1927 and the Rise of Modern America

by Charles Shindo

  Barton saw modern religion (informed by a business sense) as the solution to the materialism of the age; Lewis saw in modern religion all the worst aspects of materialism. Under a very different set of circumstances, Willa Cather saw religion as a source of inspiration for individual action, but hers was neither the efficient and pragmatic religion of Barton nor the egocentric and hypocritical religion of Lewis but, rather, a historical religion, one that was, in many ways, lost to the modern world. In 1927 Cather published Death Comes for the Archbishop, her semihistorical novel recounting the life of the first archbishop of New Mexico in the mid-nineteenth century. Death Comes for the Archbishop is more than simple nostalgia for a time passed, when a religious calling itself could be seen as a full and meaningful life, regardless of worldly success (unlike in Barton’s and Lewis’s books). The central figure of the novel is Archbishop Jean Marie Latour (the historical Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy), a French-born, Roman Catholic priest sent to the American Southwest to revive what is seen as a dying Catholic church. Latour slowly comes to appreciate not only the landscape of the New Mexican desert but the religious devotion of its people, including many of the native Indian tribes and their practices.

  Despite its title, the life-affirming story celebrates the success of Latour’s life in Santa Fe. The novel chronicles Latour’s life in New Mexico but does not present it in terms of success or failure, either materially or spiritually. Latour does not succeed in amassing wealth for himself or for the church, nor does he succeed in converting many people to Catholicism, since the majority of the population is already Catholic. Latour’s success, and that of his close friend and vicar, Father Joseph Vaillant, is measured in the lives they encountered and touched, the lessons they learned in their journeys about the people and places of the Southwest, and the satisfaction they received from performing their sacred duties. They have not changed the world, but they have participated in and encouraged positive change in the world by helping people (themselves included) find contentment in everyday life. Cather’s novel illustrates the beauty to be gained in reconciling the worldly and the spiritual, not by ignoring one for the other but by seeing the connections between the two. The harshness of the southwestern desert, as well as the difficulties of the historical circumstances of mid-nineteenth-century America, contrast with the spiritual devotion of the characters, both priests and parishioners. As a result, the religion practiced by the characters in the novel is flexible, not static. The tribal customs of Native Americans as well as the traditional practices of the Mexican American Catholics blend together with the French Catholicism of Latour and Vaillant. This melding of practices is echoed in the building of the cathedral in Santa Fe, the archbishop’s physical legacy, with its French architect and native materials combining to create something precious and unique; the cathedral is not just a copy of European architecture and style but, rather, an American creation, and as such it is modern.

  According to scholar Nicholas Birns, “Cather’s Christianity is not anti-modern and does not conform to the stereotype of Christianity as anti-modern held by Left and Right alike. It is part of modernity, and indeed it underscores the way that the Christian message, with its departure from the given and the normative, has always been laden with modernity.”43 But the modernity expressed in Death Comes for the Archbishop differs from that expressed in Bruce Barton’s What Can a Man Believe? which is more a call for the modernization of religion, as opposed to Cather’s view of religious belief as an integral part of the modernization process. For Cather, religion helps people adapt to their circumstances, not by preventing change from occurring, nor by simply accepting the changes that occur, but, rather, by placing those changes within the larger agenda of a sacred life. The result is a presentation of religion that is not opportunistic (as it is in both Barton and Lewis) but that is relevant to the ambiguities of modern America.

  a history of progress and failure

  In a larger sense, Death Comes for the Archbishop is modern in that it reinforces a progressive view of American history, one that is inclusive and tolerant of some differences (but not all) and that shows the course of American history to be, despite its mistakes, a history of progress. On his deathbed, the archbishop tells his student, “‘My son, I have lived to see two great wrongs righted; I have seen the end of black slavery, and I have seen the Navajos restored to their own country.’”44 The novel then goes on to recount the American government’s forced removal of Navajos to the Bosque Redondo, “hundreds of them, men, women, and children, perished from hunger and cold on the way; their sheep and horses died from exhaustion crossing the mountains. None ever went willingly; they were driven by starvation and the bayonet; captured in isolated bands, and brutally deported” (291). But, Cather notes, “At last the government at Washington admitted its mistake—which governments seldom do. After five years of exile, the remnant of the Navajo people were permitted to go back to their sacred places” (294–295). This simplistic recounting of the plight of the Navajos, while not very critical of the American government, is progressive and ahead of its time both in the inclusiveness of its equating racism against African Americans with racism against Native Americans and in its ideology of progress.

  By the same token, Death Comes for the Archbishop is a bit behind the times, since by 1927 the view of American history as a history of triumph and progress had already been brought under serious scrutiny, by both historians and novelists. This revision of the triumphal course of American history was best presented to a popular audience through Charles and Mary Beard’s The Rise of American Civilization, which first appeared in two volumes in 1927. The work was proclaimed by Richard Hofstadter as having done “more than any other such book of the twentieth century to define American history for the reading public.”45 Although the Beards’ work places American progress firmly in the center of an advancing world civilization, they are nonetheless cautious about the realities of progress. According to Dorothy Ross, in combining ironic prose with romantic rhetoric, “the Beards alternate between—seem deliberately to stretch the reader between—the ironic all-too-human present and the mythic destiny of America.” The Rise of American Civilization, she notes, “is a story not of America’s achievement of a prefigured identity but of American society’s struggle for progress.”46 Even though the basic narrative is optimistic and celebratory about the course of American history, it does not take that course for granted or assume that the nation’s future is predestined, and since the accomplishments came from the hand of man, they often included unintended consequences and the evils to which man is susceptible. By making the actions of man more important than destiny, the Beards secularized what was once a religious notion of America’s predestined role in the world. The Rise of American Civilization marks a change in Charles Beard’s historical thinking, not a departure from an earlier religious paradigm but, rather, a swing back toward a humanist view and away from a scientific view of history. Before 1927, Beard primarily saw history as the workings of economic laws, an empirical approach to understanding the past, but The Rise of American Civilization seeks to “explain writers to themselves, audiences to audiences, actors to actors while disclosing the reciprocal relations of writers, audiences, and actors. The profounder, wider, and more realistic the history, the greater its services presumably to letters and criticism.”47 This means understanding the political, social, and economic implications of the arts, as well as the political, social, and economic impacts on art. In doing so, ideas become supremely important in understanding creative endeavors as well as political, social, and economic actions. The central idea in The Rise of American Civilization is progress, “the most dynamic social theory ever shaped in the history of thought” (443). The Beards define progress as “the continual improvement in the lot of mankind on this earth by the attainment of knowledge and the subjugation of the material world to the requirements of human welfare” (443–444). Including the role of ideas in understanding the actions of men wa
s “perhaps the most important turning point in Beard’s intellectual development.”48 The ambiguity that intellectual history brought to The Rise of American Civilization struck a chord with readers: “Judging by their large sales, their audience was indeed still torn, as they themselves were, between ironic doubts and mythic hopes.”49

  This historical ambiguity can also be seen in historical fiction. Two novels in 1927 looked to the American pioneer past, but they did not simply celebrate the accomplishments of the pioneers, nor did they openly criticize their actions. Both O. E. Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth and Glenway Wescott’s The Grandmothers: A Family Portrait recount the struggles of American pioneers and are built around the ideas of failure, regret, and disappointment, and both have as much to do with the psychological motivations of the characters as with the physical environment.

  Norwegian-born Ole Edvart Rolvaag gave up the life of a fisherman when he was twenty years old to come to the United States to farm in the Dakotas with his uncle. Finding the life of a farmer not to his liking, Rolvaag went to school and developed his love of literature. As a professor of Norwegian literature at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, Rolvaag wrote several Norwegian-language novels about Norwegian Americans. Giants in the Earth was the first of his works to be translated into English (actually the first two, since the novel’s two books originally were published separately in Norway) and was one of the first novels about the American immigrant experience to be translated from a foreign language. Rolvaag wrote during a period of debate over Norwegian American identity resulting from the nativist sentiments of the Great War, the attack on “hyphenated Americans,” and the Red Scare. In 1925 over 200,000 Norwegian Americans celebrated a hundred years of immigrant history at the Norse-American Immigration Centennial Celebration at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds. The event illustrates the way the Norwegian immigrant community in America utilized cultural products to express its identity. While older expressions of immigrant identity, such as Norwegian immigrants’ associations, Norwegian-language newspapers, and language use, continued to decline in the mid-1920s, others “rose to take their place—historical associations; academic departments devoted to Norwegian-American studies; yearly festivals and celebrations; and, a new ‘patron saint’ who has in many ways replaced Leif Eriksson, the author Ole Rolvaag, whose tragic view of immigration is often at odds with the progressive vision still evident in much Norwegian-American activity.”50

  What puts Rolvaag at odds with a progressive view of history is not his characters’ lack of ability to succeed economically, politically, or socially in the United States—indeed, in all these things they are successful. For Rolvaag, the price one pays for success in America is psychological. In Giants in the Earth, Per Hansa and his wife Beret, along with their three children, settle in the Dakota territory, and although they succeed in farming the land, building a home, raising a family, and founding a community, theirs is ultimately a tragic tale. Beret, for whom life on the plains has resulted in loneliness, depression, anxiety, and fear, survives Per Hansa, who was perfectly suited to the pioneer life and was the main factor in Beret’s survival. As a result, Beret is left at the end of the novel without her basic survival tool, her husband. The novel is not, however, a critique of American values and ideals of success; rather, it is an examination of what is lost in the transition from old country to new world. The creation of an American can only be accomplished through the destruction of what came before.

  This theme is seen in all of Rolvaag’s works, especially in the two sequels to Giants in the Earth, Peder Victorious (1929) and Their Fathers’ God (1931). Rolvaag was also instrumental in the founding of the Norwegian-American Association, which sponsored the 1925 Centennial Celebration, and with teaching Norwegian language and history, especially the history of Norwegian Americans. While teaching at St. Olaf College, Rolvaag emphasized the need for young Norwegian Americans to know and respect their history. “You must not erase your racial characteristics in order to become better Americans. You must deepen them if possible.”51 For Rolvaag, the country would be served best not by melting immigrant differences in an American pot but, rather, by the creation of a pluralistic society in which difference is respected and celebrated. In this sense, Rolvaag was in line with critics of the U.S. home front’s record during the Great War, when difference was automatically suspect and condemned. He was also in line with those who believed that Sacco and Vanzetti had been guilty only of being immigrants and anarchists, not of being criminals. Yet Rolvaag was not opposed to the American values of acquisition and success; indeed, he encouraged Norwegian Americans to be as successful in America as they could. It was of the means of gaining that success that Rolvaag was most critical. Success did not have to come at the expense of ethnic identity, and, Rolvaag suggested, success could be better gained through ethnic self-knowledge and respect, while still buying into the American dream.

  Like Charles and Mary Beard, Rolvaag saw the potential of American life but did not believe that progress was predestined. Only through making the right choice of what to lose in order to gain could America prosper. This still optimistic view of American history allowed for the possibility of making the wrong choices, but it is an account of wrong choices that informs Glenway Wescott’s The Grandmothers: A Family Portrait, which looks back at three generations of Wisconsin ancestors of expatriate American writer Alwyn Tower. The novel has the potential to aggrandize these pioneers and farmers, but Wescott turns this family history into a study of failure, regret, and unfulfilled promise. The purpose of Alwyn Tower’s sorting through the past is to exorcize history, to try “to understand, for his own sake, shadowy men, women and children,” his family, so that he can rise above the family’s characteristics, which seemed always to lead to disappointment.52 Alwyn (like many nonfictional writers, Wescott among them) went to Europe to understand America, to gain an understanding of America above and beyond what Americans understood. What he discovers is that America has been filled with pioneers, and not just the physical pioneers, the settlers, but spiritual pioneers, “disillusioned but imaginative, these went through the motions of hope, still pioneers” (29). These pioneers never really settle down because they never find what they think they seek, and as a result they doom each future generation to the same failures as theirs. But by understanding the past, Alwyn comes to understand not just his family but his country, and he sees that his understanding of it runs counter to it:

  Indeed, it was an instinctive law for Americans, the one he had broken. Never be infatuated with nor try to interpret as an omen the poverty, the depression, of the past; whosoever remembers it will be punished, or punish himself; never remember. Upon pain of loneliness, upon pain of a sort of expatriation though at home. At home in a land of the future where all wish to be young; a land of duties well done, irresponsibly, of evil done without immorality, and good without virtue. Maturity, responsibility, immorality, virtue are offspring of memory; try not to remember. (378)

  America, as a young country, “had as yet nothing worth remembering” (378), and it continued on its way believing that the future would be better, that it was destined to be better, and that, therefore, what had been done in the past was necessary for that better future. This justification of pioneer actions—the eradication of Native Americans, the environmental destruction—as well as of more recent actions such as participation in the Great War, was exactly what Wescott sought to understand and explain. Only by critically viewing the past can one hope to make the best decisions for the future.

  Wescott, though he dealt with a single family’s story, was concerned about larger, more generalized history lessons than was Rolvaag, who sought to teach the history of a specific group, but for both, history, not technology or science, held the key to creating a better future. While neither writer was a modernist, in style or subject, both presented a modern view of history by critically examining the basic assumptions of teaching history in order to create good, “100 percent American�
� citizens. This debate over the role of historical education found itself in a Chicago courtroom in 1927, led by the town’s mayor William “Big Bill” Thompson. On the surface, the debate was an attack against the critical “new histories” of writers such as Charles Beard, who many felt diminished American greatness by being critical of the founding fathers. Patriotic “100 percent Americanism” groups such as the American Legion and the Ku Klux Klan supported Thompson’s attack on the new history, as did the Sons of the American Revolution and the Daughters of the Confederacy. Also joining the attack on the “new history” were ethnic societies eager to have their stories told in the nation’s textbooks. Both the patriotic societies and the ethnic societies agreed that there was a pro-British slant to many of these works, but more significantly, they both criticized the move away from a “great man” narrative of history to one more socially and economically descriptive. Yet this alliance was a fragile one. In their struggle to make sure that “each ‘race’ could have its heroes sung,” groups argued over which great men accomplished which great feats; for example, Italian Americans and Norwegian Americans argued over who had discovered America, Christopher Columbus or Leif Eriksson. These debates, however, for the most part only included white heroes, not black, Asian, or Native American ones. As a result, the history textbook debates of the 1920s illustrate that “cultural pluralism could itself reinforce ideological conformity. Across the country, racial and ethnic groups successfully inserted a colorful new set of characters into American history textbooks. At the same time, however, they helped block a more critical, sophisticated analysis of the nation’s origins.”53 As a result, most Americans’ view of history remained one in which great men accomplished great things in the great course of American history, with the implicit understanding that America was therefore a patriarchal, white-dominated society, and that this accounted for its success as a nation.