America Breaks and Grows 1865-1939

1
America Breaks and Grows1865-1939

• Reconstruction 1865-1877
• Gilded Age 1877-1890
• Progressive Era 1890-1914
• WWI 1914-1919
• Roaring 20s 1920-1929
• Great Depression 1929-1939

2
How Did We Get Here?

• 1863 Emancipation Proclamation
• 1864 Nathaniel Hawthorne died. Opened the
  doors, so to speak.
• 1865 Twain hits his stride. The Celebrated
  Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" 

1835-1910
3
End of Civil War April 12, 1861 to April 9, 1865

• Walt Whitman (1819-1892) saw Lincoln often, but
  the two never met face to face. Wrote much about
  Lincoln.
• When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomd
• O Captain, My Captain

Lincoln Assassinated on April 14
4
Whitmans Themes

• Transcendent power of love, brotherhood, and
  comradeship
• Imaginative projection into others lives
• Optimistic faith in democracy and equality
• Belief in regenerative and illustrative powers of
  nature and its value as a teacher
• Equivalence of body and soul and the unabashed
  exaltation of the body and sexuality

5
Reconstruction 1865-1877

• Carpetbaggers
• Copperheads
• 14th amendment Minorities born in USA get
  citizenship (not Native Americans)
• 15th Amendment Black men get right to vote
• Military rule over South
• 1866 Freedmens Bureau
• 1870- Grants Ku Klux Klan Act designed to
  curtail the KKK using federal troops

6
1876 100 Year Anniversary

• Grown from 2.5 M to 46 M people
• Exports exceeded imports for first time
• Rights of Women movement starts
• NYC Childrens Aid Society contains 11,000
  homeless boys 3000 more abandoned babies on its
  doorstep
• Vanderbilt Family spends 200,000 on a party.
  Wealth gap increases.

7
Gilded Age 1877-1893

• Twain, William Dean Howells, Louisa May Alcott,
  Bret Harte, Henry James
• Blue collar worker expansion
• Rural to urban migration
• 1870-1900 12 million immigrants
• 70 through New York
• Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
• German, English, Irish, Chinese

8
William Dean Howells 1837-1920

• Campaign Manager for Lincoln
• U.S. Consul to Italy (1861-1865)
• Editor of Atlantic Monthly (1871-1881)
• Realism author. Rise of Silas Lapham (1885)
• Dean of American Letters
• Wrote a hundred books in various genres,
  including novels, poems, literary criticism,
  plays, memoirs, and travel narratives
• Social Issues subject of his books womens
  rights, workers rights, and rights for
  minorities.
• 1887 execution of Haymarket radicals

9
Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888)

• 1868 Little Women
• 1871 Little Men
• 1873 Work
• Promoted
• interracial
• marriage and
• racial blurring.

Alcotts novels emphasize the growth their
heroines must undergo to become intellectually
and emotionally independent. In Alcott's vision
of womanhood, only when a woman can stand alone
and is not dependent on a man for fulfillment is
she capable of finding happiness, whether married
or not. By 1882, she was famous and wealthy.
10
Emily Dickinson 1830-1886

• Throughout her life, she seldom left her house
  and visitors were scarce.
• Her poems are typically marked by the intimate
  recollection of inspirational moments, which are
  decidedly life-giving and suggest the possibility
  of happiness.

Wrote about 800 good poems
11
Bret Harte 1836-1902

• Short stories of the West
• 1867 The Lost Galleon
• 1869 Outcasts of Poker Flat
• 1876 Gabriel Conroy
• Romanticist thwarted by Realism. Stock
  characters.
• Twain and Harte broke off friendship in 1877,
  after the flop of a co-written play.
• Twain said, "Well, Bret came down to Hartford
  and we talked it over, and then Bret wrote it
  while I played billiards, but of course I had to
  go over it to get the dialect right. Bret never
  did know anything about dialect."

12
Henry James 1843-1916

• 1877 The American
• 1878 Daisy Miller
• 1881 Portrait of a Lady
• 1886 Bostonians
• 1897 What Maisie Knew
• 1898 Turn of the Screw
• W.D.H. on James It is his realism of Daudet
  rather than the realism of Zola that prevails in
  his work, and it has a soul of its own (A
  compliment)

13
Westward Ho!

• 1849 Gold Rush
• 1876 Dakota Gold Rush
• 1896 Klondike Gold Rush
• Manifest Destiny
• Explorers, Outlaws, Lawmen
• Land Grant states
• Indian Wars

14
American Gold Rushes

• 1848 California Before the discovery of gold,
  California contained 12,000 Mexicans, 20,000
  Native Americans and 2,000 Yankees. By 1850,
  there were more than 100,000 immigrants.
• 1874 South Dakota 1,000 men, led by General
  Custer patrolled the Black Hills area, a large
  region held sacred by the Sioux. A couple miners
  attached to his party discovered gold. The mines
  produced 10 percent of the worlds gold supply
  over the next 125 years.
• 1896 Klondike, Alaska Gold discovered in the
  White and Chilkoot passes, each inhumanly
  forbidding high-altitude areas. Of the 100,000
  people who set out for the Klondike, 30-40
  thousand got there, and only 15-20 thousand
  prospected. Possibly 4,000 found some gold.

15
Explorers, Outlaws, and Lawmen
? Cochise, Sitting Bull, Geronimo, and Custer ?
"Buffalo Bill" Cody

• ? Theodore Roosevelt
• ? Butch Cassidy and "The Sundance Kid"
• ? John Fremont
• ? Billy the Kid
• ? Earp Brothers and Doc Holliday
• ? Jesse James Gang
• ? Calamity Jane

The dead men after the OK Corral Shootout
16
Manifest Destiny
From 1845-1890, this meant Westward expansion.
From 1890-1929, it meant expansion outside of
North America.

• Lady Columbia, a personification of America,
  leads settlers westward, stringing telegraph wire
  as she travels, while holding a schoolbook. The
  Indians and wild animals flee. Notice the
  different socio-economic backgrounds represented.

17
Indian Wars 1872-1890

• Battle of the Little Big Horn (1876) General
  Custers force of just over 200 engaged the
  Lakota and Cheyenne Indian force of about 750.
  Custer and his entire force were killed in about
  3 hours.

• Massacre at Wounded Knee (1890) fighting lasted
  less than an hour over 150 Lakota were killed
  and 50 wounded. The U.S. Army casualties numbered
  25 dead and 39 wounded.

18
Oklahoma Land Rush

• 1889-1895 In 1893 alone, more than 100,000 white
  settlers rush into Oklahoma's Cherokee Outlet to
  claim seven million acres of former Cherokee
  land.

19
1892 Worlds Fair, Edisons Telephone, Chicago
Riot
20
Depression (Panic) of 1893

• Why? Gold standard changed
• New building construction
• Agrarian factors limited economic influence and
  increased competition
• High debt (especially to England)
• 1870-1890 number of farms rose 80, to 4.5
  Million
• 1870-1890 price of farmed goods dropped 60

21
Unemployment Rates1890-1900
22
Rise of Business, Unions, and Socialism 1890-1910

• 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1 901, 1911)
• 1890 Jane Addams Hull House founded
• 1891 Populist Party formed
• 1891 Edisons Kinetoscope is invented
• Hamlin Garland, Sara Orne Jewitt, Stephen Crane,
  Kate Chopin, Emily Dickinson, Frank Norris,
  Theodore Dreiser
• Naturalism relies on these conditions

23
Hamlin Garland 1860-1940

• A novelist, short-story writer, poet, essayist,
  and memoirist, Garland lectured widely on
  American literature and writers for over 40
  years. 
• 1891 Main-Traveled Roads
• Under the Lions Paw is most famous short story.

24
Sara Orne Jewitt 1849-1909

• 1890 Tales of New England
• Her fiction is characterized by intimate views of
  characters' lives, the growth and trials of
  friendship, and a good deal of humor, both broad
  and subtle.

25
Stephen Crane 1871-1900

• Realist
• 1893 Maggie, Girl of the Streets
• 1895 Red Badge of Courage
• 1897 The Open Boat

26
1900 Census

• 76.2 Million People
• 45 states
• 1800 Census 5.3 Million People

New Yorks Metropolitan Museum excluded the
working class, as it was closed on Sunday, the
only day workers were free. That changed in 1891
as an early Progressive move.
27
Kate Chopin 1851-1904

• 1894 Bayou Folk
• A Pair of Silk Stockings
• Desirees Baby
• The Story of an Hour
• 1899 The Awakening
• Realist. Distinctly unsentimental in her
  approach, she often relied on popular period
  motifs, such as the conflict of the Yankee
  businessman and the Creole.

28
Progressive Era 1893-1914
Congress chartered the National Child Labor
Committee in 1907. However, it took until 1938
before Congress disallowed kids under 16 to work
in dangerous jobs. Congress also enacted the 40
hour work week in 1938.
29
Frank Norris 1870-1902

• Naturalist who takes on Big Business
• 1899 McTeague
• 1900 A Mans Woman
• 1900 Blix
• 1902 The Pit
• Most of his works include realistic descriptions
  of violence, squalor, and determinism.

30
Theodore Dreiser 1871-1945

• 1900 Sister Carrie
• 1912 The Financier
• Naturalist Social inequality
• 1925 An American Tragedy
• From An American Tragedy "Well, here is one who,
  whatever her defects, probably does what she
  believes as nearly as possible."

31
Early American Imperialism

• Panama Canal (1904-1914)
• Spanish American War (1898)
• Puerto Rico, Philippines, Cuba, Guam
• Lending issues with Europe
• Chinese ports for trade
• Oil contracts
• Edith Wharton, Jack London, Robert Frost,
  Gertrude Stein, Sinclair Lewis, Hamlin Garland,
  T.S. Eliot, Sherwood Anderson

32
Edith Wharton 1862-1937

• 1905 House of Mirth
• 1911 Ethan Frome
• 1920 The Age of Innocence
• Wharton made fun of the narrow-minded and
  ignorant upper class through irony
• Crossed the Atlantic 66 times
• Won Frances highest civilian award

33
Jack London (1876-1916)

• Highest paid, most popular writer in America in
  early 20th Century.
• Man vs. Nature
• An illegitimate child from California
• At 15 became an oyster pirate
• At 17 joined a sealing ship for 3 months
• 30 day imprisonment after, went to Cal Berkeley
• Gained information for stories from his time in
  the Klondike searching for gold
• Call of the Wild (1903), Sea-Wolf (1904), White
  Fang (1906)
• Died a millionaire at 40 of various diseases and
  treatments
• First real scientific farmer Darwinist
  stockbreeder
• Built his own ship, The Snark, and cruised the
  South Pacific for 27 months.

34
Robert Frost (1874-1963)

• 4 Pulitzer Prizes
• Called the American Bard
• Road Not Taken, Mending Wall, Stopping By
  Woods on a Snowy Evening
• Born in California named for Robert E. Lee
• New England settings moved there at 11
• Study of contrasts dark and depressed/beauty of
  nature
• Traditional form and meter

35
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

• Coined the term Lost Generation
• Openly lesbian and feminist (Alice B. Toklas)
• Volunteered to drive supply vehicles in WWI in
  France
• Spent most of her life abroad, especially in
  France
• Anti-FDR opposed New Deal
• Elitist poet and author
• Three Lives (1909) Tender Buttons (1914)
• Picasso (1938) Patriarchal Poetry (1953)

36
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)

• Nobel Prize in 1930 (first American winner)
• 22 novels and 3 plays
• Main Street (1920) Babbitt (1922)
• Socialist (typical of many authors of his time)
• Awarded Pulitzer Prize in 1926, but rejected it,
  saying prizes were silly. He had lost the
  Pulitzer twice as a runner-up. He accepted the
  Nobel in 1930.

37
Hamlin Garland (1860-1940)

• Midwestern guy (Wisconsin)
• Main-Traveled Roads (1891) Under the Lions
  Paw
• Realist can we argue Naturalist, too?
• 1922 Pulitzer Prize
• Wrote biographies and much about the Wild West
  and issues concerning the Midwest
• The Book of the American Indian (1923)
• Forty Years of Psychic Research (1936)
• The Mystery of the Buried Crosses (1939)

38
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

• 1948 Nobel Prize
• Literary Critic, poet, essayist, dramatist
• Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917)
• Wasteland (1922)
• Born in USA became British citizen in 1927
• Modernist Ezra Pounds Make it New!
• Ash Wednesday (1930) Conversion Poem
• Old Possums Book of Practical Cats (1939)
  became the basis for Andrew Lloyd Webers musical
  Cats. A book for children.

39
Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941)

• Winesburg, Ohio short story collection (1919)
• Fought in Spanish American War (1899)
• American Grotesque
• Epitaph Life, Not Death, is the Great
  Adventure
• "Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all
  crucified."
• Friends with famous authors of his time William
  Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Carl Sandburg, and
  scrapped with Hemingway.

40
Black America

• Jim Crow Laws (1876-1968)
• 1896 Plessy vs Ferguson
• Harlem Renaissance (1919-1934)
• KKK (1866-1873 1925-present)

41
Jim Crow Laws (1876-1954, 1964, 1968)

• Enacted in Southern States as Reconstruction
  ended (1876).
• Basically overruled 14th and 15th Amendments
  (1870)
• Horrific laws imposed on Blacks
• Examples voting disfranchisement, public
  accommodations, living quarters, athletics,
  separate libraries, advertisements marked
  colored or white, etc.

42
Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896)

• Upheld the Constitutionality of Racial
  Segregation (Separate IS Equal)
• June 7, 1892, in a planned act, Homer Plessy
  boarded a whites-only train car. He was an
  octoroon, and could often pass. He did not
  this time. He refused to leave and was arrested.
  Lost his case in local, district, and federal
  courts.
• Destroyed most of 1875 Civil Rights Laws
• Upheld most of 1890 Louisiana State mandatory
  separation laws.
• Overturned in 1954 Brown vs. Topeka Board of Ed.

43
Harlem Renaissance (1919-1934)
The Harlem Renaissance was more than just a
literary movement it included racial
consciousness, "the Back to Africa" movement led
by Marcus Garvey, racial integration, the
explosion of music particularly jazz, spirituals
and blues, painting, dramatic revues, and others.
Langston Hughes, WEB DuBois (The Talented Tenth),
Booker T. Washington (D. 1915, but impact greatly
felt), Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude
McKay, Arna Bontemps, Nella Larsen.
William H. Johnson - artist
44
KKK (1866-1873 1915-present)

• Birth of a Nation (1915)
• Founded by Confederate Soldiers after Civil War
• Destroyed by Pres. Grant with 1870-1871 Civil
  Rights Acts (Federal Troops)
• In 1925, 15 of all white men (4.7 million) were
  in KKK
• Anti Catholic, Black, Jew, Communist
• Today 70,000 members nationwide, in numerous
  small cells or chapters

45
WWI (1914-1919)

• The Great War
• Trench Warfare
• Almost 10 million killed
• Germany lost, and several European nations earned
  independence.
• Britain lost imperialistic ground
• Unresolved issues led to European theatre in WWII
• America emerged from limited involvement as world
  power
• Battle of the Somme 450,000 British Dead
• U-Boats and the Lusitania
• Zimmerman Telegram (from British Room 40)

46
Trenches, Machine Guns, and Poison Gas
47
Jingoism/Nationalism

• Extreme chauvinism and Nativism
• Imperialism and heavy military influence
• Teddy Roosevelt 1893
• Suppression of rights for immigrants

48
Modernism 1917-1939

• Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wallace Stevens,
  Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, Edna
  St. Vincent Millay, John Steinbeck, William
  Faulkner
• Political, artistic and cultural movement that is
  positive and powerful, advocating the use of all
  scientific and human means of determining a
  better environment and living it. Make it new!
• Roughly encompasses 1890-1940

49
Roaring 20s (1919-1929)

• Intolerance, isolation, cynicism
• 5 workday, incredible economic power, first
  Transatlantic flight, Jazz Age
• Gangsters, KKK, harsh immigration laws, Volstead
  Act (Prohibition)
• Flappers, parties, wealth acquisition,
  automobile, aircraft, radio, telephone

50
Stock Market Crash (1929)

• Buying stock on margin for each dollar of
  stock, purchased 9 of stock
• DOW increased from 60 to 400 from 1921 to 1929.
  Did not reach 400 again until 1955.
• Economics - banks had invested customer money in
  stock (on margin). 10,000 banks failed, and 140
  Billion in customer money disappeared. Also the
  Fed had raised interest rates too high to stifle
  inflation.
• Did not learn lessons from the first depression
  in 1893
• Market lost 16 Billion in capitalization

51
Great Depression1929-1939

• Migration
• War machine
• CCC
• New Deal
• Patriotism (against communism)
• Stats 32 of Americans were below poverty line.

52
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

• Most important player in Modernist movements in
  literature and the arts
• Left U.S. for China and Europe in 1908
• invented imagism in art, sculpture, and poetry
• Detested WWI felt betrayed by Europe and U.S.
• Cathay (1915)
• The Cantos (1915-1972) an epic spanning
  his entire life. Portions of it won major
  awards
• In 1924, Pound moved to Italy. Not a wise choice
  overall. Worked for Axis powers during WWII as
  propagandist. Nervous breakdown in 1945 in
  prison.
• Arrested and tried for treason by U.S.
  Government. Found unfit for trial because of
  insanity. Institutionalized from 1946-1958.
  Released in 1958, moved to Italy, and stayed
  until death.
• Vicious opponent of federal banking systems.

53
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

• Inventor of Lost Generation novel
• Named after his relative, Francis Scott Key.
  Married Zelda Sayre in 1920.
• The Romantic Egotist (1920)
• The Great Gatsby (1923)
• Tender is the Night (1934)
• Friends with Hemingway, until a fight split them
  forever. (Zelda hated Hemingway anyway).
• Zelda was inspiration for much of his partying,
  lost characters. He quoted her directly in
  some characters. She had a more powerful
  personality than Fitzgerald.

54
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

• Major Modernist poet
• Fun fact His wife Elsies face was used on the
  Mercury Dime (1916-1945)
• Lawyer and eventual V.P. of insurance company
  (The Hartford)
• Pulitzer Prize in 1955
• His best work was written after he turned 50, an
  amazing accomplishment.
• Harmonium (1923)
• National Book Awards (1951, 1955)
• Believed old religion was dead, and life must be
  lived differently now.

55
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

• A part of ex-pat community in Paris.
• Many canonical works
• In Our Time (1925)
• Sun Also Rises (1926)
• A Farewell to Arms (1929)
• For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
• The Old Man and the Sea (1952) won Pulitzer for
  this in 1953. Won Nobel in 1954.
• Notorious exaggerator great athlete.
• Drove ambulance in WWI.

56
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

• Imagist poetry
• The Red Wheelbarrow

57
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

• Sonnets (see course pack)
• Bohemian

58
John Steinbeck (1902-1968)

• Modernist. Accent novellas first

59
William Faulkner (1897-1962)

• Time, identity, Southern Gothic
• Absalom! Absalom!
• Sound and the Fury
• Snopes Trilogy
• Yoknapatapha Xounty

60
Then What Happens?

• German invasion of Poland, in 1939
• End of Colonialism (1946-1950)
• Atomic Bomb (1945)
• WW II (1939-1945)
• Korean War (1950-1953)
• Cold War (1945-1989)
• Vietnam (1964-1975)