Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [925]
And among the prissiest. Gilder’s method of raising public standards of taste and morality required the production of bloodless pages. As custodian of genteel culture he sought out the delicate and the refined and stood guard against the vulgar and the vernacular. Walt Whitman, though a personal friend, was banned from the Century’s pages; a bit of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn snuck in, but only after Gilder deleted references to nakedness, blasphemy, and smells and emended all improper phraseology (changing “in a sweat” to “worrying”). To those who accused him, and Americans, of prudishness, Gilder replied: “It may be that this accusation is well-founded. If so, we can only say that this is the price we pay for being, on the whole, the decentest nation on the face of the globe.”
Gilder’s values and ambitions were widely shared by the editors of New York’s (and Boston’s) genteel monthly magazines. Champions of convention and restraint, grace and serenity, they fed their readers a stately diet of English fiction, biography, travel, and cozy columns addressed to the “gentle reader” from the “Editor’s easy chair”—a mix popular since Washington Irving’s day. A similar tone marked the output of the leading publishing houses, notably that of Charles Scribner’s Sons, under the literary control of William Crary Brownell.
Brownell, born in 1851 to a comfortable Episcopalian family, was a devout Arnoldian disciple who feared New York City was disintegrating into anarchy. Brownell advanced this thesis most forcefully in 1884 after returning from France, which he applauded as a model of an integrated public culture. There the institutions and architecture of public life imposed discipline and constraint on individuals. By comparison, America’s metropolis was chaotic. Paris made people Parisians. New York generated only a “characterless individualism,” a “noisy diversity” with no “effect or ensemble.”
From 1888 on Brownell made the House of Scribners into a fortress of Culture, seeking out writers who combined “strength” and “refinement,” whose fiction and poetry reflected and espoused morality, truth, and beauty. Other great publishing houses joined him, with editors and publishers circulating in a Manhattan milieu that encompassed not only professional writers and critics but also a larger and highly sociable circle embracing amateur authors, artists, architects, cultivated businessmen, polished professionals, and learned university professors and administrators. These gentlemen, and a few ladies, gathered together to dine, talk, and listen in an interlocking network of clubs and institutions.
Genteel women remained the bulwark of Culture and the market for decent literature they had been for decades. Convinced they had a biological affinity for the beautiful and the uplifting, they took up their Arnoldian assignment of promoting art, culture, and Protestantism as redemptive antidotes to the centrifugal tendencies of a male-dominated economy. In the 1880s and 1890s the women’s club movement started by Sorosis burgeoned, developing self-improvement salons, islands of refined sociability for discussion of literature and art. In 1890 Jane Cunningham Croly and the New York Sorosis women linked literary clubs with alumnae associations, civic reform societies, mothers’ groups, and needlework guilds into a national network of female organizations, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs.
Editors of “family journals” and leading publishers were extremely sensitive to the wishes of this enormous and ever more organized reading public. They kept their content “innocent as milk” partly out of the