Accident Society: Fiction, Collectivity, and the Production of Chance 9780804778459

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accident society

ACCIDENT SOCIETY Fiction, Collectivity, and the Production of Chance

Jason Puskar

stanford university press stanford, california

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. This book has been published with the assistance of University of Wisconsin– Milwaukee, Department of English, College of Letters and Science. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Puskar, Jason Robert, author.   Accident society : fiction, collectivity, and the production of chance / Jason Puskar.   pages cm   Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-0-8047-7535-9 (cloth : alk. paper)  1.  American fiction—19th century—History and criticism.  2. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism.  3.  Chance in literature.  4.  Realism in literature.  5.  Literature and society—United States—History— 19th century.  6.  Literature and society—United States—History—20th century.  I. Title. PS374.C39P87  2012 813.009—dc22 2011011483

To my parents They gave me books.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Writing the Accident

ix 1

1 The Insurance of the Real: William Dean Howells

29

2 Aimless Battles: Stephen Crane

65

3 Detecting “Absolute Chance”: Charles Peirce and Anna Katharine Green

108

4 The Feminization of Chance: Edith Wharton and Crystal Eastman

148

5 Performing the Accident on Purpose: Theodore Dreiser and James Cain

187

Notes

227

Index

261

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the many people who supported me during the writing of this book. My wife, Erin O’Donnell, has been a gracious reader, a skillful editor, and an unfailing source of practical and moral support. I couldn’t have written this without her, and I wouldn’t have wanted to. Lawrence Buell, Philip Fisher, and Elisa New encouraged and guided this project from its earliest stages. They have been my most trusted models of scholarly curiosity and commitment. My graduate research assistant, Chad Jorgensen, was tireless in his work, especially for Chapter 2, and a marvel at sifting archives from afar. More people than I can remember have read generously, offered sage counsel, and otherwise supported this project in whole or in part, including Derek Barnett, Erica Bornstein, Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Jenny Davidson, Andrew DuBois, Jonathan Eaker, Elizabeth Freeman, Debra Gettelman, Joyce Goggin, Christoph Irmscher, Oren Izenberg, Mark Jerng, Robin Kelsey, Robert Koelzer, Maurice Lee, Elizabeth Lyman, Jennifer Marshall, Katie Peterson, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, Matthew Rubery, Laura Thiemann Scales, Jeff Severs, Carl Smith, Sarah Song, John Stauffer, James von der Heydt, Elana Weiner, Sharon Weiner, and Michael Ziser. David Aldous and Benoit Mandelbrot graciously engaged some of these ideas from the field of mathematics, despite my inability to respond in the language of numbers with anything like equal fluency. My colleagues in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee have given me a rich intellectual home and have been valued interlocutors through the final stages of this project. I’m especially grateful to Sukanya Banerjee, Liam Callanan, Jane Gallop, Kristie Hamilton, Gregory Jay, Barrett Kalter, Gwynne Kennedy, Andrew Kincaid, José Lanters, Andrew Martin, Mark Netzloff, Patrice Petro, and Peter Sands, who have all, in different ways, shared their time and ideas with me. My

  Acknowledgments sincerest thanks also to Emily-Jane Cohen at Stanford University Press and to the anonymous readers of the manuscript. This project received generous financial and material support from the Whiting Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Visiting Scholars Program, the UWM Research Growth Initiative, the UWM Graduate School Research Committee, and The Center for 21st Century Studies at UWM. Part of the first chapter appeared in American Literary History in 2006, and I am grateful for permission to republish it here. For my smallest helpers, Owen and Jonas, the last word: While I was writing a book about chance, they reminded me of the special pleasures of chaos and of the rewards of having life turned upside down.

Introduction writing the accident

Chance is made out of words. No mystical force, no scientific property, no real thing, chance is a conceptual category crafted through language and put to use in a wide range of institutional and political contexts. This book’s simple claim is that American writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced chance in new and specifically modern forms through narratives of spontaneous and blameless violence and that those narratives in turn supported emergent modes of social organization. In writing the accident, many novelists purported to detect and describe a radical instability at the heart of modern life, but in fact they were producing that instability by modeling it in narratives of causeless and blameless catastrophe. By configuring industrial injuries, gun violence, transportation collisions, falls, financial losses, happy discoveries, fires, social coincidences, and even interpersonal conflicts specifically as matters of chance, novelists helped persuade popular audiences that a wide range of events happen for no reason at all. To consider just one example, what Americans routinely call “industrial accidents” do not come straight from nature as accidents. Over time lawyers, judges, journalists, sociologists, insurers, managers, safety reformers, novelists, and even workers themselves began to narrate those events specifically as matters of inscrutable chance. The 25,000 Americans who died from industrial injuries in 1913, or the 36,140 injured or killed on the railroads, became accident victims largely because Americans stopped describing their injuries in terms of fault and blame

  Introduction and started describing them instead with the language of chance.1 By narrating violence in new and often experimental ways, American writers actively configured injury specifically as accident, both in particular, in the wake of a specific event, and in general, by classifying some kinds of injuries as accidents before they occurred. The body of critical work on the literature and culture of chance is extensive, but to a surprising degree it has focused on the limited cultural context of gambling. This comes as little surprise given that gambling was so prominent in early works of classical probability theory from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. According to Gerd Gigerenzer, “Gambling was the paradigmatic aleatory contract, and the very first problems solved by the mathematicians were of this sort.”2 But as a result, gambling has come to seem not just one way of thinking about chance but as the paradigmatic way. From historical work by Gerda Reith, Jackson Lears, and Ann Fabian, to literary criticism by Thomas Kavanagh, Walter Benn Michaels, and Jeffrey Franklin, a large and influential body of scholarship has concentrated on the important role of card games, casinos, lotteries, and many other kinds of gambling in Western culture.3 When Reith opens her history of gambling with the statement, “We are all gamblers,” she makes a claim with which many other historians, literary critics, and cultural theorists would readily agree.4 That argument is especially appealing in the period considered here, as the discourse of gambling frequently betrays a deeper concern with the changing conditions of liberal capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century. As the traditions of civic republicanism yielded to an even more individualistic and competitive ethos, gambling proved a ready metaphor for an entire financial system that seemed to be more atomizing, aleatory, and speculative than ever. Indeed, as Ann Fabian has argued, the outlawing of most forms of gambling by the 1890s actually indicates the extent to which the broader economy had absorbed gambling’s speculative ethic. As a result, Fabian says, “the ‘new’ gamblers, who profited from the operations of stock and commodities exchanges, presented themselves as virtuous, rational citizens” in a culture that was turning older values upside down.5 By translating old vices into new virtues, Americans made the gambler’s encounter with chance into a model for a revised set of liberalcapitalist values, which reflected a greater tolerance for risk taking, a cor-

Introduction   responding decline in the valuation of steady labor and prudent saving, and a more pervasively isolating individualism than ever. The following pages will not contest this view in any sweeping way but rather characterize the association of chance with gambling as only one part of a more complex history. From the very beginning, classical probability theory made use of another set of practical examples very different from gambling situations: mortality tables, first for annuities, and later for systems of insurance. When we think about chance not in terms of voluntary and highly individualistic acts of gambling but in terms of insurance and its allied forms of social and economic interdependence, we can see that chance has a far more varied character within popular culture than we have yet recognized, and far more salutary political consequences than we have tended to suspect. This story of chance might be traced back not to an early treatise on gambling such as Christiaan Huygens’s 1657 De Ratiociniis in Ludo Aleae but to something like Johann De Witt’s 1671 mortality tables for Dutch annuities.6 If gambling is a way of producing liberal individuals willing to assume disproportionate amounts of risk and responsibility, then other cultures of chance were capable of doing just the opposite, by opening up new possibilities for emergent modes of social and collective organization. Chance collectivity, as I call it here, thus resists the individualizing functions of gambling by affording American culture new opportunities for fashioning systems of social and material interdependence. At the very moment when the values of civic republicanism were yielding to the values of Gilded Age competition, doctrines of social Darwinism, and the business protections of the Lochner Era, a wide range of writers and reformers recognized that public consciousness of chance might exert an oppositional force, consolidating, rather than eroding, effective structures of mutual affiliation. From the private risk pools of the nineteenth-century life insurance industry, to models of collective scientific inquiry, to the new public workers’ compensation programs of the 1910s, chance collectives mobilized Americans to join together against the lurking threat of chance. This proved especially useful in a fractious nation like the United States, riven as it was by racial and ethnic differences, divided into hostile political factions, and troubled by lingering regional antagonisms after the Civil War. In a climate rife with such hostility and distrust, the abstract

  Introduction menace of chance functioned as a common enemy against which the diverse constituency of the chance-afflicted might unite. Each of the following chapters is a case study in the intersection of American fiction with various cultures of chance from Reconstruction to the New Deal. Novels and fiction by William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Anna Katharine Green, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and James Cain directly engage, and so help us understand, key cultural sites of chance production, including the insurance industry, American gun culture, pragmatist philosophy, and industrial accident reform efforts. None of the novels considered here are specifically about gambling; instead, they focus on cultures of chance more closely related to socializing and collectivizing endeavors. While communists further to the left dreamed of more orderly utopias, these largely progressive writers and reformers pressed chance into the service of evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, social change. By reading their works in the contexts of emergent cultures of chance collectivity, we can better understand how writers—not just statisticians and mathematicians—helped shape and maintain certain modern concepts of chance, apply those concepts to definite political ends, and in doing so, advance some of the early twentieth century’s most meaningful social democratic reforms. As a result, chance collectivity must not be seen as opposed to liberal capitalism in any sweeping way, because it is instead an expression of a different kind of liberal capitalism, one that meant to facilitate more egalitarian and interdependent social arrangements and that led, in some cases, to the implementation of significant parts of the American welfare state. The New Deal, however, marks the end of this project, not the beginning, for chance collectivity was most appealing during the decades leading up to the passage of large-scale public insurance programs. In the absence of well-funded public provisions, and in a legal climate hostile to such measures, the threat of chance was sometimes the only thing powerful enough to justify the systematic and cooperative sharing of resources. Before going any further, we had better pause to clarify just what we mean by the term “chance,” a word bound to ring with dozens of competing and contradictory associations. The term descends from the Latin casus, the root of which is cadere, to fall or to happen. That term is closely related to accidere, to fall down, which is in turn the direct source

Introduction   of Modern English “accident.” Both words thus trace their roots to the same reference to falling, as my parallel use of the two terms is meant to reflect. For these purposes, however, the term “accident” will typically refer to a specific event, while the term “chance” will have a far less stable and determinate meaning, for reasons that we will shortly see. Because chance and accident are so devoted to “the case,” they necessarily resist generalization, and partly for that reason Aristotle regarded accident as no proper object of philosophical reflection. The problem with accident, according to Aristotle, is precisely that one cannot generalize about it, for the accidental is by definition nonessential, insubstantial, and so bound to vary from one case to the next. That, however, is the best reason of all to study chance historically, for if chance has no permanent and essential nature, it must unfold within history and in relation to particular cultures. Michael Witmore and Ross Hamilton have recently charted the legacy of Aristotelian thinking about accident in precisely this way, revealing it as all the more interesting because of its permutations across cultures and through time.7 But an important corollary to all of this is that one simply cannot define chance once and for all, for chance is nothing other than a moveable category of action demarcated and applied in different ways in different contexts. Definitions of chance thus must be historical definitions, particularized to a time and place, and always attentive to the term’s inner tensions, residual meanings, and constantly shifting boundaries. Without belaboring a history that has been told more fully elsewhere, we should acknowledge that the modern history of chance involves, to a significant degree, the denial of chance’s very existence. In the early modern period, religious thinkers such as John Calvin had seen the accident as a divine disruption of the routine state of earthly affairs, which is to say, as special Providence.8 By the eighteenth century, new statistical and probabilistic methods partly secularized and rationalized a related version of that view. For Enlightenment thinkers, what seemed to be chance was not the mark of Providence after all but rather an indication that unapprehended laws and causes were yet at work in an entirely rational universe. Abraham De Moivre, author of The Doctrine of Chances (1718), wrote that chance was “a mere word” that “can neither be defined nor understood” and that “imparts no determination to any mode of existence.”9 David Hume later concluded, “Though there be no such thing

  Introduction as Chance in the world; our ignorance of the real cause of any event has the same influence on the understanding.”10 And Pierre-Simon Laplace, one of the greatest eighteenth-century probabilists, opened his Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1795) with this: “All events, even those that on account of their rarity seem not to obey the great laws of nature, are as necessary a consequence of these laws as the revolutions of the sun.” As a result, according to Laplace, what we call chance is “only the expression of our ignorance.”11 This too rapid review of just a few important episodes in the early history of chance and accident is meant to indicate just the outlines of some extremely influential ideas, against which many later theorists of chance will rebel. Even so, these shifting conceptions of chance are not as easy to periodize as this brief account might suggest. Even in the United States in the period considered here, many different conceptions of chance circulated together, competed with each other, and interpenetrated at their borders, including the religious and scientific views of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The minister and the statistician, the safety expert and the philosopher, might all use the word “chance” with perfect confidence that they knew what they were saying, but they would not necessarily be talking about the same thing. Accordingly, lingering theological and deterministic conceptions of chance certainly are evident throughout the twentieth century, and they can show up where we least expect them. To consider just one cautionary example, Walter Benjamin regarded gambling as an outgrowth of capitalism, but he also saw gambling as a source of wonder, and even of mystical knowledge. Benjamin wrote that “gambling generates by way of experiment the lightning-quick process of stimulation at the moment of danger, the marginal case in which presence of mind becomes divination—that is to say, one of the highest, rarest moments of life.”12 Many avant-garde surrealists, dadaists, and futurists also sought escape from dreary routine by romanticizing chance similarly, as we will see in the final chapter, but when Benjamin associates the moment of the gamble with “divination,” it is impossible not to hear this great voice of Western Marxism and Messianic Judaism oddly invoking a very traditionally Calvinist view. Chance is thus not just historically contingent but also heavily sedimented with the accumulated residue of its own past. Attempts to refash-

Introduction   ion chance anew are thus often laden with remnants of earlier views. Accordingly, the mostly realist novelists considered here attempted to carve out a conception of chance that was neither theological, deterministic, nor purely mathematical and statistical, but that still rejects the traditional Aristotelian dispensation. In accounts that still vary considerably, these writers began to configure chance as a radical indeterminacy principle, and so, as far more than simply a name for human ignorance of divine intentions or operative laws. In that way, these writers are important sources of what Gerda Reith has identified as the most distinguishing feature of chance in the twentieth century, its purported ontological status. According to Reith, chance came to seem real after all, an indeterminacy principle actually resident within the nature of the universe, and not a name for some higher law misapprehended nor for a mere method of probabilistic assessment. There will be more to say about the intellectual sources of the ontological view in the third chapter, but for the moment we need only note that the ontological view makes chance more ideologically potent than ever, for by naturalizing chance, it threatens to exempt it entirely from cultural analysis. We would do better to see all conceptualizations of chance as historically contingent and politically implicated, especially those most familiar to us, precisely because they do not yet appear to the naked eye in the sepia tones of the distant past. Over time, perhaps the ontological view will prove more durable than those it has only partly displaced, but I have no great optimism that this will turn out to be the case, and suspect instead that ontological chance eventually will appear only as a peculiar habit of thinking from the twentieth century, and no better or worse than those that came before. At that point, it may be clearer than it is now that ontological chance reflects deep and unarticulated cultural assumptions and serves profound political purposes, some of which these pages will bring to light. In the broader view, then, Abraham De Moivre had it exactly right when he called chance a “mere word,” for chance is nothing other than a fluid category of action and eventfulness, generated to a considerable degree through language and applied to a wide range of social, economic, and political contexts. Rather than ask what chance is, then, it seems more fruitful to ask what chance does, and what chance does in the works considered here is forestall investigation into causes and culprits that

  Introduction otherwise would render some injury amenable to the prevailing order of reason or morality. Chance creates dynamic instabilities at many different levels—knowledge, ethics, identity, economics, power—that are not just disruptive but finally useful to a loosely allied set of progressive reforms. Narratives of chance are thus prescriptive and not just descriptive, for they obscure agency and responsibility to precisely the same degree that other kinds of narratives clarify causation and establish blame. In using the term “chance,” then, I do not mean to imply that it is in any way an essential property of the natural world. Its ontology is a historical ontology, a mode of being contingent upon changing cultural and historical circumstances.13 Obviously, many of the writers who use these terms are committed to other definitions, but my goal is to show how their attempts to naturalize chance by affirming its ontological status are better understood as expressions of particular cultural investments, and better studied in terms of their social and political consequences. This is not a scientific definition of “chance,” then, but a cultural definition that attempts to describe how chance functions as a rhetorical strategy most evident, and most powerful, in literary narratives. Mathematicians, statisticians, economists, philosophers, and representatives of many other disciplines might object that chance has been, and should be, defined much more narrowly and technically, but my concern lies with the term’s function outside these professional cultures and with its consequences for the kinds of public debates that lay readers could access and that novels could facilitate. Others might object that chance does have a materialist or realist basis, in the Brownian motion of molecules, the fluctuating prices of cotton futures, or the quantum dynamics of particle physics, and that chance should be understood as the name for some specific property of the real world. Although this project cannot address all such claims directly, it assumes that trying to find a material or scientific basis for chance is no more advisable than trying to find a material or scientific basis for race, for what matters is that chance names a category of action that consists entirely of its cultural ascriptions. As such, and in all the ways that matter, chance derives its meaning not from nature but from the cultural work to which it has been applied. Chance is real, to be sure, but only in the sense that it has powerful social and cultural functions, which are in turn the products—not the objects—of our methods of classification.

Introduction   Literary works thus have an extremely important role to play in the production of chance, because they help determine what does and does not count as chance in the first place, especially for popular audiences. Accordingly, the narrative production of chance turns out to function rather differently than the “taming of chance” that Ian Hacking has associated with the “avalanche of printed numbers” that descended on the West in the early nineteenth century and led to “new technologies for classifying and enumerating, and new bureaucracies with the authority and continuity to deploy the technology.” Paradoxically, as Hacking claims, the increased attention to chance from statistics and probability theory actually reassured everyone that the world could be regulated after all. Through probability theory, Hacking says, “the more the indeterminism, the more the control.”14 Drawing on Hacking’s work, literary scholars have sometimes tended to associate qualitative narratives with quantitative numbers, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thomas Kavanagh has influentially cast literary representations of chance as directly equivalent to probability theory. “Like probability theory, the novel promised a greater understanding and mastery of life’s apparently random events,”15 Kavanagh claims, because both the novel and probability theory “worked toward a domestication of chance, toward the elimination of its threat to the Enlightenment’s faith in a rational and knowable world.”16 Narrative theorists also have been quick to see literary and historical writing as similarly rationalizing. As Hayden White has argued, events in a narrative “must be not only registered within the chronological framework of their original occurrence but narrated as well, that is to say, revealed as possessing a structure, an order of meaning, that they do not possess as mere sequence.”17 Because narrative presumes that all events have such an inner logic, the disclosure of which is narrative’s primary function, to narrate is always to moralize, according to White’s well-known formulation. Accordingly, if the work of historical writing is to restore rational and moral clarity, accidents become especially enticing to those determined to narrate history, because their very blankness causes the dowsing rod of historical curiosity to dip tellingly. At the site of the accident historians read: dig here. In that sense, chance may be absolutely essential to the work of history, but mainly in the sense that it is the very thing that narrative history works to eliminate.

  Introduction These arguments hold great weight for the literature of earlier periods, but they do not tell the entire story for the novels of the period considered here. When we define chance not as a radical antilaw that defies representation but as the narrative practice of concealing or obscuring causal relations within broader cultural contexts, we can see that narrative has far more resources at its disposal. To think about narrative as producing chance—rather than simply making it amenable to reason—is to recognize that chance is a name for the active decoupling of actions from agents, and of events from overarching moralizing and rationalizing schemes. Narrative’s capacity to demoralize and derationalize turns out to be no less pronounced than its capacity to do the opposite. As a result, we find a very different state of affairs in the American literature of this later period than in French fiction of the eighteenth century and, indeed, than in many other naturalist and modernist American novels. These primarily realist novels are powerful instruments for refashioning the social order, to be sure, but rather than assuage fears of chance, they tend to inflame them. If, as Hacking says, “the more the indeterminism, the more the control,” then the qualitative, literary production of chance could be a powerful first step in justifying new and potentially salutary kinds of social organization.18 By insisting that the future is largely out of control and that connections between causes and effects are nonexistent or entirely obscure, these novels do not reinforce liberal fantasies of mastery but undermine them. And as a result, by fostering chance consciousness, novels helped new kinds of liberal affiliation flourish, precisely because they challenged powerful fantasies of the liberal individual’s alleged independence, rational prowess, and might.

“The City That a Cow Kicked Over” At this stage it may be useful to consider the historical situation more specifically, along with an example that can make some of these introductory claims more concrete. The question of why Americans preferred to represent injuries as accidents and, further, how such accidents came to function as instruments of social collectivity, involves the cultural transformations under way in the United States after the Civil War. In the wake of that long and traumatizing conflict, accidental violence may

Introduction   have seemed a positive relief from deliberate and divisive slaughter. As Louis Menand has argued, “The Civil War swept away the slave civilization of the South, but it swept away almost the whole intellectual culture of the North along with it,” revealing in the wake of abolition’s triumph a corresponding failure of the American experiment: “people who live in democratic societies are not supposed to settle their disagreements by killing one another.”19 Menand condenses the lesson learned from the Civil War into a pithy mission statement for the relativistic and pluralistic philosophy of pragmatism that flourished at the end of the century, “certitude leads to violence.”20 If that seemed to be the case to many Americans after the Civil War, chance offered a surprising remedy. Precisely because accidental violence is not rationalized or moralized, it cannot be laid at the feet of one’s enemy, nor does it foster the kinds of certainty that might justify violent retaliation. If certainty divides, the uncertainty of chance, paradoxically, might unite. The rational and moral confusion surrounding accidental violence thus could function as an antidote to the divisive certainties of moral conviction and, accordingly, could prove a valuable instrument of social solidarity, which Americans sorely needed in the 1870s. There will be more to say about pragmatism later, which has its own complex entanglements with the cultural history of chance, but for the moment we can see these dynamics in play as early as 1871, and well outside the scholarly confines of philosophy. In the midst of Reconstruction, the United States endured what must have seemed an uncanny replay of the burning of the cities of the South, but this time in the fastest-growing metropolis in the North, the city of Chicago. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 displaced one hundred thousand people from eighteen thousand destroyed buildings, a number that equaled the entire population of London during its fire of 1666. The fire burned a footprint almost four square miles in size, which included almost all of Chicago’s prosperous downtown and much of its immigrant outskirts.21 Whereas the London fire moved so slowly that only six people died, a northwest wind fanned Chicago’s blaze into a blast furnace that consumed the city in less than forty-eight hours, chasing a mob of refugees north of the city and catching more than three hundred of them. Uncounted others may have been immolated in a blaze so hot it buckled the metal frames of the first buildings termed “fire-proof.”22 Only the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 destroyed a city

  Introduction of comparable size and killed more, so it was to Lisbon that Chicagoans looked to console themselves that it could have been even worse. Urban fires on this scale have generated telling stories of causation. A God incensed by sexual vice burned Gomorrah. The mad emperor Nero kindled the great fire of Rome in 64 CE, then fiddled while it burned. In 1666, the fates of that annus mirabilis burned much of the city of London to the ground. But after the greatest fire of them all in Chicago in 1871, the American popular imagination embraced the absurd legend of a dairy cow accidentally kicking over a lantern in an Irish immigrant’s barn. Even though that tale has acquired very little evidence in its favor in the years since, and was refuted in Chicago almost from the moment it first appeared, the story of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow rapidly became the symbolic narrative for the most sensational urban catastrophe the modern world had yet endured, and the first New World disaster of international note. But by the standards that prevailed in the aftermath of the world’s other great fires, it is difficult to understand exactly why Americans would attribute the utter destruction of an entire metropolis to an accident, let alone to such an absurd and apparently trivializing mishap as this. Yet if the stories about the fire of Rome reflected anxieties about imperial caprice, and if the stories about the fire of London channeled Puritanical fears of an angry God, the story of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow activated, for the first time on a national scale, the dynamics of chance collectivity that would shape American social life through the coming decades. Unfortunately, the O’Leary story has frequently been overinterpreted as a crude attempt to foist blame on an impoverished Irish-Catholic immigrant woman, a “sinister and little known ‘other’ that might in fact bring down an entire city,” as Karen Sawislak has argued.23 But that seems to be true only in the immediate wake of the fire, as baffled and outraged survivors turned their anger against the usual suspects, including communists, anarchists, immigrants, and Jews.24 Some early visual representations of Mrs. O’Leary thus depict her as a hag or a witch, and the few narratives of the fire’s cause configure her, variously, as a vindictive welfare cheat or a stereotyped Irish drunk. But none of these pejorative characterizations survived in popular culture, and those accounts that blame the fire on communists, a disgruntled fire extinguisher salesman, or the moral depravity of Chicagoans are now historical relics, remembered, if

Introduction  

figur e 1 .  Lithograph, “The Cause of the Great Chicago Fire Oct. 9th 1871,” published by Kellogg and Bulkeley Co., ca. 1871. Its caption reads, “A warning to all who use kerosene lamps. Never forget that more lives have been lost, and more comfortable homes burned up by a Careless Use of this light than any other ever introduced into common use.” (ICHi-34703. By permission of the Chicago History Museum.)

at all, largely within the academy. Only the tale of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow persists in the popular imagination, and in a form that no longer openly denigrates the woman at its center. Propagated largely by visual images, the O’Leary accident legend rapidly solidified in a surprisingly generous form that was already widely available by the end of 1871. In the iconic lithograph reproduced as Figure 1, Mrs. O’Leary appears as a stolid and brawny farmwife, with nothing sinister about her. Neither her barn nor her person appears untidy, and in fact she seems to be the surprised victim of the accident rather than the perpetrator of a crime. It should be remembered that this image appeared less than three months after Chicago’s destruction, at a point when one might expect emotions still to be raw. A decade later, Chicagoans commemorated the tenth anniversary of the fire with an occasional poem titled “The City That a Cow Kicked Over,” featuring a more cartoonish illustration of

  Introduction the same basic scene.25 More important, the illustration in Figure 1 was not produced in Chicago at all, and not even in the Midwest, but in Hartford, Connecticut, which indicates just how rapidly the O’Leary legend became part of a national mythology.26 Factual questions about the historical Catherine O’Leary’s role in the Chicago fire are thus far less relevant than the cultural history of the O’Leary legend’s rapid national propagation, which cast this accident as a symbolic version of the entire city’s destruction and the entire nation’s loss. The O’Leary accident legend is really America’s first grand narrative of chance collectivity, a story that complicates and obscures issues of responsibility rather than foists blame on the back of a despised scapegoat. As such, it reflected national interests and channeled national anxieties, but it also offered a new rationale for social solidarity in the aftermath of the deliberate violence of the Civil War. Of course, this iconic image does not exactly eliminate causation entirely, for it clearly does identify a proximate cause in the form of the cow kicking the lamp. The point, however, is that the cause represented offers very little of the moral and rational consolation that causal explanations typically provide. A mad emperor, sinful populace, or angry God might be terrifying, but they also help integrate the catastrophe with reassuring assumptions about the just and rational operation of the world. In contrast, even the caption of this illustration muddies the waters by alleging two different things. On the one hand, it claims that the woman present was careless, but on the other hand, it confirms that kerosene lamps are so dangerous that they routinely result in destruction such as this. Given that there is no evidence of obvious carelessness by the woman depicted, the caption raises the question of just how high a standard of care kerosene lamps require. The subtext of the image’s caption is thus not just, “Be careful of kerosene lamps,” but also, “No amount of care can protect everyone from statistically inevitable, but individually unpredictable, fires that kerosene lamps will ignite.” Similarly, while the prevailing standards of the common law held the owner of an animal liable for damage the animal caused, liability is not quite the same as responsibility, nor is it the same as a rational explanation for why this particular mishap spread so disastrously across an entire city. As a result, it is not so much that the image is devoid

Introduction   of causes or culprits but rather that it frames the interaction between multiple causes and culprits in such a way that viewers find it difficult to settle unequivocally on any one of them. If a cow truly can kick over a city, then the relative scale of cause to effect has been entirely deranged, such that any cause, no matter how small, might bear within it the seeds of catastrophe. By carefully balancing woman, cow, and lamp against each other, this image, and many other iconic images like it, finally provoke, rather than settle, debates about how to determine ultimate responsibility. Moral responsibility and rational causation end up hovering uncertainly somewhere between the person, the animal, and the object depicted, unfixed by an image that seems designed to keep questions about fault permanently up in the air. Narrative renditions of the fire’s cause are far rarer than visual depictions, and they tend to function quite differently. Most are just a sentence or two long and began appearing in newspapers immediately after the fire, but in the few longer narratives that exist we witness precisely the moralizing tendencies that Hayden White associates with historiography in general. One of the longest narratives of the O’Leary legend involving the cow and the lamp appears in Elias Colbert and Everett Chamberlin’s history of the fire, also rushed to press before the end of 1871. Despite its attempt to fix blame on a human culprit, however, the narrative also reveals how slippery the O’Leary legend could be. In their retelling, Colbert and Chamberlin sound very much like lawyers at a negligence trial: If the woman who was milking the cow had not been late with her milking, the lamp would not have been needed. If she had plied the dugs of the animal with proper skill, the lamp would not have been kicked at all. There is no use foisting blame upon the cow, for cows will kick when irritated, else they would not be true to their nature; nor to the oil in the lamp, for whatever hue and cry may be raised against coal-oil as an illuminating agency, it is unquestionably the material which nature has intended for such use, and one which only requires intelligent use to be as harmless as it is handy. The blame of setting the fire rests on the woman who milked, or else upon the lazy man who allowed her to milk.27

One way or another, Colbert and Chamberlin want a responsible human culprit at the devastation’s source, and they find one at long last, having dismissed cows, which “will kick when irritated,” and the oil in the lamp, which is by nature both “harmless” and “handy.” At that point, they settle

  Introduction the blame reassuringly on the shoulders of a human agent endowed with the full capacity for rational and moral choice. However, something else is happening in Colbert and Chamberlin’s indictment. In the final sentence, and at precisely the moment when the authors place the “blame of setting the fire” on the woman present, the text gives a shudder of confusion and the authors suddenly and inexplicably entertain doubts. They equivocate with an alternative theory, which shifts the blame yet again to Patrick O’Leary, a “lazy man” who negligently allowed his wife such free rein. Having dismissed animals and objects as adequate culprits, Colbert and Chamberlin suddenly wonder whether a woman can serve any better, so they seek a more adequate culprit still in a man who was not present. In doing so, the authors create more problems than they solve. An absent man, in their formulation, is still more responsible than a present woman, but in saying so, they reveal just how hard it was to turn the bare materials of the O’Leary accident legend into a clear-cut case for moral responsibility. Given that a few early variants of the O’Leary legend feature a child rather than a woman, we can see how the configuration of the fire as an accident involves, from the start, the eradication of adult—which is to say adult male—responsibility, which might too readily attract imputations of blame. The basic elements of the iconic story thus confound the authors’ own attempt to reconstitute blame, a sure sign that whatever else the O’Leary accident legend was doing, it was succeeding admirably at injecting a great deal of uncertainty into assessments of the fire’s cause. By representing catastrophic violence in terms of the causal obscurity that passes by the name of chance, the legend of Chicago’s accidental destruction became an implicit argument for social solidarity rather than a justification for further social fracture. In a world of chance, the legend suggests, no one can live safely apart, not when a cow can kick over a city, and not when the direst catastrophes have their origins in mishaps as trivial as this. The most devastating implication of the O’Leary legend is that the scene of violence apparently enclosed in the barn is, in fact, radically unbounded, such that the discrete accident pictured in the image was already everywhere at once. In fact, the same cow that kicked over Chicago immediately kicked off stock panics in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, bankrupted dozens of insurers who could not cover their

Introduction   losses, and likely contributed to the wider economic recession of the mid1870s.28 As a result, the amoral and irrational origins of the Chicago fire fostered a larger moral of limitless interdependence, on which journalists immediately seized. Just three days after the fire the Nation proclaimed, “Calamities . . .  are fast ceasing to be what is called local—they are all general.”29 In November a religious journal noted, “This great destruction of property furnishes a new and very striking illustration of the manner in which we are all united together. A hurricane in the Chinese seas, a war in Turkey, or an earthquake on the coasts of Chili [sic], causes mourning in New England, or destroys the fortunes of our friends in New York.”30 By December, the trope of limitless interconnection had become routine, and Harper’s Magazine began to worry about its consequences: “The telegraph has made us all of one nerve; and no one can suffer without all suffering. It enables succor to be more instant, but it breeds panic. While Chicago burns New York trembles, and the tragedy of the West paralyzes the rest of the country.”31 Whether optimistic or anxious, these acknowledgments of national and even international interdependence ground solidarity in common vulnerability to accidental violence. Whatever else divided Americans—and there was no shortage of divisions in the 1870s—the legend of the Chicago fire’s accidental cause insisted that everyone shared the condition of chance-affliction entirely in common. The emergent modes of collectivity and social solidarity considered here thus depend specifically on the production of chance as a category of action and not just on the actual experience of injury and loss. All manner of catastrophes can generate temporary social solidarities, as in the cases of natural disasters or foreign wars, but those kinds of events do not necessarily involve any conception of the accidental. The solidarities that form are thus short-term manifestations that do not outlive the experience of immediate threat or collective trauma. In contrast, chance can foster a more powerful kind of collectivity that is both more durable than temporary alliances in the wake of actual catastrophes and less divisive than nationalist orientations against foreign foes. Chance came to function as the greatest enemy of all, an enemy of reason and moral order that never could be quarantined on the other side of some purifying divide. Accordingly, the retrospective production of chance following an event like the Chicago fire is in fact a prospective claim that chance can infiltrate every

  Introduction other circumstance too. Chance is thus not just an enemy at the gates, but already inside the gates, such that it can neither be policed like communists or immigrants nor eradicated with even the utmost prudence and planning. Chance collectivity is thus not based in any of the more familiar identity categories, including race, class, or gender, and indeed its utility consists of its ability to forge ties between and across such categories. Nonetheless, women, African Americans, and even working-class writers had a substantially different relationship to chance than the more genteel and mostly white male realists who proved most interested in chance collectivity. Perhaps the radical disempowerment of chance seemed most tolerable, and even most appealing, to those who already enjoyed the most autonomy and security. As we will see in Chapter 4, deliberate risk taking through gambling and willful self-endangerment, rather than passive vulnerability to chance, often functioned as a questionable attempt by those on society’s margins to defend their self-conception as free and empowered liberal agents. Moreover, African Americans during these years were so routinely confronted with social injustice and racial violence that more concrete enemies than chance were usually near at hand. It is worth noting that the two women novelists most interested in chance in the pages that follow, Anna Katharine Green and Edith Wharton, were both wealthy and well educated, and their class advantages remedied their gender disadvantages to a considerable degree. Affluent white writers were probably most sensitive to the threat of chance simply because they faced correspondingly fewer threats of any other kind. Accordingly, despite its evident commitment to egalitarian social interdependence, the literature of chance collectivity should be seen as a strategy engineered by those who enjoyed a surplus of individual power and security on behalf of many others who had more immediate threats to worry about. If certitude really does lead to divisive violence, largely because different people prove so certain about such different things, then the radical uncertainty associated with chance could help forge a more inclusive union. That, however, would require widespread and continuous consciousness that chance was a powerful player in daily life, a consciousness that novels were especially adept at shaping. By writing the accident, novels configured injuries as accidents, but instead of supplying reassuring

Introduction   narratives of rational and moral order, they began to devise more unsettling narratives of random and inexplicable change. Of course, novels had to defy nineteenth-century narrative traditions in order to do that, including, especially, those historiographic imperatives with which Colbert and Chamberlin would not part. It took more-accomplished literary writers several decades to do that fully, and not until the 1890s does fiction begin to represent accidents as ambitiously as the visual images of the Chicago fire’s cause. In that regard, literary fiction was decidedly behind popular culture, and however influential the chance narratives of Howells or Crane might have been, I would not want to be understood as suggesting that they introduced Americans to something entirely new. What they did, it seems, was to deepen and thicken a tradition already evident in popular culture some two decades before, while deploying it in more persuasive and far-reaching ways. By divesting chance of the fanciful features so prominent in the O’Leary legend, realist novels made an especially strong claim that chance was part of the normative operation of the modern world, and they increasingly identified it with the small-scale catastrophes of everyday life. Because of realism’s pretense to document social and material fact, realist novels were especially effective at characterizing chance as an object of neutral representation rather than as a product of imaginative art. And as novelists became especially effective chance producers, they absorbed and redeployed new philosophical thinking about chance, the most important of which was beginning to emerge in the early 1870s from legal and philosophical pragmatism.

Practicing the Accident The first generation of pragmatists, including Charles Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., were key analysts of chance production but also key chance producers in their own right. Pragmatists made two important claims about chance. First, all of the pragmatists mounted a determined defense against the modish determinisms that flourished during the nineteenth century and so frequently argued that the obtrusive presence of chance affirms the open-endedness of the world. To say that something happens by chance, by their terms, is to insist that it might have turned out otherwise, for chance in this sense

  Introduction is the strict opposite of necessity. Peirce, who was in some ways the most radical of the pragmatists and in other ways the most conservative, insisted that what he called “absolute chance” was higher even than natural law, and the fertile source of all freedom, variety, and growth. Even for those who defined chance more cautiously, including Dewey and James, chance guaranteed the open-ended nature of the world and thus justified individuals in thinking that although their own choices and conduct must always fall short of full mastery, in some situations they might yet prove decisive. For pragmatists, chance is thus equivalent to freedom, in both a philosophical sense and in a political sense closely tied to the values of liberalism. According to James, chance “is the vital air which lets the world live, the salt which keeps it sweet.”32 Although chance preserves a place for the operation of free will, James argued that one must be sure to replace “the eulogistic word freedom” with “the opprobrious word chance,”33 for in doing so one “squarely and resolutely gives up all pretence to control the things he says are free.”34 This is a rather strange modification of traditional liberal theory. Rather than theorize freedom as a function of the powerful exercise of the will, James theorizes freedom first and foremost in terms of the powerlessness of the will. In a world without essences, metaphysics, or absolutes—a “pluriverse” as James called it—chance affirms that multiple possibilities remain in play, precisely because those possibilities so evidently lie beyond our command. Accordingly, evidence for chance frequently took rather violent form for both Dewey and James, especially by the early twentieth century. In echoing James’s association of chance with freedom, Dewey claims, “Man finds himself living in an aleatory world; his existence involves, to put it baldly, a gamble. The world is a scene of risk; it is uncertain, unstable, uncannily unstable. Its dangers are irregular, inconstant, not to be counted upon as to their times and seasons.”35 These are approving claims, it should be noted, for in making them Dewey rejects what seems to him the stultifying stasis of unchanging metaphysical essence. Through the experience of accidental violence, as Dewey represents it here, we encounter a fluid world without foundations or necessity, and one that proves all the more richly rewarding for it. The second key feature of pragmatism is more complicated and in some ways undermines the first. If pragmatists were interested in chance because it seemed a radically contingent antilaw, they also were determined

Introduction   to see law itself as a socially constructed habit of thought, a description of the way the world works that we come to regard as true once it proves sufficiently useful. Peirce even insisted that what seem to be scientific laws are merely habits of nature, equivalent to habitual ways of thinking but actually resident in the material world. Most other pragmatists tended to think of law and necessity as habits of thought, ossified into incontrovertible statements. In the case of legal pragmatists such as Nicholas St. John Green, this constructivist approach undermined even the idea of causation, for in an extension of Humean skepticism, Green argued in 1870 that causes are not functions of the real world but functions of our descriptions of the world.36 He used the case of a drowned man as an example. When we ask what caused the man’s death, different social, political, and institutional frames of reference yield equally valid answers: “A medical man may say that the cause of his death was suffocation by water entering the lungs. A comparative anatomist may say that the cause of his death was the fact that he had lungs instead of gills like a fish.” Given that such illustrations might be continued indefinitely, Green concludes, “In as many different ways as we view an effect, so many different causes, as the word is generally used, can we find for it.”37 Green’s skepticism undermined two traditional instruments of reason, necessity and causation, which in Green’s view were value-laden constructions masquerading as actual facts. But it was Dewey who finally turned this strain of skepticism against chance itself. I adapt the phrase the “production of chance” from Dewey’s little-read article “The Superstition of Necessity” (1893), in which he makes the familiar pragmatic argument that what seems to be lawlike necessity is really a construction, compounded of habitual experience.38 Causes and effects may seem to hang together naturally and necessarily, but for all we know things may work differently tomorrow, or in another part of the world, or for some other reason altogether. Because all of this happens within the process of judgment, Dewey says, “the continued process of judging is a continued process of ‘producing’ the object,” by which he means that we project our habits of thinking into externalized forms that we come to think of as truths.39 However, Dewey goes on to argue that chance is also a wordformula we use to account for experiences that fit poorly with our expectations, a claim aimed squarely at Peirce’s own realist theory of chance.

  Introduction In a nod to the legacy of Enlightenment thinkers such as De Moivre and Laplace, Dewey writes, “The usual statement that chance is relative to ignorance seems to me to convey the truth though not in the sense generally intended—viz., that if we knew more about the occurrence we should see it necessitated by its conditions. Chance is relative to ignorance in the sense rather that it refers to an indefiniteness in our conception of what we are doing.”40 Chance is thus not a name for law misapprehended, nor for a real antilaw scrambling the universe from within, but a name we give to a certain vagueness in our own plans and expectations. “Conditions are neither accidental nor necessary, but simply constituting elements,” Dewey says. “They neither may be nor must be, but just are.”41 In this formulation, which I broadly endorse, chance is a conceptual category shaped through language and employed to make sense of the world, even if—perhaps especially if—we refuse to acknowledge it as an instrument of our own design. These two aspects of pragmatism are clearly in some degree of conflict. Pragmatists largely devoted to the social construction of truth too often allowed themselves to grant special privileges and exemptions to chance. As James once said, “Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose,” but all of the pragmatists were reluctant to question their own purposes in classifying certain events as accidents, even Dewey, who later proved far less skeptical about the constructed nature of his “aleatory world.”42 But if pragmatists treated chance with kid gloves partly to protect a key premise of their antideterminism, they may have had other reasons as well, reasons related less to liberal theories of freedom than to the liberal argument for social interdependence. Clearly, pragmatism is closely related to liberal capitalism, but all of the philosophical pragmatists, and some of the legal pragmatists, were also practical progressives as well, generally opposed to wide-open laissez-faire markets, outraged by American imperialism, and highly conscious of the social possibilities in American life. In different ways, all contested the liberal notion that the pursuit of purely private self-interest by all individuals will yield the best possible social arrangement for everybody. Peirce rejected the idea that “progress takes place by virtue of every individual’s striving for himself with all his might and trampling his neighbor under foot whenever he gets the chance,” a doctrine he derided as “the Gospel

Introduction   of Greed.”43 Dewey proclaimed that in the school, “individualism and socialism are at one.”44 And James claimed that pluralism “takes for me a stronger hold on reality than any other philosophy I know of—it being essentially a social philosophy, a philosophy of ‘co,’ in which conjunctions do the work.”45 James Kloppenberg has characterized a wide range of turn-of-thecentury progressive reforms as a synthesis of pragmatism’s relativistic and experiential theory of knowledge with the social democratic politics behind late nineteenth-century European welfare policies. This synthesis, Kloppenberg says, occurred in the political middle ground: social democrats “tugged socialist theory away from its preoccupation with revolution,” while intellectuals like James and Dewey were “pulling the theory of liberal individualism in the opposite direction.”46 Social commitment met the social constitution of truth halfway, and the resulting reform efforts proved a successful means of limiting, without eliminating, some of the most egregious suffering of turn-of-the-century life. My point here is simply that chance functions as one pivotal term connecting pragmatism and social democracy. Pragmatic skepticism about individualism, and a corresponding commitment to various conceptions of the social, came to depend on consciousness of human vulnerability to chance. The uncertainty that chance fosters does not just affirm freedom of choice and compel an expanded search for knowledge but quite literally compels social affiliation as a strategy of defense against a hazardous future. When one examines chance in the context of pragmatic and progressive politics, it becomes clear that chance is the objective, externalized name for an uncertainty that pragmatists recognized as useful for social organization. Chance collectivity is thus not a socialism grounded in Marxist theory but a socialism of coordinated interdependence justified by the bafflements of an aleatory life. As in the case of the Chicago fire, the production of injury specifically as accident could curtail the social divisions that usually accompany fault finding and also foster a shared sense of common purpose. From Peirce’s theory of scientific error to the progressive case for workers’ compensation, the collectivizing power of chance proved indispensable to a culture that was far more openly enthusiastic about the values of individualism. The most important institution of chance collectivity is the massive

  Introduction and socially transformative insurance industry, as I indicated earlier, in both its private and public forms. The next chapter on Howells and life insurance will take up this issue in more detail, but for the moment suffice it to say that one of the most important changes in American social life in the nineteenth century involved the implementation of widespread insurance coverage, which accelerated dramatically after the Civil War. Life insurance allowed Americans to pool their risks and assets such that the entire mutual society of the insured could compensate those individuals who experienced losses. While insurance socialized enormous financial assets in privately managed risk pools, it also linked its highly efficient mechanism of social redistribution to the trigger of allegedly accidental injuries and losses. From the perspective of the insured, who to this day know very little about the mathematics of actuarial practice, social redistribution is thus keyed directly to catastrophe, which both justifies the creation of the risk pool and activates the movement of capital within it. However, it certainly is not the case that Americans bought insurance because they experienced more accidents; on the contrary, producing injuries as accidents was a fundamental step in legitimizing the social technology of insurance. Rufus Potts, the director of insurance for Illinois and a staunch public insurance advocate, described the world as insurance saw it in 1916: “The vast impersonal forces of the universe in their irresistible courses crush many, while those not thus destroyed are disabled or become diseased, so that their bodies are filled with pain and misery and their souls with despair. The ways in which humanity is injured or destroyed are innumerable.” He enumerates some anyway: “lightning’s deadly bolt,” “a tornado,” “a tempest at sea,” “giant machines,” “rocks which fall,” “fiery gasses,” and “deadly disease germs,” among others.47 Potts may sound like the narrator of a naturalist novel, but in fact he is delivering what was, by this point, a standard justification for the mutual society of the insured, and one that dates back at least to the 1850s. Accordingly, although it has been argued that the insurance industry arose to address the special perils of urban and industrial modernity, in fact its compensatory mechanism, which emphasizes human vulnerability while deemphasizing moral responsibility, helped fashion injuries as accidents in the first place. This tendency is self-reinforcing. Once the efficient and reliable methods of

Introduction   insurance compensation are in place, everyone has less incentive to find fault by seeking redress through the courts, so injuries can remain unexplained, morally and even rationally, without serious financial loss to anyone. Whereas Dewey thought the individual and the social blended ideally in the institution of the school, Peirce acknowledged an equally important alternative when he glibly remarked, “Each of us is an insurance company.”48 There has been an enormous body of work on the rationalizing technology of risk assessment, and specifically on the governmental power of insurance, from Michel Foucault’s to that of Richard Ericson, Aaron Doyle, Pat O’Malley, Tom Baker, and many others.49 However, in addressing insurance in several of the chapters that follow, I do not focus on its mathematical, statistical, and probabilistic methods for predicting future rates of loss nor on the insurance industry’s strictly disciplinary functions. Nor will I address to any great degree the emergence of the modern credit and financial systems, as in Ian Baucom’s analysis of an ongoing phase of abstract and highly speculative capitalism, which he traces back to the financial instrument of insurance.50 These are important contexts to be sure, but I am interested primarily in popular consciousness of chance and in the ways in which cognizance of an unstable and irremediably accident-prone world became a precondition for more salutary kinds of collectivity. To that end, although risk certainly has been an instrument of discipline, and insurance may have helped create an alienating system of global finance, the production of chance in the forms I address here was designed to keep a bad state of affairs from becoming even worse. Particularly at the end of the nineteenth century in the United States, with the traditions of civic republicanism in decline and new institutions of social welfarism not yet born, social security, whether managed by public or private entities, required the rhetorical production of private insecurity first. So while technical and statistical methods certainly exerted immense influence over social structures and taxonomies, to say nothing of large-scale political movements and institutions, we ignore a crucial stage of that process if we exclude equally important qualitative and literary developments, which produced a concept of chance well suited to sustaining viable modes of liberal interdependence. It is not just that mathematics and statistics

  Introduction tame chance, then, but also that American writers defined a great deal of violence as chancy in order to legitimize new modes of socialization. Insurance is the most systematic and institutionally powerful of the chance collectives addressed in the following pages, but it is shadowed by many others that are more informal, improvisational, temporary, or even theoretical. Howells’s ethic of mutual complicity, Crane’s egalitarian chaos, and Peirce’s community of scientific inquirers are all, in different ways, organized around the looming threat of chance. For Howells, insurance was such a clear example of these dynamics that he modeled a broader social theory upon it. Insurers, in turn, often recognized their own methods at work in more popular scenes of chance production. In fact, the insurance industry was involved in producing the iconic image of the Chicago fire’s accidental cause, reproduced in Figure 1. Bearing the imprint of Hartford, Connecticut, soon to be the insurance capital of the East, the illustration issued from the firm of Kellogg and Bulkeley, the president of which, William Henry Bulkeley, was the son of the first president of Hartford’s Aetna Life Insurance Company, Eliphalet Adams Bulkeley. Even as the illustration’s caption reminds readers about the practical need for prudence, it also reminds them about the practical need for insurance, given that fires cannot be eliminated entirely. William Henry would go on to serve as vice president of Aetna from 1877 to 1879, and accordingly the Kellogg and Bulkeley illustration reflects a characteristically insurantial, rather than juridical, understanding of injury and loss.51 It bears mentioning that other insurers were interested in the legends of the Chicago fire’s cause too, including C. C. Hine, editor of the Insurance Monitor, whose poem about the fire features the same iconic scene of the cow kicking over the lamp yet again and concludes with this moral: “The burdens of each in Insurance we bear, / And its benefits all its participants share.”52 The production of chance as an amoral and irrational indeterminacy principle was thus part of an effort that Hine, along with many of the writers and reformers we will meet in the following pages, understood in the most pressing moral terms. The chapters that follow are arranged chronologically, but they function not as a comprehensive history of the period but as a set of interrelated case studies. Chapter 1 describes the institutionalization of chance collectivity through the life insurance industry, which Howells first rec-

Introduction   ognized in his most ambitious and chance-saturated novel, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). Chapters 2 and 3 turn to writers whose interest in chance collectivity is marked, to a far greater degree, by an equal interest in individual experience. Chapter 2 addresses the most experimental writer considered here, Stephen Crane, in the context of that key act of American intentionality, aiming and shooting a gun. In what amounts to a dissent against traditional liberal theories of free will and self-control, Crane links the accurate execution of one’s intentions with imperial violence and links random, aimless shooting to a preferable mode of ruthless egalitarianism. Chapter 3 addresses pragmatism directly and at length, through a consideration of two writers who trust chance to aid their investigations, the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce and the best-selling detective novelist Anna Katharine Green. By reading Peirce’s famous account of his own sleuthing after a stolen watch alongside Green’s detective fiction, I show how difficult it was for both writers to reconcile a socializing conception of chance with narrative forms that are, by definition, strongly teleological. The last two chapters attend to social and political conflicts that accompanied the successful implementation of chance collectives. In Chapter 4, I address the industrial accident crisis of the early twentieth century, through Edith Wharton’s little-read industrial accident novel, The Fruit of the Tree (1907), and in relation to Crystal Eastman’s influential study of industrial injuries, Work Accidents and the Law (1910). The feminization of chance, as I call it there, refers to the ways in which modern conceptions of chance challenged masculine fantasies of power, self-sufficiency, and control, but also opened the door to important progressive reforms implemented by and for women. Chapter 5 concludes this study by examining two novels that finally confess literature’s own involvement in the production of chance, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925) and James Cain’s Double Indemnity (1936). Both writers literalize the production of chance through depictions of criminal accident fraud. For Dreiser, this spelled the end of his own realist project, but for Cain it raised the possibility that accident production might function as a valuable mode of public performance art in America’s emergent welfare state. This book thus concludes at a moment when American fiction, and especially realism, confronted the shortcomings of its own documentary pretensions. At precisely that same moment, modernist writers creating

  Introduction far more experimental works carried the literature of chance in new directions, but they were far less conscious of their own role in chance production, and far less interested in chance’s socializing potential. Even as these chapters trace a narrative of increasingly sophisticated and self-conscious chance production from Reconstruction to the New Deal, they should also be read as a set of case studies that speak to each other in clusters and groups. The chapters on Howells, Wharton, and Dreiser and Cain form a coherent group on insurance. The chapters on Peirce and the chapter on Dreiser and Cain focus on the compatibility of chance with conventional crime narratives. The chapters on Crane, Wharton, and Peirce and Green all engage pragmatism in different measures. Together, these chapters organize related sets of materials without contriving an excessively linear story of development, but while still tracing key historical changes through these decades. One of the things I have come to admire in these writers is their love of variety, which they indulge even at the expense of formal elegance or narrative cohesion. Aesthetic variety, formal inconsistency, and narrative irregularity are the very tools these writers often use to hammer out chance. To be true to its sources, a literary history of chance must not fail to be a little haphazard too.

c ha p ter 1

The Insurance of the Real william dean howells

Just fifteen years after its destruction by fire, Chicago erupted in violence again, but this time the violence was hardly represented as accidental. During a small rally of workers, socialists, and anarchists near Chicago’s Haymarket Square in May 1886, someone threw a small homemade bomb into a group of police, killing one and injuring dozens more. In the end, seven police officers were killed, some shot by other officers in the melee that erupted. There was nothing accidental about the source of this violence, obviously, but the authorities’ inability to identify who actually had thrown the bomb did not prevent them from rounding up a wide range of radical activists and arraigning eight of them as accessories to the crime.1 After a speedy and highly irregular trial in which the accused were treated as co-conspirators, even though some did not know one another, seven of the eight were condemned to death. Two of those sentences were commuted to life in prison, and a third condemned prisoner killed himself by exploding a dynamite cap in his mouth the night before his execution. The remaining four went to the gallows on the morning November 11, 1887. This show trial is widely regarded as one of the most scandalous injustices in American legal history, for in the throes of the anti-red hysteria that gripped Chicago in the summer of 1886, few voices resisted the inexorable march to the gallows or opposed convictions based on little more than guilt by association. Among prominent artists and writers, only William Dean Howells spoke out about the prosecution of the case, but he could

  The Insurance of the Real find no other writers to join him in signing a letter the New York Tribune requesting clemency for the condemned.2 After the executions, Howells famously wrote a bitter letter to the Tribune, in which he concluded, “We have committed an atrocious and irreparable wrong,” and charged the attorney general with “gifts of imagination that would perhaps fit him better for the functions of a romantic novelist.”3 Howells never mailed the letter.4 But from that date, critics have long recognized a clear shift of emphasis in his work, as Annie Kilburn (1888) and then A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) took a greater interest in the working class, more overtly addressed jarring social and economic changes, and more openly engaged, without exactly embracing, the appeal of socialism. These post-Haymarket novels do something else important as well, expanding an already pronounced emphasis on chance and accident in Howells’s work, as if Howells were attempting to counteract the Haymarket trial’s overdetermination of blame with an equal and opposite underdetermination of blame. At the very peak of his career, Howells attempted to promote chance as a socially useful instrument that not only could prevent divisive retribution but also might help systematize new modes of interdependence. The model for that interdependence—socializing but not necessarily socialist—was the institution of modern insurance. By 1890 there were already well-developed connections between literature and insurance, both in Howells’s fiction and in American culture more broadly. Near the beginning of A Hazard of New Fortunes, Basil March’s employer, Reciprocity Life, forces him out of his job and offers him a position as the editor of an in-house periodical, an “insurance paper.”5 It may seem strange to contemporary readers that an insurance company would have such a newspaper, but, in fact, the industry had dozens, possibly hundreds, of them. Beginning in the nineteenth century, insurance propagated a massive publishing arm that produced internal company periodicals and supported a vigorous independent press. Journals such as the Western Underwriter and the Insurance Monitor combined the dry work of trade magazines—reporting on market conditions and pending legislation—with greater literary ambition, and often they were run by men with no small amount of education and artistic ambition. Banking and other financial services had no comparable publishing empire, nor did they house writers and artists of comparable skill. The poet

The Insurance of the Real    Wallace Stevens, the linguist Benjamin Whorf, and the composer Charles Ives were all insurance men, and all of them published on topics beyond insurance in insurance industry magazines. Readers typically treat Stevens’s insurance career as a curious aberration, but the insurance industry had been a warehouse for literary talent and ambition for decades. Almost alone among American writers, Howells noticed the growing cultural importance of insurance and its increasingly intimate relationship with literature, particularly during his political phase during the late 1880s and in his most ambitious novel, A Hazard of New Fortunes. By 1890, even the word “hazard” was a recognizable insurance term, used more often in that context than any other. The central character in Hazard, Basil March, had made a living in insurance for the previous eighteen years, and he was already working for an insurance company in Howells’s first book, Their Wedding Journey (1871). That book is a virtual travelogue of Howells’s own honeymoon, so, from the beginning, the career of the fictional insurer and the biography of the aspiring novelist were strangely superimposed. March returned in The Shadow of a Dream (1890), An Open-Eyed Conspiracy (1897), Their Silver Wedding Journey (1899), and a number of short stories, which makes him by far the most frequently recurring character in Howells’s canon. Throughout his career, Howells returned often to this smug and stuffy insurance man not because March’s personality was particularly compelling but because the white-collar work of underwriting served as a complex metaphor for realism’s own labors in the literary marketplace. Insurance became a valuable metaphor for Howellsian realism around 1890, because it asserted a set of communitarian credentials that did not threaten to deepen the class divisions increasingly troubling to post-Haymarket America. Imagining realism as a kind of insurance allowed writing, like underwriting, to participate fully and unashamedly in capitalism’s markets while still working to construct communities of interdependent risk and asset sharers. And because insurance has no pretension to reform society, merely to compensate for allegedly unpreventable losses, realism could surrender some of its own ambition to exert managerial control over society and instead embrace a looser policy of tending to, without necessarily alleviating, the injuries and losses at the heart of modern life.

  The Insurance of the Real Alongside the practical, compensatory functions of insurance, the industry exercised a more subtle but equally profound influence on Americans’ consciousness of chance. Through relentless advertising and its own expansive publishing enterprises, the insurance industry actively trained Americans to expect accident, to imagine it richly and in great detail, and to consider it an ineradicable component of everyday life. There is, then, a complicated dialectic between accidents and insurance that the rest of this chapter will explore. Even as insurance compensates for actual losses, it works ceaselessly to spread the perception that those losses cannot be brought under the full control of rational and prudent agents and so affirms that such losses are, in effect, the inevitable products of a world of chance. More than just another branch of the financial services sector, insurance became an unusually active player in shaping a new postbellum culture of chance, and, as a result, it functioned as a powerful discipline that produced subjects surprisingly accepting of an unstable and underregulated world. Moreover, around 1890 and in the wake of the Haymarket trials, the production of chance became an important component of Howells’s realist fiction. Just as insurance cultivates the threat of accident in order to enroll policyholders in its “mutual society,” Howellsian realism promoted “the world of chance” precisely to facilitate the kind of social interdependence that Howells so desired. No real solution to the serious social and economic divisions that Hazard diagnoses, and that Haymarket exacerbated, Howells’s proposed link between insurance and realism held out hope that the dangerous instability of urban modernity might be put to good use, if configured as a radically alien threat against which a more inclusive society might unite.

The World of Chance Howells had been conspicuously interested in chance and accident since his first novel, A Chance Acquaintance (1873), and chance and accident continued to play a role in almost all of his subsequent work. While Howells himself joked that “nothing happens” in a Howells novel, in fact, his character-heavy studies of conduct and moral choice are punctuated by a spectacular series of carriage wrecks, sleigh collisions, tramplings, dog attacks, mistaken identities, train derailments, misdeliveries, fires, chance

The Insurance of the Real    encounters, falls, and strokes of luck.6 Many of these accidents take the form of a fall—from a cliff, a carriage, or high social standing—and it is to the Latin verb for falling, cedo, that “accident” owes its root. Accordingly, in A Chance Acquaintance, the accident of taking the wrong man’s arm and speaking intimately to him is coupled with the fortunate fall of the young woman’s aunt, who slips and injures her leg while entering her carriage (thereby rendering her a conveniently poor chaperone). Falling is the prelude to falling in love, for Howells as it had been for Jane Austen, and for many writers since. Later, however, Howells’s accidents became more troubling, more violent, and more intrusive to the plot. In The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), Lapham’s house accidentally burns at precisely the moment when its insurance has lapsed. In Indian Summer (1886), a middle-aged lover falls from a cliff when a horse rears. The most brutal accidents occur during Howells’s political phase in the late 1880s. At the end of Annie Kilburn, the hard-nosed reformer Reverend Peck “tried to cross the track from his train, where it had halted short of the station, and the flying express from the other quarter caught him from his feet, and dropped the bleeding fragment that still held his life beside the rail a hundred yards away, and then kept on in brute ignorance into the night.”7 Just two years later, in The Shadow of a Dream (1890), Howells repeated Peck’s accident with a different minister, James Nevil. While saying good-bye to Basil March, Nevil steps down from the train just as it starts to move and is promptly crushed between the Pullman car and an archway. This “vague and inconclusive catastrophe,” as March later calls it, is a sign that accidents in Howells’s fiction had become more vague and inconclusive too.8 Between the publication of Annie Kilburn and The Shadow of a Dream, and so bookended by the accidental railroad deaths of these two ministers, Howells published A Hazard of New Fortunes, his most sustained inquiry into the place of chance and accident in modern life. Despite the prominence of Howells’s accidents, or perhaps because of it, critics have been reluctant to take them seriously. Warner Berthoff set the tone for many subsequent readers when he referred to Howells’s accidents as “moral rigging,” carefully contrived ropework designed to hoist an ethical lesson by the novel’s end.9 Even Everett Carter, an earlier and more sympathetic reader than Berthoff, said that Hazard is knit together

  The Insurance of the Real by “a series of coincidences which stretch belief to the breaking point.”10 To be fair, many of Howells’s early novels do use convenient accidents to reinject the plot with genteel middle-class values, but that by no means adequately explains the more violent and obscure accidents in his later novels, where the easy morals that Berthoff despises are difficult to adduce. What kind of “moral rigging” kills off James Nevil at the end of The Shadow of a Dream? What lesson attaches to the accidental literary successes in A World of Chance (1893)? There are possible answers to these questions, but no simple ones, and as a result, it makes more sense to see these later accidents as part of a serious critique of indeterminacy, complex causation, and blame. In taking accidents more seriously, and in connecting them to a broader interest in judgment and moral choice, Howells anticipated several recent moral philosophers who have urged us to rethink the idea that morality in the broadest sense can be cordoned off from luck and chance. Bernard Williams’s “Moral Luck,” to name just one, argues that moral outcomes are highly contingent affairs and that it makes little sense to think of them as produced exclusively by intending moral agents.11 Williams argues that under a broadly Kantian understanding of universal morality, “justice requires not merely that something I am should be beyond luck, but that what I most fundamentally am should be so, and, in light of that, admiration or liking or even enjoyment of the happy manifestations of luck can seem to be treachery to moral worth.” Accordingly, Williams argues, not only is it morally important to consider moral life limited (otherwise we are left with “purely moral motivations and no limit to their application”), but also the “risk these agents run is a risk within morality” and not simply within a separate amoral sphere.12 Our unwillingness to concede that fact leads to what Williams calls “agent-regret,” a retrospective response to the experience of accidents in which an agent imagines that he or she might have caused things to happen differently.13 For example, the truck driver who runs over a child will experience a different kind of regret than the passenger sitting in the same vehicle. Even if the driver did nothing wrong, was in no way negligent, and could have done nothing to prevent the child’s death, still, Williams argues, he or she very likely will imagine otherwise. In imagining that different choices might have made things turn out differently, the driver effectively reasserts the

The Insurance of the Real    rules of a luckless morality, in which outcomes always lie under someone’s deliberate control. Williams’s claim that the moral and the lucky are not strictly separable challenges our received understanding of both terms, an understanding that Hazard also tests by intermingling choice and chance in ways that compromise the imagined purity of both. The novel does that largely by obscuring clear chains of causation, especially in regard to social dynamics, and by conspicuously refusing to attribute certain effects either to discrete causes or to culpable agents. For instance, when Conrad Dryfoos, the standard-bearer of liberal optimism and sympathy for labor, is shot dead among striking workers in the street, the novel takes absolutely no interest in producing a culprit. The reader is left to imagine whether the bullet fired from the police van was deliberately fired at Conrad as he rushed to Lindau’s aid, whether an officer fired on him in error, or whether he was accidentally hit by a stray bullet. No one considers who the killer might have been, why he might have shot Conrad, or even whether the police as an institution should or could be held accountable. The death of Conrad at the scene of labor unrest marks the novel’s most explicit return to the scene of the Haymarket trials, but Howells’s most telling commentary on the events of 1886 lies not so much in deciding whether or not Conrad had been killed deliberately but in the novel’s utter disinterest in that question. If, in Howells’s view, the Haymarket trials perversely produced scapegoats through the methods of a “romantic novelist,” then the lack of investigation into Conrad’s death does the opposite, producing chance through the methods of a realist novelist. That is, part of what Howells seems to recognize in Hazard is that the moral underpinnings of romantic fiction, with its polarized account of virtue and vice, can be countered by realist fiction’s determined refusal even to conduct the kinds of inquiries that might lead to any assessment of blame. By refusing to solve crimes and produce culprits, and by refusing even to try to do so, Hazard inflicts on the reader the same aggravating uncertainties and dissatisfactions that trouble its characters. While Basil March makes little effort to blame any discernible agent for Conrad’s death, he remains unsettled by the vague and inconclusive nature of the violence. He attempts to make sense of Conrad’s death by drawing a bright line between two different kinds of accidents: providential events

  The Insurance of the Real that we might experience as accidental, and other kinds of lesser accidents produced through material, social, and economic instability. March says of Conrad’s death, “All that was distinctly the chance of life and death. That belonged to God; and no doubt it was law, though it seems chance. But what I object to is this economic chance-world in which we live, and which we men seem to have created” (436). This is, of course, an entirely conventional mode of providentialism, surprising here only because it seems so untenable, given that the particular “chance of life and death” that killed Conrad came directly from the “economic chance-world” in the form of a bullet fired during labor unrest. March sounds like those nineteenth-century ministers who refused to put lightning rods on church steeples, because doing so might defy Providence. Although that kind of imprudent piety was rare by 1890, the lingering sense that some accidents are sacred signs that should not be questioned, let alone thwarted, reemerges in March’s crude attempt to distinguish providential chance from the human-made variety. When accidents are neither controlled by identifiable and culpable agents nor surrendered to the jurisdiction of a superintending deity, they lodge ineradicably in precisely those social and economic dynamics that March detests as secondary, human made, or artificial. To situate accidents there is to involve them in all of those social and economic transactions that all agents must undergo. As a result, agents who experience certain kinds of unexpected failures, injuries, or losses frequently find themselves facing a difficult choice: the agent can choose either to be innocent or to be powerful, but not both. By electing to be guilty—as Williams argues many do—the agent keeps the sovereignty of his or her will intact, but at the cost of moral innocence. In the throes of such internal conflict, it seems most likely that the kinds of accidents Williams describes would provoke an ambivalent sense of both guilt and innocence, power and powerlessness. Indeed, the intolerability of either extreme—guilt or powerlessness—structures the special cruelty of the choice. Agent-regret, then, is perhaps best seen as an active oscillation between two irreconcilable alternatives, at least as they register within the values system of modern liberal society. The point worth emphasizing, however, is that under the conditions of urban and industrial modernity, there were likely far more occasions for agent-regret than ever before and, certainly, more than there

The Insurance of the Real    had been in smaller social systems and in less complexly built environments. Near the end of Hazard, for instance, Basil March steps into Fifth Avenue and feels “something knock against his shoulder” and has “his hat struck from his head by a horse’s nose” (444). Behind that horse’s nose is a large wheel entirely capable of crushing March to death, were he to be knocked to the ground as well. Hazard makes these kinds of mishaps routine, but it also makes the response routine. March immediately worries that he will have “to confess his narrow escape to his wife” and accept some degree of moral responsibility for carelessness (445). The social nature of chance thus consists not of the embeddedness of some actual indeterminacy within social and material interactions but of the complex ways in which any event, especially a violent injury, might or might not be characterized specifically as a matter of chance. When March loses his hat, and almost loses his life, he converts chance back into moral choice by making it an occasion for a confession. Chance is social because it is the product of extensive negotiations about the nature and limits of responsibility, agency, causation, culpability, intentionality, and even moral choice, all of which must be reconfigured, however subtly, as soon as chance enters the conversation. Rather than talk about “moral luck” as if two apparently incommensurable kinds of action suddenly were found to overlap, we would do better to say that luck is moral because decisions about what counts as lucky effectively map out the limits of the moral. As Williams says, the determination that some things lie outside the bounds of moral choice is, obviously, a moral determination too, and perhaps the most audacious moral determination of all. Insisting on the existence of amoral chance is not just abject surrender to an insane world of happenstance and relativism; it is, instead, a morally important determination to set some limits on the applications of the moral. Just as limiting morality is a moral operation, so too is expanding the dominion of chance. In many cases, and especially in Howells, the two amount to exactly the same thing. Naturally, the moralizing of chance was no new idea, but historically it tended to involve the far simpler translation of chance directly into divine Providence. In a great deal of nineteenth-century fiction, chance functions as the invisible hand of the deity. Even though Charles Dickens’s outrageous social coincidences may reflect the unpredictability of modern

  The Insurance of the Real social systems, they also have centripetal and integrative tendencies that suggest higher levels of design. When, in Oliver Twist (1861), the orphan’s benefactor turns out to be closely connected to his lost relatives, the reunion of families and friends acts as a thematic counterpart to the formal integration of multiple plots, which the novel’s conclusion braids together. The very form of a Dickens novel thus re-creates the author’s sense that there are “wonderful chains that are for ever forging, day and night, in the vast iron-works of time and circumstance.”14 This tendency to moralize chance as divine justice is equally common in sentimental fiction, and it even infiltrates some works of literary naturalism, which we tend to think of as morally indifferent. The accidental burial of S. Behrman in wheat at the end of Frank Norris’s The Octopus: A California Story (1904), for instance, functions as a crude doom machine that actually figures forth chance’s opposite, rational, or even moral necessity. In most cases, however, literary naturalism tends to resist this kind of transparent moralizing, and if chance is part of the equation, and it frequently is, it tends to prefigure the obscure workings of a vast and overpowering universe of force. But as a result, it can be quite difficult to tell whether chance in any given naturalist novel is ontological chance, a real force disrupting the universe from within, or whether it is merely a name for human ignorance of entirely deterministic laws. For all of Theodore Dreiser’s windy polemic about determinism, for example, it can be profoundly unclear whether any given accident in his fiction is evidence of a shortage or a surplus of causal determination. Perhaps naturalism in general catches the concept of chance in transit between an earlier Enlightenment conception of chance as a name for human ignorance of universal laws and an emerging ontological view of chance as a real indeterminacy principle. Between those two options there are other possibilities, such as June Howard’s suggestion that chance in Dreiser is the product of a “play of causal forces,” which “are not really laws of causality, but rather the interstices between those laws.”15 Whatever the case, and even in Howard’s subtle elaboration, naturalist novels locate chance in the actual causal dynamics of the real world, regardless of whether those dynamics are judged to have natural or cultural origins. However, naturalist novels typically do not invite readers to think about chance as a by-product of our methods of categorization and classification. In Hazard, in contrast,

The Insurance of the Real    the “play of causal forces” leads back to questions about judgment and choice, especially judgments and choices about what counts as chance in the first place. So while characters in Hazard certainly do entertain the idea that chance might be ontological, the novel as a whole ultimately refuses to read chance as March does, as either a name for Providence or as a name for “this economic chance-world in which we live, and which we men seem to have created,” as March had put it (436). Instead, Hazard gradually acknowledges that chance may not be a function of the material or economic worlds in any empirical sense after all but is rather generated through the characterization of certain kinds of violence as accidents in the first place. Georg Lukács condensed a great deal of narrative theory into his pithy claim—especially pertinent here—that “narration arranges; description levels.”16 Lukács is entirely on the side of narration in this conflict, for narration helps us “construct a comprehensive, well-organized and multifaceted epic composition. Observation and description are mere substitutes for a conception of order in life.”17 For Lukács, description is thus complicit with capitalism and bourgeois values, in that it conceals the real basis of social life behind a fragmentary account of private experience. And the stakes of this, Lukács concludes, involve nothing less than the question of “what is meant by ‘chance’ in fiction?”18 His answer, to put it briefly, is that chance must appear as a social function, such that accidents in the works of those realists whom Lukács approves (Tolstoy, Balzac, and Scott) are “thoroughly integrated into the total action of the novel.”19 Conversely, in the works of those writers he criticizes (Zola and Flaubert), accidents are rendered in meticulously descriptive detail but are little integrated into a fuller account of social life. To arrange through narrative is to move past chance, back toward order and reason, whereas to level through description is to concede, disastrously, that nothing is linked by necessity to anything else. Over the course of the late nineteenth century, Howells might be said to have traveled from one of Lukács’s camps to the other. Even as he grew more politically radical, he gave up on the kind of narrative that moralized or rationalized chance and that Lukács associated with political commitment. Instead, Howells’s more political phase involves more descriptive leveling, by which he obscured social and moral order rather than

  The Insurance of the Real revealed it. This was not simply to surrender to bourgeois individualism, however, as Lukács might have charged. Instead, Howells discovered that chance has political possibilities too, because it can disrupt the tendency of social groups to define themselves against each other in exclusionary and even hostile ways. Description may level, but Howells seems to think it might level out unjust power differentials as well. For Lukács, any writer who cannot discern some sort of social order within or behind chance is ideologically complicit with capitalism. For Howells, in contrast, totalizing narratives seemed far more dangerous than atomizing descriptions, given that the Haymarket trials had shown that the rationalizing and moralizing powers of narrative were by no means guaranteed to be virtuous, or even benign. There is a complicated split, however, between two different impulses in Hazard. On the one hand, Hazard asks us to read it as a traditional realist attempt to render mimetically the complexity of the modern city’s social, material, and economic indeterminacy, especially the very real play of chance in modern urban and economic life. On the other, it exposes the artificiality of the realist assessment of chance and reveals the circumstances of chance production within literary narrative. Had Howells only described chance in the leveling way that Lukács condemned, he would have accomplished the first of those two missions more successfully. The very irregularity of the novel’s form already attests to its mimetic fidelity: no artfulness here. As regularity and order came to be identified with deliberate contrivance, the “real” became linked to the opposite, the irregular and the uncontrolled. Period critics were partly aware that something of this sort was going on. In 1891 Brander Matthews accused Howells of being “unduly negligent of form” because, he said, Hazard collects “mere fragments of human existence seized at haphazard.”20 But reading Howells’s “haphazard” narrative form as a failure of craft, as Matthews implies, is also a way of crediting him with conducting something like a random sample, artless, perhaps, but not skewed by any too pronounced attempt at artistry. The problem, however, is that Hazard is less haphazard than Matthews thinks, and perhaps even less than Howells intended. On closer inspection, the leveling descriptions of Howells’s world of chance turn out to reveal tantalizing formal similarities between otherwise separate

The Insurance of the Real    accidents and tightly integrated structural patterns that are antithetical to the nonnecessity of chance. Howells had occasionally disrupted the ends of previous novels with paroxysms of chance that undermined the narrative’s attempt at closure and highlighted the artificiality of that operation. The train derailment, misdelivered newspaper, and chance encounters at the end of A Modern Instance (1882), for example, bring the novel itself to a screeching halt in a way that can only register as outrageously contrived. In a similar way, Hazard expends the last of its energy in a spasm of disintegrative action, including Conrad’s killing, March’s near death in the street, and Beaton’s injury when he drops his pistol, all of which are clustered near the novel’s end. By piling up accidents just as the novel searches for closure, Howells in fact undermines his own realist pretense to observe chance and makes it all the more clear that he is producing chance instead. After all, these accidents are not really preventing the novel from closing; they are in fact facilitating its closure. The accident, final and conclusive, might even be the event that has to happen before the novel can allow itself to terminate, like a marriage at the end of a comedy or a death at the end of a tragedy. If so, the accidents at the end of Hazard function as the telos of a narrative that is by no means as meandering as it first appears. And just as important, even though these concluding accidents do not smuggle in any simple providentialism, the interconnections between such vague and inconclusive catastrophes nonetheless hint at the lurking presence of some underlying design. There are only four violent acts in Hazard, some accidental and some deliberate, but all four are interconnected in surprisingly intricate ways, and all are clustered near the novel’s end. In the first violent act, Jacob Dryfoos strikes his son Conrad for voicing support for the strikers. He leaves a mark on Conrad’s face, which actually comes from Christine Dryfoos’s intaglio ring, which Jacob wears on his little finger. The second follows immediately afterward, when Conrad is shot down in the street as he is trying to save Lindau from being beaten. In the third, Christine Dryfoos “with both hands made a feline pass” (491) at the artist Beaton, lashing out at him after he rejected her for the last time. The fourth occurs back in Beaton’s room immediately after Christine’s attack. The narrator says: There was a pistol among the dusty bric-à-brac on the mantel, which he had kept loaded to fire at a cat in the area. He took it and sat looking into the muz-

  The Insurance of the Real zle, wishing it might go off by accident and kill him. It slipped through his hand, and struck the floor, and there was a report; he sprang into the air, feeling that he had been shot. But he found himself still alive, with only a burning line along his cheek, such as one of Christine’s finger-nails might have left. (491)

It hardly seems necessary to elaborate on the sexual symbolism of the lover who goes back to his room to play with his gun, which he keeps loaded to shoot at a cat. But perhaps it is worth pointing out that the cat in question is surely Christine Dryfoos, “a leopardess in leash” (466) who “sprang at him like a wild-cat” and “made a feline pass” with her fingernails (491). As a result, Beaton’s accidentally dropped gun repeats Christine’s deliberate attempt to scratch his face, just as it repeats the shooting of Conrad Dryfoos, the only other gunshot reported in the book. More important, the dropped gun repeats both of these events in the most contrived and artificial way, so it is no accident that this accident is tightly bound to the preceding violence. Moreover, Beaton’s precise injury—the scratch on his face—repeats the scratch that Jacob Dryfoos had left on Conrad’s face when he struck his son. And, finally, these two scratched faces, one by gun and one by ring, turn out to be obscurely related to Christine: Beaton’s scratch is “such as one of Christine’s finger-nails might have left,” and Conrad’s scratch comes from Christine’s intaglio ring, which Jacob happens to be wearing when he strikes his son. This degree of interconnectedness and obvious literariness should make readers positively embarrassed to throw up their hands and consign the two accidental gunshots to pure inscrutable chance. If description helps validate chance as chance alone, and nothing more, then these narrative interconnections insinuate that some deeper order must be structuring chance from within, an order that, if fully revealed, would bar us from referring to chance at all. At the very moment when Howells reveals the accident most fully, he seems compelled also to expose it as a narrative contrivance. Obviously, it would be foolish to read too strict or singular a meaning into such a web of tangential interconnections. It is not as if these patterned repetitions lead, inexorably, to some obvious conclusion wrought from Dickens’s “vast iron-works of time and circumstance.” Nor do they solve a moral problem, as the accidents do at the end of A Modern Instance. In fact, the tantalizing but incomplete structure of these repetitions proves more meaningful than any single interpretation of them.

The Insurance of the Real    They balance readers between a desire to incorporate an apparent pattern into some meaningful design and a counter-desire to save space for an indeterminacy that could produce unexpected conjunctions even more surprising than these. Pitfalls lie at either extreme. If we overread the accident, attributing too much meaning to it, we risk projecting our own fantasies of causation onto it, which is precisely what Howells lamented in the Haymarket trials. Scapegoats are produced this way, and conspiracies too easily imagined. But on the other hand, if we underread the accident, accepting claims for chance too readily or naively, we risk becoming blind to complex causes that might yet be understood. Criminals are excused this way, as are social, economic, and cultural conditions that otherwise might be seen as causal. The broader point is that Hazard provokes this level of interpretive complexity by admitting the possibility of chance and its attendant irregularity and irrationality to the ethical questions of modern life. Far from negating moral judgment, the production of chance facilitates—indeed, demands—more sophisticated modes of ethical reflection and debate. Moreover, by exposing accidents as literary contrivances so openly in the end, Hazard finally refuses to naturalize chance entirely as a function of the real world and asks readers to reflect instead on the circumstances of its literary production. One of the core problems in Hazard involves the management of a world in which chance proves so destructive and so productive, so damaging to our best-laid plans, and so indispensable to our social and moral lives. One of the solutions the novel identifies is the institution of insurance.

“The Metropolitan” and Mental Life Historians of insurance typically argue that the industry developed in response to the increasing number and severity of actual hazards in the nineteenth century. By this view, insurance is strictly a secondary adaptation to a primary set of social, economic, and material changes in Western culture.21 To some extent this is true, but I argue here that insurance is perhaps better thought of as producing those hazards, not by contriving actual events but by publicizing certain kinds of violence that insurance characterizes specifically as accidental. When the policyholder signs the insurance contract, she concedes that there are practical limits to her ca-

  The Insurance of the Real pacity for self-protection and to the benefits of even her utmost prudence. A person who thinks her house is in imminent danger of burning would call the fire department, but she would call an insurance agent only after making a much more general concession about her inability to prevent such fires over the long term. Millions of Americans were making exactly that concession in the late nineteenth century. As a result, it makes sense to think of insurance as creating a culture of accidents rather than simply subsisting within one. It makes even more sense to think of insurance as constituting new kinds of subjects who are willing and able to tolerate those conditions, rather than simply recruiting them. Insurance reached maturity after the Civil War, but it had been growing and developing for more than a century.22 The first American marine insurer opened in 1721, and in the colonial period and the early Republic, small-scale operators, usually in port cities, branched out into fire and other forms of casualty underwriting. Life insurance appeared around the beginning of the nineteenth century on a very limited scale, but suddenly, around 1840, the life insurance industry boomed.23 Although relatively few people owned a ship or a home worth insuring, they all had a life they valued, and underwriting those allowed the industry to expand dramatically. In 1840, fifteen life insurance companies in the United States had less than $5 million worth of life policies in force, but by 1860, forty-three companies had almost $205 million worth of policies in force.24 It would be difficult to boom more explosively than this, fueled, as the expansion was, by the growth of urban centers, a burgeoning economy, and ongoing national expansion.25 By midcentury life insurance had turned an important corner: between 1843 and 1847, seven important mutual insurance companies opened for business, all of which dealt only or primarily in life insurance, and many of which are still in business today.26 Two important developments helped the industry grow more stable as well. The first was the improvement of statistical methods; the second was state regulation. Astonishingly, up until the 1860s, American life insurance companies had based their actuarial work on English mortality tables, a vestige of Enlightenment universalizing that trusted nineteenthcentury Bostonians to die at precisely the same rate as the seventeenthcentury residents of Northampton, England. When Sheppard Homans at Mutual Life compiled the first mortality table based on American ex-

The Insurance of the Real    perience and compared it to the figures his company had been using, he found that more Americans died when young and very old, but fewer died during middle age. (“We live faster,” Homans said. “We burn the candle at both ends.”)27 These more accurate mortality statistics translated into lower premiums and greater stability. Regulation arrived around the same time. First in Massachusetts and later in New York and much of the rest of the country, state oversight forced companies to set safer margins, which protected consumer interests and, in the long run, gave the industry the stability and credibility it needed most. So by 1890, when Howells published A Hazard of New Fortunes, the insurance industry in whose offices the novel begins had a ready and willing market, a revived economy, reliable actuarial methods, a track record of stability, tacit approval of state government, and at least the appearance of ethical integrity. By leaving behind its old reputation as what one insurance reformer called “the biggest humbug in Christendom,” insurance convincingly claimed the moral high ground of prudence, caution, and restraint.28 The reformer who leveled that charge was Elizur Wright, perhaps the most influential figure in the development of life insurance in the nineteenth century. A leading abolitionist, a brilliant mathematician, and the first English-language translator of La Fontaine’s Fables, Wright earned early notoriety for allegedly helping the runaway slave Shadrack Minkins escape from a Boston courtroom in 1851, for which he was arrested, tried, and eventually acquitted. But when Wright had visited England in 1844, he was astonished to see an auction of human life outside London’s Royal Exchange more than a decade after England had banned slavery. What Wright saw would change the course of his career and redefine the commercial landscape of the United States following emancipation and the end of the Civil War. For the auction he witnessed trafficked not in actual human lives but in lapsed life insurance policies, through a lively secondary market in which buyers bid to be listed as beneficiaries on policies owned by people who were aged, sick, or poor. “I had seen slave auctions at home,” Wright wrote later. “I could hardly see more justice in this British practice. If I should ever become old myself, I thought, I should not like to have a policy on my life in the hands of any man with the slightest pecuniary motive to wish me dead.”29 This extraordinary moment signals the extent to which the moral

  The Insurance of the Real and political rigors of abolition could be, and in fact were, applied to the unlikely field of modern insurance, the practice of which Wright often excoriated in the harshest terms, but the theory of which he revered. “The civilization of this continent has no institution of which it has a better right to be proud,” Wright said of insurance in 1871: “Life insurance is so good, is capable of a so much wider application, and is so thoroughly in unison with the spirit of our republican society, that it cannot fail, by-and-by, to be understood by everybody and enjoyed by everybody who needs it.”30 Even before the Civil War, Wright began to transfer his abolitionist zeal into a second career as an actuary and insurance reformer, and from 1858 to 1867 he served as the first insurance commissioner of Massachusetts, before spending the last two decades of his life pressuring the industry, often successfully, for even more substantive reforms. Wright’s ambivalence about insurance reflects both the dystopian fears and the utopian hopes that have long swirled around life insurance. If life insurance threatened to create a new marketplace for trading in human lives, it also promised to foster marvelous new systems of risk and asset sharing that might alleviate the economic hardships of the most vulnerable populations. And in that way, Wright—an avowed liberal, and once president of the National Liberal League—saw insurance as an instrument by which individuals might associate voluntarily for the greater good of all. Insurance, he said, “is the realization of fraternity without the destruction of independence and individuality,” and in that way, “is better than a rich uncle.”31 No leftist or socialist, and a strident foe of trade unions, Wright was equally wary of large corporations, including corporate insurers. When he died in 1885, the term “progressive” was just coming into fashion, but Wright is best seen as a liberal progressive opposed to all large concentrations of power, whether in corporations or unions, while also supporting state and federal regulation of business and markets. As his biographer Lawrence Goodheart says, Wright was “oblivious to the plight of labor,” and his political causes—including both abolition and women’s suffrage—were grounded in the liberal value of fundamental equality before the law.32 Accordingly, Wright’s efforts to reform the insurance industry can be seen as attempts to temper an age of increasingly corporate capitalism and extreme individualism with the reasserted values of republican civic virtue. His optimism about insurance’s ability to create associations of freely contracting

The Insurance of the Real    members is thus grounded not in class commitments but in a more general commitment to the education and organization of “the public,” an entity held in ever greater suspicion, if not contempt, by the century’s end.33 As a result, even as Wright tirelessly argued that “the facility for swindling in life insurance is so great, that the wonder is that it should ever be conducted with any degree of honesty,” he nonetheless saw it as an important mode of resistance to even more threatening political trends.34 Wright had reason to worry about the concentration of power in the insurance industry. In 1877 he warned that although there were “fifty or sixty” life insurance companies in business, “more than half of the business is done by five, and one engrosses one fifth of the whole.”35 By the end of the century the major players had consolidated even further, for even though insurance had no single preeminent monopolist such as Standard Oil, it did have the “Big Three,” Mutual Life, Equitable, and New-York Life, each of which had $1 billion of insurance in force by 1899.36 Moreover, dozens of other companies, such as Metropolitan, Prudential, and John Hancock, were by no means minor players, and many of them were still among the largest of all American companies.37 Whereas Wright was sometimes prone to think of insurance as a loose confederation of individuals, Howells was more aware that it had acquired truly imposing institutional dimensions as well. Indeed, insurance looms ominously over A Hazard of New Fortunes from the very start, in the material form of the massive insurance buildings that continue to define the skylines of American cities to this day. Insurance offices such as Chicago’s Home Insurance Building, the world’s first skyscraper and a marvel when it opened in 1885, often were the largest and grandest of all downtown buildings, and many of the tallest skyscrapers in the United States continue to be owned by and named after insurance companies.38 The material footprint of the industry thus indicates its less visible, but even more extensive, economic stature. Readers of the original serial publication of Hazard in Harper’s Weekly in 1889 would have been confronted with the imposing dimensions of insurance architecture through a large illustration in the novel’s first installment depicting Basil March looking back ruefully at his employer’s edifice (see Figure 2). The caption, which quotes from the first book of the novel, dramatizes the distortion of the human scale and emphasizes the sense of awe that

  The Insurance of the Real

figur e 2 .  Basil March descends from the Reciprocity Life Insurance building. From the serial publication of “A Hazard of New Fortunes: Part First,” Harper’s Weekly 33 (March 23, 1889): 217. Widener Library, Harvard University.

insurance companies hoped to inspire: “They stood on the outside steps of the vast edifice beetling like a granite crag above them. . . .  March absently lifted his eyes to it” (13). The self-styled romantic sublimity etched in an “allegory of life-insurance foreshortened in the bass-relief overhead” is no Howellsian exaggeration, and insurers no doubt were delighted to find March’s lifted eyes instructing readers in how to regard them (13). I mention insurance architecture here in order to give some sense of the ambitious scale of the industry’s other strategy for achieving greater

The Insurance of the Real    visibility, even more pertinent to Howells’s concerns: the surprisingly extensive publishing empire I described at the outset. March’s “insurance paper” would have been one of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of periodicals that the industry produced, some by the companies themselves and others by a vigorous semi-independent insurance press. Often these newspapers and magazines published on topics well beyond the industry, and sometimes they included fiction, poetry, essays, and political commentary that were only tangentially related to the business of insurance.39 Through them, the industry claimed a degree of cultural relevance and intellectual richness that few other financial services thought worth having. Operated by well-educated men, many of whom, like March, harbored frustrated literary ambitions, insurance was well equipped to increase its own cultural capital through investments in art and literature. These efforts were frequently linked thematically to the work of insurance, as in the case of the Excelsior Insurance Company’s publication of its own illustrated edition of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem about a lone mountaineer, “Excelsior” (1841), in 1872. Published with Longfellow’s permission, as Christoph Irmscher has shown, the poem reminds readers of the perils of travel, including the “roaring torrent” and “awful avalanche,” as well as the special dangers facing a romantic quester like Longfellow’s sad youth, who is determined to go it alone.40 The biggest companies were rarely shy about appropriating emblems of artistic and humanistic value. New-York Life dubbed its massive home office the “Temple of Humanity.” Another constructed a replica of the celebrated staircase of Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera House in its U.S. headquarters. Executives also made extravagant claims for the cultural importance of insurance. In 1898, the president of New-York Life gushed, “The patriot who gives his life for his country, and the man who insures his life for the protection of his family, alike link their being with the future by unselfish devotion to present duty, and though they perish outwardly, they still live.”41 By linking themselves to art, high culture, philanthropy, and even patriotic martyrdom, insurers deemphasized their industry’s function as a financial service and instead practiced what Nancy Glazener has called “cultural stewardship,” the genteel, semi-philanthropic work associated with symphonies, libraries, and museums, which is conducted on behalf of the middle and working classes but which also helps consolidate orga-

  The Insurance of the Real nizers’ power, privilege, and high social standing.42 It should not be surprising that as the putative leader of Glazener’s “Atlantic Group” of literary realists, Howells looked back to insurance for reasons of his own. If art and literature offered insurance cultural capital, insurance offered literary realism a model by which writing, like underwriting, could intervene directly in the nation’s social, cultural, and economic life, in the profitable service of the middle and working classes, and at precisely those points where modernity seemed most accident prone and unstable. The allure of the accidental in Hazard thus owes something to the insurance industry’s own need to awaken potential buyers to the dangerous instabilities of the modern world. This 1856 article from the Insurance Monitor, one of the leading insurance trade magazines, shows the world as the insurance press would have us imagine it: precarious, dangerous, and undoubtedly underinsured. It appeared under the title “How We May Die—‘Now A-Days’”: Formerly there existed such a fiction as this, that men died what was called “a natural death.” This is now a sort of tradition with our race. . . .  But how is it now. Who dies a natural death? At best those who live longest die of disease. That is an unnatural death; just as much so as is death by murder or suicide. Suppose, however, for the sake of argument, we admit that in our present artificial state of existence, certain established orthodox kinds of disease are natural, or death by them may be regarded as natural, viz.: Fevers, consumption, heart disease, liver disease, small-pox, cholera, child-birth and so forth; still what a host of other means are now at hand for killing men. Railway engines, steamboat engines, steam, camphene, burning fluid, burning houses, foul streets, omnibus carriages, city rail cars, patent elevators, patent saws, patent shafts, patent pills, patent presses, screws, paddles, pistols, fire engines, fire crackers, fire damps, fourth of July; in fine, the catalogue of murderous agents is illimitable— co-extensive with the universal spread of science and the march of machinery. Man has multiplied the elemental agents of death to infinity. Who therefore can count on natural death? None of us. The best thing, therefore, for all of us who live exposed to so many chances—nay, certainties of death—for it is now a certainty that a certain number of us, called an average, will be killed every year, every month, every day, is to keep our LIVES INSURED, in order that we may leave wherewith to pay our funeral expenses and furnish our wives and children with bread and butter. Therefore we say to all men—insure—insure—and do it quickly.43

The Insurance of the Real    Christianity’s frequent reminder that no one knows the day or the hour of death reappears here in an advertisement for a service that stands ready to help. Such richly detailed descriptions of accidental injury train the expectations of customers who might otherwise be inclined to overestimate their safety. Such appeals were common. Another promotional article reminds readers that “each pulsation of the heart marks the decease of some human creature.”44 Still others remind readers of the number of American deaths per year, the average age of death, or the pitiable consequences of a wage earner’s death for his widow and children. Visual images were especially effective, such as the trade card (see Figure 3) published by the Mutual Accident and Endowment Association of New Orleans, which features an illustration of an exploding steamship, lest travelers forget how dangerous modern transportation could be. Insurance is thus not only an institutional response to economic or material conditions—a marketplace that facilitates certain necessary transactions—but also an extremely powerful disciplinary institution that constitutes new kinds of subjects for a new kind of society. Wright’s hope that insurance might function as a neutral forum for public association thus gives way to Howells’s partial recognition that insurance actively shapes the consciousness of those it serves. Francois Ewald is one of the few historians to have treated insurance as a discipline with this kind of cultural reach.45 Ewald argues that insurance produces certain kinds of modern individuals: “It not only manages them and makes use of them but actively constitutes them as its objects.” And further, he argues, the “insurer does not passively make note of actual risks in order to insure people against them. Instead, he produces risks by making them visible and comprehensible as such in situations where the individual ordinarily would see only the unpredictable hazards of his or her own particular fate.”46 I would modify this somewhat by pointing out that the insurer actually produces both calculable risks and incalculable accidents but that, in terms of the insurance industry’s public advertising, the production of accidents was far more prevalent and far more effective. Then as now, insurance advertising rarely makes any reference to its actuarial efforts, and instead, as shown in the trade card, highlights the baffling and terrifying experience of individual accidents. It is precisely the irrationality and incalculability of chance in private experience that impels the insurance

  The Insurance of the Real

figur e 3.  Trade card, Mutual Accident and Endowment Association of New Orleans, ca. 1885. Advertising Ephemera Collections, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, olvwork92352.

customer to confess his practical inability to devise an adequate strategy of private defense. Even rational and quantified risk analysis can be consoling when it reassures people that they can better manage the future for themselves. Indeed, measurements of risk often serve as ways of shifting the responsibility for choice back onto individuals. Chance, on the other hand, as produced in the previous passage and advertisement, offers no such rational reassurance. Ewald’s broader point, however, is well taken. The rise of the American insurance industry in the mid- to late nineteenth century should be recognized as an important source of new modes of modern identity and of new strategies of social administration. The idea that insurance simply responds to a world with a preponderance of accidents is thus not entirely accurate. It makes just as much sense to say that insurance produces violent injuries specifically as accidents, as bafflingly irrational eruptions of injury and violence that cannot be predicted or prevented to any appreciable degree. By derationalizing and demoralizing violence in this way, insurance proposed that the world was, to a significant degree, out of control and always resistant to even our

The Insurance of the Real    best strategies of mastery. Accordingly, the genre of insurance advertising is often that of the Jeremiad, a call to the complacent to take stock of a truly lamentable state of affairs and to confess partial impotence in a world permanently teetering on the brink of catastrophe. Only after such a concession will a potential customer agree to pay money in advance to protect against hazards that have not yet occurred. It certainly is true that insurance intervenes in a world with a great many injuries, and a world in which social developments, such as migration away from sources of informal family support, made insurance compensation more desirable than ever. But insurance addressed these practical needs not just by efficiently managing compensation, which it certainly did, but also by justifying those efforts in advance by insisting that no amount of private prudence or systematic management could ever render the individual entirely safe. Even Elizur Wright seemed to recognize that insurance, dependent as it was on its customers’ perception of their own vulnerability, was not entirely a neutral market for the buying and selling of risk. Insurance, he once said in a telling metaphor, “is the standing together, shoulder to shoulder, of hosts of manly men, to defend each others’ homes from that enemy who shoots on the sly and in the dark.”47 A committed atheist by this point in his life, Wright describes an “enemy” who clearly is not diabolical but aleatory, for insurance, in his metaphor, appears as a military mobilization against the lurking menace of chance. I want to suggest, then, that what Howells perceives fully, and Wright more intermittently, is that insurance promoted and justified its collectivizing efforts largely by instituting new kinds of chance consciousness, through which Americans came to expect regular affliction by sudden and violent losses, to interpret those afflictions in amoral terms, and to do so with diminished regard for standards of responsibility or the exercise of justice. The efficacy of the mutual society depended on a corresponding, but precisely inverted, awareness of the vulnerability of the private self. The revolutionary methods of insurance compensation required, and continue to require, a revolution in consciousness too. An equally important point is that the chance collectivity of insurance depends not on an orientation toward some actual injury but on the general claim that chance is pervasively intertwined with all of our endeavors. Paradoxically, insurance makes accidents inevitable, even necessary,

  The Insurance of the Real by shifting them from the past to the future, so that loss is always waiting for us out there, distant in time, perhaps, but richly imagined in the present nonetheless. Rather than respond to the experience of a surprising and violent event by rationalizing it and moralizing it through narratives that promise to expand our capacity for control, insurance proposes that such events are, in effect, inevitable and that new accidents already are making their approach from obscure avenues of unreason. The industry’s advertisements, contracts, and monthly premiums mark out spaces in the present that commemorate these unpredictable but inevitable losses-tocome, and they thereby render those future losses real, undeniable, and specific, not to mention as vivid in the imagination as past losses could be in memory. The rationale behind chance collectivity thus configures chance itself as a dangerous and alien other that has infiltrated every aspect of daily life. Chance is not an enemy of the state but an enemy of reason, a cunning agent of chaos and disorder against which a more inclusive collective might unite. Abstract but omnipresent, chance so conceived could compel social affiliation in situations where shared identity might be in short supply, or even where social hostilities might otherwise prevail. As a result, chance could take the place of foreign nations, suspect immigrants, despised minorities, or political ideologies perceived as hostile, and so produce a far less belligerent and xenophobic collective. Like a universal scapegoat, chance is present everywhere and must never be entirely tamed or expelled if the fragile unity of the chance-afflicted is to be preserved. Ironically, then, and against Wright’s republican optimism about insurance, A Hazard of New Fortunes imagines that collectivity might be constituted not in opposition to the threat of hostile enemies, such as the Haymarket anarchists, but through more systematic and social defenses against the abstract villainy of chance.

Insuring the Real In the novels Howells published in the half decade before Hazard, he grew ever more aware that informal modes of mutual assistance based in the shared identity of family or community were no longer adequate to the complexities of the modern world. As early as The Rise of Silas

The Insurance of the Real    Lapham, Howells diagnosed the problem with informal models of social interdependence and began to consider the value of the systematic compensatory mechanisms of insurance. Strictly speaking, Lapham’s financial fall hinges on his failure to insure his half-constructed home, not on its actual destruction and not on his other speculations, for its burning would have been an inconvenience, not a catastrophe, if only Lapham had kept his fire insurance policy in force. As a result, the novel directs little blame toward Lapham for having left a cigar smoldering in the fireplace. These things happen, it seems to say: cigars smolder and houses burn. Moreover, placing the cigar’s butt in the fireplace would seem to be a perfectly prudent course of action, and the presence of the police officer indicates the reassuring proximity of more public sources of assistance. All of this has a surprising consequence, however, because as a result the novel implies that no amount of prudence can safeguard one’s self and property entirely, not even when one does everything sensibly and when institutions of law and order are near at hand. Accordingly, modernity’s task was not just to prevent accidental injuries and losses, and not just to clarify standards of responsibility and liability, but to deal systematically with losses without having to undertake inquiries into practical or moral responsibility in the first place. The sharing of risks and resources in Silas Lapham needs exactly the kind of systematic coordination that insurance provides. In addition to the accidental fire, the novel describes a series of cascading injuries, losses, and liabilities that are so obscurely interconnected, and so practically bewildering, that even when characters think they are acting morally, or not acting at all, they are still complicit with seemingly distant injuries and losses. This results in a peculiar kind of moral powerlessness that eventually sends Lapham, and Howells, reeling away from simple faith in the efficacy of unsystematic and individualized responsibility, or even in the redress available through the courts. Wai Chee Dimock sees this problem as the key ethical crisis of Silas Lapham. Dimock shows that Lapham is unable to determine where his responsibilities end as he considers his obligations to his own family, Milton K. Rogers, Jim Millon’s wife, her child, Tom Corey, the Englishmen shopping for his property, and many others who extend out into what Dimock calls “an almost boundless radius of pertinence.” The result, she says, is that Silas Lapham’s respon-

  The Insurance of the Real sibilities seem “fatally expansive but also fatally expensive.”48 Dimock’s shrewd reading of the novel as an investigation of complex causation and unlimited liability configures it as an exposé of a kind of moral dilemma that neither the novel nor Lapham can readily resolve but that American culture was everywhere confronting on a much larger scale. Dimock relates Howells’s novel primarily to tort and negligence law, but using tort law to manage compensation was cumbersome, often seemingly arbitrary or unjust, and increasingly burdensome to the courts. However, the disastrous absence of insurance in Silas Lapham indicates that Howells already recognizes, to some degree, that an actuarial mechanism of compensation would be preferable to existing juridical ones. The problems of responsibility in Silas Lapham are thus very much the problems of a society still determined to link the payment of compensation to the determination of blame. Because this can be exceedingly difficult, especially under the complex conditions of urban modernity, Brook Thomas has argued that “Howells invites readers to enter a contingent world of chance, in which determination of responsibility is risky business because it can never be made with certainty.”49 But where Dimock sees the “fatally expansive” sprawl of responsibility as dangerously unbalanced, Thomas sees that very lack of balance as a new source of opportunity—a new chance—to reflect on our ethical investments in a world tilted toward injustice and inequality. I would suggest that there is a third option, indicated by Lapham’s disastrous lack of adequate insurance. It is not just that one cannot determine responsibility with full certainty, but that it might be better, safer, and cheaper for everyone if, in many cases, everyone agrees not even to try. To do that, one need only classify certain kinds of injuries and losses as irrational and amoral, which is to say, as accidents rather than crimes, so that they can be addressed by insurance companies rather than courts. Moreover, if the determination of responsibility was vexing in Silas Lapham, it became positively terrifying to Howells after the Haymarket trials, as he came to recognize that overmoralizing violence as crime could be far more dangerous than undermoralizing it as chance. Howells’s explicit return to insurance in Hazard thus marks the completion of a line of thinking that began when he first diagnosed the problem of unlimited responsibilities in Silas Lapham. The solution to that problem was to decouple compensation from responsibility, in order

The Insurance of the Real    to organize more effective modes of social interdependence around consciousness of hazards held in common. Gradually, novel by novel, Howells began to experiment both with softening standards of responsibility and with distributing responsibility socially. The name he gave to one theory of social responsibility was “complicity,” a term that first appeared in The Minister’s Charge (1886), where it describes a social, economic, and moral condition in which “everybody’s mixed up with everybody else.”50 As an unsystematic and unregulated interdependence ethic governed largely by individual conscience, complicity sometimes seems to be voluntary and nonbinding and, ideally, was to be internalized as an ethical norm. However, complicity also could shade toward other formations that were more assertively systematic and that approach and even surpass the redistributive mechanisms of modern insurance. In The Minister’s Charge, for instance, Evans praises Boston’s “Wayfarer’s Lodge,” a poorhouse for transients and convicts run partly by public funds, as an example of complicity in practice. Evans says to the minister David Sewell, “But don’t you see that in establishing and regulating a place like that the city of Boston has instinctively sanctioned my idea? You may say that it is aiding and abetting the tramp-nuisance by giving vagrants food and shelter, but other philosophers will contend that it is—blindly perhaps—fulfilling the destiny of the future State, which will at once employ and support all its citizens; that it is prophetically recognizing my new principle of Complicity?”51 What Evans calls “the destiny of the future State” is, of course, an unmistakable reference to the teleology of Marxism, the explicit terms of which Howells otherwise studiously avoided. Although Howells was flirting with Christian socialism the summer before he wrote Hazard, he finally was unwilling to ally himself with any such systematic movement, in part because he feared the propensity of such systems to increase oppression and exploitation in the name of moral reform. Accordingly, strong systematic reform is itself highly suspect in Hazard, and all of the novel’s reformers turn out to be practical failures. Conrad Dryfoos’s tenement ministry is the most traditional mode of moral uplift, but his father thwarts him, and he dies at the feet of the strikers he sought to save. The strike itself seems largely ineffective, despite Howells’s well-known sympathy for labor during this time. Lindau is a secular

  The Insurance of the Real socialist-anarchist in a long literary tradition of unsociable socialists, and his anger makes him unpersuasive and ineffective. Margaret Vance may practice a more works-oriented mode of Anglo-Catholic charity, but by the end of the novel she retreats to the seclusion of a convent. The most troubling reformer is certainly Colonel Woodburn. His disgust at the commercialism that he blames for ruining the South inspires his scheme for a benevolent slave state, which, according to Fulkerson, “would have worked out slavery into a perfectly ideal condition for the laborer, in which he would have been insured against want” (179). The novel despises this appalling idea, but by ranking him with the other failed reformers, it shows just how dangerous success might be. Caught between the obvious limitations of purely private accounts of complicity, which seemed too weak, and the potential threats of organized social reform, which in Woodburn’s and Lindau’s cases seemed too strong, Howells gravitated toward the working alternative of private insurance. No utopian solution, insurance stands as a melancholy confession that, given the limits of liberalism, the perplexities of the law of torts, and the perceived perils of more assertive social reform, the best option might be a much less ambitious thing. Critics of Howells have exaggerated both his own complicity with the social and economic injustice he abhorred and, at the other extreme, his commitment to nascent radicalism in the wake of the Haymarket trials, but it would be more accurate to say that Howells’s deep ambivalence partakes equally of both status quo quietism and reformist zeal, of the political Right and Left, and of eighteenth-century liberalism and nineteenth-century socialism. He never settled comfortably with any of these opposed principles and ideologies, but for a time around 1890 he seemed to think that insurance might be able to contain and reconcile them all. Many insurers thought so, too. Insurance was sustained by a broad constituency spanning the political spectrum, uniting both socialist reformers and free-market liberals, all of whom appealed to insurance to vindicate their competing and seemingly irreconcilable ideologies.52 Accordingly, although I have spoken about insurance in general up to this point, as if it were internally undifferentiated by form and function, in fact, different insurance companies devised different organizational structures to express loyalty either to communitarian ideals of voluntary

The Insurance of the Real    interdependence or to the efficiency and profitability of speculation on misfortune. Those differences prove especially relevant to Hazard, which rejects the model of large, corporate insurance that was increasingly dominating the industry. One of the reasons that insurance may have succeeded so well in the American context is that as a bureaucratic technology for redistributing risks and assets, it actually helps conceal the fact that any such redistribution is occurring. In large insurance pools, the collective of the insured is entirely anonymous, so the mutual society consists almost entirely of its material exchanges, given that horizontal relationships between policyholders are almost entirely nonexistent. In a nation of liberal individualists, one of the greatest attractions of insurance may be that it so ably conceals the painful fact that compensation comes from the pockets of one’s peers. By fostering the illusion that each policyholder is engaged in a private contract with the company—a contract structured as a kind of bet against a future contingency—private insurance actually conceals the fact that the policyholder has joined the ranks of other mutually supportive members. This concealment of interdependence is surely one of insurance’s primary functions, and no mere ancillary effect. Insurance offers interdependence for those who prefer independence; it offers social solidarity for an antisocial population; it institutes precisely the kinds of need-based asset redistributions that socialists desired, while preserving the appearance of private, contractual independence that liberals had come to expect. Moreover, during the late nineteenth century, more insurers were moving away from the earlier model of “mutual insurance,” in which the company was effectively either a nonprofit service provider or a loosely organized cooperative owned by its policyholders. Even as early as 1877, Wright had lamented that the typical mutual company, “though constitutionally ‘mutual’ and theoretically perfectly democratic, is, de facto, autocratic.”53 During the 1880s and 1890s, however, the older mutual societies increasingly transformed themselves into actual corporations, a process known to the industry as “demutualization.” After demutualizing, the resulting for-profit and stockholder-owned company would sell insurance as a service to consumers who had no say in appointing the directors, no share in the profits, and almost total anonymity within the ranks of the insured. Richard McCurdy, president of Mutual Life (a misnomer, in

  The Insurance of the Real that his company no longer practiced the mutual model but retained the name for its marketing appeal), argued that all insurance must adopt the corporate for-profit model to survive and that, in the future, the “purely mutual company will drop asunder.”54 It has not done so even today, but by 1890 it was clear that the corporate model was gaining popularity, and Basil March’s company at the beginning of Hazard may be one of dozens during these years undergoing demutualization. The novel is circumspect, but regardless of whether Reciprocity Life is formally demutualizing, it seems to be experiencing some sort of institutional transformation that is making it, one suspects, less reciprocal than before. The narrator tells us that March had received “some suggestions of enterprise in certain ways,” which he clearly finds offensive: “The things proposed seemed to March undignified, and even vulgar; he had never thought himself wanting in energy, though probably he had left the business to take its course in the old lines more than he had realized” (33). Judging by the changes in the industry during the 1880s and 1890s, the “old lines” very likely refer to the complicity ethic incubated by the mutual system, which elevated interdependence to the level of high moral virtue. There was another alternative as well, however. Even as corporate insurers and the remaining mutual insurers increasingly dispensed with any consciousness of the policyholders’ membership in a collective, new cooperative insurers and fraternal benefit societies began to flourish in the 1870s, and they depended entirely on group identification. Often organized around ethnic or religious identity, and especially popular among the northern and eastern European immigrants of the upper Midwest, fraternal societies actually fostered, rather than hindered, a sense of belonging to a larger collective. They had the most practical reasons for doing so. By making policyholders conscious of the fact that all benefits came most assuredly from other Catholics, Slovaks, or Odd Fellows, insurers cut down both on insurance fraud and on the overconsumption of benefits.55 By 1895, fraternal benefit societies actually had more life insurance in force than the regular companies.56 I want to suggest, then, that the changing shape of the industry in the 1890s, as both corporate and fraternal insurers split the older mutual lines between them, bears strongly on Howells’s own burgeoning interest in the social possibilities of insurance.

The Insurance of the Real    The problem with the corporate model was that it utterly and completely privatized the experience of insurance, eradicating any sense of complicity with others. The problem with the fraternal model, however, was precisely the opposite, for even though it heightened members’ consciousness of complicity with each other, it depended on the maintenance of preexisting class, ethnic, religious, and national distinctions, so it made identity a condition of interdependence. Howells seems to want something like the older mutual model, which was both democratic and widely inclusive, but not necessarily an intimate community fashioned around the perception of shared identity. In a mutual society, one might think of oneself as a member of a very general collective, but that would not require any very specific awareness of whether the collective also included communists, African Americans, Jews, or even the citizens of other nations, as almost all large mutual societies did. When March leaves an industry in flux, then, neither he nor the novel rejects insurance altogether but rather appropriates the abandoned mutuality of the “old lines,” which he and Fulkerson transplant to their new publishing venture, Every Other Week. The magazine’s “co-operative character” sets it apart from other periodicals, Fulkerson claims, in that it will “pay authors and artists a low wage outright for their work and give them a chance of the profits.” One of the first titles they consider for the publication is, significantly, The Mutual, a title Fulkerson dismisses because “they’d think it was an insurance paper” (10). But in some ways Every Other Week is an insurance paper, like those periodicals described earlier, because it emerges out of an attempt to enroll its employees—really members—into a system of shared fortunes that is as widely inclusive as possible. In the end, Every Other Week succeeds in combining the fortunes of a genteel editor, a bohemian artist, a German socialist, an Indiana farmer–turned–natural gas magnate, a Southern racist, and a young professional woman and illustrator, among others, in a cooperative venture that does not depend on their identification with one another. To be sure, such a society could be broader still, but it is already far more diverse than most fraternal benefit societies. Conversely, when these people come too closely into contact, the results tend to be disastrous, as at the dinner at Jacob Dryfoos’s house, which dissolves into a pitched battle between capital and labor. What Every Other Week accomplishes, it seems, is the system-

  The Insurance of the Real atizing of shared fortunes within a cooperative structure that is neither too intimate and homogenous nor too anonymous and abstract. March’s journal may be the sole credible exception to the novel’s suspicion about reform, because it seems to represent the successful transfer of a somewhat idealized mutual principle from the business of insurance to the business of literary production. Precisely because Hazard models the enterprise of editing and publishing a literary magazine on the business of mutual insurance, it invites us to conceive of realist writing itself as a mode of insurance underwriting. Eric Wertheimer has argued that earlier nineteenth-century literary writing partakes of the peculiarly deconstructive logic of a growing culture of underwriting, which lends “an imaginary permanence to the objectively transient” by granting a permanent and enduring value—the compensation promised—to that which is, by definition, already as good as lost.57 For Howells in Hazard, in contrast, realism is constituted not so much as a compensation for a lost object but as a confirmation of missing causes in the logical structure of events, which in turn compels us to resort to the language of chance. Writing is thus not really a compensatory function in this case, like insurance compensation, but a version of that other key insurantial effort, the production of chance. By narrating a world in which both causation and blame are obscure, in which the grammar of action is descriptive rather than narrative, and in which inquiries into violent action are forestalled or abandoned, Hazard in fact produces the chance dynamics it purports only to observe and describe. Several years earlier, Howells had imagined the work of realism as parallel to the productive labor of Silas Lapham, who extracts rich minerals straight from nature, processes them, and distributes them to those with a practical need for preservative paint. Lapham’s preservative paint is a utility paint, not a decorative one, and its usefulness lies in its ability to prevent damage and decay. By the time Howells publishes Hazard, however, nothing can preserve New York’s decaying social, material, and economic conditions. If Silas Lapham is partly a parable about the efficacy of preservative strategies, Hazard proposes that insurance offers a better kind of coverage than paint, not because it prevents material loss—nothing can—but because it spreads losses over a community that holds them all in common. Realism’s job, then, is not to mitigate the threat of chance by restoring rational or

The Insurance of the Real    moral order but to bring chance to consciousness from inside the literary marketplace, as a way of affirming the individual’s ongoing membership in a defensive collective equivalent to that of the mutually insured. There is one final and especially telling form of insurance in Hazard that bears mentioning, because it indicates just how far Howells’s interest in insurance could extend: Lindau’s pension for his service in the U.S. Civil War. March assumes that Lindau receives “twelve dollars a month, or eighteen, from a grateful country” (96), but Alma Leighton alleges that “there was a hitch about it, and it was somethinged—vetoed, I believe” (109). In fact, as Lindau later protests, “No bension of mine was efer fetoedt. I renounce my bension, begause I would sgorn to dake money from a gofernment that I ton’dt peliefe in any more” (319). What Lindau renounces is nothing less than the first large-scale public insurance program in the United States, a massive effort that began strictly as a benefit for disabled Northern veterans but that eventually became, as the actuary and social insurance advocate Isaac Rubinow first noted, not a “war pension” program at all but “an economic measure which aims to solve the problem of dependent old age and widowhood.”58 As Theda Skocpol has shown, the 1879 Arrears Act and the 1890 Dependent Pension Act extended pension benefits to veterans’ widows and children and to able-bodied veterans, so this military benefits program came close to functioning as a de facto old age pension system, roughly equivalent to the European social welfare programs implemented in the 1880s. Even in the United States, traditionally seen as a laggard in social welfare policy, the costs of these pensions were enormous, amounting to more than a quarter of all U.S. government expenditures between 1880 and 1910.59 By the end of that period, Skocpol says, roughly one-fifth of Northerners age sixty-five and older were receiving pensions, a rate of coverage similar to that in Denmark and Germany around the same time.60 Lindau’s forgone pension is the closest thing this novel has to a fully functioning system of nationalized complicity, inefficient and limited though it was in actual practice. If the hazards of warfare authorized insurance compensation for military veterans and their families, Hazard avers that the world of chance might justify a similar approach for what March calls the “armies of poor people” (191). Of the fractious classes, Howells wrote in Criticism and Fiction (1891), “Let us make them know one another better, that they may be

  The Insurance of the Real all humbled and strengthened with a sense of their fraternity.”61 This is realism at its most passive and optimistic, trusting that if people know more about one another, they will care more for one another. Realism-asinsurance uses stronger tactics and, through fear of shared perils, would drive those people into each other’s arms. The results are not “Imagined Communities,” as Benedict Anderson called them, that take shape when enough people read the same newspapers and novels.62 In Hazard, the tendency toward fragmentation is so great that social cohesion requires the impetus of genuine fear. Against the idea that social union would need to do away with the threat of accident, Howells imagines that accident is precisely the thing that might draw mutual societies together. To those with less ambivalence, this is apt to seem like a failure of commitment to more utopian possibilities, but it is perhaps better to see Howells’s insurance ethic as evidence of his own cultural resourcefulness and of his positively visionary sense of the actual contours of the emergent American welfare state. Class consciousness in America never did develop to the degree that socialist reformers hoped, but risk consciousness did. From military pensions, through early workers’ compensation schemes, to the New Deal, Americans, like Howells, found that they were eager for systematic interdependence, provided it was based in the compensatory practices and future-oriented fear of chance produced by the institution of insurance.

c ha p ter 2

Aimless Battles stephen crane

A telling scene at the end of Stephen Crane’s “The Five White Mice” extends Crane’s analysis of chance, ostensibly through gambling, to that most politically charged and profoundly symbolic of American actions, the act of aiming and firing a gun. When the New York Kid draws “a revolver of robust size” in a dark alley to face down three Mexicans, he “recalled that upon its black handle was stamped a hunting scene in which a sportsman in fine leggings and a peaked cap was taking aim at a stag less than one eighth of an inch away.”1 In the Kid’s own moment of aim taking, this image reflects an entire culture of shooting that was ascendant in the United States in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Part Natty Bumppo and part Theodore Roosevelt, the sportsman in his fine leggings is both a romantic and an aristocratic emblem of natural leisure, and also a modern marksman who literally cannot miss. By showing him taking aim from “one eighth of an inch away,” as he appears to do in this miniature scene, the engraving deploys a fantasy of perfect aim, in which the hunter can execute his intentions with complete and utter certainty. Modern rifles, more powerful and accurate than ever, promised to make that fantasy a reality. Marksmanship contests and sharpshooting exhibitions nationwide were attracting new attention, and their stars earned widespread admiration. As mass production drove down the cost of firearms, hunting grew more popular, even as commercial food production and distribution became the norm. And new gun advocacy groups, such as the National Rifle Association (NRA), founded in 1871, began promoting shooting as

  Aimless Battles a patriotic and civic virtue. What the New York Kid has emblazoned on the handle of his pistol, then, is nothing less than the imprint of a culture that was rapidly connecting shooting to its most cherished fantasies of individual autonomy, precision, and might. However, everything in Crane’s story works to undermine this fantasy of perfect aim. For when the Kid draws his own gun, he immediately worries about his ability to take aim. “If any hitch occurred in the draw he would undoubtedly be dead with his friends,” the narrator says (5:49–50). The “hitch” might be the smallest possible accident: “He imagined . . .  that some singular providence might cause him to lose his grip as he raised his weapon. Or it might get fatally entangled in the tails of his coat.” Even if he draws it successfully, “he feared that in his hands it would be as unwieldy as a sewing-machine” (5:50). The fantasy of perfect aim engraved on the pistol thus contrasts with the Kid’s concern that his own aim might be shaky and unreliable, and indeed once he draws the gun, “his finger was tremoring on the trigger” (5:50). Unlike the hunter on the pistol grip, assured of success, the Kid has entered into something that looks much more like a gamble. Accordingly, he utters a “gambler’s slogan” just before he draws his gun, a slogan he had first voiced earlier in the story while gambling with dice: “Oh, five white mice of chance, / Shirts of wool and corduroy pants, / Gold and wine, women and sin, /All for you if you let me come in— / Into the house of chance” (5:42). The five white mice had been, literally, the five dice in a game of poker dice, but in the darkened alley they become something else, the five other agents who lie equally beyond his command. Crane’s story thereby configures this armed conflict not as a test of wills between weaker and stronger participants who rely on power and skill but as “a new game,” a high-stakes gamble in which even simple, deliberate acts stand revealed as accident prone and highly uncertain (5:50). The most important recent work on chance in Crane’s works has read it specifically in terms of economic issues, and often through gambling, as in Walter Benn Michaels’s analysis of Crane’s gamblers as players in a “market society” or in Bill Brown’s study of Crane’s “economies of play.”2 Michaels sees throws of dice in Crane’s gambling tales as “intrinsically indeterminate acts” traceable to the governing logic of the speculative marketplace. Brown, conversely, claims that Crane’s chance-laden fic-

Aimless Battles    tion ultimately opposes the market: “when the short story does not simply chronicle accidental events but also foregrounds the operation of chance, it seems to compensate for the standardization that characterizes the story’s very production and publication.”3 However, this disagreement about whether chance reinforces or resists the marketplace conceals a deeper agreement that chance functions primarily in relation to economic issues. In contrast, I focus not on Crane’s stories about gambling but on his writing about chance in the context of late nineteenth-century shooting practices, which turn out to have only very limited relevance to economics in any direct sense. Just as “The Five White Mice” shifts its own attention from gambling to guns, so too this chapter will analyze chance in Crane’s fiction not in expressly economic terms but in and through the politics of late nineteenth-century shooting. Approaching Crane’s treatment of chance through shooting rather than through gambling and speculation allows us to approach the topic through fresh materials, primarily Crane’s war fiction, and in relation to a culture that Crane knew intimately. After all, Crane had only limited interest in money and finance, but he was absolutely fascinated by guns. As a teenager, Crane allegedly bought a pistol from a Wyoming cowboy and famously brandished it at older students at Lafayette College.4 Crane joined gun runners smuggling “bundle after bundle of rifles” to revolutionaries in Cuba and almost died when their ship sank (9:85). Later, he showed Ford Maddox Ford how to kill a fly by using the gun sight on his Smith and Wesson pistol, and he entertained Harold Frederic by shooting his revolver on his rented English estate.5 Because Crane knew guns so well, and practiced shooting so enthusiastically, he writes about guns and shooting with an insider’s perspective, which makes it incumbent on readers to recover the particularity and detail of the late nineteenth century’s surprisingly complex shooting culture. However, it is all too easy to treat shooting as a purely mechanical action that remains fundamentally the same from its earliest European manifestations in the fourteenth century through the present, but in fact shooting turns out to be as changeable through time as dancing or drawing or any other cultural practice. Especially during the late nineteenth century, the invention of modern, low-cost, breech-loading rifles led to rapid changes in shooting practices and military strategy. Indeed, only

  Aimless Battles when we recognize how widespread the fantasy of precise and perfect aim had become can we appreciate Crane’s representation of shooting as a wild pageant of aimless chance. Plenty of people are shot in his fiction, to be sure, but usually by stray bullets or unseen foes, and just as often bullets whistle past their intended targets. Accordingly, instead of narrating scenes of careful aim and intentional violence, Crane more often describes soldiers firing into smoke, into bushes and forests, at “blurred and shifting forms,” and in wild frenzies of aimless discharge that make all outcomes seem decidedly accidental (2:36). During the Spanish-American War, for instance, Crane claimed Spanish troops “could only hit by chance, by a fluke” (6:251), while the Americans’ Cuban allies “cannot hit even the wide, wide world” (9:140). This kind of shooting represents the normal state of affairs in Crane, so what he calls “the mystery of a bullet’s journey” turns bullets into something like dice, implements that people put in motion but that then seem to contrive outcomes all their own (6:89). By reading Crane’s fiction in relation to a set of neglected rifle training manuals and military strategy papers from the turn of the century, we can see that his war stories in fact address, and attempt to reconcile, two competing and precisely opposed theories of shooting that were influential at the time. In talking about exactly the same guns, one group described shooting as chancy, while the other described it as virtually chanceless; the first thought the inaccuracy of shooting made individual intentionality irrelevant to war, while the second thought the accuracy of rifles made individual choice supreme. Accordingly, the first group thought that the chancy nature of modern shooting justified strict efforts to organize the ranks of soldiers in a much more hierarchical and disciplined collective. In contrast, the second group thought that the power and precision of modern rifles justified highly individualistic battle strategy and military organization. These two groups fought their own furious policy battles within the U.S. Army from the 1890s through World War I, and though Crane aligns himself with neither, we can best understand his own chancy shooting as attempting an idiosyncratic synthesis of both. In the end, Crane’s narratives of aimless shooting are an important part of his broader commitment to a fierce egalitarianism, one that sought the violent scrambling of all entrenched hierarchies of status and power, in order to curtail greater violence still. The very worst state of affairs, and the one that Crane’s aim-

Aimless Battles    less shooting is designed to avoid, is the one engraved on the Kid’s pistol grip, a scene of such certain aim that no accident can avert the intended killing. A better option appears in the Kid’s own gamble with that same gun, in which the uncertainty of the entire operation augurs against any actual murder. For Crane, chance generates a looser kind of chance collective than we saw in Howells, but one that nonetheless has more subtle socializing effects. More than gambling, more than financial speculation, shooting guns wildly, blindly, and aimlessly, so that the bullets could be said both to hit and miss by chance, allowed Crane to imagine a world that was not just radically open-ended and rich with possibility but also more just than any available alternative.

Taking a Chance at Chancellorsville The most important gesture in a Crane story usually appears near the end, as Crane modifies, parodies, or renounces traditional modes of narrative closure. After the New York Kid’s hesitant and shaky aim taking at the end of “The Five White Mice,” he prevails without firing a shot, and everyone walks away. The story concludes with the deadening last line, “Nothing had happened” (5:52). A great deal has happened, of course, but not the expected slaying, which the story had all but promised and which any reader of western genre fiction no doubt expects. That conclusion serves as a complex example of the peculiarly anticlimactic narrative form that Crane invented and perfected. Anticlimax is itself the thing that happens at the end of many Crane stories, in empty moments of nonaction in which expected resolutions simply do not occur. In “A Mystery of Heroism,” a Civil War soldier runs across a battlefield to fill a bucket with water and, against all odds, is not shot. As he returns with the full bucket to his cheering lines, it falls and spills on the ground. At the end of “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” the villain Scratchy Wilson shoots up the town while on a drunken bender, but when the sheriff returns, they do not have the expected showdown in the street. Instead of drawing a gun, the sheriff draws forth his new wife, and Scratchy simply walks away, scratching his head. And in “One Dash—Horses,” Mexican bandits chase an American across the desert, but instead of fighting they all stumble on a regiment of the Mexican army, which simply orders the pursuers away. All of these

  Aimless Battles stories, and others, promise moments of traditional narrative closure that they subsequently fail to deliver. Tellingly, they also involve moments of haplessness and chance, as in the dropped bucket or the chance encounter in the desert, and in the vocabulary of that final line, “Nothing had happened.” This absent happening at the end of “The Five White Mice” refers us back to an Old Norse word for chance, happ, a root that appears prominently in many other modern English words related to chance, such as “mishap,” “hapless,” “haphazard,” and even “perhaps.” To say that something “happened” is to decouple action from agency, and so to avoid integrating it with other accounts of causes and conditions. The mishaps and haplessness at the ends of Crane’s stories thus channel back through this etymology to that primary object of American pursuit, “happiness.” The vacancy and absence that is chance—its radical negation and emptiness, as it appears especially in Crane—turns out to keep things coming out differently, which is to say, happily, every time. I want to suggest at the outset, then, that Crane’s revision to the romantic ethos of self-determination and self-control begins at a point where happiness ceases to be something we deliberately or intentionally achieve and instead constitutes a condition of ceaseless change occurring around and outside the self. The etymology of the word “happiness” names the elusiveness of a condition that cannot be easily compelled, or even very easily described. But given that happiness was enshrined as a founding goal of American democracy, Crane insists on reclaiming its origins not in rational, deliberate pursuit but in the more accidental qualities that seem to govern its appearance within his fiction. No glib condition of plenitude and satisfaction, happiness, in Crane’s formulation, becomes the name for what may even be a painful experience of a world that nonetheless drastically exceeds both our capacities and our expectations. The anticlimactic endings of Crane’s stories perform similar absent happenings. Although all of the stories previously described end with someone not being shot, all of them also contain telling references to empty vessels. In “A Mystery of Heroism,” the accidentally spilled bucket literally evacuates the story of traditional meaning. In “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” Scratchy Wilson leaves “funnel-shaped tracks” in the sand, through which anything like a moral drains away (5:120). And in “One Dash—Horses,” the title itself names the dash of dice from a cup, which

Aimless Battles    stands empty once the gamble is done.6 Crane stocks other stories with similar empty vessels as well. We might recall the riddling reference to the empty teacups at the end of “The Monster” or the blasted frying pan, “only a rim with a handle,” from “A Man and Some Others” (5:63). All of these empty vessels function as metaphors for stories that refuse to collect and carry content in traditional ways. Those that conclude in moments of chance connect the “Nothing” that “happened” to an especially radical conception of chance, which Crane often imagines as the utter negation of meaning and intelligibility. Both Crane’s anticlimactic narrative forms and his preoccupation with images of empty vessels relate to his account of aimless shooting. In addition to linking the evacuation of meaning to the empty vessels, each story links it to the prominent appearance of a failed or thwarted shooting, sometimes because the shooting was inaccurate and sometimes because the participants failed to shoot at all. This coupling of anticlimactic narratives with depictions of failed shooting appears most prominently in Crane’s career-making Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage (1895). Almost everything happens by chance in that novel. The young soldier at the center of the story, Henry Fleming, fires blindly, wanders through the battle, happens to escape injury, then chances to be knocked on the head in precisely a way that can mask his shame. Between his flight and his return, the story configures all of his encounters with other people, both living and dead, as accidental. Moreover, soldiers rarely are willing or able to aim their guns. Confederate soldiers are almost always invisible, concealed in the smoke as deeply as they are concealed in the narrative, and impossible to discern as anything other than a “brown swarm” on a “foe-swarming field” (2:33, 34). At that swarm, Fleming fires “a first wild shot” and later “fired without apparent aim into the smoke or at one of the blurred and shifting forms” upon the field (2:34, 36). The fog of the battle confuses both war and text; the beclouded senses limit reason and forethought; the enemy is mostly unseen, the results of any given shot unknown, the larger movements of the battle obscure; and what the novel finally represents as Fleming’s battlefield victory turns out to be just one moment in what became a humiliating Union rout. When Fleming concludes that he “could leave much to chance,” the novel does not necessarily imply that he had any other option (2:86).

  Aimless Battles Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote, “War is the realm of chance. No other human activity gives it greater scope: no other has such incessant and varied dealings with this intruder. Chance makes everything more uncertain and interferes with the whole course of events.” 7 But war narratives are often a different story, because even as the raw violence of battle can amplify the experience of uncertainty to its limits, war narratives frequently do just the opposite, restoring rational sequences of cause and effect and clarifying the moral stakes. Accordingly, war historians often present reasons why a battle proceeded as it did, by identifying concealed causes operating behind a chaos they judge largely superficial. As a result, war narratives frequently reassure everyone that things do happen for a reason after all, either because various kinds of material conditions, such as topography, weather, or the availability of supplies, determined the battle’s outcome, or because participants chose a course of action that directly altered subsequent events, or even because heroes swayed the action decisively. By narrating the interactions of causes and effects, war narratives defend against the more terrifying possibility that in battle, and perhaps everywhere else too, things might “happen” for no good reason at all. Yet Crane finally endorses exactly that narrative of modern war. The aimless firing Crane describes in Red Badge not only indicates what Crane thought the experience of Civil War battle might have been like but, at a deeper level, also attempts to refashion war writing as a mode of narrative that erodes our confidence in the rational connectedness of events. If, as Clausewitz claims, the actual experience of war is closely connected to chance, Crane’s goal is to see that narrative at least attempts to represent the baffling causal obscurity of such experiences rather than simply dispel it. Although the text of Red Badge does not name the battle described, Crane’s later story about Henry Fleming, “The Veteran,” confirms “That was at Chancellorsville” (6:83). Critics of Red Badge have tried to explain the choice of Chancellorsville through Crane’s brother’s interest in the history of the battle,8 fighting in the battle by a regiment from Crane’s hometown of Port Jervis, New York,9 or Crane’s own research for the novel, which drew heavily on an issue of Century Magazine from 1886 devoted largely to the battle of Chancellorsville.10 Whatever the case, given Crane’s interest in chance and shooting, the choice of Chancellorsville also may owe

Aimless Battles    something to the battle’s linguistic terrain, its name, which reverberates with the word “chance.” Strictly speaking, the name “Chancellorsville” refers to the office of a “chancellor,” a secretary or writing clerk, and in that way there actually is no direct reference to chance in the place-name. Yet that fact is the best justification for hearing a reference to chance after all. The presence of chance in Chancellorsville is itself an accident of the English language, an unnecessary echo that native speakers cannot fail to hear. Chance thus shows up in “Chancellorsville” by chance, for no good reason. To argue that Crane did not mean to refer directly to chance in the battle’s name, or that the word “Chancellorsville” contains no such real reference, would be entirely beside the point, because Red Badge turns out to be a document interested most of all in surprising conjunctions that no one intended in the first place. The novel’s title is a similar kind of misfire, in that it refers to what is literally a wound from a gun, a “Red Badge,” imagined as a military decoration honoring “Courage.” But this overdetermined symbol turns out to be utterly absent from the novel, because no one is shot in that lethal spot where a badge would hang, over the heart. If anything, the purple prose of Crane’s title parodies Henry Fleming’s only real wound, which comes from a blow to the head delivered by a ranting and delusional comrade. In Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick the overdetermined symbol swims in the sea, and in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter a different kind of badge is literally embroidered on Hester’s bosom. While the metaphysical meaning of those romantic symbols remains ever elusive, Crane does something quite different by refusing to include any actual precedent for his own title’s overdetermined symbol. For Crane, the point where the symbol hits its referent may be imagined as a kind of wound, an impact point that registers as violent injury. To shoot to kill, and to hit the target, is to achieve a consummation that Red Badge regards as fatal, and that it names in its title, but otherwise studiously avoids. In contrast, the moment when the symbol shoots past its referent, approaching but not colliding, or striking a glancing blow at the worst, may rob us of the thrill of killing contact but also opens up greater possibilities. Crane’s anticlimactic endings, the symbol that turns out not to have any referent, and the deadening “Nothing had happened,” all testify to the ways in which Crane associates the inscrutability of chance not with death but with a dynamic space for ongoing life.

  Aimless Battles Donald Pease has seen “the sheer contingency of Henry’s battle experiences” in Red Badge as evidence that Crane had “forcibly excised” historical continuity, unity, and ideological order.11 Because Crane “inveigles the arbitrariness usually associated with the chance event into the orderly narrative sequence,” Pease argues that Crane exposes the incommensurability of the Civil War to its authorized narratives.12 I want to suggest that the stakes are even higher, involving not so much the Civil War itself, a conflict long over before Crane was born, or even its specific commemoration in subsequent histories, but Crane’s own more theoretical reassessment of how allegedly intentional acts of language do, and do not, work. In its reception, Red Badge was not uniformly seen as a refutation of influential grand narratives of the Civil War but was rather received with a dizzying range of interpretations, including those that simply affirmed standard narratives of nation making and unification. Everyone was reading Crane’s novel in 1895 and 1896, but reviewers disagreed about whether the book was an exercise in high realism, an experiment in psychological impressionism, an elaborate allegory, a political satire, a traditional adventure tale, or something else. General Alexander McClurg famously denounced it as the story of “an ignorant and stupid country lad . . .  without a spark of patriotic feeling, or even of soldierly ambition.”13 Others succumbed to the temptation to read realism as real history, such as the critic in the Saturday Review who speculated, “Whether Mr. Crane has had personal experience of the scenes he depicts we cannot say from external evidence; but the extremely vivid touches of detail convince us that he has.”14 Of course, Crane was not born until six years after the end of the Civil War. Other reviewers were more insightful. By way of condemning Crane’s stylistic innovations, Nancy Huston Banks presciently identified them with the soldiers’ wild firing: “The short sharp sentences hurled without sequence give one the feeling of being pelted from different angles by hail—hail that is hot.”15 Harold Frederic may have summed up the early reception of Red Badge best. “Every bookish person had it at his tongue’s end,” Frederic said, but “it is a book outside of all classification.”16 If Crane’s book were a different kind of novel, we might simply say that it is ambiguous. In Henry James’s late novels, for instance, the text puts multiple simultaneous possibilities in play and leaves them suspended to vex readers and characters alike. But in Red Badge, as in Crane’s fic-

Aimless Battles    tion more generally, one rarely feels the palpable presence of lingering uncertainty. Jamesian ambivalence depends on the withholding of knowledge—especially knowledge about what one does or does not know—and so too on the abeyance of decision and choice. In that space of limited knowledge and prolonged delay, James’s novels explore the vast networks of possibility that stretch out from even the most mundane starting conditions. Crane’s fiction does just the opposite. Characters rarely reflect for any significant period of time, or in extended and articulate language. His narrator usually assumes a position of wry detachment. And instead of minimizing the action in a long novel covering many months or years, Crane maximizes action in short stories or novellas that can cover extremely short spans of time, often less than a single day. Crane’s characters have no better knowledge of the world than James’s, but the difference is that circumstances impel them to action regularly and repeatedly, and when confronted with epistemological problems, they tend to leap into motion rather than lapse into contemplation. As with their characters, so with their readers. Whereas James does everything he can to keep readers from committing to hasty and narrow judgments, thereby opening up a richly ambiguous field of possibilities, Crane lures readers into making judgments of all sorts so hastily that they actively commit to conclusions they very likely will come to regret. This is less a matter of ambiguity than of fallibility, because the text entices readers to make a set of guesses and then invariably confronts them with some reframing of the circumstances. But there is no sense in all of this that readers should practice a more cautious, patient, or Jamesian approach, for in Crane’s fiction it is not too much to say that there can be no thinking but in action. Action, for Crane, is not theoretical but experimental, and it must be hazarded with full knowledge that events usually do turn out differently than expected. All action strays. And this is precisely the point, for in straying from what otherwise might seem the one true path of interpretation, bullets, like texts, also generate variety and possibility rather than rationally orchestrated and predictable results. If Red Badge is “outside of all classification,” as Frederic said, surely that is because Crane patterns his writing on his own understanding of chance as an active and energetic spillage of meaning far and wide. There is actually something a little disingenuous in Crane’s metaphor of empty vessels, then, for while his stories may refuse to think of themselves as

  Aimless Battles collected material—mere content held in a static form—they do dispense something after all, for they are quite eager to be seen as active happenings within the material world, unfolding variously and unpredictably in time.

Probaballistics Crane’s interest in aimless shooting has its roots in actual developments in the history of firearms and resulting changes in their use in modern battles. Because Red Badge has been read so often as a commentary on the Civil War, readers have tended to look to the actual conditions of the Union Army for critical contexts. This may be a mistake. Crane, we know, was not a member of the military and did not come from a military family. Nor was he a war historian, and his research for Red Badge seems to have come from surprisingly few sources.17 As an imaginative reconstruction of battle, then, Red Badge may reflect a culture of shooting that has as much to do with the 1890s as it does with the 1860s. In fact, when we look at Crane’s larger body of work, we find that his formal and thematic innovations have precedents in historical developments that may have begun with the Civil War but that accelerated rapidly in subsequent decades. Before the Civil War, most guns used in the army were smooth-bore, muzzle-loading muskets that were dreadfully inaccurate. The ball could come out of the muzzle spinning in any direction, so like a baseball it would curve, rise, or knuckle depending on the axis of its rotation. This is the reason that General Israel Putnam in the Revolutionary War famously instructed his soldiers not to shoot until they could see the whites of their enemy’s eyes: at even one hundred yards away, these guns were extremely inaccurate. As a result, eighteenth-century muskets often were pointed from the shoulder at close range, not aimed more precisely, and the “Brown Bess” used by British and American forces in the late eighteenth century did not even have sights. By the time of the Civil War, however, the cost of manufacturing rifles dropped significantly. Unlike smooth-bore muskets, rifles have spiral grooves carved into the inside of the barrel. This “rifling” spins the hot gas expelled from the exploding charge, which rotates the bullet so that it flies like an American football thrown as a spiral. This makes it fly much further and truer, especially once the pointed “Minié” bullet

Aimless Battles    replaced spherical projectiles. Rifling roughly quadrupled the effective range of otherwise identical guns, and special sharpshooters’ rifles were more fearsome still. By the 1890s, the American rifle historian Arthur Corbin Gould could claim that “a modern American rifle will, if properly made, correctly charged, and handled by an expert, place a majority of shots in an eight inch bulls-eye at 200 yards.”18 Some of the military rifles of the Spanish-American War in 1898 had a maximum range of more than three miles when fired on a high arc, which was further than most soldiers likely would be able to see. Just as important, breech-loading rifles could be fired quickly and repeatedly, and mass-produced ammunition supplied soldiers with a far larger stock of bullets. With magazine rifles, a soldier might shoot hundreds of rounds in a day, as opposed to dozens in the Civil War. In theory, these technological advances should have empowered individual soldiers to accomplish more impressive and discriminating feats of violence, as they extended the rifle’s range and improved precision many times over. A number of observers expected just that. Jack London optimistically suggested that “the improvement in the mechanism of war has made war impossible.” London credits “this apparently absurd state of affairs” entirely to the new capacities of the rifle, which he thought was so deadly that few soldiers would be willing to face it in combat, and those who did would simply annihilate each other.19 In fact, the consequences of rifle accuracy were rather more complicated than London expected. As Gerald Linderman has shown, as early as the end of the Civil War, troops had begun to conceal themselves behind earthworks and barricades to hide from rifles, conduct that would have been seen as cowardly in previous decades.20 By the time of the SpanishAmerican War, troops pulled much further back, entrenched themselves, and constructed more solid barricades still, so soldiers could see little of their enemies at all, let alone the whites of their eyes. As a result, more firing and more missing happened than ever. Such conditions show up regularly in Crane’s Spanish-American War fiction. In “The Price of the Harness,” the narrator complains that “there was no enemy to be seen, and yet the landscape rained bullets” (6:111). Elsewhere he says, “It was not much like a battle with men; it was a battle with a bit of charming scenery, enigmatically potent for death” (6:104). The results of these conditions can be measured fairly precisely when they occur at sea. The rifled artillery guns

   Aimless Battles of the U.S. Navy were phenomenally accurate, but records show that in significant naval battles in the Spanish-American War, as many as 98 percent of all American shells fired at opposing ships fell harmlessly into the sea.21 The most precise and powerful artillery guns ever deployed simply could not be aimed accurately from a moving deck at a distant target, and more important, no enemy was foolish enough to come close enough for a point-blank shot. The accuracy of small-arms fire is harder to measure, but as strategists assessed long- and medium-range shooting in the decade after the Spanish-American War, the results were not heartening. A 1907 study by the U.S. Army Infantry and Cavalry School concluded that long-range shooting by even the most expert soldiers in actual battle at about twelve hundred yards would produce a hit just one-third of one percent of the time, or about one hit out of every three hundred shots fired.22 Under such conditions, war can hardly be seen only as a test of skill and courage between liberal stalwarts. In Crane’s journalistic coverage of the Spanish-American War and in his fiction, war appears instead as the operation of an absurdist universe in which both hitting and missing, being hit and being missed, all happen more by coincidence than by design. When a rifle can fire a bullet three miles, a shot aimed even slightly too high might fall far behind enemy lines. Accordingly, when one British soldier complained that enemy soldiers in the Boer War had fired on a British field hospital, Crane published an exasperated response: “Does he remember the range of the Mauser and does he remember that any fieldhospital, to be effective, would have to be within that range? In these days, a field-hospital is almost certain to be under fire—not necessarily fired at” (9:247). The difference between being “under fire” and being “fired at” lies at the heart of Crane’s reassessment of shooting. To be “under fire” is to endure a state of affairs in which actions may imperil the self and others in ways that no one quite intended. The battlefield ceases to be a contest between bloodthirsty enemies and becomes something like a modern factory, with dangerous metal objects constantly whirling in close proximity. In both Red Badge and in Crane’s Spanish-American War writing, then, there are very few scenes of deliberate violence, in which a soldier shoots and kills another man. Instead, there are repeated scenes of random bullet strikes, near misses, and soldiers slain from afar by unseen assailants firing

Aimless Battles    badly aimed or entirely unaimed shots. “The modern bullet is a far-flying bird,” Crane wrote. “It rakes the air with its hot spitting song at distances which, as a usual thing, place the whole landscape in the danger zone. There was no direction from which they did not come. A chart of their courses over one’s head would have resembled a spider’s web” (6:246). The most accurate rifles ever produced thus altered the epistemology of battle, as foes fired at each other from such distances that they frequently could not aim precisely and often could not tell whether they had hit or missed. Earlier battles were simply more intimate, as soldiers could see their enemies and the results of their own deliberate actions, but modern rifles made violence more impersonal and anonymous. If Civil War sharpshooters first made such a state of affairs possible, to the terror of both sides, the modern rifles of the 1890s made it universal. Under such conditions, Crane understood that accuracy was beside the point. Spanish soldiers have “from five hundred to a thousand cartridges at hand,” he wrote, so they “are bound to hit most everything. . . .  It is destruction by volume of fire; not by individual accuracy” (9:170). Crane was hardly alone in noting the decline of individual accuracy. As modern rifles grew more precise and powerful, a group of military strategists making waves in the U.S. Army emphasized the limits of aim, rather than its limitless potential. “No two shots fired at a distant target follow the same path,” wrote Charles Crawford, an American military theorist and a noted skeptic of marksmanship training.23 Henry Eames—another skeptical theorist—emphasized the well-known fact that even when a rifle is locked in an immovable iron vice, the bullets it fires still scatter in a normal distribution. Because error always intrudes on the process, Eames preferred to describe shooting probabilistically in terms of the “Mean Dispersion” of bullets around an intended target.24 Rather than describe the arc of a single bullet connecting muzzle to target, Eames and Crawford both talked about a “cone of fire,” a three-dimensional, horn-shaped space that spreads out from the muzzle of the rifle, defined by the divergent paths of all the bullets. Within the cone of fire, bullets fall in a normal distribution, with more near the center of the cone of fire and fewer near the edge. In practical terms, the shooter does not control the path of the bullet within the cone of fire. He can only create a wider or narrower cone of fire and move that cone of fire over the intended target while hoping for a hit.

  Aimless Battles Russell Gilmore has called the movement that Crawford and Eames advocated the “field firing” school of military strategy, but other than Gilmore’s short review, historians have largely ignored this fascinating chapter in military history, the fierce debate it sparked, and its broader relevance to American politics and culture.25 Field firers proved controversial for a number of reasons. On the one hand, their conception of shooting as probabilistic challenged cherished notions of self-control that careful and accurate aim seemed to validate. Drawing on tactics developed in Germany in the 1880s, as German officers retooled battle tactics for an age of high-powered rifles, field firers wanted less autonomy for individual soldiers, more group cohesion, firmer command, and stricter official control over aiming and firing. As a result, field firers tended to discourage individualized long-range marksmanship, which they saw as wasteful, and concentrated instead on two strategic innovations: first, organizing collective long-range barrages of rifle fire that could saturate the target with loosely aimed shots; and second, forcing soldiers to make more dangerous close-range attacks than they likely would risk on their own. In both cases, field firers proved highly skeptical of the autonomous conduct of the individual soldier. James Chester, one of the movement’s fiercest American advocates, allegedly advocated replacing the sights on enlisted men’s rifles with a spirit level so that soldiers would not be too tempted to waste ammunition shooting from afar.26 “Individualism is the enemy of discipline,” Chester concluded.27 Another advocate of field firing, A. S. Frost, claimed that “if each man is allowed to follow his own bent the army will soon become a mob.”28 “The era of an army of marksmen has passed,” Frost argued; “the era of mutual support and coöperation is with us.”29 Chester’s indictment of individualism and Frost’s reference to “mutual support and cooperation” seem expressly designed to enrage large segments of the U.S. military, to whom such language smacked of socialism and European class stratification. To be sure, the emergence of field firing tactics in Germany in the 1880s reflects the increased organizational sophistication of the German state, and it is no accident that Bismarck’s army developed field firing techniques in the same decade that his civil service developed social insurance programs. Both use probabilistic approaches to address individuals’ failure to control their actions and environments completely. The challenge this posed to Americans’ self-

Aimless Battles    conception as autonomous agents was clear. Looking back from 1918, one historian gloating over the eventual defeat of field firing wrote, “While the Goliath Bismarck was busy in his ponderous Teutonic way laying the foundations for ‘Deutschland über Alles’ in making the German soldier a non-thinking automaton, our little David Wingate was outwitting him by making each American soldier a capable and efficient little skirmishing army of one, with a perfect coordination between man and his weapon.”30 The Wingate mentioned here—cast as Goliath’s slayer—is George Wingate, the founder of the National Rifle Association and a staunch advocate of marksmanship training and the individualist ethos it supported. To Wingate, Germans might fire as a group under strict official command, but a real American takes aim by himself. We can see, then, that the politics of aim were a rather serious business in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in that their stakes seemed to involve nothing less than the proper political organization of the nation itself. The field firers’ emphasis on error, inaccuracy, and the imperfect accomplishment of any soldier’s intentions tended to detract from the possible contributions of the individual soldier and made it ever more pressing to organize an efficient and disciplined group. In fact, in the first half of Red Badge, Henry Fleming is a virtual case study in field firers’ conceptions of the demerits of the modern soldier. Field firers worried that undisciplined soldiers acting on their own would start shooting too early, fire too wildly, waste ammunition, then run away, precisely as Fleming does.31 So poorly did individual soldiers conduct themselves, field firers argued, that expert officers were better equipped to make judgments about tactics for the whole group. At this point, however, Crane and the field firers part company, for while Crane seems largely persuaded that the field firers’ description of aimless and inaccurate shooting accurately reflects the conditions of modern warfare, he was by no means convinced that a stricter and more vertical hierarchy of command was the best solution, or any solution at all. The question, then, is what kind of collective structures chance could or should generate. As noted previously, William Dean Howells came to regard the inescapable threat of chance as a justification for more robust forms of risk and asset sharing in liberal chance collectives, modeled on insurance societies. Howells came to understand that in order to

  Aimless Battles justify such systems, writers, above all, would have to produce new narratives of accidental and blameless violence. The field firers made a similar claim, but they justified a far more rigid and even coercive collective: the chance that thwarts all individual designs finally authorizes and even requires far more assertive modes of group discipline. Indeed, field firers sometimes insisted that officers should keep guns at their own soldiers’ backs, which turns out to be part of what Frost had termed, romantically, “mutual support and cooperation.” Of course, no one had less interest in highly systematized mutual support and cooperation than Crane, so even though his own accounts of aimless battle are quite similar to those of field firers, he finally imagined a drastically different kind of chance collective than either Frost or Howells. It may even be that the word “collective” is too strong for what Crane has in mind, which is really a set of radically egalitarian social relations that depend not on a stable structure but rather on the regular and ongoing upheaval of all structures through the application of random violence. His stories of chaotic and accidental battles attempt to imagine a set of conditions that might militate against the consolidation of power by those who already have the most, and the depletion of power from those who already have the least. If cruel fates are to be visited on the inhabitants of Crane’s cruelly egalitarian world, at least they will be distributed evenly. Crane was not entirely alone in supposing that the instability of the world around him justified new and more egalitarian modes of social solidarity. That idea is a close cousin to the socialist argument that in the short term, collective solidarity can best defend against capitalism’s economic caprice. One thinks, for instance, of Jack London’s famous story “To Build a Fire,” which is only superficially an individualist manifesto, because in the end the series of small accidents that doom the man to death confirm primarily that he should not have been traveling alone. Similarly, Crane’s “The Open Boat,” an account of his shipwreck during a gun smuggling operation, chronicles the struggle by Crane and three others to reach shore in a small lifeboat. In the teeth of that adversity, “they were friends, friends in a more curiously iron-bound degree than may be common” (5:73). Only three of the four survive the landing on the beach, and oddly, the victim is the oiler, who, once the boat overturned near shore, was at first “swimming strongly and rapidly” and was “ahead in the

Aimless Battles    race” (5:90). Equally ironically, the injured captain somehow survives. The chances of life and death, in this story as in Crane’s war stories, are not keyed to existing advantages. The story finally articulates its own deepest theme in one of the greatest sentences Crane ever wrote, an Emersonian aphorism devoid of Emersonian optimism, and one designed to deflate centuries of seafaring lore: “Shipwrecks are apropos of nothing” (5:74). Crane seems to mean that the stunning and singular accident of the shipwreck has no natural narrative connection to any other topic and comprises an order of experience entirely unto itself. Such are all accidents, we might say, if we define the accident as the epitome of nonnecessity. At another level, however, Crane also may be suggesting that shipwrecks are apropos of nothingness itself. That nothingness, which we encounter so regularly in Crane, is often the dark inner void of chance, the barrenness of nonmeaning and utter, confounding insignificance. That, at least, is how Crane most often produces chance, as a looming abyss big enough for us all. Yet confronted with such a stark vacancy of meaning disconnected from all other experiences, the captain, the cook, the oiler, and the correspondent—Crane himself—become “a subtle brotherhood of men,” not just in the abstract but in ways “heartfelt” and “personal” (5:73). As Patrick Dooley has pointed out, often in Crane’s work “crisis situations . . .  promote a sense of brotherhood,” an argument closely related to Dooley’s broader interest in pragmatism, which often sought social and collective solutions to what would otherwise be entirely private crises.32 But I would suggest that the real crisis situation in Crane’s fiction is nothing so discrete as a single shipwreck or an actual battle but rather consists of the more general derangement of reason and order by the intrusion of chance. Only the threat of chance, equally afflicting one and all, can transform fixed hierarchies into brotherhoods as subtle as this, and in a permanent and ongoing way. Consisting of temporary affiliations of imperiled equals, such brotherhoods are more prevalent in Crane’s war fiction than many readers have tended to acknowledge, though I think they cannot be divided into humane and “bogus” varieties, as Dooley suggests.33 For Crane, the collective defense against chance—which is always everywhere at once—simply compels collective affiliation, regardless of whether or not we approve of the group that results. Accordingly, “The Open Boat” can be linked with a wide range of Crane stories through

  Aimless Battles one key detail that we have already encountered: the “ten-foot dingey” of the “The Open Boat” is one of the most conspicuous empty vessels in Crane’s entire canon, as it spills its passengers into the surf in what is actually the second meaningless shipwreck in the story (5:69). As if to cement the connection between wrecked ships and other kinds of empty vessels, the injured captain repeatedly droops over a large “water-jar” in the bow of the boat, and after the boat capsizes, “following them went the water-jar, bouncing gayly over the seas” (5: 90). As in Crane’s other stories that terminate in images of empty buckets, funnels, and cups, this scene of evacuation suggests that it is from accidents—and from their resulting losses—that our fragile social bonds are composed. What aimless shooting does, then, is generalize the conditions of chance across a wide terrain and so make common cause among people in even more distant stations than captains and cooks. The act of shooting, romanticized as the very pinnacle of individual intentionality, also appears in Crane’s account to be apropos of nothing. Whereas the field firers laid heavy emphasis on chance in order to justify new organizational discipline, Crane does so in order to salvage a bare minimum of “subtle brotherhood” in small and fragile societies of the chance-afflicted. This is not, it must be conceded, a very heartening view of the possibilities for social cohesion in the modern world, but it does indicate the extent to which Crane identifies those social structures already in existence with even greater and more vicious brutality.

Sure Shots Crane’s harsh egalitarianism, born of chance, is not a very practical prescription for American society, it must be conceded. Unlike Howells’s attempt to put chance to work in an organized system of collective defense, Crane’s portrait of an aleatory universe is primarily critical and oppositional and arrayed against other systems already in place. Largely indifferent to organized social reform, Crane nonetheless was extremely sympathetic to the marginal and the poor, from urban prostitutes to enlisted soldiers in the lowest ranks. So while Crane rejects, or at least ignores, practical possibilities for social reform, he also, and even more vociferously, rejects various individualist philosophies and politics loosely

Aimless Battles    associated with social Darwinism, which justified, rather than alleviated, existing social inequalities. By rejecting fixed and static social systems in favor of changeable if temporary chance collectives, Crane also rejects the romantic fantasy of rational and responsible individual agency in favor of a conception of the self that was far more accident prone. Precisely during Crane’s lifetime, starting with the founding of the National Rifle Association in the year of his birth, the act of aiming and firing a gun became one of the key rituals of American individualism. The right to bear arms, enshrined in the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, had made guns an important part of Americans’ political heritage from the beginning, and many early nineteenth-century Americans connected guns to the core values of liberal democracy. The American edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries (1803), edited by St. George Tucker, a Virginia judge, makes it abundantly clear that the Second Amendment is “the true palladium of liberty.” Tucker says, “Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.”34 But while citizens of the early Republic fostered lively debates over the meaning and the value of the right to bear arms, as Saul Cornell has shown, the object of the gun itself, and the ritualized act of shooting it, became especially important only later in the nineteenth century.35 At that point, beyond the theoretical right to bear arms, the practical act of actually aiming a gun, pulling the trigger, and evaluating one’s shot validated and affirmed liberal conceptions of a free and fully empowered self. In this way, the practice of shooting is in some ways a separate issue from the constitutional right to bear arms. That right seems most closely affiliated with possessive individualism, in that it addresses concerns about government restrictions of the ownership of private property. However, the new shooting practices of the late nineteenth century involved not just gun ownership but rituals of rifle practice, acted out both publicly and privately as ways of demonstrating the extensive capacities of individual free will. If Americans performed one kind of liberal individualism through the act of owning a gun, they performed a different kind through the demonstration of precision and power while actually firing it. Even though demonstrations of power had long been possible with

  Aimless Battles guns, demonstrations of precision were more widely available once the new technology of the modern rifle improved accuracy and drove down costs. Muskets were a terrible metaphor for the liberal self: inaccurate and useful only at close range, they were mostly instruments of brute force best used in coordinated volleys by massed soldiers or by hunters at very close range. Although rifles certainly existed in the early Republic, they were less powerful and less accurate than late-century models, and they were expensive and difficult to maintain. But after the Civil War the cost of manufacturing rifles dropped considerably, the army introduced rifles as standard infantry weapons, and hunters took advantage of rifles’ improved power and accuracy. Accordingly, Crane’s depictions of aimless shooting challenge this emerging gun culture, in which accurate rifle firing, not just rifle ownership, validated an outsized conception of the liberal self. The allure of rifle shooting was not entirely new, of course, and the allure of sharpshooting dates back at least to James Fenimore Cooper’s famous marksman Natty Bumppo. Bumppo was one of America’s most prominent early instructors in the merits of “quick and sartain aim,” as he calls it in The Deerslayer (1841), and consequently a foundational figure in America’s early culture of marksmanship.36 Throughout Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, Bumppo goes by the name “Hawk-eye,” and even “la Longue Carabine,” both of which link him to his “terrible rifle.”37 After the Civil War, however, new weapons brought Natty Bumppo’s exploits out of fiction and into the realm of fact. Americans flocked to popular sharpshooting exhibitions during these years to witness feats that would have been impractical, if not impossible, with earlier weapons. In 1878, William “Doc” Carver shattered fifty-five hundred glass balls thrown into the air in five hundred minutes with a rifle and promptly dubbed himself the “champion rifle-shot of the world.” A one-hundred-page appendix at the end of Carver’s autobiography reprints newspaper encomia published nationwide, which confirms the national appetite for such exhibitions. These stories also indicate how magical Carver’s powers seemed. “He did everything . . .  so easily and rapidly that it appeared like the work of enchantment,” enthused a writer for the Territorial Enterprise, published in Nevada. Labeling Carver a “Rifle Wizard,” the writer marveled that he “seems to shoot by instinct, and his bullets appear to go just where he wishes.”38 This idea that bullets might be guided by mere wishing, as if

Aimless Battles    telepathically, indicates the degree to which rifle shooting promised to fulfill romantic fantasies of supernaturally empowered agents, by seamlessly connecting thinking to doing. The gun was not just an instrument of brute force after all; rather, it made the material world newly subject to the most minute differentiations of free and rational choice. Carver worked this magic for even larger audiences as an early business partner of William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, whose Wild West Show originally featured Carver’s trick shooting alongside Cody’s own. Although Cody’s exhibitions have typically been read through their broader tropes of western nostalgia and Manifest Destiny, the spectacle of sharpshooting with technologically advanced weapons must have been an equal part of the appeal.39 Cody eventually replaced Carver with Adam Bogardus and his four shooting sons, and eventually with his greatest find of all, the Ohio farm woman named Annie Oakley, billed as “Little Sure Shot.” Before millions of spectators from 1885 to 1901, Oakley presented shooting as a kind of remote-control agency conducted not through masculine force but through feminine care and discretion. She shot cigarettes out of her husband’s mouth and ashes from the end of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s cigar. She severed playing cards along the edge, then pierced the half that was fluttering to the ground. While seeming to primp in a mirror, she shot glass balls out of the air behind her with a gun tossed over her shoulder. Middle-class audiences must have been disconcerted to see the angel of the household commanding such firepower, let alone drawing a bead on her husband, though for roughly half the audience that may well have been part of the appeal.40 Accordingly, the founding of the National Rifle Association in 1871 signaled a new cultural emphasis on practical training in firearms use and sparked a rush to organize new local rifle clubs as well. By 1885, there were at least seventy such local rifle clubs, some organized geographically, such as the California Rifle Club; some ethnically, such as the Irish Rifle Club or the Springfield Schuetzen Verein; and a few by profession, such as the Boston Press Rifle Club, the emblem of which featured a rifle crossed with a quill.41 Like the NRA, most of these organizations referred specifically to the rifle, even though Wingate easily could have called his organization the National Gun Association, had he wanted to broaden its appeal. But it was the rifle in particular, not the pistol, musket, or shotgun, that

  Aimless Battles endowed the shooter with an appropriate blend of precision and power. As the NRA extended shooting’s appeal to more people, it also gave the act of shooting a more pronounced political inflection, as private gun ownership came to embody esteem for private property and family, patriotic preparedness, family devotion, and even a commitment to manly modes of father-son intimacy. Lifelong NRA member Theodore Roosevelt was one of the most important public advocates for America’s gun culture, which Roosevelt yoked to his own mode of rugged individualism. At a moment when Americans increasingly relied on commercial food production and distribution, Roosevelt’s three books on hunting in the 1880s and 1890s helped transform the sport from a frontier necessity, or an aristocratic pastime, into a populist pursuit.42 During this period, Americans did not just foster a culture of sharpshooting because they had cheap rifles. They also built and bought cheap rifles because sharpshooting advocates from Cooper to Wingate taught them it was worthy and good to do so. Technology caught up to mythology, and when it did, a rather abstract theory of romantic individualism was poised to make the leap to universal practice. I would suggest that sharpshooting acquired such allure around this time largely because it constituted a backlash against the modern crisis of meaning and value that historians from Robert Wiebe to Jackson Lears have attributed to these decades.43 In the wake of the Civil War, under the pressure of an increasingly secular and commercial culture, and in the baffling flux of rapid technological and social change, the rifle bolstered a mythology of liberal efficacy and self-sovereignty that otherwise seemed more tenuous than ever. Read as an antimodernist backlash, sharpshooting promised to rehabilitate the classic, liberal self, compromised, as it was, by modern urbanization, industrialization, and commercialization. Dressed in rugged western clothes, but armed with the best Eastern technology, the liberal self augmented by the prosthesis of the rifle promised to equal or even surpass its Enlightenment description.44 Nowhere was this ambition to fulfill the full promise of romantic individualism more explicit than in new training practices introduced to the U.S. Army. There had been little point in marksmanship training when soldiers carried muskets, but as rifles became more accurate and powerful, the military began to place more emphasis on rifle training on live

Aimless Battles    firing ranges. Among the early leaders of the marksmanship movement was George Wingate himself, the founder of the NRA. Wingate’s Manual for Rifle Practice (1872) focused specifically on marksmanship training, and Theodore Laidley’s partly plagiarized adaptation, written specifically as an army training manual, made that shift in training official.45 Stanhope Blunt further developed Wingate’s and Laidley’s system in his Firing Regulations for Small Arms, a training manual that the army continued to use through numerous revisions well into the twentieth century. These “rifle individualists,” as Gilmore calls them, would eventually become the strongest opponents of the field firing school, and they saw modern service rifles supporting a new individualistic ethos within the army.46 Specifically, rifle individualists thought soldiers armed with rifles could be more autonomous in battle, taking more initiative, operating in small semiautonomous squads, and making more choices for themselves. With more power in their hands, they would have less need for command and could operate resourcefully and responsibly on their own. As one rifle enthusiast claimed, the rifle was “the natural arm of the American” and requires a “high order of technical knowledge and intelligent action” well suited to a nation of rational free agents. The result would be profound: with a rifle in hand, “every man then becomes a living machine-gun.”47 Politically, then, there are clear and obvious difference between the field firers and the rifle individualists. The field firers saw soldiers as unreliable, and modern rifles as error prone. As a result, they insisted upon strict official management of battles in a meticulously organized and strictly disciplined army. Because even good soldiers miss most of the time, probabilistic methods of collective shooting should be used to organize fire more effectively. Conversely, rifle individualists saw soldiers as eminently reliable and rifles as precision instruments that made them even more formidable, so they argued for a loosely organized fighting force and a looser and more egalitarian approach to command. Rifle individualists saw field firers as socialistic, nonegalitarian, antidemocratic, and mechanistic. Field firers saw the rifle individualists as romantic, undisciplined, impractical, and naive. Let me emphasize what may be obvious, which is simply that these completely opposite conceptions of modern shooting refer to precisely the same guns. The disagreement is a case study in the ways to which even the apparently scientific description of how a machine

  Aimless Battles works and what it might do is, from the beginning, inseparable from the political values that color all such judgments. Where rifle individualists saw a bull’s-eye with a hole in the middle, field firers saw a scatter-plot of aimless impacts. And as a result, each camp wrote drastically different narratives of individual agency and either its triumph over, or vulnerability to, accident and chance. Crane, as I suggested, rejects field firers’ emphasis on social organization, but he rejects the rifle individualists’ emphasis on individual control too. Unlike rifle individualists, who link accuracy to traditional liberal values, Crane suspects that accuracy extracts a steep cost from agents as well. The training manuals behind rifle individualism reveal what Crane recognized: while the soldier seemed to control the rifle, in fact the rifle might control the soldier too. Stanhope Blunt’s Firing Regulations emphasizes soldiers’ ability to correct for known sources of error, such as wind or the small amount of lateral motion caused by the bullet’s rotation, known as drift. Error, in Blunt’s account, is something that rational and capable agents might offset with sufficient skill. But because the greatest source of error is the instability of the human frame, Blunt insists that accurate shooting requires the body to be as stable as the gun. As a result, the most stable firing positions are not those commonly associated with combat today—standing, kneeling, or lying on the stomach—but rather lying on the back, Blunt says, with feet or legs crossed, and the gun lying along the length of the body (see Figure 4). This is just one of four similar back-lying positions that Blunt recommends as the most accurate of all, even though their practical limitations were easy to see, especially for any soldier who prized his head more highly than his feet.48 Even Blunt concedes, “It is, therefore, by no means determined because the back positions possess advantages for target firing, that they will be universally used in action.”49 In fact, they were not even occasionally used in action and were widely mocked by field firers, who thought Blunt and Wingate were training an army of sharpshooting divas, more interested in collecting trophies than in winning wars. Those arguments eventually prevailed, and all of these impractical back-lying poses were stricken from the 1904 revision of Firing Regulations, which admonishes soldiers that “back positions are not authorized.”50 The fantasy that the rifle might activate key liberal val-

Aimless Battles   

figur e 4 .  Stanhope Blunt, “Firing Lying Down—Fulton Position,” from Firing Regulations, 54.

ues in practice finally bumped up against the hard fact that while rifles might be extraordinarily precise, people, unfortunately, are not. Obviously, other things are going on in this illustration. Aiming the gun from directly between his legs, the soldier seems to take aim with his own phallus, projecting the full force of masculine might. The connection between rifle shooting and Roosevelt’s rugged masculinity could hardly be more literal. At the same time, the image can be read another way: perhaps the soldier is not shooting his own gun, so to speak, but has been mounted by it in a parody of sexual congress. Legs spread, and with one arm behind his head, the soldier makes love to the phallic gun in a position that, if we read this as a heterosexual dyad, appears feminized. It is hard not to recall a later parody of militarism that takes a similar form, the scene in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) in which Slim Pickens straddles a falling nuclear weapon and rides it to his doom. The ambiguity about whether Pickens is masturbating or having sex with a nuclear penetrator is, ultimately, the same ambiguity that makes Blunt’s soldier’s rifle either an extension of his own innate power or a separate

  Aimless Battles entity to which the soldier has submitted. Obviously, rifle individualists preferred the former view, but if the rifle was thought to express only the natural capacities of the liberal self, it oddly required the contortion of the body into a position of comical inferiority. Despite Blunt’s own loyalties, such illustrations confirm that even the most stalwart individualist cannot use such powerful instruments without, at the same time, also being put to use. To the extent that rifle individualists tended to be suspicious of topdown battlefield command and averse to strict military hierarchy, they might have appealed to Crane’s own egalitarian sensibilities. However, the egalitarianism of the rifle individualists depends on something that Crane could not accept, the conception of individual agency as directly intentional and reliable, and of the individual agent as precise, responsible, and decisive. We can see that Crane finally rejects rifle individualism as decisively as he rejects field firing, though for different reasons. This is clearest in a scene from Crane’s Spanish-American War fiction that most closely approximates the conception of rifle shooting as rifle individualists imagined it. It is also one of the only extended scenes in Crane’s war writing in which a soldier takes aim at a target, fires at it, and hits it. In “The Price of the Harness,” an account of the battle of San Juan Hill, soldiers were “absorbed in the business of hitting something, and all the long training at the rifle ranges, all the pride of the marksman which had been so long alive in them, made them forget for the time everything but shooting” (6:110). These soldiers are presumably products of Blunt’s marksmanship training, yet the closer we look at this shooting, the stranger it seems. One of the soldiers, Private Nolan, aims “under the shadow of a certain portico of a fortified house; there he could faintly see a long black line which he knew to be a loophole cut for riflemen, and he knew that every shot of his was going there under the portico, mayhap through the loophole to the brain of another man like himself” (6:110). Moments later, Nolan himself is shot in the stomach from an unseen enemy and bleeds to death in the grass. We never know whether there was anyone behind that loophole, or even whether Nolan himself was shot deliberately or accidentally, or from the front or the back. But these details complicate and undermine the rifle individualists’ position. First, Nolan sees no one and merely wonders whether someone may be struck by his bullets as they travel through that

Aimless Battles    space. This is, as I suggested, the most deliberate, precise, and self-controlled act of shooting that I find in all of Crane, but the scene nonetheless involves serious epistemological problems, given that there may be nobody behind that loophole at all. What Nolan is shooting at may not be a body or an object—a tangible presence—but merely the open space of the loophole itself. In wondering whether that loophole is empty or full, Crane’s archaic and affected qualifier “mayhap” returns us, through the etymological root happ that we encountered earlier, to a claim for chance. In one of the most explicit representations of intentional shooting in all of Crane, then, Nolan is effectively taking a chance that someone is there, but he has no way of assessing whether or not he is accomplishing his aims. More important, the fantasy that Nolan’s shots actually do carry “through the loophole to the brain of another man like himself” sounds suspiciously like the transmission of ideas from one mind to another, especially given that Crane quite often conflates fighting with writing, and the sending of bullets with the sending of messages. To transmit a message from one mind to another and at long range is, especially for a war correspondent like Crane, precisely what writers do. But in this case, reaching the brain of another is tantamount to shooting him in the head, as if direct, literal communication—the transmission of some active utterance to another person with its full force intact—is nothing short of deadly violence. What Crane objects to, it seems, is not violence itself but intentional violence that issues from an individual who directly and openly overpowers another. He rarely if ever represents that directly, and instead usually conceals one side of the conflict, as in “The Price of the Harness,” or perplexes intentionality with the scattering effects of chance. We can now begin to trace Crane’s skepticism about intentionality, with its tendency to conserve rather than disrupt the status quo, into the form of his own narratives of modern war.

Rough Writers Crane’s attempt to devise a radically powerless but also radically free middle ground between the values of the field firers and the values of the rifle individualists has direct bearing on his own daring narrative experiments. We can get some sense of the consequences of narrating war in

  Aimless Battles terms of chance by comparing Crane’s account of the Battle of San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War with another popular version, that of Theodore Roosevelt. Crane and Roosevelt had met in New York in 1896, when Roosevelt was president of the Board of Police Commissioners. They discussed Crane’s first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), and Crane later called on Roosevelt to complain after a conflict with police at Madison Square Garden. When Crane publicly defended a prostitute arrested in his company, however, Roosevelt washed his hands of a young writer who seemed too scandalously bohemian. Even though their paths crossed in Cuba, Roosevelt never mentions Crane in his memories of the war. Crane, however, has plenty to say about Roosevelt, and plenty more that seems to be directed at Roosevelt without naming him directly. When Crane mocks the double-barreled names of aristocratic volunteers, like his fictional “Reginald Marmaduke Maurice Montmorenci Sturtevant,” and wonders “for goodness sake how the poor old chappy endures that dreadful hard-tack and bacon,” he likely has a different Dutch aristocrat in mind (9:171). As a journalist, Crane also reported on action by Roosevelt’s 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, later nicknamed the “Rough Riders” by the press. After one ambush, Crane reported, “Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, who were ambushed yesterday, advanced at daylight without any particular plan of action as to how to strike the enemy.” He concluded, “It was simply a gallant blunder” (9:146). While Roosevelt thought of himself as gallant (“gallantry” is one of his favorite terms of approbation in The Rough Riders), he did not see himself as a blunderer, but Crane’s assessment is entirely in keeping with his general portrait of the war as one clumsy episode after another. Martha Banta has argued that while Roosevelt represents the war as a triumph of skillful regulation and as a vindication of American management, Crane indicts military leaders as just one component in what Banta terms “the general mismanagement of the universe.”51 Of course, however much Crane complained about army incompetence, he was not at all interested in better management. On the contrary, Crane seems to have been interested in the war because it showcased the breakdown of all kinds of control, and at every level, from the movements of individual bullets to those of entire battalions. That soldiers blunder in war seemed to Crane the normal state

Aimless Battles    of affairs. What he resented were subsequent narratives like Roosevelt’s, which recast blundering as heroic virtue. Even before Roosevelt published The Rough Riders, Crane anticipated that Roosevelt and other participants would recast key moments as narratives of heroic accomplishment. The Battle of San Juan Hill became a rallying point for American pride and the central exhibit in sensational news accounts that affirmed American valor and virtue. Roosevelt’s account of the battle in The Rough Riders also propelled him to political prominence after the war, in part because of his own tale of fearless and resolute leadership in the final charge. Roosevelt describes how, from the rear of a passive army waiting for orders at the base of a neighboring hill, he and his Rough Riders surged to the front, took charge of leaderless troops waiting for further orders, and finally led them up the slope of the seemingly impregnable position. While acknowledging the bravery of others along the way, Roosevelt persistently structures his account around first-person singular pronouns coupled with active verbs: “I at once hustled my regiment over the crest”; “I promptly hurried my men across”; “I led my column slowly along”; “I got the men as well-sheltered as I could”; “I sprang on my horse”; “I got the lines forward”; “I bade . . . ,” “I went . . . ,” “I ran . . .  ,” “I taunted . . .  ,” “I leaped . . .  ”52 The very grammar of action substantiates Roosevelt’s implicit theory that single, deliberate agents make things happen, and in most cases, that agent is Roosevelt. In Crane’s account of the same battle, however, the action is vague, generalized, and uncertain, and accordingly, he narrates much of it in the passive voice. “The Cuban forest was worse than any fog,” he writes (9:155), and “Over this scene was a sort of haze of bullets” (9:159). The fog and the haze are not just material but syntactical, for Crane’s own rendition of the battle conceals the source of a great deal of the action. Chance is thus not just produced by direct invocation but by fashioning a syntax that can conceal any identifiable source of agency and thereby subtly decouple causes from effects. Accordingly, the victory in the battle owes little to leaders like Roosevelt and everything to the vague but sincerely admired “gallantry of the American private soldier,” whose precise role in bringing this victory about is, nonetheless, far from clear (9:155). But even here, several years before the publication of The Rough Riders, Crane was already

  Aimless Battles anticipating that Roosevelt and others would recast the battle as a fable of heroic and determined leadership: No doubt when history begins to grind out her story we will find that many a thundering, fine, grand order was given for that day’s work; but after all there will be no harm in contending that the fighting line, the men and their regimental officers, took the hill chiefly because they knew they could take it, some having no orders and others disobeying whatever orders they had. (9:155)

Taking the hill was not a deliberate exercise at all, in Crane’s version, but the result of a chaotic melee, misguided, error prone, and quite literally accidental. The army did not intend to conquer the hill, nor were there orders to do so, and there may well have been orders to the contrary. The officers, including Roosevelt, followed the enlisted men up the hill, and the enlisted men were not entirely sure where they were going. Accordingly, the first soldier to make it to the top in Crane’s account exclaims, “Well, hell! here we are,” and thereby confesses the entire enterprise’s inadvertency (9:162). What Crane objects to in Roosevelt’s account, even before it was written, is the fantasy of self-determination that will and must refashion battlefield successes as evidence of someone’s decisive command. Roosevelt provides one other “curious incident” that helps us see the extent to which the narrative reconstitution of intentional control, and so of a more general standard of rational and moral order, has other political dimensions as well.53 Despite their differences, Crane and Roosevelt were both attracted to acts of deliberate self-exposure to enemy fire. Crane, as we saw at the outset, wrote about it in “A Mystery of Heroism” and in other stories, including “The Upturned Face” and “Marines Signaling Under Fire at Guantanamo.” Roosevelt devotes considerable attention to self-exposure in The Rough Riders, and it was a pressing issue in the 1890s, given that modern rifles were exacting a savage toll on officers who refused to take cover. One officer “had a theory that an officer ought never to take cover,” Roosevelt writes, but subsequently a bullet “struck him in the mouth” while he was “strolling up and down in front of his men, smoking his cigarette.”54 Such a theory is “certainly wrong,” Roosevelt concludes, but nonetheless, in an all-volunteer organization, “officers should certainly expose themselves very fully, simply for the effect on the men.”55 For Roosevelt, self-exposure had a moral valence too, which he makes clear in a short parable about the consequences of cowering:

Aimless Battles    I came upon a man lying behind a little bush, and I ordered him to jump up. I do not think he understood that we were making a forward move, and he looked up at me for a moment with hesitation, and I again bade him rise, jeering him and saying: “Are you afraid to stand up when I am on horseback?” As I spoke, he suddenly fell forward on his face, a bullet having struck him and gone through him lengthwise. I suppose the bullet had been aimed at me; at any rate, I, who was on horseback in the open, was unhurt, and the man lying flat on the ground in the cover beside me was killed.56

Roosevelt’s parable practically interprets itself: people who hide get punished, while brash self-exposing leaders stay safe. Or at least, Roosevelt leaves readers to draw that conclusion for themselves, for he expressly avoids any reference to chance or luck, which might mitigate against drawing a moral at all. Obviously, given the number of officers killed by snipers in Cuba, Roosevelt must have known to be very careful about such displays, but he also knew their power, not just for other soldiers, as he claims, but for readers as well. In his self-fashioning in a scene like this, Roosevelt appears to be not just lucky but beloved of God, implicitly enjoying the protection of Providence. Whether he believed that or not makes little difference to the power that such parables could have in America’s Protestant culture. Even so, by the time Roosevelt deployed such tropes of self-exposure, they were essentially ethical antiques, salvaged from previous wars and lovingly restored, but primarily for use in war stories rather than in actual battles. If Roosevelt’s account of purposeful agency and meaningful outcomes helps him consolidate and legitimize his power, Crane’s account of a randomized world undercuts claims to power by denying that agents control action in the first place. This is not to say that Crane represents war in any objective or documentary way, or that he represents modern battle more realistically, with its true accidents somehow intact. On the contrary, Crane’s narratives of accidental and aimless battles are no less politically motivated than Roosevelt’s, and no less selective in their attention, but they undercut rather than reaffirm the capacity of liberal free will, especially as it was rehearsed through narratives of heroic agency. It is not so much that Crane wanted to diminish Roosevelt in particular but that he imagined a state of affairs so opaque, unpredictable, and accidental, that heroism itself—and its attendant status—would be, if not

   Aimless Battles impossible, at least pervasively ironized. The daring claim at the heart of Crane’s critique of intentionality is that heroes and cowards are not kinds of people, as Roosevelt seems to allege, but narrative designations, produced through the stories we tell retrospectively about war. Conversely, Crane’s own narratives of accidental battles function as corrective measures meant to level out differences in status, before those differences become permanently entrenched. By narrating war as a series of random accidents, Crane alleges that war is not a proving ground for inner mettle but an irrational and amoral process that tells us very little about those who happen to survive. Heroes do not produce the outcomes in battle, as Roosevelt would suggest; the outcomes of battles produce heroes, but only through the subsequent rationalizing and moralizing narratives that Western culture obsessively applies. That, after all, is the conclusion of “The Mystery of Heroism,” in which the Civil War soldier dashes through a hail of bullets for no good reason and finds, by virtue of his survival, that he had become a hero. Insisting on the accidental quality of warfare, as Crane did in widely read journalistic pieces, was thus to anticipate, in order to undermine, the power that figures like Roosevelt would later claim by virtue of their survival. If heroes and cowards are produced through narrative, Crane realizes, heroism and cowardice might be destroyed by narrative too. The only problem is that for such a theory to be taken seriously, it would have to be very comprehensive in its denial of intentional control, not even omitting the author’s own.

Signs of Life It would do no good to expose Theodore Roosevelt as just another blunderer on the battlefield if Crane presumed to retain something like full authorial control of his own literary production. In other words, Crane’s faith in the aimlessness of all intentions must, in the end, apply to the intentions behind written documents too, especially his own; otherwise, all writing would become just another vector of intentionality and a strategic means of consolidating existing formations of status and power. Crane’s conception of war as only very loosely intentional does seem to regard the instabilities of aimless shooting as a direct corollary for similar instabilities embedded in language. It is not so much that writers should

Aimless Battles    try to be indirect and elliptical, and so avoid literalism and directness, for that would simply reconstitute the will along different lines, by providing a new and different goal to achieve. Instead, to use a metaphor drawn from Crane’s own highly figurative approach to this issue, language must be a gun that cannot shoot straight. By the end of Red Badge, Henry Fleming’s rifle is not just a source of material disorder but also a metaphor for language’s decay into mere noise. In a novel very carefully structured in two parallel twelve-chapter sections, Fleming throws down his gun once in each half. The first time he throws it down to flee to the rear, after which he undergoes the long and chaotic journey back to his regiment. The second time he throws it down to pick up the company flag and charges forward toward the enemy’s lines. In equating cowardly flight with a courageous charge, as many readers have noted, the text undermines traditional attitudes toward both and reveals the close relationship between cowardice and courage, fear and fury. When Fleming specifically swaps his gun for the company flag, however, the text invites readers to see an implement of shooting as a substitute for an implement of signification. In fact, swapping the gun for the flag follows a long set of metaphors that made guns and words interchangeable. Officers fire “arrows of scorn” (2:125). Another soldier is “pricked” by “little words of other men aimed at him” (2:82). Still another “stood then with his back to the enemy and delivered gigantic curses into the faces of the men” (2:106). Conversely, shooting often appears as metaphorical speech. Fleming hears the “courageous words of the artillery and the spiteful sentences of the musketry” (2:51). Elsewhere, “the guns on the slope roared out a message of warning” (2:123); “there was a long row of guns, gruff and maddened, denouncing the enemy” (2:122); and “the song of the bullets was in the air” along with “the vindictive threats of the bullets” (2:105, 107). So, when Fleming throws down his gun to pick up the flag, he reinforces a fundamental substitutability of fighting and writing, guns and pens, bullets and words. In that context, language appears not so much a system of signifiers but an instrument that has no real existence but in and through its use. This utilitarian attitude toward language is roughly Wittgensteinian: language is as language does. But at the end of Red Badge, what language does is shoot off wildly, as the narrative culminates in a characteristically anticlimactic capture of two scrawny

  Aimless Battles Confederate soldiers occupying a worthless position after a charge that seems devoid of any strategic value. But more important, that incoherent conclusion is paralleled by an equal incoherence that intrudes upon the very utterances that the narrator reports. Fleming’s flag functions much like the empty vessels noted at the outset. If the spilled bucket in “A Mystery of Heroism” reveals that the story finally refuses to hold traditional heroic content, Fleming’s flag indicates that even the most potent symbols meant to organize the battle in fact preside over the dispersal of reason and meaning. At first, however, the flag offers a false promise of clarity and security. Practically, the flag organizes the troops’ advance. Politically, it establishes regimental identity and affirms national loyalty. The flag seems, in other words, to be the kind of simple and meaningful token that might dispel ambiguity, and it is with this transcendent promise of fullness and presence that Fleming first seeks it. The narrator says: Within him, as he hurled himself forward, was born a love, a despairing fondness for this flag which was near him. It was a creation of beauty and invulnerability. It was a goddess, radiant, that bended its form with an imperious gesture to him. It was a woman, red and white, hating and loving, that called him with the voice of his hopes. Because no harm could come to it, he endowed it with power. He kept near as if it could be a saver of lives and an imploring cry went from his mind. (2:108)

As Fleming loads more and more significance onto the flag, he transforms it into a female object of desire, a protective goddess both “powerful” and “imperious.” But all of this occurs in the moment before Fleming actually possesses the flag, so the flag’s maternal, erotic, and apparently divine power exists only when the flag stands as a remote and idealized object. At the moment of possession, however, its power and coherence disappear, and the flag that had “called him with the voice of his hopes” suddenly presides over linguistic incoherence instead: The youth, still the bearer of the colors, did not feel his idleness. He was deeply absorbed as a spectator. The crash and swing of the great drama made him lean forward, intent-eyed, his face working in small contortions. Sometimes, he prattled, words coming unconsciously from in him in grotesque exclamations. He did not know that he breathed; that the flag hung silently over him, so absorbed was he. (2:124)

Aimless Battles    Fleming ends up performing what he had been resisting, as his barbaric prattling turns his own language into “grotesque exclamations” and unconscious chatter. At precisely this point the language around Fleming becomes increasingly unintelligible as well. “The men screamed and yelled like maniacs” (2:124). “The men burst out in a barbaric cry of rage and pain” (2:124). “Jabbering the while, they were . . .  like strange and ugly fiends” (2:124). Alfred Habegger has argued that the decay of language in Red Badge signals the construction of a certain kind of silent, laconic masculinity, so contains an account “of how a youth loses the capacity to express himself in speech. He grows up to be the kind of man who is chronically unable to speak his mind.”57 But there is more than just silence here, for the problem is that Fleming speaks wildly and incoherently, not that he ceases to speak at all. If we keep in mind that Fleming has just traded his rifle for this flag, we can see that the flag’s semantic incoherence is the displaced aimlessness of Fleming’s gun. His bizarre jabbering self-talk, performed under the sign of the flag, shows language fully in action but unable to hit its target, partly because its user cannot take adequate aim and partly because all actions in this novel, linguistic and otherwise, always drift wide of the mark. I want to emphasize that the equivalence of guns and flags in Red Badge goes both ways. It is not as if shooting is merely a metaphor for language, and that language itself is the primary object of study. Language is a kind of shooting too, in that to speak is to unleash an action that will or will not have some expected consequence. Even more than the pragmatist philosophers whom we will consider in the next chapter, Crane is the most pragmatic writer considered in this book, because he has virtually no sense that an abstraction as vague as “language” might have any meaning apart from actual instances of speaking, writing, or reading. What makes language interesting in Crane is that it has consequences that are so often varied and surprising and that not even the user of language can control. As an instrument, a mere tool that one puts to use, language functions roughly like a rifle, in that we hardly ever use it without some vague aim, but at long range it also has accidental consequences that we cannot foresee and may not even be able to assess. This is not to say that all language is utterly and completely meaningless. Far from it, for Crane would no doubt agree that in theory we can fire our instruments at point-

  Aimless Battles blank range and in such cases literally cannot miss. But in practice such opportunities are rare, and when we set our sights at longer range, or when we use language with limited knowledge, which is most of the time, error quickly intrudes. Fleming’s wild gibberish while he carries the flag is only the most extreme example of a kind of indeterminacy that, in less drastic forms, our actual language use rarely if ever escapes. Crane’s Spanish-American War writing and his conduct in the war take the metaphor of shooting for language use to even further extremes. At Cuzco, Crane worked as an assistant to Captain George F. Elliott, and Elliott reported that Crane “was of material aid during the action, carrying messages to fire volleys, etc. to the different company commanders.”58 Carrying messages is essentially what a war correspondent does anyway, but carrying them from the captain to the artillery gunners turns the messenger into a component of direct-fire forces. This helps explain why Crane was so interested in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, the subject of one of his most famous journalistic dispatches, and one of his most interesting Spanish-American War stories, “Marines Signaling Under Fire at Guantanamo.”59 Stories about the Signal Corps were likely not what Crane’s editors were hoping he would send back, but Crane seems to have been especially drawn to the signalmen, perhaps because their work seemed to be an inverted version of his own. If Crane is a correspondent helping to fire the army’s guns, the signalmen are soldiers who traffic in ciphers and signs. Accordingly, “Marines Signaling” turns out to be Crane’s most explicit meditation on the literary production of chance. The story ostensibly celebrates the bravery of two army signalmen, Sergeants Quick and Clancy. The signalmen were responsible for communicating with ships offshore by “wig-wagging” flags or lanterns from a ridge (6:199). The problem was that to communicate with the ships, the signalmen had to stand on a ridge where they were silhouetted against the sky, so while signaling, they became inviting targets for Spanish troops surrounding them on three sides. Crane writes: As soon as the Spaniards caught sight of this silhouette, they let go like mad at it. To make things more comfortable for Clancy, the situation demanded that he face the sea and turn his back to the Spanish bullets. This was a hard game, mark you—to stand with the small of your back to volley firing. Clancy thought so. Everybody thought so. We all cleared out of his neighborhood. (6:198)

Aimless Battles    This scene of self-exposure is Crane’s parody of Roosevelt’s more traditional version and a comment on the ways in which writing ideally should emanate from conditions of uncertainty and peril. Crane wonders how the soldiers are not “riddled from head to foot and sent home more as repositories of Spanish ammunition than as marines,” as he initially expects (6:195). Yet when Clancy tries to go “a ways down the safe side of the ridge,” the ship offshore cannot see him, so “Clancy had to return to the top of the ridge and outline himself and his flag against the sky” (6:198). Safety turns out to be the enemy of communication. Consequently, the sound of shooting mingles with the sound of Clancy’s own message, because “he was so occupied with the bullets that snarled close to his ears that he was obliged to repeat the letters of his message softly to himself ” (6:198). Vocal bullets again converse with another muttering soldier. The scene thus plays out on a small scale Crane’s sense that the work of writing should not make the hazardous world safe and amenable to reason but that it is finally preferable if writing is a “hard game,” emanating from a climate dense with danger, and replete with uncertainty that has genuine stakes. On reflection, it becomes clear that Crane had written this very scene before. Quick and Clancy are versions of Henry Fleming, who trades his gun for the company flag, but they are also versions of other soldiers exposed to fire in “The Upturned Face” and “A Mystery of Heroism.” Having written and rewritten this scene of reckless self-exposure so many times, perhaps it is not surprising that Crane seems to have risked it himself while in Cuba. Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino confirm that Crane actually took turns as a signalman with the men he describes in “Marines Signaling,” even though Crane does not admit to doing so in the story.60 Presumably on a different occasion during the war, fellow correspondent and novelist Richard Harding Davis recalled that Crane had “walked to the crest [of a hill] and stood there as sharply outlined as a semaphore, observing the enemy’s lines, and instantly bringing upon himself and us the fire of many Mausers. . . .  He appeared as cool as though he were looking down from a box at the theatre.”61 Such conduct suggests the extent to which Crane superimposed his own identity as a writer onto these military signalmen, which Davis clearly recognized: comparing Crane to a “semaphore” is to compare him explicitly to a system of military communication using lanterns and flags, and Davis likely has

  Aimless Battles the signalmen from “Marines Signaling” in mind. Crane’s editors in New York seem to have recognized his self-conflation with the signalmen too, given that the New York World headlined one of Crane’s dispatches, “The Red Badge of Courage Was His Wig-Wag Flag” (9:134). Against Roosevelt’s attempt to associate his command of the battle with his command over his narrative of the battle, Crane associates his own literary production with the wild, inaccurate, and aimless shooting he so relentlessly describes. Accordingly, the flag that Clancy waves is actually tied to the end of his rifle, so the signal does not replace the rifle, as in Red Badge, but becomes a rifle. And if guns can be used to send signals, flags can be used to return fire, as Crane reminds us when Clancy drops to the ground and fires wildly into the forest: “The blue polka-dot neckerchief still fluttered from the barrel of his rifle” (6:199). One might object that the kinds of military messages that signalmen like Clancy transmit are precisely the opposite of the open-ended and highly literary texts that Crane contrives. They are instead miniatures of Roosevelt’s own historical account of the battle, texts that strive to keep ambiguity to an absolute minimum. And at first, that is precisely what these army signalmen seem to be demonstrating. Quick and Clancy can see the ship. They know it is their ship. They believe its sailors are receiving their messages. And the sailors are. Many of the problems of aim that plague shooting in Crane’s account of war seem absent from the signals that Quick and Clancy send off with their flags and lanterns. Yet a familiar host of problems quickly intrudes, which indicates that signaling finally is no more exempt from chance than shooting, or than other more literary forms of writing, like Crane’s. Clancy requests that the U.S. gunboat Dolphin shell the Spanish surrounding Camp McCalla. The ship opens fire, but the shells miss their mark and end up falling on American troops instead. “It became necessary to stop the Dolphin at once,” Crane says, so Quick returns to the top of the hill to call off the bombardment, while now facing fire both from the American ships and from the Spanish troops still surrounding his position (6:199). As firing turns into misfiring, carefully aimed messages decay into aimless miscommunication. Everyone is shooting wildly, and nothing—neither signals nor bullets—ever quite has the desired effect. So it is that the signals in “Marines Signaling,” which aspire to match

Aimless Battles    the standard of accuracy represented by the modern rifle, finally decay into error and aimlessness too. In the end, “Marines Signaling” is itself a kind of miscommunication, a message that ultimately avails itself to no end of possible readings. Does the story celebrate perseverance in chaotic conditions, or does it parody Rooseveltian intentionality? Are these men heroes, fools, or victims of an inept and callous army? They look suspiciously like the absurd antihero Fred Collins, yet one of the signalmen received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his efforts, which his commanding officer expressly credited to the influence of Crane’s story.62 Indeed, the suggestion that Crane’s own stories might function like “wig-wag” flags invokes the promise of clear communication that the story itself persistently undermines. I find “Marines Signaling” to be Crane’s most profound allegory of the extent to which even the work of writing finally and fruitfully succumbs to the disorganizing power of chance. That, at least, is Crane’s proposition, and his hope. He alleges that the routine capacity for mishaps in a largely rudderless universe is, nonetheless, better than humanity’s grim capacity for deliberate violence. And it is here, I think, that we find Crane taking a final, tenuous step, by suggesting that in a world scrambled by chance, the most dangerous deployments of power will finally suffer their own undoing. Clearly, no such simple process availed itself over the subsequent century, and had Crane lived just one more year, he would have witnessed Roosevelt’s ascent to the White House. Rifles continued to grow more powerful, too, and if they fired more ammunition more rapidly and more wildly than ever, they also killed a phenomenal number of soldiers just two decades later in the First World War. Possibly the real cost of Crane’s egalitarianism would be nothing less than the derangement of all reason, an utter chaos of material relations, and the permanent upheaval of social life. If so, the cure might be worse than the disease. Such a situation could amount to little less than a permanent state of war, for if “war is the realm of chance,” as Clausewitz said, and if chance, for Crane, is the best way of subverting more orderly and intentional violence, then perhaps any condition that falls short of war constitutes a surrender to some even worse condition. These are dismal suppositions. They lead, in not too many more steps, to Ernst Jünger’s romanticized violence, or even to the fulfillment of Randolph Bourne’s

  Aimless Battles devastating charge that “war is the health of the State.”63 The only thing standing between Crane and scenarios like these is his own deep sense of the absurdity of war and of the humbling vulnerability—not the heroic valor—of the people who kill and die there. In the end, it may be that Crane recognized that his attempt to ground a more just collective in irrational chance may indeed lead to radical egalitarianism, but at the cost of reason itself. The end of “The Price of the Harness” imagines what the escape from intentional violence might look like, in a stunning dénouement that brings together many of the formal and thematic elements we have seen in Crane’s broader assessment of chance. When Nolan’s friends reconvene in a “fever tent” behind the lines, they compare notes on their fallen comrades. But as they do, they find themselves in the company of another soldier, “a kind of man always found in an American crowd, a heroic, implacable comedian and patriot, of a humor that has bitterness and ferocity and love in it” (6:113). If the story seems poised to conclude with a patriotic ending, the feverish soldier overturns everything by “wringing from the situation a grim meaning by singing the Star-Spangled Banner with all the ardor which could be procured from his fever-stricken body” (6:113). More than signal flags, more even than the regimental colors, the national flag of the United States, which appears here as the subject of the national anthem, functions as the most incoherent symbol of all. The feverish singer is ranting in malarial delusion, and his description as an “implacable comedian and patriot” makes it impossible to tell whether he sings out of mockery or pride. Similarly, his “bitterness and ferocity and love” are not easily reconciled into a single attitude, but name just three possible motivations that the story will not help readers distill into something clearer. This final act of flag waving signals Crane’s own aleatory challenge to determinate meanings and the political force behind them. No doubt he was aware that Francis Scott Key’s song is itself a military narrative, documenting “the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,” as the third verse puts it. Perhaps the comedian and patriot reached even that point, for he certainly sings all the way through the little-known second verse, as Crane’s story ends with a fragment of one of its lines, “ . . .  Long may it wave. . . .  ” In closing with that loaded reference to flag waving, but also in and through the patriot’s malarial fog, Crane’s story refuses to take up a stable, ideological coun-

Aimless Battles    terposition and instead scatters and disperses the organizing force of even such a potent political symbol as the national flag. The most devastating implication of this story, and one that applies to many others as well, is that we may finally be forced to choose between violent nationalism and utter madness. Judging the story in that light, we can see that Crane’s real literary and even political heir is not Ernest Hemingway, whose career as a war correspondent seems to have been patterned on Crane’s own, but Ralph Ellison, who was more deeply influenced by Crane than almost any other American novelist. Ellison wrote that Crane “stands as the link between the Twain of Pudd’nhead Wilson and Huckleberry Finn and the Faulkner of The Sound and the Fury.”64 That may be, but Crane also stands as the link between nineteenth-century realism and Ellison’s own high modernist aesthetics. When Ellison’s Invisible Man asks, “What if history was a gambler,” it is Crane’s theory of aleatory action that he has absorbed.65 When Ellison said that Crane’s great achievement in representing American life was that he “discovered such far-reaching symbolic equivalents for its unceasing state of civil war,” perhaps even Ellison did not realize the extent to which representations of life as a chaotic and random battle were also, for Crane, a means of liberation from quieter kinds of peacetime oppression. “Crane’s work remains fresh today because he was a great artist, but perhaps he became a great artist because under conditions of pressure and panic”—Ellison says in a final, telling compliment—“he stuck to his guns.”66

c ha p ter 3

Detecting “Absolute Chance” charles peirce and anna katharine green

In the previous two chapters we have seen how two influential realist writers who purported to document chance were in fact producing chance through narratives that decoupled action from agency and so inhibited the kinds of investigations that might lead, instead, to assessments of rational causation or moral blame. For both writers, the production of chance has political purposes, and both are aware, in at least a limited way, that chance is a product, not just an object, of realist description. Around the same time, other writers were insisting far more strongly that chance was ontological after all and in no way socially or culturally produced. The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce made some of the earliest and strongest versions of this claim. Although Peirce sometimes described chance quite cautiously as “that diversity and variety of things and events which law does not prevent,” he also attempted to define chance more assertively as a real component of the universe, an indeterminacy principle present as primordial chaos at the universe’s birth, and active throughout history up to the present, though possibly in ever-diminishing degrees (CP 6:612).1 Peirce called such an endemic antilaw “absolute chance,” an oxymoron if we think of chance as precisely that which is inessential or unnecessary, and that awkward appellation, fraught with internal contradiction, is just one sign of how problematic the concept of absolute chance would turn out to be.

Detecting “Absolute Chance”     As we saw earlier, claims for the reality of chance were routinely derided as popular superstition in previous centuries, and from the eighteenth century through much of the nineteenth century, a wide range of scientists, mathematicians, social scientists, and philosophers saw claims on behalf of chance as tacit acknowledgments of human ignorance of divine intentions or determining laws. As David Hume said, “Though there be no such thing as Chance in the world; our ignorance of the real cause of any event has the same influence on the understanding.”2 Such skepticism is entirely in keeping with similar claims by Enlightenment authorities from Pierre-Simon Laplace to Abraham De Moivre, and many others, all of whom largely agree that chance is a name for rational laws and causes we do not understand.3 But Peirce expressly rejects the idea that the world is entirely deterministic, structured by law all the way down, and his antideterminism came to depend on his claims for the liberating instabilities of chance. To Peirce, this manifest fact was so stunningly obvious that he simply could not fathom how determinists failed to see it: “Chance itself pours in at every avenue of the sense: it is of all things the most obtrusive.” As a result, Peirce insists, absolute chance “is a being, living and conscious,” a manifest presence so palpable that it cannot be denied, even by “the dullness that belongs to ratiocination’s self” (CP 6:612). Peirce’s claims for absolute chance mark an important turning point in the intellectual history of chance. He makes the most explicit claim for what Gerda Reith has called “ontological chance,” which she sees as a defining feature of chance in the twentieth century.4 Ontological chance is, in effect, real chance, chance that is not just a name for our ignorance of laws or discrete causes, not a name for contingency, not even a name for a probabilistic method, but an active entity, something that has being. To Ian Hacking, Peirce’s interest in absolute chance indicates that he fully occupies “a new kind of world that his century had been manufacturing: a world made of probabilities.”5 In such a world, knowledge itself became probabilistic, as Hacking claims, so chance assumed a very prominent place within that modern episteme. Peirce was a very sophisticated probabilist indeed, designing important methods for rationalizing observational error in scientific experiments and pioneering the deliberate use of randomization in scientific studies. Although Hacking is primarily interested in the ways in which Peirce’s probabilistic methods conclude a centuries-

  Detecting “Absolute Chance” long history of the taming of chance, I am interested in the other side of Peirce’s work, not his mathematically rigorous probabilism but his increasingly mystical and mystifying philosophy of absolute chance. To be sure, probability theory can account for part of absolute chance. When you’re a hammer, as the saying goes, everything looks like a nail, and when you’re a probabilist, everything can start to look like chance. But absolute chance is more than just a projection of a probabilistic worldview, for it also reflects Peirce’s commitment to Kantian metaphysics and, more important, his resistance to the Darwinian description of the world as open-ended and adaptive rather than as developmental and progressive. Alongside the idea that absolute chance is a product of the modern probabilistic sensibility, I want to suggest that it owes just as much, and perhaps more, to Peirce’s turn back toward the absolutism and essentialism of Kantian metaphysics, and also toward a characteristically Victorian plot of teleological progress that had by no means entirely succumbed to the challenge of Darwin. The task of this chapter is twofold. First, it traces the development of Peirce’s conception of absolute chance out of his earlier and more cautious claims about probability theory and pragmatic contingency. This change involves a number of important developments in Peirce’s thought, including his gradual transition from pragmatism in the 1870s to a more traditional metaphysics later. That transition is by no means steady and even, and as a result the conflict it engendered remains pronounced through several decades. The second task involves Peirce’s appropriation of the literary genre of detective fiction as a model for scientific inquiry, which entails a shift from an earlier pragmatic, relativistic, and communitarian theory of knowledge to a later, more metaphysical, absolutist, and individualistic one. It was the plot of the detective novel, with its assured outcomes and foreordained conclusions, that served as Peirce’s most literal model of intellectual progress. Rather than commit himself to a theory of absolute chance based on scientific or philosophical premises alone, Peirce first committed himself to a teleological narrative of demystification modeled on the narrative of crime and its detection, and then refashioned chance as an absolute in order to suit it. The following pages read two detective stories about chance in relation to one another. The first is Peirce’s own detective story about his sleuthing after a stolen watch, a tale written sometime around 1907 and

Detecting “Absolute Chance”     published posthumously under the title “Guessing.” That story is partly about how guesses are never really random after all, but it also reveals Peirce’s full fluency with the detective genre. The second story belongs to the detective novelist Anna Katharine Green, a best-seller in her day but now sorely neglected. Green’s chance-saturated fiction exposes a problem Peirce also would encounter when he attempted to embed chance in teleological narratives of progress. These two contemporaries thus share a determination to write the accident in literary narratives, but they also encounter the common problem of representing chance in a genre destined to demystify crime in the end. A third detective writer interested in chance, Edgar Allan Poe, will point the way toward a solution to this problem, at least for Peirce. Through Poe, we can finally see that Peirce’s conception of the role of chance in the universe is closely linked with, and perhaps even identical to, the role of the literary itself in Peirce’s philosophy.

Inventing Absolute Chance Peirce’s ideas about chance changed dramatically over the course of his career, and it may be useful to take stock of some of his most basic claims before turning toward narratives of detection. Peirce’s earliest conceptions of chance are fundamentally probabilistic. His admiring review of John Venn’s monumental The Logic of Chance (1866) claimed that “probability is regarded as the ratio of the number of events in a certain part of an aggregate of them to the number of the whole aggregate. This is the nominalistic view” (W 2:98). What Peirce terms the “nominalistic” view we now tend to call the “frequentist” view, which Peirce credits Venn with making explicit, even if he acknowledges that Venn did not quite invent it.6 The frequentist position defines chance not as a function of the real world at all, not as a measure of psychological uncertainty, and not as a propensity for some event to fall out a certain way (an “inherent chance,” as Peirce put it), but as a mere ratio of some number of specified outcomes to some number of overall instances (W 3:281). Chance is thus nothing other than a name for the relative frequencies of carefully defined events in an actually observed series. The frequentist approach nonetheless had important consequences for Peirce’s broader theory of inquiry. A probabilistic approach requires a large set of data, and precisely because any in-

  Detecting “Absolute Chance” dividual life is finite, Peirce claimed in “The Doctrine of Chances” that we must acknowledge the “social sentiment presupposed in reasoning” (W 3:285). In other words, if a substantial part of our reasoning is probabilistic, we would do well to avoid making it too individualistic, for according to the law of large numbers, the more inclusive we make our observations, the more useful our probabilistic assessments will be. Regarding an individual gambler, for instance, Peirce says that “if he plays long enough he will be sure some time to have such a run against him as to exhaust his entire fortune.” A single insurance company faces the same odds: “Let the directors take the utmost pains to be independent of great conflagrations and pestilences, their actuaries can tell them that, according to the doctrine of chances, the time must come, at last, when their losses will bring them to a stop” (W 3:283). The disastrous fallibility of individual reasoning compels a more communitarian model of inquiry, and accordingly Peirce imagines extending inquiry out into “an indefinite community,” marked by the “unlimited continuance of intellectual activity” (W 3:285). Peirce’s model of a community of inquirers became an especially important aspect of his general theory of philosophical and scientific investigation. Peirce wrote, “But thus to make single individuals absolute judges of truth is most pernicious. . . .  We individually cannot reasonably hope to attain the ultimate philosophy which we pursue; we can only seek it, therefore, for the community of philosophers” (W 2:212). Elsewhere he wrote that “the problem becomes how to fix belief, not in the individual merely, but in the community” (W 3:250). And in what may be his most fervent call for a social model of inquiry in “The Doctrine of Chances,” Peirce wrote that “logicality inexorably requires that our interests shall not be limited. They must not stop at our own fate, but must embrace the whole community. This community, again, must not be limited, but must extend to all races of beings with whom we can come into immediate or mediate intellectual relation. . . .  Logic is rooted in the social principle” (W 3:284). To say that logic is social is also, and more fundamentally, to say that all thinking is probabilistic, for Peirce is concerned above all to deny the merits of strict a priori reasoning and to recommend instead the merits of combining induction with the empirical testing of hypotheses. Peirce’s nominalist approach to chance is solely interested in the ways in which

Detecting “Absolute Chance”     our analytical methods function as useful instruments for settling on a belief that “terminates in action,” as Peirce says (W 3:285). Accordingly, what really compels the formation of the community of inquirers is not some partly fathomed entity termed “chance” but actual injury and loss, those unwanted contingencies that gamblers and insurers both endure and that defy their most rational and probabilistically sophisticated strategies of self-defense. The main difference between Peirce and the writers we have seen in previous chapters, who proposed related models of chance collectivity, is that Peirce places certain technical restrictions on vague and misleading uses of the word “chance.” But more important, he also retains a more fundamental conception that an inclusive community of inquirers, united by their shared probabilistic endeavors, depends upon a common aversion to unpredictable and unpreventable injury and loss. No matter what we term it, that is largely what Howells, Crane, and the chroniclers of the Chicago fire were concerned with too. I want to be clear, then, that Peirce’s community of inquirers is not a better or truer account of chance collectivity because it issues from intellectual contexts but is simply an intellectualized rationale for a model of collectivity that, as we have seen, enjoyed support from more popular and accessible literary sources as well. By the 1890s, however, this model of chance collectivity underwent significant changes in Peirce’s work. One sign of these later developments appears in his changing estimation of Venn’s frequentism. In 1867, Peirce said that Venn’s The Logic of Chance “is a book which should be read by every thinking man” (W 2:98). By 1893, he was calling it “a blundering little book” and claimed, “I do not think I learned anything” from it (CP 6:393). There is no space here to wade into debates about precisely how Peirce’s early nominalism or frequentism developed into later theories of chance, and this chapter does not pretend to account fully for Peirce’s long and varied engagement with probability. Suffice it to say, by the 1890s Peirce’s nominalism was giving way rapidly to varieties of philosophical realism throughout his philosophy, and he was proving ever more interested in individual instances rather than in very large and even potentially infinite sequences. Along with this shift from nominalism to realism, from pragmatism to metaphysics, and from probabilism to absolutism in the matter of chance, we also find a corresponding shift away from communitarianism and toward a more insistent individualism.

  Detecting “Absolute Chance” Peirce’s theory of absolute chance is one of the most audacious theories of chance ever proposed, but it must be conceded that his ideas on the subject often are not very persuasive either to philosophers or scientists today.7 Peirce’s theory of chance assumed a prominent place in his sweeping metaphysical system that sought to identify universal underpinnings for philosophy, cosmology, psychology, mathematics, semiotics, logic, and many other disciplines as well. As Peirce’s chance became more absolute, his metaphysics became more grandiose. While Peirce was working to articulate such an all-encompassing system, he also began renouncing his earlier and more cautious claims about chance. In 1893, he wrote, “For a long time, I myself strove to make chance that diversity in the universe which laws leave room for, instead of a violation of law, or lawlessness. That was truly believing in chance that was not absolute chance” (CP 6:409). Peirce is treating chance in the first instance as a name for open spaces between other finite determinants, or gaps in the causal chain where freedom and variety might flourish. But as he says, this proved to be not quite enough, and as absolute chance emerged in his thinking primarily in the 1880s and 1890s, it appeared instead as an active force preventing any law from becoming universal. “I suppose on excessively rare sporadic occasions a law of nature is violated in some infinitesimal degree,” Peirce says in an unpublished manuscript around 1883; “that may be called absolute chance” (W 4:549). By this view laws operate with “a wonderful degree of approximation, and that is all” (CP 1:402). This is not to say that the world is only a chaotic zone of unreason, of course, but that what we term “law” is really just a habit of the material world at a certain place and time. Absolute chance actually produces law, or gives rise to it out of the fullness of its infinite possibility. Much as random genetic variations produce stable, self-replicating species, so absolute chance leads to stable, self-perpetuating laws. “Now I will suppose that all known laws are due to chance and repose upon others far less rigid themselves due to chance and so on in an infinite regress, the further we go back the more indefinite being the nature of the laws,” Peirce concludes (W 4:551–52). In claims like these, absolute chance begins to seem radically different from Peirce’s earlier conception of chance as nothing other than a probabilistic assessment of relative frequencies or as an open space where determinants have no hold.

Detecting “Absolute Chance”     Yet Peirce’s “absolute chance” also turns out to be one of the most problematic theories of chance ever proposed, for by making chance absolute, Peirce effectively reversed the Aristotelian distinction between substance and accident, without seriously challenging the distinction itself. As Ross Hamilton has shown, Aristotle applied the concept of accident not just to qualities but also to events, but “since [Aristotle] did not admit causeless events into his understanding of the world, he assumed that such events must have causes.”8 Accordingly, the Aristotelian analysis of chance events requires a corresponding analysis of intentionality, for as Hamilton puts it, Aristotle’s “definition of the accidental event is predicated on an interpretive analysis of the purpose for which the act was undertaken.”9 So, while Peirce builds out from the basic outlines of Aristotle’s theory, he repositioned the concept of chance as the very source and origin of all subsequent determinations. To put it in Aristotle’s terms, what we think of as the substance of universal law is actually secondary, derivative, and changeable. Yet this reversal of values is not so radical as it first appears, for it salvages the basic structure of traditional metaphysics at a moment when many other philosophers, including William James and John Dewey, were dispensing with metaphysics altogether. With law transformed into changeable habit, Peirce restores essence, substance, and metaphysics by making chance into a new absolute. When other pragmatists objected to absolutism and essentialism, they specifically objected to the qualities of universality and permanence traditionally associated with absolutes and essences. They alleged that we do not prize the absolute because it is permanent, but rather we identify certain things as absolute because we prize them highly and want to render them immune to change and exempt from debate. When Peirce turns chance into an absolute, then, he salvages Kantian metaphysics by placing the “non-law” of chance precisely in that privileged place where universal law used to be (CP 6:606). As a result, even though Peirce may be best known as the inventor of the term “pragmatism,” he was, by the end of his career, a traditional realist philosopher working to complete a systematic account of all knowledge, a project that James and Dewey had all but abandoned. As one of “Kant’s progeny,” as he once called himself, Peirce is not quite the void-bombinating postmodernist that he can sometimes seem but instead begins as a pluralist and a pragmatist ahead of his times and ends as a

  Detecting “Absolute Chance” religious metaphysician decidedly behind them (CP 5:464). Yet for most of his career, Peirce struggled to yoke together pragmatic relativism, on the one hand, and metaphysical essentialism, on the other. There are many different kinds of metaphysics, of course, and Peirce cared not at all for Platonic idealism or scholastic debates about the nature of the soul, which he dismissed as an “arena of ceaseless and trivial disputation” and “a puny, rickety, and scrofulous science” (CP 6:5, 6). But Peirce did care about scientific “generalities,” a different sort of metaphysical claim that sees things like causation or chance as real rather than as ways of talking about experience. Over his career, Peirce moved fitfully toward increasingly strong metaphysical positions, even though he never entirely eschewed pragmatic methods. So, whereas James’s pragmatism was a philosophy of constructed and endlessly changeable truths, Peirce’s pragmatism became a method for clarifying ideas and prioritizing investigative efforts within a more traditional realist framework. His transition from pragmatism to metaphysics, or from “nominalism” to “realism” as Max Fisch has described it, becomes more complex as Peirce attempts to square his scientific metaphysics with his religious faith in a theistic God, a project that Fisch and many others regard as far from complete.10 I regard any reconciliation of those views as practically impossible, and despite many scholars’ attempts to unify Peirce’s body of work, I side with Thomas Goudge’s argument that Peirce “harbored a conflict which exhibits itself philosophically in the espousal of two incompatible sets of premisses [sic] for his thought.”11 Antifoundational, antiessentializing pragmatism always coexists uncomfortably with Peirce’s realist faith in natural categories, especially his triad of “Firstness,” “Secondness,” and “Thirdness,” universal givens that underpin almost every aspect of his later philosophy. Although subsequent readers have done a great deal to historicize the shifts in Peirce’s thinking, it seems to me that after about 1890 these conflicts in Peirce’s thinking are fairly intractable, and his own attempts to reconcile them frequently strained, and sometimes incoherent. I make no attempt to resolve those conflicts here. Instead, I propose to examine Peirce’s turn toward “absolute chance” not as an assessment of the nature of the universe but as a product of the stories he decided to tell about the universe, or what we might simply call the plot of the universe as Peirce conceived of it. This is to read Peirce’s pragmatism against

Detecting “Absolute Chance”     his metaphysics and so to take sides in the long-running debate Peirce had with himself. In late Peirce, scientific theories developed through logic and experimentation might be narrated as illustrations or exempla, but they purportedly give rise to narrative only as a simpler, secondary formation. In fact, Peirce rarely resorts to narrative at all. In contrast, William James—the most literary of the pragmatist philosophers—frequently indulges in storytelling, implicitly arguing that our most basic claims depend on the narratives we contrive. James famously described a camping party having a “furious metaphysical dispute” about a squirrel positioning itself on the opposite side of a tree from a man circling the tree, in which the fundamental question was, “Does the man go round the squirrel or not?” It depends, James says, not on the squirrel, the man, or the tree but “on what you practically mean by ‘going round’ the squirrel.”12 For James, how we arrange our stories determines how we define our truths; for Peirce, the truths we define determine the kinds of stories we are authorized to tell. Whereas Peirce would likely say that his theory of “absolute chance” as a real, universal presence might be narrated in certain ways, it seems just as plausible to argue that Peirce’s preference for a certain kind of narrative inspired, and perhaps even required, whatever he finally meant by absolute chance. The narrative form that Peirce began to embrace as he shifted from nominalism to realism, from pragmatism to metaphysics, and from probabilistic chance to absolute chance was the teleological plot of the detective novel. That plot became the model not just for Peirce’s own self-conception as a heroic investigator in a mystifying world but also for his broader conception of the inevitability of scientific and philosophical progress toward truth. Peirce’s devotion to the detective novel has parallels in other narratives that he applies to scientific inquiry, biological history, and cosmological change. In his view, inquiry will circle in on the truth, biological evolution will make real progress, and the entire universe will move ever onward toward more rational forms. Moreover, with success assured, the suspense of detective novels depends on how, not whether, the mystery will be solved. And finally, and most important, demystification will come about through a lone knowledge-hero’s highly individualistic endeavors, which have little need for anything like a broader community of inquirers.

  Detecting “Absolute Chance” Peirce refers to Edgar Allan Poe’s detective stories on two key occasions, where he makes C. Auguste Dupin’s “ratiocination” a precedent for one part of his own theory of inquiry. Based on that broad hint, more than a few readers have noticed affinities between Peirce’s methods, especially his semiotics, and detective fiction, including Umberto Eco and Thomas Sebeok in their influential collection of essays The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce. Kenneth Laine Ketner’s literary “autobiography” of Peirce, His Glassy Essence, casts Peirce as the first-person narrator of a detective tale. And subsequent detective novelists have noticed and commemorated Peirce’s affinity for their genre as well, including Dashiell Hammett, who cast a “Charles Pierce” in The Maltese Falcon, and Thomas Pynchon, who created “Pierce Inverarity” for his postmodern detective parody, The Crying of Lot 49. Before turning to Peirce’s own detective story, we should consider the kinds of detective narratives circulating during Peirce’s career. Even though there is no evidence that Peirce or Anna Katharine Green ever read each other’s work, it seems to me that Green’s fiction is actually a good model for Peirce’s own mode of inquiry, and in some ways superior even to Poe’s. This is partly because Green was among the very first novelists to write stories about women detectives, and Peirce links his own detective work to a capacity for guessing that he expressly associates with the “the insight of females” (W 5:135). But Green is also, and quite conspicuously, determined to reconcile the plot of demystification with the literary treatment of accident and chance, and the difficulties that project entails finally prove useful for understanding the relationship between narrative and chance in Peirce’s far more abstract philosophy.

Anna Katharine Green’s “Curious Approaches” Green published detective novels regularly from 1878 to 1923, helping to advance a genre still in its adolescence when she began her career.13 Over those decades, Green led the resurgence of the American detective novel both at home and abroad. When Arthur Conan Doyle visited the United States for a lecture tour in 1894, he arranged to meet Green in Buffalo, at a time when she was his more famous counterpart.14 Later, no less an authority than Walter Benjamin admired her treatment of the overdecorated “bourgeois apartment” and claimed that Green and other de-

Detecting “Absolute Chance”     tective novelists “have been denied the reputation they deserve.”15 Green’s most interesting works are those that feature surprisingly independent female detectives, such as Amelia Butterworth or Violet Strange, detectives who provide an important corrective to the tradition of masculine “ratiocination,” invented by Poe and popularized by Conan Doyle. Although Green’s novels may seem excessively genteel and decorous to modern readers, their conception of upper-class crime fighting also requires teamwork across class and gender lines. Like a false bookshelf or a concealed alcove, genteel manners conceal certain facts that otherwise would be out in the open, but by pairing professional male detectives with amateur female sleuths, Green’s novels gain access to the hidden recess of many different kinds of separate spheres. Nonetheless, Green’s female detectives also display an ambivalent mix of modern and traditional values. Sometimes they recommend the independence and autonomy of women who deliberately refuse marriage (Green did not marry until she was thirty-eight years old), and sometimes they conclude that women’s considerable intellectual powers must finally serve “home joys and a woman’s true existence.”16 If Green’s novels challenge class and gender norms in limited ways, they more aggressively defy traditional notions of how detection should work. Unfortunately, what little critical attention Green has received has tended to focus on issues of gender and domesticity, valid issues to be sure, but ones that exclude the novels’ models of inquiry and investigation, which are precisely the topics that critics have often addressed in the works of Poe and Conan Doyle. Given that the methods of Green’s detectives are prone to look like methodlessness, perhaps this is understandable, but I would suggest that her detectives’ random and clumsy investigation is itself an innovation within the detective genre and a challenge to traditional, masculine models of inquiry. In many of Green’s novels, narrative pleasure does not come from accompanying a brilliant detective as he observes acutely and reasons shrewdly in order to trace crime to its roots. Instead, it somehow comes from accompanying detectives who are groping in the dark (a favorite trope), confused by complexity, frustrated at the lack of unequivocal evidence leading to necessary conclusions, and blinkered by their own preconceptions, biases, misapprehensions, and fantasies. The reader’s job in a detective novel is always to be dim and wrong, but an important feature of Green’s novels is that her detectives are

  Detecting “Absolute Chance” usually dim and wrong too. That is not to say that her novels in any way critique her detectives or expect better from them. There are no epistemological superheroes in Green’s novels, neither a masterful Dupin nor a hyperrational Holmes. We are all in it together—detective, reader, victim, and criminal—none of whom has privileged access to special rational or observational power, and none of whom much seems to miss it. For instance, in That Affair Next Door (1897), Amelia Butterworth— spinster, socialite, and erstwhile amateur sleuth—witnesses a murderer’s entrance to the scene of the crime the moment before he commits it, but from both direct observation and rational analysis she is not able to determine the man’s identity.17 She often knows who he is not, entertains suspicions about who he might be, but she cannot be certain and in fact turns out to guess wrongly again and again. The novel conceals the murderer’s identity from detective and reader alike until the last three chapters of this nearly four-hundred-page work, and his eventual unmasking owes virtually nothing to the intellectual or perceptual abilities of the detectives. Similarly, in the novel I will look at most closely here, The Woman in the Alcove (1906), published the year before Peirce wrote his own story of criminal investigation, the detective again sees the murderer just at the moment when he has committed his crime, but she cannot identify him, and neither she nor the police ever suspect the man who actually did it. The novel gives the reader almost no opportunity to identify the culprit, who remains offstage the entire time, and when he is apprehended, it is by sheer accident, through a fortunate stroke of luck that by no means can be said to have restored any sort of rational order. In both of these novels, then, the detectives actually see the murderer at the novel’s outset, a fact that proves to be of very little advantage in the course of their investigations. Other kinds of analysis offer little more help, for with evidence in hand, no amount of thinking leads necessarily to valid conclusions. Clearly this is a drastically different state of affairs than that found in the detective fiction of Green’s admirer, Conan Doyle. Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tends to be found far from the scene of the crime, summoned by a desperate police inspector who arrives, hat in hand and with only scraps of evidence available. Holmes’s subsequent investigations affirm that slender clues allow a person with sufficient skill in reading them to reconstruct the genealogy of events. In “The Sign of Four,”

Detecting “Absolute Chance”     for instance, Holmes explains how he knows that Watson sent a telegram at Wigmore Street Post Office that morning because of “a little reddish mould adhering to your instep,” which Holmes connects to the color of the earth at a work site opposite the post office. By combining that observation with his memory of Watson’s having written a letter that morning, he deduces the rest. “So much is observation. The rest is deduction. . . .  Eliminate all other factors, and the one that remains must be the truth,” Holmes says.18 Nothing like this happens in Green’s novels. Not only does evidence fail to be as uniquely identifying as the “reddish mould” but what evidence does exist tends to admit multiple interpretations, so one simply cannot “eliminate all other factors,” as Holmes recommends. Just as often, clues are simply absent, which helps explain Green’s invention of what has since become one of the great clichés of popular detective fiction, the icicle used as a murder weapon, which disappears entirely after its use.19 In Green’s universe, evidence always melts away, and even when it remains, it frequently misleads or tells the most outrageous lies. These conditions approach their limits in Green’s The Woman in the Alcove. In that novel, a wealthy socialite wearing a large diamond is murdered at a society party in an alcove just off the main room, a crime that occurs without any of the guests noticing. The alcove is raised a few steps above the main level and was originally intended to house a “large group of statuary,” but as such its interior space is only partly visible to the rest of the room (9). A large window connects it to the outside, and a passageway behind a curtain connects it to the servants’ quarters. When guests find Mrs. Fairbrother’s body, the diamond is gone, and suspicion immediately falls on Anson Durand, a jeweler and the fiancé of the novel’s narrator, heroine, and amateur detective, Rita Van Arsdale. Van Arsdale promptly begins working to clear her beloved’s name, and a thinly rendered marriage plot accompanies the novel’s primary focus on detection. It turns out that the victim was killed by her own estranged husband, Abner Fairbrother, who had slipped into the party disguised as a waiter, accessed the alcove via the servants’ entrance, killed his wife, and escaped unnoticed. Yet for three hundred pages no one entertains any suspicion of Fairbrother, and the investigation focuses almost exclusively on an innocent man, “Mr. Grey,” a British gem collector. Once Fairbrother confesses, Van Arsdale frankly concedes that he was “the man on whom no suspicion

  Detecting “Absolute Chance” had fallen” (319). This is no overstatement. The detectives never consider Fairbrother as the culprit, the novel registers no suspicion of him, and he never appears until his capture. But most important, that capture happens by the most outrageous accident. Van Arsdale and Inspector Gryce attempt to test their hypothesis that Grey killed Mrs. Fairbrother by laying the murder weapon beside his plate before dinner, but to their surprise Grey shows no reaction to it. Van Arsdale says, “My disappointment was so great, my humiliation so unbounded, that, forgetting myself in my dismay, I staggered back and let the tray with all its contents slip from my hands. The crash that followed stopped Mr. Grey in the act of rising. But it did something more. It awoke a cry from the next room which I shall never forget” (316). The cry comes from the real murderer, who is startled by the sound of the breaking china, a sound he had last heard when he murdered his wife, causing her to drop her cup of tea. Overcome by surprise and guilt, he first draws a gun, then surrenders and confesses. By the standards that apply to the most influential kinds of detective fiction, this is nothing short of absurd. What consolation can readers take in a conclusion that seems to renounce the efficacy of reason and even method? Instead of reasoning their way toward conclusions that are necessarily true, these detectives bang away at their task until they notice they happen to have done it right. But this extraordinary accidental resolution is, in some ways, perfectly in keeping with the rest of the novel, for just as this scene is the last in a long series of blunders, so too it is the last in a long series of accidents that had advanced and retarded the narrative all along. By chance, Anson Durand had entered the alcove just a moment after the murder. No sooner had he entered, he later reports, “when, suddenly, something fell splashing on my shirt-front, and I saw myself marked with a stain of blood” (80). The blood dripped from the murder weapon, which was “thrust, point downward, in the open work of an antique lantern hanging near the doorway” (80). Durand announces what is already clear: “What had happened to me might have happened to any one who chanced to be in that spot at that special moment” (80). But why was Durand at that auspicious place at that crucial instant, right as the blood “chanced” to drip upon him? Because someone he hoped to avoid happened to be standing near the main door. Why was Durand at the party in the first place? Because someone “chanced to speak in my hear-

Detecting “Absolute Chance”     ing of the wonderful stone possessed by a certain Mrs. Fairbrother” (72). Although chance solves the crime in the end, in the beginning, chance also threatens to frame an innocent person. Chance thus ends up seeming pernicious and propitious in roughly equal measures. At first it represents the derangement of reason and morality, but in the end it functions as an instrument of rational and moral demystification. The first of these options, of course, represents the more interesting and surprising of the two, and writers who were not so quick to rationalize and moralize chance, as we have seen, could pursue that line of thinking toward a number of practical social ends. However, chance has no such socializing application in Green. Instead, Green’s entire novel is devoted to transforming one kind of chance into the other. It tells the story not just of the capture and punishment of the criminal but of the rehabilitation of irrational and amoral chance into a beneficent instrument of rational and moral authority. This transformation of what at first appears to be ontological chance into a more traditional, moralized variety reappears in a slightly dislocated form in the novel’s account of visual observation. Van Arsdale’s initial glimpse of the murderer establishes a pattern of perceptual contingency and fallibility that structures many of the novel’s other methods of assessment and configures looking itself as a highly aleatory affair. When Van Arsdale first sees the murderer, she does not yet realize what she is seeing and says: I found myself looking, as if through a mist I had not even seen develop, at something as strange, unusual and remote as any phantasm, yet distinct enough in its outlines for me to get a decided impression of a square of light surrounding the figure of a man in a peculiar pose not easily imagined and not easily described. It all passed in an instant, and I sat staring at the window opposite me with the feeling of one who has just seen a vision. (19)

It turns out that this “vision” is a glimpse of the murderer reflected in the pane of the alcove’s open window, which is in turn reflected in a mirror across another room, toward which Van Arsdale inadvertently and passively “found” herself looking (19). Afterward, when she and the police inspector realize what she had seen, the inspector says, “It would seem that by one of those chances which happen but once or twice in a lifetime, every condition was propitious at the moment to make this reflection a possible

  Detecting “Absolute Chance” occurrence” (64). Had certain shades not been drawn and others left open, had the alcove’s window not been opened to precisely the right angle, and had the alcove not been elevated due to the “freak of the architect,” this particular glimpse would not have occurred (64). It follows, of course, that in most cases—and in many other instances in this novel—no such insight does occur, not because there are sights that are overlooked but because the world fails to come together in precisely the right way to make those sights available. In Conan Doyle, criminals succeed because investigators read badly, not because the symptoms of their crime are illegible or, worse, absent. In Green, however, even direct sight is a vexed and perplexed affair, a hazy play of reflections and distortions on intermediate surfaces that, as in this case, turns direct perception into heavily mediated double representation. Under the influence of “the feeling of one who has just seen a vision,” Van Arsdale is left to ask herself whether she “had seen, or imagined myself to have seen,” and the difference between those two options, and the difficulty of telling one from the other, indicates the extent of the gulf that separates seeing from knowing in this novel (54). These failed and partial insights, as well as the accidents that both hinder and help them, also indicate the highly contingent nature of Green’s world. If simple accidents have such drastic consequences for our epistemology, then, depending on how one looks at it, the world is either terrifyingly underregulated or rich with open-ended possibility. The problem, however, is that at a deeper level, things actually could not have come out some other way, because despite the apparent intrusions of chance, Green’s detective novels are committed in advance to catching the criminal and reestablishing familiar kinds of moral order. The end really is foreordained, and it is foreordained not just in the weak sense that the last page of the novel exists as a finished product from the start, but it is also foreordained in the strong sense that the form of that particular ending was stamped from a generic template that every reader of detective fiction knows to expect. As a result, Green’s novel finally transforms chance into its opposite, divine Providence. After Van Arsdale glimpses the murderer through “one of those chances which happen but once or twice in a lifetime” (64), she concludes, “Providence was working for me” (62). Later, in the conclusion’s replaying of this initial accident, she concludes that Fairbrother “had not calculated on Providence” (371).20 Making chance a

Detecting “Absolute Chance”     component of any grand narrative—Victorian progress, divine salvation, entropic decline—transforms chance into the handmaiden of those narratives’ foregone conclusions. However, I would suggest that we go about it backward if we suppose that Green’s novels have such happy endings because she is finally devoted to a providential understanding of chance. On the contrary, her commitment to a narrative form that must punish vice and reward virtue finally forces her to recast anything that contributes to that conclusion as having been necessary from the start. In a novel that tries to read human fallibility as evidence of human freedom, Providence becomes the name for the luck that the larger teleological narrative cannot do without. This transformation of chance into Providence turns out to correlate directly with the changing nature of the observational powers of Green’s detectives. When seemingly random, contingent glimpses prove to be morally enlightening, as in the case of Van Arsdale’s “chances which happen but once or twice in a lifetime,” they also become avenues of transcendental access to higher reality. Fragmentary and contingent sight ends up being recast as transcendent vision. Accordingly, Van Arsdale’s fleeting glimpse of the murderer leaves her with “the feeling of one who has just seen a vision,” which now seems not so much like imagination, as she initially feared, but like mystical access to higher truth (19).21 In this novel, observation thus tends to be either far less or far more than empirical assessment. It is far less than empirical assessment in the sense that Van Arsdale characterizes what she sees as “strange, unusual and remote as any phantasm” and later says she could not easily distinguish it from “hallucination” (19). To see in this way is to see dimly and darkly, and to fill in the gaps with all sorts of fallible suppositions and imaginative distortions. But observation is far more than empirical assessment once it turns into visionary clarification: Van Arsdale’s “hallucination” is also a mystical “vision,” which quite literally lets the detective see around corners. As Van Arsdale struggles to explain exactly how these contingent reflections worked, and to sort out the differences between hallucination, observation, and transcendent vision, she eventually turns from narrative to illustration. So that “no confusion may arise in any one’s mind,” she says, “I subjoin a plan of this portion of the lower floor” (65). The illustration she provides, reproduced as Figure 5, thus oddly makes its

figur e 5.  “Plan of the Ramsdell House,” from Anna Katharine Green, The Woman in the Alcove, 66.

Detecting “Absolute Chance”     appeal to the very faculty of perception that is in doubt at this stage, and that has provoked no end of confusion. Karen Halttunen has shown that nineteenth-century newspaper accounts of actual murders were “highly attentive to the spatial dimensions of the crime” and frequently printed the kinds of floor plans that Van Arsdale says she found “in the leading dailies” (65).22 Halttunen also reminds us that the word “detection” literally means “taking the roof off” and so refers to an architectural exposure that allows one to look down into the rooms, as if with the eyes of a deity.23 But the aerial view that Van Arsdale provides contains its own contrasting representations of sight and vision, both of which the diagram represents. Van Arsdale’s own confused line of sight appears as the broken line, a momentary double reflection produced by chance and not easily distinguishable from hallucination. The diagram itself, however, resolves the entire scene into a rationalized and rarified omniscient vision, taken from above, which eradicates “confusion” by appropriating the vantage point of a deity (65). The diagram is actually a schematic rendering of the entire novel’s assessment of chance, for it confirms that whatever proves morally necessary must not be allowed to remain a matter of chance in the end. Mere contingent sight, which is so fallible and selective, must turn into transcendent vision in exactly the same degree that chance must turn into something like necessity. And in both cases, the real source of insight lodges not in contingent, fallible, or accidental human experience at all but in the metaphysical realm of Providence, which is also the realm of Van Arsdale’s supervisory deity, whose clarifying gaze the novel appropriates. What is left of chance in a narrative that makes chance necessary to its own conclusions? Very little; almost nothing at all. To write a narrative already structured around the work of rational and moral demystification is to produce chance not as a condition of moral and rational perplexity, which might yet prove socially or politically potent, but as an utterly unnecessary and finally disposable category of experience. Perhaps the novel has its own internal metaphor for the disposability of chance. One of the many other accidents in the novel occurs when Grey is holding a note that promises to bear significantly on the case, but it blows out of his hand and into a lake, never to return to its bearer, or to the novel. Even the absence of the note proves practically and morally irrelevant. This entirely

  Detecting “Absolute Chance” insignificant accident may finally serve as a small allegory for the insignificance of chance itself in the novel. Like the note that accidentally blows away, the very idea of chance simply gets lost in this novel, but of course within Green’s teleological narrative, utter disposability—complete and total nonnecessity—is the only characteristic that chance absolutely cannot do without.

Speculative Detection Peirce’s own detective story, “Guessing,” written the year after The Woman in the Alcove, encounters the same problem of narrating the accident that we find in Green and responds with similar solutions. Invented as a principle of radical nonnecessity, absolute chance became, for Peirce, utterly indispensable to his increasingly realist philosophy. Many critics have taken an interest in Peirce’s self-fashioning as a detective, but most emphasize alleged affinities between his theories of rational inquiry and the apparent procedures of various fictional detectives. Massimo Bonfantini and Giampaolo Proni dissect the sequence of actions in Conan Doyle’s “A Study in Scarlet” by stripping plot away from story—in the terms of Russian formalism—in order to read Holmes’s methods against Peirce’s. The authors attempt to improve on both models of inquiry, correcting deficiencies and excesses alike.24 I find it more fruitful to approach the issue from the opposite direction. Rather than strip away the literary to get at the seeming substance of analytical method, we can just as profitably analyze the ways in which Peirce’s commitment to various forms of literary narrative in fact compelled subsequent theoretical repositioning. Just as Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious seem so applicable to gothic fiction precisely because Freud read so much of it and internalized its account of the psyche, so Peirce’s theory of inquiry works for reading detective novels largely because he had already committed himself to their master narrative of rational and moral demystification. The story he tells about himself in “Guessing” is thus not primarily about detective work in any historical sense. On the contrary, the theoretical claims he makes there depend on highly literary tropes of sudden, dramatic, individualized demystification that Peirce cribbed from the pages of detective fiction. According to Peirce, the story was this: While aboard a ship taking

Detecting “Absolute Chance”     him from Boston to New York in 1878, he awoke in his stateroom with “a strange fuzzy sensation” in his head, left to get air, went ashore in New York, and took a cab to the site of a scheduled meeting (270).25 He left behind a $350 watch made by the famous British watchmaker Charles Frodsham, which the U.S. government provided to Peirce to assist his work as a coastal surveyor.26 When Peirce arrived at his meeting, he realized he had left the watch behind, along with his own watch chain, a small binnacle, a compass, and a light overcoat, and immediately raced back to the ship to find them. When he reached his stateroom, they were gone. We know that Peirce did hire a Pinkerton detective to recover the watch, because the Pinkerton detectives printed a card offering a reward for it.27 Beyond that, however, most of the other details of the crime come from Peirce himself, as he related them almost three decades after the events described. Written partly at the urging of William James, Peirce’s story was rejected by the Atlantic Monthly but published posthumously under the title of “Guessing” in a Harvard alumni magazine in 1929. In general, the piece attempts to illustrate the importance of guesses in reasoning, and Peirce supported his claims with two stories. The first is the story of his stolen watch; the second is his story of an experiment he performed on thresholds of physical sensitivity at Johns Hopkins University in the mid-1880s. The two stories are related, but the story of the stolen watch is the longer narrative and the more literary one. In it, Peirce describes how, once he discovered that his watch was gone, he immediately “made all the colored waiters, no matter on what deck they belonged, come and stand up in a row” (271). Pacing before them, he claims to have guessed the identity of the thief by nothing more rigorous than a “random choice” (281). If Green’s detectives guess rather than read clues, Peirce does too, but in his case, at least according to Peirce himself, he guesses correctly on the very first try.28 This “singular guessing instinct” that allows Peirce to identify the culprit demonstrates a logical faculty that Peirce termed “abduction,” which he grouped with induction and deduction, but which he judged superior to both. In the simplest terms, abduction is a guess or hypothesis, often about the source or origin of something. It does not prove something by necessity but narrows down the possibilities for subsequent investigation, just as venturing a scientific hypothesis is a preliminary step before

  Detecting “Absolute Chance” some scientific experiment. Abduction is thus not a prescribed way of reasoning but a description of a stage of reasoning that we cannot hope to avoid. But in “Guessing,” Peirce goes much further, for abduction appears to be something like a semimystical operation by which the mind gains access to the hidden truths of the inscrutable world. Peirce describes his approach to investigating the ship’s waiters this way: I went from one end of the row to the other, and talked a little to each one, in as dégagé a manner as I could, about whatever he could talk about with interest, but would least expect me to bring forward, hoping that I might seem such a fool that I should be able to detect some symptom of his being the thief. When I had gone through the row I turned and walked from them, though not away, and said to myself, “Not the least scintilla of light have I got to go upon.” But thereupon my other self (for our communings are always in dialogues), said to me, “But you simply must put your finger on the man. No matter if you have no reason, you must say whom you will think to be the thief.” I made a little loop in my walk, which had not taken a minute, and as I turned toward them, all shadow of a doubt vanished. (271)

There is no “symptom” of the thief, at least not the kind upon which the medical doctor Sherlock Holmes so often relies.29 Although Peirce does read signs and symptoms throughout “Guessing,” he reads them retrospectively as confirmations of guesses hazarded earlier. The guess precedes the test, as it does in the scientific method, where the hypothesis precedes the experiment. For Peirce, however, the ultimate point is that the initial guess is not really a “random choice” at all, even though he labels it such, but an intuition guided by some inner instinct for guessing correctly. The larger question that “Guessing” addresses is actually a very simple one. Given the limitless number of possible hypotheses, how do scientists so often manage to venture the very hypothesis that experiments turn out to validate? The answer Peirce comes up with is equally simple: some inner light, some “guessing instinct,” gives us all a very slight tendency to guess correctly. That claim is not just dubious as Peirce formulates it but also unnecessary for answering a perfectly legitimate question. Even so, just as accidents that contribute to moral outcomes cannot count as chance in Green’s novels, so guessing, for Peirce, cannot be allowed to be entirely random after all. In “Guessing,” Peirce’s investigation follows and also validates his initial guess; however, his method for identifying the culprit would not

Detecting “Absolute Chance”     likely carry much weight with the law, and partly for that reason, Peirce hired a Pinkerton detective to trail the alleged thief, establish his guilt more surely, and recover the stolen property. Peirce recounts his instructions to the superintendent of Pinkerton’s New York office, George Bangs: “He will come off the boat at one o’clock, and will immediately go to pawn the watch, for which he will get fifty dollars. I wish you to have him shadowed, and as soon as he has the pawn ticket, let him be arrested.” Said Mr. Bangs, “What makes you think he has stolen your watch?” “Why,” said I, “I have no reason whatever for thinking so; but I am entirely confident that it is so.” (273)

Of course, Bangs’s decision to allow his detective to trail a different man redounds to his and his company’s humiliation, when that suspect turns out to be innocent. With Peirce’s suspect now gone from the ship, Bangs notifies pawnbrokers that Peirce’s watch may be presented to them, and when it is, the thief finally is apprehended. And according to Peirce, he turns out to be the very man whom Peirce had “put [his] finger on” aboard the Bristol. The problem with Peirce’s guesses in “Guessing” is not just that his theory of abduction seems far-fetched when pushed to such extremes but also that his account of his own actions is so outrageous that even minimally skeptical readers surely wonder whether it is really just artful fiction. Setting aside the troubling business of interrogating only the “colored waiters,” it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the victims from the criminals in Peirce’s story. Peirce ends up reperforming the initial crime, for in pursuit of a man who allegedly broke into his stateroom to steal property, Peirce describes how he also forced his way into the alleged culprit’s apartment, pushed aside a “yellow woman,” rifled through her trunk, then invaded a neighboring apartment in search of his overcoat. Even the Pinkerton detective is unwilling to condone such conduct and in Peirce’s account remains discreetly below on the street. Already, we can see the outlines of highly literary detection. The timid police remain on the margins. The detective must break the law in order to enforce the law. And in what may be a partial imitation of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” Peirce very specifically repeats the very crime he has set out to solve, by purloining some of his own property back again. As a result, to read “Guessing” is to find oneself feeling far more doubt about Peirce’s candor than anything else, doubt that the piece actually seems to encourage by

  Detecting “Absolute Chance” making especially flamboyant claims about its own veracity. Peirce insists, “I promise and aver, in the most solemn manner, that in the following narration of these facts no item or circumstance is in any way exaggerated or colored” (270). Later, he repeats, “All the above, be it understood is sober truth, sedulously freed from all exaggeration and colour” (277). In statements like these, the philosopher doth protest too much. Peirce’s strident claims for his own truthfulness in fact alert readers to the heavy presence of literary artifice. There are more practical grounds for doubting Peirce’s veracity. The long span of years between the events and Peirce’s recounting of them raises perfectly legitimate questions about the accuracy of his memory, which also explains why several different manuscript drafts of the story told in “Guessing” have slightly different accounts of even basic facts.30 Those alterations raise serious questions about how much elaboration or hypothetical reconstruction may have come into play in more significant elements of the story. Little of the material evidence Sebeok gathers in support of the facts of the case, such as the card distributed to pawnbrokers, bears on Peirce’s credibility regarding key details of his own method; moreover, historians have not uncovered the alleged culprit’s identity, which makes it somewhat less likely that the suspect really was “on his road to Sing Sing,” as Peirce informs the suspect’s wife (275). Against those who have read “Guessing” as a model of scientific inquiry, I read it as a model of narrative self-production, one that appropriates the tropes of detective fiction far more than it describes the practices of actual detection. Evidence of Peirce’s exposure to detective fiction is everywhere in “Guessing,” especially in Peirce’s self-construction as a literary character. Like many literary detectives, Peirce appears eminently unflappable—“I only know that I was entirely cool”—and every inch the calm, laconic hero (275). Just as Holmes or Dupin does not rifle every nook and recess, and never stoops to long interrogations, Peirce refuses the tedious drudgery of actual policing. In doing so, Peirce contrasts his own creative intelligence with the dull and timid representatives of institutional law and order. Next to Peirce, even Pinkerton’s “very best man” is a positive hindrance to the investigation (273). Even certain subplots of “Guessing” betray Peirce’s debts to detective fiction. When Bangs refuses to join Peirce in his warrantless search of the suspect’s apartment, Peirce

Detecting “Absolute Chance”     asks him to “wait on the sidewalk for ten minutes—or stay, make it twelve minutes—and I will be down with the things” (275). Aside from speaking these lines in the voice of a windy melodramatic actor, Peirce configures the actual hunt for a stolen timepiece, appropriately enough, as a sensational race against the clock. Readers know what to expect: “I descended to the street, and reached my detective about fifteen seconds before my twelve minutes had elapsed” (277). To my ear, Peirce seems to have been reading much pulpier fare than anything written by Poe, Conan Doyle, or Green, because whatever actually happened with Peirce’s stolen watch, his own narrative of the event is anything but “sober truth” and “sedulously freed from all exaggeration and colour” (277). On the contrary, it is colored through and through by literary narratives of heroic, individualized detection, the conventions of which Peirce may have imitated in his actual search for the stolen watch, and certainly appropriated in the retelling. There is a more direct link between abduction and literature as well in Peirce’s work, and it appears in Scientific Metaphysics, which is also a key text in his treatment of absolute chance. There, Peirce says that through abduction, “those problems that at first blush appear utterly insoluble receive, in that very circumstance, as Edgar Poe remarked in his ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ their smoothly-fitting keys” (CP 6:460).31 We can begin to think about this tantalizing reference simply as a matter of content. Poe, we might suppose, has something to say about reason, which has philosophical rather than literary merit, and Peirce simply employs it as a demonstration of his broader point. There is, indeed, no small amount of support for this view. Maurice Lee has shrewdly discerned how Poe’s treatment of probability in his detective tales draws on early work from Pierre-Simon Laplace and John Stuart Mill, in which “a psychomathematical account of intuition” turned a vague awareness of probabilities into an instinctive basis for confident choice.32 In one such moment in “Rue Morgue,” a fruit vendor jostles the narrator “by accident,” causing him to stumble on a pile of cobblestones.33 That bump, stumble, and the near fall set in motion a train of unspoken thoughts in the narrator’s mind, which leads from the name for a kind of paving block, to Epicurus, to the nebular theory of cosmology, to the constellation Orion, to a newspaper article about an actor named Chantilly, who, Dupin finally replies out loud to his silent companion, would indeed play better at the Théâtre

  Detecting “Absolute Chance” des Variétés. When his companion confesses astonishment that Dupin could have read his thoughts, Dupin explains that he simply followed the chain of associations from one to the next, confirming his suppositions by observing his companion’s outward responses and gestures at each stage. Behind this bare explanation, based only in observation, is a far more sophisticated model of probabilistic intuition, Lee argues, for “‘Rue Morgue’ uses probability science to explain how we suddenly find ourselves knowing but not knowing how we know.”34 No doubt that is partly what attracted Peirce to Poe’s story, and a number of other critics have discerned an affinity between Dupin and Peirce in this matter of intuition. Nancy Harrowitz sees the very passage from “Rue Morgue” described previously as being “devoted to the expression of abduction.”35 But surely that direct reading of Dupin’s intuition as equivalent to Peirce’s abduction ignores the playfulness and even the outrageous ironies that Poe builds into Dupin’s sensational claims. Dupin’s most extraordinary ratiocinative moments are not necessarily the products of a judgment soundly trained in the arts of any sort of intuition, but rather seem so incredible that they provoke readers’ suspicions that some fundamental dishonesty or deception is involved. We might recall the famous scene from “The Purloined Letter” in which a schoolboy enjoyed such “success at guessing in the game of ‘even and odd’” that he eventually “attracted universal admiration.”36 His method, absurdly, as many have noted, was simply to estimate his opponent’s intellect in order to guess how that opponent would respond to previous trials. To treat that explanation as anything like a model of sound reasoning seems little better than reading “Ligeia” as a model of sound medicine. Both are ironic and incredible in ways that should induce not faith but doubt, not emulation but detached and skeptical critique. Accordingly, in regard to Peirce’s reference to Poe’s “Rue Morgue,” and beyond superficial affinities of content, we should consider why, when Peirce broaches the topic of guessing, he turns not just to an illustrative story but to such playful and self-conscious literary fiction. Moreover, we might also ask why Peirce draws specifically on literary texts that go out of their way to provoke skepticism and, far from demonstrating a sound investigative method, alert readers to Dupin’s own possible duplicity. Possible answers to those questions will be discussed later, but for

Detecting “Absolute Chance”     the moment, we can observe that just as Dupin makes implausible claims about his own methods, so too does Peirce. Ironically enough, the central claim of Peirce’s “Guessing” turns out to be much like Dupin’s claim about his good guesses in “Rue Morgue,” which amounts to the claim that he was not guessing after all but observing closely and thinking carefully so that he truly knew what was passing in his companion’s mind. “Observation has become with me, of late, a species of necessity,” Dupin says, which may mean not just that he needs to observe closely but also that his observations are not really speculative after all. “I saw you were still thinking of the stones,” Dupin says with complete certainty. Subsequently, he says, “I could not doubt that you murmured the word ‘stereotomy’” and affirms that he “knew” his companion would next think of Epicurus. Later he “certainly expected” his companion to glance up at Orion, after which he was “assured that I had correctly followed your steps.”37 It is not Dupin’s guessing that is remarkable, for if any of this really were a guess, we could easily consider this a probabilistic intuition. What strikes us as incredible is Dupin’s claim to certain knowledge at every stage of his observations, a degree of confidence that would seem entirely unjustified but that is nonetheless the template for Peirce’s own. For Peirce, however, rendering the guess certain by making “all shadow of a doubt” vanish requires more than Dupin’s visual acuity. Instead, it requires something like the immediacy of physical touch. Just as contingent sight gives way to transcendent vision in Green, so in Peirce failures of sight are remedied by the full metaphysics of presence that touch makes possible. Along with many other pragmatists, Peirce was deeply suspicious of sight, which he regarded as an active faculty and not as a neutral mode of reception. In the act of looking, Peirce thought, we hazard certain assumptions about the way things are and then test them retrospectively through other modes of assessment. In that way, every act of looking is actually a guess, because whenever we look at anything, we draw conclusions about what we see that are by no means certain and then test those conclusions as we proceed. It would seem at this stage as if Peirce were correcting Dupin, not turning guesses into certain knowledge but turning the truth we seem to gather with our own eyes into nothing better than a guess. As a result, all visual observations unravel into a tangle of hypothesis and experiment:

  Detecting “Absolute Chance” Looking out of my window this lovely spring morning I see an azalea in full bloom. No, no! I do not see that; though that is the only way I can describe what I see. . . .  I perform an abduction when I so much as express in a sentence anything I see. The truth is that the whole fabric of our knowledge is one matted felt of pure hypothesis confirmed and refined by induction. Not the smallest advance can be made in knowledge beyond the stage of vacant staring, without making an abduction at every step.38

By jerking the paragraph out of the gauzy language of aesthetic reflection, across a patch of violent outrage, and into declarative abstraction, Peirce exposes the construction “I see . . .  ” as a linguistic contrivance that ultimately fails to close the gap between seeing and knowing. No amount of looking can ever make leaping entirely sure; we leap first, then look around to see how and where we landed. In claims like these, Peirce mounted some of the earliest and strongest pragmatic attacks on what Dewey later called, damningly, the “spectator theory of knowledge,” that spurious idea, in Dewey’s view, that sight functions as a neutral medium of sensory reception.39 Peirce’s own experience with the science of astronomy taught him much the same lesson. Having worked as an assistant at the Harvard Observatory early in his career, Peirce recognized, first, that looking is always an active enterprise involving judgment, and second, that it is deeply riddled by errors of assessment, none of which can ever be checked against a final and definitive account of the real. Estimations of the exact positions of stars are, in fact, compounded out of many repeated observations that cluster, probabilistically, around a position we finally designate as the true one.40 Some of Peirce’s most important scientific contributions are related to his pioneering efforts in managing observational error, both by training observers more effectively and by probabilistically analyzing their collected observations. In the course of studying not stars themselves but the process of observing stars, Peirce was perfectly positioned to realize that “speculation” was something astronomers did with telescopes before it was something investors did with stocks. Accordingly, looking—astronomically or otherwise—is fundamentally speculative in the more modern and familiar use of the term, for it always constitutes a gamble, the merits of which can be determined only by further testing in the future. Seeing may be believing, as the saying goes, but for Peirce, that holds true only in the

Detecting “Absolute Chance”     sense that sight is nothing other than a conditional belief, an act of faith rather than the attainment of final and certain knowledge. However, in rejecting the spectator theory of knowledge in regard to his azalea bush, Peirce does not opt for the pragmatic argument that we simply fashion various beliefs that work, label them “truths,” and use them instrumentally as long as they serve. More accurately, if Peirce held such a view early in his career, he gradually modified it later, so that truth becomes not a product of our statements but rather the independent object of their uncertain focus. Rather than characterize his guessing as trained by long experience and through probabilistic methods, as an astronomer’s might be over many different trials, Peirce insists on discerning some means by which the mind might come into contract with truth more immediately. Because Peirce regards sight as highly fallible, however, he was forced to seek some even higher faculty by which guessing might be turned into certain knowledge. And in the quoted passage about the azalea, he implies the existence of just such a faculty by replacing references to passive seeing with metaphors of the tactile and textile, which are quite densely woven themselves. The “fabric of our knowledge” turns out to be “one matted felt of pure hypothesis,” he says, a significant transformation of the mental texture. Felt, like paper, is made with randomly tangled fibers that are moistened, heated, and rolled dry to form a densely matted sheet. When Peirce replaces the “fabric of knowledge” with the “felt of pure hypothesis,” he also exchanges the loom’s right-angle logic of warp and woof with a tangled density of intuitive surmise, the disorderliness of which gives it both its softness and its strength. The word “felt” is also tangled up with more important connotations. By echoing the past-tense form of the verb “to feel,” the passage replaces the act of looking with metaphorical references both to tactile sensation and to emotional affect: that which is felt. Sight gives way not to transcendental vision, as in Green, but to the immediacy of feeling, construed in both of its most familiar senses. That is to say, the unreliability of sight leaves Peirce to rely instead on two other faculties—oddly equated—physical contact and emotional response. Accordingly, these buried references to felt experience appeal to two organs of feeling typically more important to Peirce than the eyes, namely, the hand and the heart. Feeling—as both “touch” and “affect”—is thus not just a subjective

  Detecting “Absolute Chance” inner state but also a mode of perception tantamount to physical contact. The difference between sight and vision, as I described it in Green’s novel, is thus the difference between speculative guessing and felt knowledge for Peirce, the stakes of which become most apparent in “Guessing” in his account of his rivalry with the Pinkerton detective. Pinkerton’s was a well-known cultural icon by this point, and the company advertised its vigilance in a logo featuring a realistic human eye set in an almond-shaped white space, which is itself shaped like the white of an open eye (see Figure 6). As this ubiquitous emblem stared out from the company letterhead, and from the covers of some of Allan Pinkerton’s own volumes of detective memoirs, the Pinkerton gaze trained American society to internalize the vigilant and seemingly omniscient eye of the law. The letterhead in Figure 6 lists George Bangs himself—Peirce’s contact—as the superintendent of the New York office.41 Christopher Raczkowski has read the Pinkerton “private eye” as a striking instance of Foucauldian panopticism, in that Allan Pinkerton clearly meant for self-disciplining subjects to internalize the Pinkerton gaze. In Peirce’s vignette, however, the “Pinkerton man” embodies a different kind of seeing, not disciplinary authority but pure observational positivism, an embodiment of the spectator theory of knowledge with its basic assumption that seeing can constitute full knowing. The Pinkerton detective fails because he sees too much, which is to say, he sees only with his fallible, speculating eyes and not with that inner vision that can dispel “all shadow of a doubt.” The Pinkerton private eye thus stands in for a fantasy of observational certainty that distrusts active guesswork, but as a result, his fallible sight is either mired in the obvious or too easily led astray. For Peirce, then, the Pinkerton eye is an organ of sight, not of higher vision, but of course visionary knowledge dispenses with the eye altogether in favor of more direct modes of feeling. In his final metaphor, touch and affect come together for Peirce, for the moment when “all shadow of a doubt vanished” follows immediately after he commands himself, “You simply must put your finger on the man” (271). I argued earlier that Green’s attempt to associate sight with chance fails as soon as chance proves necessary to the plot, at which point it turns into Providence and forces a corresponding transformation of sight into vision. Peirce finds himself similarly constrained. The problem is that if

Detecting “Absolute Chance”    

figur e 6.  Letterhead, from letter by William A. Pinkerton to Frank Wind, March 18, 1884, Records of the Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, Library of Congress, Box 44 Folder 3. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

his insights in the case of his stolen watch really are guesses, then they owe themselves to chance, particularly if refined probabilistically, and correct guesses are thus predicated fundamentally on a willingness to hazard guesses in the first place. That, in fact, is what the community of inquirers does when its members guess continually and in great numbers; indeed, their individual uncertainty requires massively collective endeavor. But this is not what happens in “Guessing,” for instead of a long process of collective guesswork, we have a single amazing guess that demystifies what would only puzzle the rest of the community. Consequently, we can see that this kind of guessing actually has very little if anything to do with probability, or with any conception of chance closely related to probability. Instead, it has everything to do with translating purely probabilistic chances into what appears to be a mystical communing with the universe’s deepest truths. Having told the story of how he put his “finger” on the alleged thief of his watch, Peirce offers a second illustration of the guessing instinct in an account of an experiment Peirce and his colleague Joseph Jastrow performed in 1883 and 1884 at Johns Hopkins University (271).42 To evaluate subjects’ sensitivity to changes in physical pressure, Peirce devised an apparatus that applied pressure “upon the finger of the subject” and varied that pressure so slightly that the changes were presumed to lie below the threshold of human sensitivity (278). After a change in pressure, Peirce asked subjects to say whether or not any change in pressure had taken place. When subjects answered that no change had occurred, Peirce then forced them to guess, definitively, which of the two pressures had been

  Detecting “Absolute Chance” greater. Of these guesses, roughly “three out of five were correct,” which Peirce regards as too high a number to be simply a matter of chance (279). Peirce and Jastrow conclude in their article that there can be no such thing as a difference threshold for sensation, and so no limit to what we can sense, a fact that “gives new reason for believing that we gather what is passing in one another’s minds in large measure from sensations so faint that we are not fairly aware of having them” (W 5:135).43 If this sounds superficially like Dupin’s claim to have read the thoughts of his companion, it differs in the significant sense that for Peirce, such reading is not logical in the sense Dupin suggested but rather is to be felt directly through “sensations.” In both of its two narratives, then, “Guessing” attempts to blur the boundary between two kinds of feeling, which is the reason that the “cool” nature of Peirce’s guess on the Bristol is really an especially sensitive way of making a “discrimination below the surface of consciousness, and not recognized as a real judgment, yet in very truth a genuine discrimination” (280). So when Peirce puts his finger on the culprit, that act is speculative only in the sense that it remains fallible, but it is by no means entirely random, for as an organ of feeling, the finger endows affect with the immediacy of physical touch. For Peirce, this feeling for the truth is both internal and individualized, for “unless man had had some inward light tending to make his guesses on these subjects much more often true than they would be by mere chance, the human race would long ago have been extirpated,” he says.44 In this kind of statement, we can begin to see how Peirce’s theory of guessing depends upon his prior commitment to narratives of progress and development. The human race’s fortunate avoidance of extirpation is, in effect, a denial that humanity faces the dire fortunes of gamblers or insurance companies, as Peirce described them. In the long run, he had alleged, all gamblers lose and all insurers fail, when considered probabilistically. But here Peirce’s argument is decidedly not probabilistic, for now the human race’s continuing existence, and even progress, depends on individuals’ capacity to feel their way toward the truth. Rather than relying on a broad community of inquirers all making and testing a wide range of hypotheses, and building upon those that work, Peirce begins to imagine a special role for the romantic scientist-hero, specially endowed not just with a slight propensity to make good guesses but, as in

Detecting “Absolute Chance”     his own self-fashioning in “Guessing,” with an extraordinary capacity to discern hidden truths well in advance of their empirical detection. It is hard to escape the conclusion that as Peirce approached the 1890s, his earlier communitarian and collectivizing approaches to chance yielded to the romance of individualism, as he embodied its values in heroic adventure tales of solitary epistemological triumph. By individualizing inquiry, Peirce not only did away with the broader model of chance collectivity, which he had helped to articulate in theoretical and probabilistic terms, but also, and more important, he began to produce chance as the romantic instrument of special and entirely private enlightenment. As I will suggest, however, we need not take Peirce’s claims for the immediacy of knowledge entirely seriously as philosophy, and still less as science, especially if, as seems likely, such dubious claims are modeled on the equally dubious assertions of Poe’s Dupin.

The Guesswork of Knowing Given Peirce’s confidence in progress, we can see why he had a difficult time accepting the narrative of change without progress implicit in Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Though Peirce admired Darwin enormously, and although pragmatism in general owes deep debts to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, Peirce waffled on the question of whether specific changes resulting in new traits should be thought of as entirely random. In Peirce’s drafts for an unpublished magnum opus provisionally titled A Guess at the Riddle and composed, for the most part, in the mid to late 1880s, Peirce enthusiastically affirms that “merely fortuitous variations” to individual traits, coupled with “merely fortuitous mishaps to individuals,” result in “a continual and indefinite progress toward the adaptation of species to their environments” (W 6:199). Later in the essay, however, this mostly orthodox Darwinism gives way to an outright rejection of the theory of natural selection. When weak individuals reproduce, Peirce claims, “owing to their weakness, their offspring will be more apt to resemble the other parent,” apparently because the traits of strong individuals are predisposed to be more fully expressed (W 6:202). For Peirce, the shuffling of the genetic deck cannot be allowed to be entirely random, and traits cannot simply be adaptations to an environment,

  Detecting “Absolute Chance” but rather must preexist in essentialized “weak” and “strong” forms that beneficently sort themselves out prior to birth. In “Guessing,” Peirce takes this modification of Darwinian theory even further and expressly links it to the theory of inquiry that the rest of his essay describes. Immediately before narrating his own detective story, Peirce pauses to refute the idea that biological variation is entirely a matter of chance: In the evolution of science, guessing plays the same part that variations in reproduction take in the evolution of biological forms, according to the Darwinian theory. For just as, according to that theory, the whole tremendous gulf, or ocean rather, between the moner and the man has been spanned by a succession of infinitesimal fortuitous variations at birth, so the whole noble organism of science has been built up out of propositions which were originally simple guesses. For my part I refuse to believe that either the one or the other [was] fortuitous; and indeed I gravely doubt whether there be any tenable meaning in calling them so. (268)

The first two sentences of this passage are a fair description of Darwinian theory, but, tellingly, they leave out any reference to natural selection. In the third sentence, we see why. Biology’s guesses are not really guesses at all, for species have differentiated and adapted not as a result of external processes of selection, but because the “succession of infinitesimal fortuitous variations at birth” was not really fortuitous after all. The selection here is internal, not external, for the biological guesses that generate new traits function in concert with nature’s grand plan. The real mission of “Guessing” is thus to deny an open-ended or even aleatory narrative structure that Darwinism threatened to impose on the universe, in which adaptive change is decidedly not progress toward some final telos of rational perfection. For Peirce, however, the plot of the universe does tend toward rational perfection, just as the plot of investigation tends toward demystification. What “Guessing” does not say explicitly, but that we can now discover elsewhere in Peirce’s writing, is that the abductive feeling is not just a means of accessing concealed truths but fundamentally the very same stuff as absolute chance. Peirce’s mind-matter dualism—not very persuasive to contemporary readers, admittedly, but by no means uncommon at the turn of the century—held that the mind, being made up of material from nature, partakes of the truths of nature itself. “The mind of

Detecting “Absolute Chance”     man has been formed under the action of the laws of nature, and therefore it is not so very surprising to find that . . .  its thoughts naturally show a tendency to agree with the laws of nature,” he wrote.45 But if the rational mind hooks into the increasing and improving rationality of the developing universe, then the irrational mind—the instinctive and affective guessing instinct—retains connections to the primordial condition of absolute chance. Psychology can be mapped onto cosmology, in Peirce’s philosophy, for the evolution of the mind is just a complementary version of the evolution of matter. We should remember too that Peirce had linked the ability to make good guesses with “the insight of females,” a sign that Peirce was by no means insensible to that most traditional gendering of law and chance as male and female, respectively (W 5:135). We will explore the sexist implications of the feminization of chance in the next chapter, but for the moment Peirce’s cosmological speculations make it clearer that the plot of the universe is gendered as well, for it proceeds on a course from a primal condition of chance and feeling, gendered female, to a later condition of law and reason, gendered male. At an originary moment when something like a Miltonic chaos of absolute chance reigned supreme, anything could happen, so in time one of the things that did happen was for an opposite tendency to arise, a tendency away from pure spontaneity and toward regular and predictable habit. For if absolute chance is the condition of limitless possibility prior to any regularity whatsoever, then habit must be one of those possibilities that can and will arise. However, once some small habit takes shape, Peirce alleges, unlike chance it entails a tendency toward further repetition and even amplification. From that “tendency to habit,” more and more thorough habits evolve, some of which function so regularly that we now mistakenly refer to them as universal laws: In the beginning—infinitely remote—there was a chaos of unpersonalized feeling, which being without connection or regularity would properly be without existence. This feeling, sporting here and there in pure arbitrariness, would have started the germ of a generalizing tendency. Its other sportings would be evanescent, but this would have a growing virtue. Thus, the tendency to habit would be started; and from this, with the other principles of evolution, all the regularities of the universe would be evolved. At any time, however, an element of pure chance survives and will remain until the world becomes an absolutely perfect, rational,

  Detecting “Absolute Chance” and symmetrical system, in which mind is at last crystallized in the infinitely distant future. (CP 6:33)

Chance begets law, chaos begets order, and feeling begets reason, as the habits of the universe expand their range. Starting with “pure arbitrariness,” we end up with a universe “crystallized” in rational forms. We should note that Peirce refers to this primal chance specifically as “a chaos of unpersonalized feeling” and calls it a “feeling, sporting here and there in pure arbitrariness.” Elsewhere, Peirce makes the relationship between chance and feeling even more explicit: “Wherever chance-spontaneity is found, there in the same proportion feeling exists. In fact, chance is but the outward aspect of that which within itself is feeling” (CP 6:265). Conversely, we could say that feeling is simply a name for chance internalized and individualized; conversely, Peirce says that the “dead matter” of the physical world is just “mind hidebound with habits” (CP 6:585, 158). We cannot fail to hear a distinct religious note in this passage as well, which begins by paraphrasing the opening of the Book of Genesis. But what preceded the demarcation of heaven and earth “in the beginning” was not the mind of God—the first mover—but the “chaos of unpersonalized feeling” (CP 6:33). By associating chance with creativity, variety, growth, spontaneity, and freedom, Peirce comes close to making it a generative demiurge, a scientific surrogate for the Christian deity. No wonder the guessing instinct, which is itself just chance internalized, constitutes an “inward light,”46 is a “Divine privilege,”47 and even provides a “neglected argument for the reality of God” (CP 6:452). Having started with a nominalist description of chance, absolute chance eventually became something more, first a metaphysical principle, then a component of mind-matter dualisms, and finally, as in Green’s novel, an aspect of the divine. To this point, then, Peirce seems to have proceeded exactly as Green did. Both attempted to represent chance as an ontological presence, but by incorporating it within teleological plots of progress, chance first became necessary to a foregone conclusion, then appeared as a component of privileged perception of truth, and finally became associated with divinity itself. But in closing, I would suggest that this genuinely conservative translation of chance back into law is, finally, complicated by another view less prevalent in Peirce and more relevant to “Guessing,” Peirce was by no

Detecting “Absolute Chance”     means unequivocally enthusiastic about the idea that the universe would eventually suffer the crystallization of reason, a final, static end that he tellingly relates to thermodynamic entropy, “a death of the universe in which there shall be no force but heat and the temperature everywhere the same” (W 4:551). The triumph of reason is thus tantamount to death. From that grim finale, Peirce sought rescue through absolute chance, as if chance might thwart, forestall, or disrupt this dreaded teleology. He said that “although no force can counteract [the tendency toward law], chance may and will have the opposite influence. Force is in the long run dissipative; chance is in the long run concentrative. The dissipation of energy by the regular laws of nature is by those very laws accompanied by circumstances more and more favorable to its reconcentration by chance” (W 4:551). In this statement, which is less certain that reason will crystallize after all, chance has antientropic effects, disrupting what would otherwise be an entirely rational and entirely morbid equilibrium. Obviously, such claims are not at all in keeping with Peirce’s other ideas about the universe’s destined end, and as a result, this most ambivalent and divided of philosophers was not entirely sure whether the creative spontaneity of absolute chance was finally better or worse than the universe’s final achievement of crystalline reason. Accordingly, Peirce simply split the difference, and if the universe is on a course from chance to law, feeling to reason, and chaos to order, he located his own position midway through that process. “There must therefore be a point at which the two tendencies are balanced and that is no doubt the actual condition of the whole universe at the present time” (W 4:551). Given that Peirce’s cosmology is also, in part, a psychology, this statement from “Design and Chance” from 1884 can be taken as an apt description of Peirce’s own divided loyalties to chance and law, feeling and reason. Peirce the pragmatist wants an open-ended chance-world in which laws are contingent and continually violated, and so the future eminently free. Peirce the metaphysician wants a grand, unified system capable of guaranteeing that our scientific descriptions really are scientific advances on course toward final truth. Unable to decide between these two scenarios, Peirce opted for a perfect balance between them, in a momentarily even mix that offered the best of both worlds. His cosmology is a map of his ambivalence. However, his cosmology may also may be a map of a deeper argu-

  Detecting “Absolute Chance” ment implicit in the very form of “Guessing.” To the perfectly balanced binaries that Peirce associated with chance and law, we can add another, never explicitly advanced by Peirce, but everywhere evident in “Guessing,” which is simply the opposition of the literary to the scientific. Just as the progress of the detective toward demystification is a version of the progress of the universe toward crystalline perfection, so too “Guessing” begins with a highly literary narrative of crime and detection and concludes with a second and more scientific account of a laboratory experiment. Superficially, “Guessing” invites us to read these two parallel stories as equivalent, as if literature and the laboratory confirmed the same fundamental facts and as if the intuitive guesses of literature could be confirmed by science’s empirical rigor. But at a deeper level, and in light of Peirce’s hope that chance might also disrupt the crystallization of perfect reason, we can see that the two parts of “Guessing” are actually in considerable conflict. Just as Peirce seeks rescue from the entropic death of total reason through the disruptions of absolute chance, so too he may be seeking a similar kind of rescue from logical system building through the intrusions of literary narrative. The literary does not just restate the work of the laboratory; it disrupts and undermines it and provokes doubts by dressing fact entirely in the garb of fiction. Peirce once claimed he would outline a theory “so comprehensive that, for a long time to come, the entire work of human reason, in philosophy of every school and kind, in mathematics, in psychology, in physical science, in history, in sociology, in whatever other department there may be, shall appear as the filling up of its details” (W 6:168–69). He never finished the work in which he made that audacious proposal, and his papers are littered with many other unpublished and fragmentary works. If “Guessing” stages not so much the transformation of the literary into the scientific but rather an antagonistic stalemate between the two, then it may be that Peirce’s dream of completing “the entire work of human reason” was, quite literally, disrupted from within by a productive disorder that he finally associates with literature. As it erupts from below into Peirce’s broader philosophy, the literary may in fact be absolute chance, a disruptive force that unsettles a philosophy far too eager for rigid systematization. Rather than say that the literary functions like chance for Peirce, it might be better to say that

Detecting “Absolute Chance”     chance simply is literary, made from narratives rather than numbers. I am thinking very specifically about the literary here, and not just the linguistic, for language itself, through Peirce’s semiotics, is already incorporated into large segments of his philosophy. The literary, however, haunts its margins, and it is not immediately clear why a philosopher who must traffic in language at every turn decides, at these key moments when he addresses guessing and chance, to traffic in the tropes of genre fiction too. The explanation may lie in Peirce’s reliance on the one literary figure who arises in this context, Edgar Allan Poe, whose detective stories Peirce both cites directly and imitates. Chance is not just literary in any sense, then, but is modeled very specifically on the ironies and instabilities of Poe’s stories, which undermine their own most evident claims, and establish a duplicitous relationship with their readers. What Peirce may have admired most in Poe’s detective stories is not that they faithfully represent the logical process of abduction but that they reproduce the fraught standoff between law and chance, reason and feeling, through a character who makes overblown claims for ratiocination and through stories that persistently undermine them. Peirce would have been a very poor reader of Poe, if he took Dupin at his word and missed the subversive ironies of Poe’s detective tales. When the narrator of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” assures us that “there was not a particle of charlatanerie about Dupin,” one hopes that Peirce recognized that Dupin is a charlatan above all.48 Dupin’s charlatanerie is Poe’s as well, because Poe’s narratives of detection always remystify events in an exactly equivalent degree. Perhaps there is more than a particle of charlatanerie about Peirce too, as he erects his claims for scientific facts on a foundation of literary fiction. At its deepest level, “Guessing” asks us to speculate that chance may be nothing other than a certain highly literary style of resistance to reason, system, and order, the finality of which Peirce cannot help dreading.

c ha p ter 4

The Feminization of Chance edith wharton and crystal eastman

Previously, we have seen how a wide range of progressive writers, philosophers, and reformers used chance as an instrument for forging various kinds of egalitarian collectives. For Stephen Crane, accidents were specifically antihierarchical, especially within the ranks of the military; for Howells, the hazards of urban modernity promised to unite fractious urban populations in common cause; and for Peirce, chance compelled the formation of diverse communities of intellectual inquirers. In other contexts, however, the production of chance had far less salutary effects, because it could also reinforce existing social and economic inequalities. In this chapter, we will address just one of those contexts, the industrial accident crisis that peaked in the first decade of the twentieth century and the work safety reform efforts designed to mitigate the problem. Industrial accidents were anything but egalitarian, for they primarily afflicted working-class men and their families, many of whom were recent immigrants to the United States. No one knew exactly how many American workers were dying in industrial accidents nationwide, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that roughly twenty-five thousand perished on the job in 1908 alone.1 There was nothing egalitarian about a situation in which wage-earning workers died at a rate as staggering as that, which obviously exceeded that of their employers. However, we must remember that these industrial fatalities were not accidents in any empirical sense but rather were produced as accidents through legal and literary methods that defined violent injury as blameless

The Feminization of Chance    or causeless. To refer to work injuries as “industrial accidents,” as commentators on all sides of the debate over work safety came to do, was to presuppose the innocence of employer and employee alike, or at the very least to curtail the kinds of investigations that might establish some form of practical or moral responsibility. If chance is a cultural product with extensive political affiliations, as I have argued, the designation of industrial fatalities specifically as industrial accidents was part of a political effort to concentrate the costs of injuries on workers themselves. However, other factors were at work as well, and I argue here that even as the production of industrial injuries as industrial accidents sustained class inequalities, the traditional gendering of chance as female did just the opposite, mitigating those inequalities by entirely different means. The association of chance with women is very traditional and long predates the production of chance in the United States at the turn of the century. The name of the Greek goddess Tyche refers to “chance” or “luck,” and she was credited with special capriciousness and unpredictability. Her Roman counterpart, Fortuna, always appears as a woman and is closely associated with gambling, among other scenes of unstable change. Both goddesses have their modern counterparts in the “Lady Luck” of gambling argot, a figure that Westerners refashioned in female form from a male trickster figure, the Norse god Loki. These classical examples of the feminization of chance stand behind several versions we have already seen previously. Americans attributed the Chicago fire to a woman’s blameless mishap, and the absence of a male figure in the O’Leary legend allowed the fire to be treated as no one’s fault at all. Charles Peirce called his philosophy of chance “Tychism” after the Greek goddess and alleged that “the insight of females” gave women the profoundest access to the undercurrents of an aleatory universe.2 Even though industrial injuries afflicted working-class men most of all, the “accident problem,” as it came to be called, became a women’s issue to a substantial degree, in part because industrial accidents were complexly subsumed within the preexisting but still potent tradition of the feminization of chance. Women were among the keenest analysts of the work accident issue and some of the most powerful proponents of reform. The following pages address just two of them, the novelist Edith Wharton and the work safety reformer Crystal Eastman, both of whom were interested in industrial

  The Feminization of Chance accidents around the peak of the accident problem in 1907, and both of whom can thus be read in relation to an influential reform movement that recent historians have called “welfare maternalism.” Primarily in the 1910s, a wide range of women reformers erected what Theda Skocpol has called a “maternalist welfare state,” a loose assemblage of “female-dominated public agencies implementing regulations and benefits for the good of women and their children.”3 The rapid spread of various semipublic and state-sponsored workers’ compensation programs was, to some degree, a maternalist victory too, for when a male worker was killed on the job, workers’ compensation benefited no one so much as his widow. The history of these developments has been amply told, but it seems to me that this ambitious historical project has overlooked a more subtle theoretical concern, involving concealed connections between the rise of maternalist accident insurance and the cultural prominence of the feminization of chance. In addition to the specific political and historical explanations for the success of these maternalist reform efforts, such as the lack of a male-dominated civil service in the United States, maternalist reformers like Eastman advanced the cause of workers’ compensation by cannily exploiting women’s long-standing jurisdiction over the domain of accident and chance. Eastman can be seen as completing a project that Wharton began in her own incisive examination of the gender politics of work safety. Two years after the success of her 1905 novel, The House of Mirth, Wharton addressed the accident problem in a novel about a Berkshire factory town, The Fruit of the Tree. But as in her previous novel, which chronicled the slow decline of its gambling heroine, Lily Bart, the most disempowered women in The Fruit of the Tree respond to their plight by taking evergreater risks, as if they could seize control of a dangerously unstable world by embracing danger. Deliberate risk taking turns out to be a way of avoiding a more passive and disempowering experience of chance, which, Wharton shows, workers and women both regarded as feminizing in the most stereotypically denigrating ways. Eastman, in contrast, reveals that feminization through chance was not just a threat to be avoided at all costs but a potentially powerful instrument for forging new modes of social solidarity. As part of Paul Kellogg’s Pittsburgh Survey, Eastman documented every industrial fatality in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, from

The Feminization of Chance    July 1, 1906, to June 30, 1907, the most rigorous analysis of the accident problem to that date. The book that resulted, Work Accidents and the Law (1910), was less interested in the sheer quantity of workers killed—526 in all—than in the means by which they were injured and the precise nature of their experiences. By anatomizing workers’ accidents, Eastman amply confirmed what Wharton already suspected: male workers worried more about symbolic contact with the feminizing influence of chance than about physical contact with their potentially deadly machines. But if men responded to the threat of chance by doubling down on their commitment to the liberal values of private responsibility and self-determination, performed, counterintuitively, by embracing risk, women like Eastman responded more productively, by using chance to justify the socializing of private losses and the spreading of the costs of industrial injuries as widely as possible. Even as male workers destroyed themselves by the thousands rather than class themselves as feminized accident victims, Eastman exploited the denigrating association between women and chance in order to fashion a potent instrument of political reform.

Embracing Risk Eastman’s study for the Pittsburgh Survey arrived at a crucial juncture in the work safety debate, as public interest in the issue reached its peak and as the traditional common law solutions to workplace accidents began to be widely regarded as inadequate. The key legal question facing workers at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century was who would bear the costs of industrial injuries. The common law traditionally answered that workers came to the labor contract freely, signed it voluntarily, and so agreed in advance to assume all of the normal hazards of their trade. Known as the “assumption of risk,” this legal standard effectively held that if workers’ wages did not adequately compensate them for the risks they faced, they were free to contract for higher wages or lower risks elsewhere. In order to win a tort case against an employer, then, the worker had to prove that the employer had been negligent in some way and so had violated the labor contract that both parties freely signed. However, even when an employee could prove negligence, he or she still had to surmount two more high hurdles. First, the worker had to be guilt-

  The Feminization of Chance less of “contributory negligence,” for if the worker and the company were both negligent, the company was not bound to pay compensation. Second, if the worker’s injury were caused by the action of a fellow worker, the “fellow-servant rule” held that the company was not bound to pay compensation, because workers were judged solely responsible for injuries they caused to one another.4 Together, the standards of assumption of risk, contributory negligence, and the fellow-servant rule made it extremely difficult for workers to win substantial compensation for industrial injuries and so tended to fix the costs of industrial injuries on workers themselves.5 As industrial activity increased in the United States after the Civil War, these common law solutions came under increasing strain. In one of the most influential attempts to defend them, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously argued in The Common Law (1881) that “loss from accident must lie where it falls,” a claim largely designed to protect the efficient operation of industry as a whole. Even so, as Nan Goodman has shown, Holmes’s claim reveals that the traditional liberal faith in simple causation was yielding to a model of complex causation involving many interdependent factors.6 Accordingly, Holmes concludes that if mere assessments of causation can determine who should pay compensation, “any act would be sufficient, however remote, which set in motion or opened the door for a series of physical sequences ending in damage.” 7 To regard injuries as accidents, for Holmes, is to resist the overdetermination of causation and the overascription of blame, which otherwise might simply assign responsibility to the party best able to pay compensation. Moreover, if injuries properly result from a welter of countless blended factors, any one of which might be designated a “cause” in some subsequent rationalizing or moralizing narrative, then even the most prudent agent could hardly be expected to act in ways guaranteed to make himself and others entirely safe. Under such complex conditions, the costs of accidents should lie where they fall, Holmes argued, even if, in practice, this settled the costs of accidents on workers little able to absorb that additional burden. In this way, we can see that the production of chance was hardly uniformly egalitarian, for even though Holmes’s recognition of complex causation tacitly views causes as socially distributed through a range of intertwining factors and conditions, it finally denies any equivalent social distribution of the consequences. Causes may be complexly social, but

The Feminization of Chance    effects must remain highly individualized. Crystal Eastman would have known these arguments better than most. She graduated from New York University Law School second in her class in 1907, but instead of practicing law—the prospects for a woman lawyer would have been minimal— she accepted Paul Kellogg’s invitation to join the Pittsburgh Survey, an ambitious sociological investigation into the working conditions in one of America’s most industrialized cities.8 The book that resulted, Work Accidents and the Law, remains the most politically influential of the six volumes the survey produced, and its success launched Eastman’s own career as a feminist, labor activist, and pacifist. Its publication had an immediate effect on the work safety debate and earned Eastman a seat on New York’s Wainwright Commission, charged with drafting the nation’s first public workers’ compensation program.9 Although Eastman would later become a more committed communist, partly through the influence of her brother Max Eastman, editor of The Masses, at this early point in her career she was primarily a political progressive focused on equality of opportunity within a largely liberal political framework.10 Whereas many historians of the Pittsburgh Survey have focused on its ambitious statistical efforts, fewer have looked at its artistic and aesthetic dimensions, which are equally remarkable and do a great deal to position the work politically.11 None other than Joseph Stella and Lewis Hine produced sketches and photographs for Eastman’s volume, and Eastman herself proved more than capable of making her case through highly literary appeals, not at all in keeping with the volume’s pretense of statistical neutrality. Her most important literary contribution, for these purposes, consists of fifty-eight short accident narratives that she interspersed through the text, the shortest of which contains fewer than twenty words, and the longest just over three hundred. Scattered throughout, sometimes with little commentary, these accident narratives function like prose-photographs, verbal snapshots of moments of grisly industrial violence. Each one isolates a single accident, usually with just one victim, and renders it in spare, journalistic, and minimally analytical prose. For example: Andrew Jubreed, on April 19, 1907, was caught in a shaft around which there was no railing, and killed. This was in the Twenty-ninth Street Works of the Carnegie Steel Company.

  The Feminization of Chance On October 19, 1906, Gusatija Kosanovich was lifting something under the direction of a foreman when his foot slipped and got caught in the uncovered cogwheels of a roll table. He died in twenty minutes. Clifford Rea, a boy of eighteen, was oiling machinery for the Union Storage Company. In order to oil one machine he had to go into a space thirteen inches wide, between a heavy sliding door and a revolving flywheel. While he was there the door was suddenly opened; Rea instinctively leaned back a little, and was instantly caught in the wheel.12

As in the first two examples, many of Eastman’s accident narratives include a date and time reference, and all but three of the fifty-eight include a fictitious pseudonym for the worker killed.13 Similar narratives punctuate the text regularly, and they accomplish a number of things. They humanize a problem that could easily drift into statistical abstraction. They capture the horrific circumstances of these deaths and so add a sensational and even gothic sensibility to the book’s otherwise dispassionate analysis. And unlike the statistics, which tend to group accidents in categories, these narratives differentiate accidents, exposing the bizarre combinations of circumstances that pertain in each one, thereby implying that each work accident is irreducibly singular and unique. A fourth function is even more important: while Eastman’s narratives purport to be objective and neutral descriptions of accidental violence, in fact most produce the violent injury as accidental in the first place, through rhetorical and narrative methods that eradicate causation and blame from the scene. Because many traditional narrative forms impose a causal structure on a bare sequence of events, the practical effect of narrating is, often, the elimination of chance or, rather, the transformation of chance into necessity. The more one narrates, the more difficult it can be to avoid rationalizing and moralizing the action. Accordingly, one of the most effective strategies for representing accidents is simple brevity, which curtails the elaborate sequencing of involved factors and hinders readers’ ability to discern causes or culprits. Indeed, the narrative minimalism of Eastman’s accident narratives stands in stark contrast to the massive accident reports produced in the wake of airline crashes and other large-scale catastrophes today, which sprawl through hundreds of pages precisely in order to restore some reassuring causal logic to the process.14 A more subtle method of chance production is grammatical in

The Feminization of Chance    nature. Most of Eastman’s accident narratives present the worker’s accidental destruction in the passive voice. In the quoted passages, Jubreed “was caught in a shaft,” Kosanovich “got caught in the uncovered cogwheels,” and Rea “was instantly caught in the wheel.” The passive voice is the standard register of the accident throughout her book: Philip Zurich “was caught by a motor and killed” (42); Nicholas Kost “was caught and crushed against a post” (77); Fritz Collins “was knocked off” a crane (97); John Muschenitch “was electrocuted” (98); John McCaffrey “was thrown off and killed” (101). And so on, in example after example, in passages that withhold both active verbs and, accordingly, the grammatical identification of causal agents. Even in cases in which the verb is technically active, it usually connotes an action that is obscure or inadvertent. Frank Koroshic’s left hand “slipped and slid into the wheel” (3), Frank Lenox “slipped and fell into a tempering machine” (102), and Anthony Gallagher “fell from a five-foot platform” (101). Even though the grammar of these accidents positions the victim as the author of his own destruction, still the body, or some part of the body, seems to act on its own. Most of these cases involve falling as well, and of course falls are prototypical accidents, embedded even in the etymology of the words “chance” and “accident.” In a few of Eastman’s cases the situation is slightly more complex. Jerny Podobrick was “trying to enlarge a hole in a keg of powder with his pick” when “a spark from the pick must have ignited the powder” (45). Despite the active verb, however, Eastman shifts the locus of agency onto objects, for it is not Podobrick who ignited the powder, as she might have written, but rather a separate and seemingly independent spark. Moreover, by qualifying the verb, vaguely, with the phrase “must have ignited,” Eastman tacitly advises against drawing any too confident a conclusion. Again and again in Eastman’s accident narratives, the free and responsible human agent, who chooses a course of action and bears the consequences accordingly, vanishes from the scene, and instead workers endure injuries that seem to erupt entirely on their own or that issue obscurely from the world of things. By producing injuries as accidents, Work Accidents attempts to complicate one-sided and one-dimensional accounts of responsibility for industrial accidents, such as the common claim that “95 per cent of our accidents are due to the carelessness of the man who gets hurt,” as Eastman

  The Feminization of Chance quotes one manager saying (84). Work safety advocates sometimes argued just the opposite, insisting that employers’ negligence caused most of the problems. In the midst of those mutual recriminations, Eastman made a surprising intervention. First, she claimed that both employers and employees were responsible for about one-third of industrial injuries each.15 Of these, employers’ negligence was easily addressed: better safety equipment, such as railings, belt guards, recessed set screws, and safety coverings, as well as more reliable safety procedures and well-organized work processes, all of which Eastman urges. But the more interesting story, and the more relevant one for this chapter, involves her interest in the carelessness of workers themselves, which she does not deny at all and in fact emphatically affirms. Particularly in her fifth chapter, “The Personal Factor in Industrial Accidents,” Eastman cleverly turns “personal” carelessness into a cultural phenomenon that finally cannot be reduced entirely to the standard of personal responsibility. In the first instance, Eastman anatomizes carelessness into three separate categories: heedlessness, inattention, and recklessness. Heedlessness refers to foolish self-endangerment, such as that of Dominico Regreto (Eastman’s only punning pseudonym, and a sign of her evident contempt), who napped on railroad tracks against a resting car and was killed when an engine coupled another car to it. For such conduct, Eastman makes no defense. Inattention refers to lapses in the “constant and keen” vigilance required in complex and fast-moving built environments, but against companies who blamed workers for failing to attend adequately to dangers, Eastman insists that “heed can be given to but a limited number of things at a time” and that speed, heat, and noise “tend to numb the faculties most needed for protection” (91). But the most interesting category is recklessness, and Eastman lingers on it the longest. Recklessness refers to the “conscious taking of unnecessary risks,” though here again Eastman mounts a complex defense. On the one hand, she insists that the speed of the machinery, the disincentives against interrupting work flow, and the threat of losing one’s job all encourage workers to take unnecessary risks, even in defiance of safety measures. However, Eastman makes a more surprising claim about recklessness as well, by saying that it amounts to the standard operating practice of most men in American industrial settings. The reason that workers are reckless, she maintains, is that they are,

The Feminization of Chance    by natural temperament, long acculturation, and special selection by their employers, committed to “‘taking chances,’ the gambling instinct” (92). In her key example of recklessness, to which she returns several times, Eastman reports that railroads required yard workers to board moving locomotives from the side at a step with a handhold, but most preferred to board from the front instead, by standing in the track and stepping up on a ledge as the locomotive approached. This made boarding easier because the worker simply could wait for the locomotive, rather than run alongside it, and the locomotive’s motion helped hoist the worker up onto the platform. Even though slipping and falling while boarding from the front virtually guaranteed a speedy death, workers chose to do so anyway. Eastman quotes one brakeman who justified the practice this way, in an account that contrasts in all ways with Eastman’s own short accident narratives: You see, getting on in front your foot touches the footboard first, so if you slip there is no chance of saving yourself. Getting on at the side you take hold of the grab iron first, so if your foot slips there is some chance of hanging on. Yet I always get on in front myself. We all do. It’s easy and simple. There is a kind of fascination about it. You win or you lose. It’s a gamble. And then, it’s not professional to get on at the side. No good railroader does it. (24)

While Eastman narrates work accidents in the passive voice, this railroader prefers the active voice: he gets on, takes hold, wins or loses, touches the footboard, and in general configures his actions entirely as his own. This “gamble” that every “good railroader” undertakes represents an important and often overlooked feature in the appeal of risk even to those bound to suffer the most catastrophic losses. By taking risks, workers could validate their own status as professionals, garner responsibility for their own safety, and stimulate themselves with the “fascination” of the game, especially in work environments that could be numbingly routine. To choose to take a risk is thus to circumvent Eastman’s own attempts to configure work injuries specifically as work accidents, which is to say, as afflictions passively endured by agents who have little control over outcomes. According to Eastman, such risk taking is the natural behavior of workers who “were boys only yesterday,—boys with a more than ordinary love of risk,” and who were, moreover, selected for dangerous occupations precisely because of their capacity for daring (93). In addition, exposure to risk reduces the

  The Feminization of Chance worker’s sensitivity to risk, Eastman suggests, so that “as he loses the fear” of his first days on the job, “he acquires the recklessness” of experience (93). So while Eastman claims that only about 30 percent of accidents are due to the carelessness of employees, in an extraordinary reversal of her opponents’ logic, she also agrees that employees are incredibly reckless, precisely as employers so often alleged. Boarding a locomotive from the front is not the exception but the rule, for “extreme precaution is as unprofessional among the men in dangerous trades as fear would be in a soldier” (93–94). The difference between Eastman’s account of recklessness and the competing account from many employers is that, in her view, the behavior is not entirely personal after all (despite her chapter’s misleading title) but is rather an expression of social or cultural values that employers and workers both had reason to encourage. Beyond Eastman’s own interpretation of these matters, we can discern more profound and far-reaching political implications. Workers’ deliberate risk taking seems to have served as a strategy for laying claim to some of the most cherished values of classical liberalism, especially the exercise of free will. Deliberately taking risks promised to bring lurking hazards back under workers’ own control, as if doing so could convert chance back into choice, and accidents back into actions all their own. To be struck down unaware by a locomotive in a rail yard is to succumb to violence passively and to be rendered entirely the victim of overmastering chance. But to choose to board a moving locomotive from the front is to recast the routine hazards of the rail yard in a situation that the worker not only can but must bring under private control. The risk of real loss in such a situation—death itself—is precisely what validates the worker’s capacity to engineer his or her own future, for in such a situation, only the worker controls which of several outcomes will arise. So beyond the habituation to recklessness that Eastman discerned, we can also see that recklessness functioned as a maintenance strategy for liberal masculinity. By taking risks, men individualized their labor and, in doing so, individualized themselves, bolstering a model of liberal subjectivity that was everywhere under threat. For industrial male workers, then, choosing to take risks is “professional” because it restores the experience of making practical and moral choices with real consequences, and it does so within a work environment where choice often seemed

The Feminization of Chance    irrelevant or where the power to make choices evidently belonged to someone else. In recent years, sociologists and cultural theorists have begun to study deliberate risk taking in new and far more sophisticated terms, and in ways that have gone beyond a much older debate about gambling. Despite Eastman’s railroad worker’s claim that “it’s a gamble,” such conduct more closely resembles elective, high-risk leisure activities such as mountaineering or skydiving. Stephen Lyng has termed such voluntary risk taking “edgework” (a term borrowed from Hunter S. Thomson) and in his partly Marxian analysis suggests that voluntary risk taking functions as a method of “boundary negotiation” between reason and affect, order and chaos, life and death. For Lyng, however, edgework is also decidedly, if not exclusively, a method of “escape and resistance” to all manner of institutional constraints.16 Because “increasing numbers of people in modern postindustrial society feel threatened, both physically and mentally, by forces entirely beyond their control,” Lyng argues, edgework becomes “one of the few experiences in modern life where ‘success’ (survival) can be unambiguously attributed to individual skill.”17 Much of the broader analysis of deliberate risk taking has similarly partaken of a generally Weberian attitude toward the rationalization of work, and even of life itself, in modern capitalist societies. By this line of thinking, rationality and the attendant bureaucratic nature of modern life provoke a desire for the oppositional experience of risk. Erving Goffman famously attempted to theorize action in these terms by claiming that “we have sharply curtailed in civilian life the occurrence of fatefulness of the serious, heroic, and dutiful kind,” leaving us ever more hungry for action and adventure, including the action of gambling.18 However, it seems to me we are on safer ground when we see the embrace of risk as a ritual reexpression of some of liberal capitalism’s highest ideals rather than as resistance to them, especially within the industrial contexts considered here. Ulrich Beck’s sociological theory of risk “individuation,” for instance, sees the entire apparatus of risk analysis partly as a way of producing liberal subjectivity: people forced to make thousands of private risk decisions come to experience themselves as individuals, responsible for, and adequate to, the task of charting a largely private course of action.19 Far from undermining the liberal orthodoxy of their political

  The Feminization of Chance environments, risk experiences actively reinforce it. More to the point, Jonathan Simon has suggested that high-risk leisure activities function either as “a nostalgic invocation of capitalism in the eras before regulation” or as “a ready metaphor for life under a postwelfare form of liberalism.”20 That is to say, deliberate risk taking is not a matter of escape from or resistance to capitalism at all but rather a ritual recommitment to liberal capitalism’s highest ideals. The gamble that all good railroaders perform by boarding from the front thus exposes a conflict between two competing conceptions of capitalism, one associated with the capitalism of calculation and Weberian rationality, expressed in the workplace as Taylorization, and the other associated with the capitalism of speculation, expressed through the voluntary embrace of risk in gambling, futures and equities trading, or dangerous recreational pursuits. To escape from capitalist reason was thus to enter the zone of capitalist speculation, by actively courting those risks that finally are not calculable in a way that could be thought of as certain. But crucially, this incalculability of speculative action is really a way of validating the even more primary liberal values of freedom and self-determination, to which both of these modes of capitalism ultimately pay homage. In an argument that has become quite common, and one that is entirely prevalent at the turn of the century as well, speculation can seem to be a sweeping rejection of earlier social and economic values: gambling replaces working, spending replaces saving, and in the process an entire set of Victorian values yields to the allure of easy money and exhilarating bets. However, I would suggest that the embrace of risk was actually a very conservative attempt to preserve and defend the classical liberal values of free will, self-determination, and private responsibility in an age of increasingly alienating corporate capitalism and managerial efficiency. Deliberate risk taking is thus not just an exuberant rejection of a more stolid and prudent economic values, but an attempt to re-create conditions in which something like autonomous free will might intervene meaningfully after all. And in that way, predicating self-determination on the risk of self-destruction should not be seen as the normal state of affairs for liberal capitalist subjects but rather as a desperate effort by marginal and vulnerable people to reclaim the status of full liberal selfhood.21 We make a mistake, then, if we associate risk taking by the least empowered

The Feminization of Chance    with risk taking by the titans of industry who glamorized speculation from the Gilded Age to the New Deal. Then as now, the richest speculators often became wealthy, and stayed wealthy, precisely because they were risk averse, but also enormously talented at exploiting pricing inefficiencies to their advantage. The difference between the engineer who boards a moving locomotive from the front and John D. Rockefeller is that the engineer is trying to consolidate a degree of executive authority over his own private life that, for Rockefeller, was not really in any doubt. It turns out that at least one early twentieth-century theorist brought together an implicit account of voluntary risk taking with a specific interest in hazardous industrial occupations, the philosopher William James. In 1910, the same year that Work Accidents appeared, and near the peak of the debate over the accident problem, James made the surprising claim that we might best eliminate war not by affirming the merits of peace but by sublimating the desire for war’s violence into other risky endeavors. Through such a “Moral Equivalent of War,” to quote the essay’s title, James said that young men might “get the childishness knocked out of them” by being sent “to coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers.”22 The issue, for James, is that war offers real attractions for those living in a bureaucratic modern world, and anyone who wants to take a practical and not merely a principled stand against war must reckon with those attractions realistically. For those dulled by routine and swaddled in safety, war’s horrors “are a cheap price to pay for rescue from the only alternative supposed, of a world of clerks and teachers, of co-education and zoophily, of ‘consumer’s leagues’ and ‘associated charities,’ of industrialism unlimited, and feminism unabashed,” James claimed. “No scorn, no hardness, no valor any more! Fie upon such a cattleyard of a planet!”23 James’s plan to sublimate war into occupational risk has its roots in his earlier writings. As early as 1884 in “The Dilemma of Determinism,” James defended the concept of free will by insisting that even our smallest choices have unforeseen consequences that might bring very different futures to pass. Against the many varieties of determinism in vogue at the time, James insisted that our lives are stocked with alternative possibilities

  The Feminization of Chance leading to substantially different futures, so are genuinely free in the end. Yet James complains, “As soon as we begin to talk indeterminism to our friends, we find a number of them shaking their heads. This notion of alternative possibility, they say, this admission that any one of several things may come to pass, is, after all, only a roundabout name for chance; and chance is something the notion of which no sane mind can for an instant tolerate in the world. What is it, they ask, but barefaced crazy unreason, the negation of intelligibility and law?”24 James answers such objections by insisting that “chance” refers only to an action that “may also fall out otherwise,” a minimal formulation calculated to exclude more mystical conceptions of chance and to avoid the realist conception of chance articulated by his friend Charles Peirce. At this early stage, James’s example of chance consists of the trivial choice to take one of two streets home from work, and there is little in “Dilemmas of Determinism” that refers specifically to anything like an industrial accident. By the time he published Pragmatism in 1907, however, “alternative possibility” was beginning to harden into something far more threatening. In his rallying conclusion to Pragmatism, James insists that the “safety” of the world “is unwarranted. It is a real adventure, with real danger, yet it may win through. . . .  Will you trust yourself and trust the other agents enough to face the risk?”25 The kind of freedom that the Cambridge philosopher could experience on a walk home from work in 1884 demands, by 1907, something far more bracing, a trial stocked with “real danger” fit for rugged adventurers able to “face the risk.” As Ross Posnock has argued, James’s fondness for such violent “trials” counters the more desultory and open-ended “curiosity” that Posnock associates with William’s brother Henry. For William, idle and directionless curiosity is veritably pathological, as Posnock shows, and perhaps effeminate too, so his conception of the world as a risky adventure betrays his determination to validate a stereotypically masculine version of the self.26 But what is interesting about James’s rebellion against bourgeois softness, as he perceives it, is that he embraces not just the rugged masculinity of Theodore Roosevelt but something like the “soldier spirit” of Eastman’s factory workers, who embrace risk in a contest with no clear goal other than self-preservation. James’s defense of masculinity and all of the liberal values associated with it thus depends not on his ability to

The Feminization of Chance    compete violently against other men and so experience his own power but rather on his willingness to expose himself to danger in order to experience his own freedom. Freedom comes at the cost of power for James, or at least it registers most palpably in risk situations in which one’s own power must, by definition, be in doubt. As a result, when James finally suggests that occupational risks might function as surrogates for military risks in a national campaign of man-making, he is not so much proposing a radically new social strategy as naming one already widely in place. Dishwashing and clothes washing are the only two safe occupations in his list of hazardous enterprises, and the only two traditionally associated with women’s labor, but the rest refer to the most common scenes of industrial injuries, including the mines, railroads, and factories that hosted Eastman’s thoroughgoing culture of masculine recklessness. Though many readers of “The Moral Equivalent of War” have been uncomfortable with James’s apparent nostalgia for the battlefield, we should be just as uncomfortable with this alternative, given that in 1910 Americans were paying a steep “blood-tax” in occupational injuries already.27 On the other hand, while James clearly romanticizes the perils of modern industry, it may be no small point in his defense that workers themselves seem to have reached largely the same conclusion. Even though male workers were most often the victims of industrial accidents, workers themselves played a surprisingly limited role in agitating for safety reforms. According to work safety historian Mark Aldrich, out of almost forty-two thousand strikes in the building trades from 1881 to 1900, precisely one was over the question of safety. Similarly, out of more than fourteen thousand strikes in the coal and coke industries, six were for better ventilation, one protested an unsafe machine, and another protested the lack of a safety device on an elevator. In contrast, five strikes opposed the introduction of a new safety lamp, and one demanded that miners be permitted to smoke underground during lunch.28 In factory work that was growing ever more routine and tightly managed, workers seem to have clung more tightly to whatever evidence of their own autonomy remained. As in James’s account, the risk of self-destruction became the antidote to two feminizing alternatives, coddled safety at the hands of managers, or passive affliction by chance. In a preindustrial age, workers could validate their skill and responsibility by handcrafting some material

  The Feminization of Chance object, but few such options were available on the modern assembly line. Outside the ranks of a comparatively small number of highly skilled workers, only one kind of admirable skill remained widely available, the skill that kept a worker from being killed.29 The fact that male workers so often defied the routinization of the workplace with individualized recklessness indicates, above all, the extent to which they experienced industrial injuries not as a class-based threat to labor but as a gender-based threat to their masculinity. Accordingly, workers responded less often through organized labor and more often, it seems, through private and rather desperate attempts to salvage what they could of those traditional values associated with liberal masculinity. The threat of the accident was thus quite literally the threat of feminization too, or even the contamination of male reason and self-determination with expressly female caprice. If the real danger facing male workers was not that they might become corpses but that they might become women, the promise of better work safety through more effective managerial protections actually deepened their predicament.

Women and Risk If Eastman’s book tells the story of how male workers attempted to rehabilitate their liberal capacities through strategic self-endangerment, Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree reveals that women practiced a similar strategy as well. Wharton’s novel is built around an industrial injury to a worker named Dillon, who loses his arm in a cotton carding machine. At a crucial moment, Dillon had reached for a “tool he needed out of his trouser-pocket,” but in the overcrowded room, he inadvertently fed his hand between the spiked rollers of a cotton carding machine.30 By linking this amputation to the “tool” in Dillon’s “trouser-pocket,” the novel configures it as a rather obvious castration. Although ultimately more concerned with women’s lives, Wharton’s novel thus begins significantly by emasculating a worker who suffers an accident that he did not foresee, and through a risk he that he could not have chosen to avoid. Wharton’s novel does much more as well, for it also equates Dillon’s industrial accident with a riding accident that the female factory owner, Bessy Westmore, suffers later in the novel. On the surface, these two ac-

The Feminization of Chance    cidents could not be more different. One is industrial, the other pastoral; one injures a worker, the other an owner; one occurs during work, the other during leisure; one injures a man, the other a woman. Yet Wharton’s novel bridges these distant worlds with an analysis of accident that finally equates the experiences of working-class men in an industrial setting with those of wealthy women in a patriarchal society. For Wharton, male workers like Dillon who suffer accidents are emasculated, but women who voluntarily take risks can lay claim—problematically, it must be said—to the powers and prerogatives of men. In contrast to their estimation of Wharton’s previous novel, The House of Mirth, critics have tended to lament the crude plotting of The Fruit of the Tree, its apparent jumble of themes, and its overstuffed bulk. In addition to the accident narratives of Bessy and Dillon, it traces the lives of two figures who cross back and forth between the factory and manor, the reformer John Amherst and the nurse Justine Brent. Amherst is the assistant manager at Westmore Mills, and later Bessy’s husband, a work safety zealot struggling to realize his “Utopian vision for the betterment of the Westmore operatives” (628). Brent, who initially works as a charity nurse, meets Amherst at Dillon’s bedside and later nurses Bessy after her riding accident. In the novel’s central scene, Brent secretly gives the paralyzed and suffering Bessy an overdose of morphine and later marries Bessy’s widower and the factory manager, John Amherst. In addition to these sensational plots, Wharton devises others involving, for example, extortion, addiction, and the power struggle to control the family business. As a result, even though Henry James told Wharton that The Fruit of the Tree is “a thing of the highest and finest ability and lucidity,” he also regretted “the composition and conduct of the thing” and charged her with “George Eliotizing a little more frankly than ever yet.”31 Recent critics have amplified James’s reservations. Dale Bauer concludes that the novel “fails to weave together the complicated issues of reform, scientific engineering, and medicine,” a criticism that this chapter hopes to mitigate by showing how deeply entangled such issues were in American culture already.32 Even those who defend the novel tend to concede its deficiencies by way of excusing them, including Elizabeth Ammons, who pleads that it is “too long and sprawling” but “not nearly so disorganized or incoherent conceptually as critics have charged.”33

  The Feminization of Chance The novel may be usefully approached as a revision of the novel that preceded it, The House of Mirth, which traced Lily Bart’s falling fortunes through her attempts to gain and maintain a precarious foothold in high society. In Walter Benn Michaels’s persuasive and influential reading of the novel, Lily Bart is a compulsive gambler whose attempts at achieving social stability always devolve into more instability still. Both refusing and accepting various risks put her at further risk, Michaels argues, and “those moments that seem to express her distaste for the commerce of Wall Street in fact express her complete commitment to the practices of speculation.” Given that the risk of “accidents is finally more attractive than the guarantee of freedom from them,” Michaels argues, Bart’s attempts to escape the speculative marketplace always lead her back to it.34 Michaels’s more general claim is that speculating subjects such as Bart are in turn produced by the speculative logic of capitalism, but such a reading is less compelling in The Fruit of the Tree, where hardly anyone speculates on stocks or talks in the language of capitalist speculation, and where physical vulnerability and injured bodies replace gambling debts and dwindling bank accounts. In contrast to The House of Mirth, then, The Fruit of the Tree regards risk taking not just as a reflex of capitalist subjects in a modern market economy but as a strategy by which both workers and women attempt to recommit to its core values of freedom and self-determination. The Fruit of the Tree allows us to read backward into The House of Mirth as well and to discern new ways in which Lily Bart’s compulsive gambling might not be an expression of a normative culture of speculation, but rather a pathology of liberal subjectivity peculiar to those who feel their liberal status under threat. Like the wagers of a low-income lottery player, Bart’s gambles have less to do with winning than with experiencing her choices as potentially decisive. As a result, Bart’s slow downward spiral is a gradual version of Bessy’s own sudden fall from a wild horse, a fall that her husband and the novel itself attribute to her impulsivity and recklessness. That paralyzing fall in turn invokes another suggested by the novel’s Miltonic title. Surely Wharton had Eve’s reckless defiance of patriarchal authority in mind, given that Milton presents Eve’s recklessness partly in terms of her desire for equality with Adam:

The Feminization of Chance    so to add what wants In Femal Sex, the more to draw his Love, And render me more equal, and perhaps, A thing not undesireable, somtime Superior: for inferior who is free?35

The Fruit of the Tree is in large part the story of women who reach similar conclusions about their inferior freedoms and who, like Milton’s Eve, seek to be “more equal” by assuming fearful risks in defiance of patriarchy. Wharton’s point is not that women or even workers could take no other course of action but that voluntary risk taking was already a culturally pervasive strategy of liberal self-defense, practiced most avidly by those whose freedom and power had been most severely curtailed. The Miltonic subtext probably should not be read in any overtly religious sense but rather as the novel’s attribution of these class and gender dynamics to the traditions of classical liberalism and Protestant individualism everywhere apparent in Paradise Lost. If The Fruit of the Tree rewrites The House of Mirth, Lily Bart appears divided into two different risk-taking women, the heiress Bessy Westmore and the charity nurse Justine Brent, both of whom eventually become Amherst’s wives. Amherst is a monomaniacal manager of both women and workers, a man whose “passion for machinery” turns out to be a mechanical passion too, one that functions as relentlessly as the factory equipment. The “ordered activity of the whole intricate organism” (56) of the mill, from which Amherst derives “a responsive rush of life” (57), stands as an emblem of his own relentless and undeviating will. As a result, Amherst is a kind of anti–Lily Bart, not a compulsive gambler and risk taker but “a man whom no gusts of chance could deflect from his purpose” (274). Accordingly, Amherst neither rides, nor gambles, nor plays at games: “he was unmoved by the fluctuations of the stock-market, he could not tell one card from another, and his perfunctory attempts at billiards” reveal only his “social insufficiency” (263). Far from being absorbed in the speculative dynamics of modern capitalism, Amherst is absorbed by the antispeculative projects of Taylorization, industrial efficiency, and the practical and moral reform of his workers’ families. Accordingly, his advice to his first wife is a version of the advice he surely would give to his workers: “What

  The Feminization of Chance risks we run when we scramble into the chariot of the gods and try to do the driving. Be passive—be passive, and you’ll be happier!” (162). However, while the workers in Amherst’s industrial utopia are uncommonly passive, save for one strike briefly noted late in the novel, the women decidedly are not. Amherst’s “quiet resolution” (274) contrasts in every way with the “inconsistencies” of Bessy’s “impulsive heart” (437). Like Eastman’s soldiering workers, women respond to their positions of relative disempowerment not by seeking greater safety and security but by actively embracing risk, a strategy that, for Bessy, involves her determination to ride a dangerous horse that Amherst expressly forbids her to ride alone. The horse’s name is “Impulse,” a rather crude commentary on Bessy’s diminished capacity for forethought and reason, and a name that openly associates Bessy’s own impulsivity with unreasoning animal abandon. In this way, Bessy is an embodied version of the feminization of chance, pure caprice ungoverned by male reason. Yet there is an additional layer to her character, for like Eastman’s soldiering workers, Bessy seeks out risks with a determination that is as stubborn and unyielding as her husband’s. Although Bessy is a model of inconstancy as the owner of the factory, she organizes her impulsivity expressly around the courting of physical harm; it is, evidently, impulsivity contained within a higher strategic purpose. So when Amherst writes to Justine Brent, who is living with Bessy, “Please don’t let my wife ride Impulse,” he institutes precisely the kind of regulation that Bessy’s impulsivity is expressly designed to defy. In response, Bessy tartly informs Brent, “Take my advice, my dear— don’t ask me not to ride Impulse!” (377). Amherst’s zeal for safety ends up amplifying Bessy’s determination to court risk, just as her risk taking calls forth ever-greater safety measures from Amherst. The problem in this novel is clearly not that women’s character is somehow aleatory in any essential way, or that women or workers blithely refuse safety and security out of obliviousness to apparent dangers. The problem is that safety and security are precisely the conditions that make women and workers wonder whether their choices make any difference. Eventually, Bessy does fall from Impulse, breaks her spine, and suffers first paralysis and eventually death. But her death does not result directly from the fall, for in the novel’s most obvious rehearsal of a scene from The House of Mirth, Justine Brent euthanizes her with an overdose of

The Feminization of Chance    morphine.36 At the end of The House of Mirth, Lily Bart, having lost her social standing and having refused the security of marriage, finally dies after taking a sedative to help her sleep, but “the action of the drug was incalculable.”37 In Michaels’s reading, this serves as the clearest evidence of Bart’s commitment to capitalist speculation, but in The Fruit of the Tree, the overdose functions differently, for it is not an incalculable chance at all but a deliberately calculated and intentional euthanasia.38 In replaying the overdose from The House of Mirth, The Fruit of the Tree transforms overdose as a metaphor for gambling into overdose as a metaphor for the most deliberate and calculating management. In fact, euthanasia by overdose functions as the most troubling example of the management of others, allegedly for their own good. As such, euthanasia is not affiliated with Bessy’s impulsivity, as the precedent of Lily Bart might lead us to believe, but rather with Amherst’s deliberate management of the workers under his control. When Brent administers the overdose, she actually believes herself to be carrying out Amherst’s own wishes, in part because Amherst had recommended a similar course of action for one of his workers early in the novel. After Dillon’s injury, Amherst had told Brent, “I know what I should do if I could get anywhere near Dillon—give him an overdose of morphine, and let the widow collect his life-insurance, and make a fresh start” (15). It should be remembered that Dillon had suffered a mangled arm, which makes him physically unfit for well-paying factory work but hardly leaves him with so much pain or incapacity that euthanasia would seem justified. Nonetheless, at Bessy’s bedside, Brent remembers Amherst’s words after Dillon’s injury: “In your work, don’t you ever feel tempted to set a poor devil free?” (428). The precise repetition of that line, first in Amherst’s speech and later in Brent’s memory, signals just how far his managerial power can extend and how thoroughly it has infiltrated her own consciousness. Amherst is actually more present in this scene than Brent. As Bessy suffers, Brent browses the bookshelves and discovers Amherst’s copy of an unnamed work by Francis Bacon, a “pocket Bacon” as the narrator calls it (399). The volume is “well-worn,” and its presence in Amherst’s small library only confirms his commitment to scientific rationality. What Brent finds in its cover, however, is a note “in Amherst’s hand” that includes a line from Pascal’s Pensées, “La vraie morale se moque de la morale . . .  ,”

  The Feminization of Chance or, “True morality must make light of morality,” a passage that continues: “that is to say, the morality of the judgment, which has no rules, makes light of the morality of the intellect.” Below that entry, she finds an English translation from Seneca’s Minor Dialogues, “We perish because we follow other men’s examples . . .  ,” after which Seneca goes on to say that “we should be cured of this if we were to disengage ourselves from the herd.” And below that, she finds still another quotation from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: “Socrates used to call the opinions of the many by the name of Lamiae—bugbears to frighten children.”39 Brent initially thinks these unattributed lines are Amherst’s own compositions, before “her memory recalled some confused association with great names,” names that neither Brent nor the novel ever discloses (429). Nonetheless, she reads these expressions of nonconformity and defiance of convention as Amherst’s own license to defy the injunction against euthanasia, which she soon does. Later, when Amherst learns that the woman who has become his second wife had killed his first wife, Brent protests to him, “I did nothing but what your own reason, your own arguments, have justified a hundred times!” (522–23). With that argument she presents him with the copy of Bacon, as if to attribute Bessy’s overdose not to the work of her hands but to the work of Amherst’s own. This scene goes a long way toward clarifying the novel’s inquiry into agency and, especially, masculine managerial power. Jennie Kassanoff has noted how prevalent hands are in this novel and suggests that Dillon’s mangled hand should be read alongside references to the workers as “hands” (53) and “mill-hands” (8), Brent’s ability to “think with [her] hands” (421), and Wharton’s 1904 story “The House of the Dead Hand,” among others.40 But the most important hand may be the writing in “Amherst’s hand” in the copy of Bacon, for those quotations from three philosophers are unusual for a number of reasons. Each quotation recommends nonconformity with public opinion, moral and otherwise, but the fact that Amherst finds three concurring opinions on exactly that score suggests that nonconformity is itself a rather widely accepted value. More important, the quotation from one Renaissance and two classical authorities inscribed on the fly leaf of another Renaissance authority does not argue very strongly for Amherst’s own defiance of opinion, and makes it rather absurd to think, as Brent does just at this moment, that Amherst

The Feminization of Chance    “looked at life through no eyes but his own” (428). Ultimately, the quotations in the copy of Bacon exert an influence over events entirely beyond their scale, so the entire scene suggests a model of agency in which these dead hands can and do reach from the past to operate on the present, just as, in Brent’s view, Amherst’s own hand in the copy of Bacon helped fill and administer the morphine syringe. With Bessy’s death, The Fruit of the Tree exchanges reckless Bessy, Amherst’s opposite, for Justine Brent, who sees herself as an extension of Amherst’s own will. Bessy’s attending physician had told Brent, “You think with your hands—with every individual finger,” and indeed at this moment her hands act, in her view, under Amherst’s reasoned and authoritative command (421). But if Bessy represents the underdetermination of agency, expressed through reckless abandon, then Brent comes to represent the overdetermination of agency, expressed through her willingness to channel the power of these distant male authorities: Amherst, Bacon, Seneca, Aurelius, and Pascal, all of whom return masculine control to a scene that otherwise involves only women. Accordingly, Amherst’s “pocket Bacon,” from which Brent derives her authority, cleverly restores exactly what Dillon had lost from his own “trouser-pocket,” which is to say, a certain phallic power that workers and women lack in this novel but with which Amherst is entirely overendowed. The emasculated worker, castrated when he reaches for his tool, thus reappears not just in the form of Amherst himself but also through his now mobile managerial authority, picked from his pocket by a woman who finally appropriates the might of his managing hand. Accordingly, Brent emerges late in the novel as Amherst’s equal in management, so her nursing comes to seem less an expression of traditional female sympathy and more a method of experiencing her own mastery over others. When she describes her choice of nursing as a career, she confesses that her interest in nursing the sick is “the same kind of interest I used to feel in my dolls and guinea pigs—a managing, interfering old maid’s interest. I don’t believe I should care a straw for them if I couldn’t dose them and order them about” (458). Only Amherst could possibly think of this as “warm personal sympathy” and “human beneficence,” as he does (458). To anyone else, Brent’s “managing” interest is a more troubling expression of her own power over the sick and injured,

  The Feminization of Chance especially given that she makes this announcement after administering the overdose to Bessy. Dosing dolls is thus a telling precedent for dosing human bodies that are similarly objectified, immobilized, or powerless to resist, like Bessy after her paralysis, a condition that seems to Brent to constitute something like an ideal. Accordingly, Brent’s confession that she would not “care a straw” for the workers if she “couldn’t dose them and order them about” seems positively malicious, but it also reveals the extent to which the novel regards the medical practice of nursing as a rough equivalent to Amherst’s own industrial accident hygiene. Wharton maps the profound power imbalance of the doctor-patient relationship onto the related power imbalance of the manager-worker relationship, and in both cases the stronger partner concludes that his or her mission allows for the possibility of putting the weaker partner to death. Under these conditions, a novel that at first seems to be a progressive defense of the work safety movement turns out to wonder whether benevolent safety protections might be the greatest danger of all. With its close attention to the dangers of managing work safety, The Fruit of the Tree is one of the first American novels of management, as it focuses on white-collar figures like Amherst who increasingly mediated between capital and labor. Kassanoff’s reading of the hands in the novel links them cleverly to what Alfred Chandler famously called the “visible hand” of business management in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.41 According to Chandler, markets simply could not coordinate intricate and sprawling business systems, such as railroads, any better than they could keep pace with coal-powered “economies of speed.”42 Strict scheduling and timekeeping, standardized work processes, contingency procedures, advanced planning and forecasting, the clear structuring of authority, and the imposition of new safety regimes all required a large workforce of middle managers that simply did not exist earlier in the nineteenth century. However, Kassanoff argues that “Dillon’s accident vividly suggests that the concentration of power in the hands of the working man was for Wharton an intolerable prospect.”43 For Kassanoff, Wharton is advocating a “patrician” and “class-based strategy of social control,” but in light of the novel’s evident concern about the work of “Amherst’s hand,” even when appropriated by Brent, it seems that Wharton is far more concerned about the growing clout of white-collar management, which is also

The Feminization of Chance    a model for the disproportionate power of men.44 Surely Wharton recognized that the very term “manager” derives from the Latin word for the hand, manus; the novel’s many references to hands thus finally point back not just to manual laborers but toward the most powerful hand of all in this novel, the one visible, etymologically, in management itself. The growing power of management owed something to the accident problem as well. In its most highly organized form, Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management” increased efficiency by setting production quotas, directing work processes, and altering the implements used with exacting attention to detail. Workers frequently rebelled against the resulting loss of spontaneity and self-direction in their work, because increasing managerial authority necessarily decreased worker autonomy. For that reason, the management of work safety became one of the primary ways in which management could expand its power and also overcome workers’ resistance. As John Fabian Witt has argued, work safety came to be seen as an aspect of work efficiency and not as a separate moral or practical burden for employers. Companies began to welcome work safety reforms, Witt argues, because they started seeing the accident problem not as a moral issue, and not even as a liability issue, but as an efficiency issue. “This was why accident costs were properly internalized to firms rather than to employees,” Witt says. “Employees were inevitably careless and powerless. Employers, on the other hand, could bring systematic planning to bear on work safety.” Or, as Mark Aldrich puts it, “Only with managerial control over the workplace could safety be improved. . . .  So part of the price of better safety was paid in the loss of workers’ control.”45 It becomes clearer that Wharton’s diagnosis of patriarchal authority is patterned, in large measure, on what would otherwise seem to be admirable managerial efforts to improve work safety. Just as the apparent intrusion of irrational chance justified paternalistic management in the factory, so too it justified patriarchal authority in the home. If workers and women were both accident prone—if neither one was properly endowed with the right tools for self-protection—then managers would have to assume greater control. Accordingly, a novel that begins with the symbolic emasculation of a working man eventually concludes with the remasculation of a working woman, Brent, who takes over the authority of Amherst’s hand. In the gender economy of Wharton’s novel, then, Dillon

  The Feminization of Chance ceases to be a man, while Brent becomes a man, at least at the moment of the euthanasia when she no longer can distinguish Amherst’s authority from her own. In between these two bad options, only Bessy’s recklessness offers an alternative to the overdetermination and the underdetermination of agency, but the novel’s contempt for the strategy of voluntary risk taking could not be clearer. Voluntary risk taking may be an understandable rebellion against patriarchy and paternalism, but it proves a futile and self-destructive gesture in the end. In the larger view, the feminization of chance appears as a full complement to the masculinization of managerial control, for if female chance represents an undesirable condition of passive vulnerability, then male management represents an intolerable position of violent mastery. This intractable standoff between two equally bad options allows us to see that voluntary risk taking is finally structured as a violent strategy of self-mastery. It collapses feminine Dillon and masculine Amherst into a single figure, which can then perform both vulnerability to hazard and protection from it. The embrace of risk is actually a microplot of selfrescue, a heroic narrative performed in an entirely self-enclosed circuit, such that the manager and managed become one and the same. In this way, we can see how the embrace of risk actually stages self-sovereignty in what may be its highest form, for it contrives a situation in which the self is entirely under its own supervision, but that can register as consequential only if there is some need for supervision in the first place. In such a situation, the voluntary risk taker encounters all of the uncertainty and vulnerability associated with feminized chance, as well as all of the decisive control associated with male management, but impacted in a single ritualized and self-reflexive act. The Fruit of the Tree finally diagnoses the recklessness of Lily Bart as a version of this kind of management too, in which allegedly benevolent strategies of mastery are inflicted, violently, only upon the self. The real measure of Amherst’s superiority to women and workers, despite his theoretical equality with both, is that he can afford to take risks with lives other than his own, and from his point of view, of course, that is no great risk at all. Missing from Wharton’s account is any social solution other than the imposition of authority within a steeply classed and gendered hierarchy. It seems highly likely that Wharton recognized what she was leav-

The Feminization of Chance    ing out, for she names it in the very first chapter, “life-insurance,” which despite all its faults and limitations was helping socialize risks and losses in ways the novel finally refuses to recognize. In a novel highly attentive to the methods of modern management, to work environments, and to industrial organization and efficiency, the one thing that does not appear is something like workers’ compensation, precisely the remedy that Eastman will recommend and that much of the United States would shortly embrace. When insurance does appear early in The Fruit of the Tree, it appears tellingly as an opportunity to perpetrate an insurance crime, a topic we will take up in more detail later. Here, however, insurance crime functions both as a betrayal of the collective and as a further strategy for individualizing, rather than socializing, occupational hazards. In fact, when Amherst contemplates killing Dillon so that Dillon’s wife could collect his life insurance benefit, we see that not even the social solution of insurance is safe from Amherst’s interfering hand. One of the most curious historical oversights of this otherwise ambitious novel is that it fails to understand that women genuinely committed to work safety reform could ground their political agency in anything other than nineteenth-century sentimentality. As we return to Crystal Eastman, however, we can see that for all of the anxieties the feminization of chance provoked among male workers, it was nonetheless pregnant with its own socially transformative solutions.

Feminization of Chance As we saw in the discussion on William Dean Howells and the development of the life insurance industry, the studied refusal to produce rationalizing and moralizing narratives of violence helped justify the implementation of collective, rather than purely private, strategies of selfprotection. Two decades later, Eastman’s Work Accidents took Howells’s logic to a crucial next step, for it made a case for public accident insurance based on a similar rationale but modeled more specifically on decades-old European social welfare programs. The fundamental project of Work Accidents, even prior to its overt advocacy of public insurance, is thus the narrative production of chance, which must also be feminized in ways that

  The Feminization of Chance finally are not just denigrating to women but also useful for socially distributing the costs of industrial injuries. As Theda Skocpol has shown, the most important proto-welfare provisions before the New Deal functioned primarily as special protections for women and children, beginning with the large Civil War pension system that covered veterans and, eventually, their dependents, and continuing through the various social welfare provisions for women and children implemented during the 1910s. According to Skocpol, “While very little paternalist labor legislation was passed in the early-twentieth-century United States, the story was different when it came to what might be called maternalist legislation,” which included the founding of the Children’s Bureau in 1912 and the provisions of the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infant Protection Act, passed in 1921.46 By identifying the beneficiaries of reform specifically as women and children, maternalist reformers avoided a head-on confrontation over the rights of contract between male employers and male employees, rights that Lochner-Era courts would have been unlikely to compromise. In fact, when Eastman served on New York’s Wainwright Commission in 1910, charged with designing the nation’s first workers’ compensation law, the state supreme court promptly struck down the legislation that eventually resulted. Yet within just a decade, the situation changed drastically, and by 1920 forty-two of forty-eight states had some form of workers’ compensation in place.47 The reasons why these maternalist programs arose as they did are too numerous and complicated to consider fully here, but it seems clear that the special status of women and children played a key role in softening resistance to reforms. As Kathryn Kish Sklar has put it, “Only through the wedge of gender could freedom of contract be breached.”48 That is, only the special needs of women and children proved compelling enough to win public support and to withstand challenges in the courts. That, however, is also a way of saying that women won new forms of public protection for everyone, including male workers, largely as a consequence of their perceived inferiority. As a result, Catherine MacKinnon has rightly wondered whether using “women as a lever against capitalism” yields any net gain. Of common law decisions that granted special protections to women around the same time, MacKinnon says, “These cases did do something for some workers (female) concretely; they also

The Feminization of Chance    demeaned all women ideologically. They did assume that women were marginal and second-class members of the workforce; they probably contributed to keeping women marginal and second-class workers by keeping some women from competing with men at the male standard of exploitation.” Yet while such an approach benefits male workers at the expense of female workers, MacKinnon says, it also eventually helped bring about minimum-wage laws for everyone.49 These painful conflicts of interest are to be expected when potential allies end up competing so directly for scarce political gains, and especially when women sacrificed their own interests to those of a largely male workforce, which is, needless to say, something women were doing in many other ways already. However, it would be too simple to see the competition between class- and gender-based reforms as a zero-sum game, or even to see feminism captured and subverted by labor. Instead, it makes at least as much sense to see maternalist reformers like Eastman as canny pragmatists exploiting a rare opportunity during the Lochner Era. Rather than fight a war on two different fronts, one for class and one for gender, Eastman recognized that the incoherence of gender inequality could expose vulnerabilities in opponents of labor reform. Progressives, nothing if not pragmatic, were thus willing to sacrifice on one front if it would help them win a victory on the other, and as a result we might more accurately see these reforms as the product of savvy social bargaining by women who were far more than simply pawns in a patriarchal game. Liberal politics are especially vulnerable to the claim that women and children are suffering harm, partly because such appeals can tap the power of sentimentality but also because the denigration of women as fundamentally like children justified an extremely paternalistic kind of protection. Eastman might be seen as balancing out an even worse state of affairs, in which women could be held to a male standard of responsibility but entirely denied the male standard of rights. If rights are to be limited, then whatever counts as responsibility should be limited too, including the responsibility for devising an entirely private and self-administered defense against potential accidents. Although women may have been demeaned ideologically by that strategy, as MacKinnon says, they were not necessarily demeaned more than they would have been otherwise, for the demeaning standards were already fully in place. Eastman simply exploit-

  The Feminization of Chance ed those demeaning standards by making a case that antifeminists would find difficult to defeat, in an adjacent struggle more ripe for a victory. Moreover, Eastman’s victories were hardly just victories for male workers, for although we refer to industrial accident insurance by the name of “workers’ compensation,” it might be better to call it “widows’ compensation,” for male workers benefited only when they survived, but their wives and children benefited always. In promoting the feminized accident as socially formative, Work Accidents must walk a rather fine line, as it simultaneously affirms and denies the efficacy of male workers’ capacity to manage their own risk exposure. Eastman seems well aware that she must not take a course similar to that of an important Kansas Supreme Court decision from 1910, which claimed, “The man and the machine at which he works should be recognized as substantially one piece of mechanism, and mishaps to either ought to be repaired and charged to the cost of maintenance.”50 So much the better for workers, it seems, but the Kansas opinion made the downside for workers plain too. In shifting responsibility for accidents from workers to companies, “the man and the machine” became “one piece of mechanism,” so workers were classed along with their equipment as mere insurable capital under managers’ control. Obviously, workers thought of themselves in rather different terms. Work Accidents thus goes out of its way to depict male workers in a flattering light, and it does this primarily through the illustrations and photographs of Joseph Stella and Lewis Hine in a key chapter, “Personal Factor in Industrial Accidents,” which contains many of Eastman’s short accident narratives as well. Stella’s single drawing and Hine’s several photographs depict figures largely separated from social groups, including the family, so in every case the portraits in this chapter present workers individually, and individualistically, in stark contrast to their treatment in much of the rest of Eastman’s book. Moreover, both artists present workers as stoic, dignified, and alert, so not in any obvious way inadequate to the task of self-protection or evocative of special sympathy.51 Many of Hine’s younger subjects are also conspicuously handsome and seem to have been selected to evoke genuine admiration, not just cold, documentary scrutiny. Although the captions can also reinforce period nativism (a photo of a white steel worker is captioned “A Genuine American”), as

figur e 7.  Joseph Stella, “A Greener: Lad from Herzegovina,” Work Accidents and the Law, 84 facing.

  The Feminization of Chance a whole the photographs actually argue strongly against Eastman’s own narrative depiction of workers as careless, reckless, or especially vulnerable to mischance. All of Hine’s three photographs and Stella’s single drawing in this chapter on worker responsibility present tightly cropped portraits of the workers’ heads and shoulders. A fifth portrait, unsigned and evidently not Hine’s work, shows a seated worker down to the waist. But in none of these portraits do we see the workers’ hands, the mark of their status as manual laborers and their defining characteristic in Wharton’s novel. Stella’s drawing of “A Greener” (see Figure 7) takes this strategy of bodily erasure to extremes by eliminating all but the shirt collar, which stands in for the absent torso and limbs. One might read the erasure of the body in Stella’s “A Greener” as a repetition of the various kinds of amputations that Work Accidents documents, and in that light we might see this man as lacking the manual agency that defines masculinity in The Fruit of the Tree. That reading, however, is finally misguided, for in all of this chapter’s portraits, the subject appears composed and self-possessed and, in most, looks confidently back toward the viewer in a manner in no way suggestive of diminishment. These are not portraits of incapacity or suffering, as are many of Stella’s other drawings for the Pittsburgh Survey, which depict decidedly downcast and vulnerable figures worn out by the rigors of their work, ominously lit from below by glowing steel, shrouded in the smoke of the factory, or otherwise pitted desperately against their harsh environments. Instead, “A Greener” erases both the industrial setting and the worker’s body and presents his head and face as an emblem of autonomous and free-standing selfhood, rather than as the remnant of a damaged life. By shifting the focus from the hands to the head, Hine’s and Stella’s intimate portraits in this chapter of Work Accidents also shift attention away from the immediate source of manual labor and toward the traditional seat of rational and moral choice. Hine’s and Stella’s portraits thus cut strongly against Eastman’s broader case for accident insurance, which depends on the evident incapacities of male workers in the matter of self-protection. But by depicting workers in forms that validate their competence at planning a course of action—not just carrying out someone else’s course of action—these portraits risk affirming precisely the myth of free labor that employers

The Feminization of Chance    had long exploited. If workers were as competent as the subjects of these images appear to be, why, viewers might ask, do they need protection in the first place? This conflict is a very deep one within progressivism, and especially evident in Hine’s larger body of work. Alan Trachtenberg has argued that while the dehumanizing effects of industrialization could be powerfully represented by images of dehumanized people, Hine relentlessly humanizes his subjects instead, so the resulting photographs were not always politically useful for the purpose of actual reform.52 Then as now, theoretical equality claims can keep practical inequalities intact. Allan Sekula makes the case for Hine’s ambivalence even more strongly: while at one level “every one of Hine’s subjects is restored to the role of victim,” at the same time, and at another level, Hine’s photographs are often “a dispensation of dignity to the person represented.”53 But especially in the portraits in Eastman’s chapter on personal responsibility, it is hard to find evidence that the subjects are victims at all, for they seem instead one-dimensionally humanized and dignified, as if these men belonged to a different order of being entirely than the unwitting victims in Eastman’s own accident narratives. Work Accidents thus finds itself in a bind. Depicting workers as incompetent, reckless, or feminized might alienate men from the cause of reform. Depicting workers as competent, careful, and intelligent suggests there might be no need for reform in first place. In the end, this conflict proves irresolvable within the governing logic of at least this particular chapter of Eastman’s book, which the female author and the male artists each articulate in strongly gendered and entirely opposed ways. Eastman’s accident narratives represent workers’ victimization through horrific incidents that expose their vulnerability to forces they can neither anticipate nor manage for themselves. Hine’s and Stella’s portraits, in contrast, depict workers who appear entirely capable of charting their own course of action and worthy of bearing the consequences. Even the relationship between the image and the text of the caption of “A Greener” reinforces this gendered conflict between the male artists and the female writer. The caption insists on the figure’s youth and inexperience: he is a mere “Lad,” and his greenness indicates his proximity to childhood. In Stella’s drawing, in contrast, the subject is obviously youthful, but he displays none of the pitiful wretchedness of some of the child laborers Hine had photographed several years earlier. Eastman’s

  The Feminization of Chance caption minimizes the subject’s adult masculinity; Stella’s illustration accentuates it. In reproducing, without resolving, this core contradiction within progressivism, Eastman eventually recognized that the best course forward was to make male workers a secondary concern in the question of how best to protect them. Because Eastman focuses on fatal accidents that removed the male worker from the scene but left a suffering and deprived family behind, the primary victims of her narrative are not the men actually mangled and killed, who raise too many controversial issues about responsibility, but the women and children who bear the resulting financial losses back home. The longest statistical table in the book is a six-page tally of “Data Concerning Married Men Killed,” which includes only those 258 fatalities that left a widow behind.54 Tellingly, no similar table tallies the deaths of unmarried men or injuries to married men who survived. The table of married men killed is thus, despite its title, really a table of surviving widows. Accordingly, alongside brief and sensational notes on the manner of the male worker’s death (“Crushed between cars,” “Fell from bridge,” “Caught in belting”) Eastman presents equally troubling data under a column labeled “Compensation paid by Employer,” which in most cases amounted either to a pittance or nothing at all. Because the workers themselves were dead, this was the money that supported their widows and children alone, so the violent horrors specified in a dense six-page catalogue of male destruction turn out to be equaled by the cruelty of the meager compensation on which their families would have to subsist. As a woman who defied traditional gender expectations, Eastman nonetheless makes full use of the shock that more conservative readers could be trusted to feel at a world turned upside down. Industrial accidents turned men into impotent women, forced women to work like men, drove children prematurely into adulthood, and often left them with brutal injuries of their own. Later chapters spend a great deal of time chronicling the brutal struggle for survival that women and children had to endure. One mother of two children “has to go to work a little after five in the morning, and does not get home until nine at night” (137); a “lame, undersized boy, not yet fourteen, is bringing in the family’s only income” (140); “we have a boy of sixteen left to look out for himself, a girl barely fourteen gone out to service for her ‘keep,’ and an old grandmother

The Feminization of Chance    doing other people’s washing” (142). In all of this, the initial accident is not buried beneath sentimental detail so much as it is reconstituted, and drastically expanded, in and through its devastating long-range effects. Indeed, women’s losses from men’s industrial accidents turn out to be ultimate accidents, as Eastman’s narrative produces them: physically distant from the site of the physical violence, they happen to women in ways necessarily remote from the victim’s capacity for rational and moral choice. For the wives of industrial workers, the accident always impinges on life from some distant place beyond supervision and control. The male worker can board the locomotive from the front, and if he succeeds, he can feel the thrill of his repaired liberal will, and if he fails, even his momentary regret may serve as a final, desperate validation of his powers of self-determination. But in Eastman’s account, the widow of the man who falls beneath the train has no similar grounds for thinking that her rational and moral choices are decisive. On the contrary, she understands in a way that male workers were reluctant to admit that in all the ways that matter, her choices are often simply irrelevant. By tracing the full arc of industrial injury out from the factory and into a distant and unsuspecting home, Work Accidents expands the radius of accidental violence, so that it contains not just the initial event but the reverberating social and economic consequences too. It is not just that chance itself is feminized, then, but that all of the victims of chance occupy that especially vulnerable position ascribed, selectively, to women alone. The maternalist impetus behind the passage of some state workers’ compensation schemes in the 1910s thus seems to have depended more than we have recognized on the cultural prevalence of the feminizing of chance. By configuring injuries specifically as accidents, Work Accidents is doing something that even its male artists resist, configuring male workers specifically as women. It ceases to regard the victim of an industrial injury as the kind of liberal citizen deserving of his fate, for such a person was credited with an implausible capacity for autonomy and self-reliance. To fall short of that standard is to be classed with women and children and with other denigrated people often rendered metaphorically as women and children, such as immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and of course, those who were disabled. All of this is to say that Eastman does something quite different from what Howells had attempted in his own

  The Feminization of Chance advocacy of insurance, and something precisely opposite to Wharton’s analysis of work safety. Howells made little reference to gender at all, and Wharton saw no way out of her predicament but for women to appropriate the violent prerogatives of male mastery. But Eastman concludes that if a rich conception of chance justifies the socializing technology of public insurance, and if chance is female, then an interdependent society of the insured must include people who look more like liberalism’s traditional conception of women than like liberalism’s far grander, but also far more implausible, conception of free and responsible men. The feminization of chance thus involves two complementary issues as it intersects with the accident problem. First, and by long tradition, feminized chance denigrates women as irrational, irresponsible, and inconstant. Chance operates like a woman, just as women conduct themselves as if by chance. On its own, this simple and traditional assessment leads only to the desperate attempt by men to defend their masculine privileges by embracing risk, in order to avoid becoming the feminized victims of chance. Second, and more important, the feminization of chance encourages and justifies socializing efforts that American liberals otherwise have long resisted and that male reformers could not, or would not, advance. Eastman did not just use gender disparities to remedy class disparities; she used the allegedly aleatory character of women to justify social and insurantial—rather than private and juridical—responses to injury and loss. The retheorization of injury as accident entailed a surprising justification for social interdependence that complemented, but also may have partly supplanted, more traditional claims for women’s special authority over the social. The idea commonly found in sentimental fiction that women are specially equipped to organize healthy societies on the model of healthy families, and to correct male reason with female affect, configures the social as warmly intimate. Even in a twentieth-century feminist novel like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), the peaceful residents of an allfemale utopia demonstrate to their astonished male visitors that a cooperative society works best when grounded in the sentiment of motherly love. Eastman, however, has something far different in mind, and sentimental sociability plays only the most limited role in it. Candor about one’s own vulnerability in a world of chance, not sentiment, allows women to value a degree of interdependence that could easily threaten men’s self-worth. The

The Feminization of Chance    feminization of chance is thus the foundation for a kind of sociability that is anything but intimate, familial, or affective, because when instituted as an insurance scheme, it also, in many ways, is deeply depersonalizing. Many would only grudgingly make that trade, but Eastman rejected sentimental sociability in favor of chance collectivity largely because the more traditional and affectively satisfying options had proved so inadequate to the accident problem in the past. To think of the ideal liberal subject as a woman, as Eastman does, is to think of her as at home in a world of chance rather than steeled against it in what is bound to be a tragic plot of failure. It is also to solve Wharton’s problem of male management by including everyone—men and women, workers and managers, labor and capital—within the same critique of human incapacity, fallibility, and vulnerability. To turn men into women is actually to save men from a delusion of autonomy that finally led them to imperil themselves and coercively control others. At the very moment when first-wave feminists were seeking equal standing with allegedly independent and autonomous men, Eastman recognized that all might benefit more if they thought of themselves as accident-prone women instead, a conception that would no longer be denigrating once uniformly applied. Bringing men down to the putatively sexist, but actually more realistic, standard of female vulnerability to chance was thus a way of achieving a degree of gender equality that had, as a side benefit, the justification of greater social interdependence. Remarkably, Eastman’s solution may have been present in embryonic form from the very beginning in the defense of free labor by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. When Holmes had suggested that “loss from accident must lie where it falls,” he wanted the courts to step back from the work of arranging compensation for injured workers. But Holmes went on to make a facetious suggestion that would prove prescient in the long run: “The state might conceivably make itself a mutual insurance company against accidents, and distribute the burden of its citizens’ mishaps among all its members.” That mockery was a mode of prognostication, for far from being “cumbrous and expensive,” as Holmes went on to charge, public accident insurance came to seem expedient, efficient, and comparatively cheap.55 Holmes’s derisive suggestion that public insurance might compensate for accidents reveals a deeper truth: if causation is

  The Feminization of Chance complex, broadly distributed, and perhaps nothing more than a rhetorical claim, then the ideal liberal subject endowed with the capacity to chart his own course forward, and bear the consequences accordingly, is little more than a fiction, for the world is simply too complex and dynamic for anyone to manage completely. In carving out an implicit theory of accidental violence that was neither moralized nor rationalized, Holmes thus helped legitimize exactly the kind of neutral indeterminacy principle that made accident insurance possible in a nation otherwise deeply suspicious of social democratic reforms. In such a world, Eastman suggests, no one is “sufficient to have stood, though free to fall,” as Milton had put it, and as Wharton surely remembered, because in an increasingly complex economic and industrial environment, everyone falls short of liberalism’s untenable ideals.56

c ha p ter 5

Performing the Accident on Purpose theodore dreiser and james cain

On the night of June 14, 1934, Eva Coo and Martha Clift drove a car over a well-insured handyman named Harry Wright near Cooperstown, New York, then brought his body to coroners, claiming to have found it lying in the road. If the eighteen hundred dollars in life insurance that Clift stood to collect from Wright’s death did not immediately arouse suspicion, several other factors did: no one witnessed the “accident,” no one came forward to admit involvement, investigators later determined that Wright had been “run down repeatedly,” and the coroner suspected someone had struck him on the head with a mallet.1 As insurance crimes go, it was not the most sophisticated operation, but in that regard it resembled many other amateur attempts to profit from expanded insurance coverage nationwide. Insurance crime was on the rise during these lean Depression years, as was public interest in it. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s major metropolitan newspapers were well stocked with sordid tales of the murder of the well insured, which had become a new subgenre within the crime blotter. When the New York City police commissioner published a list of the motives for the city’s 431 homicides in 1933, he added a new one, “To defraud an insurance company,” which joined older and more venerable motives such as “robbery” and “revenge.”2 The rise of insurance crime as a social phenomenon marks more than just a sociological shift in criminality. It also indicates an important

  Performing the Accident on Purpose change in thinking about the nature of accidents. Because the point of an insurance crime is to contrive a killing that appears not to have been deliberate, its perpetrators produce a comprehensive accident-effect, in which agency stages its own attenuation. Acting “accidentally-on-purpose,” as novelist James Cain put it, became a peculiar kind of modern theater, as insurance crimes were staged and restaged throughout an increasingly comprehensive insurance culture.3 In the process, the performance of such accidents and their insistent representation in period narratives led to a growing sense that chance itself might not be as spontaneous and innocent as popularly represented. Instead, awareness of accident falsification, especially through literary and journalistic treatments of it, suggested that chance itself might be the product of careful and even criminal design.4 Cain’s novel Double Indemnity (1936) is just the most famous example of a related subgenre of crime fiction, the falsified accident novel, in which crime masquerades as a matter of chance.5 Double Indemnity was Cain’s second attempt at the genre, following The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), but both novels are deeply indebted to a common source, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925). In Dreiser’s novel, the antihero Clyde Griffiths contrives an “accidental, unpremeditated drowning” to dispense with his pregnant lover.6 In Cain’s Double Indemnity insurance agent Walter Huff murders his lover’s husband “accidentally-onpurpose” in order to cash in a lucrative accident insurance policy (16). The link between these two novels is more than just formal. Leonard Cassuto reminds us that when Dreiser was revising the death-row scenes at the end of An American Tragedy, it was Cain who arranged for Dreiser to visit Sing Sing prison in New York.7 If Dreiser’s crime novel helped usher in the era of hard-boiled crime fiction, as Cassuto argues, it served as an even more direct influence on Cain’s two studies of criminally falsified accidents roughly a decade later. These two novels thus define a period in which fiction began to cast a more skeptical eye on earlier, popular conceptions of chance. By representing the accident as a criminal plot, An American Tragedy acknowledged more candidly than any other novel we have considered so far that chance itself is a cultural product. Cain took Dreiser’s analysis a step further and attributed chance specifically to the social dynamics of America’s modern insurance culture, including the expansive public insurance programs of the nation’s burgeoning welfare state.

Performing the Accident on Purpose     Cain’s and Dreiser’s novels bring to a close the developments that previous chapters have traced, and so conclude a period in which many American writers, especially realist writers, combined the thematic consideration of chance with aleatory narrative forms and various justifications of chance collectivity. By crafting novels specifically about accident falsification, Dreiser and Cain insist instead that chance and accident had been fabrications from the start. What Dreiser finally comes to understand at the end of his career, and what Cain never really questions, is that literary narratives always produce chance rather than simply represent it. Dreiser’s and Cain’s novels of accident falsification thus do more than simply distinguish real accidents from false ones. Through narratives superficially about accident falsification, they also expose the deeper ways in which the very category of the accident was made up and then used instrumentally and politically to characterize certain events as innocent of design. Clyde Griffiths and Walter Huff thus reveal the extensive power of literary narrative to categorize and classify events as accidental in the first place, a power exercised not just by individual writers, as Cain especially understands, but by many other political and institutional players in modern American culture. In different ways, then, both novels spell the end of an earlier phase of realism. Dreiser was nearing the end of his career as a novelist, and Cain had already abandoned the large documentary realist novel for a modernist mode of sensational kitsch. It is Cain’s novel, however, that makes the greater conceptual advance, for by giving up on the documentation of social detail, Cain can attend to more theoretical concerns. By allegorizing the social dynamics of an entire insurance culture in the terms of a single insurance crime, Cain develops a more dynamic model of social and literary performativity, which he ultimately patterns on the feedback effects generated by all insurance, especially the public insurance programs of the burgeoning welfare state. Writing just one year after the passage of the Social Security Act of 1935, Cain realized that the real significance of insurance is that it possesses its own self-subverting energies and stirs up turbulent side effects that alter the very conditions it attempts to secure. At one level, these novels lament the antisocial violence that takes the form of accident falsification, but at a deeper level, they also lament literature’s failure to produce the accident more convincingly. At the dawn of

  Performing the Accident on Purpose the New Deal, and in an age of Social Security, the cost of that mimetic failure was clear. A liberal society that cannot perpetrate the illusion that chance is natural is in danger of losing one of its most effective justifications for more just and egalitarian forms of collectivity.

Dreiser’s “Accidental Double Tragedy” Dreiser’s An American Tragedy comprehensively revises the kinds of accidents that had punctuated his fiction for more than two decades. In his first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), accidents seem curiously detached from social or economic conditions, and although accidents have drastic economic consequences, they seem to impinge on social, material, and economic life from some outside position. For instance, there is little sense that the scene on which the entire novel pivots—in which a safe door swings shut while George Hurstwood holds its contents in his hands—is anything other than an inexplicable material mishap. Dreiser gives readers few opportunities to trace its significance back to any sort of market dynamics, psychological conflicts, or social structures. It would have been a different matter, for instance, had Hurstwood taken the money to a casino and lost it in a publicly sanctioned and socially meaningful game of chance. When the safe door slams shut, the novel opens another door to an opaque and mystifying force, and in doing so abandons the novel’s traditional task of tracing out extended networks of causes and effects. Even in The Financier (1911), Frank Cowperwood’s fortunes collapse when a different accident, the Chicago fire, sparks a Philadelphia stock panic that leads to margin calls Cowperwood cannot cover. As I argued at the beginning of this book, the Chicago fire generated America’s first grand narrative of chance collectivity, and even though the fire’s consequences reverberate through the financial system in Dreiser’s novel, it in no way understands that event as culturally produced. In most cases, Dreiser’s early accidents are investigative dead-ends, beyond which inquiry does not attempt to proceed. This is, in fact, what renders such events accidental in the first place. It is not as if these novels’ events are so opaque that narrative simply had to surrender before them and could proceed no further. On the contrary, the choice to curtail inquiry, the refusal to narrate an ex-

Performing the Accident on Purpose     tensive consideration of causal conditions, is precisely how Dreiser’s early novels most often produce the accident. Twenty-four years later when Dreiser wrote An American Tragedy, he rewrote Carrie Meeber in the form of Clyde Griffiths, and he rethought what it meant to plot an accident. Like Carrie, Clyde is every inch the antihero, subject to force rather than the source of it, but like Carrie he also manages to make the most of his lucky breaks. In fact, violent accidents have a way of redounding to Clyde’s benefit. An automobile “accident” in Kansas City sends him fleeing to Chicago where he has a second accident, a chance encounter with a wealthy uncle who brings him East and includes him in the family business (142). Like Carrie, Clyde becomes a kind of actor. In Lycurgus he finds that his physical resemblance to his wealthy cousin Gilbert opens the doors of Lycurgus’s high society, and he takes every advantage of his natural capacity for impersonation. But that kind of acting ultimately leads Clyde to a much more elaborate stage production, and one far different from Carrie’s, the performance of an accidental death, or what is really the murder of his pregnant lover, on a secluded New Hampshire lake. Clyde had been rehearsing such performances for months. Immediately after Clyde arrives in Lycurgus, he concludes that if accidents have such power to reshape lives, his own intentions would best be served by performing those that will not involuntarily arise. When Clyde decides he wants to meet Roberta Alden, he hopes that “he should chance to meet her alone somewhere in the street,” an encounter that “would appear as accidental and hence as innocent to her” (265). He trawls for her outside the factory to contrive exactly such an encounter, and when his plan succeeds, he feigns the surprise the occasion requires. Later, when he kills Roberta, he uses the same rationale, and his wish for her death at first takes the shape of a passive hope for “just an accidental, unpremeditated drowning” (440). As Clyde turns the allegedly original, creative power of chance into a deliberate masquerade, he also becomes an actor and an impersonator, one who is costumed, scripted, and aware that he must perform before an exacting audience. Clyde’s theatricality, like Carrie’s, thus functions superficially as a marker of insincerity and unreliability, and in that way seems the most traditional mode of moral critique. At least since Jonas Barish’s account of “antitheatrical prejudice,” readers have been conscious of the

  Performing the Accident on Purpose ways in which metaphors of theatricality tend to be “hostile or belittling,” frequently castigating the theatrical action as fraudulent and immoral, and often equating it with conduct such as perjury or prostitution.8 In this sense, Clyde’s theatricality might be read as evidence of his inauthenticity and, accordingly, as a mode of deception that strongly traduces realism’s own determination to establish and document actual facts. The problem with such a reading is that, as Philip Fisher has argued, Dreiser’s characters seem to lack anything like an authentic self beneath those theatrical performances. “Under modern conditions, the conditions no longer of nature, the self is now outside the body, around the body at a distance that, once felt, creates a desire for the possession or appropriation of an assembled self in material, external form,” Fisher claims.9 Those facts, he continues, explain the curious emptiness of Dreiser’s characters, which are in fact externalized and relational selves that acquire and maintain their identity only in conjunction with other people, places, and things. As the double of his cousin Gilbert, Clyde is not only the person he is but also the person he is taken and mistaken to be, which in turn becomes, even for Clyde, the source of an assembled identity. Almost everything in Dreiser’s novel is made in such externalized fashion—assembled, stamped out, rehearsed, or reperformed—and only at some subsequent stage reinvested with the sense that those selves, events, and objects are one of a kind. This is, of course, why the stage is so important to a novel like Sister Carrie, in that Carrie’s acting literalizes a theatrical account of identity that actually applies to everyone. But in a comprehensively theatrical account of society and private identity, Dreiser retained the accident as a basic quantum of reality, a spontaneous essence that somehow impinges on all of these performance from a position outside them. Unpredictable things might happen onstage, as when Carrie’s spontaneous and unscripted comment turns into her lucky break, but that is not the same as saying that chance itself is theatrical to the same degree. By the time Dreiser wrote An American Tragedy, then, the real question was whether criminal performances like Clyde’s, which falsify the accident, also encompass chance within a performance space that already includes everything else. Dreiser’s reassessment of chance is related to other innovations under way by modernist and avant-garde writers openly rebelling against the

Performing the Accident on Purpose     practices of realism and naturalism. Even though some avant-garde artists were well aware of the ways in which representation is always a kind of falsification, as Marcel Duchamp made clearer than anyone, many others tended to be less rigorous about such ideas when the subject at hand was chance.10 As Peter Bürger has argued, many avant-garde writers and artists sought out the “purposelessness” and “arbitrariness” of chance as an attempt to evade the oppressive effects of rationality and social order in an increasingly bureaucratic and technological society: chance alone offered escape from false consciousness.11 Tristan Tzara’s newspaper clipping poems, for instance, propose that the process of drawing words at random from a bag might create linguistic configurations free of the artist’s own ideological conditioning. F. T. Marinetti’s futurist manifestos reclaim elemental energy from a dully mechanical world by reveling in its breakdowns and crashes. The implicit claim behind such avant-garde accidents is that chance registers as authenticity and, indeed, even as a kind of ideal pseudospiritual essence behind the sullied world of ends and means. In the most extreme and highly romanticized version of these developments, André Breton’s “objective chance” functions as a cryptic signal emanating from some remote storehouse of truth and purity, to be detected in what Breton calls a “forbidden world of sudden parallels, petrifying coincidences, and reflexes peculiar to each individual, of harmonies struck as though on a piano, flashes of light that make you see, really see.”12 Just as “absolute chance” became a new foundational principle for a metaphysician like Charles Peirce, so “objective chance” became something similar for Breton, a deeper reality concealed behind the shallow surface of everyday life. Bürger recognizes the problem with Breton’s conception of chance and rightly insists that when dealing with chance, “we are dealing . . .  with an ideological category.”13 In this case, that ideology consists precisely of Breton’s designation of chance as “objective” in the first place, given that ideology is nothing other than the enterprise of naturalizing political values. Even though the production of chance clearly occurs within the most political and institutional of contexts, many avant-garde writers hoped it might liberate them from those contexts instead. In one common account of the literary history of this period, avantgarde figures like Breton, Marinetti, and Tzara supplanted earlier and more traditional realists like Dreiser, by leaping to the forefront of art and

  Performing the Accident on Purpose culture and leaving the musty methods of their grandsires behind. Yet in regard to the literature of chance, and especially in light of the sophisticated account of chance in Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, the situation can seem to be reversed. While there is no denying the extraordinary creative power of modernist and avant-garde art, its approach to chance can seem decidedly old fashioned. All of the writers in previous chapters naturalized chance to some extent, yet all of them also, in various ways and sometimes despite themselves, exposed specific sites of chance production within American culture and confessed a certain amount of complicity with that operation. But at precisely the moment when Dreiser and Cain begin to demystify and denaturalize chance more assertively than ever, these modernist and avant-garde writers and artists, as if in a rebellion, reverted to earlier, more romantic, and even metaphysical attempts to privilege chance as a mystical indeterminacy principle. Breton may have thought he had discovered a new, liberating aspect to chance, but it only seemed new because he and other advocates of the aleatory avant-garde so relentlessly denied, ignored, or repressed chance’s own cultural origins. Within popular culture, other developments began sensitizing Americans to the possibility that chance might not be as spontaneous and innocent as it seemed. The phenomenon of insurance crime was just one highly visible source of skepticism, but our records of insurance crimes are limited and skewed, because they are necessarily the records of failed insurance crimes. The successful attempts remain invisible precisely because they evade detection. But a related mode of accident production was both less violent and, as a result, more transparent: a professional trade in personal injury fraud flourishing in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In personal injury fraud, actors faked various kinds of falls and injuries in order to extract compensation from property owners, vehicle operators, and transportation companies. These practices seem to have become increasingly professional and organized during the Depression. One article in the Nation in 1936, headlined “Faking Car Accidents,” describes “floppers” who leaped in front of slow-moving cars to collect settlements from the drivers. That article also reports on a “house of pain” in Pittsburgh where organized fraudsters gouged their flesh with graters made from punctured tin cans and beat each other with sacks full of apples before these “‘victims’ went out and had ‘accidents.’”14

Performing the Accident on Purpose     These operations had a long and interesting prehistory. The most fascinating example, and surely the most pertinent given Dreiser’s interest in theatricality, lies in the origins of that greatest cliché of the Vaudeville stage, and of subsequent slapstick comedy and farce, the act of slipping and falling on a banana peel. That cliché is so stagy, and so patently improbable and artificial, that it seems as if it must have originated in the theater, but in fact, as Ken Dornstein has shown, the performance of slipping on a banana peel originated on the railroads in the 1890s, as professional “banana peelers” dropped fruit skins on the floors or steps of Pullman cars, pretended to slip on them, and then demanded modest restitution from the railroad.15 No one was fooled, least of all the railroad’s managers, but they often paid compensation anyway to avoid more expensive lawsuits. The most trite and perhaps the most common visual trope for the accident, and one that persists to this day, thus turns out to have been a criminal ruse from the start. Indeed, this now ubiquitous visual metaphor for the personal accident is, in a sense, the first and most important sign of growing skepticism about the accident’s authenticity. In an irony that Dreiser would surely cherish, and perhaps actually recognized, it was criminal subterfuge that inspired the commercial theater, rather than the other way around. The availability of certain compensatory options in fact generated theatrical conduct—self-subsidizing performance art—which originated in the economic and legal mechanisms of personal injury and which were only literalized as “real” theater in their subsequent passage to the stage. If the golden age of banana peelers and other accident fakers was the 1920s, as Dornstein argues, that seems to indicate a broader connection between Dreiser’s own interest in falsified accidents and a culture that had good reason to be skeptical about the innocence of accidents in general. An American Tragedy can thus be read as an attempt to link the literary representation of accidents to the criminal perpetration of accidents. For in many ways, Dreiser associates his own artistic production not with the penetrating and demystifying powers of the police who finally capture and convict Clyde, and so reestablish clear boundaries between real and false accidents, but with Clyde’s own stagy attempt at accident falsification. When Clyde calls himself a “poor plotter” in the novel’s long second half, Dreiser may be confessing his own responsibility for his sprawling

  Performing the Accident on Purpose narrative’s unwieldy design (561). More tellingly, the process of Clyde’s poor plotting appears to be patterned on Dreiser’s own process of writing the novel. Clyde reperforms an event he originally read about in the newspaper, an “Accidental Double Tragedy” that killed two vacationers boating in upstate New York. Dreiser had done the same in writing the novel, in that An American Tragedy is based on Dreiser’s research into newspaper coverage of Chester Gillette’s murder of Grace Brown in the Adirondacks in 1906. Moreover, the term “Tragedy” appears not just in the title of Dreiser’s novel but also in the newspaper headline that Clyde reads, “Accidental Double Tragedy.” Readers who find little tragedy in this grandiosely titled novel may be missing the point that it is making a circular return to the sensational language of Clyde’s own sources, as Dreiser’s title echoes Clyde’s newspaper’s hyperbole. Most important, Clyde Griffiths retains Chester Gillette’s initials, as if Dreiser actually wants to call attention to his own character’s fictionalization of historical fact. That turns out to be the most remarkable point of contact between Dreiser’s and Clyde’s affiliated plots, for Clyde eventually rehearses Dreiser’s own original act of appropriation, when his own pseudonyms—“Carl Graham” and “Clifford Golden”—continue to echo not only his own initials but also those that Dreiser originally borrowed from Chester Gillette. Clyde may be foolish and clumsy in devising a pseudonym that fails to conceal his identity, but at a deeper level, this carelessness also signals Dreiser’s determination to link his derivative artifice with Clyde’s more overtly criminal kind. Against the avant-garde’s romantic attempts to capture and channel the innocent spontaneity of chance, then, Dreiser associates the writing of the accident both with Clyde’s theatricality and with his criminal duplicity. Clyde’s inept performance, which convinces no one, stands as a frank confession of literary realism’s own mimetic failures, but also of its intent to deceive. Accordingly, the newspaper headline that gives Clyde the idea for Roberta’s murder, “Accidental Double Tragedy,” refers not just to the two lives lost in a boating accident, and not just to the doubling of Clyde’s plot in Dreiser’s own, but also to the counterintuitive doubling of a kind of event that is popularly thought to be defined by its innate singularity. Even before Roberta Alden’s death, accidents in An American Tragedy tend to come in pairs. We find a pair of accidentally destroyed children (one accidentally stuck by a car; the other killed in Roberta Alden’s womb); a

Performing the Accident on Purpose     pair of women “in trouble” through accidental pregnancy (Roberta and Clyde’s sister) (118, 405); and a pair of automobile accidents (the first kills a child; the second nearly kills the same car’s occupants). Even the characters notice these unlikely repetitions. At Clyde’s trial the prosecutor says to him, “You’re rather familiar with accidents that result in death to girls, aren’t you?” (709). What he means is that when accidents are doubled, they begin to seem suspiciously nonaccidental, just as when lightning strikes twice, it seems to demand some rational, causal explanation. The avant-garde attempt to “make the extraordinary repeatable,” as Bürger put it, always betrays a conscious attempt to “master chance,” and it is that desire that Dreiser finally refuses to disavow.16 However, this is not to say that Dreiser simply translates accidents into crimes in some simple or literal way. Even the “accidental unpremeditated drowning” that Clyde plans for Roberta turns out not to be quite as artificial as even Clyde intends. He takes Roberta to the lake and sets out in their boat with his bag packed, but his design to produce an accident miscarries by accident, inadvertently killing Roberta just as Clyde originally had desired. “That accident was unpremeditated and undesigned,” Clyde thinks to himself later; “it had not been as he planned, and he could swear to that” (702). At the crucial moment, and in a telling passage, the narrator describes the event this way: Yet (the camera still unconsciously held tight) pushing at her with so much vehemence as not only to strike her lips and nose and chin with it, but to throw her back sidewise toward the left wale which caused the boat to careen to the very water’s edge. And then he, stirred by her sharp scream, (as much due to the lurch of the boat, as the cut on her nose and lip), rising and reaching half to assist or recapture her and half to apologize for the unintended blow—yet in so doing completely capsizing the boat—himself and Roberta being as instantly thrown into the water. And the left wale of the boat as it turned, striking Roberta on the head as she sank and then rose for the first time, her frantic, contorted face turned to Clyde, who by now had righted himself. For she was stunned, horror-struck, unintelligible with pain and fear—her lifelong fear of water and drowning and the blow he had so accidentally and all but unconsciously administered. (492–93)

We can see that these events replay the scene of the safe door from Sister Carrie with superficial fidelity. A man plots some criminal act and then begins to enact it, but before he commits completely, events seem to tumble

  Performing the Accident on Purpose forward of their own accord, altering the material circumstances so that there is, quite literally, no going back. However, there is a key difference between the two scenes as well, in that Hurstwood plans no comparable theatrical deception. He only plans to grab the money and escape in secret, to the extent that he plans at all. Clyde, on the other hand, intends a false accident-effect from the start, which raises the stakes considerably when a similar accident finally does occur. Obviously, Clyde’s claim that the accident is innocent and spontaneous is hard to defend, given that Clyde desired precisely this result and planned to bring it about even if by a slightly different sequence of events. Even if he did not intend the final blow that sent Roberta overboard, he did intend to orchestrate all of the prior conditions that made that blow possible. Although a jury would find few legal obstacles to convicting Clyde of murder, the text of this passage goes out of its way to confuse the issue. The first blow Clyde delivers with the camera sets a chain of events in motion, as Roberta lurches and falls, causing Clyde to reach for her, which capsizes the boat, the side of which strikes her on the head as she falls into the water. The narrator later says that the initial blow was “unintended,” which might mean that Clyde did not intend to strike Roberta at all but might also mean that he simply intended to strike her differently. Moreover, the camera is “unconsciously held tight,” and the blow Clyde delivers is “accidentally and all but unconsciously administered” (492–93). It is not at all clear whether readers should take the adverb “accidentally” as a synonym for “unconsciously,” or whether they should differentiate the two terms in some other sense. Does “unconsciously” refer to a spastic muscle contraction that is nondeliberate, unintentional, and unwilled in a deeper sense? Or does it refer to the cathectic discharge of some repressed desire held in check only up to that moment, a reading that could be construed, in Freudian terms, as a claim for even higher intentionality? While the passage exposes these and many other options, it also refuses to distinguish between them. We get nowhere by joining the jury and trying to decide these questions definitively, or by joining Clyde in his irritating and simplistic selfexcusals, which attribute Roberta’s death to “an accidental combination of circumstances” (625). Legally, all of these complexities are rendered mostly irrelevant by the fact that Clyde makes no effort to help save Roberta

Performing the Accident on Purpose     once in the water. But if the legal question of Clyde’s guilt is fairly easy to resolve, the philosophical questions about agency and accident remain pressing, and the quoted passage raises their stakes. Indeed, passages like this one—the result of such lengthy conceptual and narrative preparation—ask readers to entertain a more profound collapse of assumptions about the very category of the accidental. If accidents in An American Tragedy at first seem to come in two kinds, real ones and false ones, the actual performance of Clyde’s crime suggests that either of these designations is, finally, a value-laden and culturally informed product determined retrospectively and, in this case, largely through the courts. Whether Roberta’s drowning, in whole or in part, is or is not an accident depends on how one defines an accident, and the passage seems designed to lead readers toward that inevitable conclusion. As a result, Dreiser’s novel does not distinguish real accidents from false ones after all. On the contrary, it acknowledges that the very attempt to make such distinctions depends on prior determinations about what does and does not count as accidental, determinations that clearly have their origins anywhere but in nature. This helps explain why the described scene is built around that grand emblem of realist representation, the camera, which is the closest thing this crime novel has to a murder weapon. Clyde packs the camera so he can photograph Sondra Finchley at Pass Lake after killing Roberta, but he also plans to entice Roberta out onto the water by saying that he wants to “take some pictures” (476). He does, and when the police fish the camera from the lake, they find ghostly images of Roberta on the exposed film, which establish that Clyde had been with her on the day she died. In this way, the camera functions in a rather traditional sense as an instrument of realist demystification, capable of establishing facts and piercing through deceptions to the truth. Although many realists, including both William Dean Howells and Henry James, were uncomfortable with what they considered photographic literalism, the power of photography to render allegedly factual and value-neutral accounts of the real world also helped authorize some of realism’s broader claims for its own mimetic capacities. The story of retrieving Clyde’s camera and recovering its images thus rehearses a familiar narrative of photography’s allegedly objective capacities. Tellingly, however, Clyde uses the camera not only as an instrument of duplication but also as an instrument of violence, when he “acciden-

  Performing the Accident on Purpose tally” strikes Roberta in the face with it (492). So even as the camera takes one kind of print, it makes another kind of print, as the investigator Mason later shows when he lines up the imprint on Roberta’s face with the camera’s edge. The two-directional nature of Clyde’s camera, as it both takes and makes prints, expressly challenges those theories of photography as a neutral method of reality rendering. William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature (1844–46) made this famous claim: “The plates of this work . . .  have been formed or depicted by optical and chemical means alone, and without the aid of any one acquainted with the art of drawing.” These “sun-pictures,” as Talbot also called them, inaugurate a fantasy of natural inscription that has proved surprisingly durable.17 Even Roland Barthes calls himself a “realist” when it comes to photography, and in Camera Lucida he defines the photograph as “an image without code.” Barthes says that one should “not take the photograph for a ‘copy’ of reality, but for an emanation of past reality.”18 Susan Sontag makes a similar case even more explicitly: “A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.”19 All of these claims, in different ways, theorize the photograph as an “index” of its referent, to use Charles Peirce’s influential semiotic term for a sign that has a direct causal connection to its referent, as smoke might be said to be an index of fire.20 Photography’s high standing in the court of law may thus depend less on any practical confidence that photographs are difficult to falsify and more on this widespread sense that photographs, falsifiable though they may be, are indexical emanations from reality and not merely mimetic representations of it. Accordingly, in Dreiser’s novel the camera’s promise of direct contact with reality also tends to be theorized as a kind of death. Barthes’s obsession with the palpable presence of his dead mother in a family photograph leads him to speculate that photography may “correspond to the intrusion . . .  of an asymbolic Death, outside religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death.”21 Sontag equates the object of the photograph with a death mask taken physically from a corpse, a metaphor that dramatizes both the presence of the referent in the photograph and the absence of the referent from the photograph’s viewer. And as Christian Metz has argued, “The snapshot, like death, is an instantaneous abduc-

Performing the Accident on Purpose     tion of the object out of the world into another world, into another kind of time. . . .  Not by chance, the photographic act (or acting, who knows?) has been frequently compared with shooting, and the camera with a gun.”22 As a necropolis of dead and absent things, the photograph functions as an instrument of mourning for the absent subject and the buried past, even as it promises lingering contact with the lost. Clyde’s camera-as-weapon thus literalizes the traditional connection between photography and death, as does its ghostly images of Roberta, which the investigator Mason finds still contained within the camera’s timeless mausoleum. At the same time, Clyde’s camera does something that Barthes’s and Sontag’s never do, by making and taking impressions simultaneously. The mark on Roberta’s face that corresponds with the camera’s edge reverses Sontag’s one-directional metaphor of the death mask, which receives an impression from the dead body. Clyde’s camera not only makes an impression on the body in return but, in doing so, also produces the subject’s death. Dreiser’s camera is thus the novel’s most candid confession that realism is no neutral recorder of images after all, no documenter of manifest fact, but a two-directional medium that leaves neither subject nor object unchanged. The camera-as-weapon acknowledges that even as literary realism represents reality, it cannot help giving shape to reality in a process tantamount to violence. Striking Roberta “with a camera by accident,” as Clyde puts it, configures realism as a medium whose claims to neutrality and objectivity are finally as incredible as Clyde’s own claims to innocence (563). The accidental blow with the camera suggests another, more profound collision as well, in which earlier conceptions of chance crash into realist representational practices. Clyde’s accident with the camera indicates that accidents never were things simply to be represented but were always things that representations make. As a result, realism appears as a method of deploying and managing conceptual categories—“causation,” “responsibility,” “society,” “chance,” and countless others—that are indispensable for thought and conduct but that nonetheless might have been rendered in drastically different forms. If there is any tragedy at all in this grandiosely titled novel, it has less to do with Clyde’s clumsy crime and more to do with the fact that at the end of Dreiser’s career, realism functions in ways that Dreiser links with criminal deceit. More important, the

  Performing the Accident on Purpose novel is a melancholy confession that the tools of realism no longer work, no longer generate a convincing reality-effect, and that the very attempt to do so now registers both as a practical failure and as laughably inept. When Clyde drops his camera in Big Bittern Lake, Dreiser himself may be enacting a gesture of relinquishment. Like Prospero breaking his wand at the end of The Tempest, a moment that signals the end of the magic in Shakespeare’s last play, Dreiser literally throws the tools of literary realism overboard. He never finished a novel again.

Standard Accidents James Cain’s Double Indemnity traces Dreiser’s interest in the literary production of the accident into more institutionally and politically resonant contexts. Cain rewrites An American Tragedy for an age that was transforming individual accident into aggregate risk at a phenomenal rate, and in extremely public forums. Like the novel’s murderous antihero Walter Huff, Cain had worked briefly as an insurance agent for the General Accident Company in 1914 so came to understand the subject of insurance and insurance crime from the inside.23 In the novel, Huff’s scheme is simple. As an agent for General Fidelity of California, he arranges for Phyllis Nirdlinger to take out an accident insurance policy on her husband, lists Phyllis as the beneficiary, murders him with her help, disguises Nirdlinger’s death as an accidental fall from the back of a train, and attempts to cash in on a fifty thousand–dollar “double indemnity” clause for death suffered on the railways. The novel is thus specifically about accident insurance, not life insurance, which might have worked just as well for an insurance crime plot. The difference, however, is that accident insurance brings the novel into closer contact with the broader statistical and even sociological project of defining what counts as an accident in the first place. An American Tragedy treats accidents as repetitive, but what does it mean to say that an accident repeats? Presumably, it means that some injury or loss appears to be similar in form to some subsequent injury or loss: crushed hands, crashed cars, or hard falls. Such events repeat only in the sense that some authority groups them together by defining formal similarities and then tallies the instances as iterations of some ideal kind.

Performing the Accident on Purpose     To talk about accident repetition, then, is to skip past the crucial first step of establishing a typology of the accidental, a project that was becoming increasingly technical and bureaucratic in the early twentieth century. Obviously, counting is never an objective or factual enterprise but always a value-laden and often prescriptive effort that reflects political determinations about categorization, and so about what does and does not “count.”24 In a now enormous body of work on the cultural power of social statistics, which began in earnest with the work of Michel Foucault and continues in the work of Ian Hacking and many others, we have come to recognize the ways in which social statistics create kinds of people, including the suicide, the multiple personality, or the homosexual, to name just a few. By “making up people,” as Hacking puts it, “social change creates new categories of people, but the counting is no mere report of developments. It elaborately, often philanthropically, creates new ways for people to be.”25 As we turn to the social and cultural contexts behind Dreiser’s interest in falsified accidents, we discover how statistical accountancy raised new problems when applied not just to kinds of people but also to a particular kind of event—the accident—which was thought to be immune to repetition precisely because it was popularly conceived to be one of a kind. Accident statistics thus threaten to smuggle in a complementary essentialism, through which single accidents appear to be instances of fundamental types. The category of “industrial accidents” might include the case of a child mangled by a steam loom and also the case of a woman scalded in a boiler explosion. But those events could be grouped into different categories just as easily, if the observer chose to discriminate by age, gender, occupation, means of injury, extent of injury, geography, or any other criteria. Making new accident tables, as sociologists and actuaries were doing in the early twentieth century, thus required people to organize accidents into new taxonomies, but once established, the resulting categories easily came to seem like precultural givens, precisely as the figure of the “suicide” or the “homosexual” could seem to be independent objects of medical study rather than products of medical discourse. Popular and romantic conceptions of chance as radically spontaneous, innocent, and free thus clashed with statistical classifications that configured all accidents as repetitions of fundamental types. But in this case, there is an important logical contradiction not present in the institutional production of

  Performing the Accident on Purpose identity, and not even in the statistical study of other social phenomena, such as suicide. By classifying accidents, statistics made accidents seem, as it were, less accidental than ever. That is to say, it naturalized them, but it naturalized them as rational from the start, as if accidents fell from the sky grouped conveniently by kind. At risk in all of this were those conceptions of chance generated qualitatively through literature and that often configured accidents as radically irrational, spontaneous, and singular. The production of chance in those forms depended on maintaining a certain distance from mathematical reason and statistical organization, which was precisely why insurers advertised eruptions of accidental violence to potential consumers but kept their own statistical and probabilistic methods mostly out of view. By the 1920s, however, many writers, including Cain, were newly optimistic about using better social statistics in far more publicly visible ways, and when those statistics were applied to accidents, it directly challenged, and even undermined, the kinds of literary chance production we met in previous chapters. On the brink of the Great Depression, Cain published his first book, a Menckenesque satire titled Our Government (1930). No hint of his later sensational novels appears in this series of twelve sketches, which expose and often mock the inner workings of various institutions of American government. Decrying books on the “theory of our government,” Cain recommends instead his own attempt “to paint a portrait of our government; to depict, without bias or comment, the machine which passes our laws, educates our children, and polices our streets.” He desires, in other words, pure positivism in the analysis of political life: “[Science] will form no conclusion until all the data are in, with exact weight, measure, and specific gravity.”26 But if Cain’s first metaphors are drawn from chemistry, he goes on to acknowledge the greater pertinence of social statistics, through which, he hopes, competent administrators will begin “accumulating great columns of tables” of economic and sociological data and so abandon the merely theoretical wrangling of “great debates.”27 By 1936, all that survives from Our Government in Cain’s works are those “great columns of tables,” the actuary’s art, which previously held such promise for reasoned assessment but which later became the very instruments his insurance criminals would exploit. However, Cain’s insurance crime novel is no mere continuation of the statistical commit-

Performing the Accident on Purpose     ments of Our Government but actually a rejection of Cain’s earlier, more positivist views, as it attempts to devise a more complex account of a statistically administered society. In Double Indemnity, Huff has only a general sense of various kinds of mortality rates, but the detective who ultimately catches Huff—the company claims investigator Barton Keyes—has the actuarial tables themselves. With no material evidence, no witnesses, and no specific theory to guide his investigation into a policyholder’s suspicious death, Keyes concludes, “I have nothing to go on. Nothing but those tables and my own hunch, instinct, and experience” (61). Keyes’s “tables” are the actuarial tables that document mortality rates and mortality methods, and when he rebuffs the company president’s theory that Nirdlinger committed suicide, which would invalidate the policy, Keyes shows just how detailed his statistics can be: Here’s suicide by race, by color, by occupation, by sex, by locality, by seasons of the year, by time of day when committed. Here’s suicide by method of accomplishment. Here’s method of accomplishment subdivided by poisons, by firearms, by gas, by drowning, by leaps. Here’s suicide by poisons subdivided by sex, by race, by age, by time of day. Here’s suicide by poisons subdivided by cyanide, by mercury, by strychnine, by thirty-eight other poisons, sixteen of them no longer procurable at prescription pharmacies. And here—here Mr. Norton—are leaps subdivided by leaps from high places, under wheels of moving trains, under wheels of trucks, under the feet of horses, from steamboats. But there’s not one case here out of all these millions of cases of a leap from the rear end of a moving train. That’s just one way they don’t do it. (59–60; Cain’s italics)

The fact that actuarial statistics show up in a novel as popular as Cain’s indicates that insurance statistics had, in effect, escaped the actuaries and were traveling visibly throughout American culture. Moreover, those statistics are so complete that even with “nothing to go on,” Keyes confidently concludes that Nirdlinger was murdered based largely on a statistical normativity so complete that he can check appearances against this authoritative manual for the real (60). By these terms, to commit suicide is to choose from a limited menu of possibilities, to which social practice cannot help corresponding. A “real” event, in other words, shows up as a kind of event and not as an idiosyncratic or statistical outlier. Not even suicide, popularly seen as the abrogation of all reason, can escape this tendency for social actions to function predictably and stably in aggregate. At stake is a

  Performing the Accident on Purpose deep suspicion of the single instance, and with it the very singularity and spontaneity so often attributed to chance. Typical events—which is to say, real events—may come in any number of instances but one. Despite the enormous efforts devoted to social statistics during the nineteenth century, especially in regard to sociomedical study of suicide, it is quite surprising to see just how belatedly Americans undertook the serious business of counting accidents. Before about 1910, accident statistics consisted of patchy and unreliable data limited to specific industries, concentrated in certain states, or collected with opaque or rudimentary methods, all of which make the study of industrial accidents especially daunting for historians. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics was founded in 1884, but its early state-by-state reports usually omit accident data entirely, and the bureau’s first continuing compilation of injury rates for manufacturing does not begin until 1910, and even then addressed only the iron and steel industries.28 However, as large workers’ compensation programs came on line after 1910, the private companies providing coverage realized that they lacked adequate figures with which to set reserves and rates on such a vast scale. How many women died by suffocation each year? How many miners perished, and exactly how many factory girls were maimed? The valuation of certain kinds of injuries mattered too, for the problem was not just how many instances of a certain kind of accident occurred but how much the insurer should pay for any one. How much is a leg worth? Is a right arm worth more than a left arm, and if so, how much more? What is the value of a thumb versus an index finger, and how many of each could an insurer afford to cover? Without precise accident statistics, insurers’ financial stability would be seriously at risk, as would the long-term practical efficacy of any compensatory program. The creation of modern accident statistics in the United States began in earnest when a Russian Jewish immigrant and former Marxist named Isaac Rubinow published a slim and mostly speculative document titled A Standard Accident Table as a Basis for Compensation Rates in 1915. Rubinow had experience working as an actuary in private industry, credibility as the author of the influential book Social Insurance (1913), and a great deal of power as the president of the Casualty Actuarial and Statistical Society, an insurance organization that published many of the early investigations into industrial accidents. Unlike other local accounts of accident experience,

Performing the Accident on Purpose     such as Crystal Eastman’s comprehensive tally of accidents in Pittsburgh in a single year, Rubinow’s table attempted to generalize accident rates for various industries nationwide. The creation of new public workers’ compensation schemes, for which Eastman herself was partly responsible, drove these new statistical investigations. So even though government accident statistics based on employer surveys and mandated reporting of injuries would provide more and better data in time, around 1915 insurers could not afford to wait, and although Rubinow based his Standard Accident Table substantially on European data, insurers found it better than no table at all.29 Crucially, all of this happened decades after western European nations and Russia had begun compiling accident statistics of their own and, as Hacking has shown, a full century after similar investigations transformed suicide from a private moral malady to a problem of public health.30 More detailed data quickly followed Rubinow’s preliminary efforts. In 1922, two actuaries from the Metropolitan Insurance Company lamented America’s “extraordinarily high fatal accident rate” and presented data not limited only to industrial fatalities.31 They found that 70.8 out of every 100,000 Americans met their end by some acute or violent misfortune, not including murder, suicide, war, or disease.32 They analyzed differences in accident rates by race and gender, and they tracked trends in accident rates and projected them into the future. This fascinating account of the social experience of accidents in the mid-1920s would have interested Clyde Griffiths, who would have found that drowning was the second most common means of accidental death overall, killing about 10 Americans out of every 100,000, which turned out to be more than “Traumatism in mines and quarries,” “Poisoning by food,” “Landslide, other crushing,” “Injuries by animals,” and “Effects of heat” combined.33 These and many other comprehensive investigations into the social demographics of accidents closed the last wide-open frontier of American social statistics. With it, accidents ceased to seem an energizing and violent mode of irrational upheaval and appeared instead, officially and publicly, as part of the regular functioning of the social body. The very title of Rubinow’s Standard Accident Table signals the conceptual issues that these efforts brought into play. By standardizing the accident, these new statistics stripped the accident of its traditional affiliation with originality, spontaneity, and singularity, the very qualities to which literary and

  Performing the Accident on Purpose narrative chance producers were most committed. So, at the very moment when avant-garde writers and artists were romanticizing and naturalizing chance more insistently than ever, popular culture was doing just the opposite, ceasing to see accidents as radically indeterminate events and rationalizing them instead as social phenomena that could be tracked and tabulated as predictably as anything else. Accidents, like suicide, became symptoms of social pathology in the end, and in far more popular venues than Rubinow’s actuarial journals. Chicago’s first public health commissioner, William Augustus Evans, frequently discussed accidents in medical terms in what was the first syndicated health column in the United States, published by the Chicago Tribune and titled “How to Keep Well.”34 By 1919, Evans was urging public health departments to sponsor “accident prevention weeks,” and a decade later he lamented the fact that automobile accidents and accidental drownings were more dangerous than infectious disease.35 By bringing accident statistics out of the actuarial counting house and into national syndication, Evans trained lay readers in a mathematical conception of chance that was hardly new, but certainly was new to such an audience. In a 1923 column Evans observed, “The accident rate in factories kept at 52 degrees F. is 35 percent higher than those at 67.”36 In another he alleged that workers on the day shift at munitions factories suffered more accidental injuries than those on the night shift.37 The home appeared as a site of special peril, and according to Evans “the bathroom [is] the most dangerous part of the house,” a veritable abattoir of accidental injury and death from electrocution, fainting, drowning, carbon monoxide poisoning, and broken and shattered bones.38 To treat accidents as predictable and regular functions of temperature, illumination, time of day, physical crowding, architectural design, or any other environmental factor was to deny the innocence and spontaneity popularly imputed to them in a great deal of literary fiction. In the process, the accident began to lose the luminous singularity that had made it so appealing to many writers and artists in the first place, and also the ungovernable irrationality that had made it so useful as a spur toward more systematic modes of collectivity. Cain’s novel is deeply engaged with the accident’s conceptual and political transformation, but Cain has a very different attitude toward the repetition of accidents than Dreiser. In An American Tragedy, Clyde Griffiths’s

Performing the Accident on Purpose     falsified accident fails because his accidents repeat too much. The doubling of the allegedly singular accident registers as inauthentic. In Cain’s novel, in contrast, with its far greater attention to statistical normalization, Huff’s falsified accident fails not because it repeats too much but because it fails to repeat at all. The singularity of the accident now registers as inauthentic. Just as a real suicide must take a form that repeats across society in order for Keyes to regard it as real, so all real events, including accidents, must be statistically legitimized as repetitions of some identifiable kind. This reversal also distinguishes Double Indemnity from Cain’s first insurance crime novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice. In Postman, Cain effectively imitated Dreiser’s own process of imitation. He based Postman on newspaper accounts of the sensational 1927 murder trial of Ruth Snyder and Henry Judd Gray, so like that novel’s criminal plotter Frank Chambers, Cain also “got the idea” “from a piece in the paper” (19). But the criminals in Double Indemnity try to find a way past this tendency to construct plots as elaborate repetitions of real-life events by forsaking all direct historical precedents. When Phyllis suggests disguising Nirdlinger’s death as a fall near a swimming pool, Huff replies, “Some fool in the insurance business, five or six years ago, put out a newspaper story that most accidents happen in people’s own bathtubs, and since then bathtubs, swimming pools, and fishponds are the first thing [criminals] think of” (19). That “newspaper story” might have been William Augustus Evans’s own nationally syndicated warning about “The Dangers of Bathrooms,” mentioned previously, and published exactly five years before Double Indemnity. But in rejecting a perfectly good standard accident, as he does, Huff attempts to contrive an original accident instead, or what the company president Norton calls “one of those freak things” (64). In preferring a “freak” accident to a “standard” accident, Huff attempts to perform a version of the accident that was, in effect, prestatistical. Young Norton is right to call it a “freak.” Given that the term “accident” had ceased to connote spontaneity, irrationality, and caprice, especially within the insurance industry, Norton must restore those attributes with a new term. The difference between an accident and a “freak” accident in the 1930s is simply that the second term functions as the first one had several decades before. However, Huff’s attempt to perform a freak accident turns out to be his downfall. By contriving the improbable event of a man on crutches

  Performing the Accident on Purpose dying from a fall from a slow-moving train, Huff fabricates an event that turns out to be uncategorizable, one that might have fit earlier, popular conceptions of the accident as bizarrely singular, but that no longer fits contemporary, professional, and even popular assessments of accidents as repeating instances of identifiable kinds. This is really to say that nothing, finally, can escape statistical rationality, for to appear to be outside statistics, as a singular outlier rather than an instance of a recognizable type, had become the highest evidence of inauthenticity. As a result, even though Double Indemnity purports to break with, and so avoid repeating, the narrative model of Postman, the novel cannot quite manage to do so. Despite Huff’s doomed attempt to contrive an original accident, the novel as a whole actually replays, almost word for word, key moments from Cain’s own earlier work. The newspaper story about bathtub accidents that Huff denounces from “five or six years ago” (Indemnity 19) is surely the same newspaper story Frank Chambers read, in which “a guy said that most accidents happen right in people’s own bathtubs” (Postman 19).39 Huff may draw a different conclusion from that article than Chambers, but he does so within a structure that is only minimally varied. Cain even renders these parallel claims in almost identical language, and at almost identical points in two insurance crime novels: Chambers says that “most accidents happen right in people’s own bathtubs”; Huff says that “most accidents happen in people’s own bathtubs.” In a novel and in a society where everything rings at least twice, singularity—not repetition—becomes the clearest marker of deceit. This is a predicament for Huff, but it was a predicament for Cain as well, who could no longer conceive of literary creativity as a mode of romantic originality. The doubleness of Double Indemnity thus refers not just to the doubling of the insurance payment but to the manifest fact that in a modern statistical society that categorizes everything, nothing—neither art nor accidents— can credibly be thought of as singular or unique.

Performing the Self As almost all of Cain’s critics have noted, Double Indemnity is obsessed with doubling and repetition, and the novel’s skepticism about singularity and uniqueness—a skepticism, as we have seen, born of a broader

Performing the Accident on Purpose     cultural commitment to statistical normalization—plays out in a complicated reassessment of the same theatrical themes that Dreiser had deployed a decade earlier. For Dreiser, theatricality was a metaphor for an externalized process of self-creation. Even so, while Dreiser’s novel acknowledges the production of chance more candidly than most, it largely ignores institutional contexts and tends to think about chance production largely in terms of private conduct. When Cain continued Dreiser’s exploration of the falsified accident in Double Indemnity, however, he did precisely the opposite, by configuring chance production in thoroughly institutional terms, and specifically within the context of insurance. In doing so, Cain did not abandon Dreiser’s general interest in theatricality but developed it along new lines. In a novel that begins in “Hollywoodland,” theatrical performances by actors and actresses turn out to be the main precedents for the novel’s broader analysis of American insurance culture. Almost everyone in Cain’s novel is some sort of actor. Nino Sachetti plays at being Phyllis’s lover in order to investigate his own father’s death. Lola plays the dutiful stepdaughter while trying to find evidence that Phyllis killed her father. Keyes pretends in public to think Nirdlinger’s death was suicide, though he believes differently in private. Even Huff’s domestic servant is a kind of leading man: “It used to be that what a Hollywood actor wore on Monday a Filipino house boy wore on Tuesday, but now . . .  the boy from Manila beats Clark Gable to it” (40). The novel’s one genuine Hollywood actor, the “ham” Jack Christolf, turns out to be far less adept at his craft than Huff and Phyllis, the most accomplished performers on Cain’s stage. Huff plays Nirdlinger in order to murder him in an elaborately designed production involving the full range of dramatic arts, including scripting, blocking, costuming, and manipulating an unwitting live audience. Phyllis proves to be a better actor still. The sailor suit she wears to their second meeting is not just Cain’s gimmicky glance forward to the lovers’ ocean exile but an early sign of Phyllis’s fascination with costume and disguise. None of these theatrical trappings surpasses the novel’s most outlandish stage production, in which Lola spots Phyllis costumed with “some kind of foolish red silk thing on her, that looked like a shroud or something, with her face all smeared up with white powder and red lipstick, with a dagger in her hand, making faces at herself in front of a mirror” (84). Phyllis’s outrageous B-movie

  Performing the Accident on Purpose horror getup confirms the intrusion of Hollywood artifice even on the performance of a private self. Shrouded in silk, Phyllis enacts her identity through the costumes and poses of stock movie villains, which are mirrored back in her own bedroom’s silver screen. Even this simple narcissism confirms a common Hollywood stereotype, which the janitor at Huff’s office condenses into the pithy charge, “They sure do love theirself, them actors” (92). Within the pervasively theatrical space of Hollywood, people who refuse to participate in such self-conscious and self-absorbed performances volunteer to be victims, especially Mr. Nirdlinger, whose greatest vulnerability lies in the fact that he cannot appear as anyone but himself. One surprising corollary to all of this emphasis on acting is that it never involves the one apparatus crucial to Hollywood movie production, the camera. In fact, there are no cameras in Double Indemnity, and Huff, the novel’s narrator, never describes projected film. Even when Huff goes to see the film Gun Play, the novel gives only a few sentences to scenes inside the theater but spends several paragraphs narrating his elaborate theatrical performance of an alibi with an unwitting usher in the lobby (90). While the title of the film turns out to be an ironic commentary on the fact that Phyllis will shoot Huff at their rendezvous in just over an hour, the term “play” more subtly refers to a stage production—not a cinematic production—that Huff is performing even at this moment. By expelling the camera, much as Dreiser had, Cain leaves only ephemeral performances that are never fixed, as if Hollywood were really Broadway, and as if the authoritative photographic record of celluloid did not exist. This is hardly the only odd aspect to Cain’s treatment of Hollywood. The two main industries represented in the novel are the movie business and the business of insurance, and although the novel contrasts these very different enterprises at many turns, it also, and at a deeper level, asks readers to see them as closely allied. For Cain, the similarity of Hollywood to the insurance industry lies in the fact that both sponsor pervasively theatrical behavior, Hollywood in obvious ways and insurance through the violent theater of insurance crime. Insurance may well provide considerable social stability and security, but it also generates powerful and unwanted side effects, which disrupt that security with new modes of antisocial violence. The system of insurance compensation built on the back of Keyes’s actuarial statistics thus directly incentivizes the perfor-

Performing the Accident on Purpose     mance of accidents on purpose. So even though insurers first produced violent injuries specifically as accidents in order to justify the formation of insurance collectives, that very process created perverse incentives for intentional violence and new opportunities to conceal violence within the newly legitimized category of the accident. Double Indemnity thus alleges that the rationalizing power behind a vast insurance system was by no means uniformly benevolent and enlightening, because it also introduced troubling new sources of social disorder. We can distinguish Huff’s more complex mode of theatricality from Clyde’s with a better term: “performativity.” Performativity refers both to the familiar gestures of theatrical performances, such as Clyde’s, and to those more dynamic processes by which such performances reflexively modify their environments, and even the realities they purport to represent. Performance theory has developed along many different lines in the last several decades and has found new application in a wide range of fields beyond linguistics, philosophy, and literary studies.40 In influential work in sociological economics, which is particularly relevant here, Michel Callon and Donald MacKenzie, among others, have argued for the performative functions of modern economic models, through which, MacKenzie says, “economic processes or their outcomes are altered so that they better correspond to the model.” In other words, representing a complex economic system with a certain model, such as the Black-Scholes formula for pricing options, can fundamentally alter the behavior of the modeled system once participants in that system start using that model as a basis for future conduct. In some cases, using such a model will cause the activity represented to conform more closely to the model, making the model, as MacKenzie says, “more true.” 41 But in other cases, more relevant here, the opposite happens, and the use of a certain model to represent a complex system has “counterperformative” consequences and actually causes the system and its representation to diverge, making the model, we might say, “less true.” In either case, what at first seems to be a mimetic rendering turns out to be a more complex performative mechanism that actually alters what it purports to represent. In those circumstances, as MacKenzie has it, a representational model is really “an ‘engine’ of inquiry, not an (infeasible) camera faithfully reproducing all empirical facts.”42 The camera’s disappearance from Double Indemnity, even more than its disappearance

  Performing the Accident on Purpose from An American Tragedy, shows that Cain is also beginning to think of the relationship between literature and culture as a more dynamically reciprocal than photographic representation. We can understand insurance crime in related terms, as a counterperformative dynamic functioning within a complex insurance society and not at all reducible to a simple account of complicity with, or resistance to, administrative authority. Double Indemnity suggests not just that accidents are produced, as Dreiser understood, but that the insurance industry’s systematic accident production actually generates performative countereffects that neither the system nor its individual participants completely control. Keyes’s statistics, which seem to him to function as snapshots of social truth, appear in the novel more broadly as instruments that feed back into the social realities they attempt to document. More important, Keyes’s confidence that his statistics can model mortality with perfect fidelity ignores the fact that the insurance system had already incentivized all sorts of violent masquerades expressly designed to elude his detection, some of which had surely infiltrated his tables already. Cain’s novel can thus be read as a sustained assault on Keyes’s actuarial statistics and the pretense that they can function as neutral, empirical instruments of social regulation. However, it is also, and at the same time, an equally sustained assault on the very opposite, the ludic theatricality and violence associated primarily with Phyllis. The underlying fantasy in her portion of the novel is that there is no empirical reality at all for someone like Keyes to reestablish but merely a shifting set of performances and public gestures, the most powerful or convincing of which eventually passes as the truth. When Huff dresses as Nirdlinger to kill Nirdlinger, then, he attempts to eliminate not just the authentic original that his derivative art reperforms but something like natural and essential identity itself, a true self that could shrug costumes on and off electively and instrumentally and that could go back to being itself at the end of the day. By killing the only character in the novel utterly devoid of artifice, and by impersonating that character while doing so, Huff attempts to bury for good anything like an authentic and permanent self that preexists performance. So if Keyes’s insurance narrative invites us to see Double Indemnity as the story of rationalist demystification and the triumph of social administration, Phyllis’s Hollywood narrative invites to

Performing the Accident on Purpose     us imagine a glorious freedom from all constraints, with the exception, perhaps, of one’s own capacity for theatrical self-invention. The novel ultimately rejects both Keyes’s naive realism and Phyllis’s arch-relativism. Keyes may purge society of criminal violence, but he represents a statistical and bureaucratic regime that seems stiflingly prescriptive. Conversely, Phyllis may defy and resist both individual authorities and the laws and norms of society, but her motiveless malignity disqualifies her from the role of antiauthoritarian romantic hero. In light of these two rejected extremes, it is tempting, though finally wrong, to read the novel in strictly disciplinary terms. Such a reading would find ready support from recent theorists who have described insurance and its systems of risk management in terms of Foucauldian governmentality, such as Francois Ewald and Daniel Defert, both of whom link the risk provisions of the private insurance industry and the welfare state with modern disciplinary power.43 More recently, Richard Ericson, Aaron Doyle, and Dean Barry have argued that the insurance industry’s “elaborate surveillance systems” turn “insurers into agents of governance,” and Joan Copjec has offered a similar argument specifically about Billy Wilder’s 1944 film version of Cain’s novel.44 By these readings, Huff’s attempts at secrecy or defiance, as well as his doomed attempt at criminal originality, can be seen as fully contained within the insurance industry’s broader architecture of power. Though tempting, this strictly disciplinary reading of insurance does not account for the fully reflexive, performative dynamics embedded in insurance, the disclosure of which is Cain’s signal contribution to the analysis of America’s insurance culture. It is not just that insurance produces docile subjects whose resistance is really a mode of complicity but that at the system level, insurance even resists itself, by stirring up whirls and eddies of social turbulence even as it administers safety and security. Because the performativity that Cain associates with insurance is itself a source of dynamic change and instability, one need not pose the question of whether Huff is successfully resisting or subverting that system at all. The system subverts itself, and not just as a part of a higher strategy ultimately meant to consolidate its power but in ways that genuinely vex its managers, decrease its efficiencies, trouble its foundational assumptions, and that may even destroy part or all of it in the end. Cain’s novel treatment of social experience in an insurance culture

  Performing the Accident on Purpose is most apparent in one final and utterly crucial repetition, the repetition of Huff’s own original accident on purpose. To review: Huff contrived an accident on purpose to kill Nirdlinger, but one of the problems was that he avoided precedents and performed a one-of-a-kind accident instead. In a pervasively statistical society, that turned out to be a disastrous choice, for to Keyes there can be no “freak” accidents, just repetitive accidents, because everything real rings at least twice. However, at the late stage in the novel when Huff determines to kill Phyllis, he reverses course entirely and inexplicably attempts to repeat the very accident on purpose that he initially conceived as nonrepetitive. In this final section of the novel, Huff plans to drive Phyllis to a scenic overlook in a car stolen from Sachetti. “I was going to pull in, and say something about parking there, so we could talk,” Huff says. “Only I wasn’t going to park. The car was accidentally on purpose, going to roll over the edge, and I was going to jump” (91). The repetitions between the first accident on purpose and this second version are many. Both involve cars, both require leaps from a moving vehicle, and even Huff’s language reperforms itself: Nirdlinger died “accidentallyon-purpose” (16), and Huff plans to kill Phyllis “accidentally on purpose” (91).45 If the first accident on purpose signaled Huff’s doomed attempt to unmoor performance from repetition in order to achieve some more privileged mode of originality, this second accident on purpose exposes the sheer futility of that project. The disappearance of the hyphens from Huff’s second formulation of the phrase “accidentally on purpose” indicates that even though performance reawakens its ghostly double from the past, no performance can recover some prior original exactly. The point, of course, is that Huff’s first accident on purpose had done something similar, for it never did appropriate the alleged singularity and originality of the accident, as Huff hoped, but rather joined a long history of accident falsification that stretches back to the very beginnings of insurance. What can seem like evidence of the poverty of Cain’s imagination in such repetitions—his own lack of originality—is thus better read as a formal expression of the performative dynamics of an entire culture increasingly organized around the work of insurance. Huff’s attempt to contrive an original accident thus contravenes not just Keyes’s sense that authentic things are repeatable things but also the working logic of performativity in both of the senses mentioned

Performing the Accident on Purpose     previously. Joseph Roach explains that performance “offers a substitute for something else that preexists it,” even though, in the process, performance also “stands in for an elusive entity that it is not but that it must vainly aspire both to embody and replace” (3). That is to say, performance cannot sever all ties to the past, even if it is irreducible to what it repeats from the past. For Cain, as for Roach, these dynamics operate most powerfully around the radical absence of death, and in Roach’s analysis of circumAtlantic funeral rituals, certain memorial performances attempt both to recover some lost origin (the dead person, but also a time or a place) while also marking the absence of that lost referent. Rather than simply peer into the abyss of radical absence, however, these performances have valuable social functions too, Roach shows, for even as they nostalgically reconstitute lost origins, they also shape various social groups around rehearsals of collective memory. The problem with Huff’s performances is that they are positively hostile to the past and to any referent outside the performance, even if, despite his best intentions, they remain mired in performative repetitions nonetheless. When Huff disguises himself as Nirdlinger in order to kill Nirdlinger, he is not trying to recover some absent origin, nostalgically or otherwise, but trying to kill off an original who remains all too stubbornly present. The murder is an allegory of performance’s own futile attempt to break free from that which defines it as a performance, which is its repetition of something from the past. By eliminating the figure that confirms his own performance as secondary and derivative, Huff retains the traditional association between performance and death, even as he attempts to eradicate the best evidence that he remains socially entangled in broader networks of affective, economic, legal, and historical affiliation. There is, moreover, a third iteration of the accident on purpose in Double Indemnity that raises the stakes still further and implicates the novel in its own critique. In addition to Huff’s first two accidents on purpose, a third appears in the form of a legal disclaimer that accompanied the final two installments of Double Indemnity when it was published serially in Liberty magazine in 1936. There are, in fact, a number of small differences between the text of Double Indemnity published in Liberty and the text published as a monograph in 1943, but the most important may be the omission of these two sentences, which appeared in a small box on the first page of the seventh and eighth installments: “The names and the

  Performing the Accident on Purpose descriptions of all the characters in Double Indemnity are wholly fictitious. If there is any resemblance, in name or in description, to any living person, it is purely accidental—a coincidence.”46 The previous six installments contain no such disclaimer, and although Liberty published fiction in every issue, none of the other serial novels from 1936 contain the disclaimer. The disclaimer’s appearance is thus not easily explained as a matter of standard editorial policy. However, although its origins and actual author remain entirely obscure, it clearly resonates with a novel obsessed with the problematic “resemblance” between the “fictitious” character and the “living person.” More important, the disclaimer insists that the novel, like Huff’s accident on purpose, is “wholly fictitious,” in the sense that it disavows realist copying from life. And finally, and most important, the disclaimer names, as a matter of legal policy, the very issue that the novel explores, which is nothing other than the confusion of deliberate acts with “purely accidental” events. One might note, however, that the passage seems to be protesting just a little too much, in that the final appositive phrase, offset by a dash, seems both unnecessary and more than a little embellished. Novelists, not lawyers, write with dramatic pauses and syntax as expressive as this. In its very tone, then, the disclaimer begs to be read as a part of the novel, or even as a meta-commentary on the novel disguised in only partially convincing legalese. One can take this claim a crucial next step, by noting what should be entirely obvious by now: this disclaimer is utterly disingenuous. Double Indemnity has no end of resemblances to historical facts, given that Cain clearly patterned the novel on The Postman Always Rings Twice, which he in turn patterned in the most deliberate way on journalistic reports of the Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray insurance murders. Even Huff’s second accident on purpose faithfully replays the accident on purpose from Postman, in which that novel’s lovers send a car over the edge of a cliff. If Huff is powerless to stop repeating accidents on purpose, Cain is too, for such repetitions indicate the extent to which their literary and artistic performances are always part of the broader performative dynamics of a comprehensively insured world. The Liberty disclaimer thus defines the point where Cain’s analysis of American culture intersects with his literary and stylistic innovations. Cain attempted to devise a mode of modern literature that largely rejects

Performing the Accident on Purpose     the values of both romantic originality and realist fidelity to fact. Accordingly, it further rejects both the alleged singularity and uniqueness of the freak accident and the repetitiveness of actuarial accident statistics. By affiliating the plot of his novel with the plot of Huff’s insurance crime, Cain associates the novel not with the creative capacities of a criminal mastermind, and not with the disciplinary power of modern institutions, but with the tumultuous process of mutual modification that goes on between them and in which neither enjoys a decisive advantage. The disclaimer that appeared in the novel’s serial publication thus configures the novel not just as a representation of accidents on purpose—a book about insurance crime—but as an actual accident on purpose, with all of its attendant complexity intact. Cain aspires, in other words, to topple the novel into the unpredictable feedback loops already cycling between Phyllis and Keyes, which make her extreme theatrical freedom a counterperformative function of his systematic control, and vice versa. In aspiring to be something more than social documentary in a mimetic mode, Double Indemnity seeks out the dynamic middle ground between the creative and the derivative, the singular and the plural, the fictional and the factual, the artistic and the scientific, and the individual and the social, to name just a few of the novel’s central oppositions. To Cain, insurance culture transforms these stable oppositions into dynamic processes replete with unexpected consequences and surprising avenues of modification and exchange. The best evidence that Cain did not lament such a state of affairs, dangerous though it may be, is that he modeled his own literary practice upon it.

The Moral Hazards of the Welfare State There is one final stage to this argument, which will bring to a close this chapter and this entire book. If an insurance culture renders the novel performative in ways Cain finally seems to prefer—if, that is, it amounts neither to Phyllis’s theatrical invention nor to Keyes’s statistical realism— then the question in 1936 was how this all relates to the public insurance programs of America’s burgeoning welfare state. Sean McCann, Michael Szalay, and Frederick Whiting have all, in different ways, read Double Indemnity as a commentary on New Deal public insurance programs, es-

  Performing the Accident on Purpose pecially those instituted through the Glass-Stegall Act of 1933, which established Federal Deposit Insurance, and the Social Security Act of 1935, which introduced limited pension coverage, basic unemployment insurance, aid for women with dependent children, and additional federal insurance for the families of industrial accident victims.47 Szalay’s insightful reassessment of the complex politics of the 1930s has been especially useful in breaking down the sometimes rigid political distinctions that are so conspicuous during that period. However, it is not immediately clear why a New Deal novel would focus specifically on violent insurance murder, while excluding any reference to the government’s expanded role in providing social insurance coverage. The reason becomes clearer when we recognize that Cain’s real subject is not the welfare state itself, or even private industry, but the performative dynamics common to both, which threatened the entire system from within. Private insurers had called the perverse incentives of insurance coverage “moral hazard,” and if moral hazard was most dramatic in the fields of life and casualty insurance, where it took the form of murder or arson, it was, and still is, a more lively subject of public debate in the context of the social insurance programs of the New Deal.48 Outright insurance crime constitutes only the most extreme kind of moral hazard, for, according to insurers, many kinds of moral hazard violate the spirit or even the letter of the insurance contract without violating statutory laws. Auto insurance may make an owner more willing to park in a high-crime area; liability insurance may make a business owner more careless of the safety of patrons and employees; burglary insurance may make a homeowner less conscientious about locking the door. One of the most powerful and long-standing arguments against public insurance is the familiar claim that it generates moral hazard dynamics too. According to these arguments, just as life insurance incentivizes murder, so unemployment insurance encourages idleness, insurance for dependent children encourages pregnancy, and Medicare and Medicaid encourage patients to overconsume health care.49 As Tom Baker puts it, “Because all insurance affects incentives to reduce loss, welfare will increase poverty, workers’ compensation will increase worker accidents, and products liability will increase consumer accidents.”50 The more you help through public insurance, as Baker summarizes these kinds of claims, the more harm you ultimately do.

Performing the Accident on Purpose     However, in cases of both outright fraud and more subtle kinds of imprudence, moral hazard expressly conceals itself, so counting the number of cases of arson is fundamentally different from simply counting the number of fires. In 1926 G. F. Michelbacher, president of the Casualty Actuarial Society, conceded that “moral hazard is so vague, and takes so many different forms, that it does not readily lend itself to analysis and description.”51 As Richard Ericson and Aaron Doyle have argued more recently, “Insurance fraud in particular is secret, not self-disclosing,” and as a result, “it may be argued that the prevalence of insurance fraud is ultimately unknowable.”52 This unknowability is precisely what makes moral hazard so terrifying to insurers, because it is, by definition, that which escapes their own accounting. In fact, even in an actuarial journal, Michelbacher dispenses with quantitative measures entirely and turns instead to the theatrical personification of moral hazard as a “Bogey Man” who “is always present in one guise or another,” often “lurking in the background where he employs every expedient to avoid detection.”53 Those quantitative measures that insurers did attempt sometimes seem to verge on the paranoid. One 1929 manual of casualty insurance claimed that “moral hazard constitutes as high as 90 percent of the risk assumed in some of the casualty lines.”54 A more restrained study of property insurance from 1930 still estimates that between 10 and 35 percent of all insurance losses involve moral hazard, a figure that rises to 35 to 40 percent for fire insurance.55 If even the low end of such estimates were true, the social and economic significance of moral hazard in an advanced insurance society would be enormous. As I have argued throughout this book, the production of chance effectively demoralized violence, by stripping away questions of fault or blame, and so making possible new affiliations of the chance-afflicted. In the insurance industry’s rhetoric of moral hazard, we find precisely the opposite occurring. Having demoralized the violence attributed to accident, they subsequently, and selectively, remoralized the violence incentivized by insurance. Moralizing moral hazard thus allowed insurers to disown the kinds of conduct it inadvertently promoted, by consigning those unwanted effects back to a traditionally moral private sphere. What we find in Cain’s novel, then, is a quite prescient diagnosis of the larger problem facing the public insurance programs of the welfare state, which is simply

  Performing the Accident on Purpose the problem of determining whether the performative dynamics termed “moral hazard” should be ascribed to the system that sponsors them or to the individuals who actually carry them out. This was precisely the debate swirling around public insurance in the early twentieth century. Even before the New Deal, foes of social insurance frequently claimed that public insurance would result in private moral decay. Friedrich Friedensburg, a former German insurance official, alleged, “Insurance has been the very factor which has led to universal degeneration and demoralization.”56 Friedensburg’s denunciation of public insurance diagnoses “the evil and envenomed weed of pension hysteria,” as he calls the phantom “ills and aches” and vague “nervousness” that insurance coverage allegedly inculcates.57 Isaac Rubinow, one of the strongest and earliest advocates of widespread social insurance in the United States, acknowledged that “the most damaging argument in the opinion of many is the charge that social insurance not only increases the actual hazards, but vastly more stimulates the simulation of accidents or disease or unemployment; that it encourages the professional mendicant, demoralizes the entire working class by furnishing an easy reward for malingery.”58 For Rubinow, however, such matters are not moral at all but rather constitute system inefficiencies that need to be managed better, not castigated in moral terms.59 Rubinow wrote that “from murder of wives or children under life insurance . . .  there is quite a distance to the crime of a workingman who will insist upon prolonging his period of disability after accident or disease.”60 If the debate between Rubinow and Friedensburg were the only pertinent one, Cain’s novel could be read as a fairly clear indictment of insurance rationality. A moral hazard novel published at the dawn of the New Deal would, in such terms, seem to constitute a clear warning about the consequences of expanded insurance coverage, which, against Rubinow, Cain clearly does associate with murder. The ultimate triumph of Keyes could thus be read as the successful diagnosis and cure of a specifically moral affliction. However, there was another way of framing the argument about moral hazard that complicates this reading considerably. Thirty years after the New Deal, the proponents and opponents of new health insurance programs precisely inverted Rubinow’s and Friedensburg’s arguments in response to the public insurance programs of Lyndon Johnson’s

Performing the Accident on Purpose     Great Society. Kenneth J. Arrow’s influential paper “Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care” argues that “the laissez-faire solution for medicine is intolerable” and calls for public programs to step in to insure people that the private market poorly serves. However, Arrow readily concedes that “there are a number of significant practical limitations on the use of insurance” related to “the effect of insurance on incentives,” by which he means that instituting medical coverage incentivizes the consumption of vastly greater amounts of medical care.61 So far, he sounds like Rubinow, but surprisingly, he goes on to describe those inefficiencies as “moral hazard” in several clear instances. It might be argued that Arrow is simply using a traditional term of art without actually insisting on the moral nature of moral hazard, but a later response to a critic makes it clear that to Arrow, “‘rational economic behavior’ and ‘moral perfidy’” are not “mutually exclusive categories.” He dispels all doubt about the moral aspect of moral hazard when he adds, “No doubt Judas Iscariot turned a tidy profit from one of his transactions, but the usual judgment of his behavior is not necessarily wrong.”62 The critic who provoked this outburst from Arrow had a drastically different view. Two years after Arrow’s original article appeared, Mark Pauly had offered what might seem like the obvious rejoinder, which is simply that those dynamics Arrow terms “moral hazard” are “a result not of moral perfidy, but of rational economic behavior.” For Pauly, it seemed entirely clear that a “direct relationship . . .  exists between the existence of moral hazard and the validity of the welfare proposition.”63 To Pauly, what the language of moral hazard ascribes to the conscience of individuals is, in fact, a function of welfare rationality itself. This attempt to rationalize rather than moralize “moral hazard” would seem to be the more prominent position among economists at the time, including Joseph Stiglitz, who concluded in another influential paper that it is “desirable that the government provide only limited insurance” given the “fundamental incentive problems, which are inherent in the provision of any insurance.”64 Accordingly, the earlier critique of social insurance as morally deleterious underwent a precise reversal. Arrow, the supporter of public health insurance, moralizes certain betrayals of the insurance system. Pauly and Stiglitz, the critics of public health insurance, rationalize those same be-

  Performing the Accident on Purpose trayals as inefficiencies of a regularly functioning market. The reason for this change is simple enough. For Arrow, the overconsumption of health care must be moralized, because only then can insurance disown its unwanted side effects by ascribing them to the conduct of private conscience. Arrow writes from a perspective in which the state, now with decades of experience as an insurance provider, had learned to make the same argument that private life and casualty insurers had invented decades earlier. Defenders of the public system thus learned to externalize unwanted side effects too, by shifting them to the moral domain, a move that affirmed the value-neutrality of the system itself. Conversely, those challenging the public insurance system, such as Pauly, began designating unwanted side effects as systematic after all, in order to internalize those effects as endemic inefficiencies. Precisely because those inefficiencies and incentives were not moral, the insurance system would have to take responsibility for them, which could then serve as a powerful argument against instituting public insurance in the first place. To read Cain’s novel as a response to the welfare state requires us to recognize that it entertains both of these two positions on moral hazard, one that appeared in common political critiques through the 1930s, and the other that Cain anticipates but that appeared only three decades later. Double Indemnity is thus not a simple indictment of insurance rationality as a dangerous source of moral contagion. It is also, and just as prominently, a record of how insurance generates powerful performative feedback effects all its own, which it then externalizes by casting them as matters of private moral choice. Against the possible reading of Keyes as the triumphant hero of rational and moral order, we can see that the novel also indicts him for disavowing the consequences of insurance’s perverse incentives. In fact, Keyes quite literally externalizes Phyllis and Huff from the functioning system, by sentencing both to an ocean exile aboard a steamer bound for Mexico. For Keyes, the problem is precisely that Huff is an insider, an agent for General Fidelity, and as a result he concludes, “We can’t hush it up, we know that” (109). For insurers, the real threat of moral hazard lies in the fact that it might be detected as internal after all, auto-generated by the performative dynamics of insurance compensation, even though subsequently disclaimed through a rhetoric of moral perfidy.

Performing the Accident on Purpose     In the end, the novel’s interest in moral hazard constitutes the highest instance of Cain’s double vision, for by refusing to settle into a simple position for or against the emergent welfare state, Cain manages to indicate the full range of hopes and fears swirling through America’s insurance culture at the dawn of the New Deal. By balancing different readings of moral hazard against each other, and by doubling each proposition with a counterproposition, Cain finally refuses to resolve those hopes and fears into any stable synthesis or partisan position. Instead, he anatomizes the performative complexity that lies at the heart of an entire insurance culture and that finally makes an exclusive focus on private morality seem as simplistic as an exclusive focus on administrative social control. The greatest difference between the chance collectivity of Howells, as we met it in the first chapter, and the modified and deeply problematic version we find in Double Indemnity, is that for Cain, chance can no longer appear as anything other than the social and political product it always was. This, indeed, is what comes to an end at the start of the New Deal, at least in Cain’s assessment. To see chance as a product of our own devising is finally to acknowledge that the foundations for a wide range of chance collectives are in fact artificial rather than natural and necessary. The earlier and more persuasive naturalizing of chance as an ontological presence or a mystical indeterminacy principle was precisely what made chance such a powerful instrument for forging more just and egalitarian social collectives. Once exposed as a cultural product, however, chance lost not only its seeming spontaneity and singularity but also some of its practical capacity to compel structured systems of liberal interdependence. It may be that candor about chance production, in any form, including the analysis in this book, is finally dangerous to whatever socially formative capacities chance might have. To see chance as made, not found, is also to see our social and institutional responses to it as chosen, not compelled. For a highly individualistic and deeply divided liberal society, especially in the 1930s, this amounted to nothing less than a crisis, for it called into question the very rationale on which certain kinds of American solidarity had long been based. Indeed, there are serious questions about whether many of the public insurance provisions in the United States can function without the enabling fiction of chance, given that its citizens seem to embrace them most

  Performing the Accident on Purpose readily only when impelled by genuine fear. Moreover, there may yet be untapped possibilities for chance collectivity internationally and globally, if consciousness of our shared vulnerability to chance can partly compromise national divisions. At whatever level we look, there are progressive components to the fear of chance that we too seldom recognize, or too often forget, and that should not be confused with what Judith Shklar has called a “liberalism of fear,” and certainly not with those dynamics by which nations consolidate themselves in opposition to some demonized alien population.65 On the contrary, and precisely because of its abstraction, chance tends not to support viciously imposed distinctions between “us” and “them” but in fact justifies tolerance and inclusivity within very loosely bounded and porous collectives. Even more than those great practical threats that have mobilized cross-border affiliations in the last half century, such as the threat of nuclear war or of global warming, the threat of chance is hard to localize and, as such, can seem to be the one threat that everyone shares in common. No doubt we can easily imagine better justifications for inclusive and tolerant collectives, strongly knit from mutually reciprocal concern for the other, and warm with the ethic and affect of interpersonal care. Yet such dreams have tended only to be temporarily and locally fulfilled, and it is only in the midst of that sorry situation that chance collectivity seems like an attractive option. There is nothing utopian about chance collectivity, as has been frequently noted in previous chapters; however, its value lies in what it prevents from coming to pass: a shared fear of chance prevents us from fearing one another instead, and from responding with the kinds of violence that are all too routine. For chance to work as an instrument of liberal collectivity, then, the fiction of chance must pass as a manifestly threatening fact. The perpetration of the accident must appear to be innocent of design. However produced, chance finally must avoid detection as a cultural artifact, as neither Clyde Griffiths’s nor Walter Huff’s falsified accidents succeed in doing. Dreiser’s and Cain’s falsified accident novels are finally not just indictments of theatrical criminals who obscure social fact; they are also timely reminders of what might happen to a society when its most formative fictions no longer successfully deceive.

Notes

introduction 1.  Estimates of the number of industrial fatalities in any given year vary widely. The figure cited for 1913 comes from Frederick L. Hoffman, “Industrial Accident Statistics,” Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics 157 (March 1915): 6. However, see also Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, “The Occupational Factor in Accident Mortality,” Metropolitan Life Statistical Bulletin 3 (May 1922): 6–8, in which the researchers deem Hoffman’s estimate “undoubtedly excessive” (8). Nonetheless, even for the year 1920—ten years after the implementation of the first workers’ compensation programs—the Metropolitan Life researchers still estimate that twelve thousand industrial fatalities occurred annually. For railroad injury rates, see Barbara Young Welke, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 15. For a discussion of such estimates before the existence of comprehensive national records, see the appendices to Mark Aldrich, Safety First: Technology, Labor, and Business in the Building of American Work Safety 1870–1939 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 283–319. 2.  Gerd Gigerenzer, Zeno Swijtink, Theodore Porter, Lorraine Daston, John Beatty, and Lorenz Krüger, eds., The Empire of Chance: How Probability Changed Science and Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 19. 3.  Gerda Reith, The Age of Chance: Gambling and Western Culture (London: Routledge, 1999); Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America (New York: Viking, 2003); Ann Fabian, Card Sharps and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Routledge, 1999); Thomas Kavanagh, Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance: The Novel and the Culture of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); J. Jeffrey Franklin, Serious Play: The Cultural Form of the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). 4. Reith, Age of Chance, 1.

  Notes 5. Fabian, Card Sharps, 3. 6.  See Christiaan Huygens, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 14 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1920). Johann De Witt, “Waerdye van Lyf-Renten Naer proportie van Los-renten,” can be found in Jakob Bernoulli, Die Werke von Jakob Bernoulli, vol. 3 (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1975), 327–50; an English translation appears in Robert Gibbs Barnwell, A Sketch of the Life and Times of John De Witt (New York: Pudney and Russell, 1856), 81–108. 7.  Michael Witmore, Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Ross Hamilton, Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). On the law of accidents in the United States during this period, see also Nan Goodman, Shifting the Blame: Literature, Law, and the Theory of Accidents in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 8.  See Witmore, Culture of Accidents, 42–61, which positions Calvin within an even longer tradition that also involves Cicero, Boethius, and Augustine, among others. 9.  Abraham De Moivre, The Doctrine of Chances: A Method of Calculating the Probabilities of Events in Play, 3rd ed. (1756; repr., New York: Chelsea, 1967), 253. For De Moivre, the term “chance” refers only to the possibilities generated by existing properties, such as “the number of Dice, for instance, being thrown, each of them shall settle upon one or other of its Bases. After which, the Probability of an assigned Chance, that is of some particular disposition of the Dice, becomes as proper a subject of Investigation as any other quantity or Ratio can be” (253). 10.  David Hume, “Of Probability,” in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Eric Steinberg (1777; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977), 37. 11.  Pierre-Simon Laplace, Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, 5th ed., trans. Andrew I. Dale (1825; repr., New York: Springer-Verlag, 1995), 2. 12.  Walter Benjamin, “Notes on a Theory of Gambling,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 298. 13.  The term “historical ontology” was originally Foucault’s, but I borrow it from Hacking, who uses it to describe his own modified sense of how “things, classifications, ideas, kinds of people, institutions” can be “lumped under the generic heading of ontology” (5). The term is closely related to, and perhaps interchangeable with, his earlier term “dynamic nominalism,” though the newer term transforms skepticism about transhistorical being into an affirmation of historically contingent being (106). Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 14.  Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 2–3.

Notes   15. Kavanagh, Shadows of Chance, 117. 16. Ibid., 121. 17.  Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 5. 18. Hacking, Taming of Chance, 2. 19.  Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), x. 20. Ibid., 61. 21.  On the history of the Chicago fire, see especially Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Karen Sawislak, Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871–1874 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Ross Miller, American Apocalypse: The Great Fire and the Myth of Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 22.  With Chicago newspaper publication mostly interrupted in the immediate aftermath of the fire, the New York Times reported that “the Tribune, which was supposed to be fire-proof, . . .  finally succumbed.” See “A City in Ruins,” New York Times, October 10, 1871, 1. See also “Fire-Proof Buildings,” Chicago Tribune, October 20, 1871, 1. 23. Sawislak, Smoldering City, 48. 24.  In the most outrageous example, the Chicago Times suggested that Catherine O’Leary had deliberately and criminally plotted revenge against the city when a public aid agent denied her free food and firewood: “the old hag swore she would be revenged on the city that would deny her a bit of wood or a pound of bacon” and she “set the barn on fire and thus inaugurated the most terrible calamity in the history of nations.” See “The Fire. West Division,” Chicago Times, October 18, 1871, 1. 25.  Anna Matson, The City That a Cow Kicked Over (Chicago: A. H. Andrews, ca. 1881). 26.  See Nancy Finlay, “From Hartford to Everywhere: The History of the Kellogg Firm and Its Associates,” in Picturing Victorian America: Prints by the Kellogg Brothers of Hartford, Connecticut, 1830–1880, ed. Nancy Finlay (Hartford: Connecticut Historical Society, 2009), 11–25. Finlay says the print probably dates from November or December 1871. 27.  Elias Colbert and Everett Chamberlin, Chicago and the Great Conflagration (Chicago: J. S. Goodman, 1871), 201–2. Colbert and Chamberlin wrote the fullest of the so-called instant histories of the fire, often self-published accounts of the destruction rushed to press, sometimes before the end of 1871. See also James Washington Sheahan and George P. Upton, The Great Conflagration (n.p.: Union Publishing, 1871), which concentrates on cataloguing architectural destruction and tabulating financial losses; Edgar Johnson Goodspeed, History of

  Notes the Great Fires in Chicago and the West (Chicago: J. W. Goodspeed, 1871); Frank Luzerne, The Lost City! (New York: Wells, 1872), which tends toward the novelistic in its sensational treatment of the evening’s events; Alfred Sewell, The Great Calamity! (Chicago: A. L. Sewell, 1871), a short and pessimistic account of “human helplessness” during and after the fire; and The Ruined City! (New York: Ornum, 1871), the most sensational account of all, produced by a dime-novel publisher in New York. 28.  On the specific relevance of financial panic, which is a related topic that nonetheless involves a range of further issues and complications, see David Zimmerman, Panic! Markets, Crises, and Crowds in American Fiction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), especially chapter 5 on Dreiser’s The Financier. 29.  Nation, October 12, 1871, 233. The article goes on to say, “It appears almost probable that there will, before long, be no privileged places any more than privileged persons, and no place, in short, any more peaceful or secure against alarms and anxieties than any other place.” 30.  “The Chicago Fire,” Religious Magazine and Monthly Review, November 1871, 464–65. 31.  “Editor’s Easy Chair,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, December 1871, 133. 32.  William James, The Works of William James: The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 137. 33. Ibid., 117. 34. Ibid., 138. 35.  John Dewey, Experience and Nature (New York: Dover, 1958), 41. See also Dewey’s “Escape from Peril,” the first chapter of 1929: The Quest for Certainty, vol. 4 of The Collected Works of John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 3–20. 36.  Nicholas St. John Green, “Proximate and Remote Cause,” American Law Review (January 1870), 201–16. See also Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, especially section IV, “Sceptical Doubts Concerning the Operations of the Understanding,” 15–25, and section VII, “Of the Idea of Necessary Connexion,” 39–53. For Hume’s earlier accounts of causation, see book 1, part 3 from A Treatise on Human Nature (1739; repr., Amherst, MA: Prometheus, 1992), 69–179. 37.  Green, “Proximate and Remote Cause,” 212. 38.  John Dewey, “The Superstition of Necessity,” Monist 3 (1893): 362–79. 39.  Dewey, “Superstition,” 366. Dewey, in turn, borrows the word “producing” from John Venn, The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic (London: Macmillan, 1889). In the passage Dewey quotes, Venn writes, “The act of predic-

Notes   tion . . .  really is a process by which we are not only enabled to add to our information about objects, but is also the process by the continued performance of which the objects had been originally acquired, or rather produced ” (366; Dewey’s italics). Venn was a pioneering mathematician and the author of The Logic of Chance: An Essay on the Foundations and Province of the Theory of Probability (London: Macmillan, 1866). That book contains an important claim that chance is nothing other than the relative frequency of a well-defined outcome to a large number of carefully controlled cases, and it became a particularly influential endorsement of the “frequentist” definition of chance. 40.  Dewey, “Superstition,” 374. 41. Ibid., 376. 42. James, Will to Believe, 62; Dewey, Experience and Nature, 41. 43.  Charles Sanders Peirce, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 6, Scientific Metaphysics, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1960), 196. 44.  John Dewey, The School and Society, and The Child and the Curriculum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 7. 45.  William James, The Meaning of Truth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 72. 46.  James T. Kloppenberg: Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 6–7. 47.  Rufus M. Potts, “The Altruistic Utilitarianism of Insurance,” originally an address at the National Convention of Insurance Commissioners in 1916 and published privately by Potts the following year. Citations are from the reprinted version in Kailin Tuan, ed., Modern Insurance Theory and Education, vol. 1, The Formative Era: Progress and Developments to 1949 (Orange, NJ: Varsity, 1972), 319. 48.  Charles Sanders Peirce, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 5, Pragmatism and Pragmaticism, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1960), 220. 49.  See Richard V. Ericson and Aaron Doyle, Uncertain Business: Risk, Insurance, and the Limits of Knowledge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); Pat O’Malley, Risk, Uncertainty, and Government (London: Glasshouse Press, 2004); Richard V. Ericson, Aaron Doyle, and Dean Barry, Insurance as Governance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003); Tom Baker and Jonathan Simon, eds., Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); the essays by Francois Ewald and Daniel Defert in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 50.  Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

  Notes 51. Finlay, Picturing Victorian America, 108. Daniel Wright Kellogg originally founded the printing firm in 1830 to produce low-cost prints of American historical and sentimental scenes. Bulkeley joined the company in 1867 during a period of flagging fortunes and seems to have developed the business in new and more profitable lines. See the entry for William Henry Bulkeley in Rossiter Johnson, ed., The Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary of Notable Americans, vol. 2 (Boston: Biographical Society, 1904). 52.  Hine’s italics. C. C. Hine, Mrs. Leary’s Cow: A Legend of Chicago (New York: Insurance Monitor, 1872), 14. The Black River Insurance Co. sponsored the pamphlet. chapter 1 1.  On the Haymarket riot and the subsequent trial, see Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Bruce Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs: A Social History of Chicago’s Anarchists, 1870– 1900 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988); Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). 2.  On Howells and the Haymarket trial, see Edwin H. Cady, The Realist at War (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1958). See also Sender Garlin, William Dean Howells and the Haymarket Era (New York: American Institute for Marxist Studies, 1979). 3.  Quoted from the letter’s reproduction in Cady, Realist at War, 73–77. 4.  Or so it appears, for it never saw print, even though a much revised copy was found after Howells’s death in a sealed envelope addressed to Whitelaw Reid, the editor of the Tribune. According to Cady, however, it is at least possible that Howells did in fact send another copy to Reid, who refused to print it. Cady, Realist at War, 77. 5.  William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes, ed. Don L. Cook and David J. Nordloh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 10. Quotations from this volume hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 6. William Dean Howells, Novels 1875–1886: “A Foregone Conclusion,” “A Modern Instance,” “Indian Summer,” “The Rise of Silas Lapham,” ed. Edwin H. Cady (New York: Library of America, 1982), 754. 7.  William Dean Howells, Novels 1886–1888: “The Minister’s Charge,” “April Hopes,” “Annie Kilburn,” ed. Don L. Cook (New York: Library of America, 1989), 847. 8. William Dean Howells, “The Shadow of a Dream” and “An Imperative Duty,” ed. Edwin H. Cady (New Haven, CT: College and University Press, 1962), 133.

Notes   9.  Warner Berthoff, The Ferment of Realism: American Literature, 1884–1919 (New York: Free Press, 1965), 54. 10.  Everett Carter, Howells and the Age of Realism (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1954), 205. 11. Bernard Williams, “Moral Luck,” in Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers, 1973–1980, by Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Williams’s article led to a long and fertile debate on the topic. See especially Thomas Nagel, “Moral Luck,” in Moral Luck, ed. Daniel Statman (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 57–72. See also Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 12.  Williams, “Moral Luck,” 38. 13. Ibid., 27. 14.  Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, ed. Margaret Cardwell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 119. 15.  June Howard, Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 49. 16.  Lukács’s German original is, “Das Erzählen gliedert, die Beschreibung nivellieret.” See Georg Lukács, “Erzählen oder Beschreiben?” in Probleme des Realismus (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1955), 103–45. Subsequent citations are from Georg Lukács, “Narrate or Describe?” in Writer and Critic and Other Essays, trans. Arthur Kahn (London: Merlin, 1970). Kahn renders the same line as “Narration establishes proportions, description merely levels” (127). 17. Lukács, Writer and Critic, 143. 18. Ibid., 112. 19. Ibid., 111. 20.  Brander Matthews, “Recent Essays in Criticism,” Cosmopolitan, November 1891, 125–26. 21.  The history of life insurance is too long and complicated to receive more than brief attention here. The best social and cultural history of life insurance remains Viviana Zelizer, Morals and Markets: The Development of Life Insurance in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). Among the many other relevant histories, see especially Morton Keller, The Life Insurance Enterprise, 1885–1910 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1963). The industry seems to have devoted an unusual amount of effort to historicizing itself. While many such works are simply promotional, see especially R. Carlyle Buley, American Life Convention, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1953). Sponsored by the “History Committee” of one of the industry’s national associations, Buley’s history is hardly impartial, but it does contain an especially admirable degree of detail. 22.  For my purposes, insurance can be defined broadly as a contract between two parties, the insurer and insured, in which the insured is the party that would

  Notes experience the insurable loss, and where there are enough insured parties to allow the insurer to rely on statistical averages. Nonetheless, there is a long debate about the invention of insurance. In American Life Convention, Buley sees its roots in a Phoenician practice of sharing maritime risk among shippers (4). Others locate its origin in Greek and Roman “bottomry” contracts, a type of maritime loan in which the ship itself (the very thing that might be lost) serves as collateral. See C. F. Trenerry, The Origin and Early History of Insurance, Including the Contract of Bottomry (London: P. S. King and Son, 1926). Still others see life insurance in particular emerging from the systematized charity of the Roman Collegia and medieval guilds. See A. Fingland Jack, An Introduction to the History of Life Assurance (London: P. S. King and Son, 1912). 23.  The Insurance Company of North America, the nation’s first incorporated insurer, did a brisk trade in fire and marine insurance between 1778 and 1800, but it sold only six policies on lives in its early years, the only six sold by any American company during that time. See Buley, American Life Convention, 29. This does not include life insurance sold by semipublic and charitable organizations such as the Corporation for the Relief of Poor and Distressed Presbyterian Ministers, which is often considered America’s first life insurer, founded in Philadelphia in 1759. See also Zelizer, Morals and Markets, 28, where she notes that as late as 1841, residents of Boston had insured $50 million worth of fire risks but less than $5 million worth of lives. 24. Zelizer, Morals and Markets, 6. 25.  Zelizer attributes the rapid growth of life insurance to two sets of changes, one occurring within the nascent industry, the other occurring in culture more broadly. Within the industry, she notes the importance of better marketing tactics, corporatization, greater stability of individual companies, better actuarial methods, and the reduction of rates for policies that provided better coverage. Outside the companies, she notes the importance of general economic growth, urbanization, and increased governmental support. See Morals and Markets, 9–25. 26.  They are the New England Mutual Life Insurance Company, the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York, the State Mutual Life Assurance Company of Worcester, the Mutual Benefit Life Insurance Company of New Jersey, the New-York Life Insurance Company (formerly the Nautilus Insurance Company), the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company, and the Penn Mutual Life Insurance Company. See also Buley, American Life Convention, 42–54. 27.  Sheppard Homans, “Account of the Dinner of the Actuarial Society of America,” Papers and Transactions of the Actuarial Society of America 1 (1891): 33. On the Northampton Tables, see Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 47–54. On the American break with successive British tables, see Buley, American Life Convention, 80–82.

Notes   28.  Elizur Wright, “Life Insurance,” North American Review 143 (1886): 145. 29. Ibid., 145. 30.  Elizur Wright, Savings Bank Life Insurance (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1872), 17. 31. Ibid., 17. 32.  Lawrence B. Goodheart, Abolitionist, Actuary, Atheist: Elizur Wright and the Reform Impulse (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1990), 165. 33. Wright, Savings Bank, 18. 34.  Elizur Wright, Traps Baited with Orphan, or, What Is the Matter with Life Insurance? (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1877), 11. 35. Ibid., 10. 36. Keller, Life Insurance Enterprise, 13. 37. In 1890, the total insurance in force by the Big Three exceeded the amount in force by the next twenty-two companies combined. See Keller, Life Insurance Enterprise, 13–14. 38.  The tallest building in the United States, the Willis Tower in Chicago (formerly the Sears Tower), could have been named the Allstate Insurance Tower, given that the former insurance branch of Sears, Roebuck and Company contributed enormously to the company’s bottom line. Several blocks away, Chicago’s fourth-tallest building, the John Hancock Center, is named for the insurer who owns it. That same company gave its name to the tallest building in Boston, Hancock Place, which is several blocks away from the city’s second-tallest edifice, the Prudential Center. San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid is owned by the insurance and investment company of the same name. In New York, Prudential Insurance owned the Empire State Building from 1961 to 1991. Massachusetts Mutual Life formerly owned the Chrysler Building. And the American International Building, one of the world’s tallest when completed in 1932, is owned by AIG, a global insurance conglomerate. See Andrew Tobias, Invisible Bankers: Everything the Insurance Industry Never Wanted You to Know (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 16–17. On one of the great icons of insurance architecture, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower, see Nick Yablon, “The Metropolitan Life in Ruins,” American Quarterly 56 (2004): 309–48. 39.  On the insurance press, see Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines: 1850–1865, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 93–94, 94 n. 214, as well as A History of American Magazines: 1865–1885, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 145–46. 40.  I am grateful to Christoph Irmscher for calling my attention to this publication and for sharing a copy from his collection. For a related reading of the publication, see Irmscher, Longfellow Redux (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 61–66.

  Notes 41.  John A. McCall, A Review of Life Insurance from the Date of the First National Convention of Insurance Officials. 1871–1897. An Address by John A. McCall Before the Twenty-eighth National Convention, Milwaukee, Sept. 13–16, 1898 (New York: New York Life Insurance, 1898), 68–69. 42.  Nancy Glazener, Reading for Realism: The History of a U.S. Literary Institution 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). Many other insurers cultivated an ambiguously public role, despite their entirely private nature. On the Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company, see also Robert Dalzell, Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 43.  Quoted in Buley, American Life Convention, 71. 44.  “Statistics of Life,” Manufacturer and Builder, November 1870, 338. 45. Francois Ewald, “Norms, Discipline, and the Law,” Representations 30 (1990): 138–61. See also Ewald, “Insurance and Risk,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). A number of important works on risk, insurance, and governance have appeared in recent years. See especially Richard V. Ericson, Aaron Doyle, and Dean Barry, Insurance as Governance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003); Richard V. Ericson and Aaron Doyle, Uncertain Business: Risk, Insurance, and the Limits of Knowledge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); Pat O’Malley, Risk, Uncertainty and Government (London: Glasshouse, 2004); Tom Baker and Jonathan Simon, Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 46.  Ewald, “Norms, Discipline, and the Law,” 141–42. 47. Wright, Savings Bank, 17. 48.  Wai Chee Dimock, Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 173. 49.  Brook Thomas, American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 153. 50. Howells, Novels 1886–1888, 126. 51. Ibid., 165. 52.  For instance, one of the intellectual architects of the New Deal, Isaac Rubinow, arrived in America from Russia as a staunch socialist but eventually took up a career as an actuary before publishing his influential Social Insurance: With Special Reference to American Conditions (New York: Holt, 1913). Rubinow’s book was an important source of thinking for New Deal planners, and it made a persuasive case to the middle classes by basing much of its analysis on the experience of private industry. Conversely, Chicago school economist Frank Knight saw private insurance as one of capitalism’s key technologies for turning immeasurable “uncertainty” into measurable “risk,” an argument he distributed in his

Notes   own influential work, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1921). On the relationship between private insurance and the public insurance programs of the New Deal, see also Michael Szalay, New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 53. Wright, Politics and Mysteries, 2. 54.  Richard McCurdy, “Modern Insurance and Its Possibilities,” North American Review, March 1893, 303. 55.  See David T. Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890–1967 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 56. Keller, Life Insurance Enterprise, 10. 57.  Eric Wertheimer, Underwriting: The Poetics of Insurance in America, 1722– 1872 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 17. 58. Rubinow, Social Insurance, 404. 59.  Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1992), 65. It should be noted that while Skocpol sees these veterans’ benefit programs as social welfare programs, she also argues that their complicity with political patronage and even corruption probably impeded, rather than facilitated, the implementation of New Deal public insurance programs like Social Security. For a dissenting view, see David A. Moss, Socializing Security: Progressive-Era Economists and the Origins of American Social Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 181 n. 17. 60. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers, 132. 61.  William Dean Howells, Selected Literary Criticism, vol. 2, 1886–1897, ed. Don. L. Cook, Christoph K. Lohmann, and David J. Nordloh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 354. 62.  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). chapter 2 1.  The University of Virginia Edition of “The Works of Stephen Crane,” ed. Fredson Bowers, 10 vols. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1969–75), 5:47–48. All citations from Crane hereafter cited parenthetically by volume number and page number in the text. 2.  Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 225; Bill Brown, The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 5.

  Notes 3. Michaels, Gold Standard, 235; Brown, Material Unconscious, 102. 4.  R. W. Stallman, Stephen Crane: A Biography (New York: George Braziller, 1968), 24. However, since Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino exposed the fabrications of Crane’s first biographer, Thomas Beer, researchers have needed to exercise special caution with anecdotes like that of the Wyoming cowboy. See Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino, The Correspondence of Stephen Crane, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). Many of Crane’s subsequent biographers absorbed some of Beer’s fabrications outright, and when Stallman mentions the cowboy and the purchase of the pistol for five dollars, he does so in language that comes straight from Beer’s text and offers no additional corroboration. For Beer’s version, see Thomas Beer, Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters (New York: Knopf, 1923), 54. Though I find no confirmation of this anecdote elsewhere, neither do I find it linked to Beer’s clearly fabricated sources. In order to avoid questions about such issues at more important stages of my argument, I avoid biographical claims that cannot be validated by Crane’s correspondence or by other published, eyewitness accounts. 5. Stallman, Stephen Crane, 327, 332. 6.  Gambling does not appear overtly in “One Dash—Horses,” but as J. C. Levenson points out in his introduction to Crane’s western tales in the Virginia Edition of “The Works of Stephen Crane,” the phrase “One Dash” refers to a gambler’s “dash” of the dice (5:xxxix). 7.  Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 101. 8. Beer, Stephen Crane, 126. 9.  Charles LaRocca, “Stephen Crane’s Inspiration,” American Heritage, May– June 1991, 108–9. 10.  See Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino, The Crane Log: A Documentary Life of Stephen Crane (New York: G. K. Hall, 1994), 94. 11.  See Donald Pease, “Fear, Rage, and the Mistrials of Representation in The Red Badge of Courage,” in American Realism: New Essays, ed. Eric Sundquist (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 157. See also Lee Clark Mitchell, “Introduction,” in New Essays on “The Red Badge of Courage,” ed. Lee Clark Mitchell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 1–23. Mitchell traces the contingent world of Crane’s battlefield into the very language of the book. He says, “The concentration on simple sentences at the expense of complex and compound constructions evokes a world lacking interdependency, one that refuses to hang together in predictable patterns” (17). 12.  Pease, “Mistrials,” 160. 13.  A. C. McClurg, “The Red Badge of Hysteria,” Dial, April 16, 1896, 227. 14.  Quoted in Richard M. Weatherford, ed., Stephen Crane: The Critical Heritage (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 101.

Notes   15. Ibid., 97. 16. Ibid., 116. 17.  See Wertheim and Sorrentino, Crane Log, 94. They report that Crane’s roommate R. G. Vosburgh claimed that “all of his knowledge of the war” came from “reading over the descriptive articles on the Civil War published in the Century” from 1884 to 1887. Crane’s reading presumably included the issue of Century from September 1886, containing four articles specifically about the battle of Chancellorsville. However, see also LaRocca, “Crane’s Inspiration,” for evidence of Crane’s long-standing interest in the battle. 18.  A. C. Gould, Modern American Rifles (Boston: Bradlee Whidden, 1892), 195. 19.  Jack London, “The Impossibility of War,” Overland Monthly, March 1900, 282, 278. London based his argument on the famous treatise by Jean de Bloch, The Future of War, trans. R. C. Long (New York: Doubleday and McClure, 1899). London claims that if even six times the number of attackers charged a defensive position, the two forces would be at equal numbers by the time the attackers were thirty-five yards away. Given that this “extermination” would be unacceptable, London says, soldiers “will be compelled, in scattered formation, . . .  to creep forward, hiding behind irregularities in the field, and burying themselves in the earth like moles” (278). 20.  See Gerald F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987). 21.  See Albert A. Nofi, The Spanish-American War, 1898 (Conshohocken, PA: Combined Books, 1996), 315. Nofi calculates that in the Battle of Manila Bay, for instance, U.S. warships fired 5,859 shells at other ships during combat, of which 142 hit their targets. “American accuracy was poor, and Spanish worse,” Nofi concludes (315). 22.  Charles Crawford, Weapons and Munitions of War: Part 1, Infantry Weapons (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Infantry and Cavalry School, 1907), 35. Crawford cites an even more pessimistic study, which suggests that even at six hundred yards, “in battle it is good luck even to make 1/4 of one percent of hits” (35). 23. Ibid., 19. 24.  H. E. Eames, The Rifle in War (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Staff College, 1908), following p. 8. Eames points out one great irony in this conception of shooting: the more accurate the shooter’s aim, the smaller the cone of fire, and so the more important it would be to have a precise estimate of the range to target. For field firing, however, this meant that better aim actually could be counterproductive, because any error in estimating the range—usually done by an officer—meant that bullets would be concentrated in an area away from the intended target. A larger cone of fire, on the other hand, would help compensate

  Notes for errors in the estimation of range. When many shots are fired, compounded errors could be expected to correct each other. 25. Gilmore credits General John Pershing’s insistence on marksmanship training with settling the question decisively on the brink of World War I. Clearly, the association of field firing with German military theory did not help its promoters during World War I. See Russell Gilmore, “‘The New Courage’: Rifles and Soldier Individualism, 1876–1918,” Military Affairs 40, no. 3 (October 1976): 97–102. Gilmore’s fine but brief account seems to be the only historical piece yet written on an issue that clearly has cultural relevance well beyond his primary focus on military history. 26.  Gilmore, “New Courage,” 98–99. However, I find the claim about replacing sights with spirit levels only in the appalled objections of Chester’s opponents, for whom that prospect seems to have become a rallying cry, and not in Chester’s own prolific writing. 27.  James Chester, “Modern Bobadilism or the Marksman’s Method of Defeating an Army,” Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States 12, no. 48 (January 1891): 33. 28.  A. S. Frost, “Battle Tactics,” Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States 13, no. 55 (January 1892): 133. 29.  A. S. Frost, “Infantry Fire,” Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States 13, no. 57 (March 1892): 317. 30.  Jonas E. Whitley, “The Story of American Marksmanship,” Forest and Stream 87, no. 10 (October 1918): 588. 31.  Crane’s friend Joseph Conrad wrote a similar scene in a novel published in the year of Crane’s death, in which “Lord Jim” abandoned a ship he believed to be sinking, only to learn later, and to his disgrace, that it had stayed afloat. In both cases, the individual choice of whether to abandon a position is, in effect, a bet about how events will proceed, a bet that in both cases turns out to be wrong. 32.  Patrick K. Dooley, The Pluralistic Philosophy of Stephen Crane (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 68. 33. Ibid., 66. 34.  St. George Tucker, ed., Blackstone’s Commentaries with Notes of Reference to the Constitution and Laws of the Federal Government of the United States and of the Commonwealth of Virginia, vol. 1 (South Hackensack, NJ: Rothman Reprints, 1969), 300. On gun and game laws and Tucker’s edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries, see Charles Swann, “Guns Mean Democracy: The Pioneers and the Game Laws,” in James Fenimore Cooper: New Critical Essays, ed. Robert Clark (London: Vision, and Barnes and Noble, 1985): 96–120. Swann associates the Second Amendment more specifically with antiaristocratic measures meant to guarantee open access to game.

Notes   35.  See Saul Cornell, A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 36.  James Fenimore Cooper, The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper: “The Deerslayer or, The First War-Path,” ed. James Franklin Beard (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 294. 37.  James Fenimore Cooper, The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper: “The Last of the Mohicans; A Narrative of 1757,” ed. James Franklin Beard (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 111, 332. 38. William F. Carver, The Life of Dr. William F. Carver, of California, Champion Rifle-Shot of the World (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1878), 150– 51, 88–89. 39.  See, for instance, Louis S. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (New York: Knopf, 2005); Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992): 63–87; Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), 102–11. 40. On other fascinating instances of “gender bending” in the context of frontier mythology, see Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 221. 41.  For a listing of the many rifle clubs active in the United States around this time, see the index to clubs published in Arthur Corbin Gould’s magazine The Rifle, September 1885, 52. 42. See Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (New York: Putnam’s, 1885); Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (New York: Century, 1888); The Wilderness Hunter (New York: Putnam’s, 1893). For an excellent account of the cultural and political ramifications of Roosevelt’s hunting, see Daniel Justin Herman, Hunting and the American Imagination (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 218–36. 43.  Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981). 44.  Most of the great arms manufacturers were located in the industrial East. Colt was headquartered in Paterson, New Jersey, and later in Hartford, Connecticut; Remington in Ilion, New York; Smith and Wesson in Springfield, Massachusetts; Winchester in New Haven, Connecticut. 45.  Wingate sued Laidley for plagiarism and won. See George W. Wingate, Manual for Rifle Practice (New York: Church, 1872), for the original version, and T. T. S. Laidley, A Course of Instruction in Rifle Firing (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1880), for Laidley’s unauthorized adaptation. While Laidley advocates marksmanship training for soldiers, he places rather more emphasis on mechanical and material sources of error than does Wingate or Blunt, and it is telling that in his preface to the second edition he thanks none other than “Prof. C. S. Peirce for

  Notes the results of his experiments on physiological times” (ix). As we will see in Chapter 3, Peirce’s theories of error emphasized the limitations on individual efficacy and control that the marksmanship school was eager to overcome. It is not clear which work of Peirce’s Laidley has in mind, or how it might have been applicable, but one possible candidate is “On the Theory of Errors of Observation” (1870), in which Peirce studies human errors in estimating the precise moment when a star emerges from behind the moon through periods of practice and training. It may be that Laidley saw Peirce’s astronomical training as applicable to firearms training. See The Writings of Charles S. Peirce, vol. 3, 1872–1878, ed. Christian J. W. Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 114–60. Because both men lived and worked in Boston at this time, it is distinctly possible that Laidley is drawing on personal correspondence or conversation with Peirce as well. 46.  In addition to works cited elsewhere, works consulted for this study include the following training manuals, theoretical and scientific studies of shooting, and reports on various arms: John Ratcliffe Chapman, Instructions to Young Marksmen . . . As Exhibited in the Improved American Rifle (New York: Appleton, 1848); William Gilham, Manual of Instruction for the Volunteers and Militia of the Confederate States (Richmond, VA: West and Johnston, 1861); John Pease, The Rifleman’s Hand-Book, Designed for the Use of the Massachusetts Rifle Club (Boston: Mudge, 1862); H. W. S. Cleveland, Hints to Riflemen (New York: Appleton, 1864); Edward C. Barber, The Crack Shot; or, Young Rifleman’s Complete Guide (New York: Townsend and Adams, 1868); Emory Upton, A New System of Infantry Tactics (New York: Appleton, 1868); Gatling Guns of Large Caliber for Flank-Defense: Ordinance Memoranda No. 17 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1874); N. Hershler, Soldier’s Hand-Book; for the Use of the Enlisted Men of the Army (Washington, DC: n.p., 1889); Infantry Drill Regulations (New York: Appleton, 1891); Joseph B. Batchelor Jr., Infantry Fire; Its Use in Battle (Leavenworth, KS: Spooner, 1892); Arthur Corbin Gould, Modern American Rifles (Boston: Bradlee Whidden, 1892); Description and Rules for the Management of the Spring field Rifle, Carbine, and Army Revolvers (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1898); W. G. Hudson, Modern Rifle Shooting from the American Standpoint (New York: Laflin and Rand Powder, 1903); J. G. Ewing, The Rifleman’s Handbook for Military Riflemen (New York: Laflin and Rand Powder, 1904); Townsend Whelen, Suggestions to Military Riflemen, 2nd ed. (Kansas City: Franklin Hudson, 1909); George T. Bowman, Our Military Rifle and How to Use It (Washington, DC: Arms and the Man Publishing, 1909); A. J. Macnab Jr., Individual Instruction in Rifle Practice (Seattle: n.p., 1916); Charles Askins, Rifles and Rifle Shooting (New York: Macmillan, 1919). For a useful period bibliography of rifle literature up to the 1880s, see “Bibliography of the Rifle,” Rifle, March 1888, 492–93.

Notes   47.  Marion P. Maus, “The Increased Value of Infantry Fire,” Journal of the United States Infantry Association 4, no. 3 (1907): 370, 369; Maus’s italics. 48.  See Chester, “Bobadilism,” 32, where Chester mockingly describes a battle between trained marksmen this way: “Manoeuvring [sic] will be unnecessary, and generalship will be eliminated from the art. Hostile lines will approach each other until they are within effective range. The men will then lie down, taking the prone or back position, or the ‘Texas Grip,’ as each individual may elect, and the battle will begin and proceed like a contest at Creedmore, minus the markers and scorers.” 49.  Stanhope E. Blunt, Firing Regulations for Small Arms for the United States Army, 3rd ed. (New York: Scribner, 1889), 48. 50.  Firing Regulations for Small Arms for the United States Army and the Organized Militia of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904), 60. 51.  Martha Banta, Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 64. 52.  Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders (New York: Collier, 1899), 117–35. 53. Ibid., 125. 54. Ibid., 122. Even in the Civil War, a quite common experience of self-exposure can be found in the example of General John Sedgwick, who berated soldiers who ducked as bullets whistled by. “What! What! men, dodging this way for single bullets! . . .  They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance,” Sedgwick reportedly said. Moments later, Sedgwick was shot through the head by a Confederate sniper. See Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Clough Buel, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, vol. 4 (New York: Century, 1888), 175. 55. Roosevelt, Rough Riders, 122. 56. Ibid., 126. 57.  Alfred Habegger, “Fighting Words: The Talk of Men at War in The Red Badge of Courage,” in Fictions of Masculinity: Crossing Cultures, Crossing Sexualities, ed. Peter F. Murphy (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 196. 58.  Wertheim and Sorrentino, Correspondence of Stephen Crane, 2:364 n. 1. 59.  “Marines Signaling Under Fire at Guantanamo” is loosely based on events Crane had reported in American newspapers. See “The Red Badge of Courage Was His Wig-Wag Flag” (9:134–42). 60.  Wertheim and Sorrentino, Correspondence of Stephen Crane, 2:427 n. 2. See the letter from George K. Shaw to Crane dated February 1, 1899. Shaw recounts how his son “spoke enthusiastically of your coolness under fire and of the reckless manner in which you exposed yourself at Guantanamo.” Wertheim and Sorrentino date the incident to June 11, 1898 (2:426 n. 2). 61.  Richard Harding Davis, Notes of a War Correspondent (New York: Scribner, 1911), 125.

  Notes 62.  Michael Robertson, Stephen Crane, Journalism, and the Making of Modern American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 156. 63.  See, for instance, Ernst Jünger, “On Danger,” trans. Donald Reneau, New German Critique 59 (Spring/Summer 1993): 27–32; Randolph Bourne, The Radical Will: Selected Writings 1911–1918, ed. Olaf Hansen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 360. 64.  Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1995), 76. 65.  Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1995), 441. 66. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 76. chapter 3 1.  All citations from Peirce are cited by volume and page number in the text. Citations designated “CP” refer to Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, 8 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1960– 66). Those designated “W ” refer to The Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, ed. Max H. Fisch and Nathan Hauser, 6 vols. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982–2000). 2.  David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Eric Steinberg (1777; repr., Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977), 37. 3.  See Pierre-Simon Laplace, Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, 5th ed., trans. Andrew I. Dale (1825; repr., New York: Springer-Verlag, 1995), 2; Abraham De Moivre, The Doctrine of Chances: A Method of Calculating the Probabilities of Events in Play, 3rd ed. (1756; repr., New York: Chelsea, 1967), 253. 4.  Gerda Reith, The Age of Chance: Gambling in Western Culture (London: Routledge, 1999). 5.  Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 201. 6. On the history of frequentism before Venn, see Hacking, Taming of Chance, 125–32. 7.  However, Peirce’s ideas about absolute chance do have some surprising parallels by other advocates of ontological chance, even among scientists. See Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Knopf, 1971). Monod, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on molecular biology, developed a philosophy of biological chance as openly antideterministic based largely on the model of RNA randomization. Monod’s title, Chance and Necessity, refashions Peirce’s preoccupation with chance and determinism for the late twentieth century, even as it expressly shifts the conversation from the cosmological to the biochemical realm and develops along rather less optimistic lines.

Notes   8.  Ross Hamilton, Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 19. 9. Ibid., 17. 10.  See especially Max Fisch, “Peirce’s Progress from Nominalism to Realism,” in Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism: Essays by Max H. Fisch, ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner and Christian J. W. Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 184–200. Fisch contrasts Peirce’s late attempts to define “real probability” with the frequentist version of probability he had praised in John Venn’s The Logic of Chance, published in 1866. 11.  Thomas Goudge, The Thought of C. S. Peirce (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1950), 5. See also Murray Murphey, The Development of Peirce’s Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961); and Karl Otto Apel, Charles S. Peirce: From Pragmatism to Pragmaticism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987). 12.  William James, Pragmatism, ed. Bruce Kuklick (1907; repr., Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 25. 13.  Green has been called the first American female detective novelist, a claim that is not entirely true. For a useful survey of Green’s fiction, see Barbara Welter, Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976), 130–44. 14.  On Green’s meeting with Conan Doyle, see one of the few critical and biographical studies of Green: Patricia D. Maida, Mother of Detective Fiction: The Life and Works of Anna Katharine Green (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989), 29. 15. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1996), 447. Green’s knowledge of domestic interiors owed something to her marriage to the celebrated American furniture designer Charles Rholfs, whose struggling business depended, in large part, on his more famous wife’s fortune. 16.  Anna Katharine Green, The Woman in the Alcove (New York: A. L. Burt, 1906), 102. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 17.  Anna Katharine Green, That Affair Next Door & Lost Man’s Lane (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 18.  Arthur Conan Doyle, The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, ed. William S. Baring-Gould, 2 vols. (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1967), 1:613. 19.  See Catherine Ross Nickerson’s introduction to Green, That Affair Next Door. 20.  It was not uncommon for even late nineteenth-century religious moralists to dust the surface of accidents for the fingerprints of the deity. See, for instance, Thomas T. Lynch, The Moral of Accidents and Other Discourses, ed. Samuel Cox (New York: Routledge, 1872). Lynch’s 1872 sermon “The Moral of

  Notes Accidents” claims, “Truly, the ‘Chapter of Accidents’ is no unimportant chapter in the great volume of God’s providence. Instead of Chance being the determiner of accidents, Wisdom the boldest and the subtlest rules over them and their effects” (14). 21.  On the pragmatic tradition of sight in American nature writing and poetry, see Elisa New, The Line’s Eye (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). For New, sight—as opposed to transcendental vision—collapses the subject and object in the shared zone of experience. Rather than read the act of looking as a strategy for mastery, sight exposes the contingent and provisional nature of experience. 22.  Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 121. 23. Ibid., 125. 24. Massimo A. Bonfantini and Giampaolo Proni, “To Guess or Not to Guess?” in The Sign of Three, ed. Umberto Eco and Thomas Sebeok (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 119–34. 25.  Charles S. Peirce, “Guessing,” Hound and Horn 2, no. 3 (April–June 1929): 267–82. Citations to “Guessing” hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. The manuscript draft of “Guessing” is MS 687 at Harvard’s Houghton Library. The date of MS 687 is unknown, but Peirce told William James in a letter in July 1907 that he had written an account of his stolen watch and submitted it to the Atlantic Monthly, which subsequently rejected it. 26.  For the historical details related to the stolen watch, I draw gratefully on Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok, “‘You Know My Method’: A Juxtaposition of Charles S. Peirce and Sherlock Holmes,” in Eco and Sebeok, The Sign of Three, 11–54. 27.  For reproductions of the card and for other historical material on Peirce’s involvement with Pinkerton’s, see Eco and Sebeok, The Sign of Three, 11–19. 28.  For a closely related but more theoretically elaborate statement on guessing by Peirce, see Harvard University Houghton Library, CS Peirce Collection MS 692. MS 692 is published in Carolyn Eisele, ed., Historical Perspectives on Peirce’s Logic of Science: A History of Science (Berlin: Mouton, 1985), under the title “The Proper Treatment of Hypotheses.” References to Peirce’s unpublished manuscripts here and elsewhere refer to the numbering in Robin’s catalogue of the Peirce papers. See Richard S. Robin, An Annotated Catalog of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1967). Robin dates MS 692 to 1901. 29.  On Holmes and the semiotics of medical diagnosis, see especially Eco and Sebeok, The Sign of Three, 28–46. 30. MS 687 contains two different versions of the story. The first page of the second version is missing, but in the rest of it Peirce changes several details, in-

Notes   cluding the city from which he departed and the details of his subsequent recovery of watch, chain, and coat from the apartments of two women. See also MS 688, which contains another rendition of the same story. 31.  When Peirce mentions literary authors in his own works, however, he usually betrays a taste for the classical instead. In his Collected Papers, only a single reference each to Howells and Balzac betrays Peirce’s acquaintance with popular realist fiction. In contrast, he refers to Shakespeare six times, Emerson and Chaucer four times each, Samuel Johnson and Milton three times each, and Dante, Pope, and Schiller twice each. Browning, Samuel Butler, Lewis Carroll, Longfellow, Marlowe, Molière, Rabelais, and Swift get one mention each. Given the absence of Cooper, Melville, Hawthorne, and other nineteenth-century American writers, Peirce’s two references to Poe are all the more notable. 32. Maurice S. Lee, “Probably Poe,” American Literature 81, no. 2 (June 2009): 230. 33.  Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry and Tales (New York: Library of America, 1984), 403. 34.  Lee, “Probably Poe,” 232. 35.  Nancy Harrowitz, “The Body of the Detective Model: Charles S. Peirce and Edgar Allan Poe,” in Eco and Sebeok, The Sign of Three, 197. 36. Poe, Poetry and Tales, 689. 37. Ibid., 403–4. 38. Eisele, Historical Perspectives, 899–900. 39.  See John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (1929; repr., New York: Putnam, 1960). 40.  For the technical results of his attempts to train observers to reduce the variation in their inevitable errors, see Peirce, “On the Theory of Errors of Observations” (W 3:114–60). 41.  Records at the Chicago History Museum show that the Pinkerton eye already was functioning as a corporate logo by 1878, when Peirce’s watch was stolen. Six years earlier, in 1872, George Bangs wrote to Allan Pinkerton on the subject of reproducing the eye on a gilt button. However, Bangs reported that the artist “is very certain that the design of an Eye would not be satisfactory to you, in consequence of their [sic] not being able to represent the shades which are made on paper.” See George Bangs to Allan Pinkerton, December 31, 1872, Library of Congress, Records of the Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, Box 44, Folder 3. 42.  Peirce and Jastrow also published the results of the experiment as “On Small Differences of Sensation,” Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences 3 (1885): 75–83; reprinted in W 5.122–35, and in CP 7.21–35. 43.  It is worth recalling one detail that Peirce fails to mention in “Guessing”: Peirce and Jastrow themselves took turns as the subjects of these experiments. So,

  Notes exactly as in the detective narrative in “Guessing,” Peirce himself turns out to be the especially prescient guesser with this deep feeling for the truth. 44. Eisele, Historical Perspectives, 900–901. 45. Ibid., 901. 46. Ibid., 900. 47.  Charles Peirce, The New Elements of Mathematics, ed. Carolyn Eisele, vol. 3 (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), 206. 48. Poe, Poetry and Tales, 403. On Dupin’s “principle of guessing,” see Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” in The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, ed. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 36 n. 5. For both Peirce and Dupin, then, the pretense of disclosing concealed secrets turns out to raise rather obvious questions, such that disclosure itself comes to seem like a further instance of concealment in an ongoing game. On Poe and chance, see Jacques Derrida, “My Chances / Mes chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies,” in Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature, ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 1–32. chapter 4 1.  See Mark Aldrich, Safety First: Technology, Labor, and Business in the Building of American Work Safety 1870–1939 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 76. Some industries had been reporting accident rates to some state agencies since the 1870s, but Aldrich notes that “few states gathered useful injury statistics” and he dates the rise of genuinely useful work safety statistics to the early calculation of accident frequency rates by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, a project that began in the mid-1910s (107). Aldrich’s statistics are invaluable for comparing injury rates across periods and between different industries. Even so, the lack of reliable statistics for the bare number of industrial injuries makes it difficult to compare deaths and disabilities from occupational hazards to other sources of mortality, such as war. 2.  Charles Peirce, The Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, ed. Christian J. W. Kloesel, vol. 5, 1884–1886 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 135. 3.  Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1992), 2. There have been surprisingly few literary engagements with welfare maternalism. On modernist women’s fiction, see Susan Edmunds, Grotesque Relations: Modernist Domestic Fiction and the U.S. Welfare State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Notes   4.  The fellow-servant rule stems from the famous decision by Justice Lemuel Shaw of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in the case of Farwell v. Boston and Worcester Rail Road Corporation, 45 Mass. 49 (1842) LEXIS 104 at **19, where Shaw argues that the man injured by a fellow servant “must bear the loss himself, or seek his remedy, if he have any, against the actual wrong-doer.” 5.  The fellow-servant rule seems to have angered workers most, and it was the first of the three rules to yield serious ground in the courts. As early as 1891, a Missouri judge wrote: “In the progress of society, and the general substitution of ideal and invisible masters and employers for the actual and visible ones of former times, in the forms of corporations engaged in varied, detached and widespread operations . . .  it has been seen and felt that the universal application of the [fellow-servant] rule often resulted in hardship and injustice.” Parker v. Hannibal & St. J.R.R., 109 Mo. 362, 397 (1891). Quoted in Lawrence M. Friedman and Jack Ladinsky, “Social Change and the Law of Industrial Accidents,” Columbia Law Review 67, no. 1 (January 1967): 59. 6.  O. W. Holmes Jr., The Common Law (Boston: Little, Brown, 1881), 94. On Holmes, see also Nan Goodman, Shifting the Blame: Literature, Law, and the Theory of Accidents in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 78–79. Goodman shows that Holmes was developing the pragmatic legal theory of Nicholas St. John Green, whose reassessment of causation in 1870 first turned Humean skepticism into something more identifiably pragmatic. See Green’s “Proximate and Remote Cause,” American Law Review 4, no. 2 (January 1870): 201–16. 7. Holmes, Common Law, 95. 8.  The Pittsburgh Survey produced six volumes of findings on the city’s labor force, environment, industrial conditions, and civic institutions between 1909 and 1914, four of which appeared as monographs. Women wrote two of those monographs, both of which are important early contributions to the maternalist movement: Margaret Byington, Homestead: Households of a Mill Town (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1910); and Crystal Eastman, Work Accidents and the Law (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1910). On the Pittsburgh Survey, see Maurine W. Greenwald and Margo Anderson, eds., Pittsburgh Surveyed: Social Science and Social Reform in the Early Twentieth Century (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996). 9.  On the Wainwright Commission, see especially Robert F. Wesser, “Conflict and Compromise: The Workmen’s Compensation Movement in New York, 1890–1913,” Labor History 12, no. 3 (1971): 345–72. On Eastman and her work with the Wainwright Commission specifically in the broader context of her legal career, see John Fabian Witt, Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). The New York Supreme Court struck down the legislation that resulted from the commis-

  Notes sion’s investigation the next year, in a decision issued just one day before the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire killed almost 150 garment workers. 10.  For instance, Eastman once said, “No self-respecting feminist would accept alimony. It would be her own confession that she could not take care of herself.” See “Crystal Eastman: An Editorial,” Nation, August 8, 1928, 123–24. 11. However, see Maurine W. Greenwald, “Visualizing Pittsburgh in the 1900s: Art and Photography in the Service of Social Reform,” in Greenwald and Anderson, Pittsburgh Surveyed, 124–52; Maren Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America 1890–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 47–88. 12.  Eastman, Work Accidents, 100–101. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 13.  These include Jubreed and Kosanovich from the paragraphs quoted previously. See the footnote in Eastman, Work Accidents, 100. 14.  See Peter Galison, “An Accident of History,” Archimedes: New Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology 3 (2000): 3–43. Galison argues that modern airline accident reports effectively translate the inscrutable and baffling conditions of accident back into some consolingly rational form. He says that “if the bramble of cause, agency, and procedure does not issue from a fault nucleus, but is rather unstably perched between scales, between human and non-human, and between protocols and judgment, then the world is a more disordered and dangerous place. These reports, and much of the history we write, struggle, incompletely and unstably, to hold that nightmare at bay” (40). 15.  Eastman’s final numbers are these: 29.97 percent of accidents “attributed solely to employers or those who represent them in positions of authority”; 27.85 percent of accidents “attributed solely to those killed or their fellow workmen”; 15.91 percent “attributed to both the above classes”; 26.27 percent “attributed to neither of the above classes” (104, diagram 6). 16.  Stephen Lyng, ed., Edgework: The Sociology of Risk-Taking (New York: Routledge, 2005), 5. 17.  Stephen Lyng, “Edgework: A Social Psychological Analysis of Voluntary Risk Taking,” American Journal of Sociology 95, no. 4 (January 1990): 873. 18.  Erving Goffman, Where the Action Is: Three Essays (London: Allen Lane, 1969), 143. 19.  See especially chapter 5 of Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992), 127–38. 20. Jonathan Simon, “Taking Risks: Extreme Sports and the Embrace of Risk in Advanced Liberal Societies,” in Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility, ed. Tom Baker and Jonathan Simon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 181, 187.

Notes   21.  On gambling and social status in a liberal society, see Irving Kenneth Zola’s classic study of male offtrack bettors, “Observations on Gambling in a Lower-Class Setting,” Social Problems 10, no. 4 (Spring 1963): 353–61. Zola concludes that gambling “is not simply the flight, the withdrawal, or the escape as so often claimed. By making success and recognition possible, it allows the players to function in the larger society without suffering the consequences of the realization that they indeed have little else” (361). 22.  William James, Writings 1902–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1987), 1291. 23. Ibid., 1285. 24.  William James, The Works of William James: The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 119–20. 25.  William James, Pragmatism, ed. Bruce Kuklick (1907; repr., Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 130. 26.  See Ross Posnock, The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 27. James, Writings 1902–1910, 1291. 28. Aldrich, Safety First, 90. 29.  See John Fabian Witt, The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Witt points out that although labor leaders finally did support workers’ compensation legislation, they “were hardly out in front of the movement” (147). Even Samuel Gompers was a reluctant and ambivalent supporter of workers’ compensation legislation, largely because, as Witt quotes Gompers saying, workers themselves felt “a sort of indifference or hostility” to such programs (147). See also Price V. Fishback and Shawn Everett Kantor, “The Adoption of Workers’ Compensation in the United States, 1900–1930,” Journal of Law and Economics 41 (October 1998): 305–41. Fishback and Kantor argue, “Organized labor’s reluctance to embrace workers’ compensation was part of a more general opposition to government regulation of the workplace on the theory that business interests controlled politics, and, thus, better benefits for workers could be achieved only through the voluntary organization of workers” (318–19). 30.  Edith Wharton, The Fruit of the Tree (1907; repr., Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000), 10. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 31.  Henry James to Edith Wharton, November 24, 1907, in Henry James, Letters, ed. Leon Edel, vol. 4, 1895–1916 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 476. 32.  Dale M. Bauer, Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), xiii.

  Notes 33. Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton’s Argument with America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), 53–54. 34.  Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 228–29. 35. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Barbara Lewalski (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), bk. 9, ll. 821–25. 36.  See Edith Wharton to Sara Norton, July 7, 1908, in The Letters of Edith Wharton, ed. R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (New York: Scribner, 1988), 159. Based on that letter, Wharton is sometimes said to have declared her tacit approval of mercy killing: “But, oh, if I had morphia in reach, as she has, how quickly I’d cut the knot!” But this refers to suicide, not to assisted suicide, not to euthanasia after a clear request, and certainly not to unrequested euthanasia. When Bessy says to Brent, “I want to die,” that is not quite the same as saying “I want you to end my life,” especially given that Bessy showed “no signs of contact with the outer world” (424). A closer parallel to Brent is Jane Toppan, a private nurse who used morphine to kill her patients in the Boston area in 1901 and who was arrested in Amherst, Massachusetts, near the Berkshire locale of The Fruit of the Tree. See “Alleged Poisoner Arrested,” New York Times, October 31, 1901, 1. See also “Admits to Thirty-one Persons: The Remarkable Confession of Nurse Jane Toppan,” New York Times, June 25, 1902, 3. 37.  Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York: Scribner, 1905), 521. 38.  See Michaels, Gold Standard, 229. 39.  See Blaise Pascal, Thoughts, Letters, Minor Works, trans. W. F. Trotter (New York: Collier, 1910), 10; Wharton evidently quotes from the translation of Seneca found in L. Annaeus Seneca, Minor Dialogues, Together with the Dialogue on Clemency, trans. Aubrey Stewart (London: Bell, 1902), 205, and from George Long’s translation of Marcus Aurelius, published in many American editions, including Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, The Thoughts of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, trans. George Long (Boston: Ginn, 1893), 161. 40.  Jennie A. Kassanoff, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 65. Kassanoff also shows how the common reading of amputation as castration in the context of industrial injuries is all the more meaningful in Wharton’s work given that phallic hands are extremely common in her fiction even outside the context of dismemberment. 41. Ibid., 66. 42. Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1977), 235. 43. Kassanoff, Wharton, 66. 44. Ibid., 69. 45. Witt, Accidental Republic, 119; Aldrich, Safety First, 7.

Notes   46. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 317. Skocpol shows that America’s first proto-welfare system consisted of an expansive pension system for Civil War veterans and dependents that flourished through the end of the nineteenth century. Along with Skocpol, a wide range of historians and political theorists have investigated the maternalist welfare state. See especially Linda Gordon, ed., Women, the State, and Welfare (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, “Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of the Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880–1920,” American Historical Review 95, no. 4 (October 1990): 1076– 1108; Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York: Routledge, 1993). 47. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 297. 48.  Kathryn Kish Sklar, “The Historical Foundations of Women’s Power in the Creation of the American Welfare State, 1830–1930,” in Koven and Michel, Mothers of a New World, 74. 49. Catherine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 165. In these comments, MacKinnon is referring to two important cases, Muller v. Oregon and West Coast Hotel v. Parrish. 50.  Caspar v. Lewin, 82 Kan. 604; 109 P. 657; 1910 Kan. LEXIS 16504 (Supreme Court of Kansas 1910) at 632. 51.  Whereas Hine’s photographs in Work Accidents clearly continue a project he had begun with his earlier child labor photographs, Stella’s illustrations would lead more obliquely toward his mature style of abstract futurism. Though the Rembrandtesque realism of “A Greener” disappears from Stella’s later work, his involvement with the accident problem suggests a possible connection to his later futurist depictions of the barely governable energy of the modern industrial city. 52.  See Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 189–230. 53. Allan Sekula, Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works, 1973–1983 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984), 18. 54. Eastman, Work Accidents, 325–31. 55. Holmes, Common Law, 96. A similar dynamic appears roughly a century earlier in the development of what Morton J. Horwitz has called “actuarial conceptions of risk” through maritime insurance. See Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). Early in the nineteenth century, courts tended to rule that a ship that foundered at sea for no apparent reason was unseaworthy, and so the insurers were not bound to pay. By the middle of the century, as insurance coverage became more common, courts began requiring insurers to prove unseaworthiness. In the process, “there was hardly any room for the idea that legal rules

  Notes sought to do justice to the individual case,” and instead the law addressed the sum of all cases (237). Eventually, workers’ compensation seemed preferable even to conservative judges like Wisconsin’s Roujet Marshall, who concluded that the law of torts was itself a “defective and lamentably imperfect system.” See Roujet D. Marshall, Autobiography of Roujet D. Marshall: Justice of the Supreme Court of the State of Wisconsin 1895–1918 (Madison: Democrat Printing, 1923), 2:57 n. 2. 56. Milton, Paradise Lost, bk. 3, l. 99. chapter 5 1.  Clift was convicted and executed by electric chair. Stories about the murder ran through the summer of 1934 in the New York press, including more than fifty stories in the New York Times. For a brief summary of the entire case, see “Body Exhumed on Eve of Trial of Woman,” New York Times, August 12, 1934. 2.  “O’Ryan Lists Motives of 431 Killings in Year; Contrasts Crime Thefts with Those of 1932,” New York Times, April 17, 1934. 3.  James M. Cain, Double Indemnity (1936; repr., New York: Vintage, 1992), 16. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 4.  Insurance crime had threatened the industry and its policyholders from the beginning. The most infamous of all insurance crimes occurred in 1781, when the captain of the British slave ship Zong threw his human cargo overboard to collect on the insurance. On the Zong, and its importance to an emerging system of global finance capitalism, see Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). Life insurance fraud was the most widely available form of insurance crime, and generally the most lucrative; the life lost did not belong to the beneficiary, as a ship or house might, so the insurance payoff was, effectively, pure profit. For early historical studies of insurance crime, see John B. Lewis and Charles C. Bombaugh, Stratagems and Conspiracies to Defraud Life Insurance Companies: An Authentic Record of Remarkable Cases (Baltimore: James McClellan, 1878); and Alexander Colin Campbell, Insurance and Crime (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1902). 5.  Novels, films, and plays during these years take a striking interest in falsified accidents and insurance crime. Robert Sherwood’s play The Petrified Forest (1935) is built around an attempted insurance crime. Warner Brothers’ musical The Gold Diggers of 1937 (1936) features a scheme by chorus girls to collect on a producer’s life insurance. Earlier examples of the insurance crime plot include Wilkie Collins’s The Haunted Hotel (1879), which describes a plot to murder for insurance money in Venice, where the insurance industry was born. William Dean Howells’s The Landlord at Lion’s Head (1897) turns near its end on an act of arson motivated by an expected insurance payout. Morgan

Notes   Robertson’s The Wreck of the Titan (1898) is a male melodrama of maritime insurance fraud. 6.  Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy (1925; repr., New York: Signet, 1953), 440. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 7.  Leonard Cassuto, Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 196. 8.  Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 1. 9.  Philip Fisher, “Looking Around to See Who I Am: Dreiser’s Territory of the Self,” ELH 44, no. 4 (Winter 1977): 730–31. 10.  For a provocative claim about Duchamp’s relationship to American popular culture, see Michael Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). In calling Duchamp’s more deceptive productions “humbugs for highbrows,” Leja makes a tantalizing connection between one component of the avant-garde and other kinds of Barnumesque trickery, both of which, Leja argues, Americans were surprisingly adept at understanding. 11.  Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 66–67. 12. André Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard (1928; repr., New York: Grove, 1960), 19. 13. Bürger, Avant-Garde, 66. 14.  Elliott Arnold, “Faking Car Accidents,” Nation, November 21, 1936, 602. 15.  See Ken Dornstein, Accidentally on Purpose: The Making of a Personal Injury Underworld in America (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996). Dornstein notes that banana peelers’ theatrical deceptions came to replace overt violence as a way of stealing from the railroad companies. “The accident faker came onto the scene just as the Great Train Robbers . . .  were passing into legend,” Dornstein says. “He carried not a gun but perhaps a screwdriver to loosen the bolts on a train window . . .  or perhaps a banana peel in his back pocket to occasion a fall” (60– 61). Even after its passage to stage and film, the banana peel’s origins in accident fraud were not entirely forgotten, and in one case, they combine implausibly with a plot of insurance crime. In Laurel and Hardy’s The Battle of the Century (1927), “a man sells Ollie an accident insurance policy on Stan,” after which, “to hasten an ‘accident’ for the newly insured Stan, Ollie strategically plants a banana peel.” 16. Bürger, Avant-Garde, 65. 17.  William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (1844–46; repr., New York: Da Capo, 1969), 2. Talbot calls the photographs “sun-pictures” on slips of paper he included in copies of The Pencil of Nature, according to Beaumont Newhall’s introduction to the 1969 facsimile. According to Newhall, the slips ad-

  Notes dress skeptical readers who still suspected the photographs to be illustrations, despite Talbot’s claims in his own introduction (v). 18.  Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 88. 19.  Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Delta, 1977), 154. 20.  However, Peirce would certainly say that although a photograph is an index, it also could be understood as an icon or a symbol. His semiotic categories are overlapping, not entirely exclusive. This unwieldy semiotics is, of course, far too complex to engage in any thorough way here, but see the essays “What Is a Sign?” “Of Reasoning in General,” and “Nomenclature and Division of Triadic Relations, as Far as They Are Determined,” in Charles Peirce, The Essential Peirce, ed. Peirce Edition Project, vol. 2 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). 21. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 92. 22.  Christian Metz, “Photography and Fetish,” October 34 (Autumn 1985): 84. Many other critics of photography have elaborated photography’s deathly associations. See Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Kracauer describes photographed subjects as ghosts, “spooky apparitions,” and says that “the photograph annihilates the person by portraying him, and were person and portrayal to converge, the person would cease to exist” (56–57). See also Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). In reading Walter Benjamin on photography, Cadava claims, “Photography is a mode of bereavement” and that the photograph “bears witness to an experience that cannot come to light. This experience is the experience of the shock of experience” (11). 23.  Roy Hoopes, Cain (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1982), 35. 24.  The way in which European and American culture came to understand numbers as apolitical, disinterested, and objective facts has its own interesting history. See, for instance, Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Lorraine Daston, “The Moral Economy of Science,” Osiris 10 (1995): 2–24; Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 25.  Ian Hacking, “Making Up People,” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 223. 26.  James Cain, Our Government (New York: Knopf, 1930), viii. All but four of the chapters of Our Government appeared separately in the magazine American Mercury from 1925 to 1929 and so reflect an earlier stage of Cain’s thinking

Notes   than the book’s 1930 publication date might suggest. For the publication history of individual chapters, see Hoopes, Cain, 645–46. 27. Cain, Our Government, vii. On the tables Cain mentions in Our Government, see also Michael Szalay, New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 224–25. 28. See Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition, part 1 (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975), 160. Table D1029–1036 documents “Work-Injury Frequency Rates in Manufacturing, Mining, and Class I Railroads: 1922 to 1970” (182). 29.  I. M. Rubinow, A Standard Accident Table as a Basis for Compensation Rates: Distribution of 100,000 Accidents (New York: Spectator, 1915). See also Rubinow’s Social Insurance, with Special Reference to American Conditions (1913; repr., New York: Arno, 1963), and The Quest for Security (New York: Henry Holt, 1934), which influenced many New Deal planners in the Roosevelt administration. The Casualty Actuarial and Statistical Society, over which Rubinow presided, remains the primary professional society and research body of the casualty industry to this day. Since the early 1920s it has operated as the Casualty Actuarial Society. 30.  Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 65–73. 31.  Louis I. Dublin and Edwin W. Kopf, “Mortality from External Causes Among Industrial Policyholders of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company 1911 to 1920,” Proceedings of the Casualty Actuarial and Statistical Society 8 (1921): 215. 32. Ibid., 224. 33. Ibid. 34.  William Augustus Evans became the first public health commissioner of Chicago in 1907 and upon his resignation in 1911 became the health editor for the Chicago Daily Tribune. He published his daily column “How to Keep Well” from 1911 to 1934. 35.  Chicago Daily Tribune, July 16, 1919. 36.  Ibid., December 6, 1923. 37.  Ibid., September 13, 1918. 38.  Ibid., November 14, 1931. 39.  James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934; repr., New York: Vintage, 1992). Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 40.  The size and variety of this field is too great to represent adequately here. Nonetheless, I am thinking of the body of philosophy, critical theory, and cultural study that developed from J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), including John Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

  Notes versity Press, 1969); and Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988). This debate led to more culturally engaged work on the performance of identity, such as Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); and Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), among many others. An equally relevant body of performance theory has come from various theatrical and anthropological works, especially Richard Schechner, Essays on Performance Theory, 1970–1976 (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1977), The End of Humanism: Writings on Performance (New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1982), and Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985). 41. Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 19. See also Michel Callon, The Laws of Markets (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), especially Callon’s introduction and contribution. MacKenzie’s ambitious book makes carefully qualified claims about performative economics. He expressly denies that models utterly or entirely shape markets or that any model put in use would have performative functions if backed by sufficient authority. Whereas Callon’s is the more audacious constructivist position, MacKenzie’s argument that some rather than all models are performative seems to me more persuasive. 42. MacKenzie, Engine, 11. 43. Collected in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 44.  Richard V. Ericson, Aaron Doyle, and Dean Barry, Insurance as Governance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 13, 12. See also Joan Copjec, “The Phenomenal Nonphenomenal: Private Space in Film Noir,” in Shades of Noir: A Reader, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: Verso, 1993), 167–98. 45.  There is a great deal of this sort of linguistic repetition in the novel. In Huff’s first-person account, Keyes at one point says he has “nothing to go on” but his “own hunch, instinct, and experience” (61). Later, Keyes says that Sachetti “had nothing to go on, except some kind of hunch” (106). Elsewhere, Huff reports that Keyes tells the company president, “We have our practice, and you can’t beat it” (62). Soon after, Keyes tells the same company president, “We’ve got our ancient strategy, and you can’t beat it” (63). 46. James Cain, “Double Indemnity: Part Seven—‘If you let them beat her . . . ,” Liberty 13 (March 28, 1936): 44. 47. See Sean McCann, Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Szalay, New Deal Modernism; Frederick Whiting, “Playing Against Type: Statistical Personhood, Depth Narrative, and the Business of Genre in James M.

Notes   Cain’s Double Indemnity,” Journal of Narrative Theory 36, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 190–227. 48. The term “moral hazard” appears to be of nineteenth-century origin, even though insurers had been addressing insurance crime for centuries. See Allard E. Dembe and Leslie I. Boden, “Moral Hazard: A Question of Morality?” New Solutions 10 (2000): 257–79. They associate the term with the “large-scale introduction of private and social insurance systems in Europe and the United States” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (258). 49.  Important recent work on moral hazard and the welfare state from a cultural studies perspective includes Richard V. Ericson and Aaron Doyle, “Criminalization in Private: The Case of Insurance Fraud,” in What Is a Crime? Defining Criminal Conduct in Contemporary Society, ed. Law Commission of Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004), 99–124; Richard Ericson, Dean Barry, and Aaron Doyle, “The Moral Hazard of Neo-liberalism: Lessons from the Private Insurance Industry,” Economy and Society 29, no. 4 (November 2000): 532–58; Tom Baker, “Insuring Morality,” Economy and Society 29, no. 4 (November 2000): 559–77; Baker, “On the Genealogy of Moral Hazard,” Texas Law Review 75, no. 2 (December 1996): 237–92. 50.  Baker, “Genealogy of Moral Hazard,” 239. 51.  G. F. Michelbacher, “‘Moral Hazard’ in the Field of Casualty Insurance,” Proceedings of the Casualty Actuarial Society 13, no. 27 (November 27, 1926), 1. 52.  Ericson and Doyle, “Criminalization in Private,” 103, 106. Ericson and Doyle’s broader point is that in the midst of this uncertainty, insurers treat fraud specifically as a crime in order to deny claims to, and exclude coverage of, less desirable insurance customers. 53.  Michelbacher, “Moral Hazard,” 1. 54.  Clyde J. Crobaugh and Amos E. Redding, Casualty Insurance (New York: Prentice Hall, 1928), 12. 55.  French Eugene Wolfe, Principles of Property Insurance (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1930), 14. Wolfe is treating moral hazard here strictly as deliberate fraud. 56. Citations are from an English translation of Friedensburg’s pamphlet, published in the United States as The Practical Results of Workingmen’s Insurance in Germany (New York: Workmen’s Compensation Service and Information Bureau, 1911), 46. 57. Ibid., 47. 58. Rubinow, Social Insurance, 496. 59.  Some commentators from the early twentieth century through roughly the 1980s attempted to draw a distinction between “moral” hazard and “morale” hazard, the first involving outright fraud and crime, and the second involving an erosion of motivation and work ethic. That distinction was one that Friedens-

  Notes burg and many others took pains to collapse, presumably because, for his purposes, the unwanted side effects of public insurance coverage must not appear to be less serious than those of private insurance coverage. 60. Rubinow, Social Insurance, 497. 61.  Kenneth J. Arrow, “Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care,” American Economic Review 53, no. 5 (December 1963): 967, 961. 62. Kenneth J. Arrow, “The Economics of Moral Hazard: Further Comment,” American Economic Review 58, no. 3 (June 1968): 538. 63.  Mark V. Pauly, “The Economics of Moral Hazard: Comment,” American Economic Review 58, no. 3 (June 1968): 535, 535 n. 3. 64.  Joseph E. Stiglitz, “Risk, Incentives and Insurance: The Pure Theory of Moral Hazard,” Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance 8, no. 26 (January 1983): 31. 65.  See Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1984).

Index

accident: Aristotle on, 5, 115; avantgarde treatment of, 192–94, 196–97, 208; and blame, 1, 15–16, 30, 34–35, 43, 55–56, 152, 156; definition of, 4–5; falsification of, 188–89, 193–94, 216–21, 254n4, 255n15; feminizing effects of, 27, 149–51, 163–65, 175–78, 183–86; and freedom, 20, 22, 124, 160–63, 166–67; history of, 5–7; and historiography, 9, 15, 19; industrial, 1–2, 148–58, 161–65, 172–75, 178, 182– 83; and insurance, 24–26, 32, 43–54, 56, 63–64, 150, 175, 178, 184–90, 194, 202, 204–7, 213–16, 218–21; and moral luck, 34–36; and narrative form, 15–16, 18–19, 39–42, 69–71, 82–83, 97–98, 118, 122, 127–28, 133, 153–55, 157, 181, 189– 90, 197–99; performative aspects of, 213–18, 220, 222–24; and pragmatism, 19–23, 83, 161–63; production of, 16, 32, 38–39, 43, 51, 98, 148–52, 154–55, 193–95, 202–4, 211, 214–15, 221; as Providence, 5, 35–36, 39, 97, 124–27, 245–46n20; statistics, 203–4, 206–9. See also chance agency: and action, 70, 95, 108, 188; and agent regret, 34, 36; and individualism, 85–87, 90, 92, 97; limitations of, 8, 37; masculine, 170– 72, 180; of objects, 14, 155; political, 175; and responsibility, 8, 15, 37, 155, 180, 199, 250n14 American Tragedy, An (Dreiser), 188, 190– 202, 208, 214

Ammons, Elizabeth, 165 Anderson, Benedict, 64 Annie Kilburn (Howells), 30, 33 Aristotle, 5, 7, 115 Army, United States, 68, 79–81, 86, 88– 92, 95–97, 102–4 Arrow, Kenneth J., 223–24 Austin, J. L., 257n40 avant-garde, art and literature of, 6, 192– 94, 196–97, 208, 255n10 Bangs, George, 131–32, 138 Banta, Martha, 94 Barish, Jonas, 191 Barthes, Roland, 200–201 Baucom, Ian, 25, 254n4 Bauer, Dale, 165 Benjamin, Walter, 6, 118 Berthoff, Warner, 33–34 Bismarck, Otto von, 80–81 blame: for industrial injuries, 155–56; legal determination of, 152, 249n6; narrative production of, 1–2, 8, 15– 16, 35, 154; overdetermination of, 30, 152; scapegoating, 12, 14, 35, 43; underdetermination of, 35, 55, 62 Bloch, Jean, 239n19 Bonfantini, Massimo A., 128 Bourne, Randolph, 105 Breton, André, 193–94 Bürger, Peter, 193, 197 Cadava, Eduardo, 256n22 Cain, James M.: accident falsification,

  Index 27–28, 188–89; accident repetition, 208–12; Double Indemnity, 27, 188, 202–14, 217–19, 224–25; and insurance, 202, 204–5, 211, 218– 19; moral hazard, 219–25; Our Government, 204–5, 256–57n26; performativity, 211–15, 218–19; The Postman Always Rings Twice, 188, 209–10, 218 Callon, Michel, 213, 258n41 Calvin, John, 5–6 capitalism: corporate, 46; economic instability, 82; and gambling, 2, 6; laissez faire, 22, 223; and pragmatism, 22; and realism, 31, 39– 40; speculation, 25, 159–61, 166–69, 236–37n52 Cassuto, Leonard, 188 causation: complex, 43, 56, 152, 185– 86; narratives of, 12, 35, 37, 70–72, 154, 185–86, 201, 190; obscurity of, 10, 16, 35, 62; proximate, 14; realist philosophy of, 116; skeptical philosophy of, 21, 109, 230n36, 249n6; and tort law, 14–15, 55–56, 152 certainty, 11, 18, 56, 65, 138 chance: absolute chance, 20, 108–10, 114–17, 128, 133, 142–46, 193, 244n7; avant-garde treatment of, 6, 192– 94, 196–97, 208, 255n10; chance collectivity, 3–4, 17–19, 23–25, 53– 54, 62–64, 81–85, 106, 113, 139– 41, 175, 183–86, 190, 208, 225–26; as contingency, 109–10, 161–62; definition of, 4–6; and egalitarianism, 68, 82–84, 105–6, 148, 152, 190, 225; Enlightenment theories of, 5–6, 22, 38, 109; and error, 81, 90, 109, 136; gendering of, 143, 149–50, 168, 175– 76, 183–86; ideological nature of, 193, 197; and moral luck, 34, 36–37; and morality, 14–19, 25–26, 33–38, 40, 43, 53–56, 72, 123–27, 131, 149, 154, 173–75, 221; and narrative form, 7–10, 18–19, 27, 39–41, 62, 69–74,

95–97, 110–11, 117–18, 122–28, 141–42, 146–47, 153–55, 189; ontological, 7, 109; and pragmatism, 20–23, 83, 110, 113–17, 162; and probability theory, 2–3, 5–6, 9, 109–14, 117, 133–36, 139– 41, 204; production of, 10, 17, 21–22, 50–54, 62, 102, 108, 148–49, 152, 175, 189, 193–97, 206–11, 221, 225–26; as Providence, 5, 36–39, 97, 123–25, 127, 138–39, 144, 245–46n20; and statistics, 9, 25–26, 148, 203–6, 208. See also accident Chance Acquaintance, A (Howells), 32–33 Chandler, Alfred, 172 Chicago fire, 11–19, 23, 26, 113, 149, 190, 229n22, 229–30n27 Civil War (United States): aftermath, 3, 10, 14, 88; challenge to democratic ideals, 11; fiction of, 69, 71–76, 98; pensions, veterans’, 63, 176, 253n46; shooting practices, 76–77, 79, 86, 243n54 class: attitudes toward chance, 18; class conflict, 31, 49–50, 61, 63–64, 80, 119, 149, 164, 172; gender, relation to, 182– 84; middle, 34, 49–50, 87, 236n52; working, 30, 148–50, 165, 177, 222, 251n21 classification, 2, 8–9, 22, 38, 56, 189, 203–4, 228n13 Clausewitz, Carl von, 72, 105 collectivity: compelled by chance, 3–4, 10, 54, 81, 84–85, 106, 113, 139, 141, 208, 225; coercive forms, 82; egalitarian, 4, 18, 68, 82–84, 89, 106, 148, 190, 225; and identity, 18; as insurance, 25, 53–54, 59–63, 80–81, 175, 185, 213, 225; as response to crisis, 17, 83; and social democracy, 4, 23 communism, 4, 12, 18, 61, 153 compensation: insurance, 25, 53, 59, 185, 212, 224; tort claims, 56, 152, 182, 185, 194–95; writing as, 62. See also workers’ compensation Cooper, James Fenimore, 86, 88

Index   Copjec, Joan, 215 Cornell, Saul, 85 Crane, Stephen: biographers, 238n4; and economics, 66–67; egalitarianism, 26–27, 68–69, 82–84; and field firing, 81–82; “The Five White Mice,” 65–67, 69–70; and language and communication, 93, 99, 102–5, 238n11; Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, 94; “Marines Signaling Under Fire at Guantanamo,” 96, 102–5, 243n59; “A Mystery of Heroism,” 69–70, 96, 98, 100, 103; narrative form, 69–71, 73–74, 94–96; “One Dash—Horses,” 69–70, 238n6; “The Open Boat,” 82–84; “The Price of the Harness,” 77, 92–93, 106; The Red Badge of Courage, 71–76, 78, 81, 99, 101, 104, 238n11; and rifle individualism, 85– 6, 90, 92; and Theodore Roosevelt, 94–98; “The Upturned Face,” 96, 103; war correspondence, 102–4, 243nn59–60 crime: as accident, 56, 197; Chicago fire as, 13, 15–16; construction of, 199; and detective work, 119–24, 131; Haymarket bombing, 29–30; insurance fraud, 175, 187–89, 202, 209, 219–20, 222, 254n5; narratives of, 28, 35, 110–11, 129, 131, 146, 209– 10; personal injury fraud, 195, 255n15; as realism, 201–2 Darwin, Charles, 110, 141. Davis, Richard Harding, 103 Derrida, Jacques, 248n48, 258n40 detective work: in fiction, 110, 118, 121–22, 132–33, 147, 205, 245n13; insurance industry, 205; methods of, 119–20, 122, 128; narration of, 111, 117–18, 146; and sight, 120, 125–27; speculative, 128, 131, 135–36. determinism, 6–7, 19, 38, 161–62, 244n7 Dewey, John: and pragmatism, 19–20, 115; production of chance, 21–22;

social democracy, commitment to, 22–25; spectator theory of knowledge, 136; “The Superstition of Necessity,” 21–22, 230–31n39; violence of chance, 20 Dickens, Charles, 37–38, 42 “Dilemmas of Determinism” (James), 161–62 Dimock, Wai Chee, 55–56 domesticity, 119, 245n15 Dooley, Patrick K., 83 Dornstein, Ken, 195, 255n15 Double Indemnity (Cain), 27, 188, 202, 205, 209–14, 217–19, 224–25 Doyle, Aaron, 25, 215, 221, 236n45, 259n49, 259n52 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 118–20, 124, 128, 133 Dreiser, Theodore: accident, changing treatment of, 190–91; accident repetition, 209; An American Tragedy, 188, 190–202, 208, 214; determinism, 38; The Financier, 190, 230n28; identity, theatrical account of, 192, 196, 211; literary realism, 189, 192, 201–2; and personal injury fraud, 194–95; and photography, 199–202, 212; Sister Carrie, 190, 192, 197 Duchamp, Marcel, 193 Eastman, Crystal: accident narratives, 153–54; chance, feminizing effects of, 150–51, 163, 183; narrative forms, 154–55; Pittsburgh Survey, 150–51; progressivism, 153, 181–82; recklessness, workers’, 154–58, 163; sentimentality, 177, 183–85; welfare maternalism, 176–78, 183; women and children, political power of, 177– 78; women as ideal liberal citizens, 183–85; Work Accidents and the Law, 151–57, 161, 175–83, 253n51; workers’ compensation, advocacy of, 150, 153, 175–78, 183–85, 207 Eastman, Max, 153

  Index economics: of capitalism, 51, 82, 160, 166, 223; and chance, 36, 39–40, 67, 82; of gambling, 2, 66–67; of insurance, 3, 43–45, 47, 51, 63, 221, 223, 236–37n52; postbellum changes, 30; rational choice, 223; sociological, 213, 258n41; and statistics, 204 edgework, 159 Edmunds, Susan, 248n3 egalitarianism: of chance collectives, 4, 18, 26, 68, 82–84, 105–6, 190, 225; failures of, 148, 152; military, 89, 92 Ellison, Ralph, 107 Enlightenment, 5, 9, 22, 38, 44, 88, 109, 141 entropy, 125, 145–46 Ericson, Richard, 25, 215, 221, 231n49, 236n45, 259n49, 259n52 error, 79, 81, 89–90, 109, 136, 239– 40n24, 241–42n45, 247n40 evolutionary theory, 3, 85, 110, 117, 141– 43 Ewald, Francois, 51–52, 215, 231n49, 236n45 “Excelsior” (Longfellow), 49 Fabian, Ann, 2 fallibility, 75, 112, 123, 125, 127, 137–38, 140, 185 Faulkner, William, 107 feeling, 137–40, 142–45, 147 Financier, The (Dreiser), 190, 230n28 Firearms: accuracy of, 68, 77–79, 81, 90, 104–5; field firing, 80–82, 84, 89–90; hunting, 88; National Rifle Association, 85, 87–89; rifle individualism, 88–92; sharpshooting, 86–88, 90; technological developments, 76–78; in United States Constitution, 85, 240n34. Fisher, Philip, 192 “Five White Mice, The” (Crane), 65–67, 69–70 Fortuna, 149 Foucault, Michel, 25, 138, 203, 215, 228n13

Franklin, Jeffrey, 2 Frederic, Harold, 67, 74–75 freedom: chance, associated with, 93, 114, 144–45, 166, 203; of contract, 46–47, 151, 176, 180, 185; of liberal agents, 18, 27, 85–89, 97, 155, 158–63, 166–67, 180, 215; of markets, 58; and pragmatism, 20, 22–23 frequentism, 111, 113, 230–31n39 Freud, Sigmund, 128, 198 Friedensburg, Friedrich, 222 Fruit of the Tree, The (Wharton), 27, 150, 164–67, 169, 171–72, 174–75, 180, 252n36 Galison, Peter, 250n14 gambling: and capitalism, 2–3, 6, 66– 67, 166; gods and goddesses of, 149; and liberal subjectivity, 18, 68– 69; and probability theory, 2, 112– 13, 140; shooting as, 65–66; sight as, 136; sociology of, 159, 251n21; occupational risk as, 157, 160 Gigerenzer, Gerd, 2 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 184; Herland, 184 Gilmore, Russell, 80, 89, 240n25 Glass-Stegall Act, 220 Glazener, Nancy, 49–50 Goffman, Erving, 159 Gompers, Samuel, 251n29 Goodman, Nan, 152, 228n7, 249n6 governmentality, 25, 215 Great Depression (United States), 187, 194, 204 Green, Anna Katharine: chance, moralizing of, 123–24; class position, 18; critical reception of, 118–19, 245n13; detectives, methods of, 119–22; and Arthur Conan Doyle, 118, 120; narrative form, 124–25; Providence, 124–25, 138; sight and vision, 124–28, 137–38; That Affair Next Door, 120; The Woman in the Alcove, 120–23, 126–28

Index   Green, Nicholas St. John, 21, 249n6 Greenwald, Maurine W., 250n11 “Guessing” (Peirce), 111, 128–32, 135, 138– 47, 247n43 Habegger, Alfred, 101 Hacking, Ian, 9–10, 109, 203, 207, 228n13, 234n27 Halttunen, Karen, 127 Hamilton, Ross, 5, 115 Hammett, Dashiell, 118 Harrowitz, Nancy, 134 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 73 Haymarket bombing and trials, 29–32, 35, 40, 43, 54, 56 Hazard of New Fortunes, A (Howells), 27, 30–31, 33, 45, 47–48, 54 Hemingway, Ernest, 107 Herland (Gilman), 184 heroism: of detectives, 120–21, 132, 140– 41, 224; and individualism, 117, 215; narratives of, 98, 100, 133, risk, role of, 159, 174; and Theodore Roosevelt, 95–97; in war, 72, 95–98, 105–6 Hine, Lewis, 153, 178, 180–81, 253n51 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 19, 152, 185–86, 249n6, 253n55 House of Mirth, The (Wharton), 150, 165–69 Howells, William Dean: accidents in early fiction, 33–34; accidents, moralizing of, 34, 37; Annie Kilburn, 30, 33; chance collectivity, 32, 53–54, 113, 225; A Hazard of New Fortunes, 27, 30–31, 33, 45, 47–48, 54; Indian Summer, 33; insurance, corporate, 59–60; insurance, fraternal, 60–61; insurance, life, 24, 30, 47–49, 55– 58, 60; insurance, mutual, 59–60; insurance, pension, 63; Haymarket trials, response to, 29–30; The Landlord at Lion’s Head, 254n5; A Modern Instance, 41–42; moral luck, 34–37; narrative forms, 39–43; and Providence, 36–37, 39; realism, 31–

32, 39–40, 50, 62–64, 199; The Rise of Silas Lapham, 33, 55–56, 62; The Shadow of a Dream, 31, 33–34; Their Silver Wedding Journey, 31; Their Wedding Journey, 31; The World of Chance, 34 Hume, David, 5, 21, 109 Huygens, Christiaan, 3 Indian Summer (Howells), 33 individualism: and firearms, 80–81, 85– 92; and insurance, 51, 63, 175, 221–25; and liberalism, 2, 23, 46, 59, 85, 167; in military, 68, 77, 79–81, 84, 89, 240n25; and risk, 52, 159–61, 164; and scientific inquiry, 112–13, 117, 128, 141 injury: as accident, 2, 23, 26, 51, 71, 54, 154–55, 184, 194–95; domestic, 183, 208; industrial, 148–49, 152, 164, 183, 202–3, 206–8, 248n1; insurantial treatment of, 184; moralized, 8, 17, 26, 37, 42, 183; personal, 194–95, 208; statistics, 202–3, 206, 227n1 injury fraud, 194–95, 255n15 insurance: accident, 150, 178, 180, 185, 188, 202, 206–9; accident production, 26, 32, 51–54, 62, 175, 194, 202–4, 214, 221, 225; actuarial statistics, 45, 204–9, 213–14, 219, 227n1; advertising, 32, 51–53; architecture, 47–48, 235n38; casualty, 44, 220– 21, 224; compensation, 25, 32, 53, 56, 59, 62, 185; corporate, 46–47, 58–61; employees, prominent, 30–31; fraternal, 60–61; fraud and crime, 175, 187–89, 194, 204, 209, 212, 214–15, 218–22, 254n4, 255n15; history of, 3, 24, 26, 43–47, 233– 34n21–23, 234n25–26, 253–54n55; individualizing effects of, 46, 51– 52, 59, 112, 175; journalism, 26, 30, 49, 50, 61–62; life, 3, 24–26, 44–54, 169, 175, 187; maternalist programs, 150, 176–77, 183, 253n46, 237n59; and moral hazard, 220–25, 259n48;

  Index mutual, 44, 59–62, 185; and New Deal, 176, 190, 219–20, 222, 225, 257n29; politics of, 45–47, 58–60, 150, 175, 220, 224–25; public, 4, 24, 57, 63–64, 150, 175–78, 184–85, 188– 89, 219–26, 236–37n52; and realism, 31–32, 50, 62–64, 189, 202, 215, 219; regulation of, 44–46; social, 24, 63, 80, 206, 220–24, 236n52, 257n29; theory of, 25, 32, 51–52, 215, 220–24. See also workers’ compensation intuition, 130, 133–35 Irmscher, Christoph, 49 James, Henry, 74–75, 165, 199 James, William: accidents, industrial, 161; collectivity, 22–23; construction of truth, 22, 115–17; contingency, 162; “Dilemmas of Determinism,” 161–62; on freedom, 20, 162–63; and masculinity, 162–63; “The Moral Equivalent of War,” 161, 163; risk, embrace of, 162; pragmatism, 19–22, 115–17; Pragmatism, 117, 162; and social democracy, 23 Kant, Immanuel, 34, 110, 115 Kassanoff, Jennie, 170, 172 Kavanagh, Thomas, 2, 9 Kellogg and Bulkeley Company, 13 Kellogg, Paul, 150, 153 Kloppenberg, James, 23 Knight, Frank, 236–37n52 Kracauer, Siegfried, 256n22 Kubrick, Stanley, 91 labor: and accident reform, resistance to, 158–59, 251n29; conflicts, 46, 61, 172; contract, freedom of, 151; and feminism, 176–78; legislation, 176–77; management, relation to, 163–64, 172– 73; statistics of, 148, 206, 227n1, 248n1, 249n8; strikes, 36, 41, 57, 163, 168 Landlord at Lion’s Head, The (Howells), 254n5

law, tort 15, 55–56, 151–52, 156, 185, 199 Lears, Jackson, 2, 88 Lee, Maurice, 133–34 Leja, Michael, 255n10 liberalism: classical, 46, 167; competition, 78; free markets, 22, 46, 58, 166; free will, theory of, 27, 85, 97, 151, 158; individualism, 2, 23, 46, 59, 85, 167; and pragmatism, 20, 22–23, 161–63; and risk, 3, 159–64, 183–84, 251n21; subjectivity, 36, 86, 88, 92, 158–60, 166, 185–86; women and children, role in, 166–67, 177–78, 184–85 “Ligeia” (Poe), 134 Linderman, Gerald, 77 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 49; “Excelsior,” 49 luck, 33–35, 37, 97, 125, 149 Lukács, Georg, 39–40 MacKenzie, Donald, 213, 258n41 MacKinnon, Catherine, 176–77 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Crane), 94 “Marines Signaling Under Fire at Guantanamo” (Crane), 96, 102–5, 243n59 Marinetti, F. T., 193 Marxism, 6, 23, 57, 159 McCann, Sean, 219 Melville, Herman, 73 Menand, Louis, 11 metaphysics, 20, 73, 110, 113–17, 135, 144, 193–94 Michaels, Walter Benn, 2, 66, 166, 169 Milton, John, 143, 166–67, 186 Mitchell, Lee Clark, 238n11 Modern Instance, A (Howells), 41–42 modernism: as antimodernism, 88; literary, 10, 27, 192, 194; New Deal, 220 Moivre, Abraham De, 5, 7, 22, 109, 228n9 Monod, Jacques, 244n7 “Moral Equivalent of War, The” (James), 161, 163

Index   moral hazard, 220–25, 259nn48–49 “Murders in the Rue Morgue, The” (Poe), 133, 147 “Mystery of Heroism, A” (Crane), 69– 70, 96, 98, 100, 103 narrative: heroic, 95–98, 117, 133, 141, 174; Lukács on, 39–40; moralizing and rationalizing, 54, 95–97, 125, 127, 152, 157; production of chance, 1, 8, 9–10, 12–16, 19, 62, 69–74, 98, 104–6, 117–18, 153–56, 183, 189; teleological, 41, 110–11, 117, 125, 128, 141; Hayden White on, 9, 15 naturalism, literary, 10, 24, 38, 193 necessity, 20–21, 38–39, 127–29, 154, 244n7 negligence, legal standard of, 15, 56, 151– 52, 156 New Deal, 4, 28, 64, 161, 176, 190, 219– 20, 222, 225, 236–37n52, 237n59, 257n29 nominalism, 111–13, 116–17, 144, 228n13 Norris, Frank, 38; The Octopus: A California Story, 38 O’Leary, Catherine (Mrs. O’Leary), 12– 16, 19, 149, 229n24 Oakley, Annie, 87 Octopus, The: A California Story (Norris), 38 “One Dash—Horses” (Crane), 69–70, 238n6 “Open Boat, The” (Crane), 82–84 Our Government (Cain), 204–5, 256– 57n26 panic, 16–17, 190, 230n28 paternalism, 173–74, 176–77 patriarchy, 165–67, 173–74, 177 Pauley, Mark, 223–24 Peirce, Charles Sanders: abduction, 129– 31, 133–36, 147; antideterminism, 22, 108–9, 115; chance, absolute, 20, 108–10, 114–17, 128, 133, 142–46, 193,

244n7; collectivity, 23, 112–13, 139–41; “Design and Chance” 145; detective fiction, 110, 128, 132–35; “The Doctrine of Chances,” 112; entropy, 144–46; on error, 23, 136, 141n45; evolutionary theory, 141; feeling, 137–40, 143–44; frequentism, 111; A Guess at the Riddle, 141; “Guessing,” 111, 128–32, 135, 138–47, 246n25, 246n30, 247n43; and Kant, 110, 115; laws of nature, 21; “On the Theory of Errors of Observation,” 241–42n45; and Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, 131, 138; and Poe, 111, 118, 131, 133–35, 141, 147; pragmatism, 115– 17; and probability theory, 109, 112; Scientific Metaphysics, 109, 114–16, 133, 141, 144; and Venn, 111, 113; and William James, 20, 115–16, 117, 129, 162. performativity, 189, 213–20, 222, 224–25, 257–58nn40–41 Pinkerton, Allan, 138 Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, 129, 131–32, 138–39, 247n41 Pittsburgh Survey, 150–53, 180, 249n8 Poe, Edgar Allan, 111, 118–19, 131, 133–34, 141, 147, 247n31, 248n48; “Ligeia,” 134; “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 133, 147; “The Purloined Letter,” 131, 134, 248n48 Posnock, Ross, 162 Postman Always Rings Twice, The (Cain), 188, 209–10, 218 pragmatism: on causation, 21; on certainty, 11; on chance, 19–20, 145, 162; and collectivity, 4, 23, 83, 113; and Darwin, 141; on freedom, 20–23, 145, 162; language as tool, 101; laws, natural, 21–22, 115, 145, 162; narrative, role of, 110, 117, 141; and observation, 135–36, 246n21; risk, relation to, 20, 162; social democracy, relation to, 23; on truth, 22, 115–16, 137 Pragmatism (James), 117, 162

  Index “Price of the Harness, The” (Crane), 77, 92–93, 106 probability theory: chance, conception of, 3, 5–7, 9, 109–14; classical, 2–3, 5–6, 109–10, 133, 228n9; and error, 89, 109, 136; frequentism, 111, 113, 230–31n39; for insurance, 3, 25, 44– 45, 80, 112, 140, 204; and intuition, 134–35, 137, 139; literature, relation to, 9, 133–34; philosophy of, 109–10, 112– 14; and shooting, 79–80, 89 progressivism: of Crystal Eastman, 153, 177, 181-82; and liberalism, 46, 226; workers, 181–82; and pragmatism, 22–23; work safety reforms, 172, 177, 181; and Elizur Wright, 46 Proni, Giampaolo, 128 Providence, divine, 5, 35–37, 39, 97, 124– 25, 127, 138, 245–46n20 proximate cause, 14 “Purloined Letter, The” (Poe), 131, 134, 248n48 Pynchon, Thomas, 118 Raczkowski, Christopher, 138 realism: as compensation, 62; documentary, 19, 27, 40, 74, 192, 253n51; and insurance, 31–32, 50, 61–64; Lukács’s theories of, 39–40; moralizing efforts, 35; philosophical, 113, 115–17, 162; photography as metaphor for, 199–202; rejection of, 189, 192–93, 196, 199; social construction of reality, 40, 50, 108, 189, 192, 201; statistical, 215, 219 reason and rationality: capitalist, 2, 40, 159–60, 193; and chance, 17, 39, 54, 83, 105–6, 123, 143–47, 162, 204; and detective work, 119–20, 122–23, 127–28, 133–34; Enlightenment, 5, 9, 109; gendering of, 143, 164, 168, 183–84; guessing, role of, 129–30; mathematical and probabilistic, 5, 9–10, 25, 89, 109, 113, 204–5, 209–10, 213–14; and narrative, 9, 39, 14–19, 25,

40, 54, 72–73, 98, 103, 127, 152, 154, 250n14; in Peirce’s cosmology, 117, 142–46; and risk, 2, 25, 52, 159–60; social nature of, 112 recklessness, 103, 156–58, 163–64, 166, 171, 174, 180–81 Reconstruction (United States), 4, 11, 28, 76, 132 Red Badge of Courage, The (Crane), 71– 76, 78, 81, 99, 101, 104, 238n11 Reith, Gerda, 2, 7, 109 responsibility: alternatives to, 53, 55– 57, 85, 155–56; individual, 3, 89, 92, 151–52, 157, 160, 180–84; moral, 15– 16, 37, 53–57, 149, 223–24; narrative construction of, 8, 14–16, 35–36, 152, 155, 178–82; risk, relation to, 52, 56, 151, 157, 160, 178, 184; sexist assessments of, 177, 184; social distribution of, 57, 156; standards of, 14–15, 55–57, 152, 178, 224 Rise of Silas Lapham, The (Howells), 33, 55–56, 62 risk: assessment, 25, 52, 202–6; embrace of, 103, 150–51, 156–64, 174, 184; and gambling, 2–3, 150, 157, 159–60, 166–67; and liberal capitalism, 2–3, 25, 31, 53, 59, 159–60, 166–67, 174; management of, 160, 163–64, 167, 174–75, 178, 215; morality of, 34, 55– 56, 158, 221; social construction of, 51, 202–9 Roosevelt, Theodore, 65, 88, 91, 94–98, 103–5, 162 Rubinow, Isaac, 63, 206–8, 222–23, 236– 37n52, 257n29 scientific management, 160, 167, 173 Scientific Metaphysics (Peirce), 133 Sebeok, Thomas, 118, 132 Sekula, Allan, 181 Shadow of a Dream, The (Howells), 31, 33–34 Shklar, Judith, 226 Sister Carrie (Dreiser), 190, 192, 197

Index   Sklar, Kathryn Kish, 176 Skocpol, Theda, 63, 150, 176, 237n59, 253n46 Smith, Carl, 229n21, 232n1 Social Security, 189–90, 220, 237n59 socialism, 23, 29–30, 58–59, 61, 64, 82, 236–37n52 Socrates, 170 Sontag, Susan, 200–201 Sorrentino, Paul, 103, 238n4, 239n17, 243n60 Spanish-American War, 68, 77–78, 92, 94, 102, 239n21 speculation, 2, 55, 59, 67, 69, 136–38, 160–61, 166, 169 statistics: accident, 202–10, 216, 219; disciplinary function, 25, 203, 215; of industrial injuries, 148, 153, 182, 206– 7, 227n1, 248n1; of insurance, 44–45, 212, 214–15; Pittsburgh Survey’s, 153, 154, 182; suicide, 203–9 Stella, Joseph, 153, 178–82, 253n51 Stevens, Wallace, 31 Stiglitz, Joseph, 223 “Study in Scarlet, A” (Doyle), 128 “Superstition of Necessity, The” (Dewey), 21–22 Szalay, Michael, 219–20 Talbot, William Henry Fox, 200, 255– 56n17 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 173 Taylorization. See scientific management That Affair Next Door (Green), 120 Their Silver Wedding Journey (Howells), 31 Their Wedding Journey (Howells), 31 Trachtenberg, Alan, 181 Twain, Mark, 107

Wainwright Commission, 153, 176, 249n9 war: chance, experience of, 72; narratives, 67, 72, 93–98, 102; nostalgia for, 161–63; solidarity, generated by, 17, 83; strategy and tactics, 79–82, 90–92; technology of, 76–79; training for, 68, 90–92. See also Civil War (United States); Spanish–American War welfare maternalism, 150, 176–77, 183, 248n3, 249n8, 253n46 Welke, Barbara Young, 227n1 Wertheim, Stanley, 103, 238n4, 239n17, 243n60 Wertheimer, Eric, 62 Wharton, Edith: chance, feminizing effects of, 151, 164, 174; The Fruit of the Tree, 27, 150, 164–67, 169, 171– 72, 174–75, 180, 252n36; The House of Mirth, 150, 165–69; industrial accidents, treatment of, 148–51, 164– 66; industrial management, treatment of, 167, 170–74; and Milton’s Eve, 166–67; and risk, embrace of, 168–69, 174; and work safety reform, 173, 184 Wiebe, Robert, 88 Wilder, Billy, 215 Williams, Bernard, 34–37 Wingate, George, 81, 87–90 Witmore, Michael, 5 Woman in the Alcove, The (Green), 120– 23, 126–28 Work Accidents and the Law (Eastman), 151–57, 161, 175–83, 253n51 workers’ compensation, 3, 23, 64, 150, 152–53, 175–76, 178, 183, 206–7, 220, 227n1, 251n29, 254n55 World of Chance, The (Howells), 34 Wright, Elizur, 45–47, 51, 53–54, 59

“Upturned Face, The” (Crane), 96, 103 Vaudeville theater, 195 Venn, John, 111, 113, 230–31n39

Zelizer, Viviana, 233–34n21 Zimmerman, David, 230n28