Introduction
We learn with poignant sorrow of the death in battle of José Martí, the well-known leader of the Cuban revolutionists. We knew him long and well, and esteemed him profoundly. For a protracted period, beginning twenty odd years ago, he was employed as a contributor to THE SUN, writing on subjects and questions of the fine arts. In these things his learning was solid and extensive, and his ideas and conclusions were original and brilliant. He was a man of genius, of imagination, of hope, and of courage, one of those descendants of the Spanish race whose American birth and instincts seem to have added to the revolutionary tincture which all modern Spaniards inherit. His heart was warm and affectionate, his opinions ardent and aspiring, and he died as such a man might wish to die, battling for liberty and democracy. Of such heroes there are not too many in the world, and his warlike grave testifies that, even in a positive and material age, there are spirits that can give all for their principles without thinking of any selfish return for themselves.
Honor to the memory of José Martí, and peace to his manly and generous soul.2
On Thursday May 23, 1895, the New York Sun newspaper carried the above obituary for the journalist, modernist poet and leader of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano, José Martí, who had been killed in the Battle of Boca de Dos Rios against Spanish imperial forces on the preceding Sunday. The obituary is interesting both for its subject and for its approach. No other major, mainstream, New York-based English-language newspaper carried such a sentimental or laudatory account of the controversial writer in the days immediately after his death. Many referred to him solely as ‘the insurgent leader’, focused on the sensational manner of his death, or reported the event in relation to ‘the great importance to the Spanish authorities of the papers found upon his body’.3 The articles carried by the Sun’s more populist (and increasingly more popular) ‘yellow paper’ competitors, Joseph Pulitzer’s World and William Randolph Hearst’s Journal, in the years preceding the Spanish-American War of 1898, evince a clear taste for copy about the Cuban War of Independence in New York at the time, even if that was not shared by the wider nation.4 However, they do so without the Sun’s clear support for Martí’s revolutionary vision and often with an eye towards the potential of the conflict as the starting point for US
imperialist expansion into the island nation. Indeed, the historiography of the Spanish-American War (of which the Cuban War of Independence was a major theatre) has often tied the conflict directly to competition for sales and subscribers between Pulitzer and Hearst’s news agencies, arguing that US jingoism, as well as American desire for annexation of Cuba to exploit its abundant natural resources, were partially fostered by these press magnates for the purposes of generating good copy and greater sales.5 This argument may not hold weight, since it is hard to place more blame for an invasion at the feet of the press than at the proinvention politicians and industrialists William McKinley, John Jacob Astor and J.P. Morgan.6 However, as David R. Spencer has suggested, ‘there is considerable merit in blaming both Hearst’s New York Journal and Pulitzer’s New York World for playing fast and loose with the truth in their respective attempts to garner larger and larger circulation’.7 What is clear is that in this period Cuba became a major site for testing out competing visions of US journalistic ethics. As W. Joseph Campbell has noted, reporting Cuba mobilized ‘a choice between the self-activated, participatory ethos of Hearst’s journalism and the detached, sober antithesis of that genre, as represented by the New York Times and its lofty commitment to “All the News That’s Fit To Print”’.8
The Sun charted a course somewhere between the austerity and worthiness of the Times and the flashy, explosive capitalist imperialism of so-called ‘yellow journalism’. The paper’s approach to Martí’s death is not surprising once we learn that, unlike for other obituaries, the author of Martí’s death notice was not one of the paper’s numerous, largely anonymous, reporters, but the editor-in-chief of the Sun, the former Union soldier and Brook Farm Transcendentalist Charles Anderson Dana. Dana had drafted it the day before, when the Associated Press wires had carried some of the earliest confirmed reports of Martí’s death in English. In choosing to print such a definitive and dignified obituary on May 23, Dana’s paper also set itself in clear opposition to Pulitzer’s World and Evening World, who, for several days following his death published a running joke claiming that Martí was alive and had been spotted at various places in Cuba and the Keys. Gossipy articles, such as ‘JOSE MARTI IN HIDING: It is Believed that He is Preparing to Slip to This Country’, from the June 4 edition, directly contradicted their own confirmed reports of his death, sowing confusion whilst driving sales. The running commentary was a clear instance of the yellow paper’s strategy, deploying techniques learned from popular serial fiction and printing material from dubious sources to generate marketable copy for the newspaper.
Dana’s approach was distinct from that of many of the other major New York newspapermen of his time, who channelled prevailing attitudes in the US towards the insurrection in ‘believ[ing] themselves to be benefactors of Cuba’; an attitude that following the War of Independence would transmute into the perception of ‘Cubans as indissolubly linked to the United States by ties of gratitude and obligation’ that might seemingly justify American intervention and annexation.9 Instead, Dana’s particular political vision did not discount the possibility of Cuban sovereignty, the struggles of which were embodied in the person of Martí. Dana regrettably died just before the major engagements of the Cuban–Spanish–American War, and US journalism lost one of the few major, mainstream political voices that might have resisted the rise of imperialist jingoism in the final years of the nineteenth century. As Janet Steele has noted,
Dana’s interest in the Cuban Revolution lasted until his death in 1897. He corresponded personally with leading Cuban revolutionists, including his ‘warm friend’ José Martí, and met with them when they came to New York… In 1899 a square in Camaguey, Cuba, was renamed Charles A. Dana Plaza in tribute to his support for the New York Cuban junta.10
Before discussing the obituary in detail it is worth turning to Dana, who remains a controversial figure in American letters. Literary historians have struggled over where to place him in a dominant narrative of US media history that charts a movement from the local partisan papers of the early republic, through the antebellum era’s early experimentation with a commercial press, to the era of media conglomerates and incorporated capitalist news agencies. Charles Dana has been painted frequently as a reactionary Boston Brahmin, in part because his status as an avowed member of the northeastern intellectual elite marked him out from his main rivals – the wealthy son of an industrialist (Hearst), first and second generation Jewish immigrants (Pulitzer and the Times’ Adolph Ochs), and a belligerent penny press baron (Gordon Bennett of the Herald). Until the eclipse of the Sun by Pulitzer’s World in the late 1880s, however, the daily was ‘New York’s most widely read newspaper’, particularly among the artisan lower-middle classes, and Dana one of the most famous journalists in America.11 We owe the relative neglect of Dana partly to the progressive-era critic Vernon Parrington, whose hugely influential 1930 work, The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, 1860–1920, painted a picture of the inevitable destruction of Charles Dana’s intellectual project through Hearst and Pulitzer’s marriage of American corporate capitalism to aggressive muckraking journalism. For Parrington, Dana was a conservative voice in the Gilded Age, chronically out of touch with the pushy spirit of his time. By characterizing him as a conservative Parrington played into a teleological narrative of American intellectual and social development that turned the famous clashes between Pulitzer and Hearst over reporting the war with Spain into a crucible for the emergence of modern American print culture – indeed, for American media hegemony and globalization more generally. This narrative casts a newspaper like the Sun, which was at the heart of contemporary debates, as a residual presence on the scene, so transforming the rise of Pulitzer and Hearst’s style into an historical inevitability.
Yet such an approach obscures the complex negotiations undergone by Dana’s paper in navigating the contemporary newspaper scene without violating his higher journalistic principles. The year of Martí’s death and Hearst’s purchase of the New York Journal also saw the release of an edition of the collected lectures of Charles Dana on the subject of press responsibility and the profession of journalism, entitled The Art of Newspaper Making. In his lectures Dana outlined the rules of journalistic conduct in direct challenge to Hearst, Pulitzer and the new ‘yellow journalists’. Dana’s rules were:
Get the news, get all the news, and nothing but the news.
Copy nothing from another publication without perfect credit.
Never print an interview without the knowledge and consent of the party interviewed.
Never print a paid advertisement as news matter. Let every advertisement appear as an advertisement; no sailing under false colours.
Never attack the weak or the defenceless, either by argument, by invective, or by ridicule, unless there is some absolute public necessity for doing so.
Fight for your opinions, but do not believe that they contain the whole truth or the only truth. Support your party, if you have one. But do not think all the good men are in it and all the bad ones outside of it.
Above all, know and believe that humanity is advancing; that there is progress in human life and human affairs; and that, as sure as God lives, the future will be greater and better than the present or the past.12
As well as being one of the founding fathers of the modern American newspaper, known for a clear yet eloquent prose style and an insistence on fact rather than incendiary editorializing, he was also immersed in many of the most significant movements of antebellum and postbellum literary and intellectual culture.13 In a sense, Dana was something of a contradiction. He was at once a hard-edged newspaperman who advanced himself financially and socially in the capitalist Gilded Age and a figure that in his youth had helped found a utopian, abolitionist commune at Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts (1841–7) committed to co-operative aims. The Brook Farm Transcendentalists had combined the spiritualism and focus on cultural uplift called for by antebellum US Romantics such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller with a rationalized model of agriculture drawn from the writings of the revolutionary French philosopher Charles Fourier.14 These Romantic-era thinkers believed that true democracy was possible only when cultural achievements were matched with an egalitarian rationalization of labour that dignified all work, intellectual and manual. In a speech Dana gave on January 21, 1895 at the University of Michigan he outlined the original plan for Brook Farm. Dana said, ‘If democracy was the sublime truth which it was held up to be, it should be raised up from the sphere of politics, from the sphere of law and constitutions; it should be raised up into life and be made social’.15
Dana was the de facto editor of the West Roxbury community’s in-house publication The Harbinger, which served as the site of his apprenticeship in journalism and an outlet for the dissemination of left-wing, transnational literature.16 Indeed, the Brook Farm Transcendentalists were some of the earliest adopters of French radical thought, with a young Dana even writing articles published in the New York Tribune in 1849 in support of the idea of ‘mutual banking’ put forward by the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Rather than cultivating an intellect that functioned through intuition (as Emerson had), the Fourierist Transcendentalists advocated a regime of intellectual ‘levelling up’ that operated across national boundaries and highlighted the dignity of all labour as a response to the problems of class inequality in the nineteenth century. As Carl Guarneri has noted, ‘cooperative living would eliminate the obstacles to spiritual growth presented by an acquisitive, unequal, compartmentalized society and would make the means of Transcendentalist self-culture available to more individuals’.17 The Brook Farmers attempted to marry a distinctly Victorian attention to the edifying, improving qualities of elite literature with workers’ rights and a planned economy, so as to enhance the life of all citizens.
It is these values that Dana esteemed most in the obituary for his friend Martí, a figure who similarly sought to marry Romanticism in culture with radical democracy in politics. A key claim of my argument here is that both Martí and Dana represented figures that deliberately alienated themselves from what were becoming normative social, journalistic and literary practices in the late-nineteenth-century Americas. In their writings, Dana and Martí sought to channel idiosyncratic literary styles into alternative visions of the political order. In effect, both Dana and Martí were examples of what Susana Rotker has called ‘an intellectual elite that felt marginalized and alienated by the readjustment of social relations’ in the Gilded Age, the very conditions that would some years later give birth to European modernism.18
Considering Martí’s work in light of Dana’s intellectual project allows us to partially resolve one of the key problems that plagues Martí studies: how the Cuban exile could be at once an advocate of American Romantic individualism and a voice of the collective struggle. Recent work on Martí, such as that by Laura Lomas, has considered the Cuban writer’s relationship to an American Transcendentalist tradition by offering new readings of his famous essays on US-American cultural figures such as the essayist and lecturer Ralph Waldo Emerson and the democratic poet Walt Whitman. Lomas has argued that even as Martí esteemed the individualistic and egoistic wing of the Transcendentalist movement, he remained skeptical of its self-directedness and claims for ahistorical universality, which could potentially serve as apologia for the more horrifying aspects of Anglocentric imperial modernity. Lomas writes:
In its individualism, the Emersonian subject considers adherence to a collective and compromising circumstance, whereas for Martí unity through coalition helps to ensure the anticolonial nation’s futurity. Emerson’s subject is sovereign, autonomous, and entirely self-engendering… If Emerson imagines himself as homogenous and invulnerable – a standing house and not a storm-tossed ship – Martí defines subjectivity through figures so internally heterogeneous and transitory that they threaten to split open.19
Martí was attracted and repulsed by Emerson because at the time that he was writing, American traditions of individualism and self-reliance were the characteristics being called upon by figures such as Hearst and Pulitzer to justify the American annexation of Cuba. Consequently, Emerson was insufficient as a tool to describe and mobilize Cuban subjectivity, an identity that both depended upon and was shaped by a collective history of oppression. As a former Brook Farmer, Dana felt the same about self-culture, believing structural transformations of labour needed to precede Romantic individualism in order to allow the potential of the workers as harbingers of liberty to flourish.
Performing friendship in the New York press
The Sun obituary does not only mark the passing of Martí as a man but serves as a print ritual, a performance that allows for the emergence of Cuban–American friendship as a political alterity based in what the author describes as an earlier (though somewhat ill-defined) age of high sentimental values. According to the thinking of the time, sentimental affect was supposed to operate across borders, free from the pressures of nationalism and a ‘positive and material’ capitalist hegemony.20 In this way, Dana’s obituary for Martí functions similarly to that most important of classical, republican performative genres, the funeral oration, in being at once an account of Dana’s personal loss and a moment in which the values of the democratic polis (embodied in the dead individual) are made manifest, re-affirmed and often also reorganized.21 Dana constructed a transnational fraternity of shared republican values between Cuba and the US by means of a print ritual that sought to challenge the fixing of national borders to particular sets of manners and behaviours in an age of rapacious American imperialism.
A problem emerges though in the fact that the sense of fraternity that the obituary ritualistically generates between Dana and Martí (or Martí and the New York Sun) was, in a sense, a politically troubled illusion. The same sense of transnational affection that Dana expresses for Martí was complicit in shaping a sense of commonality that in other instances was used to justify Cuban annexation by the US.22 For this reason the Martí–Dana friendship cannot be considered free from the material realities of late-nineteenth-century life, namely, the position of Cuba as a nation whose people did not confront the US on a remotely equal footing, as citizens of brother-nations, but as potential subjects of American imperial designs. It does not go far enough to read this obituary as merely a sign of Dana’s love for his Cuban friend. To do so is to ignore the audience of the Sun and their own particular attitudes to Cuba, which could not have been entirely free from the influence of generations of American exceptionalist rhetoric and an ongoing sense of the ‘inevitability’ of Cuban annexation that had predominated discussions of ‘manifest destiny’ in the antebellum and immediately post-bellum US.
Much of Martí’s work in the years preceding the War of Independence had been devoted to addressing a North American mindset that favoured ‘manifest destiny’. This was especially evident in his clashes in the press and at the pan-American Convention (1889–90) with the hawkish US Republican Senator James Blaine, whose economic policies towards Latin America, Martí thought, were devised with the aim of destabilizing sovereign nations and paving the way for heightened US intervention into the Spanish Caribbean.23 In the context of a burgeoning annexationist movement in the US, the concept of Cuban–American friendship raised by Dana’s obituary was not without its political complexities. Yet the obituary was also of value to the writer, who in speaking of Martí’s employment at the Sun alongside idealized republican values made the Cuban writer’s ‘noble’ qualities synonymous with those of Dana’s paper.
The very values that Dana attributed to Martí – his ‘warm and affectionate’ nature, his value system that elevated the ‘ardent and aspiring’ as key ‘manly’ virtues and his ‘wish to die, battling for liberty and democracy’ – might easily have been interpreted as his qualifications (and those of the Cuban people of whom he was a paragon) for US citizenship. In other words, the hard work, passion for liberty and sentimental manhood that made him an ideal Cuban nationalist in the eyes of Dana also reflected the prevailing norms of an idealized late-nineteenth-century US manhood, justifying not just a possible recourse to shared histories of revolution between Latin America and the United States but a specifically annexationist claim to the expansion of US democracy into a nation currently engaged in a freedom struggle with imperial Spain.
Dana’s obituary for Martí serves to open up a further-reaching discussion of press and politics in the Gilded Age US. It also helps us to resurrect the New York Sun as an important force in the print landscape after over a hundred years of comparative critical neglect. The death of Martí not only signalled the loss of a major Latin American thinker and activist of the Gilded Age; it was also one of the last major political events in the life of Charles Dana – one of the only extant figures in US print culture who directly connected the ‘new journalism’ to a radical history of abolitionism and the Revolutions of 1848. To truly understand the work of obituary, it is important to explore Dana’s political and commercial vision in the Sun. Part of this exercise may be achieved by paying closer attention to the form of the newspaper; an approach which does not consider the obituary as a single, isolated, transcendent text, but as a fragment in a larger collage, considering, as well, the Sun’s paratexts and distribution history. By paying closer attention to form we can reveal the proto-modernist styles that differentiated Dana’s work from that of his contemporaries.
In the age of the popular, famous, adventuring journalist (Stephen Crane, Richard Harding Davis, Nelly Bly), in which newspapers competed for big-name writers who commanded high salaries for sensational feats of daring investigative journalism, Dana’s paper frequently resisted the printing of by-lines on much of its copy and ‘avoided using enormous headlines and splashy illustrations, which of course became normative for new journalism’.24 True to this tradition the obituary was anonymous, adopting a communal ‘we’ (‘we learn with poignant sorrow’) that tied the personality of the editor to the vision of his paper as a whole. Yet the absence of a by-line importantly does not subsume that ‘we’ under the aegis of Dana himself alone; this is not the ‘royal we’, the forced attribution of a collective to the body of an individual, but a ‘we’ rooted in professional values and the kinds of collective labour that Dana had cultivated as a young man at Brook Farm.
The obituary functioned more as ‘literature’ than as simple reportage. At a time when the New York press was gravitating towards a notion of mass culture as synonymous with ‘popular’ or ‘populist’ aims, the politics of Dana’s vision lay as much in his attention to form as in his identification with a controversial political figure such as Martí. When encountered as a print performance in the pages of the paper, the obituary strikes the reader as distinctly odd. Not only is the absence of a by-line or headline somewhat out of sync with the sensationalist tenor of the contemporary ‘yellow’ journalism, but also it confers upon the piece a sense of what Walter Benjamin called ‘aura’ that can be defined only in terms of the sacred. The obituary appeared on page six and was marked off from the rest of the surrounding text by thick black lines. This technique was normally reserved for ‘Stop Press’ late additions to the paper, but we know that Dana must have been aware of Martí’s death long before the print deadline for the morning edition, since a search of the Library of Congress newspaper collections reveals that even regional papers such as the San Francisco Call, Scranton Tribune, Salt Lake Herald and others had reported his death as early as the morning of May 22. Since the Sun was a member of the Associated Press and their offices controlled many of the telegraphic communications that came from Cuba and upon which the regional papers relied for reports, there is no doubt about Dana’s knowledge of his friend’s death at least by the time of the evening edition of May 21. This leads to the conclusion that the obituary was strategically deployed with a view to creating the greatest impression upon readers. Mimicking the temporality of the ‘Stop Press’ report produced an effect of spontaneity that could be read in terms of an outpouring of sentimental sincerity – the very ideals that the author attributed to Martí. The text, then, evokes an alternative temporality. Martí’s obituary emerges from the page of the newspaper as an anonymous and poignant expression of feeling that is distinct to the textual objects around it by nature of its function as a ritual object that speaks to a history of shared values and labours.
Dana’s obituary stands in clear contrast to much ‘new journalism’ in two ways: first, by deploying the text as a material ritual object that cultivates shared feelings directed towards shared goals and, second, through the use of an anonymous voice that aesthetically renders the sense of historical legacy. However, the text functions aesthetically not based on its status as an alienated or autonomous art object in the modernist sense but because of its relationship to the material around it, its carefully cultivated positioning as a temporal and textual anomaly. Page six of the paper was a space usually reserved for the reprinting of articles from regional or foreign sources, not those produced by in-house writers. Since this page was designed to incorporate diverse democratic publics into the narrative of the Sun, the positioning of the article allowed this obituary to perform its role as a sincere outpouring of the democratic public, even if it was in reality the product of the paper’s editor-in-chief. This clever turn made the narrative Dana presented seem to be organic and democratic, an aspect of its aesthetic that was further enhanced by the absence of a by-line. Since the wider US public was, in reality, often quite hostile to Martí’s radical image of Cuban sovereignty, this positioning and anonymity served the role of legitimating the action by means of an anonymity that made recourse to a ‘public’ voice.
This notion that newspapers could be sites of genuine feeling and alternative historical narratives was explored by Martí himself in an article written for Charles Dana’s New York weekly The Hour in 1880,entitled ‘Impressions of America (By a Very Fresh Spaniard)’. In this article Martí suggested that foreigners were often prone to generalizations about the US as a vulgar nation marked by ‘arrogant militarism, violation of the public will [and] corruption of the political morality’ because they did not pay close enough attention to the American press.25 Martí writes: ‘In the columns of a newspaper, in the page of a magazine, in the familiar chit-chat, the most pure feelings, noble aspirations, and generous ideas bravely fight for the rapid improvement of the country, in the sense of moral development’.26 For Martí, conceptualizing radical democracy relied partly upon paying close attention to the newspapers and popular print, which often evinced ideas for progressive development that were seldom ever debated at the official state level or could not be summed up by a well-chosen lithograph. In effect, the Cuban modernist author (like Dana himself) valued the printed word as a source of radical potentialities not possible through recourse to the photography, visual media and punchy, simple prose styles that had come to define the new American journalistic landscape. Additionally, his ‘impressionistic’ narrative style highlighted its owns subjectivity and artistic credibility, by permitting a lyricism that was not to be found in most ‘yellow press’ writing of the time.
A similar critique was often levelled at Charles Dana, whose ‘great works’ approach to literature has been read as ‘conservative’. It is important to note though that the aspects of Dana and Martí’s work that seem ‘conservative’ may also be seen as the deployment of a strategic latency that cut against a dominant narrative of modernity, which attributed the sense of ‘progress’ to the condition of accelerated temporality. The yellow papers’ techniques of printing unconfirmed accounts and gossip was a perfect case of their marketing as periodicals that placed speed of information and imagery before fact-checking. Dana’s technique of holding back his obituary for his Cuban friend by a few days simultaneously allowed him to present the effect of sincerity and accuracy in opposition to his competitors’ journalistic ethics, whilst also suggesting through the mimicry of the ‘Stop Press’ report that his paper was not being left behind. Dana and Martí’s attention to high learning, cultivation and the slower speeds of text versus the more immediate effects of image is a modernist gesture that challenges the brash ‘progressivism’ of yellow journalism and predates the patterns of more traditional literary histories that see ‘modernism’ as emerging in Europe and America around the 1910s. Dana drew attention to this in his own lecture on ‘The Profession of Journalism’ to the students of Union College in 1893. In this lecture, Dana set his own values up in opposition both to the new journalists and to his tutor in the profession, Horace Greeley. Dana wrote,
Give the young man a first-class course of general education… I had rather take a fellow who knows the Ajax of Sophocles, and who has read Tacitus, and can scan every ode of Horace – I would rather take him to report a prize fight or a spelling match… than to take one who has never had those advantages… I believe in colleges; I believe in high education…27
Dana’s insistence on the importance of high learning and ‘a very beautiful and admirable [prose] style’28 parallels Martí’s own aesthetic, often referred to as the crónica modernista, which often utilized complex verbal constructions and esoteric textual allusions that ran counter to the dominant narrative of the Press’s accelerated speed of information. Indeed, as Susana Rotker has shown, Martí was not especially interested in ‘the mimetic function of texts… the identification of reality with external phenomena’.29 Instead, he was concerned with capturing the fragmented and discontinuous elements of experience through a complex, multivalent and largely internalized subjectivity that disrupted, rather than depicted, reality. Such an aesthetic, Martí reasoned, was better able to express utopian possibility than either a literary realism that aimed at the transparent representation of events, or the new technologies of accelerated image-making frequently exploited by the New York press. What mattered most to Martí, and to Dana, was the affect that was rarely present in modern printed visual culture, except as a degraded, base sensationalism.
Martí as colleague
The Sun obituary spoke of Martí as an ‘original and brilliant’ colleague, collapsing the geographical and generic distances that divided Latin American modernismo from New York journalism, and folding him into the collective voice that was made possible within the pages of a printed artifact that frequently refused to deploy by-lines. Dana’s decision to refuse by-lines reflected both the collectivist ethos of his Transcendentalist early days and a residual antebellum newspaper aesthetic that downplayed the contributions of individual authors. Partly as a marker of his esteem for Martí’s work as a writer and thinker, Dana commissioned over three hundred articles from him for the Sun and the Hour (the weekly sister paper to the Sun ‘devoted to social interests’) throughout the 1880s, enough for Martí to be considered a staff writer, albeit primarily on ‘subjects, and questions of the fine arts’.30 Martí contributed articles on a variety of topics, but was known in the English-language context primarily as a cultural critic, reviewing gallery openings and new book releases. His position on the staff of the Sun might suggest a self-censorship of his more overtly political writings (which appear to have been reserved for Latin American publications), or else a camouflaging of his radicalism behind seemingly more benign content. However, Martí’s theory of art and culture in Anglophile print culture was of a piece with both his work more generally and the cultural politics of Dana’s journalistic project.
Martí’s complex position as critic of American imperialism, both celebrant and cynic towards the modernity of which the USA was an important and inevitable participant, and contributor to the project of defining journalistic practice in Anglophone New York, sat quite easily within Dana’s own aesthetic purview. Reading Martí’s work in such a way, though, problematizes traditional historical approaches to the Cuban author and leader, which have appropriated him to serve as an archetype of an uncomplicated late-twentieth-century vision of Latin-American hostility to US culture. Much Latin American criticism of Martí has tended to overlook this English-language writing in an effort to depict him as a radical outsider to the American scene. Even left-wing US-based critics like Philip Foner have chosen to focus upon his exclusion and resistance to US aggression – Foner’s own collection of Martí’s work being provocatively called ‘Inside the Monster’. As Paul Giles has noted, Foner’s selections were chosen to ‘make Martí appear a forerunner to twentieth-century socialism’, and largely excluded the cultural-critical work for which he was well known.31 More recent uses of Martí, especially by Jeffrey Belnap and Laura Lomas, have situated him as a forerunner of contemporary liberal multiculturalism or chosen to look specifically to his famous call for pan-Latin American solidarity, ‘Nuestra América’, as a source of a remarkably prescient, colour-blind postracialism: ‘There can be no racial animosity, because there are no races… The soul, equal and eternal, emanates from bodies of various shapes and colors… anyone who promotes and disseminates opposition or hatred among races is committing a sin against humanity’.32 Yet historicizing Martí’s own politics casts doubts over the legitimacy of claiming the author and thinker for twentieth-century socialist or anarchist variants of radicalism. Indeed, his relationship to Dana helps us to resituate Martí within the frame of late-nineteenth-century republicanism, an ideology that developed more under the influence of the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Simón Bolívar and Thomas Jefferson, than Karl Marx or Pyotr Kropotkin.
In his obituary, Dana spoke of Martí in the highest possible terms as a ‘man of genius… imagination… hope… courage’ that ‘in a positive and material age… [was one of those] spirit[s] that can give all for their principles without thinking of any selfish return for themselves’. Testifying to the values of Martí as both an individual and a radical willing to ‘battl[e] for liberty and democracy’ against the ‘selfish returns’ of ‘a positive and material age’ was a bold move for Dana in the context both of an emergent US imperialism towards Latin America (justified by the senatorial war hawk James Blaine within the ‘positive and material’ terms of free trade expansionism), and the rise of Pulitzer and Hearst’s bullish, competitive, consumerist and jingoistic journalism. In several respects, by writing of Martí in this way, Dana was attempting to draw a parallel between the values of his own paper and those of the martyred Cuban leader. In its time the Sun rejected many of the central premises driving the American ‘new journalism’, particularly in regards to the materialism communicated by those papers’ exuberant use of visuals and explosive typography, which were designed to express a new American spirit of enthusiasm, individualism and capitalist moxie. Unlike Hearst and Pulitzer’s papers, Dana’s was run on subscription and resisted the drive for advertising, illustration or photography, refused to print unverified reports from dubious sources or intervene in the making of news, whilst also maintaining a hard-fought-for independence from political parties. The effect of this was to give Dana’s work the aura of the old-fashioned, a deliberately performed sense of being at odds with the zeitgeist. As Karen Roggenkamp has argued, where other papers struggled to marry Gilded Age culture’s mania for representation of events with entertainment, Dana took a different line and endeavoured to cultivate ‘an appreciation of finer styles of writing and egalitarian political ideas’ among a critical and intellectually engaged working-class readership.33
Dana’s paper presented the world as becoming increasingly monopolized by press magnates and dominated by the coercive power of corporate capitalism. In fact, Dana’s concern with authority was especially evident in his distrust of the position of the Presidency, which had been growing in power and influence under successive postbellum Republican administrations. In his lecture on ‘The Art of Newspaper Making’ Dana wrote, ‘There is no king, no emperor, no autocrat in the world who wields such authority, such power, as the President of the United States’.34 Even more insidiously, Hearst and Pulitzer seemed to be coopting the utopian declarations of the US’s providential national mission, which had motivated the abolitionist movements of Dana’s youth, to justify the extension of free trade and a US-centred mode of ‘democracy’ throughout the world.
In regards to Cuba, Dana’s paper was also outside the main current of thought at the time. The general atmosphere in the American press surrounding the Cuban War of Independence was chauvinistic, especially after the World and the Journal began to agitate for American intervention by deploying the pseudoscientific language of racial types to explain differing cultural and political attitudes between the continental US and the Spanish Caribbean. The yellow papers frequently depicted Cubans either as feminized ‘others’ or as lazy and ignorant farmers, to emphasize an ideological agenda that fashioned the inhabitants as dependent upon the US for their liberty and to further the cause of those who wished to annex Cuba.35 A history of racialized hierarchy and slavery in Cuba, which had often resulted in individuals of African slave descent remaining in predominantly agrarian professions (with light-skinned Cubans or criollo often taking more managerial and authoritative roles), only helped to re-enforce this ideology of dependence in the US. In reading Cuban liberty, US citizens often projected internal racial biases against African Americans (as well as a commonly held perception that attributed the freeing of the slaves to white America and galvanized beliefs in black inferiority) onto their attitudes towards the Cuban subjects seeking independence from Spain. For example, in a dispatch for the New York World of July 14, 1898, Stephen Crane wrote of the ‘lively contempt’ felt by Americans towards the Cuban soldiers fighting alongside them against Spain, arguing that the Cubans ‘manifest … an indifference to the cause of Cuban liberty which could not be exceeded by some one who had never heard of it’.36 Crane’s report completely misses the point, of course, since what he interprets in racially coded terms as the ‘indifference’ of Cuban soldiers to the ideal of Cuba Libre may rather have been signs of Cuban political animosity towards the American army. For many Cubans, American intervention signalled less the beginnings of a period of self-rule than the opening volley of a new subjugation under the wings of the US imperial eagle. Dana, however, chose to describe Martí as ‘a descendent of the Spanish race whose American birth and instincts seemed to have added to the revolutionary tincture which all modern Spaniards inherit’. In the context of anticolonial struggle, the association of ‘modern Spaniards’ with ‘revolutionary tincture’ seems misplaced. Yet, throughout the nineteenth century Spain had undergone periods of significant liberalization, constitutionalism and even republicanism. Ada Ferrer has noted that this very process of modernization paved the way for the Cuban insurrection by permitting greater press freedom on the island: ‘In 1886, the colonial state abolished press tribunals, which made authors subject to prison sentences and expatriation for publishing materials contrary to what officials termed Spanish “national integrity”’.37 For Dana, Martí was at once an ‘American’ radical (a term used to denote a pan-continental rather than purely nationalist identity) for whom an ‘instinct’ for liberty and democracy was natural or indigenous, and a Spaniard who had absorbed the ‘modern’ era’s ‘tincture’ of free self-determination. Unlike a great many US-based authors of his day, Dana’s evocation of ‘American’ did not mean US or even North American, but encompassed the whole Western Hemisphere. On the eve of the insurrection in Cuba, Dana printed in the Sun a panegyric in praise of Cuban nationalism. He wrote:
To the brave men in arms for the independence and liberties of Cuba, to the patriots… we send greetings… The seventeen republics of the three Americas desire their success… Let foreign domination this side of the Atlantic be brought to an end forever. America for Americans!38
Yet Dana chose his words very carefully in describing Martí in this way, since ‘tincture’ implied ambiguously both a low dosage and also colouration. The Sun’s refusal to buy into what Shelley Streeby has called ‘the late-nineteenth-century expansion of the pictorial marketplace and the transformation of visual culture’ posed an especially difficult problem for readers in relation to interpreting Latin American conflicts, since Gilded Age American readers often depended on the visuality of racial characteristics in shaping their perspectives on the individuals about whom articles were written.39 Because the racial origins of individuals that seemed important to readers were often difficult to ascertain from sketches in a paper that never invested heavily in visual media, Dana’s use of the term ‘Spanish race’ in relation to the concept of ‘tincture’ effectively suggested that the Cuban leader was a comparatively light-skinned European, that is, without the visual coding symbolizing African descent. This pandered to the commonly held racial biases of his working- and lower-middle-class New York readership, at the same time as it enfolded Martí into a tradition of US-Euroamerican republicanism. By supporting Martí’s project in terms that highlighted the ‘American’ (read ‘white North American’) provenance of his anti-imperial politics, whilst envisioning Spanish culture as a possible wellspring of future democratic movements, Dana painted an image of an autonomous Cuban subjectivity that drew its energy from Euro-American traditions of thought and culture and so circumvented a history of US imagery that associated racial ‘blackness’ with either feeble dependence or threatening savagery. When the Americans finally invaded Cuba under the pretext of supporting the insurrection, imagery circulated in the yellow press painted Cubans as a racial other, a ‘white man’s burden’ that required the support of the racially European, ‘Christian’ US.40
The fact of Martí’s racial whiteness has been extremely important to histories of the role he played as a leader for Cuban independence, as it connected his efforts with traditions of insurgency conceptualized in terms that tied Latin American sovereignty struggles to other revolutionary actions conceived as of racially European origin, such as the French and American Revolutions, republican struggles in Germany and even the successes of the light-skinned Simón Bolívar.41 As Ada Ferrer and John Lawrence Tone have both noted, one key reason for the failure of earlier insurrections against Spanish rule had been the white Cuban elite’s racism towards the former black slaves who comprised a large section of the rebel army. The abolition of slavery in 1886 in Cuba left creoles concerned about the possibility of arming and supporting black soldiers from the East (orientes) who many felt harboured a desire for a post-revolutionary partition of the island, along the lines of Hispaniola’s predominantly black Haiti and whiter Dominican Republic. Tone writes,
One thing kept a lid on Creole discontent. When the sugar economy took off in Cuba, population [sic] grew rapidly, and the black population grew fastest of all. White Cubans thought the island was becoming ‘Africanized’ by the very success of the plantation economy. Racial fear… induced a certain docility among whites, who saw Spain as a guarantor of the slave system and of white supremacy in Cuba.42
The importance of Martí as a light-skinned, colonially educated creole speaking on behalf of racial harmony in 1895 (just nine years after abolition on the island) cannot be overstated. Like Dana, who was a product of the radical wing of the abolitionist movement, Martí saw a focus on questions of class and national identity as a way of challenging pre-existing racial and cultural hierarchies. Denying the Spanish colonizers recourse to race as a tool to maintain their control became a major function of Martí’s rhetoric.43 In both the Cuban insurrectionist press and in the New York Sun, however, a stunning irony lay in the fact that making a claim for a ‘safe’ version of Cuban nationalism relied upon making a dual claim on Martí’s racial whiteness. For Cuban creoles, the poet’s light skin meant the possibility of people like them supporting an army made up to a large degree of black men. In the US, it allowed Dana to tie the insurrection in Cuba to ‘Western’ conflicts and so differentiate it from the history of slave revolts in the Americas in the minds of his readers. As late-nineteenth-century intellectuals operating in the context of essentialized definitions of racial difference neither Martí nor Dana managed to obliterate race wholly as a socially significant construction, even as they asked for it to be ‘transcended’ in the service of progressive political and cultural aims. Dana had to ‘use’ Martí’s race to make a claim about revolution, whilst Martí’s own body gave his words potency as a means to mobilize exiled and domestic Cuban creoles. Ferrer has suggested that Martí’s ‘vision of a transracial Cuban essentially left intact racial categories like white and black, even as it argued for their transcendence’.44
Revealing Martí’s link to Dana’s paper helps us to describe the Cuban author’s politics of race, culture and class in their Gilded Age context. As Janet Steele has shown, the Sun’s resistance to flashy populism and the mania for pictorial representation of events evident in Hearst and Pulitzer’s papers took the form of a long-standing commitment to a republican ideological stance, known historically as ‘producerism’, that reflected the paper’s origins in the artisanal economy of the 1830s Jacksonian penny press. Rather than a world divided by cultural or racial particularisms, the Sun depicted one divided by class, or, more properly, the relative importance of those that created against those that lived by the labour of others. Producerism divided society into two primary moral categories: producers and non-producers. Producers were those that created all the wealth yet owned little but their labour; non-producers were those who extracted the income of the ‘industrious classes’ in the form of rent, interest and the profits gained from buying labour at one price and selling it at another.45 The ideology of producerism followed by Dana’s paper was not wholly hostile to capitalism (at least in its early-market, pre-corporate iteration), and especially where small-scale free markets seemed to provide a legitimate alternative to slavery, but also allowed the paper to advocate collective action in the name of workers’ rights (in the form of trade unions). Dana carried this agenda through to the production of the paper itself, which refused to use the new typesetting machines that sped up the printing process but would have led to the obsolescence of skilled printers trained in the dying art of handsetting.
Dana’s politics of producerism were not ‘radical’ in the sense that more modern thinkers have used the term, and the Sun had its blind spots politically. As he aged Dana came to loathe anarchism, which he saw as a rejection of the fundamental basis of society in co-operation and progressive reform. Additionally, the paper struggled to take a clear line on European expansion into Africa. The legacies of abolitionism in Dana’s life and work could often be registered in his sense of ‘progress’, which even as it questioned corporate capitalism saw it as a legitimate alternative to the ‘greater’ horrors of ‘primitive’ life. These tensions can be seen on the very page that carried the Martí obituary. This spread includes an article damning critics of the Belgian project in the Congo as naïve in their belief that ‘there is a single square mile of the earth’s surface which man will not, some day, turn to his own advantage’. The very politics of cultivation and progress that defined producerism often forced Dana into ironic identification with those who would seek to exploit indigenous or tribal societies and the lands they occupied. Such ironies were also present in Martí’s politics, which were often hostile to societies that did not accept a version of liberty rooted in some (albeit barely-defined) notion of ‘modernity’.46 These similarities in their respective political visions speak to the fact that both the American and the Cuban were subject to similar cultural influences in being intellectuals attempting to find a vision for society in which a positive iteration of modernity could be compatible with both republicanism and the demands of global freedom struggles.
Dana’s decision to imagine a world that was divided along economic lines, rather than the racial, national or cultural axes that were being elevated in the yellow papers, allowed Martí to find a space within the paper for his own modernist aesthetic and anticolonial politics: what Laura Lomas has called a ‘proto-Gramscian position… [that] advocates the cultivation of critical working-class subjects who wield the only democratic power with which to transform society… radical pedagogy and popular education’.47 Readers of the paper did not see the same obsession with racialized categories or a binary between the feudal ‘Old World’ and the modern ‘New World’ that would come to justify American expansionism in the yellow papers. What they did find was an odd mixture of a broadly pro-labour stance with a writerly tone and support for the transformative value of high culture, especially the subtleties of fine prose. Articles by Martí on the aesthetics of ‘Flaubert’s Last Work’ (July 6, 1880) jostled for position on the same page of the Sun with pieces venerating ‘The Democratic Workingmen of California’ in a manner that seems to register no inherent conflict between ‘high’ art and working-class politics.
In much the same way as Dana’s obituary for Martí offered the possibility of an alternative politics in US-Cuban relations, to offer up the Sun as a legitimate counter to the dominant narrative of the era’s print culture works against the grain of much Americanist criticism. In the obituary for Martí we can see the influence of a ‘producerist’ bias in Dana’s rendering of a man whose ‘solid and extensive’ learning and hard work was balanced by his instincts for the freedom of others. Yet we also see the influence of New England Transcendentalism in Dana’s characterization of the ‘naturalness’ of American liberty and the importance of cultivation and learning. This Transcendentalist focus on the indigeneity of American ideas of freedom is qualified by the writer’s decision to highlight how the descendants of Spain might also draw upon the liberatory potential of a deterritorialized ‘spirit’ (or ‘tincture’) of modernity, understood as the rights of the labourers to the products and profits of their own individual labour. Through Dana’s publications Martí found a US-based access point to a collective, international culture of modern improvement that was shared across racial and social groups, but which, importantly, did not suture ideas of ‘progress’ wholly to the new forms of aggressive corporate capitalism. Unlike Pulitzer and Hearst who pragmatically manipulated popular taste for their own political and financial ends, Dana came to journalism with an intellectual project in mind – the extension of cultivation and learning to the lower classes and a veneration of collective labour, developed through his association with American Fourierism. The Sun was a site of alterity within mainstream, mass-market New York print culture that charted a difficult course between the Scylla of a base populism (in the guise of the neo-imperialist yellow journalism) and the Charybdis of cultural elitism (found within the pages of competing Gilded Age literary periodicals that were much less friendly to the underclass, such as Scribners, Century and Harpers). I have tried to argue here that in bringing a Latin American modernismo into the orbit of US print culture, Dana’s decision to adopt a middle ground in the US reflected transnationally Martí’s own unresolved modernist aesthetic in Latin American literature, described by Susana Rotker as ‘the formulation of a space… for the paradox of disillusionment and hope… The literary space of the struggle’.48 For this reason, the New York Sun and the Martí–Dana friendship must be accounted for in histories of both literary modernism in the Americas and political radicalism. Instead of seeing the paper as Parrington did, as a residue of a bygone age of cautious, reflective journalism, I have attempted to suggest that it deployed alternative temporalities and Dana’s own poor fit with the tenor of his day in a way that was actually rather ahead of the curve – developing a space of unresolved tensions that would eventually speak to the emergence of global modernist aesthetics.
In conclusion, I see Dana’s paper and his friendship with Martí as providing a potential seedbed for the project of a shared Latin American and US radical aesthetic that was set back by the emergence of Pulitzer and Hearst as dominating forces in American cultural life. The Sun and the Hour, therefore, like Martí’s chronicles for Latin American papers, may be seen as sites of deliberative liminality and self-reflexivity that are transnational by virtue of their inclusion of subalternated Cuban voices and their resistance to the dominant trends defining US culture in the Gilded Age. Furthermore, the two men’s friendship can be regarded as a utopian alternative to US–Cuban hostility in the twentieth century, which was interrupted by their deaths in the years immediately preceding the devastating Cuban–Spanish–American War. In bringing Martí into a discussion of North American print culture, I do not wish to ‘claim’ him for US American Studies so much as demonstrate how print culture and personal affection, ‘pure feelings, noble aspirations, and generous ideas’, however transient or illusory, can function as sites of the intersection, discussion and translation of radical individuals that might, consequently, serve as the basis for a transnational project directed against shared, global conditions of oppression.