Burning Boy, page 2
The litany continues. In 1882: the three-month-long strike of iron and steel workers; the freight handlers strike that disrupted rail transportation for several weeks. 1886: the strike against Jay Gould’s Missouri-Pacific railroad system, during which nine thousand strikers shut down five thousand miles of track. That year, more than six hundred thousand workers in various industries went out on strike. In May, an attack on strikebreaking workers at the McCormick Reaper Manufacturing Company in Chicago elicited a response from the police that wound up killing six and wounding a dozen others, which led to the Haymarket Square riots the following afternoon, during which a bomb was thrown, killing seven policemen and wounding fifty. Four anarchists were sentenced to death and four others put in prison, three of them for life. It seems likely that none of the eight was responsible for throwing the bomb, but with newspaper headlines declaring, “TERROR GRIPS THE COUNTRY,” it hardly mattered who was responsible or not. Countless other strikes took place over the years that followed, but the biggest and most notorious among them were no doubt the Homestead Strike of 1892 and the Pullman Strike of 1894. The action against Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead mill on the Monongahela River in Pennsylvania lasted five months and led to dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries, an emblematic instance of management’s refusal to negotiate with labor, backing up that intransigence by persuading the governor to call in seven thousand members of the state militia. Carnegie’s associate Henry Clay Frick (the same Frick who lived in the New York mansion on Fifth Avenue that housed the private art collection which has been open to the public since 1935) was responsible for calling in Pinkerton agents armed with Winchester rifles to attack the strikers, and so hated did he become among those who supported the strike that anarchist Alexander Berkman attempted to assassinate him in his office, shooting Frick twice and stabbing him three times, but the attempt failed, the strike was broken, and Berkman was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. Thousands lost their jobs. In 1894, a year when three-quarters of a million workers laid down their tools in protest, the Pullman Strike in Chicago was also broken with no tangible results, but for a brief time mayhem ruled, leading to a nationwide boycott that stopped all rail traffic west of Detroit, and the leader of the insurrection, Eugene Debs, although sentenced to six months in prison for defying a federal injunction against interfering with the operation of the U.S. mail, emerged as a hero of the Left. He lived on until 1926 and is perhaps best known today for having said, “While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
Not to be forgotten in the midst of these ongoing wars between capital and labor were the ups and downs of the market itself, which crashed twice during the years in question. The Panic of 1873 forced the New York Stock Exchange to close for ten days, and in a depression that lasted for five years, more than ten thousand businesses failed, hundreds of banks shut down, and plans for a second transcontinental railroad line were scrapped. It is doubtful that the two-year-old or even six-year-old Crane was aware of what was happening then, but the Panic of 1893 was a different story. Crane was nearly twenty-two and already living in New York when the largest and deepest of all American depressions struck (surpassed only by the Great Depression of the 1930s), in the throes of the most sustained creative burst of his life (the completion and publication of Maggie, the composition of his first book of poems, the preliminary drafts of George’s Mother and The Red Badge of Courage, not to speak of various stories, sketches, and articles), and he suffered along with everyone else in the city, where unemployment oscillated between thirty and thirty-five percent, so poor at times that he had to scrounge for food and was often dressed so shabbily that he felt ashamed to go out in public.
It was also the era of Jane Addams and the settlement house movement, which began in Chicago and spread east and west to more than thirty states, an idealistic yet pragmatic effort to protect the rights of children and ameliorate conditions among the poor. The success of Hull House, the Henry Street Settlement in New York, and scores of other charitable endeavors proved that women could play a significant role in the civic life of the country. Without question, women were still relegated to the margins during those years, but a number of remarkable exceptions should be noted, women like Jane Addams who also managed to make their mark on society: Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Baker Eddy, Mother Jones, Clara Barton, Madame Blavatsky, the painter Mary Cassatt, and the journalist Nellie Bly (the pen name of Elizabeth Cochran), one of America’s first and most intrepid investigative reporters, who famously pretended to be mad in order to gain admittance to an insane asylum, and then, after being released at the request of her employer, Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World, exposed the wretched, inhuman treatment she had been subjected to there. She also bested Phileas Fogg’s imaginary record of circumnavigating the globe in eighty days (as recounted in Jules Verne’s novel) by completing the journey in seventy-two days. But women were also joining together to form large mass movements demanding change of the status quo, among them the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (of which Crane’s mother was an active member and served as president of three different local chapters). The union finally won its victory with the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1919, ushering in the less than fondly remembered Prohibition Era, but just one year later, after making some small headway on the municipal and state levels, women’s suffrage became the law of the land, and the door that had been bolted shut for so many centuries at last began to crack open.
State universities, colleges for women, colleges for black students, private colleges founded by various religious denominations, along with the building of libraries, museums, concert halls, and opera houses radically altered America’s intellectual and cultural life, so much so that a number of black and Jewish figures eventually worked their way into prominence: Paul Laurence Dunbar, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Louis Brandeis, Abraham Cahan, and Emma Lazarus, to mention just a handful of the most recognizable names. In New York City alone, the years during which Crane lived saw the construction of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Central Station, the Statue of Liberty, Carnegie Hall, the American Museum of Natural History, the Columbia University campus, and Frederick Law Olmsted’s two glorious creations, Central Park in Manhattan and Prospect Park in Brooklyn. They are all still with us today, twenty years into the twenty-first century.
And then there was the West, which would tug at the New Jersey–born Crane all his life. The years of his boyhood were saturated with the dime novels that made legends of the fighting men from the rugged frontier, the same men who evolved into the characters featured in hundreds of films throughout the twentieth century, Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill Cody, Wyatt Earp, Jesse James, and the boy assassin Billy the Kid, who was gunned down by Pat Garrett in 1881 and continues to sit on his sacred throne as an American Immortal. But the West was more than just a place, it was an idea, a myth, a dream territory that belonged exclusively to the New World with no lingering ties to the European past, the land of the country’s future. When Crane traveled west in 1895 to write articles for the Bacheller Syndicate, he had never been anywhere outside of New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, and he fell in love with what he saw. It was his one and only visit to the region, but it stayed with him to the end and inspired some of his most sharply written and memorable stories, “A Man and Some Others,” “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” and “The Blue Hotel.”
As for the American novelists who overlapped with Crane from the early nineties to the turn of the century, only a few of them are still read today. At the top of the list stand Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Henry James, all of whom were flourishing during those years and all of whom would come to know Crane, as well as Ambrose Bierce, Kate Chopin, Frank Norris, and Sarah Orne Jewett. In painting, some of the leading members of the Hudson River school were still alive (Thomas Moran, Frederic Edwin Church, and Albert Bierstadt), but a younger generation had already established itself by then, and because Crane’s years in New York were spent mostly among artists, not writers, and because he learned as much about writing from looking at art as he did from reading books, the names of those artists bear mentioning: John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, James Whistler, and the two eccentric but enduring innovators who worked on past the Gilded Age into the new century, Ralph Albert Blakelock and Albert Pinkham Ryder.
Not least, it was the moment when Samuel S. McClure created the first international news syndicate, which coincided with the birth of large-circulation newspapers. The engine that made this possible was the newly invented Linotype machine, which worked six times faster than the handset, letter-by-letter system it replaced and allowed daily papers to publish editions that far exceeded the eight-page limit of the past. In Manhattan, Joseph Pulitzer took charge of the New York World, William Randolph Hearst assumed control of the New York Journal, and the high-pressure sweepstakes of yellow journalism began, forever changing how Americans interacted with their own universe. After Crane moved to the city in 1891/1892, he worked for all three of those men in a kind of permanent rotation until the year of his death, scratching along on the bits they paid him because he was bent on earning his living as a writer and refused to consider any other sort of work. A noble decision, perhaps, but except for a few periods of relative tranquility, he had a rough time of it until the very end.
The Linotype machine giveth, and the Linotype machine taketh away.
4
His parents named him Stephen after two of his Crane ancestors, a seventeenth-century Stephen Crane who was one of the founding fathers of Elizabethtown, the earliest English settlement in what would become the colony of New Jersey (other seventeenth-century Cranes not named Stephen helped found Newark and Montclair, which was originally known as Cranetown), and an eighteenth-century Stephen Crane who supported the Revolution, served as Speaker of the New Jersey General Assembly, and was a delegate to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, where he would have been one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence if he had not been called back to New Jersey on urgent political business. In 1780, he was captured by the British and bayoneted to death; not long after, his son Jonathan was also captured by the British and executed for refusing to divulge the position of Washington’s army to them. Another one of the second Stephen Crane’s sons, William, distinguished himself in the Revolution by commanding a New Jersey regiment and rose to the rank of major general, and his son, also named William, was a naval commander during the War of 1812. As Crane himself wrote to an inquiring journalist from the Newark Sunday Call in 1896: “The family is founded deep in Jersey soil (since the birth of Newark), and I am about as much a Jerseyman as you can find.”
However far he might have drifted from that Jersey soil, his family was of utmost importance to him, not just the heroic figures from the Crane past but the Cranes from the present as well, for even though he turned against the Methodism of his parents, he never turned against his parents themselves, and he remained in close contact with two of his brothers throughout his adulthood—the same Edmund and William who had taken care of him as a boy. In answer to a request for autobiographical information from journalist John Northern Hilliard in early 1896, Crane starts his half-serious, half-jocular reply by confessing that “I am not much versed in talking about myself” and in the third paragraph makes these few short comments about his parents: “Upon my mother’s side, everybody as soon as he could walk, became a Methodist clergyman—of the old ambling-nag, saddle-bag, exhorting kind. My uncle, Jesse T. Peck, D.D., L.L.D., was a bishop in the Methodist Church. My father was also a clergyman of that church, author of numerous works of theology, an editor of various periodicals of the church. He graduated at Princeton. He was a great, fine, simple mind.”
Jonathan Townley Crane. (COURTESY OF SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY)
Jonathan Townley Crane was born in 1819, the same year as Melville and Whitman, and like his son he was the youngest child in a family of many siblings. Orphaned at thirteen, apprenticed to a Newark trunk-maker as an adolescent, he converted to Methodism at age eighteen and was eventually admitted to Princeton (then called the College of New Jersey), where he excelled at his studies, won a prize in English composition, and was president of one of the two literary societies on campus. He joined the Methodist clergy after graduation and spent the rest of his life in the church, serving in various capacities both administrative and pastoral over the decades, the longest stint being the nine years he spent after his 1848 marriage to Crane’s mother in Pennington, New Jersey, where he served as principal of Pennington Seminary, a Methodist-run school for male and female students, and the eight years he spent as presiding elder of the Newark district. Otherwise, he was given short postings of no more than a year or two at assorted churches in northern New Jersey and southern New York State, fathered fourteen children in the process (five of whom did not live beyond infancy or babyhood), wrote numerous articles for the Methodist Quarterly Review and the Christian Advocate, and published several books, among them An Essay on Dancing (1849), Popular Amusements (1869), and Arts of Intoxication: The Aim and the Results (1870), which attacked not only the frivolous pastime of dancing (as the first title suggests) but other activities such as reading second-rate, sentimental novels, card playing, and drinking. It will come as no surprise, perhaps, that his youngest son did not refrain from indulging in the last two of those vices, rarely if ever drinking to excess but drinking as much or as little as he pleased and developing a lifelong passion for poker, to such a degree that it would be fair to call him a poker fanatic. For all that exhorting, however, Crane’s father was widely known as a warmhearted, humorous man with a strong social conscience. He supported women’s suffrage, had denounced slavery in print long before the Civil War began, and toward the end of his life, after the family moved to Port Jervis in 1878, he and Crane’s mother founded two schools to help struggling black residents of the area, the Mission Sunday School for men and the Drew Mission and Industrial School for women and children. His death in 1880 was the first great blow of his son’s life. Although Reverend Crane had been in town for just two years, fourteen hundred people turned out for his funeral—more than double the size of his congregation. By all accounts, it was the largest funeral in the history of Port Jervis.
Crane’s mother plays a larger role in the story if only because she outlived her husband by almost twelve years, also dying when Crane was young, but not desperately young, not eight years old but twenty, and as her last, unanticipated offspring, her little miracle baby following thirteen other pregnancies, born a full eight years after her previous child, she doted on him in ways his father never did—or could. Mary Helen Peck Crane (1827–1891) grew up in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the third child and only girl out of the five children in the Peck family. Her father, Reverend George Peck, started out as an itinerant backwoods Methodist preacher and rose through the ranks of the church to become one of its most important representatives, an author of several books and the editor of the Methodist Quarterly Review and the Christian Advocate, publications that Crane’s father contributed to. All four of her father’s brothers were also in the Methodist clergy, including the bishop referred to in her son’s 1896 letter, Jesse T. Peck, yet one more prolific writer in the clan and a co-founder of Syracuse University, and two of her brothers went on to become Methodist ministers as well. The entire Peck family was immersed in the waters of religion—including Crane’s mother—but it should be pointed out that not one of the seven Crane boys was ever tempted to follow his father, grandfather, or uncles into the Methodist lake.
