When asked to name the American novel with the greatest continuing social relevance, the literary historian is apt to reply with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the top-selling book of the nineteenth century after the Bible. Scholars credit Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel with broadening abolitionist sentiment in the late antebellum period and with helping to create the divided and resolute mind-sets required for the nation to split over the question of slave labor.
But Uncle Tom’s Cabin has less to teach us about politics in today’s America than does another novel that appeared almost forty years later.
Published under the pseudonym Edmund Boisgilbert, MD, Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century (1890) sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the final decade of the nineteenth century. Despite the author’s belief that his novel was the rightful successor to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it never entered the canon of high school and college curricula; today its readership is largely restricted to enthusiasts of late nineteenth-century culture. Yet perhaps more than any other novel published in the United States, Caesar’s Column illuminates the origins of the present crisis in American race relations unfolding under the banner of a resurgent populist nationalism. Although Madison Grant’s eugenicist tract The Passing of the Great Race (1916) is often cited by twenty-first-century journalists as the urtext of modern American white supremacy, it merely applied the new science of statistics and a welter of demographic data to a narrative that Caesar’s Column had sensationalized a quarter century prior. The novel popularized the paranoid “great replacement” theory that troubled Grant—and now animates twenty-first-century white nationalist movements in the United States and Europe.
Caesar’s Column hit shelves at the peak of the Gilded Age. As a result of the backroom compromises that produced the electoral college victory of President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, the Republican Party had already shifted investments of its political capital from Reconstruction to big business. Industrialists and financiers gained unprecedented political and economic power throughout the following decades, and socioeconomic inequality rose to obscene new heights, provoking deadly clashes between organized labor and the hired hands of industrial capitalists. By 1890 the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and the Haymarket Affair of 1886 had set the country on edge by exposing the violence required to repress the demands of the working classes. Religious leaders, liberal journalists, and many of those who remained only tenuously in the middle classes feared that the next contentious strike could lead to a wide-ranging insurrection resulting in martial law or mob rule. This dark scenario is brought to life in Caesar’s Column.