It is man who kills, man who creates or suffers injustice; it is no longer man who, having lost all restraint, shares his bed with a corpse. Whoever waits for his neighbour to die in order to take his piece of bread is, albeit guiltless, further from the model of thinking man than the most primitive pygmy or the most vicious sadist.
Part of our existence lies in the feelings of those near to us. This is why the experience of someone who has lived for days during which man was merely a thing in the eyes of man is non-human. 44 [Begin Page 103]
Confronted with such a world we, outsiders, can only react like the Soviet soldiers who liber-ated the camp the next day. Levi described how they stood at the barbed wire, looking at the emaciated prisoners and the corpses. "They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funereal scene." It was not that they were horrified; these were veter-ans who had fought westward from Stalingrad to Auschwitz. The hardened soldiers were not horrified, but ashamed--ashamed of being human:
It was that shame we knew so well, the shame that drowned us after the selections, and every time we had to watch, or submit to, some outrage: the shame the Germans did not know, that the just man experiences at another man's crime; the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist. 45
The design, which postulated a living space so tiny that it was fit for a coffin and not a human being, showed a blatant disregard for international law protecting prisoners of war. According to article 7 of the 1899 Hague Convention, "prisoners of war shall be treated as regards food, quarters, and clothing, on the same footing as the troops of the government which has captured them." 46 This principle was reaffirmed in a second convention in 1907. The German General Staff acknowledged its validity. Their sole clarification of article 7 was that the prisoners were to be treated like German soldiers, "not worse, but also not better." 47 The 1929 Geneva Convention sought to define the standard soldier with whom a prisoner should be compared. Article 10 of the 1929 convention established two criteria. First, prisoners were to "be lodged in buildings or in barracks affording all possible guarantees of hygiene and healthfulness. The quarters must be fully protected from dampness, sufficiently heated and lighted. All precautions must be taken against danger of fire." This statement was open to interpretation. It assumed a compromise between generally accepted standards of comfort and healthiness and limitations on the means of the detaining power to meet them. Second, a more objective standard was given: "with regard to dormitories--the total surface, minimum cubic amount of air, arrangement and material of bedding--the conditions shall be the same as for the troops at base camps of the detaining power." 48 The designation "base camps" indicated that the norm was not the accommodation of soldiers in the trenches, but of those at rest or in training in the rear. As prisoner-of-war camps were supposed to be in the rear, in practice this meant that the accommodations of the prisoners and their guards were to be comparable. That this was not the case at Birkenau is demonstrated by a photo illustrating the guards' quarters (fig. 15). For a bedroom of nine guards official guidelines stipulated 3,600 cu. ft., or 400 cu. ft. per person. That is, eight times as much space allocated for sleeping accommodations alone, to which one might add dining halls, recreation rooms, and so on. 49
This should suffice. Yet a perverse curiosity makes us compare the accommodations at the prisoner-of-war camp at Birkenau with the official SS standards for concentration-camp barracks. On the same day that Bischoff had begun work in Birkenau, his immediate superior, Dr. Hans Kammler, issued a standard plan for the accommodation of concentration-camp inmates (fig. 16). 50 Comparison of the two plans reveals how the Germans treated the Soviet Untermensch in comparison with European inmates. To allow for a fair comparison we must note that the concentration camp barrack includes a washroom and toilets. When those are taken out of consideration there remains a space of 6,515 sq. ft. for 200 prisoners. At a height of 9 ft. this yields 58,650 cu. ft., or 293 cu. ft. per inmate. That is almost sixfold the space allocated to the Soviet Untermensch. To prevent any misconception: if we compare the 293 cu. ft. allocated to a hypothetical European inmate with the 400 cu. ft. allocated to a guard (see previous paragraph) we must bear in mind that the latter number refers only to the guard's sleeping accommodation, while the 293 cu. ft. is the total living space of the inmate. To continue the comparison: the huts in Birkenau provided 181 sq. ft. of window surface for 744 prisoners, or 0.25 sq. ft. per inmate, while the standard concentration-camp barrack provided eighteen times as much light. The melancholy comparison can be applied to every aspect of the design. In Birkenau the toilets and washrooms were housed in sixteen wash barracks and eighteen latrines; that is, one wash barrack per 7,800 inmates, and one latrine hut per 7,000 inmates. Each hut had a surface of 1,745 sq. ft.; that is, a little more than 0.2 sq. ft. per inmate. The standard concentration-camp hut provides 4.9 sq. ft. of wash space per inmate, almost twenty times as much. Toilet space in the standard camp was less generous at only 2.5 sq. ft. per inmate--but still more than twelve times as much as was allocated to the Soviet Untermensch.
The design of the wash barracks and privies is paradoxically "symbolic" of the fundamentally asymbolic situation of Birkenau. [Begin Page 106] Article 13 of the Geneva Convention required belligerents "to take all sanitary measures necessary to assure the cleanliness and healthfulness of camps and prevent epidemics." Prisoners were to "have at their disposal, day and night, installations conforming to sanitary rules and constantly maintained in a state of cleanliness." They were also to "be furnished a sufficient quantity of water for the care of their own bodily cleanliness." 51 This concern for the prisoners' cleanliness was inspired by the fear of lice, the most common host of the typhus virus. Lack of water, lack of soap, and insufficient change of clothing allow lice to gain a foothold on the human body, and so expose the prisoner population to a typhus epidemic. Yet there is also another reason. It has to do with the fundamentally symbolic nature of the consciousness of the self that makes us unable to live amidst our own excrement. Julia Kristeva has labelled excrement the confusing "abject" that is neither subject (me) nor object (that), "but not nothing either. A 'Something' that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me." 52 Excrement, so she believes, links us directly to the child's separation from the mother, and with that to the origin of a person's sense of identity. Describing defilement as the oldest and most universal symbol of evil, Paul Ricoeur has come to the same conclusion. Confronted with the excremental states of dirt, decay, and rot, we feel "a threat which, beyond the threat of suffering and death, aims at a diminution of existence, a loss of the personal core of one's being." 53 In a masterly essay on life in the death camps, the late Terrence Des Pres described what he termed as the camp's "excremental assault" on the inmates. The camp's filth, he argued, was the result of a deliberate policy to destroy the last vestiges of the prisoner's sense of self-worth.  Only when the inmates were completely crushed would the SS "reach the orgasmic peak of their potential domination...Spiritual destruction became an end in itself, quite apart from the requirements of mass murder." 54 Des Pres is incorrect in his insistence that defilement was the result of the SS's desire to exercise total power. The root cause was a fundamental inadequacy of design, a lack of willingness on the part of bureaucrats far away from the camp to allocate more than a minimum of material and financial resources for the camp's construction, and an assumption about the camp's use that proved badly mistaken. Yet intended or not, the result was the same: with the latrines submerged in excrement, with very little water to be had at very few points, and with mud everywhere, what remained was an inmate population without any means to preserve the outward signs of human dignity. As Des Pres asked, "how much self-esteem can one maintain, how readily can one respond to the needs of another, if both stink, if both are caked with mud and feces?" (Des Pres, 60). This excremental assault led to the same collapse of symbol and reality we noted with regard to the 53 cu. ft. allocated to each prisoner. In the extreme conditions of the camp, Des Pres reflected, the division between "concrete existence" and "symbolic modes of being" disappeared. "Body and spirit become the ground of each other, each bearing the other's need, the other's sorrow, and each responds directly to the other's total condition" (Des Pres, 65). The result was a situation in which "meaning no longer exists above and beyond the world; it reenters concrete experience, becomes immanent and invests each act and each moment with urgent depth" (Des Pres, 69).
This, then, brings us back to the designs. Were they even competent, given the situation? First, there is the spatial arrangement: the "privy" meant to serve 7,000 inmates is a shed with a single concrete open sewer, 118 ft. long by 3 ft. wide, without seats and with one long beam as a back support (fig. 17). The design was adapted from a model latrine for large units in winter quarters, and was first published in a leaflet on wartime emergency construction (fig. 18). 55 Like the model latrine, the camp latrine pit could be accessed from walkways at both sides. Neither in Auschwitz, nor in the model on which it was based were the walkways connected; but in Auschwitz this proved catastrophic, for each of the walkways was 118 ft. long. Both in the built version and the model, access to the walkways was provided by doors at each of the building's short sides. Imagine 7,000 inmates at sunrise, suffering from diarrhea or dysentery, and trying to enter, find an unoccupied place, defecate, manage not to fall into the sewer, and get out in the ten minutes or so allocated by the camp's regulations to such necessities. Assuming that 150 inmates could find a place at one time, and also assuming that all 7,000 inmates were to move their bowels with the requisite precision, it would require forty-six successive "seatings," with all the traffic jams involved. To be sure, the design might have provided a series of doors on the long sides, like the old English commuter trains used to have, and so accelerated matters significantly; but the basic problem would have remained. One sewer, supplied with an anemic supply of water and a drop of only 1.6 percent could never flush the discharge of 7,000 people in such a short time. The result was a secretory catastrophe. Added to that were omissions in the Auschwitz version that made the whole experience considerably more unpleasant. First, there were no seats. Second, the system of support was based on the minimal design of the field latrine, only to be used at the front. Third, the "shame-walls" were removed, which might have provided at least some physical privacy for those who had to defecate next to each other. Finally, the separate aeration for the pit was omitted (it had become superfluous since the pits at Auschwitz were open), which meant an insufferable stench. Gisella Perl, who was forced to use these latrines after BA I had become the women's camp of Birkenau, gives us a succinct description of the situation delineated in Drawing 795 :
There was one latrine for thirty to thirty-two thousand women and we were permitted to use it only at certain hours of the day. We stood in line to get into this tiny building, knee-deep in human excrement. As we all suffered from dysentery, we could rarely wait until our turn came, and soiled our ragged clothes, which never came off our bodies, thus adding to the horror of our existence by the terrible smell which surrounded us like a cloud.
Added to this was the indignity of the arrangement itself: "The latrine consisted of a deep ditch with planks thrown across it at certain intervals. We squatted on these planks like birds perched on a telegraph wire, so close together that we could not help soiling one another." 56
No explanation can justify or qualify the horror of these provisions. We have seen how decisions about the design were framed by a general ideology that assigned the Soviet prisoner of war the lowly status of Untermensch. But there was also another reason why Ertl and Bischoff thought that they could get away with less than the absolute minimum, a reason explained in one document discussing the intended capacity of the waste-water treatment plant at Birkenau. Originally the camp had been conceived as a base for crews of slave workers who were to be employed in amelioration and construction activities in the surrounding area. As it was to be largely empty during the day, the architects reasoned that even when the camp was filled to capacity, it would be possible to run it with only 66 percent of the minimum sanitary facilities, for prisoners could be serviced by locally dug field latrines at their place of work. 57 The reasoning was mistaken, for it entirely neglected the question of peak use in the early morning and evening, when all the prisoners had to use the facilities simultaneously.
The mistake made the lives of the inmates insufferable. Remarkably, it also created huge problems for the SS. As we have seen, as early as 1 March 1941 provincial officials had noted that the camp's sewage was going to create problems. Himmler had dismissed their concerns then, and he dismissed them again later. Bischoff, characterized by an SS psychologist as a man who was servile towards his superiors, troublesome to his colleagues, and tyrannical to his subordinates, was not going to make trouble about it. 58 Facing serious shortages in material and manpower, the architect callously reasoned that the camp was temporary and that the inmates were going to be working outside during the day: why not dump the camp's sewage directly into the Vistula? In the first brief for the camp, he had projected three sewers to take the waste water from the camp to an open channel directly connected to the Vistula. No screens, sedimentation basins, or other cleansing units were planned. 59 The total budget was RM 250,000, that is, 2.8 percent of a budget of almost RM 9 million. 60
But even this minimal arrangement was not realized. Bischoff blamed a lack of prisoners to dig the trenches. 61 The inmates were not Bischoff's only headache. The local and provincial planners created trouble from the moment that they received Bischoff's proposals. In early February 1942 the provincial chief of construction, [Begin Page 110] Wittmer, predicted that sewage would leak from the open channels into the surrounding area and argued that a flood, which was a distinct possibility in the lowland around Birkenau, would lead to severe pollution. 62 Provincial planner Ziegler concluded that enough was enough, and that it was time to remind Himmler of his responsibilities. In a letter of 18 February 1942 he reminded the Reichsführer-SS that "when I gave my permission some time ago to create a concentration camp I made it clear that a camp of this enormous size, located in such an extraordinarily well situated place for industry (close to coal, at a major road and railway junction, and at the confluence of three rivers), will be expected to accept many conditions in the interest of other parties or for the common good." He noted that Höss had always understood this, and that therefore there had been no problems until then. 63
Ziegler's letter alarmed the SS headquarters; despite appearances, the SS was not omni-potent, and while they certainly had total control over what happened within their camps once they were built, they also had to adhere to normal planning procedures and, if necessary, inspections, while the camps were under construction. Ziegler had the power to stop the expansion of Auschwitz. Hence the SS main office instructed Bischoff to draw up a new plan for the camp's waste-water management which would satisfy the province. Within a week it was completed. For a total expenditure of RM 424,000 Auschwitz-Birkenau would receive a seven-branch sewer that was to have a total length of 1 mile (RM 52,000), three sedimentation basins (RM 205,500), a separate draining system of pipes which connected to a collection pipe for a total length of 9 miles (RM 117,000) and, finally, a 0.7 mile-long open channel to discharge the effluent into the Vistula (RM 49,500). 64
But paper is patient, and little was done. The spring came, and the summer, and the camp continued to expand, and more and more sewage flowed untreated into the Vistula, and relations between the town, the province, and the camp steadily worsened. Finally, on 23 September, the parties came together to settle their differences. It was the same meeting in which the SS yielded on the issue of Hartjenstein's Garden City: with sewage spilling into the rivers, Oswald Pohl needed to give in somewhere--especially as he lacked the resources to install a system capable of dealing with the waste that the camp produced. When the sewage came up as the last point of the agenda, Pohl chose to humbug his way through the issue. The municipal and provincial bureaucrats, who had just won an important victory concerning the relocation of the SS settlement, allowed him to get away with it. All agreed that the matter needed the special attention of Himmler, and that they would meet again in the near future to resolve the sewage problem. 65
Thus began a period in which the creation of various provisional and more sophisticated sewage treatment plants became a major obsession in the Auschwitz Zentralbauleitung (Central Construction Office) (fig. 19). Designs became more intricate and technologically advanced, but work on the ground progressed slowly. Only in July 1943 was Bischoff able to complete the first provisional sedimentation basin just south of the recently completed Crematory II (fig. 20). This was to service BA I of Auschwitz-Birkenau, which had already been completed a year earlier. Because it was located adjacent to the crematory at the windward side of the camp, the basin only sharpened the all-pervasive excremental stench of the place. Progress on the provisional treatment facilities of BA II, north of Crematory III, was slow, as there were no guards to oversee the prisoners assigned to dig the channels. 66 When Pohl visited the camp on 17 August 1943 the completion of the sewage plants was the central topic of discussion. Bischoff explained that one of the difficulties in constructing the system was the lack of guards to oversee the prisoners: the treatment facilities had been planned outside the camp's barbed wire fence, and the channels that had to be dug ran for more than three miles through lightly guarded terrain. A massive deployment of prisoners, needed to complete the project that year, would be possible only if the camp could provide a steady and predictable supply of guards. Knowing that Bischoff was hysterical on the issue of prisoner labor, Pohl decided to see the site for himself. 67 He must have urged the camp to heed Bischoff's request, because for several weeks a great deal of work was done. But by mid-September the supply of guards started to dry up, and progress was halted.
Bischoff's inability to complete the sewers because of the lack of guards points to what was perhaps the greatest fallacy of Himmler's original proposal to use slave-labor to build up the German East. Himmler had been inspired by two precedents: the Reichsarbeitsdienst (Reich Labor Service) and the Soviet Gulag. The Reich Labor Service, which had become manda-tory on 26 June 1935, had been established to do exactly the kind of work that Himmler expected from slave labor. By 1937 the programs of the Reichsarbeitsdienst affected one fifth of Germany. 68 The organization was involved in the reclamation of marshes, the draining and irrigation of underdeveloped land, the concentration of fragmented farm properties, the protection of lowlands by dikes, and the reclamation of land from the sea. But the men of the Labor Service worked with minimal supervision. They did not need guards. They took pride in their work. And the hundreds of thousands of prisoners within the Soviet Gulag worked most often in desolate areas in which an escape from the camp meant certain death in the wilderness. Himmler, however, had to deploy his slave labor (fig. 21) in a highly developed environment and, as the war continued, with dwindling manpower to guard them. Birkenau's original purpose had been unattainable from its inception.
This brings us to the camp's transformation from a prisoner-of war-camp into a concen-tration camp for Jews. I will neither analyze nor seek to explain this transformation, but limit myself to recording some facts. From the moment of their arrival the Soviet prisoners of war, who were supposed to build their own accommodations, had died more rapidly than the SS expected. Höss recalled how "the situation became really terrible during the muddy period in the winter of 1941-42. They could bear the cold, but not the dampness and wearing clothes that were always wet. This, together with the primitive, half-finished, hastily thrown-together barracks at the start of Camp Birkenau caused the death rate steadily to climb" (Höss, 133). Snow began to fall at the end of November. Höss sent a report to Berlin indicating a catastrophic situation. In response Kammler phoned Bischoff on 3 December, and demanded a full report within twenty-four hours. Bischoff's statement introduced the bad news with some statistics meant to impress on Kammler the extent of his progress until now: in just over a month 140,000 cu. ft. of earth had been moved, 1,600 concrete foundations had been poured, and 86,000 cu. ft. of brick work had been erected, using 1.1 million bricks. Further, 600 concrete posts had been erected for the fence, and 100,000 stretching ft. of barbed wire had been put into place. The bad news was that only two of the huts in BA I had been completed, twelve had been provisionally enclosed, seven were advanced enough that work could begin on the girders, and nine already had walls under construction. 69 [Begin Page 114]
A major reason for the slow progress was that the Russians had not been supplied with building materials. Bischoff's original brief, drafted in October, had mentioned that "the barracks will be for the greatest part built from brick as there is no wood available and the material will be partly derived from the demolition of the hamlet of Birkenau." 70 Thus the first batch of Soviet prisoners of war were told to cannibalize the village; they had already been brought to the point of cannibalizing each other, as Höss later admitted when recalling this early period in the history of the camp:
Cases of cannibalism happened quite often in Birkenau. Once I found the body of a Russian lying between two piles of bricks. The body had been ripped open with a dull instrument. The liver was missing. They beat each other to death just to get something to eat...During the levelling of the land and the trench-digging in the first section of Birkenau [BA I], the men discovered several corpses of Russians apparently beaten to death and partially eaten...[The Soviets] had become animals who looked for only one thing, food. (Höss, 133f.)
Not only did SS overseers withhold materials from the subhumans, they also furnished no tools to cannibalize the houses in Birkenau. They were to be pulled down with bare hands, and the barracks built likewise. This contributed to the high mortality rate during construction. In the month of October, 1,255 Soviets died; in November, 3,726; in December, 1,912; and in January, 1,017. By the end of January almost 8,000 of the 10,000 men had died, which translates into a mortality rate of 240 percent per year. One more month would suffice to kill the remaining 2,000.
The SS now began to look for a new source of labor. On 26 January 1942 Himmler com-municated his new plans to the inspector of all the concentration camps, Richard Glücks. "As Russian prisoners of war are not expected in the near future," Glücks was to take charge of the "large number of Jews and Jewesses who are being emigrated from Germany, and send them to the camps...During the next few weeks, prepare to receive 100,000 male Jews and up to 50,000 Jewesses in the concentration camps. Large-scale tasks and assignments will come to the concentration camps in the next few weeks." 71 Himmler's communication spelt more doom than might at first appear. The Jews were not to be housed in a concentration camp set up according to Kammler's guidelines, but in Bischoff's infinitely more primitive prisoner-of-war camp in Birkenau. Three years and one day after Himmler's telegram the Soviet Army liberated Auschwitz. Early Soviet estimates put the number of people killed in those three years at close to four million. Today we believe that the number is more like one million.
"Geographical Situation. Auschwitz is located in the midst of a fertile, loessial landscape that stretches between the Beskid Mountains in the south and the Upper Silesian hills in the north. The loessial terrace, which drops almost ten meters where it reaches the flood plain of the Vistula, pushes toward Auschwitz far to the north. At the point where the Vistula regains its eastern direction after having run north for some time, there was once a natural ford just above the meeting place of the [tributary rivers] Sola and Pzemsa with the river Vistula, while the terrace that offered steep slopes on three sides offered a point of departure for the thirteenth-century German foundation of a town in the shadow of a ducal castle.
Natural Traffic Situation. At Auschwitz the roads that come southwest from the Moravian Gate and south from the Beskid Mountains through the Sola valley meet the world trade route that connects the North Sea to the Black Sea.
Location. Today, Auschwitz is also a place where many important roads and railroads meet ...Its location is determined not only by the fact that Auschwitz is a central place in the region, but also by its good traffic location within the larger space. That is to say, Auschwitz occupies more or less the center of the Moravian, the Upper Silesian and the Polish indust-rial areas. Also significant is its location at the immediate periphery of the Upper Silesian coal mining area. The choice of this site as a location for large industries is made feasible by the presence of an almost flat, large, dry loessial terrace of more than two hundred acres that can be developed, and the bountiful supply of water in the Vistula valley.
Population. The present population situation in Auschwitz
(Administrative District) is as follows:
| Auschwitz-City | 12,500 (among which 7,000 Jews) |
| Babitz | 2,500 |
| Birkenau | 4,500 |
| Broskowitz | 400 |
| Dwory | 2,200 |
| Monowitz | 1,200 |
| Stare-Stawy | 750 |
| ------ | |
| Total around | 25,000 (The number of ethnic Germans is insignificant.) |
Population Planning. Because of the importance of the location, the future population has been set at 35,500 people, in addition to which there will be two reserve areas for 11,500 people, creating a total potential population of:
47,000 inhabitants.
Thereby we assume the following division of the population:
Percentage of people employable (after Rechenberg): 55% of the population. Hence 35,500 x 55% = approximately 19,500 employable people.
Percentage of this number employed to service the town and its region: 45% of the employable people (minimum according to Rechenberg 35%, increased because of the town's position as a central place in an otherwise rural area, with important traffic functions--government, trade, traffic, crafts, small industries. Hence 19,500 x 45% = local significance: 8,800.
Number of workers in the large industries: Buna [the IG Farben plant]--3,000; rolling mill--600; other--400. Total = 4,000.
Railways and ancillary businesses = 1,500.
SS and ancillary businesses (but not the barracks and the concentration camp inmates)
500 settlers x 3 = 1,500.
Reserve and otherwise employed = 3,700
Total employed (8,800 + 4,000 + 1,500 + 1,500 + 3,700) = 19,500
Space Needs of Settlement. In the enlarged municipal area we aim
to house all 35,500 inhabitants in the settlement areas described below:
| Settlement Area | Size in ha | Density | Population |
| A. Old Auschwitz
(government, banks, shops) | 45 | 200 | 9,500 |
| B. East Auschwitz
(part work settlement) | 110 | 150 | 16,500 |
| C. West Auschwitz
(Railway and SS settlement) | 100 | 100 | 10,000 |
| Reserve Area | Size in ha | Density | Population |
| D. Stare-Stawy
(Partly homesteads) | 75 | 75 | 5,500 |
| E. Zaborze | 80 | 75 | 6,000 |
| 410 | (average) 115 | 47,500 |
This suggests an average land use of 200 m2 per house, according to the land-use tables developed by Rosenberg; the population density of 115 inhabitants per hectare is, according to my own research, an average for a mixed, generally two-story, open and continuous arrangement with streets in between, lined by three-story buildings.
Planning of Districts. The point of departure for general planning has been the assumption that the only area suitable to large industry is the zone located east of the town--at the town's leeside--south of Dwory. A natural area for human settlement is offered by the nearly flat and dry terrace, which stretches west of the town and immediately adjacent to it. On the basis of considerations for safety from bombardments, the settlement area is separated from the industrial area by a depression of 500m. This area must be developed as a park-like green belt.
This is all the available space than can be used for settlement immediately adjacent to the existing town core.
The existing urban area is constructed around the medieval core, which will be preserved with its Ring. It will serve in first instance as the center of government and commerce.
Further, a natural expansion of the town can occur in the adjacent area between the sta-tion and the Sola. Because relocation of the station is impossible, this area is the only pos-sible...zone for city expansion. This will lead to the creation of an organic connection between the city as a whole and the station, of which the main hall will be pushed 300m east in order to create a new station square with a post office, a hotel and similar amenities. This expansion settlement area, which will be able to house 10,000 people, will also give space for the SS settlement and a settlement for railroad employees, each with 500 houses, with in total 2 x 500 x 4.5 = 4,500 inhabitants. The part of this area that is located north of the through road will be reserved for light industries...
Separated by a green belt from the settlement area adjacent to the station is an area of 35 ha for the SS base, which at its northwest corner touches on the existing mill.
Another green belt separates the SS base from the concentration camp proper, which is approximately 150 ha in size. The agricultural areas that are necessary for the purposes of the camp are defined in such a way that the organic development of the town will not be obstructed and no important road connections will be interrupted. For the rest it is assumed that the rivers Sola and Vistula will be the natural borders [of the concentration camp area].
As small industries can be located in the settlement area at appropriate locations, a further industrial area has not been planned. If necessary at a later date, one might consider creating another industrial area west of the station, stretching west toward the Vistula. The establish-ment of SS industrial installations might begin there, and, because of this possibility, a long-term agricultural development should be avoided in that location.
Traffic Planning. At the railroad an expansion of the station is foreseen...The spine of the traffic within the town will be defined by the narrowly shaped connector that links the station, crosses over the existing Sola bridge, and passes through a cut in the old town to the settlement area of East Auschwitz. Also at the town core will be a new Ring that will be a center for government, party, and community buildings. This area will be connected to the regional road to the north and a small railway station. The industrial road will continue east through a park-like green belt to the place where the main gate and the industrial offices will be located...
Free Areas and Recreation. The valleys of the Sola and the Vistula with their borders shall be kept free. The flood plain south of the town will become dry even during periods of flooding after flood controls around the Sola have been completed, and can hence be used for sports facilities and small gardens. A cemetery that can be expanded, with an immediate surface of 35,500 inhabitants x 3m2 = 10 ha, is also foreseen. Because of the new bridge over the Vistula the forest at Bobrek and Chelm can be easily reached.
Water and Sewage Treatment. An area in the Sola valley has been designated as a water control zone...An area has been allocated for sewage treatment, but we must still decide on measures to protect it from floods." 72
Robert-Jan van Pelt is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He is the author of Tempel van de Wereld: De Kosmische Symboliek van de Tempel van Salono , De Binnenhof , and, with Carroll William Westfall, of Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism . The essay published here will form part of a new book, The Origins of Auschwitz, to be published in spring 1995 by Yale University Press.
* The author wishes to express his thanks to the following institutions and persons for their help and hospitality. State Museum at Auschwitz Birkenau: Barbara Jarosz, Beata Koszlowska, Helena Kubica, Franciszek Piper; Municipal Archive at Oswiecim: Elzbieta Skalinska-Dindorf, Pawel Hudzik; In Oswiecim, Harmese, and Brzeszce: Ignacy Bujarowicz, Aleksander Kaminski, Grazyna Mincer, Janusz Mincer, Barbara Senkowsky, Kazimierz Senkowsky, Slawomir Staszak; Bundesarchiv Koblenz; Berlin Document Center: David Marwell, Renate Wolf; Niels Gutschow, Absteinach; Susanne Heim, Berlin; Jean-Claude Pressac, Ville-du-Bois; Yale University: Deborah Dwork, the staff of the Sterling Memorial Library, and the staff of the photography department of the Yale Audiovisual Center.
All translations, unless otherwise noted, are the author's.
1. As quoted in Gillian Rose, "Architecture after Auschwitz," Assemblage 21 (September 1993): 63.
2. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), 143.
3. I am echoing this formulation from Barthes, Mythologies, 142.
4. See Robert-Jan van Pelt, Tempel van de Wereld: De Kosmische Symboliek van de Tempel van Salomo (Utrecht: Hes Uitgevers, 1984), 53ff.
5. For a discussion of malevolence, expediency, and insufficiency, see John Kekes, Facing Evil (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 66ff.
6. See Jean-Claude Pressac with Robert-Jan van Pelt, "The Machinery of Mass Murder at Auschwitz," in Auschwitz, ed. Yisrael Gutman (Washington, D.C.: The US Holocaust Memorial Museum, forthcoming in 1994), and Jean-Claude Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, trans. Peter Moss (New York: The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1989).
7. Robert-Jan van Pelt and Carroll William Westfall, Architectural Principles in the Age of Historicism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991).
8. Hans van der Laan, Architectonic Space, trans. Richard Padovan (Leiden: Brill, 1883).
9. Dietrich Klagges, Geschichtsunterricht als nationalpolitische Erziehung (Frankfurt am Main: Moritz Diesterweg, 1937), 199.
10. Josef Nadler, Das stammhafte Gefüge des deutschen Volkes (Munich: Josef Koesel & Friedrich Pustet, 1934), 110f.
11. Rudolf Kötzschke and Wolfgang Ebert, Geschichte der ostdeutschen Kolonisation (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1937), 19.
12. Kötzschke and Ebert, Geschichte der ostdeutschen Kolonisation, 9.
13. Kötzschke and Ebert, Geschichte der ostdeutschen Kolonisation, 10.
14. As quoted in Adolf Hitler, My New Order, ed. Raoul de Roussy de Sales (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941), 737f.
15. Heinrich Himmler, "Deutsche Burgen im Osten," Das Schwarze Korps 7 (23 January 1941): 4.
16.
17. Hanns Johst, Ruf des Reiches--Echo des Volkes: Eine Ostfahrt (Munich: Franz Eher Nachfolger, 1940), 86ff.
18. Johst, Ruf des Reiches, 126 ff.
19. Quoted in A Holocaust Reader, ed. Lucy S. Dawidowicz (New York: Behrmann House, 1976), 134.
20. Der Reichsführer-SS vor den Oberabschnittsführern und Hauptamtschefs im Haus der Flieger in Berlin am 9. Juni 1942, German Federal Archives, Koblenz, Coll. NS 19, no. 4009, 18.
21. See Gordon J. Horwitz, In the Shadow of Death: Living Outside the Gates of Mauthausen (New York: The Free Press, 1990), 23ff.
22. Letter from Konrad Meyer to Gerhard Ziegler, 5 July 1940, German Federal Archives, Koblenz, Coll. R 49, no. 902.
23. Ulrich Greifelt, "Vermerk [Siedlungszone I]," 8 August 1940, German Federal Archives, Koblenz, Coll. R 49, no. 902, 2, 8-10.
24. "Vermerk über eine Sitzung am 10.10.40 in Kattowitz," 14 October 1940, German Federal Archives, Koblenz, Coll. R 49, no. 902.
25. Letter from Konrad Meyer to Fritz Arlt, 12 December 1940, German Federal Archives, Koblenz, Coll. R 49, no. 902.
26. Hans Stosberg, "Auschwitz: Erlaüterung zur Raumordnungsskizze," Provincial Archive at Katowice, Coll. Landesplanung Gau Oberschlesien, no. 467, 198-206.
27. "Vermerk betr. Ortsplanung Auschwitz," 14 September 1942, Provincial Archive at Katowice, Coll. Landesplanung Gau Oberschlesien, no. 467, 103-105.
28. "Vermerk betr.: KL-Auschwitz, Eisenbahn-, Siedlungs-, Grenz- u. Wasserfragen," Provincial Archive at Katowice, Coll. Landesplanung Gau Oberschlesien, no. 467, 96-99.
29. Hans Stosberg, "Zum Jahreswechsel 1941-1942," Provincial Archive at Katowice, Coll. Landesplanung Gau Oberschlesien, no. 467, 148-151.
30. Rudolf Höss, Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz, trans. Andrew Pollinger, ed. Steven Paskuly (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1992), 285. Further quotations from this book will be acknowledged in the body of the text by the author's name, followed by the page numbers from this edition.
31. Letter from Gerhard Ziegler to Himmler, 18 February 1942, Provincial Archive at Katowice, Coll. Landesplanung Gau Oberschlesien, no. 467, 130.
32. Minutes of the ministerial conference held at the Ministry of Propaganda, Berlin, 5 July 1941. As quoted in The Secret Conferences of Dr. Goebbels: The Nazi Propaganda War 1939-43, trans. Ewald Osers, ed. Willi A. Boelcke (New York: Dutton, 1970), 177f.
33. Reichsführer SS, Der Untermensch (Berlin: Hauptamt SS, 1942), 4f.
34. As quoted in Omer Bartov, Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis and War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 129.
35. Bartov, Hitler's Army: Soldiers, 129.
36. Bartov, Hitler's Army: Soldiers, 130f.
37. Christian Streit, "The German Army and the Politics of Genocide," in The Policies of Genocide: Jews and Soviet Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany, ed. Gerhard Hirschfeld (London: Allen & Unwin / The German Historical Institute, 1986), 4.
38. As quoted in Jürgen Förster, "The German Army and the Ideological War against the Soviet Union," in The Policies of Genocide, ed. Hirschfeld, 20.
39.
40. Karl Bischoff, "Erläuterungsbericht zum Vorentwurf für den Neubau des Kriegsgefangenenlagers der Waffen-SS, Auschwitz O/S," Central Archives of Russia, Moscow, Coll. 502/1, no. 232.
41. Archive of the State Museum in Oswiecim-Brzezinka, neg. 21493/1
42. Telegram of SS-Hauptstürmführer Sesemann to the Architectural Office of the Waffen SS, Auschwitz, 25 October 1941, Central Archives of Russia, Moscow, Coll. 502/1, no. 215.
43. Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, trans. Barbara Vedder (New York: Viking Press, 1967), 110f.
44. Primo Levi, If This Is a Man? trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Orion, 1959), 204f.
45. Primo Levi, The Reawakening, trans. Stuart Woolf (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1965), 12.
46. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law, The Hague Con-ventions of 1899 (II) and 1907 (IV) Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land (Washington D.C.: The Endowment, 1915), 10f.
47. Christian Meurer, Das Kriegsrecht der Haager Konferenz (Munich: J. Schweitzer Verlag, 1907), 125.
48. U.S. Congress, Senate, Treaties, Conventions, International Acts, Protocols and Agreements between the United States of America and Other Powers (1923-1937), 75th Congress, 3d sess., 1938, S. Doc. 134, 5231.
49. My source is a folder with twenty-five standard plans for barracks to be used in a typical concentration-camp. These plans were issued by the SS-HHB/II (Bauten) in the fall of 1941 to regulate concentration-camp design. The plan I chose for my calculation is Truppenunterkunft B. Archive of the State Museum in Oswiecim-Brzezinka, Coll. BW, no. 3/3a, File 3/5.
50. Barrack Type H3: Häftlingsunterkunft, Archive of the State Museum in Oswiecim-Brzezinka, Coll. BW, no. 3/3a, File 3/5.
51. U.S. Congress, Senate, Treaties, Conventions, International Acts, Protocols and Agreements Between the United States of America and Other Powers (1923-1937), 75th Congress, 3d sess., 1938, S. Doc. 134, 5230.
52. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 2.
53. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 41.
54. Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 60. Further references to this book will be acknowledged in the body of the text by the author's name, followed by the page numbers from this edition.
55. Behelfsmässiges Bauen im Kriege, Part I: Shelter; Section J: Sanitation; Chapter I: Latrines. Archive State Museum Oswiecim-Brzezinka, Coll. BW, no. 6a, File 6a + 7a/2.
56. Gisella Perl, I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz (New York: International Universities Press, 1948), 33.
57. "Vorentwurf für den Ausbau der Kläranlage II im K.G.L. Auschwitz," Archive of the State Museum in Oswiecim-Brzezinka, Coll. BW, no. 18, File 18/70, 3.
58. "Beurteilung," 14 November 1944, Berlin Document Center, Coll. SSO, Bischoff, Karl, 9.8.97.
59. "Erläuterungsbericht zum Vorentwurf für den Neubau des Kriegsgefangenenlagers der Waffen-SS, Auschwitz O/S," Central Archives of Russia, Moscow, Coll. 502/1, no. 232, 5.
60. "Kostenvoranschlag für den Vorentwurf über den Neubau des Kriegsgefangenenlagers der Waffen-SS, Auschwitz O/S," Central Archives of Russia, Moscow, Coll. 502/1, no. 232, 4.
61. "Baubericht über den Stand der Bauarbeiten für das Bauvorhaben Kriegsgefangenenlager der Waffen-SS Auschwitz," 10 December 1941, Central Archive of Russia, Moscow, Coll. 502/1, no. 219, 3.
62. Letter from Wittmer to Ziegler, 7 February 1942, Provincial Archive at Katowice, Coll. Landesplanung Gau Oberschlesien, no. 467, 137-139.
63. Letter from Wittmer to Ziegler, 7 February 1942, 132.
64. "Kostenüberschlag für das Bauvorhaben: Kriegsgefangenenlager der Waffen-SS in Auschwitz O/S, 25.2.1942," and "Baubeschreibung Kriegsgefangenenlager der Waffen-SS in Auschwitz, Kanalisation und Kläranlagen," Central Archive of Russia, Moscow, Coll. 502/1, no. 235, 8, 19.
65. "Vermerk betr.: KL-Auschwitz, Eisenbahn-, Siedlungs-, Grenz- u. Wasserfragen," Provincial Archive at Katowice, Coll. Landesplanung Gau Oberschlesien, no. 467, 3f.
66. Letter from Bischoff to Kammler, 26 July 1943, Archive of the State Museum in Oswiecim-Brzezinka, Coll. BW, no. 1/5, File 1/17.
67. "Aktenvermerk betr.: Besuch des Hauptamtschef...Pohl in Auschwitz, 17. August 1943," Central Archive of Russia, Moscow, Coll. 502/1, no. 232.
68. Will Decker, "Der deutsche Arbeitsdienst: Ziele, Leistungen und Organization des Reichsarbeitsdienst," in Wehrhaftes Volk: der organisatorische Aufbau Teil III, ed. Paul Meier-Bennechenstein, vol. 3 of Das Dritte Reich im Aufbau (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt Verlag, 1939), 487f.
69. Letter from Bischoff to Kammler, 4 December 1941, Central Archives of Russia, Moscow, Coll. 502/1, no. 219, 26-8.
70. Central Archives of Russia, Moscow, Coll. 502/1, no. 232, 3.
71. Quoted in Streit, Keine Kamaraden, 223.
72. Hans Stosberg, "Auschwitz: Erlaüterung zur Raumordnungsskizze," Provincial Archive at Katowice, Coll. Landesplanung Gau Oberschlesien, no. 467, 198-206.
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We begin this journal in the belief that the artistic movement known as modernism produced the most radical and comprehensive changes in western culture since romanticism. Here would be the place to list those changes, if only they were all nameable and known, like characters in a chapter of yesterday's reading. Instead we sense that the effects of modernism still reverberate through all the arts, and its products surround us in the buildings where we work, the houses and apartments where we live, and even the chairs where we sit now trying to itemize its effects. Modernism was more than a repertory of artistic styles, more too than an intellectual movement or set of ideas; it initiated an ongoing transformation in the entire set of relations governing the production, transmission, and reception of the arts. The modernists themselves seem to have understood this when they urged that changes in the arts be viewed in conjunction with changes in philosophy, historiography, and social theory, to say nothing of the scientific shifts that they claimed as part of their moment's cultural revolution. The success of modernism was so great that we all feel ourselves to be latecomers: postmodernism is the term now invoked to assert an epochal shift away from our parents' perspective.
We hope that every issue of will convey some sense of the grand ambition and scope of artists and intel-lectuals of the first half of this century. This is to say that this journal will look widely at the art and thought of this period, but also that we want to examine the sense of contestation that was essential to it: between old and new orders, of course, but also among various divi-sions of the intellectual endeavor. We hope for a journal that not only records and explains some of the crossings between architecture and political thought, say, or between music and economics; we want the essays and reviews we publish to attempt similar crossings. We will be pleased to publish essays and reviews by sociologists on literary history, for example. We won't always be able to find this sort of work, but we will always be looking for it, and will regularly ask our authors to push toward their neighboring disciplines in the hope that readers will recognize the appropriateness of this ambition in a journal devoted to the study of modernism, even when they may disapprove of poachers on their own particular territory.
The particular examples of border crossing that we've cited will suggest one of the two major ambitions of the journal. One is simply to maintain a sense of the international dimensions of modernism. An essay about a New Jersey poet, as is evident in this first issue, may sit next to another about German expansion into Poland. Our other, more difficult objective is to bring into dialogue writers in the social sciences engaged by issues of modernity and modernization and scholars of the literary and fine arts committed to the history of modernism in the arts. Scholars of the humanities have borrowed a great deal lately from social, political, and economic historians, and procedures of literary inter-pretation have influenced the writing of history as well; but we have a long way to go before we can claim that these two large divisions of professional intellectual activity are in dialogue with one another. In the pages to follow we intend to experiment with various ways of encouraging collaboration, though we know that it will be much easier to retain the international scope of modernism than it will be to facilitate exchange across the disciplinary boundaries separating literary critics and political theorists, economists and musicologists.
For the first few issues of we have chosen themes that will allow us to draw into the journal writers from various scholarly disciplines. Our first theme is modernism and race, a subject crucial both to modernism and to the social transformations of modernity. For while the modernists frequently advocated internationalism in art and politics, they also drew on folk or ethnic traditions that seemed to preserve intact vestiges of sensibilities not yet tainted by the processes of modernization, doing so in a period that also experienced intense nationalism in Europe and the mounting force of interethnic encounters mediated through travel, immigration, colonialism, and early anthropology. We have had no difficulty finding fascinating work on this topic--indeed we have given over our first two issues to it. Although we have seen many studies of aspects of this subject in the past few years, we want to hold this focus long enough to suggest how the history of modernism might look if we took race as an originating concern of modernism, as some of the authors included in this issue argue that we should. Future issues will take up such themes as anarchism, religion and secularity, fascism and culture, and the institutions of art, and we will devote some issues to single res or movements such as F.T. Marinetti and the Futurists, Wyndham Lewis, and Igor Stravinsky.
Although our editorial policies are not intended to encourage methodological conformity of any sort, the essays that appear in this first issue will rightly suggest that the journal will be primarily concerned with historical understanding, though that is an umbrella to cover a crowd. We do hope to attract writers of various methodological and political commitments to contribute to this collaborative effort, and we want as well to include the work of writers, musicians, and artists as well as professional scholars. We will try to attract to these pages work by established and well-known scholars as well as by young and lesser-known writers. What we will ask of all our authors is a commitment to clear expression with a minimum of specialized terminology; a plain style, we think, is necessary to an interdisciplinary effort like the one we've described.
Those are our hopes and desires, but the product of our efforts will doubtless turn out to be quite different from what we expect. This is after all a collaborative effort with colleagues from whom we have not yet heard. We hope for a conversation whose outcome is hard to foresee.
We have received encouragement and moral support from many colleagues at Yale and Chicago, and elsewhere too. Here we want to record our gratitude to Charles H. Long, Deputy Provost at Yale, and Philip Gossett, Dean of the Humanities Division at Chicago, without whose material support we could not have started this project. Now we look forward to the support of our subscribers to keep us going.
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At a meeting of the American Antiquarian Society in 1895, after hearing a paper on "The Scotch-Irish in America," G. Stanley Hall, president of Clark University and one of the country's leading psychologists, remarked that he did not know of "a better illustration of the beneficial effects of crossing different stocks than this." Hall was not generally in favor of race mixture, but he was willing to make an exception in this case, because the brain fibers of the Scotch and Irish fitted so neatly into each other's cranial interstices.
The Irish race anthropologically regarded is, as a stock, remarkable for its vitality, for its esprit, for its ready wit, for its quick susceptibility to all relations with all things and all men around it. On the other hand, the Scotch mature later, and from the stand-point of brain analysis they must be as remarkable for the fibers that connect the parts of the cortex one with the other, the so called 'association fibers,' as the Irish brain must be for the 'projective fibers' connecting with the external world. [The product of their] "favorable commingling of bloods is seen in the Scotch-Irish race;...they are not only more susceptible to all environments outside, but their activity is prolonged to a greater period of age.
Hall made it clear that much more was involved in the "commingling of bloods" than simply physical characteristics. "The combination of racial bloods is not a mere matter of biology or physiology...because physical inheritance does not include mere physical mingling of the bloods, but [also] that subtle atmosphere of associations, of home traditions, of family recol-lections and ideals and aims, that are so inseparable."
From the American Antiquarian Society meetings in Boston to the chambers of the United States Senate is a step out into the wider American society of the 1890s. But where the speaker is Henry Cabot Lodge, the transition is an easy one, and indeed the pattern of assumption is not dissimilar. Speaking in favor of immigration restriction in 1896, Lodge argued that though a Hindoo might "absorb the learning of Oxford" and even sit in Parliament, he could not be made an Englishman, even though they both came from the "great Indo-European family." It had taken "six thousand years and more to create the differences which exist between them," and these could not be effaced by education in a single lifetime. Lodge went on to ask what was the "matter of race which separates the Englishman from the Hindoo and the American from the Indian?"
It is something deeper and more fundamental than anything which concerns the intellect. We all know it instinctively, although it is so impalpable we can scarcely define it, and yet it is so deeply marked that even the physiological differences between the Negro, the Mongol, and the Caucasian are not more persistent or more obvious. When we speak of a race, then,...we mean the moral and intellectual characters, which in their association make the soul of a race, and which represent the product of all its past, the inheritance of all its ancestors, and the motives of all its conduct. The men of each race possess an indestructible stock of ideas, traditions, sentiments, modes of thought, an unconscious inheritance from their ancestors, upon which argument has no effect. What makes a race are their mental and, above all, their moral char-acteristics, the slow growth and accumulation of centuries of toil and conflict.
To move from scholar to scholar-politician to fictional Irish saloon-keeper is hardly to encompass all levels of late nineteenth-century American society, but for present purposes we will go no further than to note that similar assumptions seem to underlie the thinking of Mr. Dooley. Mr. Dooley felt that the trouble with the Cubans was that they didn't "undherstand our civilization." To us, freedom meant hard work; to the Cuban, it meant blissful idleness. "Ye can't make people here undherstand that, an' ye can't make a Cubian undherstand that freedom means th' same thing as a pinitinchry sintince.... Th' Cubians ain't civilized in our way. I sometimes think I've got a touch iv Cubian blood in me own veins."
In 1896, the processes and the problems of heredity were little understood, and "blood" was for many a solvent in which all problems were dissolved and all processes commingled. "Blood"--and by extension "race"--included numerous elements that we would today call cultural; there was not a clear line between cultural and physical elements or between social and biological heredity. The characteristic qualities of civilizations were carried from one generation to another both in and with the blood of their citizens. Those of us today who are sophisticated in the concepts of the behavioral sciences have lost the richly connotative nine-teenth-century sense of "race" as accumulated cultural differences carried somehow in the blood. Nor do we mourn the loss. If rich in connotation, the idea of race as blood is conceptually opaque, and in its political applications all too literally and horribly bloody. But we should still be able to define and to understand the broader meaning the term once carried. The common basis of assumption shared by Mister Dooley, Professor Hall, and Senator Lodge was widespread in the 1890s. And although there was an obvious racist potential contained and often manifest in it, it did not necessarily involve a racial deter-minism in what has come to be regarded as the usual racist sense. For these men race was as much product as cause. If it was a determinant of national cultural experience, it was at the same time an outgrowth of previous national and cultural tradition. Indeed, in 1890, the idea of race was in many ways and for many people not very different from what we would call today national character.
What I would like to do here is to look a bit more analytically at the pattern of thinking that seems common to Hall, Lodge, and Dooley--as well as to a large group of social scien-tists whose writings were originally the subject of my study. One way of doing this is to pose several obvious questions about race. What is a race? What are the causes and the nature of race differences? What is the significance of those differences? In considering these ques-tions, I will argue that their answers at the turn of the century may be viewed as the residues of several historically distinguishable antecedent traditions of racial thought, which I will call the ethnological, the Lamarckian, the polygenist, and the evolutionist.
Each of these traditions contributed elements to the late nineteenth-century pattern. The coherence and integration of these elements of what I would call the classic concept of race should not be exaggerated. Some of them may perhaps have been mutually contradictory. Nor were they in fact always found in association. For some purposes it may indeed be to the point to distinguish between monogenist and polygenist, or romantic and Naturalistic points of view. But a certain degree of coherence and integration are not lacking, especially before 1900, and quite often the elements of the classic pattern went together in the thinking of a single man, as they did in the mind of G. Stanley Hall. When integrated, the striking thing about the pattern, as about its elements, is the sense of continuity. Hall was in some respects quite forward-looking--he played an important role in introducing Freudian psychology into this country. But in matters racial there is about his thinking a clearly discernable aura of the nineteenth century. It is this aura I shall attempt now to define--although in the time available, that definition will be necessarily very schematic.
In answering today the question, What is a race? anthropologists are as likely to suggest what it is not. According to the "Statement on Race" published by UNESCO in 1950, "Amer-icans are not a race, nor are Frenchmen, nor Germans...Moslems and Jews are no more races than are Roman Catholics and Protestants; nor are people who live in Iceland or Britain or India, or who speak English or any other language, or who are culturally Turkish or Chinese...thereby describable as races." But in the years before 1900, this negative process of definition by delimitation was not complete even among anthropologists, and many other social scientists were little more precise in usage than the man in the street. For both scholar and citizen, "race" was still a catchall that might be applied to various human groups whose sensible similarities of appearance, of manner, and of speech persisted over time, and there-fore were evidently hereditary. The actual unity of such groups might be linguistic or relig-ious or national, and in fact the same groups that were called races might also be called nations or peoples with little if any change in the degree or character of hereditary affinity implied. Nor was the racial designation any more disparaging than the others. If Negroes, Jews, and Germans were all races, and the Americans were becoming one, they were all, by and large, proud of it.
This is not to say that there had not been attempts during the nineteenth century to define the notion of race more precisely. It is simply to argue the persistence of widespread confusion of usage as the most immediately evident characteristic of racial thought in this period. Indeed, it was evident even in certain attempts by social scientists to introduce greater precision into the discussion. To illustrate this--and to take the place of extensive documen-tation of the prevailing looseness of usage--let us look at two pieces by a leading sociologist of the day, Franklin H. Giddings. An early pioneer in the application of quantitative approaches to sociological research, Giddings in 1910 attempted to develop a more precise measure of the homogeneity of the American population by assigning each "nationality or race to a position on a predetermined marking scale of resemblance." Giddings argued that popular thought could be systematized in terms of a marking scale of ten positions, ranging from "0, Native-born of native white parents" through Northwestern to Southern to Eastern Europeans down to "7-Asian yellow," "8-Civilized dark," and "9-Uncivilized." As a scientific check on this popular marking scheme, Giddings suggested that one could break up the undifferentiated popular impression into a number of factors for which rating units could be assigned: parents native-born; self native-born; native language English; reared under Celto-Teutonic traditions and culture; reared under constitutional government; of European stock reared under European civilization; belongs to race that has created an independent political state; belongs to race that has created an ethical religion; belongs to race that has created a literature; belongs to race that has independently risen above barbarism; color lighter than yellow; color lighter than red; color lighter than brown; color lighter than black. Giving one mark for each of the criteria possessed by each of his ten groups, Giddings found that when ranked by the total number of such marks, these fell into exactly the order derived from popular opinion. At the top with fourteen points were native-born white Americans of native parents; at the bottom were "civilized dark" with five points and "uncivilized" with two points, granted on the basis that some of them were lighter in color than either brown or black.
In order better to understand some of the assumptions underlying Giddings's "Social Marking System," it will be helpful to look at a paper he gave in 1901 on the "Use of the Term 'Race' in Anthropology and Sociology." Giddings there suggested that the essential element of the race concept was the idea of kinship. The difficulty was that the same word was used in so many different ways that one never knew just what degree of kinship was implied. Arguing that there were eight different types of kinship, Giddings offered a mathematical notation to distinguish them. K-1 referred to familial consanguinity; K-2, to familial propinquity; K-3, to nationality, "that wide degree of kinship (physical, mental and social) which includes those who speak the same language and for many generations have dwelt together under the same political organization"; K-4 was potential nationality; K-5 was ethnic race, a "group of related nationalities, speaking closely related languages, and having well-marked psychological characteristics in common"--such as the Celtic, Teutonic, and Latin; K-6 was glottic race, a "broad relationship which was to a slight extent physical, [and] to a somewhat greater extent mental and social"--e.g. the Hamitic, the Semitic, and the Aryan races--the last of which included the Celtic, the Teutonic, and Latin ethnic races; K-7 was chromatic race, of which there were five that incorporated the various groups of the preceding level; underlying all the other levels was the foundation of the kinship pyramid, K-8, or cephalic race.
There are a number of things that might be said about these two papers by Giddings. Indeed, I would argue that they embody in residue almost every aspect of the development of racial thought in the nineteenth century, and that from an imaginative analysis of these two cultural artifacts one might derive almost all the essential elements of the late nineteenth-century conceptions of race. But the main thing to be emphasized at this point is simply that Giddings's attempts at systematization left the race concept in a rather confused state. Instead of referring to two entities of quite different orders, one physical and the other cul-tural, "race" and "nationality" in the Social Marking System were simply the names applied to groups at different points of a blurred continuum of socio-biological differences. Rather than clarifying this confusion, Giddings's analysis of kinship simply suggested its basis. It was not that he had no concept of nation that could not be distinguished from race. It was rather that he used both terms to refer to degrees of a single concept of kinship which, though it was divided into levels, was essentially undifferentiated as far as the dynamic of its process was concerned. The heredity that underlay nationality was different in degree but not in kind from that which underlay ethnic or glottic race. "Race" and "nation" were simply the terms applied to different levels of a single pyramid, and as long as they were so conceived, it was almost to be predicted that writers less precise than Giddings would confuse them.
The historical bases of that confusion are too complicated to explicate fully here, even if I were competent to do so. Instead I would like simply to comment on a perceptual fact and an anthropological tradition that seem relevant to the problem. The perceptual fact may be illustrated in Columbus's confrontation with Caribbean natives at the very beginning of European expansion. He clearly saw them as a group quite distinct from his own, but the criteria of their distinctness were not clearly differentiated, and his description of them lumped together physical, linguistic, and cultural characteristics. It is this undifferentiated "differentness," the directly observable community of race, language, and culture that was the starting point of anthropology in the nineteenth century--as indeed in a sense it still is today. Ethnology, as the study of human groups was usually called prior to 1860, was the attempt within a biblical framework to find some way of sorting out and relating the multiplicity of such groups that had been confronted in the course of European overseas expansion. In the early nineteenth century these groups began to be called "races," but there was an evident hesitation in the scientific use of the term, and the characteristics that defined it were only gradually delimited even within what we might retrospectively call the emerging science of man. Indeed, much of nineteenth-century anthropology may be regarded as a competition between different schools of thought as to the best solution of what I would call the ethnological problem. In these terms, human classification was a unitary problem, and the issue was which observable criterion was the one by which human groups should be sorted. There was a strong current in ethnology that argued that language provided the best criterion. A second current, which by 1860 becomes differentiable as physical anthropology, argued the primacy of measurable physical characters, particularly headform. And there were even some, like John Wesley Powell, who argued the primacy of cultural classification. Although the relative dominance of these viewpoints can be chronologically delimited, the point here is that they were all still viable points of view as late as the 1890s.
When the American anthropologist Daniel Garrison Brinton categorized the "Races and Peoples" of the world in 1890, he distinguished five different "races," two or more "branches" within each race, several "stocks" within each branch, and a number of "groups" or "peoples" within each stock. And he employed all the available criteria, with physical characteristics at the top and linguistic and cultural characteristics at the bottom. His model was indeed quite similar to Giddings's pyramid, and the notion of heredity was equally undifferentiated. If Brinton did not classify the Jews as a race, but rather as a subgroup of the Chaldean group of the Semitic stock of the South Mediterranean branch of the Eurafric race, it is still clear that he regarded them in racial terms, and elsewhere he indeed spoke of "the pure current of Hebraic blood."
So much then, for the question, What is race? I have argued that in the late nineteenth century there was no generally accepted clear-cut answer to the question, and that the confusion of usage can be viewed in terms of the actuality of perception and the unresolved residue of the ethnological tradition. It can also be viewed in terms of the prevailing answer to the question, What are the causes of racial differentiation? On this issue, the dominant point of view was that which I would call the Lamarckian tradition. This also had deep historical roots, which can be traced back to the burning of the Ethiopians by Phæton's chariot. Rather than duplicating the historical work of Conway Zirkle, however, I would prefer to look at another contemporary document.
In an article on human heredity published in 1890, James Stoller, Professor of Natural History at Union College, speculated about what we would call today national character. Stoller felt that it would "scarcely be disputed that national characteristics manifest themselves definitely, not only in the temperament, ideas, etc., of the people, but also in their bodily features." In answering the question of how these differences had developed, Stoller found his answer in a principle of heredity so broadly conceived as to explain almost any physical or social similarity imaginable. Like Giddings, Stoller interpreted heredity--which in his usage might just as well have been called kinship--in terms of a single pyramid. At the apex was the individual. Underlying all individual qualities was familial inheritance, whose substratum was to be found in national character, "those qualities which are less specific, which we have in common with others who live under the same laws and institutions, and generally under similar physical conditions." Underlying nation was race, and beneath the characteristics we shared with our racial group were those shared by all men. Nor was this bedrock. Two further levels of the kinship pyramid lay hidden in the sands of time: those qualities we shared first with the "higher" and "then with the lower" animals. If Stoller conceived all human inheritance as a single phenomenon, it was in order to tie man more firmly into the Darwinian framework. But in doing so, the important distinction between race and nation was blurred. As in Giddings's system, they were simply continuous levels in a single kinship pyramid. Their generative process was identical: "it is obvious that our race characteristics come to us in the same way as our national and family character-istics."
Although there is nothing in his article to indicate that Stoller had any very precise notion of the mechanism of inheritance, he did offer a suggestive picture of human evolution.
[These animals] in their turn, under the influence of external causes, came to possess new characters...while those which they had received by inheritance from their forerunners ...attained in them a higher development; in their turn, too, they transmitted their advanced organization to the succeeding order of beings--that is, to the human race. The same process continued through the successive generations of the human family. The distinctively human qualities acquired at the outset...were handed down to the races that succeeded. They, in turn, bestowed all that had been bequeathed to them, together with their newly acquired race characteristics, to their descendants. Finally, the national characteristics, which in our time we may suppose to include all the traits that characterize civilized man, were differentiated.
Clearly, Stoller conceived evolution in Lamarckian terms. Evolutionary novelties arose as organic responses to external causes, and the resulting progressive variations in organic structure were transmitted to following generations. The underlying mechanism was obvi-ously the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and Stoller's view on evolution and race formation depends on the assumption of heritability.
I have attempted to demonstrate elsewhere that in the context of the failure of Darwinism to provide an adequate explanation of the origin of the hereditary variation upon which natural selection operated, the Lamarckian assumption was widespread at the turn of the century. Here I will simply note two of its implications. In the first place, Lamarckianism made it extremely difficult to distinguish between physical and cultural heredity. What was cultural at any point in time could become physical; what was physical might well have been cultural. Thus a widespread theory of the origins of instinct assumed that habits might become organized as instincts through the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Culturally conditioned behavior patterns would thus tend to become part of the genetic makeup of subsequent generations in the form of inherent tendencies or proclivities. On the other hand, such racial instincts might, as Robert Park suggested as late as 1914, be "broken down" by the substitution of new habits of behavior. The whole notion of racial temperament was conceived in much the same terms. Herbert Spencer, the ancestral epitome of this sort of race thinking, put the matter in a nutshell back in 1870:
[I]t needs only to contrast national characters to see that mental peculiarities caused by habit become hereditary. We know that there are warlike, peaceful nomadic, maritime, hunting, and commercial races--races that are independent or slavish, active or slothful, we know that many of these, if not all, have a common origin; and hence it is inferable that these varieties of disposition, which have evident relations to modes of life, have been gradually produced in the course of generations.
The second point to emphasize is that this sort of thinking provided in effect a theoretical justification for the prevailing looseness of usage. Thus William I. Thomas, although recog-nizing in 1896 that the national groups of the present were in fact quite mixed racially, and might better be spoken of as "artificial" than as "true" races, nevertheless went on:
But the formation of artificial or historical races, through the influences of milieu and the diffusion of a common fund of beliefs, sentiments, ideas, and interests among a heterogeneous population brought by hap and chance into the same geographical zone, is taking place before our eyes at the present moment, and is a matter of history; and we are safe in assuming that in this the process of the formation of true races is repeating itself.
Thus if the Germans, the French, and the Americans were called races, it was not simply a confusion of terminology. To some they were races in the making. To others, including Lodge, they were already races in the only sense that "race" had meaning: as a community of "sentiments, modes of thought, an unconscious inheritance from their ancestors"--a community that was ultimately cultural, but whose essence had been infused by a bio-social Lamarckian heredity into the very blood of its members.
Essence, of course, suggests a fundamental difference in nature, and provides a conven-ient transition to the third question I posed above, and to a third residual tradition in late nineteenth-century racial thought, which I have called polygenist. In a specific historical sense, polygenism was one alternative viewpoint in the biblical-scientific debate on race that reached its height in the 1850s. Against the orthodox monogenist view that men had all descended from Adam, polygenism argued that the races of man were primordially distinct species aboriginally adapted to specific geographic environments, and in these terms was explicitly anti-Lamarckian. Polygenism seems to me best treated, along with monogenism, as a specific historical expression of one of two enduring alternative attitudes toward the variety of mankind. Confronted by antipodal man, one could marvel at his fundamental likeness to oneself, or gasp at his immediately striking differences. One could regard these differences as of degrees of kind, as products of changing environment or immutable heredity, as dynamic or static, as relative or absolute, as inconsequential or hierarchical. In these broader terms, it seems appropriate to include in the polygenist tradition not only the specific naturalistic scientific current within pre-Darwinian ethnology, but also a broader romantic current of racial thought that tended to see races in organismic, superindividual terms, as entities that had a common genius or soul that expressed itself in specific cultural forms and institutions, and whose existence on earth followed the individual human life cycle of birth, growth, maturity, and perhaps even death.
The main point, however, is that neither in its specific historical or in its generic sense did polygenism die with the emergence of Darwinism--despite the fact that Darwinism linked all races to a common root. As I have argued elsewhere, the European physical anthropology that developed in the last forty years of the nineteenth century may appropriately be regarded as a continuation of the naturalistic scientific current of pre-Darwinian polygenism. Its polygenist character is evident in the characteristic preoccupations of its major res: the assumption that the cultural differences of men were the direct product of differences in their physical structure, the idea that the distinguishing differences between human races were virtually primordial, the idea that the most important of these were those of the human skull and brain, and the assumption that out of the heterogeneity of modern populations there could be reconstructed "types" that were representative of the "pure races" from whose mixture these modern populations derived. Beyond this, many of the specific issues of the earlier monogenist-polygenist debate continued to be discussed down to the end of the century. Freed from the specific context of the earlier debate, many polygenist positions became part of a free-floating body of racial assumption that was often incorporated into the argument of those who were Darwinian and in that sense monogenist on the issue of ultimate human unity. I refer to the notions that the only viable race mixtures were those between closely related racial groups, that acclimation to specific environmental conditions threatened races with extinction if they migrated to sharply differing environments, and that the brain sutures of Negroes closed at an earlier age than those of whites. All of these had been polygenist arguments in the midcentury debate; all were still widely held viewpoints in 1900. Finally, the broader romantic polygenist viewpoint that saw races in organismic terms, each with its own essence and its own life cycle, was by no means incompatible with a broadly Darwinian viewpoint, and was also widespread at the turn of the century.
As only one example of the persistence of polygenist thought, I would point to U. G. Weatherly's 1910 article on race and marriage. Weatherly feared that in "the absence of positive checks" a blending of races was quite possible. But in distinguishing different types of race fusion, he accepted the polygenist notion that complete fusion was only possible if the races involved were closely related physically, and that unless crossing continued, there would otherwise be a tendency to revert to type. At a broader level, he clearly viewed races in organismic superindividual terms: "like organisms, races are likely to be most pliable in the nascent stage." Furthermore, each of these racial entities was the bearer of an essence that expressed itself in the achievements of the race, and whose purity must be maintained in order to preserve the civilization it had created. Thus Weatherly argued that if "the blood of the races which are now most advanced is to be diluted, so to speak, by that of those most backward," the loss to humanity might be "irreparable." Although much of Weatherly's thought on racial temperament is best interpreted in Lamarckian terms, on issues of race mixture he was quite within the polygenist tradition.
If the antagonistic traditions of polygenism and Lamarckianism could coexist without apparent tension in many late nineteenth-century writers, it was because the fourth tradition, evolutionism, far from simply ending the mid-nineteenth-century debate between mono-genism and polygenism, had instead made possible an accommodation between them. By and large, evolutionism tended to view the causes of racial differences in Lamarckian terms; but in regard to their nature, evolutionism may be interpreted as simply placing the syn-chronic hierarchicalism of polygenism in a diachronic framework. The differences between human races were viewed in terms of their places on a temporal evolutionary continuum of physical and cultural development. The increased time scale of evolutionism made it pos-sible, while still regarding mankind as ultimately unified, to see the differences between races as so deeply rooted in time as to be almost primordial.
In considering the evolutionary tradition it is necessary to distinguish the Darwinian com-ponent from the much older current of cultural evolutionism, which saw the development of mankind in terms of stages corresponding roughly to the popular termi-nology of savagery, barbarism, and civilization. Rooted in eighteenth-century social thought and the idea of progress in civilization, this latter viewpoint was not in the first instance racial. Indeed, the regularity of the stages of human cultural progress was based on the assumption of a com-mon human nature. However, the idea of progress in civilization was not unaffected by the racial preoccupations of the pre-Darwinian period. Furthermore, the tradition of cultural evolution took on a very different meaning in the Darwinian context. Faced with the problem of filling a large paleontological gap in the record of human evolution, Darwin had drawn on both the polygenist and the cultural evolutionary traditions. But when in the peroration of The Descent of Man Darwin linked himself to the Fuegian and baboon, in effect placing the Fuegians and other living savages in a chain that ran from ape to European, the racial hierarchy of nineteenth-century polygenism and the cultural hierarchy of the eighteenth-century social theorists became part and parcel of one scheme of universal organic evolution.
In this context, the whole problem of racial mental differences took on new meaning. There might indeed still be a common principle of human nature, but this psychic unity was strictly limited. Turning again to contemporary documents, one finds the position well worked out as late as 1905 in the writings of W. J. McGee. As McGee viewed it, mental evolution began on an animal level where mind was completely "instinctive." From there it advanced to a still largely instinctive savage mentality, to barbaric minds "measurably similar in their response to environmental stimuli," to civilized minds which, though well beyond instinct, were still alike in response, and finally to the mind of enlightened man, which was "essentially ratiocinative." There was indeed a principle of psychic unity underlying this mental evolution, but it was a developmental principle: "Minds of corresponding culture-grades commonly respond similarly to like stimuli." All savage minds, whether of the black man today or of the white man of past millennia, responded similarly to the environment of savagery. But if the same similarity of response also characterized barbarian minds, they were no longer the same as those of their savage forbearers. As the result of "cumulative mind growth" they were better minds. And because all "mind growth," whether "from infancy to maturity, from the lower races to the higher, or from the earlier culture-grades to the later," involved, by virtue of the Lamarckian law of exercise, an advance both "of neural structure and function," these minds were housed in bigger and more complex brains. Indeed, the process of "cephalization," which was part and parcel of the evolution of human culture, was so dramatic that McGee noted a marked change from the "retreating" brows of Washington and his contemporaries to the "full-forehead type of the living statesman."
The processes underlying this mental evolution are more clearly evident in another docu-ment of the period. In examining the brain of John Wesley Powell to settle a bet between Powell and McGee as to whose brain was larger, E. A. Spitzka, a prominent brain anatomist, argued that evolutionary increase in the size of the cerebral cortex was the result of an increase in the number of associational tracks. With the increase in knowledge, especially in civilized terms, each generation has added its increment; the laws of natural selection provided "for the perpetuation of the superior brains and the gradual extinction of the feebler." Although Spitzka spoke in nominally Darwinian terms, the process was in fact Lamarckian; the source of variation upon which natural selection operated was the increment in associations made during the lifetime of the individual in each generation. It is in this context that one must view McGee's comment about cephalization as well as, perhaps, Hall's comment, cited earlier, on the associational tracks of the late-maturing Scotch.
In the context of such views on mental evolution, let us return to the linkage of race and civilization in an evolutionary framework. Again, the model is pyramidal. In its broadest sense, late nineteenth-century cultural evolutionism was a generalization about the overall course of the past development of mankind as a whole rather than a description or a prediction of the course of development in every human group. Social evolution was a process by which a multiplicity of human groups developed along lines that moved in general toward the social and cultural forms of western Europe. Along the way different groups had diverged, regressed, stood still, and even died out as they coped with various environmental situations within the limits of their peculiar racial capacities, which in fact their different environmental histories had created. The progress of the "lower races" had been retarded or even stopped, but the general level had always advanced as the cultural innovations of the "superior" or "progres-sive" races were diffused through much of the world. Leadership, as Lewis Henry Morgan argued, had often changed hands, but "from the middle period of barbarism, however, the Aryan and Semitic families seem fairly to represent the central threads of this progress, which in the period of civilization has been gradually assumed by the Aryan family alone."
In this context, there was a generally accepted correlation between color and civilization. Savages were, as Giddings suggested, dark. Barbarians were red or brown. Yellow-skinned peoples had an ambiguous status, but they were often viewed as at best semicivilized. Civil-ized men had white skins, and only white-skinned men were fully civilized. Thus Frank Russell, in his 1901 presidential address before the American Folk-Lore Society, in the very process of arguing that anthropology tended to support an attitude of racial tolerance, suggested that "not only does the anthropologist take a more modest view of the virtues of the Caucasian, but he also learns to credit the savage and barbarian with many praiseworthy qualities." In terms much less favorable to savagery, J. M. Cattell in 1903 offered the same implicit equation in slightly different form: "a savage brought up in a cultivated society will not only retain his dark skin, but is likely also to have the incoherent mind of his race." Within the Aryan or Caucasian race, it was of course the Northwestern European physical types who represented the high point of evolutionary progress, who had not only indepen-dently risen above barbarism, created a literature, an ethical religion, and an independent state, but had been reared under constitutional government and Celto-Teutonic cultural traditions --with all the accumulation of hereditary capacity that this implied in a Lamarckian context.
Having considered the residual manifestations of the ethnological, the Lamarckian, and the polygenist traditions of racial thought within the late nineteenth-century evolutionary matrix, let us turn to the last question I posed above about race, What is the significance of assumed racial differences? The first thing I would argue is that it is not entirely appropriate to approach this issue by a direct application of the categories we are accustomed to in the present. For us, the significance of race is expressed in such polarities as racist and egali-tarian, heredity and environment, liberal and conservative. However, problems arise when one approaches late nineteenth-century evolutionary racial thought in these terms. Thus T. F. Gossett in his Race: The History of an Idea in America has great difficulty handling Lester Frank Ward, who in Gossett's terms was at once a liberal, an environmentalist, an egalitarian, and a racist.
To appreciate the significance of race around 1900, we must start with the understanding that there was a common body of assumption that many "environmentalists" shared with quite extreme hereditarians. Both groups commonly started from the same inclusive idea of race as an integrated physical, linguistic, and cultural totality. Furthermore, because science--to paraphrase a number of contemporary social scientists--no longer separated the phenomena of the body from those of the mind, both hereditarians and environmentalists tended to assume that racial mental differences were related to racial physical differences. If hereditarians assumed that customs and institutions were simply the reflection in the social realm of differences in hereditary racial mental structure, environmentalists assumed that customs and institutions, as parts of the external environment, reacted upon the hereditary structure of the racial mind. Because so little was really known of the processes of physical--or indeed of social--heredity, the persistence of bio-social racial characteristics, no less than their occurrence, tended to be viewed as a unitary problem, and biological and social heredity tended to be confounded both by environmentalists and hereditarians. If an arch-hereditarian like Carlos Closson argued the racial heredity of such complex phenomena as the "tax-paying capacity," there were any number of environmentally oriented Lamarckians who felt that equally complex cultural phenomena were carried in the blood, if only as instincts or temperamental proclivities. The political genius of the Aryans, the inherent cosmopolitanism of the Chinese, the innate fetishism of the Negro--all reflect a similar failure to discriminate between the racial and the cultural, between social and physical heredity, a failure based in some instances on a naive biological determinism, but more often on an implicitly Lamarckian confounding of the social and the biological.
At this point, the classic pattern of race thinking embodied in the remarks of G. Stanley Hall on the intermarriage of the Scotch and Irish should be fairly clear: the confusion of race and people, the mixed Lamarckian and polygenist thinking on the problem of intermarriage, the mental evolutionism embodied in the idea that the Scotch reached intellectual maturity later in life--to one degree or another all the elements are there. But if Closson's race thinking differed from Hall's at some points, there is some justification for considering them both as variants of a single pattern of race thought. Both would certainly have accepted Hall's statement that "the color of the skin and the crookedness of the hair are only the outward signs of many far deeper differences, including cranial and thoracic capacity, proportions of body, nervous system, glands and secretions, vita sexualis, food, temperament, disposition, character, longevity, instincts, customs, emotional traits and diseases."
This is not to suggest that there are no significant historical distinctions to be drawn among late nineteenth-century racial thinkers. For instance, within more or less the same body of racial assumption, one might have quite different conceptions of the future of the "inferior" races. A Lamarckian might argue that the accumulated hereditary characteristics of inferior races marked them for extinction, as F. L. Hoffman saw the fate of the American Negro. Or he might, like D. G. Brinton, see certain stocks as permanently disqualified "by a peculiar mental temperament which has become hereditary" from full participation in the life of modern civilization. If he still granted the "backward" races the possibility of development he might, like George Blakeslee and Hall, see it in branching multilineal terms, with each race "bearing fruit after its own kind." On the other hand, he might, like George Fellows, envisage all races as climbing a single "ladder of civilization": "if the essentials of civilization were presented to them in the right order they might advance along the line at a more rapid pace."
The most significant division was not between hereditarian and environmentalist, but between what might be called hard and soft Lamarckians. Working within the same gen-eralized body of assumption, one could move in two different directions. Hall, in whose theories hereditarian tendencies of Lamarckianism were dominant, saw the fibers of the brain as little susceptible to immediate influences of environment. But for soft Lamarckians, the fibers of the brain might be affected over a relatively short time period by changes in the social environment. The acceptance of the polygenist assumption that the development of the individual Negro came to a sudden stop in adolescence as a result of the premature closing of his cranial sutures did not necessarily mean that the Negro race was incapable of development. On the contrary, political scientist Paul Reinsch argued that a change in their social, political, and economic environment might even modify "the cranial structure of the negro race."
It is in this context that one must view men like Lester Ward. From Ludwig Gumplowicz, Ward adopted an interpretation of history in terms of race conflict. Characteristically, the conquering and the conquered races had lived together first as separate castes and then as social classes until the work of "social assimilation" had fully integrated them on a higher level. The evolution of civilization was a function of the number of such assimilations, each of which increased the "social efficiency" of a race. The superiority of the Aryan race was due to the fact that it had undergone a greater number of such compoundings. Ward insisted in a number of places that this superiority was not innate but acquired. However, since he also believed that the human brain developed by the Lamarckian "law of exercise," the line between physical and social heredity tended constantly to break down, and the superior "social efficiency" of the Aryans assumed a biological aspect. Indeed, the "law of exercise" made it possible for Ward to insist on the fundamental equality of all men, and at the same time to explain all history as the conflict of "inferior" and "superior" races.
Such a cohabitation of environmentalism, egalitarianism, and racialism, however, depended on the assumption of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. In the period after 1900, that assumption was rejected in the context of the emergence of modern genetics. On the one hand, this development lent support to a much more rigorous hereditarianism. But as some social scientists realized, the rejection of Lamarckianism also helped to clarify the dif-ference between biological and social heredity. And at the same time, the other assumptions of the nineteenth-century racial tradition were undergoing a thorough critique in the work of Franz Boas. Boas insisted on the conceptual distinction of race, language, and culture. He rejected the polygenist tradition in physical anthropology for a much more environmental and nominalist conception of racial type. He attacked the fundamental assumptions of cultural evolutionism and laid the basis for the modern relativistic, pluralistic anthropological approach to culture. Viewing these developments together, one might say that the mixed tradition of nineteenth-century racio-cultural thinking was separating into opposing currents of biological and cultural determinism. In this context, the significance of race changed drastically, and the alternatives of hereditarianism and environmentalism were much more sharply posed. That, however, is another story--part of which I have treated in my book Race, Culture, and Evolution. For the present, I hope that I have offered a more integrated picture of the turn-of-the-century concept of race than I was there able to embody.
George W. Stocking, Jr. is Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, and editor of the volume series History of Anthropology (1983- ). His recent publications include Victorian Anthropology (Free Press, 1987) and The Ethnographer's Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology (Wisconsin, 1992). He is currently completing a book on British anthropology from 1888 to 1951.
* This essay developed as a by-product of my first book, Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (1968; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Although originally conceived in rather grandly architectonic terms, that volume was published as a rather disjunctive series of essays focusing mainly on different aspects of Franz Boas's critique of late nineteenth-century racial assumptions. My understanding of the racial "discourse" (to use a more recent term) which Boas confronted was based on my doctoral dissertation, an analysis of a systematic sample of American social scientific writing on race ("American Social Sciences and Race Theory: 1890-1915," University of Michigan, Ph. D. Dissertation #60-3698). When shortly after the book's appearance I was invited to give a lecture in March of 1969 in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, it seemed appropriate to the occasion to try to represent this discourse in a more compact and systematic way, and in doing so I returned to the dissertation itself. Like the dissertation, the lecture was never published. But when I was asked to lead a discussion in the Workshop on the Avant-Gardes at the University of Chicago in 1992, a vague memory trace led me to the file in which it had been deposited. It was a pleasant surprise to discover that, after a quarter century of further discussion on race and racism, some of the themes that I had previously developed seemed still to offer insight. There are of course also anachronisms: my comments about current anthropological thinking on race and about national character studies are obviously products of the late fifties and early sixties. But since the focus of my own work has in the interim shifted to another country and another topic, it has not seemed feasible to revise or supplement the essay in the light of more recent scientific or scholarly inquiry. Save for several very minor verbal corrections, it appears here as first given--that is, without documentation, except by reference to the book and dissertation from which it was drawn twenty-five years ago.
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In late 1887 Bernard Berenson left Boston for his first tour of Europe. This gifted young man--the child of Lithuanian Jewish parents who had immigrated to America after his birth--had had his way paid to Harvard by Boston Brahmin families impressed by his potential for cultivation. After his graduation, wealthy patrons supplied him with the means for the appropriate next step in a career of self-civilization: the European Wanderjahre, sequel to the old-fashioned Grand Tour. Having already travelled to France, to England, and to Germany, Berenson in the summer of 1888 descended into what his biographer Ernest Samuels calls "the fabled art cities of Italy," where his travel took on a sharper focus. Lengthening out his stay, Berenson made a rapturous tour of Italian artistic monuments both on and off the beaten path. (Samuels's phrase for his swing through Pesaro, Urbino, Gubbio, Città di Castello, San Sepolcro, and back to Florence--"a strenuous and highly methodical campaign and the prelude to many similar bone-wearying tours in quest of paintings and architecture"--will suggest the blend of ardor and discipline that drove these travels.) In the course of his researches he met the principal art historians of contemporary Italy--Giovanni Cavalcaselle and Giovanni Morelli, chief exponents of the new, more scientific form of art historical study. He also developed, under the weight of his accumulating art-historical exper-tise, an increasing mental distance from his adopted home: to a patron from the self-appointed culture capital Boston he wrote that Boston now appeared provincial to him, not the metropolis but that culturally impoverished opposite of the center called "the colonies." By Berenson's account, these new alienations and devotions came to a head in 1890, when, sitting in a Bergamo café with his Italian-Peruvian friend Enrico Costa, he found his life-structuring mission:
Nobody before us has dedicated his entire activity, his entire life to connoisseur-ship.... We shall give ourselves up to learning to distinguish between the authentic works of an Italian painter of the fifteenth and sixteenth century, and those commonly ascribed to him. We must not stop until we are sure that every Lotto is a Lotto, every Cariani a Cariani, every Santacroce a Santacroce. 1
A second emblematic incident occurs within a year of Berenson's finding of his vocation but has a very different cast. In 1891 the superintendent of police in New Orleans (in John Higham's words) "was murdered under conditions which pointed to the local Sicilian population." Egged on by both city officials and the media, the police rounded up a number of Italian suspects, who were quickly put on trial. "But when some of the accused were tried," Higham continues, "the jury (which may have been suborned) stunned the city by refusing to convict. While officials stood idly by, a mob proceeded to 'remedy the failure of justice' by lynching eleven Italian suspects." In the wake of this nationally publicized event the United States had an Italian-based version of the Big Red Scare. Italy withdrew its ambassador from Washington in protest over the lynchings; an impending attack by the Italian fleet became a subject of popular rumor and fear; and workers in places remote from New Orleans went on strike, demanding that their employers rid the workforce of a hated Italian presence. 2
The topic of this essay is the image of Italy in American culture on the verge of modernity. I start with these two episodes because it seems to me that the main point to be made is that there were not one but two images of Italy in late nine-teenth-century America, for which my initial examples can stand as synecdoches. The decisive fact about Italian American relations in the postbellum period is that contact between these cultures became greatly extended at this time, but in two starkly different modalities. On the one hand, this is the time of the birth of modern tourism, so that many more Americans "saw Italy" in the last decades of the nineteenth century than had ever done so before. (The touristic influx of Americans to Italy, still a comparative trickle in the days of Margaret Fuller or Hawthorne in the 1840s and 1850s, had taken on the dimensions of an organized mass migration by the 1890s, when Henry James said of afternoon life in Venice, "the bark of Chicago disturbs the siesta.") 3 On the other hand, the same decades that saw the institutionalization of European tourism also saw the beginning of mass immigration from Italy to the United States, so that Americans at this time also began in new measure to encounter an Italy in their own home.
As a result, American relations with Italy in the Gilded Age took the form of a rapidly developing traffic with two phases at once weirdly symmetrical and sharply antithetical: the movement, in one set of boats, of American pilgrims to the shrines of artistic culture, located in the land that another set of pilgrims was at that same moment leaving, in another set of boats, in search of a better life in the first group's land. But the traffic with Italy at this time did not entail physical relocations alone. The drama of the American encounter with Italy in the Gilded Age consisted partly in a growing mutual contact, but partly too in the elab-oration of the cultural conceptions of "Italy" through which this contact was imaginatively managed, mediated, and mastered. Berenson saw Italy through one American idea of "Italy" fashioned by the culture of his time. The New Orleans lynchers saw Italians through another contemporaneously constructed American idea of "the Italian." To understand America's Italy in the Gilded Age is to understand how these experience-organizing conceptions were brought to social life.
The cultural frame through which Berenson selects and composes his Italy might for convenience be labeled the touristic-aesthetic conception. This conception's founding tenet is that a high, possibly even supreme, experiential value is lodged in works of art, more especially in that special rank of works called the classic. Italy, a place where such works are found in thick abundance, becomes virtually synonymous with its artistic heritage in this conception, a quasi-sacred ground of art, and "visiting Italy" is then defined as the act of travelling from monument to aesthetic monument to make visual and spiritual contact with the value they contain.
As Goethe's wanderings might remind us, the aesthetic-touristic conception of Italy did not originate in the second half of the nineteenth century. But in America, it acquired a greatly augmented cultural dissemination and power at that time, when its rise has everything to do with the emergence of a new-model gentry class. 4 To summarize this history very quickly: The period after the mid-1850s saw the coming together of a new kind of upper order in America, composed of members of the older local social elites, the owners of new industrial enterprises, and the elements of the mid-nineteenth-century middle class now moving into new professional and managerial positions. These groups were all in different ways beneficiaries of the new wealth generated in the United States through capitalist and industrial development. But the same transformations that brought these groups new fortunes also destabilized the older grounds and markers of American social hierarchy, so that after mid-century such groups were linked not just by their incomes but by their shared need to confirm their superior status in the unsettled social world American development helped bring into being. As has long been obvious, as it came to social coherence in the Gilded Age, this new upper class identified itself in an especially strong way with its new body of leisure practices, and it deployed its new recreations--serviceable evidences, in Thorstein Veblen's phrase, of its wealth and freedom from the need to work 5 --as chief weapons in its struggle to establish social distinction. The expensive new sports of the later nineteenth century--golf, yachting, tennis--embody one of the status-bearing leisure practices of this new class. Its expensive new vacation customs--visible in its summer houses and vacation colonies--are another such classifying habit. And this group's devotion to Culture--the nonproductive activity par excellence--formed another and no less central part of its work of social definition.
Devotion to and cultivation of the high arts had, of course, an association with an aristocratic class ethos long before the American Gilded Age. At the same time, Culture in this sense became an especially useful means for creating the social distinction sought by the upper orders in these years. In the nineteenth-century United States, to have physical access to high-order artistic creation--and still more, to have had the means to acquire the trained abilities needed to appreciate such art--signalled an enjoyment of social privileges and a freedom from material constraint reserved for the few. The possession of Culture had the further beauty of seeming to lift its owners out of the material orders in which it simultaneously advertised their preeminence in, marking them as devotees of "higher things" and superior to such vulgar concerns. For reasons both of sincere devotion to such culture and of its peculiar strategic value in securing social distinction, the American social elites of the later nineteenth century placed a special premium on their association with high art, investing their wealth, their civic energy, and their creativity especially heavily in this cause. This investment is witnessed in such upper-class social phenomena of the late nineteenth century as the unparalleled purchasing of classical art and the endowment of great social institutions to house it; the reformation of premier American universities that made the initiation of the children of the upper orders into the mysteries of the high arts one of their main educational functions (English and Art History departments in the modern academic sense have their birth in this development); the conspicuous deflection of gentry children of both sexes into work in the arts and arts management; and so on. 6
This excursion may seem like a digression from the question of Italy, but it is not; in the nineteenth century Italy took on one of its dominant American meanings through the history I have laid out. Touristic-aesthetic Italy--Italy rered as the Land of Art where the well-to-do can travel at leisure and cultivate aesthetic consciousness--is another projection of the upper-class American culture of the postbellum decades, in which one real social world is recast in the image of the interests of another. In the later nineteenth century and after, Italy primarily meant Art considered as a civilization-inducing (and distinction-conferring) value in those parts of American culture the new upper class succeeded in infusing with its sense of the world. Berenson's Wanderjahre have this social origin written all over them. Transplanted to Boston, spiritual capital of upper-class high-cultural piety in the United States in the 1870s and 1880s, and reaccul-turated there in the great high-culture-bearing institutions of the upper orders (the Harvard of Charles Eliot Norton and the Episcopal Church of Phillips Brooks), this one-time European returns to a Europe he now thinks of almost exclusively as a set of artistic treasures, the perfectly acquired knowledge of which will give purpose to his life. This is Italy: an Italy encountered in Europe but whose motivating social meaning has been made in America.
The second American Italy of the postbellum decades, the cultural frame that organized the responses of the New Orleans mob, might for symmetry be called alien-intruder Italy. This conception, a retouched version of a cliché of "dark Italy" in circulation at least since the Renaissance, drew its particular social energies from the late nineteenth-century history of immigration, a history apparently remote from, but at a deeper level entwined with, that of late nine-teenth-century elite class-formation. After all, the same economic transformation that produced the new wealth of America's best-off social segments also pro-duced the new positions that opened up at the lower end of the American economic ladder at this time; so that the immigrants who came in mounting waves to enlarge a new class of urban poor and low-wage workers were living at the other end of the same world of opportunity exploited by the contemporaneous leisure class. Italians arrived in large numbers in the United States through the operations of this history. There had of course been Italian immi-grants before these years, but Italian immigration notably accelerated in the mid-to-late 1880s, resuming again after the chill of the depression of 1893-94. This newly conspicuous group presence--most of it southern Italian 7 --reinforced the new idea of Italy that was growing in American minds, but again this idea did not only register real features of actual Italians.
Instead, Italians like the other immigrants of this time had complex meanings projected onto them from within the culture of the native-born, and were recruited into a symbolic cultural function among their other labors. 8 Economic transformations that had been underway at least since the 1830s had produced, by the mid-1880s, a sense of widespread crisis in America, a sense that something had gone deeply wrong with the American civic order. In the charged field of this sense of crisis, endlessly reinvigorated by the recurrent experiences of violent labor strife and menacing urban poverty, the new, more "foreign" immigrant of the 1880s could easily be read as the cause of the painful changes of the present, the foreign matter that had made the social body sick with troubling "modern" symptoms. The Italian immigrants of the late nineteenth century were largely read through this generalized image of the foreigner as agent of contemporary instability--as in the New Orleans lynching episode, where Italians are clearly being responded to as local targets of more general phobias. The proximity of this event to the Haymarket riot and anarchist trial of 1886-87 suggests that it replays a highly portable late-century scenario in which infiltrating strangers can be held accountable for American domestic woes. (The New Orleans mob adopted Italians from among the list of functionally interchangeable suspect ethnicities.) Lynching, the punishment mechanism in question, similarly shows Italians being assimilated into more general schemes for the ritual control of internal Others, since lynching was the main parajudicial rite for managing that chief "menace" of the American South, the black male.
In American thought of this time "the Italian" is often known as the dark or swarthy one, ethnic difference being in this way amalgamated with racial difference; "the Italian" is envisioned as the untidy, non-self-improving one, natural resident of the slum and natural doer of the most unskilled labor, and so is made a synecdoche for the lower classes; and "the Italian" is imagined as the organized murderer, and thus as a "cause" of violence in the world at large. 9 But these enduring prejudices only give minimally individuating "Italian" features to a core image of scarcely differentiated xenophobia. The Italian like other new arrivers in late nineteenth-century America is at root imagined simply as Foreigner, the American as Unamerican and Destroyer of Our Thing.
It needs to be emphasized that the antithetical conceptions of Italy as High Cosmopolitan Civilization and Low Domestic Barbarism were not just pieced together at almost the same time but coexisted in the same minds, supporting each other, paradoxically, through the structure of their opposition. In particular, the Undesirable Alien image frequently formed part of the same upper-class mind set that valorized cosmopolitan high culture in the late nineteenth century: so that one branch of the Bostonian Warren family sent Bernard Berenson to Italy while another branch was organizing the Immigrant Restriction League; and the same New York gentry who supplied an audience for Italian opera--rendered an upper-class, high cultural art form in the American organization of culture--also preferred that it be performed in German, to cleanse it of "low" ethnic associations. 10 Never before or since has American writing been so absorbed with the Italian as it was during the Gilded Age. I want to suggest that American literature was infused with Italy at this time in part because Gilded Age literary activity was so tightly bound to the social segment that had the Italian thus doubly on its mind. Its conceptions largely frame the "Italy" imagined in American writing, which imbibes them together with its surrounding culture of letters; and working through the images of Italy designed in this social niche can be said to be one function of American writing in the Gilded Age.
William Dean Howells won the status of principal living author or repre-sentative man of letters in the "serious" literary culture of his time, and his knowledge of Italy contributed directly to this success. Howells's first exposure to Italy came about by happy accident: he won the patronage post of United States Consul to Venice as the reward for authoring the 1860 campaign biography of his fellow midwesterner Abraham Lincoln. But if he came to Italy through the well-managed luck of the political draw, Howells grasped early on how he could use his Italian sojourn to help establish an American career. As has been shown elsewhere, Howells was sharply aware that a distinct high literary culture was being institutionalized in the United States in the early 1860s, and Howells spent the Civil War years in Venice filled with ambition to get into this new sphere. 11 In Italy he intuited the value that this emerging American cultural order attached to Italy, and so saw how he could exploit his knowledge of "Italy" as a career-founding resource. The event he later designated the turning point of his life, James Russell Lowell's 1863 acceptance of his essay "Recent Italian Comedy" for printing in the North American Review, shows Howells's canny guess that playing up his European artistic initiations would be the way to win acceptance into the cosmopolitan, art-valuing literary and social circles coalescing at this time. Howells did not unambivalently like living in Italy, but he threw himself undividedly into the task of writing Italy up for American audiences, and by this means made his way into the cultural world to which he aspired. The American publication of his Venetian Life led more or less directly to his hiring as assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, chief organ of the newly self-demarcated quality zone of literary production, and to his entrée into the social world of the Bostonian gentry. The early travel novels he soon serialized in the Atlantic--books like A Foregone Conclusion and The Lady of the Aroostook--similarly displayed knowledge of Italy in order to consolidate a high-cultural literary and an upper-class social status at home.
In the early 1870s, before he turned full-time to fiction writing, Howells had the bright idea that his first genre--touristic descriptive prose--could be wittily redirected from foreign subjects to the quotidian, contemporary home scene. His work of tourism-in-one's-own-home, Suburban Sketches , shows how early the other Italy of immigration enters his writing. This book's remarkable chapter "Doorstep Acquaintances" records, as a characteristic everyday phenomenon of the new urbanism, the experience of knowing people in passing, through casual encounters in anonymous public space. (These acquaintances are from across the doorstep, or from outside the home.) In this essay, the people one "knows" in Boston's suburban streets are largely Italian: a little tambourine-boy; the widow of a "Vesuvian lunatic" trying to collect money for her return home; a chestnut roaster; a religious image dealer who comes "da Lucca"; a Garabaldi-partisan scissors grinder; "a little old Genoese lady [who] comes to sell us pins, needles, thread, tape, and the like roba"; "dark-mooded, sad-faced" Neapolitan street musicians, including one who is "swarthiest of the organ-grinding tribe." 12
Finding that a competence acquired through cosmopolitan travel can have an unexpected second usefulness at home, Howells repeatedly speaks to these people in his excellent Italian, activating the pleasing fantasy that by his use of their language "we had made a little Italy together" (SS, 38). But the ironic awareness that there may be only a quite fictitious community between Italian touristic initiates and actual Italian immigrants--the awareness that speaking their language verbally may only conceal how little Howells "speaks their language" in any other sense--vaguely haunts this essay's self-satisfied exercises in multiculturalism; and at the end this awareness comes close to being fully faced. The last doorstep acquaintance gets brought within doors, where Howells offers him odd jobs to do. In this closer contact, the person speaks of his actual human needs, needs not at all shared by Howells: "What I want is a home." In response to this breach of decorum, Howells amazingly writes:
A sudden and unreasonable disgust for the character which had given me so much entertainment succeeded to my past delight....and I said to him: "Do you know now, I shouldn't care if I never saw you again?" (SS, 59)
Doorstep acquaintance here implicitly recognizes that it is a relation predicated on a nonrelation: that the pleasurable pseudo-intimacies of upper-class home-owners with the "different" people they meet in the streets have been based on the secure knowledge that they do not share a world in any real sense, and that these relations can be summarily terminated should such sharing actually threaten to develop.
When the Italy of cosmopolitanism meets the Italy of immigration next in Howells's work, Howells lodges his own experience in Suburban Sketches in a fictional character, where he can study its more general social meanings. Bromfield Corey, the patrician father in The Rise of Silas Lapham , has spent his young manhood in Italy, not (like Howells) through political fortune but through the standard operations of a class acculturation system. The son of a great Boston merchant, he is a moneyed person of a second generation, in which aptitude dissevers itself from a commercial activity no longer economically requisite and seeks the "higher," nonmaterial goods of cosmopolitan cultivation. In particular, Corey goes to Italy, an Italy envisioned as the sum of its famous art (while in Rome Corey has acquired a "theory of Titian's method"), 13 where he obtains the eminence-securing equipment suited to his generation of the American elite: the sense of the aesthetic derived from Italy, a sense that was highly expert yet carefully amateurish in its social manifestation, and that marks him as a member of the upper orders.
After Corey visits the place of business of the noncosmopolitan, ungentrified Silas Lapham, the industrialist paint magnate his son has gone to work for, he strolls
at his leisurely pace up through the streets on which the prosperity of his native city was founded, [where] hardly any re could have looked more alien to its life. He glanced up and down the facades and through the crooked vistas like a stranger, and the swarthy fruiterer of whom he bought an apple, apparently for the pleasure of holding it in his hand, was not surprised that the purchase should have been transacted in his own tongue. (RSL, 133)
In this vignette the language-sharing scene of Suburban Sketches gets replayed in a more satiric way, a way that underlines the social gaps thus verbally papered over and exposes the gesture's social origins. Speaking Italian to an Italian is here recognized as an unwitting expression of class: an expression of the leisure ("lei-surely pace") and aesthetic self-cultivation ("apparently for the pleasure") that differentiate Corey's social position both from the immigrant's lower-class one and from the equally "alien" commercial classes in whose district he wanders.
What is widely regarded as the climactic effort of Howellsian realism, the novel A Hazard of New Fortunes , is separated from The Rise of Silas Lapham by the span of years that saw the beginning of heavy southern Italian immigration to the United States. This historical shift is marked in literary terms by the fact that within this book old Bromfield Corey-like habits of cosmopolitan aestheticization get applied to scenes that reflect new mass immigration. Basil March, the center of consciousness of this novel, is not a patrician but a member of something like the professional-managerial upper middle class (he is an insurance executive when the book begins), another social fragment, the book notes, that identifies itself with its superior possession of culture and cultivation. ("They had traveled and seen much of the world, and they had formed tastes which they had not always been able to indulge, but of which they felt that the possession reflected distinction on them," Howells writes. "Their house had some good pictures, which her aunt had brought home from Europe in more affluent days, and it abounded in books on which he spent more than he ought.") 14 When the Marches move to New York, they are able to organize the spectacle of the city of foreigners largely through the class-specific schema of touristic-aesthetic cosmopolitanism that they share with Corey, as when "the rear of the tenement houses showed [March] the picturesqueness of clotheslines fluttering far aloft, as in Florence," or when, in Washington Square, "they met the familiar picturesque raggedness of southern Europe with the old kindly illusion that somehow it existed for their appreciation and that it found adequate compensation for poverty in this" (HNF, 259). (Here Howells's own earlier gesture of solidarity with the Italian is seen with a harshness that goes far beyond Corey's apple buying: "March thought he sufficiently expressed his tacit sympathy in sitting down on one of the iron benches with his wife, and letting a little Neapolitan put a superfluous shine on his boots" [HNF, 48].)