MODULE EL114- SURVEY OF ANGLO-AMERICAN LITERATURE
CHAPTER 9
Objectives:
a. Identify the major events during the Era of Expansion in America.
b. Analyze the theme and moral of the selected literary pieces.
c. Explain the background of the Era of Expansion in America.
THE ERA OF EXPANSION:
INDEPENDENCE AND INDIVIDUALITY
- After the American Civil War, the
nation entered a period of
commercial expansion. Factories
were built.
- Railroads stretched from one end
of the country to the other as cities
grew bigger.
- There were more opportunities for
making vast fortunes but some
writers did not believe that money
was as important as many
Americans believed.
- They questioned the values held
by many of the people.
- They also believed that the rights and
dignity of an individual were a vital part of
the American creed.
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- Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau shared these ideals as did Walt
Whitman and Herman Melville.
- Walt Whitman, determined to be the poet of democracy, tried to reach the American
people by veering away from the traditional poetic forms and creating his own.
- Another great writer was Mark Twain whose independence and individualism delighted
the American public. He was not impressed by many things he saw in America but his
criticisms were done in such a humorous way that the country refused to take his
criticisms seriously.
- Though much of the writings of this period were based on the Civil War, the war affected
literature less than the industrial expansion did.
THE ERA OF EXPANSION AND REFORM
"We must abolish everything that bears even the semblance of privilege."
Woodrow Wilson
28th president of the USA.
Message to Congress, April 8, 1913
- Between two great wars - the Civil War and the First World War -the United States of
America came of age. In less than fifty years, it was transformed from a rural republic to
an urban state. The frontier had vanished.
- Great factories and steel mills, transcontinental railroad lines, flourishing cities, vast
agricultural holdings marked the land. And with them came accompanying evils:
monopolies tended to develop, factory working conditions were poor, cities developed so
quickly that they could not properly house or govern their teeming populations, factory
production sometimes outran practical consumption.
- The reaction against these abuses came from America's people and her political leaders
Grover Cleveland, William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow
Wilson.
- Their powerfully articulated reforms, idealistic in philosophy but realistic in execution,
accepted the dictum that "legislation may begin where an evil begins."
- Indeed, the accomplishments of the period of reform served effectively to check the
wrongs engendered in the period of expansion.
- "The Civil War," says one writer, "cut a white gash through the history of the country; it
dramatized in a stroke the changes that had begun to take place during the preceding
twenty or thirty years."
- War needs had enormously stimulated manufacturing and had to speed up an economic
process whose fundamental factors were the exploitation of the iron, steam, and
electrical power, and the forward march of science and invention.
- The 36,000 patents granted before 1860 were but a pale forerunner of the flood of
inventions to follow.
- From 1860 to 1890, 440,000 patents were issued, and in the first quarter of the twentieth
century, the number reached nearly a million.
- The principle of the dynamo, which was developed as early as 1831, revolutionized
American life after 1880 when Thomas Edison and others made its use practical.
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- After Samuel F. B. Morse perfected electrical telegraphy in 1844, distant parts of the
continent were soon linked by a network of poles and wires. In 1876, Alexander Graham
Bell exhibited a
- Telephone instrument and, within half a century, 16,000,000 telephones were
accelerating the social and economic life of the nation. The tempo of business was
quickened too by the invention of the typewriter in 1867, the adding machine in 1888,
and the cash register in 1897. The linotype composing machine, invented in 1886, the
rotary press, and paper-folding machinery made it possible to print 240,000 eight-page
newspapers in an hour. After 1880, Edison's incandescent lamp brought to millions of
homes better, safer, cheaper light than had ever been known before.
LITERARY READINGS
O Captain! My Captain!
BY WALT WHITMAN
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather‘d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon‘d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
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For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You‘ve fallen cold and dead.
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor‘d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
- The poem utilizes a metaphor of describing the United States as a ship that Whitman
had previously used in "Death in the School-Room". This metaphor of a ship of state has
been often used by authors; Whitman himself had written a letter on March 19, 1863,
that compared the head of state to a ship's captain. Whitman had also likely read
newspaper reports that Lincoln had dreamed of a ship under full sail the night before his
assassination; the imagery was allegedly a recurring dream of Lincoln's before
significant moments in his life.
- For more information and knowledge about the Era Of Expansion
please visit the following links:
[Link]
[Link]
[Link]
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INDUSTRIAL AMERICA:
THE CHANGING TIMES
- After the Civil War, the factories that
used to make arms began to make
implements for "peacetime" use Many
industries were developed.
- Steel played an increasingly important
role Railroad constructions and
operations as well as great inventions
like the telephone, the electric light, the
motion picture camera, etc., created
many millionaires.
- But as the number of rich people
increased, so, too, the number of poor
people. Immigrants poured into the
country to build the railroads, to work
in the factories, and to farm the vast
agricultural lands.
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- The literature reflected the various ways sought to cope with the rapid change. One
group of writers that arose during this period was the realists who tried to show how
things re- ally were.
- There were writers like Stephen Crane who denied that they were interested in changing
things. They were primarily engaged in the quest for accuracy.
- They tried to keep their eyes unclouded and their senses sharp and clear in order to find
out the truth. These writers were called the naturalists.
- Another group of writers called veritists claimed to write only what could be verified.
- Like the other two groups, they believed in showing the ordinary, average, day-to-day
life with particular attention to details of setting. The changing times produced poetry that
provided vital interpretation of life.
- The recognized leaders were Amy Lowell, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Vachel Lindsay,
Edgar Lee Masters, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Carl Sandburg. They began to be
heard in their own voice and style.
- Poets and poems multiplied rapidly. For the first time in history, a book of poetry, The
Spoon River Anthology, became a best seller.
RISE OF INDUSTRIAL AMERICA
- The United States emerged as an industrial giant following the Civil War. Old industries
did well. New industries developed, including petroleum refining, steel manufacturing,
and electrical power. Railroads also grew tremendously. Following advancements in
industrial growth, a new class of wealthy industrialists and a prosperous middle class
developed. It also produced a vastly expanded blue-collar working class.
- However, not everyone benefited from these advancements. Many workers were not
employed for part of the year and the wages were relatively low when they did work.
- Many workers joined labor unions as a result. Farmers faced the challenges of falling
prices for farm products as technology improved. Young people moved to the city in
search of better job opportunities. Americans born in the 1840s and 1850s were the key
witnesses of the transformation.
- Light evolved from using candles, to kerosene lamps to electric light bulbs. The industrial
revolution drastically changed how people worked and where they lived. The Industrial
Revolution caused the migration of millions of people from rural America to the nation‘s
rapidly growing cities.
LITERARY READINGS
The Man with the Hoe
BY EDWIN MARKHAM
Written after seeing Millet‘s World-Famous Painting
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God made man in His own image,
in the image of God made He him. —Genesis.
Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?
Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;
To feel the passion of Eternity?
Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
And marked their ways upon the ancient deep?
Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf
There is no shape more terrible than this—
More tongued with censure of the world‘s blind greed—
More filled with signs and portents for the soul—
More fraught with danger to the universe.
What gulfs between him and the seraphim!
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?
Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time‘s tragedy is in that aching stoop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Judges of the World,
A protest that is also prophecy.
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
is this the handiwork you give to God,
This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched ?
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How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Touch it again with immortality;
Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the Future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings—
With those who shaped him to the thing he
is—
When this dumb Terror shall reply to God
After the silence of the centuries?
Reference:
[Link]
the-hoe
I Hear America Singing
BY Walt Whitman
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the
steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter‘s song, the ploughboy‘s on his way in the morning, or at noon
intermission or at sundown,
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The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or
washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.
- I Hear America Singing is one of the best-known poems about liberation. It was
first published in 1860 in Leave of Grass. The poem speaks about the happiness
of people belonging to various professions. It illustrates how America offers
them a place to live freely.
- For more information and knowledge about the Industrial America
please visit the following links:
[Link]
[Link]
[Link]
primary-source-timeline/rise-of-industrial-america-1876-1900/
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