Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Because the industrial barons of the Gilded Age were frequently so unabashed about exhibiting their wealth and leisure – in the mansions of Fifth Avenue, the tableaux vivants of Newport, the gossip of the society page – we might do well to remember that even those venues sometimes witnessed a different kind of class display. In fact, Stephen Crane witnessed one such rival event in 1892, while working as a stringer for the New York Herald Tribune in Asbury Park, New Jersey. There – as recounted in a squib entitled “Parades and Entertainments” – Crane watched a parade of the local Junior Order of United American Mechanics, marching on a boardwalk normally reserved, he wrote, for “lace parasols,” “summer gowns,” and “tennis trousers.” From a slightly bemused and unstable vantage point, Crane's voice wavered between the miffed cadences of the society page itself and a satiric bite worthy of Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). He began by describing the “most awkward, ungainly, and uncarved procession” that his home resort city had ever seen – but then quickly reversed himself into a rhetoric that echoed the producer ethos of the artisans themselves. After all, Crane suddenly intoned, Asbury Park society “creates nothing. It does not make; it merely amuses.” “The bona fide Asbury Parker,” the article went on to say, “is a man to whom a dollar, when held close to his ... log in or subscribe to read full text