Famed in American legend is the origin of the Kane fortune…
How, to boarding housekeeper Mary Kane, by a defaulting boarder, in 1868
was left the supposedly worthless deed to an abandoned mine shaft: The Colorado Lode.
Citizen Kane
After the end of the “Indian wars,” historian Frederick Jackson Turner formulated and popularized the “frontier thesis,” a theory that claimed that Americans’ exceptionalism character came from having always pushed toward new frontiers. Despite the theory’s popularity, however, there was no “romanticizing,” as far as I know, about the colonies we acquired from the Spanish-American War – most likely due to the work of “Anti-Imperialists” such as William James and William Graham Sumner. Probably because these influencers, as I noted earlier, defended imperialism in coded terms, cagily speaking out against the 1898 war, no artistic celebrations of these acquisitions took hold in the popular imagination. However, a new colony we had annexed that same year, Hawaii, was romanticized, although in quite a different way than the old west was.
Until almost the mid-19th century, there were basically four categories of goods for trading – extracts: copper, gold, oil (a fuel originally taken from whales to light lamps); livestock (slavers considering their “goods” as no more human than cattle); intoxicants: wine, hashish, opium; and food supplements: spices, herbs, salt, sugar – Using the definition of “extracts” from my February 8th entry, cotton, a crop that was only used to trade and which depleted the soil, counts here as an extract. (Of course, “plantation” intoxicants and supplements, beginning with tobacco and sugar, fit two categories.)
I mentioned the development of newspapers and how the wealthy and powerful, to protect themselves against authentic exposés, quickly monopolized the press in the 1880’s. The advertising industry developed alongside this corporate-backed press.
Thus, as these industries grew, so grew the plethora of machines for travel and entertainment. Around the same time, yet another kind of market emerged – tourism. All these industries valorized the extraction dominated by our friend Rockefeller – crude oil.
Paul Gauguin might have led the way to the romanticism of islands south of our own newly-annexed colony, creating seductive images of French Polynesia to entice the world to visit there and similar places, images that promised unlimited sensual enjoyment. With these temptations and distractions, the wealthy and powerful could more easily lure the multitude into passivity.
“Spirit of the Dead Watching” (1892) – Paul Gauguin
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