Germs, genes, and dissent: Representing radicalism as disease in American political cartooning, 1877--1919.

Abstract

This dissertation explores the visual language of anti-radicalism in American political cartoons between the 1870s and 1920s. Specifically, the dissertation engages the constitutive relationship between interpretations of dissent and changing understandings of disease in the articulation of modern American identity during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. From the late nineteenth century through the 1920s, in political cartoons, magazine illustrations, and textual description, the bodies of working-class radicals (anarchists, socialists, IWW) were characterized in terms of mental, physical and hereditary disease. This dissertation argues that images of radicals as foreign, filthy, and racially degenerate were productive of an embodied understanding of social order and national identity, articulated through an expansive language of health that was at once anxious and perfectionist. These pictures, drawn by such influential cartoonists as Thomas Nast, Joseph Keppler, Herbert Johnson, Ellison Hoover and Nelson Harding, emerged from and were constitutive of a common visual language for representing (dis)order in the body politic and the physical body. Based in detailed, contextualized readings of political cartoons, the dissertation argues that the visual discourse of radicalism as disease was integral to a modern American nationalism in which ideas of the mind, heredity and contagion were central. The first chapter of the dissertation examines the role of visuality in training a broad American public to see class conflict in terms of racial degeneration (1877--1894). Chapter Two analyzes the political, moral, and medical meanings of dirt and dirty bodies in visual articulations of moral, miasmic, sanitarian, and microbial explanatory frameworks. Chapter Three discusses the relationship between the new physiognomic sciences of criminality and insanity and the visualization of anarchism as racial atavism (1886--1894). Focusing on the assassination of President McKinley in 1901, Chapter Four examines debates about the role of contagion and heredity in the causes and cures of the disease of anarchism. Centering on the 1919--20 Red Scare, Chapter Five considers the symbol of the human cootie in anti-radical political cartooning in relation to shifting understandings of disease, dissent, and Americanism.