Nineteenth-Century Poems by Women
Hannah Flagg Gould’s “Ode on Art,” Mary Ashe Lee’s “Afmerica,” and Harriet Monroe and the Great Columbian Exposition
The reader who has proceeded this far may notice that very few poems by women have appeared: to be exact, one – Anne Bradstreet’s “Dialogue between the Old England and the New” in chapter 2. There has certainly been no shortage of female poets in America. Nearly half the writers included in Clarence Stedman’s 1900 anthology American Poetry are women, and before that, three large tomes, the first entitled American Female Poets, the others both entitled The Female Poets of America, competed for the market in the 1850s. The poet Caroline May and the indefatigable Rufus Griswold both published their volumes in 1848 (Griswold achieving at least seven more editions by 1873), while the artist-poet Thomas Buchanan Read arrived one year later in 1849 (five more editions by 1852). The corpus of women’s writings assembled by these editors, however, suffers from what Paula Bernat Bennett called a “close-to-mind-numbing sameness” – that safely poetical “sense of beauty,” which, to Griswold, was “the means through which the human character is purified and elevated.” All of these editors, Bennett writes, represented their poets aspiring to an “idealizing genteel standard.”1
The poems in these collections are thus overwhelmingly short lyrics on decorous topics. As Caroline May notes in her preface, “few women, besides the author of Zophiël, have written poems of any considerable length,” and because few ladies enjoy “sufficient leisure from the cares and duties of home … the greater part of the following poems have been derived from the incidents and associations of every-day life.” Furthermore, May apologizes for the brevity of her biographical notes: “No women of refinement, however worthy of distinction … like to have the holy privacy of their personal movements invaded. To say where they were born seems quite enough,” she writes. “Several of our correspondents declared their fancies to be their only facts; others that they had done nothing all their lives; and some – with a modesty most extreme – that they had not lived at all.”2 By this account, feminine codes so deeply internalized, the reclusiveness of an Emily Dickinson comes to seem far less exceptional, and the voluminousness of female publication in the nineteenth century all the more remarkable. In fact, given the disapproval of most males, particularly husbands, any publication at all by women writers was an inherently political act.
Common wisdom in the twentieth century long accepted this account of women’s poetry in the nineteenth century – making an exception only for Emily Dickinson. The anthologies of May, Griswold, Reade, and, later, Stedman provided ample evidence. As late as 1966, Barbara Welter’s widely reprinted essay “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860” codified these qualities as piety, purity, domesticity, and dependence. Her essay had an “enormous impact” on American Studies – it “seemed to be everywhere,” exclaimed Mary Kelly (“Commentary,” 67). In the past few decades, however, scholarship has begun to resift through the archive of women’s writing, revealing much greater diversity among the poets, along with a greater range of genre and subject matter than previously suspected. The widespread commitment of these nineteenth-century women to sentimentality and idealized domesticity voiced by Caroline May was real enough, and Shira Wolosky has agreed that male poets were more confident “participating in public national formation” (Major Voices, xi). But women’s diffidence has been over-generalized. Sentimentality itself has been interrogated as a social construction doing its cultural work in the female domestic sphere – sometimes ignoring its glaring visibility in male poetry. All generalizations about women’s poetry have become increasingly perilous. Nineteenth-century women’s poetry, declares Paula Bennett, “is neither univocal nor transparent” (Anthology, xxxix).
I begin, then, with a preliminary survey of odes written by women, but with certain caveats. Few of the major figures have been adequately collected or edited, so it is often difficult to comprehend their oeuvres; they continue to be known largely through anthologies, selected editions, or the chances of availability online, leaving us dependent on the wisdom of editors.3 Second, the recovery process itself is afflicted with the difficulties of all scholarship – blind spots or the erection of new binaries to replace old ones. Wendy Dasler Johnson, in a recent study of Lydia Sigourney, Frances Harper, and Julia Ward Howe, probes the concept of “sentimentality” through the eyes of contemporary rhetoricians (e.g., Hugh Blair and others), read by these poets. It is a productive approach; but, of course, male poets read the same books and were often every bit as “sentimental,” while Johnson wholly ignores the effects of the eighteenth-century tradition of Sensibility.
My purpose, then, is not to contrast female and male poetry but, more simply, to shine a light on the archive from the peculiar angle of this study and bring to the surface a number of poems that lie outside the stereotyped feminine realm. As Wendy Dasler Johnson observes, “a comparison of poem titles by women to those by men in antebellum anthologies suggests striking similarity, not difference, in topics” (Rhetoric of Sentiment, 24). If women were somewhat less inclined to compose public addresses on affairs of state than were their male counterparts, the record reveals more writing on political affairs than Griswold or Caroline May would want us to believe – albeit more of it appearing towards the later part of the century after their anthologies appeared. Poets like Emma Lazarus and Sarah Piatt are now recognized for their political verse, and the most powerful Civil War song of all, Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” is so familiar we sometimes forget what a vivid poem it is. Like Howe, most women who ventured political verse cast it in lyric forms – stanzas or sonnets – like “A Loyal Woman’s No” by the rebellious Lucy Larcom; or “Written on the Fourth of July, 1864,” by Alice Cary; or “The Hero of Fort Wagner” (on Robert Gould Shaw), “John Brown,” or “Garibaldi in Piedmont” by her sister Phoebe. Both Cary sisters, like many other women, contributed to the flood of eulogies after Lincoln’s assassination. Black women understandably seem even more determined to enter the activist arena. Frances Harper, best known for her novel Iola Leroy, produced lyrics on the Emancipation Proclamation and the 15th Amendment as well as reflections on African colonialism like “Death of Zombi.”
For the present study of ode and progress poem, women’s voices are set at further disadvantage. The ode itself has a taint of gender. Classically, Homer had set the bar for epic, Sappho for lyric. Women for centuries confined themselves to the lesser genres, and the ode, with its claim to the public ear and its aspiration to the sublime, the highest rank of lyric, has been treated with caution.4 Susan Stanford Friedman discussed this issue in a classic essay on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh and H.D.’s belated imagist epic Helen in Egypt (“Gender and Genre Anxiety,” 203–28). This historical avoidance, Friedman argues, has diminished the female poet’s capacity for self-authorization, the effect of a major long poem to authenticate a poet’s entire career (“Long Poem,” 721–38). But recent recovery efforts have complicated these claims as well. Even within the masculine genre of the epic, research has revealed Lydia Sigourney’s Traits of the Aborigines (1822), precursor to Hiawatha and many subsequent Indian poems, including her own Zinzendorff (sic) (1835), on a subject crucial to H.D. a century later. Maria Gowen Brooks’s Zophiël (1825) deals with a biblical heroine most unfortunate in her husbands, and Frances Harper’s Moses (1869) deals with the deliverance narrative that offered God-given solace to slavery and its aftermath.5 Moses presents an enticing analogy to Timothy Dwight’s The Conquest of Canaan, both works turning biblical subjects into American historical allegory. How much this genre anxiety affected women’s odes is hard to determine. Women did write odes, but very rough numbers suggest that they were less prolific than men; one search on the ProQuest Literature online database produced thirty-nine odes by women and 271 by men for the same time period.6
Like odes by men, most of these odes by women turn out to be devoted to slight occasions, like the “Original Ode Written for the Anniversary of the Essex Agricultural Society” (1861) by Mary Abigail Dodge, better known by her pseudonym Gail Hamilton as a fiercely crusading women’s rights journalist. Even this, however, is a patriotic wartime call for the Union to oppose “the tread of the traitor” that “pollutes the wrongèd earth.” The very act of writing for such a public occasion pushes the boundaries of female roles. Many odes by women, otherwise unexceptional, have a similar edge, like Frances Sargent Osgood’s pseudopindaric “The Cocoa-Nut Tree,” which Cheryl Walker instances as “an example of blatant phallus worship” (American Women Poets, 107), or Adah Isaacs Menken’s pseudopindaric take on the grisly biblical story of “Judith.”7 One of the best known of these pieces is “Ode to Sappho” by Elizabeth Oakes-Smith (1806–93), which focuses on the legend of the female poet driven to suicide by the rejection of her lover:
Wert thou, O daughter of the lyre!
Alone, above Leucadia’s wave art thou,
Most beautiful, most gifted, yet alone!
Ah, what to thee the crown from Pindar’s brow!
‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘
What hast thou left, proud one? What token?
Alas! A lyre and heart – both broken!
According to Yopie Prins, this is not Sappho the lesbian (a later myth), but Sappho the spurned poetess, victim of both suicide and the erasure of her works.8 Oakes-Smith elsewhere involved herself more directly in debates about gender and women’s rights, including speculations about gender ambiguity; in 1848, she published a short story under her male pseudonym Ernest Helfenstein, “On Beauty, Vanity and Marble Mantels,” at the same time that Julia Ward Howe was beginning to work on her unfinished novel The Hermaphrodite – both works probing ambiguous physiology as a trope for the social construction of women’s roles.9
There are also numbers of more or less conventional odes to abstractions on the eighteenth-century model, particularly early on. Sarah Wentworth Morton wrote several of these – “Ode for Mercy,” “Ode for the Element of Fire,” “Ode to Time” (twice over), and an “Ode for Music, inscribed to George Washington” (a conventional piece on Washington having little to do with music).10 Morton was a well-known Boston socialite of the Federal period, her portrait by Gilbert Stuart housed in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Later odes to abstractions include Lydia Sigourney’s pseudopindaric “The Friends of Man” (1835), in which the friends are “Memory” and “Hope,” looking backward and forward; and two poems simply called “Ode” by Julia Ward Howe from her 1857 and 1885 collections (the abstractions being “Love” and “Freedom”).
Among these earlier writers, Hannah Flagg Gould (1789–1865), for my purposes, stands out. Her biography seems uneventful, and she remains a shadowy figure, hardly touched even by the recovery efforts of recent scholars, with the exception of Janet Gray in Race and Time (1997). Unmarried, she devoted much of her life to caring for her father, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, and many of her poems are patriotic. Reference works fix her position, typically, through male relationships – a brother who was a respected classicist and a nephew, Benjamin Apthorp Gould, who was a noted astronomer. She was a prolific poet, including poetry written for children, and if much of her work is conventional, it is superior in the skill and variety of its prosody, and its topics exhibit an exceptionally wide-ranging invention. There are anti-slavery poems plus sympathetic works about Native Americans, including nostalgic poems on “Pocahontas” and a lengthy elegy on “The Death of the Sagamore,” plus an acerbic piece on Andrew Jackson’s ruthless Indian removal, “The Cherokee at Washington” – an address to the president set in the mouth of a dignified Cherokee chief. There is the remarkable “Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy,” which is about well-preserved ancient human remains found in a Kentucky cave. “Erin’s Son in America,” published in 1850, answers to Know Nothing agitation against Irish refugees from the Potato Famine. There is a poem “To the Siamese Twins,” another about “The Mastodon,” which raises issues of geology, and an “Address to the Automaton Chess-Player,” which may be the earliest poem about artificial intelligence.
Hannah Flagg Gould wrote at least eight odes altogether. Her two Fourth of July odes (a favourite occasion for both male and female poets throughout the century) are written to familiar Scottish airs, “Draw the Sword, Scotland” and “Scots wha’ hae”; “The Liberty Tree: A National Ode” is equally conventional but very melodious. She wrote two odes on the Revolutionary War: “Liberty: An Ode for the Celebration of the Battle of Lexington” and “Lexington’s Dead.” The second of these was written for the public occasion upon which, in 1835, on the sixtieth anniversary of the battle, seven of the eight Minutemen who died at Lexington were disinterred and recommitted beneath the 1799 memorial obelisk. Gould shows strong historical consciousness not only here but also in her “Pilgrim Land: An Ode,” on the landing of the Mayflower, and “Ode for the Second Centennial Anniversary of the Settlement of a New-England Town,” an occasion like that which inspired Emerson’s “Hamatreya.”
Then did a new creation glow
With Order’s primal rays;
While here the sons of God below
First sang Jehovah’s praise
The desert opened like a flower
Unfolding to the sun;
And great the work for every hour,
Two hundred years have done!
Her vision evokes the eighteenth-century rising-glory metaphor of creation both sacred and secular: “the Spirit, by our fathers, moved / Upon the face of Night,” the sun bringing light to the “chaotic darkness” of the “forest-child,” the earth yielding its wealth to the “genial sway / Of Culture’s wand.”
Gould’s “Ode on Art” (1845), perhaps the most rewarding of the many odes to abstractions that I’ve examined, offers a late neoclassical alternative to the prevailing romanticist poetics:11
When God had of earth laid the viewless foundation, –
The pillars had reared which the firmament buoy, –
The stars of the morn sang in glad celebration,
And thus, “all the sons of God shouted for joy.”
In the blue vault sublime
Hung the clear lamps of time,
Their beams shedding warm on the young, teeming earth:
Sun and soft dewy hours
Spread the grass, leaves, and flowers;
As Nature awoke, hymning Heaven at her birth …
Her pupils are grand master-builders of nations;
To kings give they throne, sceptre, vesture, and crown;
They spread earth and sea with her fair new creations;
They prop up the states that would else crumble down!
Freedom’s broad banner waves,
Armour her foemen braves;
While, warm from the depths of the heaven-kindled heart,
Music wafts praise, to rise
Up the far-ringing skies;
And all as the gifts of man’s good angel, Art! …
All hail to the Craftsmen, with hands that can labor, –
With arm nerved by purpose, and deeds spreading wide!
For these are the helper, the friend, brother, neighbour!
And poor but for them were the great world beside.
Ever be this their aim, –
In the cause and the name
Of man’s Friend on high, that their works all be done,
Meekly who sojourned here,
Loved the poor, dried the tear,
And wrought, when below, as the Carpenter’s Son.
’Tis they give to Commerce her ark on the ocean,
To Science her wand, and her star-sweeping wing;
They give temple, altar, and book to Devotion,
Through all the earth proclaiming our Saviour and King.
By the fond sisters three,
Faith, Hope, and Charity,
The last still the first, breathing life for the whole,
Be a house theirs, that stands
High, and “not made with hands,”
Though earth melt, and skies pass away as a scroll!
The “art” of Gould’s title is clearly not the romantic idea but, rather, is more closely related to older notions of material techne, a tonic contrast to the spiritualized debates of Emerson and Poe. Without more information I cannot speculate on particular sources, but they seem traceable back to the sensationalist Lockean aesthetics of Hutcheson, which were prevalent in colonial America. Art is given to humankind at creation. It is an innate faculty. Rather than human-made and unnatural, it arises out of benevolent divine plenitude. It is related to human goodness, the innate moral sense. It creates the material substance – “throne, sceptre, and crown” – of abstract concepts like nationhood, so that it is a social force, not a private one. (A voice whispers, “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”) Art springs from wealth and prosperity. It creates the material world to be seen, the material basis for intellectual ideas, ultimately the material form of human prosperity. There is no hard distinction between the useful arts and poetry. The lines “Water and fire at strife / Give the fleet courser life” sound, if I am not mistaken, like a metaphor from the steam engine, the creation of power out of conflict. Human labour channels art as a divine force that provides material support for all human commerce, science, even religion itself. Gould’s poem, like the rising glory poems, ends with a vision of the Millennium. Freneau and Brackenridge had both expressed similar confidence in their collaboration (see above, 28–9), and traces of the neoclassical political ode survive in Lowell and Moody. Gould’s “Ode to Art” may work with pre-romantic concepts no longer fashionable in England, perhaps, but they are concepts deeply embedded in American culture. The intimate relationship of culture and commerce is a theme not unfamiliar to readers of Pound’s Cantos.
A few other remarkable antebellum political odes appeared. Eliza Townsend (1788–1854), a resident of Boston, is described in Griswold’s headnote as “the first native poet of her sex, whose writings commanded the applause of judicious critics – the first whose poems evinced any real inspiration, or rose from the merely mechanical into the domain of art.” Townsend first came to attention with her “Occasional Ode,” a three-hundred-line-long denunciation of “Corsica’s detested son” Napoleon, which Griswold says thunders “with a vehemence and power which remind us of the celebrated ode of Southey, written nearly five years afterward.”12 The introductory notice to her posthumous Poems and Miscellanies (1856) describes Townsend as “strongly conservative” on nearly all subjects – literature, religion, civil, and social matters; but her conservatism, rather than “blind adhesion to the past,” was “a settled conviction that the principles upon which she formed her judgments were sound, salutary, and righteous.” Her feelings about Napoleon aligned with Federalist alarm about the French Revolution and its aftermath.
In 1813, her “Ocean, a Naval Prize Ode,” also nearly three hundred lines long, apostrophizes the ocean with historical allusions from the Punic Wars to the present, even touching upon Stephen Decatur’s adventures on the Barbary Coast, as a way to support American naval efforts in the War of 1812. Later, in 1832, she published a timely “Ode to Whom It Concerns,” in which she pleads with South Carolina, “Star of the South,” not to secede from the Union over the Nullification Crisis.
For us may better views betide
Than such a half survey,
Nor narrowing mists prevail to hide
What truth the times convey;
But patriots still, afar or nigh,
Till civil discords cease,
Echo impartial Carey’s sigh,
For party not, but “Peace!”
As the author’s note explains, Lucius Carey, Lord Falkland, went to his death in the English Civil War convinced that, regardless which side won victory, injury “would ensue to the common weal.” Anxieties about civil war already hang over this poem.
The prolific Lydia Sigourney (1791–1865) wrote a number of odes and poems in pseudopindaric form. Several of these are conventional, like “The Friends of Man,” mentioned above, or the “Ode on the Fiftieth Anniversary of American Independence” (1827), a thanksgiving for “patriot martyrs” in general, with no mention of the coincidental deaths of John Adams and Jefferson on that same day. More poignant is a reflection on tragic womanhood, “Lady Jane Grey, on Seeing a Picture Representing Her Engaged in the Study of Plato.” Perhaps most striking is “Napoleon’s Epitaph” (1837), a hypothetical search for anyone willing to inscribe words on the bloody tyrant’s gravestone:
Then Earth arose,
That blind, old Empress, on her crumbling throne,
And to the echoed question, “who shall write
Napoleon’s epitaph?” as one who broods
O’er unforgiven injuries, answer’d, “none.”
Sigourney shares her detestation of Napoleon with Eliza Townsend, but her expression is more ingenious and indirect. Neither poet, however, seems to relate the American War of 1812 to Napoleon’s pressure on England’s navy.
Aside from these poems on Napoleon, American odists female or male paid little attention to the affairs of Europe. An exception is Anne Charlotte Lynch (1815–91), who published her sole volume of Poems in the turbulent year 1848. (Lynch took her husband’s name [Botta] when they married in 1855.) Lynch was the daughter of an Irish Catholic patriot who was imprisoned by the English after the 1798 uprising. This, plus her experience as a famed hostess who entertained literary celebrities both European and American, gave her a more cosmopolitan outlook than most of her fellow citizens. Besides two Fourth of July odes, one finds a lyric calling for Ireland’s independence, another calling for Hungary’s independence from Austria, a poem in praise of Swedish women’s rights activist Fredrika Bremer, another praising the poet Lamartine for his short-lived career as idealistic leader in the Second French Republic, a daring lyric entitled “Eros,” an ardent sonnet called “Love,” and “Dawn-Day in Italy,” an ode denouncing Pope Pius IX for his opposition to the Italian Risorgimento. Such interest in European affairs was rare in poets of the time. Perhaps only James Russell Lowell’s “Ode to France, February, 1848” exhibits a similarly keen grasp of the mid-century European turbulence.
African American women who wrote poetry also turned occasionally to the ode. In 1876, H. Cordelia Ray was invited to compose a poem for the unveiling of the Freedman’s Monument in Washington, DC, celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation. Frederick Douglass was the speaker, and Ray’s poem “Lincoln” was recited by the black civil rights leader William E. Matthews. The event itself, however, exposed conflicting feelings within the black population. Already at its unveiling, the monument, which depicts a freed black slave kneeling at the feet of Lincoln, was felt to be demeaning, It was, of course, planned and executed entirely by whites. Frederick Douglass was overheard to say that the monument “showed the negro on his knee when a more manly attitude would have been indicative of freedom.” In his speech, Douglass argued pointedly that Lincoln “was pre-eminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men,” and emphasized that the monument was to Lincoln rather than to emancipation.13 None of Douglass’s dissatisfaction is reflected in Ray’s poem, seven ten-line stanzas of tame rhyming couplets praising the “martyred chief.” Like James Russell Lowell, Ray sees the moment of emancipation as the moment when American nationhood was truly accomplished.14 Such tensions between grateful acceptance of the white man’s benevolence and the expectation of absolute equality establish a conflict that runs through much black poetry of the period.
In July 1885, the African Methodist Church Review published one of the most surprising and important American poems of the nineteenth century: “Afmerica,” a poem of more than two hundred lines by an unknown Mary Ashe Lee. A year later, the poem was reprinted, minus its introductory twenty-six lines, in volume 1, number 1 of The Negro, a short-lived Boston periodical devoted to “critical discussions” of race problems in the United States. This shorter version then appeared in the Southern Workman (October 1886), published by the Hampton Institute in Virginia. Finally, extracts including the missing lines appeared in Mrs N.F. (Gertrude) Mossell’s book The Work of the African-American Woman (1894). The reprintings are remarkable, if only because the poem is not a short filler. The four black editors all considered the poem important. No white editor took notice.
The only modern reprinting of “Afmerica” occurred in Paula Bernat Bennett’s 1998 anthology, not with an informative headnote but in a final selection of miscellaneous newspaper verse, arranged chronologically. The only context provided is a footnote stating that this “important poem was reprinted at least three times.” The newspaper in which Bennett found it, the Southern Workman, was a publication of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute – now the thriving Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia. Bennett gives no information about Mary E. Ashe Lee’s life or circumstances – even her dates are question marks. Since then her achievement has been noticed, as far as I can find, only by three historians of black religion. No literary study has followed up on Bennett’s recovery of “Afmerica.” It waits to be fleshed out.
For a start, I must first point out that Bennett’s text of the poem is not complete. The original printing includes the important introductory passage.15 Second, the outlines of Mary Ashe Lee’s biography that I am able to piece together reveal a woman of considerable education, character, and connection.16 Mary Ashe was born in Mobile, Alabama, on 12 January 1851. Her parents are described as living “in good circumstances,” “prominent in business and benevolence.” They were apparently free and had sufficient resources to buy a farm in southwestern Ohio near Wilberforce University in 1860, just in time to escape the Confederacy. Wilberforce, founded in 1856 by the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), was the first black liberal arts institution in the United States. Mary Ashe graduated from Wilberforce in 1873 with a bachelor of science, and, having already established a reputation as a writer, she was appointed to write the class ode (not extant). She then was hired to teach public school in Galveston, Texas, but in December 1873 she married Benjamin F. Lee, professor of pastoral theology at Wilberforce, who later became president of the university and then senior bishop of the AME.
Information about Benjamin F. Lee is, not surprisingly, more plentiful.17 The AME had been founded by Richard Allen and others in 1793, after they had been forced from their knees from prayer in a non-coloured section of St George’s Episcopal Church, Philadelphia (Hobson, Mount of Vision, 6). Lee was a respected leader in his church, an editor, eventually senior bishop, and two buildings were afterwards named in his honour.18 Mary played an important supporting role to her distinguished husband, wrote articles for the Christian Recorder and the AME Quarterly Review, plus a regular column in Ringwood’s Journal, a fashion paper published in Cleveland. Preaching was a male preserve; women were active and vocal in the AME Church from the beginning but were not ordained until 1948 (31). Through this time, she gave birth to nine children, lost three in infancy, and raised six to adulthood. It is no wonder that her poetic output is small. She hoped at some point to publish a book of poems, but it never appeared. Yellin and Bond’s bibliography lists eleven poems published in the AME Christian Recorder. There seems to have been at least one other longer piece, “Tawawa” (the Native name for the site of Wilberforce), in the metre of Hiawatha, excerpted in Mossell. Mary Ashe Lee died in 1932, having seen her son Benjamin Jr become a respected doctor and her daughter Effie Lee Newcombe a writer of children’s books and poetry connected to the Harlem Renaissance
Paula Bennett imputes to “Afmerica” the provenance of its third appearance in the Southern Workman published by the Hampton Institute, but it really belongs with Wilberforce University and the AME. The ideological distinction is consequential – another reflection of divided attitudes among African Americans. Hampton had been founded in 1868 by an idealistic white benefactor named Samuel Chapman Armstrong, whose purpose was to provide black and Native American students, both male and female, vocational training. The “temporal salvation of the colored race,” he wrote, “is to be won out of the ground. Skillful agriculturalists and mechanics are needed rather than poets and orators” (Armstrong, Education for Life, 21). Both former slaves and former buffalo hunters thus had an opportunity to become productive employees. Hampton’s most successful alumnus was Booker T. Washington, who helped to found Tuskegee Institute along similar principles in 1881. Wilberforce and the AME, however, made no compromise on issues of academics or racial equality. An account of the church published in 1866 makes this very clear. One year after Appomattox, the AME calls for the immediate “removal of every civil, legal, and political disability under which the nominally free do now and will suffer,” looking to the church to forward the “cause of human amelioration, intellectually, morally, civilly and religiously considered” (Payne, Semi-Centenary, 93–4). Wilberforce was founded for “the work of Mathematical and Classical Training … for Christian ends” in 1856, and opened for the benefit of the black race, “and not theirs only, but also for every race that may desire to enjoy the advantages” (113). Like Hampton, Wilberforce particularly welcomed Native American students. There is no compromise with “an unreasonable and wicked prejudice” (160).
The resounding consequence of this idealism is clear in the AME narrative of Frederick Douglass’s meeting with President Andrew Johnson, who suggested “the hated scheme of African Colonization.”19 Douglass’s reply is an unyielding declaration of equality, the responsibilities of American exceptionalism, and a Whitmanic global embrace. “Oh, no, Mr. President! We are not going to do that.” We are struggling for an idea, “the unity of races – the brotherhood of man”: “The United States is the greatest nation on the face of the globe, and the richest fruits of her civilization shall soon be found on the Pacific coast, from whence it shall march over the Eastern hemisphere, illumining, retouching, and growing grander. Then, if the question ‘Whether the white and colored races can live side by side, on terms of political equality, without detriment to the former?’ be decided against us here in America, it is decided against us in the whole world; for American influence is destined to be predominant everywhere” (Payne, Semi-Centenary, 159–60). As Judith Weisenfeld noticed, “Afmerica” was written in the context of “ongoing discussions among whites and blacks of colonization schemes,” but instead, Mary Lee prophesies a future America “in which the nation embraces its diversity” (19). Little did she suspect how long that future would take to materialize.
The publication of “Afmerica” in 1885 situates it midway between the end of the Reconstruction period, with the Hayes-Tilden compromise of 1877, and the ultimate legalization of Jim Crow segregation with Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Compromise and the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896. It was a messy, confusing period. From hindsight, we are inclined to fix on those events that betrayed the promise of emancipation. The panic of 1873 and the resulting unemployment triggered massive labour agitation, which was brutally suppressed. The American landscape began to be peopled alarmingly with jobless tramps. Two Byzantine Supreme Court decisions of the 1870s having nothing to do with race affirmed the prerogatives of states’ rights, and immediately the states used them to disenfranchise blacks (Foner, Reconstruction, 531–4). The rise of the robber barons created gross inequalities of wealth for white and black alike. Party politics on both sides was stultified by corrupt political bosses and backroom deals. In the 1890s, privileges of “personhood,” long denied to slaves, were given by the Supreme Court to corporations.
But from Mary Ashe Lee’s perspective in the midst of these events as they unfolded, the position of the American black was still hopeful, as it was to the younger Paul Laurence Dunbar, whose equally hopeful “Ode to Ethiopia” appeared in 1896. Amendments to the Constitution had abolished slavery and established equal rights to citizenship and the vote, at least in theory. Blacks had had a taste of political power and self-sufficiency. Educational opportunities were opening up. Lee and her husband had enjoyed them personally and were deeply committed to the possibilities of self-improvement and self-fulfillment offered by higher education for deserving black students, both male and female. As late as 1900, Bishop Benjamin Lee was preaching words of unalloyed hope from the AME pulpit: The nineteenth-century, “the mightiest of all the centuries,” he declared, is ending. “The century that eliminated from civilization slavery and serfdom … In this century science has brought all parts of the world about the common center of human interest and necessities. In this century the races have come into more intimate and significant contact than ever before.” The future can only be brighter.20 Lee’s hope seems poised between faith in progress and faith in the Millennium.
The timing of “Afmerica” places it in the shadow of one other event not mentioned in the poem but probably implicit in it. In 1884, Frederick Douglass, about a year after the death of his first wife, married his secretary Helen Pitts, a white woman. A shock of scandal ran through both the white and the black populations. Not only was this a conspicuous violation of the intermarriage taboo, it even reversed the more frequent pairing of white man and black woman. The racial purity of the Southern belle was at stake. For Douglass, as Waldo E. Martin notes, this marriage embodied “his commitment to assimilationism, integrationism, and a composite American nationality,” but “public reaction was intense and predictable.” In white newspapers he was a “lecherous old African Solomon,” while black papers called his marriage “a slight, if not an insult” to coloured ladies. Douglass was supported by his closest friends, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who all agreed that it was consistent with his belief that “color distinctions were artificial and absurd.” Given the size of the mixed-race population already in existence, Douglass reasonably protested that “what the American people object to is not a mixture of races, but honorable marriage between them” (Martin, Mind of Frederick Douglass, 98–100). As Martin writes, he and AME leaders shared beliefs in a social reformism based on “orderliness, constructive change, and reason” (166, 178). It is likely that the issue of racial intermarriage prompted by Douglass has a presence in Mary Lee’s poem.
The African Methodist Episcopal Church Review itself was, from the beginning, a high-toned intellectual journal aimed at the educated African American intelligentsia. Besides predictable articles on black issues and intricacies of Wesleyan theology, it ran essays on “Dickens,” “Mirabeau,” “Socialism” (in the Paris communes), “The French Language of the Thirteenth Century,” and “A Plea for the Co-Education of the Sexes.” There was a catalogue of idiomatic phrases useful in Latin composition and a debate, pro and con, over the ordination of women. In “Shall Our Schools be Mixed or Separate?” F.L. Cardozo, a South Carolina Republican and the first black politician elected to state office, pondered the advantages to black children of segregated schools. Benjamin Lee appeared in volume 1 with an article on “Our Theology.” The issue of intermarriage did not figure prominently, but there was a brief editorial titled “Miscegenation: Redemption,” which was mainly a hostile notice of the Liberia experiment,21 and, later in volume 3, there was a more interesting piece by Pennsylvania lawyer Theophilus J. Minton asking “Is Intermarriage between the Races to Be Encouraged?” Minton’s answer is an emphatic “Yes.” Again the issue is first tied to colonization, and not just in Liberia: there are also proposals for Haiti and New Granada, or a Territory of the Union “sequestrated from the other States … where no white man would be permitted to enter or settle” (Minton, “Intermarriage,” 284). Minton notes the failures of such attempts with Indians and the Native populations in South Africa, plus the logistical impracticality of herding together a throng of some 7 million American blacks. The remaining options are that “the negro will, therefore, have either to remain a distinct and separate race, occupying a subordinate place … or he will have to destroy all lines of distinction by assimilating the manners, customs and racial characteristics of the Caucasian … producing a national homogeneousness” (285). “A distinctive negro civilization,” with its own schools, colleges, or businesses, is “not only not desirable, but indeed … reprehensible,” for it would “create class distinctions, and foster the race prejudice of which we desire to free ourselves” (286). Debate over the intricacies of cultural assimilation is ongoing, naturally, not only among blacks but also among Native and the more voluntary immigrant populations. The postbellum “freedmen’s schools” brought the issue to a focus, and poetry – reading, writing, elocution – played an important role for assimilation in the curricula (Kete, Reception, 18–19). Phillis Wheatley was the shining example.
“Afmerica,” by Mrs M.E. Lee, B.S., shows every sign of embracing these views, which seem congruent with those of Douglass and of the AME Church at large. Here are the opening lines, absent from Paula Bennett’s printing:
Hang up the harp! I hear them say,
Nor sing again an Afric lay,
The time has passed; we would forget –
And sadly now do we regret
There still remains a single trace
Of that dark shadow of disgrace,
Which tarnished long a race’s fame
Until she blushed at her own name;
And now she stands unbound and free,
In that full light of liberty.
“Sing not her past!” cries out a host.
“Nor of her future stand and boast.
Oblivion be her aimed-for goal,
In which to cleanse her ethnic soul,
And coming not a creature new,
On life’s arena stand in view.”
But stand with no identity?
All robbed of personality?
Perhaps, this is the nobler way
To teach that wished-for brighter day.
Yet shall the good which she has done
Be silenced all and never sung?
And shall she have no inspirations
To elevate her expectations?
From singing I cannot refrain.
Please pardon this my humble strain.
The evidence in these lines of an African American individual’s feelings of shame for her or his history is difficult to interpret from this distance of time, particularly by a white reader. It is a complex emotion: How much is shame at a lineage of slavery, and how much a shame at African ethnicity itself in the context of white American society? How much is shame at a history of ongoing sexual abuse by white slave owners, and how much is shame at mixed race per se? How much of this shame has been bred by white culture, with its (hypocritical) Christian ideals of sexual purity, and then internalized? How much bred by black culture itself? How widespread or deeply ingrained were these feelings? Why did subsequent black editors omit these lines, and why did Mrs Mossell reprint them? I find these questions unanswerable, but Mary Lee’s poem assumes their existence and stands firmly against them, proclaiming the individual black identity as it now exists, neither blind to its history nor apologetic for it. Lee’s opening passage strikes a tone of what leaders much later called “Black Pride,” while at the same time negotiating a view of racial equality.
These lost opening couplets address the poem directly to the black reader, especially the black female reader. Removing them – and thus removing significant psychological conflict from the text – has the advantage of opening the address to the white reader as well, leaving the speaker’s race indeterminate. The poem then proceeds for 209 more lines of iambic tetrameter divided into fifteen stanzas, each except the last having three cross-rhymed quatrains and a final couplet. The rhyming is sometimes approximate. What emerges is a portrait of Afmerica, an allegorical young mixed-race American black woman who becomes “the very exemplar” not only of her race, not only “of True Womanhood and the genteel life-style” (Bennett, Public Sphere, 67), but of American citizenry altogether. Mary Ashe Lee first presents this representative figure, then endows her with a history, which is the history of the nation itself, and then looks to her hopeful future. She challenges two of the most ingrained racial taboos of American society: the first is Crèvecoeur’s famous account of “this new man,” the American as melting together of all white European nationalities – Afmerican turns out to be not only female but also, visibly, a meld of both European and African blood (68–70); the second recalls Leslie Fiedler’s account, so daring in 1960, of the crime of racial “miscegenation” – a word that was coined as a political scare tactic during the 1864 presidential election and that has happily all but disappeared from usage in the course of my lifetime. It recalls the host of state laws proscribing marriage between races – laws that were not declared unconstitutional until as late as 1967. Given the terror (in Fiedler’s words) “that finally all distinctions will be blurred and black and white no longer exist” (Fiedler, Love and Death, 414), Afmerica stands boldly as both white and black – rather than neither white nor black. The poem effectively sets aside the American social construction of “Black.”
To place this in a larger context, Shira Wolosky distinguishes four categories of immigrant assimilation in America – all imagined “with the emphatic exception of the color line.” The narrowest, the Know-Nothing view, sees American culture as essentially English, rejecting everything else as alien; this attitude had a resurgence in the 1890s, and it is thriving as I write. Second, an attitude of “inclusive singulaity” accepted diverse peoples but expected them to conform to established Anglo-Saxon norms. Third is the melting pot of Crèvecoeur, a composite culture in which peoples of all nations “are melted into a new race of men” – Americans. “Finally, there is the model of plural identities, each maintaining its distinctive identity, whose very diversity is seen as defining the American character” (Poetry and Public Discourse, 125–37). None of these types dares breach the colour line in the way Mary Ashe Lee imagines, but her poem prefigures the third type, a future composite American citizenry that includes the African. Her Afmerica is beautiful not only for her cheeks “as brown as chestnuts dark” but her brow “of pure Caucasian hue.” As the product of (enforced) interracial union, she is not only an embodiment of the sexual power asymmetry between white master and female slave but proud of it. She is the distillation of races in the new American of the next century. “Afmerica” is thus an audacious American progress poem seen through African American eyes.
Like all progress poems, “Afmerica” falls into three sections – present, past, and future. The opening three stanzas present Afmerica, “the problem of the age,” in disarmingly familiar poetic phrases for her beauty, a maid both strange and well known, “of every hue and every shade.” When slavery prevailed, Lee reminds us, “she was a normal creature then.” Slavery created the conditions that made her representative. Now after emancipation, however, her status is less certain.
Then begins the history of the African woman in the New World, seven stanzas beginning with Phillis Wheatley and the earlier “Knickerbock days” of New York, proceeding through the period of George Washington, then to the heavy fieldwork to feed the cotton gin, enduring forced labour with the help of Jehovah, until “brave Lincoln” made his proclamation “on the first of sixty-three.” The stanza on the Knickerbock days (before New Amsterdam was ceded to the English in 1664) establishes black presence in the New World from the very beginning, when this “strange child, called African, / Began to make her history, too.” Slavery is a sin, and New England is honoured for having “washed her hands” of it; but Lee’s depiction of early slavery is relatively sunny. Phillis Wheatly (sic), “the purest type / Of Afric intellectual might,” was “content to play her part.”22 Lee’s simile comparing Wheatley to mummy wheat suggests that she regarded the experience of Africans in their native habitat as buried out of sight and without opportunity until their contact with white civilization.
The experience of slavery, particularly for women, became more intense when they were “forced within the fields t’appear / The labor of the men to share.” Before that, docile slave women were entrusted with nursing a Washington, or given all the “household care,” leaving the white mistress to her indolent ennui. There is no overt suggestion of sexual abuse anywhere in the poem, unless the word “drudge” in line 80 has a sexual connotation. But Lee is clear that it was the forced labour of the slave that made economic prosperity possible, that slavery “Brought to perfection Southern soil, / And swelled the commerce of those lands.” If Lee’s pietism depicts a sad but faithful Afmerica turning to Jehovah for deliverance from her slavery in Egypt, she also holds out the biblical command of the fifty-year Jubilee with its requirement for the manumission of slaves (Leviticus 25:8–13) against the hypocritical Christian slave-owners. Likewise, while figuring the Civil War as a providential component of salvation history and praising Lincoln for emancipation, she carefully records his action as a “war necessity” that applied only to the rebellious Southern states.
Lee shows Afmerica not as the savage ruffian of lost cause Reconstruction historiography but as fully prepared for her freedom:
So freedom found her not without
Fair education in the North.
In Southern cities too, no doubt
Her acquisitions proved her worth.
In many of her homes were found
Refinement true, and some degree
Of culture there.
Lee’s emphasis on education, refinement, and culture effectively signifies assimilation into Caucasian middle-class society, not as a denial of ethnicity but, in Christopher Z. Hobson’s term, as “a political outlook that can be termed prophetic integrationism.” This notion, Hobson assures us, “despite the later connotations of Douglass’s term ‘assimilation,’” implies “nothing race-effacing” but, rather, “a fierce sense of the particularity and assertiveness of African-American life.”23 This debate remains ongoing. Although it reflects the advantages of Mary Lee’s own background, it also underscores her sincere determination as an educator to share it with all her people. Characteristically, she seals her point with an allusion to Jesus’s Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25), the servant given the least by his master proving the most successful.
The final five stanzas of “Afmerica” may now be read as overly insistent; but this over-insistence itself tells us the urgency of the issue as it appeared in 1885. Americans recognize themselves as “mixed and intermixed” of “all nationalities”: “Behold, this colored child is thine!” The father is dared to say that he denies his child. It is a paternal duty owed her. Lee devotes a full stanza to rejecting the hated back-to-Africa movement. “Her home is here,” as planned by Providence, she insists. “Her ancestors, like all the rest, / Came from the eastern hemisphere: / But she is native of the west.” Lee ends by reaffirming the talent and potentiality of black women, mixed race or otherwise.
In song and music, she can soar;
She writes, she paints and sculptures well:
The fine arts seem to smile on her.
In elocution, she’ll excel;
In medicine, she has much skill.
She is an educator, too;
She lifts her voice against the still.
To Christ she tries man’s soul to woo.
In love and patience, she is seen
In her own home, a blessed queen.
This litany of woman’s opportunities includes higher education and professions like medicine and ministry that continued to be denied to women, black or white, for decades afterwards. Of course, it also includes the traditional option of “blessed queen” of the household (not to mention temperance crusader). Lee closes her poem by addressing the male reader, encouraging him to guarantee the woman’s security and “don that lovely courtesy / Which marked the chevaliers of old.” (Chivalry, it seems, is not a monopoly of the Southern plantation owner.) Afmerica thus stands as an American patriot looking toward the future perfection of the nation’s ideals. As a later AME leader Reverdy C. Ransom declared in 1935, “the Negro is a fool who does not stand erect, hold his head high, and claim everything in it from My Country ’tis of thee to The Star-Spangled Banner” (Hobson, Mount of Vision, 194).
Lee’s “Afmerica” offers a unique view of African American aspirations and anxieties in the period after emancipation. Her views on mixed race, however, were not unique. Joel Barlow had envisioned a future composite humanity in which the darker races will evolve to “a fairer tint” while Europeans gain “a ruddier hue and deeper shade” (Columbiad, 120ff), while Whitman had foreseen races “to marry and be given in marriage” (“Passage to India,” 33). According to Christopher Z. Hobson, “several writers believed a new people would arise through intermarriage: ‘This western world is destined to be filled with a mixed race.’” Henry Highland Garnet asserted in his 1848 lecture.” Others turned white biases upside down: “If the negro must go, must lose his identity,” George L. Ruffin insisted, “the white must also go and lose his identity.” This prophecy does not foresee the disappearance or submergence of a weaker race, as some believed, but a fulfillment of God’s Providence. “He who made all nations of one blood,” William J. Simmons declared, would “reduce this conglomerate mass to one distinct nationality.” Others turned the Southern apologists’ interpretation of the sons of Noah passage against them. If Asia was allotted to Shem, Europe to Japheth, and Africa to Ham, the exceptional America was “beneficently reserved” by Providence “as a common continent, for the reunion of all the sons of Adam in the bond of common brotherhood” (all quotes from Hobson, Mount of Vision, 84–5).
But reality is harsh. American laws against interracial marriage were not to be overturned by the Supreme Court until the Loving v. Virginia decision in 1967. After the Civil War, politicians framed the Southern conflict with the North “in terms of its fear of racial amalgamation.” As Alex Lubin has written, “interracial intimacy was at the crux of national remembrance of the Civil War through the 1930s,” and after, Southern courts struggled to maintain sexuality and race to be solely an issue of state’s rights (Romance and Rights, 4–5).
Harriet Monroe is remembered not as a poet but as the feisty editor of Poetry Magazine, which had such a momentous impact on the development of American modernism. The modernist myth of the obtuse lady editor who failed to see the brilliance of Pound and Eliot still persists, despite the research accumulated since Ellen Williams’s pioneering study.24 Monroe can now be saluted as an impassioned patron who had the personal presence to stand diplomatically firm against gargantuan egos like Pound, Amy Lowell, and many others clamouring for attention.
Twenty years earlier, however, as a young poet in 1892, Monroe was writing in the genteel nineteenth-century mode. She produced a number of patriotic lyrics in pseudopindaric form, and her Columbian Ode did its best to scale the sublime. Related by marriage to the eminent architect John Wellborn Root, she sought to give voice to the Progressive era and bring the arts to the American frontier. As Daniel J. Cahill notes, she was proud of her “Columbian Ode,” and “through the many years that followed its initial publication, she frequently recited the poem from memory for visitors to the office of Poetry” (Harriet Monroe, 99). The irony is that, as editor of Poetry, Monroe adamantly refused to accept any overtly political poetry. From her perspective, however, a patriotic poem was not “political”: it spoke with public assent.
Her “Columbian Ode” was read to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World on 21 October 1892, “before an audience of more than a hundred thousand persons.”25 Chicago marked the point where the edge of American civilization touched the frontier, the very site where Frederick Jackson Turner was soon to outline his Frontier Thesis of American history. The exposition was a triumphalist tableau of the new corporate America, ironically framed in the outer world by the financial panic of 1893 and the bloody Pullman Strike of 1894. For the recitation of Monroe’s ode, actress Sarah Cowell Le Moyne was brought from New York, and musical settings of three passages penned by the distinguished composer George Whitefield Chadwick were played by musical forces numbering in the thousands. Afterwards, Harriet Monroe accepted a laurel wreath from President Benjamin Harrison. The poem, 375 lines printed in a twenty-three-page souvenir booklet, amounts to a progress poem, a paean to the tutelary goddess Columbia, celebrating the past and future of America.26 Columbus himself incarnates the divine prerogative of manifest destiny, part of the tradition that stretches from Barlow’s Columbiad to Hart Crane’s “Ave Maria.” Monroe’s ode outdoes even Whitman in her assertion of American exceptionalism with her promise, like the grand Zionist prophecy in Micah 4:1–5, that every nation will worship the one true god of Democracy together in universal peace:
Lo! Clan on clan
The embattled nations gather to be one,
Clasp hands as brothers ’neath Columbia’s shield,
Upraise her banners to the shining sun.
One heart, one song, one dream –
Man shall be free forevermore,
And love shall be supreme. (16)
Although the language of Monroe’s grandiloquent Chicago boosterism is dismayingly generalized, all the major components of the Columbian mythology ring clear. No poem in the American archive, not even The Columbiad itself, paints such an exalted picture of the Italian adventurer.
The poem begins by calling the nations to assemble – Spain first (the war with Spain was six years in the future), England (but not Ireland), and France (with her gift of the Statue of Liberty). The exposition is a physical realization of the assembly of nations that ends Barlow’s Columbiad. Like Lanier’s “Psalm of the West,” Monroe remarks on the Vikings in Vinland but fails to notice Africa and its inhabitants. She does, however, include “the calm Orient … From hoary Palestine to sweet Japan.” She is not strictly Eurocentric, then, but her eye rests only upon regions that claim to be civilized. Although she later proclaims “Open wide the doors” (17), she is not clear how wide open they should be. Columbus himself appears as the virtuous adventurer of American legend, with no hint of conquest, greed, or bloodshed. The New World is personified as a goddess, much like Powhatan’s daughter of Hart Crane’s Bridge: She “dwelt in forests” where she heard “Two oceans playing with the lights / Of eve and morn” (12). She tends a prelapsarian garden for Columbus’s arrival: “Not with his brother is man’s battle here” (13), no murderous Cain to threaten the peace. Columbus comes with “new weapons” – with “axe and oar,” “with mallet and with spade” (14) – to construct a modern infrastructure.
According to Monroe, the New World has been kept “safe with God till man grow wise” (10). The Old World is corrupt, and Columbus has to “slip from the leash of kings” (11) to find freedom. But he does not find freedom directly. There’s a population of troublesome Indians. When their presence comes to mind, the prelapsarian Eden suddenly turns into “a prisoned world” (9) where “wild men starve and slay,” pre-conscious, subhuman, eking out a bare subsistence while “the dumb years passed with vacant eyes” (10). They are hostile savages, the enemy:
Then men in league with these –
Brothers of wind and waste –
Hew barbs of flint, and darkly haste
From sheltering tents and trees;
And mutter: Away! away!
Ye children of white-browed day!
Who dares profane our wild gods’ reign
We torture and trap and slay. (15)
Monroe dismisses them with startling ruthlessness, and their only hope is that a benign Columbus and his fellow Europeans, “armed with truth’s holy cross, faith’s sacred fire” (16), might someday baptize and civilize them.
The Chicago Exposition itself, guided by pioneering anthropologists like Frederick Ward Putnam, had at least taken efforts to present a more sympathetic representation of Native Americans. But in the spirit of the World’s Fair, emphasis fell on the future, in faith that “Science” and “Knowledge” would ultimately bring forth the Millennium:
Then shall Want’s call to Sin resound no more
Across her teeming fields. And Pain shall sleep,
Soothed by brave Science with her magic lore,
And War no more shall bid the nations weep.
Then the worn chains shall slip from man’s desire,
And ever higher and higher
His swift foot shall aspire;
Still deeper and more deep
His soul its watch shall keep.
Till Love shall make the world a holy place,
Where Knowledge dares unveil God’s very face. (22)
The Chicago Exposition was a major showcase for the coming century. Electrically lighted streets were a novelty, and the White City, as the grounds were called, was illuminated by Nikola Tesla’s new alternating current rather than Thomas Edison’s direct current. The physical structures, which covered six hundred acres of land, made impressive presentations of sham Roman imperial architecture to embody the imperium of corporate capitalism. The principal buildings were “covered with a composite plaster-like material called ‘staff’” to create “an illusion of marble and classic monumentality.” The very ephemerality of the show made the White City seem “all the more ideal: the momentary realization of a dream.”27 The fair introduced multitudes of technological innovations like elevators and the electric chair. Familiar consumer goods appeared for the first time – the zipper, Cream of Wheat, and Cracker Jacks – plus Edison’s kinetoscope, early voice recording, and George G.W. Ferris’s new Ferris Wheel on the Midway Plaisance (from which the word “midway”). “The Midway was also home to some less seemly exhibits. People of faraway regions were placed on display like animals: Lapps, Eskimos, Zulu, and opium smokers from China” in a specially constructed “joss house.”28
The Chicago Exposition did its best to be progressive, but organizers stubbornly prevented delegations of women and African Americans from participating in the planning. The decision to exclude them was upheld by President Harrison. Refusing to appoint a single African American to the 208-member Board of Commissioners, Harrison, in the words of activist Ida B. Wells, established “a precedent which remained inviolate throughout the entire term of Exposition work” (Davis, “Stage Business,” 191). Frederick Douglass appeared, but “as a commissioner from Haiti – not as citizen of his own country” (Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, 220). Women’s visibility remained more prominent, including a major Women’s Building designed by a female architect, Sophia Hayden; but the emphasis fell predictably, in Alan Trachtenberg’s words, on domesticity, “the unique, and uniquely virtuous, powers of women as mothers, homemakers, teachers, and cooks” (221). Blacks withdrew entirely, their only presence a tiny exhibit by the Hampton Institute sponsored by the Federal Department of Education. According to Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the displays of ethnicity, which included many Native American tribes, were “designed to demonstrate the primitiveness of the non-white (non-European) cultures,” leaving “no confusion about who was and who was not inherently a true, ‘civilised’ American.”29
In this light, Harriet Monroe’s Columbian Ode might be contrasted with a more intimate poem, Ina Coolbrith’s “The Captive of the White City.”30 The captive in question was Rain-in-the-Face, the Native chief held personally responsible for the death of General Custer at Little Big Horn in 1876. Custer, despite his inept defeat, was widely regarded as a martyred hero – witness Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s nine-hundred-line heroic poem “Custer” (1896). Rain-in-the-Face had been placed on exhibit at the fair, complete with trappings imported from Montana – namely, the very cabin in which Chief Sitting Bull and his son had been killed, along with several others, in the army’s bungled attempt to apprehend him. Coolbrith’s poem is remarkable not only for its sympathy with the Native American – in this it parallels Longfellow’s “Revenge of Rain-in-the-Face” – but also for calling explicit attention in a note to the claim “that the land upon which Chicago is built was never fully paid for.” The poem bears another explanatory note in its 1895 Songs of San Francisco printing: “In the Midway Plaisance of the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, there was, by permission of the United States Government (so read the record), under guard in the log cabin owned by Sitting Bull, and in which that chief and his son were killed, the Sioux Indian immortalized by the verse of Longfellow, and whose name will go down in history as the slayer of General George A. Custer, in the fight on the Little Big Horn.” Coolbrith’s disdain for the humiliation of the man is icy enough without being overstated.
Furthermore, if “pain, suffering, self-sacrifice, and loss” are intrinsic to the sentimental subject of the century’s female writers,31 as Paula Bennett writes, Coolbrith’s poem brings two of its most powerful icons, the “Dispossessed Native” and the “Grieving Widow,” into head-on collision as she imagines the Widow Custer suddenly encountering her beloved husband’s murderer in this very public place. The effect is not to magnify the sentimentality but to destabilize it with an ingeniously contrived tableau vivant enacted amid the crowds of the Great Exposition, nexus of consumer capitalism, barbarous entertainments, and marvels of the future. The grieving widow is the icon of the ruthless new corporationism and its cost to the civilized white, as Rain-in-the-Face is the icon of the Vanishing Red. The tone is complex, like Coolbrith’s sober, poetically formal treatment of the vaguely risible Native name (which was still a playground joke in my own childhood). It is utterly true to the brutality underlying the expansive nation’s optimism. Rain-in-the-Face himself, one must note, solemnly denied having killed the American general.32
The irony is heightened, however, when one realizes that Rain-in-the-Face was just one of hundreds of “primitive” peoples at the Chicago Exposition, which prided itself for showcasing the new science of anthropology. He was a very minor attraction, not even mentioned in most accounts, and only Erik Larson’s popular history (in a chapter titled “Freaks”) confirms that he could be seen there on the midway, sitting in a rainstorm with “green paint that streamed down his face” (Devil in the White City, 313). Such human spectacles had long been commonplace – circus sideshows, Wild West shows – each with its own version of Chang and Eng or a Hottentot Venus. But Chicago went about its work systematically, with help from leading anthropologists, the US Indian Affairs Bureau, and its Canadian counterpart the Department of Indian Affairs, importing Hopi bread makers, Powhatan quarry workers, Kwakiutl with totem poles from the Northwest Coast, and Inuit from Labrador. There were huge plaster casts of Maya ruins and Colorado cliff dwellings. A reconstructed street from Cairo, a village of Turkish Jews, and a tribal band from Dahomey were among the most popular exhibits on the Midway Plaisance. The fifty-nine Inuit probably had the worst experience, two children dying from sickness, adults forced to wear fur clothing in hot weather and virtually imprisoned when they objected.33 For many Native Americans, memories of the Ghost Dance movement and the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee were very fresh. The entire episode amounted to a triumphal procession of the vanquished after decades of expansionism. Rain-in-the-Face himself had minimal anthropological value, his exhibition serving only the morbid curiosity of the public. The ethics of these presentations were not unchallenged. Emma Sickles, who had acted as a mediator at Wounded Knee, attacked anthropologist Frederic Putnam and his department for committing “one of the darkest conspiracies ever conceived against the Indian race.” But her protests accomplished little (Hinsley and Wilcox, Coming of Age, 34).
One other woman dedicated an ode to the Columbian Exposition, the African American poet Mary Weston Fordham (ca. 1862–1905) of Charleston, South Carolina, where she was a teacher. Little is known about her outside of her volume Magnolia Leaves (1897), which bears a perfunctory introduction by Booker T. Washington. Like Harriet Monroe, she, too, depicts Columbus’s invasion of the Americas as a benevolent incursion, with emphasis on his religious mission. Her Natives look on in wonder at the sanctity of the Spanish arrival:
And the warriors started forth
Like fawns through the forest trees;
When lo! what a wondrous, solemn sight–
“Pale Faces” on their knees!
Before the Holy Cross,
Each with uncovered brow,
Prayed the mighty God, that His blessings e’er
Might this fair land endow.
Mary Weston Fordham pairs her “Chicago Exposition Ode” with an “Atlanta Exposition Ode,” addressing a lesser event two years later in 1895. The Atlanta Exposition was more a trade fair for the cotton states, though, like Chicago, it exhibited the technologies of the coming century. It is best remembered, however, as the site of Booker T. Washington’s controversial, humbly pragmatic Atlanta Compromise Speech, which counselled the African American to keep peace with the white population in exchange for the security of menial employment: “A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal: ‘Water, water. We die of thirst.’ The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back: ‘Cast down your bucket where you are.’ … The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket and it came up full of fresh, sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River. To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land … I would say: ‘Cast down your bucket where you are.’ Cast it down, making friends in every manly way of the people of all races, by whom you are surrounded” (“Atlanta Address,” 584). Fordham’s ode turns Washington’s vivid parable neatly into verse:
“Cast down your bucket where you are,”
From burning sands or Polar star
From where the iceberg rears its head
Or where the kingly palms outspread;
’Mid blackened fields or golden sheaves,
Or foliage green, or autumn leaves,
Come sounds of warning from afar,
“Cast down your bucket where you are.”
The conceit is ingenious, but as C. Vann Woodward said long ago, it amounted to “a renunciation of active political aspirations for the Negro” (New South, 323).
H. Cordelia Ray, author of the “Lincoln” ode discussed above, looks forward in another poem, her “Ode on the Twentieth Century (A Dream Prospect),” to a New Jerusalem in America ornamented with images from the Heavenly City of Revelation, “a hall of weird magnificence / All studded o’er with scintillating gems,” “a temple whence / Flows wisdom like a river.” Ray’s approach is broad: she does not refer to racial issues at all, nor does she assume a racialized reader. The coming of Jerusalem, unfortunately, was to be interrupted by America’s next wars, its gallant expedition on behalf of Cuban liberation, followed by its less gallant offensive in the Philippines, plus two world wars after that. H. Cordelia Ray’s poem is nothing more than a hopeful dream: but in my mind I can envision her solemnly joining hands with Afmerica on one side and Rain-in-the-Face on the other, staring uncertainly into the coming century, waiting.