The Fruits of Empire: Contextualizing Food in Post-Civil War American Art and Culture

352 Pages·2016·13.09 MB·English

University of New Mexico
UNM Digital Repository
Art & Art History ETDs Electronic Theses and Dissertations
5-1-2015
The Fruits of Empire: Contextualizing Food in
Post-Civil War American Art and Culture
Shana Klein
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Shana Klein
Candidate

Art and Art History
Department

This dissertation is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication:

Approved by the Dissertation Committee:

Dr. Kirsten Buick , Chairperson

Dr. Catherine Zuromskis

Dr. Kymberly Pinder

Dr. Katharina Vester
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The Fruits of Empire: Contextualizing Food in Post-Civil War
American Art and Culture

by

Shana Klein

B.A., Art History, Washington University in Saint Louis
M.A., Art History, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
Ph.D., Art History, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

DISSERTATION
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Art History
The University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, New Mexico
May, 2015
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would first like to acknowledge the bottomless amounts of support I received
from my advisor, Dr. Kirsten Buick. Dr. Buick gave me the confidence to pursue the
subject of food in art, which at first seemed quirky and unusual to many. She never
flinched at the connections I forged between discourses of art, food, and racism, and
always trusted my intuition that representations of food are intensely political. Through
her example, I see how researching and teaching the subject of American art can be a
vehicle for social change.
I would also like to express deep gratitude for my other committee members:
Drs. Catherine Zuromskis, Katharina Vester, and Kymberly Pinder—who generously
joined my committee last minute in replacement of my late professor, Dr. David Craven.
It was in Dr. Craven‘s Central American Art History course that I first considered the
political circumstances for the production of foods such as the banana, and how they bear
meaning on the cultivation of art and empire in the broader Americas. Dr. Zuromskis
also made an indelible mark on this project, pushing me to advance my arguments and
contemplate how systems of empire are not only built, but dismantled. I am equally
grateful to Dr. Vester who has provided a scholarly model for interdisciplinary research
on American art, politics, and food, and its role in the construction of a nation.
The Fruits of Empire is also indebted to several institutions that have shaped my
research, including fellowships at the Library Company of Philadelphia, Winterthur
Library, American Antiquarian Society, Huntington Library, Henry Luce Foundation,
and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. I am especially grateful for the support and
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conversation of Eleanor Harvey at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, David
Mihaly at the Huntington Library, Helen Langa at American University, and Lisa Strong
at the Corcoran Museum. I also consider myself an unnamed fellow of an imaginary
scholarship at the library of William Gerdts, who has so kindly given me access to his
unrivalled collection of artist files and paintings in New York City. The Fruits of Empire
is a reflection of the generosity of these institutions and scholars, whose collections of
objects and thoughtful advice underlines every word of this project.
Lastly, I am thankful for my family. After attending many of my conference
presentations, visiting me in fellowships across the country, and reading countless
versions of this project, they have earned an honorary Ph.D. in American art.
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THE FRUITS OF EMPIRE: CONTEXTUALIZING FOOD IN POST-CIVIL WAR
AMERICAN ART AND CULTURE

by
Shana Klein

B.A., Art History, Washington University in Saint Louis
M.A., Art History, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
Ph.D., Art History, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

ABSTRACT
The Fruits of Empire is a social and visual history of food in American art. With
four fruit case-studies on representations of grapes, oranges, watermelons, and bananas,
this project demonstrates how the visual culture of food provides a platform for
examining the expansion and reconstruction of the United States in the decades following
the Civil War. While chapters on grape and orange representations from California and
Florida reveal the ways in which fruit serviced national expansion and the colonization of
America‘s fruit-lands, a chapter on watermelon imagery illustrates the racial stereotypes
assigned to food that reinforced social divisions between white from ―colored‖ eaters. A
final chapter on depictions of bananas investigates the exploitation of land and labor
underwriting American fruit corporations in Central America. By directing attention to
representations of fruit in the Sunbelt and broader Americas, this dissertation reorients
the American Art History canon centered in the Northeast to art and artists in the
country‘s borders. This project also widens the scope of American Art History by
looking beyond the fine arts to the visual culture of cookbooks, crate labels, and
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silverware. Examining those who labored and prepared the fruits visible in artistic
depictions sheds light on another overlooked subject. In the end, readers discover that
representations of food in American art and culture are neither innocent nor straight
forward, but politically-charged pictures driven by ideologies that support or challenge an
imperial agenda in North America. By excavating the cultural histories of food in
American art, The Fruits of Empire reveals how the cultivation of fruit in soil and on
canvas participated in the cultivation of American empire.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 1
Methodological Approaches to the Representation of Food ........................................................ 8
Chapter Summaries .................................................................................................................... 15
Chapter One Purple Globes and Glories: Grapes and the Construction of an American
Empire ...................................................................................................................................... 22
The Grapes of Wrath and Reunion ............................................................................................ 23
Grape Empire: The Quest for Viticultural Supremacy at the Philadelphia Centennial ............. 29
―Westward the Star of Empire Takes Its Way‖: Mission Grapes and Westward Expansion .... 37
Missionaries of Art: Painting Fruit and Progress in ―America‘s Rhineland‖ ............................ 44
Treading the Wine Press: Representations of Grape Labor in California .................................. 54
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 61
Chapter Two The Golden Apple: Florida Oranges and Yankee Politics in the
Reconstruction South .............................................................................................................. 64
―The New South‖: The Cultural Awakening of Florida in the Era of Reconstruction .............. 65
Post-Marked Flowers and Painted Souvenirs: Florida Art, Oranges, and Tourism ................... 75
Florida on Wheels: The Mobility of Fruit and People on the American Railroad ..................... 89
Orange Trees, Black Lives: Imagery of Citrus Labor in Florida ............................................... 95
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 103
Chapter Three Cutting Away the Rind: Uncovering the History of Race and Identity in
Nineteenth-Century Representations of Watermelon ....................................................... 106
Breasts, Blood, Guts, and War: Watermelon and the Human Form ........................................ 107
―Oh! Dat Watermelon‖: Race and Black Identity in Images of Watermelon .......................... 118
Building and Dismantling the Watermelon Narrative in Genre and Still-Life Painting .......... 127
―You Are What You Eat‖: Racial Transformation in Representations of Food ...................... 135
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 143
Chapter Four Seeing Spots: The Fever for Bananas, Land, and Power in American Art .. 146
―Landing Bananas‖: The Arrival of Tropical Fruit on American Soil ..................................... 147
From Field to Table: The Cultivation of Fruit and Progress in North America....................... 154
‗The Raw and the Cooked‘: The Transformation of the Banana Trade under the United Fruit
Company .................................................................................................................................. 160
Rotten Empire: The Aftermath of the Banana Wars in Contemporary Art ............................. 169
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Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 180
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 182
References ................................................................................................................................... 188
List of Figures ............................................................................................................................. 210
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Introduction
In 1886, the commissioner of the Viticultural Convention of the United States
declared that ―America is a nation of fruit-eaters.‖1 The commissioner was correct. In
the last decades of the nineteenth century, Americans consumed an unprecedented
amount of fruit as it grew more favorable in public opinion and more accessible with
advancements in refrigeration.2 Americans also increasingly consumed fruit in visual
form through representations in paintings, trade cards, crate labels, print illustrations, and
world‘s fair exhibits. While pictures abounding with fruit were a testament to the
nation‘s growing wealth, they also carried political meanings specific to the expansion
and reconstruction of American empire.3 Representations of fruit from the American
South and West are particularly meaningful to the construction of American empire for
they reflect a national agenda to colonize the land and resources of fruit-growing
frontiers. Depictions of fruit cultivated by African- and Central Americans also illustrate

1 Commissioner W. T. Coleman, ―The Pure American Wines: A Plea for the Use of the Native-
Grown Article,‖ Washington Post (May 19, 1886) in the ―Henry Leslie Lyman Scrapbook,‖ Doc.
1165 v. 1 (1853-1893) in the collection of the Winterthur Library.
2 In the early nineteenth century, the consumption of raw fruit was not widespread. Fruit was
thought to be unsavory, difficult to digest, and in some instances, poisonous. Kathryn Grover,
Dining in America 1850-1900 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 94; Trudy
Eden, The Early American Table: Food and Society in the New World (Champagne Urbana:
Northern Illinois University Press, 2008), 28; Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald, America’s
Founding Food: the Story of New England Cooking (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2004), 207.
3 This project subscribes to the classical definition of the word ―empire,‖ which refers to the
systems of colonization driven by people in various roles, capacities, and bodies of government to
exert control and dominance over people, places, and things. This project specifically understands
empire as an organization of power driven by the occupation of land, pursuit of a ―civilizing
mission,‖ economic exploitation, and political intervention. This definition is drawn from the
anthology, Lessons of Empire: Imperial Histories and American Power, which defines empire as
―a political unit that is large and expansionist (or with memories of an expansionist past),
reproducing differentiation and inequality among people it incorporates.‖ Lessons of Empire, Ed.
Craig Calhoun, Frederick Cooper, Kevin Moore (New York: New Press, 2006) and Eric T.
Love‘s Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2004), 3.