The politics of the last quarter century in the United States cannot be fully understood without reference to cultural–religious issues such as abortion, prayer in the state schools, school curriculum including sex education and teaching the biblical account of creation, gay rights, gun control, the death penalty, and the proper roles of men and women. Cultural–religious conservatives defend traditional values such as patriarchy and sexual abstinence for the unmarried, while cultural–religious liberals challenge them. For example, the opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) objected, not to its guarantee of formal legal equality which was uncontroversial, but rather to it potentially changing gender roles. While the New Deal party system had been founded on a conflict between economic liberalism and economic conservatism, recent contemporary US politics also contains an explicit cultural–religious dimension. Although they have not replaced the older economic issues associated with the New Deal party system, cultural–religious issues coexist with them and have transformed the contemporary US political agenda by disrupting older coalitions and creating new coalitions and cleavages.

In a remarkable span of days at the turn of the year 1888, Edward Eggleston and Edward Bellamy issued critiques of Gilded Age America that employed a similar, and for the time, unusual, narrative device – the glance backward from the late twentieth century.1 Bellamy's, of course, was Looking Backward, 1887–2000, the most successful novel of the period, and one of the few works of American popular fiction to impel both social action and political reform.2 Eggleston's work, far less ambitious and visionary than Bellamy's, nonetheless warrants interest; not only does it provide a point of entry for recuperating Eggleston's considerable reputation in the nineteenth century as a regional novelist and social historian, it also allows us to recover the relation his writing bore then – and bears now – to American pluralist fantasies about race, class, and national identity.3 Entitled “A Prospective Retrospect,” Eggleston's backward glance purports to describe “The Age of Paradox,” an article from “a magazine called The Twentieth Century … dated November, 1987,” in which a future antiquarian “look[s] back but one hundred years upon American life.” To the observer from the future “the manners of the people of 1887” revealed the paradox of the age. On one hand, the “antiquary” noticed that democratic America had removed from the public arena “any mark of social distinction”; in this “paradoxical age,” he argued, fashion was no longer a reliable gauge of class: “the gentleman, and especially the statesman … held fellowship with cabby in wearing the high hat, the man of the upper walks of life was yet more intimately associated with the waiter, in the fact that the dress-coat of the gentleman was an exact copy of the working coat of the waiter.”

Two primary manifestations of the eugenics movement in America were the involuntary sterilization of certain classes of people, including the mentally ill and disabled and some types of criminals, and the “family study,” genealogical reports that traced criminal behavior, immorality, and mental problems throughout family trees to determine whether the characteristics are inheritable. Both family studies and sterilization proved to be important fodder for American literary authors, who made significant use of the rhetoric of family and propagation. Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road is particularly interesting to read with eugenics in mind, for the 1932 novel is intrinsically bound up with issues of breeding, heredity, and degeneration. Caldwell's text, which he characterized as literary realism, relies not only on the genre of family study in general but more particularly on a study conducted by Caldwell's father in 1928 and published two years later in the journal Eugenics; Ira Caldwell had attempted to rescue a poor white family from what he saw as the conditions of their ongoing degeneracy but was rejected completely by the family, leading to his renunciation of many of his social reform ideals in favor of sterilization programs. Erskine Caldwell drew heavily on his father's failed attempt at reform, and Tobacco Road ultimately argues for the sterilization of Georgia's poor whites, but with the pessimistic caveat that the problems of degeneracy and rural poverty have no final solution. Caldwell's manipulation of his audience, his observation of his father's eugenics experimentation, and his use of extended metaphors, both mechanical and agricultural, for family all create a deeply cynical novel that condemns America's economic modus operandi for the living conditions of the poor but also condemns those poor as being permanently beyond help. In the end, Caldwell argues that the poor – in both money and breeding – will be always with us and that we are doomed to witness the full horror of their degradation without the possibility of either relieving their plight or eradicating them.

In the light of recent events, the once widely accepted Marxist distinction between “scientific” and “utopian” socialism is fading rapidly. For it has become increasingly difficult to believe that any form of socialism is inherent in the workings of history, as the Marxists had claimed for their “scientific” variety. Today Marxism, in its own terms, turns out to be “utopian.” One can now more readily recognize the kinship of the many different socialisms as well as the significance of their link to the social ideals of the past. What had previously been a somewhat antiquarian literature on “precursors,” “forerunners,” and “schismatics” of socialism suddenly appears as especially pertinent and perhaps even central. Today, without difficulty, one turns away from the various contradistinctions developed in this scholarship and toward the interconnections implicit in it.1

Surveying this literature, we can recognize three preeminent social ideals that went into the making of the various socialisms – the call for social justice, the aspiration toward a society of brotherly love, and the belief that one could rid society of poverty. It was the eighth-century prophets of the Hebrew Bible who advanced the audacious demand for justice in society. They urged an end to oppression, cruelty, abuse, and more generally that people be given what was rightfully theirs. This demand recurs in almost all the socialist programs. In the Marxist scheme, it takes the form of the theory of surplus value which describes capitalist profit as a surplus product stolen (“entwandt”) from the worker who creates it.

In February 1912 Theodore Roosevelt sought the Republican nomination for president on a radical platform of reform that had a devotion to the Constitution as its central plank. Such an analysis differs from the standard historical explanation for Roosevelt's challenge to the incumbent Republican president, William Howard Taft, which argues that, bored with private life after his return from big game hunting in Africa in 1910 and consumed by an obsessive pursuit of presidential power, he ran to seek revenge on the successor who had failed to live up to the mentor's hopes. By initiating anti-trust suits against US Steel and International Harvester, which Roosevelt had examined when president but had not filed suit against, and by letting the Republican Party be dominated by regulars rather than Progressives, Taft had earned Roosevelt's unyielding enmity; Roosevelt's response was to seek the presidency.1 This article argues that far more important than any personal motivation, however, was Roosevelt's conviction that the issue at stake in 1912 was in essence a crusade for constitutionalism.

Throughout Roosevelt's long career constitutional issues played a primary role in formulating his political views. This was particularly true of the period after he left the presidency in 1909 when his interpretation of the Constitution was used as a means to advance various political ends. The debate about the Constitution, one which had become deep rooted in the national psyche by the close of the first decade of the twentieth century, and the judiciary's role in its interpretation was central to Roosevelt's political philosophy.

August 21, 1970

A few sound[s] are embedded in the fog – a gull mewing, different far off fog horns – like unset polished stones laid out in cotton wool.

Tuesday, March 5, 1985

At six AM the heavy gray burns a heavier blue. Rain, water drops clinging to the balcony.

There is an ethical consideration in James Schuyler's Diary. While we have spent the last fifty years grappling with the aesthetic problems of how to represent the unrepresentable, how to present the unpresentable, and how to signify the significant, little time has been spent considering the status of representations of the unremarkable. There is a whole history in American poetry and literature of validating the everyday, making it special, but Schuyler never really does that. Are things special just because we say so, or rather because we note them down? Do we name things into being, at least linguistic or literary being? The Diary asks these questions and in doing so it broaches the kind of postmodern ethical questions that one finds in the recent work of Lyotard, Derrida, and Nancy. These questions are significant not in the normal sense of the reasons for such interrogations or the answers expected, but rather because they represent a desire on the part of Schuyler to ask after otherness, to try to elicit a response from the other while respecting that such a response may not be comprehensible even if it is forthcoming. I would like here to posit a desire to ask after the other first before one asks after oneself, to enquire without any hope of a satisfactory answer as such as the postmodern ethical position, and to suggest that the autobiographical slant of Schuyler's work is, paradoxically considering the nature of autobiography, just such a positioning of his self in relation to the world.

The close relationship between machine technology and the literature of American modernism has long been acknowledged. Indeed, it is hard to imagine Fitzgerald's work without its hyper-materialised cars (and metaphysically potent car crashes), or Dos Passos's USA without the representational possibilities of the camera eye. Other writers in the 1920s had equally famous fascinations with what cultural producers and critics often abstracted into the concept of “the machine”; William Carlos Williams described poetry as being “machines made of words,” and Hart Crane used one of the triumphs of American engineering, the Brooklyn Bridge, as the organising metaphor and structuring principle of his poem The Bridge, identifying his theme as “the conquest of space and knowledge.”1 Of course, writers' fascination with how machinery or technological innovation was effecting social change had not begun with modernism. Yet often goaded by the speed of innovation in the visual arts, some American modernist writers responded to what Cecelia Tichi has called a “gears-and-girders” world by rethinking their relation to time, space, communication and economy with an unprecedented radicalism. And in the 1920s – a decade which saw more cars in Manhattan than in the whole of Britain, Lindbergh's pioneering flight across the Atlantic, and the USA move decisively ahead of Europe in industrial productivity – this rethinking had a particularly pressing urgency. Jean Toomer was one of the writers who participated in this exercise, engaging with European art movements such as Dadaism and Futurism and their proposals for new relations between machine design and literary aesthetics.

The relative obscurity of Chicago's Henry Blake Fuller (1857–1929), a prolific essayist, journalist, reviewer and novelist, with collections of plays, poems and short stories to his name, in part derives from the difficulty of placing him: the work resists classification. His early fiction, for instance, reflects, debates and sometimes satirises the alternating influences of Howells and James. The Cliff-Dwellers (1893) and With the Procession (1895), “American” novels, are framed by such “European” fictions as The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani (1890) and Waldo Trench and Others: Stories of Americans in Italy (1908). His closet homosexual novel Bertram's Cope's Year (1919), a translation of Goldoni's The Fan (1925) and the non-fictional Gardens of this World (1929) testify to an incremental diversity. Characteristically, his last work, the posthumously published novel Not on the Screen (1930), which projects the interactive mimicry of “real” life and cinema, saw Fuller exploring fresh thematic and formal territory.

Reputedly, painter Charles Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand's Manhatta is the first significant title in the history of American avant-garde cinema. It is a seven-minute portrait of New York City and focuses on those features which make the city a modern megalopolis – the traffic, the crowds, the high-rise buildings, the engineering wonders, and the speed and dynamism of street life. The film strives to capture rhythmic and graphic patterns in the movements and shapes of cranes, trains, automobiles, boats, steam shovels, suspension bridges, and skyscrapers. Due to the dominance of technology, the entire urban landscape appears in the film as a machine-like aggregate of static and moving parts independent from human intention.

Who, then, is Mrs. Dilling? Upon what strange meat has she been fed that she hath grown so great: And what inspired her, she who might have taken up knitting or petunia-growing, to adopt as her hobby the deliberate and sometimes hasty criticism of men and women she has never even seen.1

To see the lady in action, screaming and leaping and ripping along at breakneck speed, is to see certain symptoms of simple hysteria on the loose.2

May God strengthen and uphold you, [Mrs. Dilling] … May your wonderful work grow and help save our Republic, … a time is coming when you will be blessed … You deserve a place in history comparable to Washington and Lincoln.3

Hysterical and demented, saintly and just, these were just some of the characterizations of the most prominent female activist on the right during the Great Depression. Elizabeth Dilling embraced them all. For Dilling and her supporters, service in the cause of Christianity and Americanism demanded vigilance and determination, as well as a tough skin.

Dilling's story is a fascinating one and deserves telling, if only because of the passion she provoked in her audiences. Yet her story has larger historical significance. Dilling created her own unique style of politics – distinctly gendered and explicitly personal, a feminine counterpunch to her male colleagues on the far-right who were relatively more aloof from their constituents. For Dilling, involvement in the politics of anti-communism was not only a personal source of strength and satisfaction but also a ticket to what she hoped would be a long and respectable career as an authority on subversive movements.

Perry Miller was one of the most famous and distinguished American intellectual historians, in the estimation of his contemporaries and the evaluations of more recent scholars. Although his death provided some detractors with an opportunity to question his findings without fear of riposte, more recent studies confirm the relevance of his work to those historians seeking answers today to the questions which he addressed. This is especially true in the Puritan period, where his massive encapsulation of The New England Mind is a routine point of departure for new enquiries.

The historical narrative arguing that independent artisans were increasingly transformed into mere tenders of complicated machinery during the second half of the nineteenth century, leading ultimately to Henry Ford's minute division of labor in the assembly line, is both conventional and well known. Technology became more complex, its inner workings were less self-evident or easily comprehensible, and the material conditions of production, exemplified by modern factories built around a division of labor, became too large and systematic to be understood from the viewpoint of a single worker selling his or her labor. And, while industry was imagined more and more as an intricate system at the turn of the twentieth century, American society, analogously, under the increasing pressure of urbanization and immigration, came to be regarded as too complex to be understood from a single viewpoint. Exposés, for instance, on “how the other half lives,” to quote the title of Jacob Riis's famous book, attest both to the yearning and to the perceived inability to understand society as an entirety.

This article suggests and examines the ways in which two older forms of imagining large systems, specifically, the methods of model-making and diagramming, were rearticulated at the turn of the twentieth century in response to a perceived greater complexity of both technology and American society. Models and diagrams are necessary when it seems that one can no longer envision a large system; they literally provide an imaginative site for a complex system. To understand the social roles of diagramming and model-making, I detail the ways each was imagined and deployed in the cultural history of invention and entrepreneurship in the early twentieth century.