Multicultural American

Literature during the Late

Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries
Lawrence J. Oliver *
Numerous studies have documented the massive social and
cultural change in the US during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, as new immigrants, New Women, and racial
minorities struggled for social justice and equal opportunity. That
quest, of course, was waged in the literary as well as the political
and economic arenas. The books under review here by Aviva
F. Taubenfeld and Susan Mizruchi make important contributions
to American (i.e., US) literary history and American studies as
they explore how women and minority authors of the period
contested and tried to expand the dominant cultures definition of
progress and true Americanism.
True Americanism is, of course, one of Theodore
Roosevelts best-known essays. His influence on American and
world political history is well established, but he also exerted a significant influence on American literary history. Writing to Francis
Parkman in 1889, young Roosevelt confessed that while he enjoyed
politics, literature must be my mistress perforce (Letters and
Speeches 29). That mistress prompted him to generate more than
fifty volumes of writing, two of which have been included in the
Library of America. Excerpts from True Americanism as well as
The Strenuous Life are now included in The Norton Anthology of
American Literature. But what distinguishes Roosevelt from other
literary-minded presidents was his passionate and strenuous efforts
to shape the American literary canon according to his ideology. For
example, in 1891, he urged his close friend Brander Matthews, professor of drama and literature at Columbia University, to write an
anthology of American literature that would promote their
*Lawrence J. Oliver is Professor of English at Texas A&M University. His
current research focuses on W. E. B. Du Boiss doctoral education in political
economy at Harvard and the University of Berlin.
American Literary History, vol. 22, no. 3, pp. 635 644
doi:10.1093/alh/ajq033
Advance Access publication June 21, 2010
# The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

The Rise of Multicultural

America: Economy and
Print Culture 18651915,
Susan Mizruchi.
University of North
Carolina Press, 2008.
Rough Writing: Ethnic
Authorship in Roosevelts
America,
Aviva F. Taubenfeld.
New York University
Press, 2008.

636

[T]he relationship
between Roosevelt and
[Zangwill, Riis, Stern,
and Dunn] was complex
and sometimes tense, as
they resisted and even
undermined [his]
nationalist, masculinist,
and racialist ideas[.]

Multicultural American Literature

progressive American ideals; after it was published (1896), he

extolled it in a review published in The Bookman.1
In Rough Writing: Ethnic Authorship in Roosevelts America
(2008), Taubenfeld documents the surprising place and implications
of the immigrant and of ethnic writing in Roosevelts America and
American literature (4). Surprising, of course, because Roosevelt
believed that the influx of immigrants from southern and eastern
Europe threatened to destroy what he believed to be a supreme and
exceptional culture established by the countrys northern and
western European forefathers. The result of Taubenfelds research is
a fascinating account of how the epitome of manly American nationalism and opponent of hyphenated Americans championed works by
Israel Zangwill, Jacob Riis, Elizabeth Stern, and Finley Peter Dunn.
These writers, in turn, publicly praised Roosevelt, dedicated their
books to him, and even revised their works to please him. Yet
Taubenfeld shows that the relationship between Roosevelt and these
four writers was complex and sometimes tense, as they, unlike
Matthews, resisted and even undermined the nationalist, masculinist,
and racialist ideas that Roosevelt trumpeted. Though he tried to
control them and perhaps exploit them for his political purposes,
they push[ed] him and the nation he represented to confront the realities of their [multicultural] America (11). Taubenfelds Roosevelt,
one might say, was an accidental multiculturalist.
Scholars have commented on Roosevelts literary relationships with Zangwill, Riis, and Dunne (but not Stern), but
Taubenfelds in-depth study is rich in new information and
insights. She begins by sketching Roosevelts neo-Lamarckian
views on race and genetics. As is well known, social scientists
such as Nathan Shaler taught Roosevelt at Harvard that psychological and physical characteristics were shaped by the cultural as
well as physical environment and then transmitted genetically to
offspring. According to this theory of racial evolutionism, to use
Joshua Hawleys term, the millions of southern and eastern
European immigrantsbut not racial minoritiescould be assimilated into the American melting pot and then literally pass traits
developed in the US to their children. Thus it was imperative to
Roosevelt and other progressives that the immigrants absorb the
true American ideals, and literature was a major vehicle for
instilling the ideals. Which is to say that what is today called political correctness is at least a century old.
Thus Roosevelt promoted writings by Zangwill, Riis, Stern,
and Dunne because in his eyes they embodied American
ideals, which too many effeminate and colonial-minded
Anglo-Americans were abandoning to the peril of the culture.
After attending, at Zangwills invitation, the initial performance of

American Literary History

The Melting Pot in 1908, President Roosevelt proclaimed it a

great play, and subsequent publicity for it highlighted the presidents praise with his permission. Thereafter followed a close
friendship between Roosevelt and Zangwill, and when the play
was published in 1909, the Jewish American dedicated it to
Roosevelt, with respectful recognition of his strenuous struggle
against the forces that threaten to shipwreck the great Republic
(15). Similarly, Roosevelt declared Riis to be the person who came
nearest to being the ideal American citizen, and Riis dedicated his
Hero Tales of the Far North (1910) to my living hero, Theodore
Roosevelt (43). Yet Zangwills conception of the melting pot was
fundamentally different from Roosevelts: where Roosevelt believed
that immigrants must be transformed, ideologically and spiritually,
into the American character established by the founding fathers and
hardy pioneers, Zangwill held that the Jewish sense of justice and
spiritual originality would transform American culture (much as
Du Bois believed that African-American soul would spiritualize a
materialistic culture). Similarly, Riis remained an ardent Danish
nationalist throughout his life, and embraced the very hyphenate
identity and loyalty to the home country that Roosevelt vociferously
condemned.
Dunne proved to be a particularly troublesome friend and ally.
Roosevelt generally responded to Dunnes lampooning of him
through the persona of Mr. Dooley with good humor, and he strove,
perhaps for political reasons, to form a personal bond with the political satirist. But Dunne, who as a child of Irish immigrants despised
English imperialism, could not abide Roosevelts belief in
Anglo-Teutonic racial supremacy or manifest destiny. When Mr.
Dooley drew the connections between US colonizing of the
Philippines and British rule of Ireland, Roosevelt was outraged.2
Dunne had exposed the contradictions and racism beneath the rhetoric of true Americanism, and his criticism impelled Roosevelt to put
more emphasis on the nations multicultural (European) roots (156).
Taubenfelds chapter on Roosevelts role in promoting the
publication of Elizabeth Sterns My Mother and I: The Story of
How I Became an American Woman is fascinating reading and
exemplary scholarship. Taubenfeld begins by tracing how
Roosevelt and his friend Edward Bok, the founder and editor of
the Ladies Home Journal, used the popular magazine as a vehicle
for promoting a version of middle-class domesticity that Amy
Kaplan calls manifest domesticity. Realizing that white middleclass women wielded considerable cultural power, Roosevelt and
Bok set out to enlist them in their progressive campaign to
strengthen the home country by shaping the American home,
especially the homes of ethnic immigrants in need of

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Multicultural American Literature

Americanization. To avoid the imagined doom of race suicide,

they aimed to induce middle-class Anglo-American women to
bear more children. But they also recognized that growing
numbers of educated women wanted more than motherhood; they
desired expanded social and political roles. Roosevelt was contemptuous of New Women and believed that the separate spheres
of men and women had to be maintained. Thus, a way had to be
found to enlist educated middle-class white women and the right
type of immigrants in the campaign for Americanism without
altering defined gender roles. As Taubenfeld argues, Roosevelt and
Boks solution was to alter rhetorically the nature and value of
domestic work, putting it on par with the labor of men. Women
too could live the strenuous life by working at home to foster
middle-class values in their children and ethnic immigrant women.
Thus in 1906 President Roosevelt welcomed Boks suggestion that
the Ladies Home Journal run a column titled The President: A
Department in Which Will Be Presented the Attitude of the
President on Those National Questions Which Affect the Vital
Interests of the Home.3 After leaving the White House, Roosevelt
became a reader for the magazine, advising on which submissions
should be published. Bok also invited Roosevelt to ghostwrite the
initial mens page for the magazine, in which the anonymous
author preached to men about their domestic responsibilities as
committed fathers and good companions to their wives.
The advisory reader who recommended Sterns autobiographical essay My Mother and I: The Story of How I Became an
American Woman for publication in the Ladies Home Journal in
1916 was none other than former President Roosevelt, and it
appeared in the same issue as Roosevelts initial mens page piece.
Attached to Sterns essay was an introductory note by Roosevelt
(his readers report) commending the story as a Jewish immigrant
autobiography that, to him, demonstrates the superiority of
American civilization.4 The Ladies Home Journal version of
Sterns narrative of Americanization promotes the ideology of
progressive womanhood that Roosevelt and Bok endorsed. But
Taubenfelds analysis reveals how the essay, and even more so the
book version, also implicitly challenges that ideology.
Assimilation into the mainstream culture alienates the protagonist
from her mother and community of ethnic women, and if the protagonist embraces Americanization, she also portrays the cold
sterility of the progressive middle-class American home (119).
Taubenfeld argues, therefore, that the Rough Riders support
of the four ethnic writers simultaneously and inadvertently . . .
opened the narrative of Americanism to alternate notions of race,
nationalism, gender, class, and politics (11). There is compelling

American Literary History

evidence in her book to support that assertion, except in regard to

race. Though he invited Booker T. Washington to the White
House (once), Roosevelt had no desire to erase or even blur the
color line, nor to support African-American writers who believed
in racial equality. Like most progressives, he endorsed segregation
and considered the labor problem a more serious issue than the
so-called Negro Problem.5 As a result, African-American and
other writers of color are virtually invisible in Rough Writing.
Du Boiss Souls of Black Folk (1903), for example, is not even
mentioned. In 1905 Du Bois invited President Roosevelt to meet
students at Atlanta University during a scheduled visit to Atlanta,
but Roosevelt declined.6 Similarly, though Brander Matthews sent
Roosevelt a copy of James Weldon Johnsons The Autobiography
of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), Roosevelt never publicly commented on it.7 Taubenfeld duly notes Roosevelts exclusionary definition
of American (160), and she should not, of course, be criticized for
ignoring writers that Roosevelt and other white progressives ignored.
Still, in laying out the theoretical ground for her study, she might
have devoted more attention to the critical difference between the
ethnic and racial categories of identity, since the word ethnic
in the books title in reality means Euro-American.
What is largely absent in Taubenfelds study permeates
Mizruchis The Rise of Multicultural America: Economy and Print
Culture 1865 1915 (2008). Her literary-cultural study attempts
to capture the full and complex richness of US diversity by giving
equal attention to racial as well as ethnic writers (3). In the opening
pages of her introduction, she foregrounds the effects of American
racism on racial minorities and is careful to refer to ethnicity and
race and immigrants and former slaves. In Mizruchis expansive
frame of reference, Roosevelt virtually disappears, while Du Bois
and other racial minorities often take center stage.
Mizruchis central argument is that national awareness of,
and discourse about, the multicultural nature of the US developed
during the post-Civil War years and was fueled by capitalist
expansion and advances in print and photographic media. Readers
of American Literary History may remember that Mizruchi developed this thesis in her contribution to the spring 2003 issue of
the journal, which was devoted to the challenges of constructing
the Cambridge History of American Literature (CHAL) and which
featured essays by general editor Sacvan Bercovitch and CHAL
contributors. Titled Becoming Multicultural, Mizruchis article
provides a general sketch of her three-hundred-plus page CHAL
chapter, which is titled Becoming Multicultural: Culture,
Economy, and the Novel, 1860 1920. The Rise of Multicultural
America is a revised and expanded version of the CHAL chapter,

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Multicultural American Literature

and readers should be warned that there is a great deal of overlap

between the two works.
In place of a long series of authoritative proclamations,
writes Bercovitch in his introduction to the American Literary
History special issue, contributors would offer groups of disparate
but connected narratives, each of which would constitute, at best, a
coherent dialogic narrative in its own right (1). Mizruchis dialogic is a remarkably comprehensive, meticulously researched, and
lucidly written account of her subject. As in her CHAL contribution, she segments The Rise of Multicultural America into eight
sections (chapters) focusing, respectively, on (1) retrospective
accounts and images of the Civil War, (2) racism and economic
opportunity during the Reconstruction Era, (3) cosmopolitanism,
(4) white and Native American works on the sacrifice of indigenous peoples required for progress, (5) the interconnected development of marketing and literature, (6) writers reflections of class
and ethnic divisions, (7) corporate America, or texts that respond
positively or negatively to the rise of corporations and big
business, and (8) American utopian literature, a literary laboratory for probing the nature of cultural difference (257). Mizruchi
includes a vast number of figures from the worlds of literature,
business, and photography. Photographs and their analyses (including those of a magazine advertisement for the Nodark camera and
a gruesome photograph of a lynched black man that are included
in her American Literary History article [57 58]) enrich her study.
Like all literary histories, The Rise of Multicultural America must
at times sacrifice depth to breadth, and portions of the book are
composed of very general commentaries in a somewhat mechanical format: Writers A, B, and C represent this perspective on
issue D, while writers X, Y, and Z provide a different perspective.
These discussions are accompanied by brief biographical sketches
of each figure, even major ones.
The most fruitful sections of the book explore how immigrants, writers of color, and feminists used their literary and economic powers to inject their visions and values into the national
cultural debate over Americanism. Not only were the numbers of
such writers increasing, but so too was the audience for their productions. Literate ethnic and racial minorities, as well as white
women, were ready to buy the books, magazines, and advertised
products that provided the financial base supporting growing
numbers of minority writers, who became mediators of modernization (3). Mizruchi does not, unfortunately, clarify what she
means by that vague phrase, but her study suggests that she has in
mind the new modernist paradigm explored in Douglas Mao and
Rebecca L. Walkowitzs recent PMLA article.

American Literary History

Du Bois was certainly one such mediator, and his life and
work embody the main arguments of Mizruchis book. Mizruchis
short section on him discusses not only his masterpiece, The Souls
of Black Folk, but also his less-known works such as The Negro in
Business (1899) and The Economic Future of the Negro (1906)
that explicitly and astutely address economic issues. Whereas many
of the writers of the period were interested in and responded to
economic conditions, Du Bois was a trained economist who studied
and wrote on economic issues, especially on the interconnectedness
of capitalism and racism. While studying for his doctorate at the
University of Berlin (before he turned to Marxist theory), his economic and political thought was profoundly influenced by his mentor
there, Gustav von Schmoller. Schmoller was the intellectual leader
of the Historical School of economics, whose members were at the
time pitted in academic battle against the theoreticians (Boston).
Schmoller, Max Weber, and others taught Du Bois empirical methodology and gave him insights into the interrelationships of race
and economics, which he then applied to the US and global scene
in his writings from behind the Veil.
Mizruchi discusses Du Boiss economic writings in chapter 2
titled Racism as Opportunity in the Reconstruction Era, in which
she contends that A curious feature of American capitalist development was the rich economic prospects sometimes concealed in debilitating realities (46). Mizruchi has to stretch to develop that
controversial thesis, and she ultimately undercuts her own argument
as the chapter progresses. She is correct that, as Du Bois noted in
1899, segregation allowed for limited economic opportunity for
blacks in such professions as undertaking and Pullman porters, as
well as in writing. But for the vast majority of African Americans
and other racial minorities, the Reconstruction era and following
decadesoften referred to as the nadir of African-American
historyprovided more opportunity for experiencing peonage, theft
of their land, disenfranchisement, and lynching than for economic
advancement, as Du Bois documented in his The Economics of
Negro Emancipation in the United States (1911) and in many other
writings. Mizruchi is fully aware of the racism and violence of the
period. Indeed, in Racism as Opportunity and elsewhere in the
book she surveys minority and white writers responses to the grim
racial situation. The chapter closes with the photo of the lynched
black man and the comment that irrational human behavior was
more intractable than modern [white?] Americans were prepared to
admit (75). In this chapter, dialogic narrative leads to confusion.8
Taubenfeld and Mizruchis literary-cultural studies add to the
already compelling body of evidence that the development of literature, economics, and politics has been inextricably connected

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Multicultural American Literature

throughout US history. Needless to say, the US is still developing

as a multicultural nation, and passionate debates over race, nationalism, imperialism, immigration, and other issues that engaged
writers during the progressive era continue to animate public discourse. But the current context is decidedly global and international. And this brings up the issue, evident in the titles of both
books, of the contested concept of American literature and
culture. With an ever-increasing number of books and articles
calling for transnational and comparativist approaches to the study
of the literature and culture of the Americas, including an ALH
special issue (18.3 [2006]) on hemispheric American literary
history, descriptors like Roosevelts America and peculiarly
American (the final words of Mizruchis narrative) imply a nationalistic and exceptionalistic domain of inquiry that is increasingly
being challenged by scholars. Taubenfeld and Mizruchi have
written excellent books, but they have crafted their studies within
a theoretical model that has, and will continue to be, challenged
by scholars with a transnational view of American.

Notes
1. In his anonymous review he asserted that the principles upon which Mr.
Matthews insists . . . are those which must be adopted, not only by every student
of American writings, but by every American writer if he is going to do work
that is really worth doing (qtd. in Oliver 140).
2. Dunne stung Roosevelt with barbs such as the following: We [U.S. and
imperialist England] ar-re achooated to be a common purpose fr to march on . . .
carryin to th ends iv th earth, th blessins iv civil an relligous liberty an shootinthim into th inhabitants therof anteahcn thim th benfits iv yeer gloryous
thraditions an our akelly glorious products, among which is Higgins Goolden
Cremery Butthrine XXX. It melts in th mouth (qtd. in Taubenfeld 148).
3. Roosevelt did not actually write these columns; they were drafted by Robert
L. OBrien after his monthly conversations with Roosevelt. Roosevelt edited
them for publication, however.
4. The authenticity of Sterns autobiography was cast into doubt in 1993 when
her son claimed that she was an American-born illegitimate child who was
adopted by Russian Jewish immigrants. Regardless, as Taubenfeld explains (100),
one should not assume that the unnamed persona is the author.
5. See, for example, McGerrs chapter titled The Shield of Segregation (182
218). As Taubenfeld notes, Zangwill and Riis shared Roosevelts belief in black
inferiority (171 72, 172 82, 18695). Charlotte J. Richs new study,
Transcending the New Woman: Multiethnic Narratives in the Progressive Era
(2009), of multiethnic authorship in the Progressive Era focuses on several
women of color who critiqued white middle-class feminism.

American Literary History

6. You are coming to our very threshold, Du Bois wrote to Roosevelt, will
you not step in a moment and tell us and the world that you have the same faith
in the right sort of college-bred black men that you have in the right sort of artisans and workingmen? (Correspondence 1: 111). Du Bois soon became convinced that Roosevelt was, despite his progressive rhetoric, a racist, and he began
attacking him in his essays. See David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois:
Biography of a Race (1993), 339 and 353.
7. Roosevelt wrote Matthews that he was much impressed by Johnsons novel
(which he thought was an autobiography), but he made no further mention of it
(Oliver 5556).
8. The title of the corresponding chapter in the CHAL is Social Death and the
Reconstruction of Slavery, which obviously projects a darker and, I believe,
more accurate view of this period.

Works Cited
Bercovitch, Sacvan. Problems in the
Writing of American Literary History:
The Examples of Poetry and
Ethnicity. American Literary History
15.1 (Spring 2003): 1 3.
Boston, Thomas D. W. E. B. Du Bois
and the Historical School of
Economics. American Economic
Review 81.2 (1991): 303 6.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The
Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois.
Ed. Herbert Aptheker. Vol.1. Amherst:
U of Massachusetts P, 1973.
. The Economics of Negro
Emancipation in the United States.
The Sociological Review 4 (1911):
303 13.
Hawley, Joshua David. Theodore
Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness.
New Haven: Yale UP, 2008.

Studies. PMLA 123.3 (May 2008):

737 48.
McGerr, Michael. A Fierce
Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the
Progressive Movement in America
18701920. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.
Mizruchi, Susan. Becoming
Multicultural. American Literary
History 15.1 (Spring 2003): 39 60.
. Becoming Multicultural:
Culture, Economy, and the Novel,
18601920. Cambridge History of
American Literature. Ed. Sacvan
Bercovitch. Vol. 3. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2005. 413 739.
. The Rise of Multicultural
America: Economy and Print Culture
18651915. Chapel Hill: U of North
Carolina P, 2008.

Kaplan, Amy. The Anarchy of Empire

in the Making of U.S. Culture.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005.

Oliver, Lawrence J. Brander Matthews,

Theodore Roosevelt, and the Politics
of American Literature, 18801920.
Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1992.

Mao, Douglas and Rebecca L.

Walkowitz The New Modernist

Roosevelt, Theodore. True

Americanism. The Norton Anthology

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of American Literature Volume C:

18651914. Ed. Nina Baym. 7th
ed. New York: Norton, 2007.
115359.
. Theodore Roosevelt: Letters
and Speeches. Ed. Louis Auchincloss.
New York: Library of America, 2004.

Taubenfeld, Aviva. Rough Writing:

Ethnic Authorship in Theodore
Roosevelts America. New York:
New York UP, 2008.

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