Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series: Catherine Prendergast, "Writer, Painter, Banker, Thief"
Response by Kaia Simon

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

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[On November 10, the Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory hosted the second lecture in the 2014-2015 Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series, "Writer, Painter, Banker, Thief: The American Arts Colony in the Public Account." The speaker was Catherine Prendergast, Professor of English. Professor Kathryn Oberdeck (History) responded. Below are reflections on the event from graduate student Kaia Simon (English).]

Writer, Painter, Banker, Thief: The American Arts Colony in the Public Account
Written by Kaia Simon

The origin story of the Yaddo artist colony is steeped in romanticism, the natural, and the supernatural. It lauds the benevolence of the rich in creating and preserving a space for the development of art and artists. The origin story runs like this: during a walk in the Yaddo woods surrounding her home, Katrina Trask (a wealthy married woman and prolific author of poetry and plays) sees a divine vision that instructs her to leave Yaddo to artists. She grabs her husband’s arm and pointing to the trees, claims to see a vision of men and women among them, “creating, creating, creating!” Spencer Trask, her husband, moved by his wife’s vision, agrees to bequeath the estate for an artists’ retreat. Thus, Yaddo is founded as an idyllic site for the development of artists and has since yielded a rich harvest of 68 National Book Award winners, 67 Pulitzer Prize winners, and 108 Rome Award winners.

Prendergast demystifies this origin story and offers a counternarrative of its founding and legacy. She argues that a study of the material conditions surrounding the acquisition of the Yaddo estate and its eventual incorporation is crucial to understanding that the economic and the cultural are not separate realms in American life but intricately connected. Prendergast’s account brings to light the material conditions that made and continues to make Yaddo possible. She contends that rather than being a story of divine intervention and the affirmation of artistic work, Yaddo was built on the economic panic of “second-tier robber barons”--the Old Money Yankees whose fortunes could not compete with the New Money of J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and the Guggenheims, but who wanted to use philanthropy to protect their wealth during the economic booms and busts of the end of the Gilded Age. These second-tier robber barons might not have been able to amass art collections or endow libraries across the nation, but they were able to buy up rural properties on the cheap—and found many of these artist colonies.

The Yaddo Mansion, ca. 1905
Prendergast arrives at this claim after careful and detailed study of the documents containing the economic transactions and court cases related to the Yaddo estate, and by examining the Saratoga locals’ response to the Trasks and the Yaddo estate. By assembling an archive of documents that detail the material conditions of acquisition, development, staffing, and maintenance of this estate, Prendergast is able to argue that it is the very fraught history of the conflict between the economic and political interests of the Trasks and the people of Saratoga that enabled Yaddo to exist and, eventually, to thrive. Her research sheds light on the complex interconnections between business and charity, New York and Saratoga, and Spencer Trask, Katrina Trask, and George Foster Peabody. These linkages, much more than divine vision and noblesse oblige, offer a clearer material history of the founding of Yaddo.

Prendergast’s archival research captures the complexity of personal and business relations at this time, and offers rich details to help us understand the personal and economic motives that inform the development of Yaddo. Some of the most compelling details center around the Trasks’ marriage: that they used the estate and the people who staffed it to “play medieval” (even addressing each other Lorde and Ladye in their correspondence); that Spencer encouraged his wife’s affair with George Foster Peabody as Spencer himself kept residence in his office on Bowling Green; and that Spencer’s death may not have been the train “accident” it was reported as in newspapers. These details plot the unrest between Yaddo and the Saratoga locals, explain Katrina’s eventual marriage to Peabody, and illuminate Peabody’s role as president and chairman of both the Yaddo Board and the Broadway Realty Company.

Yaddo’s documented economic history started in August 1873. The mansion and land were auctioned to buyers who Prendergast likened to those who bought vacation property in Florida in 2005. Yaddo’s property immediately lost 70% of its value in the subsequent September 1873 market crash, paving the way for Spencer to buy the mansion and surrounding property on foreclosure in 1881, and then eventually buy up the surrounding lots at deflated prices from owners who could no longer afford them. Prendergast documents one conflict between Spencer and a landowner named Hamilton, who not only refused to sell his lot but also took Trask to court for changing the course of a stream and flooding that very land. This conflict speaks to the way the Saratoga locals resisted the entitlement the Trasks exercised.The Trasks did not endear themselves to the residents of Saratoga in any way: not only did they take advantage of their misfortune in acquiring the land, they insulted their employees and orchestrated moralistic anti-gambling campaigns targeting their activities and practices. The people of Saratoga resisted them in multiple ways: in the papers, in court, and even through civil disobedience (which, Prendergast said, is a nice word for vandalism).

The Yaddo pergola
Amid this complex interplay of forces, Prendergast argues, Yaddo was born as an artist colony. The central conflict between Yaddo and the people of Saratoga centered on Yaddo’s claim for tax-exempt status as a charitable organization, long before the first artists were installed there. After being denied tax-exempt status by the city of Saratoga on the claim that Yaddo was functioning only as a private residence with no evidence of artists in its quarters, a series of court decisions forced Peabody to actually work to incorporate and develop Yaddo. Because of the public's and the court’s scrutiny, Peabody appointed a board of directors for the charitable organization, held meetings, and developed the land, all to save face for what had been initially a tax shelter for the Broadway Realty Company. After eventually winning the court cases and achieving tax-exempt status, Yaddo accepted its first artists in residence during 1926. The public of Saratoga did not collect any tax money from the estate, essentially subsidizing it.

Prendergast does not intend this story to be a critique of artists’ colonies or of support for the arts in the United States—quite the opposite, in fact. She uses this story to argue that without an understanding of the material history of public support and funding for the arts, the arts can too easily become pawns in others’ economic battles, while the actual public support for the arts goes unaccounted for. Prendergast shows that the public of Saratoga made and continue to make Yaddo possible: by not collecting taxes from it and by working there while surrendering the use of the land for other public uses or good. Ironically, despite its continued investment in Yaddo—whether willing or not—the public receives no credit in the enshrined origin story of Yaddo. The benefactors and donors do. Prendergast wonders what the actual cost of such stories of altruistic purity are, and how they continue to obscure the public support that sustains the arts. Read more

Three Scenarios of American Decline

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

posted under , , by Unit for Criticism
Written by Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Sociology

The question now is not whether the US is declining but what form decline will take and whether it will be mild or severe. Does it refer to the economy, to hegemony or to overall decline? Decline isn’t necessarily negative. It’s a relief for Americans who feel besieged by war prone government and incessant marketing, for two-earner households who work harder without seeing their prospects improve; yet recession spells trouble and won’t stop marketing. Decline offers the United States a chance of becoming a “normal country”. But this will happen only if the upset is big enough to surrender the claim to world hegemony and shrink the defense industries and the military. Upon reflection decline becomes a riddle, a glyph to decipher. Arguably the main scenarios of American decline can be narrowed down to three: a crash landing, the Phoenix, and a new New Deal.

1. Crash landing. According to Clyde Prestowitz, “In many respects it resembles the Titanic, a magnificent machine with serious and largely unrecognized internal flaws heading at full speed for icebergs, armed with knowledge and assumptions significantly at odds with reality” (Three Billion New Capitalists, 2005, 21). The Titanic in this passage refers to the global economy, but according to the gist of the book it mainly applies to the US. This script may be too catastrophist. Yet deflation has been ongoing for some time, financially the US already depends on the “kindness of strangers” and bargain basement America already exists. Significant course corrections are unlikely because ongoing trends mortgage future options and “Permanent Washington” is well entrenched. In financial markets there is no greater reflexivity than in 1929; new credit instruments such as derivatives are out of control, transparency is in question because the rating agencies malfunction.

Yet, endings are also beginnings. As a crash landing unsettles elites and closes paths it opens new ones so Uncle Sam’s journey may take several directions. First, it may simply be decline. This doesn’t mean total breakdown but a climb down from the top—the dollar losing its role as world money, foreigners less keen to hold dollar assets, hence the need to raise interest rates, further slowing the economy. Even then the US remains a substantial economy. If it’s true that the US suffers from spleen deficit, a crash landing may generate requisite spleen—greater thoughtfulness could remedy many American ailments. A trend break might curb Pentagon expansion and Wall Street excesses and restore fiscal sanity. Thus American decline may lead into two possible scripts of decline-as-hope.

2. The Phoenix. Britain carried the day during the turn of the 18th century commercial-maritime cycle (“Britannia rules the waves”) and the 19th century industrial cycle (“workshop of the world”). British hegemony declined and then rose again and the same may happen to the US. The US rose with industrial mass production, underwent deindustrialization during the late 20th century and may climb back in the 21st century riding the wave of new economy technologies.

Pros and cons of this script are that the US economy is large and diverse but import dependent. Its higher education system is enviable but the cost of education is rising. The infrastructure is good but old fashioned and energy inefficient. The US leads in services from software to Hollywood and is attractive to immigrants, but on the downside it has low social solidarity, an aging population, dysfunctional health care, unsustainable consumption patterns, a dysfunctional political system, oversized military, self seeking elites, corporate welfare and is headed for fiscal catastrophe. Prima donna narcissism and laissez-faire don’t help rising from the ashes.

So a Phoenix option is possible, but not in the short run. During the Clinton-Gore years this might have been—a smart way forward on the information superhighway with innovation, research and development, ecological sustainability; though already then innovation also meant deregulating telecoms and energy, opening the way to Wall Street financial engineering and Enron creative accounting alongside triangulation, welfare reform, Nafta and WTO. With the Bush administration the smart option was definitively off the program; the America of neo/conservatives is authoritarian, militarist, brawn over brain, the opposite of the smart way forward—another American century built on war and fear, “Americans are from Mars,” channeling innovation into future weapons systems, Star Wars, Total Information Awareness and surveillance, e-espionage rather than e-clever, a fear economy rather than a smart economy. Merge the propensity to war with the ideology of small government and tax cuts and the outcome is a $1.6 trillion credit card bill. War and tax cuts, deindustrialization and imports, consumption and deficits mortgage American futures and reinforce outsourcing and offshoring, so for years smart America has been leaving America and has not been betting on the dollar. The key American problem, by comparison to Europe and Japan, is underinvestment in productive assets. Instead of innovating American companies have tapped and tweaked old value streams, bilked cheap labor offshore and a sheltered home market—quite different from Nokia, Siemens, BMW, Toyota. Thus the foundation and resilience of a Phoenix are lacking. American deindustrialization doesn’t merely foster industrialization in emerging economies but off shores research and development. American specialization in military power and technology is too slim a basis for resurgence. The attempts to gain control of the world’s major oil and gas reserves involve such massive spending in political and military energies, resources and legitimacy that they endanger rather than enhance American futures. Sovereign wealth funds have started buying up American assets and futures. A future smart America may well hinge on corporations owned or part owned by Chinese, Indian and European enterprises. An American Phoenix is possible down the road but is already mortgaged and sold off to outside interests to pay for the debts of the Titanic as it is heading to its rendezvous.

3. New Deal2. Decline may be a source of hope also if it leads to rebalancing the relations between government, corporations and society so social stakeholders (workers, consumers, communities) play a greater role, in other words if it ushers in a new New Deal and a turn to the social market. This script runs, after crisis (via Hoover), Roosevelt and the New Deal.

Many American economists advocate Keynesian demand-led growth with greater public investments, higher wages, stronger unions, overall regulation, full employment, corporate social responsibility and smart consumerism. Progressive cities adopt measures of economic populism. The laissez-faire consensus among American economists has begun to fray at the edges and economic heterodoxy, though still marginal, has been gaining points.

What are lacking are not alternatives but the mobilization of political will and momentum around alternatives. Deep down the key problems are not policies but politics and institutions—undemocratic, old-fashioned and aged political institutions. But declining empires tend toward the “idolization of institutions” as people seek to restore the conditions that had made their rise possible, so the prospects are dim. The economy slouches from crisis to crisis—savings and loan, LTCM, dotcom crash, Enron, subprime and credit crisis. The reasons why the subprime crisis emerged are no different from the reasons why the new economy bubble popped years earlier: deregulation to the point of anarchy. The years pass and ailments are not fixed but deepen and meltdown draws nearer. “The housing bubble was a reaction from the effort to protect us from the collapse of the tech bubble. What’s the next bubble going to be as a consequence of trying to protect us against this?” (M. Darda, New York Times, January 13 2008). A turn toward labor is now much less likely than it was in the thirties. Corporations are much stronger and dispersed in their operations and headquarters, technology is more advanced, large corporations control the public sphere, trade unions are weaker and less organized, political parties are closed to substantial alternatives, the public is socialized in complacency and the utopian imagination is a faint and distant memory. The very meaning of “American” has become dispersed—American as in Halliburton’s headquarters in Dubai, as in IBM and Intel’s investments in India and China, as in tax havens in Bermuda and the Bahamas? Elites have learned from the Depression and can anticipate and block a social turn. Recession turning into crisis might as well bring deepening authoritarianism, extending the fear economy, deftly mobilizing disaster for yet another round of predatory enrichment—Las Vegas capitalism teaming up with disaster capitalism.

Decline is rich with opportunity and danger, which is ordinary by historical standards. A problem specific to the US is that a savvy national conversation about these dilemmas is not within reach. Which script of decline materializes depends largely on reactions to economic upset and electoral options. Decline follows 35 years of backlash politics and culture as the dominant American mood. What began as backlash against the sixties and defeat in Vietnam has hardened in an all-round angry mood, now bashing globalization, free trade, China, immigrants. A turnaround in corporate media is unlikely. Parties remain closed to alternatives. Riots in the streets are unlikely; barricades in the suburbs don’t make sense and would interfere with shopping. So what is likely is muddling through and deepening decline.

Leadership matters but American culture overestimates leadership and underrates structural trends, so which leadership emerges from elections matters but not nearly as much as most talk and media make it out to be. To address Uncle Sam’s problems of growing inequality and economic decline it takes not just more public investment but also private investment, which has been lagging for decades and doesn’t lend itself to an easy political fix. It requires a fundamental turnaround not just in policies but in philosophies—in short, reregulating Wall Street and cutting the Pentagon. Yet Wall Street and the Pentagon, America’s luxury liners, don’t easily change course. Political and corporate unaccountability are structurally entrenched and public forums to address them barely exist. Consider the constants of American policy—in short, support for Wall Street, the Pentagon, and Israel—and there is barely variation among elites across the political spectrum, regardless of party affiliation. There are policy variations but no change in fundamentals.

So I don’t think significant self correction is in the cards in the foreseeable future. The minimum reforms that Uncle Sam should undertake are not particularly fancy or extraordinary. They are commonsense by international standards and most Americans would probably agree. They include, following Chalmers Johnson, “reversing Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for the wealthy, beginning to liquidate our global empire of over 800 military bases, cutting from the defense budget all projects that bear no relationship to national security and ceasing to use the defense budget as a Keynesian jobs program” (Le Monde diplomatique, February 2008). Yet by the standards of American politics these are extreme measures for which a congressional mandate is far off. As long as commonsense changes are unfeasible in American politics, the US cannot self correct. Then Uncle Sam will muddle through and problems will get worse until economic decline will get so bad that elites are unseated and an overhaul finally takes place. In the intervening years correction will come from outside by the actions of external forces that cease to follow the US or invest in the US.

(This is part of a book Is there hope for Uncle Sam? Beyond the American Bubble, London, Zed Books, forthcoming August 2008. See homepage URL http://netfiles.uiuc.edu/jnp/www/)
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