Deconstructing the American Sublime

Below is my review of The Brooklyn Bridge: A Cultural History by Richard Haw. I think the book is quite a remarkable achievement, and recommend it.

What I particularly like about Haw's work is its identification of the end the Grand Experiment of American democracy with the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. It is with the dedication of the bridge that the anti-democratic ethos of the plutocracy is made visible, where the early workings of the public relations state and the softer techniques of domination it employs is made manifest.

We hardly notice the extent to which we have been drafted into the discourse of the American technological sublime nowadays; that's why books such as Haw's are important. To see and understand the beginnings of the discourses of cultural domination, to experience them in their nascent, still rough-around-the-edges form, is to peek behind the curtain and see through the smoke and mirrors of the Bush administration's present construction of reality.

Like me, author Haw clearly admires cultural historian Alan Trachtenberg's work, citing Trachtenberg's Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol, as a seminal text of the "myth and symbol" school of U.S. historical discourse, holding it in even higher regard as such widely praised works as Leo Marx's Machine in the Garden. Based on Haw's recommendation and my own reading of Mr. Trachtenberg's other works, I plan to read Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol soon.

Deconstructing the American Sublime
For students of U.S. cultural history, Richard Haw's The Brooklyn Bridge: A Cultural History offers a complete, and engagingly written interpretation of the cultural meanings and materials inspired and evoked by this iconic American structure. Those who work in cultural studies would be wise to acquire this book, not only for Haw's superlative treatment of the bridge's cultural history, but because Mr. Haw also identifies and nimbly employs the discipline's key theoretical texts. His end notes are especially detailed and useful.

Mr. Haw seems to have read or viewed every cultural text that references the bridge and this extensive scholarship is laudable. At the same time, Mr. Haw, whose main theme is officialdom's exclusion of countervailing interpretations and histories of the bridge, should have given more thought to excluding some of the minor works he cites. True, there are works once thought to be minor whose reputations have waxed over time and vice versa. In addition, minor works can be employed to exemplify important insights, a strategy Mr. Haw uses very effectively, but a more rigorous selection of such minor works would have served to sharpen this history with little cost to it comprehensiveness. But this is a minor quibble.

As Mr. Haw's relates the official and non-official versions of the bridge's history and the meanings ascribed to it, he shows how official versions, such as the opening day speeches, present an idealized bridge freighted with high civic aspirations – democracy, social and economic justice, etc. -- but actually exclude the voice of the average citizen and worker, and not just from the speeches and images, but from the ceremonies, too. He notes, for instance, that the opening day ceremony on May 24, 1883 and during the subsequent 50th and centennial celebrations, it was only government and business elites who through speeches interpreted the bridge's meanings and walked its walkway during the ceremonies.

On opening day, for instance, the mostly Irish immigrant men who built the bridge were excluded from the ceremony. Earlier, they had protested the fact that the date coincided with Queen Victoria's birthday. When they asked for the event to be rescheduled, the organizers refused and called in extra police to quell a potential disturbance (which did not materialize). Contrast this with the opening of the Ead bridge across the Mississippi in St. Louis 10 years before, an occasion where workers, citizens and city officials all participated in a massive 15 mile parade across the bridge. In the 1983 ceremony, which I personally observed from a tightly policed East Side highway along with thousands of other average New Yorkers, the more well-heeled citizens, those who could afford a $500 ticket were enjoying back-stage access to New York's other movers and shakers, where they could drink complimentary cocktails well away from lesser mortals.

This points up another of Haw's observations: the exclusionary tactics of Brooklyn Bridge's opening day ceremony where the average citizen participates only as a distant spectator has been the ruling condition of such events ever since. As Haw points out, this is an era in American history where the conditions of mass industrialization and the concomitant exploitation of workers was rampant, where, in the years immediately following, "strike actions would sweep through Jay Gould's expansive railroad network, and troops would be dispatched to the streets of Cincinnati. In just two years, the Haymarket affair would divide the nation. At this time of national crisis, the men responsible for the bridge's opening manufactured an image that blurred the realities of life in America and sponsored a wholly conservative vision. At the day's speeches, amelioration was less the promise than the desired effect" (page 32). Mr. Haw suggests that opening day was perhaps the first public relations event, or citing Daniel Boorstin's construction, the first pseudo-event, the beginning of the society of the spectacle.

Mr. Haw's discussion of Walker Evans' Depression era photographs of the bridge offers an example of how most depictions of the bridge serve the official version of reality. This version makes reference to the soaring aspirations of the American people, suggests that only a free people could build such a marvelous structure, that it is in keeping with Americans' innovative and daring spirit that the world's first suspension bridge was built in America, etc. So, unlike the powerfully affecting Evans' photographs of destitute farm families in the 30s Dustbowl, when he photographed the bridge Evans captured the socially approved version empty of individuals, a modernist emblem of the "technological sublime" to which people need not apply, except perhaps as witnesses kept well off-stage.

Haw makes brief reference to the "New Criticism" as a parallel manifestation of the modernist sensibility which preferred aestheticized interpretations of texts and provided readings shorn of social context, sealed off from an examination the political and economic arrangements. Having been schooled, albeit sloppily, in the New Criticism, I can attest to the powerful attraction of the method as entrée to an intellectual priesthood. I am also aware that because the method mostly treats the surface of works that yields mostly surface insights. It was perhaps the most politically acceptable method for American intellectuals at mid-century, a time when to question the political orthodoxies of the Cold War was to invite blacklisting. And so we of the next generation were taught to look at the urn and its well-wroughtness, and not to wonder at the circumstances that supported or impeded its manufacture.

Until I read The Brooklyn Bridge, I was not aware of the place the bridge occupies in the firmament of America's civic religion. Mr. Haw convinced me of its importance as a sign of the plutocratic takeover of America political and economic system, the first "revolution of the bosses," a reprise of which we are experiencing today. Indeed Mr. Haw obliquely suggests that there are many parallels between the late 19th, late 20th and early 21st centuries, that the cynical coupling of exclusionary tactics and inclusionary rhetoric practiced on opening day continue to be employed now with an ever more cynical intent and to greater and more pernicious effect.