Part 3: From Reconstruction To Turn-Of-Century, 1865-1900

LOUIS SULLIVAN'S lushly organic bronze decoration for his Carson-Pirie-Scott Department Store in Chicago gathers a fecund nature into rhythmic curves that sweep outward with centrifugal force before funneling back toward the center. It is an apt image of the contrary energies of the nation in the post-war years. An international expansion of travel and trade was introducing a more cosmopolitan artistic and expressive language. Yet the fine arts were characterized by inward contraction: interior scenes, psychological portraiture, and paintings whose main subject was the orchestration of mood through color and form.

In 1860 the United States was a relatively minor player in the world economy. The United Kingdom, France, and Germany all boasted higher levels of industrial output. The Civil War changed all that. It opened the way for new national markets, mass modes of production, and largescale forms of organization. It sped the construction of a national transportation infrastructure of rails and bridges, as well as the development of steel-cage construction enabling the tall office building; and it accelerated the rise of the "corporation," which transformed businesses from simple family partnerships into large-scale integrated enterprises. By 1890 the United States led the world in industrial production. Clocks and mechanization displaced natural rhythms. Identities defined by locality, by family, and by the intertwined worlds of home and work, gave way before the growing mobility of both people and information. This mobility was made possible by transcontinental railroads, transatlantic ocean liners, and the first transatlantic telegraph.

The Civil War had also undermined faith in American exceptionalism, the belief that the republic enjoyed a special relationship to providence, appointed to stand at the vanguard of the world's nations. The tragedy of the war had brought in its wake a sense of national mourning, and consequently a new awareness of moral complexity.

Still, amidst such transformations, the old ideal of a stable rural republic remained enshrined in both the popular and the fine arts. By taking refuge in ideals linked to an older vision of the republic, the arts tended to evade the social challenges that followed in the wake of Emancipation and large-scale immigration. Yet artists in these years also explored subjective sensations, they playfully embraced artifice, and they and their contemporaries crossed scientific, psychological, and cultural frontiers. All these factors pointed toward a modern sensibility.

Sullivan's department store-the perfect stage set for a world of mostly female shoppers engaged in new forms of personal consumption-also represents an emergent public realm shaped by economic consolidation. Largescale industrialization required huge concentrations of capital for the rapid exploitation of vast resources and the employment of multitudes of workers. Efforts to control the marketplace through consolidation could not, however, stave off the boom-and-bust cycles that characterized the nation's economy. Along with the shock to traditional religion delivered by Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), with its explanatory principle of natural selection, economic instability created a climate of cultural, social, and epistemological indeterminacy. Like the shadowed recesses of Sullivan's ornament-blurring the boundaries between solid and void-knowledge itself was unsettled from its secure foundations in religion and "common-sense" philosophy. The scepticism of the late nineteenth century-a doubt about the foundations of all inherited forms of authority-introduced characteristically modern anxieties while also encouraging a spirit of experimentation and adaptability to the challenges posed by uncertainty.

Thumbnail: LOUIS SULLIVAN, Schlesinger and Mayer Department Store (Carson-Pirie-Scott; detail), 1899.