Unsuspecting Souls Page 10
Slowly, very slowly, the dying abated. But a second wave of cholera hit the city less than twenty years later, in 1849. The population of New York City had by then doubled to five hundred thousand, and the number of dead rose substantially, to over five thousand. The dying had slowed not because the cholera was any less virulent, but because so many poor people had died that crowding had eased a bit.
Across the ocean, cholera hit London hard in 1854. More than Manhattan, London was an amazingly overcrowded city. In fact, within its ninety square miles or so, according to the census of 1851, lived 2.4 million people, making it the most populated city in the entire world. As Steven Johnson points out in his book The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, “All of those human lives crowded together had an inevitable repercussion: a surge in corpses.” He then cites the then-twenty-three-year-old Friedrich Engels, who surveyed the city for his father: The corpses [of the poor] have no better fate than the carcasses of animals. The pauper burial ground at St Bride’s is a piece of open marshland which has been used since Charles II’s day and there are heaps of bones all over the place. Every Wednesday the remains of dead paupers are thrown in to a hole which is 14 feet deep. A clergy-man gabbles through the burial service and then the grave is filled with loose soil. On the following Wednesday the ground is opened again and this goes on until it is completely full. The whole neighborhood is infected from the dreadful stench.
The stench: Not only did people have to contend with the dead, but they also believed that the smell of putrefying flesh, miasma, could make them seriously ill. That’s why municipalities eventually moved graveyards to the outskirts of town, like the burial ground in Islington, which had been designed for three thousand but during the cholera outbreak held an astonishing eighty thousand corpses. An Islington gravedigger, sounding straight out of Shakespeare, describes being “up to my knees in human flesh, jumping on the bodies, so as to cram them in the least possible space at the bottom of the graves, in which fresh bodies were afterwards placed.”4
The Ghost Map recounts the story of a London physician named John Snow, who finally made the connection between the bacterium Vibrio cholera and contaminated water, but not until 1854—not until, that is, tens of thousands of people had died of exposure to cholera. He made his discovery by plotting the outbreaks of cholera on a map of Soho and deducing that all the victims had drawn their water from the same public pump. By itself, that did not solve the mystery, but that a mother had tossed her infected baby’s diaper down the well did clinch the case for him. He would have made Sherlock Holmes proud, for at that point it all seemed so elementary.
Categories are like prison beds: Once you have one, it must be filled. The nineteenth century had a category not called simply death, but a degraded death, a death out of all proportion that requires gravediggers to stomp on corpses to make room for more decaying flesh. It is a death that disparages the poor as the cause of all of civilization’s ills and woes. In the nineteenth century, death, as a category, opened wide its huge maw and demanded more and more. And somehow the United States in particular willingly satisfied that voracious appetite.
Prisons can fill their beds most efficiently by creating more and more criminals. Filling the beds allows the public to see that everyone is doing his or her job, and thus making the average citizen feel safer. The category of death was so wide and so deep, it took a lot of dying to fill it. And America, as I’ve said, responded, as if it were just waiting for the right situation. If the world-famous magician and escape artist of the period, Harry Houdini, did not exist, the age would have created another, equally magnificent magician to entertain them. This is dangerous thinking, I know, to suggest that as a people, or as a nation, we could call into being a grand cause to satisfy such dying. It is dangerous to suggest that the age precipitated something like the Civil War because of its erasure of the deep meaning of death. But it almost seems that actually happened. I want to focus in this chapter on the Civil War, but first a peek beyond the war—just a few years—and then back to the war itself.
As the United States started to climb out of its Civil War, the country also began its slow and steady emergence as the world’s major superpower. The country moved westward, acquired new blocks of land, and annexed new territories. Ideas and policies that the United States articulated had a remarkable effect in shaping much of the world; people looked to America to find what was in the leading edge, say, of technology and commerce, and now, politics. By century’s end we would be at war in the Philippines. We had our eye on new shipping routes. We had to, for the great machinery of the Industrial Revolution hummed loudest in America. One startling result of the emergence of an America constantly on the make is that, in the twenty-first century, with only five percent of the world’s population, this country manages to consume an astonishing twenty-five percent of the world’s total resources.
Those numbers, so grossly out of proportion, reveal a particular attitude—one of absolute certitude if not downright arrogance. For a long time, what America argued politically and pulled off militarily carried enormous weight with a good deal of the world. For a very long time, much of the rest of the world read our policies as dicta, and took our acts as exempla. For roughly one hundred years, from the end of the Civil War to the end of the Vietnam War, America polished its reputation as the world’s key imperial power—in both ideas and actions. We have the capacity for backing up what we claim, with money and military might. In every significant way, America invented the idea of the world superpower, just as we helped to demonize a good portion of the East and Middle East.
It’s in this country, then, that we begin to see bold moves in the world of technology rolled out on a grand scale—early on with the railroad, and then with photography, cinema, industry, and in most dramatic fashion with warfare. America, in its wealth—in land and money and enterprise—meant change and progress. The technological revolution, to a great extent, occurred in this country. Although it took nearly a century, in the welter of that rapid change, both death and life assumed new meanings. Though not as noticeable at first as in other areas, technology exerted a tremendous effect in this country on those two very basic ideas—life and death.
It’s in America that we first hear those fierce debates on “pulling the plug” on a dying patient, on the one hand, and “aborting a fetus” on the other. (The 1925 Scopes trial may represent the first modern attempt at developing legal arguments for the beginning and end points of life, through trying to determine the nature of human essence.) And so in this chapter, I want to look at the radical change in attitude toward living and dying that coalesced in this country around the second greatest upheaval of the nineteenth century after the Industrial Revolution, the Civil War.
In the nineteenth century, artists and philosophers and scientists all began to raise the same basic question: Who is alive and who is dead, or where do we find that line that separates the living from the dead? The Civil War added to the blurring of the line: More than at any other time in the nation’s history, life felt and looked more like life-in-death. Ordinary citizens turned zombie-like, killing the enemy at point-blank range and then robbing the corpses for loot. And in 1861, when the war began, only the most foolhardy thought it would end any time soon. Moreover, unlike war today, say, in Iraq or Afghanistan—that is, killing in a remote part of the world that we periodically hear about—the Civil War raged on in the American backyard and, in ways that we would find hard to fathom, death’s long reach touched nearly every citizen.
In the most obvious way, the soldiers fighting that war came from households close by the battlefields where they suddenly found themselves holding rifles in their young hands. No man got “called up” and then left home for a period of training. Men—sons and husbands and fathers—lay down their hoes and plows on the farm one day, volunteered for military service, and the next morning woke up wearing boots and carry
ing a canteen and a rifle. They took up arms against folks from their very own country, but who happened to live on the wrong side of the Mason-Dixon line.
Aside from all the outright slaughter, the war also disrupted lives, interrupted marriages, and destroyed families. This war, a monstrous battle of state against state, was immediate; no one had to speechify about sacrificing for something abstract like “the war effort,” or “to make the world safe for democracy.” In its ability to devastate family and friend and neighbor, the war was close at hand. The president of the United States himself, Abraham Lincoln, instructed the nation that the stakes could not be higher: the continuation of the Republic, the integrity of an idea that had come to be called the United States.
Even if the battles did not take place on or near a family’s own farm, any person could look at the war up close in the most grainy detail—in large part on account of the various kinds of fledgling technologies that made for the reproduction of reality: ambrotypes (aptly derived from the Greek word ambrotos, “immortal”), tintypes, collotypes, daguerreotypes, amphitypes, melainotypes, ferrotypes, albumen prints, camera obscuras, and those silver prints so familiar to us today. The age of mechanization—in which the machine began to inform virtually every aspect of daily life—had even wormed its way into war, and immediately proved the axiom that any technological change destroys both time and space. For even though many of the battlefields were at some remove from the great majority of Americans, some folks still made their visits to search for loved ones. They also went to spectate. The morgue drew its crowds in Paris, and the battlefields in America drew their own visitors. People in the nineteenth century loved to spectate, especially at death.
Those with the means needed to travel no further than a local gallery to see the war up close in one kind of photographic reproduction or another. And thus, more than collapsing space—take a trip down the road and view the war on a gallery wall—the photograph more effectively destroyed notions of time. By freezing the events of the Civil War, people could gawk at a single moment of violence over and over again. Other technological advances would help shape the conduct of the war, by making killing an act of efficiency, but more than any of those other innovations or inventions, the photograph deeply affected the popular imagination and helped to shape popular opinion, not so much about the war but about death. Most of the Civil War photographs recorded the grim aftermath of one battle or another. In the imaginations of some, the war never ended, just as it had never begun—it just was. That new and startling invention, the photograph, made it so.
The father of what we now call photojournalism, and the man who made the Civil War most vivid in the minds of Americans—then and now—is Mathew Brady, principally a portrait photographer, who opened his first studio, in New York, in 1844, followed by others in Washington, D.C. At his major gallery in New York City, he brought home the most graphic evidence of the decimation of war to thousands upon thousands of viewers. Everyday citizens, sometimes far removed from the field of battle, came to stand and stare at scenes of monumental death up close, thanks to Brady and his assistants, who took their equipment out onto the field of battle and captured unfiltered and directly the grisly details of killing.
He chose for his first show several hundred photographs of the war’s most bloody battle, and titled it, appropriately and without embellishment, The Dead of Antietam. Mathew Brady opened the show in his Broadway gallery, in October 1862, knowing all too well the truth of things: War meant bloody and horrible death—plain and simple. With the Civil War in particular, the battlefield spilled over with an unimaginable and pervasive amount of the most gory and bloody images of death. People needed to bear witness to all that death; most of them wanted to see it. Like people fascinated with highway accidents, Americans liked to stare at death. They could not avert their eyes. They could not turn away from death.
Brady chose his subject deliberately, for the Battle of Antietam, which had been fought on September 17, 1862, already had, by October, when Brady opened his gallery show, the well-deserved reputation as the most gruesome, bloodiest single day of combat in all of American history. Twenty-three thousand men (and maybe as many horses and mules) lost their lives with even more soldiers suffering serious wounds on that one day, on the field of battle, in Washington County, Maryland. In the overwhelming enormity of its scope, Brady knew, the Battle of Antietam would do more than pique the curiosity of the average American. Antietam went far beyond the pull of any ordinary automobile accident. The sheer extent of the carnage fascinated people, making them realize that ordinary, virtually untrained human beings now had the power to eradicate tens of thousands of other human beings—in a confrontation that need last no more than a simple farmer’s workday: sunup to sundown.
Up to that point, the majority of Americans had heard only reports of the war; they had seen only paintings and drawings of various battles. Many, though not all, had followed the course of the war by reading the news. And just as the French went to the morgue, in the heart of Paris, to stare into death’s implacable face, so in this country scores upon scores of Americans managed to travel to the most well-known local battle sites to see the war for themselves. They were used to visiting death. Beginning in the 1830s America had undergone a remodeling of its cemeteries that contemporaries called “the cemetery movement.” At places like Mount Auburn in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Green-Wood in Brooklyn, traditional graveyards transformed into large parks, with trees, rolling mounds, and lakes filled with swans. From the 1830s on, photographers sold an enormous number of pictures of these parklike cemeteries, where visitors could come, picnic, and contemplate God. Americans knew their death.
And they knew it better once they visited Brady’s gallery (and other local galleries). When they arrived he offered them something shocking: a panoramic and detailed look at the real thing—or more exactly, a picture of the real thing. Americans, who might in other ways have little direct experience of the war, found themselves lingering in Brady’s gallery, and conversing with one another about that most fascinating and taboo of subjects, death itself. A New York Times reporter offered this eloquent description of Brady’s Antietam show:We recognize the battlefield as a reality, but it stands as a remote one. It is like a funeral next door. . . . It attracts your attention, but it does not enlist your sympathy. But it is very different when the hearse stops at your own door, and the corpse is carried out over your own threshold . . .
Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along [our] streets, he has done something very like it.5
So Brady gave the people death—but a kind of death they had never before experienced. The Civil War went beyond people’s usual experience of the random and sometimes sudden occurrences of death—what the period referred to as “ordinary death”—and allowed them to see the lethality of human beings visiting death on other human beings with colossally devastating results. They got a view of the Civil War as a re-prise of Armageddon—as the end of civilization. They witnessed death as something deliberate and calculated, as thoroughly planned and executed. Men literally held in their hands the lives of other men. And in the process, average Americans learned a simple and chilling truth about themselves: They were very good at both creating an enemy—in this case, other Americans—and perhaps even better at wiping that enemy off the face of the earth.
With so many dead in so many places, the idea of death lost a great deal of its menacing power. Photographs turned death into a fashionable subject, just like portraits and landscapes, for study and display. Even without the aid of photographs, however, a great many people in the nineteenth century saw this change in attitude toward death coming from a long ways off. And, as if the change over those years was heading toward one climactic event, the Civil War provided just that right historical moment. It brought together all the knotty issues in its great focusing of death and deva
station in the American imagination and psyche. But placing that four-year battle in the category of war does not do justice to such a stupefying amount of devastation. Americans bore witness not just to an ordinary war—if such a thing ever does exist. Beginning in 1861, the conduct of war underwent an escalation in kind, an escalation that brought the art of killing into a new kind of modernity. Such marked changes gave a different meaning and shape to death.
Hatred on the battlefield seemed to unleash in the business world a rush of entrepreneurial know-how to find the best ways to totally and completely eradicate the enemy. As in Europe and England, the machine came to dominate American life in hundreds of disparate and unexpected areas—just as the computer has come to dominate our lives today. Instead of acting as an agent to improve the quality of people’s day-to-day lives—such was the promise—technology now came to herald new efficiencies in killing. Civilization had turned topsy-turvy and seemingly evil. We had all fallen down Alice’s hole in the ground, into a surreal world of our own making.
The war became a surprisingly rich place where mechanical innovation transformed the chaos of killing into a kind of smooth-running, efficient operation. For the first time, the military started holding hands with industry. Of course, at this point in the country’s history, 1861, it is difficult to talk about something as specific and nefarious as the military-industrial complex. A much cozier relationship would certainly come to full flower later—but, nonetheless, one can see that partnership developing here.
Two mechanical innovations in particular helped turn the average, poorly trained soldier into an efficient and effective killing machine. The first involved a simple adaptation of machine tooling. Up until 1850, the military provided its soldiers with standard, smoothbore muskets. The soldier fired his musket and hoped to hit something with a ball that most often tracked through the air, for relatively short distances, in an erratic fashion. On top of inaccuracies, the smoothbore musket had a limited range of about one hundred yards. But with an innovation called rifling, which consisted of etching one continuous spiral groove inside the entire length of the barrel, soldiers could fire their muskets not just with remarkably more accuracy but at astonishingly greater distances—up to three hundred yards. Some military historians claim a one-thousand-yard range for those new rifles, the equivalent of ten football fields. But even if that claim falls short of the truth, the military historically has pursued a goal, through advances in technology, of continually increasing the range and firepower of its arsenal of weapons.