Thirty-nine: The Sir Walter Disease

In a chapter of Life on the Mississippi (New York: P.F. Collier, 1917) entitled “Enchantments and Enchanters,” Mark Twain begins with a memory of seeing Mardi-Gras festivities in New Orleans in 1850. He remembered seeing a procession of the Mystic Crew of Comus, “with knights and nobles and so on, clothed in silken and golden Paris-made gorgeousness, planned and bought for that single night’s use; and in their train all manner of giants, dwarfs, monstrosities, and other diverting grotesquerie – a startling and wonderful sort of show, as it filed solemnly and silently down the street in the light of its smoking and flickering torches.”(373)

He then notes that Mardi-Gras had been a relic of French and Spanish “occupation” of the city, but that any religious origins of the festivities had been “pretty well knocked out of it now.” The reason for this, Twain tells us, is that “Sir Walter has got the advantage of the gentlemen of the cowl and rosary, and he will stay. His medieval business, supplemented by the monsters and the oddities, and the pleasant creatures from fairy-land, is finer to look at than the poor fantastic inventions and performances of the reveling rabble of the priest’s day, and serves quite as well, perhaps, to emphasize the day and admonish men that the grace-line between the worldly season and the holy one is reached.”(373-4)

More’s the pity, Twain believes. He is pleased that such pageantry is unlikely to spread beyond Memphis, St. Louis, and Baltimore to infect the “practical North”, let alone London. But he is obviously less than happy with the fixation of his own natal region on all this romanticism. “For the soul of it,” he intones, “is the romantic, not the funny and the grotesque. Take away the romantic mysteries, the kings and knights and big-sounding titles, and Mardi-Gras would die, down there in the South. The very feature that keeps it alive in the South – girly-girly romance – would kill it in the North or in London. Puck and Punch, and the press universal, would fall upon it and make merciless fun of it, and its first exhibition would be also its last.” (374)

Now, while we may be less sanguine than Twain about the career of romance in the dens of practicality, he certainly makes an interesting case about the South, framed nicely in relation to the French Revolution. He writes:

Against the crimes of the French Revolution and of Bonaparte may be set two compensating benefactions: the Revolution broke the chains of the ancien régime and of the Church, and made a nation of abject slaves a nation of freemen; and Bonaparte instituted the setting of merit above birth, and so completely stripped the divinity from royalty that, whereas crowned heads in Europe were gods before, they are only men since, and can never be gods again, but only figure-heads, and answerable for their acts like common clay. Such benefactions as these compensate the temporary harm which Bonaparte and the Revolution did, and leave the world in debt to them for these great and permanent services to liberty, humanity, and progress.(374-5)

One imagines that Twain is capable of believing that “abject slaves” would not just mean Frenchmen, but could include the bonded Haitian, and his similarly situated brother and sister in the Old South. But, liberty, humanity, and progress, were to be taxed commodities in the domain of literature. “Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments,” Twain continues,

and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society.(375)

What Twain tells us is quite important, I think.  Perhaps there is a historian who in a footnote about the Old South has mentioned the appeal of Sir Walter Scott to members of the slaveholding society; but none that I know of has gone so far as to attribute the characteristics of that society to changes in literary taste. With few exceptions, historians have a more materialistic bent, seeing culture as a reflection of material conditions – the superstructure built upon the economic base. Now, obviously one might still wonder why Scott might have the appeal in the Old South that Twain claims for him, attributing this to the institution of slavery perhaps, but one would still have to recognize what impact is being afforded a mere writer of Scottish romances. Twain notes:

He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote.  Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully as a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization, and so you have practical common sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works, mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried.(375)

So, according to Twain, the South had been held back by its adoration for the romance of Scott and “but for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner…would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed, and the South would be a generation further advanced than it is.”(375-6)  But the problems associated with the Scott disease were even more pernicious. For,

It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a major or a colonel, or a general or a judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter.(376)

Much of the honor code described by Bertram Wyatt Brown as central to Southern mentalité in Southern Honor, a work that come closer than most others to an idealist rather than materialist interpretation of the South, can be linked to this Scott fixation. And, more still, Twain claims that this fixation was one of its causes of the Civil War itself:

Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war. It seems a little harsh toward a dead man to say that we never should have had any war but for Sir Walter; and yet something of a plausible argument, might, perhaps, be made in support of that wild proposition. The Southerner of the American Revolution owned slaves; so did the Southerner of the Civil War; but the former resembles the latter as an Englishman resembles a Frenchman. The change of character can be traced rather more easily to Sir Walter’s influence than to that of any other thing or person.(376)

As one reads “Enchantments and Enchanters” one is reminded of both Connecticut Yankee in the Court of King Arthur and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The former work does a couple of things.  First, it places the representative of northern practicality in a Scott-like medieval setting, but with an unexpected twist. Rather than simply showing the idiocy of Arthurian society and ridiculing its conventions, as one might predict from this particular essay, Connecticut Yankee has its Yankee imposing his own conventions in such a way that “the modern” itself becomes problematic. Second, the work provides a parable about Reconstruction. While the South may have been a weird mix of medieval and modern, northerners’ attempts to reconstruct this region, without really knowing the extent of their own warped romanticism (and so their susceptibility to Southern wiles) and without understanding the region they were trying to reconstruct, would be abortive.

Huck Finn, by contrast, provides an antidote to Sir Walter’s fare. Twain ends the “Enchantments” essay by juxtaposing Scott’s work and that of Cervantes:

A curious exemplification of the power of a single book for good or harm is shown in the effects wrought by Don Quixote and those wrought by Ivanhoe. The first swept the world’s admiration for the medieval chivalry silliness out of existence; and the other restored it. As far as our South is concerned the good work done by Cervantes is pretty nearly a dead letter, so effectually has Scott’s pernicious work undermined it.(377-8)

Huck Finn provides an assault on the Scott-ridden South using Cervantine conventions. Huck is very much a Don Quixote maneuvering his way through the South’s pretensions to chivalric civilization, finding its limits in the contradictions and hypocrisies evident in the racism of the South. Huck’s companion, Jim, very much takes on the air of a Sancho Panza, uneducated and yet wise, especially by comparison with those who would keep him in bondage.

So, what of all this?  We have then a novelist who has transformed a society for ill – showing the power of the novel not just to tell us about particular kinds of societies and historical narratives, but also to mislead us, and in so doing create a historical memory that begins to shape history itself. We have another novelist attempting to put things to right in his own writing, and doing so via the muse of Miguel de Cervantes. As we have said in the introduction to these “novel histories” – all roads lead to Cervantes; we will get there yet.

Thirty-eight: The Transplanted

It goes without saying that The Graduate is an important movie. Few would disagree with this, I believe. The Graduate symbolizes for many an articulation of 1960s rebellion against the plastic world of the Organization Man. This was certainly how I viewed it when I first saw it. Although I was only thirteen, and it was my first weekend at my public (private) school, this was close to the sixties and the feelings of that decade were very much in the air. A few weeks later the school screened Lindsay Anderson’s If, which was asking for trouble since it ends with Malcolm McDowell standing atop Cheltenham Cathedral (if I recall correctly) raining bullets down on the parents and teachers of his own public school. The association of The Graduate with rebellion, which was probably there anyway, was further accentuated in my mind as a result of the juxtaposition of these movies. While confused in its own way – adopting the system’s mode of conformity (Benjamin’s desire to marry Elaine) to protest against conformity – The Graduate nonetheless opens a gaping hole in the monochromatic suburban landscape.

The movie also comes at the end of an era in Hollywood history, and represents an interesting counterpoint to The Jazz Singer. The earlier film represented the coming of age of the Jewish mogul bringing to the fore the internal conflict of the sons of immigrants endeavoring to assimilate into American culture. Produced in 1927, three years after the Johnson-Reed Act effectively cut off immigration, the story revealed Jake Rabinowitz turning himself into Jack Robin and dating fellow Broadway dancer and Jew, Mary Dale. While the movie appears on the surface to celebrate the continuity of Jewish traditions, alongside the emergent “American” culture (baseball and apple pie), the reality of a nation cutting off the immigrants from the “old world”, and the coming rush to the uniform suburbs, left the culture of the cantor and the synagogue seeming quaint and moribund. What followed in Hollywood was several decades of Jewish producers, directors, and actors, helping to create an image of America that was decidedly WASPish in most of its aspects.

The Graduate, however, does the exact reverse of The Jazz Singer. Made by Anglicized [Americanized?] Jews, like the director Mike Nichols, it turns a story of a WASP youth into that of a Jewish rebel thumbing his nose at the establishment. This was not a deliberate move on Nichols’ part, apparently, but rather came to fruition with the hiring of Dustin Hoffman (as opposed to Robert Redford) to play the lead role. Seeing Hoffman’s audition enabled Nichols to see that Benjamin’s alienation could be rendered as more than just a product of generational difference; it could become something embedded in Hoffman’s appearance as not being the tall, handsome, bronzed and blonde California male. The question would be asked, how did these goy parents have this Jewish kid? – though, of course, many Jewish parents would have endeavored to pass as WASPs throughout the 1950s. When you throw in the music of Simon and Garfunkel and Benjamin’s waving of a large cross at the wedding-goers – a reversal of sorts of Jesus cleansing the synagogue of the money-changers, since these were now being locked in the church – then the fact that “Jesus loves you more than you know” no longer amounts to a point of great importance, or anything more than irony. What comes to mind is William Jennings Bryan’s statement, “Thou shalt not crucify mankind on a Cross of Gold,” except the cross is now being waved by Hoffman at all the Christians – when Bryan would have had it the other way around.

In this guise, The Graduate takes on the form of a second pronouncement on the closing of the frontier and a revenge of the east against the west. California was the last land of the settlers, those who responded to the call to “go west young man,” and the most recently developed section of the United States as a result of the great growth of the military-industrial complex during and in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The establishment of a chemical industry, which provides the single word “plastics” for the movie, represents the coming of age of industrial capital in California, and Benjamin’s return from the East – a land associated in the minds of Dustin Hoffman and Mike Nichols with Jewish intellectuals (e.g., Dylan and Lenny Bruce) who had also been the backbone of the labor movement in the 19th century – is the injection of a foreign agent into this mix. De Tocqueville, one feels, is close at hand. While Benjamin doesn’t fit the mold of the radical protesting at Berkeley, there are allusions to these disturbances, and his protest is powerful nonetheless. In the process, he ends up transplanting Jack Robin back into his earlier persona as Jakie Rabinowitz, taking him out of his convertible (suburban) and placing him back on public transport (urban), all just in time for social historians to rediscover the immigrant community;   

Thirty-seven: The Widening Horizon

One of Paul Lyon’s notable characteristics was his ability to pepper almost every encounter with some information that one did not know, though one frequently felt that one ought to know it. I remember on first meeting Paul in the fall of 1996, standing at the top of the stairs from the I-wing gym (I didn’t know at the time that this would be one of the places we would most frequently bump into each other, Paul holding his gym clothes), he informed me about a trip he had made to England in the 1960s during which he had stayed with distant relatives in the large and extensive Jewish community of Leeds. Well, of course, the fact that there was a large Jewish community in Leeds was news to me, and almost every subsequent encounter followed in a similar vein as I learned about historians and academics he knew (and I should have), about Philip Roth and Newark in the 50s, about incidents at the college, and on and on.

One name that came up frequently was E.H. Carr, an English historian we history undergraduates all read in our first weeks at British universities. I had some recollection of his work – What is History? – remembering mainly the outlines of his various points about the study of history, and the fact that these fit loosely within a Marxist approach; but I had not gone back to it, and the finer points Paul made about Carr were, truth to tell, frequently more opaque for me than they perhaps should have been. But I got enough of a sense from Paul, during many of these conversations, that Carr had been a guiding light for him in shaping his approach to his research and writing.

Added to this, I also knew that Paul did not believe that there was a clear divide between his work as a historian and his commitment to social work. It was no surprise to me when I read this in his self-evaluation letter for his application for the Distinguished Professorship. He believed that the two parts of his work were linked, and he felt, not surprisingly, that Stockton was a place where he could realize his vision of himself as a Social Work Historian, or a Historian Social Worker. The present informed his understanding of the past and his understanding of the past shaped his action in the present. He was a little mystified, I believe, when it was suggested that he wasn’t a real historian or not a real social work professor; he believed he was both and more. He would also have been mystified by the need to explain how a historian ended up as a social worker, or how a social worker ended up writing so much history.

Well, it turns out that Edward Hallett Carr's work may have been an inspiration for this vision of himself as crossing boundaries of disciplines in the way that he did. One of the wonderful parts of the memorial service for Paul was the invitation to go up to his office and pick out a book of his to take away and keep as a memento. You just know that he would have loved this idea! And, I imagine that many others like me went into his office wanting to find something that spoke to them directly, or in some way brought them and Paul into some form of connection. Well, I was having great difficulty – we had talked about so many topics and had many overlaps in our work – until my eyes looked up at the top shelf where Paul kept his volumes on the study of history.  There in the midst of these books, was a hardback copy of Carr’s What is History? published in 1967. Once I had seen it, it took me no time whatsoever to choose this book, as I certainly felt a compulsion at that moment to find out more about Paul’s view of this discipline that we had inhabited together.

I certainly was not disappointed in my decision.  When I got home and opened the book I found many passages highlighted, which, it seemed to me, placed a lot of Paul’s comments in context and helped me to understand better what he felt he was doing in his work. I thought I would take note of a few in case you are also interested.

The first comment that seemed to conjure up Paul for me was this: “Great history is written precisely when the historian’s vision of the past is illuminated by insights into the problems of the present” (p.44).  Here, already, you can see Paul engaging both past and present simultaneously, feeling his way around the present in social work, in part to help him understand history better.

But, a longer passage (which Paul had marked both in yellow magic marker and with two bold ink lines down the margin), struck me as significant, in terms of the relationship between social work and history – if one were to substitute social work for sociology in this contrast with history:

This is perhaps the place for a brief remark on the relations between history and sociology. Sociology at present faces two opposite dangers – the danger of becoming ultra-theoretical and the danger of becoming ultra-empirical. The first is the danger of losing itself in abstract and meaningless generalizations about society in general. Society with a big S is as misleading a fallacy as History with a big H. This danger is brought nearer by those who assign to sociology the exclusive task of generalizing from the unique events recorded by history: it has even been suggested that sociology is distinguished from history by having “laws.” The other danger is that foreseen by Karl Mannheim almost a generation ago, and very much present today, of a sociology “split into a series of discrete technical problems of social readjustment. Sociology is concerned with the historical societies every one of which is unique and molded by specific historical antecedents and conditions. But the attempt to avoid generalization and interpretation by confining oneself to so-called “technical” problems of enumeration and analysis is merely to become the unconscious apologist of a static society. Sociology, if it is to become a fruitful study, must, like history, concern itself with the relation between the unique and general. But it must also become dynamic – a study not of society at rest (for no such society exists), but of social change and development. For the rest, I would only say that the more sociological history becomes, and the more historical sociology becomes, the better for both.  Let the frontier between them be kept wide open for two-way traffic. (83-84)

I can hear Paul talking about the need not to become “an apologist of a static society,” of the need to understand that society is not “at rest,” and the need for “two-way traffic” between disciplines; and I can imagine him feeling that the two parts of his work strengthened each other.

The next passage speaks more to Paul’s ability to write about people with whom he didn’t necessarily agree, as in his last book on Conservatives and Conservatism:

Let us therefore reject the notion of the historian as a hanging judge, and turn to the more difficult but more profitable question of the passing of moral judgments not on individuals, but on events, institutions, or policies of the past. These are the important judgments of the historian; and those who insist so fervently on the moral condemnation of the individual sometimes unconsciously provide an alibi for whole groups and societies. (100)

And the Paul, who adapted to new ways of looking at things, and he certainly did, could be found in this statement:

The abstract standard or value, divorced from society and divorced from history, is as much an illusion as the abstract individual. The serious historian is the one who recognizes the historically conditioned character of all values, not the one who claims for his own values an objectivity beyond history. (108)

The last chapter of What is History? is called “The Widening Horizon,” and I think Paul had really taken this chapter to heart. The chapter talks about the limitations of Hegel (imagining that history ended in the present), the failure of Marx (in believing that it ended in a particular kind of proletarian revolution), and it praised Freud for his contribution to our understanding of history (once again highlighting the significance of interdisciplinarity for Paul). Freud, Paul highlighted, “has encouraged the historian to examine himself and his own position in history, the motives – perhaps hidden motives – which have guided his choice of theme, or period and his selection and interpretation of the facts, the national and social background which has determined his angle of vision, the conception of the future which shapes his conceptions of the past.” But, for Carr, and I think for Paul, history was about the future – that widening horizon. It was about endeavoring to understand the past in order to make the future better. You clearly got the sense of this in the well-crafted film of Paul teaching screened during the memorial service. He outlined the histories of slavery and some of the negative aspects of the American experience, talked about some of the achievements (and the idealism of the “City upon a Hill”), and gave a clear sense of how he felt things ought to be. This was the idealist in him; not the Hegelian or Marxist idealist, who thinks he knows how things should end up looking, but the simple humanist; one who looks forward to the future because he sees the possibility of making things better than they now are, however imperfect and in need of change they will remain.

My very last conversation with Paul occurred the day before he went into hospital, though he didn’t mention that he was going to be having a check-up of any kind. We talked about the lecture engagements in China that I had helped arrange for him, and about his hopes for American Studies at Stockton, and we talked about me writing a letter for his Distinguished Professor file. We then happened to fall into conversation about the former Yugoslavia and about the dissident intellectual, Mihailo Markovic, whom we both had known at Penn, just before Paul started at Stockton (when he was teaching history). Markovic, who ended up being severely beaten (Paul informed me) for breaking with the Milosovic regime, had advocated challenging theory with praxis. He was a dissident primarily because he wouldn’t fall in line with the orthodox views of his country’s rulers. I could see that Paul had really imbibed a good deal of this spirit, wanting to insure that his own work was grounded in some form of engagement, and I remember saying as he left (he had other meetings to go to) that we should get lunch and talk about it some more.

Paul was always going to leave some things unsaid; he had so much to say that things would inevitably be left for further discussion. I think I like that feeling of being left in mid-conversation – perhaps, in part, because it allows me to make up his lines in future imagined dialogues, lines that I will inevitably agree with! – but more because it keeps a connection with him going, like reopening the pages of What is History? And after delving into this book again, I think it is clear that Paul endeavored to widen the horizon for everyone he came into contact with; and he succeeded with so many!

Thirty-six: A Common Wind

Pulled kicking and screaming from the archive, this essay is one of the short pieces published in my second book, Inside Out, Outside In: Essays in Comparative History (St. Martin's Press/Macmillan, 2000). It combines the readings of a couple of different novels separated by almost twenty years. The first was E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, which I read in the summer of 1980, not long after the book had appeared. I had been spending a year as an exchange student at the University of Pennsylvania and I was on a road trip out to the Rocky Mountains with my brother and some friends. On the trip, when I wasn't doing my share of driving the beat up 1966 Mustang, I would read quite voraciously. I also consumed The World According to Garp, I believe, and a fair amount of James Baldwin.

While reading through Ragtime the novel struck me as very familiar. Quite by happenstance, I had just finished reading all the Heinrich von Kleist short stories, and the similarities between one of the subplots in Ragtime and “Michael Kolhaas” seemed to be more than coincidence. I have never seen any criticism of the work along these lines, but I believe that this borrowing from Kleist is fairly well known. What was compelling to me at the time was the use of a story about nascent class struggle in Europe for the development of a narrative highlighting American race relations. Using E.P. Thompson’s work on The Making of the English Working Class for developing a social history of African Americans (as I would later attempt to do in my first book, Sparks from the Anvil of Oppression) was a logical extension of this transnational borrowing.

Many years later, however, I was sitting in Pune reading V.S. Naipaul's A Way in the World. The manner in which Naipaul questioned the notion of agency, particularly in the context of analysis of race (almost claiming that deploying such a notion might be ethnocentric), forced my mind back to my reading of Kleist and Doctorow. This reading made me wonder whether "Michael Kolhaas" really worked in the manner used by Doctorow, and whether that would still be the case if one looked at another of Kleist's story which dealt specifically with the Haitian Revolution. These thoughts led to the following musings.

  

Yet die not; do thou

  Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow

Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,

Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind

  Powers that will work for thee; air, earth and skies;

There’s not a breathing of the common wind

  That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;

  Thy friends are exultations, agonies,

And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.

– William Wordsworth, To Toussaint L'Ouverture[1]

In E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, the central character, a black musician named Coalhouse Walker, Jr. is driven to rebellion against white society by the actions of members of a volunteer fire brigade. Walker is a successful, self-respecting black man. He is driving his Model T. Ford past the fire station when he is stopped and his car is dismantled as part of a racist practical joke. The firemen are saying, in effect, you may be successful but in America you are still black.[2]

Receiving no satisfaction from the authorities, Walker takes the law into his own hands and carries out a reign of terror in New York City, culminating in the takeover of J. Peirpont Morgan’s museum and Booker T. Washington’s unsuccessful intervention to placate the rebel and have him turn himself in. In effect, Walker’s predicament and his response to it represent a commentary on Washington’s accommodationist philosophy.

As many know, this Doctorow novel owes its origin to a short story written at the beginning of the 19th century by a young German novelist named Heinrich von Kleist.[3] Kleist’s story, based on events that occurred in the 16th century, was named “Michael Kolhaas” and was about a successful young horse-dealer who has two of his hoses detained and ill-treated by the Junka von Tronka, whose land he happens to be traveling through. His horses are taken away from him in the most dishonorable fashion and Kolhaas seeks retribution, sacrificing everything he has, family and property, for revenge against the Tronka and the society that elevated him. The story is set in the sixteenth century, and so we find Martin Luther attempting to intervene. But Luther is concerned only for law and order, and is unreceptive to Kolhaas's claim that he had to make this stand, he could do no other.

Almost two centuries divides these two authors, but the story seems to work in both instances. On the first occasion it is applied to the issues of class, the division between the aristocrats of Germany and a nascent bourgeois class; the author is a man looking back at these social developments through the events of the French Revolution. In the second instance, the same scenario is attached to the racial divide in the United States at the nadir of post-emancipation race relations; in this case Doctorow is surveying this nadir from a post-Civil Rights movement perspective.

But this equivalence is all too neat, and this is so in a way that I think tells us something about the dangers of bringing categories of class and race together. What do we miss if we make the jump from Kolhaas to Coalhouse reflexively? What we miss is the event that always seems to be missed – the Haitian revolution.[4]  A short story that might easily be paired with “Michael Kolhaas” is Kleist’s “Betrothal in Santo Domingo.”[5] In this story we see the world turned upside down. What we see is the Kolhaases of Saint Domingue determining that they too need to make their stand. Their butchery, however, is not looked on quite so favorably as Kolhaas's. In Kolhaas's case we are dealing with a victim, and his rebellion is justifiable. In the case of Congo Hoango and company, it seems to be evil and sheer savagery at work. While Martin Luther is to be ridiculed for intervening on the side of authority in the Kolhaas piece, one feels that there is a desperate need for some Luther figure in the second story.  Only if we carry forward the story about Kolhaas to the era of ragtime without knowledge of Haiti do we feel comfortable with the transposition. With Haiti in place we feel some dissonance, that the narrative is doing work that it was not intended to do. Either it cannot be applied to race, or Coalhouse has in a way been deracinated – incorporated into a system where we are to feel sympathy with him as no different from one of “us.” But the questions that were evaded in the previous story – what of the peasants whom Luther also condemned and the other “walking fertilizer”, what of such people? – these things become clear when we know that some stands against oppression are to be valorized while others, however equivocal, however (non)-violent, are to be condemned.

But here we do an injustice to Heinrich von Kleist. For, what arises from the juxtaposition of these two stories is the realization that it is inadequate to take on the position of comfortable narrator and have the story develop along easy lines of good against evil. In the case of Kolhaas, we now know that the first part of the story, based on an 18th-century chronicle was written in 1808. The later part, which introduces a lot of complication and tends to undermine the realism of the first half, was written two years later, at about the time that Kleist was writing his story of Santo Domingo.[6] In this later part Kleist introduces a gypsy-woman who gives to Kolhaas a talisman, and in so doing introduces a “bizarre and fantastic sub-plot” to the story. What this sub-plot does, in effect, is take the easy identification with Kolhaas as protagonist away from the reader; Kolhaas now has a thirst for revenge that isn’t merely reducible to his mistreatment. If this is an example of Nietsche’s aphorism that “I am just” really means “I am avenged,” then this is no different for others, who like Kolhaas have had their “agency” stripped from them. In effect, Kleist racializes Kolhaas, he also endeavors to “class-ify” Santo Domingo.

In “The Betrothal in Santo Domingo,” Kleist invites the reader to adopt a racial categorization in which white is good and black is evil, and then at almost every point along the way he attempts to dismantle this. A black woman’s evil act of luring a white slaveowner to her bed when she is dying of yellow fever, is contrasted with a white woman’s nobility when she goes to the guillotine during the French Revolution in place of her fiancée. These are the two stories that the Swiss mercenary tells to the two women who have themselves lured him into an evil trap.

The younger of these two women, Toni, who is the daughter of a mulatto woman and white Frenchman, and was born in Paris, has been given the assignment of trapping white men so that Congo Hoango, an ungrateful former slave and leader of ex-slaves in that section of the island, can kill them. But Toni falls in love with this young Swiss mercenary, and in a way seems to whiten herself. Her attempt to save the Swiss soldier, however, leads him to suspect that she has been trying to trap him, and when she finally brings about his rescue, he kills her. Once he learns the truth, he puts a pistol to his own mouth and commits suicide (with the kind of mess only Kleist seems to be able to savor, and in the manner that the author would a few months later end his own life).

The racial categorization is complicated by Toni’s actions, by the fact that in her eyes not all whites are the same as the French slaveowners, and by Kleist’s attempts to humanize the actions of Hoango and Toni’s mother as the story progresses. In addition, the former slaves are no different from French revolutionaries, who are described in the story of the noble white woman, as 'inhuman monsters' and 'butchers.' But, in the end it does not matter: the Swiss man seems trapped in his vision of the woman as either good or evil, white or black – tragedy will follow.

The memory of these events and the couple’s love for each other, occurring in the face of General Dessalines’ march on Port-au-Prince, about which Kleist announces, “the world knows,” is reduced to a small monument hidden beneath a bush in the garden of a Swiss family who had been saved by the young couple. In such ways, stories that go against the grain of world historical events become silences to be searched for and retrieved.

Thinking of Kolhaas and Haiti, of the “common wind,” V.S. Naipaul's A Way in the World comes to mind.[7] For it is altogether too easy to make one-dimensional men out of revolutionaries – to divest Kolhaas of his irrationality. Naipaul describes the work of an English travel writer during the period just prior to decolonization, who was sympathetic to the Grenadian workers’ struggles in Trinidad of that period. In one particular strike led by a Kolhaas-like figure, Tubal Uriah Buzz Butler, and supported by a character Naipaul calls Lebrun, who appears to be modeled on George Padmore (with a twist of C.L.R. James for good measure), the English author gets carried away in his praise, turning Butler into a figure of the stature of a Gandhi. According to Naipaul:

The strike he and the trade unions called came close to being an insurrection. A policeman was burned alive in the oilfield area. The government began to recruit and arm volunteers. The atmosphere would have been like that of 1805 or 1831, when there was talk of a slave revolt. And then, as happened in the slave days, passion died down, and people returned to being themselves.

This was the subject of the English writer’s book. He (Foster Morris)

wrote of Tubal Uriah Butler and the people around him. He wrote of them with the utmost seriousness. He gave them families, backgrounds; he treated what they said without irony. Nothing like this had been written about local people before. He wrote of them as though they were English people – as though they had that kind of social depth and solidity and rootedness.

For Naipaul, this was praiseworthy, “well-intentioned,...but it was wrong”:

What was missing from Foster Morris’s view was what we all lived with: the sense of the absurd, the idea of comedy, which hid from us our true position. The social depth he gave to ordinary people didn't make sense. That idea of a background – and what it contained: order and values and the possibility of striving: perfectability – made sense only when people were more truly responsible for themselves. We weren’t responsible in that way. Much had been taken from our hands. We didn’t have backgrounds. We didn’t have a past. For most of us the past stopped with our grandparents; beyond that was blank. If you could look down at us from the sky you would see us living in our little houses between the sea and the bush; and that was a kind of truth about us, who had been transported to that place. We were just there, floating.(p. 81)

Foster Morris, acting the part of social scientist, “didn’t understand the nature of our deprivation.” He saw “versions of English people and simplified us.” He could not see that Butler was considered by his followers, simultaneously, “a kind of messiah” and “a crazed and uneducated African preacher” (p. 82). Morris also could not understand that the policeman was not someone reviled by the insurrectionists, “that he was to become, in calypso and folk memory, a special sacrificial figure, as famous as Uriah Butler himself, and almost as honoured.” (p. 82).

Morris's “rescue” project had avoided condescension towards the Butlers and Kolhaases, it is true; but what of those who could not be given their moment of reason in the face of oppression? They would remain un-anglicized, their irrationality – of which they would have the usual measure – characterizing them as far as it was necessary to characterize them at all.

Notes

[1] In Helen Gardner, ed., The New Oxford Book of English Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 504.

[2] E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime (New York: Vintage Books, 1991).

[3] Heinrich von Kleist, The Marquise of O and Other Stories (Middlesex: Penguin, 1985), pp. 114-213.

[4] Trouillot, Silencing the Past.

[5] Kleist, The Marquise, pp. 231-269..

[6] David Luke and Nigel Reeves, 'Introduction," in ibid., pp. 27-31.

[7] A Way in the World (New York: Vintage, 1994).

Thirty-five: Of Epigrammatology

Words Worthy of a Martyr

There’s not a breathing of the common wind

That will forget thee…

                        – William Wordsworth, To Toussaint L’Ouverture 

I used this epigraph in an essay on Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kolhaas and E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, (see #25, The Common Wind) because I wanted to link the self-destructive, suicidal resistance of both Kolhaas and Michael Coalhouse, Jr. to the “common wind” mentioned by William Wordsworth. But there was more to be found in these words than this alone. Here one witnessed arguably the most important English romantic poet waxing lyrical on the rebellion in Haiti. I and other school kids were brought up in England to believe that the romantic poets had largely focused on nature, and if they ever did stretch to politics it was either in the form of a harking back to traditional rural England, or a momentary infatuation with the French Revolution. That they might have even known anything about the plight of slaves in the French Caribbean, or anywhere else for that matter, would remain beyond our ken. Yet, in these words, the empire and the descendent of Africa were found right at the heart of European culture.

This epigraph from Wordsworth’s poem for Toussaint L’Ouverture speaks to the condition of martyrdom that western nations are now doing so much to promote [e.g. in Iraq]. It might seem odd, at first glance, to think that an English Romantic poet would have found much to praise in Toussaint. Yet this is not so much about praise as it is about the realization that the European endeavor to shackle the descendants of Africa would inevitably unleash forces that would never be fully contained. The rebel only needed to breathe “the common wind” to gain sustenance. This points to the fundamental fallacy that has governed Euro-American global policy ever since. Systems that are felt to be oppressive by those who inhabit them cannot be sustained by war and force. How much more is this so, when that common wind is bolstered by the fact that those who would contain local insurgencies endeavor to do so in the name of freedom and democracy?

Thirty-four: Of Epigrammatology

War and the Intellectuals

The many wars that have been fought in Europe since 1855, and are likely to be fought during the next twenty years, have or will have for one of their causes the discovery of Sanskrit.  Though in itself this is by no means a very gratifying result, still I allude to it to simply show how deeply the Europeans have been influenced by the new ideas.

         – R.G. Bhandarkar, “The Critical, Comparative and Historical Method of Inquiry,” 1888[1]

This epigram is really quite staggering, in my opinion. The comment is just one of many made by a relatively little known (outside of India) Sanskritist and Brahman intellectual who lived in Poona in the latter part of the 19th century. One weekend, I happened to be browsing through the several volumes of R.G. Bhandarkar’s work owned by my father-in-law, and the title of the piece from which the comment came jumped out at me. I consider myself a comparativist so I was immediately curious to see what an Indian intellectual had been writing about comparative history over one hundred years ago. It is worth remembering that the discipline of history was in its infancy as a profession at this time in both Europe and America, and, while many were implicitly undertaking comparative analysis (particularly comparing the United States and Europe), few would have talked of a comparative method or described themselves as comparativists. So I felt an immediate dislocation in finding someone whom one would have expected to be behind his European counterparts in this regard actually several steps ahead of them. 

But this is not the only displacement that is evident here. After making a pretty outrageous statement (to which I will return), Bhandarkar ends by indicating that the Europeans are finally catching up. The Europeans have been “deeply…influenced” by the new ideas. About a hundred years before historians and literary theorists began to argue that the empire struck back, that western intellectuals gained many of their ideas from the colonized, and that the transmission of ideas and culture was not a one-way street (with Europeans imposing themselves on or “uplifting” the natives), Bhandarkar was saying very much the same thing.

And look at the statement itself: One of the causes of European wars has been and will be the discovery of Sanskrit! How can this possibly be? Who else has ever suggested this? Where do we find examples of our comparative historians ever using their comparative method to so radically alter perceived historical truth? And what if Bhandarkar is right?  Certainly anyone who has ever read about the Paris negotiations following World War I and Woodrow Wilson’s obsession with linguistic communities, anyone who has analyzed Nazi obsessions with liebensraum for Germans (whoever they might be), and anyone observing the kind of break-up that occurred in Europe following the demise of the Soviet Union, would recognize that there may be a kernel of truth in Bhandarkar’s comment. And yet, who would pursue this line of reasoning further?

The epigram seemed to me to be perfect for an essay that was endeavoring to challenge the way that we undertake comparative history of the United States and the way in which so many Americanists have heard the sirens’ call of exceptionalism.[2] But are we surprised that the sirens’ call is heeded so frequently when so few Americanists have read Bhandarkar?

Notes

[1] N.B. Utgikar and V.G. Paranjpe, eds., Collected Works of R.G. Bhandarkar, vol.1 (Poona: Bhandarkar Oridental Research Institute, 1933), p. 390.

[2] “Apropos Exceptionalism: Imperial Location and Comparative Histories of South Africa and the United States,” in Inside Out, Outside In: Essays in Comparative History (Macmillan, 2000), 5.

Thirty-three: Of Epigrammatology

Non, Je ne regrette rien, except…

I have one great regret regarding my essay, “Making the World Safe for American History,” which was published in Antoinette Burton’s edited volume, After the Imperial Turn (Duke, 2003).  It has nothing to do with anything that might substantially alter the content of the essay. I would not want to change my analysis much, though I am sure there must be something problematic in what I have to say somewhere in the essay.

Indeed, the essay seems to have had very favorable responses. One hears through the grapevine that some such fellow really liked it, but funnily enough one hears less frequently directly from the people themselves. C’est la vie. It doesn’t seem to lead to invitations to give lectures or the like, even while the targets of the essay itself seem to be fêted across this fair and meritocratic land of ours. But, there are no regrets on that score either. Indeed, when one gets a review in The Historical Journal from a historian as smart as Susan Pedersen at Columbia University (and we know that she is smart, not just from the well-written and thought-provoking review of the whole volume, but because she liked my work!), then it brings a smile to one’s face that almost makes one forget the regret associated with the essay.

For, Professor Pedersen writes that there are a number of “gems” in the volume dealing with historiographical and interpretive battles. And, she continues,

my favourite essay among this group is Robert Gregg’s splenetic and very funny skewering of the recent endorsement of an ‘international turn’ by the doyens of the Organization of American Historians (‘Making the World Safe for American History’), a ‘turn’ whose muddle-headedness he finds captured perfectly in a recent invitation-only meeting to discuss this project held (as all good conference-cum-boondoggles should be!) at the Villa La Pietra in Florence. (‘Let’s be honest now, Gregg writes disarmingly, ‘My real beef with OAH’s conference on internationalizing the study of American history at La Pietra was that I was not a participant.  Had I been invited…I would be endorsing the La Pietra Report in a snap, like all the other worthies on the participant list.’ (p. 173).) It is nice for us he was not invited [not for me], though, for exclusion provides him with the perspective (or perhaps just the animus) to point out that – as should be obvious to anyone taking a cab, buying a newspaper, or simply spending five minutes contemplating the furnishings and appliances of their own home – one scarcely needs to travel to Florence to understand how utterly ‘global’ is the history of this mature settler state [nice]. As Gregg mildly proposes, ‘internationalizing American history might be more effectively demonstrated by endeavouring to bring out the global buried [clearly not very deeply] within the local’ (p. 171).

Who wouldn’t enjoy reading that about their work?

Nonetheless the work itself is a disappointment to me. Just look at the epigraphs in the piece. I use one from the album “Who’s Next?” but I could have used one so much better from the same song (“Won’t get fooled again”) that this one came from. I was in the car the other day and these lines came floating over all those annoying engine sounds:

And the world looks just the same,

And history ain’t changed….

Damn!  How could I have missed those lines?

Well, I feel a little better now.

Thirty-two: Of Epigrammatology

The Unreliable Informant

He is an English man

For he himself has said it

And it’s greatly to his credit…

for despite all temptations

to belong to other nations

he is an English man

                        Gilbert and Sullivan, “The Pirates of Penzance”

Now, anyone who knows anything about Gilbert and Sullivan knows that this is not the “Pirates of Penzance,” but is rather “H.M.S. Pinafore.” It is such an elementary mistake, that it is curious that I should have made it in my last book, Inside Out, Outside In: Essays in Comparative History. Needless to say, the mistake was deliberate.  Here’s why I did it.

The essay in which this epigram was used was entitled “Beyond Silly Mid-off: C.L.R. James, Ranjitsinhji, and the Boundaries of Englishness.” This title itself may need explaining for those uninitiated in the splendors of English cricket (though I could probably count myself one since I haven't played the game in over 35 years and until the Lagaan revival hadn't watched it in ten). The position of silly mid-off is one extremely close to the bat, and a fielder (the mid-off, akin to a shortstop) is positioned there only when the fielding team is pretty confident that the batter is going to give up a catch and is unlikely to be able to make a big hit off the bowling. This can be somewhat insulting to the batter (an assault on his masculinity), so often the response of that same batter is to move down the wicket and take an almighty swing at the ball, very much endangering the welfare state of the silly mid-off. C.L.R. James is the author, among a host of other things, of the most cited sports history text, Beyond a Boundary. One of the arguments he makes in this work is that cricket was not merely something the English imposed on those they colonized – an opiate or a mechanism for social control; it also became a medium through which, and the idiom in which the colonized turned the ideology of the colonizer on its head. While there is no denying the power and persuasiveness of his text, my article endeavored to suggest that even the most subtle of theorists could not step beyond the boundaries of empire, but rather continually found him or herself fielding at silly-mid-off again.

A key element in this argument was the manner in which the cricketer Ranjitsinhji was deployed in Beyond a Boundary and the way in which South Asians in the Caribbean were written out of the story. The section on Ranjitsinhji, in particular, endeavored to suggest that the very Englishness of cricket could be considered in many respects a confection created by this Indian Prince. This was the section that used the words from this particular Gilbert and Sullivan song as its epigraph. For, interestingly, there is something very imperial about the words of this song; Englishness is up for grabs here. There is choice. Though, of course, Gilbert is suggesting that to be English is the right choice, one that Indians and Africans might want to consider (rather than following the nationalist example provided by the Americans), and also a better one than opting for being German, French, Japanese, or another imperial identity. Ranjitsinhji certainly made this choice, playing cricket for England, and supporting the English team as it went into bat against the Germans on the Western Front.

But the words of the song are also quintessentially English and, along with the rest of the work (that old oily cart) written by these two men, they are often thought of when people think of Victorian Britain. To get them wrong, both in the wording (should it not be: “in spite of all temptation”, which scans better?) and in the attribution, is nigh on criminal – especially for an Englishman. But as Salman Rushdie suggests in his essay on unreliable narration in Midnight’s Children, such things are important as ways of “deflating that narrational pomposity,” and can serve as “a way of telling the reader to maintain a healthy distrust.” We should end with Rushdie: 

History is always ambiguous.  Facts are hard to establish, and capable of being given many meanings. Reality is built on our prejudices, misconceptions and ignorance as well as on our perceptiveness and knowledge. The reading of Saleem’s unreliable narration might be, I believed, a useful analogy for the way in which we all, every day, attempt to ‘read’ the world. [1]

[1] Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-91 (London: Granta Books, 1991), p. 25.

Thirty-one: Of Epigrammatology

Omaha

Hey Mister, if you you’re going to walk on water

You know you’re only going to walk all over me.

                     Adam Duritz

One of my favorite singer-songwriters is Adam Duritz, the front man for Counting Crows. My fondness for his work dates from the very first album, “August and Everything After” (1993), not just because of its undeniable quality, but also because it provided me with one of my very first epigrams. 

I had used epigrams all the way back to my first book, Sparks from the Anvil of Oppression, but these epigrams were clearly apposite and in a way positivistic in their role in the work; they seemed to speak exactly to the content of the chapter that they headed, and the connection was fairly obvious and straightforward for the reader. The newer ones, which generally followed in the wake of the Duritz quote sometimes required explanation (though one wasn’t necessarily going to be given), and often went against the grain of the text that followed. They might complement the text, in a way, but they might also aim at a confrontation with it. As such, they might very well annoy the reader, as they would leave her or him scratching her/his head wondering what the connection might be. In some instances, that connection might have been evident to the author at some point and yet later forgotten, placing the author in a position of alienation from the text, in the same way that the reader inevitably would be (to some degree or other). Such alienation might lead down its own avenues and the text might “live” longer as a result – the familiar becoming less so, and the text taking on an air of quasi-independence by default. Is this what Kenneth Burke called “perspective by incongruity”?

But the ideas in Duritz’s lines, for me at least, speak to a fundamental understanding of society that goes against the grain of much of social history, and since this was what I felt I was grappling with at the time, they struck a chord with me when I heard them first in 1994. The particular section of the essay, “Apropos Exceptionalism,” for which I used the Duritz epigram, dealt with the historiography of Populism. What I argued was that when placed in a comparative framework and understood in terms of empire, Populism took on an altogether different character from that described in most historians’ works. While most historians were trying to determine whom the Populists were railing against – was it Eastern Capitalists or African Americans? – and while they attempted to create singular answers or determine which Populists were radical and which ones were reactionary, I argued that they needed to be considered in terms of a triangulation characteristic of all farmers placed in a frontier-like situation and confronting the growth of commercial capital. They needed to be understood in terms of their imperial location – as I termed it – placed in the middle between Capital and the Other – in this case, American Indians. It was instructive, I felt, that Omaha, Nebraska, the site of the most important Populist conference where demands against Eastern capitalists and the establishment were fashioned, was in the heart of territory where the American Indians were being viciously put down. One might compare American Populists, therefore, with Afrikaner farmers, who were, at about the same time, railing against both the British and the Bantu. 

Duritz’s words, unwittingly I would imagine, picked up on this “middling” aspect, and in mentioning Omaha obviously fit my needs to perfection. Also, in indicating that if the person described in the song was going “to walk on water” he was going to have to walk on someone else, Duritz encapsulated both the self-righteousness of the Populist and the fact that his alternative utopia would not be free of its own exploitation or denigration – women, blacks, American Indians, immigrants (especially Jews).  One of the questions most frequently asked of the Populists is how did people like Tom Watson turn against their liberal intentions after 1896? Understanding imperial location and seeing them comparatively would have made such a question unnecessary. [I should also mention that if my analysis corresponded with that of any earlier American historian, then it would have to be that of Richard Hofstadter who used status anxiety so effectively – status anxiety is the currency that keeps empire intact.] 

One last plug for the “Apropos Exceptionalism” essay:  written when it was, for a conference at the University College, London, in 1995, and published in American Exceptionalism? in 1997, the work was very much ahead of its time, and received excellent reviews both at the conference and afterwards from some very prominent historians in Britain, the United States, and Australia. Several people, of course, didn’t like the tone of it, or my rather jet-lagged and flippant presentation at the conference itself; but they could not deny the overall uniqueness of the essay and its important implications. Much of what I said, not especially about the Populists (because they have not really been treated comparatively still – to my knowledge) has become commonplace thinking to some degree. But I would still contend that while internationalizing American history and comparative analysis have become central to American historiography, much of what I suggested about imperial location still needs to be more fully developed. I have done some of this work in my second book, Inside Out, Outside In, and in a number of my articles – particularly the two on policing in India, the U.S., and Britain – but I am just a lost soul on the edge of the academy. Violins please.

Thirty: Of Epigrammatology

Introduction

“What, is that supposed to be an epigram?” Pavel Petrovich remarked in a questioning tone and walked away.

              – Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Children.

  

The epigrams I use are no sideshow. Provoking a chuckle sometimes, they are no laughing matter. Were they to be, then they would warrant W. Somerset Maugham’s dismissal of them as “mechanical appliance[s] by which the dull achieve a semblance of wit” (hey! I could use that as an epigram).[1]   Epigrams are an important part of my writing, and I continue to add them to my texts because they contribute some perspective, even if it is only as a result of their sheer incongruity. They are not supposed to reflect the text that follows them, nor are they bounded by it. Authored by others, they can only be turned to my purpose in an incomplete fashion; there is always some slippage from which a dialogue of sorts may emerge. In addition, the quotes are (even if only in so slight a fashion) transformed in their use as epigrams in my work. Their authors could or would not have conceived of them being uttered in such a conversation as those engaged in my work, and after their utterance (in conjunction with the essay that follows them) the epigrams may provoke new thoughts and so be created anew.

I first acquired an interest in epigrams as an undergraduate at Edinburgh University. My advisor and American History professor, Owen Dudley Edwards, was a scholar of Oscar Wilde and had become fascinated by his epigrams (or “fireworks”) as he called them. Partly as a result of this, I imagine, Edwards had developed a unique method of examination for his students. Instead of asking questions that would assume that a definite or precise answer was required, he provided a choice among numerous epigram pairings. Each student was required to write three essays, one for each of the pairs he or she had chosen. This was quite daunting a prospect, but certainly once the exam was underway it allowed one to free associate and deploy all that one had learned while developing new ways of looking at some old topics. It seems to me, in retrospect, that while in my other final exams I had been continually excluding material that didn’t fit with an answer to the particular question that had been asked, in my responses on Progressivism (the topic in question) I had been pulling in almost all the material with which I had familiarized myself.

I remember the night before the exam that a friend and I went for a beer with Edwards at the University faculty club. At some point, I indicated that I needed to go to “revise” for the following morning’s exam. His response surprised me at the time, but I think it was exactly right. I wouldn’t be helping myself by doing this, he said, since I needed to be thinking creatively rather than trying to cram facts into my head. My friend and I took this advice, went out on the town, and, as I recall, I turned up late to the exam because I had overslept. Nonetheless, I am sure that I did pretty well, though the only thing that I now recall is somehow quoting thirty lines from Ezra Pound’s “Homage to Sextus Propertius.” I am not sure how that was relevant!

After that I pretty much forgot about epigrams until I came to work on my dissertation. At the time I was struggling to decide what to work on, though I had done a fair amount of research on African Methodists in Philadelphia. It was only when I came upon a comment by a Philadelphia minister ["Methodists like sparks come out of the anvil of oppression"] that I suddenly found that I had a thesis. I did not use the comment as an epigram as such, but instead made it the basis for the title of the book itself – Sparks from the Anvil of Oppression. When it came time to publish the book I started inserting epigrams, though pretty conservative ones (very much to the point), at the head of each chapter. Then, I began to think about the epigrams themselves and recognized that they could be seen almost as countertexts, speaking to, against, and in parallel with the text that ensued. Once I began to see their potential, I began to go in search of them (though almost subconsciously at first), until like a surfer searching the globe for the perfect wave, I was seeking them out in some curious places.

This section of Histrionics (“Of Epigrammatology” – with apologies to Derrida!) describes some of the thinking behind the epigrams that I have used. Here I am endeavoring to explain why they “fit”, and, on occasion, suggesting reasons why it was that I felt I should be using something that didn’t “fit”.

[1] Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence (London: Pan Books, 1974), p. 15.

Twenty-nine: News From New Lanark

[This piece was written in October, 2003. The text vanished, however, only to be relocated and reassembled today.]

The first view one gets of New Lanark, arriving as a tourist either by car or by coach, is from above as one strolls down the steep path that takes you from the parking lot into its center. The impression is awesome, as Robert Owen must have hoped it would be. The single gaze takes in the whole industrial village, which is thus confined and manageable, while the buildings are of such magnitude that they seem to stretch beyond the ken of the gazer. The immediate effect is to conjure up both the possibilities and impossibilities of Utopia, a self-contained world that seems impervious to the raging conflicts of class, race and gender going on beyond the valley, but which necessarily accompany the new arrivals as they stroll downward.

There is a nice comment William Morris is supposed to have made after reading Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, that were he to be conscripted into one of Bellamy’s utopian communities he would lie on his back and start kicking.[1] But, Robert Owen’s version of utopia, at first glance, seems rather more appealing than Bellamy’s, and one can imagine that were William Morris to have found himself in New Lanark at the beginning of the 19th century working in one of Owen’s cotton mills, he would have lain on his back and started screaming had someone forced him to leave, to go and work at another cotton mill. This sense of Owen’s utopian achievement is readily reproduced in The New Lanark Conservation Trust’s restoration of the industrial village.

How came I to be trudging down this footpath, family in tow? I had not been hit on the head. I had not taken a draught of a drug to cure my neurasthenia. Nor was I dreaming. We were merely tourists making our way up from England towards the west of Scotland, with our ultimate destination, the island of Jura, where we planned to stay in a converted “Wee-Free” church and walk, weather permitting, along the Paps.  But we had taken a small diversion off the A74 for a reason beyond the fact that we, the parents at least, are trained labor historians.

About 180 years ago, my great-great-great-grandfather, one Dr. Anthony Todd Thomson, had taken his new bride on a tour of the Highlands. His wife, Mrs. Katherine Byerley Thomson, who would go on to be a historian of some renown during her day and be quickly forgotten afterwards, was introduced by her husband to the smart set of Edinburgh before driving through the newly cleared Highlands, reciting as they went James Thomson’s The Seasons (a volume of which Anthony would later edit and publish), and visiting almost every spot of significance to Walter Scott, who seems to have been the major influence on the young bride’s later writings. All the details of this trip were described by Anthony Todd Thomson in an unpublished journal of the tour, a typed transcript of which is in my possession.

Descending from the Highlands, and after visiting Glasgow briefly, the Thomsons traveled south into Lanarkshire, on a circuitous route back to Edinburgh, where they would catch their steam packet back to England. Stopping in Lanark, Thomson, who had been closely connected with the contributors to the Edinburgh Review during his days at Edinburgh University medical school, and so was of a liberal persuasion, wanted to visit Robert Owen’s mills nearby and learn more about the New Lanark “experiment.” He sent a letter from his hotel in Lanark to Owen and was invited to have tea, after visiting the nearby waterfalls.

When our own small 21st century party had reached the bottom of the footpath, we turned the corner onto the road from Lanark that the inhabitants of New Lanark now use to drive to their residences, and which would have brought Thomson down to the village. On the left, the row of tenements that housed the laborers when the mill was in use was visible. These have now been restored for use by some of the town dwellers, many of them local craftsmen, others of them workers in the New Lanark museums, and still others commuters to nearby towns and cities.

Across the road, in front of and overlooking the mills, we saw the mill owner’s and manager’s house. This is perhaps most noticeable for its relative modesty, and for the fact that it is in the heart of the town. Owen had possibly read enough of Jeremy Bentham to know that in order for his utopia to work successfully he would need to be in a position to keep town dwellers under surveillance both when they toiled and when they rested. Unlike the mill owners in other situations (one thinks of the homes of “robber barons” in Holyoke, Massachusetts, for example), Owen did not want merely to look down on his mills from afar and keep his distance from the lower orders. Instead, the visitor senses from the proximity of this dwelling to those of the workers (and this is emphasized in the museum’s literature about the mill owner) that he felt a great, almost paternal, commitment to his workers.

However, this building was Owen’s residence only in his earlier days as manager of the mills, when the owner lived away from the town. By the time that Thomson visited in 1823, Owen was also living half a mile away at Braxfield. Thomson’s account of his meeting with Owen and his family was not altogether flattering:

We were introduced into the drawing room to Mrs. Owen and her daughters; Mr. Owen and his sons, with a foreign Count, whose name I could not ascertain, not having yet left the dining room. Mrs. Owen is a little woman, with plain features and very simple unaffected manners. She received us with an open frankness, which, instantly, shewed that her welcome was sincere, and not merely the result of habitual politeness. Her conversation was like herself, simple and commonplace; but it displayed her desire to entertain us and to remove that reserve, which every stranger is apt to feel on a first introduction. In a few minutes Mr. Owen made his appearance, accompanied by his two sons and the Count. He is about the middle stature; of unprepossessing appearance, his features being sharp and rather harsh, but his eye is good and his gaze steady and penetrating. His gait is awkward, and his attempts to appear easy display a want of that self possession which is the genuine characteristic of an original well bred gentleman. His conversation does not flow easily except upon the subject of his own plans; and, when expatiating upon them, he can scarcely be said to converse, for he is impatient of contradiction, and can allow of no doubt being expressed of his ultimate success in completely altering the present structure of Society. Happening to say that Ireland was an excellent place for trying the experiment of establishing his system, he kindled at the expression "experiment", and replied, with some warmth, that it was no longer an experiment, and, in a very short period it would be universal.[2] His reception of us was stiff and rather reserved at first; but in a few minutes, he began to talk on the subject of our tour, and mentioned several places which he thought we should have visited. As he was professing to accompany us to visit the evening schools, at his establishment, two Quakers were introduced, with whom he appeared to be familiar, as he took one of them by the hand, and welcomed him by the name of "friend Cruickshanks;" who, introduced his friend and began to converse on business. Friend Cruickshanks was invited to visit the schools with us, but he objected; and we were, therefore, turned over to the guidance of young Mr. Owen and the Count, with whom we forthwith proceeded to New Lanark.

Before entering the museum, we walked down the slope towards the mills, and turned left to walk along a path towards the river. It had not been raining for about half an hour, surprisingly, so we felt we should take the opportunity to see around the buildings while we had the chance. The loud, fast-rushing river, part of the Clyde making its way down towards Glasgow, powered the mills accounting for their location in this valley. As the Trust’s website describes the origins of the mill town:

While poets and artists and tourists in search of the sublime came and went, two visitors in 1783 looked at the falls with a different eye. David Dale, son of a grocer, and prosperous cloth merchant accompanied by Richard Arkwright wondered if the power of all this water could be harnessed to drive cotton spinning machines. Arkwright had invented one called "the water-frame" which needed too much power to be used by an individual family (as was common with spinning machines and looms at the time). They wanted to incorporate hundreds of these machines in one location and use a common source of power to drive them all.[3]

While this is the beginning of the Fall of Clyde Nature Reserve through which many inviting pathways weave past sandstone gorges and dramatic waterfalls, for us, as it was for Dale and Arkwright, it is an alternative beginning for considering this village and its achievement. The tourist coming down the hill from the parking lot is forced to contemplate the sheer magnitude of Owen’s dream world construction, but the walker, coming towards the town along the Clyde, is confronted with the possibilities of nature, providing the power through which any experiment – utopian or dystopian – might occur.

To run his mills, Dale had diverted water into a fast moving canal and it is the small channels and falls that lead off from this canal, sending the water hurtling back down to the river, which turned the carbines. The huge wheel of one of these, exposed to the open, where once a mill had stood before it had been burned down in the 1870s, now turned quietly and aimlessly. We wandered on, not reciting Wordsworth or Coleridge to ourselves; nay, not even Robbie Burns.[4] Our predecessor, Thomson, had felt no restraint on this score, however:

The noise was tremendous; but, it was a continued roar…; the wind, also, which had risen to a brisk gale, mingled its rushing moan through the trees, and the hollow amphitheatre of the rocks, forming the basin, echoed back the sounds. It was in truth a proper scene for impressing the mind of the Minstrel – where
      “Waters, woods, and winds, in concert join
        And Echo swells the chorus to the skies.”

The sky’s chorus returned to us in the form of raindrops, so we returned to the entrance of the museum.  This is in the former community center, or “Institute for the Formation of Character,” in which the village folk of New Lanark gathered for their celebrations and for other recreation. We entered and paid our fee, which allowed us to go through the mills, into the school building, inside Owen’s house, into a cooperative grocery, and finally inside a restored worker’s tenement. Cheap at half the price, we said to ourselves, meanwhile thinking that we were making a quite weighty contribution to Scotland’s economy, in return for learning about its heritage.

And, Scotland, we found, was the other utopia here on display. After walking through a door behind the cash register we found ourselves traversing a tube-like bridge across to the mill, and once inside the mill, we were invited to sit in a conveyor, which if it had been found going up the side of a Cairngorm mountain, would have been mistaken for a Bellamy-esque version of a ski lift. Instead, this was dazzling moving tour through a history of New Lanark. But, as lights flashed on and off and laser images appeared and disappeared, we found we were being guided by a young Scottish lass from the future. Treating us rather like Julian West in Looking Backward, this 22nd century Dr. Leete informed us that she had come from a time when humans had solved the problems of society, leaving the visitor to wonder at the great changes wrought by devolution and the recent political separation from Westminster.

But, also like West, we were invited to look back to the past, to the time of irrationality, and witness the harshness of the time, but also the brave attempts of Robert Owen to deal with some of the problems vexing humans in the late 18th and early 19th century. The displays were powerful, revealing all the hardships, but they were also elevating, placing Robert Owen in the vanguard of some of the great reformers of modern societies, from Mohandas K. Gandhi through Martin Luther King, Jr., and on to Nelson Mandela. Indeed, one alighted from this modern-day Brougham with a sense of possibility, and our kids had been reached by the simplicity and clarity of this young Scot from the future.

But after this, came sound and fury, signifying not much. By which I mean that the operating system of the mill was working at full tilt and producing very little. Only one of the spinning machines is up and running, but the sound is absolutely deafening – the sound of nature’s fall now seeming quite tame after all, if it had not led to this. A man was working the machine, tying up the loose threads, as a laborer would have done in the days when the machines were being run for profit, walking back and forth with the machine. Signifying nothing, perhaps, but suggesting enough about the conditions of yore, that were I to be conveyed back in time and forced to operate one of these machines, with all the dust and all the noise, alongside other machines making similar sounds, I tell myself I would have lain on my back kicking and screaming, begging to return to my nice bourgeois job with my nice bourgeois students in dystopic America.

After this we are directed into the corner of the spinning room and watch a black-and-white movie about the cotton production process. This was both captivating and moving. Of course, the production process began with slave plantations of the cotton South, from which Owen would have drawn his raw materials in spite of his political opposition, and no doubt that of Friend Cruickshanks, to the institution of slavery.

The story then continued with the stevedores loading the cotton onto the ships, its arrival in Glasgow, and transportation in wagons down to New Lanark, before being spun into thread for weaving. In the process of following this story, the visitor is made intimately aware of the connections between the young child scampering in and out of the spinning jennies cleaning away all the lint, and the young black slave picking the cotton at harvest time. Suddenly, the transnational connections are made evident, and we immediately sense that Owen’s contributions may indeed be linked in some way to the black southerner in the United States, a transplanted Indian peasant today working in Mumbai mills, and the erstwhile resident of Apartheid South Africa.

After stopping in the store to shop for woolen clothing to protect us from the chill and damp of the Scottish summer, it was time for lunch. Where better to go than down to another mill in which is housed, the four-star New Lanark Mill Hotel, an on-site hotel and convention center? This is not a run-of-the-mill convention center – though, actually, I suppose that is what it is. Visions of holding a labor history conference flashed before our eyes, as we spooned down the potato leek soup – pretty much the only thing that fit within our budget. Not only would such a conference be held close to the point of production (and what, after all, is the point of production if not to make possible a labor history conference?), but it would also be in an atmosphere of luxury that any self-respecting labor historian must need.

Back to reality, away from utopian visions of the ideal academic conference: It was now time to investigate Owen’s school system. Arriving six years after the completion of the new school building, Dr. Thomson had described it at considerable length thus:

In the centre [of the village] is the building containing the schools. It is set apart for this purpose; and is a long regular edifice, with a pediment in the middle, crowned with a small spire. It contains within it four large rooms, with a spacious lobby or entrance hall on the ground floor. Owing to the space occupied by this hall, the two rooms on the ground floor are smaller than those above; but they are nevertheless large apartments, and are furnished with benches and forms, which are placed close to the wall so as to leave a considerable open space in the centre, which is evidently intended for the convenience of visitors. One of the rooms above is furnished with a gallery and has benches at one end only; and the other is seated, something in the manner of a chapel with a pulpit at one end, and a more extended rostrum, or elevated bench with a desk before it, which stretches nearly across the rooms, at the other end. All the rooms were lighted by lamps suspended from the ceilings.
            On entering the hall of the schools, our attention was attracted by a beautiful little boy, who was standing near the door. He was apparently dressed in the Highland garb; but on being spoken to by young Mr.Owen, he quickly threw off this attire and presented himself to us in the costume of a Roman citizen; and assuredly, Brutus was never more finely represented in miniature, than in the person of this juvenile cotton spinner. The child was about six years of age, well formed in limbs and person, with a beautiful, open, ruddy countenance, shaded by a fine, curled head of hair. The dress was a white, twilled cotton tunic, without sleeves, which buttoned over the shoulders descended no lower than the knee, and was confined round the waist by a leather belt, which was fastened with a buckle in front. The head and the limbs were altogether uncovered. We were informed that this was the general school dress of all the children under a certain age; and that the dress of the girls differed from that of the boys only in falling a little below the knee, and in having no leather belt. On our little Roman it was extremely becoming; but the beauty of this child would have rendered any dress graceful: the dress, however, is easy, simply elegant, and in my opinion admirably adapted for children, as it is in no degree cumbrous, and leaves the limbs and arms free for any species of exertion.

            On entering the first school, we found about forty lads employed in writing, cyphing<sic> and in acquiring arithmetic and book-keeping; superintended by a very intelligent young man as teacher. The ages of the pupils differed from fourteen to twenty. They appeared very attentive; and some of them wrote good, current hands; whilst others displayed that they had made some progress in the higher rules of arithmetic. Mr. Owen informed us, that this school was, comparatively, thinly attended on this evening, but as the scholars had been ten hours employed in labour during the day, and no compulsion was employed to bring them into the school the attendance was very different on different evenings. The boys, however, were more anxious to improve themselves than the girls; for, in the opposite apartment, which was the female schools, the number of girls employed in the same studies as the boys in the first school, did not exceed twenty. They wrote in general, however, better than the boys; and we were struck with the facility with which they acquired a neat, current hand, by at first learning to form waving lines across the paper; then making these complex; and ultimately, connecting letters together.

Along with other tourists, we entered the building and went into a theater and were informed about the life of one child who had lived in New Lanark in the first decade of the 19th century. Annie McLeod, appearing before us as a hologram played by a young actress of about 12 years, introduced us to the life, and death, of a single child. Annie had been the child of a group of Skye Highlanders displaced by the clearances making their way to America, before a storm had incapacitated their ship. Owen had welcomed many of the stranded migrants to his village to work in his mill. It is in a story such as this that Owen’s achievement is perhaps most evident. For his utopian experiment is most frequently compared to other industrial sites, and in such a contrast it seems like merely an enlightened version of business paternalism, of the kind that would be practiced by Cruikshanks’ Friends, the Cadburys, for example. But when it is placed in the Scottish context, and considered in light of the clearances and the ravages of the countryside by the woolen industry, the transformative possibilities of slave-grown cotton for the landless and starving Scottish peasant becomes all the more noteworthy.

Annie McLeod was not to live beyond her twelfth year, however. While several opportunities had been available to her that other industrial laborers would not have been able to conceive, learning to read, write and do arithmetic, in her case this was all cut short by a bout of pneumonia, which brought home the harsh realities of disease in early 19th century Britain.

After seeing this film, we ventured upstairs to the classroom. We wandered around the room that had been restored to roughly how it might have appeared at the time that Dr. Thomson and his spouse had visited. We came upon the model of skull head and, lo and behold, a label alongside it, mentioned Dr. Thomson. The label mentioned many educators’ interest in phrenology at the beginning of the 19th century, and quoted from the Thomson journal in the following manner:

Observing that some of the boys were very quick in calculations, I enquired whether the teacher understood craniology; and being answered in the affirmative, whether he had observed any extraordinary development of the organ of numbers in those who had displayed extraordinary talents for figures. He replied that he had not remarked any extraordinary development of that organ, in such boys; but that a case had, lately occurred, which had greatly shaken his faith in phrenology. A boy had come into the school, who had the organ of numbers so strongly marked that he had pointed it out as a fine demonstration of the organ to other boys; and yet, this boy was incapable of being taught the simplest rules of arithmetic, and could scarcely put two and two together. Several of the boys verified this anecdote. It added another fact to many which I have collected, which tend to prove the absurdity of the doctrine of Gall and his adherents.

Thomson, as one of the founding professors of the University College, London, medical school, never lost an opportunity to speak out against practices that he felt might constitute quackery, so it is perhaps fitting that this should be the one passage from his journal that is on display in New Lanark, courtesy of my father, who had sent this information on to the museum’s curators.

But, lest we imagine that Owen’s village dwellers were tied only to production and educational pursuits, there apparently was room for entertainment, something of which Annie McLeod had informed us. The Thomson party witnessed a dance occurring in the school building:

Leaving these schools, we proceeded upstairs, and saw another party of the children dancing in the room, which I have already mentioned as having a gallery in it. The dances were country dances; and the steps were pretty well executed, although the only music was execrable scraping on a violin. We enquired whether the boys have permitted to choose their partners and were informed that this privilege was confined to the elder boys. The younger children seemed to enjoy this exercise; but the elder did not appear to dance with that vivacity, which is the characteristic of the Scottish peasantry. Some of the girls were good looking: but in some there was an air of pertness, which did not impress us with the most favourable opinion of their modesty. The room in which the dancing was going on, was decorated with drawings of objects of Natural History; quadrupeds, insects, shells and mineralogical specimens on a large scale and coloured. These are employed as illustrations of lectures on Natural History, which are delivered in this room three times a week. Geography and History are also taught by very large maps, pictures of towns and chronological tables. This mode of appealing to the sense of sight in these studies, tends greatly to facilitate their acquisition; particularly to individuals whose minds have not been prepared by previous acquirements.  The propriety however, of such studies for cotton spinners has been, seriously questioned; and were we to regard the sole time and occupation of these persons as being barely sufficient to supply them with the absolute necessities of life, I would admit that any study which did not directly tend to lessen their daily toil, and increase their means of subsistence, was labour lost; but, when I am informed that these people are required to labour ten hours only in the twenty four, I can see no reason why a cotton spinner should not be able to pass his leisure time in a rational and instructive manner; and surely nothing tends more to expand the mind and to elevate the ideas, than the study of Natural History.  Do those who deprecate all education for the poor, intend to recommend the ale house as the best place of recreation?  Is such a place likely to increase the religious, moral, domestic and loyal virtues of any one?  Can a man, who makes a beast of himself, in a pot-house, prove a good husband or a good subject?  Or is more discontent to be dreaded from a person who finds amusements in every blade of grass which he presses beneath his foot, and traces the finger of the Almighty in the structure of every insect, than from him who knows the existence of a Diety only from the instructions delivered from the pulpit, and looks upon him rather as a Being dreadful and vindictive, than all wise, omnipotent, and abounding in goodness and mercy? If the world has not been made for a few, but for the whole mass of mankind, it is evident, that the extension of intellectual acquirements must tend to increase the sum of human happiness.

Which goes to show, I suppose, that no observation regarding workers’ entertainment by a member of the middle-class could be lost as an opportunity for lecturing on moral uplift; though at least the worthy doctor was open to the idea that the Scottish peasantry might have more wants than merely to toil in drudgery.

Our own tour turned to the 19th century dwelling and the cooperative grocery, two of the only former tenement homes not now used by Dr. Thomson’s fellow members of the bourgeoisie.  In the dwelling one can see why young Annie did not make it to adulthood, with the crowding that must have troubled these workers, though not perhaps as much as their contemporaries in Manchester. In the cooperative store one learned the origins of the Cooperative movement at the Co-op grocery stores that became ubiquitous in the twentieth century and provided a clear marker for working-class culture and Britain’s class stratification. Indeed, Owen’s contribution to the emergence of the cooperative movement was widely acknowledged as his most lasting achievement.

Information about some of his other less successful experiments, is to be found in the basement of the Owen house. Here one may learn about Owen’s American ventures in Indiana. A few years after Thomson’s visit, in 1825, Owen decided that he ought to attempt another experiment on a yet grander scale on the American frontier. Along with his son, Robert Dale Owen, he endeavored to set up a colony at New Harmony, Indiana. This colony never really got off the ground. Robert Owen returned to New Lanark and retirement, leaving his son to endeavor to make his mark in the New World. This he did, going on to become a prominent educationalist and then an elected member of the United States Senate.  Thomson had been somewhat disparaging about this young man who showed him around the school, writing, “His son does not appear to possess the natural powers of mind, and the energy of character of his father, although his education and his acquirements are superior. He was several years under M. Fullenberg, and is now endeavouring to introduce some of the plans of the Academy at Hofwyl, into the Lanark establishment.” But, he was clearly a man of ideas also, and one who was able to sway opinion, as he would help to do in Indiana where he maintained strong opposition to the institution of slavery.

We could not linger long looking at this American experiment, however. Our children had had their fill, and we had to return to the car for our northward journey. Like Dr. Thomson before us, we were all suitably impressed by Robert Owen’s performance on our behalf. We were not so troubled as he by the absence of religious practice in the experiment, not seeing it as its downfall:

Mr.Owen is reported to have no religious principles, and to attend to none in the regulation of his community. We had no opportunity of verifying this account; but we heard a chapter read from the bible, when the schools were dismissed; and we were informed that the morning instructions are always prefaced by a hymn sung by the children. This looks a little like religion; but if it terminate here, and no religious principles are instilled into the children and youth of the establishment, for the general regulation of their conduct, little good can be expected from the most perfect plan of government, where the passions and ordinary feelings of our natures are to be the sole mainsprings of every transaction of life.

We had not seen this as a problem, and after reading of the cant of the slave master’s religion, it was a welcome relief to leave religion at the top of the hill with all the other unbelievers. But, the limits of Owen’s project, as annunciated by Dr. Thomson, were apparent nonetheless:

In a local, manufacturing community, in which the chief object is to secure a succession of labourers, fitted to the tasks they have to perform from early habit; and rendered, comparatively comfortable by the education bestowed upon them, the plan of New Lanark is likely to succeed; but to spread it over general society, to extinguish all the feelings, which from the commencement of society have been considered as the most valuable in the human character, to crush ambition, emulation, benevolence, heroism, poetic fancy, enthusiasm, religious fervor, and devout piety; to level ranks, and make men truly passive drudges, labouring for a mere subsistence, as bees of a rational hive, is a dream of a discordant brain, which, were it even realized, could never exist for even a very moderate period.

And that, I think, was William Morris’s point, in response to Edward Bellamy’s utopian vision, though his own sensibility was that of the socialist trying to push for change without dampening the human spirit.

But, what was important for us now, was to head north to that land of tourism made accessible by the ’15, the ’45, and the clearances, where lairds and their friends could come up from town to do a spot of shooting in August, while the descendants of the land on which they played would be in Pennsylvania engaging in a spot of bagpipe playing and tossing the caber. For we, after all (to borrow from Gandhi), were clearly ready for civilization – for heroism and poetic fancy in a world of inequality. If only it wouldn’t rain.

Notes

[1] This may just be apocryphal.  One can imagine that E.P. Thompson would have made a good deal out of such an utterance in his biography of William Morris, since it would have fit so well with Thompson’s own sense of political theater.  A.L. Morton, while quoting extensively from Morris’s review of Looking Backward in Commonweal, also does not mention such a comment, even while it would have helped cast off Morris’s News from Nowhere from Bellamy’s earlier work; Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (London: Merlin Press, 1977), and A.L. Morton, The English Utopia (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978), pp. 193-226.

[2] Of the many attempts to replicate New Lanark, the only one that met with reasonable success was at Ralahine, in Ireland; Morton, The English Utopia, p. 169.

[3] http://www.aboutscotland.com/water/clydenl.html

[4] All of whom, along with (at different times) J.M.W. Turner, and James Thomson, had visited the Falls.