Even here in Charleston, the city celebrated so lovingly in its pages, Owen Wister’s Lady Baltimore (1906) seems to be the subject of a discreet silence. For some time I was puzzled by this, for the novel has lost little if any of its original charm. While DuBose Heyward’s sentimental Porgy is daily fodder for every horse-and-buggy tour guide on Meeting Street and Pat Conroy was, until his death, feted at Spoleto soirees, Wister and his Lady seem to arouse only embarrassment (when read at all). Wister’s fault, at least by contemporary standards, is twofold: First, his treatment of racial politics more than a century ago falls well short of anything that might qualify for the Oprah Book Club seal-of-approval today. Second, his narrator is unabashedly elitist in his admiring presentation of an old Charleston aristocracy contemptuous of nouveau riche vulgarity and Negro demands for equality. All of this is exacerbated by another problem. If the narrator, Augustus, could be seen as just another character, then his views might be more easily (and smugly) dismissed as the pitiable bigotry of a benighted era. But Augustus is, at least to some extent, a mouthpiece for the views of Wister himself, and for the sensitive and “progressive” modern reader, this presents a perplexing matter of conscience. He begins to feel implicated by the very act of reading; he is, willy-nilly, somehow complicitous. Thus the author must be made to shoulder the blame for the reader’s feelings of guilt by association.
While I have no intention of exploring exhaustively here the various ways in which the race question arises in Lady Baltimore, it may be instructive to glance at a few scenes, and to begin with one that has been a particular bone of contention: It takes place when Augustus, a northern patrician sojourning in Charleston, ostensibly to engage in genealogical research, enters a curious little shop in search of an antique “kettle supporter.” The shop’s owner is a loquacious German whose opinion of emancipated blacks is more profoundly racist than any Augustus has encountered among the Charleston natives. Once the topic of race is broached, the shopkeeper becomes frenzied in his efforts to persude Augustus that the philanthropic efforts of those northerners who wish to educate the black man are the height of human folly. Importuned with pamphlets and dusty Huxleyian tomes filled with “diagrams of various bones” and lines of mammalian ascent from the primordial sludge, Augustus begins to wonder if he “is closeted with a maniac.” “But this is only the beginning,” says the maniacal shopkeeper. “Come in here to my crania and jaws.” Whereupon he leads Augustus into the inner sanctum of his shop, a dark room whose shelves are lined with the polished skulls of “man-like apes” and modern railroad magnates. Then, in a moment of “overweening triumph,” the Teutonic enthusiast invites the bewildered Augustus to contemplate two skulls in particular: one the skull of a modern Caucasian; the other that of a modern African. And what does this demonstration prove? That “in every respect that the African departed from the Caucasian, he departed in the direction of the ape!”
Now it is quite true that Augustus, in spite of the obvious distaste that he feels for the zealous shopkeeper, seems for a moment in this scene to be half persuaded by the evidence of the skulls. And Wister’s critics have not been hesitant to cite this scene (among others) in evidence of the claim that Wister’s Lady Baltimore “represents,” as John L. Cobbs has written, “an unabashed outpouring of racist attitudes unmatched in the fiction of any other major American writer of the twentieth century” (Owen Wister 106). In fact, criticism of the skulls scene began while the novel was still appearing in serial form in 1905 (in the Saturday Evening Post), when Wister was barraged with letters from one Burt G. Wilder, a zoologist at Cornell University, charging him with having relied on shoddy and outdated science in his presentation of the cranial evidence. When Wister failed, as Wilder had demanded, to revise or delete the offending scene in the 1906 first edition of the novel, Wilder eventually went public with his attack and denounced Wister at a national conference in Baltimore, claiming that the novelist’s treatment of the zoological material was a “monstrous perversion of the facts.” (A more detailed account of this episode can be found in Edward H. Beardsley, “The American Scientist as Social Activist: Franz Boas, Burt G. Wilder, and the Cause of Racial Justice,” in Isis 64, No. 1 [March 1973].)
What all of these critics (including Wister’s biographer, Darwin Payne) miss—or deliberately overlook—is the clearly satirical intention of the scene. Indeed, only a reader utterly bereft of an ear for the farcical, Dickensian tone which pervades the scene in question could possibly regard it as a serious endorsement of the Teuton’s zoological determinism. There is, in fact, no evidence that Wister himself held such extreme views, and Augustus, as he departs the shop, refers to the German shopkeeper as a “screaming anatomist—or Afropath,” and reflects bemusedly upon how unsettling it was to “come serenely in among dingy mahogany and glass objects … [only to] find the whole place turned into a sort of bedlam with a gibbering scientist dashing skulls at me to prove his fixed idea ….”
None of the interpreters of Lady Baltimore have ventured, as far as I am aware, to suggest a specific model for Wister’s hysterical “anatomist,” and it is very likely that this collector of skulls was largely a creature of the author’s fertile imagination. But some inspiration may have come from a group of scientists who were, in the 19th century, quite prominent advocates of what is called “craniometry,” the measurement of skulls for the purpose of ranking the intelligence of racial groups at a time when a direct correlation was assumed to exist between cranial capacity and intelligence. The most prominent advocates of the practice were Samuel George Morton and Louis Agassiz. The former, a well-known and respected Philadephia physician, gathered a massive collection of skulls (over 1,300 by one estimate) and created, in 1849, a museum to measure and house them. The museum, sometimes called “the American Golgotha,” was part of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, an institution over which Morton presided. This is not the place to delve into the question of how Morton acquired his skulls, though needless to say many of them were those of African slaves. For present purposes, it is enough to observe that Wister was himself a Philadelphia native and may very well have visited Morton’s museum (which remained at the Academy until 1966). Thus it is plausible that the Charleston anatomist’s dingy little museum of skulls may have been a parochial version of the massive collection in Philadelphia. Moreover, like Wister’s Teutonic collector, Morton’s cranial studies were intended to prove, among other things, that the intelligence of the duskier races was decidedly inferior to that of caucasians.
The truth of the matter is that Wister’s racial views were very nearly identical to those of his old friend, Theodore Roosevelt, and the views of both men were altogether typical of a period when—in the backwash of a failed Reconstruction—the vast majority of southerners and northerners alike seriously doubted whether black Americans would ready for full equality in the forseeable future. As George M. Fredrickson has demonstrated exhaustively in The Black Image in the White Mind (1972), racial views in the North during the post-bellum era came increasingly to resemble those of the South. A number of factors influenced the convergence of opinions, but the most important of these was the widespread perception that Reconstruction had failed, and that perception was in turn shaped by the growing prestige of the claims of social Darwinism, whose adherents—especially in the North—published dozens of studies that seemed to prove empirically and irrefutably that Africans were biologically inferior to whites. It seemed to follow from such evidence that full equality for blacks, at least for some time to come, was a mistake. Such views, according to Fredrickson, “were shared by almost all white Americans, North and South, during this period” (285).
However, Roosevelt, as is well-known, was aligned with the progressivist wing of his party and attempted, during his first term, to elevate prominent black Republicans across the South, among them William D. Crum, a well-to-do Charlestonian who was active in Republican politics in South Carolina. In fact, Crum was a mulatto by birth, and his Negro father (born a freeman) had been a slaveholder. For years Crum had sought appointment as Postmaster in Charleston, only to be passed over. When Roosevelt was elected, Crum’s good friend Booker T. Washington lobbied the new president in hopes that he might be able to secure an appointment for Crum. Roosevelt already had someone else in mind for the Postmaster’s position but offered Crum a position as the head of the Charleston Custom House, a high profile job. To Roosevelt’s dismay, the appointment stirred up a firestorm of opposition, especially among the Tillman faction of South Carolina Democrats, as well as many of the most influential Charleston families. In the end, Roosevelt compromised and gave Crum the job only as a temporary measure.
As Willard B. Gatewood tells the story (in “William D. Crum: A Negro in Politics,” The Journal of Negro History [Oct. 1968]), when Lady Baltimore was published, Roosevelt was still nursing a grudge against the Charleston “aristocrats,” and his hard feelings over the Crum episode may have contributed to his decision to write his friend Wister a long letter (Apr. 27, 1906) of protest against the latter’s sympathetic portrayal of the same elite circles who had worked to frustrate his hopes for Crum and the cause of Negro advancement in the Southern state which had, perhaps more than any other, stymied his optimistic faith that Negroes like Crum—well-educated and deferential—could, if only given the opportunity, prove themselves just as capable as whites. Yet Roosevelt’s personal ambivalence about racial matters is quite evident in the letter when he notes, “I entirely agree with you that as a race and in the mass they are altogether inferior to the whites.” Nevertheless, he expresses skepticism about the evidence of the skulls: ‘Your small German scientific friend,” he writes, “had probably not heard of the latest scientific theory—doubtless itself to be superseded by others—which is that the negro and the white man as shown by their skulls, are closely akin, and taken together, differ widely from the round skulled Mongolian.” To his credit, the president doesn’t place much faith in scientific theorizing about racial differences. But what is most striking here is that, despite his almost scoffing doubts about the credibility of craniometry, Roosevelt fails, like so many readers of the novel since, to see the satiric intent of the scene, and reproaches his old friend for “overstating the case,” apparently convinced that Wister was seriously endorsing the monomania of his German anatomist.
In fact, the Crum appointment was the basis for a prominent sub-plot in Lady Baltimore, though Crum is never named and the details are somewhat disguised. (In the novel the earlier attempt to appoint Crum as Postmaster is conflated with the Custom House appointment.) For the Charleston bluebloods the appointment is an appalling insult, all the worse because young Mayrant is employed at the Custom House (in some executive capacity never made specific). They are incensed at the prospect that he will be forced to carry out the directives of a Negro superior. Nothing in Augustus’s attitude toward this development suggests that he is anything but sympathetic to those who see Mayrant as the victim of abject humilation.
Yet there is a certain reticence in Augustus’s dealings with the Charlestonians that suggests he is not really the unredeemed racist that many readers assume him to be. This is supported by several scenes, but I will close with a glance at just one of them. When he is confronted by the novel’s heroine, Miss Eliza Le Heu, about the new president’s habit of inviting Negroes to dine with him at the White House, he is taken aback—in part because she seems (without evidence) to assume that his opinion on such matters is a “Northern” one. In fact, he admits that he is not so disturbed by the president’s cordiality as she seems to be: “If you mean that a gentleman cannot invite any respectable member of any race he pleases to dine privately in his house —” Her retort to this, her eyes seething with indignation, is that a president who invites a Negro to dine with him in the White House is not engaging in a “private” act. Her words are worth quoting in full:
If I knew him, I would go to him myself, and I would say, ‘Mr. President, we need not discuss our different tastes as to dinner company. Nor need we discuss how much you benefit the colored race by an act which makes every member of it immediately think that he is fit to dine with any king in the world. But you are staying in a house which is partly our house, ours, the South’s, for we, too, pay taxes, you know. And since you also know our deep feeling — you may even call it a prejudice, if it so pleases you—do you not think that, so long as you are residing in that house, you should not gratuitously shock our deep feeling?’
A few lines later, after Augustus questions her assumption that the president’s hospitality toward Negroes will somehow cause millions of them to think they are “fit to dine” with kings, she replies:
It was proof to them that they were as good as anybody — just as good, without reading or writing or anything. The very next day some of the laziest and dirtiest where we live had a new strut, like the monkey when you put a red flannel cap on him — only the monkey doesn’t push ladies off the sidewalk. And that state of mind, you know … isn’t the right state of mind for racial progress!
Of course, contemporary readers will be triggered by the monkey pushing ladies off the sidewalk, but we should also note that her final words appear, at least implicitly, to suggest that she is not altogether opposed to “racial progress” in the South. Her underlying point is that if progress is going to occur, it should not be forced upon the South, as it had been during Reconstruction, by a bully in the White House; rather, Southerners should be left to handle these matters in their own way and in their own good time.
I suspect that this was Wister’s view, as well.
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