by Peter Watson
Benedict’s chapters reporting on primitive societies were bracketed by polemical ones. Here her views clearly owe a huge debt to Boas. Her main theme aimed to show human nature as very malleable; that geographically separate societies may be integrated around different aspects of human nature, giving these societies a distinctive character. Some cultures, she said, were ‘Dionysian,’ organised around feeling, and others ‘Apollonian,’ organised around rationality.46 And in a number of wide-ranging references she argued that Don Quixote, Babbitt, Middletown, D. H. Lawrence, the homosexuality in Plato, may all best be understood in an anthropological context, that is to say as normal variations in human nature that are fundamentally incommensurable. Societies must be understood on their own terms, not on some single scale (where, of course, ‘we’ – whites – always come out on top). In creating their own ‘patterns of culture,’ other societies, other civilisations, have avoided some of the problems Western civilisation faces, and created their own.47
It is almost impossible now to recover the excitement of anthropology in the 1920s and 1930s.48 This was an era before mass air travel, mass tourism, or television, and the exploration of these ‘primitive’ societies, before they changed or were killed off, was one of the last great adventures of the world. The anthropologists were a small number of people who all knew each other (and in some cases married each other: Mead had three husbands, two of them anthropologists, and was for a time Benedict’s lover). There was an element of the crusade in their work, to show that all cultures are relative, a message wrapped up in their social/political views (Mead believed in open marriage; Benedict, from a farming family, was self-educated).
Benedict’s book was as successful as Mead’s, selling hundreds of thousands of copies over the years, available not just in bookstores but in drugstores, too. Together these two students of Boas, using their own research but also his and that of Malinowski and Mead’s husband, Reo Fortune, transformed the way we look at the world. Unconscious ethnocentrism, not to say sexual chauvinism, was much greater in the first half of the century than it is now, and their conclusions, presented scientifically, were vastly liberating. The aim of Boas, Benedict, and Mead was to put beyond doubt the major role played by culture in determining behaviour and to argue against the predominating place of biology. Their other aim – to show that societies can only be understood on their own terms – proved durable. Indeed, for a comparatively small science, anthropology has helped produce one of the biggest ideas of the century: relativism. Margaret Mead put this view well. In 1939, lying on her back, her legs propped against a chair (‘the only posture,’ she explained, ‘for a pregnant woman’), she jotted down some thoughts for the foreword to From the South Seas, an anthology of her writing about Pacific societies. ‘In 1939,’ she noted prophetically, ‘people are asking far deeper and more searching questions from the social sciences than was the case in 1925…. We are at a crossroads and must decide whether to go forward towards a more ordered heterogeneity, or make frightened retreat to some single standard which will waste nine-tenths of the potentialities of the human race in order that we may have a too dearly purchased security.’49
Sociologists were not tempted by exotic foreign lands. There was enough to do at home, trying to make sense of the quiddities thrown up by Western capitalism. Here, a key figure was Robert E. Park, professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and the man who more than anyone else helped give sociology a more scientific status. Chicago University was the third of the three great research universities established in America in the late nineteenth century, after Johns Hopkins and Clark. (It was these research universities that first made the Ph.D. a requirement for would-be scholars in the United States.) Chicago established four great schools of thought: philosophy, under John Dewey, sociology, under Park, political science, under Charles Merriam, and economics, much later in the century, under Milton Friedman. Park’s great achievement in sociology was to turn it from an essentially individual, observational activity into a much more empirically based discipline.50
The first noteworthy Chicago study was The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, now generally forgotten but regarded by sociologists as a landmark that blended empirical data and generalisation. W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki spent several months in Poland, then followed thousands of Polish immigrants to America, examining the same people on both sides of the Atlantic. They gained access to private correspondence, archives from the Bureau of Immigration, and newspaper archives to produce as complete a picture as possible of the whole migration experience. That was followed by a series of Chicago studies which examined various ‘discontents’ of the age, or symptoms of it – The Gang, by Frederic Thrasher, in 1927; The Ghetto, by Louis Wirth, Suicide, by Ruth Shonle Cavan, and The Strike, by E. T. Hiller, all published in 1928; and Organised Crime in Chicago, by John Landesco, released in 1929. Much of this research was directly related to policy – helping Chicago reduce crime or suicide, or get the gangs off the streets. Park always worked with a local community committee to ensure his studies chimed with the real concerns of local people. But the importance of Chicago sociology, which exerted its greatest influence between 1918 and 1935, had as much to do with the development of survey techniques, nondirective interviewing, and attitude measurement, all of which were intended to produce more psychological ways of grouping people, going beyond the picture painted in bland government censuses.51
The most significant Chicago survey was an examination of the discontent that most maimed American civilisation (a rival even to the unemployment caused by the Great Depression): race. In 1931 Charles Johnson published The Negro in American Civilisation and for the first time froze a statistical picture of the black American against which his progress, or lack of it, could be measured.52 Johnson was actually on the faculty of Fisk University when the book came out, but he had trained under Park and, in 1922, published The Negro in Chicago as one of the sociology department’s series of studies.53 Johnson, more than anyone else, helped create the Harlem Renaissance and believed that if the American Negro could not achieve equality or respect in any other way, he should exploit the arts. Throughout the 1920s, Johnson had edited the New York magazine for blacks, Opportunity, but toward the end of the decade he returned to academia. The subtitle of his new book was ‘A Study of Negro Life and Race Relations in the Light of Social Research,’ and the research element was its strong point. The book, the most thorough analysis of Negro status yet produced, compiled government records and reports, health and crime statistics, charts, tables, graphs, and lists. At that time, many blacks – called Negroes then – could remember slavery, and some had fought in the Civil War.
The statistics showed that the lives of blacks had improved. Illiteracy had been reduced among Negroes from 70 percent in 1880 to 22.9 percent in 1920. But of course that compared very badly, still, with the white illiteracy rate of 4.1 percent in 1920.54 The number of lynchings was down from 155 in 1892 to 57 in 1920 and 8 in 1928, the first time it had fallen to single figures. But eight lynchings a year was still a fearful statistic.55 More enlightening, perhaps, was the revealing way in which prejudices had evolved. For example, it was widely assumed that there was so pronounced a susceptibility among Negroes to tuberculosis that expenditures for preventive or corrective measures were practically useless. At the same time, it was believed that Negroes had a corresponding immunity to such diseases as cancer, malaria, and diabetes, so that no special measures of relief were necessary. It did not go unnoticed among Negroes that the majority opinion always interpreted the evidence to the minorities’ disadvantage.56 What Johnson’s survey also showed, however, and for the first time in a thorough way, was that many social factors, rather than race per se, predetermined health. In one survey of fifteen cities, including New York, Louisville and Memphis, the population density of Negroes was never less than that for whites, and on occasions four times as high.57 Mortality rates for Negroes in fifteen states were always higher than for
whites, and in some cases twice as high. What emerged from the statistics was a picture that would become familiar – Negroes were beginning to occupy the inner-city areas, where the houses were smaller, less well built, and had fewer amenities. Already there were differences in what was then called ‘law observance.’58 A survey of ten cities – Cleveland, Detroit, Baltimore, and others – showed Negroes as two to five times as likely to be arrested as whites, though they were three and a half times less likely to be sentenced to a year or more in prison. Whatever was being shown here, it wasn’t a biological propensity on the part of Negroes to commit violence, as many whites argued.
W. E. B. Du Bois’s chapter in Johnson’s book repeated his argument that the supposed biological differences between the races must be ignored. Instead attention should be focused on the sociological statistics – now amply widened – which disclosed the effects of discrimination on the status of the Negro. The statistics were particularly useful, he said, in the realm of education. In 1931 there were 19,000 black college students compared with 1,000 in 1900, 2,000 black bachelors of arts compared with 150. Those figures nailed the view that Negroes could never benefit from education.59 Du Bois never wavered from his position that the obsession with biological and psychological differences was a device for prejudiced whites to deny the very real sociological differences between races, for which they – the whites – were largely to blame. Herbert Miller, a sociologist from Ohio State University, felt that the tighter controls on immigration introduced in the 1920s had ‘profoundly affected race relations by substituting the Negro for the European’ as the object of discrimination.60 The long-term message of The Negro in American Civilisation was not optimistic, confounding America’s view of itself as a place where everything is possible.
Charles Johnson, the black, urban, sophisticated polymath and star of the Harlem Renaissance, could not have been more different from William Faulkner, a rural, white monomaniac (in the nicest sense) from the Deep South. Between 1929 and 1936 Faulkner produced his four masterpieces, The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), the last two of which specifically confront the issue of black and white.
Faulkner, who lived in Oxford, Mississippi, was obsessed by the South, its obsession with itself and with its history, what his biographer called ‘the great discovery.’61 For Faulkner the South’s defeat in the Civil War had trapped it in the past. He realised that whereas most of America was an optimistic country without much of a past, and with immigrants forever reshaping the present, the South was a very different enclave, almost the opposite of the thrusting North and West Coast. Faulkner wanted to explain the South to itself, to recreate its past in an imaginative way, to describe the discontents of a civilisation that had been superseded but refused to let go. All his great books about the South concern proud dynastical families, the artificial, arbitrary settings in which barriers are forever being transgressed, in particular those of class, sex, and race. Families are either on the rise or on the wane, and in the background is shame, incest, and in the case of Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! miscegenation. These unions raise passions, violent passions, death and suicide, frustrating dynastic ambitions.
Most typical of Faulkner’s approach is Absalom, Absalom! for in addition to its plot, this book, like The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, is notoriously difficult. Faulkner imposes strong demands on the reader – flashbacks in time, rapid alternation in viewpoint without warning, obscure references that are only explained later.62 His aim is to show the reader the confusion of society, unhelped by the author’s guiding hand. Just as his characters work on themselves to create their identities and fortunes, the reader must work out Faulkner’s meaning.63
Absalom, Absalom! begins when Miss Rosa Coldfield summons Quentin Compson, a friend and amateur historian, and tells him a story about the rise and fad of Thomas Sutpen, the founder of a southern dynasty whose son, Henry, shot his friend Charles Bon, who he had fought with in the war, causing the demise of the dynasty.64 What motive could Henry Sutpen have had for killing his best friend? Gradually Compson fills in the gaps in the story – using his imagination where facts are too sparse.65 Eventually, the mystery is solved. Charles Bon was actually the fruit of an earlier union by Thomas Sutpen and a Negro (and therefore his eldest child). In Sutpen’s refusal to recognise his eldest son, we see the ‘great guilt’ underlying the whole edifice of the dynasty, and by implication the South itself. Faulkner does not shirk the moral dilemmas, but his main aim was to describe the pain that is their consequence. While Charles Johnson catalogued the shortcomings of northern urban American society, Faulkner illuminated – with sympathy – that the South had its imperfections too.
If race was (still) America’s abiding problem, in Europe and particularly in Britain it was class that divided people. Here, one man who did so much to publicise the great poverty associated with Britain’s lower classes, especially in the 1930s following the great crash, was the writer and reporter George Orwell. It was no accident that Orwell was a reporter as well as a novelist, or that he should prefer reportage to bring home his message. The great age of reportage, as Eric Hobsbawm tells us, had only recently begun, in the 1920s, following the growth of new media, like Time and newsreels. The word reportage itself first appeared in French dictionaries in 1929, and in English in 1931. Many novelists of the time (Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis) were or had been or would become reporters.66
Orwell, born Eric Blair in the remote town of Motihari in Bengal, northwest of Calcutta, on 25 June 1903, received a conventional – that is to say, privileged – middle-class upbringing in Britain. He went to Saint Cyprian’s school near Eastbourne, where Cyril Connolly was a friend and where he wet the bed, then was sent to Wellington and Eton.67 After school he joined the Indian imperial police and served in Burma. Dissatisfied with his role in the imperial police, Blair cut short his time in Burma and began his career as a writer. ‘Feeling tainted by his “success” as a young officer in the East, he wanted to shun anything that reminded him of the unjust system which he had served. “I felt that I had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man’s dominion over man,” he explained later. “Failure seemed to me to be the only virtue. Every suspicion of self-advancement, even to ‘succeed’ in life to the extent of making a few hundreds a year, seemed to me spiritually ugly, a species of bullying.” ’68
It is too simple to say that Blair’s desire not to succeed was the direct result of his experience in Burma.69 The idea had planted itself in his mind long before he became a police officer. Saint Cyprian’s, says his biographer Michael Shelden, had prejudiced him against success very early in life by giving him such a corrupt view of merit. Winning was the only thing that mattered at the school, and one became a winner by ‘being bigger, stronger, handsomer, richer, more popular, more elegant, more unscrupulous than other people’ – in short, ‘by getting the better of them in every way.’ Later, he put it like this: ‘Life was hierarchical and whatever happened was right. There were the strong, who deserved to win and always did win, and there were the weak, who deserved to lose and always did lose, everlastingly.’70 He was made to feel that he was one of the weak, and that, whatever he did ‘he would never be a winner. The one consolation for him was the knowledge that there was honour in losing. One could take pride in rejecting the wrong view of success … I could accept my failure and make the best of it.’71 Of Orwell’s four most famous books, two explored in reportorial fashion the weakest (and poorest) elements of society, the flotsam of the 1930s capitalist world. The other two, produced after World War II, explored the nature of power, success, and the way they so easily become abused.
After leaving the police, Blair stayed with his parents for a few months but in the autumn of 1927 found a small room in the Portobello Road, in west London. He tried his hand at fiction and began to explore the East End of the city, living cheek by jowl wi
th tramps and beggars in order to understand how the poor lived, and to experience something of their suffering.72 Having rejected ‘every form of man’s dominion over man,’ he wanted ‘to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants.’ Blair worried at his appearance on these visits. He acquired a shabby coat, black dungaree trousers, ‘a faded scarf, and a rumpled cap’. He changed the way he spoke, anxious that his educated accent would give him away. He soon grew to know the seedy area around the West India docks, mixing with stevedores, merchant sailors, and unemployed labourers and sleeping at a common lodging house in Limehouse Causeway (paying nine pence a night). Being accepted in this way, he decided to go ‘on the road’ and for a while meandered through the outreaches of the East End, overnighting in dingy ‘spikes’ – the barracks of local workhouses. These sallies formed the backbone of Down and Out in Paris and London, which came out in 1933. Of course, Orwell was never really down and out; as Michael Shelden says, his tramping was something of a game, one that reflected his ambivalence toward his own background, his ambitions, and his future. But the game was not entirely frivolous. The best way he could help those who were less fortunate was to speak up for them, ‘to remind the rest of the world that they existed, that they were human beings who deserved better and that their pain was real.’73
