Romney
by Owen Wister, edited by James A. Butler
I had found in Charleston, and wherever I had gone in the South, many more people, whether urban or rustic, who were the sort of people I was, with feelings and thoughts and general philosophy and humor and faith and attitudes toward life like my own: Americans; with whom I felt just as direct a national kinship as I felt with the Western cow-punchers, and which I feel less and less in places like New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, that are affected by too many people of differing traditions. So I wrote Lady Baltimore, not as a tragedy but as a comedy: calling Charleston Kings Port, owing to the suggestion made by Henry James that I invent some slight disguise for the real name; it would help me to move more freely. (Roosevelt, 247)
Anyone who recoils from Wister's attitudes toward immigrants of "differing traditions" (or, for that matter, from his later serving as vice-president of the Immigration Restriction League or writing the essay "Shall We Let the Cookoos Crowd Us From Our Nest")15 would be repelled by the racial attitudes of Wister's narrator Augustus in Lady Baltimore. Such viewpoints, and others, provoked Theodore Roosevelt to send, immediately after publication of the book in 1906, a five-thousand-word letter of protest to the author. To his credit, Wister prefaced Lady Baltimore in his Collected Works (1928) by printing Roosevelt's reproving letter in full and revising some of the most painful passages in the novel. In particular, Wister came to accept the objections that Roosevelt had outlined in the postscript to his 1906 letter. For Roosevelt, Lady Baltimore in its comparison of North and South presents a partial and thus inaccurate picture, especially in its depiction of those Northerners with "new money" as crass, immoral, and essentially irredeemable. In such getting of "the picture completely out of perspective," continued the President, Lady Baltimore resembles the anonymously published and acidic novel Democracy. (Roosevelt apparently did not know-but Wister was fairly certain-that historian Henry Adams authored Democracy.)16 Hence, Wister's work "hinders instead of helping the effort to secure something like a moral regeneration." True, writes Roosevelt, "there is very much which needs merciless attack both in our politics and in our industrial and social life." But he concludes with words that must have badly stung Wister coming from his hero and friend, the President, writing to him on official White House stationery: Lady Baltimore makes one feel "that there is no use of trying to reform anything because everything is so rotten that the whole social structure should either be let alone or destroyed" (Roosevelt, 247-57).
The charge that Lady Baltimore hindered the reform movement would have particularly dismayed Wister, because the author thought of himself as "Progressive" in politics. Wister once went to Capitol Hill to shake the hand of Progressive leader Robert ("Fightin' Bob") La Follette, telling the Wisconsin senator that even though Wister was from corrupt Philadelphia that he, too, "was a Progressive" (Roosevelt, 299). Wister's mentor Theodore Roosevelt, of course, also came to be identified with the general spirit of reform associated with Progressivism. But that movement was ill-defined, and its umbrella covered a varied group, mostly Protestant and financially secure, who shared a distress at what they saw as the loss of values in an America increasingly industrial and urban. The general principles of Progressivism were commendable but vague: citizens should be active and well-informed; politics, especially urban politics, should be less corrupt; both big labor and big business should be reined in; a strong government should serve as a benevolent, perhaps paternalistic, improver of social conditions. From the smorgasbord of specialized and sometimes conflicting goals held by the many stripes of Progressives, Wister would have found the following ones particularly appealing: universal use of the secret ballot; direct primary election rather than selec-tion of candidates by political bosses; restriction of immigration and "Americanization" of those already here; emphasis upon a meritocracy of talent rather than on a leveling equality. Education historian Lawrence A. Cremin has written that "Progressivism implied the radical faith that culture could be democratized without being vulgarized."17 That faithor, better, that hope-pervades Wister's Romney.
Roosevelt's stinging criticism of Lady Baltimore determined many of Wister's actions between the publication of that novel in 1906 and the beginning of Romney in 1912. "Roosevelt rose in my mind like an accusing shape," Wister wrote; the President "thought little of the citizen who talked and talked and found fault in his comfortable arm chair, while others got into thefight" (Roosevelt, 266). So Wister did get into the Progressive fight, writing in 1907 a long article ("The Keystone Crime," see Appendix ii) castigating the graft involved in building Pennsyl-vania's state capitol and expressing his hopes for reform. In order to keep the Progressive agenda before the public, Wister agreed to run in 1908 for Philadelphia's Select Council on the ticket of the reformist City Party; he lost to the Republican Party machine candidate by a vote of 3,458 to 646. In April 1912 he introduced Roosevelt, then campaigning for a third term as president, at a Philadelphia campaign rally, shouting to the audience in the unamplified hall that the "battle is against the secret inner circle of privilege that would defraud these American people and turn the very Constitution that they made into a weapon for their destruction" (quoted in Payne, 279). And when Wister once again came to write fiction about the social structure of the North, in Romney between 1912 and 1915, he planned a work very different from Lady Baltimore in presenting his hopes for reform.
After publication of Lady Baltimore in 1906 and of his biography The Seven Ages of Washington late in 1907, Wister next intended to write a collection of short stories and a novel.18 But there were distractions: his unsuccessful campaign for a Philadelphia Select Council seat, his mother's death, his relocating of the family to Butler Place, the ancestral home that he then inherited. In addition, the nervous ailments and depression that had struck Wister in the 1880s recurred, leading to trips to California, Virginia, and Wyoming in search of renewed health. Despite his illness, the planned short-story collection (Members of the Family: More Stories of the Virginian) appeared in April 1911. Wister's thoughts then turned to his new novel, already about two years past Macmillan's suggested due date for the next full-length work of fiction from its phenomenally popular author.19 There were false starts as Wister tried to find his subject, but the process that would eventually produce Romney was now under way.
On 19 September 1911, at the J. Y. Ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Wister drafted a prospectus for a "short novel" to be called "The Star Gazers" (see Appendix i). That outline did not become the story of Romney; instead "The Star Gazers," if written, would have been the story of a female astrologer who begins in cynicism but gradually comes to believe in her own powers, and of two couples who switch partners. Even though "The Star Gazers" never advanced beyond its prospectus, Wister nevertheless had made crucial decisions that affected the next novel he did write. "Augustus-the same person who had narrated Lady Baltimore" would have recounted the events of "The Star Gazers," set in a "large place like New York, Boston, or Philadelphia." When Wister abandoned "The Star Gazers" for Romney, he kept Augustus as storyteller and a major eastern city as setting.
Several reviewers of Lady Baltimore commented on the influence of Henry James on the plot and especially on the character of Augustus.20 Those comments were apt. The old-money, aris-tocratic, gentlemanly Augustus-twenty-eight in Lady Baltimore, forty in Romney, and unmarried in both-is so similar to James that Macmillan editor George Brett cautioned Wister about "some phrases which sound like Henry James."21 After reading sections of Lady Baltimore aloud to James, Wister tried out on him Brett's criticism: "Look here, while I was reading my stuff aloud, Augustus sounded remarkably like you. That'll never do." James countered with a typically Olympian (and Jamesian) remark: "Well, my dear Owen, may I in all audacity and sincerity ask, what could Augustus better sound like?"22
15. The American Magazine 91 (March 1921), 47.
16. Wister said Roosevelt disapproved of Democracy because "he disliked pessimistic generalizations" (see Roosevelt, 257, 150-51). A text of Democracy (originally published in 1880 and reprinted more than a dozen times in the next four decades) is conveniently available in The Library of America edition of Henry Adams's Novels, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, and The Education of Henry Adams (1983); see 1217 for Adams's secret authorship of the book.
17. The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), ix. Wister's wife, Mary, served on the Philadelphia Board of Education.
18. Owen Wister to M. A. De Wolfe Howe, 20 and 29 August, as quoted in Payne, 253.
19. Owen Wister to M. A. De Wolfe Howe, 29 January 1913, which indicates that the novel is, as of that 1913 date, four years overdue. This manuscript is referred to by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University: bMS Am 1524 (1724).
20. See, in particular, "Some New Novels of the Spring: Owen Wister's Story," New York Times Book Review, 21 April 1906, 254; review of Lady Baltimore, Public Opinion 40 (5 May 1906), 572-73; Edward Clark Marsh, "Owen Wister's Lady Baltimore," Bookman, 23 May 1906, 296-97; "Summer Reading," New York Times Book Review, 16 June 1906, 383.
21. Owen Wister to his mother, Sarah Wister, 21 January 1905 (OWP), quoted in Julius Mason, "Owen Wister: Champion of Old Charleston," Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 29:3 (1972), 168.
22. Owen Wister, "Preface" to Lady Baltimore (New York: Macmillan, 1928), ix.
© 2001 The Penn State University