Review of George Cotkin's "Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture 1880-1900"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

This volume, the fourth in the Twayne Modern American Thought and Culture series edited by Lewis Perry and Howard Brick, looks at American intellectual history from 1880-1900. Cotkin covers this ground adeptly and even-handedly, from the pervasive influence of Darwinism on practically every area of human endeavor of the time to the ambiguous place of the woman in intellectual life. The book has its weak points, which I will mention at the end. 

The first part of the book is the best and offers some of the clearest insights, though Cotkin never really does get to the heart of the matter in attempting to define what modernism actually is for him. He uses the metaphor of a “tangled bank” – the same one that Darwin used in another context to describe nature. The themes are familiar ones: how our subjects are continually buffeted to and fro between moribund Victorianism and the new, ambiguous, questioning modernism. Cotkin does a superb job of detailing how far-reaching are the ideas of progress, often espoused in the guise of Darwinism. Even the leading liberal religious thinkers of the time – Henry Ward Beecher, Newman Smyth, Octavius Brooks Frothingham – co-opted the idea of progress to create a theology that ministered to the particularly Victorian (not modern) worldview. Former orthodoxy started to become laced with aspects of rationalism, but not necessarily for the scientific pretense it provided; in fact, more often than not, this aspect of religious thought devolved into a calming anodyne for the complacent middle class, an appeal to their fetishization of progress. He covers Pragmatism, that fresh American philosophical tradition, very well, including how its professionalization also led to the development of psychology as its own academic discipline. Even in the realm of psychology the freedom versus determinism debate comes up again, with William Graham Sumner firmly on the side of passively accepting Nature’s laws, while William James suggests there is room for human volition.

In one chapter, Cotkin does a fine job in detailing the perhaps not terribly surprising extent to which racism dominated the fields of academic anthropology and ethnology. Lewis Henry Morgan’s work with the Iroquois and John Wesley Powell’s involvement with the U.S. Geological Survey are also indicative of the search for parallelism, order, and logic that Cotkin has already illustrated. Naïve optimism was not relegated to the middle-class, however. As James C. Wellington of Columbian College said, “There is a limitless vista opened (though not an absolutely unlimited one) for the prospective working of better laws, purer justice, wiser economics, richer science, and higher morality.” By the end of the century, as the influence of Franz Boas grew, anthropology began to slowly slough off its former assumptions and found that “the contextual understanding of culture … was complex and inexact.” 

The second half of the book provides information that is just as interesting, but much more derivative. I was introduced to some new names – Frances Benjamin Johnston and Gertrude Kasebier – but the background story has been told much more effectively elsewhere. In the closing chapters, Cotkin touches on the growth of American consumerism, and gives a few quick and insightful sketches of Stephen Crane, Louis Sullivan, Thorstein Veblen, and Edgar Saltus. 

For an undergraduate student who is looking for a quick overview of the reigning ideas of the time, this book is perfectly sufficient. The first half is worth reading all the way through for the interesting undercurrents of rationalism and progress Cotkin develops, but the second half should serve mostly as biographical reference material.