American Literature 1865-1914

• Time of dramatic change in the United States
• The Civil War left the nation traumatized and “morally exhausted” (Baym 3)
• Yet the country prospered over the next several decades
• Agricultural production increased, transcontinental railroad completed, invention of the telephone, widespread introduction of electricity
• Expansion of US imperial interests (Spanish-American War in 1898)
• Rapid industrialization at a rate never witnessed before
• Some people grow very wealthy
• Large masses suffer as economic inequality grows: tenements in the cities, displaced farmers in the country, child and other exploited laborers in the factories
• 1859: Darwin’s Origin of Species
• “Humans were special, not—as the Bible taught—because God loved them and created them in His image, but because they had successfully adapted to changing environmental conditions and had passed on their survival-making characteristics” (Baym 9)
• Had a profound effect on social thinking as well
• Economic shifts bring more women to the workforce, but their options are still drastically limited

Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Plight of African Americans:

• 1865: with the passage of the 14th Amendment, four million slaves were freed
• Reconstruction (1867-1877): Federal Government attempted to radically restructure the South
• Massive economic rehabilitation
• Large black participation in local, state, and national politics
• New educational opportunities
• 1877: Federal troops withdrawn, and Reconstruction ends
• Southern blacks disenfranchised in the decades that followed
• By 1910, blacks were effectively barred from voting in all eleven former Confederate states
• “Jim Crow” Laws established segregation in everything from transportation to schooling
• About 60 percent of land in the South was owned by 10 percent of the white population
• 1866: Ku Klux Klan established; between 1866-1870 tens of thousands of blacks are murdered
• Between 1885 and 1910, at least 3500 black men were lynched (Lauter 19)
• All of this also did extensive psychological damage to African Americans

Immigration:

• 1870: US population is 38.5 million; 1910: 92 million; 1920: 123 million
• Most settle in the city (so populations shifts even more from rural to urban)
• Ethnic diversity increases
• Conflicting attitudes towards new Americans
• Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus” (1883): “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”
• Thomas Bailey Aldrich, “Unguarded Gates” (1894): “O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well / To leave the gates unguarded?”

Native Americans:

• Pushed towards assimilation to white ways, often with disastrous results
• Children removed from homes and taken to schools to learn English, white ways of living
• 1887: Dawes Act (also called General Allotment Act)
• Designed to give individual natives plots of land to live on, but did not take into consideration other factors including tribal traditions of collective land use, lack of capital for farming, poor quality of the land, etc.
• 1934: Dawes Act is finally repealed, but at this point only 48 million acres of land (less than 1.5 percent of the original amount) was in Native American hands (Lauter 22)

Realism:

• William Dean Howells: “Nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of the material” (qtd. in Baym 7)
• “… response to the sweeping economic, social, and political changes of post-war life; to the recognized need to capture, report, and interpret the world of the developing cities and the declining rural regions” (Lauter 10)
• “On the simplest level, realism was a matter of faithfulness to the surfaces of American life, and in its interest in accuracy it reflected the rise of science, and by the end of the nineteenth century, the social sciences, as a source of empirically derived truth” (Lauter 10)
• Also manifested in an interest in investigative journalism, popular fascination with photography (invention of Kodak camera in 1888) (Lauter 10)
• Emphasized ordinary people, everyday life, authentic speech patterns and dialogue

Naturalism:

• Understood as an extension or intensification of realism
• Literature in which “environmental forces, whether of nature or of the city, outweigh and overwhelm human agency, the individual can exert little or no control over determining events, and the world is at worst hostile, at best indifferent to humankind” (Lauter 12)
• Often focused on characters whose fates “are the product of degenerate heredity, a sordid environment, and a good deal of bad luck” (Baym 9)

Regional Writing:

• Large demand for stories of distinct regions of the United States
• Product of nostalgia for a disappearing way of life
• Way for people to “travel” through reading
• Primarily a genre for women writers
• “May been seen as an invitation to consider the world from the perspective of women awakening to, protesting against, and offering alternatives for a world dominated by male interests and values” (Baym 12)

Literature of social reform/Literature of Argument:

• Investigative (sometimes sensational) journalism: Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906), Ida B. Wells’ articles on lynching
• Up From Slavery and The Souls of Black Folk
• Native American writers like Sarah Winnemucca and Zitkala Sa

Works Cited
Baym, Nina, editor.  The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Volume C.  NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003.
Lauter, Paul, Editor.  The Heath Anthology of American Literature: Volume C.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006.