Abstract

Heedless, irreverent, unlovely, cultivating huge beards, shod in polished top-boots-the last refinement of the farmer's cowhides-wearing linen dickeys over hickory shirts, moving through pools of tobacco juice ... the decade of the [eighteen] seventies was only too plainly mired and floundering in a bog of bad taste. A world of triumphant and unabashed vulgarity without its like in our history, it was not aware of its plight, but accounted its manners genteel and boasted of ways that were a parody on sober good sense.