitz, Stanley, “The End of Political Economy,” Social Text 2 (1979): 3–52 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
56 Lordon, Frédéric, Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire, trans. Ash, Gabriel (London: Verso, 2014), 147–8Google Scholar.
57 Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital, 149.
58 Cornel West, “Goodbye, American Neoliberalism. A New Era is Here.” The Guardian, November 17, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/17/american-neoliberalism-cornel-west-2016-election