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‘The Iroquois on the girders’: poetry, modernity, and the Indian ironworker

2013; Wiley; Volume: 55; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/criq.12048

1467-8705

Fiona Green,

Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

‘The building of cities – the shovel, the great derrick, the wall scaffold, the work of walls and ceilings’: these lines, adapted from Whitman's ‘Song for Occupations’, appear as an intertitle in the 1921 film Manhatta, Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler's ‘machine-like aggregate’ of the modern metropolis.1 In the sequence of demolition and construction scenes that follows, a mechanical steam shovel and crane swing in turn across the screen, dwarfing the manual labour of picks and hammers, until the sequence closes on the static pattern of a half-built skyscraper, the frail figures of two ironworkers perched in its immense geometry. In 1935 Sheeler reproduced that frame as a watercolour in which he brought out the sculptural form of the central scaffolding column, and which he modified also by giving it a title (Fig. 1). Sheeler called the painting Totems in Steel, and in doing so reframed machine-made component as tribal artefact. Under that heading, urban construction work went native. Charles Sheeler, Totems in Steel (1935), gouache on paper, Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester. By 1935 Sheeler had no doubt heard of the Mohawk construction workers who had begun in the late 1920s to move down from the Caughnawaga Reservation in Quebec to form the Mohawk colony in the North Gowanus neighbourhood of Brooklyn, and of the part they played in shaping the Manhattan skyline, from the Washington Bridge to the Empire State.2 The argument of this essay is that the imaginative association of Indian and skyscraper pre-dates this visible presence of the Iroquois in the labour force, and that it emerges in an unexpected match between the vertigo at the heart of urban modernity and the ephemerality ascribed to indigenous peoples since the mid nineteenth century. As successor to this figurative parallel, the Indian ironworker comes to stand at a dense intersection of competing concerns, with primitivism and modernity, with mass production and autonomous craft, with wildness and nationhood. From William Carlos Williams's brief downtown reminiscence of ‘Indians on chestnut branches’ to the fully fledged ‘Iroquois on the girders’ in a 1959 poem by Frank O'Hara, a special preserve of these fleeting energies is the provisional form of the American modernist poem. Insofar as native Americans did feature in the written and visual cultures of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes, they did not belong to the city. At the turn of the century, ‘playing Indian’ had formed part of Roosevelt's ‘out of doors gospel’ promising rejuvenation for an enervated urban populace. So too in the teens and twenties the New York poets, painters, and photographers associated with the Stieglitz circle sought an ‘authentic’ America in native objects and cultural practices distant in space and time from the metropolis.3 Mabel Dodge Luhan's artists' colony at Taos, New Mexico, drew painterly attention to the pueblo peoples of the southwest, while Edgar L. Hewett's revival of the Santa Fe Festival and the southwest Indian Fair were allied with Mary Austin's efforts to promote and thereby protect a ‘handicraft culture threatened by the machine age’.4 Marsden Hartley, one of several painters to follow O'Keeffe in making the pilgrimage to New Mexico, was typical in espousing the grounded localism of the pueblo Indian who ‘has for so long decorated his body with the hues of the earth that he has grown to be part of them’.5 Where the ‘poor Indian’, according to Paul Rosenfeld's 1922 review of Hartley, is devoted to the soil, the Yankee ‘has always ravished the earth […] he has wanted to get away from it, to rise “above” it’.6 The earthiness associated with the southwest, then, could not be more distant from what Waldo Frank calls ‘the spirit of the steel’, the corporate industrialism which he decries as ‘the true Puritanism of our day’.7 New York is a resplendent city. Its high white towers are arrows of will: its streets are the plowings of passionate desire. A lofty, arrogant, lustful city, beaten through by an iron rhythm. But the men and women who have made this city and whose place it is, are lowly, are driven, are drab. Their feet shuffle, their voices are shrill, their eyes do not shine. They are different indeed from their superb creation. Life that should electrify their bodies, quicken them with high movement and high desire is gone from them.8 New England New England is the condition of bedrooms whose electricity is brickish or made into T beams – They dangle them on wire cables to the tops of Woolworth buildings five and ten cents worth – There they have bolted them into place at masculine risk – One name stands out in the otherwise anonymous environment of Williams's poem. ‘Woolworth buildings’ on the inside are places of thrifty spending, of nickel and dime purchases, but the brand name also connotes a more substantial investment, that embodied in the Woolworth Building itself. The Woolworth Tower, completed in 1913, was by 1923 still the tallest skyscraper in New York. Sheeler and Strand's movie camera tilts down its flank in Manhatta, before looking out over the rooftops above which it looms. ‘I like to see a building that shows its construction’, engineer George Simpson is quoted as saying in a 1917 article on the Woolworth Building, and Williams obligingly exposes the inner workings of his construction here, so that you can't tell whether electricity, bodily energies, or nickels and dimes, are being spent in it, or on it.11 Frank Woolworth conceived of his tower, ‘bathed in electric light’, as a giant signboard, with Cass Gilbert's design for the ‘Cathedral of Commerce’, as it came to be known, combining the modernity of its steel frame with references to earlier forms of artisanal labour in the Beaux-Arts stone façade.12 ‘The Woolworth Tower looms up, at right angles to antiquity,’ writes J. B. in the 1917 essay,13 and even though Williams's poem looks ‘to the tops of Woolworth buildings’, rather than the Woolworth Building, in writing that brand name into his poem he likewise sparks connections between ancient craft and modern commerce, and thinks about the new kinds of display in which skyscrapers such as this one competed. F. W. Woolworth had built his fortune by turning pedestrians into consumers, siting stores and designing window displays to catch the eye of the potential buyer. Since the turn of the century, the building of skyscrapers had offered its own attraction for sidewalk crowds, as reported in the much-cited article ‘Cowboys of the Skies’ in Everybody's Magazine (1908): ‘high up in the red and black steel frame of a rising skyscraper the riveters are putting on the best open-air show in town’.14 During the post-war building boom and into the 1930s, construction work served as a kind of urban theatre, and provided opportunities for publicity shots such as those commissioned by Woolworth, and later, Lewis Hine's photographs of men at work on the Empire State.15 If, as Waldo Frank feared, the citizens of New York were ‘different indeed from their superb creation’, destined always to shuffle below the superstructure of their desires, here, in the performance of the sky boys, was something to look up to, a riveting spectacle that might once again ‘quicken them with high movement’. Williams's precarious poem hints at another type of urban theatrics too, the vogue in the early twenties for human flies, itinerant climbers of public buildings whose daring feats attracted huge audiences. Some of these carnivalesque performers, heralded by business managers, were in the pay of advertising campaigns. The most notorious of these publicity stunts was for the Harold Lloyd film Safety Last, whose producers hired a human fly to scale the Martinique Hotel. It's an unhappy irony of that film's title that Harry Young, with ‘Safety Last’ emblazoned on his back, fell to his death promoting the movie.16 Young's death in March 1923 made headline news, so Williams's poem of June 1923 – which, like Safety Last, features a lead character known as ‘the boy’ – might have arisen from and would certainly have generated speculation about the corporate interests in whose name such entertainers risk their necks.17 As well as glancing at these sidewalk attractions, Williams's poem gives particular form to a more generalised sense of vertigo that characterised the booming economy of post-war New York. The rapidly changing Manhattan skyline was understood as ‘an outgrowth of American conditions’, as engineer George Simpson put it, its skyscrapers a specific response to urban congestion and to fluctuations in the value of real estate, with each monumental structure merely ‘a short-lived proposition’, just as likely to be torn down and replaced as it had been quick to put up.18 The dangling components in the first half of Williams's poem make it a similarly precarious project, as though to strike that ‘expensively provisional’ note that had troubled Henry James in turn-of-the-century New York, and which persisted: as Rem Koolhaas puts it, ‘the Skyscraper is the great metropolitan destabilizer: it promises perpetual programmatic instability’.19 Or a boy with a rose under the lintel of his cap standing to have his picture taken on the butt of a girder with the city a mile down – Captured, lonely cock atop iron girders wears rosepetal smile reminiscent of Indians on chestnut branches to end ‘walking on the air’ That fleeting reminiscence ‘of Indians/ on chestnut branches’ revives the nostalgia for a vanishing race that's been familiar in American primitivist discourse since the mid nineteenth century, and which resurfaces especially in the 1920s. Waldo Frank's writing on native cultures, for example, is saturated with elegiac feeling: ‘the Indian is dying and is doomed. There can be no question of this. There need be no sentimentality’, he writes,20 courting sentiment even as he eschews it; likewise for Marsden Hartley, the tribal dances of the Taos Indians seem ‘the gesture of a slowly but surely passing race’.21 Williams roots out native origins elsewhere too, most obviously in In the American Grain's celebration of Daniel Boone, who ‘saw the truth of the Red Man,’ and of the Jesuit Père Sebastian Rasles, in whom, says Williams, ‘one feels the indian emerging from within the pod of his isolation from Eastern understanding’.22 The ‘dash of Indian blood’ that goes into the making of the benighted girl in ‘To Elsie’ is a more ambiguous source, of desolation but also of the truth that her body continues to tell.23 Compared with the fertile critical field that surrounds those works, relatively little attention has been paid to ‘New England’, perhaps because it seems a less weighty text. 24 Yet it is precisely the structural infirmity of this poem that carries its thought: in the retitled ‘Down-Town’ Williams revised ‘wears rosepetal/ smile reminiscent of Indians’ to ‘wears rosepetal/ smile – a thought of Indians’, which makes the connection – now a mere dash – between the modern city and the native American more slender still. Curiously, it is the very slightness of that gesture (‘– a thought of’) that captures the most enduring myth of the red man: the Indian was for anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan ‘as fleeting as the deer and the wild fowl’,25 essentially itinerant, and forever on the brink of departure. His perpetual ‘evanescence’ has underwritten his staying power in the collective imagination ever since.26 Marsden Hartley laments the departure of another itinerant tribe in ‘The Twilight of the Acrobat’, when he asks what has become of the ‘wandering minstrel’, the street performer who finds no substitute in the mass entertainments of the variety show or music hall. ‘We cannot find [the acrobat] on the street in the shade of a stately chestnut tree,’ laments Hartley,27 and perhaps Williams's ‘Indians on chestnut branches’ bring a glimpse of that nomadic performer back into view, his poem's wire cables and T beams, along with the ‘walking on the air’ of its finale standing in for what Hartley calls ‘all those charming geometrics of the trapeze, the bar, and the wire’.28 Williams's ‘lonely cock atop iron girders’, fitted out as part steeplejack and part weathervane is certainly putting on a one-man show of some kind. As he poses ‘to have his picture taken’, it is worth asking what kind of photograph would capture him, anonymous yet full of personality, of one substance with his surroundings (there is a ‘lintel’ to his cap) yet also a decorative addition to them (why would a construction worker come with ‘a rose'?). The portrait is too much a close-up to replicate Manhatta's vertiginous stills, nor yet is its subject quite the kind of urban figure favoured by Stieglitz's ‘straight’ photography, in which, claims Hartley, ‘a series of types […] lend themselves for the use of the machine’.29 Williams's boy is more cocky than that, and too self-possessed also to have lent himself to a publicity shot in Woolworth's PR campaign. A boy ‘standing/ to have his picture taken’, then, stands within hailing distance of social document, popular entertainment, and large-scale corporate enterprise. Yet to be captured as photographic type, he treads the thin line at the end of Williams's poem – itself suspended, girder-like, in quotation marks – so that what we find in that bottom line is not so much a grounded alternative to the vertigo produced by corporate capital, as an answering paradox of permanence and ephemerality, centred in the Indian and suspended in the fragile rigging of poetic form. Lewis Henry Morgan, the first anthropologist to conduct a detailed investigation of ‘that gifted race which formerly held under their jurisdiction the fairest portions of our Republic’, wrote that ‘the Iroquois will soon be lost as a people, in that night of impenetrable darkness in which so many Indian races have been enshrouded’.30 This is the inevitable consequence of contact, he maintains: the indigenous races ‘are destined to fade away, until they become eradicated’.31 The inheritors of this thinking, whereby the extinction of native peoples is naturalised as the inevitable – if lamentable – course of history, include Waldo Frank, for whom the Indian is ‘blotted out before the iron march of the Caucasian’.32 Though this casting of progress traces a rhetorical route much travelled since the coming of the railroad, iron has more than just a figurative place in Frank's narrative. According to this account, metalwork, or the lack of it, has been directly responsible for the Indians' passing: ‘everywhere, he had one fatal weakness: he knew not iron’.33 Yet this very failing seems also a saving grace, in that if he is to remain intact, the red man must be left behind, rather than submit to a more insidious threat, as Hartley describes it: ‘[the Indian] is already in process of disappearance from our midst, with the attempts toward assimilation’.34 Walter Benn Michaels has traced the ways in which early twentieth-century writers and ethnographers thought of assimilation as a modern ill as devastating to native Americans as the flu, with the efforts of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to ‘civilise’ and ‘educate’ tribal peoples to be resisted as vigorously as legislative measures depriving them of land.35 the men you see clambering up the columns and walking along the beams that form the skeletons of the tall buildings […] belong to a union called The International Association of Bridge, Structural, and Ornamental Ironworkers. The columns and beams are steel, but the men are called ironworkers. They are not called steelworkers. Steelworking is another trade altogether.36 Whereas the anonymous ‘They’ of Williams's ‘New England’ seem as loosely joined up as the industrial components they have yet to assemble, Reiss's drawing imagines, and looks like the product of a more integrated kind of craft (Fig. 2). This picture has the flattened stylisation that Reiss learned at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts under the tutorship of Franz von Stuck and the Jugendstil, the German decorative arts movement.39 Drawing on that influence, Steel Workers resembles a block print, perhaps even a stained-glass window. How like a Christ figure the burdened worker in the top left corner looks, while the groups of three in the lower panes, along with the cross dividing the picture plane into four, lend themselves to the iconography of the crucifixion. These workers seem to have produced the lines that they tread and which organise their space, yet the mallet and nail one of them wields would be more suited to joinery than to ironwork. In fabricating these relationships between forms of representation (verse or drawing), and the acts of making they depict, Williams and Reiss make different things of high steel construction work. Yet in their different ways both artists prepare a place, as it were, for the Iroquois ironworker before he becomes a publicly recognised figure, Reiss by assimilating industrial production to pre-industrial craft, and Williams by bringing out the curious impermanence of steel frame buildings, and matching it with that fleeting reminiscence of ‘Indians on chestnut branches’. Winold Reiss, Steel Workers (c.1920), drawing: gouache or tempera. Library of Congress, Winold Reiss Collection, LC-USZC4-5691. Title devised by library staff. Another and a prominent cause of the decline of the Iroquois, was the large numbers induced, at various times, to emigrate to the banks of the St. Lawrence, under the influence of the Jesuit missionaries […] Their descendants now reside upon the St. Regis reservation, in the county of St. Lawrence.40 The paradox, central to the whole situation of the Iroquois in New York State, of a race of skilled machinists and workers in iron and steel, who earn their livings in ways that are removed by millennia from primitive handicrafts yet who belong to a cultural tradition that immeasurably antedates these and who desire to lead a life which has little in common with that of the contrivers of the processes they serve, produces a strange impression, and is likely to be quite unimaginable to their white neighbours who have never looked into it.42 The government sat lightly upon the people, who, in effect, were governed very little. It secured to each that individual independence, which the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee knew how to prize as well as the Saxon race; and which, amid all their political changes, they have continued to preserve.47 Several foremen who have had years of experience with Caughnawagas believe that they roam because they can't help doing so, it is a passion and that their search for overtime is only an excuse […] ‘the news will come over the grapevine about some big new job opening up somewhere; it might be a thousand miles away. That kind of news always causes a lot of talk, what we call water-bucket talk, but the Indians don't talk; they know what's in each other's mind. For a couple of days they're tensed up and edgy. They look a little wild in the eyes. They've heard the call. Then, all of a sudden, they turn in their tools, and they're gone’ […] George C. Lane, manager of erections in the New York district for the Bethlehem Steel Company, once said that the movements of a Caughnawaga gang are as impossible to foresee as the movements of a flock of sparrows.50 As the work progressed, it became apparent to all concerned that these Indians were very odd in that they did not have any fear of heights. If not watched, they would climb up into the spans and walk around up there as cool and collected as the toughest of our riveters, most of whom at that period were old sailing ship men especially picked for their experience in working aloft. These Indians were as agile as goats. They would walk a narrow beam high up in the air with nothing below them but the river, which is rough there and ugly to look down on, and it wouldn't mean any more to them than walking on the solid ground.53 Edmund Wilson's Apologies to the Iroquois originated in his discovery that the New England house which had been in his family since the eighteenth century lay at the northern boundary of an Iroquois land claim, a settlement which had at its nucleus a group of Mohawk steel workers from Brooklyn.57 Wilson's larger interest was in the resurgent nationalism he had witnessed among the Iroquois, a movement, in his view, ‘not unlike Scottish nationalism or even the “ingathering” of modern Israel’.58 He attributes the Indian activism of 1958 in part to ‘the world-wide reaction on the part of the non-white races against the meddling and encroachments of the whites […] [The Iroquois nationalists] also know that India has freed herself, that Ghana is now a free state, and that the Algerians are struggling to become one’.59 Another New Yorker to glimpse these worldwide stirrings from downtown Manhattan was Frank O'Hara. In 1959, in ‘The Day Lady Died’, O'Hara has a moment to wonder ‘what the poets/ in Ghana are doing these days’, and in his ‘Adieu to Norman’ to quip that ‘de Gaulle continues to be Algerian’.60 ‘The gaited Iroquois on the girders’ in ‘Naphtha’, a poem of the same year, are more encoded figures of nationhood.61 This is not the only time O'Hara takes a longing look at construction workers (‘if/ I ever get to be a construction worker/ I'd like to have a silver hat please’, he writes in ‘Personal Poem’,62) but the Iroquois in ‘Naphtha’ have a more complex legibility. In this poem O'Hara casts a backward glance over the orders of high modernism, and across to the Parisian avant-garde that so often displaces Manhattan as his source of reverie.63 The Mohawk construction worker prompts O'Hara to stay in his own moment too, to dwell on the power of American art at mid century, and, I want to suggest, on the harnessing of savagery in the service of Cold War nationalism. Ah Jean Dubuffet when you think of him doing his military service in the Eiffel Tower as a meteorologist in 1922 you know how wonderful the 20th Century can be and the gaited Iroquois on the girders fierce and unflinching-footed nude as they should be slightly empty like a Sonia Delaunay there is a parable of speed somewhere behind the Indians' eyes they invented the century with their horses and their fragile backs which are dark Indolence, negligence, precipitate haste, these are the virtues, the outer guiding logic that Dubuffet in general imposes on his paintings of the ‘Beaten Pigments’ type. Practicing the processes of the work of art backwards involves the constant risk of catastrophe. Dubuffet thus paints in an impression of vertigo.67 we owe a debt to the Iroquois and to Duke Ellington for playing in the buildings when they are built we don't do much ourselves but fuck and think of the haunting Métro and the one who didn't show up there while we were waiting to become part of our century in the spring of 1943, [Dubuffet] painted a few canvases on the subject of the Métro, the Paris subway, one of the themes that were to remain dear to him. Then he came to Jazz, to which he was to return in 1945. These are groups with very elongated bodies, provided with saxophones. Jean Dubuffet was very fond of Jazz, at the time. He had always played the piano, since his childhood, but he became a Duke Ellington fan and could listen to him for days on end. After having ‘rediscovered the child,’ he ‘went Negro.’68 and Jean Dubuffet painting his cows ‘with a likeness burst in the memory’ apart from love (don't say it) I am ashamed of my century for being so entertaining but I have to smile. At a recorded reading in 1964, O'Hara said ‘the next poem is called Naphtha. I don't know why, that has no significance whatsoever. It's just a word I always liked.’75 It would be a mistake, probably, to take his word for that. Naphtha is the lightest of hydrocarbons, a form of liquid petroleum with applications from lighter fuel to oil paint to napalm. O'Hara no doubt liked it for its volatility, but perhaps also for its association with mothballs. Naphtha changes unpredictably from one state to another, it is perilously unfixed, but it's also kind of stuffy, with the reek of old things about it. In this way ‘Naphtha’, unstable compound or volatile poem, preserves the paradox of the Mohawk ironworker – ‘the most footloose Indians in North America’, as Mitchell called them,76 yet also, answers O'Hara, ‘fierce and unflinching footed’ – in the national myth of their everlasting evanescence. The building of the skyscraper The steel worker on the girder Learned not to look down, and does his work And there are words we have learned Not to look at Not to look for substance Below them. But we are on the verge Of vertigo.77 We look back Three hundred years and see bare land. And suffer vertigo. I am grateful to David Trotter, Sarah Meer, and Lloyd Pratt for their comments on earlier versions of this article.