Regional History

Dual and Dueling Histories: Constructions of Narragansett Past

Dany Chan

History is in a constant state of revision. An exemplary model of this phenomenon is the body of histories surrounding the Narragansett country. The histories began with the planters' children in the 1840s, with the writings of Caroline Hazard and Elisha Potter, and has continued into the present. Ernest Hamlin Baker contributed to this rewriting of history with his mural, The Activities of the Narrangansett Planters, and ultimately, our website can be regarded as yet another such revisioning.

The story of Baker's revisioning of this history begins with the evolution of the mural's title. In the contract with the Section of Fine Arts, Baker proposed the title The Activities of the Narragansett Planters, which suited the subject matter of the preliminary sketches. These sketches included various activities such as hunting, gaming, and drinking. But the final composition featured only the economic ones, so Baker offered the amended title of The Economic Activities of the Narragansett Planters.[1] However, the official plaque that hung in the post office from 1941 described the mural with the original title. Despite this restoration subsequent writers have included the word "economic" in their titles. This anecdotal story of the mural's title highlights the dynamics of historiography. The confusion surrounding the title may seem trivial, but it can be a factor in the mural's interpretation. The title is important because it could shape the viewers understanding of how economics help define "history." It furthermore serves as an example of the revisioning process of history.

One theme that has driven the historiography of South County since the nineteenth century is the self-proclaimed uniqueness of life in the early eighteenth century. The standard histories, as written by Hazard and Potter, portray the planters as living in opulence and possessing an independent character. Baker was well aware of these representations of the planters. He made three visits to Wakefield and its environs to obtain information from the Rhode Island Historical Society where he would have read works by Hazard, Potter, and Edward Channing. He also spoke with local historian William Davis Miller, whose contributing history was published in 1934. Although there were slight variations in their interpretations, these writings promoted the idea of Narragansett exceptionalism. Baker clearly endorsed this view in a letter to the Section: "they [the Narragansett planters] were lusty, free-thinkers, feasters, hunters and gamesters,---quite the 'Squire Western' of Fielding in type."[2]

Baker here agrees with the standard histories in presenting the planters as a people possessing a spirit that was unlike their "over-conscienced Colonial neighbors."[3] This lifestyle was made possible through an accumulation of wealth from a variety of economic activities that depended on the labor of slaves.  Both the standard histories and Baker's mural portray eighteenth-century Narragansett society as the "golden age" in terms of social order and material wealth.[4] Formally, the active surface of the canvas and such details as the delineation of musculature in the figures alludes to the vitality of that past. While the majority of the standard histories minimalizes the contribution of slave labor to the economy, Baker asserts in the mural that slave labor was crucial to Narragansett wealth.[5]

While highlighting the importance of slavery, the mural portrays the master-slave relationship as harmonious. Historian Robert K. Fitts contends that "an important part of this idealized past was a rigid and unchallenged social hierarchy. There was no room for conflict between masters and slaves."[6] Indeed, Baker emphasizes social hierarchy through physical positioning of master above slave. With one point of the master's finger, the slave obeys without contention. Such a relationship, although nowhere near the familial bond described in standard histories,[7] does reinforce the idealization of a perfect past when everyone knew their place.

It may seem counterintuitive to conduct comparisons between the mural and the standard histories. After all, Baker worked on the mural during the 1930s, whereas the seminal histories of South County had emerged by the 1880s. Furthermore, the former is pictorial and the latter are textual. However, closer examination of the sociopolitical and cultural trends of both time periods will reveal how such a comparison is not only plausible but illuminating. Both the writers of the 1880s and the artist of the 1930s were responding to analogous demands that had been placed upon them by their respective times. The two time periods shared much in terms of social, political, and cultural trends. We will focus on three areas of concern: an agrarian-based populist movement, scientific racism, and the definition of American citizenship.

Historian Jonathan Harris recognized a shared agrarian-based populist movement between the 1890s and 1930s:

It is significant that the New Deal's appeal for (and notion of) social reconstruction involved a restatement of some of the ideological elements of the populist movement of the 1890s [...] during which measures were proposed to regulate the economy, aid the farmer and develop natural resources in an integrated and rationalized manner.[8]

The proponents of New Deal populism reprised this movement through appeals to the working class, with special emphasis on rural America. Artistic manifestations of this national campaign appeared in popular regionalist art such as Baker's mural (See Racialized Bodies). Agricultural productivity stemmed not only from the rationalized distribution of natural resources but also from human hands, without which Narragansett wealth may not have been realized.

Scientific racism gained increasing power and popularity following the emancipation of slaves after the Civil War as many white Americans responded defensively to the presence of the new, "free" black community.[9] In order to retain the hierarchies of the pre-emancipation period the authority of natural science was mobilized to naturalize physical differences between bodies (between black and white bodies, and even among white bodies) as evidence for differences in moral character and intellectual acuity.[10] Channing writes, "it has been claimed that the progenitors of the Narragansett farmers were superior in birth and breeding to the other New England colonists, and that to this the aristocratic frame of Narragansett society is due."[11] Although Channing opposes this contemporary claim, he nonetheless alerts the reader to the fact that such concerns for genetic hierarchy circulated in the late-nineteenth century. Similarly, in the 1930s, the members of the same upper-class popularized scientific racism under the label of eugenics.[12] Its influence was seen in writings, product designs, and art. The eugenic bent of Baker's mural, therefore, points to the circulation of these racist ideas in the Depression years (See Eugenics and Streamlining).

The third area of concern shared by the powerful members of both time periods focused on how to define the citizen. Following the Civil War, the new nation dealt with reunification, industrialization, and immigration (of free blacks migrating to the North and of Europeans moving into the country). In other words, a new population of emancipated blacks and working-class whites now had to be incorporated into the body politic. During the Depression era, the government similarly focused on the re/definition of "the people" as citizens of the federal state. In both cases, the popular rhetoric appealed to "the Common Man" for cultural and economic reinvigoration.[13]

Middle class white American and African American writers and artists offered different responses to these changes in the social order. The writers of the late-eighteenth century adopted "Victorian sensibilities ... [as a means of escaping] the present and visit[ing] places where life was simple and pure."[14] These ideas greatly influenced the constructions of a romantic Narragansett past in the standard histories. In addition, emancipation introduced into old society new people (free blacks), who brought with them new history (their history of enslavement).[15] Sensing a breakdown in the established social order, the elites of Narragansett country actively recalled an idealized past to escape contemporary social threats on the one hand; and on the other hand, constructed racialized genetic barriers to prohibit full citizenship of the free black populace.

Baker's response to similar demands of defining national identity in the Depression era appears in his federally-commissioned mural. Federal Art Project (FAP) administrators asserted that "the strength and vitality of a national culture would be found in exactly the diversity of roles and identities [and histories] unified by a common bond of citizenship."[16] New Deal citizenship incorporated such bodies as the Common Man and the working class that were all aligned with productivity--New Deal citizens were productive workers (See Labor).[17] Could one see the reinforcement or perhaps a critque of "New Deal citizenship" in the representation of black and white figures in Baker's mural? The citizens of New Deal South County included both whites (those responsible for a history of slavery) and blacks (those possessing a history of enslavement). These "multiple and opposing histories [were] united under the same banner of the [New Deal] nation."[18] The unsettling union of these dual histories in the mural was at once a product of the social conflicts that troubled South County's citizens in the 1930s, and a challenge for contemporary Rhode Island citizens.

"Public space [such as a post office wall can be regarded] as a representational battleground."[19] Beginning in 1939, the separate yet shared histories of slave and master, black and white, dueled on the battleground of the Wakefield Post Office wall. When I began this examination, I had every intent on highlighting the combative potential of the dual histories constructed by local historians in the late 1800s and their re-envisioning in Baker's mural in the 1930s. However, both the textual histories and their pictorial illustration in the mural complement each other. Tension was to be found, instead, between the dueling histories of black and white citizens of South County. Having traversed the distance between the 1880s and the 1930s, these histories come to us now in 2005 still as potent and combative. 

Notes

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1. Ernest Hamlin Baker, in a letter to Forbes Watson of the Section of Painting & Sculpture, Treasury Department, Washington, D.C. (Dec.17, 1938).

2. Ernest Hamlin Baker, "Background of Subject Matter: Picturesque Life of the Famous Narragansett Planters 1700-1763."

3. Ernest Hamlin Baker, in a letter to Forbes Watson of the Section of Painting & Sculpture, Treasury Department, Washington, D.C. (Dec. 17, 1938).

4. Robert K. Fitts, Inventing New England's Slave Paradise: Master/Slave Relations in Eighteenth Century Narragansett, Rhode Island, Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1995, 20.

5. Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780-1860 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1998), 16.

6. Fitts, 53.

7. The "family" has been utilized as the rhetorical framework for inclusion and exclusion of slaves in the slave owners' lives: Melish, 27.

8. Jonathan Harris, Federal Art and National Culture: The Politics of Identity in New Deal America (New York; Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 21.

9. Melish, 2.

10. Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 8.

11. [Italics mine]. Edward Channing, The Narragansett Planters: A Study of Causes, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical & Political Science, 4th ser., no.3 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1886), 6.

12. For a comprehensive study of eugenics and its influences in the 1930s, see Christina Cogdell, Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

13. Savage, 19.

14. Fitts, 45.

15. Savage, 5.

16. Harris, 9.

17. Ibid.

18. Savage, 5.

19. Ibid.