Pure English: Wharton and the Elect

This chapter reads Edith Wharton's writing about race and nation alongside similarly 'ambassadorial' texts by her friend Barrett Wendell. Considering Wharton's French Ways and Their Meaning, 'Amérique en Guerre' and also Backward Glance in light of the antagonism between Wendell and Charles William Eliot, the chapter observes how each thinks about inequality, education, race, and change over time. Liberal, segregationist and eugenicist, Eliot argues for an aristocracy of merit in which the winners will be white; he stands for a liberal, democratic 'Puritan' heritage. Wendell and Wharton affiliate themselves instead with a Dutch, Cavalier tradition that claims whiteness without claiming democracy, and favours warm pleasure over icy rectitude. Sharing nostalgia for an 'Old New England' of Anglo-Saxon purity, they see racial decline where Eliot hails racial development. Less sanguine than Eliot about the possibilities of education, Wharton argues for continuity rather than rapid progress, criticizing 'Puritan' tendencies towards idealism and disruption. To Wendell's students Van Wyck Brooks and Vernon Louis Parrington, Wharton and Wendell alike offer rich source material: a story of decline and extinction, a resistance to 'Puritanism', and a realist critique of idealism. Brooks and Parrington adapt these elements as they develop the narrative about the 'genteel'.

The Dreamer of Dreams

This chapter explores Andrew Carnegie's shifting racial dreamworld. Racial dreamworld argues that nationalism and international competition were slowing down the march of progress, and it was essential to eliminate them in order to unleash the full potential of humanity. The chapter outlines his account of historical change, the value of social dreaming, and his early ideas about the racial reunion. Carnegie's account of historical change — a kind of naturalized secular theodicy — sustained his boundless optimism, moralized his rapacious capital accumulation, and guaranteed the realization of his political desires. He insisted that dreams were both the prerogative and the privilege of the engaged citizen and social dreaming was a vice not a virtue, a danger not a duty. It also discusses some of the most popular historical narratives deployed by unionists to ground the claims about Anglo-America, focusing especially on Teutonist visions of racial development.

Tacking to the Wind

This chapter discusses the philosophy that Robert T. Motts had imprinted on the Pekin Theater and how it resonated with George Walker's belief in the possibilities for the growth and maturation of black theater as a special case of racial development and acceptance. From start to finish, Motts remained an entrepreneur ideologically committed to the doctrine of economic success as the surest engine of racial uplift. He left artistic aspirations in the hands of the Pekin Stock Company, and this meant primarily those of J. Ed. Green. This chapter describes the musical comedies served up at the Pekin and the Columbia Theater between September 1907 and May 1908, including The Isle of Pines and Peanutville, along with the operetta The Merry Widow. It also considers the battle among seven vaudeville and movie houses at The Stroll, an entertainment district on Chicago's South State Street.

Raciation in Epacris impressa. I. Corolla colour and corolla length

195 populations of Epacris impressa in Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania were surveyed for corolla colour composition. Of these, 75 consisted entirely of plants with white, or pink, or scarlet corollas. These monomorphic populations showed a consistent association between corolla colour, corolla length and anther colour, which suggested that corolla colour is a marker of racial development in this species. Most of the other 120 populations were polymorphic for pink- and white-flowered plants, the content of white-flowered plants ranging from 1 to 99 %. Twenty-six of these polymorphic populations were located in the Grampians and belong to the previously recognized grandiflora race. Four races are distinguished in E. impressa, marked respectively by short white corollas, long pink corollas, long scarlet corollas, and broad pink or white corollas (grandiflora). Corolla colour and length in the genus Epacris, and the potential importance of corolla colour and other differences in successful pollination are discussed.