Sierra Prasada

I’ve previously introduced W.E.B. Du Bois on this blog as an opponent of Booker T. Washington’s, but he deserves significant mention in his own right as an influential and much-admired author, scholar, political organizer and, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “gifted discoverer of social truths.”

A classic of early sociology and African American history, The Souls of Black Folk consists of essays written by Du Bois between 1897 and 1901, essays on the history of the Freedmen’s Bureau; the black cultural milieu he encountered while studying and teaching in the South; the tragic death of his own infant son; the leadership of Washington; and black spirituals, among other topics. The book received mixed reviews when it was first published, but it sold well in its own time and many important contemporary figures, including Barack Obama, have cited Du Bois as an influence.

In the following excerpt, Du Bois raises two of the ideas for which he is best known, that of the ‘veil’ and the ‘double-consciousness’ of his people:

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world – a world which yields him no true self-consciousness but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife – this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of White Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American…

As Henry James himself recounts in the preface to his 1903 novel, The Ambassadors, first serialized in twelve installments of the North American Review, “never can a composition of this sort have sprung straighter from a dropped grain of suggestion.”

A few years earlier, a young American, Jonathan Sturges had shared an anecdote with James: At a Paris garden party, he’d approached a downcast William Dean Howells (also a novelist and the former editor of the Atlantic Monthly), and, on attempting to raise his spirits, found himself the audience of a spontaneous and heartfelt declaration by Howells, who urged him to rejoice in his youth and “Live!”

In James’s novel, the matriarch of an American industrial concern in Woollet, Massachusetts, has dispatched a middle-aged, paid subordinate Lambert Strether to Europe to retrieve her son Chad, with the understanding that should he succeed, she will marry him. Even as Strether courts disaster in succumbing (spiritually, mind you) to the lavish temptations of turn-of-the-century Paris, he grasps that they are no longer his to claim and, at a similar party, he turns and confides in his companion, a young artist:

Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had? This place and these impressions – mild as you may find them to wind a man up so; all my impressions of Chad and of people I’ve seen at his place – well, have had their abundant message for me, have just dropped that into my mind. I see it now. I haven’t done so enough before – and now I’m old; too old at any rate for what I see. Oh, I do see, at least; and more than you’d believe or I can express. It’s too late. And it’s as if the train had fairly waited at the station for me without my having had the gumption to now it was there. Now I hear its faint receding whistle miles and miles down the line. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. The affair – I mean the affair of life – couldn’t, no doubt, have been different for me; for it’s at the best a tin mould, either fluted and embossed, with ornamental excrescences, or else smooth and dreadfully plain, into which, a helpless jelly, one’s consciousness is poured – so that one ‘takes’ the form, as the great cook says, and is more or less compactly held by it; one lives in fine as one can. Still, one has the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t be, like me, without the memory of that illusion.

Strether, it turns out, is prepared to sacrifice much in struggling to claim even the “memory of that illusion.” Initially charmed by the clever and lively American expatriate Maria Gostrey, he finds the irresistible allure of Paris itself embodied in the unattainable Madame de Vionnet, the very woman whose entanglement with Chad threatens to block Strether from completing his ‘diplomatic’ mission.

Click here to listen to a playlist of music recorded in 1903, beginning with Edvard Hagerup Grieg playing “Remembrances.” Many thanks to Chuck Jones and friends for creating a music playlist for every year of the 20th century, so I don’t have to do it: 1900, 1901, 1902, 1903, 1904, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1908, and 1909…

More on the Flatiron building (built in 1902) and another 1903 Stieglitz print.

Just a few months ago, one of only two known copies commemorating the first World Series game sold at auction for a reported $241,500.

Over eight days in early October, 1903, the Boston Americans won five games to the Pittsburgh Pirates’ three, though the Pirates would take the series in 1909. More than 16,000 people showed up to watch the game at Huntington Avenue Baseball Grounds. The grounds have since been incorporated into Northeastern University but the grass – holy turf – went to Fenway Park and became part of its field.

For your trivia night: The Boston Americans changed their name to the Boston Red Sox in 1908 and went on to win six more world series up to the present day. The Pittsburgh Pirates suffered some name confusion in between 1897 and 1911, during which the United States Board on Geographic Names purportedly forced the city of Pittsburgh to drop the ‘h.’ The team restored the traditional spelling for the World Series poster but not the program.

Images: Poster (left) and program

In early January 1903, The New York Times deemed the serialization of a new James novel so noteworthy as to merit an article (PDF) about another article that itself heralded the debut of that serialization.

Both the serialization and the commentary ran in the North American Review. As The Times reported, William Dean Howells, the same man whose impassioned remarks inspired James to conceive of The Ambassadors, distinguished between James’s “readers” and his “enemies:”

Those people, who, [Howells] says, “frankly say they cannot bear [James], and then either honestly let him alone, or secretly hanker for him, and try if they cannot like him, or cannot bear him a little better,” are his enemies, but, [Howells] continues, many of [James's] readers are his enemies because they question his point of view and object to the world that, if there is truly such a world, the author does not paint truly.

Incidentally, Howells goes on to suggest that most of these “enemies” are women, those same readers who James credited for the rising swell of the novel just three years previous, and who are, apparently, reluctant captives of “the somewhat labyrinthine construction of Mr. James’s later sentences,” as Howells delicately puts it.

The renowned scholar William James, repeatedly chided his younger brother for the lack of “vigor and decisiveness” in his later works, and went as far as to urge Henry to write a more straightforward novel and publish it under the name of William James, who would then give Henry half the profits. Soon after, Henry inscribed one of his books, “To William James, [from] his incoherent, admiring, affectionate Brother, Henry James.”

It is rare in the present day to find, among James aficionados (both fictional and real), anyone reluctant to express a certain exasperation with James’s later works, that is The Wings of the Dove (1902) and The Golden Bowl (1904), as well as The Ambassadors. In Alan Bennett’s sublime novella The Uncommon Reader, the Queen of England discovers her own love of reading late in life and, eventually, as one does, picks up a James novel:

It was Henry James she was reading one tea time when she said out loud, ‘Oh, do get on.’
     The maid, who was just taking away the tea trolley, said ‘Sorry, ma’am,’ and shot out of the room in two seconds flat.
      ‘Not you, Alice,’ the Queen called after her, even going to the door. ‘Not you.’

In her contribution to NPR’s “You Must Read This” series, Anne Patchett gets to work reading The Ambassadors on the request of a friend:

And work it was. I followed Lambert Strether to Paris as he tried to reclaim the errant playboy Chad Newsome and return him home to his mother. The action was so subtle and the conversations so dense I could scarcely blink for fear of missing something. Suddenly reading felt more like deep sea diving, going miles out on a boat, suiting up in heavy gear, and then swimming down and down into that other world.

It’s an elegant backhanded compliment, and what follows is more unabashedly admiring. While reading The Ambassadors, I too felt as though I had been pulled into another world, not underwater but back to another era, and not merely the fact of it, which is hardly remarkable for a historic novel, but also the rich and wondrous feel. To read The Ambassadors, then, is to read with the same intensity that Lambert Strether urges his young friend to “live!”

When she lectured in Berlin on “The Dance of the Future,” Isadora Duncan articulated ideas that would form the core of Modern Dance, the movement she played a key role in originating:

The dancer of the future will be one whose body and soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of that soul will have become the movement of the body. The dancer will not belong to a nation but to all humanity.

She will dance not in the form of a nymph, nor fairy, nor coquette but in the form of a woman in its greatest and purest expression. She will realize the mission of woman’s body and the holiness of all its parts.

She will dance the changing life of nature, showing how each part is transformed into the other. From all parts of her body shall shine radiant intelligence, bringing to the world the message of the thoughts and aspirations of thousands of women. She shall dance the freedom of women …

For additional excerpts from her speech, click here.

Image: Isadora Duncan on the Lido in Venice, 1903 (Photographer: Raymond Duncan)

In 1903, the Minnesota advertising firm of Brown & Bigalow tasked Cassius Marcellus Coolidge with producing a series of oil paintings depicting dogs engaging in human activities; nine of the 16 paintings ultimately created by the now rarely recalled “Michelangelo of the dog world” feature man’s best friend playing poker.

More than 100 years later, “these signature works, for better or worse, are indelibly burned into the subconscious slide library of even the most un–art historically inclined person through their incessant reproduction on all manner of pop ephemera: calendars, t–shirts, coffee mugs, the occasional advertisement,” wrote Annette Ferrara in a take-no-prisoners article for the now defunct Ten By Ten magazine.

Allison Cooney, a specialist on American paintings for Sotheby’s offers a different assessment: “It’s a humorous, ironic take; a jab at middle-class America; another way of poking fun at ourselves.” The second interpretation, of course, is the more lucrative – two of the series sold for a combined $560,000 in 2005, setting a record for work produced in 1903.

For your trivia night: Both Coolidge and a more famous Cassius take their name from “one of the most eloquent antislavery politicians of the antebellum South, the Kentucky senator Cassius Marcellus Clay.” If you don’t remember Coolidge for his paintings, you can just as easily not remember that he is credited with having invented “Comic Foregrounds,” amusement park “placards of headless musclemen and bathing beauties that tourists could stick their own faces through, to be photographed.”

Image: His Station and Four Aces, 1903

Two years prior to his death in 1903, Smithsonian transportation curator John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. imagined “What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years” in an article for the Ladies Home Journal.

He successfully predicted the mass use of central air conditioning and heating (“Central plants will supply this cool air and heat to houses in the same way as now our gas or electricity is furnished”); the popularization of electronic appliances, including stereo systems (“Automatic instruments reproducing original airs exactly will bring the best music to the families of the untalented”); and the modern telephone (“A husband in the middle of the Atlantic will be able to converse with his wife sitting in her boudoir in Chicago”); as well as color photography, television, automobiles, genetically modified agriculture, globalization, x-ray technology and more.

The human life span, however, has increased considerably more than the 50 years he predicted; the English alphabet has retained the letters “C,” “Q” and “X,” and they are far from “unnecessary”; there are wild animals outside of “menageries;” our “air ships” do far more than successfully compete with “surface cars and water vessels for passenger or freight traffic”; and “huge forts on wheels” do not, in modern warfare, “dash across open spaces at the speed of [turn-of-the-century] express trains.”

I find it most curious that Watkins predicted free healthcare and amenities for the poor but not the end of poverty itself. Then again, maybe beet-sized peas are easier to imagine than the fall of the class system.

This catalogue of the astute and the ridiculous is worth reading in full, either via the original article or a more reader-friendly version.