Anthem Press The Significant Hamlin Garland: A Collection of Essays (Anthem Nineteenth-Century Series)

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Significant Hamlin Garland A Collection of Essays By Donald Pizer Wimbledon Publishing CompanyCopyright © 2014 Donald Pizer All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-78308-305-3 Contents Preface, ix, A Selected Secondary Bibliography, xv, Editorial Note and Acknowledgments, xvii, Part I. THE RADICAL YEARS, 1. Hamlin Garland in the Standard, 3, 2. Hamlin Garland and the Prairie West, 15, 3. Hamlin Garland and the Radical Drama in Boston, 1889–91, 29, 4. A Summer Campaign in Chicago: Hamlin Garland Defends a Native Art, 37, Part II. THE MAJOR WORKS, 5. Main-Travelled Roads, 47, 6. Main-Travelled Roads Revisited, 59, 7. Rose of Dutcher's Coolly, 71, 8. Sexuality in Rose of Dutcher's Coolly, 79, 9. A Son of the Middle Border, 87, Notes, 97, Index, 105, CHAPTER 1 HAMLIN GARLAND IN THE STANDARD Hamlin Garland's desire to express a particular economic point of view has been long recognized as an important factor in his early work. However, there have been various interpretations of the motives which led Garland to adopt and later abandon economically orientated writing. A primary reason for the misinterpretation of this phase of Garland's career, a notable example of which is Bernard I. Duffey's recent article in American Literature, has been the lack of information regarding Garland's economic thought and activity during 1887–92, these years constituting the period of both his most intensive literary output and fullest participation in political-economic affairs. Garland himself has sketchily outlined this period in various autobiographical recollections (see notes 5–7, 37 below), but a much more particular and explicit source of information is found in the previously unnoted and for the greater part uncollected appearances of Garland in the Standard. The Standard was begun as a single-tax weekly, with Henry George as editor and proprietor, in New York on 8 January 1887, during the flood tide of single-tax enthusiasm in the United States. Running for mayor of New York in November 1886, George had astonished the country by his strong showing, and his supporters immediately called for a national political party to represent single-tax ideals. This new party, the United Labor Party, promptly produced a candidate for mayor of Boston, and during the week of 5–12 December 1886, George was in Boston speaking for the candidate. As Garland has related, it was hearing George speak, first at Faneuil Hall and the following night at a Boston theater, that converted him "from a passive disciple to an active advocate," as "What had been mere intellectual agreement now became emotional aspiration." He had read Progress and Poverty in 1884 while still in Dakota and had completely accepted George's arguments and proposals. However, though "the trumpet call of the closing pages" filled Garland with a "desire to battle for the right," he did not become active in the movement, rather confining himself to self-education and establishing himself as a literary figure in Boston. Even the vitalizing Faneuil Hall speech on "the question of poverty" and the following night on "Moses and the Land Question" failed to bring him into either the Land and Labor or the Henry George clubs then existing in Boston. It was his trip to the West in the summer of 1887 that firmly entrenched Garland in the reform movement. The bleakness and hardship of western life, which he now viewed from the perspective of his years in Boston, were readily explained by George's land theories. Returning to Boston with "two great literary concepts – that truth was a higher quality than beauty, and that to spread the reign of justice should everywhere be the design and intent of the artist" – he began attending the Sunday night meetings of the Boston Anti-Poverty Society at Horticultural Hall. At the "Ninth Regular Meeting," 20 November 1887, the chairman admitted to the audience that he had no new speaker to announce for the followi