On the
elite, snooty, and deeply inspiring community of which Gardner was an integral
part.
As Richard
Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism
in American Life (1963) convincingly demonstrated, Americans have long
had some serious issues with our cultural elites. I don’t think those issues
necessarily go all the way back—Ralph Waldo Emerson sold
out his highly intellectual lectures—nor have they ever been an uncontested
trend, but there’s no question that to be considered a know-it-all in America
is generally not a good thing; note Willy Loman’s casual
dismissal of young Bernard as precisely such an egghead, compared to
Willy’s own football-playing Adonis-like sons Biff and Happy (the three men’s
respective fates reveal that Miller doesn’t share Willy’s disdain, of course).
And if you’re a know-it-all who also tends to prefer European culture to
American, and who has the money and ability to pursue that preference through
travel? Forget about it.
That’s an
over-simplified but not inaccurate description of the Boston Cosmopolitans, the
group of artistic and cultural elites—including Gardner as well as such figures
as Henry
Adams, Henry
and William James, Charles Eliot
Norton, Augustus
Saint Gaudens, and more—whose presence on both sides of the Atlantic
significantly influenced turn of the 20th century society. Like
Gardner, these figures came from prominent American families and only gained in
prominence in their own lives, used that prominence and its accompanying wealth
to travel extensively, developed strong affinities for and attachments to
Europe (Henry
James spent much of his adult life and set most of his novels there, for
example), and generally constructed international and, yes, cosmopolitan
identities. Each individual is worth his or her own attention and analysis—and
I’ll have more to say about Adams and Saint Gaudens in the next two posts—but
collectively, the Cosmopolitans certainly exemplified a new possibility for
transnational experience and identity, one that would seem to place them distinctly
outside of America even if we refuse to buy into anti-intellectualism or its
ilk.
Or did it?
In The
Boston Cosmopolitans: International Travel and American Arts and Letters (2008),
scholar and long-time mentor and
friend to this American Studier Mark Rennella seeks to reclaim the
Cosmopolitans, both from critiques of them as elitist or out of touch and from
the idea that they were not centrally and inspiringly American. In Rennella’s
argument, the key components to the Cosmopolitans’ lives, such as new modes of
travel and international connection, were central features of their era, and
their experiences can thus serve to illustrate the best possibilities for both
the American and world communities in that moment and beyond. Moreover, as
Rennella likewise notes, the Gardner Museum itself exemplifies the
Cosmopolitans’ lifelong and genuine desire to use those experiences to benefit
their native county and their fellow Americans—Gardner may have constructed her
Museum out of a Venetian palace and filled it with (mostly) European art and
culture, but she built it in the Fenway and hoped that it would become an
important part of the city and of America in the centuries to come. That’s the
heart of the Cosmopolitan project, Rennella and I would both argue, and it’s a
very American and powerful one.
Next
Gardner Museum link tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? What’s your take on this community or these questions?
9/12
Memory Day nominees: A tie
between two ground-breaking, boundary-pushing,
controversial
and inspiring
20th century cultural
icons, H.L. Mencken and Jesse Owens.
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