Genetic revolutionaries: American socialism, the Russian Revolution, and the invention of the radical immigrant, 1886-1920
Item
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Title
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Genetic revolutionaries: American socialism, the Russian Revolution, and the invention of the radical immigrant, 1886-1920
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:875ffbda0444:11527
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identifier
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12029
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Creator
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Schwartz, Jesse W.,
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Contributor
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Peter Hitchcock
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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American literature | American studies | Ethnic studies
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines the American response to socialist politics in general and the Russian Revolution in particular during the titular period. I argue that Gilded-Age anti-radicalism followed by Progressive-Era anti-communism act as a discursive crucible that irrevocably links the two figures of the radical and the immigrant, manufacturing a forced association between particular ethnicities and specific political forms. While immigrants to the US had long been blamed as carriers of biological contagions, socialism in the late nineteenth century would soon be characterized as a social disease in the American imaginary, one that "naturally" infected lesser minds from Central and Eastern Europe, and could then be transmitted to "native" constitutions that betrayed their own weakness simply by the act of adopting radical views. Through readings of contemporaneous literature from authors such as William Dean Howells, Jack London, and John Reed, as well as analyses of concordant reportage and jurisprudential decisions, this study argues that conceptions of a "politics in the blood" not only offered ballast to harsh anti-immigration policies but also generated a contradictory population of "indigenous foreigners" alongside the immigrants themselves, a "counterpublic" rendered un-American purely for their political views. Aided by post-bellum racial categories, new forms of political representation, unprecedented waves of immigration, and the helixing of legislation with the new sciences of anthropometrics, the frightening figure of this "radical immigrant" would abet an increasingly centralized American government in the transition from a discourse of empire in the late nineteenth century to one of anti-communism in the early twentieth, producing contours of contact that still obtain.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
