Political Culture and Male Mass-Party Formation in Late-Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico

The exceptional character of the United States' political culture has been and continues to be hotly contested. In the late nineteenth century, commentators framed radical ideologies as “un-American” and they subsequently entered the political lexicon as alien to American ideals and values. However, far less scholarly attention has been given to alternative definitions of “un-American” activity that emerged in the late nineteenth century. This article examines the charges made by contemporaries against the “un-American” town of Pullman and of George Pullman's patronage of his town and its workers. Through a close reading of Addams's critique of Pullman as “A Modern Lear” as well as other narratives and counternarratives contained within contemporary speeches, pamphlets, and newspaper and journal articles, this essay will demonstrate the flexible nature of the charge of “un-Americanism” in the crisis years of the 1890s. In that decade, the character of the modern nation was still highly contested and although the conservative, anti-union view won the immediate Pullman battle, it did not do so without a fight and it did not ultimately succeed in defining the character of the modern nation.

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1. Tramps, Fallen Women, and Neglected Children: Political Culture and the Urban Poor in the Late Nineteenth Century

Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children ◽

10.9783/9780812201451.11 ◽

2002 ◽

pp. 11-52

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Political Culture ◽

Urban Poor ◽

Late Nineteenth Century ◽

Fallen Women ◽

Late Nineteenth ◽

Neglected Children

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Chapter 3. Francisco Oller and Rafael Cordero: Art and Pedagogy in Late Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico

10.37862/aaeportal.00261.004 ◽

2014 ◽

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Puerto Rico ◽

Late Nineteenth Century ◽

Late Nineteenth

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Abolition, Race, and the Politics of Gratitude in Late Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico

Hispanic American Historical Review ◽

10.1215/00182168-2351656 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 93 (4) ◽

pp. 621-657 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Ileana M. Rodríguez-Silva

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Puerto Rico ◽

Social Order ◽

The Political ◽

Late Nineteenth Century ◽

The Us ◽

Late Nineteenth ◽

Political Project ◽

Southern City ◽

Imperial State

Abstract This essay investigates the political workings of gratitude in Puerto Rico in the postabolition decades in order to uncover how these practices of benevolence, which obscure the violence of everyday marginalization, became key in liberal political forms as a means of rearticulating white superiority and patriarchal authority. The article analyzes the practice of gratitude that liberal elites demanded from former slaves after emancipation as well as the appropriation of and challenges to such practices by laborers. The dynamics explored here appear in a set of performances in newspaper writings and street demonstrations commemorating abolition from the 1870s to the 1890s in the southern city of Ponce, Puerto Rico. The politics of gratitude refers to the dynamics through which many came to see abolition as an effort to modernize Puerto Rico, an endeavor for which everyone should be morally indebted to abolitionists and their successors. The politics of gratitude thus provided the ideological structures through which liberal reformists could preserve a racialized and patriarchal social order in the absence of slavery. In the process, liberals also constituted themselves as the only intermediaries between popular subjects and the imperial state. Moral indebtedness was one racialized means by which various constituencies sought to craft or accommodate (in the case of authorities) a more inclusive political project that did not contradict the basis of imperial rule—even though it did alter its foundation, if only momentarily, before the US takeover of the island in 1898.

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