On 4 May 1886, an anonymous individual threw a dynamite bomb at advancing police who had begun to violently disperse a crowd of labourers in Haymarket Square on Chicago's West Side. The group had assembled to protest police brutality in response to a recent strike at McCormick's Reaper Factory, a large producer of agricultural machinery for the Mid-West. The strike had been part of a far-larger campaign by a variety of trade union and workers’ societies in Chicago for fairer pay and conditions, called the Eight-Hour Movement. The bomb killed one policeman, Mattias Degan, instantly and twenty-three officers were injured enough to disable them. Six policeman died of injuries in the following weeks and months – though it is not known whether these were sustained from the bomb or friendly fire in the chaos following the explosion. The police response to the bomb was panicked and disorganised. They shot into the crowd with live ammunition, failed to identify participants from by-standers, and reports exist suggesting they even fired into their own lines. Accounts vary quite widely as to the number of civilians killed, as no official count was taken by police or the newspaper syndicates, although the historian Timothy Messer-Kruse suggests ‘three civilians were killed near Haymarket that night of May the Fourth’ and ‘several dozen’ sustained bullet wounds (3). The lack of an accurate headcount was likely because the workingmen and women involved were unwilling to reveal themselves as present at the time and so face a potential death penalty for conspiracy or other forms of extrajudicial violence that were promoted in the press as legitimate responses to what was framed as, but did not always refer to itself as, ‘anarchism’.

In May 1900 the American author and journalist Stephen Crane published the short story ‘Manacled’ in the London magazine The Argosy. In several senses Crane was the archetype for expatriate American authors of the later modernist era; writing, publishing and settling in England at a time when he was facing increasing hostility in the US press for the bohemian character of his work and his decadent, nonconformist lifestyle. Crane's circle of friends and associates in fin-de-siècle Great Britain reads like a checklist of some of the most successful and important writers of the age. Henry James and Joseph Conrad were frequent visitors to his home at Brede in East Sussex, Rudyard Kipling was approached to complete his final, unfinished novel The O’Ruddy, H. G. Wells wrote a glowing obituary of Crane in the August 1900 issue of The North American Review and Arnold Bennett and Ford Madox Ford were emphatic in their praise. Whereas his US critical notices after The Red Badge of Courage (1895) had been increasingly disparaging, British critics had been generally more favourable across the whole of his career. For this reason the decision to publish ‘Manacled’ first in the London Argosy rather than with the New York syndicates that had previously carried his short fiction was in keeping with the broad trajectory of Crane's career in the final years of the 1890s. Indeed, Crane did not settle in his home country and they would not readily claim him for their own, at least not until after his death. By 1895 cosmopolitan mobility became Crane's personal and artistic raison d’être. After leaving Asbury Park, New Jersey as a teenager Crane lived in New York, Florida, Greece, Cuba and Britain, seldom settling for long before a new journalistic commission moved him on to pastures new.

At one time The Argosy had been a leading light of the Victorian periodical scene and had appealed to the middle classes through a careful pairing of the lush, Pre-Raphaelite-inspired illustrations of William Small with fictional content that shuttled between popular categories of the sensational and sentimental. By 1900, though, The Argosy had begun to face financial difficulties and a declining readership.

In her 1925 collection of essays on craft, The Writing of Fiction, Edith Wharton reflected on the basis of her literary technique and her belief in the formal weaknesses of an emergent literary modernism. Coming towards the end of what scholars frequently recognise as her greatest period of production in fiction, beginning with The House of Mirth (1905) and topped off by The Age of Innocence (1920), Wharton used her literary fame and the platform it gave her in The Writing of Fiction to question what she saw as an emerging cult of ‘originality’ whose values were drawn from a neo-romantic fixation on ‘inspiration’ and vanguardism, and a desire that new psychological fiction (Woolf, Joyce and Proust are particularly referenced) capture all that was subject to the senses in a given moment. For Wharton, this modernistic adoration of totality and aesthetic completeness was a hubris of sorts that found its style in the deployment of the uninterrupted, unimpeded Jamesian (William) ‘stream of consciousness’ that she loathed. Excluding materials from appearance in art, for Wharton, was not a withholding of one's right to see and feel all things, but was, rather, a generous and humble exercise that not only made art ‘better’ in her view, but also opened it up to other potentialities. These potentialities were experienced by the reader as a democratising sense of wonder as to how things might be different through the deployment of a different form or focus of attention. Rather than relying on the energy of the creative writer to capture all things at all times, Wharton's theory of art created drama through a certain exercise of modesty that could provoke the reader's contemplation as to other possible outcomes, forms and ways of being.

James Huneker is now a somewhat neglected figure in the pantheon of American literary and critical achievement. In his time though (from the 1890s through to his death in 1921) he was perhaps the USA's most revered and respected cultural critic, occupying a position that would eventually, perhaps, be taken by the presently-more-famous H. L. Mencken. A passionate and relentless advocate for cosmopolitanism in art, literature and politics, and opposed to the rising nationalistic fervours of the 1910s that I spoke about in the previous chapter, he was also an unapologetic champion of bohemian morals and a critic of the Puritanical sexual pieties of the Anglo-American bourgeoisie. His life-long bohemianism, campaign for the improvement of aesthetic and cultural values in American literature and art, and wide, international reading might make Huneker an obvious candidate for a position within the fold of the emerging ‘high modernism’; or, at the very least, as one of its clear progenitors. Yet, Huneker is more a figure of the transitional (but no less distinct) moment I have outlined in this book. Indeed, he shared with Edith Wharton (who adored his writings on music and theatre especially) and others a suspicion about the meaning and direction of so-called ‘modernism’ and its various sub-cults in the arts. Moreover, Huneker was quite assuredly the inheritor of the variant of cultural critique associated with José Martí, whom he followed into the major role of society and culture critic at The New York Sun.

In his 1919 novel Painted Veils (a borderline pornographic romp through the theatre and opera world of Gilded Age New York), Huneker pokes fun at the then current vogue for forms of ‘primitivism’, anthropological deep reading, and esoteric orientalism as so much pseudo-intellectual chaff covering more base needs and desires. The novel, which follows the sexual and social exploits of a popular opera singer, Esther Brandés, and her melancholic man-about-town suitor Ulick Invern through a plot involving religious revivals that transform into orgies, orgies that transform into near-religious revivals, and a whole parade of chorus girls in various bohemian locales, opens by calling out the misogyny and voyeurism of literary and artistic history.

On Thursday 23 May 1895, The New York Sun newspaper carried the above obituary for the journalist, modernist poet and leader of 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’. Martí died after ordering his men to charge a heavily fortified Spanish position in direct violation of an order from the military leader of the insurrectionists General Máximo Gómez. In fact, Martí's presence in Cuba was controversial in itself. Few of the insurrectionists felt that this scholar-poet and orator could contribute much to the war effort on the ground and would better serve the cause of independence by continuing to agitate and write in the USA.

This book is about turn-of-the-twentieth-century American literature's discovery that in the overwhelming complexity of everyday life was the key to imagining the future. More especially, it is about the way in which writing in the last decades of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth sought to express the political possibilities that lay on the surface of the everyday in opposition to conservative forces that relied on historicising American experience by reifying difference so as to suppress a progressive imagination of the future. This new focus liberated American writing from its dependence on the Event as a key structuring principal of aesthetics and turned literary art towards questions of the anti-evental; the ongoing, unresolved, excessive and chronic quality of time. In contrast to the Romantic era's dependence upon the temporally organising principal of the spectacle, Progressive Era literature developed aesthetic practices that sought to find potential in the ongoing and immanent quality of lived experience.