A Unique Slant of Light: The Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana - (Page 77)

and the New Orleans Daily Picayune (edited by Eliza Jane Nicholson who inherited it from her husband in 1876) to a degree that is today present only in the more radical press. The sovereignty of capitalism and the industrial giants were debated issues then, where the debate has now been stifled by acceptance. Why this happened can be explained by the pressure of the contemporary events themselves and the insecurity the middle class felt in the face of the changes they wrought. The middle class strove to secure its social position, founding professional schools of law, medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, and veterinary medicine in large numbers. The number of these schools increased between 1850 and 1900 from 60 to 261. Other professional schools, in such fields as engineering, business, and journalism, were also formed. Professional associations proliferated also, including such organizations as the American Ophthalmological Society, the American Surgical Association, the American Pediatric Society, the American Chemical Society, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the National Statistical Association, and the American Mathematical Society. As part of this phenomenon in New Orleans, Tulane University was founded in 1884. As the middle class strove to secure this culture of professionalism, to make itself indispensable to American society, it forged an ideology to explain the world as it saw it, and to provide a controlled direction for future action, but it was hampered by the limitations of a society blinded by its own ideology, a society kept from the truth by its own preconceived notions of what it was. Absent the burgeoning middle class and still obsessed with GEORGE FRANÇOIS MUGNIER (b. 1857, Switzerland or France – d. 1938, New Orleans, Louisiana) Cotton Yards, ca. 1880-1920 Photograph; 8 x 10 in. Louisiana State Museum race and inequality, tempering the more general American perspective was another flame in the intellectual forge of the time that likely spoke more directly to the South. Herbert Spencer’s The Study of Sociology, published in 1874, applied the principles of Darwin’s theory of evolution to the social structure and became the major underpinning for a school of social thought that justified the social and political inequalities present in American and Southern life by arguing a kind of biological determinism. Spencer’s book was widely reprinted and quoted in America in the 1880s. It was absorbed into the ideology that saw these inequalities as naturally determined and outside the ability of society to correct, thus rationalizing the existence of poverty and the impoverished, and especially the plight of African Americans, as the products of a natural process, and denying the effect of environmental factors or the economic system. One of the conclusions of this philosophy, which will sound familiar to contemporary ears, was that the poor were to blame for their poverty. LOUISIANA ART OF COMMEMORATION AND CONSOLATION In some respects Louisiana art—as in literature, industrialization, CIVIL WAR THROUGH THE NEW CENTURY 77  http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1319 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1319

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A Unique Slant of Light: The Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana

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