SOURCE: King, Kimball. “Local Color and the Rise of the American Magazine.” In Essays Mostly on Periodical Publishing in America: A Collection in Honor of Clarence Gohdes, edited by James Woodress, pp. 121-33. Durham: Duke University Press, 1973.

[In the following essay, King discusses the post-Civil War growth of local color fiction in the pages of American magazines.]

The emergence of the American magazine after the Civil War provided for many young writers access to the reading public and afforded them the opportunity and encouragement necessary for their development. Also the more established authors were in a better position to negotiate publication of separate full-length, hard-back books after their works had found an audience in the journals. Yet authors paid a price for magazine publication: compromises were extracted from those who chose this route to literary fame. The taste and expectations of the average magazine reader and the editor's philosophy imposed restrictions upon an artist's development. In turn a writer might unwittingly accustom his public to certain reassuring fictional attitudes or formulae which they would expect in his subsequent publications. It became difficult for some authors to mature because their initial writings had burdened them with an image which they were frequently hesitant to jeopardize.

American magazines have at various times created markets for literary genres which they have later felt bound to perpetuate. A case in point is the local color movement which was encouraged by post-Civil War literary journals and which was an integral part of the American family magazine's development. Local color writers expressed the optimism of a war-weary nation eager to suppress an awareness of social realities and nourished the growing cultural ambitions of an aspiring middle class. Capitalizing on the national yearning for self-improvement and social harmony, magazine editors fostered a romantic literary tradition which continued to exist even after interest in regional writing began to wane, and local color writers either became more national in their interests or faded into obscurity.

The “magazine revolution,” as it has been called, established a bourgeois ethic in American journalism which continues in some degree to the present time. Always, of course, there is an interesting reciprocal relationship between what the media offer and what the public demands. Magazine editors, for example, claim to provide the public with the quality, quantity, and type of entertainment the reader seeks; yet it often has appeared that the public accepts the offerings of a medium simply because it is not provided with alternatives, and the hard economic facts of publishing tend to make the publishers cynical. They blame subliterature on the pedestrian yearnings of an uncultivated and uninformed public. Or they assume that the public necessarily shares their prejudices and inhibitions.

In fairness it must be acknowledged that many readers do expect editors to exercise some form of censorship and guidance. There is a longstanding strain of prudery in American readers who have on occasion responded vindictively to “indelicate” disclosures in their magazines. For example, James C. Austin reveals that an article by Harriet Beecher Stowe called “The True Story of Lady Byron's Life” so distressed a large number of the Atlantic's readers in 1861 that circulation plummeted.¹ It took the journal several years to recover from its losses. The essay's inflammatory passage described Byron's incestuous relationship with his sister as a “secret adulterous intrigue with a blood relation so near in consanguinity that discovery must have been utter ruin and expulsion from civilized society.”² This decorously phrased accusation was responsible for a public outcry.

But for the most part it was the publishers, considering themselves the custodians of public morality, who consistently imposed a genteel tradition. No matter how puritanical and unsophisticated they considered their public, publishers nevertheless viewed their growing number of readers in America with enthusiasm.

The rapidly increasing market for family magazines reflected the technological, economic and social changes of that period and was welcomed by aspiring young editors as well as writers. Advances in printing and in the reproduction of illustrations by using half-tones made it possible to assemble attractive journals at a modest cost. Publishers and congressmen had worked together to have the postal rates for second class mail reduced from three cents per pound in 1874 to two cents in 1879, and finally to one cent in 1885. Within a burgeoning capitalistic system, businesses were discovering the possibilities of marketing and advertising in magazines. Merle Curti has suggested that certain social attitudes also played their role in the public's new interest in magazines. Essentially the “popularization” of culture, as Curti calls it, continued to broaden the base of an educated reading public, which began before the Civil War with the expansion of academies and colleges and the distribution of penny newspapers and inexpensive books.³ Curti has credited Edward Youman with the popularization of natural science by making available to the public the most significant studies of European scientists and by keeping Americans up to date on the latest scientific ideas, such as the theory of evolution, in his Popular Science Monthly. The public library movement and the growth of adult education seminars, such as those at Chautauqua Lake, were equally important. This was the heyday, too, of authors' reading tours. Mark Twain, George W. Cable, Thomas Nelson Page—in fact, most major writers of the period—supplemented their incomes by reading favorite stories, poems, and essays on the lecture platform. Inexpensive books were made possible by innovations in printing and publishing methods, and mail-order houses like Sears, Roebuck, and Company often were responsible for distributing them. A growing political awareness, perhaps stimulated by the Civil War, assured reform-minded, muckraking periodicals like McClure's of interested readers. The American cult of self-improvement flourished in this era of Horatio Alger and the robber barons, and the public was ready for the thinly disguised history and geography lessons upon which early local color sketches and stories were based. People were reading to be educated and measured in part the literary merit of a work by the information it provided. Not surprisingly, magazine editors saw themselves in the role of educators and arbiters of taste.

Thus, R. W. Gilder, assistant editor of Scribner's Monthly from 1870 to 1881 and editor of the Century from 1881 to 1909, writing to Hamlin Garland in 1890, outlined the obligations of the journalist:

People who are trying to bring up their children with refinement, and to keep their own and their children's language pure and clean, very naturally are jealous of the influence of the magazine—especially of the Century Magazine—in this respect. Here is really a predicament, and feeling the predicament, we at least think a dialect story—especially … where “yup” is used for yes, for instance, and where all sorts of vulgarisms occur,—should very strongly recommend itself before being sent into almost every cultivated household in the United States!”⁴

Here Gilder appeared to view writers and editors as cultural missionaries. He and other magazine editors wished to cement the ties of the union, reaffirm federalism and the democracy, and encourage public acceptance of free enterprise, optimism, and national pride. Within the local color movement there were dramatically opposed philosophies, but these individual philosophies tended to be translated, altered, or absorbed into a bland mixture of platitudes acceptable to purposes of an editorial campaign intended to “shape” the thinking of the American middle class. The magazine was the proper medium for reaching the masses, and local color was felt to be the literary movement best suited to an audience inexperienced but eager to learn. As early as 1870 Thomas Wentworth Higginson argued the benefits of local color in an article called “Americanism in Literature.” Higginson stated that American writers would do well to follow Emerson's example and “make allusions to natural objects” (such as the “humblebee”), and he explained that a writer seeking worldwide recognition ought not to omit everything “occasional and temporary” from his work but “make this local coloring forever classic through the fascination of the dream it tells.”⁵

Some critics, Claude Simpson among them, believe that local color had already begun with frontier humor in the early nineteenth century, first acquired respectability with the publication of Longstreet's Georgia Scenes (1835) and J. J. Hooper's Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs (1835), and eventually transcended sporadic newspaper publication to become the staple of family magazines.⁶ Bret Harte provided the model for the local color short story in 1868 with “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” and during the next twenty-five years the reading public was surfeited with this new literary subgenre.

The dominant political and social philosophy of the post-Civil War years was nationalism. The war had forced Americans in all parts of the country to reevaluate their commitment to the Union. The westward movement introduced new experiences and attitudes, impressing upon everyone the variety and heterogeneity of American life. A pride in regional differences was found to be compatible with an overall faith in democracy. In fact, readers learning about the geographical and cultural peculiarities of a Louisiana or California community took pride in discovering the uniqueness of their fellow countrymen. Such a spirit of friendly discovery, however, was not conducive to sober investigations of troublesome social or economic problems. The racial injustices of a southern city like New Orleans which continued after the Civil War were overlooked in favor of its exotic atmosphere and rich, foreign traditions. The hardiness and perseverance of the Westerner and the rough beauty of his terrain overshadowed the frequent lawlessness and brutality of pioneer life.

The continued rise of a middle class also played its part in the acceptance of local color since the emphasis in this literature was on simple people who were proud of their provincial heritage. Average men and women took delight in stories they could understand and gained some satisfaction from knowing that Boston's influence on the national culture was waning and that stories by and about the Eastern intelligentsia were encountering fierce competition from neglected segments of the country.

As a literary form local color fiction represented a gentle initiation into realism. It was a blend of romanticism and realism, and Helen McMahon, writing on the popularity of regional fiction in the Atlantic, has noted that in “dealing with regions far enough removed from every-day experience to offer a certain romantic charm and with the recent past rather than with the immediate present local color offered a gradual transition to realism which undoubtedly made that movement more palatable to many readers.”⁷ She draws attention to a review by William Dean Howells of some local color stories by Stowe, De Forest and Eggleston in which the editor praises a magical blend of social “narrowness and intolerance” and “lurking pathos” with the “charm of romance in their transitory aspects.”⁸ Howells suggested here that since public enlightenment is inevitable, an amused tolerance toward past wrongs in fiction softens the edge of the author's social realism.

Writers from the South, in particular, worried their editors when they spoke too candidly about secession, the Civil War, or carpetbagging. A Southerner who was defensive about his region's past, like Thomas Nelson Page, or one who saw himself as a reformer and champion of civil rights, like George Cable, could be equally tactless and challenge the new sense of national harmony. For example, a lingering belligerence toward the North frequently had to be toned down in Page's works. One editor at Scribner's, Mary Mapes Dodge, wrote to Page that he must disguise his obvious approval of the rebel's cause in “Meh Lady” or the story would not be the “olive branch” he intended.⁹ “Meh Lady” is an archetypal formula story of the local color era, since it focuses on the marriage of a Southern girl to a Yankee. Anecdotes about intersectional marriages were popular after the war, and some specific incidents may have influenced the author in developing the plot of “Meh Lady.” The theme, however, was suggested to Page by Robert Underwood Johnson, then an editor of Century Magazine, who had seen a performance of Lessing's Minna Von Barnhelm in New York and wrote to Page that he might profitably adapt the play to a Southern setting. Page, never a deeply imaginative writer, was grateful for the idea and used it; in this way, a Northern editor influenced the literary image of a reunited nation.

Sometimes editorial changes were so careless as to disrupt a narrative's logical development. Page created a violent tale in “No Haid Pawn,” a story which contained an attack on abolitionists and a savage beheading by slaves. But Scribner's E. L. Burlingame urged Page to modify the horror in the story and stress the exotic local color atmosphere instead. He wrote Page on January 8, 1887, that “it seemed to me that one incident—the severing of the head at the hanging—was unnecessarily repellent without increasing the force of the story.” Page acquiesced to Burlingame's judgment and emphasized the mysterious rather than the macabre in his story. Clearly Scribner's was not ready for the gothic horrors of twentieth-century Southern fiction. But in the magazine's desire to remove the possibility of anything offensive to their readers, the symbolism of “No Haid Pawn” became pointless, and the plot was rendered hopelessly confusing. Harriet Holman has discovered in Page's correspondence with Scribner's and Century countless examples of editorial interference, and always with the purpose of avoiding confrontation with social or moral issues or of toning down the author's prejudices. Obviously his editors intended him to pass as a reconstructed Southerner, epitomizing the best of the old and new Souths.

George Cable was similarly plagued by editorial interference, as Arlin Turner and Louis Rubin have often noted. In fact, Cable's work in many ways illustrates most clearly the detrimental effect of editors who refused to accept a local colorist's attempt to transcend a genre they favored. Cable's first story “Bibi,” which dealt with the Creoles' barbarous treatment of a slave prince, was rejected by the Atlantic on the grounds that its total effect was “unmitigatingly distressful.”¹⁰ The Scribners also rejected “Bibi” in 1873 although they accepted “‘Sieur George” at the same time. It was the local color aspects of Cable's writing that appealed most to the editors at Scribner's; they seem to have been somewhat insensitive to the subtler nuances of his stories. They encouraged Cable to be more like Bret Harte, making clear their interest in well-plotted, suspenseful stories with clear-cut resolutions of them.

From the beginning Cable's manuscripts were closely supervised by Gilder, from submitted copy to page proof. Gilder was a benevolent editor with a genuine interest in literature, but he was not a man of vision. He wanted to make Cable acceptable to the majority of readers at a time when the author's dissenting views were certain to be unpopular. Arlin Turner believes that Gilder was “cautious and over-sensitive to the limitations a family magazine such as Scribner's must impose on its authors.”¹¹ As publishers, the Scribners had always promoted the idea of reconciliation, and elements in an author's work which might reopen old wounds were deleted—as they were, for different reasons, from the works of Page. Cable's harsh indictment of slavery and his provocative questions about the dilemma of the freedman threatened the illusion of national harmony.

Despite pressure from the men at Scribner's, however, Cable continued to write about thorny and embarrassing issues. His reforming purpose was probably encouraged by the opposition he received, and he politely refused the advice of those who told him to abandon what they considered didacticism. What Cable could not ignore, however, were the occasional charges that his work contained immodest or indecorous elements. He was distressed at the thought of appearing vulgar, offensive, or immoral. Gilder rejected Cable's humorous story “Posson Jone’” in 1875, although Scribner's published the story with its sequel under the title Posson Jone' and Pere Raphael as a separate book in 1909. R. U. Johnson believed that Gilder later regretted the initial decision to refuse publication of this story, but at the time he feared the depiction of a drunken clergyman might offend Dr. Holland, then the editor of Scribner's Monthly. After the New York Times, the Galaxy, and Harper's Magazine also rejected the story, “Posson Jone’” was accepted by Appleton's Journal for publication in 1876. Despite its final acceptance, Cable did not again attempt to write an essentially earthy tale. His comic touch may have been inhibited by the rebuff from Scribner's.

Gilder continued to exert what he felt was a refining influence on Cable's work, as Turner has noted:

Though Gilder did not say … that a story must be pleasant he repeatedly urged Cable to avoid the unpleasant. He found a figure of speech in “‘Tite Poulette” unpleasant; he would print “Cafe des Exiles” if he could “omit a touch or two of horror,” and he added, “Write something intensely interesting—but without the terrible suggestion you so often make use of.”¹²

Gilder didn't specify what particular “terrible suggestion” he had in mind, but Johnson implied in his autobiography that an acceptable topic must be “short of disgusting,” adding that death and alcoholism, a topic which Cable later treated in “Gregory's Island,” were two subjects which could be edifying if “treated from the right point of view and with the right tone.”¹³ Later in Cable's career Gilder and other editors expressed despair at Cable's excessive moralizing, little realizing that their own attempts to suppress controversial aspects of his work were partly responsible.

The Grandissimes had been published serially by Scribner's in 1879, as were Page's novels, and fortunately Gilder had decided that despite its emphasis on racial unrest in Louisiana, the book was essentially conciliatory. He wrote Cable that the novel would help “to bring about the days of a better understanding and a more cordial feeling.”¹⁴ It is inexplicable that Cable's bold dissection of the deep South should have received the same praise from Gilder as Page's “Marse Chan.” Possibly the relatively happy conclusion of The Grandissimes was supposed to mitigate the effect of the novel's social protest.

Cable's later books, however, with the exception of The Cavalier, were not as popular as The Grandissimes and the early stories collected in Old Creole Days. Johnson found frequent cause at this time to warn Cable about his “tendency to leave the novel and go pamphleteering.”¹⁵ The public looked to Cable for more stories with a local color flavor, and instead he gave them novels increasingly centered on social reform. Perhaps he had listened too carefully to his editors and had become somewhat self-conscious about his style and choice of materials. His spirit was essentially more rebellious than Page's, and his views were frequently more radical than his editors desired. He insisted on advocating in his fiction civil rights for the Negro, education for the masses, revision of the penal system, and denounced his own society for passively accepting poverty, ignorance, and injustice.

Although Gilder was personally opposed to segregation and published three articles which Cable later collected in The Negro Question, the controversy which these essays engendered convinced Gilder that continuing involvement with civil rights would decrease rather than augment national unity. When Cable's friend, Charles Chesnutt, offered his essay, “The Negro's Answer to the Negro Question,” to Gilder, the editor politely declined to accept it, claiming it was “a timely political paper. So timely, in fact so partisan—that we cannot handle it. It should appear at once somewhere.”¹⁶ Gilder grew increasingly hostile toward any literature he considered polemical, especially when it dealt with racial problems, and was so thoroughly disgusted with the manuscript of Cable's reconstruction novel, John March, Southerner, that he told him, “I could weep with disappointment.”¹⁷

Garland's stories of the midwest also were criticized by Gilder for being too polemical. When Gilder refused to publish Garland's story, “A Prairie Heroine,” he warned the author to “present things concretely. Let others find the preaching.”¹⁸ Even a Garland story, such as “A Girl of Modern Tyre,” which Gilder reluctantly accepted, distressed him because it contained a social viewpoint which he distrusted. The hero of the story, Albert Lohr, gives up college and his desire for a career in politics and law in order to get married. Garland implies that the young man's emotional needs combined with social pressures ended his chances for personal fulfillment. Gilder rejected any such notion of determinism and confessed he found the young man's capitulation pointless. In his correspondence with Garland, Gilder consistently strove to eliminate controversial elements from the author's fiction. He asked him to suppress allusions to the democratic politician, James Gillespie Blaine, because they would conjure up “violent and disagreeable controversies,” and he asked the author to substitute Vanderbilt as an example of an American tycoon in place of Jay Gould, a man Gilder considered “a live thief whom we would rather not honor, even in that way.”¹⁹

In his biography of Gilder, Herbert Smith comments that the editor was never comfortable with Garland's starkly realistic pictures of midwestern life, and that he preferred writers like Edward Eggleston who shared his own optimism about American society. Gilder, according to Smith, found it “easier to accept the softer, more sentimental view of Eggleston than he did the more socially oriented, bleaker ‘veritism’ of Hamlin Garland.”²⁰ Smith adds in the same passage that Gilder could never approve those writings of Garland such as “A Prairie Heroine” or Jason Edwards “in which the degradation of life in the West is clearly stated and the social causes are made evident.”

It may be unrealistic to assume that any writer whose career was jointly linked to the local color movement and the American family magazine could forge an independent literary identity. Considering the torrent of bland literature offered by the popular journals at the turn of the twentieth century, one finds it difficult to believe that the works of James, Howells, Crane, and Dreiser also were available. Only a small number of readers, however, were ready for realism or naturalism. Perhaps the dichotomy between the general reading public and the educated reading public already had begun. The former appeared to expect—and usually got—conservative attitudes and sentimental events in their fiction. And the popularity and subsequent financial success of a work had a declining relationship to the acclaim it received from professional critics and scholars. The concept of the “bestseller” had evolved, and the idea of giving the public “what it wanted” resulted in a pandering to unsophisticated tastes.

A brief look at the commercially successful fiction from the late 1890's until the First World War reveals that romance, especially with an historical setting, was a predominant form and that areas used by local color writers, such as the antebellum South, were still considered an ideal backdrop for tales of chivalry and love. Readers who had been conditioned to formulaic local color fiction could identify with the nostalgic, orderly world of Page's Red Rock, a best seller of 1898, or they could revel in the glamorous pseudo-history of Mary Johnston's To Have and to Hold, which was the best seller of 1900. Similarly, drawing on the local color aspects of colonial America, New Hampshire-born Winston Churchill wrote Richard Carvel (1899), then turned to the Civil War scene in The Crisis (1901). In Indiana Booth Tarkington's first and best-selling novel, The Gentleman from Indiana (1899) blended romance and local color, while his fellow Hoosiers Maurice Thompson and Charles Major were presenting George Rogers Clark in Alice of Old Vincennes (1900) and glamorizing the Middle Ages in When Knighthood Was in Flower (1898). Churchill's Civil War novel capitalized on the romantic aspects of the conflict between the states and emphasized the adventurous spirit of the time, much as Page had done. Page's Gordon Keith and John Marvel, Assistant were published during the first decade of the new century, and they projected in a modern setting the same romantic characters and values of the author's Tidewater fiction. Cable's The Cavalier, a bestseller in 1901, dealt directly with the Civil War. Both this novel and the play adapted from it offered the public melodrama in a Southern setting. The climactic moment of the play's New York production was actress Julia Marlowe's singing of the Star-Spangled Banner to a dying Union soldier. The fact that the play was an enormous success helps us gauge the pervasive acceptance of romantic historical backgrounds in this era.

The fundamental values which the majority of local colorists had supported in the years immediately following the war had been respect for authority, a rather static vision of social order, and affirmation of charity, self-sacrifice, and a stoical and emotional acceptance of life's vicissitudes. The same scheme of values underlies the era of sentimental fiction. There is generally an avoidance of unpleasant sociological analysis in such fiction, and characters tend to develop or mature in these works in so far as they are able to reconcile themselves to their environment without excessive expectations of improving their lot. The gift of romantic love is usually considered sufficient compensation for thwarted personal freedom or ambitions.

Just as the monthly magazines had been acceptable reading for the whole family, the popular novel was suitable fare for all ages. Much of the best known fiction contained children as protagonists or at least in crucial, respected roles. Gentleness of temperament, patience, and self-sacrifice were the most apparent virtues of these oddly unchildlike young people. Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) has become a notorious example of this genre. In 1903 John Fox's Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come vied for popularity with another children's tale, Kate Douglas Wiggin's Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. The maudlin sentimentality of Wiggin's fiction was defended by Gilder, who described her work and that of other writers in the same sentimental tradition as representative of the “genial” in fiction: “In the rush and strain of modern life is the genial especially valued. The romantic has been of late warmly welcomed, by contrast to straining modern conditions, but the genial seems now, in America, to be living up promisingly to its claims.”²¹ The aging editor's alarmed observation of rapidly changing social and literary trends contributed to his defense of a fiction which compensated for its literary deficiencies by reaffirming traditionalism. Traditional bourgeois values form the core of Gene Stratton Porter's Laddie, which was introduced serially by Scribner's in 1913 as a “true blue story” and was followed by Freckles in 1917, a story of a one-armed boy who overcame adversity with stoicism and gentleness. Harper's claimed another popular sentimentalist in the first two decades of the new century, Mary Heaton Vorse. She penned a number of unusually vapid love stories such as “Awkward Question” and “The Case of Carolinda.”

It would be unfair, however, to denigrate all the major journals because they contained sentimental stories of minimal literary value. Scribner's, the Century, the Atlantic, Harper's and McClure's among others published major authors such as Howells, Dreiser, Crane, Wharton and some sophisticated nonfiction articles on important political and social questions. The quality of their publications was uneven, but essentially they raised the level of national culture and provided entertainment and education for millions of readers. These journals promoted first the local color movement and later encouraged the continuation of the style and ethical values of this movement in the sentimental popular fiction of the years preceding the first World War. It is difficult to say whether or not the journals were merely satisfying the demands of their newly acquired, eager-to-be-informed readers or whether they were in fact molding American values according to the principles of their editors. Most probably editorial enthusiasm and general public acceptance mutually combined to create a market for popular fiction which fulfilled the expectations of the journal's circulation department and the readers' dreams of educational but soothing literature. Wedged somewhere in between these two factions were the writers themselves. The exceptionally gifted could forge a separate literary identity but the majority were, to borrow James's phrase, “ground into the very mill of the conventional.” Courted by an easily pleased magazine audience in their youth, many young writers of promise prospered as long as their fiction reflected the complacency and optimism of their age, but they discovered as mature and wiser men that they were only valued as purveyors of a dream world which their editors and readers tenaciously refused to outgrow.

Notes

1. James C. Austin, Fields of the Atlantic Monthly: Letters to an Editor, 1861-1870 (San Marino, Calif., 1953), p. 298.

2. Austin, p. 295.

3. Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought, 3rd ed. (New York, 1964), pp. 576-587.

4. Herbert F. Smith, Richard Watson Gilder (Twayne series) (New York, 1970), p. 95.

5. Atlantic Monthly, XXV (Jan., 1870), 58-63.

6. Claude Simpson, ed., The Local Colorists: American Short Stories, 1857-1900 (New York, 1960), p. 3.

7. Helen McMahon, Criticism of Fiction: A Study of Trends in the Atlantic Monthly, 1857-1898 (New York, 1952), p. 15.

8. McMahon, p. 16.

9. Harriet Holman, “The Literary Career of Thomas Nelson Page: 1884-1910,” doctoral dissertation, Duke University, 1948, p. 64.

10. Arlin Turner, George W. Cable (Durham, N.C., 1956), p. 54.

11. Turner, pp. 66-67.

12. Turner, p. 67.

13. Turner, p. 291.

14. Turner, p. 95.

15. Turner, p. 98.

16. Smith, p. 71.

17. Turner, p. 291.

18. Smith, p. 92.

19. Smith, p. 97.

20. Smith, p. 102.

21. Smith, p. 144.