The American 1890s-PB [Paperback]

This book, no doubt intended for college survey courses, is misnamed. It is not about the American 1890s but about an unrepresentative slice of them: the aspirant and financially comfortable, if politically and socially nervous, middle classes. A surprising number of the selections deal with college -- from Teddy Roosevelt's "The College Graduate and Public Life" to Annie Payson Call's almost unbelievably dumb "The Greatest Need of College Girls."
In the 1890s, most people didn't even go to high school, much less college. Warren Harding, who lived in the prosperous town of Marion, Ohio, which had 10,000 inhabitants, was one of only 10 high school graduates his year.
Missing from the survey is any sign of ordinary folks: there are no articles from newspapers and certainly not from the Police Gazette; none from the very influential religious press; none from the numerous Socialist, radical and farmer magazines.
What we are given is a selection from the would-be serious magazines like The Critic, Scribner's, Atlantic Monthly and Harper's, some of which are still around and still have approximately the same kind of limited readership they had in 1895: typical of nothing much.
This is not to say that some of the selections are not interesting, although for about half, the main interest is in seeing how silly and trivial our great-grandparents could be.
Susan B. Anthony's "The Status of Woman" from the Arena has merit, and so does Simon Pokagan's "The Future of the Red Man" from Forum.
"The Gospel of Relaxation" by William James in Scribner's will do nothing to enhance his reputation, but the fact that he delivered this tedious lecture many times must reveal something.
I suppose we are intended to draw conclusions about the American 1890s after reading this selection, but it cannot be done. And the editors are no help.
Although they are politically correct (the vocabulary will leap out within the first few paragraphs of their introduction) and so overselect those who would "resist a dominant culture," they choose voices that were, from their own low-status experiences, like W.E.B du Bous, as aspirant as the troubled white middle class magazine subscribers who the editors so obviously find unappealing.
However, they then place these challengers in a false position, as punch-pulling compromisers. Maybe they were, but it is not true, as Susan Harris and Melanie Dawson assert, that it was "rare and difficult to speak against a dominant society." These were the years when, to take one example among thousands, the Single-Taxer Henry George was running for mayor of New York City and selling his radical books by the hundreds of thousands.
Such voices were rare to non-existent in the pages of the Chautauquan, but they were noisy, vibrant, courageous, cranky, goofy, wonderful, serious and everywhere in the real American 1890s.

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