Crane, the Civil War, and the 1890s

Ireprise at the head of this chapter a phrase quoted not very many pages back: I aim here to trace the happy-go-lucky moods of Stephen Crane's fiction to the national distemper so well diagnosed, as we have just seen, by Du Bois. The two authors are of an age, after all, and Crane's remarkable novel The Red Badge of Courage (1895) alerts us—as does The Souls of Black Folk—to what Du Bois calls the rapid passing away, in the 1890s, of the “ideals” for which the American Civil War had been waged, by the best of Radical Republicans anyway (Souls 392). He means, simply, the ideals of widening democracy and of emancipation: in short, the new birth of freedom of which Lincoln spoke in 1863, and for which men like Robert Gould Shaw, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, and a host of other “Radicals” (and thousands of black soldiers) believed themselves to be fighting and dying. Du Bois and Crane register this passing away of war “ideals” in utterly different keys. The one is angry, elegiac, disturbed, indignant. The other is cool, irreverent, detached, whimsical, ironic. Du Bois would impress upon us the heroism of the men who fought, or who thought of themselves as fighting, for the better angels of our nature (in such books as Black Reconstruction [1935]). Crane satirizes heroism and courage, quarantines them in quotation marks. He seems highly skeptical that such things actually motivate men. The war, as we know it in his pages, has nothing to do with principles. Alfred Kazin gets Crane about right in On Native Grounds (1995): “The surest thing one can say about Crane is that he did not care which way the world went. No one was ever less the reforming mind” (68). And the surest thing one can say about Du Bois is that he did and was.