THE NINETIES This Chapter Deals with Other and More Cheerful Aspects of Life in America Just Before 1900. The Bicycle Built for Two. The Gibson Girl. Remington's Cowboys. Kemble's "Coons." Moody and Sankey. "The Ninety and Nine." The Four Hundred. The Klondike. The White City. The International Copyright Law, Which Gave a Lift to American Fiction. Owen Wister's "Virginian" and "Lin McLean." "Silas Lapham." "Wolfville.' 'Colonel Carter of Cartersville." Old Cap Collier, and Mr. Beadle's Entrancing Library. "Fables in Slang." Victor Herbert. "Brown October Ale." "Songs from Vagabondia." Kipling's Poems. "The Old Moulmein Pagoda." "Mr. Dooley." "Daisy Bell." "Sweet Rosie O'Grady." "Grandfather's Clock." "Gentleman Jim" Corbett. Li Hung Chang. "Casey at the Bat." "The Purple Cow." "Fin de Siècle." Richard Mansfield. "Cyrano de Bergerac." Julia Marlowe in Her Youth. Weber and Fields. The Pat and Mike Joke Gives Way to the Two Jews Joke. "The Old Homestead." "Uncle Tom's Cabin." "The Count of Monte Cristo." "Erminie." "Florodora." Sherlock Holmes. "Sag Harbor." And others, as they say, "too numerous to mention." We have been dealing with the political aspects of the nineties, picking out deliberately those conditions that caused the average American to be in a mood of resentment, to feel that he was, politically and economically, in the position of the little dog being mauled by the big dog. We have been dwelling on these because they were the conditions that gave rise to the politics and the humanitarian movements of the early part of the present century. It is true that in politics the nineties was a period of deep feeling, often angry feeling. There was truculence, or was talk of strife, actual strife. When Jacob S. Coxey found himself unable to approve some things being done in politics, the form of protest that occurred to him was military. "Coxey's Army," that started from northeastern Ohio to march to Washington and take control of the government in the interest of the people what Coxey1 thought was the people's interest one of the most colorful episodes of the nineties. Even civil war was talked. Governor Waite, of Colorado, having been quoted as saying, "I am prepared to ride in blood up to my bridles," the New York Sun, then at the height of its brilliance under Charles A. Dana, harped wittily on "Bloody Bridles Waite." Threats of arms and blood were characteristic of the political and class contentiousness of the early nineties. No such angry intensity of feeling accompanied any of the political conflicts that came after 1900. But politics, even under the hectic conditions of the nineties, had less bearing than many other aspects of existence on the average man's capacity and opportunity to get comfort, satisfaction, and fun out of life. There was plenty of enjoyment in the nineties, both highspirited and the quieter sort that went with a more leisurely way of life. That slower pace of living was just beginning to be disturbed and speeded up by new standards. Just as certain economic conditions of the nineties determined much that happened in politics after 1900, so did other conditions give birth to much that happened after 1900 in literature, the drama, entertainment, diversion, culture. 1 For those who want to read about it, there is a picture in Garet Garett's novel "The Driver." Coxey himself, in the year 1924, was engaged in the quite peaceful operation of a sand-quarry at Massillon, Ohio, and turning up at national political conventions, a most unobtrusive, rather shy man, who hung about the edges of the crowds, hoping to find some one who would listen to certain novel ideas he had about finance, and urge them upon the platform committees. PICTURESQUENESS OF NINETIES 185 Several writers, lured by the picturesqueness of the nineties, have tried to characterize them in a word, occasionally a word of color. Stuart P. Sherman used the "Yellow 90's," though there is nothing in his text to suggest why he saw aptness in that adjective. Possibly the reason lies in the especial familiarity of Mr. Sherman as a man of letters with an artistic and literary movement that started in Europe and was expressed partly by Aubrey Beardsley in the "Yellow Book." Henry L. Mencken was thinking of this movement when he spoke of the nineties as a period of intellectual war, essentially a revolt against academic authority, against the dull, hollow dignity of pedants, who continued to teach the Hawthornes and Emersons, and were anesthetic to the new literature coming to flower all around them." The characterization Mr. Mencken arrived at is the "Electric 90's." Richard Le Gallienne's phrase, the "Romantic 90's," fits some of the literature and other forms of art that prevailed and otherwise carries an implication of the mood of those who lived through the period, that mood of memory which usually thinks of the past as "golden." W. L. Whittlesey, of Princeton University, spoke of them as the "Moulting Nineties," a characterization that would be seriously inept if it referred only to appearance, but having aptness as an intellectual characterization, since it implies the emergence from old ways, the dropping of old standards, old ideas, old political allegiances, old concepts of human relations, old disciplines of religion and family life. "Moulting" suggests a lusty, youthful hospitality to the new which came crowding in every field: new ways of life, new standards in art, a new spirit in literature, new inventions in machinery, new styles in clothing, new con |