Sanctifying those who govern, harnessing official religion for state ends, inspiring the people, channeling their dreams—even in modernity angels adorn public structures and monuments, whether in victory pillars, war memorials, or paintings of the apotheosis or heavenly ascension of great leaders. The Apotheosis of Pittsburgh, by the then-renowned American artist John White Alexander, is a series of 48 murals, all painted by Alexander between 1905 and 1915, in the grand staircase of the Carnegie Institute (now the Carnegie Art Museum) in Pittsburgh, a cultural haven sponsored by industrialist Andrew Carnegie, dedicated in 1895. Alexander died in 1915, leaving his enormous mural cycle unfinished. The paintings tell and glorify the story of the building of Pittsburgh through the kinds of industries that Carnegie ran and that made him wealthy enough to found institutions for the people devoted to culture and the arts. In the 2nd-story painting known also as The Crowning of Pittsburgh, a knight in black armor floats heavenward, to the sounding of trumpets, about to be crowned with a wreath by angels, the man who made all this bounding development possible, the hero. The knight is meant to be a virile personification of the city of steel and looks quite similar to the Institute’s benefactor, Andrew Carnegie.

Detail from The Apotheosis of Pittsburgh courtesy of Lee Sandstead

Alexander meant his monumental artistic feat to instill in viewers a historical yet mythological narrative that made American industrial capitalism a manner of fulfilling God’s purpose. I came across images of Alexander’s angels while researching a forthcoming book on angels and modernity. As with so many modern angels, I find these riveting. Despite the supposedly anti-metaphysical bent of modernity, the art of public spaces continues to aspire to shape people’s spiritual dreams. Hence one explanation for the continued ubiquity of angels.

Around the ascending knight/Carnegie, around across some of the walls of this enormous “grand staircase” flits a bevy of gorgeous angels, slim, vanilla pure and elongated, an art-nouveau-like chorus line, adoring fans, coming forward with gifts. Their garb resembles fancy evening dresses, their faces and expressions not un-innocent. A few of the winged beauties in the foreground—therefore the largest, most prominent, also highlighted because unlike others they wear colored outfits—are topless, their breasts detailed in a way rather risqué for the angelological tradition. This makes an interesting choice for Alexander, whose many portraits of (human) women, though dwelling attentively on femininity and sensual detail, never depict anything immodest. The figures in The Apotheosis of Pittsburgh are not technically angels. Because the painting hails from a classical genre (apotheosis), they are actually winged genies from classical mythology, not Judeo-Christian angels. The different winged beings from different cultures have a history of coming together and interbreeding, however. Most of the artistically-aspiring viewers of Alexander’s paintings would have understandably seen these winged females as angels. The rising black knight, the modernity of all of the scenes of the building of Pittsburgh serve to Christianize the cycle and essentially make these attractive fairies into angels.

Detail from The Apotheosis of Pittsburgh courtesy of Lee Sandstead

By the time Alexander won this assignment he was an accomplished and internationally admired artist, sought after as a portraitist. An orphan, his artistic life had begun in the Illustrations Department of Harper’s Brothers, publishers of Harper’s, and turned into an American dream. With only this brief experience, and a bit of saved money, he set out for artistic training on a European tour, joined up with continental artists, and remained throughout his life intensely active and successful in painting’s institutional world, becoming an ardent missionary for and defender of American painting. Friend of modernists as varied as Auguste Rodin, Stéphane Mallarmé, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James, considered a great American painter like Edwin Abbey, John Singer Sargent, and James Whistler, from 1909 until his death in 1915 he presided over the U.S. National Academy of Design. As an artist, Alexander came to favor Beaux-Arts, art for art’s sake and the ornamental; fluid lines and soft colors, yet sober; naturalism, but idealized. Rarely did he abandon realism in his depictions.

Born in Allegheny City in 1856, later absorbed into Pittsburgh, a sense of local patriotism likely moved Alexander when engaged in the Apotheosis murals. His own American rags-to-respectability and financial security paralleled that of steel-built Pittsburgh and the nation as a whole, each a fulfillment of the promise of America, it’s manifest destiny, built on grit and faith, at least in the telling of works of art like this. Industrial progress and economic growth is the civil religion Alexander lauds in his imperial-sized painting cycle. By the time he received the Carnegie commission he had painted some official monumental art, such as panels for the Congressional Library in Washington, DC, and had been invited to paint a series celebrating Pennsylvania history for the State Capitol in Harrisburg.

Some monomaniacal drive leads an artist to attempt, much less execute, a work consisting of tens of gigantic paintings. (The original commission conceived of 69 individual works.) The grandiose scale of the physical effort, not to mention the work itself, mirrors the life of the sponsoring institution’s founder and funder, Andrew Carnegie, who made his vast wealth as a canny and ruthless industrialist. Carnegie first laid out his doctrine of social Darwinism and redemptive philanthropy in an 1889 article entitled simply and aptly, “Wealth,” later published in 1900 as part of his book The Gospel of Wealth. Cultural centers such as the Carnegie Institute were to serve as the temples of the new social gospel that sought to improve the lives and souls of the laboring masses. Behind Carnegie and Alexander stands the all-consuming drive toward power, control, reputation and empire critiqued in Melville’s contemporary tragic anti-hero Ahab.

In an update on an age-old motíf, Alexander’s self-exposing and gift-bearing angels comprise the (male) hero’s true gift, his reward for performing well, like a man, for leading heroically. Labor entails one of the main themes of Alexander’s Apotheosis murals—he called the whole cycle “The Crowning of Labor”—and a noticeable gender division distinguishes the masculine exertions that built the city from the heavenly compensation of feminine charms bestowed on the male hero(s). The lower level of murals portray the city’s working classes, a theme that was rare at the time, their lives and labor romanticized for art patrons’ consumption, though Alexander’s depiction of “the laboring male body as physically vigorous and autonomous” obscured “the extent to which mechanization had degraded the role of the skilled worker to that of machine operator.” Here panels named “Fire” and “Toil,” the foundation of Pittsburgh and of Alexander’s paintings, evoke materialism as emerging from hellish conditions. The top level, unfinished when Alexander died, was to show the masses closing in on their goal: culture and the arts, achieved by means of the wealth produced by industry. In between, smoke rises from all the industry, forming into clouds on which flit the jarringly erotic angels as well as the knight in black armor floating heavenward. The knight, personification of Pittsburgh, makes Andrew Carnegie, a robber-baron of the utmost wealth, a self-made public intellectual and quasi-celebrity, into the protector and patron of the people he believed himself to be. Sarah Moore reads the depiction of Carnegie—“aloof and sanguine”—as a reflection of his “practice of absentee corporate capitalism” that featured “[i]ncreased mechanization, a transfer of workplace control from skilled workers to management, and a hiring boom for unskilled and semi-skilled labor” and “a rigid hierarchical line of control.”

Moore considers Alexander’s use of medieval tropes—knighthood, chivalry, and one could add the apotheosis theme itself—as part and parcel of the era’s anxious reaction to the power and wonder but also the dislocations of advancing technology, industry and science, modernity. In different ways spiritualized Christianity both resisted and sanctified technology and science. The angels stand in relation to industry in the paintings much in the way Alexander’s own artistic pursuit of beauty was described after his death by John Agar President of the National Arts Club: “We have had little time in this country to devote to the production of beauty or to the study of its forms. We have had to devise and develop a political government, conquer a wilderness, fashion the commerce and industry of a throbbing nation in a vast continent. Our best minds have been too much occupied with these immediate works to find time for the larger spiritual endeavor.” Like Alexander, Agar genders beauty and spiritual endeavors as feminine, ancillary and supplementary to the more primary masculine work of conquest and building.

As was common in European modernism at the time, Alexander’s bevy of angels represent pure feminine beauty, as well as spiritual beauty; beauty as spirit/mind, spirit/mind as beauty. It should be noted that Alexander apparently initiated an evening class for women at the National Academy of Design. He also co-authored an article in 1910 that, typical for the times, warned against the increasing masculinization of women and effeminacy of men. Perhaps he intended his (unprecedented for him) breast-baring women to remind viewers of the femininity that was proper for women. The beauty and sensuality of Alexander’s angels—certainly manifesting “the vitality of a young and vigorous race” of the figures in his painting in general–the quiet seductiveness of the color and lighting aim to heighten the viewer’s response, and thus double the libidinal energies that must be invested in the heroic accumulation of wealth, the wealth that permits the flourishing of society and great art, which lauds the wealth that made it possible. Sarah Moore says that the winged spirits represent “the arts, music, literature, science, and poetry.” Masculine lust for achievement is rewarded through pleasure in/of the feminine. Viewers could be forgiven for confusion about the carnal rewards seemingly implied by these seemingly Christian angels.

The urge toward beauty that is said to motivate biological reproduction Alexander harnesses to invigorate the cultural reproduction of citizens who believe that they should aspire to Enlightenment/spiritual notions of self-fulfillment: autonomy, reasonableness, civility, refinement. Such citizens are to believe, like Alexander, that the ability to achieve personal wealth unencumbered is justified (in the theological sense), even if by means of crushing, within the limits of the law or beyond, the human aspirations to livelihood, health, and autonomy of others. In this telling, the desire that feeds robber-baron industrial capitalism stems from great (divinely-ordained) desire, great both quantitatively and qualitatively. Beauty, art and culture, properly channeled forms of desire, can improve and redeem the working classes—only Carnegie’s knight gets the heavenly girls, as it were—whose working conditions have been eroded through Carnegie’s and other robber-baron union-busting tactics, can erase or compensate for the harms caused in the very process of producing civilization. Paid for by the libidinal hero, high art intends to sublimate, to spiritualize the libidinal hero and his achievements, the latter beneficently (sycophantically, really) equated to the achievements of the people. On the one hand, suggest Alexander’s topless “angels,” perhaps the joke is on high art. The visual metaphor of spirit subverts itself, leaving only carnal figures, the very sign that, despite art’s intentions, best generates the kind of urges capitalism needs in order to succeed. On the other hand, high art, domesticated by patronage, gets to play its joke as well. After all, it has already been well paid. For our part, we continue to take in (to be taken in by?) art’s mythification of the manufactured toils and travails of the working masses, its mythification of our own worlds. We continue to be shaped by painted angels, larger than life, intended to shape us.

By the time its cables had reached the Pacific Coast, the telegraph had already come to occupy a prime place in the American imaginary, providing (among many other things) a metonym for what Catherine Albanese has called the “kinetic revolution” that was placing new priorities on motion, transformation, and progress in all facets of civil, cultural, economic and political life in the Jacksonian era. Alongside the extension of roads, bridges and tunnels across even the most mountainous terrains, the expansion of the railway system, and increasing opportunities for travel by steam-powered watercraft, the telegraph engendered a new, vertiginous experience of “life in the fast lane” and the collapsing of distant horizons through the universal and invisible, but very tangible medium of electricity. Long before Google, Second Life, or the Web 2.0, telegraphy was implicated in the creation of phantasmatic, electrically-mediated communities of knowledge-seekers, conversation partners, and like-minded souls dispersed across the entire globe.

The very first message to reach California on that inaugural day of the new transcontinental line came from Brigham Young, the Mormon leader, governor of Utah, and patron of Western settlement, who rejoiced in the telegraphic strengthening of “the bonds of friendship between the people of Utah and the people of California,” but who ended his salutation with an injunction that pointed to the work to come: “Join your wires with the Russian Empire, and we will converse with Europe.” The Pacific Coast was already no longer visualized as the end of the line. At the very moment of completion of the American transcontinental line, the telegraph’s horizon was extended further, pointing toward an imminent, truly global, frontier-less, and harmonized future.

The choice to depict the bearer of telegraphy’s utopian gifts in the form of an angel was not unique to Harper’s magazine, nor is it particularly surprising. As John Durham Peters reminds us, the figure of the angel has been linked at least since St. Augustine to the idea of instantaneous travel, and angelic speech has been described as a transference of pure, interior thoughts from one party to another without any degradation or loss. “Angels,” Peters summarizes, “a term that comes from the Greek, angelos, messenger, are unhindered by distance, are exempt from the supposed limitations of embodiment, and effortlessly couple the psychical and the physical, the signified and the signifier, the divine and the human. They are pure bodies of meaning.”

But as it so happens, angels were not the only spirit entities who presided over the completion of the telegraph line, and not all these transcendent powers worked toward the same end. In his memoir published in The Californian magazine in 1881, James Gamble—the pioneering figure responsible for laying the cable that connected San Francisco to Salt Lake City, as well as much of the rest of the telegraphic infrastructure along the Pacific coast—recounts the many challenges he faced setting up the line. His narrative details the extended effort to manage hostile terrains, difficult weather, pack animals, a less-than-reliable workforce, and, not least, the delicate negotiations needed to win the assent of local Indian populations, specifically the Shoshone people, whose territories at that time extended from Western Utah across Nevada and into Eastern California, precisely along the route of the Overland Pass, which had been chosen for the construction of the transcontinental line. A striking feature of Gamble’s story is the recurring manifestation of magical and spirit forces, control over which seemed decisive for the success of Gamble’s enterprise. At times, Gamble’s journey resembles that of an itinerant magician, an electrical showman trading in mysterious demonstrations designed to both educate and awe his audiences. One such spectacle was performed during the opening of the first telegraph office in San José, California, where a crowd of curious onlookers had gathered to bear witness to new technology at work. Gamble writes:

Observing the anxious and inquiring expression on the faces of those who had managed to get near enough to thrust their heads through the open window, it occurred to me to act in a very mysterious manner in order to see what effect it would have upon my spectators. … [As] I was preparing the message for transmission … instead of handing it to the boy for delivery, I put it, holding it in my hand, under the table, which was provided with sides sufficiently deep to hide the envelope from their view. As I did this I kept my eyes fixed on the wire, while, with my right hand, I took hold of the key and began working it. The moment the crowd heard the first click of the instrument they all rushed from under the veranda out into the street to see the message in the envelope pass along the wire. On seeing them rush out tumbling one over the other to catch a glimpse of the message, we on the inside burst out into one long and continued roar of laughter. … The telegraph was to them the very hardest kind of a conundrum. It was impossible of solution. Their final conclusion was that it was an enchained spirit—but whether a good one or an evil one they could not quite determine—over which I had such control that it was obliged to do my bidding. Under this impression they departed one by one, looking upon both the telegraph and myself as something, as the Scotchman would say, ‘uncanny’.

This “very mysterious manner” of acting and its “uncanny” effects belong to a long history of technological wonder-making in the service of public edification, profit, and boundary-maintenance with respect to scientific literati and their abject others. In this case, Gamble’s mastery of the art of legerdemain provided fellow telegraph operators with the opportunity to revel in the naïveté of their technologically illiterate onlookers. But working wonders also proved useful to the company’s efforts to pacify potentially hostile populations and thereby to secure control over territories marked out for extension of the telegraphic infrastructure. A telling instance was Gamble’s way of dealing with Sho-kup, chief of the Western Shoshone tribe that lived in the Ruby Valley in northeastern Nevada, which lay directly along the Overland Pass. In order to win Sho-kup’s assent to the construction of the telegraph line, Gamble had one of his agents lead him on a tour of a working telegraph station, whereupon Sho-kup

was told that when the telegraph was completed he could talk to [his distantly located wife] as well from there as if by her side; but this was more than his comprehension could seize. Talk to her when nearly three hundred miles away! No; that was not possible. He shook his head, saying he would rather talk to her in the old way. His idea of the telegraph was that it was an animal, and he wished to know on what it fed. They told him it ate lightning; but, as he had never seen any one make a supper of lightning, he was not disposed to believe that.

For Gamble and his men, it seems, the telegraph was a magical tool for transcending not only distance but also the privations of “the primitive mind.” Sho-kup, however, was hardly the primitive that Gamble makes him out to be. While it seems that Sho-kup was indeed mystified by the telegraph’s secret modus operandi, his reaction was not based on a total lack of familiarity with the media technologies that were ushering in a new modernity in the mid-nineteenth century. For, as we learn later on in Gamble’s memoir, Sho-kup was already an eager participant in the emerging economy of photographic portraiture, availing himself of the powers of self-representation that were being dramatically reworked thanks to the spreading technology of the photographic camera. Gamble recalls how, at the closing of his encounter with Sho-kup, he:

presented me with a daguerreotype of himself in full dress, taken in Salt Lake several years before, begging me to receive it as a mark of his appreciation of the kindness I had manifested toward him. This was accompanied by the request that on my return home I would send him a portrait of myself. I promised to do so, and on arriving in San Francisco had myself photographed … [and then] placed [the picture] in a gold double locket, with a chain, so that it could be worn around the neck, and forwarded it to him through the Indian Agent, who afterward presented it to Sho-kup with great ceremony.

In this exchange, which of the actors is “the primitive” and which is “the modern?” Perhaps an answer can be found by taking stock of the remarkable collection of material, technological, and phantasmatic entities populating Gamble’s narrative: telegraph operating instruments; invisible flows of electricity; sleights of hand; superstitious minds; enchained spirits; monstrous, metallic animals that live on a diet of lightning; and photographs destined to serve as talismans, yoking their wearers into bonds of distant friendship and strategic alliances. It is hardly insignificant that most of these magical forces were mobilized not by Gamble’s putatively gullible audiences or by the primitives he encountered along his journey, but by Gamble himself. By projecting the presence of spirits, assigning magical explanations, and offering supernatural gifts, Gamble had joined the ranks of what was emerging–not only in the USA—as an advancing army of proselyte-engineers, whose mission was to expand and secure general acceptance for the telegraph through the promulgation of magic. Like the Biblical Aaron beating the Pharaoh’s magicians at their own game, the protagonists of telegraphic modernity forged consensus for their project through the creation of “better,” “more impressive” magic.

By the time of Gamble’s epic journey, an appreciation of telegraphy’s transcendent, magical nature had already been well established in American popular culture. Not least in the case of Spiritualism, a movement whose development precisely overlapped with the rise of the telegraph. One particularly prescient observer of the telegraph’s apparent promise to render distance obsolete was the Universalist minister and trance speaker, John Murray Spear (1804-1887). In 1854, Spear was the recipient of detailed plans, provided to him in a trance state by the spirit of Benjamin Franklin, for the construction of a “soul-blending telegraph.” The soul-bending telegraph was an intercontinental telepathic transmission system to be powered by a corps of sensitized mediums installed in male/female pairs in high towers. This network of harmonized spirit mediums promised stiff competition with existing telegraph services, which were still beset by operational difficulties, and which had yet to announce success in the ongoing effort to connect distant continents. Spear thus imagined an imminent future of communicative harmony on a global scale, a utopian dream to which the crude workings of the electromagnetic telegraph only imperfectly pointed. As it turns out, Spear’s plan was never implemented. But its mere example provided Spear with a vantage point from which to denounce the undemocratic character of telegraphic globalization as it was actually coming to fruition in his day. Commenting on the (at the time, yet-to-be realized) project of the American industrialist, Cyrus Field, to lay a submarine telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean, Spear writes:

The purpose is a laudable one, and should be encouraged; but it is seen that such a means of communication would be exceedingly expensive, and, of necessity, would rarely accommodate the poorer classes, while it would enrich others. It is a hazardous scheme—the most so of any proposed. In that submarine wire lies the snake of a most dangerous monopoly.

Who living in our contemporary moment, marked on the one hand by fantasies of hyper-connectivity and techno-transcendence, and on the other by the specter of sinister corporate intentions and digital divides, cannot hear the echo of Spear’s cry?