The falsely golden America of Mark Twain and Walt Whitman
The Notepad of Michael the Great
Historically republicans, after the American Civil War (1861-1865) in which they identified themselves, the liberal intellectuals of the educated and patrician elite, northern and metropolitan, increasingly considered themselves "independents". Faced with the scandals that had marked the two administrations of Ulysses Grant (1869-1877), they began to wonder which nation had emerged from that bloody war, and their response was a shiver of horror. In his Ode to the Fourth of July (1876), the poet James Russel Lowell gave voice to these sentiments: "This is the country we dreamed of in our youth / Where wisdom and not numbers would have weight, / Sowing ground of manners more simple, of bolder truths, / Where would shame cease to dominate / In homes, churches and the state? / Is this Atlantis? ”.
The "Liberal Reformers", as they were called, thus initiated a radical critique of mass democracy, in which semi-literate and vulgar professional politicians proliferated, and party bureaucracies devoted to the plunder of public resources, which crushed – through the "spoils system" – honest citizens with their greed for public office and various kinds of prebends. Those were the years when Mark Twain portrayed Washington as a city where members of Congress had such a bleak reputation that landlords demanded upfront rent. The Gilded Age (1873), his satirical novel written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, became the mocking symbol of an entire era: not of gold, but falsely gilded.
Even a poet like Walt Whitman, the singer of the "American dream", did not hide his anxiety about "the alarming spectacle of parties usurping the government, wild and voracious parties". Up to launching, in Democratic Vistas (1871), a heartfelt appeal: “Disengage from parties. They have been useful, and to some extent remain so; but [….] the farmers and the employees and the workers are the masters of the parties, [….] they are the ones we need most, now and in the future. It is better not to put yourself in the hands of any party, not to blindly submit to their dictators ”. Whitman's language was different from that of the liberal reformers, who for him were "amateurs and dandy," but the suggested remedy was identical.
****
In the essay "Von Deutscher Baukunst" (On German architecture, 1773), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) had harshly criticized those who "measure rather than feel", who were denied access to the true source of artistic experience , which can arise only from the emotion that is disinterested and free from any intellectualism. For his part, along the lines of the great German playwright, the scholar and art historian Francesco Galeani Napione (1748-1830) warned: "The judgment of a learned and practiced eye is more superb than any compass and measure. ”(Monuments of ancient architecture, 1820).
Of course, not only the engineers and architects, but also the cartographers disagreed. For Antonio Genovesi (1712-1769), holder of the first chair of political economy in Europe, it was scandalous that the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies ignored its borders. Cartographic production could therefore not ignore the definition of "certain measures" to overcome this gap. However, the Neapolitan illuminist could not have imagined that, thanks to technological progress, in the new century even the most common topographical instruments – theodolites, barometers, levels and sextants – would become much more exact and reliable. Nor could he have imagined that these tools would be accompanied by the engraving technique of lithography, which allowed the serial reproduction of atlases and maps. No longer a monopoly of scientific cabinets, they could finally enter even private living rooms and classrooms.
At that time the maps were elaborated with the triangulation method, borrowed from the Pythagorean theorem. Before even a meticulous data collection, triangulation was a grueling physical test. Surveyors were forced to walk for days, often climbing rugged mountains with a tripod under their arm and a saddlebag full of provisions. The study of the territory required extreme concentration until late at night, when the cascades of measures scribbled in pencil during the day were copied in pen. In short, that of the topographer was an eccentric professional figure. In possession of an impeccable scientific background, he carried out his task as a religious mission. When exploring territory, his excitement was similar to that of a reporter in a war theater.
****
Émile Zola, who with the naturalistic method invoked by Flaubert had treated the theme of adultery in Thérèse Raquin (1867), gained international fame thanks to the case of treason that rocked France at the end of the nineteenth century. His "J'Accuse", published in "L'Aurore" on January 13, 1898, shifts the balance of power between the supporters of the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish artillery captain accused three years earlier of intelligence with Germany , and how many (the overwhelming majority of public opinion) are sure of his guilt. In the months in which Dreyfus was arrested and tried, Édouard Drumont's La France juive (1886) had exceeded one hundred reprints.
At a time when positivist scientism was mixed with spiritualism and Satanism, Drumont uses it in an anti-Jewish key to explain how betrayal is inherent in the Jew. For the founder of "Libre Parole", the Jew does not belong to the enemy, he does not belong to anyone: he is a "wanderer" and hides himself in the folds of society. Since betrayal presupposes the breaking of a relationship of trust, for Drumont the truest traitors are not the Jews, who are rather spies who infect the social body with their presence, but their friends and supporters, the "judaïsant". The consensus gained by these theses confirms the inconvenient truth denounced by Mathieu Dreyfus, namely that the indictment of his brother was attributable to the virulent anti-Semitism that was found among his fellow citizens. But it was only in 1898 that the world of culture, also at the urging of politicians such as Jean Jaurès, decided to counter the patriotic tide that was engulfing France. Together with Zola, the historian Gabriel Monod and the sociologist Émile Durkheim, the first to take the field will be the scientists, starting with the director of the Pasteur Institute Émile Duclaux.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/lamerica-falsamente-dorata-di-mark-twain-e-walt-whitman/ on Sat, 19 Feb 2022 06:25:03 +0000.