For nearly forty years, the world of American music has sustained a state of astonishment over its discovery of Charles Ives. That he is America's Greatest Composer and one of the three or four greats of twentieth-century music (along with Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and possibly Bartok or Webern) is generally conceded, yet a fervor still surfaces when his champions announce, as Harold Schonberg did in 1974: “Nobody has had that kind of vision, that personality. … Nobody, nobody ever, and least of all any American composer, has achieved his combination of unorthodoxy, passion, bigness, sweetness and nostalgia.” To characterize his importance, his Americanness, his style, or his place in world and national culture, he is offered to us as the Walt Whitman of American music, our Emerson, our Thoreau, Mark Twain, Melville, Frank Lloyd Wright, Norman Rockwell, James Joyce, our modern Beethoven, “our Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson” rolled into one. The enormous number of performances of Ives's music during the last ten years or so (there are more entries for Ives in recent Schwann and BMI orchestral catalogs than for any other American composer and almost any other modern one) has forced disbelievers to pay attention. When the New York Times “Music” column reported in 1968, under the breathless headline “Suddenly a Flurry of Ives,” that his piano works were being performed at home and abroad, the flurry had scarcely begun. For the Ives Centennial in 1974 and the nation's Bicentennial in 1976 brought even more performances, many recordings, three major Ives festivals, a musical based on his life, conferences, exhibits, and a spate of books—three by scholars with American Studies credentials, one of which was a revisionist biography designed to refute an “Ives Legend.”

I suppose I can find in the details of my own biography all the contradictions of place and mobility in modern American civilization. I was raised for eighteen years in the same house in Miami Beach, one of the paradigmatically transient cities in America. I was an undergraduate in a small southern town, where people were as likely to stand up for “Dixie” as for “The Star Spangled Banner” and where a sense of place hung in the air like Spanish moss on the live oaks. I was a graduate student in Philadelphia and took my first job in Davis, California.

The Good Gallic adjective “mystique” has been transmogrified into a not uncommon American noun. Why? Because we needed a name for those sets of transcendental or mystical beliefs and attitudes that attach to certain elusive ideas, persons, institutions, objects, events, and so on that fascinate us. We need just as badly a name for those complexes of legendary or mythical stories and meanings that express certain, equally elusive and fascinating things, ideas, experiences, and expressions. We need a name for the sense of American destiny and identity—a sense that first seized the Puritans and that their successors have changed and recombined into the stuff of a patriotic tradition. This paper will explore two systems within that mythical complex, stories about American destiny and about American identity, tales that tell us where we are going and who we are who are going wherever we are going.

Whether or not we can look forward to a humble America, William Clebsch has done a splendid job of subduing the American mythique. And has subdued it, appropriately, by dividing it into four parts, a strategy that not only improves upon Caesar but evokes the prophet Daniel. It's the right blend for the occasion: secular and spiritual progress entwined, empire wedded to apocalypse. Except, of course, that we end up in the realm of irony and common sense, a most un-American millennium. And isn't an un-American millennium, like a humble America, a contradiction in terms?

American Literary history conventionally interprets the sixty or seventy years between the Stamp Act crisis and the beginning of the “American Renaissance” by highlighting the theme of the “quest for nationality” or the effort to achieve “literary independence.” Accounts of what are considered the formative years of a native literary tradition trace the gradual development of a climate of opinion more conducive to American authorship and belles lettres than the one that prevailed in the colonial period. Revolutionary nationalism was obviously a major factor in the shift of attitude. Beginning even before the war, at Princeton, Yale, and a few other redoubts of civilization, and gathering momentum on a broad front after 1776, a campaign for an instant, if not indeed an indigenous, high culture gradually produced a shrill literary nationalism. The persistent clamor for the Americanization of poems, plays, and novels helped beat back the long-standing puritanical fear of the imagination as an ambush of the devil. It also made headway in combating the closely related American prejudice against activity that seemed to serve no immediate practical purpose. Gradually a legion of enthusiastic amateur and semiprofessional authors ventured into belles lettres, beyond the more utilitarian literary forms—history, biography, autobiography, sermon, promotional tract, almanac, and captivity narrative—which, together with religious verse, had predominated in the colonial period. However crudely constructed or awkwardly styled, American epic poems were written, as were long pastorals. By 1800 Americans had produced an abundance of satire in both verse and prose. With William Cullen Bryant's early work added to Francis Hopkinson's and Philip Freneau's, American lyric poetry achieved some respectability by 1820, the year of the completion of Washington Irving's Sketch-Book, with its two remarkable short stories, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” American theaters were producing native comedies and tragedies. Successful magazines were in operation. And the reading of novels had become a craze, which American writers were helping to nourish.

In one of those brief but illuminating apocryphal tales with which all history abounds, we are told that Benjamin Franklin was prevented by the Founding Fathers from authoring the Declaration of Independence because they feared he would insert a joke. They knew their man; indeed, John Adams, who may have known the most, wrote that Franklin “had a satire that was good-natured or caustic, Horace or Juvenal, Swift or Rabelais, at his pleasure.” Both the story and the description point to a central paradox in Franklin's character—his capacity for irreverent reverence—a psychological and artistic reflex that appears throughout a career that consistently merged with a society undergoing rapid social, economic, and political changes. Even given his far-ranging genius, it is remarkable how Franklin's humorous and satiric energy permeates his writings and erupts at critical social and political moments into a variety of discrete forms, which nevertheless remain part of an organic comic vision. Far more than an occasional jokester or ad hoc satirist, Franklin embraced the comic as a habitual mode of expression so integrated with his deistic beliefs and reliance upon reason and the “natural order” of things that it may be said to function as a form of epistemology, a dialectical way of not only exposing the errata of human behavior in the traditional manner of humor and satire, but also of gaining control, insight, and understanding into the nature of humanity. Thus, he could write to Madame Brillon:

Reflect how many of our duties [Providence] has ordained naturally to be pleasures; and that it has the goodness besides, to give the name of sin to several of them; so that we might enjoy them more.

Margaret Fuller Was “many women in one,” and, as Thomas W. Higginson observed, “there is room for a difference of opinion even in assigning a key-note to her life.” Higginson thought the early biographies made too much of her “desire for self-culture.” Some more recent studies put their chief emphasis on her feminist and revolutionary activities. Higginson's own view, persuasively expressed in his 1884 account of her life, is that “what she always most desired was not merely self-culture, but a career of mingled thought and action such as she finally found.” It is clear that after her father died in 1835, leaving twenty-five-year-old Margaret the head of the family, her life became more and more public. From teaching school to conducting her famous Conversations, to editing The Dial, to working for Horace Greeley's Tribune in New York, to her involvement with Mazzini and the Roman revolution of 1848, the intellectual radicalism of the Transcendentalist steadily widened into the social and political activism of the revolutionary. The increasingly active side of the last ten years of her short life was not so much a reaction against her earlier beliefs as it was, in important ways, a natural outgrowth of them. The two sides of her life were closely, causally connected; nowhere is this clearer than in her considerable but largely ignored interest in myth.

He had planned merely a fanciful tale of the whale fishery and had written almost an entire first draft. Then Herman Melville had discovered Nathaniel Hawthorne the man and William Shakespeare the tragedian. The result was Moby-Dick, a hybrid, a medley, an extravaganza, but progressively a formal drama, possibly the first American tragedy. “How to effect so mighty a metamorphosis?” one imagines him asking himself as he began to rewrite his story. By retaining the original light material, yet preparing the reader for the later heroic prose and action. Even more: justifying these last. That this is what Melville did, we can surmise from a number of transitional passages in Moby-Dick that reveal him in the process of converting a story about life on an American whaling ship, its officers and crew, into a tragedy such as readers were accustomed to associate with Shakespeare, his kings and clowns. Yet it is, finally, a tragedy whose protagonist—it is time to propose—was inspired by the greatest hero of Melville's own times.

In October 1854, a Georgia clergyman wrote to his son a circumstantial account of a death in the family. The deceased, a younger brother of the clergyman's wife, had contracted yellow fever and died in his twenty-ninth year. The letter-writer reports every detail he can remember:

We found your uncle in the shed room off the parlor pulseless, his hands blackened, the blood settling under the nails, perfectly calm and conscious when roused, then falling into sleep. He turned over and gave me his hand, saying, “What do you think of my case?” He had taken much quinine, and was then taking brandy at intervals; his hands and feet rubbed with brandy and pepper, and blisters applied on legs, thighs, stomach, breast, and arms and back of neck. Every effort made to bring on reaction. Your dear mother rubbed his hands and arms incessantly, others his feet.

A version of this essay was delivered as the Kenneth B. Murdock Memorial Lecture at Leverett House, Harvard University, March 8, 1978.

Unquestioning faith in an equilibrium of stasis: it is this flaw of temperament, this European fault of social and moral intelligence that separates European women from their American counterparts in nineteenth-century literature. Particularly in Henry James's fiction women of distinctively New World bearing, young women bred to combine stamina with delicacy of spirit, stubbornness with flexibility, reared to disavow perfectly held balances in favor of riskier angles of poise—James's exemplary women conduct their lives along lines of equilibrium more flowing than European, less stiff by far, lines and angles that parallel the mode and style and history of the society they embody, a society shaped at hazard and given to gamble. It is indeed in his masterwork, The Golden Bowl, a fatidic text anticipating which myth of order would shape American high style during the industrial age, that James devised a program intended to discredit stasis and extol movement without forswearing form. In descent as well as dissent from a Swedenborgian father, both Henry James and his brother William endorsed a creed of “vital equilibrium.” And this American ideology presupposed the existence or cultivation of a self galvanized by “balance/imbalance,” a dynamics of tension which provides a constant feature of motive in our classic literature.

When upton sinclair committed himself to writing The Jungle, he had no idea how he was going to pull it off, and he ended up improvising all the way. The result was a novel, the first ever to be called “proletarian,” which is far more complex and revealing than is generally understood. We still tend to break the book in two, and read it, as its first public did, for the sensational early chapters, dismissing the rest as a tedious tract. However, taken whole, in light of the story of its conception, composition, and revision, The Jungle comes to look less like an episode in the muckrake movement, and more like a major text of American social fiction, one of those compelling, garbled, perplexing, sometimes amusing encounters between the conventionally literate and the working class, which became a fixture of imaginative life in America by the end of the nineteenth century.

American fiction in the years from 1950 to 1970 may be read as a continuing dialogue between writers married to a variety of traditional forms and attitudes and writers who embraced a number of avant-garde positions. Often this dialogue grows sharp and shrill, spilling over from works of fiction into manifesto, polemic, or criticism, and the relationship between these two groups looks more like a battle than a dialogue—a new battle of the books. The traditionalists are on the defensive generally, falling back a little querulously on humanistic positions derived from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which yielded a man-centered value system, an empirical epistemology, and a mimetic and teleological aesthetic, all of which seem less certain and more ambiguous than they used to. The modernists, heirs to the movement for which James Joyce may stand as a symbol, are the aggressors, announcing in their proclamations the liquidation of the art of the past and taking a nihilistic attitude toward traditional values and forms, espousing a cult of novelty, conceiving of art as a plaything, and pushing their experimentalism possibly toward self-ruin and silence; in short, behaving like traditional avant-gardists. To understand the terms of this dialogue, or the lines of this battle, is to understand more than the tensions between the two camps and more than the substance and form of the fiction written in each. It is to understand certain major cultural phenomena from which this battle issues and which it illustrates and documents.

On July 2. 1874, the Ashtabula Sentinel carried the following announcement: “Hon. W. C. Howells left home for Quebec on last Thursday morning. He will enter immediately upon his duties as Consul.” At first glance, there seems to be little of importance in this editorial lead: but, in fact, it marked the end of an era. For the first time since 1840, it seemed, the influential editorial voice of William Cooper Howells would be missing in Ohio. As editor of the Scioto Gazette, he had first put William Henry Harrison's name “at the head” of the paper for nomination; his first number as editor of the Hamilton Intelligencer recounted the Columbus nominating convention; and he marked his first year as editor there with the official announcement of Harrison's election—“the crowning of that great struggle for right principles that has characterized the past year.”

Phineas Taylor Barnum was a strange breed of nineteenth-century Renaissance man. Although best known as showman and exhibitor of “curiosities,” Barnum enjoyed a multifaceted career including stints as editor, politician, reformer, and patron of a higher form of “the arts” than is usually associated with him. But in each of these endeavors, he represented a product of, and comment upon, his roots. If his enterprises grew and adapted in striking parallel to the social and political changes of the nineteenth century, they also represented a constant application of the peculiar down-eastern Yankee of Connecticut known as the “humbug.”

There has never been a day in Afro-American history to equal January 1, 1863. This was the “day of days” in which the morning sunshine of freedom finally faded the long night of slavery. It is impossible to adequately assess the human effort that went into making this day a reality. All of the slaves' prayers for freedom were finally answered; all of the abolitionists' speeches were finally heeded; and the ceaseless arguments for human freedom published in the Liberator, the Douglass Monthly, and other abolitionist newspapers finally caused President Abraham Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. This day was the culmination of the hope for freedom expressed in the August 1 celebrations and the promise of freedom issued in Lincoln's preliminary proclamation of September 22, 1862. The one-hundred days had passed and, wonder of wonders, Lincoln had not reneged on his promise to set the slaves free! As the Brenham, Texas, barber Rupert Secrett put it: “Abe Lincoln touched the pen and four million slave chains were heard to rattle in the southland.”

The relationships between an author's text and an illustrator's images can pose fascinating questions about literature and art and how readers perceive both. This is especially true if the writer happens to be a Utopian author whose work appeared in America during the late nineteenth century when two different traditions combined with some delightfully unusual results.

Disappointed by the demise of the Macedonia Cooperative Community, in which he had become a member, Staughton Lynd wrote in 1958: “Let us hope that some contemporary group will demonstrate by a living example that disintegration and authoritarianism are not our only alternatives.” Indeed, these have been the twin perils in the experience of many American intentional communities throughout the years, particularly those that have sought a high degree of integration as an antidote to what their members perceive to be the inequality and competitiveness of conventional society. Because such ideals cut across the cultural grain, the casualty rate is high. But the primary ingredient in the survival of some may be the very factor responsible for the mortality of others: the almost inevitable quest for a common center, characterized by insistence upon deeper levels of commitment, an increasing degree of homogeneity, and a greater sense of common purpose. Recent works by sociologists like Rosabeth Moss Kanter and historians like Laurence Vesey support this conclusion, as does the judgment of many earlier observers. The quest for such a communal center lay at the heart of the Macedonian experience.

Robert Henri, born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1865, was the acknowledged leader of the “Ash-Can” School of painters. The other members were George Luks, William J. Glackens, John Sloan, and Everett Shinn. Branded as “revolutionaries” and “apostles of ugliness” after the turn of the century, because their work and theory seemed to rub against the grain of contemporary American artistic taste and its conception of acceptable aesthetic good manners, they came into conflict with the respectable and conventional painters, critics, and art dealers in the early years of the twentieth century. Although they were a group of artists obviously in the minority, their independent exhibitions were applauded by a proportionately small—yet highly vocal—number of newspaper and magazine critics. However, it was Henri, rather than any critic, who led the way in articulating their theories and practice and who made it impossible for their work to be ignored. He was the group's intellectual spokesman, artistic catalyst, and revered father figure.

Late in the 1890s, accompanied by several of his friends, Thomas Eakins attended a number of prizefights at the Arena on the corner of Broad and Cherry Streets in Philadelphia, diagonally across from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and a few blocks from his Chestnut Street studio. Eakins was sufficiently intrigued by the matches he saw to befriend several of the participants and to ask them to pose for him. The results were three major canvases—Taking the Count (1898—Yale University Art Gallery, Whitney Collections of Sporting Art, New Haven, Conn.), Salutat (1898—Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass.), and Between Rounds (1899—Philadelphia Museum of Art)—and about ten related sketches, studies, and portraits. Although since ancient times painters and sculptors have celebrated their periods' equivalent of the pugilist, Eakins' boxing paintings are completely original in their conception. Indeed, one can think of few works by a serious artist of Eakins' era as far removed from the lofty propriety that dominated nineteenthcentury American art as are these treatments of nearly nude boxers. The boxing paintings reflect Eakins' special fondness for sport and vigorous activity in his life and art, as well as his sometimes controversial belief in portraying the unidealized human figure; but they go beyond these interests insofar as they are complicated compositions by a mature master who is using his craft to examine his life and career.

In 1939 Erwin Panofsky opened his seminal essay on the interpretation of expressive content in the visual arts with a bold definition of a new and socially relevant discipline. “Iconography,” he declared, “is that branch of the history of art which concerns itself with the subject matter or meaning of works of art, as opposed to their form.” According to his model, subject matter can be read in three stages, ranked in an ascending hierarchy of richness and complexity. The first and simplest step isolates the “factual meaning” of patterns and shapes under the guidance of the history of style, or knowledge of the ways in which, at a given moment in time, objects were expressed by forms. Hence, certain arrangements of line and color in an American painting of 1934, let us say, may be identified as a representation of a male figure grimly carrying a flat rectangular object on a pole. When this object can subsequently be recognized as a sign bearing the legend “On Strike,” the “secondary or conventional” subject matter is exposed: the hypothetical canvas depicts a strike. Subject to a knowledge of the history of types, or the ways in which, at a given moment in time, concepts were expressed by objects, the motifs of worker and placard form a coherent image, which conveys the concept or story of a strike. These “factual” and “conventional” revelations are the prelude to an exposition of “intrinsic meaning”; the history of culture and ideas is brought to bear on the work of art in this third and final stage through an intuitional process, which suggests how “the essential tendencies of the human mind” in a given epoch have been expressed via objects and concepts, style and type.