Three Things Tuesday: Cosmopolitan Edition

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been shifting some energy toward my winter research break. I’ve been teaching a lot more than usual lately so these breaks in the routine of prep, teaching, and marking are incredibly valuable. While I’m writing about pottery manufacturing in the area of E.F2 at Polis (a levigation pool, a kiln, and an assemblage of lamps), I’m looking forward to writing about the history of North Dakota Quarterly in the early 20th century as a regional magazine.

As readers of this blog know, I’ve been reading about late-19th and early-20th century regionalism with an eye toward placing NDQ in a context as a regional magazine. At the same time, I recognize regionalism as a larger aspect of post-Civil War American nationalism (and beyond that, an aspect of emerging concept of cosmopolitanism manifest in such things as 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition which sought to showcase the diversity of the world as well as its growing unity).

Tom Lutz’s book, Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value (2004) helped me articulate some of the tensions between the regional and national or cosmopolitan and the plurality of ways that this tension manifest itself. In particular Lutz argued that this required a negotiation between the social scientific interest in the universal as it is manifest in the particular, in the way that regional literary voices were integrated into a national literary character, and local values and increasingly national (and global) flow of capital.

I certainly many of these binaries, oppositions, and complements in NDQ in the 1910s and 1920s.     

1. Tension between the promodern and premodern. Lutz moves nimbly across books and authors with an agility that simply exceeds my simple archaeologist mind. That said, I was compelled by his unpacking of Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! (1913), and his centering of the conflict between the “premodern” and the “premodern” describes certain key aspects of 20th century regional literature and intellectual regionalism more broadly.

NDQ plays a key role in this discourse in that its first series (from 1910/11-1933) was particularly preoccupied with the promodern transformation of the state. Housed at UND, NDQ authors spearheaded progressive approaches to education, social services, jurisprudence, extractive industries, and agriculture and celebrated these achievements in the Quarterly’s pages. The audience for the Quarterly, then, is profoundly regional focusing on those invested in the future of the state. At the same time, this approach to regionalism saw North Dakota as a place that needed modernization in distinctive ways or risked enduring its premodern condition.   

2. Restrained Radicalism. Lutz also explores the influence of Hamlin Garland, one of the great fathers of both literary regionalism and its close connection to prairie radicalism. Here the inherent character of the everyday on the rural prairie created a fertile ground not for kind of premodern torpor, but for a kind of economic and political life that was both deeply local (and rural) as well as radical in its necessity capacity to resist the grasping power of Eastern centers.  

By the 20th century, these ideas had graduated from Garland’s prairie villages and small towns (let’s say) and matriculated in the halls of the regions institutions. NDQ was never a radical publication before World War II. Instead, it embodied certain progressive traits through the influence of folks like John M. Gillette, the father of rural sociology in the US, Orin G. Libby, a moderate, but progressive leaning historian, and Earle Babcock, the first dean of the College of Engineering and champion of industrial development. None of these men, other than perhaps Gillette (on a good day) stood as radicals. They were conspicuously in the “promodern” camp, but in the polarized political landscape of North Dakota they often threw in their hats with the populist and socialist Nonpartisan League in its efforts to resist the the state becoming a colony of Minneapolis, Chicago, or New York capital. In other words, they saw the region as having inherent value not just an an economic hinterland for Eastern interests, but as a place of social, political, and even economic independence. If holding these values involved partnering with more radical political agents, then, they were willing to deploy the university’s resources toward that as a moderating influence.    

3. NDQ as counterpoint and complement. Thus, by the first decades of the 20th century, NDQ emerged a counterpoint and complement to the maturing concept of a regional literary voice that acknowledge the necessity (and even radical potential) of American regionalism, but also understood that the particularism of social and hard sciences (especially when deployed to define a region) required the universal to produce meaning.

By locating NDQ in this context, it makes it possible to situate the Quarterly in relation to literary magazines, such as The Midland, Frontier, and Prairie Schooner, as well as other magazines such as North Dakota History (previously the Quarterly Journal of the North Dakota State Historical Society) as contributing to the conditions necessary for the region to move from a concept embedded in a kind of radical politics and premodern agrarian values to a concept articulated by institutionalized voices at the university (as well as in the state house).