Nathanael West's Indian commodities. - Free Online Library (2024)

If the imaginary Indian, from the moment of the nation's founding, served as a flexible figure through which to work out questions of "American" identity, Indianness came to serve in the early twentieth century as a category through which Americans could also define what it meant to be modern. American modernism had nativist and nationalist inflections; American moderns demonstrated their commitment to a national artistic culture through their "Indianness," which was cast as fundamentally opposed to Jewishness. This discussion seeks to address Jewish American literary response to this nativist modernism through a discussion of Nathanael West, whose ambivalent relationship with both Jewishness and aesthetic modernism continues to preoccupy and vex his critics. This essay reads West's preoccupations with Indians, Jews, and the marketplace through the unfixable Jewishness dramatized in his 1934 novel A Cool Million, whose modernist parody of racial and ethnic typologies succeeds in thoroughly undermining them.

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 Way out West in the wild and woolly prairie land, Lived a cowboy by the name of Levi, He loved a blue blood Indian maiden, And came to serenade her like a "tough guy." Big Chief "Cruller Legs" was the maiden's father And he tried to keep Levi away, But Levi didn't care, for ev'ry ev'ning With his Broncho Buster, Giddyap! Giddyap! He'd come around and say: Chorus: Tough guy Levi, that's my name, I'm a yiddish cowboy. I don't care for Tomahawks or Cheyenne Indians, oi, oi, I'm a real live "Diamond Dick" that shoots 'em till they die, I'll marry squaw or start a war, for I'm a fighting guy. Levi said that he'd make the maiden marry him And that he was sending for a Rabbi, The maiden went and told her father, He must not fight because she liked the "tough guy," "Cruller Legs" gave the "Pipe of Peace" to Levi But Levi said I guess that you forget, For I'm the kid that smokes Turkish Tobacco, Get the Broncho Buster, Giddyap! Giddyap! Go buy cigarettes. --1907 Tin Pan Alley song (1)

If the imaginary Indian, from the moment of the nation's founding, served as a flexible figure through which to work out questions of "American" identity, Indianness came to serve in the early twentieth century as a category through which Americans could also define what it meant to be modern. Michael North argues that the "story ... of becoming modern by acting black was to be retold over and over;" (2) alternatively, the story of becoming modern by acting "red" was to have specific nationalist and nativist incentives. For Walter Benn Michaels, the emergence of "nativist modernism," which was interested in questions not only of art but of language, citizenship, culture, and race, constitutively involved "the transformation of the opposition between black and white into an opposition between Indian and Jew." (3)

Up until the twentieth century, however, Indians and Jews had been imagined by both Europeans and Americans as racially consanguineous. The orthographic slip in, for example, Othello between "Indian" and "Iudian" reflected a real confusion in European minds between Indian and Jew. (4) The theory that the Indians of the New World were in fact descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel was widely popularized in the mid-17th century by an Amsterdam rabbi and subscribed to throughout the 19th century by Puritans, Jews, and Indians alike, who used it to argue, variously, national, religious, or political legitimacy. (5) This initial historical identification of Indian with Jew is ironized by what seems to be, in the 1907 song reproduced at the beginning of this essay, a union of "grotesque extreme anomalies." Indeed, much Jewish "redface" in twentieth century popular culture--from Fanny Brice and Eddie Cantor to Woody Allen and Mel Brooks--relies for its meaning on a profoundly dialectical relationship between Indian and Jew, in which kinship and unlikeness are plumbed in equal parts. (6)

Michaels does not discuss the various and often conflicting responses of Jewish writers (or Native American ones, for that matter) to the ways in which American moderns demonstrated their commitment to a national artistic culture through their "Indianness." This essay seeks to begin to address this lacuna through a discussion of Nathanael West, whose ambivalent relationship with both Jewishness and aesthetic modernism continues to preoccupy and vex his critics. Harold Bloom, in his introduction to a collection of critical essays on Nathanael West, declares it to be a "melancholy paradigm that West, who did not wish to be Jewish in any way at all, remains the most indisputably Jewish writer to yet appear in America." In the body of West criticism, however, much disagreement exists as to whether or not to place him in the pantheon of Jewish-American writers. Beginning with Leslie Fiedler and continuing with Victor Comerchero, Max Schultz, Kingsley Widmer, and Daniel Walden, among others, West has been recuperated as a Jewish-American writer "in spite of himself." Daniel Walden writes that he could not "have written as he did had he not been Jewish, hated being Jewish, and suffered from the fact that he could not escape being Jewish." (7) Critics have argued West's influence on, among others, Saul Bellow (Gordon Bordewyk), Lenny Bruce, and Woody Allen (Robert Emmet Long); they have argued in addition that West "began the great take-over by Jewish-American writers of the American imagination" (Fiedler), and that he had "a seminal role in the development of American Jewish fiction after World War II" (Long). On the other hand, more recent and important works on West, commodity culture, and literary modernism by Jonathan Veitch and Rita Barnard, although they seriously and sustainedly reflect upon the neglected and undervalued novel A Cool Million, hardly mention West's Jewishness, not to mention his repudiation of it. (8) My discussion of West aims to read his preoccupations with Indians, Jews, and the marketplace through the ambivalent and unfixable Jewishness that I suggest is dramatized in A Cool Million, whose modernist parody of racial and ethnic typologies succeeds in thoroughly undermining them.

Waldo Frank, a writer and critic of German-Jewish descent, helped to articulate and consolidate the widespread feeling that the racial qualities of Indians and Jews, and their resulting contributions to American culture, were as antithetical as the imagined physical landscapes they inhabited. In his 1919 survey of American literary culture, Our America, Frank describes the Jews as modern America's Puritans: "There was no fortuity in the New Englander's obsession with the Hebrew texts, in his quite conscious taking on of the role of Israel in a hostile world.... And as with the Puritan, so with the Jew, once free in a vast country, the urge of power swiftly shook off its religious and pietistic way, and drove untrammeled to material aggression" (p. 79). (9) In America, Frank asserts, secularism had deadened the Jews' spiritual mysticism. Frank is particularly critical of Felix Adler's Ethical Culture society, which he describes as a substitute religion, "completely commercialized ... a religion, in other words, which was no religion at all, since all the mystery of life, all the harmony of sense, all the immanence of God were deleted from it: and in their place a quiet, moral code destined to make good citizens" (p. 87). The result is the "anaesthetic Jew," who is "bitter, ironic, passionately logical.... They become critics of the arts. They consort with artists: study the anatomy of aesthetics: and from the strategy of close acquaintance subtly inspire the distrust of art, prove art is dying, teach how trivial an affair art has become" (pp. 88-9).

This chapter on the Jews, "The Chosen People," is immediately followed by a chapter entitled "The Land of Buried Cultures," in which Frank addresses the Indians of the Southwest, which he describes as the inverse of the materialistic, aggressive Puritan-Jew: "The Indian art is classic, if any art is classic. Its dynamics are reserved for the inward meaning. Its surface has the polish of ancient custom. Its content is the pure emotional experience of a people who have for ages sublimated their desire above the possessive into the creative realm" (p. 114). (10) Twelve years later, Oliver La Farge, a novelist and Indian rights activist, would recall Frank when he wrote that the Indian artist "deserves to be classed as a Modernist, his art is old, yet alive and dynamic.... His work has a primitive directness and strength, yet at the same time it possesses sophistication and subtlety. Indian painting is at once classic and modern." (11) Frank articulates, along with a chorus of American literary modernists, and in contra-distinction to the marriage fantasized by "I'm a Yiddish Cowboy," an emerging opposition between Indian and Jew, between "classic," modern, emotional, and spiritual Native artist, uncorrupted by materialist desire, and "anaesthetic," sterile, and commercial Jewish critic. (12)

Our America coincided with Mabel Dodge's 1917 move from New York to Santa Fe and then Taos, where she established "Greenwich Village's western adjunct." (13) Her visitors and friends eventually included Georgia O'Keefe, Mary Austin, Willa Cather, D. H. Lawrence, and Frank's friend Jean Toomer. Despite the fact that it was painter Maurice Sterne, Mabel Dodge's Jewish Russian-born husband (whom Mabel Dodge later left for Tony Lujan, a Native American and Taos local), who visited the American Southwest first and urged his wife to "save the Indians, their art-culture--reveal it to the world!", (14) Jewish artists, particularly those of recent Eastern European extraction, were not included in an emerging arc of native modernist American literary product; Jews were not "American" but rather, to use a term coined by Mary Austin, a famed "translator" of Native American song, thoroughly "New Yorkish." (15) In her 1920 editorial in The Nation, Austin emphasized the distance between Jews and "American art and American thinking:"

 "It is only when the Jew attempts the role of interpreter of our American expression that the validity of racial bias comes into question. Can the Jew, with his profound complex of election, his need of sensuous satisfaction qualifying his every expression of personal life, and his short pendulum-swing between mystical orthodoxy and a sterile ethical culture--can he become the arbiter, of American art and American thinking?" (16)

Nathanael West, born Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein into a family of German-speaking Jewish immigrants, was thirteen years younger than Frank, but attended the same high school, was also a Francophile, and was deeply influenced by the criticism of Frank and his circle. However, in his 1934 satirical novel A Cool Million: Or, The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin, West would both exploit and undo the neat antitheses of Our America. (17) The novel envisions a United States that is, like the Germany under the newly appointed Chancellor, in thrall to fascism, whose exploitation of an imagined and manufactured folk national culture plays with Frank's identification of Puritans and Jews as "material aggressors," as well as upon the series of dichotomized oppositions between Jews and Indians that Frank forwards as Our America continues. West's critical vision of what he saw as the "sinister" political implications of American literary modernism's "lyrical cultural nationalism"--that is, the imagining of a mythic America and fascism, the construction of the "primitive" and cultural commodification--is articulated through the exaggerated enactment of a racialized opposition between Indian and Jew.

In "I'm a Yiddish Cowboy," intermarriage between the "newest of the new Americans" and the "oldest of the old Americans" results in an American union that, whatever possibilities it suggests for a successfully integrated American identity, is formalized and consummated by an ecstatic assertion of consumerist activity: "Go buy cigarettes." As in that 1907 lyric, acts of consumption and performance in A Cool Million have the specific function of yoking, if not uniting, the two ethnic groups that in early-twentieth-century popular, intellectual and artistic imaginations came to reside at two opposite poles on the spectrum of native Americanness. Through a pastiche of passages lifted wholesale from Horatio Alger novels, (18) the novel chronicles the "adventures" of Lemuel Pitkin, son of the Widow Pitkin of Ottsville, Vermont and descendent of Revolutionary war heroes, who is persuaded by Nathan "Shagpoke" Whipple, former U.S. President and current Rat River National Bank President, to go out in the world and seek his fortune, "like Ford and Rockefeller," in order to save the family home from foreclosure. (19) The bank wants to sell the Pitkin homestead to a Jewish collector and interior decorator from New York, Asa Goldstein, who collects "Colonial Exteriors and Interiors." In short order, Lem is robbed, thrown in jail, and deprived of his teeth and one eye. He is reunited in New York with Betty Prail, his friend from Ottsville, who has been kidnapped by white slavers and forced to serve a stint in Wu-Fong's "one hundred percent American" brothel, whose suites are decorated in various American regional styles by the same Asa Goldstein. Lem and Betty join Shagpoke Whipple, who is headed out West with his Indian friend Jake Raven to raise funds for his new, fascistic National Revolutionary Party. Out West, Lem loses his leg and is scalped by Indians, led by the Harvard educated, proto-Marxist intellectual Indian Chief, Israel Satinpenny.

The novel's satire of race, culture, and commerce acquires an increasingly sinister political inflection. Lem and Shagpoke then join a travelling show, titled "Chamber of American Horrors: Animate and Inanimate Hideosities," managed by the confidence-man poet Sylvanus Snodgrasse. (20) The show, although it appears to be a "museum," is actually a "bureau for disseminating propaganda of the most subversive nature," and is financed by both the Communist Party and the International Jewish Bankers (in the demented logic of the novel, as in German and American fascist discourse, the two organizations are working together). When they arrive in the South, Shagpoke stages a violent revolt with newly recruited members of his fascist organization: "The heads of Negroes" are "paraded on poles"; a Jewish salesman is "nailed" to the door of his hotel room; the housekeeper of the local Catholic priest is raped. In the chaos, Lem escapes to New York, where he finds employment with a vaudeville act. Persuaded by Shagpoke to make a political speech on stage, he is assassinated. The novel closes with a parade of Whipple's Leather Shirts, who now rule the nation, in which Lem Pitkin is memorialized as a martyr for the cause. (21)

West wrote A Cool Million at the height of the Depression, animated both by a desire for material success, hoping to capitalize on the critical success of Miss Lonelyhearts, and the disappointment of Miss Lonelyheart's commercial failure, which was directly attributable to the financial collapse of the publishing house which had issued it. Just as favorable reviews of the just-published novel had begun to come in, one of Liveright's creditor's seized 2,000 of the first edition of 2,200 and refused to release them until he had been paid. What is more, the publication of Miss Lonelyhearts coincided with a national crisis: Roosevelt's declaration of a national bank "holiday" (which West mentions in A Cool Million, making sure to mention the life savings his hero has once again lost). (22) A letter to Minna and Milton Abernathy demonstrates West's keen awareness of the ways in which the circulation of art was dependent on the vagaries of a fragile and unpredictable market:

 By now I suppose you've heard about the deal I got from Liveright. Despite the fact that they are bankrupt, that they have no books to sell, and that I never received a cent from them and am willing to give up the $400 in royalties that they owe me, they refuse to give me back the copyright to the book ... The book surprised everyone including me--it got swell reviews and even more it started to sell very well, making Macy's best seller list and selling 2000 copies in less than 10 days right in Manhattan without salesmen or promotion of any kind. Liveright has not been functioning as a publishing house for the past six weeks and the book had to make its way by itself. Everybody, Knopf, Harrison Smith, etc. says that with normal exploitation it might have sold 15,000 copies. I've been heartsick over the thing as you can imagine, and I'm still sick. (23)

It is West's "heartsickness" over the fate of Miss Lonelyhearts that results in the writing of A Cool Million, an account, writ large, of the subordination of art, history, ideology, sexual relations, and ethnic identities to the marketplace.

At the same time that he endured this initiation into the painfully enmeshed relationship between art and commerce, West served as associate editor and contributor in 1932 and 1933 to two magazines, Contact and its satirical counterpart, Americana. Contact, with William Carlos Williams as editor and Robert McAlmon and West as associate editors, was to affiliate itself with Frank's modernist notions of authenticity, Americanness, and primitiveness, announcing its intent on its title page to "attempt to cut a trail through the American jungle without the use of a European compass." (24) West considered the second issue of Contact, in May 1932, a "Primitive America" issue, but in it, mysteriously, planned to print, in addition to original contributions, a sermon by Jonathan Edwards, a sketch of Benjamin Franklin by one of his contemporaries, and an excerpt from an old Sears, Roebuck catalogue, as if it were a poem. (25) West, that is to say, was evolving a vision of a "primitive" modernism in opposition to Williams', that quoted Puritanism, the gospel of success and the language of advertising. His interminglings of art, commerce, and the rhetoric of "America," however, weren't included in the final product, which in its ultimate incarnation included several pieces of short fiction which, like the regionally organized Our America, featured Mexico, Texas, New England, upstate New York, and the South. (26) In the editor's "Comment," Williams writes earnestly:

 When we are forced by a fact (a Boston, a Chicago even-provided we avoid sentimentality) it can save us from inanity, even though we do no more than photograph it. Eye to eye with some of the figures of our country and epoch, truthfully--avoiding science and philosophy--relying on our well- schooled senses, we can at least begin to pick up the essentials of a meaning. This primitive and actual America--must sober us. From its revealing aspects of what might be an understanding may be seized for the building of our projects.... But always, at this point, some blank idiot cries out, "Regionalism"! Good God, is there no intelligence left on earth. Shall we never differentiate the regional in letters from the objective immediacy of our hand to mouth, eye to brain existence? (p. 109)

Williams works very hard to differentiate between "regionalism" and what he sees as the project of the American Primitive issue: to "reveal the object," and as a result "touch authentically the profundity of its attachments." West's relentless parody of the "authentic" in A Cool Million, however, seems to militate against Williams' reading of "primitive" America. (27) West expressed his disappointment in Contact's sincere vision of an "authentic" America when he wrote to Milton Abernathy after the second number had come out:

 I don't like Contact much. We had an idea in the beginning, but it looks as though we'll drift into the old "regionalism." You know the Blue Denim stuff they print in Pagany and Hound and Horn. No. 1. Lem Harrington at Cross Purposes: Sally was sweating like a horse at her weeding and Lem had an erection behind the hydrangea bushes. No. 2: The Paint Horse: The Indian came across the meadow leading a restive horse and old Mrs Purdy remembered her youth in the circus with no little regret. No 3: The White Church: The old county church looked like a prim little girl in a starched white dress as Jetsy drove by in the Ford on her way to the movies ... (28)

Lem (Pitkin), an Indian, the circus, and Ford all make appearances in this declaration of the failure both of Contact's "regionalism" and its modernism. Indeed, this reads both as a critique of the magazine and as a rehearsal for A Cool Million's brand of satire, which is marked, like this passage, by its abundance of ironic lists, catalogues, and revues.

T. R. Steiner describes A Cool Million as an "encyclopedia of mythic 'America,'" (29) and a key feature of that mythic landscape was the Indian, who in the nineteen-thirties was the object of nativist, modernist, and popular fascination. According to S. J. Perelman, his brother-in-law, West was "much impressed with the Indian and the bad deal he had received." (30) West wrote a seventeen-page screen treatment, probably around 1935, about Osceola, which he described as "a story of one of the greatest heroes in American frontier history. The story of a soldier who never lost a battle, of a statesman who never made a mistake, of a lover who was always generous and loyal, yet, in the end, lost everything ... who was destroyed, like an ancient Greek hero, by inevitable destiny." (31) Osceola, Martin believes, was for West the "Indian Lem Pitkin;" that is, "another dismantled innocent."

Osceola's innocence, however, was precisely what, for West, made his story a potentially profitable one; after all, what West proposed was the transformation of Osceola into a subject fit for mass consumption. If Osceola represents West's attempt to exploit commercial culture, the Indians of A Cool Million reify his complicated and even ambivalent critique of it. Lemuel Pitkin, Jake Raven, and Israel Satinpenny all perform, at different moments, alternative and profitable versions of popularly circulated visions of the Indian. Lem and Shagpoke's "red-skinned friend," Jake Raven, after disappearing in the aftermath of Chief Satinpenny's massacre, turns up alive, performing as "Chief" Jake Raven in Snodgrasse's revue and peddling a secret Indian elixir. At the same time, Whipple exhibits Lem for money as "the last man to have been scalped by the Indians and the sole survivor of the Yuba River Massacre."

The Harvard-educated Satinpenny represents most specifically both early Puritan myths that swirled around Indians and Jews, and Frank's identification of Puritans with Jews. His name evokes both the popular Puritan hypothesis that the American Indians were descended from the ten lost tribes (Israel), as well as, with "Satinpenny," the old familiar charge of the Jew as both "materialist aggressor" and communist (it is not accidental that a "red" of one stripe could be associated with a "red" of another). The intellectual, Spengler-quoting Satinpenny, in his catalogue detailing the detritus of modernity, articulates high culture's preoccupation in the thirties with the authentic, pastoral, pre-modern way of life represented by the Indian:

 "Red men!" he thundered. "The time has come to protest in the name of the Indian peoples and to cry out against that abomination of abominations, the paleface. "In our father's memory this was a fair, sweet land, where a man could hear his heart beat without wondering if what he heard wasn't an alarm clock, where a man could fill his nose with pleasant flower odors without finding that they came from a bottle. Need I speak of springs that had never known the tyranny of iron pipes? Of deer that never tasted hay? Of wild ducks that had never been banded by the U.S. Department of Conservation? "In return for the loss of these things, we accepted the white man's civilization, syphilis and the radio, tuberculosis and the cinema. We accepted his civilization because he himself believed in it. But now that he has begun to doubt, why should we continue to accept? His final gift to us is doubt, a soul-corroding doubt. He rotted this land in the name of progress, and now it is he himself who is rotting ... "In what way is the white man wiser than the red? We lived here from time immemorial and everything was sweet and fresh. The pale- face came and in his wisdom filled the sky with smoke and the rivers with refuse. What, in his wisdom, was he doing? I'll tell you. He was making clever cigarette lighters. He was making superb fountain pens. He was making paper bags, doorknobs, leatherette satchels ... the land was flooded with toilet paper, painted boxes to keep pins in, key rings, watch fobs, leatherette satchels ... "Now even the Grand Canyon will no longer hold razor blades. Now the dam, O warriors, has broken and he is up to his neck in the articles of his manufacture." (pp. 156-7)

At the same time that Edward Curtis published his elegiacal, deliberately composed, sepia photographs of American Indians between 1907 and 1930, which featured as a key image a photograph of a line of Navajo horsem*n disappearing into a canyon entitled "The Vanishing Race," early twentieth century ethnography and social reform aimed to document, preserve, and ameliorate the situation of living Indians. (32) Oliver La Farge, a trained ethnographer and later Indian-rights activist, won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1930 novel Laughing Boy, whose success confirmed, rather than awakened, sympathetic interest in Native-Americans. John Collier's Indian Reorganization Act, passed in 1934, which drew on the ideas of modernist campaigners such as Mabel Dodge Luhan and was supported by them, had as its first aim "the conservation of the biological Indian and of Indian cultures." From the perspective both of romantic nostalgia and hopeful preservation, the Indian represented the artistic, spiritual, anti-bourgeois values that commercially obsessed America had lost. (33) Laughing Boy and his wife, Slim Girl, the central figures of La Farge's novel, are artists: Laughing Boy creates silver and turquoise jewelry, Slim Girl weaves Navajo blankets. Slim Girl, however, is an Indian who was taken away from her tribe very young and has gone to a government school, where she has learned successfully how to be "an American." She hopes to return to the ways of her people through her union with Laughing Boy, but white culture has, the novel seems to imply, corrupted her deeply. This is primarily communicated through her obsessive desire for money; one of the ways she obtains it is by continuing to prostitute herself to a white man. The materialist fantasies of accumulation instilled by white culture, the novel argues, contaminate the aesthetic purity of the Indian. Unsurprisingly, one of the Native-American ceremonies that most fascinated modernist ethnographers was that of the potlatch, in which prominent figures in the community periodically and ritualistically gave away or destroyed all of their material possessions. (34)

A Cool Million, however, exposes the ways in which the critique of the commercial in favor of the "authentic" becomes increasingly and troublingly articulated through racial and ethnic typologies. Nativist entities, after all, made similar appeals to the values represented, it was imagined, by the Indian. The character of Shagpoke Whipple was modeled not only on Calvin Coolidge but on William Dudley Pelley, the leader of a fascist organization in the 1930's called the Silver Shirts, which was modeled on the Nazi Party. (35) In the novel, Shagpoke cultivates a friendship with Jake Raven, declaring: "I am happy to welcome you into our organization. We 'Leather Shirts' can learn much from your people, fortitude, courage, and relentless purpose, among other things" (p. 113). The real-life Pelley made overtures to Indians: he recruited a "redskin" branch of his legion to stamp out Communism on the reservations. Throughout A Cool Million, West addresses the irony involved in the way a number of political and cultural attitudes, seemingly at odds with each other, all used the figure of the Indian as an ideological and metaphorical touchstone. The critique of commodity culture articulated by the Jewish Indian Satinpenny was, the novel suggests, a site in which the discourses of modernism, Marxism, and fascism converged. (36)

At the same time, Jewish characters in the novel are, pointedly, the manufacturers, appropriators, and purveyors of artifacts meant to reference an imagined national past, which is itself constructed around and invested in fantasies of Indianness. Asa Goldstein is the proprietor of the fifth avenue antiques store "Colonial Exteriors and Interiors," appropriator and marketer of Lemuel Pitkin's "authentic" Vermont cottage, and decorator of Wu-Fong's brothel. "Ezra Silverblatt" is mentioned briefly as the "Official Tailor to the National Revolutionary Party", whose costume consists of "Coonskin hats with extra long tails, deerskin shirts with or without fringes, blue jeans, moccasins, squirrel rifles, everything for the American Fascist at rock bottom prices" (pp. 101, 113). The Jewish merchant outfits Whipple's fascists in an "American" costume that, with its deerskin shirt and moccasins, is an appropriation of Indian garb. (37)

The conflicted nature of West's critique of the marketplace, however, inheres in the ironic fact that while West sought to expose and parody American materialism, he also openly hoped the novel would prove successful, and provide him, finally, with an income. West had, Martin writes, "the instincts of a good businessman: he was disciplined and well organized, with a love for moneyed life. He looked, Arthur Kober remarks, 'like someone out of Wall Street,' 'very formal indeed'" (p. 122). A Cool Million was a business venture for West even as it is a satire, among other things, of America's most prominent businessmen. Nathan "Shagpoke" Whipple, whose name is very close to Nathan Weinstein/Nathanael West's own, repeatedly mouths Coolidge-like aphorisms that recall the latter's famous "The business of America is business." Shagpoke declares to Lem after he has refused to lend Lem enough money to save his home: "The story of Rockefeller and of Ford is the story of every great American, and you should strive to make it your story"; Lemuel resolves to "go and do as Rockefeller and Ford had done" (p. 137). The novel's critical anatomy of business and businessmen, however, is informed by and a critical component of West's discussions of race, nationalism, and nativism. (38) Ford, the creator of Greenfield "Historical" Village, and Rockefeller, the primary backer of the Colonial Williamsburg restoration project, are reincarnated as Goldstein and Silverblatt; (39) in all likelihood, neither Ford, whose antisemitic barbs in his newspaper The Dearborn Independent were notorious, nor Rockefeller, who had funded the Eugenics Committee of the United States in the early 1920's, would have appreciated the joke. (40) The novel critiques, at once, Rockefeller and Ford as the avatars of an American material success that eluded West, as well as Rockefeller and Ford as the guardians of American national culture.

The Jewish Goldstein's determination to purchase Lemuel's boyhood home from Widow Pitkin's mortgage holder leads directly to the foreclosure on the house, and, subsequently, Lem's misadventures; Goldstein's store, in the window of which he displays the Pitkin cottage, parodies Ford's method, in creating Greenfield Village, of purchasing, dismantling, and then reconstructing such Americana as "authentic" New England cottages. Lem, like his house, is systematically "dismantled" throughout the novel, and through his death at its conclusion is finally reconstituted (like Greenfield Village or Colonial Williamsburg) as a symbol of an America "delivered from sophistication, Marxism, and International Capitalism," thus "purged of alien diseases" (p. 179).

Wu-Fong's brothel both emblematizes this corruption of native America which Ford's Greenfield Village sought to correct, and replicates Greenfield Village's importation and "prostitution" of Americana. When Betty Prail is first brought to Wu-Fong's establishment, initially a "House of all Nations," she is meant to "round out his collection," for he is still missing a "real American girl." Betty Prail's suite, a "perfect colonial interior," is decorated by, of course, Asa Goldstein (pp. 92-94). Betty's most avid clients are "orientals, Slavs, Latins, Celts and Semites," who bring to mind the ethnic make-up of the masses of immigrants that, in their likeminded eagerness to consume authentic American "product," were perceived as a threat to native American culture in the early part of the century.

Later in the novel, his business suffering under the pressures of the Depression, Wu-Fong realizes that "the trend was in the direction of home industry and home talent, and when the Hearst papers began their 'Buy American' campaign he decided to get rid of all the foreigners in his employ and turn his establishment into an hundred percentum American place" (p. 126). Many families of "genuine native stock," in desperation, have "thrown their female children on the open market," and it is with these that Wu-Fong stocks his brothel, after hiring Asa Goldstein to design a series of American interiors ("Pennsylvania Dutch, Old South, Log Cabin Pioneer, Victorian New York, Western Cattle Days, California Monterey, Indian, and Modern Girl") described by West with obvious relish.

West would later recycle this brothel of American culture, conceived of, designed, and managed by two "aliens," in his proposal for an "American Chauve-Souris." When it became apparent, after critical reviews, that A Cool Million would not be the money-maker that West had apparently hoped it would be, West hit upon a "surefire commercial idea" for a theatrical revue based on American folk materials. (41) His "American Chauve-Souris" was named after Nikita Balieff and the Moscow Art Theatre's "Theatre de la Chauve-Souris," which was a hit in Paris and Berlin, and later imported to the United States in the 1920's. West imagined a series of musical sketches depicting "Nantucket during the great days of the whaling industry," "Natchez-Under-the-River at the time of the land pirates," "the Erie Canal at the time of its construction," "a gathering of mountaineers," and finally, "a Harlem rent party, using real scat music." (42) West even wrote to the Leland Hayward agency that "the material should be as authentic as possible ... in no case should it be permitted to deteriorate to the 'folksy' or 'arty' in a Cape Cod Tea Shop sense." (43)

"I could keep this sort of thing up forever," writes West in the middle of his list of projected scenes, satirizing Waldo Frank's imagining of ethnic and regional America as he goes on to suggest "a barber shop of the nineties," "a group of Louisiana, French English patois songs," a "Salvation Army group," and an Oregon Trail scene. He imagines, moreover, that "this material, arranged chronologically and combined with the history of an American family as the plot, would make an excellent moving picture." (44) The revue was meant to be a performance of a series of American setpieces united through one family's history; what it was, rather, was a representation of the national "family" fragmented by and through American mytho-history. That the ideal American "fitter family" was consistently imagined, throughout the early part of the twentieth century, as native, white, and continually endangered by undesirable elements such as blacks and Jews, lent West's satire a sharper edge. (45) The family of West's deeply cynical "Chauve Souris" was, it seems, rather more typically and "authentically" American--if deeply unsettling to the racially "responsible" spectator--than the "fitter family" imagined by mass culture. West's multiracial, multiethnic "family," after all, could count as its members both Nantucket whalers and inhabitants of Harlem.

While A Cool Million's failure immediately prompted the fitter family satire "Chauve Souris," West continued to affiliate Indianness, Jewishness, and the marketplace. In the fall of 1933, West contributed a short story to the "Hollywood" issue of Americana, entitled "Business Deal," a satirical sketch in which the head of "Gargantual Pictures" engages in a battle of wills with a screenwriter who has come into the office to discuss his contract. (46) During the tense exchange, the producer, Eugene Klingspiel, decides that "a good joke would clear the atmosphere. 'Vas you dere, Sharlie?' He regretted it immediately; Charlie's frigid stare made his remark almost indelicate" ("Business Deal," p. 404). West would repeat this offending line several years later in his novel The Day of the Locust, which West worked on for three years before it was published in 1939. That novel also, famously, features an Indian who recalls both "Chief" Jake Raven in his incarnation as walking advertisem*nt, and Israel Satinpenny as Jewish Indian. He is referred to as "Chief Kiss-My-Towkus," and repeats the accented line from West's earlier story: "Vas you dere, Sharley?"

West puts this gag line first in the mouth of a successful Hollywood producer, and then in the mouth of a "Hollywood Indian"--an Indian performing a commodified, and commodifying, version of himself. Tod Hackett meets him outside a Sunset Boulevard saddlery store, wearing a sandwich board that reads:

 TUTTLE'S TRADING POST for GENUINE RELICS OF THE OLD WEST Beads, Silver, Jewelry, Moccasins, Dolls, Toys, Rare Books, Postcards. TAKE BACK A SOUVENIR from TUTTLE'S TRADING POST (Day of the Locust, p. 374)

Barnard describes this Hollywood Indian as a "symbolic summation of West's critique of commodity culture" (p. 161). He represents the reduction of the American West to a collection of knick-knacks and souvenirs for sale; these objects are signs, for Barnard, of "the loss not only of 'a fair sweet land' but of authentic experience" (p. 161). What A Cool Million seems to suggest, however, is that West does not lament the loss of authentic experience as much as problematize its very possibility. (47) West's "authentics" seem always to refer to their own satirical possibility, or, as in his treatment of Osceola and the "Chauve Souris," their potential profit.

Klingspiel, a Jewish Hollywood producer, and Chief Kiss-My-Towkus, a "Jewish" Hollywood Indian, then, are connected through the utterance of a punchline popularly associated with a Jewish comic: "Vas you dere, Sharley?" (48) In both cases the line underscores the commodification of ethnic identity and the transmutation of commodity culture into American myth (and vice versa) that West continually exposes in A Cool Million, dramatizing the way in which a preoccupation with native identities results in ethnic and national fricture and fracture. Waldo Frank and Mary Austin argued the irreconcilability of the Jew and the Indian; for these moderns, the unbridgeable divide between Indian and Jew was due to the spiritual, cultural, and aesthetic "authenticity" of the first and the manifest inauthenticity of the second. West could not conceive of an "authentic" that could exist within the machine of America's commodity culture. Both modernism's trust in authentic possibility as articulated by Williams, and commodity culture's exploitation of it, were to West deeply suspect.

As a result, West was faced with his own impossible categorization. He complained to Edmund Wilson in 1939:

 Somehow or other I seem to have slipped in between all the "schools." My books meet no needs except my own.... [I] go on making what one critic called "private and unfunny jokes." The radical press, although I consider myself on their side, doesn't like it, and thinks it even fascist sometimes, and the literature boys, whom I detest, detest me in turn. The highbrow press finds that I avoid the important things and the lending library touts in the daily press think me shocking. The proof of all this is that I've never had the same publisher twice--once bitten, etc.--because there is nothing to root for in my books and what is even worse, no rooters. (49)

An undated and unpublished (and probably unfinished) short piece entitled "The Adventurer," read against the apprehension of his ambiguous position among the "schools" of writing, seems to expand upon West's linked racial and authorial anxieties. "The Adventurer" describes a 37-year-old grocery store order clerk with "cultural pretensions" who spends his spare time alternatively in the New York Public Library or in Central Park. He is filled with self-loathing, comparing his picking over of the Western classics in order to vicariously experience "adventure" through them, to his janitor, perhaps immigrant, father who picked over refuse, searching for "mementoes of pleasure:" "fans, perfume bottles, an embroidered slipper, a gilt dance card, theatre programs, elaborate menus, things of that sort" (p. 446).

In the subway, the Adventurer self-consciously reads Aristotle or Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," hoping that people will notice him and think him a "superior man, a college man or even a professor of some sort. Could anything be more humble or undignified? Or unreal? Or soiled and second-hand?" (p. 447). The library, filled with "poor people who farm books," has become to him a "monstrous place," although he is compelled to go nevertheless. He is as drawn to Central Park, whose paths and "secret nests" he first discovered as a child, when he played "Indian scout in the park with a little gang of other boys." Central Park, in turn, becomes the setting for re-imagined scenes from the Morte D'Arthur.

The "adventurer" is both reader and Indian, alternating between the library and the park: that is to say, he alternates between the persona of the "anaesthetic" consumer of art, and of the "Indian" who, at the end of the manuscript, "creates" it. The "great picture" of Grail legend imagined by the adventurer, however, is the same used by Eliot to such great effect in The Waste Land. (50) The story is a pastiche of quotation and paraphrase, caricaturing different kinds of modernist posturing, stitched together through the adventurer's profound sense of alienation from himself. "Unreal," "soiled and second-hand," West's adventurer is neither Jewish nor Indian, and yet, in his dismantling of literary modernism's most cherished originary texts, is in some way both.

Rachel Rubinstein

Hampshire College

(1) "I'm a Yiddish Cowboy (Tough Guy Levi);" Tin Pan Alley lyric by Edgar Leslie, Al Piantadosi, and Halsey K. Mohr (1907), reprinted in Harley Erdman, Staging the Jew: The Performance of an American Ethnicity, 1860-1920 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 169. In his discussion of the song, Erdman asserts that the song performs positive possibilities for America's melting pot, "as if in the meeting and mating of these two grotesque extreme anomalies lay all the myriad possibilities of the nation" (p. 141).

(2) Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 8.

(3) Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 106.

(4) The Folio (1623) offers "Judean" (Iudian) and the first Quarto (1622) "Indian" for Act V.ii.346: "... of one whose hand/like the base Indian, threw a pearl away/Richer than all his tribe ..." (Sylvan Barnet, General Editor, The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), p. 1136.

(5) See Menassah ben Israel, The Hope of Israel: The English Translation by Moses Wall, 1652, ed. Henry Mechoulan and Gerard Nahon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), as well as Menassah ben Israel and His World, ed. Yosef Kaplan, Henry Mechoulan and Richard H. Popkin (New York: E.J. Brill, 1989). For a discussion of the use of the theory by 19th century Jewish and Indian nationalists, see Sandra Gustafson, "Nations of Israelites: Prophecy and Cultural Autonomy in the Writings of William Apess" (Religion and Literature 26.1, Spring 1994). Ben Katchor's recent graphic novel, The Jew of New York, uses these materials in its reimagining of Jewish/Indian interchanges in early 19th century New York (New York: Pantheon, 2000).

(6) Michael Rogin discusses some moments of Jewish redface, such as Eddie Cantor playing Indian in the 1930 film Whoopee!, and includes a photograph of Paul Whiteman's orchestra in Indian costume (Blackface, White Noise: Jewish American Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot, [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996]). Peter Antelyes delivered a paper entitled "Jewish Indians and the Columbia Complex" at "The Next Turn in American Literary Studies" (Harvard University, May 14, 2002) in which he drew upon Rogin's arguments in his more extended analysis of Jewish redface, most particularly of a Fanny Brice performance in which she sang "I'm an Indian" dressed as a squaw. For a discussion of Indian presences in Yiddish American literary culture, see also Alan Trachtenberg, "Babes in the Yiddish Woods': Dos Lied fun Hiavat's," Judaism 50:3 (2001): 331-340. Both Mel Brooks and Woody Allen feature moments of Jewish redface embedded in more extended satirical critiques of ethnic identity and American myth, in Blazing Saddles (1974) and Zelig (1984).

(7) Quoted in Ben Siegel, Nathanael West: Critical Essays (New York: G.K. Hall, 1994), p. 32.

(8) I am particularly indebted to Rita Barnard's discussion of West's A Cool Million, of which she writes," A Cool Million, which critics usually dismiss as a tasteless and inaccurate satire on the rise of American fascism, can then ... be read profitably as a satire on the commodification of American culture" (The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995], p.149). I read the novel as a satire on the commodification of, specifically, native and ethnic identities in America. Barnard dedicates a good portion of her Nathanael West section in The Culture of Abundance to A Cool Million, writing that critical interpretation of his work has tended to cast it "as a battle between art and the cheap cliches and disorders of mass culture, a battle from art emerges victorious.... This kind of interpretation has necessitated the exclusion or slighting of certain interesting aspects of West's work, such as the irredeemably (and deliberately) trashy satire A Cool Million and the overtly revolutionary poem 'Burn the Cities'--both of which critics have generally preferred to see as aberrations" (p. 11). Other scholars who have considered A Cool Million with a similar degree of seriousness are Jonathan Veitch in American Superrealism: Nathanael West and the Politics of Representation in the 1930's (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), Susan Hegeman, Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), and, as early as 1971, T. R. Steiner, "West's Lemuel and the American Dream," Southern Review 4, vol. 7 (October 1971), reprinted in Harold Bloom, ed., Nathanael West: Modern Critical Views (Northborough, MA? Chelsea House Publishers, 1986).

(9) Our America, as Frank writes in his introduction, came about at the suggestion of two Frenchmen, Gaston Gallimard and Jacques Copeau of the Nouvelle revue francaise, a French publishing house, theatre, and magazine. It was meant to serve as an explanation of "Young America" to "Young France," that is, as an exercise in intercultural understanding. It is at the same time, as Frank himself would write later, "not an objective portrait of a real land, but an appeal for it to be" (Memoirs of Waldo Frank, ed. Alan Trachtenberg [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973], p. 99).

(10) In a later chapter, "New York," Frank discusses Alfred Stieglitz and other New York Jews whom he sees as taking up "the ancient destiny where the degenerate Jew whom we have observed had let it fall. He is the prophet. And his ways are near to the old ways of his people ... Stieglitz is primarily the Jewish mystic ... A true Jew" (p. 186). Other Jewish moderns whose spirituality Frank praises include James Oppenheim, Paul Rosenfeld, and Leo Ornstein, of whose music Frank says, "Since there is no good American music save that that of the Indians and Negroes, his music is as American as any" (p. 187). Later, Frank would become increasingly attracted to African American life and culture, using eroticized black female figures in his short fiction, enlisting his friend Jean Toomer to take him on a Southern tour (where they both "passed" as black Northerners), and writing the novel Holiday, about interracial desire and lynching. He and Toomer wrangled in their correspondence over the essentiality of race. Daniel Itzkovitz suggests that Frank's alternating "fetishization" of Toomer's African American ancestry and his own anxious fantasy, during his visit to the south, that he was "with" the "Negro;" indeed, "was a Negro," was a reflection of his own "racial panic"; "his was clearly an identity under siege" ("Passing Like Me," South Atlantic Quarterly 98 1/2 [Winter/Spring 1999]: 35-36). Mary Austin did not share Frank's romantic views on black life (in fact, quite the opposite), but writes of Indians: "A primitive state of mind is, as nearly as I can make out, a state of acute, happy awareness. Streams of impressions of perennial freshness flow across the threshold of sense, distinct, unconfused, delicately registering, unselected" (The American Rhythm [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1923], p. 28).

(11) Oliver La Farge, ed. Introduction to American Indian Art (Rio Grande Press, Inc. 1931; reprinted 1985), p. 15.

(12) Walter Benn Michaels reads Willa Cather's 1925 novel The Professor's House in similar terms, in the opposition the novel sets up between Tom Outland, "descendent" of a lost Indian tribe, who is engaged to the Professor's daughter, and the Jew Louie Marsellus, who marries her after Tom's death: "The point, then, of identifying as a Jew the 'stranger' who wants to marry into your family is to identify as American the family he wants to marry into" (Our America, p. 8).

(13) Susan Hegeman, Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 107.

(14) Mabel Dodge Luhan, Movers and Shakers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936), p. 534. Cited in Hegeman, Patterns for America, p. 108.

(15) Louis Untermeyer's poor review of The Path on the Rainbow, George Cronyn's volume of translated Indian chant, for which Austin had written the introduction, prompted Austin to write an outraged letter to the Dial, declaring: "That all these things seem to have been missed by the reviewer raises again the question as to whether we can ever have anything which is American literature, sui generis, until literary judgement begins to be American and leaves off being thoroughly New Yorkish" (May 31, 1919, p. 570).

(16) The Nation, 111, 1920, reprinted in The Selected Essays of Mary Austin, ed. Reuben Ellis (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), pp. 57-58.

(17) As Susan Hegeman notes, West eventually would "create a nightmare negation of Frank's vision, in which he would satirize Frank's cultural typologies and his optimism about cultural change, but even suggest some sinister political implications of Frank's vision of transformation through a lyrical cultural nationalism" (p. 148).

(18) One-fifth of the novel is copied, with little alteration, from Alger's books. See Douglas H. Shepard, "Nathanael West Rewrites Horatio Alger, Jr.," Satire Newsletter (Fall 1965): 13-28; Gary Scharnhorst, "From Rags to Patches, or A Cool Million as Alter-Alger," Ball State University Forum 21 (1980): 58-65. West called the novel "my Horatio Alger book" (Letter to Edmund Wilson, July 25, 1933).

(19) All quotations from Nathanael West, A Cool Million and The Dream Life of Balso Snell: Two Novels (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1963).

(20) By invoking the nom de plume that the real Samuel Clemens had tried out and then discarded in favor of Mark Twain, West affiliates his novel with Twain's satirical and politically pointed critiques of race, modernity, authoritarianism, and commercial culture in such novels as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Puddnhead Wilson, and, especially, the dystopic A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

(21) The conclusion of the novel describes the "youth of America" singing the "Lemuel Pitkin Song," just as German schoolchildren sang the "Horst Wessel Lied" in commemoration of a young Nazi storm trooper who was killed in a political street brawl in 1930 and subsequently declared a "saint" by the Nazis.

(22) Jay Martin, Nathanael West: The Art of His Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), p. 193. In A Cool Million, Lem opens the newspaper to the headline: "'PRESIDENT CLOSES BANKS FOR GOOD,' he read one night. He sighed profoundly. Not because he had again lost the few dollars he had saved, which he had, but because it made him think of Mr. Whipple and the Rat River National Bank. He spent the rest of the night wondering what had become of his old friend" (p. 174).

(23) Nathanael West, Novels and Other Writings, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (New York: Library of America, 1997), p. 781.

(24) See Contact's title page. The three volumes of the revived Contact were reprinted in 1967 by Kraus Reprint Corporation, New York.

(25) Martin, p. 147. Also see letter to William Carlos Williams, April 1932, reprinted in Nathanael West: Novels and Other Writings, p. 775.

(26) Nathan Asch, "Mary," Erskine Caldwell, "Over the Green Mountains," Robert McAlmon, "Mexican Interval," Julian Shapiro, "The Fire at the Catholic Church," Charles Reznikoff, "My Country 'Tis of Thee."

(27) Williams not only identifies all Americans as Indians in his 1925 "history" In the American Grain ("I do believe the average American to be an Indian, but an Indian robbed of his world" [New York: A & C Boni, 1925,] p. 128), he also explicitly asserts his desire to "lift dead Indians tenderly from their graves, to steal from them--as if it must be clinging even to their corpses--some authenticity, that which--" (p. 74).

(28) Novels and Other Writings, pp. 772-3.

(29) West's Jewishness, Steiner argues, "begins to be seen in the intertwining of native American and Christian (and New Testament) with Jewish (and Old Testament) strains." Each character has a Hebrew name, Steiner notes: Nathan Whipple, Levi Underdown, Ephraim Pierce, Jake Raven, Israel Satinpenny. West's point, Steiner observes, is that "the American mythic landscape is about and for Jews if they attend to it closely enough" (p. 105).

(30) Martin, p. 281. Rita Barnard devotes a few pages of her discussion to West's interest in the fate of Native-Americans, to which, she notes, "his critics have paid surprisingly little attention" (p. 157). I am indebted to her discussion, on pages 157-161.

(31) Martin, p. 281.

(32) Although Curtis condemned conventional studio portraits of Native Americans as inauthentic, he nevertheless brought with him into the field an inventory of props such as masks and feather headdresses, which would resurface in photographs of different tribes. For Curtis, as for other "romantics," "real" Indians were only those who remained "ethnographically pristine and uncontaminated by Whites" (Alison Griffiths, "Native-American Representation in Early Cinema," in S. Elizabeth Bird, ed., Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular Culture [New York: Westview Press, 1996], p. 88).

(33) Helen Carr, Inventing the Primitive: Politics, Gender, and the Representation of Native American Literary Traditions 1789-1936 (New York: New York University Press, 1996), p. 199.

(34) Marcel Mauss, the French sociologist, nephew and student of Emile Durkheim, wrote extensively on the potlatch in his 1925 Essai sur le don, forme archaique de l'echange. He refers to earlier work on the subject by Pere Lambert, Franz Boas, "Mayne, Dawson, Krause, etc." (Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, Ian Cunnison, translator [New York: Norton, 1967], pp. 31-37). Jonathan Veitch, moreover, argues a connection between West and Georges Bataille, who used the term potlatch to describe a phenomenon in which the pressures of class struggle transform traditional modes of nonproductive expenditure (the building of monuments, games, spectacles, and so on) into "an immense travail of recklessness, discharge, and upheaval": in other words, the potlatch of revolution (Veitch, American Surrealism, p. 129).

(35) Jay Martin argues that the inspiration for Whipple's Leather Shirts was William Dudley Pelley's fascist organization, the "Silver Shirts," profiled by John Spivak for The New Masses in 1934. According to Pelley's 1933 account, he died for seven minutes one night in April 1928, during which he learned from an "Oracle" of an international Jewish conspiracy and of his own mission to return America to Americans in the form of a giant corporation, with Pelley himself as president and with only "100 per cent Americans" as stockholders. The Oracle also told him that when "a certain young house-painter comes to the head of the German people" he should take this as a sign of his time to launch his Christian militia. The organization soon numbered 75,000, with members in 46 of the 48 states.

(36) Barnard notes the peculiar position of another Jewish writer of the 1930s, Mike Gold, who as an orthodox Marxist held out hope for the transformative power of modern factories, but who in his poetry unironically and sincerely accessed the critical and pastoral possibilities embodied by the Indian:

 Arrested as a picket in a recent strike I have found my cellmate here an Indian Chief His name John Thunder of the Ottawas Once his father owned America (p. 158).

(37) In Spivak's interview with one of Pelley's lieutenants, Eugene R. Chase, Chase admits the opportunistic economic motives behind his use of antisemitic rhetoric, saying: "You got to give them something to get mad about. It's business. What the hell! The official shirtmaker for the Silver Legion is a Jew. Look--." He points out an advertisem*nt in the Silver Ranger: "Milton's Toggery: Official Shirt Maker for the Silver Legion" (pp. 233-4).

(38) The novel's epigraph, billed as an "old saying" was indeed a saying at Brown, West's alma mater: "John D. Rockefeller would give a cool million to have a stomach like yours." Whether that stomach would go inside Rockefeller, or inside a museum or exhibit funded by him, is perhaps the source of the satire (Martin, p. 227).

(39) Frank's effort in 1919 to create "America" through a collection of its parts (Our America is arranged by geographic region) had its counterpart in Henry Ford's "salvaging" efforts that he began at the turn of the century. In 1905, he began amassing Edisonia; in 1914 he collected McGuffey Readers. In 1919 he restored his old family home in Dearborn, Michigan. By 1922, he expanded his collection of tools and machine to include American antiques, and in 1924 Ford bought the historic Wayside Inn in South Sudbury, Massachusetts. In 1927, Ford began the reconstruction of Edison's Menlo Park, New Jersey laboratories in Dearborn, Michigan. 1929 marked the dedication of Ford's "Edison Institute," which quickly grew into the Greenfield Village and museum. Ford purchased the homes of Noah Webster, William Holmes McGuffey, and the Wright brothers, restored them, and moved them to Greenfield Village. Joining these were an Illinois courthouse where a young Lincoln once practiced law, the circa-1830's Eagle Tavern, and "Mrs. D. Cohen's" late nineteenth-century millinary shop. Nearby, the Ford Museum eventually featured twelve indoor acres of Americana. Ford brought together buildings and artifacts (as opposed to Frank's artists and writers in Our America) from all over the United States, and from different historical periods, and reconstructed them in order to forward a narrative of America as engaged in a uniform and harmonious march into modernity. As one visitor wrote on a comment card after viewing the complex: "I never knew that Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and the Wright brothers all lived on the same street" (James S. Wamsley, American Ingenuity: Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village [New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1985], pp. 19-23).

(40) In 1920, Ford's Dearborn Independent published a series of articles on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document which was said to present proof of the Jews' desire to take over the world. The collected articles were published in 1921 as The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem.

(41) Martin, p. 247.

(42) Martin, p. 248.

(43) Martin, p. 248.

(44) Martin, p. 249.

(45) Michaels writes, "Insofar as the family becomes the site of national identity, nationality becomes an effect of racial identity" (p. 8). In 1920, the Kansas Free Fair featured a "Fitter Families for Future Firesides Contest," the object of which, in the words of eugenicist Dr. Florence Brown Sherbon, was "the stimulation of a feeling of family and racial consciousness and responsibility" (Robert Rydell, World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 49). "Fitter Families" exhibits became a staple of expositions and world fairs throughout the two decades following, and even the New York World Fair of 1940 featured a "typical American family" display, informed by eugenicist principles and underwritten in part by the Ford Motor Company, that proved to be one of the fair's most popular exhibits. Americans were invited to write essays explaining why they were "typical"; winners received a free trip to the fair and lived on the fairgrounds, in a curious incarnation of the ever-popular ethnographic village. The typical American family, unsurprisingly, was white and native-born: as the governor of Arkansas wrote in his letter to the family selected from his state, "you typify the best that this nation can produce, for Arkansas, by virtue of its high percentage of native-born population, is the most American state in the union" (Rydell, pp. 56-57).

(46) Martin, pp. 214-215.

(47) Immediately after publishing A Cool Million in 1934, West applied for a Guggenheim Foundation grant for an apparently autobiographical project, modeled, West wrote, in part on Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. One of West's chapters is entitled "Chapter Four; Business and the objectives involved. An attempt to love, and the difficulties encountered. The impossibility of experiencing a genuine emotion" (Novels and Other Writings, p. 465).

(48) My thanks to Daniel Itzkovitz, who pointed out to me that "Vas you dere Sharlie?" was the signature line of the Jewish radio comic Jack Pearl (born Jake Perlman) who became enormously popular in the early 1930's playing "Baron Munchausen," an exaggerated German who would address this catchphrase to his sidekick, Charlie, when the latter expressed doubt about the Baron's tall tales.

(49) Novels and Other Writings, p. 793. West was so involved in this dilemma that he also wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald, repeating verbatim: "Somehow or other I seem to have slipped in between all the "schools" (p. 791).

(50) "Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston's book on the Grail Legend: From Ritual to Romance (Macmillan). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston's book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation worth the trouble" (T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land: Text of the First Edition [New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922]. Reprinted in The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, ed. Valeris Eliot [New York: Harvest, 1971], p. 147). West quoted and rewrote Eliot as well in his poem "Burn the Cities," a version of which entitled "Christmass Poem" ran in Contempo (Feb. 21, 1933). The longer, unpublished version begins: "The Eastern star calls with its hundred knives/Burn the cities/ Burn the cities" (Novels and Other Writings, p. 458). The Waste Land takes on as an explicit theme the city as crumbling wasteland, reading in part: "To Carthage then I came/ Burning burning burning burning."