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Blog Post 3 (for Tuesday, 1/28)
In his introduction to American Disasters, Steven Biel reinforces a notion that our class has grown familiar with over the last few weeks: the category of disaster is a seemingly arbitrary catchall for unusual destructive events. The essays that follow further demonstrate how the study of disaster can be approached from almost any angle.
Sheila Hones, in “Distant Disasters, Local Fears”, describes how local characterizations of distant disasters can illuminate “areas of immediate cultural or social concern” (171). In particular, she examines how a Boston publication called The Atlantic Monthly described disastrous events during late 19th century. For example, “His Best” is the fictional tale of a working class Irishman who falls in love with an upper class girl in the midst of a flood. The narrative integrates the natural disaster as a metaphor/parallelism of the social instability that the romance represents. The working class man’s passion is a threat to societal order. Perhaps the “immediate… concern” that this particular story addresses is the problem of incorporating the immigrants that were “flooding” America during the late 19th century. Additionally, Hones also explains that distance makes the event feel like a “safe theater” for social introspection (171). Because “His Best” is set in fictional Virginia, rather than real Boston, the author is free to explore the issues of class in a non-confrontational manner.
Kevin Rozario, in his essay “What Comes Down Must Go Up”, writes about the economic opportunities that result from disasters. Just as disasters promote social progress by revealing the “challenges to established ways”, they also promote economic progress through “creative destruction”—the idea that outdated systems must be eliminated to make way for more modern replacements (Biel 3, Rozario 73). For example, a businessman named George Harvey who witnessed the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 expressed excitement for the “resuscitated capital” (73). By this he meant the physically rebuilt capital city, but also alluded to “the revitalizing role of the calamity for American capitalism” (73). Inevitably, innovation and progress would replace what was destroyed by the quake. For Harvey, the San Francisco quake was an economic opportunity. This philosophy seems particularly well paired with the rapid industrialization that characterized the Gilded Age. And on a deeper level, the notion that “destruction breeds progress” is consistent with the Gilded Age’s lack of policy regarding industry regulation. Eli Caldwell describes how Gilded Age businessmen were hardly concerned with the ethics of industrialization, saying: “the so-called progressives of San Francisco cared as little about the effect of their plans on the working class as did Haussmann, though at least they did not blast away their housing with cannon.”
These two articles illuminate the cultural and social milieu of the Gilded Age while also demonstrating the manner in which disasters were understood during this period. Personally, I think that “His Best” and George Harvey both show that people who lived during the late 19th and early 20th century felt more confident in the face of disaster, because of social, intellectual, economic, and technological changes that they believed were “innovations.” The fictional story seems comfortable utilizing the disaster as a literary metaphor, and Harvey views disaster as an economic opportunity.