Gunja Sengupta

Elites, Subalterns, and American Identities: A Case Study of African-American Benevolence

Seventeen-year-old Anne Smith harbored aspirations higher than a lifetime in domestic service. Born in New York of Virginian blacks at the turn of the twentieth century, Smith was reared in a predominantly African-American community at the Howard Orphanage and Industrial School (HOIS), originally of Brooklyn, later of King's Park, Long Island. In accordance with institutional practice, soon after Smith entered adolescence, she was placed in housework with the family of the orphanage's white treasurer in Westfield, New Jersey. Before long, her mistress, Marjorie Snevily, reported that the young woman was anxious to withdraw savings from her wages—held in trust for her by the institution—in order to put herself through business school. The reluctant maid reportedly grew "mean" with her mistress's children when every business school in the Westfield area refused to admit her on account of her race.¹ Subsequently, Snevily attributed Smith's discontent to "a lack of money that she could herself spend on clothes ... Her friends are all making good money and dressing a little more up-to-the minute than she is."² It was no accident that Smith reportedly combined her longing for a business education with a taste for the latest fashion in clothing. For this first-generation New Yorker of African descent, "putting on style"³ became at once a means of challenging her received identities of race, class, and gender by testing the promise of America's much vaunted success ethic, and by contesting the color construction of American consumer culture. Moreover, it served as the occasion for Smith's performance of the role of a rational economic actor in an ostensibly laissez-faire world. She was demanding control over her own wages as a worker and the autonomy to spend it however she wished as a consumer. Her bid for such independence accorded well with her interracial custodians' emphasis upon self-sufficiency in adulthood, even as it defied their agenda to promote thrift and feminine restraint among their charges.

The story of Smith's upbringing at the HOIS reveals much about microlevel, "multipositional" African-American negotiations with the contested narrative of American exceptionalism—the tension between race and civic equality that it embodied—in a particular moment and space in U.S. history.⁴ This account carries important lessons about the interplay of identity, power, and the everyday politics of engagement and resistance in marginalized communities. The dynamics of this interplay may be seen in what the historian Earl Lewis has described as the "relational matrix of identity formation" among the historical actors associated with one benevolent institution from their overlapping vantage points as benefactors, staff, and "clients;" as men and women; as workers and consumers; as surrogate parents, children, and lovers; and as black and white Americans.⁵ These vantage points were embedded in multiple discourses of power structured around the relations of race, class, gender, age, occupation, and consumption, as well as the politics of child welfare and constructions of nationalism in Progressive America. The archival remains of the HOIS offer an usually rich set of windows to study not only the positioning of our protagonists at the intersection of these different discourses of power but also to explore the fashion in which interactions among them molded subaltern agency. To that end, I probe in this essay the dialectical relationship between elite black and white interpretations of "American" identity implicit in the welfare visions and management styles embraced by Howard's mostly white directors and its black staff. Further, I argue that these perspectives provided a complex filter through which the orphans construed and articulated the diverse facets of their own identities. From the interlocking sites they inhabited in the full range of their social experiences, they daily mounted an array of material, rhetorical, and symbolic strategies to achieve personal autonomy, sexual equality, and racial justice within the framework of debates over national belonging.

My analysis draws upon conceptual insights generated by exchanges among scholars of subaltern groups in colonial and postcolonial Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Postcolonialists have shown that Europeans used the institutions and architecture, languages and literature, and rituals and regulations of imperial rule to create categories of knowledge that defined the imperial "self" in opposition to the colonized "other." In subordinate hands however, these categories of knowledge could become launching pads for subverting rigid identity constructs of ruler versus ruled.⁶ Along similar lines, some subalternists have redefined the familiar Gramscian notion of "hegemony" to reflect what they see as a reciprocal relationship between systems of power and the agency of marginalized peoples. The Latin American scholar William Roseberry has suggested that "we use the concept [of hegemony] not to understand consent but to understand struggle; the ways in which the words, images, symbols, forms, organizations, institutions, and movements used by subordinate populations to talk about, understand, confront, accommodate themselves to, or resist their domination are shaped by the process of domination itself. What hegemony constructs, then, is not a shared ideology but a common material and meaningful framework for living through, talking about, and acting upon social orders characterized by domination." For example, anticolonial nationalists in Partha Chatterjee's work on India attacked imperialism at least partly in terms of the very premises of reason and modernity that were used to legitimize colonial rule. Similarly, the Namiquipans of Chihuahua, Mexico, studied by Daniel Nugent and Ana Maria Alonso, who rejected the ejido brand of agrarian reform, were nevertheless operating within the bounds of a land tenure policy established by the state.⁷

Understanding power relations in this way illuminates the processes of negotiation in hierarchical societies that keep both hegemonic frameworks and subaltern identities in flux, confounding established notions of "otherness."⁸ As Frederick Cooper has noted, the female prostitutes and landlords who, in Luise White's study of colonial Nairobi, took advantage of opportunities in a growing urban economy to serve the needs of male migrant workers "were both subverting the cultural project of colonialism and subsidizing the economic one."⁹ The experience of White's Kenyan subjects as both economic players manipulating the material structure of colonialism and as unchaste but resourceful women challenging imperial notions of a proper working class, underscores an overlapping finding of many subalternists. This consists in the notion that subordinate identities are "migrating" subjects contingent upon varying situations. Moreover, as Florencia Mallon has made clear, such subjects are simultaneously "dominated and dominating" based on "the circumstances in which we encounter them." For instance, a revolutionary leader can "go home and beat up a wife"¹⁰ Thus, Ania Loomba urges us to not simply "situate the subaltern within a multiplicity of hierarchies," but also to "think about the crucial relations between these hierarchies."¹¹

These ideas have obvious implications for untangling the overlapping identities and complex social relations in African-American history. As Lewis has noted, historians have often separated black people's workplace experiences from the worlds of their community and home, treating the class and race aspects of African-American identity as "simply additive or subtractive." Instead, Lewis proposes that we scrutinize the "interactive construction of identity—as child, lover, spouse" in conjunction with the more familiar categories of race, class, color and gender.¹² In this context, our recourse to the subalternist notion of hegemony as a field of engagement by multilocational actors might illuminate the processes through which power and identities are negotiated, thereby revealing the interplay among individual, racial, and national senses of self. Black orphanages, by blurring the boundaries among work, family, and community as they arbitrated issues of social welfare and racial uplift with their Progressive white allies and a hostile world, present an excellent medium for exploring these connections. These institutions were embedded in the common "material and meaningful" framework of American exceptionalism within which contests over national belonging unfolded. The hegemonic exceptionalist frame of reference operated not simply through words and symbols like the national anthem or flag but very importantly through concrete social relations, economic arrangements, and political structures. Black voluntary associations that were partially subsidized by but marginalized within this national system of "meanings and values," functioned as material and symbolic modes of representation, throwing all manner of received identities into disarray.¹³ Unfortunately, the records of most black orphanages, unlike their wealthier and better documented white counterparts, often lack the assortment of voices that might help unwrap the relational formation of "client" identities. Thus much of the scholarship on African-American benevolence, although wonderfully rich, has been written mostly from the race, class, and gender standpoints of its relatively privileged leaders.¹⁴

By contrast, the documentary remains of the HOIS offer access to a kaleidoscope of perspectives on intraracial social relations and intra-bourgeois race relations intertwined with narratives of the nation within the bounds of a single institution. For the purposes of my analysis, these records are most complete for the period after 1913. At that time, the institution completed its transformation from a black-run civic association into a northern industrial school under predominantly white management before its unfortunate demise in 1918. Its remains reveal a complex web of dialectics between the overlapping worlds in which the orphanage and the various actors associated with it were entrenched. They show that like non-western revolutionaries and peasants engaging the hegemonic structures of imperialism or neo-colonialism, members of the HOIS family turned the contradictions within American exceptionalism into tools of subaltern subject formation (that is, subalterns as self-conscious actors as opposed to objects of domination) in various ways, both material and representational.

Scholars across a variety of disciplines have defined identity as a relation of difference (of race, religion, and so on), in which the dominant party depersonalizes or objectifies an allegedly inferior "other" by attaching to it the "mark of the plural ... an anonymous collectivity ("They are this"; "They are all the same")."¹⁵ Howard materials unveil the multiple approaches that variously situated orphanage figures adopted in order to fight the depersonalization of blackness, the objectification of African Americans. Fund-raising flyers and the cottage model of institutional organization ratified by the institution's interracial managers fashioned the exceptionalist ideal of civic equality into an inclusive discourse of what I call individual "sameness" versus the "anonymous collectivity" of racial difference. Other cultural "texts" bolstered the same idea by turning the symbols of white racial nationalism on their head.¹⁶ The most interesting of these artifacts consisted of the scripts of several pantomimes apparently produced by the institution's black custodians, and intended to be performed by the orphans themselves. Simple in plot line, yet versatile in interpretive range, these pantomimes tell us a great deal about subaltern uses of cultural practices to defang codes of power by inverting the context of their representation, and to constitute new, resistant identities within the boundaries of dominant narratives. As we shall see, the scripts turned signifiers that linked whiteness with American civilization and blackness with savage "otherness"—such as the narrative of rape, the ode to upward mobility, and the doctrine of domesticity—into arguments for racially inclusive civic nationalism, illustrating the discursive operation of hegemony as a contested terrain. At the same time, the sometimes discordant interplay of different discourses of power centered around race, class, gender, and the official norms of social welfare surface in official inspection reports of the orphanage's living arrangements and exchanges between its white managers and black female superintendent. They suggest that on one level, Howard's black staff embraced the individualism inherent in the color-blind civic nationalism promoted by their white Progressive allies. Yet they also pluralized the meaning of American identity by crafting an alternative sense of community defined by an extended familial, black Christian, participatory democratic model of administration. Anchored in their historic traditions of consanguineal families and racial solidarity, their vision of community responded to the contemporary needs of African Americans.

This dialectic of bourgeois black engagement with a particular narrative of American exceptionalism upheld by the HOIS's managers, provided a prism through which their charges—the orphans themselves—acted out their own confrontations with the competing nationalisms of race and civic equality. In this context, the institution's records include rare letters written by and about former residents. These letters illuminate the ways in which the inmates' intersecting locations—as surrogate children, working women and men, aspiring professionals, mass culture consumers, and sexual rebels—forged a spectrum of behavior in the pursuit of individual and group empowerment. Their definitions of freedom, independence, and domesticity were contingent upon the various contexts of their daily lives in which they enunciated these ideas. The language, themes, and rhetorical appeals of their letters point to the ways in which the structure and texture of everyday life in HOIS, and the identities constituted within cultural practices like the pantomimes, may have influenced the orphans' self-image and strategies for mobility and autonomy.

Taken together, the records of the HOIS illustrate the fashion in which black and white approaches to welfare, and the notions of "American" identity they embodied, related to the orphans' self-expressions as individuals and subordinate group members. In the process, these sources demonstrate the interplay of hierarchies in the construction of identity and the workings of hegemony as a field of contest and contradiction, subject to appropriation, subversion, and even redefinition by multipositional subalterns. The following pages trace the tension-ridden evolution of American exceptionalism before going on to narrate its dialectical interaction with subaltern identities during the Progressive-era history of the Howard Orphanage and Industrial School.

Conceived in 1866 in the Manhattan home of Sarah A. Tillman, the widow of a black pastor, as an asylum for the children of southern migrants, the HOIS lived out its fifty-two-year existence against the backdrop of vigorous debate about the racial meaning of American identity. The national narrative of the United States celebrated its unique commitment to the ideals of "liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism and laissez-faire" as hallmarks of its identity.¹⁷ Yet, the historical legacy of black slavery shaped a "white republic" not unlike empires conceived in relations of difference. The ideology and institutions of the "white republic" sculpted a racialized and gendered image of the ideal American, that in political discourse, came to be wedded to the notion of "republican citizenship." Republican citizenship made the capacity for self-government in the American republic a function of economic independence that guaranteed freedom from the political will of others. Thus, it effectively excluded women and non-whites from its purview until well into the twentieth century.¹⁸ In the age of capitalist transformation, this political model of self-determination came to be associated with a bourgeois ethic of competitive individualism. Rugged and self-made, the idealized Euro-American male was a free agent who made rational decisions guided by enlightened self-interest. He strode through the pages of dime novels and Horatio Alger fiction overcoming an adverse environment no matter what form it assumed—whether the Indian-infested wilderness of the West or the grimy sweatshop of the metropolitan East—to ascend from rags to riches in America's dynamic, fluid, expansive society. The black male was his reverse mirror image: the contented, infantile dependent of the slaveholders' imagination; the prancing, singing, undisciplined Jim Crow conceived in minstrelsy; and the pretentious but bumbling "coon" of media construction.

At the same time, the market revolution forged the ideal of a bourgeois world divided into two gendered spheres. The home took on a new importance as an organic refuge of affection from the competitive world of commerce beyond, under the moral guardianship of "True Woman," mother of worthy republican citizens. Defined by the virtues of piety, domesticity, purity, and virtue, this middle-class ideal was ostensibly inapplicable to laboring black "Jezebels" in slavery and freedom. It was as racialized as its male counterpart of the economically independent "rugged individual." Thus, fixed notions of the white "self" and the black "other" became firmly ensconced in the evolving perspective of racial nationalism.¹⁹

When the Gilded Age's economic revolution bred what the social critic Henry George labeled the "paradox of poverty amid progress," the ideological constructs of the "true" American man and woman implicitly entered discourse on "pauperism." They helped guide the twin efforts to reform the poor and Americanize the culturally alien immigrants flocking to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century.²⁰ Catholic and Jewish newcomers of uncertain "whiteness" from southern and eastern Europe appeared to threaten venerable national institutions of economic independence, "true" womanhood, and self-government. Americanization became for President Theodore Roosevelt an essential condition for admitting immigrants to the privileges of American citizenship. Yet, in a land imagined as possessing a white soul, acculturation to American norms was itself invested with racial meaning. A number of developments in the last quarter of the nineteenth century—popular travel accounts of non-Western cultures, "frontier" skirmishes with Mexicans and Indians, and anti-Chinese agitation in the West—reinforced the construction of the American nation as divided between "whiteness and its others."²¹ Above all, by the advent of the twentieth century, white southerners had devised what Grace Elizabeth Hale calls a "culture of segregation" to reassert their dominance over slaves-turned-citizens, some of whom presented the alarming specter of black economic and even social mobility.²² The evolution of racial nationalism, however, never proceeded unchallenged. Progressive America's civil rights activists and suffragists—among others—continued the legacy of the Civil War by championing a version of civic nationalism that, within the structure of democratic capitalism, offered equality of opportunity and freedom to all individuals regardless of color, creed, or gender.

African-Americans and their white patrons associated with the Howard Orphanage and Industrial School found within these controversies over the premises of American exceptionalism, the resources to reinvent black identities and empower African-Americans, however informally or imperfectly. The HOIS originated in the Brooklyn premises of the Pan-Africanist African Civilization Society (ACS), founded by New York blacks to promote colonization and missionary work in Africa. The ACS collaborated with local black women led by Sarah A. Tillman to provide a haven for the children of freedwomen émigrés, mostly in domestic service, who could not take their charges to work. The institution was incorporated in 1868 as the Brooklyn Howard Colored Orphan Asylum (BHCA)—possibly in honor of one of its white supporters, General Oliver A. Howard, head of the Freedmen's Bureau. Until 1902, the BHCA remained almost wholly under the management of local laundresses and other African-American women of far less privileged status than their sisters in such national organizations as the National Association of Colored Women. Its most visible representative was its superintendent of thirty-three years, a blind preacher and indefatigable fundraiser named William F. Johnson.²³

The orphanage teetered perennially on the verge of financial crisis, as its annual reports to the New York State Board of Charities revealed.²⁴ Prevailing stereotypes of black financial ineptitude, together with the departure of Johnson after a conflict with the managers in 1902, prompted a directive from the New York City comptroller under which the board transformed itself into an all male, part white body aided by a women's auxiliary.²⁵ It was this body that reinvented the orphanage from a community service vehicle run predominantly by black women for black women into a northern industrial school and farm on the Tuskegee model.²⁶ In 1911, with the blessings of the New York State Board of Charities, the HOIS moved to a 600-acre property in King's Park, Long Island. There it adopted the cottage system: separate small buildings within a pastoral setting designed to foster the individuality thought to be central to family life. The move entailed a financial crisis, which amid intrablack friction prompted a further whitening of Howard's Board in 1913 under the Presidency of L. Hollingsworth Wood, a white Quaker lawyer. Secretary of the National League of Urban Conditions Among Colored People, Wood was well-connected with the heads of southern black industrial schools like "Tuskegee Wizard" Booker T. Washington. He sought and received carte blanche in picking his board of managers. Its white members included bankers, lawyers, and corporate executives with ties to benevolent and civil rights organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), while the black managers consisted of ministers and physicians well respected in the world of African-American philanthropy. Thus in the course of ten years, the social profile of Howard's supervisors changed in favor of those with influence in the charity establishment but less entrenched in the realities of working-class black life.²⁷

The managers' position at the crossroads of the sometimes incompatible worlds of child welfare reform and civil rights shaped a welfare vision informed by civic nationalism and an administrative style committed to efficiency. They were lone stewards of a cause that attracted little public sympathy or financial support. Progressive America's preference for "scientific charity" over voluntarism coupled with social welfare professionals' lack of confidence in African-American managerial skills and financial acumen impeded the efforts of black voluntary associations to win public support for their projects. The prevailing opinion overwhelmingly favored shifting black dependent children from black-operated institutions to public care. These factors lent successive generations of Howard's managers an aspect of "subalternity" in relation to the larger charitable world of which they were a part.²⁸

Like colonized elites in other parts of the world, these interracial Progressives couched their mission in the exceptionalist language and institutional forms of the dominant culture. The first contingent declared in 1906, "all the colored people ask for is the opportunity to fit themselves by industrial, moral and intellectual training for self support and ... useful citizenship ... or as our President Roosevelt puts it, 'a square deal.'"²⁹ The managers' language of color-blind nationalism was matched by structural changes in the organization of the institution, embodied in its adoption of the cottage system in 1911. In general, reformers believed that the "homelike" quality of the cottage model would help Americanize European immigrant children by individualizing child care.³⁰ For Howard's black elites and their white allies, however, the cottage ideal's promise of individual regeneration carried a racial connotation. For they saw in it a device to counter the "depersonalization" of blacks inherent in racial "othering" by erasing the premise of "whiteness" underlying American identity. In other words, it facilitated their enterprise to shape African-American subjects by signifying the capacity of black children to "Americanize" just like white children. It encoded their civic nationalist ideal of individual "sameness." Declaring that "What is true of the white race is true of the colored race. Knowledge ... elevates, while ignorance ... degrades," Howard's managers sought to demonstrate the importance of environment by rearing their charges in clean and airy cottages under the "personal supervision" of devout housemothers, by teaching young women "the domestic sciences" and men agriculture, carpentry, and shoemaking, and by requiring them all to go to church.³¹

As black migration to the urban North gained momentum under the pressures of southern racism and the promise of northern economic opportunity, the HOIS projected itself forcefully as a vehicle for acculturating, urbanizing, and training the children of destitute southerners for productive labor and citizenship in their new environment.³² This endeavor explicitly recalled the Americanization programs of schools and factories directed at European immigrants. At the same time, it contained the implicit promise of defusing a potentially explosive racial situation captured by the New York Times' report of a "Negro Invasion."³³ The orphanage's promotional literature had long conveyed the mutability of social identities and the dynamics of individual subject formation implied by its project of acculturation. One early flyer, for instance, represented the prospect of black embourgeoisment with the help of a pictorial logo. The logo juxtaposed two images positioned on either side of an inscription that read "Where Does Your Money Go?" The one labeled "undeveloped" depicted a diffident looking sharecropper from the rural South with drooping shoulders, sparse clothing, and bare feet, looking almost as though poised to perform a "Jim Crow" routine. The other figure, labeled "developed," was a portly, obviously urban success story, handsomely attired in a jacket tie, trousers, breeches, and boots, standing erect with his paunch jutting out—the very picture of confidence. The official identity of the uninitiated Howard orphan thus took on the character of a malleable rural southern-born black child as capable of transfiguring into urban respectability as one originating in a Russian Pale shtetl or the southern Italian peasantry. (See Figure 1). The managers used a similar language of "individual sameness," embodying the logic of racial integration, at public gatherings commemorating national heroes. At such events they celebrated the black Booker T. Washington and the white Abraham Lincoln as twin models of the quintessentially "American" traits of initiative and self-reliance whose humble origins mirrored the inmates' own.³⁴

Figure 1: Front of pledge card; Howard Orphanage and Industrial School Records, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Reproduced with kind permission of the New York Public Library.

The managers' vision of civic nationalism interacted with their mandate as child welfare reformers to promote a "rational" style of administration within what some subalternists might describe as the hegemonic bounds of Progressive thought. The post-1913 board sought to combat Progressive pressures against black voluntarism by adopting Progressive measures to advance efficiency and economy in the running of the institution. In an attempt to introduce a spirit of personal responsibility and sensitivity to the profit incentive among the children, Mansfield Snevily, originally vice-president, later treasurer, promised handsome pictures as a reward to the cottage with the best record in discipline, neatness, and lack of breakage.³⁵ Moreover, he suggested that "free wards"—those admitted by destitute parents and supported at institutional expense—be replaced with "city children" committed by the public authorities so that they would bring in appropriations from the public purse.³⁶ The managers also sought to enforce the rules regarding parental support of "half-orphans" more vigorously. To ensure regular payment by living parents of Howard children, they devised a standardized form permitting the employers of domestic servants to remit the fee of $12 per child per month directly to the institution from the mother's wages. Those who could not afford that sum were now advised to apply directly to the Department of Charities to admit their children, so as to get that body to defray part of the expenses.³⁷

These rules floundered, however, when the mostly white board, in its role as arbitrator with the officialdom of child welfare, confronted differing perspectives of race, gender, and class within the HOIS. The resultant dynamic illustrates the operation of subalternism as a multilayered grid of power relations underpinned by shifting identities colluding and colliding with dominant beliefs according to circumstances. Through much of its brief but best-known twentieth-century existence, the Howard Orphanage reared its young "clients" under the fiercely protective maternal wing of Mary Gordon, matron of the institution during her husband James Gordon's tenure as superintendent between 1902 and 1914. Upon the death of her husband of twenty-nine years in March 1914, the fifty-year-old Pennsylvania native succeeded him as superintendent and remained in that position until February 1917.³⁸ Gordon presents a revealing case of the multipositional subaltern whose numerous "locations" shaped her complex approach to race, reform, and American identities. A light-skinned African-American married woman, her middle-class sensibilities placed her in sympathy with the managers' larger mission of broadening the definition of American nationhood to include people of color. Publicly, she fully endorsed the cottage system with its goal of promoting "individuality." Moreover, she shared her white supervisors' attachment to what Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham calls the "politics of respectability,"³⁹—conformity to Victorian morality as a means of countering negative stereotypes of the black female character, thereby challenging the color figuration of "true" American womanhood. For instance, Gordon threatened to dismiss a custodian for kissing a teacher within sight of the children, and a teacher for allegedly borrowing money from men.⁴⁰

Gordon's consciousness of the scope of African-American need, combined with her experience as a staff member on the ground forced to grapple with the day-to-day problems of running a large institution with few resources, fostered a management style frequently at odds with the "efficient" approach of Howard's managers, as well as with the standards set by the State Board of Charities. Such friction represented the points at which the civic nationalist discourse of "individual sameness" dissolved in a clash of different hierarchies rooted in the identities of gender, race, class, and professional experience. For instance, Gordon explicitly invoked both her domestic authority as a woman, and her professional credentials as a ground-level administrator in an argument over Wood's proposal to save money by eliminating the offices of housekeeper and matron. She wrote that she was at first surprised, but that "when I remember you are a man and have had no experience in running a small house much less an institution of this kind, I can understand. I am sure your sister [Carolena Wood, also a board member] will understand that it would be utterly impossible for one person to get along here with a farm of this proportion, 11 homes to look after, 350 children and more than forty employees to supervise. It is not even to be thought of."⁴¹ The superintendent boldly chastised board members for usurping her power to appoint and especially to dismiss staff members. She argued that such interference encouraged insubordination on the part of unsatisfactory employees, especially male ones. These instances suggest the ways in which intra-institutional subaltern hierarchies, that is, the orphanage's own pecking order, could collide with the tiered power structure of the child welfare establishment, challenging established orderings of not just gender, but those of race as well.⁴²

These collisions, together with ruptures in the "sameness" paradigm that they spawned, emerge even more clearly in reports of inspection conducted under the auspices of New York City's Department of Public Charities and the State Board of Charities between 1913 and 1917. These reports, read in the context of evidence of the nature of interpersonal relationships that prevailed at the orphanage, suggest that under Gordon's direction at King's Park, the children were nurtured in a cooperative world that often functioned more like an informal and affectionate extended family with its own hierarchies than an institution. The HOIS's living arrangements, modes of socialization, and economic system followed a communitarian, black Christian model of organization based on flexible conceptions of time and space and porous boundaries between education and work, institution and family, and the individual and the community. Several inspection reports juxtaposed complaints about the inadequacy of the institution's frame cottages, hot water supply, heating and lighting facilities, the poor equipment of its kitchens and work rooms, and its failure to observe the rules of individual property ownership with observations about the affectionate relations evident between children and staff. One inspector noted disapprovingly that the orphans ate at long dining tables seating up to fifteen and recommended cutting them into smaller units.⁴³ Government inspectors were also unenthusiastic about the apparent neglect of private property ownership among the children. One lamented the lack of individual ownership of toys as well as the absence of "individual bins and lockers for the children's clothes" which lay unmarked, "jumbled together" in a closet. Another, perhaps as concerned about hygiene as about individual property ownership, observed, "the toothbrushes and combs were not marked but the cottage mothers could identify each child's brush by its appearance." Nor was he pleased to learn that the infirmary and detention houses were used as bedrooms by some of the children and that two young women shared a bed in the superintendent's cottage.⁴⁴ Recommendations by the State Board of Charities simultaneously upheld hygiene standards and struck against the communitarian principle of ownership and living: "number all toilet articles and provide a definite place to keep them; provide a locker or bin for each child's wardrobe; number all the face towels; cut the tables into smaller units, each to seat 6–8 children," and so forth.⁴⁵

The communal features displayed by Howard may have existed in some white institutions,⁴⁶ but what gave them a different meaning at the black orphanage was the context of the familial nature of relationships existing between the staff and their charges. One state inspector reported: "Conversation is permitted in the dining rooms ... One notable feature of the home (is) the spirit of cordial relationship and friendliness evident between staff and children ... Nothing resembling military discipline prevails at the institution; the children freely go about their work and play."⁴⁷ Along a similar vein, Booker T. Washington wrote Wood after a visit to the farm, "the thing that pleased me perhaps most was to note the natural bearing of the children, they had nothing of the 'institutional' atmosphere. A natural relation seemed to exist between them and their instructors."⁴⁸ Self-government—"participatory democracy"—governed the orphanage's method of discipline. A child accused of a misdemeanor was tried by a jury of his/her peers drawn from the student body. The chief form of punishment consisted of extra work.⁴⁹

Washington's observations about the "natural relations" existing between Howard staff and their charges are borne out in part by the intimate ways in which residents addressed Gordon in their letters—often as "dearest mother." Gordon, on her part, went beyond the bounds of ordinary institutional duty to protect the interests of her charges long after they had left her care. When a Howard alumnus (I will call him Thomas Marshall), a hall boy employed by the Brooklyn Hospital, was arrested for alleged theft, she pleaded earnestly with Wood to intervene in Marshall's behalf with all the anguish of a concerned mother: "he (Marshall) has fallen into temptation ... but he is so sorry ... my poor heart is aching ... I am his mother in love, trust and purpose ... I have labored so hard ... to raise him as a Christian gentleman ... I will do anything, anything to save him." Marshall was discharged to Wood's care, and Gordon arranged for "her boy" to live with her brother, Reverend George E. Stevens of St. Louis, Missouri. There Marshall prospered, eventually becoming an independent farmer. He received permission to take Gordon's last name, referring to her as "his mother" in his letters to Wood. It appears that, in Marshall's case at least, the child savers' concern that institutions stymied the emotional development of dependent children and robbed them of support networks to help them in their careers proved unfounded.⁵⁰

Gordon's relationship with her wards suggests that although other (non-black) orphanages displayed some of the same group-oriented modes of living as the HOIS, communitarianism carried an entirely different meaning in the context of a black institution. Progressive-era reformers concerned about dependent children opposed all those features (like long dining tables) that they felt made orphanages seem less like a private family and more like an institution.⁵¹ Certainly, there is much evidence to suggest that at predominantly "white" orphanages, congregate living spelled "total institution," with features that bothered child welfare advocates of all faiths. As Reena Sigman Friedman has shown, even at turn-of-the-century-Jewish orphanages—arguably some of the most enlightened of their kind⁵²—children were identified by number rather than by name, had their hair cropped short, wore uniforms, and "marched to their various activities in silent rows to the clanging of a bell."⁵³ These institutions liberalized their policies a great deal in the twentieth century, yet their staff-inmate relations were often marked by a certain degree of formality. For instance, alumni of the Jewish Foster Home of Philadelphia remembered their superintendent Aaron Faber as a "disciplinarian" who expected the children to greet him in a "military-like manner."⁵⁴ Hymen Bogan, an alumnus of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, has written that the institution's early twentieth-century superintendent Solomon Lowenstein was reputed to be "kind and gentle," but even so, did not address the children by their first names.⁵⁵ Likewise, a chronicler of the Rochester Jewish Children's Home has recorded that the "best the alumni could say (about the matrons of the institution) is that they 'told us what was right and wrong ... encouraged us to be neat and clean' ... 'there was no hugging stuff in the Baby Cottage. Whatever hugs I got came from elsewhere.'"⁵⁶

The level of intimacy between custodians and their charges distinguished Howard's brand of communitarianism from that of some Catholic orphanages as well. According to Dorothy M. Brown and Elizabeth McKeown, when the Catholic social worker Mary Anne Kennedy visited St. Paul's Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum in Pittsburgh in 1919, she found some of the same physical elements of group living that abounded at the HOIS: children sat at long tables, clothing "was not marked for individual use," and the same hairbrush served several children. Yet what separated the Pittsburgh institution from Howard was Kennedy's finding that "no semblance of homelikeness" prevailed. At dinner, a whistle sounded after grace was said, signaling that it was time to eat. Kennedy was especially critical of the distance between the living standards of the superintendent on the one hand and that of the children on the other: "In his own study, he [the superintendent] shows a commendable appreciation of what a homelike room should be; books, pictures and some fine plants are strongly in evidence. And yet, not in one place throughout the building, has there been any attempt made to provide a homelike atmosphere for the children." Kennedy complained that the superintendent cared more about his "prize ferns," which he left in the custody of an expert gardener when he went abroad, even as he neglected the broken arm of one of his charges, an Italian boy named Gregory.⁵⁷

The foregoing discussion suggests that based on their observations of a majority of orphanages, Progressives had reason to regard group living as the antithesis of that ostensible bastion of emotional security, the nuclear family. The historical experiences of African Americans, however, made congregate living perfectly compatible with family life. Surrogate kin networks that adapted African consanguineal traditions to New World exigencies were common not only in slavery but also helped black migrants withstand the harshest challenges of urban living both before and after emancipation. Notwithstanding its adoption of the "cottage system," the HOIS retained features that might be considered "institutional" in the context of non-black orphanages because they undermined "individuality," but in the context of a black establishment merely reified the tradition of group solidarity central to African-American family life. Recall that one state inspector noted that although the brushes assigned to Howard children were not labeled, cottage mothers could tell their owners by their appearance. Thus, a black style of benevolence management that obscured the lines between (extended) family and "institution"—as evident not primarily in practices such as the communal ownership of toys and the use of long tables but in the nature of staff-client relationships—was rooted in the historic conditions of black life in America.⁵⁸

The familiar black cultural model of family organization upheld by Gordon was reinforced by the children's frequent interaction with black churches and civic organizations in New York City. Several African-American religious institutions in Brooklyn participated in the orphanage's fund-raising festivals and bazaars, setting up tables for ice cream, lemonade, clothes, toilet articles, etc. Howard's alumni came to these affairs, making them significant not so much because they raised a great deal of money but more as forums for socializing and community organizing.⁵⁹ These cultural affairs, combined with the children's labor pressures, interrupted their academic schedules in a way that confounded the lines among school, work, and community, in stark contrast with the much more regimented routines characteristic of most non-black orphanages. Public inspections suggested that regular cooking classes were suspended in order to manufacture articles for the annual fair, or to practice for public concerts. Work schedules sometimes got in the way of punctuality in school attendance, since the older children provided much of the labor on the farm and in the cottages. The 1917 report noted, "when girls were found carrying buckets of coal to the kitchen ... and ironing clothes, and the boys cleaning the stables, carting away manure, and killing chickens during school hours, it was explained by the Superintendent that this was part of their vocational training. Under the guise of vocational or industrial training as it is called at the institution, the work of the home is performed."⁶⁰ These practices violated prevailing concepts of childhood that opposed child labor and emphasized the importance of nurturing and educating children at home and in school in order to prepare them for responsibilities of family and citizenship. No wonder then, that state inspectors disapproved of the practices described above as infringements of board standards intended to safeguard the health and welfare of dependent children.

From the perspective of Howard's staff, however, the institution was reconciling its financial constraints with the needs of a growing community of indigent African Americans in ways that made creative use of scarce resources. Rather than turn needy children away, it accommodated the overflow in the infirmary and detention houses, occasionally allowing more than one person to share a bed (as in the case of two young women in the superintendent's cottage). Given the shortage of clothing and toys, common ownership ensured variety. A flexible definition of time seemed necessary in a situation where, unable to afford outside labor, the orphanage was forced to let its charges combine study with household and farm chores. Vocational instructors doubled as the mechanics of the institution, while the school Principal also served as the resident minister.⁶¹ From the vantage point of the white managers, Gordon's supervisory style made Howard vulnerable to stereotypes of black mismanagement. Yet the fact that state inspectors found overcrowding and other violations a few years after the HOIS board had enacted the efficiency-driven reforms mentioned earlier suggests that Howard's black staff may have resisted the letter of the new laws rather frequently.

Through her style of benevolence management, Gordon and her staff devised an oppositional community identity rooted in black historical experiences—a communitarian universe permeating the physical structure of the ostensibly individualistic "cottage" system. They questioned their white supervisors' commitment to the virtues of "individuality," order, and economic efficiency when the practical needs of working poor African Americans were at stake. This disruption of the HOIS managers' world view of color-blind "sameness" injected a race-conscious vision of pluralism into the mix of black American identity formation. At the same time, however, Gordan's communitarianism was complicated by subaltern hierarchies of class, color, and professional positioning.⁶² For working poor African-American guardians, having a voice in their children's lives and labor constituted a vital element of familial self-determination. Any institution's appropriation of a child's custody smacked of slavery's disregard for family ties. For Gordon, however, the children's access to equal opportunity sometimes entailed the unfortunate but necessary step of separation from their "unrefined" and often destitute kin, an attitude that injected more than a hint of condescension in her dealings with the relatives of her "boys and girls." One formerly homeless mother, Mrs. S., tried repeatedly to discharge her son from the orphanage when she returned to work. Gordon refused, referring Wood (who tried to intervene in Mrs. S.'s behalf) to an outdated report by the Commissioners of the Poor: "Father in prison. Mother and child homeless, staying with old neighbors ... Mother's physical condition does not warrant her caring for more than one child." Gordon wrote Wood," ... some of these people make one very weary of them, even when you try to be kind" [my italics]. The superintendent's words clearly reflected her sense of alienation from the likes of Mrs. S.,—not simply in terms of class, but also as a welfare "bureaucrat"—despite their shared racial identity. Wood, however took Mrs. S.'s side, reminding Gordon that the mother's position had changed since the commissioners had issued their report.⁶³

Gordon's dialectical approach to benevolence, racial solidarity, and national identity was mirrored in a variety of cultural "texts," the most significant of which was a series of pantomimes. These materials were apparently crafted by Howard's staff—arguably members of an emerging black bourgeoisie drawn from such southern institutions as Fisk and Howard Universities, and Tuskegee and Hampton Institutes, as well as northeastern normal colleges such as those at Danbury, Connecticut, Collingswood, New Jersey, and Cheney, Pennsylvania.⁶⁴ The pantomime scripts elucidate important processes of subaltern subject formation through the appropriation and subversion of hegemonic narratives. On one level, they were designed to publicize the school's mission and usefulness in the context of a turbulent, protean society's search for order and harmony in the classic Progressive tradition. Yet, the plays also destabilized the insignia of racial nationalism to question the place of African Americans in American society. Their simultaneous appeal to white and black patrons stemmed from their multilayered interpretive potential—from their engagement with the tensions within American exceptionalism, and from their simultaneous acquiescence in, and opposition to, Progressive reform ideology. When used in conjunction with letters written by former inmates of the orphanage, they offer a basis for analyzing the ways in which the didactic values they conveyed may have shaped the children's aspirations and sense of self.⁶⁵

The story lines of the pantomimes revolved around the same moral refrain: the value of equal opportunity in a fluid, ultimately just society that rewarded personal integrity and industry, irrespective of race. Such a conception of the nature of American society and the individual's relationship with it accorded well with the ethos of self-reliance, individualism, and racial harmony upheld by the institution's civic nationalist management. Yet, subtexts woven into the scripts' narrative fabric suggested not only an awareness of pervasive institutional racism that thwarted the color-blind promise of civic nationalism but also a consciousness of racial solidarity as the path to black success. Moreover, in an inversion of the terms of black-white relations, the black adult often emerged as a heroic savior of the very whites who had oppressed his or her race.

The script of one pantomime offers a good example of these themes. It opens with the protagonist, a newsboy named Restus shooting craps in a crowded street, surrounded by scenes of "drunkenness, street fights and disorder." Arrested presumably for disorderly conduct, he is sent to the Children's Society, where white children mock his friendly overtures. When he attempts to save a white girl from a white male tormentor, he is severely reprimanded and locked in a room by himself. Whites who visit the society to adopt children shrink from him in disgust, so that he is "more lonely than ever before." His journey to salvation begins when a young white visitor, Elsie Watson, persuades her gentleman father to admit him to the Howard Orphanage. Subsequent scenes depict Restus mature from a troubled youth into a well-adjusted and productive adult. Eventually the young man becomes a school teacher in the very southern town where his old benefactor Mr. Watson resides. Walking in the woods one day, Restus notices a trinket which he recognizes as belonging to Elsie. He follows hoof tracks into the woods and discovers Elsie lying at the bottom of a precipice where she has been thrown by her horse. He carries her back to her home and rings for a doctor while her family and servants panic. The doctor felicitates Restus with words capitalized in the script, "YOUNG MAN, YOU SAVED HER LIFE," whereupon Restus reminds Watson of the favor he did the young man of color a long time ago.

This script encoded a number of ideas that reflected Howard's appeal to potential white donors and its staff's conception of racial identity and vision of welfare. The notion that the school would rehabilitate through education and religious influence southern immigrants led astray by the pernicious influences of New York's mean streets was in keeping with the institution's official mission. Moreover, the central role of a white child as a mediator between the black boy and the instrument of his salvation—the Howard School—contained an obvious appeal for white patrons. Furthermore, Restus's saving of Elsie may have been interpreted as an act of gratitude reinforcing the loyal black image in the white mind. At the same time, the contrast between Restus's experiences in the white Children's Society and the black Howard Orphanage underscored the obduracy of structural racism, the wisdom of raising black children among their own kind, and black children's potential not simply for spiritual redemption but for productive citizenship as well.

Most important, however, the script challenged the myth of the black rapist by portraying the black male as a white woman's savior on two occasions, during one of which the black protector was punished for daring to raise a hand against a white male offender in defense of a white woman's honor. By turning black Restus into white Elsie's protector rather than violator, the pantomime undercut the rationale of that ultimate and very public expression of white racial nationalism: lynching. As Grace Elizabeth Hale has argued, ritualized lynchings of black men accused of dishonoring white women, "conjured whiteness ... through their spectacle of a violent African-American otherness as much as through the narratives of [white communal] unity they generated." As black southerners used the culture of segregation to carve autonomous spaces for themselves in their own churches, businesses, and homes, lynch mobs inverted the practice of racial separation to consolidate white dominance, to remind black people that there was no space they could call their own, and that even their bodies "were subject to invasion by whites." The technology of mass consumer culture commodified the imagery of this very public message by marketing souvenirs, photographs, even human "leather" goods generated by lynchings.⁶⁶ Through their own performance of public resistance—however small scale—the authors and actors of Restus's story implicitly exposed lynching as a link between white supremacy and savagery, thereby draining whiteness of its monopolistic signification of civilization.

Another pantomime "scenario" begins in a one-room tenement home, which although sparsely furnished, manifests "a general air of cleanliness." It is home to Lulu, "a comely modest negro girl in hat and jacket." She works as a maid to support her four-year-old sister Mary, who sports "well-brushed" curls and a "clean gingham dress." Lulu kisses Mary goodbye and leaves for work. Upon her return, she discovers that Mary has managed to unlock herself out of their home and pilfered ginger cookies and bananas on the streets. Lulu then secures her mistress's permission to take her sister to work. Ellen and Mary become playmates, despite Mary's rueful longing for Ellen's finery and Ellen's occasional lapses into "aristocratic" indifference to Mary's material deprivation. When Ellen, on her birthday, flaunts her beautiful cake and her many costly presents, including a gold locket, Mary gives into the temptation to steal a similarly flashy pendant from a pawnbroker's shop. Her theft is discovered, and Lulu is persuaded by her mistress to dispatch her little sister to the Howard Orphanage. At the orphanage, Mary thrives; she learns to "rub clothes" and iron. More important, the "selfishness and envy of her manner with Ellen has departed." Years later, she serves as a maid at Ellen's wedding, showing "great respect for Lulu's directions" in the kitchen. When one of the other maids steals Ellen's string of pearls, reducing the bride to tears, it is Mary who discovers the culprit and through her impressive powers of persuasion and faith is able to induce the transgressor to repent and return the stolen goods to their rightful owner. A grateful Ellen writes Mary, "My dear dear Mary, we are ten thousand times obliged to you ... Walter says that a detective would have cost three or four times as much and would have made lots of talk and trouble in the papers ... Your very grateful friend, Ellen."

This pantomime shared certain thematic parallels with the story of Restus: the danger of exposing unattended children to the streets, and the black child's potential for salvation realized at Howard through the mediation of a white patron. Yet the script also emphasized the role of white material flamboyance and condescension in Mary's fall from virtue. In addition, the figure of Lulu, who despite her modest means maintained a clean, wholesome home and a well-groomed sister, suggested that black women conformed to Victorian ideals of domesticity under far more adverse material circumstances than their middle-class white sisters. Yet, in recognition of Lulu's need to work for wages, the script also conveyed the need for adequate day-care facilities for black children. In this context, the Howard Orphanage assumed the role of not just a refuge for parentless children, or a safeguard against disorder on the streets, but also an essential social service agency for working-class women of color. Moreover, while the script did not challenge the traditional racial and gender identities of black women—every black woman played a maid—Mary's part in saving Ellen's jewelry suggested that Howard had vested this inmate with the power of faith and persuasion to protect a white woman's property, if not her person. Even if the terms of black-white social relations had not changed, the roles of white as paternalist/maternalist-civilizer and black as the beneficiary of protection had been reversed in this script.

Other scripts forcefully projected an environmentalist view of crime by contrasting the fate of youth left to their own devices with the success stories of their siblings unfolding under the protective care of the Howard Orphanage. The various themes interlaced in these narratives—racial solidarity, a challenge of racial stereotypes, black children's potential for not just moral uplift but professional success through education, wage-earning women's daycare needs, the sanctity of feminine virtue, and the environmental interpretation of the roots of poverty and crime—informed the welfare vision of Howard's black staff. On one level, this outlook celebrated equal opportunity, asserted the power of environment in molding the personal traits necessary for individual success, and embraced the trimmings of Victorian morality in accord with the white managers' civic nationalist template of "sameness." It shaped the black subject as individual, a project furthered by the pantomimes' subversion of the icons of white supremacy. As we have seen, the emblems of white racial nationalism—the fiction of the black rapist, the discourse of mobility, the rhetoric of internalized self-discipline, and the "cult of true womanhood"—functioned as hegemonic markers in flux. For they were appropriated, recontextualized, robbed of their racial meaning, and fashioned into an argument against racial nationalism. On another level, however, the pantomimes manifested a sense of institutional racism and promoted black solidarity in concord with the communitarian spirit suffusing Howard's cottages and farms.

How did a Howard upbringing—the children's lifestyle and interpersonal relationships at the orphanage combined with their exposure to ideas encoded in the institution's cultural productions—mediate the orphans' own negotiations of personal, racial, and national identities? In other words, how did the children express themselves as surrogate daughters and sons, workers and consumers, aspiring professionals and lovers, and as black and American? And how did these roles interact with each other, as well as with hegemonic structures, to form multidimensional subaltern subjects? Letters addressed to Superintendent Gordon and Board President Wood by and about former inmates, mostly women placed by the orphanage in domestic service, provide valuable clues to these questions.⁶⁷

These documents show that the managers' emphasis on "individuality," thrift, order, self-reliance, and feminine virtue supplied a civic nationalist prism through which the children navigated the fractious terrain of American exceptionalism. In this context the letters framed the themes of respectability and decorum, professional aspirations and consumption patterns, and control over work and sex in terms of the discourse of individual "sameness." At the same time, however, the African-American welfare vision, informed by a sense of responsibility for the "race" and profound faith in black youth's potential for success, also textured the children's quest for empowerment. From their various situations defined by a plethora of social experiences, the orphans manipulated the paradoxes of American identity constructs to write a multivocal African-American experience into a national narrative premised upon a unidimensional construct of black dependence. By disrupting supposedly immutable identities defined by "natural" difference, the alumni sought not only to advance their personal autonomy but also to challenge the racial meaning of Americanism. The informal, surrogate family ethos that governed staff-inmate relations at Howard may well have endowed the children with the emotional confidence to make assertive claims to freedom and equality. It is manifested in the familiar ways in which alumnae addressed Mary Gordon. Common salutations included "My darling Mother," "My dearest Mother," and "My own sweet mother." Many strove to win her approval by describing themselves as efficient workers and devoted Christians, striving for temporal and spiritual self-improvement in ways that validated the institution's plea for equal opportunity. One wrote: "Mrs. Swartz (her employer) broke her arm a few weeks ago and I had to jump right in like a little woman and help all I could. No one can dress her or comb her hair like I can. She says she don't know [sic] what she'd do without me. I had all Dr. H's bills to make out and checks too." She stressed her own observance of public decorum: "P. (a friend from the orphanage) tickles me at times. She talks so loud on the streets and I am not used to that and remind her often where she is."⁶⁸ This missive reveals interlocking identities at work, knitting together dimensions of individual self-consciousness with race. For its author was a surrogate daughter seeking a parent's favor by embracing her values and a black woman de-racializing the canon of "true womanhood" by representing "respectability" as an individual attribute as likely to be found among African Americans as among whites.

Similarly, the hallowed American ideal of occupational mobility was integral to the alumni's sense of personal security as well as their conception of American identity. The HOIS's emphasis on its charges' potential for success created several ambitious young aspirants for careers loftier than the menial service to which the dominant society bound their identity as a race. For the girls, black women in key positions of authority at Howard—whether as superintendent, matrons, or teachers—must have served as role models of professional achievement.⁶⁹ Thus, work became an important motif in their articulation of racially egalitarian "sameness." A night watchman for the City and Suburban Homes Company declared that he was "still fighting to become an able man. Even if I am married which stops many a career."⁷⁰ One young woman assured her "own sweet matron" that "Some day you may have just cause to be proud of us, for I know I don't intend to spend the rest of my days in the kitchen."⁷¹ Young women who had their sights set upon careers in nursing or teaching fared badly in the kitchen and parlor, whether by natural ability or design. Mary Jackson's mistress described her as "slow" with "absolutely no initiative." Yet Jackson enthusiastically sought and filled out an application for nurse's training at the Lincoln Hospital and Home, explaining: "My reason to be a nurse is to try and help somebody. There are so many nobodys [sic] that I'm so anxious to do my part it may be very small but its helping just a little. If I am accepted I will try and do my best."⁷² Another woman left her employer when the latter refused to give her the music lessons she had been promised.⁷³ Thus Ann Smith, whose tale of frustrated ambitions opened this essay, was not unique in her refusal to resign herself to the status of eternal servility prescribed by her location at the intersection of a "triple jeopardy" of race, class, and gender.

As noted before, the link between Smith's professional and sartorial aspirations was not accidental. Fancy clothing was not only a significant element in the emergence of a working-class youth culture in turn-of-the-century New York but represented for African Americans a conspicuous mode of rejecting the racial premises of American consumer culture. Kathy Peiss has argued that New York women strained the "boundaries of immigrant, working class life" by frequenting public spaces dressed flamboyantly. For some New Yorkers, "putting on style" became a way of expressing a variety of sentiments, from aspirations to upward mobility to the drive for romance and autonomy, while others adopted distinctive clothing as a badge of union membership.⁷⁴ According to Elizabeth Ewen, for the "new immigrants" from Europe, participation in the consumer economy served as a tool of acculturation to "American" values. Ready-made clothing became a visible symbol of national identity.⁷⁵

Yet, the culture of mass consumption was by no means color blind. Hale has argued that national advertisers purveyed images of blackness to sell a variety of articles to consumers constructed as white. For instance, the smiling face of Aunt Jemima—repository of mammy's culinary expertise and penchant for service—drew self-consciously white consumers of pancakes. At the same time, the caricatures in trade cards of African Americans in ridiculously mismatched clothing or as inept users of durable consumer goods conveyed the sense that no amount of spending would raise blacks above "their place," that their innate racial shortcomings would surface in their mishandling of manufactured goods.⁷⁶ As Hale has shown in the context of the South, however, the spaces of consumption could also become sites for transgressing traditional racial hierarchies, as stores courted black customers and well-dressed mulattoes jostled whites in railway compartments. In the cities of the North perhaps more than anywhere else, consumer culture became an arena for straining the boundaries between blackness and whiteness, a theater for contesting the national advertisers' invention of legitimate consumers, capable of attaining cultural capital though spending, as white. Howard women's penchant for fashion encoded a struggle to assert their dual identities as consumers and Americans—as black consumers and black Americans. It connoted their defiance of the idea that to wear the visible symbols of national identity and social mobility—such as ready-made clothing—was the prerogative of "whiteness" alone. This contest for equal opportunity thus symbolically invoked Howard guardians' civic nationalist premise of individual "sameness," even as it contravened their strictures against material extravagance.

A similar dynamic is evident in the women's endeavors to flout etiquettes of class relations, as well as those of race, by violating dress and behavioral codes for maids. Fannie Moore's mistress complained that when the family had visitors, Moore refused to leave the room and joined in the conversation and moreover, refused to wear an apron or any dress that was not "dressy": "she refuses to wear anything but silk stockings, silk shirt waists and white skirts when she gets up in the morning and when I call she just takes her own good time to dress and comes out of her room after I have the breakfast ready to serve." To her mistress's horror, Moore spent $1.25 for a pair of stockings. "I told her 50 cent stockings were nicer, but she said no sir not on me," complained the employer. "She seems to think she must have everything my daughter has, and go with her everywhere we go, so in some way will you please try to influence her not to forget her place and try to dress for her work, as it has been commented on around the Lake about her working in high heeled shoes and silk stockings, and my daughter and I wearing khaki skirts."⁷⁷ Some Howard women combined their appeal to the American "ode to upward mobility"—whether through business training or stylish apparel—with gestures of patriotism. Ann Smith, for example, invested in liberty bonds when the United States entered World War I.⁷⁸ Through her particular configuration of spending, this black woman, like other Howard alumnae, was testing both the promise of civic nationalism and the limits of her keepers' enforcement of the rules of personal economy.

Commercialized leisure presented opportunities to subvert racial hierarchies and assert individual "sameness" through consumption even more fundamentally, because it facilitated inter racial mingling. Yet the infractions it prompted may also be interpreted as the rebellion of youth against all authority. Movies and amusement parks cast their spell on several of Howard's first-generation black New Yorkers, much to the distress of their guardians, as institutional entries on visits to children placed out suggest. One Brooklyn employer, Mrs. Williamson, complained about her charge's propensity to visit Coney Island in violation of her curfew: "Telling [Juliet] to do or not to do is like putting water in a colander you just put it in but it runs right out." Williamson reported that Juliet in company with another Howard woman was "meeting white boys in secluded places"—a transgression the girls admitted to when told that they were under police surveillance.⁷⁹ Their actions bespoke many roles: black women breaching racial norms in accord with the managers' logic of individualism, and teenaged girls violating the discipline regimen and gender expectations of their custodians.

As workers and spenders, Howard women articulated an economic self-image that invoked rights to profit and property to question their dependent status at the margins of the national narrative. In this instance, their rhetoric of "sameness" drew on their common claim (with whites) to the mantle of the rational, freely acting individual motivated by enlightened self-interest. Although the managers embraced the same rhetoric in their calls for equal opportunity, their charges' appropriation of this stance often conflicted with the institution's parallel mission to encourage frugality. The managers required that the wages of each charge be held in a savings account in trust for the child until she reached the age of 18. However well meaning, the women saw this decree as infringing upon their control over their own earnings in what amounted to a violation of the fundamental American right to private property. Rosa Johnson invoked this sense of proprietorship when she wrote Superintendent Waring: "let me have my money as I am owner of it." When informed that she could not have her money until she reached the age of eighteen years, she angrily retorted to President Wood, "The home has been telling me that (I am not 18 yet) for the past five years ... Will you please look my age up. You know I have worked for the money and can take good care of it ... I also will be more than satisfied to give the home which took the place of any mother. I would not feel right if I didn't"⁸⁰ To Johnson, the power to dispose of her wages as she wished was inalienable from her elemental right as a worker to the ownership of the cash proceeds of her labor, and did not conflict with her sense of loyalty to the institution she called "home" and likened to "any mother." Indeed, she was willing to donate some of her savings to the home, provided that she (rather than a trustee) reserved the right to make that decision.

Other former residents negotiated their appeal for control over their wages within a framework of hallowed American values such as financial prudence and economic self-sufficiency to which they knew the managers to be attached. One woman pleaded, "I am 18 years old now ... I think I'm old enough to know the value of money ... I think I could be responsible for something. What kind of woman do you think I'll make if depended on someone else all the time. I promise you I won't touch a cent in the bank. I'll try and save all I can."⁸¹ Many others advanced plausible grounds for taking charge of their savings: economic need, the sickness of loved ones, the desire to invest in liberty bonds, to buy Christmas presents for relatives, or to replace broken articles belonging to others. Dorothy Benedict declared tersely, "Mr. Wood, I worked very hard for the money and I think I deserve some of it now because I need it ... the money I make (in my present place of employment) goes to my Grandmother. She is very sick in bed."⁸² In negotiating the terms of her life with her "benefactor," this young woman resorted to an all-American laissez-faire argument that, while consistent with the ideals of Howard's trustees, also advanced her own search for self-determination.

Finally, from their locations as consensual lovers, Howard women occasionally engaged the dialectics of sexual politics in ways that interrupted conventional configurations of female respectability, race relations, and national identity from within the cultural universe prescribed by their guardians. For the orphans, interracial dating may have served both as a symbol of personal independence as well as a challenge to the logic of whiteness. However, preserving and protecting female black sexual purity was pivotal to the Howard managers' mission of creating a respectable black citizenry, and to the staff's attempts to combat the historic traditions of black women's sexual exploitation and the stigma of their alleged licentiousness. For African-American leaders and their white sympathizers, it represented a significant tool for undermining the color fabrication of "true" American womanhood. This concern surfaced with new urgency in 1918, when sixteen-year-old Frances Carter conceived a child as a result of an affair with an Italian named Frank Fuccillo. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children got wind of the situation and had Fuccillo arrested for rape in the second degree. His lawyers sought Wood's permission for Carter's marriage to Fuccillo. Their client, they argued, was not only a citizen, but a patriot: "was lately on his way to camp as a soldier when the armistice was signed ... he has purchased from his savings one hundred dollars in Liberty Bonds." Wood, in consultation with Carter's mistress Bertha Blackman, and the Brooklyn SPCC, refused on the ground that Fuccillo's offer of marriage was no more than a device to circumvent the law. Fuccillo went to jail, and Carter returned to the Blackmans, where she had her child.

The case of Frances Carter combined a centuries-old theme of seduction with new concerns shaping the consciousness of a wartime America suspicious of alien radicalism. These concerns included the specter of female sexuality run riot embodied in the formulation of the alleged "girl problem," the emergence of white ethnic males as the new urban sexual predator against which to protect and preserve female honor, and the role of professional social welfare agencies as arbiters of these new social alignments and conflicts. For Carter's black well-wishers, Fuccillo became a stand-in for the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males who had long engaged in the sexual exploitation of black women. For her white guardians, he not only symbolized the decrepitude of the ethnic white but also raised the alarming specter of an alliance between marginal groups. Where did Carter herself stand in this controversy? She allegedly expressed great distaste for Fuccillo in her letters to Wood and the SPCC and showed no inclination to marry him. She expressed support of her guardians' characterization of Fuccillo as one who displayed "an awful temper when out of sorts ... and licentious feelings toward young girls." Under the circumstances, all agreed that although marriage offered the advantage of "legitimizing" Carter's child, it would bring the young mother a "life of misery and unhappiness" while depriving her of the chance to marry another. Yet, while Carter's protectors took comfort from her apparent remorse and rejection of an unworthy suitor, she may actually have won a battle for sexual autonomy against them—premarital sex without the compulsion to marry—albeit within the parameters of moral and social values set by them.⁸³ Thus Carter may have balanced her multiple roles as lover, "single girl about town," and obedient ward (imbued with a renewed sense of domesticity) in ways that furthered her pursuit of personal freedom. On a more symbolic level, however, her act of sexual rebellion, of miscegenation, represented the ultimate "sameness" discourse. It perforated the heart of the whiteness mythology premised upon "absolute racial difference" that defined the national culture of segregation. Frances Carter literally infused life into the figure of the tragic mulatta who traversed the works of black writers and artists as the most powerful signifier of segregation's contradictions, the living embodiment of the "American dilemma."

By the time the Carter-Fuccillo affair reached its final outcome, the HOIS had been forced into an ignominious demise. In January 1918, a severe winter destroyed the plumbing and central heating system at King's Park. Several children suffered frostbite, two so severely that they had to have their feet amputated. This tragic incident prompted an order by the State Commissioner of Charities to close down the HOIS. The premature demise of the Howard experiment suggested the tremendous odds against which black voluntary associations had to labor. In an age marked by the professionalization of social welfare, prejudice against the management competence, policy preferences, and financial skills of African Americans kept white donors from contributing money to institutions run even partially by blacks. Wood recalled being told that if only he had a "white person in charge," the school would have survived, suggesting that the directors had themselves been engaged in something of a dialectic of accommodation and opposition with the larger society of which they were a part.⁸⁴

Yet the history of the Howard Orphanage and Industrial School, however brief, sheds light on the relationship between individual identities, racial formation, and imaginings of the nation on the most local of levels. From their myriad positions rooted in particular constellations of race, class, gender, age, color, work, and familial and romantic allegiances, HOIS figures seized through image, word, and action the language and institutions of a paradoxical exceptionalism to redefine subalterns as actors and American identity as pluralistic. In this regard, their actions and politics of representation paralleled those of subjugated peoples on other continents who turned the tools of imperial or statist domination into strategies for sabotaging the barricades between rulers and ruled. Howard's middle-class black and white dispensers of social welfare cast the democratic capitalist tenets of individualism and equal opportunity into a civic nationalist language of "sameness" that contradicted the assumption of inherent difference embedded in the discourse of "whiteness." The institution's black staff devised cultural productions, most notably the pantomimes, that recontextualized the symbols of white supremacy—the metaphor of rape, the imagery of feminine respectability, the notion of internalized self-discipline, the ethos of upward mobility—in order to unmake the racial nationalist premises underlying notions of American civilization and citizenship. At the same time however, the peculiar experiences of race—manifested in a combination of black client needs, the institution's scarce resources, and African-American historical experiences—interrupted the managers' civic nationalist discourse of inclusion. They shaped, under Mary Gordon, an alternative community identity grounded in an informal, extended familial, black Christian, participatory democratic style of management that sometimes clashed with the white trustees' campaign to introduce a spirit of individuality, economy, and "efficiency" in Howard's operation.

By no means, however, was this race-based community monolithic in identity or interest. The variables of class, color, gender, and age invested the concepts of "freedom" and "equality" with sharply different tenors and textures in practical, everyday terms. These nuances emerge in the dialectical interplay of the orphans' own aspirations and consciousness as individuals and subaltern group members with the norms and expectations of their interracial caretakers. Howard alumnae configured the race consciousness of their black stewards with elements of the managers' outlook of individualism, economic self-sufficiency, and Victorian womanhood into everyday tactics of engagement with the worlds they inhabited. Their tactics shook the coherence of established identities of the white "self" and the black "other" pivotal to racial nationalism in ways that defied the orphans' personal dependence, racial subordination, and occasionally the authority of their custodians as well in a variety of circumstances. As surrogate daughters, Howard women pleaded allegiance to the "politics of respectability," thus challenging the racial meaning of feminine virtue. As aspiring professionals, they questioned the racial boundaries of occupational mobility. As shoppers, they foiled the national advertisers' color fabrication of consumer culture as a tool of racialized Americanization. As sexual rebels, they quite literally hybridized a population divided between "whiteness and its others." As workers and spenders, Howard's young men and women negotiated their pursuit of autonomy in the very language of self-sufficiency central to the liberal creed that their "benefactors" promoted. Their everyday attempts to inject a rainbow of colors into a national narrative laden with the promise of equal opportunity and individual freedom, but premised upon whiteness, exposed hegemony as a dialectical arena of accommodation and struggle on the most immediate and intimate of levels—a crucible for the negotiation of individual, racial, and national senses of self.

Work on this project was partly funded by research grants from Texas A&M University-Commerce, PSC-CUNY, and a Whiting fellowship. The essay began as a job talk at Brooklyn College, on which occasion Adina Back, David Berger, Renate Bridenthal, Phil Gallahger, Donald Gerardi, and Lenny Gordan offered valuable comments. For their very helpful feedback or other support, I also thank Awam David Amkpa, Clarence L. Mohr, Barun De, Manthia Diawara, Bonnie Anderson, Jocelyn Wills, Edwin Burrows, Stuart Schaar, Cheryl Hicks, Teesta Ghosh, Salim Darbar, Sabita and Sunita Manian, Christopher Vaz, Craig Hoek, David Herrmann, Jonathan Soffer, Mary Gallagher, my Texas friends, and the editors and anonymous reviewers of the AHR. I am grateful to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture for giving me access to the HOIS records.

Gunja SenGupta studied at Tulane University with Clarence L. Mohr. She is an associate professor of history at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. She has authored For God and Mammon: Evangelicals and Entrepreneurs, Masters and Slaves in Territorial Kansas (1996) and is completing a new book on African Americans, whiteness, and welfare that explores welfare discourse as a site for the creation and negotiation of racial identities in Victorian New York. Her current research focuses on transnational and comparative perspectives on slavery in India and North America in the age of imperial expansion.

Notes

¹ Marjorie C. Snevily to H. Hollingsworth Wood, September 5, and October 17, 1918, Howard Orphanage and Industrial School, Records, Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York (hereafter, HOIS). Wood, a white Quaker lawyer, became President of the Orphanage in 1913. In order to protect the privacy of Howard alumni and their families, I have used pseudonyms for all of them mentioned in the text. In the notes, I have identified letters written to and by them by citing their initials rather than their full names. Anne Smith's true initials were M. J. Her demographic details may be found in the Thirteenth Census of the United States (1910) for the Borough of Brooklyn under entries for the Brooklyn Howard Colored Orphan Asylum. Before entering the Snevily home, M. J. was placed with the family of a Brooklyn real estate broker named D. S. Willis who promised to send her to school. When the Willises reneged on their promise on the ground that M. J. was "so backward in her work that it required every minute of her time ... to do her lessons ... she of course could never become a teacher," the Orphanage Superintendent Mary Gordon removed her from the Willis home. See letter by D. S. Willis to Wood, n.d., HOIS. For an institutional history of the Howard Orphanage and Industrial School, see Carlton Mabee, "Charity in Travail: Two Orphan Asylums For Blacks," New York History 55 (January 1974): 55–77.

² Marjorie Snevily to Wood, November 1918 (no day), HOIS.

³ See chapter three, entitled "Putting on Style," in Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, 1985).

⁴ As the historian Gary Gerstle has argued in American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J., 2001), two competing nationalisms shaped Progressive America's schizophrenic sense of "self." President Theodore Roosevelt imagined a masculinized, racialized nation forged in the crucible of war, one that promised the rights of American citizenship to all European men, no matter what their national origin, as long as they acculturated to "American" norms in a democratic capitalist order divided between what Matthew Frye Jacobson calls "whiteness and its others." Yet Roosevelt's America was shaped not by racial nationalism alone but also embraced a version of civic nationalism that offered—at least in theory—equality of opportunity and freedom to all regardless of color or creed. One racialized the promise of American exceptionalism, the other opened up that promise to all individuals regardless of race, nationality, religion or, it could be argued, gender. My understanding and use of the term "multipositional," based on Earl Lewis's discussion of that concept in "To Turn as on a Pivot: Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas," American Historical Review 100 (June 1995): 783, is developed in greater detail later in the essay. See also Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York, 1998). On the notion of the bipolar construction of society into "whiteness and its others," see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).

⁵ Lewis, "To Turn as on a Pivot," 783. Historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has also pointed out that the "apparent overdeterminancy" of race in the United States has eclipsed not only other categories of social relations like gender but also the interrelationships among these categories. See Higginbotham, "African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," Signs 17 (Winter 1992): 251–74, reprinted in Darlene Clark Hine, Wilma King, and Linda Reed, eds., We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible: A Reader in Black Women's History (New York, 1995), 5.

⁶ See the essays in the AHA Forum, American Historical Review 99 (December 1994): 1475–1545, as follows: Gyan Prakash, "Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism," 1475–90; Florencia E. Mallon, "The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History," 1491–1515; Frederick Cooper, "Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History," 1516–45. For reflections on the connections between African-American history and studies of colonialism, see Kevin Gaines, "Rethinking Race and Class in African-American Struggles for Equality, 1885–1941," AHR Forum, American Historical Review 102 (April 1997): 378–79.

⁷ William Roseberry, "Hegemony and the Language of Contention," in Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, N.C., 1994), 360–61. See also Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London, 1986); Daniel Nugent and Ana Maria Alonso, "Multiple Selective Traditions in Agrarian Reform and Agrarian Struggle: Popular Culture and State Formation in the Ejido of Namiquipa, Chihuahua," in Joseph and Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation, 209–246.

⁸ Florencia E. Mallon, "Time on the Wheel: Cycles of Revisionism and the 'New Cultural History'," Hispanic American Historical Review 79 (May 1999): 339–40. See also Homi K. Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," in Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994), 85–92.

⁹ Cooper, "Conflict and Conection," 1534.

¹⁰ Mallon, "The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies," 1511.

¹¹ Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London, 1998), 240.

¹² Lewis, "To Turn as on a Pivot," 783–84.

¹³ On the materiality of such "meaningful" discursive frameworks, see Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, "Popular Culture and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico," in Joseph and Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation, 20; and Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London, 1980), 38. In this context, situational subaltern perspectives on hegemony encourage us to think of "languages" or "modes" of representation more expansively than those of literary texts implied in the all too familiar debate over whether "experience" or "epistemology" should be the guiding principle of the historian's enterprise. For a good summary of this debate (with its implications for subaltern agency), see Regina Kunzel, "Pulp Fiction and Problem Girls: Reading and Writing Single Pregnancy in the Post-War United States," American Historical Review 100 (December 1995): 1471–73. See also the exchange between Joan W. Scott and Linda Gordon over reviews of Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (New York, 1988), and Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), in Signs 15 (Summer 1990): 848–59; Christine Stansell, "A Response to Joan Scott," International Labor and Working Class History No. 31 (Spring 1987): 24–29; Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer 1991): 773–97. For a critique of the "linguistic left" on the ground that it ignores the agency of the dominated, see Steven Watts, "The Idiocy of American Studies: Poststructuralism, Language and Politics in the Age of Self-Fulfillment," American Quarterly 43 (December 1991): 625–60, and responses by Barry Shank in "A Reply to Steven Watts' Idiocy," American Quarterly 44 (September 1992): 439–448; and by Nancy Isenberg, "The Personal is Political: Gender, Feminism and the Politics of Discourse Theory," American Quarterly 44 (September 1992): 449–458. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has explored the relationship between words and the world that created them in "Writing History: Language, Class, and Gender," in Teresa de Lauretis, ed., Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Bloomington, 1986) and Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York, 1985).

¹⁴ Obviously, my assertion about the dearth of works from subaltern perspectives does not apply to African-American history outside the realm of social welfare. The literature on slavery, the black migration, the African-American working class, and black political activism offers some of the finest examples of U.S. histories "from the bottom up." This corpus is too voluminous to enumerate. For examples, see Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom (New York, 1977); Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York, 1994) and Tera Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors (Cambridge, Mass., 1997).
Work on private philanthropy by minorities (both religious and racial) has contributed to adjustments in the definition and periodization of social welfare history so as to collapse the neat chronological and intellectual boundaries between benevolence (conceived as private/evangelical/nineteenth century) on the one hand, and social welfare (thought to be statist/professionalized/post-1890s) on the other. For instance, historians have noted that black women bereft of government influence established privately funded voluntary associations dating back to colonial times. These organizations not only provided African Americans with services denied them by whites, such as homes for the aged, the infirm, and unwed mothers, kindergartens, libraries, and settlement homes, but in the late nineteenth century also addressed problems of special concern to the black community such as lynching, rape, and the convict-lease system in the South. Moreover we have been reminded that the black vision of welfare differed from that of whites, so that the inclusion of black perspectives has produced a far more nuanced portrait of American reform than existed before. In this context, Linda Gordon, in "Black and White Visions of Welfare: Women's Welfare Activism, 1890–1945," Journal of American History 78 (September 1991): 559–90, has argued that African-American women welfare activists held a structural view of poverty's origins, supported universal rather than means and morals-tested public service, made racial uplift an important goal, were tolerant of wage-earning mothers, and sustained a discourse against rape to protect women from sexual exploitation. Orphanages run by religious minorities like Catholics and Jews were similar in some respects to black orphanages in terms of their internal class relations, their commitment to a combination of uplift, cultural preservation and Americanization, and their relationship with a sometimes hostile world. See for example Reena Sigman Friedman, These are Our Children: Jewish Orphanages in the United States, 1880–1925 (Hanover, N.H., 1994). On Jewish orphanages see also Hyman Bogen, The Luckiest Orphans: A History of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York (Chicago, 1992); Jules Doneson, Deeds of Love: A History of the Jewish Foster Home and Orphan Asylum of Philadelphia (New York, 1996); Howard Goldstein, The Home on Gorham Street and the Voices of its Children (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1996); Ira A. Greenberg, Richard G. Safran, and Sam George Arcus, eds., The Hebrew National Orphan Home: Memories of Orphanage Life (Wesport, Conn., 2001). Yet there were also significant differences. For example, Dorothy M. Brown and