Covart Comps Reading Notes 2007

1 The Great Republic ​Textbook. Bernard Bailyn. Chapter 1. British North America Vs. Spanish Colonies “For most Americans this divergence between ideals, habits of mind, and beliefs on the one hand, and experience [wilderness living], and patterns of behavior on the other, ended at the Revolution. The American Revolution was an upheaval that destroyed the traditional sources of public authority and called forth the full range of advanced and enlightened ideals.” ● Wilderness of colonial period helped to shape colonial North America. ● Early 18​th Century society in British America was marked by free, open political competition made possibly be certain underlying institutional and cultural conditions. Faction vs. faction and Groups vs. the State did not exist in the Spanish American Colonies. ● 3 Main waves of Spanish Colonial Settlement. 1. Columbus and the Subjugation of the Caribbean Islands 2. Cortes, de Vaca, and de Soto and the Reduction of Mexico and the Exploration of southern N. America 3. Pizzaro and the Invasion of Chile, Peru, and Northern Argentina. ● Spain installed elaborate bureaucracy after Columbus discovery to control lands. 1.Board of Trade had strict trading rules 2. Council of the Indies controlled religion and civil laws. 3. Vice-Royalties-head officials in the colonies—1 For New Spain and 1 for South America. 4. The Audencias—Royal Courts who shared power with vice royalties. 5. Cabildo—local municipal government. This system functioned largely unchallenged for 300 years even though there was lots of clumsy, power overlap. ● No Centralized British Imperial government in the colonies –Opposition existed for what tiny amount of Imperial Authority did exist. ● Spain eliminated encomiendas, provincial assemblies, and municipal corporations because of possible power challenges. ● Spanish colonization was fast and decisive, led by the sons of poor farmers and townsmen, most were illeterate. ● English colonization was slow and undeceive, led by the educated sons of wealthy landed elite. They were the younger sons who could not inherit and wanted a landed lifestyle. ● Spain had few immigrants to the colonies and few creoles. England had thousands ready to leave because of perceived overcrowding and religious dissent. ● Organizers both financed and governed the British colonies. They chose local governments with an imperial superstructure to seemingly connect them together.

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Eric Wolf, ​Europe and the People Without History​ (1982) Problem: “…the scholars to whom we turn in order to understand what we see largely persist in ignoring them. Historians, economists, and political scientists take separate nations as their basic framework of inquiry.” (4) They look at single nations rather than the connective tissue that binds the nations to other nations and the world.

Argument: ​“I hope to make clear that European expansion everywhere encountered human societies and cultures characterized by long and complex histories. I argued that these developments were not isolated from one another but were interlocked and this interconnectedness held also for the world that Europe built.” (x) People without history are those “primitive” people supposedly isolated from the external world and from one another. (4) Native Americans and Africans are people without history.

Good Question: “If there are connections everywhere, why do we persist in turning dynamic, interconnected phenomena into static, disconnected things?” (4) History is not a moral success story even though the history of the West teaches it as such.

“Thus neither ancient Greece, Rome, Christian Europe, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, democracy, nor even the United States was ever a thing propelled toward its unfolding goal by some immanent driving spring, but rather a temporally and spatially changing and changeable set of relationships among a set of relationships. (6) History is not predetermined.

Ethno history allows “their” history and “our” history to appear as one history, “Thus, there can be no “Black history” apart from “White history,” only a component of a common history suppressed or omitted from conventional studies for economic, political, or ideological reasons.” (19) Marx was a materialist not an economic determinist. He believed in the primacy of material relationships as against the primacy of “spirit.” (21) This book “It hopes to delineate the general processes at work in mercantile and capitalist development, while at the same time following their effects on the micro-populations studied by the ethno historians and anthropologists.” (23) “…​in the same sense of history as an analytic account of the development of material relations, moving simultaneously on the level of the encompassing system and on the micro-level.” (23) Book Organization: ​1. Look at the world in 1400 before Europe achieved worldwide dominance. 2. Development of European mercantile expansion and to the parts played by various European nations in extending its global sway. 3. How global effects of European expansion in American and Asia. 4. Trace transition to capitalism in course of industrial revolution, its impact on areas of resource supply to industrial centers, and sketch out the formation of working classes and their migrations within and between continents. (23) Religious and political ideologies shaped the world Europe recognized through girds of trade.” (25) Geography and climatic differences separated people and allowed them to develop different cultures—trade, religion, and politics united people. Especially trade.

Discusses how farming in New Spain, mining, the fur trade, Cocoa, Sugar, and Slave trades all interconnected peoples.

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World Systems theory introduced. Wolf wants to show how the production of the people w/o history was supplanted by the production of the industrializing West from 1400 onward.

Rejects the idea the US History is teleological = US History was not pre-destined or pre-determined.

Alfred Crosby Jr., ​Ecological Imperialism​ (1986) Problem: Why have Europeans leap frogged around the world while every other culture moved just next door or within an isolated area? (2) How did the Neo-Europes become the world’s breadbaskets? Through Ecological Imperialism. ● “Perhaps European humans have triumphed because of their superiority in arms, organization, and fanaticism, but what in heaven’s name is the reason that the sun never sets on the empire of the dandelion? Perhaps the success of European imperialism has a biological, an ecological, component.” (7) ● People of the Old World had to spread as the land they were living on began to overpopulate and the resources on it run out. (20) ● Animals made life possible in more ways than one for humans. They provided fertilizer, food, transportation, comfort, and sometimes water for their domesticators. (25) ● Civilized people on the move have the advantage of taking diseases with them and therefore wiping out unexpectant, sedentary or indigenous populations. (32) ● Diseases could destroy populations that had gone through the Neolithic Revolution. (40) ● Europeans tried to take over the Middle East and Asia but failed because they lacked biological or technological advantages. (58) ● European plants and animals, like the weed and the pig, drastically altered New World ecosystems. ● Crosby’s Impact on the historiography: He offers a sweeping explanation of disease, plants, animals, and humans working together as biological organisms to bring change. He uses Darwinism and evolution to describe why some species last and others do not. ● Weeds, vermin, and ills drive Crosby’s version of history. This interpretation is between humans driving nature and humans as part of nature. ● McNeil’s law—Indigenous people conquered easily because of disease. ● Teleological study: doctrine or study of ends or final causes especially as related to the evidences of design or purpose in nature—Why were Neo-Europes successful? Crosby’s work is teleological (moving towards a goal) and predetermined, but New Zealand chapter factors in the Azores and Canary islands which saves this book from being entirely teleological—Guanches were a long bitter campaign to destroy and change them—Crosby does not treat this outcome as definite. ● Crosby would argue that man and animals are biological organisms that interact with the ecology—they are not separate. The real agents of change are germs, animals, and plants and they drive human settlement history. Nature drives human history. ● Reductionist Work:​ he took something really big and made it smaller. ● Problems for Crosby: ​Crosby does not allow race, gender, or class to factor into his work; however, the New Zealand chapter allows these issues to factor in. ● Crosby’s article diminishes capitalism as a reason for expansion and environmental change. He focuses on biological and some cultural changes, primarily biological. ● Sources: ​Scientific, anthropological, Vinland Saga primary source, 16​th​ century writers, navigators, and secondary sources, Stuart B. Schwartz, “Introduction,” to Schwartz ed., ​Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era ● Observing another culture can cause problems, as there is a permeable barrier between observers and observed and it is hard to separate the two. ● “Some scholars [Stephen Greenblatt] have seen the practice of representation itself as the essential act, to such an extent that the possible adequacy of representation to some reality, its truth or falsity, is, if possible at all, of little concern.” (1) Representation overpowers truth or falsity for Greenblatt. ● Observations help us learn a lot about the observer. ● Thesis: “Each group’s sense of its own cultural identity shaped its perception of others, and this in turn was refracted back on self-understanding.” (3) ​“​The contact between cultures always demands a selective understanding of self and other conditioned by context, goals, and perceptions.” (1) ● “Whatever the previous understandings and expectations, however generalized the common understanding of “others,” the contacts themselves caused readjustments and rethinking as each side was forced to reformulate its ideas of self and other in the face of unexpected actions and unimagined possibilities. Thus a dynamic tension between previous understanding and expectations and new observations and experiences was set in motion with each encounter, and modified as the encounters changed over time.” (3) ● Encountering others helped contribute to the intellectual change within cultures. ● Contact influenced all cultures and peoples touched by it. The experience was not one-sided. ● Be careful how you view cultural encounters: “If one views cultural encounters and evaluations as governed by a perspective of power and hegemony, as Said and others have done, there is the danger of falling into the reductionist argument in which ultimate goals determine cultural understandings in a somewhat simplistic fashion.” (6) ● Power should be used sparingly for measuring the subtleties of cultural interaction.

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Neal Salisbury, “The Indians’ New World: Native Americans and the Coming of Europeans” (1997) Argument: ​The idea of Native America as a static and unchanging (prehistory) before the arrival of Europeans is too simple—they had a complex and fluctuating history, and while incredibly diverse, were linked by exchange. Also the initial intrusion of Europeans, while surely important, did not fundamentally alter societies until a century or so after contact. ● “The purpose is to show how certain patterns and processes originating before the beginnings of contact continued to shape the continent’s history thereafter and how an understanding of the colonial period requires an understanding of its American background as well as its European context.” (436-437) Methodology: ​Salisbury uses archeology—looks at patterns of exchange and relates how exchanges were performed in ways that remained consistent with their customs and beliefs. (453) ● Salisbury defines history as “quite simply, of the processes of change and continuity over time, processes from which no human or collection of humans can be exempt.” ● “Although it departs from our familiar image of North American Indians, the historical pattern sketched so far is recognizable in the way it portrays societies “progressing” from small, egalitarian, autonomous communities to larger, more hierarchical, and centralized political aggregations with more complex economies.” (444) Indian communities developed in similar way to Europe. ● The Indian political map was in a state of extreme flux when Europeans arrived. ● Native Americans in awe of European goods but this awe did not automatically create a craving for European goods.

Calvin Martin, ​The American Indians and the Problem of History​ (1987) Argument: Western European history is fundamentally antagonistic and irreconcilable with Native American history. He defines the anthropological worldview as “the world according to, for, and about humanity” and less precisely defines the Indians’ biological worldview as a connection to nature and the cosmos and a repudiation of time and human-oriented thinking. ● 2 types of time: 1. Biological and 2. Anthropological or man centered. ● Martin believes that natives should be viewed in their own time and in eternity rather then as a people with history—Martin believes history to be a concept beyond the understanding of Native Americans. ● Mythic people renew and structure their lives in cycles, living within the time of origins by virtue of living their life by myth/archetype. ● Martin’s position is hyper-western in its stereotyping of Indians in romantic terms to serve a very western purpose: to create foils to criticize western culture. ● Martin specifically mentions that works like ​Changes in the Land and ​Europe and a People Without History as assigning Native Americans someone else’s rationality. Historians portray Native Americans as having the same approach to life as Europeans, which Martin profoundly disagrees with.

Central Question: ​“How well have we, how well ​do​ we, render the history, the meaning of Indians and whites in concert?” (5-6) ● Indian speculative philosophy is biological, Western European speculative philosophy is anthropological. (8) Both are every bit as reasonable and practical as each other. ● Martin believes that Native Americans should not be put on the same level with white self-interest and motivation. (10) ● Indians have rationality; they just didn’t have the same rationality as Europeans. ● Indians were not on the same historical trajectory as the white Europeans. ● Indians are at one with nature. They look at what they can learn from all of nature’s creatures and conditions. Whites do not.

(28-30) We must include this mythological and cosmological worldview when writing about Native American history. ● European technology and disease that seeped into the Indians’ lives did not fit within their mythic view. (196) ● “To write about American Indians without making the biological connections, that is, to write about them exclusively in anthropological terms, is to lose not only an integral part of the narrative but lose its ethic as well.” (213) ● Calvin Martin sees the world in terms of good and bad. ​Good: biological, mythical, nature ​Bad: ​anthropological, enlightenment, materialism, westerners, linear views of history ● Martin believes in the Indians’ spiritual goodness. He does not deal with change over time. Martin almost says that Indians are static. Martin is recycling the noble savage. He wants a complete worldview that neglects materialism. ● Static time leads to problem of not being able to understand culture. Even to describe worldview you are always going to use Western concepts. ● Makes natives seem simplistic. ● 4 interpretations of Native Time and Native Concepts of interaction with white Europeans: 1. Salisbury and anthropological view. 2. Martin and the biologic or mythic view. 3. Trigger the rational only after prolonged contact with humans view and 4.

Albers’ view that Native Americans were rational and they worked for goods. ● Interpretative Techniques: ​Upstreaming: applies accounts of culture and practices from living Amerindians to the written and oral historical records. ​Triangulation: ​compares the findings of upstreaming with archeological and anthropological evidence Neal Salisbury, “American Indians and American History,” from Martin, ed. ​The American Indian and the Problem of History

4 Thesis: ​Scholars need to break their myth-rooted habits and approach Indian history as historians approach other subjects. They need to approach Amerindian history “by envisioning events in past time as occurring in multifaceted contexts, and by bearing in mind that history consists, quite simply, of the processes of change and continuity over time, processes from which no human or collection of humans can be exempt. This means, first, casting aside the patently ahistorical notions of “prehistory,” “ethnographic present,” “historical baseline,” and “protohistory,” all of which qualitatively differentiate the Native American past from the Europan past and prevent us from seeing it on its own terms and as a continuum.” (46-47) ● Europeans created a moral, biological, and cultural difference between them and Indians. ● Indians still have some prejudice as they are seen without history before whites. ● We must look at each Indian group’s history. We can’t just generalize about all Indians. ● Delineates time periods of Indians: Wisconsin and the Bering Strait, Paleo-Indian, Archaic, Post-Archaic, and European Phases.

Bruce G. Trigger, “Early Native North American Responses to European Contact: Romantic Versus Rationalistic Interpretations” (1991) Argument: ​“I will examine the conflicting claims of cultural relativists and rationalists and the utility of each position for interpreting the historical evidence. I will seek to demonstrate that, while cultural beliefs may have significantly influenced Indian relations in the early stages of their encounters with Europeans, in the long run rationalist calculations came to play a preponderant role, and I will document how this cognitive reorganization occurred.” (1195-1196) ​Direct Challenge to Martin. ● Romantic approach emphasizes contingently variable cultural patterns as principle determinants of human behavior while rationalism emphasizes the major role to practical, or universal, human reason. ● Romantics see early contact as an interaction between cultures and mentalities. Rationalists see these same encounters in terms of economic and political considerations. (1200) ● Romantic view sees Indians as allowing their religious beliefs to show the Europeans as divine, but sources proving this view are scarce. Therefore economic (rational) motive are more important. ● Continued contact with Europeans led to a “cognitive reorganization” in which the rational component of the mental process began to play the dominant role in guiding native relations with Europeans. ● He uses anthropological case studies to prove his point—like with the fur trade when he directly challenges Martin.

Problems with Trigger: 1. Trigger acts as if Indians could not be rational until they had prolonged contact with Europeans. 2. Trigger makes a similar dichotomy to Martin but flipped, he says that Indians were at a lower stage of development than Martin. 3. Trigger connects romantic view with cultural relativism where rationalist approach assumes that Natives and Europeans are similar in that they act in their own self-interests.

Patricia C. Albers, “Marxism and Historical Materialism in American Indian History.”

Argument: ​Albers concludes that a good history must combine the romantic and biological readings of history and the materialist’s (rationalist, anthropological) views of history. “Historical materialism offers one methodology for bridging the divide between cultural constructs and material conditions.” (126) ● Albers advocates both romantic and rationalistic view but she leans towards the rationalistic. ● The social order and the material order coevolved and how they connect is historically specific. ● She has a really solid approach. ● “It still surprises me how we know so much about the material conditions and outcomes of various acts of labor but understand so little about the experience of performing labor and even less about the languages and cultural constructs within which its agency gets expressed.” (111) ● She advocates trying to understand Indians on their own terms, like how do Indians understand and use language—she provides an 1885 treaty example and how it played into a 1970s court case. The court ruled that the Native Americans did not understand what they were signing. ● European market structures impacted the way Native Americans lived and worked.

Stephen Greenblatt, ​Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World​ (1988) ● Argument: ​How did Columbus and other early European explorers justify their acquisition and sovereignty in the already inhabited New World? Greenblatt explains that this justification came from the European Renaissance conception of the “marvelous.” “Wonder is, I argue, the central figure in the initial European response to the New World, the decisive emotional and intellectual experience in the presence of radical difference: it is quite possible that the people whom Columbus was encountering also experience, as he reports, a sense of wonder, but here as elsewhere in the account of the other we principally learn something about the writer of the account.” (14) Sources: ​Greenblatt uses Columbus’ papers and journals, Mandeville’s Travels (fictional), and the diary of Bernal Diaz del Castillo.

The problem is he chooses random editions. On page 95 he uses an Early English translation of Peter Martyr when he could have used a contemporary translation which he uses for most of the book.

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Europeans explained the marvels they saw and justified their sovereignty by mentally linking their unfamiliar, New World observations to their familiar Old World concepts and constructs. Mental linking allowed Europeans to believe that they and the Indians shared more similarities than differences. Anytime a European like Columbus could not compare a New World phenomenon to an Old World counterpart, the Europeans used the word “marvelous” to describe what they saw. (78) ● Greenblatt’s thesis has two parts: 1. Historians read primary texts strictly to construct neat and totalizing interpretations of history. 2. Greenblatt believes that documents hold intricate webs of events and meanings that need to be teased out. ● Greenblatt’s work does tell historians not to read primary documents too literally. ● Using anecdotal history, Greenblatt shows that on the surface a letter by Columbus explains his acquisition of five islands.

However, below the surface, Columbus’ words provide a view of the Spanish representational practices used to acquire those islands; he carries royal banners to represent Spain, crosses to represent the Catholic Church, and names the islands to represent both. (52) Problem: ​Greenblatt’s work is too neat. He complains that historians read documents and craft narratives to be too neat and yet his concept of “wonder” and the “marvelous” allow him to create that which he decries. He provides no explanations for what happens when Europeans become familiar with that which was once marvelous. He does not complicate his narrative at all. Greenblatt’s use of the simplistic anecdote creates the bulk of his problem. ● Greenblatt uses anecdotes because he feels they are cultures “representational technology, mediators between the undifferentiated succession of local moments and a larger strategy toward which they can only gesture.” ● Greenblatt is exploring the need of individual cultures to assimilate with another. ● Gestures for Europeans are not the same gestures for natives. ● Highly critical of Todorov’s thesis that the essential difference between Europeans and Indians was wrong, which allowed Europeans better methods of representation which they could then manipulate and adapt to, unlike the natives, which led to their demise. Instead Greenblatt emphasizes the ability of effective communication. ● Wonder means you have not made value judgments about what you have seen, you just write what you see. It is also an agent of appropriation.

Connections: ​This coincides nicely with Schwartz’s article on observations. Europeans see all foreign rituals as heathenish and could not see nor respect the beauty that the rituals might have had.

James Lockhart, “Sightings: Initial Nahua Reactions to Spanish Culture” Argument: To disprove the notion that: “the indigenous inhabitants of Central Mexico were overwhelmed and dumbfounded by the Spanish advent, immobilized by fear and fatalism, expecting the Spaniards to carry and prophesies of their own doom and the disappearance of their own culture.” (220) All of this can be done largely through linguistic analysis of the key nahuatl language texts. ● At contact Lockhart argues “the Nahuas continued to be primarily self-centered, judging things within the framework they had developed for themselves, concerned above all with life inside the local ethnic state that had always been their primary arena.

Yet they did not shy away from contact with things Spanish…” (219) Sort of like Greenblatt and his Europeans but Nahua centered. ● He makes a good case that the Nahuas saw the Spanish not as radically new outsiders, but just as another ethnic group to compete with. ● Double mistaken identity where Nahua and Spanish both thought that they were using cultural symbols that both could understand, but they weren’t. ● Lockhart stands in contrast to ​Broken Spears, which shows natives being terrified of European encounters. Lockhart says that the natives tended to stay self-centered and concentrated on their own needs. ● Lockhart wants to highlight the similarities between the Europeans and the Nahuas; dynastic rulers, tax systems, intensive agriculture, priesthood, well-developed religious apparatus and social distinction between nobles, commoners, and intermediate groups. (218-129) ● 2 parts to study: 1. Linguistic reactions by Nahuas to Spaniards. 2. Emotional reactions of Nahuas to Spanish occupation.

Sources: ​Mostly book 12 of Sahagun’s Florentine Codex. He combs through it looking for or the absence of Spanish lexical items and Spanish influenced phonological, syntactic, and semantic features. (221-222) ● The Nahuas described the conquest and what the Spaniards were doing in terms of what they themselves would do. They were not privy to the Spaniards’ conversations nor did they speak Spanish. (234) ● Moctezuma ceremonially handed over his kingdom because that was custom. Dona Maria was too literal with Cortez and there existed some misinterpretation of cultural customs on both sides. (242-243) Inga Clendinnen, “Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty”: Cortes and the Conquest of Mexico (1991) Argument: ​Challenges the notion that Europeans were fated to conquer the Aztecs, either by virtue of technology or ideology. “In what follows I want to review the grounds for these kinds of claims about the nature of the contrast between European and Indian modes of thinking during the conquest encounter…” (66) ● 2 Phases of Conquest: 1. Conquest to Noche Triste, death of Moctezuma ends 1​st phase. 2 Noche Triste to fall of Tenochitlan ends phase 2 —most research falls into the 1​st​ phase which Clendinnen seeas as having the sketchiest evidence.

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Indians and Spanish saw war in different terms: Cortes saw war in terms of conquest and the native saw the importance of taking captives and waged a war with guerilla techniques that the Spanish found dishonest and cowardly. ● When Cortes interpreted Moctezuma’s gifts as submission he misinterpreted them and Dona Maria could not help him as this was the realm of men. ● We do not know enough about Moctezuma to know how and why he behaved when Cortes came. ● Native manipulation of Spanish is little remarked on, like when the Tlaxcala convince Cortes to attack Tenochitlan. ● Cortes’ success was not inevitable but given that he was a renegade, he really had to succeed. ● Clendinnen argues that the 2​nd​ phase is the only phase to offer enough analytical evidence to reach a conclusion. ● Florentine Codex much more solid in describing 2​nd phase and the Spanish accounts of the siege are much more in sink when compared with the 1​st​ phase accounts. (77) ● Aztecs could adroitly read Spanish combat moves. They understood where the Spanish were vulnerable and exploited that. ● Spaniards exploited the Indian need to take captives by feigning retreat and then killing an entire group of pursuing Indians. ● Mexicans did not understand the massacre, they had precise rules about killing and how to cut the human body. They did not understand the Spanish so their graphic description is made in the attempt to get a better handle on what happened. (81) ● Spaniards impressed by the level of complexity the Aztecs had in social organization (89) ● Cortes was changed by his experience in Mexico and he hated having to destroy Tenochitlan and he was amazed at the Indians’ refusal to surrender. (91) Conculsion: ​“All I would claim at the end is that in the long and terrible conversation of war, despite the apparent mutual intelligibility of move and counter-move, as in the trap and ambush game built around the brigantines, that final nontranslatability of the vocabulary of battle and its modes of termination divided Spaniard from Indian in new and decisive ways. If for Indian warriors the lesson that their opponents were barbarians was learned early, for Spaniards, and for Cortes, that lesson was learned most deeply only in the final stages, where the Mexicans revealed themselves as unamenable to “natural” reason, and so unamenable to the routines of management of one’s fellow men. Once that sense of unassuageable otherness has been established, the outlook is bleak indeed.” (94) Sources: ​both native and Spaniard accounts are compared and analyzed to get at the crux of the truth.

Hernan Cortes, “The Second Letter” ● Demonstrates Cortes’ unwavering desire for wealth and territory. He describes the conquest of Tenochitlan and expresses his appreciation for Aztec cities, jewelry, and marketplaces. ● Recounts how he would read the Requerimiento three times and then was forced to subdue some tribes into submission. The problem was that a three-way translations system existed. Dona Maria translated the Nahuatil into the dialect of Aguilar who translated that dialect into Spanish and visa versa. ● Cortes over exaggerates his casualties and inflicted harm on the natives to improve his standing in the eyes of the monarchs. ● Cortes impressed by native legal system. The letter supports Clendinnen’s findings that Cortes was a conflicted man about the conquest—on the one hand admiring of the people and sad at their loss and on the other hand pleased to have been successful. ● Very clear in some sections that Cortes may have misinterpreted some gestures and he never discusses translators in his account. For example, he interprets gifts of clothes, stones, and featherwork to mean thanks for being our friend and that we are happy to be vassals of the Spanish monarchs. ● Cortes assumes that all native peoples are the same peoples. ● Cortes brags of his manipulation of the natives in his effort to divide and conquer them. ● Even after the Noche Triste Cortes discussed his resolve to succeed and to not give up—just like Clendinnen said.

Miguel Leon-Portilla, ed., ​The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of Conquest of Mexico.”​ (1962) Leon-Portilla has translated a series of native renderings of the conquest of Mexico and put them together in this volume. He claims that this is the first time someone has published a book giving the natives’ side of the story. (viii) ● Leon-Portilla sets the stage for the narratives by providing background information. ● Sources: Florentine Codex, Annals of Mexico and Tlateloco, Annals of Tepanecas, and other Spanish sources.

James Lockhart, “Double Mistaken Identity: Some Nahua Concepts in Postconquest Guides,” in Lockhart, ​Of Things of the Indies​ (1999, essay 1983) Argument: ​In the present paper I wish to discuss several aspects of postconquest Nahua corporate culture in which indigenous ways of thinking existed under the Spanish auspices or put their stamp on ostensibly Spanish derived forms. In doing so I will try to consider how it was that the different concepts and practices involved somehow intermeshed to give a workable result minimally acceptable to both parties.” (99) ● Scholars thought one of two things: 1. Spanish effaced indigenous culture upon their arrival in Mexico and replaced it with Spanish structures and patterns. 2. Indigenous culture lived on in relative isolation and that large sectors of its culture had survived quite untouched. “Eventually it was seen that neither position was right. The indigenous people of postcontact central Mexico were far less isolated from Spaniard than had been imagined; at the same time, many basic features of preconquest culture survived indefinitely, though often in new forms.” (98)

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“At the heart of cultural interaction was a process I call Double Mistaken Identity, in which each side of the cultural exchange presumes that a given form or concept is functioning in the way familiar within its own tradition and is unaware of or unimpressed by the other side’s interpretation.” (99) ● Examples: o Key Nahua sociopolitical unit in preconquest and early postconquest was city-state-sized entity, an ethnic state called an altepetl. It had defined territory and constituency and a dynastic leader who people gave both loyalty and tribute.

The Spanish installed territories to be ruled by governors who received the same title as the Nahua’s old leader. o Nahuas tried rotating offices, but they were used to permanent holders—they made distinctions between current and past officeholders but often times past holders worked with authority of current ones. (106) o Nahuas latched onto Catholic concept of saints. They equated saints with other gods in their pantheons and easily transitioned into worshiping at the church for the patron saint, celebrating the saint on holidays, and praying to the saint. (113) Ties in with other Lockhart article in that while Lockhart tried to find linguistic turns to figure out how the Nahuas really felt about their being conquested, his quest for language turns showed how the Nahuas assimilated into the Spanish culture by making it their own. This allowed the Spaniards to think the Nahuas assimilated while the Nahuas believed they just adjusted their old culture and made the Spanish assimilate.

Inga Clendinnen,​ ​Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570 ​(1987) Book was written in an attempt to understand from whatever sources we happen to have what the participants in the past events thought in good faith they were up to—what in the widest sense happened. (xiii) Argument: “​Nonetheless, we can know the Maya only from the time of, and through their engagement with, Europeans….Therefore the trick is to strip away the cocoon of Spanish interpretation to uncover sequences of Indian actions, and then to try to discern the pattern in those actions, as a way of inferring the shared understanding, which sustains them.” (132) ● Successfully uses upstreaming techniques and she uses localism which shows that conquest was not necessarily a watershed event but that conquest took a long time to occur. The Indians and the Spanish took a very long time to learn how to live together. ● There was lots of resistance and violence. ● She discusses the assertion that men express themselves more fully in action than in words and more fully in words than in script—songs and chants are better than looking at Broken Spears. And those words are only understood in cultural context.

You need to strip away the Spanish cultural interpretation and to uncover sequences of Indian sequence and then try to understand the Indians’ patterns in those sequences. All this helps us to understand the shared experiences with the Indians. ● She upstreams, but uprstreaming can be controversial because it implies a continuity that may not exist. ● Clendinnen divides her book into 2 parts: 1​st section does not contain closure about Mayan behavior and the 2​nd section is trying to answer and make conclusions based upon Mayan sources which are not chronological. ● Clendinnen’s explanations of the Maya use of Christianity fits in with Lockhart’s Double Mistaken Identity theory. The Maya adapted Christianity to fit their previous worldviews. The Spanish mistook this adaptation for the Maya adopting the Spanish version of Christianity. The result of this misunderstood episode resulted in the inquisition. ● De Landa saw the problem with the Maya as one of authority. “The common people had indeed been in the process of conversion, responding to the friars’ tuition, when the process had been interrupted by the intervention of the superseded men of authority, the native chiefs, and the priests of the old religion. The people with their habit of deference had been misled as to where authentic authority lay.” (117-118) Sources: ​Carefully examines both Spanish and Mayan sources. She analyzes each from the standpoint of the context in which they were written. In the end she comes up with a compelling set of stories that attempts to explain both stories without necessarily reconciling them. Clendinnen carefully triangulates Spanish document and translation. She looks at Spanish Inquisitorial records, the Chilam Balam, Landa’s Relacion, Spanish government records, and she upstreams with the Ethnographic present—looks at rituals of today and what they practiced yesterday. (Upstreaming allows us to see and hear native voices, yet it is not as concrete as native primary sources.) (Methodology listed on page 132) Methodolgy/Organization: ​The first part of the book provides a linear history and does not provide closure to Mayan actions. The second part is not chronological but an interpretation of what the Maya did and understood on their own sort of time—Martinesque.

Similarities w. Lockhart: ​Stages of Conquest, Localistic view (altapetal view), Lockhart also says that Spnaish brutality fits into passed concepts of time with invasions the localism of both the Aztecs and the Maya wants to incorporate the Spanish into their history and culture.

David J. Weber, ​The Spanish Frontier in North America​ (1992) Goal: ​To challenge the notion that all of American history is descended from the 13 English Colonies. To bring to light the impact of Spanish culture on our country and the Spanish influence in our nation’s early heritage. He likes the articles that have come out but he

8 sees them as too specific and failing to connect readers with the larger picture. He wants to create a more up-to-date version of Herbert Eugene Bolton’s ​The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest ​(1921).

Argument: ​“Simply put, I try to explain Spain’s impact on the lives, institutions, and environments of native peoples of North America, and the impact of North America on the lives and institutions of those Spaniards who explored and settled what has now become the United States.” (8) Not really an argument. Weber also confronts Turner’s thesis and states that it is one-sided. Weber argues that the frontier was a two-sided dialogue. He also provides an answer for why Spaniards were interested in settling marginal lands—defensive positions to secure the colony. Last lines of introduction: “Native peoples, then, must be understood as more than a mere “challenge” to Spaniards, as an earlier generation of historians suggested. Even books like mine, which attempt to illuminate the Spanish experience, must come to terms with Indians, whose societies and cultures Spaniards transformed and who, in turn, transformed the frontier societies and cultures of the Spaniards.” (13) ● Boundaries of book are within the present-day United States. ● He will not put a “gloss” on Spanish behavior as the pro-Spanish Bolton did. ● Themes: 1. Native Americans and Spaniards failed to understand one another. 2. Definitions—The Spanish Frontier and Borderlands. 3. Environmental differences and impact. 4. ● Weber says he is being eclectic not reductionist, however he acknowledges that in some places he is reductionist. (11) ● “Frontiers have at least two sides, so that an expanding frontier invariably edges onto someone else’s frontier. Rather than see them as lines, frontiers seem best understood as zones of interaction between two different cultures—as places where the cultures of the invader and the invaded contend with one another and with their physical environment to produce a dynamic that is unique to time and place.” (11) The Spanish Frontier in America was fluid—it waxed and waned with the fortunes of Empire. Different zones of the frontier could expand even as other contracted. ● Spain’s frontier settlement set in motion several simultaneous frontier processes including urbanization, agriculture, ranching, and commerce. (12) ● Spanish frontiers unlike Anglo frontiers sought to include the Natives. ● Chapters deal with Political, economic, social, cultural, spiritual, military, and imperial influence. ● He sees the Spanish frontier as being alive—border and immigration debates. Frontiers were marginal lands used as buffers against other imperial forces. ● Frontier is defined as: where the culture the cultures of the invader and the invaded contend with one another and their physical environment to produce a dynamic that is unique to that time and place. Middle Ground sounding. ● Pueblo revolt pressures and facilitators. There were all these pressures of repression, tribute, raids, and disease. What the Pueblo Revolt needed was the emergence of a facilitator—Pope to lead the revolt. This is a perfect example of Weber’s argument where both people’s are changed by this encounter. The Spanish leave after the revolt and stay away for a while and then they come back but do not establish a tribute system—they are altered from the experience. It also shows agency of the Indians—they revolted. ● Weber wants to explain Spain’s impact on the lives and institutions of the Spanish who settled North America.

Causes of Pope Revolt: ​Franciscans’ treatment, famine and drought, increased native raids, change in tribute system, and Indians grew disenchanted with Christianity and its failure to fix these problem and disease. Franciscans’ treatment of shamans made them likely revolt leaders. Franciscans also have rampant sexual abuse. Revolts can be explained through causes and facilitators (charismatic leaders, a uniting factor—Spanish language, native languages (creates disunity) and identity.

What do we learn: ​After the revolts of 1680 and 1696, a new deal is formed, a blind eye to natives’ religious practices, allows them to hold guns, hold some official positions. Pueblos are seen as more of being allies rather than enemies, especially given the Commanche, Navajo, Ute, and Apache raids. The Spanish abolish tribute and really live and get along with Pueblos out of necessity.

Patricia Seed, ​Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640​ (1995) Argument: “This book compares how Europeans created political authority over New World peoples, lands, or their goods between 1492 and 1640. It is not, therefore, a history of first contacts, nor is it an account of the many expeditions of trading and fishing between the New World and Old. Rather it examines the initial attempts to own the New World, to claim it for England, Spain, Portugal France, or the Dutch Republic.” (3) “This book attempts to show exactly why such convictions [cultural methods of asserting sovereignty and possession in the New World] appeared reasonable to some members of each European society, while failing to persuade others.” (13) ● Europeans all had different ways to establish sovereignty. ● Europeans shared common technological and ecological platforms—trans-Atlantic ships bearing crossbows, cannon, harquebuses, horses, siege warfare, and disease. But they did not share a common understanding of even the political objectives of military action. (3) ● “This book treats all rationales and legitimation of the exercises of imperial political power as cultural constructions. These constructions have a certain logic with respect to the cultural, political, economic, ecological, and social history of each nation.

They are entirely reasonable given national languages and particular histories. But they are also entirely “reasonable” ​only ​in the context of those histories. The same things that rendered them rational for subjects of one monarch or citizens of one

9 republic were the very factors and experience that rendered them unfamiliar and alien to the subjects and citizens of another.”

(13) ● Acts of Possession stopped after 1640 as Natives seen as inherently belonging to Europeans. ● Ceremonies show what the Europeans thought colonization was going to be like and for the English it included no one but themselves.

Sources: ​There is a problem of sources as “Rarely did colonists and their leaders explain why they did what they did to establish their political rights. To each group of Europeans, the legitimacy of their or their countrymen’s actions could be readily understood. Their rituals, ceremonies, and symbolic acts of possession overseas were based upon familiar actions, gestures, movements, or speeches, and as such, were readily understood by themselves and their fellow countrymen without further elaboration, and often without debate as well.” (3) o Uses historical assumptions to interpret written accounts of symbolic actions of sovereignty establishment to interpret sources. 1. “Everyday Life” 2. Common Colloquial Language. 3. Shared Legal Code. These three assumptions about each culture will be used to help set the actions of each country in context and then to derive the real meaning of the symbolism. For example, “Ferdinand and Isabel ordered Columbus to make a solemn speech, but the content of that speech soon became fixed, reflecting a newly elaborated practice created from traditional Iberian Islamic traditions of declaring war.” (5) Book Organization: ​Chapter 1: Anticeremonial English conceptions of possession (House, Hedge, and Fence building and farming).

Chapter 2: contrasts the English method with elaborate French parades with the Natives and cross planting. Chapter 3: Spanish speeches, Requirmiento, and notaries. Chapter 4: Portuguese technological achievements, astrological confirmation, and intellectual property possession. Chapter 5: Dutch detailed map making. ● Seed does not present a chronological study. She makes the order to try and show how these acts occurred in the same cultural moment. ​Her order: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch. ​Right Order: Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, and English.

Connections: ​Connects in with Lockhart, Clendinnen article, and Greenblatt in terms of meaning. Europeans mistook their own notions of possession as much as the Natives did. Seed’s book is very Eurocentric and she does not discuss how the Natives reacted to certain ceremonies of possession and how they understood them, which is where her work differs from Lockhart and Clendinnen.

Ramon A. Gutierrez, ​When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846​ (1991) Argument: ​“As a social history of New Mexico between 1500 and 1846 largely viewed through the institution of marriage, this book examines three models of marriage in three cultures during three contiguous historical periods…Part I explores marriage customs among the Pueblo Indians during the sixteenth century…Part II traces the history of the Spanish conquest of the Pueblo Indians, which began in 1540 with the expedition of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado into New Mexico…Part III deals with marriage formation and control in the mature eighteenth-century colony that was reestablished with the 1693 reconquest of New Mexico.” (xviii-xix) “the Central theme of this book: how marriage structured inequality [in both private and public domains.]” (227) Goal: ​The task at hand is to identify inequality and how it reared its ugly head during the Spanish Conquest of the Pueblo. (xviii) Sources: ​Lots of Spanish sources and he uses Clendinnen ​Ambivalent Conquests.

Book Outline: 3 parts: Part 1 Marriage customs and history of the 16​th century Pueblo People. 2: History of the Spanish conquest of the Pueblo Indians in 1540, and 3. The heart of the study: marriage and control in colonial New Mexico during the 18​th​ Century.

Methodology: ​“The methodology employed to construct this representation of the sixteenth-century Pueblo Indian world on the eve of European contact is simple. Approaching the voluminous heap of information on the Pueblos as a modern-day archeologist of knowledge, I have bored down through the numerous layers of historical artifacts searching for certain themes, symbols, and practices.

In the nieteenth and twentieth centuries these artifacts are ethnographies, archaeological site studies, collections of myths and traditions, and reminiscences about the “olden days.” For the eighteenth century they are reports by friars and bureaucrats on the state of affairs in the Kingdom of New Mexico, as well as extensive civil and ecclesiastical court record. For the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries they are investigations on Indian revolts, litigations between church and state functionaries, chronicles of conquest, and explorers’ narratives.” (xxix) Why Work is So Ground Breaking: ​Gutierrez tries to give voice to the Native Americans. He also tries to show how marriage and sexuality could be used by Pueblo women to establish control and domination over Spanish men. With its release in 1991, its publication was a fresh and revolutionary attempt to present the Spanish conquest of New Mexico as a dialogue between the Spanish and Pueblo peoples. Gutierrez’s work for better or for worse affected how many historians pursue subjects with Native Americans and the future works learned from Gutierrez’s methodological mistakes. Gutierrez’s third part is the first to present sexual tensions and marriage as a way to gain power and submission. ● Gives an accurate portrayal of Spanish and Franciscans, but not the Indians. He gives a weird sexual account of Indian life.

Biggest Criticism: ​Gutierrez claimed to be an insider as a native New Mexican presenting an inside history. However, many claim that he was an outsider who used Spanish documents to give yet another Spanish history under the guise of presenting the Indian view.

Gutierrez also comes under criticism because he generalizes about the Pueblo people by not differentiating between different Pueblos,

10 customs, languages, and religious beliefs. Instead he uses the Acoma Pueblo to speak for all Pueblos and his critics say he got this interpretation wrong too. Criticisms complain about first two parts of book, not third part. ● Gutierrez eroticizes sexuality, which makes his work seem more of a Western than a Native view. ● Methodology NOT Approach should be criticized. Approach should be praised.

Connections: ​Franciscans are millenarian and in the frontier they become more fanatical and they see no middle ground between native Christianity and their Christianity. They see absolute conversion or no conversion. Tensions between the Franciscans and the Spanish soldiers are accurately portrayed. The soldiers tend to be pretty brutal towards the Indians but the Franciscans were too. This work shows a different kind of Europeans/Native relationship development than White.

Sort of like Clendinnen in respect to Gutierrez trying to get at the native voice through Spanish sources. Like Clendinnen, Gutierrez does try to put the natives’ worldviews in context of their own views and explain how they reconciled them and adapted them or did not adapt them to Spanish Catholic worldviews—Corn Mother = Virgin Mary.

“Commentaries on ​When Jesus Came the Corn Mothers Went Away,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal​, XVII 1993, 141-150 ad 166-169 These responses to Gutierrez are highly critical.

Claims: ● Pueblo Indians have more than one worldview—this shows that in order to establish tenets you might have to rely on something that does not support it—like the idea that all Pueblos have one worldview. ● Gutierrez’s sources do not corroborate his argument. ● Gutierrez is selective in the quotes he uses ● Gutierrez uses Jorgenson’s 19​th​-20​th​ century study to talk about 16​th​ century conquest. ● Gutierrez used elements of Plains Indian society to describe Pueblo—which Brooks in Captive and Cousins shows that the cultures become somewhat blended through trade and captives. ● Evidence on Junior-Senior gift-giving status was misinterpreted too as it came from a book on the Cheyenne. ● Gutierrez accuses the Pueblo of being in denial about their own culture. ● Gutierrez says that Esteban was seen as a kachina—the Pueblo deny it saying that they never would have seen a conqueror as a god—Evidence to support this view: The Pueblos killed Esteban. ● Inquisition records make sex acts appear worse than they were and Gutierrez should have taken this into account. ● Gutierrez misconstrues reciprocity. Gutierrez points out that sex was given by women as gifts…he does not place this gift in the context of the Pueblo view that all things are part of each other and that giving and receiving cannot happen one without the other. Sexuality is part of that whole notion of giving and receiving. ● Pueblos state that they met the Spanish with respect not fear because they knew they were people. ● Gutierrez does not distinguish among Pueblo Peoples, he uses the Acoma to discuss all Pueblos. ● Gutierrez’s work is Puritanical.

James F. Brooks, ​Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands​ (2002) Argument: “This, then, is a story about how peoples of markedly different cultural heritage found solutions to the crises of the colonial encounter. In the Southwest Borderlands, two powerful social impulses, inclusion and exclusion met on the historical terrain of colonialism and resolved themselves in forms of slavery that were at once particular and mutual. Diverse traditions of capture, servitude, and kinship met and meshed to accommodate both the community-forming impulse of alienation. These were the most visible aspects of borderland political and cultural economies that bound indigenous and Spanish colonial peoples in long-term relations of violence, exchange, interdependence, and interdevelopment. Within their system, native and colonizing peoples crafted a locally negotiated distribution of wealth and power that led not simply to distinctions between captives and cousins or to hierarchies of masters and victims but to the interpretation of cultures.” (31) ● “This book addresses several areas of contemporary debate in native American, Spanish Borderland, and North American history. It highlights patriarchal competition for women and children and the accumulation of indigenous units of social wealth as curcial factors in triggering violence within and between native American societies. As such, it casts shadows across a tenaciously sunny romanticism that see indigenous peoples on the fringes of Euramerican expansion operating within subsistence-and-exchange economies that produced little intergroup conflict.” (365) ● “This study at hand suggests that, when natural resources were scarce or unevenly distributed among Indian groups, customs of exogamous marriage and reciprocal adoption that usually fostered intergroup exchange could shift to a violent and competitive commerce that reaped sorrow.” (366) Goal: ​“Captives’ numerical representation may seem insignificant when compared to the commerce in stolen livestock, but this story suggests that the slave system of the Southwest Borderlands provided the ideological and cultural fuel that fed the larger economy.”

(363) Brooks wants to correct all misconceptions about slavery in the Southwest. ● Book is really about the NATIVE encounter with the “other” in the Southwest Borderland, not a Eurocentric view. ● Young women in borderland villages most likely to become a victim in the commerce of slaves. Brooks explores gender and class in Native American and Hispanic communities by looking at the violence of the Southwest Slave trade.

11 ●

Work “emphasizes cycles of conquest by the Spanish, Mexican, and American colonizers, focuses on land-tenure systems as sites of conquest and resistance struggles, and takes cognizance of world-systems theory to describe the engulfment of local societies by Euroamerican capitalism.” (38) ● “By 1786, customs of captivity and servitude in Plains Indians and New Mexican society alone had facilitated economic and cultural exchanges that contributed directly to the establishment of formal diplomatic relations.” (79) ● Marginal peoples of New Mexican society established new villages in the outlying mountains. With their regional Indian neighbors these marginal villagers created a mixed society that stood apart from the colonial center and yet played a crucial role in stitching together the plains and pastoral borderlands. ● “Both Indian and New Mexican montaneses brought some captives into their encampments, but not primarily as labor sources—rather, these people were incorporated as subordinate family members whose cultural repertoires would prove useful in borderland negotiations. Customs of slavery and kinship interacted with both economic intensification and isolation to foster distinctively different ‘borderland communities of interest’ in the coming century.” (159) ● The Santa Fe Trail that connected St. Louis with Chihuahua “brought a new set of mixed-culture actors in the borderlands, especially French, Canadian, Scottish, English, and American fur traders who served as agents of capitalist expansion as well as cultural affines of the borderland communities.” (228) ● By the 1870s land-hungry migrants moved into and settled on Ute land. The borderland political economy was giving way to modernization with the capitalist incorporation of the Southwest, fueled by violence out of the Civil War. ● “This analytical framework emerges from overwhelming evidence that native Americans and New Mexicans, despite their cultural differences, shared an understanding of the production and distribution of wealth as conditioned by social relations of power. At the same time the captives entered the borderland economy, many hundreds of thousands of [domesticated animals] were moving between Native American, Mexican, and New Mexican societies. If these livestock served as capital on the hoof, captives represented a type of cultural capital. Captured women and children served as objects of men’ contestations for power while simultaneously they enriched the culture in which they found themselves lodged throughout their own social and biological reproductive potential.” (363) ● Organization: ​Introduction of Native American and Spanish captive and slave traditions, Sources: ​Multicultural: baptismal and burial registers, military reports, captive narratives, exchange data, anthropologic sources, ethnographic material, and oral Native American sources.

Connections: ​This book “suggests that the volatile matrix created by the borderland economies actually brought some significant sectors of the colonial population into the indigenous social formation…Thus, North America featured nascent social alternatives to nativistic resistance or European expansionism.” The work of Richard White in ​The Middle Ground also suggests this for the Great Lakes region, while Daniel Usner does the same for the cis-Mississippi region in ​Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy. ​(367-368) Could link with Richter article on Mohawk Captives. Connect with Rowlandson’s narrative?

William Cronon, ​Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England​ (1983) Argument: ​“The shift from Indian to European dominance in New England entailed important changes—well known to historians—in the ways these peoples organized their lives, but it also involved fundamental reorganizations—less well known to historians—in the region’s plant and animal communities..” (xv) Cronon argues that nature as a commodity for market was the driving force for environmental change; Sailors came to the New World for capitalist reasons and they brought disease—biology and capitalism are related.

Goal: ​Cronon wants to show how culture affected ecological changes in the land. “My purpose throughout is to explain why New England habitants changed as they did during the colonial period.” (xvi) Organization: Three parts: Part I: Looking Backward a reflection on how the wilderness of New England looked to Thoreau. Part II: The Ecological Transformation of Colonial New England and Part III: How the wilderness became the object of capitalism. ● Changes is declensionist—the Indians had achieved a balance with the environment and the English came and destroyed the balance, the Indians, and the environment for economic gain. ● White Americans perceived and later Native Americans perceived nature as a commodity for market. ● There is no place for Native Americans at the end of the story, he has no history of the Indians beyond when the White men take over. ● Cronon does not really get deep into culture beyond cultural conceptions of the land and how cultures viewed it or came to view it as a market. Cronon does not include the Native Americans in the market. ● Cronon views white men as being separate from nature and Indians have a zen-like communion with nature, but they do use fire and nature as though they were separate from it…yet, they understand that their well being and future as being tied with nature. ● Capitalist system places humans separate from nature, natural system allows man to commune with nature and use it withour exploring it. ● There was a puritan view of the Indians as part of the wilderness and the wilderness needed to be tamed.

Sources: ​Primary Sources from New England’s colonial period, ecological sources, ecological and economic anthropology sources, Native American Secondary Sources, and Colonist Secondary Sources.

12 Connections: ​Calvin Martin has a tiny point in that Cronon should have talked about religion. Use Mashpee article to show that Native Americans continued to exist and use the environment after the white man.

Impact: ​Writing a history that involves nature is still new in 1983. Cronon draws on Crosby and McNeill but has a different argument.

Mary Rowlandson, ​The Soveraignty and Goodness of God​ Neal Salisbury ed., with Related Documents (1682, 1997) ● It’s a post war document published when debate was going on about what to do with the Indians Organization: ​Narrative divided into 20 removes, each chapter accounts for every time she moved with the Indians. ● Rowlandson writes about how good God is in her attempt to stave off or to convince herself that she is remaining a faithful Christian in the “heathens” presence. ● Edited by Mather so emphasis will be on God as her work is used as an example for the pulpit. ● Indians are part of wilderness and both are limitless ● Increase Mather explains the war as a divine judgment for sin. ● William Hubbard believes that the Indians are satan’s minions. ● Daniel Gookin defends the praying Indians saying that they helped to defeat bad Indians ● Empires are trying to construct natives as the primitive other.

Jill Lepore, “Come Go Along with Us” in Lepore, ​The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (1998) Argument: ​“The lasting legacy of Mary Rowlandson’s dramatic, eloquent, and fantastically popular narrative of captivity and redemption is the nearly complete veil it has unwittingly placed over the experiences of bondage endured by Algonquian Indians during King Philip’s War.” (126) ● Captivity redeemed Rowlandson as much as the ransom redeemed her. ● Lipore discusses the captivities of James Printer, a Christian Indian who type-set Rowlandson’s narrative, Captain Tom, an Indian executed when he tried to return to English Society, and John Tift an Englishman who was executed for not telling the truth about his Indian captivity and his involvement in battles against the English.

Calvin Martin, “The European Impact on the Culture of a Northeastern Algonquian Tribe: An Ecological Interpretation” William and Mary Quarterly​ 1974, XXXI, 3-26 Argument: ​To say that the Indians were “economically seduced” by European goods to kill their beaver supply is superficial. The Indians’ relationship with the land and animals was infused with religious beliefs, which was too strong for European goods to change. ● Metaphysical is just as intertwined with ecology as physical and biological. ● Micmacs hunted for essential food, not for profit. ● “Hunting…was a “holy occupation”; it was conducted and controlled by spiritual rules.” (11) ● How you killed and what you killed depended on how you could use it. ● Disease wreaked havoc on the Indians and broke parts of their spirituality. Fisherman off the Great Banks introduced disease to the Micmacs and initiated the subversion of Micmac material culture by trading European goods for pelts.

Connections: ​Cronon, White’s ​Roots The Great Republic ​Textbook. Bernard Bailyn. Chapter 2: Transplanation ● Massachusetts Bay Charter was an elaborate document that empowered the company not only to trade and settle within the lands already given to the New England Company, but also “to govern and rule all of His Majesty’s subjects that reside within the limits of our plantation.” The charter prove to be a legal bulwark behind which a powerful social movement could organize and develop. (48) ● Unlike the Pilgrims, the Puritans did not want to separate from the Church of England. They wanted to seize control of it, cleanse it of its corruption, and reconstruct it, at home or abroad, in a pure and unadorned form. They also wished to create a society that would gain God’s approval, not remove themselves from it like the Pilgrims. (48-49) ● 20,000 Puritans, separatists of the English state not the Church of England, migrated to Massachuestts between 1630-1643. ● Puritan domination of the government was legally secured not by the clergy’s control of the government—in fact, the clergy did not hold public office—but by the fact that only church members could vote. (51) ● Both Connecticut and Rhode Island were the products and offspring of Massachusetts—Connecticut a reproduction of it, Rhode Island a rejection of Puritan ways. ● Maryland founded as a Catholic proprietary colony. Catholics ruled the upper house and the Protestants the lower—Protestants made up majority of the population. Constant struggle of the people to make the proprietor listen to them.

(56-58) ● New Netherland was a hodge-podge colony with settlements all over the place and few that were defended well. New Englanders plagued the Dutch by settling on their land and then calling for an English conquest. The Hartford Treaty (1650) did not help because of the settlers on Long Island. The colony fell to the English in 1664.

Darren Staloff, ​The Making of an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals & Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts​ (1998)

13 Argument: ​“How did the ethereal elements of the world of ideas and mentalities actually impact the material world of historical elements?” (p. xiv) The answer is through the power of the thinking class. Really this book is about the cohesion of the intellectuals and their creation of a thinking class and then their search for ways to legitimize their power and one way was through their thinking. ● Staloff explains how the leading ministers of Massachusetts (Puritan “intellectuals”) and its magistrates (the “intelligentsia”) forged a “thinking class”: a coterie of educated, like minded men who acted as a “class conscious group” to achieve lasting “cultural domination.” Staloff argues that the thinking class created the vaunted “New England Way,” a middle road in matters of church polity and civil politics that produced “remarkably stables and enduring” institutions. ● The thinking class was composed of Puritan ministers and magistrates who were united by their high levels of education and their vocational need to use abstract theological and legal ideas. Their intellectual labor defined them as a cohesive group. ● The goal of the thinking class was to transfer their cultural power into political power—Staloff says by means of a “system of cultural domination.” ● Staloff is looking to interrogate “the social and political features of early Massachusetts history that gave technical theological doctrines such powerful efficacy,” (xiv) ● Book tracks Puritans from settlement through 1684. ● Everyone is trying to figure out how New England obtained and maintained stability in their church and government. ● The Thinking Class never lacked challengers—John Cotton and his “charismatic” religious leadership in the 1630s and the political voice of the colony’s “yeomen-freemen” throughout the century. The Cotton issue was overcome by the show trial of Anne Hutchinson, while the yeomen and freemen voice was overcome by the extension of the vote. ● The trial of Anne Hutchinson was a “political show trial” that allowed Winthrop to isolate Roger Williams and pull John Cotton away from the merchant dissidents and back to the thinking-class fold. (617, Bloch) ● “The extension of baptism to the third generation undermined the position of the lay church members and enabled the clergy to dominate a greater flock.” (617, Bloch) Reference to the Half-way Covenant. ● “The difficulty with Staloff’s argument is that he makes the drive for power the primary cause of historical action and he never analyzes the general concept of power….Instead the author credits the Biblicism of Puritanism alone with providing the clergy with authority—their claim to a superior understanding of scripture ensured the political importance of their literacy critical skills. (617, Bloch) ● “Thus, if Staloff’s story is, in part, one of thinking-class triumph rather than Puritan “declension,” it is also a tale of triumph at a price—a price that, by the 1680s, the colony’s cultural elite proved unable to pay.” (1574, Kamensky) ● Staloff’s book really maps the dynamics of “the ‘struggle for power,;” an epic clash of which the fortunes of New England’s thinking class serve as an early exemplar.” (1574, Kamensky) ● Staloff’s Puritans are historically transcendent, for better and for worse. His “thinking class” model will speak to academic readers outside history departments, and we should all applaud such bold efforts to burst the narrow boundaries of disciplinarity. (1574, Kamensky) ● Staloff examines how the New England Way came to be through the establishment of a firm orthodoxy. It was first accomplished by the dismantling of John Cotton’s “charisma” as well as the dissenting views of any other dissenters within and without the regime, to be supplemented with a firm and uniform religious education of the colony’s ministers at Harvard.

The creation of the New England Way remained firmly intact until the Restoration of the Stuart Monarchy and royal challenges to Protestantism placed lingering tensions between the laity and the clergy in full view. Staloff affirms, “the inevitable result if this division was a loss of cultural authority by the thinking class in general and the ministerial intellectuals in particular” and “by the time of King Philip’s War in the mid-1670s, the Bay clergy had been sorely buffeted by the winds of Restoration” (143). This weakening was exploited by Increase Mather’s own charisma which Staloff asserts is the final assult on already weakened cultural domination. As a prophetic man, Mather foresaw the doom presented by the “lax and sinful” colony. Mather’s disappointment echoes the initial assertion of Perry Miller that the Puritan’s “errand into the wilderness” was not as final and ultimately authoritative as perhaps it could have been. Staloff, despite his vehement support of the cultural domination model, is fair in his discussion of its inevitable decline. (143) ● Staloff does make some outlandish claims, like the Antinomians as being the urban bourgeoisie instead of religious zealots that John Winthrop hated. Or that John Cotton manipulated that urban bourgeoisie in the same fashion as Mao Tse-Tung manipulated the Red Guards. ● No date ends the effects of the thinking class—look at how people use Harvard, Yale, etc to legitimize their intelligence and standing in the community.

Contributions: ​Staloff makes us reconsider Miller and his work on the Puritans. It makes us want to consider the world of the New England Puritans and the legacies they bequeathed to other times and places. Staloff’s work is also interdisciplinary in that he maps out the dynamics of the struggle for power and invokes the philosophy of Marx, Weber, and Walzer.

Views: I dislike this book because it is using contemporary theory and imposing it upon a group of people who lived 200-300 years before the theories were developed. The philosophers were coming up with theories to describe modern revolutions not the New England Puritan movement. Hall conducts similar research and finds that the thinking class used magic and folklore in their sermons to maintain the trust and support of the laypeople and this seems more plausible than the Puritans understanding that they were forming a thinking class and that the Antinomians made up the urban bourgeoisie. The Puritans believed in a hierarchical society and wanted no

14 more power than the wealthy landowners of England. While Foster, Vickers, Miller, and Hall all found ways of showing how the elite connected with the common New Englanders, Staloff’s rigid structure does not allow for the common people, it shows that the hierarchy was stringent and unwelcoming to new members, where the other shows fluidity in relations (not social movement) between the classes.

Stephen Foster, “New England and the Challenge of Heresy, 1630 to 1660: The Puritan Crisis in Transatlantic Perspective” William and Mary Quarterly ​38 (1981) 624-660 Argument: “Religious controversy in early New England, it may be suggested, was the consequence of ambiguities in the Puritan movement in England on the eve of the Great Migration of the 1630s, but these very ambiguities also enabled New Englanders to accommodate the fissiparous tendencies of their faith without major schisms or disruptions. American Puritanism was able to retain its basic integrity by means of successive institutional redefinitions that short-circuited the appeal of potentially divisive challenges to the established order.” (626) Methodology: “Even most of those scholars willing to award the culture of colonial New England a certain durability rest their case on a claim for a ​relative degree of harmony. They, too, implicitly in church, town, and colony must be a sign of social change, and social change in turn must equal the passing of communality and religious mission. A causal link between conflict and decline in Puritanism seems too inextricably woven into the literature to be entirely overthrown in one go. Its explanatory value, however, can at least be questioned by a reexmination of one spectacular arena of religious dispute: the instances in which the American Puritans faced the challenge of heresy in their early years in New England, when their establishment was least established and their orthodox brethren in the moth country actually did suffer defections to Antinomians, Baptists, Quakers and other sectarian rivals.” (625-626) ● Compared to Perry Miller’s puritans, Foster’s Puritans are more adaptable and less exceptional. ● Foster draws direct comparison between English and New English Puritans ● Foster does not tell a declensionist story ● Foster’s puritans are Elizabethans. ● Everything is tied to a generation gap—1​st​ generation of native-born colonists view things differently. ● Antinomian and Familist labels applied loosely in the 1630s to people with no relation to the larger movements. ● Heretics were heretics but hard to identify with one group because they never fully expressed their beliefs in writings or in court testimony. ● “The genius of the American Puritan ordinarily lay in the direction of papering over fundamental division. After a certain amount o heartburning, some sort of formula would be produced that harnessed the energies of the diverging parties under a single standard, and the Puritans emerged the stronger for their ability to embrace differing religious impulses in a single movement.” (650) This was not possible with Hutchinsonians as they were viewed as genuinely sinister. They were ejected from the colony. ● Foster does not see the challenges posed to the Puritan doctrine and society by dissenters within the faith or even those outside, like the Quakers, as serious threats and sources of declension within the seventeenth century Puritan regime. Rather, he sees that “the eventual resolution of the American [Antinomian] controversy with minimal casualties offers an instructive demonstration of the ways in which the ambiguities of the English Puritan experience could be put to good use on the other side of the Atlantic.” (641) (Jen) ● Foster points out that there were diverse groups of settlers coming from various religious beliefs to New England, and the church’s response to them was more flexible than autocratic. Although he acknowledges that “from 1630-1660 the greatest danger to Puritanism was from its own left wing [and]…in the successful containment of this threat the ecclesiastical institutions of New England took on a stricter form,” they “still remained flexible enough to shift again gradually, beginning with the first Half-Way Synod of 1657, as the problem became not spirital cocksureness but diffidence and scrupulosity” (660) (Jen) ● Unlike Staloff, Foster does not see the challenges posed to Puritanism as “declension” or as threats to the “Puritan way of life,” rather it the New England Way was never designed to run smoothly and that is why it lasted. (Jen) Sources: Primary Sources, Christopher Hill, Biographies, Church Records, Laws, Winthrop Papers, and Sermons Perry Miller, “Errand into the Wilderness” in Miller, ​Errand into the Wilderness​ (1964) Argument: “​I suggest that under the guise of this mounting wail of sinfulness, this incessant and never successful cry for repentance, the Puritans launched themselves upon the process of Americanization.” (9) Winthrop’s covenant draft was good, but the first generation never accounted for how the wilderness and its expanses would alter and shape the American Puritan experience. ● New England was sent on a religious errand and it failed, Miller derives this from a batch of second-generation sermon titles. ● The second generation began to question what kind of errand were they on, a personal errand or on an errand for God? ● The mission and journey of the Pilgrims was simple and an easy picture to see: they left England for religion and they left the Netherlands to avoid the brewing war with Spain. (3-4) ● The Puritans left England of their own accord. They were driven by religion and profit. Unlike the Pilgrims, they were not forced to leave England to practice their religion.

15 ●

Winthrop acknowledges that God disposed mankind in a hierarchy of social classes, that some must be rich and others poor.

However, in discussing the migration to New England, Winthrop tried to tell people that they were going not for wealth but to enter into a covenant with God. He also acknowledged that some poorer people might come to make wealth. (5) ● Winthrop meant the government of the New World to be biblical, now its called congregational. ● The role of government: “a political regime, possessing power, which would consider its main function to be the erecting, protecting, and preserving of this form of polity. This due form would have, at the very beginning of its list of responsibilities, the duty of suppressing heresy, of subduing or somehow getting rid of dissenters—of being, in short, deliberately, vigorously, and consistently intolerant.” (5) ● Winthrop saw their errand as being “to improve our lives to do more service to the Lord, to increase the body of Christ, and to preserve our posterity form the corruptions of this evil world, so that they in turn shall work out their salvation under the purity and power of Biblical ordinances.” (5-6) ● Winthrop did not intend to do away with social classes. ● The second-generation of Puritans saw failure because blights had come upon to punish them, mostly King Philip’s War. In figuring out where they went wrong, how they could not live up to their fathers’ generation, they found first, there existed a visible decay of godliness. Second, several manifestations of pride—contention in churches, insubordination of inferiors to superiors, particularly of those inferiors who had more wealth than their betters, and, astonishingly, a shocking extravagance in attire. Third, heretics with the Quakers and Anabaptists. Fourth, notable increase in swearing and sleeping through sermons.

Fifth, the Sabbath was wantonly violated. Sixth, family government decayed. Seventh, Lawsuits were on the rise and lawyers were thriving instead of having a community that lived in harmony. Eighth, sins of sex and alcohol. Ninth, New Englanders were betraying a marked disposition to tell lies. Tenth, Business morality left everything to be desired. Eleventh, people showed no disposition for reform. Twelfth, Destitute of civic spirit. (7-8) ● Puritans complain about the lack of godliness but they never actually do anything to fix it. ● Second and Third generations only looked to fix the social problems with their community, not the religious. ● Second and Third generations are Americans and they think like Americans. Their fathers and grandfathers were Europeans and all their lofty ideas about the New World were written in Europe. ● The real errand was that the New Englanders were supposed to be successful so they could go back to Old England and lead a Reformation. (11) ● English Civil War rendered the New England model unusable as it split in the Puritan movement between Presbyterian and Independents so no one system, like that of New England, could ever be imposed upon England. Especially since Independents tolerated heretics like Roger Williams. ● “In other words, New England did not lie, did not falter; it made good everything Winthrop demanded—wonderfully good—and then found that its lesson was rejected by those choice spirits for whom the exertion had been made.” (13) Sources: ​None provided.

Daniel Vickers, “Working the Fields in a Developing Economy: Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630-1675” in Stephen Innes, ed.

Work and Labor in Early America Argument: Children served the same economic function in New England that indentured servants served in the Chesapeake. ● Settlers of both New England and the Chesapeake shared the same challenge of developing a new country. ● Massachusetts’s scarcity of labor and tools was in short supply but not as bad as in the Chesapeake region. ● Fathers and sons had to adjust the rural traditions of Old England to fit the frontier of New England. ● 3 Old English Practices: 1. Agricultural labor usually carried out in household units. 2. The more land you owned the less you had to work for a larger landholding neighbor. 3. Age determined work 4. Tenants did proper farming. ● New Englanders had two goals: 1. To reproduce the material comfort they had at home. 2. They intended to accomplish this in an English manner. ● Initially no one worked for their neighbors as there was so much land and labor was expensive. ● How could the rural economy of old England be reestablished in an environment where workmen were so difficult to procure?

How, in other words, were the twin scarcities of capital and labor to be overcome? These questions forced New Englanders to adapt to their new environment and adjust their working ways. ● Husbandry could not subsist once servants dispersed. ● Most servants in Massachusetts before 1675 were unlike those in England, they lacked family anywhere in the county. ● Refutes Edmund Morgan’s claim that simple farm service was common by men and boys. Vickers says it was not common. ● Labor in New England obtained better wages because laborers were so hard to obtain. Govn’t tried to regulate wages but stopped for fear that the workers might move elsewhere to obtain higher wages. ● Poorer neighbors and newly married men were often employed to help farmers. ● “These early New Englanders hired themselves out on occasion to their older, wealthier, and more market-oriented neighbors because they could not satisfy all of their families’ wants from their own holdings along.” (60) ● Many sons were employed to work their father’s land. Men did not usually inherit or get their own farms until 25 or 30.

16 ●

Wealthy landholders held most of the land, but since they devoted their lives to public service, they had to lend out their land to leaseholders who worked it in exchange for rent and foodstuffs.

Sources: ​Secondary Sources, William Bradford’s Narrative, Letters from New England 1629-1638, Winthrop’s Journal, Records and Files from Essex County, and Essex Court records.

David D. Hall, ​World of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England​ (1989) Argument: “Events that were commonplace in much of Europe were not re-created in New England. Nor was this accidental. The differences ran deep into the structure of society and the structure of religion. Six main circumstances deserve close attention: the role of the “folk,” the geography of religion, the relationship between church and state, the appeal of “radical” religion, the appeal of “magic,” and the sway of literacy.” (5) ● This books is about religion as lay men and women knew and practiced it. Mine is a history of the religion of the people, or popular religion, in early New England. (3) Elites’ discourse was not the popular discourse. ● He ignores the rich history of the “Puritan” movement. ● Cultural system in New England more uniform than in Europe. As mostly “middling” status emigrants they had different folk beliefs. ● “In New England, too, space was much less consequential than in Europe. The significance of space was that religion varied with the distance between center and periphery. In outlying regions Christianity took on the character of “local” religion as distance turned into differences of style and understanding.” However, in New England “​no minister held office unless he was in residence, a rule (and practice) obligated by the “congregational” structure of the church. Here there was not court or urban center to which the more ambitious clergy moved; the social and the spatial order of New England was radically decentralized. Dispersed throughout a hundred towns, the clergy helped maintain a common system. They had all been trained alike; they all thought alike.” (6) ● In contrast with Europe, the New England colonists made church membership voluntary, did away with church courts, and made it so the New England clergy were less likely to arouse anticlericalism. It was a highly independent system. ● Clergy sometimes looked to older folklore and they wrote the almanacs with the magic normal people looked to. Folklore served as a leveling agent. ● Hall refuses to represent the clergy as so dominating in the churches that their way of thinking always prevailed. ● Hall rejects the argument that “popular religion” refers only to the ways in which laymen and women broke with what the clergy said. ● Powers of the New England ministry bounded more closely to the civic body than we normally suppose. ● Horse-shed Christians: those who spent the break in between the two sermons, discussing secular matters instead of attending Sunday School. ● Meteorology, astrology, apocalyptic prophecy, and natural history all used by religious people to predict God’s works. ● Early on New England almanacs reiterated references and formulas derived from English almanacs, books, and broadsides propounding on “magic” and God. ● Tales of Satan, natural disasters, mystical animals and events all told in New England sermons to discuss God’s power and the Devil’s temptations. ● Elements of wonder used to discredit political opponents. ● Prophecy and magic empowered people like Anne Hutchinson. Prophecy overturned the authority of mediating clergy and magic gave access to the realm of occult force. ● By 1685, ministers like Mather tried to draw a line around magical ideas they knew to be wrong in forecasting messages from God—like comets and eclipses—ideas that the common lay people still believed in. Mather invoked items of wonder in his sermons even though he understood that some of his flock would not follow them. ● New England clergy could not impose systematic order on the meaning of wonder. Nor could the suppress prophesying.

Problems: ​Hall spends so much time looking at what elite Puritans thought and what London presses published for the popular reading public, that he does not get into what the common, horse-shed (unchurched) New Englanders thought about folklore and wonder.

Possibly this is because the sources do not exist.

Connections: Hall is different because he does not write about the Puritan movement nor does he try to contend that Old World religion was re-created in New England. Perry Miller also argues that New England Puritanism differed from English Puritanism—he says because of the wilderness. Like Foster’s Puritans, Hall’s New Englanders (he does not use the word Puritan) were adaptable.

Ministers like the Mathers catered their sermons for the laypeople and that sometimes included the use of wonder.

Sources: ​Diaries, almanacs, period literature, minister letters like Increase Mather’s, secondary sources.

Richard L. Bushman, ​King and People: In Provincial Massachusetts​ ​(1985) Argument: ​“The political culture of eighteenth-century Massachusetts, Bushman argues, focused on two poles, king and people, bound together in a relationship of dependence implying a hierarchy of favor and obligation.” (61, Cohen) A vigorous relationship between the people and the crown pervaded 18​th​ century Massachusetts politics and culture. (615, Butler)

17 Goal: ​“My aim in writing the book was to recreate the values and assumptions of the participants in politics insofar as those principles could be discovered in contemporaneous writings and actions. Above all I wanted to recover the underlying structure of political culture as experienced at the time.” (vii) “The aim of the study thus became the reconstruction of political culture among Massachusetts politicians during the provincial period, from 1691 to 1776.” (3) Methodology: ​“Concentrating on the writings of eighteenth-century politicians, I paid little heed to the debate over republicanism that was going on when the book appeared in 1985. In fact I implicitly exempted myself from the debate by using the words “republican government” rather than “republicanism” when outlining the book’s themes in the Introduction. By focusing on republican government, I emphasized the constitutional changes made in 1776—the elimination of the monarch and the transfer of royal power to the people—rather than the implications of ideology for society and culture.” (vi) ● The first charter (1629) granted Massachusetts the power to run its own republic and they often undermined the King’s orders. ● The revolutionaries believed that the adoption of republican government was the most radical and important transformation in the Revolution. ● Republicanism arose in opposition to the evils in royal government, not to the consequences of capitalism. ● When tyranny threatened, only independent people could be counted on to resist—that is, to act virtuously on behalf of the general good. (ix) ● The King was a powerful symbol in the colonies. The king served as an anchor for a social system based on the protection which the powerful offered to the weak—people gave support and loyalty to king and he protected them. ● People were the moral equal of the king, the word “people” invested politicians with the moral order they needed to stand up against government officials and disobey royal instructions. Royal power was devoted entirely to the well being of the people. ● Americans rejected the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as their model for revolution. They looked to the bloody Puritan Revolution (the English Civil War) instead. ● The management of overweening self-interest in all its complexity was, in fact, the central problem of provincial politics. The main point of the popular party was to dam those interests or to make them converge with the people’s. (7) ● For a century and a half the colonies embodied the contradiction of a monarchical government lacking a monarchical society, that is, rulers appointed by the crown-governing people whose shops and farms made them independent of all superiors. (248) ● The Revolution did not overthrow the ruling class; it overthrew the class of rulers. (Under monarchy the rulers were a class apart.) (248) ● Bushman demonstrates how contemporary political thinking on both sides of the Atlantic stressed ​inter​dependence between crown and subjects. The people exchanged obedience for protection, and the crown became duty bound to guarantee advantages, right wrongs, fix outrages. (615, Butler) ● Loyalty to the kind did not, however, prevent opposition to the royal bureaucracy. (679, Greene) ● As the colonists were independent to their superiors, the royal Governors could not form the same web of patronage and influence that the Crown and Parliament could construct in England. This made it hard to govern and showed that the King’s authority did not necessarily help his underlings in the colonies. (62, Cohen) ● Turning Point: The passage of the Massachusetts Government Act and the subsequent election of an extralegal Provincial Congress (1774) led the colonists to question the crown itself. As the King hired foreign mercenaries and declared his loyal subjects to be rebels, his moral influence eroded, still, reluctance to dismiss the ancient anchor of authority preserved it from complete repudiation by Massachusetts until July 1776. (63, Cohen) Organization: ​“The first part explicates political culture from the establishment of royal government in 1691 through to mid-century, with some slight attention to specific political issues. The second part focuses on the influence of that culture on the movement toward independence. I have not attempted a full-scale analysis of the Revolution in Massachusetts, but have offered a schematic description, emphasizing the interaction of traditional cultural ideas with the course of events. (8) Problems: It suffers from a number of carless statements, an exaggerated emphasis on the fear of dependency as a spur to revolution, and a failure to establish beyond question the interests Bay colonists so wanted to protect. (64, Cohen) [He uses Massachusetts to sometimes speak for all the colonies. This does not work, like when Bushman says that after 1760 “all of the colonies” suddenlty turned toward revolution (136) this was not the case.]

Sources:​ Contemporary pamphlets, politician papers, newspapers, speeches, secondary sources, government documents.

Impact: ​“By analyzing popular and political attitudes towards the crown in Massachusetts between 1691 and 1776, [Bushman] demonstrates the crown’s centrality to pre-Revolutionary colonial culture. The result is a significant new interpretation of the Revolution that presses the roots of the “republican” synthesis deeper into the colonial soil and resurrects older interpretative problems in stimulating and surprising ways.” (615, Butler) Views: ​I believe Bushman to be right in that the colonists were angrier with Parliament and the King’s ministers than they were with the King. Even when their port was shut down with the Intolerable or Coercive Acts, the Parliament and the ministers were blamed, not the King. I think the Foreign mercenaries really was the final straw for most colonists.

18

Denys Delage, ​Bitter Feast: Amerindians and Europeans in Northeastern North America, 1600-64​ (1995) Argument: Delage examines the fur trade using world systems theory. The theory postulates that an economic core links both a semi-periphery and a periphery through economic exploitation. In the 17​th Century the Dutch served as the core, the English and French the semi-periphery, and the Amerindians became the periphery. Because the Europeans profited more than the Amerindians, Delage argues that this unequal exchange linked the Native Americans into the market economy. ● Delage examines how the Netherlands, England, and France developed capitalist ecnomies during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. ● The Netherlands was the first to develop full-scale capitalism because they were the first to increase their agricultural production to stimulate urban growth and divisions of labor, which produced surplus goods for trade. ● England developed capitalism after the Netherlands, the French were still practicing feudalism in the 17​th century and were really far behind. ● As the Native Americans lacked knowledge of capitalism, the Dutch, England, and French exploited them. ● Delage creates and Edenic picture of Huronia, a place where sin, capitalism, inequality, disease, and famine did not exist until Europeans arrived. ● Delage asks “How did this [fur trade] exchange lead to wealth for some and poverty for others?” (78) Delage explains that unequal exchange existed between Europeans and Amerindians; exchange producing profits for Europeans and dependence upon European wares for the Indians. For Delage, Amerindian dependency came when Amerindians replaced their clay pots and bark containers with metal kettles, when Europeans textiles replaced their animal skin garments, and when firearms replaced their bows and arrows. ● Without Delage deriving an Amerindian voice from his sources, questions exist about how and if the Hurons viewed their trade situation as one of dependency. ● Delage does present a thorough analysis of European trade using World Systems theory by explaining why Europeans traded in Northeaster North America the way they did and how the European countries competed against each other for trade domination. ● The British conquest of New Netherlands in 1664 ends the period of Dutch dominance at the core. The English were unable to become as dominate as the French in the fur trade, but they did emerge as the core after the Seven Years War. Sources: ​Jesuit Relations, letters, travel accounts, missionary reports, secondary sources.

Problems: ​Delage does not look at Amerindian oral histories or place reports of Indians in context, he takes his European sources concerning the Amerindians literally, and he generalizes about all Indians based on one, European account of a single tribe.

Connections: White complicates role of dependency in the Middle Ground. You could discuss Wolf because of World Systems Theory. Contrast with Greer and his source use.

Allan Greer, ​Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits​ (2005) Goal: Greer wanted to learn more about the native experience of contact and colonization. “I was hoping to gain a better understanding of the larger processes of colonization by taking as my subject not “Indians,” not even “Iroquois” or “Mohawks,” but a particular native person.” (vii) ● Greer is careful with his texts. He uses upstreaming and triangulation to get an accurate native voice and he is highly skeptical of European sources and reads them with care—like the hagiographies of the Jesuits. ● Does an excellent job of showing how the middle ground works on a micro level. Greer shows how Indians accepted concepts of Christianity and adopted them as their own—middle ground. ● Greer does not present Jesuits as being powerful and unified as Delage does. ● Greer is like Salisbury in showing that Native History is not static and they had centuries of change and upheavals and adapted to changes in life. ● Catherine was unusual among Native Americans in that she did convert to Christianity and did become devout. ● Greer really shows how Native Americans made Christianity their own.

Contribution: “Until now, the history of Native Americans of the colonial period has been written largely in terms of faceless collectivities: “the Arawaks” greet Columbus on the shores of Hispaniola, the “Narragansetts” suffer defeat in Metacom’s War, a faction of “the Mohawks” aligns itself with the French and accepts Catholicism, and so on…. Hence my interest in Catherine Takakwitha, a Mohawk woman of the early colonial period whose short life happens to be more fully and richly documented than that of any other indigenous person of North or South America in the colonial period.” (vii) Sources: ​Jesuit Relations, hagiographies, diaries of Chachautier, and techniques to get at the Native story—archaeology, oral histories, upstreaming and triangulation.

Connections: White’s ​The Middle Ground is a macro picture of what Greer shows. Contrast with Delage and his use of sources, both use Sagard’s history, the Jesuit Relations, and Chauchetiere’s diary and come up with different pictures of Native life. Compare with Salisbury about how both show the Indians as having a real, non-static history.

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Richard White, ​The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815​ (1991) Argument: ​“The book is about a search for accommodation and common meaning. It is almost circular in form. It tells how Europeans and Indians met and regarded each other as alien, as other, as virtually nonhuman. It tells how, over the next two centuries, they constructed a common, mutually comprehensible world in the region around the Great Lakes the French called the ​pays d’en haut​.

This world was not an Eden, and it should not be romanticized. Indeed, it could be a violent and sometimes horrifying place. But in this world the older worlds of the Algonquians and of various Europeans overlapped, and their mixture created new systems of meaning and of exchange. But finally, the narrative tells of the breakdown of accommodation and common meanings and the re-creation of the Indians as alien, as exotic, as other.” (ix-x) ● White counters the idea that there are only two outcomes where the Indians were either absorbed or resisted white culture ● Pontiac’s rebellion is an example of the collapse and redefinition of the middle ground established after the French and Indian War. After the French leave the British take a hard line with the Indians—no coddling or gift giving and this turns into rebellion. The British realize that it is more expensive to wage war then to provide presents. The British realize they don’t have sufficient military and political power to force the Indians to do anything so they are forced to make concessions like the Proclamation line and the reinstatement of gift giving—this creates problems with settlers. This new middle ground is not as good as the French version. The British do not want to mediate and they can’t control their settlers and they are not interested in doing the middle ground so they take a minimalist approach. ● Pontiac’s brother Neolin shows religious sychronism where he shows how the Indians have been influenced by Chritianity but at the same time they accept Christianity on Indian terms. They recognize that things are spiraling out of control and they express a desire to regain control. ● Book starts with a bad world for the Iroquois. White depicts this pre-1701 world to show you why a middle ground was needed. ● The Fox Wars: Native peoples go to the French saw the Fox are a problem and they are going to take Detroit. Instead of mediating hunting conflicts so they drive the Fox away and because they have British ties the Fox have to go. The Indian tribes do not want the Fox to go and fight against the French to stop this precedent. The French do not want to fight the Fox. White uses this example to show that the French were not always nice guys to the Indians at all times.\ ● The British win Pontiac’s Rebellion and they make some concessions and limited gift giving resumes. ● The British have a hard time reconciling settlers’ need for land and keeping Indians at bay. The settlers keep moving on to other Indians’ land, they bring livestock, they compete for hunting ground, they murder Indians like Fredrick Stump. ● Pontiac’s Rebellion caused because British do not give presents, insist that the Indians accept the British way, they disrespect the Indians and settlers intrude on the Indian Ohio Valley. o The rebellion hopes to improve life by bringing back Onontio and restore Indian life to what it was.

The Middle Ground: ​“The middle ground is the place in between: in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the nonstate world of villages. It is a place where many of the North American subjects and allies of empires lived. It is the area between the historical foreground of European invasion and occupation and the background of Indian defeat and retreat.” (x) o Middle Ground: balance of power, recognition of cultural legitimacy over assimilation and that it was a system of expedient misunderstandings; i.e. French conception of father and the Indians conception of father. o Middle Ground ingredients: 2 different groups with lots of interactions, ability to communicate, balance of power—neither group can win by force, each side needs to recognize or at least accommodate cultural identities—works towards similarities—Inga Clendinnen’s ​Ambivalent Conquests o Middle Ground is not a compromise—it is something new formed without domination.

Methodology: ​“I am practicing the “new Indian history.”…This book is “new Indian history” because it places Indian peoples at the center of the scene and seeks to understand the reasons for their actions.” “But this book also, and indeed primarily, a study of Indian-white relations, for I found that no sharp distinctions between Indian and white worlds could be drawn.” (xi) ● “I have also tried to avoid the ethnohistorical technique of upstreaming, although diligent readers will, I am sure, find places where I have indulged in it. Upstreaming is a technique of using ethnologies of present-day or nineteenth-century Indian groups to interpret Indian societies of the past. If assimilationist studies had a built-in bias towards the disappearance of earlier culture, then upstreaming has a bias toward continuity.” (xi) Sources: ​Journals, military papers, government papers, correspondence, oral histories, Jesuit Relations, secondary sources.

Daniel Usner, ​Indians, Settlers, & Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783 ​(1992) Argument: “Here I examine the evolution and composition of a regional economy that connected Indian villagers across the Lower Mississippi Valley with European settlers and African slaves along the Gulf Coast and lower banks of the Mississippi.” (6) ● “The term “frontier exchange” is meant to capture the form and content of economic interaction between these groups.” (6)

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“Without using any spatial models or formulas, I examine how Indians, settlers, and slaves produced and distributed goods at a regional level. The Lower Mississippi Valley is here defined as a colonial region shaped by forms of production and means of exchange practiced commonly and regularly among its diverse inhabitants.” (6-7) ● “Despite significant differences between cultures and official efforts to manipulate those differences, Indians, slaves, and settlers forged a network of cross-cultural interaction that routinely brought individuals into small-scale, fact-to-face episodes of exchange.” (277) ● “The accelerated influx of settlers and slaves, the expansion of plantation agriculture, and the commercialization of Indian trade altogether contained important man-made origins of a new socioeconomic structure in the Lower Mississippi Valley—commonly called the Cotton Kingdom. An export-directed economy was supplanting a frontier exchange economy, with profound effect upon economic relations between different cultural groups. In order to reinforce this transformation, colonial officials intensified measures to control interaction among settlers, slaves, and Indians.” (282) ● “As the government increased patrols during the 1780s and 1790s, runaways slaves found it increasingly difficult to form maroon camps in the backcountry thickets and wetlands of Louisiana. Indians and free people of color were encouraged to participate in these slave-catching expeditions, fueling animosity between cultural groups while getting the immediate job done.” (283) ● “The supplanting of the frontier exchange economy by the agricultural export economy affected Indian groups in different ways and, therefore, elicited different strategies of accommodation and resistance to the changing economic order.” (284) ● “Usner identifies a transitional period between 1763, when at the end of the Seven Years’ War French Louisiana was divided into Spanish Louisiana and British West Florida, and 1783, when Louisiana was reunited under Spain and the American Revolution removed England from the Southeast. Three major changes took place during this period: increase in-migration of African slaves and diverse groups of European settlers, who were encouraged to plant crops for sale on the external market; expansion of plantation and agricultural using slave labor; and commercialization of the deerskin trade with Indians.” (349, Hanger) ● “Economic roles in this southern region only later became rigidly defined by race. In the early eighteenth century, blacks carried firearms, both for hunting and for war; Tunica and Avoyelle Indians traded in cattle and horses; black cowherds, even when slaves, achieved considerably autonomy; maroons rustled livestock; Indians worked in the colonies as free laborers or slaves. Africans, Europeans, and Indians alike engaged in hunting, farming, and herding, often borrowing techniques from one another.” (234, Dowd) ● “Europeans and Africans interacted with native peoples in ways that defied mercantilism, colonialism, and metropolitan governments. Usner’s analysis reveals how their relationships differed from those of a later period. He clearly establishes commercial colonial empires, exploitive labor systems, and rigid social hierarchies as human inventions that represent the rejection of alternative ways of organizing society. (717, Perdue) Organization: ​2 Parts: “the first a chronological overview of the region’s part in the contest for empire between Britain, France, and Spain, and the second an analysis of the structure and components of Louisiana’s frontier exchange economy.” (348, Hanger) ● 1. “The evolution of a colonial economy” “This section includes the establishment of France in the area, France’s economic interest in the natives, and the disastrous impact of the Europeans upon the natives. The French (and the English too) preferred to send Indian slaves to the Caribbean in exchange fo African slaves because the Indians escape too easily. In 1730-1731, following the Natchez revolt in November 1729, about five hundred Natchez Indians, mostly women and children, were sent as slaves to the Caribbean. In this section Usner traces the development of the slave, fur, tobacco, and indigo trades and the great commercial rivalry that existed between France and England. This rivalry le to a series of colonial wars that involved the various Indian nations. Among other things, the lack of females among the European population resulted in a large number of mixed relationships…Usner concludes this section with…Spaniards and British upon the area: expansion and intensification of plantation agriculture and significant increases in slave and non-slave populations.” (516, Coker) ● 2. “The frontier exchange economy,” “concentrates on production at Indian villages and camps, colonial farms, and plantations. Farming, gathering, hunting, fishing, and herding practices crossed intercultural lines during the eighteenth century. Usner analyzes both the movement of foodstuff through the frontier exchange network and the frontier labor, especially that of soldiers, sailors, and rowers. The study concludes with a review of the fur trade, which was a very important aspect of the colonial economy. In fact, the fur trade, particularly deer skins, played a vital role in the economy of the entire Southeast during much of the eighteenth century.” (516, Coker) ● “The organization sets up an essential tension between the framework of empire and the realities of colonial life.” (717, Perdue) Contributions: ​“Daniel H. Usner, Jr., has achieved two goals much desired by historians of colonial North America: a history of relations among Indians, Europeans, and Africans; and a history that brings the story of all three to bear on an important current debate, one that originated not in the subdiscipline of ethnohistory but in the social and economic history of early America.” (234, Dowd) ● “Usner shows us that social history, particularly a careful analysis of nonelites, can change the way we think about politics and economics. He reveals a New World of enormous variety where ethnic and racial diversity were not barriers to complex

21 economic and social relationships. In the process, he rescues colonial Louisiana from the margins of history and provides a model for scholars of the colonial South and the American frontier.” (718-719, Perdue) Sources: ​judicial records for common folk, secondary literature on French peasants, African peoples, and Native Americans, French, British, and Spanish primary source records—government papers, documents of exchange, etc. Very diverse sources.

Connections: ​White’s the middle ground. Each culture tried to have equal power, trade relations so they could get what they needed to supply. Just as in White’s work there were several imperial powers competing for Indians relations.

James Axtell, The White Indians of Colonial America,” ​William and Mary Quarterly​ XXXII (1975) 55-88 Argument: ​“Axtell’s evidence suggests that the real pluralists or assimilationists of early America were the Indians, not the settlers.

Indians absorbed European women and children with remarkable ease. Had they somehow recognized intuitively the modern biological discovery that children acquire their immunity to disease from their mothers, not their fathers? Tribal absorption of white women represented the quickest and most effective defense any Indian community could adopt against the threat of demographic disaster.” (16-17) ● Very few Indians chose to live as Englishmen. As soon as they had the chance they went back to being an Indian. ● “On the other hand, large numbers of Englishmen had chosen to become Indians—by running away from colonial society to join Indian society, by not trying to escape after being captured, or by electing to remain with their Indian captors when treaties of peace periodically afforded them the opportunity to return home.” (18) ● Captive women faced a rock and a hard place. Most remarried to Indian men and bore half-blood children who were not accepted in English society when the captives were returned, however most women could not escape to go back to their adopted families. ● Some captives didn’t remember English, their places of birth, or their names. All they spoke was Indian and adds describing them were placed in newspapers to return the captive to their English families. However, too many looked like Indians so the ads were of no avail. ● Paradise Lost situation. Indians had a wonderful society and it was so wonderful that many whites decided to go live with the Indians. Axtell looks at the difference between Puritan culture and Indian culture. ● No tribal identification and he gives the impression that adopting captives only occurred after 1753, and he only discusses the adoption of white captives—not native captives. ● The Indians were defined as an inversion of the colonial world.

Sources: ​Cadwallader Colden papers, Benjamin Franklin papers, eyewitness letters, and secondary sources Connections: ​Rowlandson, Richter, Tanner, and de Vaca Daniel K. Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience” ​William and Mary Quarterly ​XL (Oct, 1983) Argument: “Thus neither commonplace stereotypes nor scholarly efforts to combat them have left much room for serious consideration of the possibility that the non-state societies of aboriginal North America may have waged war for different—but no less ration and no more savage—purposes than did the nation-states of Europe. This article explore that possibility through an analysis of the changing role of warfare in Iroquois culture during the first century after European contact.” (528-529) ● War was very important to 17​th​ Century Iroquois. ● Trade and economic motives were essential to later conflicts such as the beaver wars, which implies that before trade the only type of war was the mourning war. ● The mourning wars become more deadly with disease accelerating tribal death and the desire for guns and the fur trade. ● “In many Indian cultures a pattern known as the “mourning-war” was one means of restoring lost population, ensuring social continuity, and dealing with death.” (529) ● Iroquois waged war for honor. ● Enemy camps were targeted for mourning wars. Family members from extended household took part in the mourning war. ● Captives were made to dance until matrons decided to adopt or execute their captive. ● There was ceremonial torture of some captives to help assuage grief. ● Iroquois did not want to die in battle like Europeans. Slain in battle the warrior would be excluded from the village and family in the spirit world. He would forever walk the ground searching for vengeance. ● Indian fighting tactics were designed to limit casualties. ● European contact dramatically changed Indian warfare because of guns and diseases. ● Mourning wars were waged as never before to replace disease ravaged populations. ● “Trade with Europeans made economic motives central to American Indian conflicts for the first time. Because iron tools, firearms, and other trade goods so quickly became essential to Indian economies, struggles for those items and for furs to barter for them lay behind numerous seventeenth-century wars.” (539) ● 2/3 or more of the Iroquois were adopted. ● Christianity also took its toll on Iroquoisia as many converts left homes because of discrimination. Iroquois could not assimilate captives fast enough. (542)

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“By the late 1670s the mourning-war complex was crumbling. Warfare was failing to maintain a stable population; despite torrents of prisoners, gains from adoption were exceeded by losses from disease, combat, and migrations to Canada.” (542) ● Mourning wars by 18​th​ century were no longer effective and uniting. ● The Grand Settlement showed the Iroquois as restraining from warfare and leaning on diplomacy. ● Iroquois kept peace by playing the Europeans off each other.

Sources: ​Primary documents from Canada, France, England, secondary sources, anthropological data.

Connections: ​Rowlandson, Axtell, Tanner, de Vaca, and Richard White—middle ground begins to substitute for mourning wars.

James H. Merrell, “The Indians’ New World: The Catawaba Experience” ​William and Mary Quarterly ​(October, 1984) Argument: “​The experience of natives was more closely akin to that of immigrants and slaves, and the idea of an encounter between worlds can—indeed, must—include the aboriginal inhabitants of American.” (539) “Rather than survey the broad spectrum of Indian adaptations, this article considers in some depth the response of natives in one area, the southern piedmont. Avoiding extinction and eschewing retreat, the Indians of the piedmont have been in continuous contact with the invaders from across the sea almost since the beginning of the colonial period, thus permitting a thorough analysis of cultural intercourse.” (539) “Tracing the experience of these upland communities both before and after they joined the Catawbas can illustrate the consequences of contact and illuminate the process by which natives learned to survive in their own new world.” (541) ● Indians experienced as much a new world as the colonists and Africans and in some cases the Indians experience more of a shock with the New World because the Europeans new they were setting out for a world that was new where this New World was the Indians’ old world. ● Salisbury’s article “The Indians Old World” is in response to this article where Salisbury demands continuity. He does not see the moment of contact as a watershed event—contact was a long term process of change. ● This is a new history in that Merrell and Salisbury calls for adaptation where the old way of telling Indian history in context of American history is assimilation or genocide. ● After 1492, Indians lived in just as new of a world as the Europeans. ● Native Americans left out of colonial history because they are unable to fit into the new world theme, a theme that enters a powerful hold on our historical imagination and runs throughout our efforts to interpret American development. 537-538 ● New order for Indians arrived in three phases: 1. Alien microbes kill vast numbers of natives, 2. Traders who exchanged European technology for Native products, which brought the Natives into the developing world market and 3. Traders gave way to settlers eager to develop the land according to their own lights. (539) ● Both Europeans and Indians affected by disease—Indians more so and as disease wiped out their elders and youth their prospects for the future, both in terms of population and knowledge, looked bleak. ● Disease caused tribal mergers and new cultures formed as a result—like the Catawaba culture. ● Tribal mergers caused some peoples to have to move away from their ancestral lands—a very unsettling and immigrant-like experience.

Connections: ​Salisbury and the Indians’ Old World, Richter in that culture adapts to form new culture.

Sources: ​Anthropological, government papers, journals, secondary sources Nancy Shoemaker, ​Negotiators of Change​, “Introduction” (1995) The full book is “a collection of original research articles, each on some aspect of Indian women’s history, covering the experience of women from different tribal groups, and spanning the period from the seventeenth century to the twentieth.” 1 ● “Native women maintained the cultural traditions of their people. They also, on other occasions, advocated change. They were, in short, crucial participants in the ongoing struggle for the survival of Indian cultures and communities.” (2) ● 3 questions that dominate scholarly work in women’s Indian history: 1. In native societies, did women have status and power equivalent to that of men? 2. What was the source of women’s authority? 3. How did European settlement of the Americas affect the gender balance within native societies? ● Indian women are often portrayed as beasts of burden or voluptuous and promiscuous women. ● Women had their own world as the men’s world excluded their work. ● Because women reared children they dominated private sphere while men dominated the public sphere. ● Gender roles were important in native communities and it was a non-hierarchical social category. ● Gender was socially constructed and not biologically determined. Beardaches were men who dressed like women and did women’s work. Women could also assume male roles. ● Reproductive or productive roles expanded women’s authority. ● Iroquois women had power because they controlled economic resources. ● Motherhood was so valued it did give women political power. ● People who argue that women’s status declined after contact use Marxist theory. ● Women were as active as men in buying livestock.

Connections:​ Mary Beth Norton’s article on Women’s History.

23 James Clifford, “Identity in Mashpee,” in ​The Predicament of Culture,​ 277-346 ● Clifford puts white culture on trial by looking at how Americans decide what Indians should be. ● There is a legal liability of the romantic savage identity. The idea of what Indians look like is so imbedded in modern American culture. ● Hybridity: The idea that natives and whites can go from one world ot the other with a sense of fluidity. Tanner, de Vaca, Rowlandson. Tanner is a really good example of how he bounced back and for the having been raised as a white child and then as an Indian child. ● Cape Cod culture who survived in the colonial period and continued to exist into today. After the deadly epidemics upon European arrival this tribe merged with others to form a new one. ● Clifford describes this non-federally recognized tribe as a community that retains kinship bonds and some traditional political and religious institutions. ● This Indian community intermarried with free blacks, members of other native peoples, and whites showing that the Indian community absorbed outsiders.

Connections: ​Connect with Richter, Tanner, Rowlandson, de Vaca, and Axtell.

Alvar Nunez Cabeza De Vaca, ​Castaways​ Enrique Pupo-Walker ed., (1993) ● You can learn about the roles that these captives can assume in a tribe and how those roles are perceived by natives—de Vaca’s identity as a healer was thrust upon him. ● The natives see healing power as coming from within oneself—magic. Cabeza de Vaca can’t claim magic in 16​th century so he said God has chosen him and helped him to heal. ● De Vaca cured people because they thought they were cured ● This is an ethnographic account of the 16​th century. In the beginning he sees the Indians as an other but from slave onwards he becomes a much better observer. ● This text is, like Rowlandson’s, a claim on their roles in the home society after captivity. De Vaca was 7-9 years in with the Indians and he has no reason to think he will be redeemed. Rowlandson expected to be captured, de Vaca did not. ● There is a lot of knowledge in this book being suppressed. When teaching it talk about the strands that show the suppression of more knowledge.

John Tanner, ​The Falcon ​Louise Erdich ed., (1994) ● The text was mediated with a professor. ● Tanner is not able to integrate in the United States—he has a hard time with crowded towns, houses are confining, as is clothing, people do not share—Americans are hyper competitive and materialistic. He loves Indian mobility and sharing. ● Recurrent features of Tanner—sickness, hunting, hunger, mobility, reliance on others, drinking, dreams, and respect for others. ● Net-no-Kwa has dreams and she is cunning—she has great spiritual leader and she can tell where the animals are and who is going to die in a year. ● Tanner waffles on his spiritual beliefs. ● Tanner was adopted in 1789, at nine years old, and was raised as an Ojibwa after he was captured and sold. ● The Tanner narrative has no sense of time, there is little moralizing, and he reports things matter of factly. It does offer a non-popular critique of American Society in a non-romanticizing way.

Brian Moore, ​The Black Robe ​(1985) ● Moore relies on the Jesuit Relations—which say that the natives used profanity. ● The book comes across as caricatures of people—Daniel is cynical about French Society.

Oscar Handlin, “The Significance of the Seventeenth Century” in James Morton Smith ed., ​Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History Argument: “The seventeenth century was immensely significant. In the decades after the settlement at Jamestown, three generations of Americans—the first Americans—began to shape the social order, the way of life, and an interpretation of their own experience that would influence much of subsequent American history.” (4) ● The seventeenth century had societal roots and practices extending back into the medieval age. ● Jamestown settlement’s social order diverged from that of Europe’s. ● Settlers always proclaimed loyalty to the governments from which they emigrated and explained that their emigration was not intended to disrupt but preserve and improve the society they left. However, the settlers were constantly moving off on tangents through the force of circumstances and the pressure of the environment. ● The colonists who came to America were already displaced and often already had lives in disorder ● Death rate was high throughout the colonies ● The wilderness created problems for men accustomed to open spaces ● Native born American children grew up accustomed to colonial society and its wilderness

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The corporate colonies were settled like medieval boroughs while the proprietary colonies rested on feudal precedents, but this changed quickly o Power devolved to local sources leading to decentralized political organization o Churches developed into a de facto congregational form even though they wanted centralized authority o All colonies developed a society of yeomen and artisans even though the companies and proprietors had hoped for servants. There was social stratification as well as a high degree of social mobility. o The American seventeenth-century social order was disorderly by the expectations of normal men. But the settlers were not normal men. The terms of American existence compelled frequent and serious deviations from the norms of behavior accepted by the men who peopled the colonies. (6) o May groups immigrated so the experience of transplantation was not limited to any one group or one moment Connections: ​Perry Miller, “Errand into the Wilderness,” Stephen Foster about adaptability.

Robert Blair St. George, “Introduction” in St George ed., ​Possibile Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America​ (2000) Argument: “Becoming “colonial” was an intricate process. It involved both vernacular theories of and lived experience of race and racial mixture, commercial exchange, kinship alliance, aesthetics, creolization, language, civility, savagery, and ambiguity concerning one’s social position and personal power.” (5) ● “Becoming colonial” suggests an emphasis on the negotiative processes that characterize symbolic exchange in colonial cultures.” (4) ● Concept of Habitus: “Thus while habitus is a organized means of calculating interest and reproducing normative assumptions about everyday life, it does not ensure any equal social distribution of this “generative principal.” Habitus is thus a “regulated improvisation” for potentials of domination, for the shaping of a commonsense, everyday life—its languages, material artifacts, beliefs, bodily regimes, ritual acts, assumptions about social class, gender, or race—through which politics almost invisibly moves.” (8) ● “Imperial states and authors strategically used the politics and poetics of colonial discourse to produce ways of seeing, talking, writing, painting, and thinking so as to promote acquiescence to political subordination and enforced discipline. There are limits to this discourse. An obvious one is that its perspective is Eurocentric, concerned more with the metropolitan making of power than with its transformation or outright rejection in colonized places by people with their own vision of appropriate social order.” (11) ● “A final difficulty with “early America” is disciplinary. How should the “early” in early America relate to the “early” in early modern Europe?” Both fields share a time period, 1600-1800 and both have common concepts of selfhood, traditions of spatial representation and illusion, bureaucratic national governments, self-regulating market economies, and the salve trade.

Some authors say there is continuity—like St. George. ● “The lines of continuity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries between early modern Europe and early America were not always drawn from the Old World to the New. Specimens of natural history such as animals, plants, and minerals, the material culture and symbolic practices of “exotic” peoples, and occasionally the people themselves could and did move from the colonial margins to metropolitan centers in Spain, Italy, France, and England.” (16-17) ● “Hybridity is a useful approach to thinking about the expressive, constituent elements of colonial encounters.” (24) ● “Transculturation is the active process of moving across or through cultural boundaries to affect autoethnographic understandings and hybrid formations. In anthropology the term is frequently used to describe the communicative processes by means of which members of subaltern or marginalized social groups select from the cultural repertoires of dominant groups and invent something new of their own making.” (25) ● “Becoming colonial in early American did not happen strictly at the level of discourse alone. It happened in the many places where the realms of discourse and daily practice converged to define regimes of authority and techniques of parodic subversion and resistance.”(28) Views:​ Interesting theories, would have made more sense if some of the essays had been assigned Ian K. Steele, “Exploding Colonial American History: Amerindian, Atlantic, and Global Perspectives,” in ​Reviews of American History​ 26 (1998):70-95 Argument: ​“New work on Amerindian history illustrates how attention to marginalized groups has affected perceptions. A great deal of other new scholarship reasserts an Atlantic context for colonial America. Work on the British Atlantic empire, on early modern capitalism and consumerism, and on the history of migration and religion all contribute to a growing Atlantic perspective. Competing Amerindian and Atlantic aspects juxtapose uniqueness and replication, environment and heredity, as well as frontier and imperial history.” (71) ● “Women, people of “the common sort,” and people of diverse origins and ethnicities are being studied in detail, with emphasis on the mutualities of power relationships.” (71) ● “Acceptance of the extremely useful anthropological definition of culture has enhanced our understanding of the symbolic function of goods, and has also encouraged considerable study of colonial religion as the sociology of church.” (71)

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“Scholars of colonial communities…are now seeing intercolonial and transatlantic comparisons and connections in demography, family relations, economics, material culture, politics, and religion. Despite its limitations, the community study remains a fruitful and manageable way to practice “total” history.” (71) ● “Even the best separate “liberation histories” inevitably preserve and enhance the significance of racial, gender and ethnic differences.” (72) ● “Afro-American culture has become a major, and much contested, theme. For some scholars, slaves were the first modern Americans. Forced from their family, community, language, and religion, stripped of much of their culture, they struggled to create new social contexts and a new creole language with which to survive and combat colonial slavery in the Americas.”

(72) ● “The picture of colonial women living in a golden age as compared to nineteenth-century women has been challenged by new evidence, by multiracial comparisons, and by theoretical attacks on “essentialism.” The study of Amerindian and black women has raised an additional question: whether women were the leading agents in cultural mixing or champions of cultural traditionalism, or both.” (73) ● “Women’s history bifurcates the study of colonial communities and is inventing men’s history.” (73) ● “The history of male communities of seamen, fishermen, loggers, and soldiers could pay more attention to their notions of manliness, to the gendered place of guns and alcohol in cross-cultural relations, and to the impact of white sex ratios on racial attitudes.” (73) ● “Gender studies, like black studies, have accelerated the disintegration of colonial history while providing valued new comparisons that are interracial, intercolonial, transatlantic, and global.” (73) ● “Modern multiculturalism has encouraged the recovery of the history of non-British colonial America.” (73) ● “Canadian history, and the history of French Illinois and Louisiana, interact with those of colonial British America and Amerindian America.

Spanish aspects of colonial North American history have, unconscionably, long been under-represented; the flood of anniversary interest in “Columbian encounters” has helped, and there are many new studies in English that provide access to the history of Spanish Florida, the Spanish Southwest, and colonial Mexico, studies that are often sensitive to current questions of race and gender. Dutch New York has received increased attention, much of it exploiting the three-quarters of the surviving documents that have not yet been translated. The history of German migration and German communities in colonial America is also becoming more accessible in English, as are the histories of numerous other ethnic and religious communities.” (73-74) ● “As the study of European migration to American is strengthened by a fuller understanding of life before migration, colonial history becomes more demanding, more diffuse, and more Atlantic.” (74) ● “Currently, one of the most explosive and transformative new subfields of early American history is Amerindian history.” (74) ● “Refugees, survivors, captives, and renegades not only reinforced and preserved existing tribes, they often coalesced into new power groups with surprising speed and puzzling complexity and produced new communities such as the Catawba, Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Seminole” (76) ● Use of captivity narratives, study of trade and its impact on the environment are up. ● “Simplistic notions of European exploitation are evaporating as we come to understand the power of Amerindian consumers, the creative uses made of trade goods, and the significance assigned to them. There remains one major logical anomaly that looks suspiciously political and that concerns colonial acquisition of Amerindian land; most studies still emphasize European chicanery and bullying of Amerindians who are seen as unable to understand or resist effectively.” (76) ● “Whites who decided that dilution of African ancestry was legally impossible, nonetheless claimed, and can still claim, that Amerindians with any African or European ancestry ceased to be Amerindians.” (77) Mashpee link. ● “The “imperial school” of early American history has long since examined the structural framework of the British Atlantic, with emphasis upon the constitutional, legal, and administrative machinery of the political economy. The economic history of mercantilism and the staple trades has been revised by the discovery of the early modern consumer. The study of governance, economy, and society are rightly fused in much recent work, but the Atlantic aspects of each topic deserve to be noted separately.” (78) ● “Colonial America was also much more cosmopolitan, multiethnic, and multilingual than traditionally assumed, and this earlier multicultural American survived and prospered. The needed social history of all homelands takes the boundaries of early America beyond a well-studied, imitative, and dependent “colonial” history of British colonists. Migration history is bound to succeed.” (81) ● “An early modern “Atlantic History” is emerging as an alternative integration model which incorporates and extends colonial America beyond the British Atlantic, and promises to compare the separate, connected, and blended histories of Europeans, Africans, and Amerindians.” (83) Connections: ​American Colonies, Spanish Frontier in North America, Beyond the Melting Pot, Becoming America, Marketplace of Revolution, ​Axtell, Salisbury, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in A Frontier Exchange Economy, Possessing Albany, Divided Ground, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, ​almost anything published recently that we have read. Butler’s ​Becoming America is a giant synthesis of scholarly work concerning Early America pre 1997. It confronts and includes many of the topics discussed by Steele.

26

Jon Butler, ​Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776​ (2000) Argument: ​That America is the first modern society. Butler uses five distinct characteristics to prove his point: 1. Ethnically and nationally diverse, 2. Developed transatlantic economies that supported vigorous domestic trade, 3. Politically advanced with large-scale participation, 4. Held modern penchant for power, 5. Religious pluralism (2) “The argument here is simple—that an American society emerged before an “American character” could be found in any of its residents.” (7) ● “Finally the book implicitly contests the recent stress on a “market revolution” in antebellum America. In this view, the colonial era’s localized, subsistence, and community-focused lifestyle gave way to a postrevolutionary “market” economy whose profit orientation and enthusiastic entrepreneurialism reshaped American culture, politcs, and religion as thoroughly as it transformed the economy from agriculture to manufacturing….​Becoming America ​locates the origins and early progress of many crucial changes not in the early nineteenth century but in the subtle and dramatic alterations that created a new society in British America before 1776.” (5-6) ● “In all, then, this book centers on the transformations of colonial America between 1680 and 1770—its extraordinary heterogeneity of peoples; its rapid economic transformation; its energetic provincial and local politics; its evolving secular and material culture; its rapidly expanding pluralistic religions; its regionalism and sometimes unwilling creation of vigorous subsocieties within the larger culture; and a widespread drive for authority to shape individual and collective destinies.” (6) ● After 1680 the English are no longer the biggest group of migrants. (19) ● Material gain stressed to religious refugees to get them to settle in the colonies. (21) ● Colonists focused on Africans for slaves for two reasons: 1. Convenience 2. No moral questions asked because of color. (39) ● Development of African culture produced colonial fears of rebellion. (46) ● Indians had complex economic relationships with Europeans and settlers. (67) ● Politics in the colonies were provincial not local. (90) “provincial politics that involved the governors, councils, and especially elected assemblies.” (96) Urban politics added a class dimension to local politics. (95) ● Exceptionalism in American began with food. (134) ● Women, Africans, Native Americas, and common laborers together with artisans—both rural and urban—are credited with playing as large a role in the emerging colonial “Economy” as merchants and aristocrats.” (152, Buel) ● For Indians and colonists, housing said as much about culture and power as it did about wealth and refinement. (150) Good Summary of Book: ​“In 1770 America had become a society strikingly different from what it had been only decades earlier.

Emigration, forced and voluntary, as well as conquest reshaped the colonial population, creating a diverse and uneasy mix of peoples unknown anywhere else. Economic development had produced an extraordinarily vital domestic as well as export economy without forceful central planning and, certainly, without always understanding important subtle and direct consequences of this achievement.

Politics emerged as assertive, provincially driven, institutionally sophisticated, and cohesive, not only within most colonies but from region to region. A vibrant secular life capped by explosive, broadly available arrays of material goods turned European colonists into powerful consumers. A vigorous and unprecedented religious pluralism proved simultaneously astonishing and distressing for Europeans, added new and not always welcome choices to American Indian religious life, and turned Africans toward an engagement of Christianity that would ultimately transform African-American culture, though not before 1770.” (226) ● “After the revolutionary victory of 1783, Americans transformed this very society in which the Revolution had been born, not by destroying the past but by transfiguring it one again in a politics, economics, religion, social milieu, and material culture whose deep roots in the eighteenth century seldom precluded newer changes and more powerful expressions. In this regard, the American Revolution proved even more revolutionary than its successors in France, Russia, or China, where revolution upended so much that had gone before. The American conflict demonstrated that the past could indeed be useful, particularly when it had itself been innovative.” (244-245) ● Book’s population diversity figures are controversial because its hard to figure out for sure how diverse America was. ● Butler thinks American is exceptional because of its diversity. ● “Butler concludes by acknowledging that the Revolution did not repudiate what colonial society had achieved by 1760 and that it did provide a basis in documents like the Declaration of Independence upon which subsequent generations of Americans could build. But that still qualifies the Revolution’s significance as a founding event.” (153, Buel) Connections: ​Greene’s ​Pursuits of Happiness​ (see note card on comparisons).

Sources: ​Synthesis of all relevant literature up until 1997, some primary sources, mostly secondary sources.

Problems: Butler advances an argument that America is the first modern society but he fails to prove it—all his points are general they are not specific. Butler’s work omits ideas and instead relies on generalizations—even in religion he fails to use the Mathers or Jonathan Edwards.

Impact: ​“The book also raises an interesting problem about the American Revolution, which Butler addresses in his conclusion. Since the degree of “modernity” attributed to American society in 1760 diminishes the significance of the nation’s founding, Butler chooses to focus on affirming the Revolution’s achievement in enshrining many of the values of our political culture, such as the sanctity of individual rights, freedom of religion, the constitutional division of powers, and the rule of law. (152-153, Buel)

27 Compare and Contrast of Jon Butler’s ​Becoming America and Jack P. Greene’s ​Pursuits of Happiness as taken from Steven C. Bullock’s review of Butler. ● “The two books differ…most notably in their definition of the subject and their intended audiences. Butler focuses his attention on the area that has traditionally been conceived of as colonial America, the territories that broke away from Great Britain in 1776 or that soon afterwards became part of the resulting union. Greene ranges further. His discussions include the Caribbean and (to a lesser extent) the British Isles. Butler’s tighter geographic focus, however, allows him greater topical range. Ethnicity, religion, gender, and material culture, all subjects that Greene mentions largely in passing, receive extended attention. Butler also spends substantial time discussing Native Americans, a topic Greene omits completely.” (494) ● “Greene describes his work as ​The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture​. Butler opts for a shorter ​The Revolution Before 1776 ​[for his title and focus].” (494) ● “Greene explicitly builds a social science model, explicating social processes in ways that can be generalized to other areas.

His key terms include “Simplification,” “Disorientation,” “Elaboration,” “Acculturation,” “Replication,” “Creolization,” and “Metroplitanization.” By contrast, Butler’s large claims (America had the most diverse population and the quickest growing economy ever; the colonies developed the first modern society) serve less as a basis for close comparative examination than as a means of emphasizing changes within the colonies.” (495) ● “Greene directs his work at other scholars….By contrast, Butler’s work seeks a broader readership, an ambition visible in ways beyond the sparkling prose and the beautifully clear exposition.” (495) ● “The relatively loose articulation of Butler’s book can also be seen as part of an attempt to attract a broader readership.

Greene’s tightly argued explanations typically trace a transformation through a number of complex steps.” (495) ● “Both Butler’s and Greene’s work represent reactions against the dominance of New England Puritanism in earlier interpretations of the period. Puritanism once seemed to be the master key not only to early New England history, but to all colonial history and, many argued, American history as a whole.” (496) ● “Greene and Butler emphasize the same thing, the colonies’ growing complexity.” (496) ● “The two histories, however, fail to agree on the comparative meaning of this development. For Greene, the colonies were merely catching up with an England that was already remarkably modern in in the seventeenth century. Butler considers the colonies unique, “the first modern society.” (496) Alan Taylor, ​American Colonies: The Settling of North America​ (2001) Argument: ​That the American Colonies go beyond the realm of English settlers along the East Coast of the present-day United States.

That American Colonies needs to include all colonies that would be included in the present-day United States or affected the development of the United States—such as the Caribbean. To study the colonies we must be willing to look at the interactions between the pluralistic cultures that settled the American colonies and the new cultures that these interactions developed. We must also look at the impact that the environment of the colonies and the trade in biological life forms had on shaping the colonies. To accomplish all this Alan uses an Atlantic approach, Environmental History, and Ethnohistory. ● “Colonial societies ​did diverge from their mother countries…the biggest difference was the unprecedented mixing of radically diverse peoples—African, European, and Indian—under circumstances stressful for all. The colonial intermingling of peoples—and of microbes, plants, and animals form different continents—was unparalleled in speed and volume in global history. Everyone had to adapt to a dramatic new world wrought by those combinations. In their adaptations to, and borrowings from, one another, they created truly exceptional societies (which is not to say that they were either better or worse than European societies, just new and different.)” (xi) ● People always forget that the colonists were a very diverse group of people, as were the Indians and Africans. (xii) ● All cultures and peoples of the colonies changed and incorporated each other. (xii) ● “the British colonies relied in war primarily on local militias of common people, rather than on professional troops. That increased the political leverage of common men as it involved them in frequent conflicts with Indians and in patrolling the slave population.” (xiii) Methodology: ​“​American Colonies draws upon three especially productive lines of recent scholarship: an Atlantic perspective, environmental history, and the ethnohistory of colonial and native peoples. The ​Atlantic approach examines the complex and continuous interplay of Europe, Africa, and colonial America through the transatlantic flow of goods, people, plants, animals, capital, and ideas. ​Environmental history considers the transformative impact of those flows on the landscape and life of North America. And ethnohistory​ focuses on the cultural encounters between Africans, Europeans, and natives in colonial North America.” (xiv) Organization​: “I favored a regional rather than a topical organization lest I confuse myself and my readers by leaping back and forth over broad regions and distinct centuries, comparing British apples to Spanish oranges without first creating a context for understanding both.” (xiv) ● “Little in the first section of the book (“Encounters”) even deals with English colonization. Instead, Taylor devotes considerable space to the colonial experiences of the Spanish and French and looks closely at what happened in Iroquoia. The middle section of the book (“Colonies”) focuses on the lands the English settled. Here the reader learns about the colonies such as Jamaica—“the wealthiest and most important colony in the English empire” by 1713—that were crucial but are

28 typically ignored by colonial historians….The book’s final section (“Empires”) will take most early American historians into unknown territory—across the continent to the Pacific with excursions into Alaska and Hawaii.” (485, Mancall) ● Wants to avoid teleology. ● When does Alan believe the American Colonies ceased to be colonies? “In 1776, the colonial encounter with native peoples was just beginning on the Pacific rim. Consequently, my ending has a sliding scale: about 1775 in the east, where and when the imperial crisis broke into revolution, and approximately 1820 in the west, when colonialism had taken root in California, Alaska, and even Hawaii. By 1820 the United States had emerged from an anticolonial revolution to exercise its own imperial power on the Pacific coast.” (xvi) ● There was a revolution in the Atlantic world in the early modern era and that revolution can only be discerned in the forces that changed the lives of all the peoples who inhabited the Atlantic basin and forever altered the societies they created. (484, Mancall) Sources: ​Mostly a broad range of secondary sources as this work is a synthesis.

Connections: Butler’s ​Becoming America both are syntheses that look at the population and its diversity—Taylor has a larger geographic area and brings in the Indians more. Both authors omit ideas. Taylor draws on the work of Crosby, Axtell, Merrell, and many of the works on the comps list. He just puts them all together.

Jack P. Greene, ​Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture ​(1988) Argument: ​The New England declension model and the idea that the New England colonies represented the most exact replicas of England is incorrect. Instead we must look at the Chesapeake colonies as being the most reflective of English society and of what the United States would eventually become. ● Nash has four goals for his book: 1. Prove that New England was not a model for all colonies. 2. Formulate a model of social development that is more applicable to the British Colonies and future United States than the declension model. 3. Show a process by which a general American culture emerged. 4. Provide a synthesis of the existing literature on the social development of Britain’s colonies. ● “I regard this book as an attack on the reductionist and often either unconscious or unstated, assumptions that have supported precisely those kinds of arguments in reference to the alleged centrality of New England or the Middle Colonies in colonial American history.” (xii) ● “I have proposed what I call a developmental model, which looks at historical change in new societies as a movement from the simple to the complex….this model seeks to provide an abstract rendering of a process that, at least in colonial ​British America, was first manifest in the oldest settled region, the Chesapeake, but was also evident in every other region, including even, in several important respects, New England.” (xiii) ● “The focus of the book is upon social development, and it considers religious, political, and even economic developments only insofar as they have social dimensions. Second, my concern throughout has been with the settler societies created by European and African immigrants and their descendants….I have made no effort to treat the aboriginal cultures with which those societies interacted.” (xiii) ● “During the first 150 years of their existence, the southern colonies were not distinctive. Not only did they stand at the center rather than on the peripheries of colonial British American cultural ad social development, but they were also, for their free populations, the very embodiment of what was arguably the single most important element in the emerging American mind—the ideal of the pursuit of happiness b independent people in a setting that provided significant opportunities for success.” (207) ● 3 stags of sociocultural development in Early Modern New Societies: 1. Social simplification (Disorientation upon arrival that made settlers preoccupied with finding ways to manipulate their new environment into providing for their sustenance and for their advantage.) 2. Social elaboration (Now that society is simplified you now seek to complicate it slightly by articulating socioeconomic, political, cultural institutions, structures, and values that were once highly creolized variants of those found in the mother land. The creolized versions help settlers assimilate them quickly and with relative difficulty.) 3. Social Replication (Finish step 2 by anglicizing and replicating actual British mores and norms.) (167-168) ● By creolization Greene means: “defined as the adjustment of inherited forms and practices to make them congruent with local conditions.”(169) ● “Green concludes with a provocative analysis of how different kinds of colonies converged developmentally between 1720 and 1780. The colonies south of New England, he argues, edged from individualism towards communalism, and the New England colonies moved along a reverse path [from communalism towards individualism.]” (528, Nash) ● “Greene believes that generations of scholars have understood New England in terms of a “declension model”—that is, decline from the lofty goals and high standards of the founders—and that there has been an ill-informed tendency to apply this declension model to all of early American history.” (639, Kammen) ● “In every colony, Greene contends, the first generation of settler drastically simplified their English institutional heritage, but what they retained and what they abandoned varied enormously from one province to another [because of goals and environment]” (177, Murrin)

29 Contribution: ​“Its further contribution is its systematic attempt to construct a developmental model for understanding the social morphology of various fragments of the English-European-African society that was planted on the western side of the Atlantic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” (527, Nash) It also provides the first synthesis of Colonial America literature on the British American colonies in 30 years—Boorstin’s 1958 work. ● “Greene has destroyed American exceptionalism, or most of it for the colonial period, but retained and even heightened New England exceptionalism while simultaneously narrowing its significance.” (180, Murrin) Sources: ​Mostly secondary it is a synthesis.

Problems: Neglects Native Americans whether he recognizes that omission or not. I hate the comparison of the Chesapeake to New England—too different. I also dislike the declension model, which he refutes. New England also affected American culture more than Greene will admit—the migrations. ● “Greene argues convincingly that New Englanders became more individualistic and southerners more cohesive—thus meeting at the middle, “as they increasingly assimilated to a common American social and behavioral pattern” (176). But the argument can be sustained only when slavery is defined as irrelevant to that social and behavioral pattern or is regarded as a constant in all colonies.” (528, Nash) ● “Greene’s gambit is to argue that slavery is a constant….This argument is untenable. It is true that slaves were increasing in number in northern colonies, but slavery, as the basis of the economy, was decreasing; and it is simply wrong, as Greene’s own statistic show (Table 8.1)….In fact, the northern colonies were moving rapidly toward a free-labor economy in the secod half of the period of purported convergence (1720-1780), and the southern colonies were moving just as rapidly toward mature slave-labor economies.” (528-529, Nash) ● “Only the motives of free people count in Greene’s equation. Although he takes slavery quite seriously as an institution, the aspirations of slaves never enter his account, to say nothing of their happiness.” (178, Murrin) Connections: ​Jon Butler, ​Becoming America and Alan Taylor, ​American Colonies both works no doubt were partially shaped by this earlier synthesis. Darren Staloff, ​Making of the American Thinking Class​—obviously Staloff took no heed of Greene’s work as he espouses the declension model in his work.

Edmund S. Morgan, ​American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia​ (1975) Argument: ​“The men who came together to found the independent United States, dedicated to freedom and equality, either held slaves or were willing to join hands with those who did. None of them felt entirely comfortable about the fact, but neither did they feel responsible for it. Most of them had inherited both their slaves and their attachment to freedom from an earlier generation, and they knew that the two were not connected. The rise of liberty and equality in America had been accompanied by the rise of slavery.” (4) ● “It is Morgan’s contention that Virginia’s leaders in the 1770s were ardent Republicans because they were slaveholders. This book endeavors to explain why they adopted slavery, why they became libertarians, and how slavery and freedom buttressed each other.” (669, Dunn) Good Summary: ​“The central theme [of the book] is the acquisition, exploitation, and discipline of labor. Virginians initially solved their labor problems with indentured servitude, a system that worked well as long as high morality and an expanding economy provided servants who survived their terms opportunity to become planters in their own right. However, after mid-century chronic depression in the tobacco trade and improved life expectancy created a large class of dissatisfied former servants, wild young men who, by themselves or more dangerously under the lead of disaffected large planters, kept Virginia in a state of constant turmoil. Slavery brought social peace to Virginia. It gave Virginia a black labor force that could be, as white workers could not, severely exploited without provoking rebellion. It eliminated the need for further imports of servants and thus removed the social threat posed by freedmen in a community that could no longer accommodate their ambitions. And, through racism, it bound whites of all classes together in a common cause. Slavery, in short, because it provided Virginians with laborers who did not threaten the established order, permitted Virginians to indulge an inclination toward a politics populist in style and republican in content.” (371-372, Menard) ● Colonial Virginia’s Ordeal: “Colonial Virginia’s was to suffer through a full century of economic, social, and political chaos, and to escape from this chaos only by erecting a free white society on the basis of black slavery.” (669, Dunn) Organization: ​“The first three-quarters of ​American Slavery—American Freedom is…of events in pre-slavery Virginia, from the 1580s to the 1680s. It is a story of continuous misfortune and mismanagement…Morgan presents the social development of early Virginia as a steady, sordid retreat from initial plans and hopes. As he sees it, the Englishmen who planned settlement at Roanoke dreamed of liberating the Indians and blacks in the New World from the cruel Spaniards, and even after the debacle of the Lost Colony the Virginia Company wished to sponsor at Jamestown “an integrated biracial community, in which indigent Englishmen would work side by side with willing natives, under gentle English government” (44). Such dreams of liberation quickly evaporated. Morgan discusses the first settlers’ alienation of the Indians and their refusal to do enough farm work to prevent starvation. In the 1620s he abruptly switches themes to stress the brutality of the chief tobacco entrepreneurs, who exploited their indentured servants more harshly than was customary in England. In the 1630s and 1640s he explores ingeniously the disastrous effects of high mortality. In the 1650s and 1660s the home government becomes the prime villain, with its crew of rapacious officials and its extortionate tobacco customs duties. In the 1670s Morgan reverts to planter-worker tensions, and focuses on the ex-servant freemen—“terrible young men,”—he calls them—who roamed about Virginia without property or political voice. The result was Bacon’s Rebellion, which he presents as a race war against the Indians that turned into a series of plundering forays by the discontented freemen against Governor Berkeley and

30 his fellow grandees. It was essentially a negative event, a rebellion without a cause and without a reform program. (269)…In the final section of his book Morgan discusses the massive importation of slave laborers at the turn of the century, the development of anti-black racial prejudice, the improvement of relations between the rich and poor white planters, and the growth of the ideas of political equality, liberty, and democracy among whites.” (669-670, Dunn) ● “In Morgan’s view Bacon’s Rebellion did point the way to a new future: a social formula by which the planter class could avoid further conflict with the discontented freemen. If Bacon could build his popularity among the poor whites by inciting them against the Indians, the leading planters could draw their labor force from black slaves instead of white servants and make common political cause with the poor whites on the basis of racism, populism, and republicanism.” (670, Dunn) Contributions: ​In 1975 this book was a breakthrough in Indian historiography—​American Invasion​ was the beginning of that trend.

Huge amounts of statistics on colonial Virginia, from demographics, to money, to tobacco. A comprehensive social history of Virginia.

Problem: ​Is the book too focused? It only discusses Virginia and does not apply that to the rest of the country, although it insinuates it by calling Virginia’s paradox of slavery and freedom an “American paradox.”

Connections: ​Greene’s ​Pursuit of Happiness, ​Brown’s ​Good Wives, Nasty Wenches & Anxious Patriarchs, Allan Kullikoff, ​Tobacco and Slaves Kathleen M. Brown, ​Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia​ (1996) Argument: ​“My ultimate concern in this work is to plot the role of gender in the regulation of laborers, the politics of community life, the legitimation of political authority, the creation of meanings for racial difference, and the changing formation of English identity.”

(7) “Brown’s argument is twofold. First, she suggests that gender served as the template for structuring, naturalizing racial slavery in the seventeenth-century. Second, she argues that racial slavery, once in place, reconfigured the very gender relations that shaped it….the patriarchal household maintains its place as the cornerstone of social order. Indians, slavery, tobacco, rebellion, and unruly women alter its foundations, but the household’s position in legitimizing political, economic, and social power remains intact.” (228, Bercaw) ● Gender:​ The historically specific discourses, social roles and identities defining sexual differences and frequently deployed for the purposes of social an political order (4) ● Race:​ Similarly constructed by social meanings attributed to physical appearance devised in the service of economic and imperial goals (4) ● Patriarchy:​ In the domestic form, it is the historically specific authority of the father over the household. The patriarch’s power as husband, father, master and head of the household in colonial VA derived much of its strength from his attempts to inscribe sexual, economic, medical and punitive meaning on the bodies of the women, children and bound men in his household (4-5). VA’s wealthiest patriarchs, however, were aware that they too were bound to submit to higher authorities: imperial administrators, the Crown, and God (5). ● “The challenges presented by indigenous peoples, the tobacco economy, and African slavery ultimately transformed the meanings of English womanhood and manhood, which were themselves already contested categories” (8) Native American gender roles in particular seen as unnatural, as were African women put to work in the fields. (White women in fields nasty wenches too.) ● “By the 18​th​ century, many Anglo-Virginian women, especially those of the planter class, aspired to the prerogative of plantation mistresses than the responsibilities of “goodwives” (marked contrast to the NE and Middle Colony systems) (9). ● Women take a much more subordinate role because the book is about male construction. This is a gender history.

Organization: ​About Good Wives: “In Part One, “Gender Frontiers,” Brown artfully explores how the dominant discourses naturalizing power in England were challenged and upset by contact with new cultures and environments. Power in this section of the book is extraordinarily fluid as Brown examines the relationship between discourses and changing social practices…According to Brown the household, and more specifically the “good wife,” legitimated English concepts of conquest and social order. Good government, according to the English began at home and clearly distinguished the civilized from the uncivilized. A man’s authority, they argued, rested on his ability to maintain an orderly house and a “good wife” devoted to domestic production within the home.”

(230, Bercaw) ● “Closely following the thesis developed in Ramon Gutierrez’s ​When Jesus Came the Corn Mothers Went Away​, Brown argues that contact fundamentally altered gender relations in both Anglo and Indian cultures....Suddenly, gender was exposed as neither natural nor divinely ordained.” (231, Bercaw) ● “Without the formal institutions of the church, courts, or stable families, it was left up to the community to articulate the meaning of gender roles and identity.” (231, Bercaw) ● About how to fix Nasty Wenches: “In Part Two, “Engendering Racial Difference,” Brown gradually silences the cacophony of voices present in the first section until only two principal strains remain—black and white. Focusing on the law, Brown examines the construction of racial slavery in colonial Virginia. The question that plagues historians is how can one explain the adoption of a foreign cultural practice (slavery) based on radical new beliefs (racial difference) in a period of three generations?...Brown forcefully enters this debate arguing that the gender relations of the household provided the structural and ideological base for defining Africans as different and stripping away their freedom.” (231, Bercaw)

31 ●

“The term “nasty wench” initially referred to any woman (regardless of race) who breached the boundaries of the household.

A “nasty wench” had no household of her own; instead she upset the gendered conventions of the “good wife” by working in the fields….According to Brown, the relations between the good wife and nasty wench provided a language and practice of difference which legitimized the social distance between the free and unfree and white and black.” (231-232, Bercaw) ● “Brown argues that the construction of blackness went hand in hand with a tight regulation of womanhood.” (232, Bercaw) Bacon’s Rebellion: ​“she argues, represented a crisis in masculinity. During colonization, Anglo-Virginian men had unwittingly repositioned masculine authority. Power still rested on household, but new technologies of race and violence fundamentally reconfigured patriarchal authority. Realizing they were no longer English, colonials feared that they had lost their manhood. The Rebellion, according to Brown, resulted in a more conscious articulation of an Anglo-Virginian identity. Patriarchal power was reasserted but on a new foundation which intertwined race and manhood.” (232-233, Bercaw) ● About Anxious Patriarchs and the Plantation Mistresses: “In part three, “Class and Power in the Eighteenth Century,” Brown examines the reconstruction of patriarchal power for legitimacy. “Focusing on just a handful of elite Virginia families (principally the Byrds and Carters), Brown uses performance theory to carefully document how elite men and women set themselves apart through public and private rituals of gentility….The performance of gender, according to Brown, was critical to class formation. In public spaces, white men rubbed elbows in an easy familiarity unheard of in England and sowed the bonds of a common identity based on whiteness and manhood. Yet such comradery was only possible because of women’s role in maintaining social distinctions. A man might gamble with his neighbor without any threat of equality as long as his wife’s manner, dress, lineage, and grace clearly set him apart from the lower orders. Brown emphasizes repeatedly that elite women worked tirelessly to maintain class distinctions, seldom questioning their support for the newest construction of patriarchy….Having silenced the “good wives” and “nasty wenches” in their consolidation of power, the “anxious patriarchs” are left listening only to themselves. The only challenge to their authority comes from within.” (233, Bercaw) Gender and race roles intertwined to support roles of the wealthy, white planters.

Problems: ​Poor men are left out of this book.

Sources:​ court records, plantation records, diaries, material culture, landscape, and government records, secondary sources.

Connections: ​Edmund Morgan’s ​American Slavery, American Freedom especially in terms of Bacon’s Rebellion and the development of slave society. Jack Greene’s ​Pursuits of Happiness ​to help refute why the Chesapeake did not serve as a model for the entire country. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s ​Good Wives ​and Karen Wulf’s ​Not All Wives​ in terms of women’s versus gender history.

Contributions: ​“Brown supplies the missing ingredient by highlighting the hypermasculine quality of gentry culture and its roots in gender appropriation (of African men) and sexual exploitation (of African women)….Perhaps the most important contribution of this very important book is her insight that the “key relationship” in the history of slavery was that between slave women and white men. In a convincing narrative of the evolution of legal codes from the 1640s through the 1670s, Brown shows in relentless detail that African women were at the center of judicial attempts to fix social status in racial difference.” (380-381, Juster) James Horn, ​Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake​ (1994) Argument: ​“European settlers did not suddenly become ​Americans​, ineluctably brought together as a new people by shared experiences and conditions in the New World. Neither did they abruptly shed their heritage in the face of change. Attitudes, values, and norms, shaped by Old World backgrounds, were just as important in forging their adaptation to colonial society as the environment they encountered. Their intention to create a society resembling the one they left behind might not have been realized, but it cannot be doubted that settlers were highly successful in transferring significant elements of Old World culture to America.” (10) ● “This work aims to describe the evolution of English society in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake through a comparison of local societies in England, Virginia, and Maryland. The approach and argument depend upon a key aspect of Chesapeake society. Virginia and Maryland were ​immigrant societies: down to the final decades of the century the majority of settlers were born and raised in England, a factor that had far-reaching consequences for social development in the two colonies.” (11) ● “[English] Expansion was maintained by two major developments. First was a sharp rise in reexports….Second, was a dramatic rise in domestic demand for consumer goods such as tobacco, sugar, calicoes, wine, and dried fruits.” (5-6) ● “English awareness of newly established societies across the Atlantic was aroused primarily through the import and distribution of colonial products. From its inception England’s empire was an “empire of goods.”” (7) ● “Colonial trade had a significant impact on English society, not only in stimulating domestic industry, transforming traditional patterns of imports and exports, and encouraging new consumer tastes but also in the development of a consciousness of a wider world on the other side of the ocean.” (7) ● “The foundation of colonies in America heralded the beginnings of the most important expansionist phase in English history.”

(7) Old Rhetoric and Arguments​: “colonial society diverged significantly from its parent cultures.” “Although immigrants sought to recreate their societies, the argument goes, their experience in the New World rapidly led them away from traditional attitudes and patterns of behavior inherited from the Old World. An abundance of cheap land and the perceived opportunities for relatively poor men to make a good living accentuated the aggressively materialistic traits already discernible in the mother country.” (9)

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“Understandably, the New England town has been an essential focus of study, and the fact that people frequently emigrated in groups from their native communities in England has greatly eased the problem of making comparisons between specific locales in the two societies.” (12) ● “As will be argued throughout this study, understanding the English context and the cultural assumptions that guided settlers’ adaptation to life in Virginia and Maryland is crucial to an analysis of the factors that shaped immigrant experience. Such a perspective provides a means to assess cultural continuity and change in early America and locates the social development of Virginia and Maryland in the broader setting of the seventeenth-century Anglophone world.” (14) ● “Throughout Part III, the argument is that, while material conditions changed dramatically, inherited attitudes and values did not.” (15) ● “The early history of the Chesapeake is about this disjunction. Traditional attitudes, inherited from their English backgrounds, influenced powerfully the way settlers through about themselves, social relations, and the institutions of state and church they sought to establish. In Virginia and Maryland, however, inherited values and norms were not easily translated into accepted patterns of social and political behavior as practiced in England.” (15-16) ● “Horn focuses primarily on two localities in different regions of England, southern Gloucestershire and central Kent, and two Virginia counties, Lower Norfolk…and Lancaster…a third area, St. Mary’s County, Maryland is incorporated to widen the New World context.” (513, Quitt) ● “[Horn] gives equal due to the lives of servants and free immigrants and to women and men. He acknowledges the presences of Africans and Native Americans, suggests that both groups affected the adaptation of English settlers, and raises a series of questions about their respective encounters but does not chart particular slave or native influences on colonial culture except for noting the uniqueness of interracial incidents of crime and disorder.” (514, Quitt) ● “At the local level Horn believes the evidence does not support the usual view of chronic instability, and at the provincial level he is impressed by the extent to which English laws were transferred, English precedents regarding who should rule followed, and English institutional forms adopted. Accordingly, he interprets Bacon’s Rebellion not as an expression of social fragmentation but as an effort to “restore the traditional rights of Englishmen.”” (516, Quitt) ● “Where, in the introduction, the author argues blatantly for the Englishness of the Chesapeake and chastises past scholarship (unjustifiably, to some extent) for stressing Americanization and exclusiveness, his concern in these chapters [Part III] is to delineate not only consistencies but deviations forced by the environment, demography, and evolving economy of the Chesapeake, deviations that lead him in the end to describe the region as “a new ​and distinctive English province​” (italics added). Horn, in effect (and despite the overstated introduction), ties Chesapeake society both back to its English roots and forward to what it will become.” (169, Rutman) ● “It was, Horn tells us, English ideas and English attitudes that dictated the process of adaptation by which the English colonists settled into their new world. The men and women who moved to the Chesapeake did not reject their former life but used its conventions to carve out a life for themselves in their new circumstances.” (614, McCusker) Organization: ​“The book is divided into three parts. Part one examines the social characteristics of Chesapeake immigrants generally and then looks at the social, economic, and geographic landscapes of the Vale of Berkeley, Gloucestershire, and central Kent. Part two begins with an overview of Chesapeake society in the seventeenth century and proceeds to the settlements of Lower Norfolk and Lancaster. Part three, containing 54% of the volume, compares England and the Chesapeake in chapters devoted to “family, kinship, and community,” “working lives,” “house and home,” “order and disorder,” and “religion and popular belief.” (513, Quitt) Contribution: ​“What sets Horn apart from other social historians is not his comparative perspective but his analysis of how English culture shaped colonial society. No one else has made the theme of diversity in a national culture as central as Horn, who attempts to identify and weigh both variant and common elements in English culture in order to track formative influences on American development.” (514, Quitt) Problems: ​Too harsh on old argument of American exceptionalism.

Sources: ​Ship records, town records, immigration records, Secondary sources Connections: ​Morgan’s ​American Slavery, American Freedom​, Brown’s ​Good Wives, Nasty Wenches & Anxious Patriarchs in reference to Bacon’s Rebellion and disorganization vs. stability in early Chesapeake society. Greene’s ​Pursuits of Happiness concerning the Chesapeake as a normative model for the colonies. Butler’s ​Becoming America to refute Butler’s portrayal of the colonies as exceptional.

Alan Kulikoff, ​Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake​ (1986) Argument: ​“During the early eighteenth century, after slaves replaced servants in the Chesapeake labor force and the white population began to grow by natural increase, tidewater gentlemen and their yeoman allies constructed a stable, conservative social order, characterized by interlocking class, racial, and gender relations.” (421) ● “Kulikoff argues that the planter class consolidated its power as opportunities for the majority of white men diminished.” (307, Klein) ● “The evolving relationship between planters and yeomen forms a central theme in this story. Kulikoff argues that the open class conflict of the early eighteenth century gave way to relative calm. He attributes the change not only to economic

33 prosperity and to shared involvement in slavery but to the reciprocal if often unequal relationships that bound yeomen to leading men.” (307, Klein) Summary: ​“In the decades after 1680, an intertwined series of demographic, economic, and social changes transformed this social world and promoted increasingly hierarchical relations between men and women, masters and slaves, and gentlemen and yeomen.

Rapidly falling tobacco prices discouraged white immigration and created conditions conducive to the beginnings of white natural population increase. Planters turned to African slaves to replace white servants, thereby elevating the status of poor whites. At the same time, political dynasties appeared, composed of the descendants of officeholding families. Three structural changes—the decline of opportunity [for whites], the beginnings of natural increase, and the rise of chattel slavery—deserve special emphasis.” (4-5) ● “Prosperity returned when tobacco prices rose after 1740, but the tobacco boom of the seventeenth century did not reappear.

As a result, opportunities for freed servants to buy land nearly disappeared, and immigrants soon avoided the Chesapeake.

Sons of poor men rarely procured land or unfree labor; sons of men of substance usually replicated the status of their fathers.”

(5) ● “The growth of the slave population revolutionized Chesapeake society. African immigrant slaves provided the material basis for the development of a gentry ruling class in the region: wealthy men invested heavily in slaves, and these me and women produced vast quantities of tobacco for their masters.” (6) ● “These two processes, making slaves efficient workers and devising a ruling class ideology, were inseparably intertwined and, together, constituted what is called ​class formation.”​ (6) ● “This work analyzes six of the principal consequences, three each for whites and blacks. Among whites, patriarchal families replaced relatively egalitarian families; kin groups replaced neighborhoods as the primary focus of social interaction; and two new classes formed, a gentry ruling class and a class of yeoman planters. At the same time, black communities, often encompassing more than one plantation, developed. Slaves created extended families and kinship networks, and they (and their owners) mastered a new racial etiquette.” (7) ● “During the early eighteenth century, for the first time, white men and women in the Chesapeake colonies could devise a patriarchal form of family government [because they were not working in the fields.] Three events made domestic patriarchy possible. First, the slave trade accelerated, thereby resolving the labor shortage and permitting wives of slaveholders to cease producing tobacco. Second, the decline of white immigration reduced the sex ratio and reduced the demand for teenage brides. Mothers could then keep daughters at home long enough to teach them housewifery. Third, increased adult life expectancy led to longer marriages because of less frequent parental death and so allowed clearer patterns of authority within the household.” (7) ● “Classes are formed when discrete groups of people with similar levels of wealth and similar relations to the dominant source of production come to understand their place in the social order and develop coherent ideologies to legitimate or challenge that place.” (9) ● “By supporting gentlemen, the yeomen secured protection of their property and assured themselves a role in politics.” (10) ● “By the middle of the eighteenth century, Chesapeake slaves had become both a racial caste and a laboring class. Black people were members of a caste because they could rarely escape chattel slavery, a status that defined them both as a means of production and as people. They were a laboring class because of their complex and changing relation to production processes their masters controlled.” (12) ● “And, despite severe constraints, even slaves made choices. They formed communities from among the extended kindred who lived on large plantations, and they adapted those African forms of child rearing that were compatible with chattel slavery.

And while masters determined who would work in each slave gang, slaves themselves set the pace of work.” (12-13) Problem: ​“Kulikoff wholeheartedly embraces the idea that Chesapeake economic growth is best described by the staples thesis, which locates the engine of economic growth in the import sector. Kulikoff gives so much causal power to demographic developments, however, that he ends up supporting the competing thesis that population growth governed economic growth. More specifically, Kulikoff maintains that lower mortality among whites led to longer marriages and more children, who in turn had to be given either land or slaves to grow tobacco or grain for export.” (147, Wetherell) Where Work Fits: ​One group of historians “have detailed patterns of economic development, population growth, and family organization. Most of their work stresses seventeenth-century developments and emphasizes the origins of the region’s population and economy as causes of the great transformation of the decades after 1680.” The Second group of historians stress “political and cultural developments, especially among gentlemen and their families. Most of their scholarship focuses on the eighteenth century and seeks to explain the origins or consequences of the American Revolution.” “​This work seeks to synthesize the findings of these two groups and add to their achievements. Both groups of historians tend to slight the significance of the half-century before the Revolution; in contrast, this book insists that the kind of familial, class, and race relations found in the antebellum South first developed in the Chesapeake region between 1720 and 1770.​” (14-15) Sources: ​Diaries, journals, plantation records, slave sales, population figures, facts and figures and a wealth of secondary sources.

Connections: ​Morgan’s ​American Slavery, American Freedom and Brown’s ​Good Wives, Nasty Wenches & Anxious Patriarchs​.

Unlike Morgan and Brown, Kulikoff does not see the turning point of class formation being Bacon’s Rebellion. Kulikoff sees it as the tobacco depression and the decline in the slave trade. Brown extends Kulikoff’s work on the formation of the patriarchal family government and takes it even further to show how maleness arose in the Chesapeake by subverting women and African slaves. She

34 also seeks to show how the planter class sought legitimacy. Kulikoff builds on Morgan by showing that not only did a slave class develop but that the slaves made restricted choices and developed slave communities and kin-based networks as well.

Brendan McConville, ​These Daring Disturbers of the Public Peace: The Struggle for Property and Power in Early New Jersey (1999) Argument: ​“This book is the story of the troubled existence of Jerseymen living in the first British empire. My goal is to show how deep changes in eighteenth-century society—in spiritual life, economic relations, government institutions, political discourse, and ethnic identity—encouraged the colony’s yeomen to respond to the disputes over property with crowd violence. The sustained popular unrest ultimately undermined the conventions that maintained the provincial social order and led to a final collapse of the gentry’s hold over the land tenure system by 1800.” (2) ● “The character of localism changed.” o “The unrest of the 1740s helped erode the tribal, inward-looking, ethnically based localism of the early eighteenth century as different communities and groups joined together to defend local rights from the great gentry. Gradually new, universalist idioms supplemented the older languages of group and community and helped redefine the relationship between the individual and the collective.” (4) o “Like property and deference, localism should be understood as a dynamic concept that changed over time.” (4) ● “Anglicization was a contested process that was still far from complete in 1776.” o “Certainly, over the course of the eighteenth century the province’s institutional structures and cultural practices became more overtly modeled on those of England, but resistance to this broad pattern of change encouraged the creation of new institutions, new political and religious languages, and new types of social relationships.” (4) ● “The disputes over property and the social unrest that they encouraged reveal the society’s subjective understanding of deference.” o “ethnicity and religion influenced deference’s functioning. In New Jersey, this ​ethnodeference encouraged property-related violence as yeomen accustomed to deferring only to those within their ethnic and religious groups refused to acknowledge the authority of a culturally alien gentry.” (3-4) o “Deference needs to be understood as conditional, culturally bound, and changing over time in the eighteenth century.” (4) ● “Enlightened learning informed the gentry’s aggressive property claims.” (3) o The gentry understood property rights by their “understanding of neoclassical political and social theory. The model provided by ancient Rome inspired Enlightened provincial gentlemen to seek landed estates in order to preserve their status and political autonomy, even as it would later lead some of the same men to challenge imperial authority and champion a libertarian yeomen society.” (3) ● “The yeomanry’s defense of their property rights grew from their particular understandings of their liberties.” (3) o “The rise of a distinctive popular political consciousness did not begin with the imperial crisis….traditions of defiance shaped deep in the colonial period, together with a growing familiarity with the writings of radical Anglo-American political theorists, informed popular definitions of liberty, which legitimated physical challenges to authority long before the Revolution. These beliefs encouraged participation in the Whig movement, but they did not arise from that movement.” (3) ● “Agrarian unrest in British North America grew from fundamental disagreements over the origins and nature of property.” (2) o “Simply put, the gentry and their clients conceptualized property as flowing from institutional authority and maintained that the empire’s legal system was the ultimate arbiter of property rights.” (3) o “After 1740, the yeomanry came increasingly to assert that property was the product of labor and possession, and they understood ownership established in that fashion as protected by natural law.” (3) Drew on John Locke Sources: ​Town records, private and official correspondence, government and surviving court records, pamphlets, affidavits, diaries, journals, graveyard lists, wills, travel accounts, sermons, and church records.

Problems:​ Fails to deal with slavery, but really beyond the scope of this study.

Connections: Bailyn’s ​Ideological Origins​, Lambert’s ​The Great Awakening. ​Wayne Bodle, “The Fabricated Region” it calls for studies to show how the Middle Atlantic regions combined and combated multi-ethnic groups to get a national culture.

Wayne Bodle, “The Fabricated Region: On the Insufficiency of ‘Colonies’ for Understanding American Colonial History” (​2003) Argument: ​“Pluralist culture, in other words, did not just “emerge” in early America, it was ​made​. If we are to understand its origins and dynamics we need to explore ​where ​it was made, and why and how.” (8) ● “In truth, the formal ​political boundaries of the Middle Atlantic colonies never came close to containing or constraining the high politics of their constituent provinces, much less the underlying socioeconomic structural foundations on which we now presume “politics” to lie.” (9) ● Complex webs of political, legal, and economic ties bound the Middle Colonies’ elites together much more tightly than New England or the South. (12) The elites were very transprovincial.

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“Most if not all of the major Middle Atlantic migration pathways during the first two generations after the English conquest contributed to this process of regional consolidation without regard to the technicalities of new political boundaries.” (17) ● “But over the course of historical time, social and economic and even cultural structures did change, and as they did, regional formations inevitably became more threadbare around their edges. During the 1760s, for example, increasing demand in the Atlantic economy for grain products led some tobacco planters in the upper Chesapeake…to begin diversifying their crop regimes. In an astonishingly short time wheat and corn displaced tobacco as the principal export crops in parts of that area and made major contributions to farm income throughout it.” (23) ● “The land between—a “middle ground” in every sense of the word before it was fashionable to ​be ​one—was erased; reduced to a comedic dumb show of slumbering Knickerbockers, bloodthirsty Mohawks, crafty Loyalist profiteers, stolid Quakers, eagle-eyed Philadelphia lawyers, clannish Pennsylvania Dutchmen, and political bosses. We know now that it was all of these things and none of them too. The task at hand is to describe more fully, and more seriously, how those cultural types—and the dozens more that the region sustained—combined and combated to build a national culture.” (26-27) Sources: ​Mostly Secondary Connections: ​McConville, ​These Daring Disturbers.

Barry Levy, ​Quakers and the American Family: British Settlement in the Delaware Valley​ (1988) Argument: ​“A type of domesticity, almost identical to that later advocated by New England reformers, informed a major seventeenth-century folk movement and was the organizing principle beneath arguably the most socially and economically successful process of development in early America: the settlement and ensuing social and economic growth of colonial Pennsylvania.” (5) ● “the early Friends believed that God’s Truth, Grace, or Light was reborn on earth with the birth of every individual. They instead that Truth in both individuals and society could only be hampered by excessive external coercion. They rejected intolerance, university-educated ministerial authority, and most forms of civil and international force.” (5) ● “Having faced problems of poverty and dispersion of settlement in England between 1654 and 1681, English Quakers devised a new solution to the question of social authority: they originated a form of domesticity based upon radical religious ideas.

Northwestern Quakers who emigrated to Pennsylvania found that their way of life provided an unusually effective blueprint for North American settlement.” (6) ● Domesticity—“This work prescribed the elimination of all symbols and gestures of honor from family life and human relations; the complete spiritualization of marriage; the redefinition and intensification of childrearing; and, perhaps most radically, the existence of rational, self-disciplined women in every Quaker household; and the demand that such women be encouraged to discuss and legislate on what [George] Fox called “women’s matters,” including sex, child-birth, and childrearing, in specially designed and church sanctioned “women’s meetings.” (13) ● “Northwestern livestock farmers, after becoming Quakers, could no longer give their children promiscuously to their kin or the local gentry. They now accepted a religious obligation to protect their children’s gift of grace from “canal talkers,” not simply by protecting and cherishing them when young children but also by settling them in morally protected situations. This task required more wealth than most northwestern middling households had. Most of their children left Quakerism.” (13) ● “The settlers’ child-centeredness also greatly helped the Pennsylvania Quakers maintain a strong religious community. Their peculiar beliefs and commitments about nurturing and protecting children made piety, profit, and community compatible—at least initially. These Quakers had been poor farmers in northwestern England and had lost their children. In Pennsylvania, the Quakers became wealthier farmers and retained their children. The Pennsylvania monthly meetings reinforced the settlers’ desire to become decently rich by encouraging economic virtues for the purpose of saving children. They also provided many forms of non-economic advice and intrusions to help parents save their children.” (14) ● “Late eighteenth century during the Pennsylvania Quakers’ great spiritual crisis, what Jack Marietta has called the reformation of American Quakerism [occurred].” From 1750 to 1790, Pennsylvania Quakers disowned almost 50 percent of the rising generation of Quaker children; they abolished slavery within the Society of Friends, and the Quakers withdrew from government.” (16) ● “This crisis was caused by Quaker domesticity itself. After 1740, many Quaker farmers increasingly found that the Delaware Valley economy, although rich in raw wealth and opportunity, was becoming too complex for the successful transference of “holy conversation” to the next generation. Many Quakers were running out of land. The alternative of establishing their sons as independent, rural tradesmen, while economically feasible, also led to their sons’ longer independence from their parents’ households’ intimate family relations. Many of their sons married non-Quakers or other Quakers outside of meeting. Thus by the late eighteenth century Quaker meetings and parents faced difficult choices. They could either ease the Quaker discipline and the purity of their household ideal or disown a large share of their children. After much debate and resistance, Quaker leaders chose to protect their household ideal and to disown, in effect summarily, all those who married irregularly.” (16) ● “Although Quakerism had grown in population dramatically between 1681 and 1750, it failed to grow after 1750 in pace with other American religions. The Quakers’ reformation meant the end of Quaker hegemony in Pennsylvania.” (17) ● “Study of Quaker framers in Delaware Valley is chiefly the study of the origins of an influential form of domesticity in American life, not a study of why this particular ideology was so successfully spread by New England reformers in the nineteenth century.” (21)

36 Sources: ​Removal certificates, Organization: ​“Part One describes the development of Quaker domesticity in Wales and northwestern England after 1650.

Disagreeing with historians who stress middling values over religious concerns, Levy insists that a proper understanding of northwestern ​mentalite does not diminish religious values, but “highlights the Quakers’ zeal and the social impact of Quakerism.” (27)” (371, Taylor) ● “Part Two focuses on the “triumph of Quaker domesticity” in the Delaware Valley between 1681 and 1750.” (373, Taylor) ● “Part Three discusses Quaker women and then the relationship between domesticity and Pennsylvania Quakerism’s numerical decline.” (374, Taylor) Contributions: ​The study of Quaker domesticity, the data that he found showing that poorer friends more likely to exit the Society.

Most scholars focus on the wealthy who left the ascetic Society for Anglicanism. A trans-Atlantic perspective on Quakerism.

Connections: ​Nash’s ​Quakers and Politics​, Greene’s ​Pursuits of Happiness could be used to argue that the Delaware Valley model could be seen as most American model of development.

Gary B. Nash, ​Quakers and Politics: Pennsylvania, 1681-1726​ (1968) Argument: ​“The Quakers’ attempt to reconcile inherited ideas and institutions with a new environment was in many respects, typical of the Amerian colonial experience….It is hoped that this study of society and politics in early Pennsylvania will contribute to an understanding of the political dynamics of the American colonies in general in the early stages of development.” (xvi) ● Money determines power. Those with a lot of money vested in Pennsylvania reaped the rewards of choice land and government power. ● “Careless in money matters and accustomed to an aristocratic style of living, Penn may have seen in Pennsylvania a means of recouping or at least bolstering his sagging finances. Certainly he expected the colony to return handsome profits through quitrents and the sale of land.” Money First, religion second. (10) ● As the power resided in the hands of Penn and his minions there was little visibility of government. (166) ● Why factionalism among Quakers in PA? “There had always been a strong prophetic strain in Quakerism, and Penn’s promotional pamphlets, through he was more cautious than many colonial promoters in his promises, fed these utopian anticipations all too well. Pennsylvania, by all accounts, was to be an approximation of Zion.” (161-162) ● “The failure of Pennsylvania society to coalesce in the early years is also attributed in minor degree to the effects of the wilderness environment….But in Pennsylvania inchoate institutions and unfixed patterns of political recruitment let to a pursuit of position which bordered at times on anarchy.” (163) ● “If the Quaker system of beliefs could not prevent social and political disequilibrium in the early stages of settlement, Pennsylvania was not significantly different from Puritan New England, Dutch Reformed New York, Catholic Maryland, or Anglican Virginia in these respects. (342) ● “The uppermost Quakers had suffered the disorganizing effects of the New World experience. They had intermittently lost control of the machinery of government while groping for stability and political maturity over a period of two generations.

But finally, with utopian hopes transformed by the realities of colonial life and their role redefined by the political experience of the first five decades, they assumed an important and enduring role in provincial society.” (343) ● Two Factions: Lloydians and Keithians—Keith a radical who wants to reform the Society as well—2 bodies of Christ.

Summary: ​“William Penn’s “Holy Experiment” was a carefully planned religious, social, economic, and political development.

Nevertheless, because of land policy, proprietary rights, political power, and economic conflicts, the colony split; and, after the “agonizing struggle,” a group of Quaker merchants came forth to rule. Their success was erratic because a “kaleidoscope” of factions rose to contest the control of political power. This factionalism stemmed in part from the continuing tradition of anti-authoritarianism found in migrant Quakers. In the early 1700s David Lloyd was important among faction leaders; his change of the political structure resulted in the spread of political power downward in society. After his brief flirtation with almost “middle class democracy,” the Quaker merchants reasserted themselves.” (348, Anderson) Views: ​I think what happened is you have a group of power hungry men, who come to the colonies to make a better life for themselves, Penn gives them a bit of power and they take it too far. So does Penn. It’s a repressed group gone wild.

Sources: ​William Penn papers, pamphlets, government correspondence.

Problems:​ Reeks of economic determinism.

Connections: Levy ​Quakers and the American Family which discusses family life and how disciplined it was and how Quakers tried to get ahead financially to support their domesticity. In Nash domesticity is not mentioned but it does shows what happens to Quakers in the public life that want power as they increase their financial holdings.

David Waldstreicher, “Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic.” (1999)

37 Argument: “This article uses runaway advertisements to analyze the acts of cultural hybridization black and racially mixed people committed for their own purposes and then proceeds to evaluate the owners’ use of print to counter the mobility of the unfree, to establish or reestablish confidence in slavery and servitude.” (247) ● “This article seeks a new way of seeing some blacks in slavery and servitude: as confidence men. Though Tom might not have been typical among eighteenth-century runaways, his strategies were typical of eighteenth-century confidence man, and perhaps even more ordinary free men. The runaways described in many advertisements use the assumptions of resource-rich whites to get what they want and need. They manipulate goods and texts to their advantage; they capitalize upon the ambiguities in the dominant racial classification system of eighteenth-century America; they employ their knowledge of the developing colonies, and the expanding marketplace in which they themselves were producers, consumers, and commodities, to change their identities and gain at least a measure of freedom.” (244-245) ● “The advertisements that sought to rein in fugitives show the changing possibilities for black resistance in late-colonial America, especially in those areas like the mid-Atlantic where bound servitude had not yet been racialized.” (245) ● Running away proved to destabilize the community of the mid-Atlantic as slaves rebellions did in the South. ● “What would the alternative public imply for the republican public sphere, epitomized by Benjamin Franklin and his enterprising use of print, upon which the runaway advertisements so rudely (or, rather, profitably) intrude?” (246) ● “mid-Atlantic runaways insisted, as Franklin had insisted, on using their connections, their knowledge of the world of goods, and their linguistic skills to change their condition. Their awareness of how the system worked cannot be separated from the knowledge and skills that made them such valuable commodities in the first place.” (247) ● “To get slaves or servants back into the role—to have them captured and returned, like the property they were, rather than the self-motivated persons they also were—owners had to describe what the slaves or servants had done to escape their role and what attributes (positive, negative, or both in their view) they possessed that might or might not help them “pretend to be free.”” (248) ● “Four of these attributes stand out in the advertisements: clothing, trades or skills, linguistic ability or usage, and ethnic or racial identity.” (248) ● “Clothing also illustrates the contemporaneous movement of an emulative consumer desire down from the top of society and the emergence of vernacular styles at the bottom. Insofar as average Americans participated in new forms of self-making—in the mode of gentility or otherwise—clothing informed the process. Benjamin Franklin dressed up to be a gentlemen in the 1740s and 1750s and dressed down to show his virtuous republicanism after he arrived in France…” (252) ● “to be white was not necessarily to be free; to be black was not necessarily to be a slave; and to be a mulatto or racially mixed was not necessarily to be either of these. Slaves and indentured servants instead pretended to be free, which only occasionally—but not usually, or even primarily—meant passing for white.” (262) ● “Print, as Shane White reminds us, was “one of the means of enforcing the slave system.” The slave system was also an important means of supporting print culture and the extralocal market that made print so expansive and interesting.” (268) ● “The stories told by the mid-Atlantic runaway advertisements are, not of the decline of slavery, but rather of its North Americanization. To read these runaways is to come face to face with the modernity of slavery and servitude at its crossroads on the eve of the Revolution, for every characteristic that has been ascribed to the American self-made man, and cited as evidence of his lack of deference and unfreedom, can be seen in the likes of the exploited Charles Roberts.” (271) Sources: ​Primary source slave advertisements, Secondary sources Connections: ​Bodle and the pluralisticness of the Mid-Atlantic.

Gary B. Nash, ​The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution​ (1979) Argument: ​“Despite the importance attached to economic and social change, this book argues that ideology in many instances was far more than a reflection of economic interests and acted as a motive force among urban people of all ranks.” (xii) ● “The narrowing of opportunities and the rise of poverty are two of the subthemes of this book.” (ix) ● “More particularly, I have tired to discover how people worked, lived, and perceived the changes going on about them, how class relationships shifted, and how political consciousness grew, especially among the laboring classes.” (viii) ● “Much of this book is about those who occupied the lower levels of urban society, the people who frequently suffered the unequal effects of eighteenth-century change.” (viii-ix) ● “But it needs to be emphasized at the outset that ideology is not the exclusive possession of educated individuals and established groups. Nor do I believe that those at the top established ideology that was then obligingly adopted by those below them. Slaves, indentured servants, the laboring poor, women, and the illiterate also had an ideology.” (xii) ● “What I mean by ideology is the awareness of the surrounding world, penetration of it through though, and reasoned reactions to the forces impinging upon one’s life. People living in communities as small as the pre-Revolutionary port towns, linked together as they were by church, tavern, workplace, and family, exchanged views, compared insights, and through the face-to-face nature of their associations, arrived at certain common understandings of their social situations.” (xiii) ● “One of the main tasks of this book is to show that many urban Americans, living amidst historical forces that were transforming the social landscape came to perceive antagonistic divisions based on economic and social position; that they

38 began to struggle around these conflicting interests; and that through these struggles they developed a consciousness of class.” (x) ● “It is not my argument that by the end of the colonial period class formation and class consciousness were fully developed, but only that we can gain greater insight into the urban social process between 1690 and 1776 and can understand more fully the origins and meaning of the American Revolution if we analyze the changing relations among people of different ranks and examine the emergence of new modes of thought based on horizontal rather than vertical divisions in society.” (xi) ● “Thus, the laboring ​classes included slaves, whose bondage was perpetual, indentured servants, whose unfree status was temporary, free persons, whose independence could be altered only in unusual circumstances. The laboring ranks also ascended from apprentice to journeyman to master craftsman.” (xii) ● “There was, in short, no unified laboring class at any point in the period under study. That does not mean that class formation and the shaping of class consciousness was not happening in the era culminating with the American Revolution.” (xii) ● Nash is concerned in general with a decline in communalism. (472, Maier) ● “Social conflict in Nash’s conception turned upon two developments, the “rise of poverty: and the “narrowing of opportunities” for members of the urban work force. Poverty was the product less of economic development than of a plague of wars that persist throughout Nash’s narrative.” (473, Maier) ● “The “middle order” of colonial cities, composed largely of artisans, shopkeepers, and the more prosperous mariners, was far more politically influential than the poor. Its members, Nash argues, experienced an embittering “gap…beteen aspiration and achievement” as the eighteenth century proceeded (p.9).” (474, Maier) ● Nash’s results suggest a greater rate of upward mobility than other studies. (475, Maier) ● “After 1760 conditions worsened: depression and poverty afflicted all three cities, and the “lower classes” saw a serious deterioration in their standard of living. Those circumstances, Nash argues, provided a critical contest for the American Revolution, which consisted in part of a massive struggle in which class became an important dimension of urban society.”

(475, Maier) ● “The war between the rich and poor that the wealthy dreaded never materialized. Uprisings turned against “elitist oppressors” such as Thomas Hutchinson only when they happened also to be British officials or important supporters of British policy, which makes the interpretation of such events as attacks “on wealth itself” and therefore as proof of class consciousness on the part of the “mob” difficult to maintain (pp. 269, 297).” (475-476, Maier) ● Nash’s three cities: Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, all share a mercantile orientation, a preindustiral mode of production, a similar division of wealth, and a similar pattern of social relations.

Methodology: “This books is also comparative in its approach. Examining concurrently the process of change in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia has enabled me to comprehend how particular factors intertwined in each city to hasten or retard the formation of class consciousness and to give a particular texture to social discourse and political behavior.” (xi) ● “The comparative approach has also convinced me that the Marxist maxim that the mode of production dictates the nature of class relations has only limited analytic potential for explaining changes during some historical eras.” (xi) Sources: ​newspapers, municipal records, business accounts, diaries and correspondence, and published sermons, political tracts, legislative proceedings, tax lists, poor relief records, wills, inventories of estate, deed books, mortgages, court documents, portledge bills and wage records.

Problems: ​Omits women, admittedly, but omits them all the same. Argument that a class consciousness developed is weak although he tapers it to be that class consciousness was embryonic.

Views:​ Good Marxist history.

Connections: Joyce D. Goodfriend, ​Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664-1730​ (1992) Argument: ​“The book’s central thesis is that a pluralistic social order structured around Dutch, English, and French ethnoreligious communities emerged in late seventeenth-century New York City as a consequence of the juxtaposition of new immigrants and old settlers. By furnishing individuals with an institutional base in the increasingly heterogeneous society, these ethnic communities fostered a tenuous equilibrium in the city. After 1700, the ethnic basis of community life began to fracture, notwithstanding the tenacity of Dutch women in clinging to their ancestral faith. It was not until the mid-eighteenth century, however, that other forms of social identity superseded ethnicity. The success of Europeans in creating ethnic preserves in New York’s fluid society is brought into relief by considering the problems blacks encountered in fabricating the bonds of community.” (7) Goodfriend uses her chapter of NYC’s African population to show how this community could not develop along the same lines of ethnicity that the others did. ● “Goodfriend argues convincingly that for half a century after the English conquest of 1664, the increasingly native-born Dutch held onto their ethnicity in the clothes they wore, the houses they built, the productive trades they continued to dominate, and the ways in which they educated their children. In short, there was no rapid “Anglicization” of the colony, and the English relied on “toleration” and “strategies of cooptation and conversion” to gradually enhance their control of both town and colony, tactics that encouraged other immigrant ethnic groups to create and maintain similarly distinct ethnic cultures (p. 218).

This pluralistic society did not fade away until economic self-interest and religious revivalism encouraged the creation of new supra-ethnic loyalties in the 1730s and 1740s.” (121, Newman)

39 ● ●

“The research design for this book incorporates three distinct levels of analysis—family, immigrant group, and society.” (6) “What is needed to capture the social experience of early New Yorkers is a multidimensional approach that explores the consequences of contact between ethnic groups from the perspective of the individual and the group as well as the society.” (5) ● “Despite New Amsterdam’s heterogeneous makeup, cultural exchange had essentially flowed in one direction as individuals of diverse nationalities gradually conformed to Dutch culture. By the time of the conquest many of the town’s Germans, Scandinavians, French, and English had become culturally Dutch. After England assumed power, however, the agglomeration of diverse peoples that had been loosely bound together by the institutions of a trading company in New Amsterdam was transformed into a pluralistic society divided along ethnic and racial lines.” (219) ● 4 fundamental ideas to keep in mind while deciphering colonial NYC’s evolving social patterns: o 1. NYC “had a unique sequence of development among American colonial cities which cannot be understood without recognizing the enduring impact of the Dutch on society and culture. As a “charter group” the Dutch introduced institutions, laws, and customary practices, altered the landscape, set the pattern for interaction with native peoples and imported Africans, and selectively transplanted their culture. But just as they were beginning their metamorphosis into a creole group they were forced into the subordinate status of a conquered people when New Netherland passed into English hands. Submission to English rule, the virtual cessation of immigration from the Netherlands, and the influx of English, French, and other Europeans did not entail the wholesale divestiture of the Dutch way of life in New York City. In varying degrees, the Dutch settlers maintained their institutions, social forms, and values as they gradually adapted to the altered context of their lives.” (6) o ​2. “The concept of “Anglicization” which has come to dominate the historiography of colonial New York City, is limited in its explanatory power. Focusing exclusively on the pace and timing of Dutch assimilation to English ways not only diverts attention from assimilative processes that worked the other way—what John Murrin refers to as “Batavianization”—but compresses the variety of social adaptations and cultural permutations into a monolithic mold. (6) o 3. ​“New York was a biracial city from the outset. Social life and cultural forms reflected African as well as European influences.” (6) o 4. “The central expression of culture in early New York City was religion. Until recently, scholars have charted the city’s history primarily in secular terms, focusing on the role of ethnicity in political and economic developments.

But without defining the relationship between ethnic identity and religious identity in this milieu, it is impossible to comprehend how individuals defined themselves or how communities functioned.” (6) Problems: ​“Imperial policy, ethnic mistrust, and interracial society produced violence and suffering all over North America, yet these seem curiously absent from this study.” (122, Newman) Sources:​ Church records, census data, diaries, correspondence, marriage records, tax lists, wills, government records, laws.

Connections:​ Wayne Bodle—stands in direct opposition. Gary B. Nash, ​The Urban Crucible Donna Merwick, ​Possessing Albany, 1630-1710: The Dutch and English Experiences ​(1990) Argument: ​“The Dutch and the English each “possessed” Albany according to their own central metaphors.” (5) ● Book is all about understanding the Dutch of Albany on their own terms: “Comprehension of these people who created and sustained a version of the Dutch Republic in the New World will be very difficult for us English-speaking outsiders. We have inherited and now perform Anglo-American cultural ways. In encountering the Dutch in Albany, we do a common thing: We quickly rush to analogy or resemblance, making the strange familiar. We bring strangers like the Dutch into our present-day culture; we assume they made our improvisations in life. Or we make seventeenth-century Dutch colonials into seventeenth-century Anglo-Americas. (5) ● “The Dutch privileged purposeful movement. Lands and seas, continents and oceans, river lands and rivers, all were merely background to movement. They put the physical environment in order by setting ​burgerlijk [the city] over ​onburgerlijk [the countryside], that is city over countryside, dynamism over stasis, change over permanence, the mercantile use of land over its mere occupancy.” (3) ● Merwick takes Albany’s history as layers of time. “I do not take its history, however, to have been an evolution. I take its past to have been layers of time when a single site, Albany, was made and remade as a result of successive, socially constructed interpretations. The generator of change in Albany was interpretation.” (1) ● “Merwick finds culture that was the product of Dutch urban life. The people who settled Albany came from a rich urban culture that thrived on trade and resolutely defended republican values. Absorbed by commerce, they occupied the landscape but were not intent on setting roots. In one of her central metaphors Merwick sees them as navigating the land, intent on trade routes and trading places but not on creating landed empires. They were entrepreneurs who saw the opportunity in the New World continue their traditional activities. (476, Ritchie) ● “In short, the Dutch came to the New World for trade, whereas the English came mainly for land and power.” (336, Anderson) ● “Where the Dutch had “navigated” the land, the English “occupied” it; where the Dutch saw the countryside as a thing to be transversed en route to the next trading center, the English saw it as a territory to be claimed in the name of the Crown.

40 English maps and minds therefore stressed boundaries rather than connections and the hinterland rather than urban centers.”

(173, Richter) ● “Leisler’s quarrels with others in New York and at Alban, Merwick argues, were not really about political power but rather about conflicting symbolic systems, about clashing interpretations of ritualized political acts.” (174, Richter) Problems: ​“The central theme of the book commences with the entry of the English. Here I am afraid it is not so much a tragedy but a soap opera dominated by caricatures that is portrayed. The English are the bad guys and the Dutch the good guys, and, unfortunately for the Dutch, there is no cavalry. If the Dutch are urban, commercial, and republican, the English are rural, feudal, and monarchical.

Worse, hey are a bunch of thugs who are venal, shabby, corrupt, and dishonorable (pp. 260-263). What is disappointing is that, while the Dutch are treated with sensitivity, the English are stereotyped. A few royal officials come to stand as metaphors for all English society.” (476, Ritchie) Seconded by Richter.

Contributions: ​“This book, however, breaks new ground in both the conceptualization and the presentation of her findings on the ways in which the people of colonial Albany “possessed” and shaped their town.” (171, Richter) Sources: ​maps, letters, pictures, archaeology, governmental records, personal papers.

Connections:​ Goodfriend, ​Before the Melting Pot​, Nash, ​The Urban Crucible, Philip D. Morgan, ​Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake & Lowcountry​ (1998) Argument: ​“That is the “counterpoint” Morgan pursues: slavery as an institution that European settlers created for extracting labor from enslaved Africans and controlling their behavior in the Americas; and slavery as an ordeal experienced by Africans and negotiated with masters in the struggle to make life bearable.” (613, Nash) ● “Morgan argues that slave systems and societies were molded differently primarily by the staple crop produced and to a lesser extent by settlement patterns; by the morphology of slave population; and by the planters’ lifeways.” (614, Nash) ● “Three arguments provide the thematic unity for ​Slave Counterpoint. The ​first ​is that over the course of the eighteenth century black cultures in the Chesapeake (primarily Virginia) and Lowcountry (primarily coastal South Carolina) diverged from each other because of the ecologies of the two regions supported distinctive staple economies, tobacco and rice. Tied to this is a ​second ​argument: that both the Chesapeake and the Lowcountry were unique “places in time,” distinguishable from the youthful frontier settlements of the seventeenth century, from antebellum Southern slavery, and from other slave regimes of the eighteenth century. ​Finally, Morgan argues that for most slaves material welfare and communal autonomy were inversely related, a contrast that helps distinguish slave culture in the Chesapeake (relatively better material conditions) from that in the Lowcountry (relatively greater autonomy vis-à-vis white society).” (2, Clemens and 1296, Johnson) ● “The emergence of a Creole majority, first in the Chesapeake and later in the lowcountry, Morgan argues, “facilitated cohesiveness among slaves.” (p. 463) Morgan notes, however, that relations between slaves were shot through with conflict along the axes of age and sex and, especially among those with plans of resistance, were characterized by a good deal of suspicion. From the outset, Morgan’s account of the “slave family” emphasizes vulnerability.” (1297, Johnson). ● “That difference in labor organization [gang versus task], suggests Philip D. Morgan, more than any other variable, explains the critical differences between slave cultures in the Chesapeake and the Carolina lowcountry.” (541, Egerton) ● “Morgan argues, slavery was harsher in Virginia and Maryland, contrary to conventional wisdom.” (542, Egerton) ● Black slaves in the Lowcountry did not move as much given the Lowcountry’s perfect climate for rice and relatively little soil exhaustion. The result being that Lowcountry slaves had a better sense of family and community than Chesapeake counterparts. ● Crop is focal point of book without being the focuse because it was a determinate in how slavery evolved but not sole determinate. ● Morgan gives agency by treating all unfree people as being equal to those who are free. Everyone has humanity. ● Morgan’s “grammar of culture” idea contradicts his idea that Africans were fragmental.

Morgan on Paternalism: ​“Morgan argues that humane patriarchalism took root in the mid-eighteenth century amid intimate black-white relations in the Chesapeake but advanced much more slowly in the Lowcountry where blacks and whites were more distant—physically, emotionally, and socially.” (615, Nash) ● “Morgan carefully delineates how the character of patriarchalism changed in the eighteenth century and how it operated differently in two regions separated only be a few hundred miles. [Morgan] finds three ways in which patriarchal doctrines and strategies altered: movement toward a milder exercise of authority, spurred by the heightening of evangelical sensibilities as well as the growth of natural rights theory; a growing sentimental expectation among slave masters that their slaves would express gratitude and loyalty for milder treatment; and the slavemasteres’ gradual creation of the fiction of the contented slave.” ● “But where Genovese regards the emergence of a settled, American-born labor force as the most important factor in the rise of paternalism, Morgan sides with Sylvia Frey and Allen Gallay in suggesting that the rise of evangelical religion, enlightened humanitarianism, and the ideal of the affectionate family were central to the emergence of paternalistic theories.” (542, Egerton)

41 Comparison with Berlin Article: ​“Comparison is at the heart of Morgan’s analysis and in the main bears out Ira Berlin’s seminal article about the importance of regional patterns in the creation of slave societies in British America (“Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society on British Mainland North America.”” (614, Nash) Book Structure: ​Three parts: ​Part I: “Morgan carefully outlines the “contours” of black life in eighteenth century Chesapeake and lowcountry: environment; crop regime; rate of slave reproduction; pattern of slave importation; density of white settlement.” ​Part II: “[Morgan] overlays an account of the structured interchanges between blacks and whites. Over the course of the eighteenth century, Morgan argues, the relations between slaveholders and slaves shifted from an “austere patriarchalism,” characterized by often shocking brutality and an ideological emphasis on master’s obligations and slaves’ duties, to a “mellow paternalism,” more concerned with generosity, kindness, and the mutual attachment of masters and slaves.” ​Part III​: “Morgan turns from the material detriments and social parameters treated in the first two parts to the social relations, family life, and cultural forms that defined “the black world.””

(1296-1297, Johnson) Contribution: “​Morgan chose for this massive study two regions that were both a part of the British mainland empire [not a study that cross-culturally compared slavery].” (541, Egerton) Sources: ​“Working without the aid of narratives of freed and fugitive slaves…Morgan turns instead to evangelical church records, runaway advertisements, probate and court records, and plantation accounts.” (2, Clemens) Connections: ​Berlin, “Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society on British Mainland North America,” Kullikoff, Tobacco and Slaves​, Berlin, ​Many Thousands Gone,​ Frey​ Water from the Rock.

Already printed and carded up through here (11/13/2006) Ira Berlin, “Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society on British Mainland North America​ ​AHR​ (1980) Argument: “During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, three distinct slave systems evolved: a Northern nonplantation system and two Southern plantation systems, one around Chesapeake Bay and the other in the Carolina and Georgia lowcountry.” (45) ● “Thus no matter how complete recent studies of black life appear, they are limited to the extent that they provide a static and singular vision of a dynamic and complex society.” (78) ● But viewing Southern slavery from the point of maturity, dissecting it into component parts, comparing it to other slave societies, and juxtaposing it to free society have produced an essentially static vision of slave culture.” (44) ● “Most slaves lived on farms (not plantations), worked at a variety of tasks, and never labored in large fangs. No one in the North suggested that agricultural labor could be done only by black people, a common assertion in the sugar islands and the Carolina lowcountry.” (47) ● “As a result, black women had few children, and their fertility ratio was generally lower than that of whites. The inability or unwillingness of urban masters to support large households placed a severe strain on black family life. But it also encouraged masters to allow their slaves to live out, hire their own time, and thereby gain a measure of independence and freedom.” (48) ● “If urban life allowed slaves to meet more frequently and enjoy a larger degree of social autonomy than did slavery in the countryside, the cosmopolitan nature of cities speeded the transformation of Africans to Afro-Americans. Acculturation in the cities of the North was a matter of years, not generations.” (49) ● “As birth rate slipped, mortality rates soared, especially in the cities where newly arrived blacks appeared to be concentrated.

Since most slaves came without any previous exposure to New World diseases, the harsh Northern winters took an ever higher

42 toll….In its demographic outline, Northern slavery at mid-century often bore a closer resemblance to the horrors of the West Indies during the height of a sugar boom than to the relatively benign bondage of the earlier years.” (52) ● “Newly arrived Africans reawakened Afro-Americans to their African past by providing direct knowledge of West African society. Creole blacks began to combine their African inheritance into their own evolving culture. In some measure, the easy confidence of Northern whites in their own dominance speeded the syncretization of African and crole culture by allowing blacks to act far more openly than slaves in the plantation colonies.” (53) ● “The mass of black people, however, remained physically separated and psychologically estranged from the Anglo-American world and culturally closer to Africa than any other blacks on continental North America [in the lowcountry.]” (54) ● Lowcountry slaves allowed to enlist in the militia in the lowcountry—if they show the enemy they got freedom. ● Africans’ intimate knowledge of weather, geography, and planting in lowcountry climate allowed them to lead the whites. ● Whites, blacks, reds, all worked together in lowcountry fields. ● Blacks became a majority in the lowcountry by 1710s. ● Lowcountry slaves lived in large units and worked at tasks, which gave them a sense of black autonomy. ● Chesapeake slaves were not given the chance to develop an Afro-American culture as were Northern and Lowcountry slaves. ● Better to be a Creole in the Chesapeake than an African. Creoles received better work assignments and learned trades. ● Paternalism was potent in the Chesapeake. Paternalism helped to stall the development of an Afro-American culture. ● “The nature of the slave trade, the various demographic configurations of whites and blacks, and the demands of particular staples—to name some of the factors influencing the development of slave society—created at least three distinctive patterns of Afro-American life.” (77) Sources: ​ Plantation papers, Secondary sources, merchant books.

Contribution:​ Made clear that there are many, dynamic types of slavery, not one static type.

Connections:​ Alan Kullikoff, ​Tobacco and Slaves, ​Philip D. Morgan, ​Slave Counterpoint,​ Daniel Usner, ​Indians, Settlers, and Slaves Ira Berlin, ​Many Thousands Gone : The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America​ (1998) Argument: ​“Thus understanding that a person was a slave is not the end of the story but the beginning, for the slaves’ history was derived from experienced that differed from place to place and time to time and not from some unchanging transhistorical verity.” (3) ● “Slavery was never made but instead was continually remade, for power—no matter how great—was never absolute, but always contingent.” (3) ● “Although the playing field was never level, the master-slave relationship was nevertheless subject to continual negotiation.

The failure to recognize the ubiquity of those negotiations derives neither from an overestimation of the power of the master (which was awesome indeed), nor from an underestimation of the power of the slave (which rarely amounted to much), but from a misconstruing of the limitations humanity placed upon both master and slave.” (2) ● “The minuet between master and slave, when played contrapuntal music of paternalism, was a constant, as master and slave continually renegotiated the small space allotted them.” (4) ● “Since labor defined the slaves’ existence, when, where, and especially how slaves worked determined in large measure the course of their lives.” (5) ● “In slave societies, by contrast, slavery stood at the center of economic production, and the master-slave relationship provided the model for all social relations: husband and wife, parent and child, employer and employee, teacher and student.” (8) ● “But the right to enter the slaveholding class was rarely denied, because slave ownership was open to all, irrespective of family, nationality, color, or ancestry.” (8) ● “Three “revolutions” subsequently transformed slavery. ​The first was the “Plantation Revolution.” Beginning in Barbados, where tobacco cultivation gave way to sugar production and the slave system overwhelmed indentured servitude and wage labor, planters consolidated their economic and political power…​The second revolution, the “Democratic Revolution,” was intellectual, political, and military. The Enlightnment and the evangelical and pietistic religious movements led to the first sustained opposition to slavery….​The third revolution, the “Cotton Revolution,” dramatically undercut the illusion—bred by declining productivity and soil exhaustion and the shift to grain production in tobacco regions—that slavery was a dying institution.” (1735-36, Mintz) ● “Ira Berlin’s book concludes with the movement of slavery into the Old Southwest and the large-scale Christianization of slaves during the Second Great Awakening.” (1736, Mintz) ● “Berlin’s examination of slavery’s genesis necessarily also has to explain the emergence of racism. He therefore traces two patterns: how slavery came to be equivalent with enslavement of Africans, and how freedom did not guarantee racial equality.

Berlin’s goal is to demonstrate that, in early North America, slavery was a pervasive and little questioned institution whose increasingly close associate with concepts of race made it difficult to root out its legacy.” (188-189, Chaplin) ● “This range of places permits comparison between slavery in Spanish, British, and French colonies, as well as in a spectrum of climates that encouraged quite different economies.” (189, Chaplin) Societies with Slaves Vs. Slave Societies: “In the Chesapeake region, for example, tobacco was grown in a society with slaves before the 1670s and in a slave society thereafter. What distinguished the post-1670 Chesapeake was not the cultivation of tobacco or the employment of slave labor but the presence of a planter class able to command the region’s resources, mobilize the power of the state,

43 and vanquish competitors. A salable commodity was a necessary condition for the development of a slave society, but it was not sufficient. The slaveholders’ seizure of power was the critical event in transforming societies with slaves into slave societies.” (10) Edmund Morgan’s Argument: “in the Chesapeake, where black-slave and white-servant labor developed in tandem within an economy organized around the production of tobacco.” (7) Berlin uses this argument in describing slavery in the Chesapeake.

Organization: ​“At the book’s heart is a nuanced examination of how slavery and slave culture evolved in three chronological eras in four distinct geographical regions.” (1735, Mintz) ​Regions: ​Northern (New England and Mid-Atlantic), Chesapeake (VA and MD), Lowcountry (Carolinas and Georgia), and Lower Mississippi Valley. ​Chronological Eras:​ 1. Charter 2. Plantation 3. Revolutionary Contribution: A synthesis of all modern works on British, French, an Spanish slavery (1286, Davis). ​“Many Thousands Gone demonstrates, more successfully than any previous book, that, far from being a static or monolitithic institution, American slavery varied widely across time and space.” (1735, Mintz) Comparison with ​Slave Counterpoint: “Morgan explores slave life in Virginia and South Carolina mainly between 1700 and 1790, so he is essentially portraying Berlin’s plantation generations in much fuller and deeper detail than Berlin has space for. Both authors find major widening differences between slavery in the Chesapeake and the Lowcountry, and both locate the most crucial differences in the tobacco plantation labor system versus the rice plantation labor system because they see work as the central feature of American slavery. Both authors also build quite parallel—and richly complementary—portrayals of family life, language, and religion, arguing that, as the slaves were increasingly stigmatized by their racist white masters, they turned inward and produced robust cultural worlds of their own. Both look ahead to the nineteenth century as a harsh new era, dominated by forced migration, family breakups, and coerced manual labor in the cotton fields.” (827-828, Dunn)​ Both books compliment each other Connections: Morgan, ​American Slavery, American Freedom​, Morgan, ​Slave Counterpoint​, Kullikoff, ​Tobacco and Slaves​, Berlin, “Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society…,” Usner, ​Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy Karin Wulf, ​Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia ​(2000) Argument: ​Philadelphia offered unmarried women greater opportunities to make a living and a life than the rural countryside. ● “The book closes as a tragic declension story. In the late colonial period unmarried women were increasingly excluding from public consideration and participation as gender trumped marital status and class standing in dictating social position and public life was masculinized.” (15, Lyons) ● “A focus on marital status allows us to untangle the influence of gender from marital status and class standing. Such a study will refine our understanding of how gender operated in colonial societies, and uncover the diversity of women’s experiences.”

(16, Lyons) ● “Wulf argues that the prevalence of marital conflict within popular culture gave rise to a counter discourse of marital resistances that allowed women to evaluate marriage and consider other options. The same discourse that treated spinsters with scorn also presented women’s rational objections to marriage that required her own submission.” (17, Lyons) ● “Wulf argues that young women engaged in resistance to hierarchal marriage through the exchange of poetry in their commonplace books.” (17, Lyons) ● “Wulf posits, eighteenth-century Quakers in Philadelphia created a form of female individualism. Unlike male individualism that was based on independence and the material self, female individualism required a woman to set aside her personal interests, especially her customary relationships as wife and mother, to achieve spiritual fulfillment.” (18, Lyons) ● “Many unmarried women were easily incorporated into the households of kin, who welcomed their skills as housekeepers and the emotional support gained by having family close at hand. Others lived as domestics in the households of others.” (19, Ly) ● “A significant number of women lived as independent householders, and were enumerated as female heads of households by the city’s tax collectors.” (19, Lyons) ● “Unmarried women were hucksters, storekeepers, milliners, and a few were artisans and craftsmen. Because of their economic independence unmarried women were “central actors” in the creation of networks of associate within their neighborhoods. Wulf maintains that the network of connections established by married women were defined through their husbands, but that unmarried women, particularly widows and spinsters who were usually long term residents in their neighborhoods, created vital, economic, religious, social, and political networks free of such constraints.” (19, Lyons) ● “Two areas where unmarried women’s independence comes under attack in the two decades preceding the American revolution: poor women’s access to poor relief necessary to sustain their self-sufficiency, and propertied women’s ability to participate directly in local politics. Echoing Susan Juster and Jeanne Boydston, Wulf finds that the masculinization of civic culture in the middle third of the eighteenth century led to a new exclusion for women in areas where they had previously been included.” (20, Lyons) ● “​Femes Soles​, however—those who were ​not wives​—had less complicated legal relationships, and yet more nuanced cultural relationships, to their families, communities, and polities. The legal status of a single woman, whether because she was widowed or had never married, was unambiguous. She could make contracts, own and devise property, and head a household.

In short, she possessed the same legal capacity as any man.” (3) ● Masculine = independent, economic, political. Feminine= dependent and domestic. (5) Sources: ​public, private, secular, and religious records. Mostly diaries, commonplace books, and papers of well-off Quakers.

Problems: ​Book mostly deals with wealthy and middling class women even though Wulf discusses lower class women.

44 Contributions:​ Significant work on gender in the Middle Colonies as well as femme soles.

Connections: ​Ulrich, ​Good Wives​, Brown, ​Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, Bodle Article, Juster, ​Disorderly Women​, Godbeer, ​Sexuality in Early America Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, ​Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England 1650-1750​ (1980) Argument: ​Good Wives is a study in role definition. It is also a description of neglected aspects of daily life in the province of New Hampshire and in the two Massachusetts counties which bordered it, Essex County to the south and York County (now Maine) to the north and east. The texit is organized around three role clusters, each epitomized by a Biblical prototype frequently employed in New England. “Bathsheba” focuses upon economic life, “Eve” upon sex and reproduction, “Jael” upon the intersection of religion and aggression.” (10) ● “Bathsheba, the diligent housewife, “deputy husband” and charitable neighbor.” (471, Koehler) ● “Eve, the “physically and sexually vulnerable” (p97), the “help meet” to the her husband, deliverer of children, and affectionate “mother of all living.” (471, Koehler) ● “Jael, the virago, the endurer of Indian captivity, and the churchmember.” (471, Koehler) ● “Although women lived in a male-oriented world, Ulrich argues that Puritans were nevertheless flexible in their image of female duties and responsibilities, with little conception of an appropriate sphere of feminine activities.” (471-472, Koehler) ● “[Ulrich] suggests that families be thought of in three dimensions: a “family of property,” identified by people who leave property to each other in wills, which largely corresponds to our nuclear family; a “family of reproduction,” which consists of wide kinship networks, including daughters and sons-in-law; and a “family of sentiment,” expressed in naming patterns in which children were named for others who were loved or who had died.” (185-186, Kerber) ● “Like Bathsheba, Puritan women of northern New England were expected to assume a variety of household and community roles. Ulrich cites numerous inventoried estates and personal diaries to argue that, contrary to the traditional stereotype of circumscribed domestic responsibilities, northern New England housewives “were neither isolated nor self-sufficient.” (877, Cohen) ● “The book’s second section invokes the image of Eve in focusing on sexual relationships, marital rites, reproduction, and motherhood. Males controlled the legal powers governing sexual conduct, but Ulrich notes that women themselves held the ultimate responsibility for maintaining their personal virtue. (878, Cohen) ● “Haverhill’s Hannah Duston, who helped slaughter ten of her Indian captors during an escape was prominently extolled among Puritan leaders as the analogues of Jael. Ulrich, however, contends that Hannah’s heroism “belongs to a much larger tradition of violence in northern New England.” Substantiating this claim, Ulrich cites numerous cases which reveal that a number of women from the area were involved in various acts of violent behavior, including murder.” (878, Cohen) ● Power is in the domestic realm and in the courts. Women’s gossip networks regulate power.

Sources: ​New England court and probate records, household inventories, husband diaries and correspondence, captivity narratives Contributions: Sheds light on the daily life of colonial women in northern New England as well as presents innovative record use to get at colonial women’s voices.

Connections: ​Wulf, ​Not All Wives,​ Brown, ​Good Wives, Nasty Wenches,​ Godbeer,​ Sexuality in Early America,​ Rowlandson Susan Juster, ​Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics & Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England ​(1994) Argument: ​“This book contributes…by examining women’s changing role within the church and the adoption of a newly gendered model of authority by the evangelical community as inseparable components of the democratization of evangelical religion (components entirely absent from recent celebratory renditions of the same process). Coincident with the evangelical clergy’s embrace of revolutionary politics, an older model of authority on the organic unity of the body of saints gave way to a newer model predicated on the hierarchical layering of individual interests.” (11) ● “In this book I have located the source of ideologies of gender more in the realm of political struggle than in the realm of bodily experience, however mediated notions of “masculine” and “feminine” are used by the physical parameters of one’s sexual identity.” (9-10) ● “feminine qualities in general came to define the very essence of sin. The process by which sin became a gendered construct was a subtle one, occurring largely beneath and between the lines of the official church records. “Dissimulation,” for example, was a key element in the evangelical understanding of disorder and manifested itself in a variety of guises in the late eighteenth century—from women who spread false rumors about their neighbors’ private affairs to men who tried to deceive their customers and defraud their creditors.” (8) ● “The strong association of women with certain categories of sin, most notably slander and bearing false witness, lent a feminine cast to other categories of transgression which were not gender-specific. Once “dissimulation” was redefined as an inherently feminine vice, men who practiced deceit became, to paraphrase Amy Lang, “so many women” in the eyes of the evangelical church. This process of transference is most striking in the case of men who joined the Baptist church during the revivals of the early nineteenth century; as unreliable and suspect soldiers in the evangelical cause, recent converts (male and female alike) were more prone to be disciplined for sins that, the larger population of church members, devolved specifically on women.” (8)

45 ●

“The success of the Baptists in New England, however, overturned the position of women in the church from spiritual equal to disorderly female.” (223, Lindmann) ● “Once Baptists embraced the cause of liberty, “a fundamental renegotiation of gendered relations” occurred within the evangelical community; the church was defeminized in order to assume the masculine posture and identity necessary for participation in the Revolution.” (223, Lindmann) ● “Juster convincingly argues that Baptist support of the colonial revolt required integration into the existing political culture, that to attain legitimacy as political actors, Baptists had to discard their feminine religious ethos. Because of the association of femininity with dependency in the fight against tyranny, the evangelical community reconfigured itself by adopting the patriarchal models of the dominant society. This masculinization allowed Baptist men to assert patriarchal power over women in the church as female members and the feminized faith of the Baptists were sacrificed on the alter of freedom.” (224, Lind) ● “Early evangelicals, Juster points out, reveled in rejecting conventions. They rejected meeting houses for fields, schedules for spontaneous services, and hierarchy of age, training, or gender for equality of membership.” (907, Gelles) ● It is in the language of converts that Juster discovers the transformation of gender symbolism that signified the elevation of feminity and a new public role for women.” (907, Gelles) ● “Early evangelical conversion narratives show gender reversals, men using feminine language of community and women invoking the individualism of masculine discourse.” (907, Gelles) ● “In fact, she argues much of the evangelical experience was gendered feminine.” (907, Gelles) ● “The American Revolution came and the evangelical world changed along with the political. Men in the new churches had to choose whether to join the rebellion. That positive choice resulted in respectability, which they liked, and in liking it they decided to reform their ways to mirror the major culture. That meant abandoning the practices that had previously marginalized them, which included rejecting feminized qualities and the tolerance of female assertiveness. Conformity meant reinstating patriarchal conventions of silencing women’s speech and excluding their participation at a decision-making level.

In the end, only sin was feminized. The revolution was completed. Respectability was negotiated at the price of women’s religious equality.” (908, Gelles) Contribution: ​“Juster adds a new dimension to this growing scholarship by arguing that “the ‘gendering’ of evangelicalism” was a key component in the growth of the Baptist church, its successful integration into New England society, and its participation in Revolutionary politics. Gender as theory and practice was inextricably linked to “the democratization of evangelical religion” and to the evolution of American political culture.” (223, Lindmann) Connections: ​Ulrich, ​Good Wives, ​Brown, ​Good Wives, Nasty Wenches​, Godbeer, ​Sexual Revolution in Early America​, Mary Beth Norton, Staloff Richard Godbeer, ​Sexual Revolution in Early America​ (2002) Argument: ​Godbeer’s Thesis: “That conflict concerning sexual morality existed between orthodox Puritan leaders and ordinary New Englanders, both Puritan and not….He argues, “The sexual agenda contained within Puritan ideology remained nonetheless quixotic: it demanded of colonists not only an extraordinary degree of self-control but also strict observance of a sexual and marital protocol that ran counter to longstanding popular traditions, including and especially the widespread condoning of premarital sex.” (99, Soderlund) ● “Godbeer argues (as have others) that Americans did not conceptualize sexuality until the modern era, that early Americans viewed sex “not as a product of sexuality but as a component of spirituality, cultural identity, and social status.” (100, Soder) ● “Godbeer aims both to undermine arguments of present-day moral pundits that American society has experienced declension in sexual mores since the colonial period and to distinguish current notions of sexuality from the early American past.” (98, S) ● “The Puritans he describes value sexual pleasure to the point of considering sexual satisfaction a moral and legal obligation in marriage; Godbeer cites a number of lawsuits in which women accused their husbands of failing to provide “full content and satisfaction” in sexual relations.” (155, Bergland) ● “Godbeer makes it clear that, in New England as elsewhere, the disagreements were not between those who wanted to confine sex to marriage and those who advocated casual sex…rather, the dispute was over what precisely defined a marriage and therefore under what circumstances sex was legitimate. Older, popular sexual mores held that once a couple was committed to each other, regardless of whether an official ceremony or registration had taken place, sexual intercourse was licit and there is plenty of evidence that local communities concurred in this assessment….These mores allowed for more fluid beginnings and endings of marital relationships than most colonial leaders appreciated, and so reformers, Puritan and Anglican alike, sought to crack down on premarital fornication and informal marriage, as well as bigamy and serial monogamy.” (496, Spear) ● “Godbeer argues that ordinary colonists in New England and the Chesapeake may not have agreed with official harsh anti-sodomy rhetoric or, at least, they were willing to occasionally tolerate it among their neighbors.” (497, Spear) ● “Godbeer makes it clear that their tolerance [of sodomy] did not mean they approved of [the] behavior.” (497, Spear) ● “Godbeer argues that the rarity of sodomy prosecutions indicates popular tolerance in opposition to elite aversion, but when it comes to interracial sex, he suggests that popular opinion tended to concur with elite denunciations.” (498, Spear) ● “Physical attraction toward African and Indian women was offset by distaste for “black” and “tawney” skin color, which Englishmen associated with dirt, sin, and savagery.” (5)

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“Anglo-Americans did not believe that racial identity was fixed: “savages” could undergo physical and cultural “improvement” as a result of interacting, sexually and otherwise, with more “civilized” people. But racial mutability could operated in both diretions, so that English men and women might degenerate through contact with Indians and Africans.

Instead of “blanching” their partners, the English might themselves become “blackened.” (6) ● “And [this book] shows a fundamental shift in sexual culture during the eighteenth century away from an ethos rooted in organic conceptions of society and toward a more individualistic marketplace of sexual desire and fulfillment.” (10) ● “These developments correlated with the American Revolution in two distinct ways. On the one hand, young adults appropriated revolutionary rhetoric and its invocation of liberty to justify their insistence upon sexual independence. On the other, republican ideology stressed the need for moral virtue as the lifeblood of free institutions; that emphasis in polemical writings played a crucial role in shaping contemporary responses to increasing personal freedom. (15) Organization: ​“​Sexual Revolution in Early America consists of three parts: “Passionate Pilgrims,” “Sex and Civility,” and “The Sexual Revolution.” ● “In Part II, “Sex and Civility,” Godbeer focuses primarily on the eighteenth-century mainland South and Caribbean to describe sexual relations among Euro-Americans, between whites and Native Americans, and between whites and enslave Africans.”(99, Soderlund) “Part Two of ​Sexual Revolution​, “Sex and Civility,” moves from New England to the South (Virginia, the Carolinas, and the Caribbean). Rather than framing sexuality in terms of spirituality, Godbeer argues that colonists in the Chesapeake and Caribbean tended to think about sex in terms of ​civility​. Within the tripartite discourse of civility, each person can be located, first, by social status (civility as gentility), and third, by race (civility as white European civilization). (156 Bergland) ● “In Part III, “The Sexual Revolution,” Godbeer considers evolving sexual behavior during the eighteenth century, particularly the popularity in rural New England of bundling, by which couples got to know each other intimately by sleeping together, “at least partly clothed,” in their parents’ houses. He also describes evolving attitudes concerning the sexual nature of women, and the existence of a lively seaport culture in early national Philadelphia.” (99-100, Soderlund) “Godbeer argues that the relaxing of sexual prohibitions caused a great shift in the gendering of moral virtue. Since women were more likely to suffer the consequences of unintended pregnancy, there were good reasons for them to become the guardians of sexual purity within a culture where sexual activity had a wide range of meanings and implications for men and women of all classes and races.”

(158, Bergland) Sources: ​Secondary and primary journals, diaries, ads, literature, sermons, court records Connections:​ Ulrich, Norton, Brown, Juster, Shields.

Mary Beth Norton, “The Evolution of White Women’s Experience in Early America” ​AHR​ (1984) Argument: ​“For over fifty years one theme has dominated historians’ thinking about women in early America: the notion that colonial women were better off than either their English contemporaries or their nineteenth-century descendants.” (593) This “Golden Age” theory came about in the 1920s and unfortunately is still utilized by historians in the 1980s. Norton argues that instead women’s experiences in early America were far from being “golden,” and that women’s status did not decline as it went into the 19​th​ century. ● The paradigm that claims a decline in 19​th century women’s status rests on the idea that women’s economic function in society decreased. Norton argues that this is too simplistic. (595) ● By examining gender role definitions, the nature of the colonial economy, demographic patterns, religion, law, houshold organization, ideas and behavior brought over from the Old World, and the colonists’ attitudes toward themselves and their society, you get a good picture of how early American society defined women’s lives and status. (595) ● New Scholarship presents 3 chronological divisions that more accurately reflects women’s experiences: 1. Initial settlement period when American patterns of family and community were first established (1620-1660); 2. Period of transition where those patterns were entrenched and challenged (1660-1750); and 3. American Revolution changed women’s lives (1750-1815) ● The England the emigrants left behind developed the nuclear family concept where patriarchy was key—women deferred. ● Puritanism stressed the religious role of the paterfamilias and thereby sought to keep and enforce nuclear family norms. ● Women stood below their husbands in family hierarchy. They were to manage daily affairs of house and she could act on her husband’s behalf if he were away—deputy husbands discussed by Ulrich. ● Women’s experiences varied by region: in the Chesapeake women were often widowed and re-married multiple times. In New England women married usually once and were only widowed late in life, had lots of kids, and were subordinate to their man. ● New England women had a greater ability to become religious leaders-like Hutchinson—where the Chesapeake did not. ● Everywhere women’s status depended on her marital state: “In the Chesapeake no less than in New England, a woman was seen chiefly as an adjunct of her husband. Her social standing depended on her husband’s position in the colonial hierarchy; her primary role in family and community was as mistress of his household.” (600) ● Women in England probably spent as much time working for a wage outside of marriage as they spent time in a marriage.

American women did not have access to factories for wage labor and as a result of this and skewed gender balance, they spent more time in a marriage and more time working at the home for subsistence than English counterparts. ● By 1700 the sharp divergence in women’s demographic experiences ended in the colonies. ● Bequests to wives were made by husbands to give the wife income enough to keep them off the dole not financial indep.

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Not all women had the equipment to be subsistent. In some cases a wife with bread pans would trade bread for cheese with a wife who had cheese molds. ● Except in MA and CT some colonies accepted the fact that women could have their own separate, but restricted estates. ● All women responsible for child rearing. ● In PA, Quaker women were the key person linking church and family. Maternity had a public function in Quakerism. ● The first Great Awakening loosened the ties between women’s religious and familiar roles as religion was now personal ● After the Revolution patriarchy in the North began to crumble. In the South it began to take a firm foothold. ● After Revolution divorce was legalized. Changes like this occurred after the war because during the war women reassessed their own abilities as they took over for absent husbands and even participated actively in local politics. ● Republican motherhood gave rise to the cult of domesticity. Republican motherhood had two sides: “if one innovatively stressed the importance of women’s political role, the other conservatively emphasized the significance of their domestic role” Connections: ​Brown, Ulrich, Godbeer, Juster David S. Shields, ​Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America​ (1997) Argument: ​“Shields’s primary argument questions the role of Habermasian reason as the basis for the public sphere that emerged from private society. He argues that the institutions of this private society were founded instead on the pursuit of pleasure via the exercise of fellow feeling. Tavern companies, coffee-houses, tea tables, salons, dancing assemblies, routs, card parties, gentleman’s clubs and college fraternities, and their differing modes of pleasure, communication and interaction, are scrutinized in turn.” (735, Knott) ● “To summarize: this history recalls what various groups of person did in the name of civility to rearrange their conversation and behavior in British America. I concentrate on private societies and discursive institutions driving certain social and intellectual transformations because they most clearly show that something more was entailed than consent or dissent or custom in creating the public world” (xxi) ● “Rather I would argue that these communities—convecticles, reform societies, charitable groups, associations for the promotion of practical knowledge, political parties— constituted that domain of private society that Daniel Defoe called “projecting” societies, associations that prosecuted programs promoting the welfare of persons besides their memberships.”xvi ● “My particular concern is to bring to light the discursive practices that served as verbal glue for these communities of appetite and feeling.” Xvi ● “This is a study of the role of private society invoking civility in British America. It explores from a transatlantic perspective American cultural provinciality.” Xiv ● “By private society, I mean pretty much what Shaftesbury meant when he coined the term—groups formed outside the jurisdiction of the state so that people might share pleasures, promote projects, and fashion new ways of interacting.” Xiv ● “The proliferation of coffeehouses, clubs, salons, and tea tables made the consolidation of this special zone hard to ignore….They as much as any government, seemed requisites of civil order, for in them persons entered into a sense of communal identity and found a happiness in society.” Xiii-xiv ● “Shileds argues that the tavern, like all these various pleasure-based institutions, remained unchanged and flourishing through and after the Revolution, despite the charge of aristocratic luxury from radical republicans. (735, Knott) ● “Shileds’s learned book creates an archivally informed and balanced picture of eighteenth-century elite culture in Anglo-America. Examining the varying cultural effects of England’s literate discourse upon Anglo-American elites, Shilds contends that Anglo-Americans refigured themselves as participants in what, by 1725, came to be called the ​sensus communis​, a communal identity fostering socially secure relations in coffeehouses, taverns, and clubs.” (397, Mulford) ● “In the face of political squabbles and partisan business transactions, Shields argues, the ​sensus communis defined social actions within polite society by forcing members, either tacitly or by mutual compact, to exclude quotidian concerns from their “worlds” and to develop instead sociability and wit.” (397, Mulford) ● “Shields’s point is twofold: print media served a growing market interested in belletrism, but it also spurred wide intrest in private, sociable, and literate communications circulated via manuscripts intentionally outside the print marketplace.” (398, M) ● “The development of polite and cultivated society was one way colonists formed an American identity.” (2, Metz) ● “Shields argues that it was the gentry who sought to exert such power because “in the British American colonies, where no long-standing aristocracies commanded autocratic deference, social rules and rites [were needed] to assert their status and [were] central to their self-understanding” (141). Thus activities ranging from balls to card parties provided the social and discursive frame for the wealthy to assert and mark their power. (6, Metz) ● “Belles Letters (polite letters) enabled the transmission of a secularized, cosmopolitan genteel culture into 17​th and 18​th century North America. In belles lettres, an American would “come into being a proto-public of clubs, women’s tea tables and coffeehouses.” (Metz, Notes) ● “Imperial institutions and dependence on London and Parisian society waned after the revolution, but America’s main polite institutions remained as thriving as ever.” (Metz, Notes) ● “The Democratic-Republicans of the 1790s did attack these institutions as institutes of tyranny. Their failure reflected the failure on their part to recognize the place for leisure in society.” (314, Metz Notes)

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“Print culture and personal correspondence was so key to society and polite communication. Women were particularly active within these private correspondence arenas.” (Metz, Notes) Sources: ​literary texts, print culture, belles letters Connections:​ Breen’s ​Marketplace of Revolution​, Grasso’s ​A Speaking Aristocracy

T.H. Breen, ​The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence​ (2004) Argument: ​“Breen’s argument is that the coming of the American Revolution cannot be understood without a consideration of the scope, scale, and penetration of a prior consumer revolution, as Americans from the 1740s were drawn into the advancing juggernaut of British manufactured goods, a sensuous stream of textile, ceramic, glass, metal-wares, and printed goods that reached into virtually every American household. These goods—objects of desire and avenues of choice—revolutionized American life before the Revolution itself. They became a common ground of American identity, a materialized “imagined community,” that, Breen argues, determined the shape and trajectory of the evolving revolutionary mobilization.” (329, Brooke) ● “​The Marketplace Revolution argues, therefore, that the colonists’ shared experience as consumers provided them with the cultural resources needed to develop a bold new form of political precedent. In this unprecedented context, private decisions were interpreted as political acts; consumer choices communicated personal loyalties. Goods became the foundation of trust, for one’s willingness to sacrifice the pleasures of the market provided a remarkably visible and effective test of allegiance.” (xv-xvi) ● “Breen offers two important points. The consumption of British goods had appeared to become a “necessity of life” by the end of the French and Indian War….Furthermore, the market was the economic equivalent of the public sphere in which anyone with a shilling, as with a voice or a vote, could make his or (because women too were consumers) her presence felt by deciding whether to boycott British goods and begin using domestic equivalents.” (449, Pencak) ● “[Breen’s] analysis unites rather than divides the classes, or the cities and farms, behind common grievances and policies; whether issues dividing colonial society other than between patriots and loyalists mattered as much is another question too complex to discuss here.” (500, Pencak) ● “Neither political pamphlets nor class grievance, [Breen] argues, begin to explain the breadth and depth of American mobilization against British authority. Rather, it was the alchemy of individual desire and self-denial in the marketplace, developing in waves between 1765 and 1774 and shared in some manner by a wide cross-section of white colonials, which established the popular ground for mobilization and resulting national identity.” (330, Brooke) ● “Breen posits that the central problem of the imperial crisis was the process by which large numbers of ordinary colonials were mobilized behind the evolving resistance movement. From this democratic frame of reference, the Stamp Act period recedes in importance, while the long and inconclusive resistance to the Townsend duties, continuous with the Tea Act crisis, become the center of attention.” (332-333, Brooke) ● “Rather than leaving non-importation to groups of merchants in secret meetings—merchants who were refusing to cooperate—the resistance movement asked ordinary individuals to sign agreements again importation and began to compile lists of violators of these agreements. Thus starting in 1767, not 1765, “private decisions in the consumer marketplace came to be widely reinterpreted as acts meriting close public scrutiny” and “a shared hostility to their dependency on Britain for the key articles of the good life provided the ligaments for political union in the years to follow” (pp. 235, 238). By 1773, when colonists constructed “bonfires of tea,” and 1774, when the Articles of Association mandated a continent-wide signing of commitments against both importation and consumption, private habits had been linked to public affairs through a setting aside of the objects of empire.” (334, Brooke) ● “Why not simply call consumer virtue a form of republican virtue, which assumes a disinterested self-sacrifice in the common good? Because, Breen argues, republican virtue “assumed that one owned a great landed estate or could bring an unsullied independent judgment to civic debate.” (264)…Breen hues to an exceptionally narrow and confined view of republicanism, and one that the ordinary people of revolutionary America would have rejected….Republicanism in the broadest sense, meant a sacrifice of self-interest in the public interest.” (337, Brooke) Organization: ​the book is divided into two parts, one describing the eighteenth-century “empire of goods” and the other the political and cultural dynamics of the non-importation movements between 1765 and 1775.

Sources: ​Estate inventories, newspapers, government papers, journals, sermons, secondary sources Views: ​I do not like the way Breen discounts the ideological origins of the American Revolution and places them in the material world Connections:​ Bailyn’s ​Ideological Origins,​ Wood’s, ​Radicalism,​ Shield’s ​Civil Toungues​, Grasso’s ​Speaking Aristocracy.

Christopher Grasso, ​A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut​ (1999) Argument: ​“​A Speaking Aristocracy explores the ways that learned men tried to shape the broader culture of eighteenth-century New England as the style, content, and social matrix of intellectual life and public communications evolved…As cultural authority was reconstituted in the Revolutionary era, knowledge reconceived in the age of Enlightenment, and the means of communication radically altered by the proliferation of print, speakers and writers began to describe themselves and their world in new ways. To ground these

49 sweeping changes in a local context and in individual experience, this book focuses on the intellectual culture of Yale College and the world of public speech, writing, and print in eighteenth-century CT.” (2) ● “[Grasso] poses three goals at the outset: to define the relationship between written and spoken texts and their cultural and political contexts and to examine how “the social role of the learned man” was constituted in discursive practice and in a reciprocal dialectic with evolving conceptions of moral order.” (204, Brooke) ● New England was slow to develop a polite society. Once it developed clubs were created to promote it and school embraced public speaking and the polite arts because they represented true education. Educational snobbery kept NE behind polite society but once the transition to it was complete they led the way. ● “Grasso asks, “What knowledge had the most social value? How might ideas best be communicated to the public?” To answer these and related questions about the relations of language and rhetoric to power, he uses case studies==one central figure to each chapter—to explore how “publication and speeches shaped—and were shaped in—their cultural and rhetorical contexts,” “how participation in public discourse helped constitute the social role of the learned man,” and “how ideas about moreal order these speakers and writers described changed over time.” (212, Gura) ● “Even on matters unrelated to religious instruction, to address the public was to assume an authoritative voice usually reserved for the elite. Men of wealth, family connections, and military experience could command attention when they spoke at town meetings; their sons, who displayed their logic, Latin, and elocution at college commencements, showed by their speaking and writing that they were distinguished from their neighbors and prepared to be leaders in church and state. Those among the educated elite who were licensed to preach joined an order of men specifically charged to address the public. Ministers were the primary public speakers and writers in every colonial New England town’s little aristocracy of elite men.” (3) ● “After mid-century, however, newspapers, essays, and eventually lay orations began to compete with sermons for public attention, introducing new rhetorical strategies to persuade or instruct an audience. Political ideologies stressing citizen virtue and civil liberty reformulated the language of public debate. Lawyers challenged the clergy’s dominance in intellectual life.

Learned me with the Enlightenment’s faith in progress and practical knowledge encouraged a scientific attitude. Writers in the Revolutionary era cultivated literary sensibility by publishing satirical verse and epic poetry.” (4) ● “Public speech and writing, understood in the early eighteenth century as the words of the authoritative few ​to people, came to be understood by many in the Revolutionary era as the civic conversation ​of​ the people.” (4) ● “The changes in both the content and the form of public writing and speaking were connected to the reconstruction of the social role of the learned man and the realignment of those institutions—church, state, and college—sustaining the elite. These changes reveal reorientations of values, reconfigurations of ideas about God and man, self and society, religion and politics, knowledge, and power.” (4) ● “’Discourse’ refers to a category of sources that includes a wide range of writings. The term also implies how those writings will be approached: to read sources as discourse, Terry Eagleton has written, is to see speaking and writing as “forms of activity inseparable from the wider social relations between writers and readers, orators and audiences, and largely unintelligible outside the social purposes and conditions in which they were embedded.”” (6) ● “​A Speaking Aristocracy focuses primarily, but not exclusively, upon ​public discourse. In general, this means speech or writing explicitly or implicitly addressed to what Edwards had simply called the “multitude.” Public discourse makes claims on the attention of its broadly defined audience by purporting to address general concerns.” (7) ● “The sample is limited partly by design and partly by the facts of publication and public speaking in the eighteenth century.

The primary producers of public speech and writing in southern New England were educated Anglo-American males.” (8) ● “The partisan nature of this political enthusiasm developed as New Englanders increasingly imagined themselves affiliated with national or even international political communities and felt compelled to exhibit these new political identities to their neighbors. The Connecticut press helped draw attention to national and foreign affairs. As the proceedings of the British Parliament and the French National Convention filled local papers, some men quickly and publicly recoiled from the radical turn taken by the French Revolution and old friends like Thomas Paine in 1793; others, like those in New London who celebrated French success in January 1794 with cannons, flags, and bells, continued to proclaim their support for French republicanism and the universal brotherhood of man.” (466) ● Federalists wanted to limit public discourse to elite, learned men and the Jeffersonians wanted to open the discourse to the larger public. ● “Christopher Grasso explores the transformation of public discourse in eighteenth-century Connecticut. Focusing on the public careers of several learned men who graduated from Yale College—Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Clap, Jared Eliot, Ezra Stiles, John Trumbull, and Timothy Dwight—Grass traces the profound changes that reshaped civic culture between 1700 and the creation of the new republic.” (205, Brekus) Organization: ​the book is separated into three sections which are roughly analogous to the (1) Great Awakening, (2) the Enlightenment, and (3) the Revolution.

Sources: ​Sermons, newspapers, speech transcripts, journals and papers of 4 elite men.

Connections: ​Shield’s ​Civil Tongues, Staloff’s ​Making of an American Thinking Class​, Bailyn’s ​Ideological Origins​, Wood’s Radicalism​, Breen’s ​Marketplace of Revolution

50 Jon Butler, “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretative Fiction​ ​JAH​ (1982) Argument: The Great Awakening was not the major, watershed event that many scholars portray it to be. “In the main, then, the revivals of religion in eighteenth-century America emerge as nearly perfect mirrors of a regionalized, provincial society. They arose erratically in different times and places across a century from the 1690s down to the time of the Revolution.” (324) ● “Virtually all texts treat the Great Awakening as a major watershed in the maturation of pre-Revolutionary American society.

The Great Republic​ terms the Awakening “the greatest event in the history of religion in eighteenth-century America.” 306 ● “The result is that the general character of the Great Awakening lacks sustained, comprehensive study even while it benefits from thorough local examinations.” 307 ● “Historians should abandon the term “the Great Awakening” because it distorts the character of eighteenth-century American religious life and misinterprets its relationship to pre-Revolutionary American society and politics.” 322 ● “First, with one exception, the pre-Revolutionary revivals should be understood primarily as regional events that occurred in only half the colonies…Second, the pre-revolutionary revivals occurred in the colonial backwaters of Western society where they were part of a long-term pattern of erratic movements for spiritual renewal and revival that had long characterized Western Christianity and Protestantism since its birth two centuries earlier…Third, the revivals had modest effects on colonial religion…Fourth, the link between the revivals and the American Revolution is virtually non-existent.” 322-324 ● Contemporaries never termed the movement “The Great Awakening.” ● “How do historian describe “the Great Awakening”? Three points seem especially common. First, all but a few describe it as a Calvinist religious revival in which converts acknowledged their sinfulness without expecting salvation...Second, historians emphasize the breadth and suddenness of the Awakening and frequently employ hurricane metaphors to reinforce the point…Third, most historians argue that this spiritual hurricane affected all facets of pre-Revolutionary society.” 308-309 ● “No one would seriously question the existence of “the Great Awakening” if historians only described it as a short-lived Calvinist revival in New England during the early 1740s.” 309 ● “Yet Calvinism never dominated the eighteenth-century religious revivals homogenized under the label “the Great Awakening.” The revivals in the middle colonies flowed from especially disparate and international sources.” 309 ● “The Great Awakening” also is difficult to date. Seldom has an “event” of such magnitude had such amorphous beginnings and endings...Establishing the beginning of the revivals has proved more difficult, however. Most historians settle for the year 1740 because it marks Whitefield’s first appearance in New England.” 310 ● “Yet revivals in Virginia, the site of the most sustained such events in the southern colonies, did not emerge in significant numbers until the 1750s and did not peak until the 1760s. At the same time, they also continued into the revolutionary and early national periods in ways that make them difficult to separate from their predecessors.” 310 ● “Yet even if one, were to argue that “the Great Awakening” persisted through most of the eighteenth century, it is obvious that revivals “swept” only some of the mainland colonies. They occurred in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Virginia with some frequency at least at some points between 1740 and 1770. But New Hampshire, Maryland, and Georgia witnessed few revivals in the same years, and revivals were only occasionally important in New York, Delaware, North Carolina, and South Carolina.” 310 ● “The revivals democratized relations between ministers and the laity only in minimal ways…the laity followed rather than led.” 314 ● “Itinerants usually bypassed the local church only when its minister opposed them; when the minister was hospitable the itinerants preached in the church building.” 315 ● “Instead, [revivals] appear to have arisen when three circumstances were present—internal demands for renewal in different international Christian communities, charismatic preachers, and special, often unique, local circumstances that made communities receptive to elevated religious rhetoric.” 323 Sources: ​Sermons, journals, papers, secondary sources Connections:​ Lambert’s ​Inventing​, Butler’s ​Awash,​ Issac’s “Evangelical Revolt,” and Juster’s ​Disorderly Women Jon Butler, ​Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People​ (1990) Argument: ​“This book is an attempt to open up the discussion of the first three centuries of the American religious experience by reconstructing a more complex religious past, one the reflects processes of growth and development far removed from a traditional “Puritan” interpretation of America’s religious origins.” 2 ● “[This book] proposes that we attach less importance to Puritanism as the major force in shaping religion in America and more importance to the religious eclecticism that has long been prominent.” 2 ● “[This book] suggests that the eighteenth century may have left a far more indelible impression on the American religious tradition than did the seventeenth century. It offers an explanation for why so few people went to church on the eve of the American Revolution and why more attended on the eve of the Civil War. It attempts to determine the importance of the quasi-Christian or non-Christian religious beliefs about magic and the occult. It stresses the role of authority and coercion in advancing Christianity in America. It explores beliefs in divine intervention as a persistent theme in American religious history.” 2

51 ●

“[This book] argues that a rising Christianity directly shaped the colonies’ system of slavery and, in combination with slavery, created an African spiritual holocaust in America. It describes the widening range of spiritual alternatives that turned Antebellum America into a unique spiritual hothouse, even as organized religious expression of all kinds, including Christianity, appears to have been losing ground in Europe.” 2 ● “Finally, [this book] argues that quite contrary to Cotton Mather’s well-known (and well-justified) fears, the story of religion in America after 1700 is one of Christian ascension rather than declension—Christianization rather than dechristianization—and of a Christianity so complex and heterogeneous as to baffle observers and adherents alike.” 2 ● “In the period from 1680 to 1760, according to Butler, a major religious revolution occurred. The European pattern of state churches was renewed in America, the landscape was sacralized, and even dissenters established elaborate denominational institutions.” (940, Stein) ● “Butler’s account of early American religion removes New England from center stage and reintroduces a significant role for the Church of England.” (940, Stein) Sources:​ sermons, journals, newspapers, books, church records, secondary sources.

Connections: ​Butler’s “Enthusiasm Described and Decried,” Lambert’s ​Inventing,​ Juster ​Disorderly Women

Rhys Isaac, “Evangelical Revolt: The Nature of the Baptists’ Challenge to the Traditional Order in Virginia, 1765 to 1775” WMQ ​(July, 1974) Argument: From 1765 to 1775 the Baptist revivals infiltrated and threatened gentile Virginia society over time. Middle and lower class men and women were attracted to the Baptist movement because of their egalitarian way of life. There was still a hierarchy among the sexes but the non-formally educated men were given opportunity as well as women to voice their opinions and shape society. Towards the end of 1775 more and more gentile folks joined the Baptist movement, but not enough to really change society. ● “The gentry style, of which we have seen glimpses in the confrontation with Baptists, is best understood in relation to the concept of honor—the proving of prowess.” (348) ● “An ideal identification of parish and community had been expressed in the law making persistent absence from church punishable. The continuance of this ideal is indicated by the fact that prosecutions under the law occurred right up to the time of the Revolution. (349) ● “the front pew of a King and Queen County church were allocated to the gentry, but the pressure for place and precedence was such that only the greatest dignitaries could be accommodated together with their families; lesser gentlemen represented the honor of their houses in single places while their wives were seated farther back.” (350) ● “The ruling gentry, who set the tone in this society, lived scattered across broad counties in the midst of concentrations of slaves that often amounted to black villages. Clearly the great houses that they erected in these settings were important statements; they expressed a style, they asserted a claim to dominance. The lavish entertainments, often lasting days, which were held in these houses performed equally important social functions in maintaining this claim, and in establishing communication and control within the elite itself.” (351) ● “The importance of pastime as a channel of communication, and even as a bond, between the ranks of a society such as this can hardly be too much stressed. People were drawn together by occasions such as horse races, cockfights, and dancing as by no other, because here men would become “known” to each other—“known” in the ways which the culture defined as “real.” Skill and daring in that violent duel, the “quarter race”; coolness in the “deep play” of the betting that necessarily went with racing, cockfighting, and cards—these were means whereby Virginia males could prove themselves.” (352) ● “Entrance into [the Baptist] community was attained by the relation of a personal experience of profound importance to the candidates, who would certainly be heard with respect, however humble their station. There was a community resonance for deep feelings, since, despite their sober face to the outside world, the Baptists encouraged in their religious practice a sharing of emotion to an extent far beyond that which would elicit crushing ridicule in gentry-oriented society.” ● “The warm supportive relationship that fellowship in faith and experience could engender appears to have played an important part in the spread of the movement.” 354 ● “The number of preachers who were raised from obscurity to play an epic role in Virginia in their day is a clear indication of the opportunities for fulfillment that the movement opened up to men who would have found no other avenue for public achievement. There is no reason to doubt that contemporary reputation of the early Virginia Baptist movement as one of the poor and unlearned. Only isolated converts were made among the gentry, but many among the slaves.” 355 ● “The tight cohesive brotherhood of the Baptists must be understood as an explicit rejection of the formalism of traditional community organization.” 355

52 ●

“That Baptists were drawing away increasing numbers from the dominant to the insurgent culture was radical enough, but the implication of solemnity, austerity, and stern sobriety were more radical still, for they called into question the validity—indeed the propriety—of the occasions and modes of display and association so important to maintaining the bonds of Virginia’s geographically diffuse society.” 358 ● “The Baptists did not make a bid for control of the political system—still less did they seek a leveling or redistribution of worldly wealth. It was clearly a mark of strength of gentry hegemony and of the rigidities of social hierarchy with slavery at its base that the evangelical revolt should have been so closely restricted in scope. Yet the Baptists’ salvaationism and sabbatarianism effectively redefined morality and human relationships’ their church leaders and organization established new and more popular foci of authority and sought to impose a radically different and more inclusive model for the maintenance of order in society. Within the context of the traditional monistic, face-to-face, deferential society such a regrouping necessarily constituted a powerful challenge.” 363 ● “The Revolution ultimately enshrined religious pluralism as a fundamental principle in Virginia. It rendered illegitimate the assumptions concerning the nature of community religious corporateness that underlay aggressive defense against the Baptists. It legitimated new forms of conflict, so that by the end of the century the popular evangelists were able to counterattack and symbolize social revolution in many localities by having the Episcopal Church’s lands and even communion plate sold at auction….The diametrical opposition of the swelling British movement to traditional mores shows it to have been indeed a radical social revolt, indicative of real strains within society.” 368 Sources:​ Journals, newspapers, church records, secondary sources.

Connections: Butler’s ​Awash​, Butler’s “Enthusiasm,” Shield’s ​Civil Tongues​, Grasso’s ​Speaking​, Lambert’s ​Inventing​, Juster’s Disorderly

Frank Lambert, ​Inventing the “Great Awakening”​ (1999) Argument: ​Frank Lambert asserts, “The Great Awakening was an invention” (6). He argues in ​Inventing the Great Awakening that “colonial revivalists themselves constructed the…idea of a coherent, intercolonial revival” (6), and that it was created and promoted largely through print sources like Edwards’s ​A Faithful Narrative and a plethora of newspaper and journal “propaganda” such as Christian History​, and a handful of persuasive ministers on both sides of the Atlantic (201) (Metz) ● “Limiting his discussion largely to the years between 1735 and 1750, Lambert stresses the “regional and intercolonial” character of the New England, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey revivals; their deliberately “sequenced invention” that spanned both sides of the Atlantic; and the revivals’ “contested” character as well as their status as “part of the colonial cultural war.”

(1661,Butler) ● “Lambert tales up the middle ground. He argues that evangelicals invented diverse yet coordinated intercolonial revivals in New England, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania between 1735 and 1750. These revivals upset the standing order wherever they appeared, drenched the colonial press in a war of words, and brought evangelicalism and its revivals center stage in rapidly expanding colonies.” (1661, Butler) ● “While conceding Butler’s point that the titanic struggle to define revivalism’s meaning occurred in the eighteenth century, not in the nineteenth century as Butler’s followers have maintained. While unalloyed use of the phrase “the Great Awakening” technically did not occur until 1842 (a century after the revivals), Lambert’s larger point is that ​what was written about is more important than ​what it was called.​” (643, Olivas) ● “By focusing on rhetoric surrounding promotion of the 1740s revivals, Lambert offers new insights into how the Awakening transformed religious practice and public discourse about it.” (643, Olivas) ● “The notion of the Great Awakening, Lambert contends, was not a retrospective interpretive fiction. It was a cultural invention of the mid-eighteenth-century awakeners themselves. Lambert builds on this fine earlier study of George Whitefield to examine how, through publicity efforts and an expanding print culture, revivalists promoted the perception that local awakenings were part of a connected intercolonial, even transatlantic, movement. In the process, revivalists created an “imagined community” of believers. Lambert argues, invoking a line of analysis that has become something of an interpretative workhorse in newspaper accounts, and, above all, revival narratives to dissolve denominational and geographical boundaries separating awakeners and to advance their “cultural construction” of a Great Awakening.” (441, Conforti) ● “Lambert resists suggesting that anti-revivalists created their own imagine community.” (441, Conforti) ● “revivalists saw unity in awakening occurring in diverse communities separated from each other by great distances. They witnessed the same Spirit at work, the same sudden outburst of awakening the same rapid spread of the revival, and the same effects on people.” (4) ● “This study makes an argument similar to those of Butler and Conforti: the colonial “great awakening” was an invention. But it differs by contending that colonial revivalists themselves constructed the Great Awakening—not the term, but the idea of a

53 coherent, intercolonial revival. It explores how American evangelicals expected, perceived, promoted, explained, and debated the revival. It traces the process of invention from small, scattered local “great awakenings” beginning in the Connecticut and Raritan Valleys in the mid-1730s to the interconnected revivals of the 1740s known to contemporaries as “the remarkable Revival of Religion” and to most historians as the Great Awakening. (6) ● “The Great Awakening, then, is also about contestation, a sustained, intensive struggle over meaning that may be termed an early American cultural war. The exchange reflected the colonies’ great social and ethnic diversity and religious pluralism as the revival exacerbated deep divisions and sparked acrimonious debate.” (10) Organization: Three Parts: 1. Context of Great Awakening—its players, where it occurred, and how people perceived it. 2. Places revivals in larger transatlantic context. 3. Feuds between revivalists and anti-revivalists who contended that the awakening was not the cause of divine spirit.

Sources:​ ​Journals, sermons, newspapers, books, secondary sources Connections: ​Butler’s “Enthusiasm Described and Decried,” Butler’s ​Awash​, Isaac’s “Evangelical Revolt,” Juster’s ​Disorderly Women​, ​Grasso’s ​SpeakingAristocracy,​ Shield’s ​Civil Tongues​, Staloff’s ​Making of an American Thinking Class Cathy Matson, ​Merchants and Empire: Trading in Colonial New York​ (1998) Argument: ​“Maton’s book is framed by its own Big Question…were the merchants of colonial New York mercantilists or free traders?

In particular, she wonders whether “lesser merchants support[ed] the commercial goals…that are closely identified with the commercial elite and political authority?” (5) But her most general answer is to suggest that England’s mercantilist policies usually benefited, and were most consistently supported by, the city’s most prominent traders, who dominated the trans-Atlantic trade. Lesser traders, whose livelihoods were much more closely tied, according to Matson, to the coastal and West Indies trades and to regional marketing, were more likely to argue for free trade. These arguments generally failed, since the “came from the lesser merchants, who were most vulnerable in trade and least empowered in politics.” (7) (650-651, Hinderaker) ● “In their attempts to rise, Matson argues, lesser merchants chafed against mercantile regulations that restricted their opportunities. They came to be identified “not only with the West Indies and coastal trades, but with smuggling and dissent” (91). Matson stresses that this identification was exaggerated, but that it nevertheless demonstrates the extent to which the distinction between middling and great merchants had taken root in the minds of New Yorkers. (652, Hinderaker) ● Book traces New York trade from founding of New Amsterdam through the French and Indian War. ● “Matson’s agenda is two-fold: to describe the economic experience of New York’s merchants and to focus on the relationships between their activities and status and the patterns of their economic thought.” (642, Hancock) ● “This study takes a longer view of the colony’s international commerce, from the time of its founding, through its middle decades, and into the imperial crisis that culminated in the American Revolution, hoping thereby to gain a better understanding of the unfolding of New York City’s trade, the development of its merchant community, the fluctuations and intermittent crises of its economy, and the extended time-frame in which many merchants’ careers unfolded.” 2-3 ● “Moreover, although the legacy of economic freedom continued to appeal to New Yorkers after the conquest in 1664, and efforts to eliminate commercial restraints surfaced frequently well into the eighteenth century, they proved difficult to sustain, And the reason for these failures is easy to find: most calls for one or another form of economic freedom came from the lesser merchants, who were most vulnerable in trade and least empowered in politics.” 7 ● “Lesser merchants were less directly connected to English credit and English laws through their trade, and they had little to cushion them against adversity; consequently, they argued for commercial freedoms that would enhance their opportunities closer to New York, and were likely to pursue those freedoms illegally when government policies worked against them.”74-75 ● “Until 1713, the official definition of “free trade” held that the rights of merchants to transport goods in wartime were defined by the neutrality of commodities rather than the destination port or registration of the ship. Thereafter, the ability to transport goods freely depended upon the status of the vessel’s owners and port of origin; goods transported on enemy vessels were no longer neutral, but “infected,” which enabled privateers to plunder foreign competitors on the high seas when other risks were low.” 127 ● Large merchants proved successful because “their successes were linked firmly to owning large ships; concentrating certain goods and London credit in few hands; selling at city auctions; and the privileges of personal banking, marine insurance, markets for bills of exchange, and government loans.” 149 ● Middling merchants encouraged staple production in countryside. Matson stresses imports and exports ● There was no unified voice on trade restrictions—it depended on individuals and what was being restricted ● She proves that the politics, actions, and thoughts of large merchants should not be taken for the actions, politics of all. ● It was believed that English factors used NYC as a dumping ground for luxury items that colonists could not afford. 171 Organization: ​2 parts: Matson points out the success of the Dutch free trade system for all merchants, and how this success made it necessary for England to impose mercantilism as imperial policy because the Dutch way provided such appeal even after New Amsterdam’s conquest in 1664, particularly among the lesser merchants (7). She also examines here why lesser merchants were adamant in their trade with the West Indies, a phenomenon she argues stems from their lack of status through marriage and credit and their inability to handle large quantities of unprocessed goods from the mother country (89). Part Two deals with “Encounters with Imperial Maturity,” and looks at the change in New York’s sphere of commerce in the eighteenth century British imperial system. Here

54 Matson identifies the widening gulf between large wholesalers and lesser merchants as a result of material success, as well as the disagreements within the small scale merchants over the appropriate strategies for expanding and protesting trade, an early and informal “political economy” that she admitted that she did not expect to find (122, 317).

Sources: ​journals, merchant records, and census data, shipping logs, secondary sources Connections: ​Breen’s ​Marketplace of Revolution​, Vicker’s “Comeptency and Competition” Daniel Vickers, “Competency and Competition: Economic Culture in Early America” ​WMQ ​(January, 1990) Argument: ​“This article argues that the aspiration to comfortable independence, or competency, accompanied English families to America and infused the economic culture of free working people from the period of settlement down to the beginnings of industrialization. It suggests that the obsession with competency troubled early Americans far more than worries about legitimacy of commerce. And it tried to explain how this superficially benign ideal was, in fact, the source of deep social tensions that English and American people managed only with difficulty to control.” 4 ● “To express a degree of well-being that was both desirable and morally legitimate, early modern Englishmen often chose the term competency.” 3 ● “The ideal of competency nevertheless had a broad constituency within the producing ranks of society, and a vast range of behavior spoke to its importance. It inspired working people to engage in petty commerce, structure inheritance practices to maintain family farms intact, claim perquisites at harvest, and even riot when their customary rights to common land were threatened.” 4 ● “The point here is simply that commercial exchange was not only necessary but patently attractive for a family that was simultaneously involved in supplying most of its own needs.” 7 ● “Those who argue for the importance of this ethic usually depend on evidence that comes from well into the nineteenth century, or they call by sel-sufficiency what is really the rather different notion of independence. In Caleb’s time, the latter meant the possession of sufficient property and skill to ensure free access to the means of production. Families that were able to deal with others from an independent perch, in the knowledge that they were not bargaining away the privilege of managing their won working lives, regarded the act of buying and selling in a healthy light.” 7 ● Stresses values as determining regional economy and purchasing power. ● Competency is about taking satisfaction in work and achieving a certain level of comfort and maintaining a certain level of control over the mode of production. Farmers wanted to stay clear of debt and yet still participate in the market. ● Vicker’s model does not work for elite merchants, southern planters, Benjamin Franklin, nor the unfree, works for 20% of pop ● Vicker’s approach helps with understanding the early New England economy from the family farm economies. It connects yeomen with capitalism. ● Vicker’s can explain Matson by relating his work to the hinterland.

Connections: ​Breen’s ​Marketplace of Revolution,​ ​Matson’s ​Merchants and Empire John McCusker & Russell Menard, ​The Economy of British America, 1607-1789​ (1991) pages 1-88 Argument: ​This work sets out to nudge the study of the British American economic history along in many directions. “Our purpose, then, is to set down what we think is the best current understanding of the colonial economy. We will arrange our discussion along lines suggested by the staples approach.” 11 ● “The domain of economic history encompasses any past process, event, or issue that can be illuminated by economic theory….We have adopted....to focus on the production and distribution of wealth.” 7 ● “The economy of British America grew impressively in the century and a half before 1775, if only because population grew so fast. Some argue that that is the whole story, that the principal task of early American economic history is to account for the rapid growth of population and settled area, gains achieved without major changes in the organization of the economy, in per capita income, or in the distribution of wealth.” 9 The Staples Approach: ​The staples approach can be briefly summarized. Initially, colonies are characterized by small domestic markets, limited supplies of labor and capital, and abundant natural resources. Given this combination, colonists can maximize income by producing resource-intensive goods for an external market. The result is a simple exchange system in which colonists ship staples to a metropolis in exchange for manufactured good and additional supplies of labor and capital with which to further exploit colonial resources. Such a strategy leads to regional specialization within colonies, with the particulars determined by the interaction of local resources and metropolitan demand. Specialization in turn leads to gains in productivity and income.” 26 The Malthusian Approach: “​The Malthusian, or frontier, approach locates the central dynamic of early American history in internal demographic processes that account for the principal characteristics of the colonial economy: the rapid, extensive growth of population, of settled area, and of aggregate output combined with an absence of major structural change.” 18 ● “Almost the entirety of colonial life was linked with overseas trade. The colonists wanted goods imported from abroad; to buy them they had to produce goods for which an export market existed abroad.” 10 ● “The central assertion of the staples thesis is that expansion of a staple export determines the rate of economic growth in “new countries” or “regions of settlement.” A small (at first virtually nonexistent) domestic market, abundant resources, and shortages of labor and capital give the colony a strong comparative advantage in the production of resource-intensive

55 commodities, or staples, for export. In such a region, the process of economic growth is twofold: expansion of export sectior and diversification around the export base.” 20 ● “The [staples] theory assumes a two-region world and an economy combining labor, capital, management, and natural resources to produce staples, services, and manufactured goods. The first region, the metropolis, is a mature, developed, initially self-contained economy that produces all the goods and services consumed by its inhabitants….The second region, the colony, is initially unpopulated and therefore without capital, management, or labor, but it possesses abundant natural resources. Colonization can be understood as the movement of labor, management, and capital from the metropolis to the colony in order to exploit the untapped resources.” 21 ● “The principle concern of the staples theory is the relationship between exports and domestic development; although it argues that foreign trade is the proper starting point for analysis, it need not lead to an emphasis on one sector to the exclusion of others.” 27 The Mercantilist Paradigm: ​“It is helpful to define the mercantilist paradigm in modern terms. Balance-of-payments accounting establishes three categories within which international exchanges can take place: the current account; the capital account; and the bullion account. The first of these, the current account, measures the value of goods and services exchanged in a year….The bullion account would have measured the movement of gold and silver bars or in coin.” 36-37 ● “In balance-of-payments accounting, imports on the current account create debits and exports earn credits. The same is true of the bullion account. In contrast, exported capital is accounted a debit, while the dividends such investments earn are credits.

In theory during a specific accounting period and in practice over the long haul, a nation’s credits and debits must balance: both must total to the same sum. Any imbalance in one account—an excess of debits over credits—has to be made up by transfers registered in one or both of the other two accounts. Thus, as early seventeenth-century English mercantilists appreciated, a debit in the balance of trade might well require the export of gold and silver to even things out. Ideally, according to mercantilists, a nation should so order its international trade as to ensure a net gain in the bullion account.” 37 ● “Traditional emphasis on the negative aspects of the Navigation Acts has blinded many to something that the colonists themselves quickly appreciated: the elimination of the Dutch from the trade of the empire, especially after the conquest of New Netherland in 1664, created numerous opportunities for colonial merchants…” 50 ● “Any farmer who produced more than he and his family needed and sold the surplus, even just a hogshead of tobacco or a barrel of flaxseed, was not fully insulated from market fluctuations. And all colonists, of course, felt the influence of the market when they purchased something produced outside their immediate region.” 66 Connections: ​Breen, ​Marketplace of Revolution,​ Matson, ​Merchants and Empire​, Vickers “Competency,” Dunn,“Servants and Slaves” Richard S. Dunn, “Servants and Slaves: The Recruitment and Employment of Labor” in Pole and Green ed ​Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era​ (1984) Argument: “I will define a colonial laborer as any person who performed manual labor, with or without wages, for a head of household: a slave, a servant, an apprentice, a wage laborer, or a dependent family worker. This definition ​excludes a great many colonial manual workers: self-employed small farmers and craftsmen, because they were independent producers; tenant farmers.

Because they were semi-independent producers; and members of the armed forces, because they were employed by the state rather than by individual entrepreneurs….I will consider the recruitment of servants and laves from England, Ireland, Germany and Africa.” 158 ● “Estimate[s] suggests that about half of the whites who came to the colonies from Britain and continental Europe during the colonial period arrived as servants.” 159 ● “In the seventeenth century most servants came from England. They were bound for terms of varying length [7-10 years].”159 ● Thus, despite the Caribbean conversion to slave labor and the beginnings of a parallel conversion to slaver in the southern mainland colonies, the overall American demand for indentured servants may not have been contracted greatly in the late seventeenth century. But the supply pattern did shift: after 1680 the servants came chiefly from Ireland and Germany, not from England.” 160 ● “English servants “were drawn from the middling classes: farmers and skilled workers, the productive groups in England’s working population…Horn characterizes the seventeenth-century emigrating servants as “a representative cross section of the ordinary working men and women of England.” In these lists few servants describe themselves as from the gentry or trained in a profession; many of them described themselves as yeomen, husbandmen, or artisans; a small number described themselves as laborers; about half had no stated occupation. The current view is that these anonymous servants were younger and less skilled than the others. Furthermore, an additional cadre of emigrant laborers did not appear on English servant lists because they came over without signing indentures in England.” 161 ● “English servant laborers emigrated to America not because they wanted to but because they had to. Push was more important than pull. The combination of hard times at home and labor demand in the colonies facilitated by a well-organized servant trade in the chief English port towns, drew thousands of people who knew little or nothing of the Chesapeake or the Caribbean into emigration abroad. Only such a pattern can explain why English laborers flocked in great numbers to Virginia and Barbados at a time when disease, mortality rates, and agricultural working conditions were so disadvantageous to newcomers.”

56 ●

Colonists turned from servant to slave labor for economic reasons as cost, profit and productivity. They also switched for social reasons, Englishmen were Eurocentric and they considered America for the white people so they left little advancement for slaves and lots of advancement for whites.” 166 ● “Mortality rates on the Middle Passage declined very markedly over time. In the 1680s, when a Royal African Company trader could buy a slave in Africa for about one-fifth of his selling price in America, 23 percent of these slaves died during the Atlantic crossing. By the 1790s a slave in Africa cost close to half of his selling price in America. High mortality would now erase all profit, and accordingly the death rate on the passage to Jamaica fell to below profit, and accordingly the death rate on the passage to Jamaica fell to below 6 percent.” 168 ● “Beginning in 1719 English felons convicted of minor crimes could be transported to the colonies as laborers on seven-year terms, while felons convicted of major crimes were to serve fourteen years.” 170 ● “German redemptioners, came in family groups and sometimes in large neighborhood or community groups…The Germans who migrated to America appear to have been in better shape than most of the other immigrant laborers…two thirds of the people who landed in Philadelphia paid their own way or were able to finance the trip through the sale of goods in Pennsylvania or through loans. The remaining third were the redemptioners, or contract workers, who sold their own or their children’s labor in order to cover the cost of the Atlantic passage.” 171 ● “In sum, the chief common feature among the nearly two million bound workers recruited from Europe and Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the they came to America under duress.” 172 ● 4 different types of labor systems developed in colonies, Caribbean, Southern [does not divide south], mid-Atlantic, and New England. Caribbean and South had slavery, Mid-Atlantic relied on servants and unskilled paid laborers in urban areas, and New England relied on familial assistance through children. 172-188 Connections: ​Vicker’s “Competency,” Vicker’s “Working the Fields.” McCusker & Menard, ​The Economy​, all slave books, Nash, Urban Woody Holton, ​Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves & the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia​ (1999) Argument: “the thesis of this book has been that the Independence movement was also powerfully influenced by British merchants and by three groups that today would be called grassroots: Indians, farmers, and slaves.” 206 ● “despite all the differences among Indians, British merchants, smallholders, slaves, and gentlemen, they had two important traits in common. The first was a dream of freedom, and the second was a belief that they stood a better chance of achieving their goals if they banded together with others of like mind.” 212 ● “The relationship between two classes was often powerfully influenced by the actions of a third. This argument parallels my overall thesis: that the bilateral relationship between British politicians and Virginia gentlemen was powerfully influenced by various third parties. For example, Native Americans were (indirectly) able to close the bluegrass region to Virginia land speculators—but not to settlers.” 213-214 ● “This work has focused on the ways in which Native Americans, British merchants, debtors (at all wealth levels), and enslaved Virginians indirectly and unintentionally helped to bring on the American Revolution.” 214 ● “In the struggle between Virginia gentlemen and British merchants, the House of Delegates, no longer constrained by an imperial administration determined to protect British slave traders’ profits, forever abolished the importation of foreign slaves into Virginia.” 215 ● “The gentry and smallholder classes were united by their mutual interest in growing tobacco and in controlling slaves and women.” Xvi ● “That particular web of influences helping to push Virginia into the War of Independence is the subject of this work.” 3 factors pushed VA into Independence: 1. Indians, slaves, and British merchants contested VA gentlemen’s influence in imperial policy. Eliminating a government that supported merchants, slaves, and Indians was a bonus. 2. Virginians loved the commercial boycott because it allowed them to impel Parliament to repeal laws considered oppressive by white Americans and reduce Virginian debt to British merchants. 3. The boycott adopted by the Continental Congress in 1774 shaped the Virginian economy and offered opportunities to enslaved Virginians while putting the crunch on small farmers who in turn challenged the authority of the provincial gentry and led the gentry to turn their 1774 protests into the Independence movement of 1776. Xvii-xviii ● “The virtue of this persuasive study is that it helps us to see the various sources of the anxiety that beset the Virginia gentry in the revolutionary era and, in so doing, helps us to see the roles of other people who have not otherwise been so prominent in the historical record. In an oversimplified sense, one could read this book as a case study of Carl Becker’s classic distinction between “home rule” and “who should rule at home.” (1015, Nobles) ● “Holton discerns a different set of threats facing the planter elite. Here Indians were not just a passive presence west of the Alleghenies; they were savvy political actors whose diplomatic skills influenced the outcome of British policy and, therefore, colonial response. Similarly, slaves were not just sources of labor and symbols of status; they were politically aware people whose acts of resistance revealed and understanding of how to use the revolutionary unrest for their own purposes. And even many white smallholders did not immediately or unthinkingly follow the lead of the gentry in the early stages of the

57 Revolution: they resisted or refused to join economic boycotts of the British, rioted against rents and privileges for officers in minuteman units, and rejected elected leaders they deemed insufficiently republican in principle.” (1015, Nobles) Organization: ​“This book is divided into four parts that follow a chronological and thematic narrative. Holton begins with two chapters on Virginians’ grievances against the British Empire in which he portrays a colonial culture riven below the surface between the gentry and yeoman tobacco farmers….Part two constitutes the analytical center of the book with chapters on nonimportation and nonexportation. These political struggles over trade effaced the latent conflicts between the gentry and yeomen, because planters and farmers recognized their shared interests in blocking British merchants’ attempts to collect debts….Part three traces the unintended consequences of the independence movement. Holton retells the well-known story of Lord Dunmore’s attempt to really enslaved Virginians against independence, as well as the less famous story of Dunmore’s effort to spur a pan-Indian alliance….In post revolutionary Virginia, small farmers and religious dissenters gained freedom and influence, but they won them at the expense of Indians and enslaved Virginians. In Holton’s nicely turned phrase, “It is not sufficient to say….that slaves and Indians were denied the fruits of Independence. To a large extent…slaves and Indians…were the fruits of Independence.” (211)” (1297-1298, Sidbury) ● “[Holton’s work] portrays the coming of the Revolution in Virginia as deeply bound up with competing social groups—planters, farmers, Indians, slaves, and British merchants—all of whom pursued their own interests.”1298, Sidbury ● “This ides that the “founders” did not seek independence out of high-minded concern for political rights and liberties is a revival of progressive historians’ characterization of the Revolution as “a conflict over both home rule and who would rule at home.” Thus Holton takes issue with Bernard Bailyn’s now-classic argument that the Revolution “was above all else an ideological, constitutional, political struggle, and not primarily a controversy between social groups undertaken to force change in the organization of the society or the economy.”” Herndon Sources: ​Holton has a narrow scope which causes him to take literally the top-down sources to tell a bottom-up history.

Connections: ​Bailyn, ​Ideological Origins​ and “Central Themes,” Nash, ​Urban Crucible​, Gross, ​Minutemen​, Brown, ​Good Wives Robert A. Gross, ​The Minutemen and their World​ (1976) Argument: ​“Many writers have told Concord’s story. For the most part, theirs have been tales of great events and great men—of the “embattled farmers” and the distinguished writers who have brought fame to the town. This book takes a different approach. It examines how the citizens fared the land, raised their families, and carried on their politics at the end of the colonial period. Within this setting, it then asks what brought them to the bridge, and it shows how the peculiar tensions and social patterns of the town shaped both its response to revolution and what men did on April 19. Finally, it traces the townspeople through the Revolution and the war into the new republic and links the world of the Minutemen to that of Emerson and Thoreau. In this way, the Minutemen emerge as real people, with hopes and fears, ambitions and doubts, ideals, and interests.” Xv-xvi ● “For most Americans today, the Revolution seems distant, arcane, and dull because for so long it has been treated as a forensic debate over abstract principles by impossibly pure men in funny clothes. Gross renders that revolution more real, compelling, and important by connecting its philosophical principles to the experiences of ordinary people struggling with the human universals of birth, adolescence, labor, poverty, pride, sickness, and death.” Xi-xii ● Work is a New Social History. ● “When the Crown replaced the elected town council with a Crown-appointed body, the people of Concord joined the rebels.

Almost overnight, their politics changed. They became a dominant voice in the Committee of Correspondence, organized companies of minutemen, and became the Continental Congress’s center for stockpiling arms and ammunition.” 331. Bly ● “While sons began leaving home sooner, daughters of the town like Lucy Hosmer, began assuming control over their bodies [by marrying suitors of their choice by becoming pregnant out of wedlock], usurping the authority of their fathers who arranged their marriages. Taken in this light, Gross intimates that the Coercive Acts were profoundly significant in Concord because it attacked the last cornerstone of the town’s diminishing Puritan tradition.” 331, Bly ● “One of the major contribution of the family studies which are part of the new social history rests in their attention to kinship.

This concern follows from the belief that kinship networks and family affairs constituted the normative realities of agrarian life in the western world. So it was in Concord, where behind almost every political issue, every militia turnout, even where minutemen stood on the fateful April day, one discerns competing family alliances….But let none think that homogeneity implied social equality, for when it came to supplying troops for continental service after 1778, the town sent its landless younger sons, blacks, and hired hands.” 405, Waters ● “Signs of decline were everywhere [in Concord]: in falling property values, in worn-out land, unsold inventory, and increased vagabonds, in an exodus of the young who stood to inherit insufficient land to support themselves, and in decreased parental authority over children. With all this, the loss of the single political institution the mattered—the very basis of freedom, the town meeting—was, Gross suggests, the final blow, the last straw, the ultimate push toward independence.” 531 ● “Threats to one’s home: is that what drove Concordians to rebellion? Its sounds too simple. But when the fighting moved away, townspeople grumbled about supporting the war. When their own property was no longer endangered, independence became someone else’s battle.” 531, Twombly ● “[Gross] concludes, for example, that sectional, religious, and class factions were united during the independence movement; that Concord’s intensely parochial politics opened to outside influences; that the Revolution was a conservative effort to recapture the pre-1774 status quo; and that its immediate political, economic, and social consequences were minimal.” 532

58 Sources:​ sermons, death records, birth records, baptisms, church records, tax lists, inventories, letters, journals, maps, account books Connections: Holton, ​Forced Founders, Bailyn​, Ideological Origins​, Brown, ​Good Wives​, Ulrich, ​Good Wives, Nash, ​Urban​, Bushman, ​King and People Steven Watts, ​The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America​,​ 1790-1820​ (1987) Argument: ​“Evidence suggests that the decades from 1790 to 1820 encompassed a massive, multifaceted transformation away from republican traditions and toward modern liberal capitalism in America…This study proposes that the War of 1812—both as fantasy and reality—played a crucial role in this crystallizing process by energizing and validating larger liberalizing impulses in early nineteenth-century America…I contend that a particular social group—middle-and upper-class elites, most of them articulate writers and speakers, who were important members of the post-1800 Jeffersonian Republican majority—took the lead both in advancing liberal ideals and in sanctifying them in war.” Xviii ● “This study offers an overarching theoretical framework that reintegrates fragments of experience from this age of profound change. It shows that a liberal revolution in the early republic, and the important role played by war in that process, comprised a long first step in the creation of modern, industrial America.” Xvii-xviii ● “​The Republic Reborn ​examines the emergence not so much of capitalism itself as the “culture of capitalism”: those complex and ambivalent ways in which impulses toward self-interest entered public discourse to be challenged, modified, and eventually legitimated as the moral basis for marketplace practice.” Xxii ● “Americans stubbornly retained many premodern economic and social traditions until late in the eighteenth century. These included a “household system” of economic production, commodity exchange often revolving around “use-value” rather than cash, and a “moral economy” based on task-oriented work and a social valuation of economic endeavor. Moreover, social relations for the most part remained in the mold of “paternalism.” 7 ● “The commercial growth, geographic expansion, and challenges to traditional authority that had begun to appear in the mid-1700s gained unstoppable force after the War for Independence.” 7 ● “With rapid commercial expansion, the pervasive “household economy” began to lose its grip under pressure from “intraregional markets” spreading into the countryside from growing urban areas….So Americans not only overturned the moral economy and household system of colonial tradition, but also began to replace the social notion of paternalism with a new sense of competitive individualism. In other words, the development of America after the Revolution involved the consolidation of a market economy ​and​ a market society. Bother are necessary for the existence of liberal capitalism.” 8-9 ● “The scramble for wealth and status in a liberalizing society seemed to be raising a social ethic of dishonesty—or so it seemed to concerned viewers of economic speculation and business scams in the America of the early nineteenth century. 72 ● “Social inequality and friction had existed before 1790, of course, but republican deference and the community model of traditional colonial society had worked to deflect and discourage resentment. But with the scramble for wealth becoming a sanctioned social norm, and with competition raising the specter of chaos, many observers feared that emerging social factions would destroy the new republic.” 74-75 ● “Thus war beckoned as the perfect vehicle for revitalizing America’s weakened will. By 1810 growing numbers of Republicans were eager to plunge into conflict. They savored the prospect of Americans rousing from their commercial lethargy to face the bracing winds of war. Such desires for revitalization inspired portraits of war as intense, galvanizing activity, and images of renewal abounded in pro-war discussion.” 105 ● “By relaxing the tension between dreams and disquietude for the self-made individual, purging him of guilt, and regenerating him, the War of 1812 comprised a long step toward assuring the hegemony of liberal society in America.” 107 ● “Hard work and material comfort, Christian morality and steady habits, willful energy and sensual restraint—all began to congeal into a creed of bourgeois virtues that became the cultural foundation for middle-class America in the nineteenth century.” 119 ● “That decades of peace since the Revolution had created in America “an inordinate love of money, the rage of party spirit, and a willingness to endure even slavery itself rather than bear pecuniary deprivations or brave manly hazards.” Thus Rush presented war not only as a defense of American rights but also as a regenerating cure for commercial depression.” 162 ● To guarantee the Republic’s survival, Republicans promulgated public improvement schemes and mandatory education. 218 ● “Thus by declaring war in 1812 many Jeffersonians hoped that America’s republican government would draw badly needed energy from her dynamically growing society and economy.” 269 ● “Yet war fulfilled neither Jeffersonian hopes of ecstatic regeneration nor Federalist fears of cataclysm….the second war with Great Britain had a profound impact on American life. As scholars have noticed since the nineteenth century, the end of the clash seemed to inaugurate a new phase in the brief history of the United States. Historians of Jeffersonian American traditionally have associated the “successful” English conflict with post-1815 acceleration of economic development, government centralization, and nationalist fervor.” In essence Jeffersonians were no longer hostile or indifferent to roads, banks, funded debt, and nationality. 276 ● “Watts is able to argue that their views emerged from personal attempts to resolve inner doubts over the disparity between the austere prescriptions of republicanism and the reality of their personal lives. The war promised them—and, by extension, the nation at larges—a release from guilt, an opportunity to demonstrate the kind of courageous self-sacrifices that the founding

59 fathers had shown, and a means of validating liberal political and economic behavior. The successful conclusion of the war brought a great emotional purgation and established a new political economy, liberal republicanism, in a “hegemonic” position within American culture.” 526, Anderson Sources: ​Journals, newspapers, literature, government documents, pamphlets, congressional debates and speeches Connections: Sylvia R. Frey, ​Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age​ (1991) Argument: ​“Although the black liberation movement did not achieve its revolutionary goals, it did exert deep pressure on the slave system, which required energetic response of adjustment in the postwar period. The postwar period seemed to me to be a time of transition from an older prewar world of values and structures to a new, objectively different situation, which provided the framework for the subsequent development of a mature plantation society. In attempting to understand the direction and dynamics of change, I singled out three spheres of life in which the transformations seemed especially significant—the economy, the law, and religion.” 4 ● “Two central themes emerged: a black liberation movement was central to the revolutionary struggle in the South, and the failure of the movement did not dissipate the black revolutionary potential, which reemerged in the postwar period as a struggle for cultural power.”4 ● “For over thirty years Benjamin Quarles’ ​The Negro in the American Revolution (1960) has remained the standard account of black participation in the War for Independence. Quarles’s detailed achievement culminated black historians’ efforts to remind other scholars of the African-American contributions in America’s wars. In tightly argued chapters, Quarles revived the forgotten history of Black Patriots and Loyalists, propounded the effect of revolutionary rhetoric on slaves, and outlined the development of a black postrevolutionary consciousness.” 157, Hodges ● “Sylvia Frey’s massive study offers the first book-length extension on Quarles’s work. Rather than refute Quarles, she extends and amplifies his arguments and evidence.” 157, Hodges ● “Frey employs three major strategies. First, the book begins and concludes with powerful, synthetic discussion on southern African-American life in the ear of the American Revolution….Second, eschewing a general approach, Frey concentrates on economic, legal, and religious factors within an unfolding military experience in specific regions…Third, although she acknowledges Peter Wood’s concept that the revolution was a triangular war between Patriot, Tory, and black, Frey’s study emphasizes the dynamic relationship of black and British.” 158, Hodges ● “Frey’s carefully drawn introduction places slave resistance and rebellion within the economic and political crisis of the old colonial empire and the emergence of a new republican order in the Americas between 1760 and 1790.” 158, Hodges ● “Large slaveholding provided the bedrock upon which each plantation system was built.” 9 ● “The rituals of death provide evidence of the persistence of traditional religious concepts and practices [among African slaves]….The continuation of relevant traditional concepts and practices thus satisfied individual psychological needs and helped to create and to sustain a sense of community. 42 ● “Although historians have tended to view the war in the South in military terms as a bipolarity, in fact it was a complex triangular process involving two sets of white belligerents and approximately four hundred thousand slaves.” 45 ● “Sctual or potential resistance was a main factor in the development of Britain’s southern strategy. Influenced in party by slaves’ combative and aggressive behavior, British military leaders and Crown officials seized upon the idea of intimidating independence-minded white southerners with the threat of a slave rising without, however, actually inciting one. In the end the British strategy of manipulating conflict between the races became a rallying cry for white southern unity and impelled the South toward independence...To that extent, the American Revolution in the South was a war about slavery, if not a war over slavery.” 45 ● “Although most slaves were probably aware of Britain’s role as the world’s leading slave-trading nation, they quite correctly perceived that their best chances for freedom lay with a British victory, or at least with the disruption of the existing social order Resorting to patterns of resistance inherited from their African past, some slaves deserted to form maroon communities; some attempted to forge large-scale rebellion; most fled to British forces in the South. As much as any other single factor, their readiness to enter into open rebellion created the dynamic for revolution in the South…The revolutionary war in the South thus became a war about slavery, if not a war over slavery.” 326 ● “The paternalistic those southern evangelical leaders helped to formulate was eagerly embraced by slaveholding society.

Disseminated by the courts and such institutions of cultural formation as churches and schools, it became a principal instrument for the reassertion of slaveholders’ hegemony over their slaves.” 327 ● “Black southerners emerged from the Revolution with a deeper sense of strength and of kind, with a greater awareness of the universality of the black struggle, and a more viable political consciousness.” 328 ● “The establishment of separate black churches throughout the South was a radical departure from anything that had gone before. By refusing to accept discrimination in the biracial churches, African-American Christians implicitly rejected the hierarchal structure of white Protestantism and, by implication, the notion of white supremacy upon which it rested.” 328 ● “Ultimately, of course, white southerners realized that such subversive behavior raised a direct challenge to white cultural hegemony and posed a threat to the structure of white southern society and so they acted to quash it. By then Afro-Christianity had a distinct and rooted life.” 328

60 ●

“In the end, by insisting upon blacks’ common humanity and their equal endowment with moral if not political power, southern blacks, slave and free, raised the most effective challenge to the ideological structures that sustained the slave system.” 329 ● “Although the mass of southern slaves were illiterate, there is every reason period of history when written communication was still hindered by undependable mail service and a paucity of printers and publishers.” 50 ● “The slave community had, moreover, the means to maintain a vital oral tradition. The close physical proximity and the communality, which had disappeared among the white upper classes by the late eighteenth century, continued in a modified form among poor whites and slaves, most of whom lived in communal quarters of ten or more people.” 50 ● Slaves judged the war in terms of whether it was beneficial to escape, be loyal to owners or to the British. Slaves stuck between a rock and a hard place in terms of loyalty. A promise of freedom from the British was no guarantee.

Sources: ​military records, journals, diaries, census, secondary sources Connections:​ Nash, ​Urban​ and “Social Change…”

Bernard Bailyn, “ “The Central Themes of the American Revolution.” In ​Faces of Revolution​ (1990) Argument: American resistance in the 1760s and 1770s was a response to acts of imperial power deemed arbitrary, degrading, and uncontrollable—a response that was inflamed to the point of explosion by ideological currents generating fears everywhere in America that irresponsible and self-seeking adventurers—what the twentieth century would call political gangsters—had gained the power of the British government and were turning first to the colonies.” 208 ● For Bailyn Whig ideology is the important ideology. Bailyn’s ideas are not new—he is not an advocate of the Radical Revolution, but he does acknowledge some of the radical aspects. ● Bailyn argues that the Revolution was natural and if England had not been making taxation decisions that helped serve as catalysts, some other issue would have ignited it. ● “We know now that the great classic texts of the Enlightenment, while they formed the deep background and gave a general coloration to the liberal beliefs of the time, were not the immediate sources of the ideas, fears, and beliefs that directly shaped Americans’ responses to particular events or guided the specific reforms they undertook, nor were they perceived in the American colonies in quite the same way they were perceived elsewhere.” 202 ● “The starting point was the struggle between king and Commons in the early seventeenth century, which secured the rule of law and the principle of the consent of the governed expressed through representative institutions as necessities for legitimate governance. But though these principles remained fundamental in the pattern of British liberal thought and though the seventeenth-century ideas of consent, individual rights, and parliamentary privilege were drawn on repeatedly in the eighteenth century by colonial assemblies seeking the legislative autonomy enjoyed by the House of Commons, they were overlaid with an array of new conceptions and concerns that took shape later in the seventeenth century, in the years surrounding the Exclusion Crisis, 1679 to 1681.” 203 ● “And everywhere in this late-seventeenth-century world of ideas there was fear—dear that a free condition of life, the preservation of personal rights against the power of the state, was a precarious thing, ever beset by power-hungry, corrupt enemies who would destroy it.” 204 ● “And they were distinct, finally in their heightened emphasis on the dangers of corruption—the corruption of massed wealth, the corruption of luxury, the corruption of indolence and moral obtuseness, all of which threatened to destroy the free British constitution and the rights it protected.” 205 ● “The sanctity of private property and the benefits of commercial expansion, within customary boundaries, were simply assumed—the Revolution was fought in part to protect the individual’s right to private property—nor were acquisitiveness, the preservation of private possessions, and reasonable economic development believed to be in necessary conflict with the civic rectitude that free, republican governments required to survive.” 206 ● “But both are resolvable into the concept of “ideology,” which draws formal discourse into maps of reality—shifting patterns of values, attitudes, hopes, fears, and opinions through which people perceive the world and by which they are led to impose themselves upon it.” 206 ● “The colonists—habituated to respond vigorously to acts of arbitrary rule; convinced that the existence of liberty was precarious even in the loosely governed provinces of the British American world; more uncertain than ever of what the intricate shufflings in the distant corridors of power in England portended; and ever fearful that England’s growing corruption would destroy its capacity to resist the aggressions of ruthless power seekers—saw behind the actions of the ministry not merely misgovernment and not merely insensitivity to the reality of life in the British overseas provinces but a deliberate design to destroy the constitutional safeguards of liberty.” 207 ● “The outbreak of the Revolution was not the result of social discontent, or of economic disturbances in the colonies, or of rising misery. Nor was there a transformation of mob behavior or of the lives of the inarticulate in the pre-Revolutionary years that accounts for the disruption of Anglo-American politics. The rebellion took place in a basically prosperous, if temporarily disordered economy and in communities whose effective social distances, for freemen, remained narrow enough and whose mobility, social and spatial, however it may have slowed from earlier days, was still high enough to absorb most group discontents.” 207

61 Connections: ​Nash, ​Urban Crucible, ​Nash, “Social Change and the Growth of Pre-Revolutionary Urban Radicalism.”

Gary Nash, “Social Change and the Growth of Prerevolutionary Urban Radicalism,” in Alfred Young ed. ​The American Revolution​ (1974) Argument: ​“One of the purposes of this essay is to challenge these widely accepted notions that the “predicament of poverty” was unknown in colonial America, that the conditions of everyday life among “the inarticulate” had not changed in ways that led toward a revolutionary predisposition, and that “social discontent,” “economic disturbances,” and “social strains” can generally be ignored in searching for the roots of the Revolution. I do not suggest that we replace an ideological construction with a mechanistic economic interpretation, but argue that a popular ideology, affected by rapidly changing economic conditions in American cities, dynamically interacted with the more abstract Whig ideology borrowed from England.” 6 ● “The gist of the ideological interpretation of the Revolution is that colonists, inheriting a tradition of protest against arbitrary rule, is that colonists, inheriting a tradition of protest against arbitrary rule, became convinced in the years after 1763 that the English government meant to impose in America “not merely misgovernment and not merely insensitivity to the reality of life in the British overseas provinces but a deliberate design to destroy the constitutional safeguards of liberty, which only concerted resistance—violent resistance if necessary—could only effectively oppose.” 5 ● “To understand how this popular ideology swelled into revolutionary commitment within the middle and lower ranks of colonial society, we must first comprehend how the material conditions of life were changing for city dwellers during the colonial period and how people at different levels of society were affected by these alteration.” 7 ● “Understanding that the cities were becoming centers of frustrated ambition, propertylessness, genuine distress for those in the lower strata, and stagnating fortunes for many in the middle class makes comprehensible much of the violence, protest, and impassioned rhetoric that occurred in the half-generation before the colonial challenge to British regulations began in 1764.”11 ● “This developing [class] consciousness and political sophistication of ordinary city dwellers came rapidly to fruition in the early 1760s and thereafter played a major role in the advent of the Revolution.”11 ● “Bostonians of meager means learned that though concerted action, the powerless could become powerful, if only for the moment. Wealthy merchants who would not listen to please from the community could be forced through collective action to subordinate profits to the public need.” 11 ● “Although the land bank movement failed in 1720, it was out of this defeat that the Boston Caucus, the polical organization designed to mobilize the middle-and lower-class electorate in the decades to come, arose.” 12 ● “The Land Bank controversy from 1740 to 1742 further inflamed a wide segment of Boston society. Most of the colony, including Boston, favored a land bank which would relieve the economic distress of the period by issuing more paper money and thus continuing the inflationist policies of the last twenty years. In opposition stood a group of Boston merchants, who “had railed against the evils of paper money” for years and now “damned the Bank as merely a more invidious form of the soft money pancea typically favored by the provinces’ poor and unsuccessful.” 15 ● “In the end, the Land Bank movement was thwarted. The defeat was not lightly accepted or quickly forgotten by debtors and Bostonians of modest means.” 16 ● “But the willingness of broad segments of urban society to participate in attacks on narrowly concentrated wealth and power—both at the polls where the poor and propertyless were excluded, and in the streets where everyone, including women, apprentices, indentured servants, and slaves, could engage in action—should remind us that a rising tide of class antagonism and political consciousness, paralleling important economic changes, was a distinguishing feature of the cities at the end of the colonial period.” 18 ● “That no full-fledged radical ideology emerged in the decade before the Revolution should not surprise us, for this was a preindustrial society in which no proletariat yet existed. Instead, we can best understand the long movement of protest against concentrated wealth and power, building powerfully as social and economic conditions changed in the cities, as a reflection of the disillusionment of laborers, artisans, and many middle-class city dwellers against a system that no longer delivered equitable rewards to the industrious.” 30 ● “But the absence of clearly identifiable class consciousness and of organized prolitarian radicalism does not mean that a radical ideology, nurtured within the matrix of preindustrial values and modes of thought, failed to emerge during the Revolution.”30 Connections: ​Nash, ​Urban​, Bailyn, ​Ideological and “Central Themes,” Greene, ​Pursuit of Happiness, Butler​, Becoming​, Bushman, King and People Bernard Bailyn, ​Ideological Origins of the American Revolution​ (1967) Argument: ​“The central theme of Professor Bailyn’s interpretation remains the idea which he twice quotes from John Adams, that: “The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775…​This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution.” Bailyn continues to focus on “the years of crisis from 1763 to 1776,” when he says a “view of the world and America’s place in it only partially seen before” was clarified and consolidated, “fused into a comprehensive view, unique in its moral and intellectual appeal.” 578, Brown

62 ●

“By tracing the arguments of Bolingbroke as well as “commonwealthmen,” Bailyn has succeeded in connecting colonial opinion more closely to English “country” views than previously.” 578, Brown ● “Yet the burden of Bailyn’s new argument is that “the configuration of attitudes and ideas that would constitute the Revolutionary ideology was present a half-century before there was an actual Revolution…So he concludes, “there was no sharp break between a placid pre-Revolutionary era and the turmoil of the 1760’s and 1770’s.” 579, Brown ● “Indeed if Bailyn is correct in describing the “Revolutionary” ideology as fully formed in the 1730’s, then the impression he conveys is that the experience of the Revolutionary period served to extend this system of ideas, not transform it. The revolutionary change was not the fusion of partially recognized ideas into an ideology; that was already complete. Rather, it was the extension of this ideology to greater numbers of people who stretched it to its logical conclusions in applying it to immediate political questions.” 579, Brown ● “the category ​dissenting thought to include all ​opposition thought and argues that both opposition thinkers and mainstream thinkers were proud of “the liberty-preserving constitution of Britain” and “agreed on the moral qualities necessary to preserve a free government.” The crucial distinction between them was that the latter “spoke mainly with pride of the constitutional and political achievements of Georgian England,” while the former viewed contemporary Britain “with alarm, ‘stressed the dangers to England’s ancient heritage and the loss of pristine virtue,’ studied the processes of decay, and dwelt endlessly on the evidences of corruption they saw about them and the dark future these malignant signs portended.” 210, Greene ● Pamphlets were a very important tool to spread Revolutionary ideology. Pamphlet writers often cited Roman Republicans and English philosophers like Locke to support their point, even if they misinterpreted the philosophers; the citations lent credence to work, only Locke’s ideas were fully understood in the colonies. 30 ● American pamphlets amateurish compared with English pamphlets—in America writing was a hobby not a profession. ● Americans “sought to convince their opponents, not, like the English pamphleteers of the eighteenth century, to annihilate them.” 18-19 ● “What was essentially involved in the American Revolution was not the disruption of society, with all the fear, despair, and hatred that that entails, but the realization, the comprehension and fulfillment, of the inheritance of liberty and of what was taken to be America’s destiny in the context of world history.” 19 ● 3 Phases of Revolutionary writing: 1. Period up to and 1776, 2. 1776-1780 and devising of state governments, 3.

Reconsideration of state governments and consideration of how to form the national government—post 1780. 21 ● “The common law was manifestly influential in shaping the awareness of the Revolutionary generation…English law—as authority, as legitimizing precedent, as embodied principle, and as the framework of historical understanding—stood side by side with Enlightenment rationalism in the minds of the Revolutionary generation.” 31 ● Puritan ideology made people see that America was settled by Britons and by God for ultimate aims. Puritans wanted to shake off old customs and worked hard to improve themselves—ideology that became shared throughout the colonies.32 ● “The ultimate origins of this distinctive ideological strain lay in the radical social and political thought of the English Civil War and of the Commonwealth period; but its permanent form had been acquired at the turn of the seventeenth century and in the early eighteenth century, in the writings of a group of prolific opposition theorists, “country” politicians and publicists.” 34 ● “The colonists identified themselves with these seventeenth-century heroes of liberty [Sidney, Neville, Milton, Tenchard, Gordon, Bolingbroke]; but they felt closer to the early eighteenth0century writers who modified and enlarged this earlier body of ideas, fused it into a whole with other, contemporary strains of thought, and above all, applied it to the problems of eighteenth-century English politics.” 35 ● Opposition thought pamphlets were devoured in the colonies. 43 ● Colonists believed in government reform. “Everywhere, they agreed, there was corruption—corruption technically, in the adroit manipulation of Parliament by a power-hungry ministry, and corruption generally, in the self-indulgence, effeminizing luxury, and gluttonous pursuit of gain of a generation sunk in new and unaccustomed wealth. If nothing were done to stop the growth of these evils, England would follow so many other nations into tyranny from which there would be no recovery.” 51 ● Liberty was the worry and concern of the governed, power was as natural as liberty but far more dangerous because the nature of man makes power corrupt. Liberty rests on a system of check and balances between the government and the people. 59-65 ● The colonists bought into a conspiracy theory against liberty, corruption abounded in different scenarios—Hutch/Oliver/judges for life/ taxes without consent, etc.—the colonies were to be the microcosm of what would happen to English liberty—especially once the Coercive Acts were passed. 95 ● 50 years before Independence the colonists had been thinking about liberty and the decline of England, and what their roles as inheritors of liberty would mean. 144 ● The colonists made change by studying traditional concepts and shaping them to their desired fit. The experience transformed America and helped transform Europe. 161 ● Ideas of representation, liberty all go back to earlier precedents from medieval Europe. 163 Views: Bailyn is promulgating the idea of a conservative revolution. The only revolutionary thing they did was get rid of the monarch.

All their ideas on liberty and representation came from medieval and ancient ideas. They did think about those ideas and drafted them into state and national constitutions that fit their specific needs.

Sources:​ Primary sources of pamphlets, books, newspapers.

63 Connections:​ Bushman, ​King and People, ​Bailyn, “Central Themes,” Nash,​ Urban Edward Countryman, ​The American Revolution​ (1985) Argument: ​“Countryman’s thesis is that New York experienced a “real” revolution—that is, a social as well as a political one—precipitated in part by growing disharmonies between “power wielders and people.” These came to full expression during the Revolution, and by 1790 had transformed and democratized New York’s political society and institutions. In 300 densely written pages Countryman explores social relationships, political behavior, and factional divisions in the legislatures, counties, towns, streets, and fields of New York between 1760 and 1790.” 335, Bonomi ● “The progressive interpretation of the American Revolution…has always been on a version of class conflict that may explain more about American history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than in the eighteenth century.”14, Middlekauff ● [Countryman’s scholarship] “makes use of much of the social history of the Revolution written in the last generation. But it belongs in the progressive line, though its progressivism is muted, and its controlling themes quietly stated, if forcefully phrased. What sets it off from progressive history is its emphasis on people.” 15, Middlekauff ● “The people who really attract [Countryman] are the sort that did not seem to count for much in the scales of power—women, slaves, and artisans for example. In the old progressive histories the agents of change waged the good fight largely in the political arena.” 15, Middlekauff ● “Out of this disorder, he says, came new coalitions of the formerly powerless who combine and align themselves in such a manner as to change in lasting ways political life in America.” 16, Middlekauff ● “Countryman’s technique is to reconstruct events that probably affected their lives and then to speculate on what they might have observed or saw or felt. None of this is illegitimate, and much of it is illuminating. But it is worth noting that Countryman’s perceptions, though always restrained and thoughtful, are not based on much evidence.” 16, Middlekauff ● “[Countryman’s] major interpretive line is that a split or conflict in American society shaped much of the Revolution. The split was between what he calls “corporatism” and “individualism.” The first was on the banner of the “people”; the second ethic of the “elite,” especially merchants, planters, and certain political leaders. The division took form virtually everywhere in America. Corporatism implied commitment to a large sense of the public interest, and in part embodied the ideas about virtue and public spirit of the radical Whig tradition.” 17, Middlekauff ● “Yet, it is clear that he believes that the 1780s were a period of peril for America and that the disposition for significant constitution change was powerful. He is also convinced that what went on in the Federal Convention did not always conform to the best of revolutionary standards.” 17, Middlekauff ● [Those historians working on J. Franklin Jameson’s suggestion that] “the American Revolution had authentic social content.

Looking beyond the front ranks of the revolutionary leaders, they have brought to the fore ordinary men and women, soldiers, sailors, housewives, and shoemakers, and have tried to examine more closely the connections between ideology and social action.” 335, Bonomi ● “One major challenge to the idea of the American Revolution really was revolutionary is that id did not destroy slavery, as the Revolution in France supposedly did. The challenge is wrong-headed, and not just because slavery did not actually end in France’s American possessions until 1848. In 1760 slavery was a fact of life in many parts of the world.” Xix ● “Unless we appreciate these issues of space, identity, power, economics, and contradiction, we cannot appreciate what all the people of the revolutionary era lived through. We cannot understand what they lost or what they achieved.” Xxii ● “”Colonial America” included every part of the western hemisphere that felt the impact of Europeans. Even if we leave aside the Pacific Coast, Central America, and South America, colonial America was huge.” 5 (Alan Taylor-esque) ● “Colonials used the term ​empire to describe their relationship with England. They thought of empire in terms of shared glory, rather than in the modern sense of an underdeveloped periphery that is subordinate to a self-defined metropolis of core. In theory, at least, the relationship was reciprocal and equal, but in fact it was not equal at all, whether between Britons and colonials or among colonials of different sorts. People in the colonies had economic as well as religious and cultural reasons both to differ from metropolitan Britons and to conflict with them.” 19 ● “Particularly effective is his description of how the Sons of Liberty, mechanics’ committees, and antilandlord organizations gave political experience to men who had previously taken no more than a passive role in public life. 336, Bonomi ● “In any case the Constitution of 1777 is characterized as neither radical nor conservative, though the author points to 1777 as “the high point” of conservative influence.” 336, Bonomi ● “Coutnryman’s general characterization of New York politics in the 1780s gives significant support to Gordon Wood’s argument in ​The Creation of the American Republic (1969) about the devolution of power to state legislatures and the rise of self-interested localism during the Confederation era.” 336, Bonomi ● “For all the attractiveness of the class struggle, Countryman is too good a historian to insist on this as the sole principle of explanation for the revolution in New York. Geography, localism, ethnicity, family connections, economic interest, Anglophobia, and personal ambition—often described in patient detail—also shaped people’s actions and attitudes.” 338, Bon ● “Indeed all of the recent literature, including Countryman’s book, is more or less in agreement on this question of deference.

Riots in the streets, the activities of revolutionary committees, and the enlarged sense of citizens’ competence to affect politics

64 substantially reduced the distance between leaders and led…What emerged from the Revolution, then, was a more civic-minded, egalitarian-tending society in which an artisan like George Hewes “would not take his hat off to any man.””

339, Bon Sources: ​Secondary, evidence very sparse. Only bibliographic essay exists, no footnotes or endnotes.

Connections: ​Nash, ​Urban​ and article, Bailyn, ​Ideological​ and article, Gross, ​Minuteman,​ Middlekauff, G ​ lorious​, Bushman, ​King Robert Middlekauff, ​The Glorious Cause​ (1982) Argument: ​“In my account the Americans may appear especially conservative because I have tied their convictions about rights and politics to their protestant past. The appearance does not correspond to reality. The Americans did wish to preserve much from their past, but their struggle was not conservative, for it was shot through with hope for the future. This hope was in part a millennial hope, born of a conception of the world that was religious in origin. Nor was the rejection of monarchy a conservative—or safe—act. To conceive of a republic and to fight for it in a world dominated by monarchy took daring and imagination.” Viii ● “Religion, especially values derived from it, when mixed with English Radical Whig thought, became the force that shaped the Revolution and helped hold it together over the quarter-century between 1763 and 1789. “Radical Whig perception of politics,” he explains, “attracted widespread support in America because they revived the traditional concerns of a Protestant culture that had always verged on Puritanism.” As “heirs of this seventeenth-century religious tradition,” the Americans, “the children of the twice-born,” ranged from conservative to evangelicals, from arminians to deists, yet they were “marked by the dispositions of a passionate Protestantism…an American moralism that colored all their perceptions of politics.”” 456, Higgen ● “As a thesis, this religious theme has interesting possibilities, but it is not rigorously developed; most notably, it fails to interact meaningfully with most of the narrative of the post-1775 years.” 456, Higginbotham ● “So far as Middlekauff’s volume relates to the schools of Revolutionary historiography, it is reasonably compatible with the neo-whig or consensus view.” 546, Higginbotham ● “Middlekauf, unlike some neo-whigs, is aware of divisions within American society. He acknowledges that colonial factional politics, like the Otis-Hutchinson family rivalry, and exaggerated fears of a ministerial conspiracy added fuel to the fires of revolution.” 456, Higginbotham ● “If there is a unique contribution in these later chapters, it is in the author’s returning to his theme of the influence of Protestant culture, which he finds uniting with sentiments of nationalism born of wartime experiences. “The Americans in the 1780s,” says Middlekauff, “still believed that they had been selected by Providence to do great deeds. They had been chosen, and their victory in the war and the achievements of independence demonstrated the worth of their calling.””457, Higginboth ● “It is traditional narrative history: the focus is on people and events in the public sector. It is the story of men in action—in crowds, in conventions, in legislative halls, and on the battlefield.” 458, Higginbotham ● “Although Middlekauff does not explicitly challenge this conventional breakdown [of Revolution periodization], he devotes almost 50 percent of his text to the war years with the first period taking up slightly under 40 percent and the third just over 10 percent, a distribution that reveal Middlekauff’s conviction that the military events that led to the establishment of American independence were the most significant aspects of the Revolutionary era.” 1060, Greene ● “[Middlekauff] emphasizes the extent to which colonial behavior was conditional as much by the colonists’ seventeenth-century religious heritage as by the radical political tradition stressed by Bailyn.” 1060, Greene ● “For one thing, [​The Glorious Cause​] does not represent a synthesis of the work of “the latest generation of historians,” despite the claims of the series.” 965, Norton ● “This is, in other words, a standard political-constitutional-military account of the Revolution that could have appeared a decade ago nearly in its present form. The picture of the Revolution it paints is one dominated by colonial elites, sure of themselves and of their power. Middlekauff’s New England-centered revolution moves from the top down rather than the bottom up; independence seems almost a forgone conclusion. [Middlekauff] conveys little sense of the dynamic uncertainty of the prewar and war years so vividly revealed in the recent work of” Nash, Gross, Young, and Countryman. 965, Norton Sources:​ Secondary and primary source military records and state papers Connections: ​Bailyn, ​Ideological​, Nash, ​Urban,​ Gross, ​Minuteman,​ Countryman, ​American Revolution​, Bushman, ​King Ned C. Landsman, ​From Colonials to Provincials: American Thought and Culture 1680-1760​ (1997) Argument: ​Landsman goes on to consider three primary themes: the Enlightenment, evangelical religion and the Great Awakening, and ideas about liberty. In each case, he argues, immigrants from other British provinces (particularly Scotland) played important roles, and the result was a growing convergence with the mother country.” 1-2, Bullock ● “​From Colonials to Provincials recounts the cultural transformation of the mainland English colonies. Scattered outposts on the edges of the Atlantic world in the seventeenth century became full participants in cosmopolitan British cultural life in the eighteenth century—and on the same terms as the provincial cities of the British Isles. In 1680, Landsman writes, the colonists were “isolated” from England and each other. This condition began to change over the next generation. The crown showed new interest in colonial governance; the settlement of the Middle Colonies opened fresh territory form migration and trade; and, in the wake of the Union of England and Scotland in 1707, a host of ambitious Scots gained access to opportunities

65 for wealth and leadership in the Americas. Increased communications, most notably the greater availability of printed material, helped integrate colonials into the international republic of letters.” 1, Bullock ● “Landsman begins his discussion of the Enlightenment by noting its origins in Restoration England and Scotland. These new ways of thinking soon spread to New England. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, Harvard College-trained ministers helped move the region away from its parochial peculiarities, particularly the work of Benjamin Colman, who introduced set prayers into his services and genteel style into his sermons without rejecting Calvinist orthodoxy.” 2, Bullock ● “Landsman next moves to the Middle Colonies, where, he argues, Quakerism was closely allied to the Enlightenment. The Friends’ doctrine of an inner light helped prepare the way for interest in Scottish discussions of the moral sense.” 2, Bullock ● “Landsman concludes his tour by noting the southern interest in natural history and looks at the rise of scientific organizations and the study of American Indians.” 2, Bullock ● “At first glance, Jon Butlers’ recent survey of virtually the same years, ​Becoming America​…dovetails nicely with Landsman’s account. Together, they cover virtually every important aspect of colonial life. Their larger arguments, however, are almost diametrically opposed. Butler insist that America during these years was becoming uniquely modern. Landsman disagrees.

Rather than…becoming America, the mainland colonies were actually becoming Bristol or Aberdeen.” 2, Bullock ● “Indeed it was British liberty that gave provincials their claim to citizenship within the empire.” 3 ● “The suggestion that, during the eighteenth century, Americans came to view themselves as fully British in important respects than they had before cuts against the grain of common understanding, especially when viewed against the end-product of the American Revolution that was shortly to follow, but it is accurate nonetheless. Whereas colonials before 1680 had largely defined themselves with reference to their particular colonial experiments…living on the margins of civilized settlement…provincial Americans increasingly came to view themselves as Britons and as Protestants, whose positions were secured by a system of British liberty.” 3 ● “It must be emphasized, however, that American colonists did not identify with everything British. Instead, over the course of the eighteenth century, they would identify themselves increasingly as provincial Britons, citizens of the British provinces, with a particular provincial point of view. That identification increasingly linked colonial citizens to one another and to other citizens of the expanding provincial sectors of the empire….with whom they were increasingly connected through patterns of trade, in their common support for dissenting religious denominations, for a broadly provincial variety of Enlightenment culture, for a “country” politics against the interests of the “court,” and in their shared attachment to the liberties of Britons secured by the “Glorious Revolution of 1688 against the allied forces of Popery and tyranny.” 3-4 ● “In part it resulted from the increased contact between the colonies and such provincial outposts as Glasgow, Londonderry, and Whitehaven. In part it was due to the altered political situation.” 4 ● “The engagement of provincials with British works linked them ever closer to some of the principal trends in eighteenth-century culture, such as the scientific revolution, evangelical religion, and the world of the Enlightenment. The publication of Isaac Newton’s ​Principia Mathematica​…for the first time persuaded substantial segments of the reading public that the natural world operated on the basis of a system of fixed, uniform, and comprehensible laws...To a greater extent than Newton himself realized or even wished to concede, natural events in the post-Newtonian world came to seem less the product of divine whim and more the result of natural forces. 5 ● “But everywhere, the Enlightenment was characterized by the widespread belief among the educated classes that western civilization had crossed a threshold from superstition to science, from the chains of ancient belief to a new era of worldly improvement founded on intellectual discoveries patterned on the scientific method. Theirs was a cosmopolitan movement that reached beyond the confines of particular countries or particular ideas.” 5 ● “Still another innovation in British culture that had important ramifications for Americans was the rise of evangelical religion, or religion based on the personal, felt experience of communion with God, both within and outside of established churches.” 6 ● :In some respects, evangelism and the Enlightenment were rival movements. Evangelicals everywhere questioned the Enlightenment’s exaltation of religion of the head over religion of the heart and its efforts to explain the divine plan according to natural laws. Conversely, the literati and advocates of natural religion scoffed at evangelical visions and emotional displays, which they labeled “enthusiasm” and superstition.” 6 ● “For all of that antagonism, evangelicalism and the Enlightenment had a good deal more in common than many in either group recognized….Fundamental to both was the rejection of scholasticism, or inherited wisdom, as the basis for knowledge.

Evangelicals and the Enlightened also shared a surprisingly cosmopolitan view of the world. The revivals that eighteenth-century preachers promoted were not confined to regions, nations, or denominations but viewed as the products of an omniscient God.” 6 ● “In their most optimistic moments, provincials viewed themselves as embodying both the moral center and the most dynamic sector of the British world…At the same time, that confidence served to encourage provincials to insist on their rights and privileges as British citizens. The resulting confrontation would tear the empire of liberty apart.” 7 Sources:​ Sermons, literature, newspapers, journals, secondary sources Connections: Butler, ​Becoming​, Greene, ​Pursuits, Bushman, ​King​, Bailyn, ​Ideoloigical​, Shields, ​Civil​, Grasso, ​Speaking​, Breen, Marketplace

66 Simon P. Newman, ​Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic​ (1997) Argument: ​“I shall argue, in their rich array of parades, festivals, civic feasts, badges, and songs, that most Americans experienced national politics. I contend that ordinary men and women were active participants in their political world, and that a national popular political culture and political parties were created, at least in part, by ordinary Americans participating in celebrations of George Washington’s birthday, Independence Day, and the French Revolution. This book will explore the political world of ordinary men and women during the epochal decade between the ratification of the Federal Constitution and the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson.” xiii ● “Newman argues that during [the 1790s], culture became politics: Public ritual evolved into political party…[Newman] redefines the public sphere as “contested terrain” and moves on…Rather than worrying too much about a bourgeois public sphere, Newman grounds “the formation of an American popular political culture” in the general forms of “English festive culture.” Americans in the 1790s, fed by a continuous migration, organized their public lives in the new nation in ways rooted in the carnivaleque qualities of British patriotic celebration. Crowds in the streets might hail the king, but they were just as apt to protest and riot in his name as well. American poipular politics in its partisan nationalism was grounded in this duality.”

50-54, Brooke ● The political history of those who were ruled is largely missing from the historiography and debate of political parties and culture. Xi ● “When Americans participated in a July Fourth celebration as enthusiastic spectators, or took part in public meetings disavowing the Jay Treaty, or sang the “Marseillaise” in a theater, they were not behaving in an abnormal or even unusual fashion. This was the regular and routine stuff of popular politics, and it is in this sense that these activities and those who participated in them were commonplace and essentially ordinary.” 4 ● “Public ritual and festive culture were vital elements of political life, and if we are to understand American politics in the age of the first political party system, we need to learn more about these aspects of the political lives of ordinary Americans. For rulers and ruled alike in late eighteenth-century America, parades, feasts, and festivals were essential components of early national popular political culture.” 5 ● “Crudely put, culture is the web of meanings spun in and around the rites and symbols that are the subject of this book.” 5 ● “I use “popular” to refer to “beliefs”…practices and festivities widely dispersed in a given society.”” 5-6 ● White men had loudest political voices ● In chapter 1, Newman argues that American derived their heritage for political culture from England but that the New World with its regional and ethic diversity Americans derived ultimately something entirely new. This was a fractured political culture due to poor communication. They became more unified after the French and Indian War (12). Some of the major festivals included the King’s Birthday (more South), Saints and Feasts Days (NE), militia gatherings, Pope’s Day (truly bottom up), liberty tree, civic fests and toasts, Declaration of Independence celebrations (12-30). These celebrations often took place in urban costal towns, and varied by class where elites often met indoors and the lower class gathered out-of-doors. This was a world for white men, although within the marginalization we see some movement in black resistance and women homespun (32-33). Metz ● Americans replaced their celebration of the King’s birthday with George Washington’s birthday. As Washington became unpopular because of the Jay Treaty, Federalists continued to celebrate his birthday while Democratic-Republicans celebrated the French Revolution. ● For Newman the significance in these celebrations of the French Revolution resides in their ability to incorporate women and blacks. As woman came to symbolize liberty, freedom, and virtue in the French Revolution, the Democratic-Republicans welcomed the participation of women in their festive events even though they could not vote. Even more disenfranchised than women, free blacks also found a political outlet in celebrations of the French Revolution, especially when the French became synonymous with the Haitian Revolution. Like the women, blacks wore tri-color cockades; both women and blacks (free and unfree) sang the songs of the French Revolution. Yet this inclusive, although not fully inclusive, nature of the Democratic-Republican party allowed the Federalists to take them to task, especially for their welcoming of women into the male political sphere. ● Alison thinks that Newman stretches the influence of the people in influencing political events. The events and the politics seem to influence the people more.

Sources: ​contemporary magazines, manuscript correspondence, journals, and diaries Connections: ​Shields, ​Civil Tongues, ​Grasso, ​Speaking, ​Nash, ​Urban​, Brown, ​Good​, Ulrich, ​Good, Breen, ​Marketplace​, Bailyn, Ideological Origins​, Landsman, ​From Colonials Jack N. Rakove, ​Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution​ (1996) Argument: “This book has two ambitions. First, it is part of a broader effort to explore how Americans created a national polity during the Revolutionary era…it examines the politics of constitution-making and the major problems of constitutional theory and institutional design that Americans had to consider when they replaced the Articles of Confederation with a true national government. Second,…I also address a question that recurs in legal and political controversies over the Constitution: What authority should its “original meaning”…enjoy in its ongoing interpretation? In its simplest form, the debate over this question can be reduced to two positions. The advocates of ​originalism argue the meaning of the Constitution…was fixed at the moment of its adoption, and that the task of

67 interpretation is accordingly to ascertain that meaning and apply it to the issue at hand. The critics of originalism hold that it is no easy task to discover the original ideas of the framers and ratifiers would convert the Constitution into a brittle shell incapable of adaptation to all the changes that distinguish the present from the past.” Xiii ● “Because originalism depends on our knowledge of the past, it raises further questions beyond the normative problem of deciding whether or not it provides a sound theory of constitutional interpretation.” Xiv ● “This book is ​an interpretation of the origins of the Constitution; it is selective in the topics it pursues and in the approach it takes; it attempts to identify the great sources of contention, but it does not address many of the less (and some major) questions that were also in dispute.” Xv ● “This book pursues my deeper agenda as a historian. For it is also concerned with the interplay between politics and political thought—between what Hannah Ardent called “the speech making and decision-taking, the oratory and the business, the thinking and the persuading, and the actual doing” which Revolution required, and the conceptual creativity that enabled the revolutionaries to think their way through fundamental problems of government.” Xvi ● “Democracy—and especially American democracy—is an endless present, a polity that occasionally looks forward but rarely looks back (except through mists of nostalgia and myths of origins that little resemble the complexities of the past).” 366 ● “Why, then, in a society not otherwise known to defer to past wisdom, do appeals to the original meanings of the Constitution and the original intentions of its framers still play a conspicuous role in our political and legal discourse? The short answer might be that originalist appeals are used for instrumental purposes alone. They offer a form of argument to be employed whenever rhetorical convenience or the imperatives of law-office history and its political variants promise some tangible advantage.” 366 ● “In the end, it was Jefferson who better grasped the habits of democracy, Madison who better understood its perils. But perhaps Jefferson also saw more clearly than his friend what the experience of founding a republic finally meant, even to the conservative framers themselves. Having learned so much from the experience of a mere decade of self-government, and having celebrated their own ability to act from “reflection and choice,” would they not find the idea that later generations could not improve upon their discoveries incredible? How could those who wrote the Constitution possibly understand the meaning better than those who had the experience of observing and participating in its operation?” 367 ● “Rakove’s Madison does not change his positions lightly or easily…Rather, Rakove sees continuity in Madison’s epistemology, in the way he knows and draws his conclusions about politics. And that method is empirical. In the Confederation period, Madison delved into history and learned everything he could about the past; but his own experience with the state governments during and after the Revolution most influenced his ideas about the federal government. This empiricism, Rakove indicates, provides the key to constitutional interpretation. The solution lies in the working out of specific cases guided not so much by absolute principles as through commonly accepted procedures, institutions, and mechanisms.”

139-140, Zagarri ● “Madison himself never came up with a consistent theory of orignialism. As Rakove shows, in the early 1790s Madison invoked the Convention debates, which were not yet published, as a source of authority in determining a particular point of constitutional interpretation. A few years later, however, he repudiated the debates as a valid source of understanding and looked instead to the state ratifying conventions and proposed amendments….If Madison’s intentions for the Constitutions cannot provide a controlling authority for its interpretation, Rakove implies, then we can rely even less on the more obscure, and often conflicting, intentions of the other framers.” 140, Zagarri ● Madison wants a strong, but checked central government. Checks that will overrule passion and cub corruption. Madison saw flaws in both federal and state governments so he tired to develop a plan to fix both.

Sources: ​Madison’s journals, papers, the Federalist papers, Jefferson and Hamilton’s writings, secondary sources Connections:​ Bailyn, ​Ideological Origins​, Cornell, ​Other Foudners Saul Cornell, ​The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism & the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828​ (1999) Argument: “This study explores the evolution of a dissenting public discourse about politics and constitutionalism. In contrast to the approach of traditional political history or constitutional history, I have concentrated on how this evolving tradition was shaped by a constantly shifting set of texts that defined what Anti-Federalism meant at various moments. Whereas older approaches have tended to homogenize and reify Anti-Federalism, assuming that it was an unchanging construct, I have tried to show the persistence of certain themes while demonstrating how this tradition was evolving and being constantly reshaped.” 8-9 ● “The nature of federalism created a problematic that all opponents of the Constitution were forced to grapple with: how to preserve the autonomy of the states and localities within a federal system that would command citizen allegiance. The difficulty was how to achieve this goal without endowing a strong central government with considerable coercive authority. 11 ● “Anti-Federalists agreed on the need to resist greater centralization of authority. Their response included three components: federalism, constitutional textualism, and support for a vigorous public sphere of political debate. In contrast to their Federalist opponents, Anti-Federalists continued to place their faith in a federal system in which the states would be the primary units of political organization and contain the bulk of political authority.” 11

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“The themes of consolidation and constructive interpretation, central concerns of Anti-Federalism, became the cornerstones of opposition constitutionalism. The original opposition to the Constitution gained new legitimacy as various authors attempted to find a solid historical foundation for their critique of the nationalist jurisprudence of the Marshall Court.” 14 ● “Although modern commentators have generally presented ratification as a dialogue between discrete Federalist and Anti-Federalist voices, the reality of ratification is far more complex. The debate over the meaning of the Constitution began as a many-sided conversation, a free-for-all. Only after ratification, during the 1790s, did the public debate take shape as a dialogue between distinctive Federalist and Anti-Federalist positions.” 19 ● “The decision of the Philadelphia Convention to submit the Constitution to state ratification conventions ensured that Americans from all walks of life would be drawn into a wide-ranging public debate about its merits. The Constitution was subjected to unprecedented public scrutiny; every clause of the document was parsed and in some cases literally rewritten by readers who took issue with its phraseology or principles.” 20 ● “Anti-Federalist support depended on three crucial groups in American society: backcountry farmers and artisans, the middling sort who dominated politics in the Middle Atlantic, and a small but highly influential group of elite politicians.” 48 ● “The Anti-Federalist critique of the Constitution, if not unanimous, was certainly not incoherent. The dynamics of the public debate over the Constitution worked to focus, not fragment, their argument. Their main outlines, in fact, emerged early in the ratification debate and were repeated frequently over the course of that debate.” 48 ● “the vast majority of Anti-Federalist writers acknowledged that American society was divided into three amorphous classes: the better sort, the middling sort, and the lower sort. Authors adopted techniques focused on reaching each of those audiences.

The tone of an essay, quotations from other authors, and the choice of pen name were all selected to help an author get a particular message across. Style and content were therefore inextricably linked.” 49 ● “To be persuasive in the struggle over the Constitution, authors had to do more than attack the Constitution: they had to put forward an alternative constitutional vision. Although individual Anti-Federalists did not always advocate a clear institutional framework or blueprint for government, their writings did embody a variety of different conceptions of constitutionalism.” 49 ● “Anti-Federalist ideology made it possible for planter aristocrats and middling democrats each to champion a system reposing the bulk of authority in the states; Anti-Federalist federalism allowed Virginians to defend a decidedly hierarchical vision of republicanism, even as it accommodated the more democratic vision of New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians. Anti-Federalist constitutionalism provided a broad tent under which many different political visions could rest. The one group that could not easily be accommodated was plebian populists, whose extreme vision of localism and radical democratic ideas set them apart from elites and the middling sort.” 50 ● “Federalism and localism were both crucial to elite Anti-Federalism, and recognizing their importance also challenges the idea that elite Anti-Federalists were simply men of little faith who mistrusted the people as much as they feared government.” 79 ● “Most members of the Anti-Federalist elite framed constitutional issues in Whig republican terms. Although limited by constitutional charters, legislatures enjoyed considerable latitude when enacting laws for the common good. As long as such laws were the product of duly elected representative bodies, there was no contradiction between limits on the rights of citizens and the ideal of liberty.” 79 ● “The political ideal of the small republic was crucial to Anti-Federalist political and constitutional theory. In such a society virtuous men would rise to positions of power and understand the interests of people. This goal could be achieved only when politics remained rooted in localities.” 80 ● “The version of democracy championed by [middling AF] writers was not that of populist democracy. Nor was middling democracy tied to an agrarian vision. Authors such as Federal Farmer consciously framed their appeals to persuade the middling sort, which might include artisans and small merchants as well as the broad ranks of the yeomanry. The ideal of liberty defended by middling democrats sought to restrict government interference with the economy and basic rights while defending the legislature’s right to enact laws consistent with the public good.” 119 ● “Although they supported a free press, [middling AF] did not view the public sphere as a medium for the refinement of opinion, but saw in it a forum in which the will of the people could be directly ascertained: the plebian public sphere was little more than a plebiscite. For plebeians there was no particular advantage to print. Public opinion might just as easily be obtained by assembling the people in the streets.” 120 ● “When Anti-Federalists worried about the absence of a bill of rights, they focused on such threats as the absence of a guarantee for trial by jury and the failure to protect freedom of the press. Nothing seemed more likely to imperil liberty than the prospect that the new government might use the law of libel as a political weapon to suppress dissent.” 142 ● Anti-Federalism was not a monolithic movement. Instead it was a diverse movement with many different ideas.

Organization: “The first part of this study explores the dynamics of the public debate over the Constitution and the range of Anti-Federalist constitutional thought….Part II charts the role of Anti-Federalist ideas in the emergence of Democratic-Republicanism…The final section of this study analyzes the evolution of a dissenting tradition of constitutionalism indebted to Anti-Federalist ideas in the period 1800-1828.”11-14 Sources: ​Pamphlets, newspapers, journals, correspondence Connections:​ Rakove, ​Original​, Bailyn, ​Ideological

69 Alan Taylor, ​Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1760-1820​ (1990) Argument: ​“The conflict between Great Proprietors and Liberty Men and the ultimate triumph of the Jeffersonians were symptomatic of more widespread social and political transformation: the making of a liberal social order.” 10 ● “This study examines four phenomena that converged in Benjamin Tibbetts’s life: migration to the frontier, labor applied to wilderness land to create property, a spiritual search for divine meaning, and organized resistance to the Great Proprietors.” 3 ● “Initially the insurgents called themselves Liberty Men or Sons of Liberty: defenders of a Revolution betrayed by America’s great men. But their foes called them White Indians, on account of their disguises and their supposed savagery. Over time, especially after 1800, the most militant settlers adopted the name of White Indians and elaborated a protest culture of mock-Indian costumes and rituals. This study also narrates the resistance in order to explore the interdependence of migration, labor, religion, and politics in the settlers’ lives. The mid-Maine land conflicts generated an extraordinary volume of richly detailed documents, which offer a special opportunity to explore the language, ideas, and behavior of rural people in post-Revolutionary America.” 3 ● “Mid-Maine’s conflict was part of a national pattern of backcountry resistance. From the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century in at least ten other areas, yeomen seeking free or cheap access to wilderness land confronted gentlemen who had exploited their political connections to secure large land grants.” 4 ● “The surge of settlers into the backcountry occurred at the same time that the American Revolution encouraged heightened aspirations among the common folk. The Revolution did not cease in 1783 when the Treaty of Paris ended the war with Great Britain; during the 1780s and 1790s the diverse people who had united against British rule fell out over the social and political implication of their Revolution. The agrarian conflicts represented a new, internal, and attenuated stage in the continuing American Revolution, as yeomen and gentlemen, in certain select hillcountry pockets, came to blows over the nature of property, the local diffusion or central consolidation of power, and the legitimacy of extralegal crowd violence in the new Republic.” 5 ● “Gentlemen of property and standing favored a limited reading of the recent Revolution as simply a war for national independence, a war intended to place America’s government in their own hands and to safeguard their extensive property from arbitrary parliamentary taxation. They expected the new order to honor pre-Revolutionary legal contracts, especially large land grants. Distrusting the political judgment of the common people, most gentlemen sought to consolidate political decision-making as much as possible: in counties rather than towns, in states rather than counties, in a new federal government rather than in states. Then the commercial centers’ discerning gentleman could govern.” 5-6 ● “To safeguard their limited Revolution, gentlemen parried the “popular license” of backcountry agrarians.” 6 ● “Wild Yankees, Anti-Renters, Whiskey Rebels, Regulators, and Liberty Men believed in a different American Revolution, one meant to protect small producers from the moneyed men who did not live by their own labor, but, instead, preyed on the may who did…They sought an American Revolution that reinforced their fundamental drive—to maximize their access to, and secure their possession of, freehold land. This meant minimizing the levies of great men: taxes, rents, legal fees, and land payments. Convinced that republican government could not survive (except as an oppressive sham) unless property was widely and equitably distributed among adult white males, agrarians regarded free access to frontier land as essential to liberty’s survival. They feared that, unless the great could be checked in their demands, America would ultimately replicate Europe’s oppressive societies of arrogant aristocrats lording over impoverished, landless, and powerless masses. To protect their freeholds for transmission to their children, agrarians insisted on the right of local communities to check forcefully the encroaching power of wily great men.” 6 ● “To understand agrarian resistance in the early Republic, we should avoid two misconceptions: that settlers were a proletariat, and that there can be no class conflict without one. As small freeholders engaged in manual labor, the settlers were not a proletariat, but they belonged to a class distinct from the great land speculators, who were mercantile capitalists living of the land payments levied on the fruits of the yeomanry’s labor.” 7 ● “At a time when debts and hardships threatened many rural Americans’ family independence, when most rural folk elsewhere in the British Empire endured wage labor or tenancy, and when the most conspicuous social trends moved New England’s circumstances closer to Britain’s, the yeomanry’s fears of losing their economic autonomy were far from groundless.” 8 ● “If we define capitalism in neoclassical terms as the avid pursuit through market exchange of improved circumstance, the yeomanry were eager capitalists. They readily bargained and swapped, bought and sold, in part to gratify immediately, as far as possible, their passion for store-bought goods but also, in part, to acquire and develop land to support their families and sustain their security in old age.” 8 ● “But if we perceive capitalism as a system of social relations of production in which most people must sell their labor for monetary wages to capitalists who own the means of production, then the yeomanry were determined to avoid such a fate, were determined to cling to the land that sustained them in cherished “independence.” They wanted to live in a society where many small producers engaged in exchange as equals, where no white man had any dominion over another. Agrarians hoped to sustain American capitalism at a simple stage of development where households bought and sold the fruits of their labor without having to sell their labor itself.” 8

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“The Great Proprietors, in contrast, insisted that America’s commercial development required the emergence of a more efficient, complex, and hierarchical social order where property would become concentrated in the hands of the capitalists who best understood how to employ it to create more property.” 8 ● “Most of the founders’ grand-children had to move on in search of their own frontier land or forsake independence for either tenancy or wage labor. To sustain their way of life, every generation needed vast and increasing quantities of land; the yeomanry purchased its autonomy by destroying that of the native Americans in their way. The society of agrarian producers was only possible where there was a continent that could be readily wrested from its aboriginal inhabitants.” 9 ● “The early Republic’s land conflicts pivoted on whether, in a given region, the inevitable decline of the agrarian dream would be accelerated, or postponed, by a single generation. By minimizing what they had to pay for the land, a community’s settlers hoped to secure sufficient land for themselves and for their children. Recognizing the pace at which their population growth consumed land, they knew that most of their grandchildren would have to move on. Where proprietors succeeded in imposing prices for their titles, it was difficult for settlers to procure enough land nearby for their sons; in such circumstances the children, rather than the grandchildren, felt the pinch.” 9 ● “Taylor’s book has four main themes: migration to the frontier during the post-Revolutionary area; labor applied to wilderness land to create property; a spiritual search for divine meaning through evangelical religion; and the organized resistance by self-styled Liberty Men to mid-Maine’s Great Proprietors.” 137, Innes ● “”Vieing the Revolution as a collective enterprise to secure laboring men’s “God-given right to claim and improve wilderness land” (p 96), the agrarians—as Taylor dubs them—developed the “resistance,” a protest culture meant to guard these newly won rights.” 137, Innes ● “This legalistic and formulaic conception of land title was opposed by the settlers’ Lockean labor theory of property, by which true ownership derived from the sweat of the worker’s brow in turning a wilderness into a settled land. Hence, each group “saw itself defending its property (and so its liberty) from the other’s aggression” (p 25). For the settlers, liberty meant access to wilderness land that could be made into independence-conferring property by the squatting families’ labor. The agrarians favored a social order of small but roughly equal farms based on family labor and mixed agriculture. For the Great Proprietors, however, liberty meant the right to protect—by court-enforced ejectment and trespass suits if necessary—their baronial property claims. The social order that the proprietors favored, Taylor declares, was one characterized by hierarchy and paternalistic relationships. They believed that American commercial development demanded an efficient, differentiated, and hierarchical social order in which property and decision making would be concentrated in the hands of the few. The Great Proprietors were genuinely fearful, the author believes, that the combination of frontier migration, Revolutionary egalitarianism, and evangelical religion would produce socially destructive centrifugal forces.” 138, Innes ● “The struggle of the Liberty Men, which occurred between 1796 and 1810, primarily concerned land titles, the prices for land demanded by the proprietors, and the latters’ use of their political and judicial power and control over appointments. The farmers failed as usual to send delegates to the legislature in Boston and, lacking local influence, restorted to force—threatening, beating up, and destroying the property of agents of the government/courts/ proprietors (and their allies).”

304, Main Sources: ​Correspondence, journals, land records, tax records, court records, newspapers, government minutes Connections:​ Cornell, ​Other Founders, ​Bailyn, I​ deological,​ Rakove, ​Original

Alan Taylor, ​The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution​ (2006) Argument: ​“By narrating their lives, this book examines the making of twin borders that constituted the new United States: the boundaries between natives and Indians and between the British Empire and the American Republic. To achieve power at their core, new nations must define and control their peripheries. By asserting and displaying political difference at a boundary, regimes consolidate the allegiance and identity of their citizens or subjects within. Loose borders make for weak nations or empires. But attempts to make and to control borders inevitably invite resistance by local people who resent restrictions.” 7 ● “This book examines the transition of one borderland—Iroquoia—into two bordered lands: the state of New York in the American Republic and the province of Upper Canada in the British Empire. In particular, I will focus on Brant’s Mohawks and on the Oneidas who hosted Kirland’s mission. As a borderland history, this book explores both sides—Canadian and American—of the revolution’s contested boundary in search of insights lost by the standard nationalist approach that tells only the American half of the story.” 8 ● “Treating settler expansion and the creation of the United States as natural and inevitable, Turner neglected the creative efforts

by Indians to frame alternatives to their dispossession. In his history, both native and Britons were modest speed bumps in the frontier pursuit of American identity.” 8 ● “If we treat the American triumph as inevitable, we obscure the fluid contingency of the 1780s and 1790s, when Brant promoted an alternative vision of an enduring Indian confederacy between the empire and the republic. To frustrate American border-making, he championed an earlier boundary that ran from north to south to distinguish an Indian country on the west

71 from the colonial settlements to the east. Sir William Johnson and the Iroquois chiefs framed that alternative boundary in a treaty council at Fort Stanwix in 1768.” 8 ● “By clinging to their British allies, however, Indians defied the new borer and the American expansion that it invited.

Emboldened by that Indian resistance, the British broke the peace treaty by retaining border forts on the southern shores of the Great Lakes. That retention strengthened native defiance and sustained a cold war between the republic and the empire. To overcome Indian and British resistance to the new border, the Americans worked to divide and separate Indian peoples by isolating their villages on reservations surrounded by settlements.” 9 ● “Restricted by reservation lines, Indians became dependent on state annuities and thereby lost the capacity to flee or to fight….Alarmed and inspired by that American consolidation, the British sought enhanced security by tightening their control over the Indians on the Canadian side of the border. Border competition drove both powers to control Indians on reservations, giving meaning to the postrevolutionary boundary between the republic and empire. The Iroquois resisted their entanglement within those three interacting layers of lines. Rejecting division and confinement by the peace treaty line, the Iroquois defended their traditional position as autonomous keepers of a perpetual and open-ended borderland, a region of exchange and interdependence. By exploiting the rivalry between the republic and the empire, they hoped to remain intermediate and autonomous. The natives conceived of their borderland as porous for information, trade, and people.” 10 ● “Rather than resisting all settlement, they tried to regulate the creation of new farms to serve Indian ends. They hoped to choose their new neighbors, favoring those who treated Indians generously. They also preferred to lease rather than to sell land. As lessors (rather than sellers), Indians could reap annual rents that would grow as settler labor enhanced land values.

As landlords, Indians would also retain sovereign title to the land. Preserving their independence.” 10 ● “During imperial wars, colonial leaders anxiously wooed the Iroquois with presents, flattery, and some limits on settler expansion. During peace, however, those same leaders coveted and finagled the fertile land of Iroquoia anticipating immense profits from clearing the forest to make thousands of new farms. By 1760, that pressure by land speculators and settlers had already cost the Mohawks most of their land and had taken some from the Oneidas.” 6 ● “During the years 1759 to 1761, however, the British routed the French, conquered Canada, and occupied French forts along the Great Lakes. Surprised by the rapid French collapse, the Iroquois feared that their alliance had become redundant to the victorious British, who seemed poised to unleash settlers throughout the continent.” 7 ● “By 1761, the 450,000 Yankees had overwhelmed New England’s Algonquian Indians, confining the survivors to small enclaves in a landscape of colonial farms and commercial seaports. Sobered by that Algonquian fate, the Iroquois resolved to defend their independence by preserving their strategic position beside, rather than within, the colonial settlements.” 7 ● “By asserting boundaries that overlapped, the rival empires invited natives to seek concessions from both—as the Six Nations did with the British and the French. The Iroquois defended an alternative vision of political space where native persisted in autonomy between settler regimes, rather than divided and absorbed by them. After the American Revolution the victors worked to pin Indians down, creating reservations within as a key step to consolidating the larger boundaries of the new nation.” 8 ● “Matters changed in the wake of American independence. The Jay Treaty (1794) put the final nail in the coffin of the old play-off system. Impoverished and weakened by the war, their homelands devastated, the Iroquois now faced a government dominated by land speculators and elected by farmers on the one side and a Canadian government determined to dominate them on the other. The British empire in North America had collapsed in part because it would not satisfy the colonists; insatiable appetite for Indian lands. The Iroquois now had to appease it in two different contexts.” 1507, Haefeli ● Taylor’s book exposes what one might call the political economy of frontier expansion. Intensive research in political, business, and personal correspondence illuminates the links among individuals, their patrons, their profits, and the powers that coerced them. Even religious affiliation does not escape this web. A careful illustration of the intense pressures that dispossessed the once powerful Iroquois, it is a model case study of this most fundamental dynamic of American History.” H Sources:​ Correspondence, deeds, maps, journals, government documents, court records Connections:​ Taylor, ​Liberty Men​, White, ​Middle​, Nash, ​Urban​, Bailyn, ​Ideological David Waldstreicher, ​In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820​ (1997) Argument: ​Nationalist sentiment in the United States grew quickly because of local and later racial interest in promoting it. “People, no matter their origins or agendas, found it profitable to invoke nationalist rhetoric in the service of parochial concerns.” 523, Clayton ● “Rejecting received notions of nationalism that focus on the nation as an idea, Waldstreicher argues that nationalism should be seen in terms of cumulative popular experience, as revealed in the celebrations, parades, toasts, songs, symbols, and printed discourse that comprised “the true political public sphere of the early Republic.” Waldstreicher visualizes the public sphere as an arena in which local rituals and local print culture allowed people to participate in, and incrementally define, the political culture of the new nations. In this intersection, nationalism was no an abstract idea grounded in consensus, but “a set of practices that empowered Americans to fight over the legacy of their national Revolution and to protest their exclusion from the Revolution’s fruits.” 50, Brooke ● Waldstreicher does not confine himself to urban areas or one region. “America’s “print culture” thus created a national dialogue on nationalism, giving local celebrations “extralocal meaning.”” 1317, Travers

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“This study is about the festive innovations through which Americans of the early Republic practiced a divisive politics and a unifying nationalism at the same time. I examine that ambiguous middle ground of parades, spectatorship, and politics, which remains a site of national identity, effective political action, and mass-mediated delight. I specifically trace the development of nationalism in the United State to celebratory activities like the parades of 1788.” 2-3 ● “Waldstreicher wants us to understand the symbiotic relationship between local interests and national rhetoric.” 523, Clayton ● “I am less interested in the emergence of “American identity,” or even in the rites of that identity, than in the relationship of nationalist ideology to political practice in the United States. In reconsidering nationalism in terms of its practices as well as its ideas, this work attempts to comprehend the everyday interplay of rhetoric, ritual, and political action that permitted the abstractions of nationalist ideology to make real, effective, practical sense.” 3 ● “Nationalism…has been a set of practices that empowered Americans to fight over the legacy of their national Revolution and to protest their exclusion from the Revolution’s fruits. It is not inherently reactionary or progressive; like other nationalisms, its political meanings are multiple, even contradictory, and can be shown to have changed radically over time. Thus, it will be instructive, first, to see how, by stressing the ideological nature instead of examining the everyday practice, we have misunderstood American nationalism.” 3 ● “Our understanding of nationalism still derives from nineteenth-century idealism. “The nation is a soul, a spiritual principle,” wrote Ernest Renan, one of the first scholar-critics of nationalism, in 1882.” 3 ● “This study argues… that relentless politicization gave nationalist ritual their most important meanings. Conflict produced “the nation” as contestants tried to claim true American nationality and the legacy of the Revolution.” 9 ● “Nationalism, the ideology of the “imagined community.” Is certainly an abstraction, but it is imagined and practiced locally in distinct, changing ways by different groups for a variety of purposes.” 10 ● “During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, newspapers transformed the very rituals that they might seem to merely describe. In an important sense, American parades were always media events. By thinking of newspapers as mere documentary windows onto the scenes and symbols of parades, social historians have largely ignored the printed discourse that surrounded these events and gave them extralocal meaning. From the beginning, celebrants of the nation took their cues from printed sources. They improvised upon events they read about and then publicized their own interventions in public life.” 11 ● “I try to show that celebrations and the printed discourse that suffused them made it possible for large numbers of people—men and women—to practice nationalism and local politics simultaneously. To see the contemporary public sphere in the intersection of local rites and expanding print culture illuminates much about early national political culture, including the seemingly paradoxical existence of partisanship alongside nationalist denials of party legitimacy, and how partisan competition helped keep women and blacks beyond the pale of citizenship.” 13 ● `This study traces the enabling and paralyzing contradictions of American political culture to the conjoined emergence of popular politics and the rituals of national identity. It is this conjunction—the local and the national, the politicized and the consensual—that inspires the remarkable creativity and the profound ambivalences I see as equally crucial aspects of whatever American political tradition can be said to exist.” 14 ● “Celebrations and printed accounts of them embodied and emboldened a nationalist ideology that made consensus the basis of patriotism. Indeed, by fostering an idea of the nation as extralocal community and by giving ordinary people the opportunity for local expression of national feeling, this reciprocal influence of celebrations and print literally and figuratively papered over the disturbing class resentments (expressed in the antiaristocratic language of the Revolution) that had energized much of the populace in the first place. By the 1790s these resentments would reemerge in festive culture, as nationalist celebrations provided a venue for recasting them as national, partisan political divisions.” 18 ● “Women were active participants in the political debates of the 1790s; they marched in parades, read newspapers, wrote pamphlets, and dressed in ways that reflected their opinions about the French Revolution or the importance of George Washington…In general, Federalists, with their emphasis on harmony and their comparison of the nation to an extended patriarchal family, welcomed women’s involvement in the public sphere, if not in voting; or at least they welcomed the relatively small group of “Respectable women” who served the public good in sentimental ways without threatening the existing order. Democratic-Republicans, on the other hand, found a more creative way out of the contradictions of revolutionary rhetoric. Rejecting hierarchy and promoting fraternity, they devised a form that organized white males in the public sphere even as it excluded those who did not belong to their fraternity: the political party, which they could justify in partisan terms as an organization created in the name of national good. ” 524, Clayton ● “The very flexibility of the system of celebration and publicity made it possible to read the same national and regional attachment different ways, in acts of alliance and opposition; patriotism and sectionalism were in the eye of the beholder.” 293 ● “The A[merican] C[colonization] S[ociety]’s neocolonial white nationalism is best understood as a response to the black and white antislavery activists who used the forms of national celebration to challenge slavery after the Revolution. Meanwhile, northern, urban free blacks appropriated nationalist celebration to their own ends. Their declarations of African identity, amid hostile white reactions, reveal the remarkable openness as well as the tragic limitations of American political culture.” 296 Sources: ​Print Culture Connections:​ Newman, ​Parades​, Cornell, ​Other,​ Rakove, ​Original,​ Taylor, ​Liberty ​and ​Divided,​ Bailyn, ​Ideological​, Nash, ​Urban

73 Comment: Waldstreicher writes about the formation of nationalism and its partisan nature, Newman writes about popular political culture and how the development of political parties was manifested in these national celebrations. Newman does not discuss nationalism or write about print culture the way that Waldstreicher does.

Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, ​Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic​ (2004) Argument: “Nevertheless, [the new New Political Historians] emphasize how an era of postrevolutionary ferment and retrenchment, uneven and contradictory democratization of public life, geographical expansion, and economic upheaval, politics took multiple shapes at interlocking local, state, regional, and national levels. The task of constructing (and for some, contesting) relatively new political institutions hardly ended with the ratification of the Constitution or with the turbulent 1790s. Beyond the founders, in terms of people and in terms of time, lay struggles to demarcate the identity of the citizen, the modes of political action, and the changing nature of the political itself.” 3 ● “These newest political historians of the early republic are heavily informed and sometimes inspired by post-1960s social and cultural history, not the vanguard of a backlash against it. Very much aware of the difference intellectual and political leadership made, they look beyond the founders to find a larger and richer political landscape during a longer early republic (1780s-1840s). While they do not reject the founders as a subject, they do insist that neither the invention of American politics nor the significance of the early republic can be grasped solely, or even mainly, from the top down.” 2-3 ● “The Revolution’s radicalism, for Wood, consisted precisely in the tendency for elite or gentry republicanism to be appropriated by and on behalf of the middling sorts, who used it to promote their own economic interests and their new political power. The early republic becomes the culmination of a long transition from republican “benevolence” and natural aristocracy to brash capitalism and “middle-class democracy,” a gradual but real social revolution fought out simultaneously in the realms of politics and culture.” 4 ● “Like Wood, [Appleby] argues strongly for the wide extent and fast pace of democratic change and fully justifies careful attention to a broad generational experience in an expanded early republic (1790-1830). For Appleby, the victories of the Jeffersonians in 1800, which she sees in a positive light, were only the beginning of the Revolution’s modernizing, democratizing thrust.” 5 ● “Influenced by a larger trend toward cultural history, younger political historians have broadened the study of political culture beyond the partisan persuasions and other “isms” they had read about as students. The effects of an ascendant cultural history seems as diverse in this field as in others, signifying for some a revised yet vigorous social history, for some a broadened political history of ideas or meanings, and sometimes a rejection of social history and its subjects. Where it succeeds in connecting elites and plebeians and middling sorts along various trajectories of thought, experience, and political action, however, the editors believe that the “newest” political history has synthetic potential, and begins to answer the call of Pessen and Wood for a more integrated understanding of the early republic.” 5 ● “Political culture—defined most commonly as the set of assumptions (and less commonly as the set of methods or practices) that people brought with them into the political realm—enabled new political historians (sometimes referred to as the “ethnocultural school”) to remain in a creative dialogue with intellectual history at a time when intellectual historians began to move away from their postwar rejections of the progressive school’s insistence on class conflict as the dominant theme in U.S. history.” 6 ● “Political culture was especially useful because it could address historically shifting relationships between the national polity and specific groups—the key agenda, despite differences in methods, of the 1960s’ new political history.” 7 ● “Bernard Bailyn, Gordon S. Wood, and a score of fellow travelers depicted the Revolution as an ideological transformation that could be discerned through close attention to changes in political languages over time. The profusion of words unleashed by the Revolutionary controversy emerged as something more than propaganda: it was the material through which the Revolution, and America itself, could be grasped.” 7 ● “Print shaped American politics (and connected it to American society and culture) in ways that more traditional approaches have had a hard time seeing. Indeed, the print theme is one of the most important examples of what we hope will be a major project for this new wave of political history: the detailed study of political practices as concrete social activities and economic enterprises, rather than simply as disseminating mechanisms.” 12 ● “The essays in the second group, “Gender, Race, and Other Identities,” suggest that the politics of identity is as much a legacy of the early republic as it is a late-twentieth-century phenomenon, and that white males of different classes in fact led the way.

Class itself came to mean something somewhat different, as white men learned to couch their claims in the idioms of republican citizenship. Gender became an especially significant axis of political struggle during this period, for men as well as women. Phenomena as diverse as women’s participation in politics, Federalist young men’s habits of association, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the lure of the frontier, Jeffersonian understanding of political economy, and the cultural use made of celebrities and treason trials in the period turned on gendered language and ideas about men, women, and sex roles.” 13 ● “Beyond the founders lies a complex and important story about how recognizably American political institutions and practices actually emerged from the top down, from the bottom up, and perhaps especially from the middle out in every direction. It is a story about leaders and followers together, about Americans simultaneously unified and divided by partisanship. By gender,

74 by race, by class, by region, by nationalism and by localism. Nothing about these categories keeps it from being a story about the making of the American republic, a story about the making and remaking, through politics, of the United States.” 18 ● “As modern historians of culture, the editors seek political context in “class hierarchies, economic inequalities, and cultural differences.” They move beyond a few top leaders to examine their relationship with common voters. Several go further, broadening the definition of political nation to include the women and blacks who contributed to informal political discourse and who attended political rituals as avid witnesses.” Taylor ● “Bridging the early Republic and the later Jacksonian era, several authors detect a transition away from a more civic (yet far from civil) culture toward a more paradoxical society that married mass parties to an extreme individualism, a public majoritarianism with private concepts of rights.” Taylor ● “In an astute (but repetitive) conclusion, William G. Shade shows that the essayists ultimately share more than they acknowledge with traditional historians. Indeed, the editors describe their collection as “about the making and remaking, through politics, of the United States.” In this project so different from that of makers of Founders chic? Whether done in a popular vein or an academic vein, American political history remains the story of the nation-state, for better or worse. In theory and method, the essayists also profess more novelty than they practice. Aside from Brooke almost no one discusses theory or method. Yet there is not much need when the method consists of mustering quotations and narrating biographical episodes, just as Ellis and McCullough do.” Taylor ● “New Political History” that first emerged in the late 1950s, made extensive use of quantitative data, and focuses on parties and elections…the “newest” political history—that is, the scholarship produced during the last decade on parties and elections, which borrows heavily from either cultural history or organizational studies in the behavioral sciences and focuses on either symbolic meanings or the significance of policymaking institutions.” This does not really answer to the old New History. Bene Connections:​ Cornell, ​Other​, Newman, ​Parades​, Waldstreicher, ​In the Midst Linda K. Kerber, ​Women of the Republic: Intellect & Ideology in Revolutionary America​ (1980) Argument: “Kerber’s main theme, however, is the meaning of patriotism for the Revolutionary generation. Again, she shows how strikingly different the questions of political loyalty and political action are when faced by women. At issue is this: How do women express their patriotism in a society that denies them a public identity? This search for a public voice or political persona is a problem specific to women. Men who decide to act, or discover the opportunity to act, do not need to create their roles. Kerber suggests that the need to create a female public identity is one of the most radical questions of the Revolution.” 438, Berkin ● “The “real” story of the Revolutionary years ahs been thought to lie in accounts of battles or constitutional conventions—events from which women were necessarily absent—and women’s work has been treated as service to men, women’s words treated as trivial.” Xi ● “This book assumes that women’s work and women’s words did make a difference, and that our understanding of the general contours of the American past will be more accurate if we assess women’s experience as carefully as we do men’s experience.

The early Republic does look different when seen through women’s eyes. The Revolutionary army turns out to have been dependent on women’s nursing, cooking, and cleanliness. Both patriot and tory forces could recruit men not because cheerful women waved them off to war, but because those same women bravely stayed on alone, keeping family farms and mills in operation, fending off squatters, and protecting the family property by their heavy labor, often at grave physical risk. Political theory appears less radical and more conservative when measured against the conscious refusal of constitution makers to recognize women’s presence in the Republic and to change women’s status. And the catalog of significant American literature is enriched by the addition of essays, memoirs, and fiction written by women that have awaited careful evaluation.” Xi-xii ● “The paired female images of so many engravings of the Revolutionary era that show both Minerva, emblem of force and intelligence, and Columbia, surrounded by emblems of domestic work and prosperity, suggest the difficulty of merging the two themes. A synthesis has permeated women’s history in America from the time of the Revolution to our own; this book explores the early stages of that search. I hope it will be clear that I have treated women’s history both as a subject to be studied for its own intrinsic interest, and as a strategy by which we can test long-accepted generalizations about the past.” Xii ● “Like most women in preindustrial societies, eighteenth-century American women lived in what might be called a woman’s domain. Their daily activities took place within a feminine, domestic circle: infants were delivered by midwives, the sick were cared for by nurses, women who traveled stayed overnight at boardinghouses owned and run by females.” 7 ● “In the late eighteenth century, this traditional world was battered by the storms of political and technological change.

Industrial technology reshaped the contours of domestic labor and thus began to erode the stability of households. The war of the Revolution and the constitutional experiments that followed composed one of the great ages of political innovation in Western history; in these years the terms were set by which future Americas would understand their relationship to the social order.” 7 ● “For at least a generation before 1776, American activists and pamphleteer had used the occasion of each imperial crisis to challenge American men to change their habitual obedience to elites and to England, to emerge from a world of custom and tradition, to behave as a serious political opposition. These pre-Revolutionary agitators addressed themselves to men. It was men who passed resolutions in town meetings, men who refused to try legal cases with stamped writs. The pre-Revolutionary crises were their political education.” 8

75 ●

“Since the days of Anne Hutchinson, however, no secular group or institution had consistently sought to articulate the impact of imperial policy on women.” 8 ● “Not until economic boycott became a major mode of resistance to England did it become obvious that women would also have to be pulled out of the privacy of their traditional domain and propelled into the public world of political decisions.” 8 ● “There was no formal political context in which women might be consulted or might develop their collective judgment. But the war itself did speed the integration of women in to the civil polity. Whether a woman was whig or tory, her services in a largely guerilla war were much sought after—as a provider of essential services for troops, as a civilian source of food and shelter, as a contributor of funds and supplies, as a spy. Women were challenged to commit themselves politically and then to justify their allegiance.” 8-9 ● “Since only the citizen with independent control of property was thought to be able to exercise free will, it seemed to follow that the married woman had no independent political capacity.” 9 ● “On the one hand women—married or unmarried—were responsible for acts of espionage or treason and were subject ot the full penalties of the law. But except for overt acts of treason, the assumption still prevailed that married women could make no political choices of her own; for example, the wife of a tory was judged to be under such clear control of her husband that she perforce became a tory herself. During wartime this assumption caught women in a double bind: women left at home while their husbands fought for the loyalists were often ostracized by their communities and forced into exile without being asked their own political opinions. But women with property may have been somewhat less vulnerable to patriot pressure.

Confiscation acts normally excluded dower portions from seizure. Once the war was over, Americans permitted themselves to be even more sympathetic to the awkward position of the married woman and assumed she had been apolitical unless proven otherwise.” 9 ● “The new republic leaned on the law for structure. In turn, an educated citizenry was expected to maintain the spirit of the law; righteous mothers were asked to raise the virtuous male citizens on whom the health of the Republic depended. This assumption added political and ideological overtones even to technical discussions of education. A revolution in women’s education had been underway in England and America when the Revolution began; in postwar America the ideology of female education came to be tied to ideas about the sort of woman who would be of greatest service to the Republic.” 10 ● “Excluded from the world of politics, women were understandably cool to Montesquieu, Gibbon, Rousseau. Female readers sought accounts of women grappling with reality; in epistolary fiction and in religious memoirs they found detailed accounts of women who overcame evil by purity, who overcame force by apparent concession. They learned that the seduced were likely to be abandoned; they were taught not to trust their own passions. Ambition, energy, originality—laudable in man—were to be distrusted in women.” 10-11 ● “Searching for a political context in which private female virtues might comfortably coexist with the civic virtue that was widely regarded as the cement of the Republic, they found what they were seeking in the notion of what might be called “Republican Motherhood.” The Republican Mother integrated political values into her domestic life. Dedicated as she was to the nurture of public-spirited male citizens, she guaranteed the steady infusion of virtue into the Republic. Political “virtue,” a revolutionary concept that has troubled writers from Edmund Burke to Hannah Arendt, could be safely domesticated in eighteenth-century America; the mother, and not the masses, came to be seen as the custodian of civic morality.” 11 ● “The woman now claimed a significant political role, though she played it in the home. This new identity had the advantage of appearing to reconcile politics and domesticity; it justified continued political education and political sensibility. But the role remained a severely limited one; it had no cohesive definition, provided no outlet for women to affect a real political decision. If women were no longer prepolitical, they certainly were not fully political. The image of the Republican Mother could be used to mask women’s true place in the polis: they were still on its edges..” 12 ● “As Kerber shows, the Revolution ​is ​different when viewed through women’s eyes. It is disruptive, chaotic, destructive of the patterns of daily life and of human relationships.” 437-438, Berkin ● “In ​Women of the Republic​, Linda K. Kerber makes a fresh and important contribution to the debate over the ideological origins and consequences of the American Revolution that has been unfolding in the work of Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, J.R. Pole, and others.” 119, Fox-Genovese Sources:​ Military Records, memoirs, fiction, letters, journals, correspondence Connections: Bailyn, ​Ideological​, Nash, ​Urban​, Brown, ​Good Wives, Ulrich, ​Good Wives​, Juster, ​Disorderly​, Norton, “The Evolution,” Breen, ​Marketplace​, Wulf, ​Not All Wives​, Godbeer, ​Sexual Revolution Drew R. McCoy, ​The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America​ (1980) Argument: “The present study is designed to extend and deepen our understanding of political and constitutional thought that has dominated the attention of historians into the broader domain of political economy. In this regard, it will attempt to uncover, analyze, and give unity to a “lost” intellectual world of eighteenth-century political economy. In addition to placing the social and economic thought of articulate Americans in a meaningful ideological context, this study will analyze the impact of republican concerns on policymaking in post-Revolutionary America. Because a commitment to republican government demanded attention to the more general question of the structure and character of society, American statesmen were intensely concerned with the broader social and moral implications of the policies they pursued. IN their quest to build a republican economy and society, therefore, they could

76 perceive intimate connections between such seemingly remote and discrete matters as, for example, the need to open export markets for American produce and the need to sustain the virtuous character of a republican people.” 8 ● “As Gilpin used the term, it was derived from the Aristotelian sense of “economics” as the art of managing a household; by direct analogy, the art of managing a state was referred to as “political economics.” Indeed, many eighteenth-century writers used political economy as Adam Smith did, to refer to “a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator” whose object was “to enrich both the people and the sovereign.” In this sense of the term, “political economy” could refer specifically to the economic policy of a state. But in an even broader, more general sense, the concept also signified the necessary existence of a closer relationship between government, or the polity, and the social and economic order.” 6 ● “In this sense, once the Revolutionaries succeeded in establishing independence from the British Empire, they had to do much more than merely define and put into practice the proper constitutional principles of republican government. They had to define, and then attempt to secure, a form of economy and society that would be capable of sustaining the virtuous character of a republican citizenry. They had to establish, in short, a republican system of political economy for America.” 7 ● “Jefferson’s’ practicality in political economy, however, like that of his contemporaries, was contained in an intellectual universe of assumptions, values, and expectations that to a great extent defined the parameters as often the direction of his thinking. It was a distinctively eighteenth-century universe, a world of ideas with its own peculiar vocabulary, conceptual framework, and emotional context, irretrievably different from our modern world of political and economic assumptions.” 7 ● “Broadly defined, “republicanism” or “republican ideology” has come to refer to a peculiarly eighteenth-century political culture in which the idea of republican government was part of a much larger configuration of beliefs about human behavior and the social process…we can now speak of “republicanism as a distinctive universe (or “paradigm”) of thought and discourse that gave shape to contemporary perceptions of the American Revolution.” 8 ● “By the 1790s, at least two coherent “systems” of political economy can be identified in American thought and policy.” 9 ● “My emphasis throughout this study will be on the ideological origins and the impact upon public policy of a Jeffersonian conception of republican political economy. By “Jeffersonian” I refer to a specific configuration of assumptions, fears, beliefs, and values that shaped a vision of expansion across space—the American continent—as a necessary alternative to the development through time that was generally thought to bring with it both political corruption and social decay. My analysis suggests that this Jeffersonian vision reflected the dominant ideological strain of republican political economy in Revolutionary and early national America.” 9-10 ● “Above all, American republicanism must be understood as an ideology in transition, for it reflected an attempt to cling to the traditional republican spirit of classical antiquity without disregarding the new imperatives of a more modern commercial society.” 10 ● “Jefferson reported that the Revolution had encouraged the prolific production of very coarse clothing “within our families,” but for the “finer” manufactures Virginians desired, he continued, they would undoubtedly continue to rely on importations from abroad. Recognizing that such a pattern would be considered unfortunate by “the political economists of Europe,” who had established the principle “that every state should endeavour to manufacture for itself,” Jefferson contended that it was instead a wise and necessary response to peculiar American conditions and to the lessons of history. In Europe, where the land was either fully cultivated or “locked up against the cultivator” by the bars of aristocratic tradition, manufacturing was to be created, in other words, for those people who could not find occupations on the land.” 14 ● “If his countrymen foolishly and prematurely embraced manufacturing, [Jefferson] predicted, a consequent and inevitable corruption of morals would necessarily endanger the fabric of republican government.” 14 ● “Drew McCoy extends the discussion of republican thought from constitutional principles to political economy. The revolutionary, argues McCoy, were obsessed with the moral dimension of economic life, for a republican polity required virtue for the nation to remain stable and to succeed. Republican institutions could only be safeguarded with a political economy that nurtured and sustained a virtuous citizenry. McCoy concentrates particularly on the thinking and writings of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.” 196, Crow ● “The book’s strength lies in his ability to delineate the internal contradictions in republican thought as it attempted to reconcile classical republicanism to social realities and conditions in America.” 196, Crow ● “For more that two decades Jeffersonian republicanism—the dominant ideological strain of the period, in McCoy’s opinion, wrestled with the “synthetic” belief that America could remain in a “middle stage” of development, grow prosperous and civilized, and not succumb to decadence and luxury as Britain had done. Although the vision of an agricultural republic with industrious, independent yeomen remained the ideal, concessions to commerce and manufacturing had crept into republican thought during the 1780s and 1790s to accommodate domestic and international realities.” 196, Crow ● “McCoy…sees the administrations of Jefferson and Madison as a sustained attempt to secure the requisite conditions for a republican political economy: to purge the national government of corruption by dismantling Hamilton’s fiscal system, to provide for unlimited expansion through space with the Louisiana Purchase, and to establish an international free trade to absorb America’s agricultural surplus. Jefferson’s efforts to create a peaceful agricultural republic through an aggressively expansive foreign policy, McCoy contends, propelled America into a second war for Independence.” 197, Crow ● “[McCoy] weaves in and out of his story three quite distinct possibilities for an American economy: a primitive or Spartan economy, frugal and austere, tied to simple, self-sufficient agriculture and without commerce or luxuries; a mid-level

77 economy, based on widespread property ownership, on a sophisticated agriculture, on household manufactures, and on enough commerce to exchange American raw produce for refined European manufactures; and a mature economy, with a balance of commercial agriculture, large-scale manufactures, and both internal and external commerce. He argues that most articulate American believed that all societies normally or naturally or even inevitably (the ambiguities here are critical) developed through each of these three stages. The first or Spartan stage best fits what he calls a classical republican vision.” 301, Conkin ● “Since the American economy had already developed far beyond such a primitive [Spartan] beginning, this economic ideal functioned largely as a tool of criticism. At the other extreme, the third or mature stage seemed to most Americans inimical to republicanism, for it meant a class-ridden, European-type society, characterized by privilege and monopoly, by nonpropertied and dependent workers, and by greed and corruption at all levels.” 302, Conkin ● “Madison worked hardest to rationalize such time-stopping policies, such clever ways to beat the ordinary march of progress toward both greater wealth and greater poverty. But after the War of 1812 he had to give way before change; he not only increased his emphasis upon household manufactures but accepted the value of a carrying trade not tied to American exports, and even began to accommodate factory production to his older republican goals. In fact, he accepted many of the policies of his old antagonist, Alexander Hamilton, and embraced the idealism of later whigs—that in the free, nonmercantilistic context of American we could have even factories without dependence and forestalled opportunity, as long as entrepreneurial opportunities remained open and wages high, and as long as owners enjoyed no special privileges and produced only necessities or comforts for domestic consumption.” 303, Conkin ● “[McCoy] enlarges our understanding of Madison’s economic beliefs, confirms our understanding of Jefferson’s, and is at least fair toward Hamilton’s, although he explores few of the subtleties in Hamilton’s thought. But with the possible exception of his excellent treatment of Madison, he does not by this descriptive effort open up new scholarly territoriy, as he acknowledges in his introduction. 304, Conkin Sources:​ Papers, newspapers, speeches, journals, government documents Connections:​ Bailyn, ​Ideological​, Nash, ​Urban,​ Breen, ​Marketplace

Begin 19th Century Reading List Notes

1 John W. Blassingame, ​The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South​ (1972)​ First Wave of Revision Argument: ​“Based largely on the autobiographies of fugitive slaves and survivors of slavery, ​The Slave Community shatters the notion that slaves were molded by a common experience into a common mold of suffling subserviency, Blassingame shows that the experience of slavery was by no means the same experience for all salves at all times and places.” 132, Rose ● “Inside the plantation community there existed a black-white symbiosis with its own peculiar demands on everybody; beneath the hairshirt of slavery were restless beings too often generalized about and too seldom identified by name.” 132, Rose ● “But by-and-large slaves were allowed room for the development of individual attributes and even talents; otherwise the exploitation of their labor would have been incomplete. The slave’s family, his work, his community role, his religion and culture, contributed to the maintenance of sanity and individuality.” 132, Rose ● Blassingame did not utilize the WPA’s slave narratives. ● “Blassingame broke with historiographical tradition by accepting antebellum slave narratives as the most useful source for understanding the slave community. Viewing the slave quarter from the cabin step rather than the Big House vernada allowed him to revise the prevailing interpretations of Sanley Elkins and Kenneth Stampp.” 148, Piersen ● “The typical bondsman emerges as a bridge between the stereotypes of Sambo and Nat, and the slave institution fluctuates between the extremes of oppression and leniency. Such a position leaves considerable room for individual enterprise…” 114, Mills ● “This book describes and analyzes the life of the black slave: his African heritage, culture, family, acculturation, behavior, religion, and personality.” Xi ● “The ethnic origins of the first slaves are important primarily in relation to the extent to which native culture and economic organization prepared the African for one facet of plantation life: systematic labor.” 6 ● “The similarities between many European and African cultural elements enabled the slave to continue to engage in many traditional activities or to create a synthesis of European and African cultures.” 20 ● “The Africans retained enough manhood to rebel because the Southern plantation was not a rationally organized institution designed to crush every manifestation of individual will or for systematic extermination.” 47 ● “The key determinants in the acculturation of bondsmen historically have been the length of their servitude, the parallels between their culture and that of their masters, the role of the masters’ governmental and religious leaders in protecting, training, and converting the slaves to their faith, and the treatment and labor of bondsmen.” 49 ● The Revolution and the Great Awakening created abolition parties in some Southern churches. G.A. also led many to free slaves ● “There is overwhelmingly convincing evidence that a substantial number of Southern slaveholders never rested easy with their black species of property. While guilt was neither the South’s biggest nor smallest crop, it grew to sizable proportions among women allied to slaveholding families.” 79 ● Religion was given to slaves so they would be more docile and work harder. Slaves told to view slavery as God’s service 82 ● “Shouting, singing, and preaching, the slaves released all of their despair and expressed their desires for freedom.” 135 ● “The white man’s fear of the slave was so deep and pervasive that it was sometimes pathological.” 231 ● Stereotypes of Nat, Mammies, and Sambo relieved whites as having to think of slaves as men and women.” 230 ● “The typical slave used his wits to escape from work and punishment, preserved his manhood in the quarters, feigned humility, identified with masters and worked industriously only when he was treated humanely, simulated deference, was hostilely submissive and occasionally obstinate, ungovernerable, and rebellious. 322 ● “While the concentration camp differed significantly from the plantation, it illustrates how, even under the most extreme conditions, persecuted individuals can maintain their physical balance because of group solidarity, prior experience in similar institutions, religious ideals, a culture differing greatly from that of their oppressors, prior referents for self-esteem, and physical stamina.” 331 Sources: ​Slave autobiographies, secondary sources, psychological sources Connections: ​Genovese, ​Roll​, White, ​Ar’n’t Eugene D. Genovese, ​Roll, Jordan, Roll​: ​The World the Slaves Made ​(1972)​ First Wave of Revisionism: Fix Elkins Argument: ​“In this book I refer to the “black nation” and argue that the slaves, as an objective social class, laid the foundations for a separate black national culture while enormously enriching American culture as a whole. But that separate black national culture has always been American, however much it has drawn on African origins or reflected the distant development of black people in America.

White and black southerners, however different they may claim to be and in some ways are, have come to form one people in vital respects.” Xv ● “Genovese argues that American slavery must be viewed as a paternalistic institution. But that paternalism of slavery, he maintains, was much more complex that the simple beneficence depicted in the pages of white southern folklore. Paternalism created a mutual dependency that allowed blacks considerable opportunity for asserting rights and developing autonomous cultural institutions. The masters’ need to see themselves as paternal figures required certain responses from their slaves, and the blacks’ understanding of this essential fact gave them considerable room for self-assertion. In their very act of distinguishing between good and bas masters, for example, the slaves revealed their understanding of the ambiguities of paternalism.” 162, Zil

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“The most significant area in which slaves asserted their autonomy was religion. Genovese makes an important contribution by demonstrating the ways in which blacks created a religion that was a crucial resource for fostering individual self-respect and group survival. Blacks created a new faith, combining Christianity with African traditions, rejecting the Christian concept of sin, and emphasizing the African “irrepressible affirmation of life.” The slaves’ religion blended the “image of Moses, the this-worldly leader of his people out of bondage, and Jesus, the otherworldly Redeemer.” Afro-Americans thereby transformed Christianity “into a religion of resistance—not often of revolutionary defiance, but of a spiritual resistance that accepted the limits of the politically possible.”” 162, Zilversmit ● “Genovese recognizes the subtleties and the ambiguities involved in developing ways of coping with an oppressive institution.

He argues, that “the legacy of paternalism, no matter how brilliantly manipulated to protect their own interests, kept the slaves and generations of later blacks from a full appreciation of [their]…individual strength. And the intersection of paternalism with racism worked a catastrophe, for it transformed elements of personal dependency into a sense of collective weakness.”” 162, Zil ● “[Genovese] is a Marxist who repudiates economic determinism. [Genovese maintains that] social classes have cultures and “worldviews” that transcend their material interests.” 131, Fredrickson ● “The heart of Genovese’s interpretation of Afro-American slavery is his concept of paternalism. For him paternalism is a system of mutual duties and obligations between social classes, as exemplified in the classic feudal formulations of the concept by distinguishing the master’s view of the relationship from that of the slaves. The masters saw their role as one of providing protection for helpless dependents, and they expected gratitude from their charges; the slaves saw the relationship as involving genuine reciprocity. By fulfilling their obligation to work for the masters, they established a claim to “customary rights,” which included a certain level of material well being, reasonable standards of discipline, and, most important, some breathing space in which to assert their cultural autonomy and sense of community. They generally had their way, Genovese suggests and felt no reason to be grateful for what was only their due. The slaves accepted paternalism on their own terms, which meant that they asserted their humanity and rejected slavery; for slavery by definition denies any rights or independent will to the enslaved.” 132 ● “Placing the southern “domestic institution” in the broad context of labor arrangements elsewhere in the nineteenth-century world, Genovese draws effectively from the works of Max Weber, Antonio Gramsci, Eric Hobsbawm, and many others in the European structuralist tradition.” 240, Brown ● “The central thesis: the interrelatedness of black accommodation and resistance in the authoritarian framework. Rather than serving as points of paradox or fain irony, slave acquiescence and self-assertiveness move rhythmically together throughout the work like a brooding, percussive line in a symphonic score.” 240, Brown ● “Analysis of slave weddings and burials, work habits and family exchange, and all the other rituals that lent black experience a meaning beyond the immediacy of bondage. Rejecting old and recent stereotypes of race behavior, Genovese honors such maligned figures as the black preacher, the household “mammy,” the slave driver, as well as the ordinary members of families…slave assumed leadership as occasion or duty required but usually rejected outright rebellion so that they and their kindred could make the best of a sad existence.” 240, Brown ● “[Genovese’s] conclusion is that, though far less bellicose and modernistic than we of more blessed times might wish, the antebellum black southerner…endured.” 240, Brown ● “Eloquently, ​Roll, Jordan, Roll demonstrates how accommodation merged into resistance, and rebellion into acceptance of what could not be overturned, only modified, hour by hour.” 240, Brown ● “I hope I have shown that slaves made an indispensable contribution to the development of black culture and black national consciousness as well as to American nationality as a whole.” xvi ● “I have chosen to stay close to my primary responsibility: to tell a storey of slave life as carefully and accurately as possible.”

Xvi ● “Slavery, especially in its plantation setting and in its paternalistic aspect, made white and black southerners one people while making them two. As in a lasting although not necessarily happy marriage, two discrete individuals shared, for better or worse, one life.” Xvi-xvii Sources: ​theory, secondary sources, sermons, diaries, correspondence, laws, court records Connections: ​Blassingame, ​Slave Community​, Oakes, ​Ruling Race​, White, ​Ar’n’t James Oakes, ​The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders​ (1982)​ 2​nd​ wave of revisionism: Scope Expans of Slave System Argument: ​“I have been guided by two priorities: First, I have tried to establish an accurate portrait of the entire slaveholding class, and to demonstrate that the slaveholders were a more diverse group that has generally been appreciated. Second, I have tried to elicit larger patterns of political, ideological, economic, and demographic development without doing violence to the evidence of diversity within the slaveholding class.” Xv ● “How, I asked, did race and class interact in the daily lives and lifelong careers of the slaveholders themselves?...The slaveholders were a ruling class if ever there was one, but they justified their power by defining themselves as a superior race.” x ● “ I set out in this book to explore, through the history of the slaveholders, America’s simultaneous commitment to slavery and freedom. I wanted to see how the slaveholders, as founds and heirs of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy, fit racial slavery into their conception of the world.” Xi

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“Most slaveholders believed that through hard work and fugal habits they could accumulate more land and more slaves. They thus saw slavery as a means to what we now call upward mobility. They claimed, albeit with little evidence to back themselves up, that industrious yeomen farmers could rise from slavelessness to slaveownership.” XI “Every historian of the Old South knows that while the majority of slaves lived on units with more than twenty bondsmen, the majority of slaveholders owned five slaves or fewer. Thus, the “typical” slaveholder did not necessarily own the “typical” slave.

Most historians have used this fact to justify their emphasis on large plantations.” Xvi “paternalism is the ideological legacy of a feudal political system with no fully developed market economy; liberalism developed alongside political democracy and free-market commercialism. The two systems are thus intrinsically antagonistic, and this antagonism will be heightened when a paternalistic social order finds itself virtually isolated in an increasingly liberal world.

These appear to be Genovese’s assumptions; they are mine also.” Xviii “I see paternalism giving way to liberalism throughout colonial, revolutionary, and pre-Civil War America. Genovese finds a reversal of centuries of historical development in the wake of America’s withdrawal from the Atlantic slave trade in 1808, after which the South retreated rapidly into a highly sophisticated paternalistic social order such as the New World had never before known. Genovese argues that slaveholders were temperamentally hostile to the political democracy in which they operated.”

Xviii “I have found ​some ​slaveholders who articulated a paternalistic world view with increasing stridency as the Civil War approached; ​some slaveholders who were overtly and increasingly hostile to democracy; and ​one who went so far as to repudiate free trade.” Xviii “Genovese…indeed argues something like the opposite: that paternalism flourished in direct proportion to the expansion of the cotton economy. In so arguing, he ignores—almost completely—the profound impact of the market economy on the nature of slavery, and it is this issue on which our disagreement is deepest.” Xix “Virtually every recent historian of slave life argues that Afro-American culture provided the means by which bondsmen successfully resisted the dehumanizing tendencies of the slave regime. I have tried to complement these studies by showing how often unstated assumptions and daily behavior of the slaveholders contributed to the dehumanization to which Afro-Americans were forced to adapt.” Xx “Born to an age that rewarded wealth with political power, the master class eventually thrust itself into the struggle for democracy. Slaveholders took the lead in the American Revolution, authored its most cherished documents, and carried the struggle into the nineteenth century. Taking its name from one of America’s wealthiest planters, the “age of Jackson” saw the principles of democratic egalitarianism implemented by slaveholding politicians who made the white man’s freedom the black man’s burden.” 226 “The slaveholding experience coincided with the American experience at large. Except for its defense of bondage, the slaveholders’ ideology was strikingly similar to the Republican party ideology of the 1850’s. Indeed it was this closeness that so frightened the master clas. Free soil and free labor were for most slaveholders the inalienable rights of free white men.

Furthermore, they were the rights that the institution of slavery sustained.” 227 “[Slaveholders] viewed human bondage as the basis of their entire civilization. The president of the Florida secession convention declared that “at the south, with our people of course, slavery is the element of all value, and a destruction of that destroys all that is property.” Mississippi secessionists publicly announced that their position was “thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world.”…By placing slavery at the heart of their society, the master class came into conflict with a northern tradition that claimed the same ideological heritage.” 227 “From 1815 to 1839 the cotton trade provided much of the export capital to finance northeastern economic growth. But, after 1840, slavery’s importance to the northern economy declined even as the southern slave economy continued to prosper. Indeed, so successfully had the American economy developed outside the South that the rest of the nation was increasingly able to prosper independently of the cotton trade.” 228 “Thus, just when the South’s predominance was declining, western lands became increasingly important to northern economic growth. That the traditionally expansive slave economy should come into conflict with the North over the issue of western lands was hardly surprising. For both the North and the South, territorial expansion spoke directly to the great questions of slavery and freedom.” 228 “The basis of the slaveholders’ authority had always been the capacity of the slave economy to distribute its wealth, however unequally, to a significant fraction of the southern white population. But, beginning around 1830, that population began to expand so quickly as to create demands that the slave economy could no longer meet. The percentage of slaveholding families in the South was shrinking, and with increasing velocity in the 1850’s…But whatever its ultimate cause, the declining proportion of slaveholders threatened to undermine their authority by closing off popular avenues of material advancement, thus jeopardizing the masters; ability to sustain the loyalty of the nonslaveholdig whites.” 229 “If the slaveholders felt compelled to advocate measures that would ensure the survival of slavery, abolitionists opposed those measures precisely because they hoped to see slavery die. In so doing, they brought to the surface the gravest fear of the slaveholding class: that emancipation of the slaves would so threaten the “purity” of whites as to raise the specter of a bloody race war across the South.” 233

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“The slaveholders could not conceive of a society in which blacks and whites lived in equality and harmony. This powerful conviction informed their actions throughout the sectional crisis.” 234 ● “Whereas Genovese argues that slavery was a precapitalist social system which generated a ruling class with aristocratic pretensions and an emerging world-veiw antithetical to bourgeois values, Oakes argues that slavery was capitalistic and that the slaveholders eagerly embraced the values of the marketplace and political democracy (for whites). Whereas Genovese argues that the master-slave relationship became increasingly paternalistic over time, Oakes argues that it became decreasingly paternalistic. Whereas Genovese argues that wealthy planters achieved hegemony within the slaveholding class and the larger civil planters achieved hegemony within the slaveholding class and the larger civil society and moved toward a defense of slavery in the abstract, Oakes argues that small slaveholders were politically, as well as numerically, dominant within their class and held fast to a racial and economic defense of bondage.” 220, Hahn ● “[Oakes’] main themes are that owners of small umbers of slaves were far more numerous than planters, and typically they were restless, accumulating, middle-class farmers, much more comfortable with the democratic ideologies of the nineteenth century than with antiquated doctrines of patriarchy and paternalism.” 691, Wright Sources: ​journals, estate papers, correspondence, court records, secondary sources Connections: ​Genovese, ​Roll​, Blassingame, ​Slave Community Deborah Gray White, ​Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South​ (1985)​ 2​nd​ wave of Slavery revisionism: Scope Argument: ​“This present study takes a look at slave women in America and argues that they were not submissive, subordinate, or prudish and that they were not expected to be so. While the focus is primarily Southern antebellum plantation life it does not ignore bonded women in the colonial and early American South. Women, it will be seen, had different roles from those of men and they also had a great deal in common with their African foremothers, who, in many precolonial West African societies, held positions not inferior but complementary to those of men. This study also argues that mutual respect characterized relationships between the sexes. If the male supremacy of the Big House did not infiltrate the quarters it was in part because the jobs and services performed by slave women for the community were not peripheral but central to slave survival. Evidence presented here also suggests that slave women had a high degree of sex consciousness and that it was encouraged by the plantation work regimen, which required women and girls to work together in groups and which made black women highly dependent on each other.” 22 ● We cannot consider who black women are as black people without considering their sex, nor can we consider who they are as women without considering their race.” 6 ● “African and African-American women were not born degraded but rendered so by enslavement.” 8 ● “As part of this revisionist history ​Ar’n’t I a Woman? argued that “despite the brutality and inhumanity, or perhaps because of it, a distinct African-American culture based on close-knit relationships grew and thrived, and that it was this culture that sustained black people.” Like others I focused on the community of the quarters and the slave family, but I also highlighted the network of enslaved women, their will to quietly resist and avoid total domination. I held then and still believe that “in the assimilation of culture, in the interaction of blacks and whites, there were gray areas and relationships more aptly described in terms of black over white.” 8 ● “The slave woman’s condition was just an extreme case of what women as a group experienced in America. Many activities were circumscribed and hopes blunted by the conventional wisdom that a woman’s place was in the home. Women were overworked and underpaid in factories and other work places because the were denied the legal and social sanctions necessary to fight unjust and intolerable working conditions.” 15 ● “For antebellum black women, however, sexism was but one of three constraints. Most were slaves, and as such were denied the “privilege,” enjoyed by white feminists, of theorizing about bondage, for they were literally owned by someone else. They were slaves because they were black and even more than sex, color was the absolute determinant of class in antebellum America.” 15 ● “The feeling in antebellum America was that women needed male guidance because women were fickle and weak-willed. Slave women demonstrated that sex was not an absolute determinant of skill, will power, aptitude, or even strength. Undoubtedly they wanted the whip off their backs and an end to all other iniquities that came with slavery, but did they want America’s ideas about a woman’s place to envelop them?” 16 ● “American white women were expected to be passive because they were female. But black women had to be submissive because they were black and slaves. This made a difference in the sex roles of black and white women, as well as in the expectations that their respective societies had of them.” 17 ● “The direction that the research took, however, was in large part predetermined because Elkins’ ​Slavery defined the parameters of the debate. In a very subtle way these parameters had more to do with the nature of male slavery than with female slavery.”18 ● “However, both sexes did not travel the [middle] passage the same way. Women made the journey on the quarter and half decks.” 19 ● “That Elkins seemed to omit women altogether was accentuated by his description of slaves whom he identified as part of an American “underground,” those who never succumbed to Sambosim. Among those mentioned were Gabriel, who led the revolt of 1800, Denmark Vessey, leading spirit in of the 1822 plot in Charleston, and Nat Turner, the Virginia slave who fomented rebellion in 1831. An omission, conspicuous by its absences, was Harriet Tubman, a woman who in her own way waged a

5 successful little private war against Souther slaveholders. If Elkins had really been thinking of slaves of both sexes he would hardly forget this woman, who became known widely as the Moses of her people.” 19-20 ● “Following the lead of E. Franklin Frazier and Kenneth Stampp, Elkins maintained that women were allowed the alternative role of mother…The etiquette of plantation life, explained Elkins, even deprived the black male of the honorific attributes of fatherhood. Since Elkins’ Sambo theory rested, in part, on the absence of significant alternative roles for a slave, to recognize the role of mother was tantamount, on Elkins’ part, to arguing that black women escaped Samboism.” 20 ● “But the byword for blacks at the time Elkins’ ​Slavery was circulating was “militancy,” the ideology was black power. If the stage Elkins set for the debate over slavery was one that reemphasized the femininity of race, those who did most of the debating were bent on defemininizing black men, sometimes by emphasizing the masculine roles played by slave men, and sometimes by imposing the Victorian model of domesticity and maternity on the pattern of black female slave life.” 21 ● “John Blassingame’s ​The Slave Community,​ Plantation Life in the Antebellum South [is a class work] but much of it deals with male status. For instance, Blassingame stressed the fact that many masters recognized the male as the head of the family. He observed that during courtship men flattered women and exaggerated prowess. There was, however, little discussion of the reciprocal activities of slave women. Blassingame also described how slave men gained status in the family and slave community, but he did not do the same for women.” 21 ● “Eugene Genovese argued in ​Roll, Jordan, Roll,​ The World that Slave Made​, that female slaves did not assert themselves, protect their children, or assume other normally masculine activities.” 21 ● “Much of what is important to black Americans is not visible to whites, and much of what is important to women is not visible to men. Whites wrote most of antebellum America’s records and African-American males wrote just about all of the antebellum records left by blacks. To both groups the female slave’s world was peripheral. The bondwoman was important to them only when her activities somehow involved them.” 23 ● “Women, like slaves, and servants, deliberately dissemble their objective reality. Like all who are dependent upon the caprices of a master, they hide their real sentiments and turn toward him a changeless smile or an enigmatic impassivity.” 24 ● “It is unfortunate, but so much of what we would like to know about slave women can never be known because they masked their thoughts and personalities in order to protect valued parts of their lives from white and male invasion.” 24 ● “As White points out in her opening chapter, when the dominant white society did look at black women, all it could see were self-serving stereotypes—reflection of its own desires. Some black women were seen as “Jezebels,” sex-crazed females who could conveniently be blamed for white males’ lust. Other black women were thought to be “Mammies,” loyal servants and surrogate mothers whose selfless love for white children conveniently demonstrated the absence of oppression and the bonds of affection which united the races.” 252, Greenberg ● Slave experiences differed: “While male slaves came to the new world in disproportionately large numbers during the early colonial period, by the middle of the eighteenth century the pattern began to equalize. Masters realized the economic value of a slave force which could reproduce itself. Although women continued to be used as field laborers, their ability to bear children gave them added value. Ironically, according to White, the master’s desire to encourage female childbearing and childcare coincided with a role traditionally assumed by West African women. Hence, the economic desires of masters and the traditions of enslaved Africans reinforced each other to shape a unique female experience of slavery.” 253, Greenberg ● “White also points out that the close connections between black women and children meant that mothers were less likely to resist slavery by running away. To run from a master usually mean abandoning a child.” 253, Greenberg ● “Slave women rarely left their farms for any reason. If they were involved in an “abroad” marriage, the many usually visited the wife.” 253, Greenberg ● “Women spent most of their time with other women and they forged the closest bonds among themselves. Women did field work in sex-segregated gangs. Some of the happiest experiences of a slave woman’s life centered around such female group activities as doing laundry or quilting. In matters of health, black women usually relied on other black women with abilities as midwives or herb doctors. Childcare responsibilities were shared by the community of women. Cooks, seamstresses, midwives, and others learned their distinctive skills from other black women. According to White, with husbands often on other plantations and always subject to the threat of sale, the closest and most stable relationships often developed between black female kin.” 254 Sources:​ WPA narratives, ex-slave narratives (men), plantation ledgers, plantation records, owner correspondence, African research Connections:​ Blassingame, ​The Slave Community​, ​Genovese,​ Roll​, Jacobs, ​Incidents Walter Johnson, ​Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market​ (1999)​ 2​nd​ Wave of Revisionism: Scope Expans. Slave System Argument: ​“Every one of the two million human-selling transactions which outlined the history of the antebellum South proved a way into it deepest secrets: into the aspirations of southern slaveholders and the fears of southern slaves; into the depth of the slaveholders’ daily dependence on their slaves, despite claims of lofty independence; into the dreams of resistance that often lurked within the hearts of slaves; into the terrible density of the interchange between masters and slaves, whose bodies and souls were daily fused into common futures in the slave market.” 17 ● “The history of the antebellum South was made (and occasionally unmade) in the slave pens. There, through the black arts of the trade, people were turned into products and sold at a prices; there, human bodies were stripped, examined, and assigned meaning

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according to the brutal anatomy lessons of slaveholding ideology; there, slaveholders daily gambled their own fantasies of freedom on the behavior of people whom they could never fully commodify; there, enslaved people fashioned commodities and identities that enabled them to survive on of the most brutal forcible dislocation of human history; and there, sometimes, slaves were able to shape a sale to suit themselves. In the slave market, slaveholders and slaves were fused into an unstable mutuality which made it hard to tell where one’s history ended and the other’s began.” 214 “The fact that slaveholders included so much about the slave market in their letters is absolutely central to one of the arguments of this book: that slave holders often represented themselves to one another by reference to their slaves.” 13 “The closing of the Atlantic slave trade did not mean that North American slavery would wither away through the high mortality and low birth rates that characterized slavery elsewhere in the New World. It meant, instead, that any expansion of slavery into the western states would take the shape of a forcible relocation of American-born slaves. In the seven decades between the Constitution and the Civil War, approximately one million enslaved people were relocated from the upper South to the lower South according to the dictates of the slaveholders’ economy, two thirds of these through a pattern of commerce that soon be came institutionalized as the domestic slave trade.” 5 “In its earliest years the domestic slave trade was probably not recognizable as such. By the end of the eighteenth century slave coffles were a common enough sight on the roads connecting the declining Chesapeake—its soil exhausted by a century of tobacco planting—to the expanding regions of post-Revolutionary slavery, the Carolinas to the south and Kentucky and Tennessee to the west. But in these years the trade was a practice without a name or a center, a series of speculations made along the roads linking the small towns of the rural South into an attenuated political economy of slavery. As the coffles traveled south, slaves were sold at dusty crossings and roadhouses through informal rural networks of traders and chance encounters that continued to characterize much of the trade throughout its massive nineteenth-century expansion.” 5 “As the end of the eighteenth century, the slave trade began to follow the international demand curve for cotton. Although slaves continued to cultivate tobacco, rice, and indigo that funded the first expansion of American slavery, the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, the purchase of Louisiana in 1803, and the subjugation of southern Indians, finalized along the Trail of Tears in 1838, opened new regions of the South to cultivation and slavery.” 5 “the price, of slaves tracked the price of cotton to such a degree that it was commonplace in the years after 1840 that the price of slaves could be determined by multiplying the price of cotton by ten thousand (seven cents per pound for cotton yielding seven hundred dollars per slave). Only in the 1850s did slave prices seem to cut loose from cotton prices in a cycle of speculation that made entry into the slaveholding class prohibitively expensive.” 6 “Those hundreds of thousands of people were revenue to the cities and states where they were sold, and profits in the pockets of landlords, provisioners, physicians, and insurance agents long before they were sold. The most recent estimate of the size of this ancillary economy is 13.5% of the price per person—tens of millions of dollars over the course of the antebellum period.” 6 “Along with the two thirds of a million people moved through the interstate trade, there were twice as many who were sold locally. Slaves from neighbor to neighbor, state-supervised probate and debt sales, or brokered sales within a single state do not show up in the statistics that have been used to measure the extent and magnitude of the slave trade.” 6-7 “This project takes the form of a thrice-told tale: the story of a single moment—a slave sale—told from three different perspectives…this book began with the idea that the history of any struggle, no matter how one-sided its initial appearance, is incomplete until told from the perspectives of all those whose agency shaped the outcome.” 8 “In what follows I have used three strategies to accomplish the dual task of reading the history of the many in the stories of the few and separating the experience of slavery form the ideology of anti=slavery. First, I have read the narratives in tandem with sources produced by slaveholders and visitors to the South…Second, I have read the narratives for traces of the experience of slavery antecedent to the ideology of antislavery, for the “facts” provided by Frederick Douglass without which William Lloyd Garrison could not have fashioned his “philosophy”…”Third, I have read the narratives for symbolic truths that stretch beyond the facticity of specific events...In addition to the slave narratives, I have relied heavily on the docket records of approximately two hundred cases of disputed slave sales that came before the Louisiana [Supreme C.] in the 19​th​ century.”10-12 “Finally, I have relied on the chillingly economical descriptions of slave sale generated by the trade itself: the notarized Acts of Sale by which a sale was given legal standing, and the traders’ slave record books, price lists, and advertisements.” 14 “This history, then, is not organized around “change over time” in the traditional sense. It does not begin at one time (say 1820) and progress toward another (say 1860), providing an overview of the history of the slave trade in between…Instead, it begins with the efforts of various historical actors—traders, buyers, or slaves—to imaging, assimilate, respond to, or resist the slave trade, with the desires and fears that gave the trade its daily shape. The scope and scale of the chapters shifts according to the efforts of the participants to understand and control the history in which they were joined.” 15 “Even as the traders packaged their slaves by “feeding them up,” oiling their bodies, and dressing them in new clothes, they were forced to rely on the slaves to sell themselves, to act as they had been advertised to be. Likewise, even as slave buyers, and asked them questions, they depended on the slaves to give them answers that would help them look beyond the traders’ arts. The stakes were high, for their identities as masters and mistresses, planters and paternalists, hosts and hostesses, slave breakers and sexual predators were all lived through the bodies of people who could be bought and sold in the market.” 16

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“During their time in the trade, the slaves had come to know and trust one another, and in the market they could share their observations of the slaveholders and collectively (and sometimes violently) resist them. Even those who did not revolt found ways to resist the trade. In the way they answered questions, characterized their skills, and carried their bodies—in the way they performed their commodification—slaves could use the information unwittingly provided them by the traders’ preparations and the buyers’ examinations to select the best among the poisoned outcomes promised them by the trade.” 16-17 ● “This, then is a book not only about Louisiana, or the slave market in New Orleans, or the domestic slave trade as a whole, although it is all those things. This is the story of the making of the antebellum South.” 18 ● “As they were driven south and west by people they called “soul drivers,” those slaves carried with them the cultural forms—the songs, the stories, the family names, and the religion—out of which they forged the commonalities that supported their daily struggle against slavery.” 215 ● “Even as it transformed the geography of both white and black life in the South, the criss-crossed pattern of the slave trade knit the political economy of slavery into a cohesive whole. Long after intensive tobacco farming had eroded the fertility and profitability of the slave-cultivated fields of the Chesapeake, the slave trade enabled Virginia and Maryland planters to retain their ties to the political economy of slavery…the planters of the Chesapeake were slave farmers who held onto their wealth and status by supplying the cotton boom with the offspring of slaves idled by the decline of tobacco….in the 1850s, when for a time it seemed that the upper South was being overtaken by a renewed tobacco boom, the trade began to flow northward as well as southward.” 215 ● “The crude spectacle that was daily on view in the slave pen—a human body publicly stripped, examined, priced, and sold—thus became an image that stood for the whole of slavery. The daily process of the trade provided a template through which opponents of slavery could establish the connections between the upper South and the Lower, between kind affection for their slaves and the unmistakable material reality of a person with a price. By thinking their way through the slave trade, critics of slavery like Pennington could articulate the links that joined individual slaveholders to the broader system and argue that the essence of slavery lay in the worst of its abuses rather than the rosiest of its promises.” 219 ● “Walter Johnson’s ​Soul by Soul​…refines the paternalist interpretation of slavery. The slave system’s pervasive violence belied the presence of a set of reciprocal duties and responsibilities. The daily history of slavery, Johnson contends, began in the slave market’s showrooms as a contest between the slaveholder’s efforts to beat their slaves into submission and the slaves’ collective will to resist.” 650, Bell Sources: ​slave narratives, antislavery propaganda, proslavery propaganda, court records, sale ledgers, newspaper advertisements Connections: ​Blassingame, ​The Slave Community​, Genovese, ​Roll​, Oakes, ​Ruling,​ White, ​Ar’n’t Peter Kolchin, ​American Slavery: 1619-1877​ (1993)​ Synthesis of 2​nd​ Wave Revisionism Argument: ​“Kolchin argues that slavery in British North America did not result from a predetermined plan. Rather, the British, who were “color blind” in their initial effort to fill the demand for labor, with Europeans and a smaller number of Indians providing much of the labor, did not switch to African labor until the European labor well had run dry. The use of black labor was therefore not ideologically motivated [very Edmund Morganesque]. By the 1680s Africans had replaced Europeans and Indians as the dominant group.” 93, Johnson ● “In writing this volume, I have had several goals in mind. First, I have sought to creat an account of slavery that is at the same time substantive and historiographical. Because historical reinterpretation is a continuing process, any understanding of slavery requires coming to grips with the diverse and changing ways in which historians have treated the institution. I thus combine a primary focus on the evolution of slavery itself with frequent brief (and I hope unobtrusive) discussions of historical controversies over slavery.” X ● “Second, I have aimed for a balanced approach that pays attention to the slaves, the slave owners, and the system that bound them together. For years, historians treated slaves primarily as objects of white action rather than as subjects in their own right, and largely ignored the behavior and beliefs of the slaves themselves…I believe that neither slaves nor slave owners can be understood in isolation from each other: a well-rounded study of slavery must come to grips with slaves as both subjects and objects and must consider slavery from their perspective of both the masters and the slaves while adopting the perspective of neither.” x-xi ● “Third, I have striven to show how slavery changed over time…Finally, although this is a study of ​American slavery, I have placed that slavery within a broad comparative context…In the modern era, American slavery was part of a larger system of New World slavery that reached its height of development in the Caribbean and Brazil and emerged contemporaneously with the widespread use of forced labor in Eastern Europe, the most notable example of which was provided by Russian serfdom. The comparative approach to slavery has yielded important insights, enabling scholars both to note common patterns and to probe the ways in which geographically varied historical conditions shaped differing social relations.” Xi-xii ● “The new revisionism is both less well known and harder to summarize succinctly, in part because its practitioners are pursuing a less unified goal: rather than aiming to refute notions of slave docility, they seek in a wide variety of different ways to ​refine and add complexity to our understanding of slavery.” 239

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“The current scholarship in general exhibits a more cautious tone than that of the 1970s. Many of the most influential works of that decade were big and bold; typically, they dealt with the entire South…With some exceptions, the most notable of which are Ira Berlin’s sweeping surveys ​Many Thousands Gone and ​Generations of Captivity​, most recent and current historians of slavery have tended to shy away from establishing new paradigms or from making claims concerning slavery in general throughout the entire South, in favor of exploring particular dimensions or angles or geographic areas [Like Philip D. Morgan].” 244-245 ● “This more muted tone [by current historians] is not entirely surprising; indeed, it is what one might very well expect in the refining and filling-in stage of scholarship that has followed the pathbreaking but less nuanced works of the first revisionist wave…As slavery scholarship has become more cautious, more balanced, more narrowly focused, more sophisticated, and more voluminous, it has also become less familiar, less noteworthy, and perhaps less accessible, to those who are not experts in the field.” 245 ● “This ambitious book has some good qualities. It covers a great deal of ground in relatively few pages, is clearly, simply, straightforwardly written, and pays attention to changes over time and to some extent over space.” 575, Hall ● “Although Kolchin is correct that slaves culture(s) cannot be discussed in isolation from white culture(s) and the institution of slavery, his image is of an orderly world in which the cultural influence went largely one way: from knowledgeable whites to ignorant blacks. In fact, most of the crops cultivated in the Americas were domesticated in or introduced into and widely cultivated in Africa long before the United States was colonized.” 575, Hall ● “Most of the book is devoted to an examination of how American slavery changed over time—from the colonial period, to the American Revolution, to the antebellum period, and concluding with a discussion of Reconstruction. During the colonial period, “slavery acquired some common features that distinguished it in significant ways from slavery elsewhere” (29). The Revolutionary War had a major impact on slavery. After the war, differentiation between the Upper and Lower South became greater and slave autonomy increased in both sections. Changes continued during the antebellum period; slavery became more rigid and paternalistic, at the same time it became increasingly distinctive, and masters interfered in the lives of their slaves to an “extraordinary” degree.” 93, Johnson ● “[Kolchin] argues, instead, that “slaves did not really form communities in the sense that peasants did..they did develop a common identification that substituted for—and has often been confused with—a sense of community” (153).” 93, Johnson ● “Southerners according to Kolchin, were Americans just like northerners, but “Southerners lived in a slave society whose history differed in important ways from that of other Americans” (171).” Finally, Kolchin argues that Reconstruction was, indeed, an “extraordinary departure.” 93-94, Johnson ● “The book, moreover, devotes little attention to the practice of slavery in the northern colonies as well as to urban slavery, and ignores the early republic as a distinct period of American history.” 94, Johnson Sources: ​Secondary—it’s a synthesis Connections:​ Blassingame, ​The Slave Community,​ Genovese,​ Roll, ​Oakes,​ Ruling, ​White, Ar’n’t, Johnson, ​Soul Peter H. Wood, ​Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion​ (1974) Argument: ​“Wood seems to cast his vote more on the side of those who emphasize rebelliousness than of those who stress the psychologically induced docility of the slave population [by climaxing his book with the Stono Rebellion (1739)]…Wood seems to adopt the version of the position advanced by Oscar and Mary Handlin in their 1950 article, namely, that slavery was less a result of racial antipathy toward blacks than a product of the demands of a plantation system that reduced blacks to slavery to meet its need for labor and then regarded slavery as a badge of inferiority.” 63, Tate ● 1​st​ wave of revision ● “”The literature about slavery in the British North American colonies is sparse, and nowhere has the dearth bee more unfortunate than in regard to South Carolina, where blacks early constituted a majority of the population.” 335, Weir ● “By employing modern concepts of epidemiology [Wood] is able to substantiate the early belief that Africans were more resistant than whites to the fevers endemic in the lowland swamps. In addition, Wood believes that blacks, many of whom had long been familiar with the rice plant, probably contributed much of the know-how as well as the labor necessary to its successful cultivation. Skilled in raising livestock, fishing, and woodcraft many Africans also proved to be adept as artisans.

Initially, therefore, they engaged in a wide range of occupations that often permitted a considerable degree of independence and intimate contact with whites. But their increasing numbers led to greater anxieties in the white community, which then tightened restrictions. In turn slaves ran away and plotted insurrection with greater frequency. Ultimately, these forms of resistance culminated in the Stono Rebellion, when perhaps as many as one hundred slaves set out for St. Augustine and freedom. But the revolt failed, and, according to Wood, the resulting repression systematized in Negro Act of 1740 was successful in preventing further serious rebellions during the remained of the colonial period.” 335, Weir ● “Wood sensibly describes the transferal of West African culture to the New World. The West Africans’ skills at husbandry, boating, farming, and ready acclimation to the subtropical environment worked mightily toward the colony’s wealth and prominence in the eighteenth century. The author also convincingly shows that in spite of enslavement, the first blacks enjoyed a great deal of freedom during the pioneer period. Whites and blacks lived and worked together in the mutual dependence implicit in pioneer existence.” 103, Walsh

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“In fact, the colonial ancestors of present-day Afro-Americans are more likely to have first confronted North America at Charlestown than at any other port of entry. It has been estimated that well over 40 per cent of the slaves reaching the British mainland colonies between 1700 and 1775 arrived in South Carolina, while most of the remained were scattered through northern ports.” XIV “As one might expect, it became increasingly clear that the role of the black majority was major rather than minor, active rather than passive. Negro slaves played a significant and often determinative part in the evolution of the colony.” Xvii “It appeared that the transition to an African work force at the start of the eighteenth century, due to the interweaving of variables which are widely familiar, may also have depended in part upon several factors explored here in detail for the first time. A number of Africans possessed prior familiarity with rice cultivation, which could have greatly enhanced the value of all blacks as workers, particularly in the years when this commodity was first being established. Furthermore, West Africans, like Scilians and others who have lived in malarious climates for centuries, had retained a high incidence of sickle-cell trait, a genetic characteristic the negative effects of which were balanced by is positive contribution: the ability to inhibit malaria among humans constantly exposed to infectious mosquitoes.” Xvii-xviii “Although the fraction of this wider migration that embarked for Carolina was never large, those who traveled to that coast from Barbados—both blacks and whites—were to make up a significant segment of the first permanent colony in that region after 1670. And even during the preceding decade, the activities of a group of Barbadian Adventurers helped lay out the terms under which the Carolina coast would eventually be colonized.” 9 “While I have not limited my sources racially, I have made an effort to confine them chronologically. Too often Afro-American history has been read backward, with nineteenth-century life.” Xviii “Scholars leave “the impression that the institution [of slavery] was a static one, and that the records for studying its evolution from the beginning of settlement do not exist.” Too, [Wood] reminds us that Africans were “the earliest of any major contingent of ethnic immigrants” and that “the proportion of Negroes in the population would never again be so high as it was during the eighteenth century.” (xviii) 59, Tate “Black Majority obviously continues the tradition of separate studies on individual colonies as has much of the other recent work…If colonial historians of slavery are, however, still writing its history colony by colony…” 60, Tate This was how it was written in the beginning, colony by colony rather than broad, synthesizing works.

“In his computation of slave importations into the colony, which goes beyond the evidence compiled by Elizabeth Donnan, [Wood] finds a particularly heavy flow of Africans in the 1730s, largely from the single region of Angola, which proves to bear directly upon the Stono Rebellion of 1739, the climactic event of the book.” 60, Tate “The organizing principle of the book is that a tree-stage development of slavery in South Carolina from the founding of the colony in 1670 to about 1740, in the aftermath of the Stono Rebellion, Wood concludes, slavery had been set upon a course from which there was little change of turning back.” 60, Tate “The first settlers came largely from Barbados, brining with them blacks who had been part of the slave system already established there.” 61, Tate “The second phase extend from 1690 to the beginning of royal government in 1720. It, too, was a period of “pioneering,” on a larger scale than before but with the same variety of economic pursuits—timber cutting, naval stores, fishing, cattle raising, and, of course, some agriculture. To Wood, however, it was a time in black-white relations that still had a good bit of the spirit of “we are all in this together.” Black men and women were valued not as a mass of unskilled labor to be used in the dull, back-breaking cultivation of a staple crop but rather for the variety of skills they could bring to the diversified tasks involved in establishing the colony. Blacks and whites shared an admittedly difficult life, worked together, enjoyed sexual relationships with one another certainly more openly and perhaps more frequently than in later years, and functioned virtually as interracial family units. Blacks were freely armed in periods of Indian war and trusted in occupations that required great freedom of movement about the colony and its waters, such as fishing of the Indian trade.” 61, Tate “[Wood] has to concede that reality was not always so idyllic. The number of free blacks remained small, their condition was more likely to decline than improve, and what appears to have been the first concerted period of discriminatory legislation against blacks followed almost immediately in the 1720s.” 61, Tate In the “third of Wood’s periods [from 1720 through Stono] of slavery development begins. Rice cultivation had now been perfected, and with its removal in 1731 from the enumerated list of commodities the colonies could ship only within the Empire, the way was open for South Carolinians to tap the all-important Mediterranean market. Slavery continued to expand, but more now from fresh importation of Africans and less from increase in American-born blacks, who were at the moment not reproducing themselves. White South Carolinians, alternately wanting more black labor and decrying its predominance in the population, developed exaggerated, but, perhaps self-fulfilling, fears of being overwhelmed. Growing hostility with the Spanish on the southern border and apprehension at Spanish encouragement to slave resistance added to their uneasiness.” 62, Tate “Whether more the result of the transient phenomena of the rice boom and the Spanish menace or the longer-range circumstance of population ration, the two races grew steadily apart ad life became harsher for the slave. The “dehumanizing” tendencies of the rice plantations, concentrating the slaves in larger work gangs, removing them from contact with their masters, putting them

10 to more difficult labor, require little comment, nor is the ineffectiveness of humanitarian efforts, largely by S.P.G. missionaries, surprising.” 62, Tate ● “In their anxiety and determination to maintain control whites tried to confine blacks more and more to work on staple crops, despite the variety of skills they possessed, and to restrict their mobility, possession of firearms, or wearing of fine clothing.

They began to demonstrate hostility to overt interracial sexual relations and obsession with physical violation of their own persons, and they punished slaves more cruelly. All these efforts, of course, received the sanction of stricter black codes and the means of enforcement in patrols and nightwatches. The black response, as Wood reminds us, ran the whole spectrum from abject submission to total resistance, but it produced a large number of runaways, increasing acts of individual violence, by poisoning or arson in particular, and, ultimately, the Stono Rebllion. The armed uprising was, of course, abortive, though more than twenty whites died on the first day, and the last recorded execution of a black participant took place fully three years later.”

62, Tate ● “For Wood, however the rebellion failed in another sense, since the slaves, although brining the colony closer to upheaval than its historians have recognized, produced “a concerted counterattack” from the whites. As a result, “the new social equilibrium which emerged in the generation before the Revolution was based upon a heightened degree of white repression and a reduced amount of black autonomy.” Had the resistance of the South Carolina blacks, he concludes, “been less abortive, the subsequent history of the new nation might well have followed an unpredictably different path.” (326) 63, Tate Sources: ​Journals, papers, census records, court records, government laws Connections: ​Blassingame, ​The Slave Community, ​Genovese, ​Roll​, Oakes, ​Ruling,​ Johnson, ​Soul​, White, ​Ar’n’t James Brewer Stewart, ​Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery​ (1976) Argument: ​“Its thesis is that opponents of slavery made an understandable, logical, perhaps even inevitable response to those trends as did the defenders of slavery, given the parameters of their own society.” 458, Fladeland ● “[​Holy Warriors​] outstanding contribution is that it presents the crusade of the “Holy Warriors” in the context of the dynamic social, economic, intellectual, and political currents which influenced it.” 458, Fladeland ● “Its titles to the contrary, there are neither heroes nor villains in the book; all are natural products of cultural influences, with both flaws and virtues but not psychopathic aberrations. It presents a dispassionate compound of the passionate defenses-of-or-attacks-on approach that flourished at the height of the civil rights movement. Consideration of ideas, personalities, and activities is also well balanced.’ 458, Fladeland ● Stewart “has placed the origins of the American antislavery movement in its international setting: the rise of commercial capitalism, religious awakenings, the growth of benevolent sensitivities, and the spirit of revolution. Although he indicates some British influences on the progress of American abolitionists into the nineteenth century, one does not get a sense of the full impact of continuing support.” 458, Fladeland ● “The book also reflects a trend of recent years in giving more weight to the pre-Garrisonian efforts, even to colonization as a training ground for budding abolitionists. Stewart acknowledges that progression from gradualism to immediatism might have resulted from frustration with the failure of piecemeal efforts but gives greater emphasis to the impact of “cosmopolitan forces”: economic interdependence, urbanization, democratic politics, and mass communication.” 458, Fladeland ● “A bit of psychohistory is utilized in examining the question of parental influence and youthful alienation as factors in producing a generation of abolitionist leaders. The thesis of psychological self-liberation is tied to the “vibrant romantic radicalism” of the 1830s, and so supports the theme of the antislavery movement as being within the context of the intellectual and social currents of the times.” 458, Fladeland ● “Stewart credits the fugitive slave with forcing the major issue of the 1850s, which was to lead to a growing acceptance of violence and eventually to a rationalization of emancipation through war.” 458-459, Fladeland ● “Stewart characterizes the eighteenth-century Anglo-American intellectual legacy as a set of traditions serviceable to most of the diverse participants in the nineteenth-century debate over slavery.” 343, Friedman ● “Stewart synthesizes the findings of historians like Bertram Wyatt-Brown and John L. Thomas regarding the abolitionist commitment to immediate emancipation during the early Jacksonian period. Immediatism, Stewart notes, came from a desire for moral self-liberation from a world of apparent hypocrisy and impurity…Stewart then discusses the mob violence that immediatist abolitionist encountered in the 1830s and how the suppression of abolitionists’ civil liberties caused many white northerners to fear for their own freedom.” 343, Friedman ● “In his middle chapters Stewart draws together recent studies tending to undercut David Donald’s claim…that abolitionists came from families of declining socioeconomic status.” 343, Friedman ● “Stewart clearly distinguishes Garrisonian abolitionists who favored reform by operating within existing structures…Stewart points out that even conservative abolitionists wanted earthly man-made institutions to conform to God’s command, and they felt that slavery did not conform to God’s command. Whenever earthly institutions did not conform, conservatives joined with Garrisonians in refusing to honor them.” 343-344, Friedman ● Strongly favoring black civil rights, white abolitionists nonetheless demanded that their black colleagues conform to white middle class models of propriety.” 344, Friedman

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“​Holy Warriors closes with a discussion of the transformation of immediatist abolitionists during the 1850s and 1860s…Stewart identifies specific intellectual “loopholes” that allowed broadly pacifist abolitionists to endorse organized violence against the southern slaveocracy. Form there, they had little difficulty approving relatively “orthodox” institutional weapons directed at slavery—the Republican party, the Lincoln administration, and the Union army.” 344, Friedman ● “Stewart contends that during the Civil War and the postwar decades, abolitionists continued to campaign for civil rights and for de facto emancipation. They were increasingly concerned, however, with the mundane practicalities of reform; their piety and fervor had at least somewhat receded.” 344, Friedman ● “Because ​Holy Warriors ​is a synthesis of abolitionist historiography, it inevitably reflects the two primary concerns of most recent analysts of the abolitionists—their role in Civil War causation and the reasons why, as radicals they failed to exert significant influence. With respect to Civil War causation, Stewart maintains that abolitionists did much to mobilize northern parties as radical agitators, Garrisonians persuaded many supporters of the major parties to cast ballots for antislavery candidates. Meanwhile, the efforts of more conservative abolitionists within the Liberty party “gave enormous stimulus to sectionalism within the major parties.” On the other hand, Stewart incorporates into his synthesis the long-standing concern of historians with the failure of abolitionists to influence the North. He characterizes as valid observations the comments Frederick Douglass and Ann Greene Phillips on the absence of abolitionist influence. Stewart, moreover, concludes his book: “Abolitionists could not really claim that their thirty-year movement led directly to the destruction of slavery…Generals Sherman and Grant, not Garrissonians and Liberty men; warfare between irreconcilable cultures, not moral suasion, had intervened between the master and his slave.” Thus, ​Holy Warriors perpetuates the conflicting historical appraisal of abolitionists. The abolitionists who greatly influenced northern society had only indirect and relatively insignificant influence.”

344-345, Friedman Sources:​ Journals, papers, speeches, secondary sources Connections:​ Walters, ​American Reformers,​ Douglass, ​Narrative,​ Jacobs, ​Incidents, ​Thomas, “Romantic Reform,” Johnson, ​Shopkeeper Ronald G. Waters, ​American Reformers, 1815-1860 ​(1978) Argument: ​“I hope it shows that there terms “radical” and “reformer” have meaning only within particular historical contexts, and that we can understand our own positions, and the alternatives available to us, only in relation to other positions, including those of the past.”x ● “Some scholars dismissed reformers and radicals as cranks; others presented them as noble, farseeing men and women; still other saw them as resolving their own “status anxiety” by engaging in reform. In all these cases, it seemed—and it still seems—inadequate to me to reduce reform and radicalism to the character and motivation, good or bad, of reformers and radicals. Still other scholars presented antebellum reform as the product of evangelical Protestantism, a view that persists and has merit. The problem with these interpretations, as far as I was concerned, was their failure to explain the existence of non-evangelical reformers, of anti-reform evangelicals, and of reformers who moved away from their evangelical heritage over the course of their causes. Finally, there were scholars who saw antebellum reform as “social control” on the part of elites bent on making working class and ethnic “others conform to their code of morality and accept the discipline of an emerging capitalist order. The social-control theory struck me as less wrong than self-evident. Of course reformers and radicals want others to conform to their beliefs; it is hard to imagine a reform or radical movement based on anything else.” X ● “By 1814—the year the War of 1812 ended—a combination of theological and economic developments led many men and women to assume that the world did not have to be the way it was and that individual effort mattered.” 3 ● “The religious revivalism of the 1820s encouraged this optimistic and activist spirit by teaching that good deeds were the mark of godliness and that the millennium was near. Other significant new ideas, attitudes, and systems of thought jostled around in the public press and likewise encourage reform.” 3 ● “The manner in which the population grew had as many implications for reform as did the growth itself. Reproduction, as usual, played the major role. But the antebellum birth rate, although high by present-day standards, declined steadily after 1800. That trend coincided with subtle but substantial alterations in family patterns, a matter of significance for understanding why reformers were so concerned about home life and why so many of them were women. 4 ● “Many of these new Americans were hostile to reform crusades, particularly to temperance, and a large number of them were Catholic. For reformers, these hordes of poor, religiously suspect aliens were one of several indications that America was changing rapidly and that decent men and women had to act quickly to keep it on a morally true course.” 4-5 ● “Even more spectacular evidence of change came from the performance of the American economy after 1814. Precise figures are impossible to give, but it is clear that the standard of living for more free Americans was improving and that the scale and location of industry was changing dramatically. The proportion of the workforce in agriculture declined while that in manufacturing and commerce rose.” 5 ● “America’s economic development provided reformers with problems in need of solutions. Troubled by the pains and dislocations of sudden expansion, cities were especially ripe for moral crusades. Reformers regarded them—with only a bit of exaggeration—as dismal swamps of vice, disease, and misery. Urbanization and industrialization also helped turn the attention of reformers toward slavery after 1830. As Northern and Southern ways of life became increasingly different, abolitionists saw the South’s “peculiar institution” as a relic of barbarianism and the North’s mixture of farming, commerce, and industrial growth

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as the course of civilization and progress. Economic difference between the sections, from their point of vew, reinforced moral judgments.” 6 “Prosperity meant that their were middle-class men and women with education, income, and leisure to devote to social causes.

New technology put powerful weapons in the hands of such people. The same transportation revolution that brought goods to distant markets also carried lecturers to widely dispersed audience they could not have reached a generation before. Innovations in printing reduced the cost of producing propaganda to the point where a person could make a living editing a reform newspaper or writing books and pamphlets for a limited but national readership.” 6 “in 1824, only three states restricted suffrage for white men in any meaningful way and in many areas even recent immigrants found it easy to cast ballots. This may have been democracy, but it also permitted anyone, including the worst sort of rascals, to help select the nation’s leaders. Reformers complained that a degraded and sinful majority, manipulated by political machines, had more of a voice in the nation’s affairs than they, the godly minority, did…Politicians confirmed reformers’ dour view of them by seeking the electorate’s lowest common denominator. No promise was too extreme, no spectacle too extravagant, if it got votes.” 8 “Yet reformers did not entirely reject politics. The Jacksonian political system itself made their propaganda effective by linking “public opinion” and governmental action. As reformers perceived, winning hearts and minds had become the essential first step toward political change, for better as well as for worse. Many reform crusades, moreover, explicitly sought political consequences. If everything worked according to plan, temperance, Sunday schools, and public education, for instance, would produce a morally responsible electorate.” 8 “What we have here are four things—anti-Masonry, proslavery, mobs, and nativisim—more or less seeming to be unrelated to one another or to antebellum reform (although anti-Masonry and nativism attracted some reformers). Yet each of the four, in common with reform movements, represented an assessment of what was wrong with America and of what needed correcting.

Each, also like reforms, focused upon a supposedly disruptive element in American society: Masons, the North, whoever angered rioters, and foreigners. Reformers, naturally, had different lists of villains—heathenism, the competitive impulse, slavery, war, alcohol, ignorance, and so forth. But the pattern of thought was the same: old values were being lost and whatever was at fault had to be eliminated or controlled if America was to fulfill its destiny.” 10 “Behind that reasoning was a suspicious mentality characteristic of many antebellum reformers, as well as non-reformers, that attributed the nation’s troubles to conspiracies of one sort or another—by slaveholders, liquor dealers, Masons, the Catholic Church, or politicians and clergy serving special interests.” 10 “When political hacks and chronic office seekers climbed aboard the bandwagon, the movements lost credibility and support.

Their temporary success and long-run failure are a sign that much of the electorate, not simply reformers, was uneasy with the party-oriented political system of Jacksonian America and responsive to people and organizations claiming moral detachment from it.” 12 “The decisive factor in making, or not making, a reform commitment was how the transformation of America played upon individual’s life history and connected it, or failed to connect it, to some larger cause…Most people involved in reform…were obscure men with regular employment, single women, or women with family responsibilities. They drifted out of reform after a few years or, at most, stayed on the periphery of it throughout their adulthood. Although their participation, dues, and consumption of propaganda kept reforms alive, they made little mark in the historical record.” 12-14 “It does not demean reform to say that it did a great deal for reformers. It was no small blessing for individuals to have been able to put their lives in order, to have created emotional bonds with others, and to have done some good in the process.” 15 “It was the responsibility of those with moral and financial advantages to ameliorate suffering, without any expectation that the millennium was at hand or that social relationships would be fundamentally changed. Antebellum reformers saw things differently. Some men and women, consistent with their evangelical Protestantism, insisted that change could be total, that perfection was possible for people and for society, and that it began with the individual, no matter how lowly. Making a sinner’s heart yearn for good behavior, not imposing morality by fore of giving charity, was the task of reform.” 16 “The majority of reformers lived north of the Mason-Dixon line and most were drawn to the Northern cause, willing to subordinate their programs and swallow their doubts in order to help it triumph. They had, moreover, to reconsider their belief that the individual could be a force in history. Despite acts of heroism, humans seemed irrelevant in modern war, when large organizations deliver men and materiel to the front lines and care for the sick and wounded. It was a massive army rather than sanctified hearts that won the war.” 17 “Part of the change came about because of what had not been accomplished in decades of agitation. Sinners were harder to reach than anyone imagined; drunkards remained drunkards, the insane were not made sane, and so it went. Reformers had been far too optimistic about what propaganda and moral suasion could do. If nothing else, fatigue and a lack of results began dampening enthusiasm for reform by 1860. When success did come, it proved to have as much of a chastening effect as failure.

The destruction of slavery in 1865 deprived reformers of their most emotionally compelling issue. Few white Americans could bring to the cause of civil rights for blacks the same passion they invested in anti-slavery.” 17

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“As hopes for humanity declined, so did the rationale for reform. Political corruption in the 1870s provided more reasons for morally sensitive people to retreat in disgust from social involvement: the most meaningful of wars ended with elected officials wallowing in the public trough. Perhaps human nature was fatally flawed and mankind was beyond redemption in this world.” ● “[Walters’] book has three main purposes: (1) to argue that America’s antebellum reformers were not unique to their time but were—complete with strengths and weaknesses—“more representative of their period than they seem to have been at first glance” (2) to demonstrate the interrelated nature of the various reform movements; and (#) to synthesize recent research into a broad explanatory overview to supplant the still useful but badly outdated Alice Felt Tyler’s ​Freedom’s Ferment​.” 275, Wheeler ● “[Watlers] correctly perceives the reformers—an admitted minority of the population—as being men and women responding to economic and ideological shifts which affected most of the nonreformers as well, shifts such as economic modernization, the creation of a fairly comfortable middle class (from which to draw reformers), an anti-elitist mentality of suspicion toward traditional figures of authority and institutions, and an upsurge of evangelical Protestantism.” 275, Wheeler Sources: ​Secondary Connections: ​Stewart, ​Holy​, Douglass, ​Narrative​, Jacobs, ​Incidents, ​Thomas, “Romantic Reform,” Johnson, ​Shopkeeper John L. Thomas, “Romantic Reform in America, 1815-1865” ​American Quarterly​ Vol. 17, No. 4 (Winter, 1965) Argument: ​“The central fact in the romantic reorientation of American theology was the rejection of determinism. Salvation, however variously defined, lay open to everyone. Sin was voluntary: men were not helpless and depraved by nature but free agents and potential powers for good.” 658 ● “Out of a seemingly conservative religious revival there flowed a spate of perfectionist ideas for the improvement and rearrangement of American society. Rising rapidly in the years after 1830, the flood of social reform reached its crest at mid-century only to be checked by political crisis and the counterforces of the Civil War. Reform after the Civil War, though still concerned with individual perfectibility, proceeded from new and different assumptions as to the nature of individualism and its preservation in an urban industrial society. Romantic reform ended with the Civil War and an intellectual counterrevolution which discredited the concept of the irreducible self and eventually redirected reform energies.” 656-657 ● “Romantic reform in America traced its origins to a religious impulse which was both politically and socially conservative. With the consolidation of independence and the arrival of democratic politics the new nineteenth-century generation of American churchmen faced a seeming crisis. Egalitarianism and rising demands for church disestablishment suddenly appeared to threaten an inherited Christian order and along with it the preferred status of the clergy. 657 ● “The initial thrust of religious reform, then, was moral rather than social, preventative rather than curative. Nominally rejecting politics and parties, the evangelicals looked to a general reformation of the American character achieved through a revival of piety and morals in the individual. By probing his conscience, by convincing him of his sinful ways and converting him to right conduct they hoped to engineer a Christian revolution which would leave the foundations of the social order undisturbed. The realization of their dream of a nonpolitical “Christian party” in America would ensure a one-party system open to moral talent and the natural superiority of Christian leadership.” 658 ● “Perfectionism, on the contrary, as an optative mood demanded total commitment and immediate action. A latent revolutionary force lay in its demand for immediate reform and its promise to release the new American from the restraints of institutions and precedent. In appealing to the liberated individual, perfectionism reinforced the Jacksonian attack on institutions, and precedent.

In appealing to the liberated individual, perfectionism reinforced the Jacksonian attack on institutions, whether a “Monster Bank” or a secret Masonic order, entrenched monopolies or the Catholic Church. But in emphasizing the unfettered will as the proper vehicle for reform it provided a millenarian alternative to Jacksonian politics.” 659 ● “As the sum of individual sins social wrong would disappear when enough people had been converted an rededicated to right conduct. Deep and lasting reform, therefore, meant an educational crusade based on the assumption that when a sufficient number of individual Americans had seen the light, they would automatically solve the country’s social problems. Thus formulated, perfectionist reform offered a program of mass conversion achieved through educational rather than political means.” 660 ● “By far the most profound change wrought by perfectionism was the sudden emergence of abolition.” 660 ● “The abolitionist pioneers were former coloniationists who took sin and redemption seriously and insisted that slavery constituted a flat denial of perfectibility to both Negroes and whites. They found in immediate emancipation a perfectionist formula for casting off the guilt of slavery and bringing the Negro to Christian freedom. Destroying slavery, the abolitionists argued, depended first of all on recognizing it as sin; and to this recognition they bent their efforts.” 661 ● “From the beginning, then, the abolitionists mounted a moral crusade rather than an engine of limited reform. For seven years, from 1833 to 1840, their society functioned as a loosely coordinated enterprise—a national directory of antislavery opinion.

Perfectionist individualism made effective organization difficult and often impossible.” 661 ● “In 1840 the Garrisonians seized control of the society and drove their moderate opponents out. Thereafter neither ultras nor moderates were able ot maintain an effective national organization.” 661 ● “Thus romantic perfectionism altered the course of the reform enterprise by appealing directly to the individual conscience. Its power stemmed from a millennial expectation which proved too powerful a moral explosive for the reform agencies.” 662

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“Something very much like a conversion experience seems to have forged the decisions of the humanitarians to take up their causes, a kind of revelation which furnished them with a ready-made role outside politics and opened a new career with which they could become completely identified. With the sudden transference of a vague perfectionist faith in self-improvement to urgent social problems there emerged a new type of professional reformer whose whole life became identified with the reform process.” 663 “Pushed to its limits, the perfectionist assault on institutions logically ended in the attempt to make new and better societies as examples for Americans to follow.” 665 “There was thus a high nostalgic content in the plans of humanitarians who emphasized pastoral virtues and the perfectionist values inherent in country living. Their celebration of the restorative powers of nature followed logically form their assumption that the perfected individual—the truly free American—could be created only by the city. A second assumption concerned the importance of the family as the primary unit in the reconstruction of society.” 667 “A new feudalism threatened; and unless a drastic remedy was discovered, the “hideous evils” of unequal distribution of wealth would cause class war…Diffusion of education, he pointed out, mean wiping out class lines and with them the possibility of conflict. As the great equalizer of condition it would supply the balance-wheel in the society of the future.” 670 “Transcendentalism, as its official historians noted, claimed for all men what a more restrictive Christian perfectionism extended only to the redeemed. Seen in this light, self-culture—Emerson’s “perfect unfolding of our individual nature”—appeared as a secular amplification of the doctrine of personal holiness. In the transcendentalist definition, true reform proceeded from the individual and worked outward through the family, the neighborhood and ultimately into the social and political life of the community. The transcendentalist, Frothingham noted in retrospect, “was less a reformer of human circumstances than a regenerator of the human spirit…” 671 “Accordingly the transcendentalists considered institutions—parties, churches, organizations—so many arbitrarily constructed barriers on the road to self-culture. They were lonely men, Emerson admitted, who repelled influences.” 671 “Accepting for the most part Emerson’s dictum that one man was a counterpoise to a city, the transcendentalists turned inward to examine the divine self and find there the material with which to rebuild society. They wanted to avoid at all costs the mistake of their Jacksonian contemporaries who in order to be useful accommodated themselves to institutions without realizing the resultant loss of power and integrity.” 671 “Both transcendentalism and perfectionist moral reform, then, were marked by an individualist fervor that was disruptive of American institutions. Both made heavy moral demands on church and state; and when neither proved equal to the task of supporting their intensely personal demands, the transcendentalists and the moral reformers became increasingly alienated. The perfectionist temperament bred a come-outer spirit. An insistence on individual moral accountability and direct appeal to the irreducible self, the faith in self-reliance and distrust of compromise, and a substitution of universal education for partial reform measures, all meant that normal political and institutional reform channels were closed to the perfectionists.” 674 “With an increasing number of reformers after 1840 perfectionist anti-institutionalism led to heavy investments in the communitarian movement. The attraction that drew the perfectionists to communitarianism came from their conviction that the good society should be simple. Since American society was both complicated and corrupt, it was necessary to come out from it; but at the same the challenge of the simple life had to be met. Once the true principles of social life had been discovered they had to be applied, some way found to harness individual perfectibility to a social engine.” 674-675 “Communitarians agreed in rejecting class struggle which set interest against interest instead of uniting them through association.” 675 “The most striking characteristic of the communitarian movement was not its apparent diversity but the fundamental similarity of educational purpose. The common denominator or “main idea” Noyes correctly identified as “​the enlargement of home—the extension of family union beyond the little man-and-wife circle to large corporations.”​…Thus the problem for radical communitarians was to solve the conflict between the family and society.” 677 “The communitarian experiments in effect were anti-institutional institutions. In abandoning political and religious institutions the communitarians were driven to create perfect societies of their own which conformed to their perfectionist definition of the free individual.” 678-679 “The collapse of the communitarian movement in the 1850s left a vacuum in social reform which was filled by the slavery crisis. At first their failure to consolidate alternative social and educational institutions threw the reformers back on their old perfectionist individualism for support.” 679 “But slavery, as a denial of freedom and individual responsibility, had to be destroyed by institutional forces which could be made to sustain these values. The antislavery cause during the secession crisis and throughout the Civil War offered reformers an escape from alienation by providing a new identity with the very political institutions, which they had so vigorously assailed.”

“The effects of the Civil War as an intellectual counterrevolution were felt both in a revival of institutions and a renewal of an organic theory of society. The war brought with it a widespread reaction against the seeming sentimentality and illusions of perfectionism. It saw the establishment of new organizations like the Sanitary and the Christian Commissions run on principles of efficiency and professionalism totally alien to perfectionist methods. Accompanying the wartime revival of institutions was a theological reorientation…The extreme individualism of the antebellum reformers was swallowed up in a Northern war effort

15 that made private conscience less important than saving the Union…Those reformers who contributed to the war effort through the Sanitary Commission or the Christians Commission found a new sense of order and efficiency indispensable…Young Emersonians returned from combat convinced that professionalism, discipline and subordination, dubious virtues by perfectionist standards, were essential in a healthy society. A new emphasis on leadership and performance was replacing the benevolent amateurism of the perfectionists.” 680 Sources:​ Writings, journals, revival narratives Connections:​ Stewart, ​Holy​ and Walters, ​American, ​Johnson, ​Shopkeeper’s Frederick Douglass, ​Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, Written by Himself​ (1840ish) (1993) Argument: ​Slavery is bad: “Close readings of the ​Narrative uncover not only Douglass’s rhetorical strategies, which are many and complicated, but also a good deal about the moral and economic nature of slavery, the master-slave relationship, the psychology of slaveholders, the aims and arguments of abolitionists, and the impending political crisis between North and South.” 3 ● “Although Douglass lived long and witnessed many great events, perhaps his most important contribution to American history was the repeated telling of his personal story. Above all else, this book, ​Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass​, is a great story told, like most other great stories, out of the will to be known and the will to write. This tale of a young African American’s journey into and out of slavery provides a remarkable window on America’s most compelling nineteenth-century social and political problem.” 2 ● “Douglass saw to the core of the meaning of slavery, both for individuals and for the nation. Likewise, the multiple meanings for freedom—as idea and reality, of mind and body—and of the consequences of its denial were his great themes. 2 ● “Douglass probed his past throughout his life, seeking to understand the relentless connection of past and present, telling his story in relation to the turbulent history of his time, and hoping to control or stop time itself.” 2 ● “Douglass saw his mother for the last time when he was seven, making him in every practical way an orphan. The actual identity of his father is still unknown, but he was undoubtedly white, as Douglass declares in the ​Narrative​. Douglass was, therefore, of mixed racial ancestry, including part American Indian…Douglass’s twenty years in slavery were marked in stark contrasts between brutality and good fortune, between the life of a favored slave youth in Baltimore and that of a field hand on an Eastern Shore farm, and between the power of literacy and the despair born of its suppression.” 3 ● “In 1845 Douglass felt compelled by many factors to write his story. His extraordinary life as a slave, the circumstances of his escape, his emergence as a skillful abolitionist lecturer in the early 1840s, and suspicious as well as bigoted denials that so talented a voice could ever have been a chattel slave combined with the sheer popularity of slave narratives prompt him to tell his tale.” 3 ● “On September 3, 1838, at the age of twenty, Douglass, disguised as a sailor and having obtained the papers of a free seaman, escaped from slavery on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake in Maryland. Within a week he was joined by his fiancée, Anna Murray, a free black woman from Baltimore.” 3 ● “In its content and strategies, therefore, Douglass’s ​Narrative belonged to the world of abolitionism and to the national political crisis over slavery from which it sprang. Douglass’s autobiographies are our principal sources for major aspects of his life, especially his early years. Bur they are perhaps as revelatory of the history of the times through which he lived as they are of his personality and his psychology.” 3 ● “Douglass had been a practicing abolitionist of a kind—out of self-interest and for his fellow bondsmen—even while he was a slave. He had read the Bible extensively, and he had discovered and modeled his ideas on a remarkable 1797 book, ​The Columbian Orator,​ by Caleb Bingham.” 4 ● “But in the ​Narrative ​he sought authentication. He wanted the world to know that fugitive slave had histories. His book would make witness to the fact, contrary to popular attitudes, that blacks too were people, whose struggles and aspirations mattered in human society.” 5 ● “Although antislavery sentiment emerged in a variety of ways during the age of the American Revolution, the formative decades of organized abolitionism were the 1820s and 1830s, the period in which Frederick Bailey grew up a slave in Maryland.” 6 ● “Under the influence of evangelical religion, a growing realization of southern commitment to slavery, and especially the British antislavery movement, American abolitionists found their ideological roots in the 1820s. The campaign to end slavery in the British Empire profoundly shook the increasingly active defenders of slavery in the American South and helped to cause a steady radicalization of antislavery tactics in the North.” 7 ● “Under new influences, especially the New York abolitions and philanthropist Gerrit Smith, Douglass came to believe that the Constitution could be used to exert federal power against slavery, especially its expansion into the West. He also embraced the use of political parties, and eventually even certain instances of violence, as a means of destroying slavery.” 8 ● “Sophia Auld, Douglass’s “kind and tender-hearted” mistress in Baltimore who first taught him to read…becomes Doughlass’s principal example that slaveholding is a learned behavior, and presumably can therefore be unlearned. In a document so full of anti-slavery propaganda, physical violence, and suffering, it may come as some surprise that Douglass could conclude that, for Sophia, “slavery proved as injurious to her as id did to me.” But such is the complex argument of this highly crafted narrative: It

16 is a picture of a world that not only involved brutal dehumanization but also operated by the cunning and negotiation of human relationships.” 12 ● Common for master’s to humiliate their slaves before punishing them for insubordination. 43 ● Masters were sneaky about disguising themselves and finding out how slaves felt about them. In the case of Colonel Lloyd he sold a disgruntled slave down to Georgia without the slave knowing that he did wrong. 49 ● Slaves measure their self-confidence and worth by the attributes of their masters. 50 ● Slaveholders paranoid about slaves and hire spies to find out about possible revolts.” 50 ● Not all whites own slaves and those that do are changed by the experience. 57 ● City slaves are better off. 58 ● Religious slaveholders are the worse they use the scripture to defend their actions and often times they beat slaves more harshly because they believe in the power of their religious justification. “Prior to his conversion, he relied upon his own depravity to shield and sustain him in his savage barbarity; but after his conversion, he found religious sanction and support for his slaveholding cruelty.” 69 Connections: ​Jacob’s, ​Incidents Harriet A. Jacobs, ​Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl​ (1861, 1987) Argument: ● “Like all slave narratives, ​Incidents was shaped by the empowering impulse that created the American Renaissance. Jacobs’s book expressed democratic ideals and embodied a dual critique of nineteenth-century America: it challenged the institution of chattel slavery with its supporting ideology of white racism, as well as traditional patriarchal institutions and ideologies.

Jacobs’s achievement was the transformation of herself into a literary subject in and through the creation of her narrator, Linda Brent.” Xv-xvi ● “This narrator tells a double tale, dramatizing the triumph of her efforts to prevent her master from raping her, to arrange for her children’s rescue from him, to hide, to escape, and finally to achieve freedom; and simultaneously presenting her failure to adhere to sexual standards in which she believed. Unmarried, she entered into a sexual liaison, became pregnant, was condemned by her grandmother, and suffered terrible guilt. She writes that still, in middle age, she feels her youthful distress.

But she also questions the condemnation of her behavior; reaching toward an alternative judgment, she suggests that the sexual standards mandated for free women were not relevant to women held in slavery. Further, by balancing her grandmother’s rejection with her daughter’s acceptance, she shows black women overcoming the divisive sexual ideology of the white patriarchy and establishing unity across the generations.” Xvi ● “It is the voice of a woman who, although she cannon discuss here sexual past without expressing deep conflict, nevertheless addresses this painful personal subject in order to politicize it, to insist that the forbidden topic of sexual abuse of slave women be included in public discussions of the slavery question.” Xvi ● “Learning that her [master] planed to move her son and daughter from her grandmother’s home to [the plantation at] Auburn, she resolved to rescue them from plantation slavery. Believing that if she were gone her master might find the children troublesome and sell them, she ran away…for years [she] was hidden in a tiny crawlspace above a storeroom in her grandmother’s house. She succeeded in protecting her children. Shortly after she went into hiding, their father [a white lawyer], Sawyer, bought them and her brother. Sawyer allowed the children to continue to live with her grandmother, an later he took Louisa Matilda to a free state, but he failed to keep his promise to Jacobs to emancipate the children.” Xvii ● “In 1842m after nearly seven years in hiding, she escaped to the North.” Xii-xviii ● “In Rochester Harriet Jacobs met her brother’s circle of antislavery activists, and early in March 1849 she ban working in the antislavery reading room, office, and bookstore they had established.” Xix ● “With her brother often on the road lecturing, Jacobs lived for nine months in the home of the Quaker reformers Isaac and Amy Post. A participant in the first Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls in July 1848, Amy Post had helped organize the follow-up Rochester Convention. Jacobs later admitted, “when I first came North I avoided the Antislavery people as much as possible because I felt that I could not be honest and tell the whole truth.” In Rochester, however, with slavery years behind her, she made Post her confidante. Post urged her to make her personal history public to aid abolitionism.” Xix ● “Jacobs quickly became known among abolitionists as the author of ​Incident​s. She used this limited celebrity to further a new project: relief work with the “contraband”—slaves behind the lines of the Union Army--and the freedmen. AS an agent of the Philadelphia and New York Quakers, she worked in Washington D.C, in 1862, in Alexandria from 1863 to 1865, and in Savannah from 1865-1866, distributing clothing and supplies and organizing schools, nursing homes, and orphanages.

Throughout these years Jacobs used the public press to raise money for her work and to report back to the reformers on conditions in the South.” Xxvii ● But ​Incidents​, perhaps the most comprehensive slave narrative by an Afro-American woman, presents a heroic slave mother struggling for freedom and a home. She runs away to save her children—and particularly her daughter—from slavery. Men and women were valued for contrasting qualities in nineteenth-century America, and recent critics have pointed out that Frederick

17 Douglass’s classic 1845 ​Narrative presents its protagonist in terms of physical bravery, an important “masculine” attribute. It is not surprising that Jacobs presents Linda Brent in terms of motherhood, the most valued “feminine” role.” Xxviii ● “Instead of coupling female sexual activity with self-destructions and death, ​Incidents presents it as a mistaken tactic in the struggle for freedom. Jacobs’s narrator does not characterize herself conventionally as a passive female victim, but asserts that—even when young and a slave—she was an effective moral agent. She take full responsibility for her actions: “I will not try to screen myself behind the plea of compulsion from a master; for it was not so. Neither can I plead ignorance or thoughtlessness…I knew what I did, and I did it with deliberate calculation.” Xxxii ● “Nor does this narrator mouth the standard notion that a woman’s self-esteem is a simple function of her adherence to conventional sexual behavior…Denied the protection of the laws, denied even an extralegal marriage to a man she loved, she writes that in a desperate attempt to protect her hated master from forcing her into concubinage, she relinquished her “purity” in an effort to maintain her self-respect”; she abandoned her attempt to avoid sexual involvements in an effort to assert her autonomy as a human being, to avoid being “entirely subject to the will of another.” Xxxii ● “Jacob’s Linda Brent does not seek to inspire her audience to overcome individual character defects or to engage in reformist activity within the private sphere, but urges them to enter the public sphere and work to end chattel slavery and white racism.

Informed not by “the cult of domesticity” or “domestic feminism” but by political feminism, ​Incidents is an attempt to move women to political action.” Xxxiv Connections: ​White, ​Ar’n’t​, Douglass, ​Narrative Paul E. Johnson, ​A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837​ (1978) Argument: ​“revivals were above all the outgrowth of class tensions.” 926, Bushman ● “[​Shopkeeper’s​] was addressed most explicitly to Lee Benson, whose ​Concept of Jacksonian Democracy (1961) “scientifically” demonstrated that ethnic and cultural divisions shaped the beginnings of two-party politics in the North more decisively than did questions of social class. In particular, Benson found that an activist evangelical Protestantism was at the heart of the Whig Party in New York State. My own reading convinced me that Benson was right. But evangelical politics was new in the 1830s.

I wanted to “test” whether it was the result of cultural inheritance or of the well-known revivals of the 1820s and 1830s.” xiv ● “The result was a book that traced Rochester’s middle-class revivals (and thus local Whig electorate) to problems of legitimacy and moral order that attend the making of modern work. More broadly, the revival was bound up with the making of a middle-class culture within the transformations of the market revolution. I concluded that Benson’s ethnocultural division had its historical roots in the rise of modern social classes.” Xv ● “​A Shopkeeper’s Millennium explains religious revivals in terms of social change, and it has been attacked as “reductionist”: it reduces religion to something else.” Xvi ● “The alternative, in the case of this book, would be to talk about the rise of the American middle class and its religion without mentioning class—with no other classes, no structured inequality, no market revolution, northing of what we used to call history—nothing but middle-class psyches, feelings, imaginations, and interior decoration. Too much recent scholarly literature has chosen that alternative.” Xvii ● “I argued that changes in relations between work and domestic life were at the heart of religious change in Rochester; then I followed evangelical men out into male politics and male public life. New studies in women’s history quickly called my strategy into question: they stayed indoors pointing out that women far outnumbered men in evangelical churches, and disclosing the domestic character of the message preached in those churches. These studies argued forcefully that middle-class evangelicalism (and middle-class culture generally) was about gender, not class. They argued just as forcefully that most of the cultural work that made the middle class was performed by women. I nodded to all that, but not with the emphasis that could have warded off justifiable criticisms of my male-centered study. Yet I continue to argue that the privatization and feminization of the middle-class domestic life is unthinkable without reference to larger transformations in society, that the middle-class family and its culture were deeply implicated in those transformations and in the ways in which they worked out in history.” Xix ● “The revival made new hearts in hundreds of thousands of middle-class men and women, and set them off on a massive and remarkably successful crusade to remake society in God’s name. This book attempts to explain why it happened.” 4 ● “The awakening of 1831 climaxed a generation of revivals that historians have called the Second Great Awakening…The awakening began near the turn of the century in the villages of New England and in isolated Yankee colonies in western New York. Within that region enthusiasm sputtered for twenty years, arbitrarily descending on one congregation or community while neighboring churches slept.” 4 ● “Within a few years free agency, perfectionism, and millennialism were middle-class orthodoxy. They were powerful idea, and in the 1830s they underlay a missionary crusade that transformed society and politics in the United States. It was Gilbert Barnes, a historian of the antislavery movement writing in the 1930s, who “discovered” the revival of 1831. Barnes wanted to explain why, in the 1830s, critics of slavery rejected gradualist techniques, recruited thousands of new supporters, and attacked the South’s peculiar institution as a national evil that demanded immediate abolition...[Barnes] argued convincingly that antislavery immediatism was a direct outgrowth of the revival of 1830-1831.” 5

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“Since then, Barnes’s discovery has been extended to the whole array of antebellum reform. The temperance, moral reform, and missionary societies of the 1820s had been organizations of gentlemen who wished to slow the course of social and political change and reinforce their domination over a hopelessly godless multitude. IN the early 1830s newly converted evangelicals invaded all of these organizations and took most of them over. The new reformers did not want to control the inevitable excesses of drunkards and prostitutes and Jacksonian Democrats. They wanted to liberate them from their sins. Through individual conversion and public example, and increasingly through mass politics and outright coercion, they promised to eliminate sin from society and pave the way for the Second Coming.” 6 ● “The 1820s witnessed the beginnings of large-scale manufacturing in American cities, and with it came attempts to subject farm boys and preindustrial artisans to the discipline and monotony of modern work. Historians of labor are finding that in the 1830s proto-industrialists fought that battle with religious weapons. Their most favored means of combating drunkenness, spontaneous holidays, and inattention to work were the temperance society, the Sunday school, and the revival. Indeed many masters and manufacturers saw industrialization as a civilizing mission: they believed in their hearts that in proletarianizanizing workmen they were rescuing them from barbarism and granting them the benefits of Christian discipline. The workingmen, of course, saw things differently, and the crucial first generation of industrial conflict in this country was fought largely along religious lines.” 6 ● “Whig politicians, industrial moralizers, temperance advocates, missionaries, and family reformers worked tirelessly to build a world that replaced force, barbarism, and unrestrained passion with Christian self-control. That was not the idea of a few visionaries and cranks and political opportunists. It was the moral imperative around which the northern middle class became a class.” 8 ● “To put it simply, the middle class became resolutely bourgeois between 1825 and 1835. And at every step, that transformation bore the stamp of evangelical Protestantism…An explanation of how the middle class became modern, must come to terms with revival religion.” 8 ● “Revivals were a means of building order and a sense of common purpose among sovereign, footloose, and money-hungry individualists.” 9 ● “The sequence of rapid urbanization, religious revival, and political and social reorganization struck that community with uncommon force. Rochester was the first of the inland cities created after 1815 by the commercialization of agriculture. In 1812 the site of Rochester was unbroken wilderness. By 1830 the forest had given way to a city of 10,000, the marketing and manufacturing center for a broad and prosperous agricultural hinterland. Rochester was the capital of western New York’s revival-seared “Burned-over District,” and a clearinghouse for religious enthusiasms throughout the 1820s and 1830s.” 13 ● “The focus is upon the biographies of the converts themselves, reconstructed from church records, newspapers, genealogical materials, tax lists, city directories, census schedules, petitions sent from Rochester to various agencies of government, and a surprising number of diaries and letters left by participants in the revival. These materials are used to place Finney’s converts within four crucial spheres of social experience: domestic life, work, community relations, and politics.” 14 ● “In a society that lacked external controls, revivals created order through individual self-restraint.” 136 ● “The Rochester revival served the needs not of “society” but of entrepreneurs who employed wage labor…In towns and cities all over the Northern United States, revivals after 1825 were tied closely to the growth of a manufacturing economy.” 137 ● “Canal towns that were devoted to commerce were relatively immune to revivals. So were the old seaport cities. But in mill villages and manufacturing cities, evangelicalism stuck as hard as it had at Rochester.” 137 ● “We must conclude that many workmen were adopting the religion of the middle class, thus internalizing beliefs and modes of comportment that suited the needs of their employer…Evangelicalsim was a middle-class solution to problems of class, legitimacy, and order generated in the early stages of manufacturing. Revivals provided entrepreneurs with a means of imposing new standards of work discipline and personal comportment upon themselves and the men who worked for them, and thus they functioned as powerful social controls.” 138 ● “The revival of 1831 healed divisions within the middle class and turned businessmen and masters into an active and united missionary army.” 140 Sources:​ church records, tax lists, city directories, newspapers, revival sermons, secondary sources Connections: ​Walters, ​American,​ Thomas “Romantic Reform,” Stewart, ​Holy​, Cross, ​Burned Over Whitney R. Cross, ​The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850​ (1950) Argument: “S.D. Clark, perhaps Crosse’s most astute reviewer, highlighted this aspect of Cross’s thesis: “The Yankee settler brought with him an attitude of mind favorable to the growth of such [religious and reform] movements, but, so long as frontier conditions existed, the population was too much occupied with securing a livelihood to devote much energy to religious affairs. With the coming of prosperity conditions became favorable to the burgeoning of a great variety of religious movements” 170, Wellman ● “Burned-over district was a name applied to a small region, during a limted period of history, to indicate a particular phase of development. It described the religious character of western New York during the first half of the nineteenth century.” Vii

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“As far as time goes, this book is an illustration of the way in which the minds of one era help to form the destinies of succeeding generations. Neither the causes of the Civil War nor the origins of national prohibition, to cite only two prominent examples, can be thoroughly understood without reference to the Burned-over District.” Vii ● “Cross called his book both an intellectual and a social history. In terms of intellectual history, the book revolved essentially around the rise and decline of an idea, the idea of ultraism, which Cross defined as “a combination of activities, personalities, and attitudes creating a condition of society which could foster experimental doctrines” (73).” 159, Wellman ● “[Cross] based his central theme (ultraism and its spread) on provocative nuggets of social and economic explanations. Areas which supported ultraism, Cross argued, were economically mature, agrarian regions. They had a stable population that hovered at a high point about sixty persons per square mile, with a heavy infusion of Yankee settlers, a steep decline of household production of cloth, with often a surplus of women and a relatively large proportion of single women. They also had widespread education and literacy and a large number of newspapers and magazines, especially religious periodicals.” 160, Wellman ● “It was nothing short of genius which led Cross to choose as a title ​The Burned-Over District​. Not only did this title make the book itself memorable; it also brought a clear identity to the upstate region before the Civil War.” 164, Wellman ● “Neither Cross nor his mentors seemed to perceive a second problem f focus, although contemporary historians must deal with it: that is Cross’s emphasis on some movements while virtually ignoring others. He dealt at length with Finney and John Humphrey Noyes, for example, but barely mentioned the Shakers. He gave credit to women as the “paramount” influence in “a history of enthusiastic movements” (84), but devoted less than one page to women’s rights activities per se. He argued that “only after the ultraist phase has passed could the women’s rights enterprise take form, and that movement had very little connection with western New York’s religious history” (287). Yet he dealt at length with the establishment of Fourieristic communities in the region, which themselves were not part of a strictly religious movement.” 165, Wellman ● “[Cross] explained to an editor at Alfred Knopf in April 1948, that “my aim has been to explain these movements in terms of the civilization which produced them, and to synthesize them as symbols of intellectual trends of the day.” 166, Wellman ● “When the book appeared, Cross gave equal weight to both fields in the subtitle…yet he presented not a synthesis of social and intellectual history but a study of a state of mind, of ultraism, set in its social and intellectual context.” 166, Wellman ● “And ultraism itself was the key to understanding the whole burned-over district phenomenon, [according to Cross].” 167, Well ● “Once the economic situation had stabilized, Cross argued, transplanted Yankees would turn to concerns of religion and reform.

In this formulation, it is the presence of Yankees that is the key to ultraist enthusiasm, but the Yankee propensity for isms will be unleashed only against the background of a mature rural society.” 170, Wellman ● “Similarly [Cross] argued that “the proportion of married women to the total of females declined with the maturity of town and countryside alike” (62). Yet only in the dissertation footnote did he give some sense of what this meant.” 171, Wellman ● “The result is an intimate account of a relatively small area within the limits of the early nineteenth century which he calls ​The Burned-Over District​, a title derived from the contemporary records of the religious enthusiasm which blazed across this region in a period when revivals, new creeds, and strange beliefs were phenomena of American cultural history.” 82, Tyler ● “The district had its full share of each of the religious obsessions and vagaries of the ear—the earlier and the Finney revivals, the beginnings of Mormonism annd of spiritualism, the Antimasonic movement, the Oneida Community, and a host of perfectionist ideas and other agitations of a social and religious nature.” 82, Tyler ● “Garisson’s “root and branch” abolitionism, extreme pacifism in the peace movement, and “teetotalism” in the temperance crusade all are evidence of ultraism in reformers, and the subdivision of churches in the period into many sects was observed as early as the 1830’s by de Tocqueville and called “rienism”… Mr. Cross’s conclusion that “Men cannot remain long poised on the logical absolute of any doctrine” is proved over and over in this study of one small area and would be equally true of others.”

83, Tyler ● “One of Professor Cross’s more interesting ideas is that the continual emphasis upon the individual sinner and the personal nature of the “sin” of slavery or of intemperance, for instance, led men away from consideration of society and its needs and delayed rather than furthered real advancement. The author’s final conclusion is that “the American tradition has been greatly enriched by the legacies of radicalism.” “Courageous nonconformity,” he says, “ought of itself to constitute a precious heritage to the twentieth century.” 83, Tyler ● “But the Yankees had a strong ascendancy, and these people Professor Cross sees as more inquisitive, independent, “experimenting” than the New Englanders who stayed at home, and as also highly literate. Here he finds light on the peculiar mentality of the Burned-over District.” 95, Nichols ● “”The ultraist state of mind rose from an implicit…reliance upon the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit.” It took up one or another religious or moral cause with uncritical enthusiasm and intense activity, confident that the triumph of righteousness in the world would be attained through the movement in hand, full of inconsistencies, intolerant.” 95, Nichols Sources: ​sermons, census data, revival newspapers, maps Connections: Johnson, ​Shopkeepers, Stewart, ​Holy Warriors, ​Walters, ​American​, Johnson and Wilentz, ​Kingdom, Hatch, Christianization​, Thomas “Romantic Reform” Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz, ​The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th ​ ​-Century America​ (1994)

20 Argument: “The story of Matthias and his Kingdom…[and its] characters appeared to be emblematic of a more general social type; and almost every twist in the plot seemed indicative of some larger cultural trend. The story was shocking but it was also significant…one writer observed, eccentric but dead-serious commentary on the contests over family life, sexuality, and social class that accompanied the rise of the market society.” 11 ● “The United States, [Matthias] said, had promised union, freedom, and equal rights but in fact produced political and religious confusion—a nightmare world where the wicked spirit separated what God had joined and joined what God had split apart.” 5 ● “Unembarrassed, Matthias showed up for yet another meeting with [Joseph] Smith the next morning, when he described some of his own spiritual history. He proclaimed himself a direct descendant of the Hebrew prophets and patriarchs, of Jesus Christ, and of Matthias the Apostle. He possessed the souls of all these Fathers, for that was the way of everlasting life: the transmigration of spirits from Father to son. He was, in short, the incarnate Spirit of Truth.” 5 ● “The meeting of the Prophets Matthias and Joseph Smith was one of hundreds of strange religious events that occurred all across the United States from the 1820s through the 1840s. These were the peak years of the market revolution that took the country from the fringe of the world economy to the brink of commercial greatness. They were also (not coincidentally) years of intense religious excitement and sectarian invention, the culmination of what historians have called the Second Great Awakening.” 6 ● “Building on more that two centuries of occultism and Anglo-American millenarian speculation, the seers of the new republic set the pattern for later prophetic movements down to our own time and gave birth to enduring religious institutions, including Smith’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” 6 ● “Matthias and Smith, poor men who were rooted socially and emotionally in the yeoman republic of the eighteenth century, had been diminished by that revolution; both of them detested the emerging Yankee [Northern] middle class and its new moral imperatives. They thus fell outside of what respectable northern opinion considered the main currents of religious change in the decades before the Civil War, currents that most closely identified with the evangelical reformism of Yankee revival preachers like Charles Grandison Finney” 7 ● “Having abandoned the gloomy Calvinist determinism of their parents’ generation, they understood that every human being was a moral free agent, and that individuals could overcome inherited human selfishness and be saved through repentance and prayer.” 7 ● “The reassessment began at home. In the wake of the great Finneyite revivals, businessmen whose fathers and grandfathers had assumed unquestioned control over their households began to pray with their wives and to give themselves over to a gentle, loving Jesus. Finneyite men worked honestly and hard, prayed for release from anger and passion, used their money for Christian purposes, and willingly delegated day-to-day authority over child-rearing and other household affairs to their wives.

Evangelical women, for their part, taught their children (and very often their husbands) how to pray, how to develop an instinctive knowledge of right and wrong, and how to nurture the moral discipline that would prepare them for conversion and lifelong Christian service.” 7 ● “their fervor and organizational skills turned the Whig party in revival-soaked regions into an arm of Finneyite reform.” 8 ● “If perfection began in individual autonomy, they reasoned, then ​all​ coercive human relations were sinful.” 8 ● “Against the Finneyites’ feminized spirituality of restraint, Smith and Matthias (each in his own way) resurrected an ethos of fixed social relations and paternal power. Yet as they saw things, they were defenders of ancient truth against the perverse claims of arrogant, affluent, and self-satisfied enemies of God. And a majority of those Americans who were exposed to Finneyite evangelicalism apparently shared their anti-Finneyite views, if not their spiritual inventions and revalations. Southern evangelicals of all classes and colors were either untouched by Finneyite revivals or actively hostile to them. And in the North, as historians have only begun to discover, the great democratic revivals of the early nineteenth century emerged primarily not from the new middle class but from Americans whom the market revolution had either bypassed or hurt. These plebian Christians—including most Methodists, Baptists, and Disciples of Christ, the members of smaller evangelical sects like the Freewill Baptists, and prophets like Matthias and Joseph Smith—resented the Finneyites’ wealth, their education, their aptitude for organization, and their self-assigned roles as the cultural vanguard of market society and moral reform. So did the relatively tiny groups of American free-thinkers and deists, along with uncounted other Americans who were indifferent to any form of religion.” 9-10 ● “The story revolves around the interaction of two would-be prophets. The first, Elijah Pierson, was a Manhattan merchant who had experience a heavy dose of evangelical perfectionism and had rejected traditional religious authority. Unable to raise his wife form the dead, Pierson (who renamed himself Elijah the Tishbite) was vulnerable to a visionary with even greater self-proclaimed powers. Robert Mathews, a frustrated carpenter, was the second prophet. Mathews was enraged over his declining fortune, the success of bourgeois evangelicals, and the demise of the patriarchal family. Rejected by the evangelical churches, Mathews found a new direction for his religious enthusiasm. He proclaimed himself the Prophet Matthias, defender of patriarchy, and incarnation of the male spirit of God the Father.” 1679, Johnson ● “Soon after the two prophets met, Mathews absorbed Pierson and a number of his acquaintances into a small religious community. The Kingdom of Matthias was notable for its pre-commercial habits and customs, bizarre doctrines, sexual eccentricities, and obedience to the whims of its authoritarian patriarch. The kingdom lurched from crisis to crisis until the sudden death of Pierson led to Mathews’s indictment for murder.” 1679, Johnson

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“this narrative reminds us that the Second Great Awakening was more than a series of evangelical religious revivals. It was, as William McLoughlin wrote in ​Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform ​(1978), a paradigm shift in which people sought new ways to order their lives…Second, this book broadens our understanding of American religious history. Not all religious mutations survive—Matthews was a spectacular failure since his innovations challenged conventional morality as well as the new middle-class family—but unsuccessful experiments are also part of our religious past. Third, the epilogue offers some somber warnings as it connects Matthews to similar leaders (Jim Jones and David Koresh) in the late twentieth century. Religion does not always ennoble and enlighten; American cults have a long history of twisting, distorting, and even extinguishing lives that full under a prophet’s spell” 1679, Johnson Sources:​ journals, newspapers, court records, pamphlets Connections: ​Cross, ​Burned-Over​, Walters, ​American, ​Stewart, ​Holy, Hatch, ​Christianization​, Thomas, “Romantic Reform,” Johnson, Shopkeepers Nathan O. Hatch, ​The Democratization of American Christianity​ (1989) Argument: ​“Nathan O. Hatch argues that between 1775 and 1845 a host of evangelical populists led a religious revolt against learned theologians, gentlemen preachers, decorous congregations, and centralized ecclesiastical institutions. They repudiated Calvinist creeds, sedate forms of signing, formal orders of worship, and polite styles of preaching, preferring rough and ready theologies that accentuated human freedom, popular sons and ditties sung to fiddle tunes and jigs, spontaneous exuberance in church services, and earlthy sermons by uneducated exhorters. And they revolutionized American religion.” 633, Holifield ● “This book argues that the transitional period between 1780 and 1830 left indelible an imprint upon the structures of American Christianity as it did upon those of American political life. Only land, Robert Wiebe has noted, could compare with Christianity as the pulse of a new democratic society.” 6 ● “This book is about the cultural and religious history of the early American republic and the enduring structures of American Christianity. It argues both that the theme of democratization is central to understanding the development of American Christianity, and that the years of the early republic are the most crucial in revealing that process.” 3 ● “Starting from scratch just prior to the Revolution, Methodism in America grew at a rate that terrified other more established denominations. By 1820 Methodist membership numbered a quarter million; by 1830 it was twice that number. Baptist membership multiplied tenfold in the three decades after the Revolution; the number of churches increased from five hundred to over twenty-five hundred.” 3 ● “Between the American Revolution and 1845, the population of the United States grew at a staggering rate: two and a half million became twenty million in seventy years. This unprecedented growth was due to a high birth rate and the availability of land, rather than to heavy immigration.” 4 ● “This book examines five distinct traditions, or mass movements, that developed early in the nineteenth century: the Christian movement, the Methodists, the Baptists, the black churches, and the Mormons. Each was led by young men of relentless energy who went about movement-building as self-conscious outsiders. They shared an ethic of unrelenting toil, a passion for expansion, a hostility to orthodox belief and style, a zeal for religious reconstruction, and a systematic plan to realize their ideals.

However diverse in their theologies and church organizations, they all offered common people, especially the poor, compelling visions of individual self-respect and collective self-confidence. Like the Populist movement at the end of the nineteenth century, these movements took shape around magnetic leaders who were highly skilled in communication and group mobilization.” 4-5 ● “Abstractions and generalities about the Second Great Awakening as a conservative force have obscured the egalitarianism powerfully at work in the new nation. As common people became significant actors on the religious scene, there was increasing confusion and angry debate over the purpose and function of the church.” 5 ● Deep and powerful undercurrents of democratic Christianity distinguish the United States from other modern industrial democracies. These currents insure that churches in this land do not withhold faith from the rank and file…Religious populism, reflecting the passions of ordinary people and the charisma of democratic movement-builders, remains among the oldest and deepest impulses in American life.” 5 ● “Above all, the Revolution dramatically expanded the circle of people who considered themselves capable of thinking for themselves about issues of freedom, equality, sovereignty, and representation. Respect for authority, tradition and education eroded.” 6 ● “A diverse array of evangelical firebands went about the task of movement-building in the generation after the Revolution. Intent on bringing evangelical conversion to the mass of ordinary Americans, they could rarely divorce that message from contagious new democratic vocabularies and impulses that swept through American popular cultures. Class structure was viewed as society’s fundamental problem. There was widespread disdain for the supposed lessons of history and tradition, and a call for reform using the rhetoric of the Revolution. The press swiftly became a sword of democracy, fueling ardent faith in the future of the America republic.” 7

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“America’s nonrestrictive environment permitted an unexpected and often explosive conjunction of evangelical fervor and popular sovereignty. It was this engine that accelerated the process of Christianization within American popular culture, allowing indigenous expressions of faith to take hold among ordinary people, white and black.” 9 “The rise of evangelical Christianity in the early republic is, in some measure, a story of the success of common people in shaping the culture after their own priorities rather than the priorities outlined by gentlemen such as the framers of the Constitution.” 9 “The democratization of Christianity, then, has less to do with the specifics of polity and governance and more with the incarnation of church into popular culture. In at least three respects the popular religious movements of the early republic articulated a profoundly democratic spirit. First, they denied the age-old distinction that set the clergy apart as a separate order of men, and they refused to defer to learned theologians and traditional orthodoxies. All were democratic or populist in the way they instinctively associated virtue with ordinary people rather than with elites, exalted the vernacular in word and song as the hallowed channel for communicating with and about God, and freely turned over the reigns of power. These groups also shared with the Jeffersonian Republicans an overt rejections of the past as a repository of wisdom. By redefining leadership itself, these movements reconstructed the foundations of religion in keeping with the values and priorities of ordinary people.” 9-10 “Second, these movements empowered ordinary people by taking their deepest spiritual impulses at face value rather than subjecting them to the scrutiny of orthodox doctrine and the frowns of respectable clergymen.” 10 “The early republic was also a democratic movement in a third sense. Religious outsiders, flushed with confidence about their prospects, had little sense of their limitations. They dreamed that a new age of religious and social harmony would naturally spring up out of their efforts to overthrow coercive and authoritarian structures. This upsurge of democratic hope, this passion for equality, led to a welter of diverse and competing forms, many of them structured in highly undemocratic ways.”10-11 “”What had been defined as “enthusiasm” was increasingly advocated from the pulpit as an essential part of Christianity. Such a shift in emphasis, accompanied by rousing gospel singing rather than formal church music, reflected the common people’s success in defining the nature of faith for themselves. In addition, an unprecedented wave of religious leaders in the last quarter of the eighteenth century expressed their openness to a variety of signs and wonders, in short, an admission of increased supernatural involvement in everyday life.” 10 “these populist religious leaders were intoxicated with the potential for print. The rise of a democratic religious culture in print after 1800 put obscure prophets such as Elias Smith, Lorenzo Dow, and Theophilus Gates or black preachers such as Richard Allen or Daniel Coker on an equal footing with Jonathan Edwards and Timothy Dwight.” 11 “This is a book about popular religion which focuses, ironically, upon elites—or at least upon those persons who rose to leadership positions in a wide range of popular American churches and religions movements. Using democratic leadership as an organizing principle complements other approaches: the evolution of individual denominations; the clash of theological debate; the outworking of ethnic and regional patters; the dynamics of recurring revival; or the flourishing of popular religion outside Christian institutions. The theme of democratic leadership brings into sharper focus certain deep and recurring patterns in American religious history.” 12 “In the same vein, I focus on common developments rather than those characteristic of a given region…The choice to study common developments springs from a conviction that certain underlying cultural dynamics of this period are not reducible to distinct regional characteristics. The flowering of Methodism, of the Christian movement, or of black Christianity cannot be explained by focusing attention on a single section of the country.” 12 “This work focuses upon the religious leaders themselves, particularly those who mastered the democratic art of persuasion and on that rock built significant religious movements. The agitations of these insurgents brought them into being new churches and denominations in which authority depended not on the ability to move people and retain their confidence.” 12 “the fundamental religious debates in the early republic were not merely a clash of intellectual and theological difference but also a passionate social struggle with power and authority. Deep-seated class antagonism separated clergy from clergy. The learned and orthodox disdained early Methodism’s new revival measures, notions of free will, and perfectionism.” 14 “It is the intent of this study to tell at least part of this complicated story: how ordinary folk came to distrust leaders of genius and talent and to defend the right of common people to shape their own faith and submit to leaders of their own choosing.” 14 “This story also provides new insight into how America became a liberal, competitive, and market-driven society. In an age when more ordinary Americans expected almost nothing from government institutions and almost everything from religious ones, popular religious ideologies were perhaps the most important bellwethers of shifting worldviews. The passion for equality during these years equaled the passionate rejection of the past. Rather than looking backward and clinging to an older moral economy, insurgent religious leaders espoused convictions that were essentially modern and individualistic. These convictions defied elite privilege and vested interests and anticipated a millennial dawn of equality and justice. Yet, to achieve these visions of the common good, they favored means inseparable from the individual’s pursuit of spiritual and temporal well-being. They assumed that the leveling of aristocracy, root and branch, would naturally draw people together in harmony and equality. In this way, religious movements eager to preserve the supernatural in everyday life had the ironic effect of accelerating the break-up of traditional society and the advent of a social order of competition, self-expression, and free enterprise.” 14

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“The early republic was the most centrifugal epoch in American church history. It was a time when the momentum of events pushed toward the periphery and subverted centralized authority and professional expertise.” 15 ● “Attempting to erase the difference between leaders and followers, Americans opened the door to religious demagogues.” 16 ● “What then is the driving force behind American Christianity if it is not the quality of its organization, the status of its clergy, or the power of its intellectual life? I have suggested that a central force has been it democratic or populist orientation. America has lived in the shadow of a democratic revolution and the liberal, competitive culture that followed in its wake. Forms of popular religion characteristic of that cultural system bound paradoxical extremes together: a reassertion of the reality of the supernatural in everyday life linked to the quintessentially modern values of autonomy and popular sovereignty. American Christians reveled in freedom of expression, refused to bow to tradition or hierarchy, jumped at opportunities for innovative communication, and propounded popular theologies tied to modern notions of historical development.” 213 Sources: ​Sermons, journals, newspapers, pamphlets Connections: Cross, ​Burned-Over​, Johnson, ​Shopkeepers​, Johnson and Wilentz, ​Kingdom​, Thomas, “Romantic Reform,” Walters, American​, Stewart, ​Holy Comment: The Second Great Awakening has an impact because of the historical memory. Americans follow no tradition and the heirs of the Revolution are trying to figure out exactly who they are and one way they do this is religion. At the same time, they have the right to self-rule and they do not really want to be like Europe.

Bruce Laurie, ​Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America​ (1997) Argument: “This book does not pretend to be comprehensive. It seeks to merge the institutional focus of the old labor history with the special social and cultural insights of the new labor history. It is chiefly concerned with organized workers and their politic and more especially with the major labor movements of the nineteenth century—the Working Men’s parties and General Trades’ Union in the late 1820s and 1830s and the Knights of Labor and American Federation of Labor in the 1880s and 1890s—but not in isolation. It deals with organized workers in their larger world, their relations to unorganized males, women, and blacks as well as with employers and government. It also attempts to tell us something about the unfolding of capitalism in the countryside as well as the city. And it strives to demonstrated ho the making and unmaking of the American working class influenced the country’s history.” 13-14 ● Laurie shows the specific development from skilled artisans into relatively unskilled factory workers. ● “Laurie’s view is that American workers’ critiques were commonly fueled by a “radicalism” that, while often militant, remained linked to an underlying “free labor” vision of the American economy as open, dynamic, and capable of yielding wealth and independence to all who worked hard.” 138-139, Prude ● “In sum, Laurie concludes, “socialism…was so weak because radicalism was so strong.” And then, after 1865, the corrosive force of “radicalism” was supplemented by overt, and often government-sanctioned, repressions of labor organizations—a development making dreams of beneficent stat-run socialism even harder to credit.” 139, Prude ● By socialism [John R.] Commons [the father of American Labor History] and his students meant both class consciousness and a socialist party speaking for the working class.” 3 ● “But Commons considered American workers indifferent or averse to socialism by comparison with Europeans, who had formed socialist parties earlier and were more demonstrably class-conscious.” 3 ● “ [Selig] Perlman [Common’s student] argued that conditions peculiar to the United State imbued social relations and worker consciousness with two fundamental distinctions. First, during the nineteenth century American workers in the name of antimonopoly made common cause in politics with the “producing classes” of farmers and small businessmen. Labor’s romance with independent politics defeated the primary function of trade unionism by diverting attention to fruitless third-party political campaigns that necessarily relegated workplace activity to a “sunshine” enterprise, an avocation undertaken between electoral initiatives. Second, in the long run, employers were able to keep their employees satisfied and contented with wage labor. This enhanced the stature of the employer so that his “individualistic spirit” penetrated “the ranks of his employees.” 4 ● “A deeply ingrained respect for property rights, “bred into the American community from the very beginning,” nurtured “social and economic conservativism” and produced a nation of expectant capitalists. Geographic mobility destabilized working-class communities and disrupted workers’ organizations, no the least of which, of course, were trade unions. Mainstream political parties, on the other hand, were more durable and popular than unions. And because (white male) American workers were awarded the “free gift” of the right to vote, they were more firmly integrated into the political order than European workers, who could not exercise the franchise for most of the nineteenth century. In addition, constant waves of immigrants made the American working class “the most heterogeneous.” 4 ● “Job-conscious workers saw themselves not as the political companions of petty producers or members of a class with common concerns but as practitioners of individual crafts, a constellation of interest groups with the narrow aims of increasing wages, reducing the length of the workday, and safeguarding their jobs through enforced apprenticeship training and work rules.” 4-5 ● “It is my purpose to show that the development of the American working class differed from its European counterpart in two critical respects. First, the ideology of radicalism persisted longer than in any continental nation….to emphasize the dualism in the radical tradition before the Civil War and indeed long afterward. At the workplace it encouraged a form of class consciousness, a belief that employers illegitimately accumulated profit from the toil of labor. It justified struggle for immediate

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gain and proposed the long-term solution of cooperative production. IN politics, however, radicalism operated as a force for integration because of its loose compatibility with free laborism and because of the adaptability and social openness of the established parties. The durability of radicalism also inhibited the transition to socialism that took place in some European nations.” 12 “Equally important, radicalism never completely repudiated the old republican axiom that active government was corrupt government. It never fully greeted government as a class ally or instrument for class liberation, and as a result could not easily accept the role that socialism demanded of the state. One reason why “there was no socialism” in the late nineteenth century, or to be more accurate, why socialism was comparatively weak, is that radicalism was so persistent.” 12 “Second, Gilded Age workers not only ran up against an arrogant and callous class of industrialists fiercely antipathetic to unions. They also encountered ruthless resistance from state and federal government. Judges freely gutted labor laws and stifled job actions with crippling injunctions. Armed militiamen, sometimes bolstered by federal troops, were aggressive and shot down strikers not just during the major strikes of the mid-1870s, the general strike for the eight-hour day in 1886, the Homestead strike, and the Pullman boycott were not simply dramatic clashes in which each side exchanged blows, ministered to the wounded, buried the dead, and repaired to the bliss of the Victorian home. They were formative events widely discussed, assessed, and reassessed in corner taverns, party headquarters, and union halls. And they proved decisive in the development of the labor movement.” 13 “Evangelical Protestantism, a frequent companion of paternalism, could also soften early industrialism. Evangelicalism, to be sure, offered a contradictory message. The 1840s found workers invoking the injunction “in the sweat thy brow shalt thou eat bread” to attack selfishness and inequality; they quoted passages from Genesis to assail mandatory labor on the Sabbath and excessive hours during the week. At the same time, evangelicalism imbued workers with the individualistic spirit of the entrepreneur, with distrust of collective action to redress job-related grievances and with suspicion of nonbelievers as well as virulent anti-Catholicism. The church was also a social center, a place where employee and employer met as equals in the eyes of God and sometimes worked out mutually beneficial arrangements to serve Mammon. Poorer churchgoers patronized the shops of wealthier parishioners who hired fellow congregants or helped ambitious journeymen establish their own businesses.”

“Few antebellum workers, however, were evangelicals. Only a fraction of working people in the North or South regularly attended church before the popular revivals during the economic slump of the late 1830s. These outbursts of holiness were followed by a great influx of European immigrants that fundamentally changed the composition of the work class in both regions.” 212 “The intensification of economic change, marked by the rise of the sweating system and expansion of factory production, set off the first sustained attacks on the industrial revolution and systematic programs for equality drafted by artisans for artisans. The radical essayists and pamphleteers of the 1820s brought together two strands of thought, an older political convention and a new economics. The first was rooted in the traditional republican wisdom that vilified government as oppressive and exploitative and entrusted mechanics an small farmers with preserving equality and republican rule. The political vigilance of the plain people grew out of their economic autonomy and self-sufficiency, which inculcated a fierce sense of independence and deep distrust of those who depended on government, whether for subsistence or for economic well-being invested political radicalism with a critical perspective on the commercial aand industrial revolutions, but not with concepts that grasped economic affairs in economic terms.” 213 “Political radicalism told the artisan he was a citizen and, within the context of political democracy, the peer of every (white) man. It asserted through political action that would clear the field of privilege and favoritism.” 214 “The economics of radicalism, on the other hand, told the worker he was an economic being, a producer with interests separate and distinct from such parasitic accumulators as merchants, financiers, and large employers. Economic radicalism pointed the worker toward unionism in a more emphatic way than political radicalism.” 214 “Unions were the foundation of the movement culture that arose in the major cities of the North in the 1830s. The General Trades’ Unions of those years combined cultural with economic functions, supporting labor papers, debating societies, reading rooms, and other cultural resources while standing behind union men seeking better pay and shorter workdays. They were remarkably successful on the economic front, perhaps more so than any other union movement in the century. The vast majority of the general strikes in 1835 either achieved the ten-hour day or ended in compromise settlements, and most of the strikes for wage increases in 1836 won their demand.” 214 “It is an idle exercise to suppose what might have been had the panic of 1837 not stopped the momentum of cooperation in its tracks and then brought about the collapse of the labor movement itself. We can be certain that the destruction of unions and cooperatives gave the initiative to the politics of radicalism. In the immediate aftermath of the panic, labor advocates fell back on the politics of hard money; they lampooned bankers and speculators in language consistent with the received politics of the Democratic party. By midpoint in the depression labor had leaders without a movement; with few exceptions the leaders had become minor functionaries in the Democratic party.” 215 “Except for the building trades and pockets of industrial craftsmen in the old crafts and new industries, the typical wage warned in manufacturing was turned into a semiskilled machines operative without much discretion on the job. The supple artisan culture of the small shop was swept into the industrial periphery and paternalistsic management declined or fell apart.” 215-216

25 Sources: ​newspapers, union records, pamphlets, church records Connections: ​Wilentz, ​Chants​, Sellers, ​Market​, Cross, ​Burned,​ Johnson, ​Shopkeepers, ​Walters, ​American​, Hatch, ​Democratization Sean Wilentz, ​Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850​ (1984) Argument: “The overall argument of ​Chants Democratic is easily summarized. From the revolutionary period to the Jacksonian era New York City’s artisans formulated a ​collective identity unifying masters, journeymen, and apprentices and setting them apart from other social groups, a unique blend of egalitarianism and revolutionary ideology that Wilentz calls “artisan republicanism.” By the 1820s, however, the transformation of journeymen into wage earners had proceeded sufficiently in some trades to raise questions about the mechanics’ solidarity. Masters and employees increasingly extracted and emphasized different themes from their shared republican heritage, a divergence that accelerated rapidly with the emergence of the Workingmen’s movement of 1829 and the General Trades’ Union of the early 180s. While the depression of 1837-1843 forced many workers to seek comfort in their own distinctively plebian visions of nativism, temperance, and land reform, the labor crisis of 1850 once again revealed how thoroughly industrialization had shattered artisan republicanism and how workingmen understood their ordeal in terms of class.” 460, Steffen ● “In New York City—by 1850 the most productive manufacturing economy in the United States—the great leap in production was neither a function of technological innovation nor a triumph of the factory system. The development of industry was uneven, with small manufactories in the finishing consumer trades, such as garments, outnumbering heavier, more fully mechanized industries. Throughout the period smaller master craftsmen abounded, while larger manufactures traced their roots to artisan shops, not to a merchant elite. The most important transformation was in the allocation and organization of labor, the increasing subdivision tasks, the utilization of cheap labor, and the resort to “out work”—all hallmarks of a sweated system of industrial production. By 1850 the world of the independent craftsman had disintegrated into what Wilentz calls the “bastard workshop,” where artisan journeymen were replaced by exploited wage workers.” 140-141, Ryan ● “Until the 1820s, manufacturers in New York City were a unified if hierarchically differentiated class. Masters, journeymen, and apprentices all shared a republican identity, loyally advocating the five principles of commonwealth, virtue, independence, equality, and citizenship, as described by Pocock.” 141, Ryan ● “By the third decade of the century this harmonious workshop had been supplanted by the bastard system of production…As Wilentz shows us, “1829 was an extraordinary year,” marked by depression, the explosion of Jacksonian politics, and the birth of a radical popular movement. The movement began with a protest by journeyman and culminated in the formation of the Working Men’s Party. Yet, it is an event along the way—a mass meeting called by Thomas Skidmore in April—that Wilentz finds most revealing. This mass democratic assemblage, composed primarily of militant journeymen, endorsed a radical critique of private property and questioned the very legitimacy of banking and credit…Coincident with the degradation of artisan labor at a moment when the second party system was not fully in place, New York workers mounted a militant political and ideological challenge to the established powers.” 141, Wilentz ● “In fact, the 1830s brought us many as two out of three industrial workers into New York’s General Federation of Trade Unions.

Moreover, the reports of the GFU, as well as their parades, revealed the clear formulation of a new class identity. Some twenty-six trades united in the GFU, and almost all of them demanded their right as producers to control wages and the conditions of work. In so doing, the journeymen of New York adopted a new language of class. Large employers were no longer master craftsmen; now they were set apart as “capitalists,” intent on maximizing profits by cheapening wages and abrogating the workers’ right to property in their own labor. At the same time employers were also refining a class identity. Masters, represented by associations like the American Institute and the Mechanics Intitute, articulated a theory of capitalism as a republican utopia, where anything that contributed to economic advancement ultimately helped the whole society and polity.

The artisans, according to Wilentz, saw things differently. To them it had become clear that the inordinate power of the master in a capitalist marketplace contradicted republicanism itself, especially in its tenets of equality and independence. Journeymen and increasing numbers of unskilled laborers could no longer march in unison with their masters on ceremonial days; instead they walked defiantly out on strike.” 141-142, Ryan ● “The organizational center of the labor crisis of 1850 was the New York Industrial Congress, which by the end of the year enrolled some ninety different trade unions composed almost entirely of propertyless workers from the poorer wards of the city…Wilentz adduces ample evidence to demonstrate that the workers of 1850 had become a class unto themselves. Not only did they demand wage increases and call for the eight-hour day, but by founding scores producer cooperatives, they aimed to “Be Forever rescued from the control of the capitalist.”” 142, Ryan ● “It was a distinctly American heritage that inspired those workers assembled at City Hall. They rose in 1850 to uphold republicanism amidst the ravages of metropolitan industrialization, to champion the now well-honed doctrines of the worker contempt for nonproducing capitalistsm, and the recognition of the antirepublican implications of wages. By 1850 these values were posed in direct confrontation with those of the capitalists, who in turn had solidified their class position so adamantly that they could resort to police power to subdue the strikers….the obvious conclusion…metropolitan producers of American manufactured goods had become a self-conscious, separate class, capable of radical though and militant action.” 143, Ryan ● Strikes and labor unrest seem to stop in periods of economic downturn.

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“Gradually, from the sixteenth century through the early nineteenth, merchant capitalists and master craftsmen restructured the social relations of production, transformed wage labor into a market commodity and established the basis for new sets of class relations and conflicts. In America, colonial rule, slavery, the weakness of mercantilist guilds, and an abundance of land created a different economic matrix; nevertheless, a similar process of occurred at an accelerated rate beginning in the late eighteenth century in the New England countryside and the established northern seaboard cities. Along with the destruction of plantation slavery, this disruption of the American artisan system of labor ranks as one of the outstanding triumphs of nineteenth-century American capitalism, part of the reordering of formal social relations to fit the bourgeois ideal of labor, market, and man.” 5 “So by 1850…New York, although no longer a political capital, had become the metropolis of America.” 6 “Progressives like [William] Trimble, [Dixon Ryan] Fox, and [Arthur] Schlesinger, Jr., thought that the heart of the matter lay in party politics—that the early industrial revolution and the advent of the Jacksonian Democrats market the political rise of “proletarian,” liberal forces, centered in New York and Massachusetts, which aimed to curb the excesses of conservative “capitalists.” 7 “The Progressives’ insistence that political parties, in New York and elsewhere, directly embodied class interests—that the Whigs were the party of business, the Democrats the party of farmers and labor, or simply “the people”—led them in turn to ignore the plain truth that in New York and in the rest of the country, both major parties were led by established and emerging elites and their professional allies, unusually lawyers. By then looking at employers and workers primarily through the distorting lens of party politics, the Progressives further narrowed their understanding of popular social consciousness, virtually equating it with the ideas espoused by either the Whigs or the Democrats; simultaneously, they took the politicians’ most fiery “class” rhetoric at face value, as a full and accurate expression of the ​politicians’​ social views and allegiances.” 7 “In place of a static, instrumentalist economic determinism, they [New Social Historians] have treated class as a dynamic social relation, a form of social domination, determined largely by changing relations of production but shaped by cultural and political factors (including ethnicity and religion) without any apparent logic of economic interest.” 10 “In short, they [New Social Historians] insist that the history of class relations cannot be deduced by some “economic” or sociological calculus and imposed on the past; nor can it be ignored if it does not appear just as the historian thinks it should, either in or out of politics. It must be examined as part of a human achievement in which men and women struggle to comprehend the social relations into which they were born and in which, by the collective exercise of power, they sustain or challenge those relations, in every phase of social life.” 10 “The final product approaches the problem through a series of interconnected middle-range themes. The first will come as no surprise: the central role of the crafts. Craft workers—sometimes treated by labor historians as a working-class elite, the aristocracy of urban labor—were in fact at the heart of New York’s emerging working class from the 1790s until mid-century, embracing wide range of people, form well-paid skilled journeymen to outworkers getting by on starvation wages. Clerks and unskilled laborers represented a numerous but decided minority of male metropolitan workers before the Civil War; except for domestic servants, a very special group, the vast majority of female wage earners as well were craft workers. Although male laborers and dockhands did organize on their own behalf, it was the craft workers (including the women) who, in concert with radical small producers, elaborated the first articulate forms of plebian radicalism, and who dominated the most powerful labor organizations of the era.” 10-11 “The history of class and class formation is the history of the “process of confrontation” between classes, then the terms of confrontation were set by the ideals, aspirations, rationalizations, and activities, of New York’s employers and independent small producers as well as by the city’s workers. To make sense of the emerging middle class in this context is to begin to comprehend the dialects of power and social change.” 12 “The subjects of this book turned to the language of the Republic to explain their views, attack their enemies, and support their friends…this discourse rested largely on four interlocking concepts: first, that the ultimate goal of any political society should be the preservation of the ​public good, or ​commonwealth​; second, that in order to maintain the commonwealth, the citizens of a republic had to be able and willing to exercise ​virtue​, to subordinate private ends to the legislation of the public good when they conflicted; third, that in order to be virtuous, citizens had to be ​independent ​of the political will of other men, lest they lose sight of the common good; fourth, that in order to guard against the encroachments of would-be tyrants, citizens had to be active in politics, to exercise their ​citizenship​. To these concepts, eighteenth-century Americans, above all “middling” merchants and artisans, added ​equality​, the liberal idea that all citizens should be entitled to their natural civil and political rights under a representative, democratic system of laws.” 14 “Faced with profound changes in the social relations of production, ordinary New Yorkers began to reinterpret their shared ideals of commonwealth, virtue, independence, citizenship, and equality, and struggled over the very meaning of the terms. In so doing, they also revealed the social meanings of republicanism for urban producers—and how they changed. Formal republican thought was a political ideology, a world view that distinguished sharply between society and government and held that social disorder stemmed from political corruption. Nevertheless, it bore close associations to social relations outside of politics, associations that were severely tested as Americans came to consider their own way of life as peculiarly conducive to a proper republican order.” 14-15

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“By 1850, with the erosion of the artisan system, that shared vision had virtually collapsed and been replaced by new and opposing conceptions of republican politics and the social relations that would best sustain them. This process of social reformation and ideological transformation was neither simple nor linear; to trace its sometimes baffling course form the most direct of class confrontations through nativism and immigration, political intrigue, gang warfare, and numerous reform movements, is the greatest challenge for the historian of early-nineteenth-century urban labor.” 15 ● “Rather, between 1829…and 1850, both a process and a strain of consciousness emerged in numerous ways from the swirl of popular politics, in which people came at various points to interpret social disorder and the decline of the Republic at least partly in terms of class divisions between capitalist employers and employees. More specifically, workers and radicals elaborated a notion of labor as a form of personal property, in direct opposition to the capitalist conceptions of wage labor as a market commodity. For much of the period, this consciousness of class appeared within a broader defense of the “producing classes,” an amalgam of “honorable” anticapitalist small masters and wage earners; in moments of particularly acute crisis, however, as in the mid-1830s and in 1850, critiques of wage relations came to the fore, usually in trade-union movements.” 17 ● “If new forms of class relations and social consciousness arose, as I believe they did, they should show up in redefinitions of gender, sexuality, and family, in the conduct of politics, in childhood, in household patterns, in the meanest transactions of everyday life. No such total history is attempted here.” 17 ● “But a new order of human relations did emerge, primarily in the North and West, defined chiefly by the subordination of wage labor to capital. What is more, men and women came in the same period to understand that this was happening, and they began to think and act, in E.P. Thompson’s phrase, in new “class ways,” unlike those of the mid-eighteenth century.” 18 Sources:​ court records, ceremonial speeches, contemporary prints and drawings, and accounts of parades and festivals.

Connections: Laurie, ​Arisans, Sellers, ​Market​, Cross, ​Burned, Johnson, ​Shopkeepers​, Hatch, ​Democatization​, Thomas “Romantic Reform,” Walters, ​American,​ Stewart, ​Holy Charles Sellers, ​The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846​ (1991) Argument: “the crucial catalyst [of the market revolution], rather, is the National Republicans, a small yet “purposeful” group of seaboard gentry which included John C. Calhoun, James Monroe, Henry Clay, and John Quincy Adams. In Seller’s account, it was the National Republicans, and not the great majority of ordinary Americans, ho pssesset “nteeneurial vision” necessary to bring this transformation about.” 302 John ● “Central to Seller’s account is the concept of the “market revolution,” by which he means the transformation of the American economy, polity, and culture through the expansion of commercial agriculture. Sellers uses this concept to divide American history into three major phases. In the first phase, most Americans lived in a pre-capitalist world in which agricultural production remained geared to the immediate needs of family subsistence. Around 1815, all this would change. The hinterland would be rapidly transformed by the same commercial pressures that had already triumphed along the coast. By 1846, this transformation was largely complete. By this time, the “use-value world” of the subsistence farmer had been almost entirely supplanted by the “market world” within which Americnas have lived ever since.” 302, John ● “Fundamental to the National Republicans achievement was their self-conscious manipulation of public polity to promote the commercial exploitation of the hinterland.” 303, John ● “Charles Sellers’s ​The Market Revolution marks an ambitious effort to narrate and explain the triumph of capitalism in antebellum America. Unlike most historians of the “capitalist transition,” Sellers insists that politics lay at the center of that process, and narrates the political struggles that, he argues, largely determined the shape of America’s economic and social order. ​The Market Revolution serves as a capstone to efforts to revive, in far more sophisticated from, the Progressive historians’ belief that the fierce political struggles of the Jacksonian era were rooted in class conflict.” 413, Huston ● “According to Sellers, capitalist development was the defining issue of Jacksonian politics. At the heart of the era’s political conflicts lay overriding struggle between the market ethos of the capitalist seaboard and the cash crop frontier and the “subsistence culture” of the rural majority.” 414, Huston ● By 1815, Sellers argues, entrepreneurs and their representatives had won control of Jefferson’s Republican party—and, through that party, the federal government. These National Republicans pursued a program of state-sponsored capitalist development and national consolidation through a national bank, territorial expansion, internal improvements, and protective tariffs. This program sparked a political insurgency among farmers and urban mechanics, who found their way of life threatened by the market revolution and who remained dedicated to local autonomy and limited government.” 414, Huston ● “Long before the presidency of Andrew Jackson, Sellers argues, anticapitalism and democracy were inextricably linked. The National Republican program also led to a defection among southern slave owners, who came to fear northern National Republicans’ hostility to slavery and saw the national party’s extension of federal power a threat to human property.” 414, Hust ● “These class-based insurgencies found their national leader in Andrew Jackson. Antibank farmers and mechanics throughout the nation flocked to the hero of New Orleans in 1824 and 1828, imbuing his candidacy with a popular, democratic, and anticapitalist ethos.” 414, Huston ● “By 1840, Sellers argues, “democracy proved safe for capitalism. With this political defeat, popular anticapitalism lost its power. Gradually, the farmer-worker majority accommodated itself to the ways of the market. The class solidarity exhibited by

28 producers during the 1820s and 1830s gave way to racial and ethnic fragmentation; popular politics came to reflect ethnic and cultural divisions rather than class aspirations.” 415, Huston Sources:​ Store records, journals, court records, land grants, migration records, census data, company records Connections: Wilentz, ​Chants​, Laurie, ​Artisans​, Walters, ​American, Cross, ​Burned, Stewart, ​Holy​, Thomas, “Romantic,” Johnson, Shopkeepers,​ Hatch, ​Democratization Sean Wilentz, ​The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln​ 2005) Argument: ​“Democracy ​was on the rise throughout the United States in the antebellum era, even in some sectors of the South. And, as he writes, eloquently, at its end the conflict left the victors “to define and implement democracy,” as the United States boiled over with “all sorts of ideas about how equality might best be expanded—or curtailed” (p 793-794) 175, Altshuler ● “the book has a few major themes. One…is that democracy, at the nation’s inception, was highly contested, not a given, and developed piecemeal, by fits and starts, at the state and local as well as the national level. A second theme is that social changes barely foreseen in 1787—the rapid commercialization of the free labor North and the renaissance of plantation slavery in the South—deeply affected how democracy advanced, and retreated after 1815. Third, Americans perceived these social changes primarily in political terms and increasingly saw them as struggles over contending ideas of democracy...A fourth theme concerns the constancy of political conflict: democracy in America was the spectavle of Americans arguing over democracy…Fifth, the many-sided conflicts over American democracy came, in the 1840s and 1850s, to focus on an issue of recognized importance since the republic’s birth: the fate of American slavery. Throughout the decades after the Revolution, free-labor democracy of the North and the slaveholders’ democracy of the South—distinct political systems as well as bodies of thought…The book’s final theme is implied in the others: the idea of democracy is never sufficient unto itself.” Xxi (While I always love the political, I think one has to go with an economic argument here—the world was changing, primarily through the economy and people kept searching for ways to deal with that change through social and political movements.) ● “A republic—the ​res publica​, or “public thing”—was mean to secure the common good through the ministrations of the most worthy, enlightened men. A democracy—derived from ​demos krateo​, “rule of the people”—dangerously handed power to the impassioned, unenlightened masses…Yet by the 130s, as Alexis de Tocqueville learned, most Americans proclaimed that their country was a democracy as well as a republic.” Xvii ● “Today, democracy in America means enfranchisement, at a minimum, of the entire adult citizenry. By that standard, the American democracy of the mid-nineteenth century was hardly a democracy at all: women of all classes and colors lacked political and civil rights; most blacks were enslaved; free black men found political rights they had once enjoyed either reduced or eliminated; the remnant of a ravaged Indian population in the eastern states had been forced to move west, without citizenship.” Xviii ● “Before Schelsinger, historians thought of American democracy as the product of an almost mystical frontier or agrarian egalitarianism. ​The Age of Jackson toppled that interpretation by placing democracy’s origins firmly in the context of the founding generation’s ideas about the few and the many, and by seeing democracy’s expansion as an outcome of struggles between classes, not sections.” Xix ● “Thomas Jefferson, more than any other figure in the early republic, established (and was seen to have established) the terms of American democratic politics. Abraham Lincoln self-consciously advanced an updated version of Jefferson’s egalitarian ideals, and his election to the presidency of the United States caused the greatest crisis in American democracy has yet known.” Xx ● “One of the book’s recurring themes is how ordinary Americans, including some beyond the outermost reaches of the country’s political leaders did not create American democracy out of thin air, so the masses of Americans did not simply force their way into the corridors of power.” Xx ● “For [Noah] Webster, Jackson was reborn Thomas Jefferson, accomplishing what Jefferson had only imagined accomplishing when the philosophizing mood was upon him. Jackson himself, not known for philosophizing, called his political beliefs an extension of “good old Jeffersonian Democratic republican principles.” And if Jackson came to symbolize a fulfillment of Jeffersonian desires, his path had been cleared long before he took office.” 4 ● The mysterious rise of American democracy was an extraordinary part of the most profound political transformation in modern history: the triumph of popular government and of the proposition—if not, fully, the reality—that sovereignty rightly belongs to the mass of ordinary individual and equal citizens.” 5 ● “Bits and pieces of the English plebeian radicalism of the 640s and 1650s crossed the Atlantic and survived to help inspire the American revolutionaries and frighten their opponents over a century later.” 6 ● “The radicalism of the seventeenth century belongs to the genealogy of American democracy…Colonial charters installed property requirements for voting, usually landed freeholds, but in newly settled colonial areas where land was cheap, anywhere from 70 to 80 percent of white adult men could meet the qualification. It was far easier for an American man of middling means than for his British counterpart to hold local and even legislative office….Americans’ experience of town meetings (where, in New England, humble men won election to local offices) and of independent, parish-run dissenting churches gave them a strong taste of direct political engagement.” 6

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“In older settled rural areas of the colonies, as in the coastal towns and early cities, the proportion of eligible voters among white men was much smaller than elsewhere, as little as two in five. Those proportions probably declined during the years immediately preceding the Revolution, when the rate of property ownership in the colonies was falling. The famous town-meeting democracies of New England were often run as means to ratify decisions already made by locals leaders, and to give the air of amiable consensus.” 6 ● “The major claims on democracy’s behalf before the Revolution rested on the rising power, in many colonies, of the lower houses of the colonial legislatures, in imitation of the rising power of the Commons in England after the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89. In principle, these assemblies represented the common middling sort, the small farmers, artisans, and petty merchants who made up the great bulk of the colonial free male population.” 7 ● “If the unelected had any other political voice, it came in the form of extralegal mob violence and crowd disturbances—forms of protests condoned and even instigated by established political leaders when it suited their political advantage.” 8 ● “Among the many surprises in the book is its placement of politics, politicians, and parties at the center of American history.

Like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in ​The Age of Jackson (1945), Wilentz sets the rise of democracy in the context of conflict between classes. But, he argues, most American viewed social and economic developments through a partisan political prism, fighting for (and over) democracy, broadly conceived, at the local, state, and national level.” 169, Altschuler ● “Wiltenz gives strikes and social movements their innings in ​The Rise of American Democracy, with vivid descriptions and Workies and Washingtonians (p. 588). But presidents, senators, and congressmen command the stage.” 169, Altschuler ● “In the early national period, the Democratic Party, with a push from farmers and urban workers, Wilentz suggests, turned democratic aspirations into political realties. Thomas Jefferson battled the elitist, aristocratic, “unrepublican perversions” of the Federalists in the 1790s (p. 104).” 170, Altshuler ● “As chief executive, Wilentz asserts, Jefferson gave voice to “the axioms of free society,” encouraged ordinary folk to stand for political office, gave a measure of influence to the emerging city and country democracies, and “vindicated the political equality of the mass of American citizens” (pp. 790, 138).” 170, Altshuler ● “The end of the War of 1812, Wilentz writes, cleared the way “for new permutations of American democracy” (p. 142). The Federalist Party disappeared. Anti-democratic assumptions persisted, at the national level, in the politics of John Quincy Adams, who warned representatives in his first message to Congress, not to “slumber in ignorance or fold up on our arms and proclaim to the world that we are palsied by the will of our constituents” (p. 216) He won 56 percent of the popular vote, with four times as many Americans casting ballots in 1828 than 1824.” 171, Altshuler ● “Jackson created the first mass political party. He took as his democratic credo a fear of encrusted privilege and a conviction that if anyone deserved the favor of government it was farmers, mechanics, and other hardworking men. And he insisted that the presidency was the office most responsible for—and responsive to—them.” 172, Altshuler ● “Most historians, Wilentz, believes have not taken sufficiently seriously Jackson’s claim that he made war on the Second Bank of the United States “to liberate democratic government from the corrupting power of exclusive private business interests”…the Jacksonians sought to minimize speculation and boom-and-bust cycles, while giving the sovereign people, not banks or Biddles, power over the distribution of the money held by government…Jackson vetoed the bill renewing the charter of his bank.

Biddle’s use of the resources of the Bank to support the Whig Party in 1832, Wilentz writes, constituted “definitive proof of the Bank’s pollution of American democracy” (p. 394). The adverse impact of deposits in “pet banks,” he adds, has been exaggerated. Jackson’s hard money policies “were not so much the triggers for the subsequent distress as they were reforms that came into existence too late…to have much effect” (p. 445).” 172, Altshuler ● “Acknowledging that the president ultimately reneged on his promises about voluntary and compensated relocation and set in motion an “insidious policy,” he suggests that Jackson “was not a simple-minded Indian hater,” but a “benevolent, if realistic paternalist.” Wilientz takes, at face value, Jackson’s assertion that he wished “to preserve this much-injured race” and his argument that, since full tribal sovereignty was unconstitutional,” removal was the only way to safeguard both the Indians’ future and the Constitution of the United States.” In this context, Wilentz’s admission that “the realities of Indian removal belied Jackson’s rhetoric” seems a sufficient critique of his own uneasy, improbably defense of Old Hickory.” 172, Altshuler Organization: “The first section…covers the years from the Revolution to 1815, with Thomas Jefferson as its central actor…Wilentz stress the role of what he called city and country democrats—urban artisans and yeomen farmers—in initiating the Revolution…Section 2…covers the rise of Andrew Jackson and the Jacksonians and ends with Martin Van Buren’s defeat in 1840. This section s the core of the book and is superior in many ways to the equivalent account in…​The Age of Jackson​…Wilentz’s third section…tells the familiar story of the growing sectional split over slavery and slavery extension between 1840 and 1861.” Holt Comparison with Schlesinger: “​Wilentz provides a much fuller analysis of the 1820s than did Schlesinger, properly citing the Panic of 1819and the Missouri Crisis as key events that shaped the decade…Wilentz is also faiere…to the Antimasons and Whigs. Whereas Schlesinger associated virtually every reform movement between 1820 and 1860 with Jackson, Wilentz correctly insists hat humanitarian reformers often opposed Jackson. Unlike Schlesinger, he also confronts Jackson’s Indian removal policies, the results of which he labels “insidious,” and he devotes far more space to the section tensions within the Democratic party over slavery than did Schlesinger…” Holt Connections:​ Schlesinger, ​The Age​, Cross, ​Burned​, Walters, ​American​, Sellers, ​Market​, Johnson, ​Shopkeepers

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Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., ​The Age of Jackson​ (1945) Argument: ​“The tradition of Jacksonian democracy was primarily a reform tradition, dedicated to a struggle against the entrenched business interests of the national community.” 510, Nye ● “In this contest [between entrenched business interests and the national community]…the political strength of the eastern workingman, and not the intermittent radicalism of the West and South, formed the backbone and sinews of Jacksonian power; by reason of this support, Jackson added economic freedom to the political freedom that Jeffersonianism had already established as a demand.” 510, Nye ● “The West, Mr. Schlesinger points out, furnished ideas and leaders—Benton, Polk, and Tappan, among others, and of course Jackson himself—but the real driving force in the practical application of Jacksonian reform principles came from workingmen of the seaboard and their political leaders, from the areas where corporate interests were more powerful and arrogant, and where the substratum of revolt against wealth was strong enough and consistent enough to maintain a program, execute it, and make Jacksonianism a vital facto in politics and political theory 510-511, Nye ● “The Jacksonian tradition split on the rock of slavery, its pressing economic issues submerged in moral arguments and its force lost in the wave of interest aroused by the new controversy.” 511, Nye ● “It is clear from the author’s statement of his thesis that he considers the impetus of Jacksonian principles as chiefly stemming from economics, as the awakening of the have-nots in the period of 1830 to 1860 to the encroachments haves upon American political and economic life, and that he believes the history of the era to be read in terms of party battles but of economic and social cleavages. The fact that the West wanted some things, and the East others, and that the Jacksonian program was able to satisfy and retain the support of both, provides the book one of its most provocative sections and one of its keenest analyses of political motivations.” 511, Nye ● “[Jackson’s] opposition to federal subsidization of internal improvements, for example, while unsatisfactory to the West, was balanced by his fiscal policy, equally unsatisfactory to the eastern workingman. The antistatism of the old Jeffersonian tradition, from which Jackson inherited much of his southern support, fitted ill with the strong-government predilections of Old Hickory and with the demands of the East for a national ally against banking and industry.” 511, Nye ● “The trend of Jackson’s administration, its spirit, its emphasis on rights of the masses and the workers, and its advocacy of general reform, seemed all things to all who supported it. Because it embraced within it the essential doctrines of one great stream of the American political tradition, it succeeded in consolidating divergent forces and personalities. It gave expression to what Mr. Schlesinger calls the “basic meaning” of American liberalism, that is, the eternal struggle of the many for political and economic freedom from the power of the entrenched conservatism of the economically dominant few.” 511, Nye ● “ “American History,” remarks the author, “has been marked by recurrent swings of conservatism and liberalism.” Mr. Schlesinger is clearly on the side of society to restrain the power of the business community.” 512, Nye ● “For Bancroft the American Revolution was a prelude to Jacksonian Democracy; for Schlesinger Jacksonian Democracy, including the contributions of Bancroft, was a prelude to the New Deal.” 151, Cole ● “Rejecting the standard Progressive view that Jacksonianism was a sectional movement led by western frontiersmen, Schlesinger argued that the movement should be “regarded as a problem not of sections but of classes,” and that its ideas came from eastern workingmen and intellectuals.” Schlesinger later insisted that “​The Age of Jackson [did] not argue that there was a ‘class conflict between great capitalists on one side, and a mass of propertyless wage-earners on the other,’ but he believed that Jacksonian Democracy was a “struggle of non-business groups against business domination of the government” on behalf of urban workers.” 151, Cole ● “Nevins praised Schlesinger for treating the Jackson movement “as the outgrowth not of frontier development but of new economic strains and tensions” and for recognizing that the movement “brought up from the depths of American life a powerful set of new forces” that “revitalized our politics by the impact of profound impulses from below.” 152, Cole ● “​The Age of Jackson is almost as striking for what it is ​not as for what it ​is. Although the best-known books ever written about the era of Andrew Jackson, it is not a book about Jackson himself. Aside from an eight-page sketch of Jackson’s early political career, there is little direct treatment of the Old Hero, and the index carries more references to Martin Van Buren than to Jackson. In addition there is surprisingly little analysis of Jackson’s eight years in office, for Schlesinger ignores the nullification crisis, the tariff bills, the Maysville veto, and Jackson’s diplomacy. He, furthermore, gives almost no attention to women, blacks, and American Indians. In an index of some 1,100 citations only ten are to women, eight of which are brief references in which the woman is used to describe a male politician. Only the notorious Fanny Wright and Peggy Eaton receive more than passing attention. Although there is a lengthy discussion of the political issue of slavery, there is little concern for the social issue of race. Indians are omitted completely; even the Indian Removal Act fails to make it. The son of Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., who pioneered in the field of social history, did not show much interest in that field in ​The Age of Jackson​.” 153 Organization: “​The Age of Jackson is a work of intellectual history. The author begins with a graceful essay sketching in the background of Jacksonian Democracy with a graceful deal of attention to the Old Republicans John Randolph, John Taylor, and Nathaniel Macon. He follows with an extended description of the Bank War, interpreted in terms of class conflict, and with that he is done with the administration of Andrew Jackson. Next comes Jacksonian Democracy at the local level—the Loco Focos, the Albany

31 Regency, and the Massachusetts Democratic Party—after which he returns to the struggle over banking, especially the Independent Treasury bill, during Van Buren’s term in office. Schlesinger concludes with a lengthy analysis of Jacksonian Democracy as manifested in such nonpolitical areas as law, industry, religion, and literature, and a narrative of the Jacksonians during the coming of the Civil War.” 154, Cole ● “Schlesinger describes him as “the first national leader really to take advantage of the growing demand of the people for more active participation in the decisions of government,” and praises him for furnishing “the practical mechanisms which transferred Jackson’s extraordinary popularity into the instruments of power” and without which “the gains of Jacksonian Democracy would have been impossible.” Schlesinger makes Van Buren, not Jackson, the hero of ​The Age of Jackson​, devoting more space to Van Buren’s one term than he does to Jackson’s two. The high point of the book and of Jacksonian Democracy comes on July 4, 1840, when Van Buren signed the independent treasury bill, which separated the government from the nation’s banks and which Francis Preston Blair called the second Declaration of Independence.” 154, Cole ● Schlesinger’s detractors “argued that workers were just as likely to vote Whig as Democratic and that Jacksonians were more interested in making money than in helping the underdog. Instead of being arrayed in two rival camps, Americans were united in a common selfish drive for the acquisition of property.” 155, Cole ● “Although Schlesinger’s class conflict view of Jacksonian Democracy has not stood up, his concern for social classes, his skill in linking them with political history and his ability to deal with symbols gives ​The Ages of Jackson​ a modern flavor.” 158, Cole Sources: ​political tracts from politicians, speeches, bills, judicial decisions, government records, secondary sources for synthesis Connections​: Wilentz, ​The Rise​, Wilentz, ​Chants​, Laurie, ​Artisans​, Johnson, ​Shopkeepers​, Hatch, ​Democratization​, Sellers, ​Market Robert F. Dalzell, Jr., ​Daniel Webster and the Trial of American Nationalism, 1843-1852​ (1972) Argument: ​“Dalzell argues that Webster’s twin concerns [political ambition and nationalism] had stood in balance, each complementing other, through most of his career. The tariff, the bank, and similar questions had all been largely political issues on which Webster could express his nationalism in a legal and conservative framework. About 1843, however, a shift began. In Massachusetts and elsewhere, slavery was quickly becoming a moral question, one involving conscience and emotion rather than reason; for many, slavery could no longer be tolerated. Webster had but the gap between Webster’s concept of balanced interests and the abolitionists’ moralism was wide and impassable.” 474, Moser ● “The focus of Dalzell’s study is limited to the last decade of Webster’s career, the period of time when for Webster an the nation slavery became the paramount issue…Dalzell develops Webster as a man motivated by a “duality” of concerns. One was ambition—the furthering of his political career and his hopes of gaining the White House. The other was nationalism, which Webster envisioned as a “viable balance of sections, interests, and rights,” founded on “reason, not the heart.”” 473, Moser ● “When, in 1843, [John] Tyler pressed for the annexation of Texas, Webster resigned as Secretary of State to retire to his home at Marshfield. In Massachusetts, he found a divided Whig party…Meanwhile, slavery had swept aside all other issues; and by 1850, in the North and the South, emotion had replaced reason, political parties had splintered, and party alignments had become meaningless. That was the situation when Webster made his famous Seventh of March speech in support of the Compromise of 1850.” 474, Moser ● “The author convincingly argues that the controversial speech was a piece of “disinterested” and “interested” statesmanship. It was premised on his view of the “nation as he sincerely believed it ought to be, the nation his rhetoric had always celebrated, and the only nation in which Daniel Webster could ever hope to be elected President.” The speech was aimed at placing slavery completely outside the “province of the federal government.” At the time, Webster did not believe the Union endangered by secession, but he gambled that if the divisive issue of slavery could be removed from the political arena, Americans would concentrate on renewed national feelings. Webster’s gamble failed. His concept of the nation was no longer applicable in 1850, and the Whig convention passed over him in 1852 to nominate General Winfield Scott for the presidency.” 474, Moser ● “Dalzell, who began his study as an analysis of the rhetoric of Webster’s nationalism, uses the Bunker Hill Monument oration of 1843 as a take-off point. That day, Webster called for union, not necessarily unity, and at the same time encapsulated a definition of American nationalism.” 82, Gatell ● “Dalzell readily admits that Webster swung no votes in 1850, and that Douglas shepherded the compromise bills through Congress, but he holds fast to the symbolic importance of Webster’s role: people ​thought of him and Clay as the power brokers; thus their stands, Webster’s especially, take on added significance.” 82, Gatell ● “Webster’s readoption of the Politics of Union, his role in the Compromise of 1850, his presence in the Fillmore cabinet, and his support for the Fugitive Slave Law killed him in Massachusetts.” 82, Gatell ● “I chose Webster’s nationalism because it stands as his most significant contribution to American political and intellectual life.”x ● “Webster was ambitious and he was a nationalist, and if he was a nationalist at least in part because he was ambitious, over most of his career there had been no necessary conflict between the two. He chose the course he did in 1850 because to a greater extent than any of the others open to him it satisfied the requirements of both politics and ideology.” Xi ● “What made the [7​th​ of March] speech so controversial then and afterward was the question of Webster’s motivation.” 157 ● “Webster offered his own version of “the most expedient course to pursue at the present moment in regard to the Territories of California and New Mexico.” Basically it amounted to the recognition of whatever law existed in the area as a temporary basis

32 of authority. Since the law in question was Mexican law and Mexican law prohibited slavery, the plane would have had the same effect as the [Wilmot] Proviso—a fact that escaped no one.” 163 ● “For many people, particularly Southerners, the problem reduced itself to simple arithmetic. There were fifteen slave and fifteen free states in the Union; the addition of California would place the slave states in a minority. Practically speaking they were already outnumbered in the House, in the Electoral College, and in the nominating conventions of the major political parties.

Only in the Senate had they retained an equal footing, but that made all the difference.” 168 ● “The quarrel over slavery had its origin in the realm of emotion, and its chief support still lay there, [Webster] argued; if harmony was to be restored they must heal the breach at its source. This mean a regime of restraint for both sides, but particularly the North.” 189 Sources: ​Speeches, personal papers, Senate minutes Connections:​ Schlesinger, ​The Age​, Wilentz, ​The Rise Eric Foner, ​Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War​ (1970) Argument: “At the center of the Republican ideology was the notion of “free labor.” This concept involved not merely an attitude toward work, but a justification of ante-bellum northern society, which appeared both different and inferior to their own. Republicans also believed in a conspiratorial “Slave Power” which had seized control of the federal government and was attempting to pervert the Constitution for its own purposes. Two profoundly different and antagonistic civilizations, Republicans thus believed, had developed within the nation, and were competing for control of the political system. These central ideas will provide the initial focus for this study of Republican ideology. The study will then examine the distinctive ideological contribution of each of te elements which made up the Republican party—radicals, former Democrats, and moderate and conservative Whigs…Finally, the Republican response to the competing ideology of nativism will be discussed, as well as their attitude toward race, an issue which illuminated many of the virtues and shortcomings of the Republican world view.” 10 ● “The book argued, in brief, that the Republican party before the Civil War was united by a commitment to a “free labor ideology,” grounded in the precepts that free labor was economically and socially superior to slave labor and that the distinctive quality of Northern society was the opportunity it offered wage earners to rise to property-owning independence. From this creed flowed Republicans’ determination to arrest the expansion of slavery and place the institution on what Lincoln called the road to “ultimate extinction.” ix ● “Foner focuses his study on the Republican party during its formative years prior to the onset of the war. More specifically, he is concerned with the ideology or “world view” of the party during this period.” 505, Miller ● “the definition of free labor depended on juxtaposition with its ideological opposite, slave labor. Under the rubric of free labor, Northerners of diverse backgrounds and interests could ally in defense of the superiority of their own society, even as other voices questioned whether the contrast with slavery did no disguise the forms of compulsion to which free laborers were themselves subjected. The dichotomy between slave and free labor masked the fact that “free labor” itself referred to two distinct economic conditions—the wage laborer seeking employment in the marketplace, and the property-owning small producer enjoying a modicum of economic independence. Despite large differences in their economic status, these groups had in common the fact that they were not slaves, that the economic relationships into which they entered were understood as “voluntary” rather than arising from personal dependence.” X-xi ● “The economic depression of the 1760s seems to have persuaded many employers that the flexibility of wage labor, which could be hired and fired at will, made it economically preferable to investment in slaves or servants. But the market in wage labor remained extremely unpredictable, and employers were bedeviled by frequent shortages of workers.” Xii ● “The metaphor of wage slavery (or, in New England, its first cousin, “factory slavery”) drew on immediate grievances, such as low wages, irregular employment, the elaborate and arbitrary work rules of the early factories, and the inadequacy of contract theory to describe the actual workings of the labor market. But at its heart lay a critique of economic dependence. Workers, wrote one labor leader, “ do not complain of wages slavery ​solely on account of the poverty it occasions…They oppose it because it holds the laboring classes in a state of abject dependence upon capitalists.” Xviii ● “It has recently been argued that North as well as South, the rhetoric of wage slavery implicitly rested on a racist underpinning.

Slavery was meant for blacks, freedom for whites, and what was degrading in wage labor was reducing white men to the same level as African-Americans.” Xix ● “In the effort of antebellum economists to reconcile belief in economic progress with the rise of a large number of wage earners…they turned to Adam Smith and other exponents of eighteenth-century liberalism who had insisted that slavery was far more costly and inefficient means of obtaining labor than the payment of wages, since it prevented the laborer’s self-interest from being harnessed to the public good….The ever-expanding wants stimulated by participation in the marketplace offered the most effective incentive for productive labor. While lamenting the effects of the division of labor upon workmen consigned to mindless repetitive tasks, Smith nonetheless insisted that in a commercial society, wage laborers were genuinely “independent” since the impersonal law of supply and demand rather than the decision of a paternalistic master determined their remuneration and they could dispose of their earnings as they saw fit. In the 1850s, the Republican party would hammer home Smith’s anti-slavery message: freedom meant prosperity and slavery retarded economic growth.” Xx

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“The dignity of labor was a constant theme of ante-bellum northern culture and politics…In a party which saw divisions on political and economic matters between radicals and conservatives, between former Whigs and former Democrats, the glorification of labor provided a much-needed theme of unity.” 11-12 “Contemporaries and historians agree that the average American of the ante-bellum years was driven by an inordinate desire to improve his condition in life, and by boundless confidence that he could do so. Economic success was the standard by which men judged their social importance, and many observers were struck by the concentration on work, with the aim of material advancement, which characterized Americans.” 13 “The foremost example of the quest for a better life was the steady stream of settlers who abandoned eastern homes to seek their fortunes in the West. The westward movement reached new heights in the mid-1850s, and it was not primarily the poor who migrated westward, but middle class “business-like farmers,” who sold their farms to migrate, or who left the eastern farms of their fathers.” 14 “The Republican ideology of free labor was product of this expanding, enterprising, competitive society. It is important to recognize that in ante-bellum America, the word “labor” had a meaning far broader than its modern one, Andrew Jackson, for example, defined “the producing classes” all those who work was directly involved in production of goods—farmers, planters, laborers, mechanics, and small businessmen. Only those who profited from the work of others, or whose occupations were largely financial or promotional, such as speculators, bankers, and lawyers, were excluded form this definition.” 15 “In the free labor outlook, the objective social mobility was not great wealth, but the middle-class goal of economic independence. For Republicans, “free labor” meant labor with economic choices, with the opportunity to quit the wage-earning class.” 16-17 “There was a substantial body of Republicans—the former Democrats—who came from a political tradition which viewed the interests of capitalists and laborers as being in earnest conflict…the political rhetoric of Jacksonian Democrats involved a series of sharp antagonisms. They insisted that there existed real class differences between rich and poor, capital and labor, and consciously strove to give their party an anti-wealth persuasion. Democrats traditionally opposed measures like the protective tariff, which they viewed as government said to the capitalist class, and paper money, which they claimed robbed the laborer of a portion of his wages by depreciating in value.” 18 “For while it was true that the Republicans insisted on opening the opportunity for social advancement to all wage earners, it must be borne in mind that as true disciples of the Protestant ethic, they attributed an individuals success or failure in the North’s “race of life” to his own abilities or shortcomings. Given the equality of opportunity which the Republicans believed existed in northern society, it followed that economic success was, as Horace Greeley argued, a reflection of the fact that a man had respected the injunctions to frugality, diligent work, and sobriety of the Protestant ethic.” 23 “What the homestead policy did propose to do was to aid the poor in achieving economic independence, to raise them into the middleclass. If the policy of free land were adopted, said Greeley’s ​Tribune​, every citizen would have the essential economic alternative “of working for others or for himself.” 29 “But even educated slaves would not be as productive as free labor, Republicans maintained, because slaves lacked the incentive which inspired free laborers—the hope of improving their social condition and that of their families.” 46 “The comparative lack of a middle class effectively blocked any hope of social advancement for the mass of poor whites, for it was all but impossible for a non-slaveholder to rise into the southern aristocracy.” 48 “The idea that free labor was degraded by slavery, and the corollary that if slavery were allowed to expand into the territories, northern laborers would be effectively barred from settling there because of the invariable stigma attached to labor in slave society, formed vital parts of the Republican appeal in the 1850s.” 58-59 “[George] Fitzhugh divided northern society into four classes: the rich, the highly skilled professionals, the poor thieves, and “the poor hardworking people, who support everybody, and starve themselves.” For this last class there was no hope of advancement—not one in a hundred, as South Carolina’s Chancellor Harper said, could hope to improve his condition.” 66 “[Salmon P.] Chase developed an interpretation of American history, which convinced thousands of northerners that anti-slavery was the intended policy of the founders of the nation, and was fully compatible with the Constitution. He helped develop the idea that southern slaveholders, organized politically as a Slave Power, were conspiring to dominate the national government, reverse the policy of the founding fathers, and make slavery the ruling interest of the republic.” 73 “Publicly and privately, Chase insisted, the founders deplored the institution and hoped for its early abolition. They regarded freedom and equality as the natural condition of men, and viewed slavery as a temporary and abnormal state…Jefferson, Chase argued, had set forth the common law and political faith of the United States I the Declaration of Independence, dedicating the new nation to the inviolability of personal liberty. By his anti-slavery activities in Virginia and his authorship of the Northwest Ordinance, which barred slavery from the original territories of the United States, Jefferson demonstrated his hope that the institution would die out. According to Chase, Jefferson planned to prevent the extension of slavery, to mitigate its excesses, and finally to secure abolition by the action of the individual states.” 75 “Chase shifted the immediate attention of the Liberty party to all the places where slavery could constitutionally be reached and challenged by the federal government—the District of Columbia, the territories, the interstate slave trade, and the fugitive slave law.” 79

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“Chase’s interpretation of the Constitution thus formed the legal basis for the political program which was created by the Liberty party and inherited I large part by the Free Soilers and Republicans.” 87 “The Slave Power idea came to symbolize for northerners all the fears and resentments they felt toward slavery and the South.

There were many reasons why the Slave Power was such an effective political symbol. For one thing, Americans of the mid-nineteenth century retained the distrust of centralized power, which had characterized the revolutionary period. In addition, the idea of a Slave Power emphasized the southern threat to the interests and rights of northern white men, and thus had a far greater appeal than arguments focusing on the wrongs done the slave. Finally, its widespread acceptance was aided by the American penchant for viewing historical events in conspiratorial terms.” 99 “Like other Republicans, the radicals did disavow any intention of promoting abolition by unconstitutional means.” 115 “The fact that a sizable portion of the party’s leadership and mass support was composed of former Democrats had considerable impact on the emergence of distinctive Republican political program and ideology. We have already seen how the ex-Democrats’ ideas influenced the free labor ideology of the Republican party. Equally important were their contributions to the party’s anti-southern and pro-unionist outlook and to the way in which it dealt with economic issues in the 1850s.” 149-150 “The largest and most influential group of Democrats who entered the Republican party were the self-styled “heirs of Jackson,” close friends and advisors of Old Hickory who felt they had been displaced in the Democratic leadership during the 1840s.” 150 “1844 had marked the end of the traditional politics of the Jacksonian era, because “Slavery upon which by common consent no party issue had been made was then obtruded upon the field of party action.”” 152 “By 1847, the New York Van Burenites, or Barnburners as they were called, walked out of the Democratic state convention when the pro-administration Hunkers refused to endorse the principle of the non-extension of slavery, and in the next year helped organize the Free Soil party, with Van Buren as its presidential nominee.”152-153 “Indeed n many states, factional bitterness over issues other than slavery—internal improvements, temperance, nativism, and the perennial disputes over patronage—were slowly tearing the [Democratic] party apart. The stage was therefore set for the mass defections which took place between 1854 and 1856; yet it is difficult to imagine the party chaos or reorganization which marked these years having occurred without the introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska bill in January, 1845 and the subsequent warfare in Kansas.” 155 “Between 1856 and 1860, the moderate Republicans held the balance of power within the Republican party, and they used it to maintain the party’s integrity and purpose against attacks from both the right and left. On the one hand, they upheld the ideal of party regularity against radicals who sometimes threatened to desert conservative Republican nominees at the polls.” 205 “In many states, moderates worked to confine the Republican platform to the simple principle of non-extension, instead of the radicals’ denationalization of slavery or the conservative’ restoration of the Missouri Compromise.” 205-206 “The moderates, with Lincoln at their head, refused to abandon either of their twin goals—free soil and the Union.” 219 “Studies of modern sate and presidential elections have demonstrated that immigrants and Catholics are much more likely to vote Democratic than native-born Protestants, an such findings have also appeared in analyses of nineteenth century voting behavior.” 226 “Samuel P. Hays, for example, argues that party ideologies never reflect the major concerns of grass-roots voters, and that on the local level ethno-cultural issues are much more effective in mobilizing electoral support than such national questions as the tariff and trusts.”227 “Another cause of Republican resentment against immigrants was that many blamed the newcomers for the social ills of the large cities.” 231 “Federal law prescribed a five-year naturalization period before immigrants could attain citizenship, but in some Democratic states even this waiting period was waived, and resident aliens who declared their intention to become citizens were given the vote. Whigs and Republicans strongly believed that the immigrants’ increasing political power was being wielded by the Catholic Church and the Democratic bosses, especially since they thought foreigners were “by education and custom…more submissive, to the voice of authority” than native-born Americans.” 230 “Political nativism reached its peak in 1845 and 1855, partly because it was able to fill the political vacuum left by the dissolution of the Whigs, partly because it was in some respects a genuine reform movement, attacking real abuses, and partly because of fears aroused by the great influx of European immigrants.” 260 “Several recent historical studies have show that racial prejudice was all but universal in ante-bellum northern society. Only five state, all in New England, allowed the black men equal suffrage, and even there he was confined to menial occupations and subjected to constant discrimination.” 261 “During the 1850s, Republicans accepted the idea that the Negro should be given an “equal chance” to prove himself capable of economic advancement, and their actions in state legislatures and in Congress had the effect of breaking down some of the legal inequalities which surrounded the black citizen.” 299 “It was its identification with the aspirations of the farmers, small entrepreneurs, and craftsmen or northern society which gave the Republican ideology much of its dynamic, progressive, and optimistic quality. Yet paradoxically, at the time of its greatest success, the seeds of the later failure of that ideology were already present. Fundamental changes were at work in the social and economic structure of the North, transforming and undermining many of its free-labor assumptions. And the flawed attitude of

35 the Republicans toward race, and the limitations of the free labor outlook in regard to the Negro foreshadowed the mistakes and failures of the post-emancipation years.” 316-317 Source: ​letters, speeches, bills, diaries, newspapers Connections: ​Dublin, ​Women​, Laurie,​ Artisans, ​Wilentz, ​Chants, Thomas Dublin, ​Women At Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860​ (1979) Argument: “Dublin argues that the young women in his sample were drawn to mills by the prospect of social and economic independence from their families. Although letters and diaries sometimes reveal daughters torn between a feeling of obligation to their families and a sense of individual entitlement to their wages, Dublin finds little evidence that young women sent money home, and cites some letters to show that parents supported their daughters’ expectations of economic independence. At the same time, women in Lowell maintained other connections to their rural communities: kin networks linked workers in the mills, while visits and letters sustained emotional ties to family and friends.” 352, Melosh ● “For the first time Dublin has systematically trace a group of Lowell mill workers back to their origin in Merrimack County, New Hampshire. He finds that they came initially from middling farm families, and were often elder daughters, with kinship ties to other workers, who regarded factory work as a financial and social opportunity. When they left the mills, Dublin finds they usually marred men about their own age (on the average 10 months younger) and settled in urban places. The Lowell experience appears to have generally fulfilled their expectations, at least until 1834 when wage cuts began. Periodically thereafter, working conditions became more demanding, as management required increased productivity.” 415, Brown ● “For a decade, quasi-independent Yankee mill women, calling on the same revolutionary tradition as workingmen, protested when pay was cut or work increased. Peer pressure in the mills and boardinghouses reinforced their solidarity. But after the failure of their ten-hour movement in 1845 and the almost simultaneous arrival of Irish men, women, and children in the mills, the pattern changed. A dependent labor force, one which was mixed in terms of ages, sexes, ethnicity, and living arrangements, was not conducive to worker solidarity.” 415, Brown ● “[Dublin] points to a number of overlapping circumstances that made the mills less attractive to Yankee women, especially the lure of other opportunities and careers (e.g., teaching), and the harder, less genteel working conditions of the 1840s and 1850’s.

By the latter decade the corporate paternalism of the original Lowell was dead.” 415, Brown ● “As hard-pressed Irish families gradually replaced young Yankee women in the mills, owners revised the work process, reducing skill and wages and accelerating the work pace with new technology. Labor agitation declined in the 1850s, limited by the low expectations and desperate economic need of Irish families, and by the sharp ethnic divisions between Yankee and Irish workers.” 353, Melosh ● “Dublin’s study reveals the strength or protest based instead on mutual support at work and peer culture in the boardinghouse.

Rather than the defense of “manhood” which moved nineteenth-century male workers to resistance, Lowell women drew strength from the bonds of sisterhood.” 353, Melosh ● “The work force of early Lowell stood out in its own time: far more common was the so-called Rhode Island system, which drew labor from men, women, and children living in families. The young, single Yankee women of Lowell were an anomaly even in the city’s own history, soon replaced by Irish families.” 354, Melosh ● “Dublin poses the importat question, “Did Lowell make any difference in their later lives?” In terms of their marriage ages, their husbands’ vocations, and where they later settled, he concludes that, for more than a third of them, work in Lowell “constituted an entry into the urban industrial world and signaled a permanent departure from the one in which they had grown up.” (54)” 538, Armstrong ● “Although new Irish workers lacked the independence of the Yankee women (and were resented by them), and although they experienced discrimination in job placement, pay, and housing, their position in the Lowell mills improved significantly in the 1850s, as the Yankees’ advantages diminished. The most striking development was the new residential diversity and dispersal that “removed an important element in the shared experience of women workers” (167)” 538, Armstrong Sources:​ Hamilton mill records, census records, newspapers Connections: ​Foner, ​Free Christine Stansell, ​City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860​ (1982) Argument: “Shrewd little girls, truculent housewives, feckless domestic servants, astute trade unionists. All these women played a part in the thoroughgoing changes in work, family and politics in nineteenth-century New York, initiating and responding to change in ways that were often different from both men of their class and their sisters in the middle class.” xiii ● “Within the propertied classes, women constituted themselves the moral guardians of their families and their nation, offsetting some of the inherited liabilities of their sex. Laboring women were less fortunate: The domestic ideals from which their prosperous sisters profited did little to lighten the oppressions of the sex and class they suffered. They were also more troublesome, since their actions—indeed, their very existence as impoverished female workers—violated some of the dearest held genteel precepts of “woman’s nature” and “woman’s place.”” Xi

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“Class formation was related to, but not synonymous with, the thoroughgoing transformation of the gender system in the first half of the nineteenth century: that is, the changes in all those arrangements of work, sexuality, parental responsibilities, psychological life, assigned social traits and internalized emotions through which the sexes defined themselves respectively as men and women.” Xii “Designating themselves moral guardians of their husbands and children, women became the standard-bearers of piety, decorum and virtue in Northern society. They claimed the home as the sphere of society where they could most effectively exercise their power. In their consignment to the household as the sole domain of proper female activity, women suffered a constriction of their social engagements; at the same time, they gained power within their families that also vested them with greater moral authority in their communities.” Xii “In confronting the working poor, reformers created and refined their own sense of themselves as social and spiritual superiors capable of remolding the city in their own image. From the ideas and practices of domesticity they drew many of the materials for their ideal of a society that had put to rest the disturbing conflicts of class.” Xii “Female class relations, then, were central to the tremendous efflorescence and self-confidence of bourgeois life in the first half of the nineteenth century. It was the ladies who expanded on its possibilities and the workingwomen who bore the brunt of its oppressions. Female needleworkers and domestic servants fashioned the clothes, stitched the fancywork and tended the homes that together formed the physical basis of gentility; the burgeoning female occupations provided much of the discretionary money and leisure that allowed reform-minded men and women to undertake their energetic forays out into the city to investigate and admonish. Women, as self-appointed exemplars of virtue, were especially fitted to make that trek, since it was often members of their own sex who seemed most in need of moral correction—all the varieties of working-class women whose sexual and social demeanor subverted strict notions of female domesticity and propriety.” Xiii “Earlier in the eighteenth century, poverty had usually been associated with the ​inability to work—with the crippled, the aged and the very young. By the early nineteenth century, poverty was becoming connected to the changing structure of work itself—to the difficulties laboring people had in supporting themselves in manufacturing employments that paid insufficient wages and gave insufficient work.” 4 “These rearrangements also involved changes between men and women. Within the swelling ranks of the laboring poor, urban migration and the beginnings of urban manufacturing spelled the disintegration of the customary household economies that had formerly absorbed the energies and loyalties of women. The growing uncertainty of employment for may men eroded the older, familiar configuration of male provider and female household manager, an actuality for many laboring families up to the Revolution and a reasonable expectation for many more. The disruption of household economies fostered new forms of insecurity: for women, uncertainties about men’s support and commitment; for men, the loss of accustomed kinds of authority within their households and workplaces.” 4 “The necessity of furnishing goods in bulk encouraged them to abandon traditional methods of handicraft and to implement rudimentary methods of mass production. In their workshops, they began to use their journeymen as hired wage laborers rather than as craftsmen due an accustomed price for their work. In changing around their workshop arrangements, the masters laid the groundwork for urban industrialization.” 5 “Although wage rates rose for journeymen and unskilled laborers between 1790 and 1830, seasonal and intermittent unemployment undercut these gains. High prices made periods of unemployment all the more difficult, especially since saving was nearly impossible. In those trades where the shift to entrepreneurial, profit-accumulating methods of production was pronounced, journeymen suffered increased competition for work, irregularity of employment and a lowering premium of skill (which resulted in the breakdown of apprenticeship and the hiring of semiskilled and unskilled workers).” 6 “The problems of poverty were becoming a continuing crisis. From 1790 to 1800, the population of New York nearly doubled; in the next twenty years it doubled again. The pressures strained the old municipal relief system nearly o the point of collapse.”

7-8 “As the livelihoods of many men became less dependable, families increasingly needed women’s cash earnings to get by.” 11 “The working poor, however, lacked such domestic resources. Some poor journeymen’s wives who lived on the outskirts of town might still keep gardens and poultry. But the well-stocked larder of the respectable artisan’s wife was unattainable for the wives of poor artisans and causal laborers who crowded into the tenements and for many destitute female immigrants who had once kept their own pigs and spun their own yarn in Irish and English villages.” 12 “Domestic service was probably the most common waged employment. “Helps” (a more common term than “servant” in the early nineteenth century ) worked alongside mistresses in the demanding routines of household crafts and the labor-intensive tasks of housekeeping in the age before utilities like running water and gaslight were available.” 12 “Family situations propelled women into the working class, and the relations of gender gave a distinct shape to the female experience of proletarianization. A woman’s age, marital status, the number and age of her children, and, above all, the presence or absence of male support determined her position in working-class life. Any woman, whether the wife of a prosperous artisan or a day laborer’s daughter, was vulnerable to extreme poverty if, for some reason, she lost the support of a man.” 45

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“The loss of housekeeping services, along with whatever income they contributed, created hardships for widowers and deserted husbands. Nonetheless, a woman’s absence alone was not sufficient to imperil a husband’s livelihood, while a wife cast on her own faced the specter of the Almshouse.” 45 ● “For all laboring women, native-born and immigrant, black and white, wives of skilled men and daughters of the unskilled, working-class life meant, first and foremost, the experience of living in the tenements. The tenements were remote from the middle-class home, and they were also different the households of the urban laboring classes in the late eighteenth century.” 46 ● “Washing and cleaning were difficult [in tenements], since all water had to be carried up the stairs. People tracked in dirt from the muddy streets; plaster crumbled; chimneys clogged and stoves smoked. The winter wind blew through broken windows and scattered ashes about. Children knocked over slop pails; rains flooded basement rooms….For all the lack of substantial household effects, domestic labor in these tiny rooms absorbed the energies of women morning to night. The poorer the family, the heavier the woman’s work. Cleaning was only a small part of complicated and arduous family economies. The major effort went into acquiring necessities—food, fuel, and water—a task that took up hours of the day and entailed scores of errands out of the house. This work was by nature public, knitting together the household with the world of the streets. It generated its own intricate network of exchange among neighbors and between parents and children and created the material bases for a dense neighborhood life.” 49 ● “It was, in part, the consolidation of these domestic networks that contributed to the evangelicals’ perceptions of the “concentration” of wickedness in the city. As they came to identify working-class mores as inherently vice-ridden, the neighborhood took on the appearance of the breeding ground of sin. The ways laboring women helped one another, raised their children and played out their pleasures and grievances on the streets only seemed to the pious to manifest a belligerent iniquity.”

75 ● “In a city where it was difficult for any woman to support herself and where no mother could earn a living wage, women needed men more than men needed women. He fact of female economic dependency continued to breed hostility on both sides. As in other areas of domestic life, however, the working-class neighborhoods gave women leverage in their dealings with men.

Neighbor women often challenged, if not misogynistic ideology, then at least the ways in which men turned sexual hostilities into physical abuse.” 76 ● “The neighborhood was an alternative court, judge and jury, that, although predisposed to look favorably on women, did not always render verdicts in their favor. In pursuit of justice it could be cruel and vengeful. Nonetheless, the collective power that women found there, for all its terrors, counterposed itself to men’s privileges.” 83 ● “By dispersing female workers among thousands of individual workplaces, outside employers made it virtually impossible for women to combat the low wages and exploitative conditions which set the terms of their employment. Yet sex segregation and its associated forms of exploitation were consequences, not causes, of women’s inferior position in the labor market. Sex segregation grew out of a deeper political economy of gender, founded in the sexual division of labor in the household. It resulted from the incorporation of patterns of female subordination within the family into those of capitalist exploitation.” 106 ● “By the 1850s, the promising beginnings of cooperation between men and women n the 1830s had disappeared, and the labor movement had almost completely excluded women. Laboring women’s tentative expressions of their particular dilemmas in supporting themselves had dissolved amidst a masculine rhetoric that posed marriage as the answer to their problems.” 131 ● “Since the early nineteenth century, service had increasingly tended to be women’s work; by 1840 it was entirely so in bourgeois homes. But it was also work that women did not much like, and they abandoned it whenever they had the chance.

Manufacturing employments, outside and inside, brought their own hardships, but women often preferred them to domestic service, with its relatively high wage but claustrophobic conditions. As other female employments opened, the women who knew where to seek them did so, and domestic service increasingly became work for those just off the boat.” 155 ● “By 1860, both class struggle and conflicts between the sexes had created a different political economy of gender in New York, one in which laboring women turned certain conditions of their very subordination into new kinds of initiatives…But immigration, widespread misery and the casualization of male labor made those dependencies all the more precarious and forced women to seek other means of support. They did so by becoming family heads themselves and utilizing their children’s labor, by depending on other women and by pressing their needs upon the municipality. The problems of supporting women and the problem of controlling them overstripped the boundaries of family and entered into formal politics, to be taken up by city officials, social reformers, and trade unionists.” 217-218 Sources:​ reform notes, almshouse roles. Censuses, journals, newspapers, magazines, manufacturing records, government records Connections: ​Ryan, ​Cradle​, Cross, ​Burned,​ Wilentz, ​Chants​, Sellers, ​Market​, Laurie, ​Artisans​, Dublin, ​Women Mary P. Ryan, ​Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865​ (1981) Argument: ​“Early in the nineteenth century the American middle class molded its distinctive identity around domestic values and family practices. At any rate, it is this intuition, this kernal of a reinterpretation of the making of the modern family that this book seeks to elaborate.” 15 The making of the middle class began and ended at home—Gross Men and women worked together to raise the family. ● “First of all, examination of the basic biological relationships that constitute traditional family status, the differences in age and sex, were found to extend outside the household into schools, reform associations, clubs, and women’s networks. Second, the

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central functions of the modern family—the socialization of children, the care and feeding of the population, the development of personality, the regulation of sexuality—all take shape in a larger social universe and, theoretically at least, can be transferred outside the conjugal unit. These tasks, whereby people, rather than goods, are created, are encompassed in the term ​social reproduction​, which sets the wider conceptual boundaries of the subject matter of this book.” 15 “This book will focus on one manifestation of this dynamic relationship, the role played by changes in social reproduction in the making of the middle class.” 15 “Utica and its environs recommended themselves for analysis for a variety of reasons. The region replicated a process of historical development that characterized many American communities in the antebellum era, that is, rapid advancement from a sparsely populated frontier through a bustling stage of small-scale commercial capitalism and on toward industrialization.” Xii “It was a regional publishing center and the portal through which countless volumes of literature on domestic subjects sped their way through the Burned-Over District and beyond. One set of such publications especially piqued my curiosity. Two of the first American mothers’ magazines bore Utica imprints and traced their origins to one of the city’s first, but least studied, reform movements, the maternal associations.” Xii “This cult of domesticity is too effusive in the celebration of an intensely privatized home to economic functions of nineteenth-century women have exposed gender divisions that cut through society and introduced an emotional complexity to American households.” 4 “By the middle of the nineteenth century the economic life of Oneida County had been integrated into a national and international market system whose regional focal point was now the city of New York. This regional network that centered around Utica and maintained some measure of economic autonomy early in the century will set the serpentine boundaries of this study.” 7 “When three turnpikes met in front of Bagg’s door in 1805, the boom was on in the newly incorporated village of Utica. By 1817, when the village broke off from Whitestown to form an independent township, the population numbered nearly three thousand inhabitants, most of whom earned their livelihoods as shopkeepers, merchants, and handcraftsmen. As the construction of the Erie Canal stretched westward, reaching Utica in 1820 and Lake Erie in 1825, the town’s population tripled and its shopkeepers and artisans flourished.” 8 “The organization of temperance suggests that society was being reorganized along the lines of age and sex; segregated groups of young men filed out of their families and into the Cadets of Temperance, and mothers and sisters congregated outside the home in groups like the Martha Washington Total Abstinence Society. At the same time, revivals and reform movements seemed to conspire to draw family members together again on a new basis; mothers were especially active in the evangelical churches and moral reform societies where they took particular concern to convert and to rehabilitate their own sons, daughters, and husbands.” 12 “Consequently, hardly a laborer could be found in the ranks of the evangelicals, and the richest manufacturer among them was merely a prosperous and enterprising hat maker. There is ample reason to entertain the hypothesis, then, that those who joined the evangelical churches and reform crusades along the route of the Erie Canal were responding to the inducements of their kin as much as of their employers and were often involved in an exercise in “self-control” rather than “social control.” 13 “The towns along the canal, like the revival churches and the reform societies, were inundated with youthful migrants between 1820 and the mid-1840s. Many of the young men would find their first jobs as apprentices, clerks, and junior partners in small retail stores. They were, in other words, only beginning to find positions for themselves in the urban structure.” 13 From the frontier family life into the city family life, the church increasingly intruded upon the private lives of families in the home. Moral authority of church helped dictate family relationships. 39 Factories pitched as contributing to the family farm income by putting idle women and children to work. “The factory was as tightly integrated into the communal network of the church as was the family economy.” 46-47 “Thus the frontier family system had acquired both definition and breadth by the third decade of the nineteenth century. Its distinguishing characteristics could be found in the industrial village of New York Mills and the commercial town of Utica as well as in the original agricultural settlement of Whitestown. Foremost among the family’s attributes was a corporate economic structure that was based on the organization of production around the social categories of sex and age and a stem pattern of inheritance. The internal relations and ideology of the family were colored by these economic imperatives and gave prominence to notions of hierarchy, authority, and patriarchy rather than either warm mutual ties or the free play of individual interests.” 51 “The rapid proliferation of “societies” in Whitestown is one indication of the dynamic historical element of the frontier: the commingling of primitive social organization with contemporary culture in such a way as to produce genuine innovations in collective life. The goals and the ideology of the benevolent and religious societies were basically congruent with the New England way and supportive of the family economy.” 52 “Like the benevolent society, the nuclear family itself seemed to be subtly subversive of the balanced placement of households within the community.” 54 Oneida County families were tight-knit, they did not put their children out like in old New England. 56 The course of revivals paralleled the course of trade routes.

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“As the supply of unimproved land dwindled and the cost of farm real estate rose, many small farmers were forced to distribute their agricultural property in an arbitrary and unequal fashion, perhaps even excluding some offspring form the family patrimony. Alternatively, the profits reaped in commercial agriculture may have allowed more prosperous farmers to educate their sons or set them up in some nonagricultural business.” 63-64 ● “Mothers joined fathers, sons, and daughters in the heavy traffic streaming out from the homes of Oneida County and into voluntary associations. The traffic was so voluminous and so diverse as to age, sex, and class background that the old boundaries between household, church, and society seemed blurred by a flurry of associations.” 105 ● “The family and the association coexisted quite equanimously in the thirties and forties. In fact, it will be argued that the voluntary associations actually served as the crucibles of new domestic values and new relationships between the ages, sexes, and classes that would in the end heighten the importance of the conjugal family. The mothers of Oneida would, in the end, return form “society” to the home, bringing with them out of the associations more intense bonds with their children.” 106 ● 1850s and 1860s saw women retreating back into the home, as it was seen as unseemly for them to be outside. As a result reform groups dwindled.

Sources: ​Magazines, literature, newspapers, art, reform group records, government papers Connections: ​Stansell, ​City​, Cross, ​Burned, ​Sellers, ​Market​, Walters, ​American​, Johnson, ​Shopkeepers,​ Dublin, ​Women Roy Rosenzwieg, ​Eight Hours For What We Will: Workers & Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920​ (1983) Argument: ​“This study argues, Worcester workers successfully protected their leisure time and space from outside encroachment.

Although they exercised very limited control over their work time, workers effectively managed to preserve their nonwork hours as a relatively autonomous sphere of existence.” 5 ● “And in industrial communities across America workers fought not only for the right to time and space for leisure but also for control over time and space in which that leisure was to be enjoyed. This study examines how workers struggled to maintain “eight hours for what we will” and what that “eight hours” meant.” 1 ● “The study of popular recreation helps to explain some of the distinctive features of American working-class development: the absence of a mass-based labor and socialist party, the weakness of working-class consciousness and solidarity, and the late emergence of industrial unions.” 2 ● “Thus this study of working-class recreational patterns in Worcester, Massachusetts, from 1870 to 1920 attempts to contribute to a more comprehensive history of the American working class in its broadest social, economic, and political context. To do this, it seeks not simply to describe the pastimes and amusements of Worcester workers but to shed light on three central questions about American labor and social history. First, what have been the central values, beliefs, and traditions of the American working class, and how have they shaped workers’ views of themselves and the society at large? Second, what are the interclass bonds and conflicts within America’s industrial communities? Third, how did both working-class culture and class relations change in the transition from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century? 3 ● “Trade unions and political parties are not, however, the only forms of working-class organization. Ethnic communities and institutions—churches, clubs, saloons, groceries, schools—have often provided an alternative organizational focus for the lives of America’s immigrant working class.” 10 ● “The opening of the Blackstone Canal in 1828 and, more important, the development of extensive railroad connections between 1835 and 1847 made new markets accessible to Worcester products. At the same time, the adoption of steampower around 1840 freed Worcester from reliance on its limited waterpower. Industry and population boomed.” 11 ● “Worcester workers created tight ethnic communities with elaborate organizational infrastructures—churches, clubs, kinship networks, saloons—which served as alternatives to trade unions and political parties. These ethnic communities offered Worcester workers a sphere in which they could carry out a mode of life and express values, beliefs, and traditions significantly different from those prescribed by the dominant industrial elite.” 27 ● “Yet while the factory workers of the 1870s faced a more structured work regimen than the artisans of the 1820s, they also more generally had more free time in which to pursue some of the socializing that had been removed from their workday. The drinking that manufacturers like Washburn repressed on the job now found a new temporal and physical locus in public, commercial leisure-time institutions known as saloons. Thus, it was in response to a complex set of social forces—tightened work discipline, shorter workdays, intensified regulation of public recreation, increased working-class incomes—that the saloon emerged as a center of working-class social life.” 36 ● “When leisure was removed from the home or its immediate vicinity, it became predominately a male privilege. While some women continued to patronize saloons, these public leisure spaces increasingly became male preserves.” 45 ● “Public toilets, food, warmth, clean water, meeting spaces, check-cashing services, newspapers—often otherwise unavailable to workers in the late nineteenth century city—could be found free of charge in the saloon. Often the saloon served as a communications center, a place where workers picked up their mail, heard the local political gossip, or learned of openings in their trade.” 53 ● “On the one hand, these celebrations [for 4​th of July] offered an occasion for workers to express their own values, affirm their ethnic and religious autonomy, escape from the oppressive burdens of the workplace, and even occasionally voice discontent. In

40 their celebrations they expressed a vision of a better life—of a less regimented, less restrictive world. They also affirmed their commitment to values of mutuality, reciprocity, collectivity, and community…On the other hand, this world view—admirable in so many respects—failed to transcend the insular confines of a particular ethnic group or even a particular congregation. As a result, workers found themselves divided against each other not only on the Fourth but also at the ballot box, on the picket line, and on the shop floor.” 90 ● “The temperance crusade was, in part, an efforts by the city’s middle and upper classes to reform, reshape, and restrict working-class recreational practices.” 93 ● “Just as the playground movement had confronted—and tried to reshape—existing and autonomous traditions of working-class play, so the effort to reform Independence Day celebrations—what came to be called the Safe and Sane July Fourth movement—commemorations by the working class of the nation’s birthday.” 153 ● The more movie theaters there were the fewer saloons because people were now spending money on movies not booze. 191 ● “The birth and triumph of the movies heralds this slow, gradual, and incomplete process of change for ethnic working-class culture. It would be foolish to see the movies as the triggering device for this glacial process of change. Deeper social and economic forces—the coming of age of the second-and third-generation immigrants, the emergence of an ethnic middle class, the development of mass-production and mass-marketing techniques—are at the root of the transformation of working-class culture.” 215 ● “At the Rialto more than at the rum shop, young workers were likely to meet members of other ethnic groups and these recreational associations could begin to facilitate some of the workplace organizing that had proven so difficult in earlier decades. In addition, although desires for fashions and furnishings might divert workers from the labor movement, the frustration of those desires by an unequal social and economic system might prompt some questioning of that system. Finally, the worker’s new perception of themselves as “Americans” could lead them to expect a good deal more than their parents had ever received form the larger society. Consequently, workers who had spent their time in the movie theater in the 1920s might find their way to the union hall in the 1930s and 1940s, as they sought to achieve what the movies promised but the large society failed to deliver as they became increasingly able to make common cause with workers from different ethnic and religious groups.” 228 Sources: ​liquor licenses, park records, union literature, newspapers, mill records Connections: ​Laurie, ​Artisans​, Johnson, ​Shopkeepers,​ Dublin, ​Women, Ryan, Cradle​, Blumin, ​The Emergence​, Wilentz, ​Chants​, Stansell, ​City,​ Kasson, ​Amusing Stuart M. Blumin, ​The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900​ (1989) Argument: ​“that a middle class was ​not fully formed before the [Civil] war, and that developments of the postwar period—most notably, widening differences between the worlds of nonmanual and manual work, the expansion of middle-class suburbanization, and the resumption and expansion of social and economic conflict that was phrased in class terms—contributed to the further articulation of the American middle class.” 13 ● “This book, then, is a study of middling folk, and of the proposition that Americans (or at least urban Americans) of middling economic and social position were formed and formed themselves into a relatively coherent and ascending middle class during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. It should be noted that this is not one subject but three. The ascendancy, or elevations , of the nineteenth-century middle class to a level of affluence, prestige, and power distinctly higher than that of eighteenth-century “middling sorts” is at once interconnected with and separate from the formation of a more distinct middle class.” 12 ● “This book is rooted in a somewhat different tradition, one that emphasizes the variations that spring from specific social contexts, and that focuses upon the ways in which unequal distributions of wealth, income, opportunity, workplace tasks and authority, political power, legal status, and social prestige have organized the lives and consciousness of specific groups of Americans.” 2-3 ● “It is becoming increasingly clear, in short, that Americans diverged widely in their economic circumstances, and that they translated their economic differences into significant differences in lifestyle, outlook, and aspiration.” 3 ● “The discovery of definable social classes at the top and bottom of society lends plausibility to the proposition that such a class or classes also may be found in its middle, and accentuates the relative neglect of middling folk by the very historians who have advanced our understanding of nineteenth-century urban and industrial revolutions by focusing upon urban elites and industrial workers as distinct historical groups.” 3 ● “The temporal focus of this study is the tree or four decades preceding the Civil War, which a number of historians have already identified as the period in which classes began to take shape in American cities, but its boundaries extend beyond the antebellum period—backward to the final third of the eighteenth century, and forward into the final third of the nineteenth century.” 13 ● “The structure of eighteenth-century society on both sides of the Atlantic—that society was organized primarily into vertically arranged interests (religious and political as well as economic) rather than into horizontally layered, antagonistic classes; that “ranks” identified the flow of influence, patronage, and deference within this system of interests, rather than the experiences and

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consciousness of separate classes; and that society as a whole was profoundly elitist in its recruitment of political leadership and in its assignment of social prestige.” 17-18 “It is worth noting that in eighteenth-century America “class” was used to specify a wide variety of such groups—sexes, races, age groups, political factions, types of personal temperament, even, on occasion, levels of society.” 19 “It would be difficult to overstate the significance of this prejudice to our understanding of the social meaning of middling rank, for the vast majority of those deemed to be middling sorts were in fact hardworking artisans…But at least 50% were artisans, two and a half times the number of middling storekeepers and clerks, and a proportion quite sufficient to establish a close identification of middling status with skilled manual work.” 30 “The term “mechanic” was indeed used in eighteenth-century America to specify the limits of legitimate social aspiration from men who worked at manual trades.” 31 “ “Middling rank” did refer, on balance, to a rather humble position in society, one easily conflated with that of “inferior” sorts by elites who stood so far above both.” 38 “In sum, it is the strength of the culture of rank, not its weakness, that stands out in the political and social history of the American port cities during and after the Revolution. Artisans asserted themselves, especially during the Revolution, in ways that had not done before, but they did not succeed in elevating themselves much above the modest rank that separated them from the better sort, and “middling rank” and its equivalents remained terms suggestive of the limits of prestige that could attach to a social stratum numerically dominated and largely defined by handworking mechanics.” 64 “I argue that even if the consideration of other aspects of social life and thought later compels us to set limits on the idea of middle-class formation, changes in nonmanual work and workplace relations constituted a significant though hitherto largely unchronicled component of that broad revolution that historians have located in American society (perhaps I should say American urban society) during the second quarter or middle third of the nineteenth century.” 67 “Changes in commercial work did occur, and we will take note of them, but the most significant elements of change lay not in the structure or technology of specific tasks, but in a number of somewhat broader relations: first, in the increasing alignment of nonmanual work with entrepreneurship and salaried (as opposed to wage-earning) employment, and, to cite the well-known reverse of the coin, the increasing alignment of manual work with employment for wages; second, in the increasing specialization of firms in the nonmanual sector; and third, in the increasing physical separation of manual from nonmanual work, the increasing distinctiveness of manual and nonmanual work environments, and the rapid elevation of nonmanual work environments by means of architecture, interior design, and the location of firms within urban space.” 68 “We must note that most clerical employees were young men who, like their eighteenth-century predecessors, continued to be regarded and to regard themselves as businessmen-in-training rather than as permanent employees. In this and in other easy, not the least significant of which was that they were paid a salary rather than a wage, nonmanual employees were distinguished from manual workers. Actually, the work clerks performed was not always cleaner or more “mental” than the work performed by skilled manual workers, although sweeping the shop, stocking shelves, delivering merchandise to customers, and distributing handbills in the streets were chores reserved mainly for the youngest and most clerks. And ther were signs even in this era of the emergence of a more permanent “white collar” work force.” 77 “The contribution that the manual-nonmanual dichotomy made to the ways in which antebellum Americans defined their society and assumed individual identities within it. More specifically, they suggest, that large numbers of previously humble or ambiguously placed “middling folk” were elevated by the redrawing of society’s most critical boundary below, rather than above, the smaller businessmen, now that so many of them no longer shared the social stigma of manual labor with wage-earning mechanics.” 107 “I will argue here that American values had not changed in this respect—that Americans who did not work with their hands did, despite the currency of the “image of the respectable worker,” continue to consider as socially inferior those who performed manual work. Indeed, the emerging structures of work and well-being almost certainly revitalized this old prejudice by making it more reasonable in the light of underlying economic realities.” 122 “These men had become nonmanual proprietors, but their tobacco shops, groceries, newsstands, and taverns were not vehicles for the journey out of the working class. Their mobility was lateral rather than upward, and in their life-styles and personal associations, and presumably their sentiments as well, they remained unexceptional figures in the working-class community, even though they no longer worked with their hands. And just as there were nonmanual proprietors who remained in the working class, there were mechanics who did not.” 134 “The urban middle class, whose members experienced a domestic revolution during these years that went beyond the acquisition and furnishing of a larger and more elegant home (completely separated, we might add, from the male household head’s place of business) to the sanctification of the home and of domestic affairs, the redefinition of child nurturance and education, the whole constituting, to Mary Ryan critical to the formation and perpetuation of the middle class.” 139 “The most dramatic changes in the production of consumer goods were those that made ordinary goods cheaper. Hence, those mechanics who were able to find work fairly often, and who maintained their skill levels in the face of industrialization, were able to take advantage of significant price reductions in cloth, clothing, and a number of household goods that previously had been available only to people with larger incomes.” 140

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“The city had acquired a variety of new institutions that clearly expressed the styles and ambitions of specific and very different clienteles. In the evening as well as during the workday, the city was sorting its classes of people into increasingly distinct institutions and spaces.” 146 ● “Artisans were more vulnerable to year-to-year and seasonal variations in income and, especially in those trades requiring heavy physical labor, could be less certain of performing any manual work at all past middle age.” 162 ● “Middling families, then, reasonably perceived their homes and their domestic strategies and habits to be distinct from those of manual workers, as well as from those of the fashionables who did not even aspire to the domestic ideals. If this was an achievement—and it was often described that way by contemporary writers—it was one that should be attributed largely to the women who shaped the middle-class home, sometimes with and sometimes without the cooperation of the men ho provided the financial means…In this respect we may say that middle-class formation was a phenomenon that went beyond the realignment of work, workplace relations, incomes, and opportunities. Events on the other side of the retail sales counter, and in the “separate sphere” of domestic womanhood, were influential, perhaps even crucial, in generating new social identities. To this extent, middle-class formation was woman’s work.” 191 ● “The concept of class, which refers first and foremost to the sources and the consequences of manifest in differentials of power, wealth, and prestige—provides the obvious principle of this synthesis.” 231 ● “Social networks, by which I mean the arrays of interactions characteristically experienced by the members of specific groups of people in their daily rounds—within the home, at work, on the streets and in public markets, in stores, taverns, restaurants, and theaters, at church, within the meeting rooms of voluntary societies, at the homes of friends, and in whatever other public and private spaces people confront and interact with one another.” 231 ● “”The transition from a “pre-class” to a “class” society was primarily a shift in the nature of inequality and of unequal social relations as the personalized, face-to-face hierarchies of the eighteenth century gave way to the more distant, categorical hierarchies of the nineteenth century, particularly within the larger cities. Hence, the experience of class in the nineteenth-century city can be understood in no small degree as the process by which people were brought together and kept apart, attracted to one another and repelled, and as the effect that resulting social networks had on the way people lived and perceived themselves as living in society.” 231 ● “Social networks were shaped in specifiable ways by industrialization and other aspects of economic development (changes in modes of production, to be sure, but also changes in retailing and other forms of economic activity), by the changing scale of the city, by the redistribution of people and institutions within increasingly specialized urban space, and by the development of greater numbers of more formalized institutions within that space.” 231-232 ● “Middle-class identity, in sum, should not be thought insignificant because it did not usually manifest itself in explicit ways in politics, however important the latter may have been in this first era of mass partisanship. Its significance was expressed in other ways, in the physical milieux and social round of daily life, in new styles and manners, and in a changing though not yet clarified and still half-apologetic taxonomy of social class.” 257 Sources: ​directories, census, government papers, reform society records, secondary sources Connections: ​Laurie, ​Artisans​, Ryan, ​Cradle​, Johnson, ​Shopkeepers, Wilentz, ​Chants​, Rosenzweig, ​Eight​, Sellers, ​Market​, Dublin, Women,​ Stansell, ​City David W. Blight, ​Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory ​(2001) Argument: “Blight’s central argument, that race profoundly shaped the development of the Civil War in American memory and, in turn, that ways of remembering—and forgetting—the Civil War contributed to the political, economic, and social significance of race in the post-Emancipation United States.” 498, Clark ● “Most Americans have a storehouse of “lessons” drawn from the Civil War. Exactly what those lessons should be, and who should determine them, has been the most contested questions in American historical memory since 1863, when Robert E. Lee retreated back into Virginia, Abraham Lincoln went to Gettysburg to explain the meaning of the war, and Frederick Douglass announced “national regeneration” as the “sacred significance” of the war.” 1 ● “This book is a history of how Americans remembered their most divisive and tragic experience during the fifty-year period after the Civil War. It probes the interrelationship between the two broad themes of race and reunion in American culture and society from the turning point in the war (1863) to the culmination of its semicentennial in 1915…I am primarily concerned with the ways that contending memories clashed or intermingled in public memory, and not in a developing professional historiography of the Civil War.” 1-2 ● “Reconstruction politics, reunion literature, soldiers’ memory, the reminiscence industry, African American memory, the origins and uses of Memorial Day, and the Southern Lost Cause receive considerable attention in this work, while other important forms and voices of memory do not, such as monument-building, late-nineteenth-century presidential politics, business enterprise, or the gendered character of America’s romance with reunion…but in every chapter have kept my eye on race as the central problem in how Americans made choices to remember and forget their Civil War.” 2 ● “Three overall visions of Civil War memory collided and combined over time: one, ​the reconciliationist vision​, which took root in the process of dealing with the dead from so many battlefields, prisons, and hospitals and developed in many ways earlier than

43 the history of Reconstruction has allowed us to believe; two, ​the white supremacist vision​, which took many forms early, including terror and violence, locked arms with reconciliationists of many kinds, and by the turn of the century delivered the country to a segregated memory of its Civil War on Southern terms; and third, ​the emancipationist vision​, embodied African Americans’ complex remembrance of their own freedom, in the politics of radical Reconstruction, and in conceptions of the war as the reinvention of the republic and the liberation of blacks to citizenship and Constitutional equality. ​In the end this is a story of how the forces of reconciliation overwhelmed the emancipationist vision in the national culture, how the inexorable drive for reunion both used and trumped race​.” 2 ● “Americans faced an overwhelming task after the Civil War and emancipation: how to understand the tangled relationship between two profound ideas—​healing and ​justice. On some level, both had to occur; but given the potency of racial assumptions and power in the nineteenth-century America, these two aims never developed in historical balance.” 3 ● “Americans have had to work through the meaning of their Civil War in its rightful place—in the politics of memory. And as long as we have a politics of race in America, we will have a politics of Civil War memory.” 4 ● “In many ways, this is a story of how American culture romance triumphed over reality, sentimental remembrance won over ideological memory. For Americans broadly, the Civil War has been a defining event upon which we have often imposed unity and continuity; as a culture, we have often preferred its music and pathos to its enduring challenges, the theme of reconciled conflict to resurgent, unresolved legacies.” 4 ● “In the half century after the war, as the sections reconciled, by and large, the races divided. The intersectional wedding that became such a staple of mainstream popular culture, especially in the plantation school of literature, had no interracial counterpart in the popular imagination. Quite the opposite: race was so deeply at the root of the war’s causes and consequences, and so powerful a source of division in American social psychology, that it served as the antithesis of a culture of reconciliation.

The memory of slavery, emancipation, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments never fit well into a developing narrative in which the Old and New South were romanticized and welcomed back to a new nationalism, and in which devotion along made everyone right, and no one truly wrong, in the remembered Civil War.” 4 ● “It was a white man’s experience and a white nation that the veterans and the spectators came to celebrate [at Gettysburg] in July 1913. Any discussion of the war’s extended meanings in America’s omnipresent “race problem” was simply out of place.

Wilson’s “righteous peace” was far more the theme than Lincoln’s “rebirth of freedom.” At this remarkable moment when Americans looked backward with deepening nostalgia and ahead with modern excitement and fear, Jim Crow, only half-hidden, stalked the dirt paths of the veterans’ tent city at Gettysburg. He delivered supplies, cleaned the latrines, and may even have played the tunes at the nation’s feast of national memory.” 387 ● “Press reports and editorials about the Gettysburg reunion indicate just how much a combination of white supremacist and reconciliationist memories had conquered all others by 1913. The issues of slavery and secession, rejoiced the ​Washington Post​, were “no longer discussed argumentatively. They are scarcely mentioned at all, except in connection with the great war to which they led, and by which they were ​disposed of for all time​.” 387 ● “The war, said the ​Outlook​, had been fought over differing notions of “idealism”; “sovereignty of the state” versus “sovereignty of the nation.” Demonstrating the degree to which slavery had vanished from understandings of the Civil War causation in serious intellectual circles, the ​Outlook announced that “it was slavery that raised the question of State sovereignty; but it was not on behalf of slavery, but on behalf of State sovereignty and all that it implied, that these men fought.”” 388 ● “Naturally, monuments and reunions had always combined remembrance with healing, and, therefore, with forgetting. But racial justice took a different fork on the road to reunion. Not out of over conspiracy, not by subterfuge alone, did white supremacist memory combine with reconciliation to dominate how most Americans view the war.” 389-390 ● “Black newspapers of the era were weary, even resentful, of the celebration at Gettysburg in 1913. As segregation deepened and lynching persisted, many black opinion leaders observed history and memory wielded in such a way as to write blacks out of the story.” 390 ● “By 1913 racism in America had become a cultural industry, and twisted history a commodity. A segregated society required a segregated historical memory and a national mythology that could blunt or contain the conflict at the root of that segregation.

Most Americans embraced an unblinking celebration of reunion and accepted segregation as a natural condition of the races. 391 Sources: ​journals, newspapers, photos, artwork, movies, monuments, books, accounts Connections: ​McPherson, ​Battle​, Mitchell, ​Civil War​, Williams, ​Lincoln​, Douglass, ​Narrative​, Jacobs, ​Incidents​, Foner, ​Free​, Sears, Landscape James M. McPherson, ​Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era​ (1988) Argument: “The central plot…is the political and military defeat of the defenders of slavery. In ​Battle Cry of Freedom​, the real war took place not on the hospital cots visited by Whitman, but in the capitals, the congresses, the tents of field commanders, and the firing lines.

The outcome was not the profound amnesia that troubled Whitman. Instead, it was victory, sweet and good, though costly.” 215, Johnson ● “The Civil War “was pre-eminently a ​political ​war, a war of peoples rather than of professional armies.” (332) 261, Hyman ● “The first third of the book surveys the politics of sectional strife from the Mexican War to Fort Sumter.” 214, Johnson ● “McPherson makes clear that freedom came from battle, not birth. He utterly rejects the Civil War revisionists’ interpretation of the war as a senseless squandering of life and treasure. Instead, he stands in the tradition of post-World War II historiography

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that views the war as a bloody and courageous affirmation of the nation’s highest ideals. McPherson’s argument illustrates several major tendencies in that historiography since the 1960s.” 216, Johnson “By putting slavery at the center of the war, McPherson emphasizes the principle of freedom at stake in the conflict. He points out that in the beginning both sides “shoved slavery under the rug” (312). Lee, not Lincoln, exposed slavery to the vicissitudes of the battle. Lee’s success at the Seven Days doomed slavery, McPherson notes: “If McClellan’s campaign had succeeded, the war might have ended. The Union probably would have been restored with minimal destruction in the South. Slavery would have survived in only slightly modified form, at least for a time. By defeating McClellan, Lee assured a prolongation of the war until it destroyed slavery, the Old South, and nearly everything the Confederacy was fighting for.” (490) Lee’s victories began the South’s demise because they stirred the North to a policy of total war that eroded reservations about emancipation while casualties mounted and conscription reached deeper into northern communities.” 216, Johnson “The Emancipation Proclamation represented a turning point not just because it committed the Union to freeing slaves in rebel territory but, more decisively, because it permitted blacks to enlist in the army and navy.” 216, Johnson “McPherson acknowledges the racism that pervaded nineteenth-century American and repeatedly notes its impact on wartime politics. However, the accelerating toll of battle steadily undermined the influence of racism. In the North, racist opponents of freedom were concentrated in the Democratic party, McPherson argues. Unlike many other scholars, McPherson contends that the Democrats’ strength in the wartime North has been exaggerated. In the 1862 elections, for example, Republicans retained control of all but two free-state governorships and three legislatures, while adding five U.S. Senate seats and retaining a 25-vote majority in the House—an index, McPherson implies, of the strength of an emerging Republican constituency for freedom.” 216 “Battle Cry of Freedom is at peace with the concept of nationhood that emerged from the war. “Union victory in the war destroyed the southern vision of America and ensured that the northern vision would become the American vision,” McPherson concludes. That vision grew out of an “ideology of competitive, egalitarian, free-labor, capitalism” embraced by “the northern majority.” 218, Johnson “But the North did not first fight to free the slaves. “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with slavery in the States where it exists,” said Lincoln early in the conflict. The Union Congress overwhelmingly endorsed this position in July 1861. Within a year, however, both Lincoln and Congress decided to make emancipation of slaves in Confederate states a Union war policy. By the time of the Gettysburg Address, in November 1863, the North was fighting for a “new birth of freedom” to transform the Constitution written by the founding fathers, under which the United States had become the world’s largest slaveholding country, into a charter of emancipation for a republic where, as the northern version of “The Battle Cry of Freedom” put it, “Not a man shall be a slave.” Vii-viii “The multiple meanings of slavery and freedom, and how they dissolved and re-formed into new patterns in the crucible of war, constitute a central theme of this book.” Viii “In 1882 Samuel Clemens found that the Civil War remained at the center of southern consciousness; it was “what A.D. is elsewhere; they date from it.” This was scarcely surprising, wrote Twain, for the war had “uprooted institutions that were centuries old…transformed the social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations.”” Viii “The North had a potential manpower superiority of more than three to one (counting only white men) and Union armed forces had an actual superiority of two to one during most of the war. In economic resources and logistical capacity the northern advantage was even greater. Thus, in this explanation, the Confederacy fought against overwhelming odds; its defeat was inevitable.” 855 “Given the advantages of fighting on the defensive in its own territory with interior lines in which stalemate would be victory against a foe who must invade, conquer, occupy, and destroy the capacity to resist, the odds faced by the South were not formidable. Rather, as another category of interpretations has it, internal divisions fatally weakened the Confederacy; the state-rights conflict between certain governors and the Richmond government; the disaffection of non-slaveholders from a rich man’s war and poor man’s fight; libertarian opposition to necessary measures such as conscription and the suspension of habeas corpus; the lukewarm commitment to the Confederacy by quondam Whigs and unionists; the disloyalty of slaves who defected to the enemy whenever they had the chance; growing doubts among slaveowners themselves about the justice of their peculiar institution and their cause.” 855 “In any case the “internal division” and “lack of will” explanations for Confederate defeat, while not implausible, are not very convincing either. The problem is that the North experienced similar internal divisions, and if the war had come out differently the Yankees’ lack of unity and will to win could be cited with equal plausibility to explain that outcome. The North had its large minority alienated by the rich man’s war/poor man’s fight theme; its outspoken opposition to conscription, taxation, suspension of habeas corpus, and other war measures; its state governors and legislatures and congressmen who tried to thwart administration policies…One critical distinction between Union and Confederacy was the institutionalization of obstruction in the Democratic party in the North, compelling the Republicans to close ranks in support of war policies to overcome and ultimately to discredit the opposition, while the South had no such institutionalized political structure to mobilize support and vanquish resistance.” 856

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“A number of historians have looked instead at the quality of leadership both military and civilian. There are several variants of an interpretation that emphasizes a gradual development of superior northern leadership. In Beauregard, Lee, the two Johnstons, and Jackson the South enjoyed abler military commanders during the first year or two of the war, while Jefferson Davis was better qualified by training and experience than Lincoln to lead a nation at war. But Lee’s strategic vision was limited to the Virginia theater, and the Confederate government neglected the West, where Union armies developed a strategic design and the generals to carry it out, while southern forces floundered under incompetent commanders who lost the war in the West. By 1863, Lincoln’s remarkable abilities gave him an edge over Davis as a war leader, while in Grant and Sherman the North acquired commanders with a concept of total war and the necessary determination to make it succeed…the Union developed superior managerial talent to mobilize and organize the North’s greater resources for victory in the modern industrialized conflict that he Civil War became.” 856-857 ● Most attempts to explain southern defeat or northern victory lack the dimension of ​contingency—​the recognition that at numerous critical points during the war things might have gone altogether differently. Four major turning points defined the eventual outcome. The first came in the summer of 1862, when the counter-offensives of Jackson and Lee in Virginia and Bragg and Kirby Smith in the West arrested the momentum and intensification of the conflict and created the potential for Confederate success, which appeared imminent before each of the next three turning points. The first of these occurred in the fall of 1862, when battles at Antietam and Perryville threw back Confederate invasions, forestalled European mediation and recognition of the Confederacy, perhaps prevented a Democratic victory in the northern elections of 1862 that might have inhibited the government’s ability to carry on the war, and set the stage for the Emancipation Proclamation which enlarged the scope and purpose of the conflict. The third critical point came in the summer and fall of 1863 when Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga turned the tide toward ultimate northern victory.” 858 ● “One more reversal of that tide seemed possible in the summer of 1864 when appalling Union casualties and apparent lack of progress especially in Virginia brought the North to the brink of peace negotiations and the election of a Democratic president.

But the capture of Atlanta and Sheridan’s destruction of Early’s army in the Shenandoah Valley clinched matters for the North.

Only then did it become possible to speak of the inevitability of Union victory. Only then did the South experience an irretrievable “loss of will to fight.”” 858 ● “Of all the explanations for Confederate defeat, the loss of will thesis suffers most from its own particular fallacy of reversibility—that of putting the cart before the horse.” 858 ● “But certain large consequences of the war seem clear. Secession and slavery were killed, never to be revived during the century and a quarter since Appomattox. These results signified a broader transformation of American society and polity punctuated if not alone achieved by the war…The war marked a transition of the United States to a singular noun. The “Union” also became the nation, and Americans now rarely speak of their Union except in the historical sense.” 859 ● “The old federal republic in which the national government had rarely touched the average citizen except through the post-office gave way to a more centralized polity that taxed the people directly and created an internal revenue bureau to collect these taxes, drafted men into the army, expanded the jurisdiction of federal courts, created a national currency and a national banking system, and established the first national agency for social welfare—the Freedmen’s Bureau. Eleven of the first twelve amendments to the Constitution had limited the powers of the national government; six of the next seven, beginning with the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, vastly expanded those powers at the expense of the states.” 859 ● “Thus when secessionists protested that they were acting to preserve traditional rights and values, they were correct. They fought to protect their constitutional liberties against the perceived northern threat to overthrow them. The South’s concept of republicanism had not changed in three-quarters of a century; the North’s had.” 860 ● “ “We are not Revolutionists,” insisted James B.D DeBow and Jefferson Davis during the Civil War, “We are resisting revolution…We are conservatives.” 861 ● “Union victory in the war destroyed the southern vision of America and ensured that the northern vision would become the American vision. Until 1861, however, it was the North that was out of the mainstream, not the South. Of course the northern states, along with Britain and a few countries in northwestern Europe, were cutting a new channel in world history that would doubtless have become the mainstream even if the American Civil War had not happened. Russia had abolished serfdom in 1861 to complete the dissolution of this ancient institution of bound labor in Europe. But for Americans the Civil War marked the turning point.” 861 Sources:​ journals, government records, military manuals, military maps, secondary sources Connections: Mitchell, ​Civil​, Foner, ​Free, Blight, ​Race​, Douglass, ​Narrative, Jacobs, ​Incidents​, Williams, ​Lincoln​, Sears, ​Landscape, McWhiney and Jamieson, ​Attack T. Harry Williams, ​Lincoln and his Generals​ (1952) Argument: Williams puts forth two “new and somewhat basic contentions: first, that Lincoln prove himself “a great natural strategist, a better one than any of his generals,” including Grant, over whom he continued to exercise his guidance as commander-in-chief; and second, that, in the years between 1861 and 1865, Lincoln evolved the command system, which had been “archaic.” Into a “modern command system for a modern war” that was, in fact, “the first of the modern total wars.” 508, Potter

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“Professor Harry Williams’ study of the development of the command system of the Union armies with special emphasis on President Lincoln as the central controlling figure—“a great natural strategist, a better one than any of his generals.”” 991,Henry ● “As commander in chief the President had a double responsibility, both of directing the grant strategy of the war and of “choosing the generals to manage the armies.” 991, Henry ● “From Professor Williams’ analysis it appears that the President made twelve unfortunate, or at least unsatisfactory, choices of commanders during the first two and a half years of the war. As a result, his “patience with the generals wore very thin” and he “came to doubt and even score the capabilities of the military mind,” the author says. Fortunately for Mr. Lincoln, however, and for the Union cause, he had in superior numbers and resources a margin of strength, and in a fixed four-year term a margin of time, within which he was able to keep on working at his problem of command until he found the right answer.” 991, Henry ● “For Professor Wiliams does not accept “Grant’s vision of himself conducting the war with a free hand.” He was allowed more latitude than earlier generals, the author says, because “Grant conformed his plans to Lincoln’s own strategic ideas.

Fundamentally, Grant’s strategy was Lincolnian.” 992, Henry ● “My theme is Lincoln as a director of war and his place in the high command and his influence in developing a modern command system for this nation.” Vii ● “Judged by modern standards, Lincoln stands out as a great war president, probably the greatest in our history, and a great natural strategist, a better one than any of his generals. He was in actuality as well as in title the commander in chief who, by is large strategy, did more than Grant or any general to win the war for the Union.” Vii ● “Lincoln tried to use McClellan; but rightly distrusting the General’s ability, he intervened frequently in the management of military matters. Rightly trusting in Grant’s competence, Lincoln intervened less after Grant became general in chief, but even then he always exercised an over all authority and never hesitated to check Grant when he thought the General was making a mistake. It might be said that before Grant, Lincoln acted as commander n chief and frequently as general in chief and that after Grant, he contented himself with the function of commander in chief.” Viii Sources:​ personal papers, journals, military orders Connections:​ Foner, ​Free​, McPherson, ​Battle​, Mitchell, ​Civil​, Blight, ​Race​, Sears, ​Landscape​, McWhiney and Jamieson, ​Attack Reid Mitchell, ​Civil War Soldiers: Their Expectations and Their Experiences​ (1988) Argument: ​““Professor Mitchell, like most of the invader, blames what northerners considered the sins of the South on slavery. “An economy largely dependent on slavery was radically different form one that relied on free labor,” he suggests (2). “Economic opportunity and the South’s distinctive culture both rested on the fact of slavery” (4). Mitchell stresses slavery—“racism” (4), and “paranoia” (5) over possible slave rebellions—as the cause of the war. He notes that by 1865 “slavery no longer seemed worth fighting for (204) and quotes a Confederate as saying “for man to have property in man was wrong, and that the Declaration of Independence meant more than they and ever been able to see before” (205). “The Civil War was as bloody as any war Americans ever fought,” concludes Mitchell. “As bloody as slavery” (190).” 125, McWhiney ● “This is a book about the soldiers who fought during the Civil War. It uses the most personal of document, their letters and diaries, to re-create their wartime experiences. It is also a book about the meaning of the Civil War, written in the belief that establishing what the war meant to that generation will help us decide what it means for us.” Vii ● “So I come to the letters and diaries left by Civil War soldiers with the questions I would have asked the writers if they had been alive. Why did you fight? What did you think of your enemy, your American enemy? How did you feel about slavery and race and all the unfinished business that means in some way the war you fought is still not over? What was it like to be in battle?

Were your frightened; how did you overcome your fear? How did you face death—how did you give meaning to violence and destruction? How did you accept that you yourself were a killer? What did you take home from the war? What legacy have you left us?” vii-viii ● “With an eye o what the United States in 1861-65 had been and was to become, the author probes for answers to questions that have intrigued military historians for decades.” 910, Gallaway ● “But the author concludes that on many issues soldiers on both sides agreed far more than they differed.” 910, Gallaway ● “Mitchell focuses throughout the first half of his book on the similarities between northerners and southerners. “Family honor,” he says, “was a powerful incentive for enlistment, North and South” (17); Yaks and Rebs shared “a pervasive American identity,” and “the Confederate flag was an image of how much the Confederacy shared the common American culture” (22); “the North and South were two regions separated by a common culture” (23); both sides “believed that they fought an uncivilized enemy” (26); “similarities between the Confederate image of the North and the Northern image of the Confederacy are striking” (35); both sides “had trouble keeping its army motivated” (42); “North and South, the soldier of the 1860s was most likely an independent farmer or a farmer’s son,” and “Americans found military regimentation hard to accept” (57); “volunteers [North and South] also feared what might best be called dehumanization” (59); finally, both sides “could agree [that] the ultimate cause of the Civil War was American sin” (89).” 124, McWhiney ● “After emphasizing the similarities of Rebs and Yanks for nearly one hundred pages, Mitchell then contradicts the first half of his work by showing that northerners and southerners were quite different... “Northern soldiers went to war convinced of the industry and virtue of “Union Boys,” admits Mitchell. “They also had a corresponding belief in the superiority of Northern

47 civilization. They thought that Southerners and the culture that had produced them were inferior” (90), and they never changed their minds. Mitchell notes that Union soldiers often treated the South “as if it were a foreign country.” He emphasizes that “cultural contempt—the sense that one was in a foreign or backward country—made such actions easier.” Yanks “came to think of the war itself as a war against the Southern way of life” and wished “to remake the South in the North’s image. That desire too could be justified only by a belief in the South’s cultural and moral inferiority.” (91)” 125, McWhiney Sources:​ Journals, diaries Connections:​ McPherson, ​Battle​, Blight, ​Race​, Williams, L ​ incoln​, Foner, ​Free​, Douglass, ​Narrative,​ Jacobs, ​Incidents​, Sears, ​Landscape Stephen W. Sears, Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam (1983) Argument: ​Part 1: McClellan bad. Part two: “Sears points to Antietam and the ensuing Emancipation Proclamation as marking the transformation from a limited war aimed at rapid reconciliation with slavery preserved to a total war designed to subdue the South and destroy the peculiar institution. Ironically, it was McClellan, the advocate of limited war, who by battling Lee to a standstill permitted this transition to take place—and then found himself the first casualty of it.” 371, Simpson ● “Of all the days on all the fields where American soldiers have fought, the most terrible by almost any measure was September 17, 1862. The battle waged on that date, close by Antietam Creek at Sharpsburg in western Maryland, took a human toll never exceeded on any other single day in the nation’s history.” Xi ● “By almost any measure, too, Antietam was pivotal in the history of the Civil War. In September 1862 events across a broad spectrum—military, political, social, diplomatic—were rushing toward a climax. The battle in Maryland would affect all of them radically, turning the course of the war in new directions.” Xi ● “It may be true, as Sears says, that the ending of Lee’s offensive convinced the British ministry to withhold recognition of the Confederacy.” 484-485, Adams ● “Sears believes that Lee intended to force the Union army into an all-out fight, whereas Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones in the recent ​How the North Won maintain that his motive was not to fight a major battle but to garner supplies from untouched regions, taking pressure off war-torn Virginia.” 485, Adams ● “Sears shows conclusively that T. Harry Williams was correct in castigating McClellan as criminally slow and that my belief in the rebels’ psychological mastery of their opponents operated in every phase of the Maryland campaign.” 485, Adams ● “One of Sears’s original points is that Lee’s army was so traumatized by the battle that he abandoned a contemplated second northward movement in 1862.” 485, Adams ● “Transformation of the conflict from limited to total war but of how that transformation was embodied in contrasting characters of McClellan and Grant.” 369, Simpson ● “The book concentrates on the North’s response to Lee’s decision to invade Maryland, at times rendering the story of the Antietam campaign in terms of explaining McClellan’s failure to do more than drive Lee back across the Potomac. Indeed, Lee’s audacity appears less remarkable in light of his opponent’s caution; the Confederate’s great achievement was his insight into the workings of McClellan’s mind and soul—at times Lee seemed in command of both armies.” 369, Simpson ● “It is a damning indictment of McClellan, who T. Harry Willimas once labeled “the problem childe of the Civil War.” Sears follows Williams, Canton, and Kenneth P. Williams in condemning the creator of the Army of the Potomac, building a case against McClellan supporters will be hard pressed to counter. In every way McClellan seems the antithesis of Grant, although both men were fond of smoking cigars as they watched the progress of battle. Yet such a negative portrain inevitably causes the reader to wonder why McClellan was idolized by so many of his soldiers.” 370, Simpson ● “Sears is at a loss to make sense of McClellan’s charisma, in part because to do so moves beyond the questions of McClellan’s psychology and personal flaws into much more difficult territory.” 371, Simpson Sources:​ First historian to use personal records of soldiers and generals for this battle Connections: ​Williams, ​Lincoln​, McPherson, ​Battle​, Blight, ​Race​, Mitchell, ​Civil​, McWhiney and Jamieson, ​Attack Grady McWhiney and Perry D. Jamieson, ​Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage​ (1982) Argument: “Briefly, the book argues that Confederate officers and soldiers were excessively prone to offensive tactics and that the officers, including those of the highest rank, failed to appreciate the significance of the greatly increased range and killing power of the war’s basic weapon, the rifled musket. Put another way, the Confederates used outmoded, eighteenth-century tactics against nineteenth-century technology. They bled themselves to defeat as an army and a nation, as well as to death individually in almost one hundred thousand instances.” 475, Roland ● “We contend that the Confederates bled themselves nearly to death in the first three years of the war by making costly attacks more often than did the Federals. Offensive tactics, which had been used so successfully by Americans in the Mexican War, were much less effective in the 1860s because an improved weapon—the rifle—had vastly increased strength of defenders. The Confederates could have offset their numerical disadvantage by remaining on the defensive and forcing the Federals to attack; on man in a trench armed with a rifle was equal to several outside it. But Southerners, imprisoned in a culture that rejected careful calculation and patience, often refused to learn form their mistakes. They continued to fight, despite mounting casualties, with

48 the same courageous dash and reckless abandon that had characterized their Celtic ancestors for two thousand years. The Confederates favored offensive warfare because the Celtic charge was an integral part of their heritage.” xv ● “There are nearly as many explanations of Confederate defeat as there are historians writing about the Civil War. They have blamed excessive southern localism, poor diplomacy, the blockade, financial problems, weak administration, an unsound political system, excessive democracy, inadequate resources, misuse of the black population, better northern leadership, loss of the will to fight, and a host of other things.” Xiii ● “The tragedy of the Confederates was that they rushed confidently and courageously against the more numerous Yankees but failed to defeat them.” Xiii ● “[The authors] demonstrate that in the first twelve major campaigns of the war (those taking place through the autumn of 1863) the Confederate armies suffered almost forty thousand more casualties than their opponents, and that because of the relative smallness of the Confederate forces they incurred proportionately almost twice as many casualties (24.6 percent Confederate to only 13.9 percent Union).’ 475, Roland ● “The authors contend persuasively that the rifled musket, “effective at 1000 yards,” rendered obsolete many of the tactical operations that had been successful in the recent Mexican War, which was fought largely with smoothbores; that cavalry charges and the employment of field artillery on line with the infantry were now prohibitively costly in lives; and that, more important, so were infantry attacks in close formation.” 475, Roland ● “In part, they say, Confederate generals attacked because they had been taught at West Point to do so and were too “fossilized” to break with their training. But there was a deeper and more pervasive cause. The Celtic makeup of the Southern population (Scotch-Irish, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and Cornish) produced Confederate soldiers who were extremely courageous but equally impetuous, just as their Celtic forebears had been throughout recorded history. The charge was the Celtic way of war.” 475, Rol Sources:​ military manuals, battle maps, rifle manufacturing information, ethnic history Connections:​ McPherson, ​Battle​, Williams, ​Lincoln,​ Sears, ​Landscape Eric Foner, ​A Short History of Reconstruction​ (1990) Argument: “Nonetheless, whether measured by the dreams inspired by emancipation or the more limited goals of securing blacks’ rights as citizens and free laborers and establishing an enduring Republican presence in the South, ​Reconstruction must be judged a failure.

Among the host of explanations for this outcome, a few seem especially significant. Conditions far beyond the control of Southern Republicans—such as the national credit and banking systems, the depression of the 1870s, and the stagnation of world demand for cotton—severely limited the prospects for far-reaching economic change. The early rejection of federally sponsored land reform left in place a planter class far weaker and less affluent than before the war, but still able to employ its prestige and experience against Reconstruction. Factionalism and corruption, although hardly confined to Southern Republicans, undermined their legitimacy and complicated their efforts to respond to attacks by resolute opponents. The failure to develop a lasting appeal to white voters made it nearly impossible for Republicans to combat the racial politics of the Redeemers. None of these factors, however, would have proved decisive without the campaign of violence that turned the electoral tide in many parts of the South and the weakening of Northern resolve, itself a consequence of social and political changes that undermined the free labor and egalitarian precepts at the heart of Reconstruction policy.”

255 ● “But no period of the American experience has, in the last twenty-five years seen a broadly accepted point of view so completely overturned as Reconstruction—the dramatic, controversial era that followed the Civil War.” xi ● “The interpretation elaborated by the Dunning school may be briefly summarized as follows: When the Civil War ended, the white South accepted the reality of military defeat, stood ready to do justice to the emancipated slaves, and desired above all a quick reintegration into the fabric of national life. Before his death, Abraham Lincoln had embarked on a course of sectional reconciliation, and during Presidential Reconstruction (1865-1867) his successor, Andrew Johnson, attempted to carry out Lincoln’s magnanimous policies. Johnson’s efforts were opposed and eventually thwarted by the Radical Republicans in Congress. Motivated by an irrational hatred of Southern “rebels” and the desire to consolidate their party’s national ascendancy, the Radicals in 1867 swept aside the Southern governments Johnson had established and fastened black suffrage on the defeated South. There followed the sordid period of Congressional or Radical Reconstruction (1867-77), an era of corruption presided over by unscrupulous “carpetbaggers” from the North, unprincipled Southern white “scalawags,” and ignorant blacks unprepared for freedom and incapable of properly exercising the political rights Northerners had thrust upon them. After much needless suffering, the South’s white community banded together to overthrow these governments and restore “home rule” (a euphemism for white supremacy).” Xi-xii ● “In the 1960s, the revisionist wave broke over the field, destroying, in rapid succession, every assumption of the traditional viewpoint. First, scholars presented a drastically revised account of national politics. New works portrayed Andrew Johnson as a stubborn, racist politician incapable of responding to the unprecedented situation that confronted him as President, and acquitted the Radicals—reborn as idealistic reformers genuinely committed to black rights—of vindictive motives and the charge of being the stalking-horses of Northern capitalism. Moreover, Reconstruction legislation was shown to be not simply the product of a Radical cabal, but a program that enjoyed broad support in both Congress and the North at large.” Xiii

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“By the end of the 1960s, Reconstruction was seen as a time of extraordinary social and political progress for blacks. If the era was “tragic,” it was because change did not go far enough, especially in the area of Southern land reform.” Xiii ● “Over a half-century ago, Charles and Mary Beard coined the term “the Second American Revolution” to describe a transfer in power wrought by the Civil War, from the South’s “planting aristocracy” to “Northern capitalists and free farmers.” Xiv ● “Modern scholars tend to view emancipation itself as among the most revolutionary aspects of the period.” Xiv ● “The magnitude of the Redeemer counterrevolution underscored both the scope and the transformation Reconstruction had assayed and the consequences of its failure.” 254 ● “Without Reconstruction, it is difficult to imagine the establishment of a framework of legal rights enshrined in the Constitution that, while flagrantly violated after 1877, created a vehicle for future federal intervention in Southern affairs.” 254-255 ● “What remains certain is that Reconstruction failed, and that for blacks its failure was a disaster whose magnitude cannot be obscured by the accomplishments that endured. For the nation as a whole, the collapse of Reconstruction was a tragedy that deeply affected the course of its development. If racism contributed to the undoing of Reconstruction, so also Reconstruction’s demise and the emergence of blacks as disenfranchised dependent laborers accelerated racism’s spread, until by the early twentieth century it pervaded the nation’s culture and politics.” 256 ● “Long into the twentieth century, the South remained a one-party region ruled by a reactionary elite that continued to employ violence and fraud to stifle internal dissent. An enduring consequence of Reconstruction’s failure, the Solid South helped define the contours of American politics and weaken the prospects not simply of change in racial matters but of progressive legislation generally.” 256 ● “Yet the institutions created or consolidate after the Civil War—the black family, school, and church—provided the base from which the modern civil rights revolution sprang. And for its legal strategy, the movement returned to the laws and amendments of Reconstruction.” 259 ● “This book is an abridgement of my ​Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877​, a comprehensive modern account of the period. The larger work necessarily touched on a multitude of issues, but certain broad themes unified the narrative and remain crucial in this shorter version.” xv o “The first is the centrality of the black experience. Rather than passive victims of the actions of others or simply a “problem” confronting white society, blacks were active agents in the making of Reconstruction whose quest for individual and community autonomy did much to establish the era’s political and economic agenda.” Xv o “A second purpose of this study is to trace the ways Southern society as a whole was remodeled, and to do so without neglecting the local variations in different parts of the South. By the end of Reconstruction, a new Southern class structure and several new systems of organizing labor were well on their way to being consolidated. The ongoing process of social and economic change, moreover, was intimately related to the politics of Reconstruction, for various groups of blacks and whites sought to use state and local government to promote their own interests and define their place in the region’s new social order.” Xv o “The evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations, and the complex interconnection of race and class in the postwar South, form a third theme of this book. Racism was pervasive in mid-nineteenth-century America and at both the regional and national levels constituted a powerful barrier to change. Yet despite racism, a significant number of Southern whites were willing to link their political fortunes with those blacks, and Northern Republicans came, for a time, to associate the fate of the former slaves with their party’s raison d’etre and the meaning of Union victory in the Civil War. Moreover, in the critical, interrelated issues of land and labor and the persistent conflict between planters’ desire to reexert control over their labor force and blacks’ quest for economic independence, race and class were inextricably linked.” Xv o “The book’s fourth theme is the emergence during the Civil War and Reconstruction of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and a new set of purposes, including an unprecedented commitment to the ideal of a national citizenship whose equal rights belonged to all Americans regardless of race. Originating in wartime exigencies, the activist state came to embody the reforming impulse deeply rooted in postwar politics. And Reconstruction produced enduring changes in the laws and Constitution that fundamentally altered federal-state relations and redefined the meaning of American citizenship.” Xvi o “Finally, this study examines how changes in the North’s economy and class structured affected Reconstruction. That the Reconstruction of the North receives less attention than its Southern counterpart reflects, in part, the absences of a detailed historical literature on the region’s social and political structure in these years. Nonetheless, Reconstruction cannot be fully understood without attention to its distinctively Northern and national dimensions.” Xvi (For more notes, see book underlining.)

Sources:​ legislation, journals, WPA records, newspapers Connections:​ Foner, ​Free​, Blight,​ Race​, McPherson,​ Battle​, Woodward, ​Origins of the New South​, Ayers, ​Promises of the New South C. Vann Woodward, ​Origins of the New South, 1877-1913​ (1951)

50 Argument: Change in the South resulted from the efforts of the industrial-entrepreneurial class of carpetbaggers and was constricted by its economic and political status as an internal colony. ● The ““New South” was a slogan for Henry Grady and the Redeemers who were converted to the Yankee gospel of industrialism, and tried to make the South over in the image of a middle-class North.” 141, Shugg ● “Neither Confederates nor Radicals were so influential in shaping the modern South as the Redeemers. In the Compromise of 1877 they sought not only home rule but economic privileges.” 141, Shugg ● “The Redeemers were not all honorable man; the defalcations of many who held office show that corruption did not end with Reconstruction. The industrial revolution which they promoted, largely as agents for northern capitalism, went far beyond textiles and was not benevolent in character. In agriculture, although labor and capital were greatly changed, the plantation system did not break up. For a generation the southern people—white as well as colored—endured a numbing poverty, starved of education and of their share in the nation’s prosperity until the present century.” 141-142, Shugg ● “The political consequence was agrarian revolt…the southern farmers fought for power and prosperity. The forked road to reunion had led them to combine with the West. But their fundamental challenge to the new order was crushed in every state, not only by the cry of white supremacy but—perhaps more effectively by economic forces and adroit conservative opposition.

Out of the political turmoil of the 1890’s emerged the Democracy of a white minority, allied again with the North in support of a colonial economy at the South.” 142, Shugg ● “The “Redeemers” of the South after Reconstruction were middle-class heirs of the old Whig tradition.” 994, Hesseltine ● “[Woodward] examines the industrial revolution of the 1880’s, and concludes that with all the achievements, the South remained rural.” 994, Hesseltine ● “The core of the book is a penetrating discussion of southern Populism—its rise from the rural protest against urban and eastern exploitation, its betrayal by is leaders, and its aftermath of discrimination, disfranchisement, and disillusion.” 994, Hesseltine ● “By the South I mean the eleven former Confederate states plus Kentucky and, after it became a state, Oklahoma.” X ● “Politically the South achieved, on the surface at least, a unity that it had never possessed in ante-bellum times. Economically it was set apart from the rest of the nation by differentials in per capita wealth, income, and living standards that made it unique among the regions. War and Reconstruction, while removing some of the South’s peculiarities, merely aggravated others and gave rise to new ones.” X ● “Published more than forty years ago, this still great book advanced a sociological model of the New South that attributed change both to the influence of an ascendant, entrepreneurial-industrial class and to the constraints imposed by the South’s political and economic status as an internal colony. Fifteen years ago, Woodward’s model was challenged by revisionist…who argued instead that what made the New South regionally distinct was the persistence of the class relations of the postemancipation plantation system and its still dominant planter class…Ayers takes a decidedly postmodern turn by focusing instead on the diverse and contradictory local stories of Southern experience.” 815-816, Billings ● “Woodward, while rooting for the people acted upon, told the story of the powerful men who prevailed in the public realm.”

697, Lewis ● “[Woodward] championed outsiders and dissenters; he punctured the pretensions of the South’s self-proclaimed leaders.

Because he sympathized with the underdogs, Woodward focused on the errors, self-delusion, and duplicity of the public men of the South. As he confided to a friend, “my sympathies were obviously not with the people who ran things, and about whom I wrote most, but [with] the people who were run, who were managed, and maneuvered and pushed around.” Ayers, vii Sources: ​journals, newspapers, manufacturing records, government papers Connections:​ Ayers, ​The Promise​, Foner, ​Reconstruction​, Foner, ​Free​, Blight, ​Race​, Cashman, ​America​, Sanders, ​Roots Edward L. Ayers, ​The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction​ (1992) Argument: “The history of the New South was, accordingly, a history of continual redefinition and renegotiation, of unintended and unanticipated consequences, of unresolved tensions. People experienced conflict within their own hearts and minds; classes, races, and partisans clashed. The New South was an anxious place, filled with longing and resentment, for people had been dislodged from older bases of identity and found no new ones ready at hand. People worried about the inability of both the young and old to appreciate the other’s concerns and hopes. People worried that the tenuous compromises and local arrangements struck between whites and blacks, rich and poor, the worldly and the godly would not hold. People remained ambivalent about the spread of commercial values and institutions, certain that the South needed to be more prosperous yet fearful that economic change would dissolve whatever stability their society could claim. Southerners often managed to persuade themselves, despite all this, that the new era held out unprecedented promise for the region. People of both races hoped that emancipation had given the South a fresh start, a chance to catch up with the rest of the nation while avoiding the mistakes of the North.” viii ● “Post-Reconstruction politics, I argue, was extremely unstable. Apparently antagonistic groups fused while erstwhile allies split; most men cared passionately about politics though government did little; black men voted in large numbers and in many combinations; women played important roles in reform efforts; politics in the North and the South bore deep similarities.

Economically, too, the South was far more fluid and active than we have thought. Advertising, name brands, and mass-produced products flowed into the South in a widening current. Some capitalists in the region managed to create businesses of national and

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international impact. Each year, manufacturing, mining, and lumbering pulled more blacks and whites, men and women, adults and children into wage labor. Villages and towns appeared by the thousands where none had appeared before. People of both races moved restlessly through the South and often beyond its borders. Churches proliferated, establishing a presence in private and public life they had never known before, meeting disaffection and resentment along the way. Relations among black Southerners and white Southerners embodied every tension and conflict in the region.” Ix-x “Ayers provides the other half of C. Vann Woodward’s classic account. Woodward, while rooting for the people acted upon, told the story of the powerful men who prevailed in the public realm. Ayers, while cognizant of the contributions of the socially and politically powerful, included the voices and perspectives of non-elite southern men and women. In a region where the topography varied greatly, the notion of a unified South was illusory at best. But the South did exist, defined and redefined by its many citizens through a process of negotiation.” 697, Lewis “Trains furthered—and symbolized—the great themes of this [1877-1913] era: the struggle to reverse economic disaster, the yearning to find lives free from racism, the plans for flourishing cities, the curiosity about other places.” 951, Stowe “More than forty years ago, C. Vann Woodward, looking at this period, was uneasy with the term “New South,” worrying that it might be simply a rallying cry of southern boosters. Ayers attempts to get past this concern by going beyond the political deceptions and delusions that preoccupied Woodward to an understanding on “what it meant to live in the American South” in this time.”” (vi). 951, Stowe “Ayers aggress with those who see the Populists as genuine reformers, leaning toward modernity rather than nostalgia, and he argues that the South’s economy was potentially dynamic enough to respond. But whites’ racist fears and blacks’ traditions of careful survival combined to snuff out Populist hopes.” 952, Stowe “What was the “promise” of the New South, and how did literary and political change influence or mirror everyday life?

Sometimes the promise seems to be in modernity, in southerners’ capacity to imagine and define the temper of the twentieth century. At other times it seems that trace relations held the promise of renewal even when renewal failed. At still other points, Ayers hints at a broader unifying theme, an understanding of how difficult it was for southerners of all descriptions to grasp the complexity of living in a region that has so promiscuously embraced history and myth.” 952, Stowe “War, emancipation, Reconstruction, the return of white dominance, and depression followed on another in quick succession between 1861 and 1877. Slavery ended more abruptly and more violently in the South than anywhere else in the modern world.

Politics lurched from one regime to the next between 1865 and 1877, recrimination and bitterness marking the transitions. Blacks and whites withdrew into their own houses, churches, and neighborhoods, watching the other warily. Death and separation weighted on many families. After 1877, Southerners had no choice but to create a new society, one without precedent or blueprint.” Viii “Southerners lived with stunted economic growth, narrow political alternatives, poisoned race relations, confined roles for women, and shallow intellectual life. In the process of exploring those shortcomings, however, an unintended thing has happened: we have focused so much on the limitations Southerners endured that we have lost sight of the rest of their lives. The people of the New South have become synonymous with the problems they faced. Southerners of both races have become reduced to objects of pity, scorn, romance, or condescension.” Viii-ix “This book tries to convey some of the complexity and experience in the New South. Account books, love letters, memoirs, and sermons offer clues; computers reveal submerged patterns; photographs permit glimpses of the way things looked.” Ix “Change did not displace the past or standardize the present. The South did not become more homogenous as modern institutions worked within the region nor did it lose its distinctiveness within the nation. Differences among people and places widened rather than narrowed; violence and distrust found new sources and new expressions; some Southerners tested new ways only to return to the old.” X “The home of the antebellum South’s most lucrative plantations, the Black Belt declined in the New South.” 6 “Quickly evolving systems of commerce heightened difference among places and people even as the systems tied them together.

Although railroads, stores, and towns came into sudden prominence throughout the South, each place had its own local chronology. Any given year would find some places in a buoyant mood as a railroad approached or a new mill opened, while others, bypassed by the machinery of the new order, fell into decline. The arrival of a railroad could trigger many consequences: rapid population growth or population decline, a more diversified economy or great specialization, the growth of a city or the death of small towns.” 7 “The New South era began in the mid- to late 1870s when the biracial and reformist experiment of Reconstruction ended and the conservative white Democrats took power throughout the Southern sates. Then, in the early 1890s, the largest political revolt in American history, Populism, redrew the political boundaries of the South and the nation. Business cycles, too, created common experiences across the South. The 1880s saw town and industrial growth in the South but steady economic pressure on farmers.

The 1890s began with a terrible depression that lasted through half the decade, followed by a decade of relative prosperity.

Within these broad patterns, the people of the New South lived lives of great variation and contrast.” 7 “Reconstruction’s final gasp came in 1877, when Congress declared victory for the Democrats in contested elections in Louisiana and Florida.” 8

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“The Democratic Redeemers defined themselves, in large part, by what they were not. Unlike Republicans, the Redeemers were not interested in biracial coalition. The Democrats would not seriously consider black needs, would not invert the racial hierarchy by allowing blacks to hold offices for which white longed. Unlike Republicans, too, the Redeemers would not use the state government as an active agent of change. Democrats scoffed not only at Republican support for railroads and other businesses, but also at Republican initiatives in schools, orphanages, prisons, and asylums. Democrats assured landowning farmers that the party would roll back taxes. The Democrats saw themselves as the proponents of common sense, honesty, and caution where the Republicans offered foolishness, corruption, and impetuosity. The Democrats explained away their own violence and fraud, both of which soon dwarfed that of Reconstruction, as fighting fire with fire. Democratic policies encouraged economic growth not through active aid, as the Republicans had done, but through low taxes on railroads and farmland, with few restrictions on business and few demands on government. Democrats realized, as hard the Republicans, that railroads were the key to economic growth in the last half of the nineteenth century.” 8-9 ● “Sores sped the reorientation of plantation-belt economic life. Many freedpeople, at the demand of their landlords, concentrated on growing cotton and abandoned their gardens; they turned to stores for everything they needed. Other freedpeople, working for wages and having some say over how they would spend their money, also turned to the store, eagerly purchasing symbols of their independence. Many planters used plantation stores to wring extra profit from their tenants, marking up goods substantially and doling out credit to keep tenants on the farm throughout the season.” 13 ● “In the late 1880s and early 1890s, the railroads became the scenes of the first statewide segregation laws throughout the South.”

18 ● “Every measure of industrial growth raced ahead in the New South, the rates of change consistently outstripping national averages…Productivity actually grew faster in the South than it had in New England during its industrial revolution fifty years earlier.” 22 ● “In fact, many more whites than blacks fled the South. While the thirteen Southern states saw a net loss of 537,000 blacks between 1880 and 1910, the loss of whites totaled 1,243,000 in those same decades. After 1900, when land in Texas and Louisiana became harder to get, Southern whites began to move to California and other parts of the Far West, places to which relatively few blacks had the means to go. All along, the South lost white population to every other part of the union.” 24 Organization: “Ayers devotes seven chapters to what he calls “the landscape of everyday life.” Here he describes the diverse and contradictory experiences of black and white Southerners who lived in the countryside or small towns, worked in mines and mills, worshipped in segregated churches, and began, literally to buy into mass consumer culture. Three subsequent chapters…describe the promise and the failure of the Southern Populist movement to point the region in the direction of greater equality and the Jim Crow South that eventuated. Finally, in an innovative departure from canonical traditions o Southern historiography, Ayers describes ho New South experiences were creatively translated as new cultural expressions in literature, music, and Pentecostal-holiness religion.” 815, Billings Sources:​ quantitative data, maps, novels, sermons, diaries, government records Connection:​ Woodward, ​Origins of the New South,​ Foner, ​Reconstruction​, Foner, ​Free​, Blight, ​Race​, Cashman, ​America​, Sanders, ​Roots Sean Dennis Cashman, ​America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt​ (1984) Argument: “in short, some political and cultural attitudes of the Gilded Age long survived the close of the nineteenth century when the period itself had ended.” 6 ● “This book, intended as an introduction to the Gilded Age and Industrial America, offers a general account of the industrial and economic, social and political history of the period from 1865 to 1901…The book aims at a clear, concise presentation of essential facts but does not attempt to record the history of high society or the complex and diverse stories of education and religion, arts and letters.” xvi ● “Economic development took center stage in this period, as the country passed suddenly from a society based on farms, small towns, and small mercantile and manufacturing enterprises to one boasting concentrated power in every sphere of life. Cashman focuses on prominent entrepreneurs and their corporations, using terms such as ​robber barons and ​monopolies where others might be less pejorative.” 599, Morgan ● “Cashman retains much of the inherited view that the major parties were basically alike, that innovative ideas came from the fringes, especially the Populists. This has been the hardest stereotype about the period to alter, but historians would do well to remember that most people at that time saw profound differences between Republicans and Democrats. The Democrats still represented southernism, but were also the party of parochialism and city bossism. The Republicans generally spoke for the rising middle class, for prosperous farmers with ready markets in the industrial sector, and for some skilled labor. The political wars revealed a balance because the economy and society were balanced between old and new ideals, not because the issues debated were irrelevant. At heart, the party debate was about differing conceptions of development. Both parties accepted competition and individualism. The Republicans were willing to temper them with some government action, and were more tolerant of large enterprises than were the Democrats or Populists.” 599, Morgan ● “Industrialism’s promotion of mass culture was bound to raise dissent from those who saw their inherited order fade. None were more vocal than the Populists. Cashman sees their grievances as rooted in real economic distress, but that movement also involved sectional resentments and a potent sense of individual inequity. Cashman is probably too favorable toward Populist

53 remedies. The currency manipulation they advocated would have been disastrous. Subsidy programs for farm surpluses would have increased the public costs without solving the farm problem. Government ownership of railroads and communication systems probably would have stagnated those enterprises.” 600, Morgan ● “There were formative years. The Industrial Revolution and the development of commercial monopolies, Reconstruction and the New South, the settlement of the West and closing of the frontier—all brought to the fore of politics a cast of characters that was very different from the statesmen, soldiers, and slaves of the Civil War. This was the heyday of the robber barons. Perhaps the most damaging accusation against Lincoln after his assassination was that to win the war he had been ready to sacrifice the ideals of the Republican party to spoilsmen and profiteers.” 1-2 ● “The West was settled at a fatal cost to Native Americas. The South was tied back to the Union at a humiliating cost to African-Americans. There were two depressions, in 1873 and 1893, each with devastating effects on the economy. The amazing industrial expansion of the United States was accomplished with considerable exploitation of factory artisans. The splendors of the new cities arose amid the squalor of industrial slums. The most damning indictment of this postwar American society was attributed to the future French prime minister Georges Clemenceau, who lived for a time in New York and New England. Noting is undoubted problems, he could claim the United States had gone from a stage of barbarism to one of decadence without achieving any civilization between the two.” 3 ● “Society was obsessed with invention, industrialization, incorporation, immigration, and, later, imperialism. It was indulgent of commercial speculation, social ostentation, and political prevarication but was indifferent to the special needs of immigrants and Indians and intolerant of African-Americans, labor, unions, and political dissidents.” 4 ● “Each period benefited from a boom in transportation—after 1865, the railroad; in the 1920s, the mass production of the automobile; from the late 1940s on, widespread commercial use of the airplane. Each enjoyed a revolution in communication—the Gilded Age, telegraph and telephone; the 1920s, motion pictures and radio; in the 1950s, long-playing vinyl phonograph records and television; in the 1980s, personal computers and compact discs. Innovations in transportation and communication together worked for a more homogeneous culture and a more informed citizenry, as well a shaving undisputed industrial and commercial significance in their own right.” 4 ● “In the 1870s and 1880s labor unions were tainted by presumed association with anarchists, and the Haymarket anarchists of 1886 were tried without justice.” 5 Sources: ​some primary, mostly secondary—a synthesis Connections:​ Foner, ​Reconstruction​, Woodward, ​Origins,​ Ayers, ​Promises,​ Blight, ​Race​, Sanders, ​Roots Elizabeth Sanders, ​Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917​ (1999) Argument: ​“It is the contention of this book that agrarian movements constituted the most important political force driving the development of the American national state in the half century before World War I. And by shaping the form of early regulatory legislation and establishing the centrality of the farmer-labor alliance to progressive reform and the Democratic Party, the agrarian influence was felt for years thereafter. Indeed, its characteristic ideological conceptions and language are still with us.” 1 ● “The alliance between farmers and the workers who staffed the nation’s industries, mines, and railroads was a difficult one to effect and maintain, and it existed more in the farmers’ perception than in the workers’. Nevertheless, its legislative fruits were more abundant than is commonly realized, and the vision of this alliance of “producers against plutocrats” was central to the Populist and Progressive Eras and to subsequent reform efforts as well.” 1 ● “What this rich literature has not provided is an account of the political interaction of these two sectors and the extent to which Progressive Era national state expansion embodied the demands of farmers and workers.” 2 ● “My argument is that the dynamic stimulus for Populist and Progressive Era state expansion was the periphery agrarians’ drive to establish public control over a rampaging capitalism. The periphery generated the bulk of the reform agenda and furnished the foot soldiers that saw reform though the early-twentieth-century periphery was innately antagonistic to the designs of core industrial and financial capitalism and had no effective means with which to fight it other than the capture and expansion of state power.” 4 ● “The agrarians hoped, through their control of the national state, to restructure the domestic market and to slow or reverse the concentration of wealth and power that was the legacy of nineteenth-century industrialization. Periphery representatives sought neither to impose a general collectivism nor to restore a mythical state if laissez-faire. Rather, they believed that the mass of citizens would benefit if powerful government mechanisms were created to restrain rapacious corporations, prevent excessive concentration of wealth and market power, and publicly provide certain goods and services that either would not be sufficiently furnished by private enterprise or would be supplied only through monopolistic exactions. Within the decentralized market to be fostered and policed by the state, they hoped that a genuinely free commerce would flourish and believed that both individual and collective efforts would yield a more just and broadly prosperous society.” 4 ● “The capitalist response to this challenge was reactive and largely negative, it did, however, establish the outer limits of reform and succeeded in significantly modifying the agrarian statist agenda. The force of capitalist resistance was all the more powerful because of the failure of the labor movement in the industrial North to meaningfully challenge corporate political hegemony in its local bastions. That failure has been variously attributed to federalism, immigration, judicial intervention, conservative

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leadership, internal ideological division, and other factors that weakened labor’s organizational force. In my view, labor’s tentative and ineffective political mobilization must also be viewed in juxtaposition to the greater programmatic cohesion and intuitional strength of agrarian interests.” 4 “The existing two-party system, not rigidly bound by partisan discipline or centralized around a unitary government, was flexible enough to accommodate rising political demands from new quarters. But the Democratic Party of the post-1896 period was an overwhelmingly agrarian vehicle that carried the legacy of populism. The periphery farmers’ enthusiasm for politics an the territorial nature of their political demands interacted with the structure of Congress and the electoral system to give them a driving force and an institutional strength that workers could not match. Thus labor was offered a subordinate role in a party coalition, the content of whose program, because of its strong agrarian bias, could be labeled by its opponents as a threat to the health of the northern industrial economy.” 4-5 “In the early twentieth century the alliance with the cotton South in the Democratic Party was a problematic one for northern labor, not because (as some scholars have argued) the party served the interests of a Bourbon elite antagonistic to labor by virtue of its class position but because the party embodied the political demands of export-oriented agricultural producers whose position in the national economy differed fundamentally from that of northern industrial workers.” 5 “Nevertheless, the farmer-labor political alliance did succeed in constructing a rudimentary interventionist state that limited corporate prerogatives in ways that seemed genuinely frightening to capitalists at the time.”5 “In addition to tracing the political-economy roots of the modern interventionist state, this book will describe the sources of a major anomaly in American political development; social forces profoundly hostile to bureaucracy nevertheless instigated the creation of a bureaucratic state.” 6 “(core, diverse, and periphery)…regionalism was based on the nature of production, but equally significant for politics was the market destination of goods produced—which distinguished, for example, farm economies that were linked by tariff sensitivity and interdependency with domestic industry from those agricultural regions heavily involved in international trade.” 6-7 “An extensive body of evidence will be presented to support my contention that the main contours of Progressive Ear state expansion were direct results of the pressing of agrarian claims in the national legislature: the redefinition of trade policy; the creation of an income tax; a new, publicly controlled banking and currency system; antitrust policy; the regulation of agricultural marketing networks; a nationally financed road system; federal control of railroads, ocean shipping, and early telecommunications; and agricultural and vocational education. These constituted the core of the agrarian political agenda.

When regulation appeared insufficient to achieve the aims of the agrarian regions, direct state control of production and transportation was urged, refuting the popular image of the agrarians as antistatists hamstrung by a constricting “states’ rights” ideology.” 7-8 “The argument that these farmers were nevertheless the principal instigators of progressive reform and of correlative efforts to construct a farmer-labor alliance in the three decades before World War I sets this book apart from most pervious works and from popular constructions of the past.” 410 “One of the purposes of this book is to reclaim the agrarian radical heritage and even to suggest that its goals and methods have some relevance today.” 410 “The farmers’ goal was to use the expanded regulatory, social, and infrastructure-building capability of the national state to level the economic playing field and effect a more egalitarian distribution of wealth and power. Farmers took the lead in this political transformation because their grievances were numerous, their commitment to politics unflagging, and their position in the territorially based national legislature advantageous.” 411 “The principal labor movement organization had a much longer life (and in fact is with us still), but the farmers’ movement had a much greater impact on national state development. Farmer and labor organizations were internally distinct and were shaped to create an alternative cooperative economy and, failing that, to press on the state a great variety of market-shaping powers to be exercised for the good of the large number of ordinary producers. The AFL, on he other hand, accepted the concentrated structure of the modern industrial economy and, as an alternative to politics, focused its efforts on achieving power in the workplace, vis-à-vis employers—an alternative that farmers, after the failure of their cooperatives, did not have.” 411 “Workers’ organizations, repelled by the difficulties of political mobilization and maneuver that confronted them, were halfhearted and cross-pressured in their approach to politics and, in the Progressive Era, as likely to spend political energy on behalf of particularistic ethnic concerns as on more universal working-class benefits. Farmers’ organizations were somewhat more inclusive in their occupational definition of eligibility for membership, which recognized only the division between “producers “ and controllers, exploiters and plutocrats—the latter all grouped together.” 411 “By contrast, most labor organizations (after the demise of the wonderfully inclusive and producerist Knight of Labor) were narrowly divided along craft lines and paid little attention to immigrant and unskilled workers. Farmers’ organizations in the South were, for the most part, racially segregated, though farmer organizations differed from labor groups in having more gender-egalitarian membership and leadership. This quality lent a considerable advantage to farmers’ social and political mobilization. However, both farmer and worker movements were undeniably rent by class, ethnic, and regional political economy differences that diminished their capacity for economic and political mobilization and—particularly in the case of southern racial segregation—their moral authority.” 412

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“The farmers’ movement enjoyed more unity and collective purpose than, in particular, the AFL. The latter combined state and local fragmentation with a national leadership that possessed little capacity to mobilize the membership but significant autonomy to go its own way in high-level, corporatists negotiation and to take political and social positions at variance with the inclinations of the rank and file. There was more political consensus and less distance between members and leaders in farm organizations.” ● “In the post-Civil War era, farmers were always committed to politics, whereas workers were profoundly ambivalent about the relationship of politics—particularly national politics—to their economic interests and skeptical about their ability to participate effectively in a winning national and political coalition. Farmers’ interests converged easily and naturally on the national state; workers’ goals were strongly local, and the forces of judicially maintained constitutional rules, political economy, and the two-party system worked against their national political mobilization.” 412 ● “Workers were concentrated in the core industrial region of the Northeast and Great Lakes, a region dominated by corporate capital through the Republican Party. To win against capitalists in national political contests, they had to make alliance with the periphery farmers, who not only were numerous and determined antagonists of core capital but also enjoyed strategic legislative advantage. But at critical junctures—in 1894, 1896, and 1908—capitalists were able to convince core industrial workers that the interests of farmers were antithetical to the interests of ​all​ residents of the core industrial regions.” 413 ● “The electoral support the workers offered to the farmers’ party ( in return for the latter’s acceptance of labor’s limited national political agenda) was always very feeble, never enough to maintain sufficient control of the national state to implement the key protections that workers needed for their organizations and workplace collective actions. The farmer-labor alliance could and did flourish ​within states in the periphery and diverse regions, but it could not sustain an effective cross-regional alliance in national politics. Labor was caught in a political economy that produced and sustained a two-party system, with one party dominated by core capital and the other by periphery farmers. Workers could not comfortably ally with either, and this realization was the major reason for labor’s apolitical, voluntarist strategy.” 413 ● “The farmers’ natural forum was the legislature. The needed change in the national legal structure, and Congress was much more responsive to grassroots social movements and more willing to deny large capitalists their cherished goals than the executive branch of the courts.” 414 ● “With the decline of indigenous organization for both farmers and workers in the 1920s and the shift of policy initiative definitely to the executive branch, neither farmers nor workers were able to dictate terms in national politics. When the economic crisis of the 1930s arrived, the stage was set for state actors and public-service-oriented intellectuals to propose and impose ​a program that offered to do a lot ​for farmers and workers, according to the interpretation of their interests developed within​ the state, but to grant them little autonomy from national administrative control.” 417 ● “ The decline of indigenous labor organizations resulted from state repression of radical trade-union organizations during World War I (repression that the AFL, feeling secure in its corporatist arrangements, did not oppose) and from the failure of workers to wrest definitive organizational rights from the grasp of hostile courts and employers….Organizational rights would finally be won in the 1932 Norris-LaGuardia Act, a legislative legacy of the farmer-labor alliance. Agrarians had been trying to emancipate labor from antitrust prosecution since 1890, but labor was never able to elect enough industrial Democrats to sustain the alliance or the anti-trust exemption. Farmers had provided the crucial less that labor would no learn: the Supreme Court would inevitably pick apart your legislation. You had to ​keep coming back, again and again, to patch it up and plug loopholes—as the farmers did with railroad legislation in 1906, 1910, and 1913 and also with antitrust and commodity futures regulation and as the farmer-labor alliance finally did for labor in 1932.” 417 ● “For farmers, the decline of indigenous organizations after 1917 was in part a result of agrarian legislative victories in the Wilson era and the commodity price increases of the war years, but there was another, ironic development. One of the Progressive Era legislative victories of the farmers’ movement was the Smith-Lever Act of 1914 creating an agricultural extension service. As the system developed, it created a powerful, state-spawned competitor to the Grange and the Farmers’ Union—the groups that had fought for the 1914 act. Faced with determinedly localistic administrative structure of the act and the food-production needs of World War I, the Extension Service encouraged the growth of local “farm bureaus” to support its agents and then backed their federation into state and national organizations.” 417 ● The United States is divided into three regions by Sanders; “an industrial “core” based primarily in the Northeast, a “periphery” in the South and West, and several “diverse” localities mostly in the Midwest.” 177, Vaught Sources:​ legislative journals Connections:​ Foner, ​Free​, Foner, ​Reconstruction​, Ayers, ​Promise​, Woodward, ​Origins​, Cashman, ​America Robert C. McMath Jr., ​American Populism: A Short History, 1877-1898​ (1992) Argument: ​“Populism developed among people who were deeply rooted in the social and economic networks of rural communities, not, as some would have it, among isolated and disoriented individuals.” 17 ● “My own telling of their story pays close attention to the economic distress of farmers and workers in the South, the Great Plains, and the Mountain West, and especially to those sharp and unexpected jolts that struck the farming regions in the decade between 1886 and 1896, leading people to believe that the great economic and political institutions of the United States and Europe were aligned against them. This telling of the story also follows closely the careers of the grass-roots organizations

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through which rural men and women interpreted those personal and collective crises and out of which they fashioned a movement of protest. By chronicling these organizations, their battles with the dominant institutions of an industrializing nation, and their own internal struggles, we can move beyond thee sometimes static question of who joined to explore the dynamics of the movement. And though my sympathies are with the Populists, I do not ignore the dark and irrational side of their movement.” 16-17 “The Great Strike of 1877 ushered in an era that would divide Americans along lines of wealth and occupation for the next two decades. Spawned by the nation’s worst depression to date, this bloody strike revealed the sharp edge of class conflict in industrializing America. Much of the nation’s rail network was paralyzed, and in cities from Baltimore to San Francisco, from Chicago to Galveston, railroad men were joined by other workers in angry confrontation with company representatives and local militia units. In Pittsburgh militamen sent to protect private property joined the mob in attacking the hated Pennsylvania Railroad. In St. Louis workers called a general strike and briefly established what they called the nation’s only “​genuine commune.”​ 3 “But by 1877 the farmers and merchants of western New York were hurting. They believed themselves to be the victims of discrimination in freight rates at the hands of the trunk-line railroads that were the connecting the East Coast and the new grain belt of the Midwest. In March 1877, F. P. Root, a prominent Monroe County farmer and a leader of the Patrons of Husbandry (the Grange), convened a meeting of wheat farmers and cattlemen at the Rochester courthouse for the purpose of establishing a Farmer’s Alliance. Its aim was to join representatives of existing agricultural organizations (the Grange, the Western New York Farmers Club, and the State Agricultural Society) in a loose alliance to lobby the state legislature for redress of grievances.” 5 “This New York Farmers’ Alliance was short-lived. Dominated as it was by large landowners and focusing on relief from high property taxes and freight rates, the Alliance never won a mass following. Farmers and laborers who were impatient with its nonpartisan approach and its concentration on the transportation issue found a more congenial home in the Greenback Party (1878) and in the new Antimonopoly League (1881).” 5 “The founders who gathered at the Rochester courthouse and at John Allen’s farm did not invent Populism. Neither the form nor the content of their movements were brand-new. Both drew upon techniques for mobilizing people and for channeling their enthusiasm that were understood in communities across the land…Both struggled with a political dilemma that had bedeviled workingmen’s organizations since the 1830s: in a nation where a two-party system prevailed and where individual citizens took partisan identity ​very seriously, how could an interest group express its grievances politically without being destroyed by partisan controversy, and what happens when both major parties ignore its petitions? Finally, these two short-lived organizations, like scores and even hundreds of other community-based movements, were called into being by the transformation of American capitalism amidst the economic social trauma of the 1870s.” 7 “since Populism was a major force in three very different regions of the country (the South, the Great Plains, and the Mountain West), the answer to the question “Who were the Populists? depends on where you look.” 9 “John D. Hicks…Located the source of Populism in the economic distress of farmers on the Great Plains frontier and in the depressed kingdoms of cotton and tobacco. In the 1880s and 1890s southern and western farmers, already locked into an agricultural market economy over which they exercised little control, were hit hard by a series of financial shocks: falling commodity prices, high freight rates, and expensive credit, compounded by capricious acts of nature, especially crippling droughts that parched the West from Texas to Canada in the mid-1880s.” 10 “If ​The Populist Revolt made the case that Populism was on movement with branches in the South and West, C. Vann Woodward’s biography of a leading southern Populist confirmed that view…​Tom Watson​, ​Agrarian Rebel made the case the southern farmers, like their western counterparts, were driven to Populism by legitimate economic grievances. Economic self-interest could bring farmers from the late Confederacy into political alignment with farmers who had made war on the South. IT was even possible, despite the racial “settlement” symbolized by President Hayes’s withdrawal of troops, that white Southerners would make common cause with former slaves.” 10 “Populists, we must acknowledge, were not immune to the racism that saturated American culture.” 11 “Where Hicks and Woodward saw a rational reform-minded protest movement, Viereck detected something more sinister: “Beneath the sane economic demands of the Populists of 1880-1900 seethed a mania of xenophobia, Jew-baiting, intellectual-baiting and thought-controlling lynch-spirit. Rural people, worried about their declining social status in an urbanizing society, were drawn to an irrational crusade that fanned their prejudices and led to scapegoating and even violence rather than to legislative remedies for economic grievances.” 12 “Farmers had willingly entered the modern world of commerce in pursuit of the main chance, but when the terms of trade went against them they sought comfort in the agrarian myth of an earlier and simpler time when those who toiled in the earth were thought to be closest to God. It is in this irrational retreat from the consequences of their own actions that Hofstadter finds the Populist movement “to foreshadow some great aspects of the cranky pseudo-conservativism of our time.” ​Status anxiety made people Populists, ​Hofstadter concluded.” 12-13 “Hofstadter’s own analysis has been subject to four challenges. First, critics have charged that the study of Populist rhetoric from which he drew his negative conclusions was restricted to a handful of texts that were not proven to be representative of the movement…Second, most social historians now agree that rural America was not a disorganized, atomistic “mass society” ripe

57 for the demagoguery of an American Hitler, but was in fact blanketed by a thick network of community and familial associations. Third, while the Populists’ cultural traditions did look backward to an earlier rural America, they were not “dysfunctional.” Their values and beliefs were part and parcel of the radical republicanism that was, even in the late nineteenth century, a vital force among working people in America. And fourth, the theoretical perspective upon which Hofstadter’s work rested assumes that the natural state of society is one of harmony among its constituent parts. Conflict and protest occur when there are temporary strains in the social structure caused by rapid social change. The source of protest is thus located in the protesters themselves: protest is an irrational response to change.” 13 Sources: ​organizational literature, speeches, platforms, journals, newspapers, county records Connections: Woodward, ​Origins​, Ayers, ​Promise​, Hosfstadter, ​Age​, Sanders, ​Roots​, Cashman, ​America​, Sinclair, ​Prohibition, Cronon, Nature’s​, Faragher, ​Sugar, West, ​Contested, ​Limerick, ​Conquest​, Johnson, ​Roaring​, Rauchway, ​Murdering, Blessed​, Hays, ​Response​, Kloppenberg, ​Uncertain,​ Rodgers, ​Atlantic​, Willrich, ​City​, Wiebe, ​Search William Cronon, ​Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West​ (1991) Argument: ​“My contention is that no city played a more important role in shaping the landscape and economy of the mid-continent during the second half of the nineteenth century than Chicago.” Xv ● First nature is composed of concrete ideas; geography, ecology, and frontier. ● Second nature an abstraction—capital infrastructure built into exploit 1​st​ nature-railroads, telegraph, stockyards, grain elevators. ● First and Second nature concepts try to avoid the declensionist interpretation but they aren’t completely successful. He is declensionist in that these system are corrupt—he tries to be neutral but you can tell that he feels that environmental degradation is bad. ● Class is important in this book but not as important as it should be given the Populist Movement, labor strife, he dismisses manufacturing that is not done with nature. He talks about the forces that create the Populist Movement such as railroads, wheat demand for Chicago, producing more for less, and people away from the rail lines get charged more to ship for the market. ● Capitalism is the driving force of environmental change. ● He introduces the concept of Second Nature into the historiography, he also introduces urban factories as a factor in rural development and before this environmental history had not done urban history before—you cannot divorce the urban environment from rural environment. ● Consumers become distanced from the products they produce which makes them more distant from nature. He also rejects the “Frontier Thesis” and agrees with Van Thunen, which means that at the center of the city the land is most expensive and the land gets cheaper as you go out. Therefore you need to have high profit industries in cities. Van Thunen is also like center-periphery theory—Central Place Theory. ● Cronon does have a revulsion for the city but this book is an attempt to overcome this. ● Grain altered into a liquid commodity with new technology of the grain elevator. By making grain liquid in Chicago merchants made it abstract and removed it from the landscape—Grain was no longer tied to a geographic place but to a grade. ● Modifies Turner by showing how Chicago became bustling city from nothing avoiding Turner’s sequence of events. Chicago develops with nothing in the middle. Turner states that everything before Chicago should have developed first. Then in rings civilization follows the railroad East and West in the middle. Chicago is started by Eastern Capital to get people to go west and grow items for their factories and populations. ● In the city life is labor intensive. On the country farms its land intensive work. ● Alison thinks that the critical point here is that Chicago developed before the railroad, thereby challenging Turner’s thesis, and that labor in the city became labor intensive while labor on farms became land intensive. Also, as city land became more expensive, rings of urbanization developed around the city. As the railroad expanded, more and more people were in contact with the city. Also as Chicago set the price of grain and other farm goods, the Populists get mad because speculators on liquidity of crops, not the producer of crops, gets the profit.

Sources: ​Financial records, catalogs, railroad records Connections: ​McMath, ​American, ​Sanders, ​Roots, Isenberg, ​Destruction​, West, ​Contested​, Limerick, ​Legacy, ​Faragher, ​Sugar​, Warren, Buffalo Bill, ​Leach, ​Land, ​Monkkonen, ​America, ​Smith, ​Urban Disorder Andrew C. Isenberg, ​The Destruction of the Bison (​2000) Argument: ​“This book is a history of the interactions among ecology, economy, and culture that led to the near-extermination of the bison, the dominant species of the historic Great Plains.” 4 Indians, Euroamericans, and nature contributed the bison’s demise. The US government encouraged destruction of the bison to remove the Indians from the Plains and make them sedentary. ● “A host of economic, cultural, and ecological factors herded the bison toward their near-extinction. That diverse assembly of factors first emerged in the middle of the eighteenth century from ongoing encounters among Indians, Euroamericans, and the Great Plains environment. Those encounters were both a ​process of intercultural and ecological exchange and an interaction between people and a ​place​, the nonhuman natural environment.” 1 ● “Indian and Euroamerican hunters pushed the [bison] species to the brink of extinction for commercial profit.” 2

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“More than a capitalist economy’s demand for natural resources caused the near-extinction of the bison. The volatile grassland environment itself was a factor; drought, cold, predators, and the competition of other grazing animals accounted for much of the decline.” 2 “Largely in reaction to the European’s introduction of the horse (which facilitated bison hunting), Old World diseases (which discouraged a sedentary life), and the fur trade (which encouraged specialization as hunters), some Indian groups reinvented themselves as equestrian nomads in the high plains. These adaptations left the newly nomadic societies dependent on the bison, a species vulnerable to depletion by overhunting and drought. In the mid-nineteenth century, the combination of Indian predation and environmental change decimated the bison.” 2-3 “Beginning in the 1840s, the presence of increasing numbers of Euroamericans in the plains displaced the bison from their customary habitats. Livestock belonging to Euroamerican emigrants on the Oregon-California and Santa Fe trails degraded the valleys of the Platte and Arkansas rivers. More important, between 1870 and 1883, Euroamerican hunters slaughtered millions of bison. Federal authorities supported the hunt because they saw the extermination of the bison as a means to force Indians to submit to the reservation system. “ 3 “Although Eastern preservationists at the turn of the century decided the wastefulness of the hid hunters, they nonetheless yearned for the bygone era that the hide hunters had epitomized. Their desire to preserve the bison as a living memorial to a romanticized frontier in Euroamerican conquest animated their mission to save the species from extinction.” 3 “In the 1870s and early 1880s, the effort by the newly founded Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to halt Euroamerican hid hunters’ destruction of the bison reflected the emergence of a feminized rhetoric of moral reform. The installation of bison in managed preserves in the early twentieth century by the American Bison Society emerged from a concern by the officers of that organization that masculine virtues were on the wane in urban America. To reverse that decline, the Society resolved to preserve the bison as a reminder of frontier manliness.” 5 “The destruction of the bison was party of a global decline of mammalian diversity in the nineteenth century.” 6 “Indians in the plains initiated the decline of bison when they adopted the most useful of Old World domesticated species, the horse. In the plains, horses not only facilitated hunting, but they competed with the bison for scarce water and forage. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, bison preservationists saw their work as a repudiation of the commercial slaughter of the herds. Yet in important ways they were complicit in the transformation of plains fauna from feral to domesticated. The enclosed, managed preserves they established made semi-domesticates of the remnant bison who had survived the nineteenth century.” 6 “Environmental factors such as overgrazing and diseases brought by domestic livestock certainly contributed to the destruction of the bison, but they were inextricably connected to the human economies that introduced domesticated species to the plains.

Human societies were so bound to the plains environment in the nineteenth century that there were few purely environmental or anthropogenic causes of the bison’s destruction.” 6 The bison were constantly moving. “This mobility was the greatest challenge to the bison hunters’ subsistence. The inevitable consequence of the western plains Indians’ year-round reliance on the bison was nearly year-round mobility.” 9 “They knew their land well, defended it from outsiders, and made ingenious use of resources to maximize productivity: for example, firing grasses to attract game and anticipating the bison’s seasonal movements between river valleys and high plains.

Like nomads of Eurasia and Africa, they did not exist in isolation from sedentary societies; indeed, they relied on trade contacts with agriculturalists. They had not permanent homes, but they were not homeless; they made habitual use of their favorite sites for winter and summer camps. The Indians’ mobility was not primitive but a creative use of the land.” 10 “Insofar as the nomads of the western plains were concerned, the notion of aboriginal environmentalism holds that the Indians hunted bison only when necessary and wasted no parts of their kills. Mounted bison hunting was not a time-honored practice, however, but rather an eighteenth-century improvisation that the western plains Indians continued to revise during the nineteenth century. Moreover, like other Native American groups that relied on the hunting of large mammals—whales, seals, and caribous, for instance—the nomadic bison hunters sometimes wasted large amounts of their kills.” 10 “The hardy short grasses endured despite low precipitation; the bison survived on the meager carbohydrates and the sparse water that the region offered. When Euroamericans first came to the Great Plains, the bison—short-grasses environment was well over 10,000 years old. Yet the semi-arid climate also periodically wreaked havoc on its dominant plant and animal species. In wet years tall grasses invaded the western plains. During droughts, both shortgrasses and considerable numbers of bison died. The western plains, form this perspective, were prone to frequent and pronounced ecological instability.” 11 “The environmental history of the destruction of the bison thus united two meta-narratives of eighteenth and nineteenth-century history. First, imperial expansion brought Europeans, their economic system, an their biota into worldwide contact with non-Europeans. The conquest of indigenous peoples in North America was duplicated in South America, southern Africa, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. Second, the migration of European people, plants, animals, and economies overseas occasioned a global decline in biological diversity. Ultimately, European domesticated animals supplanted indigenous wildlife in many parts of the world. Domesticated livestock’s displacement of bison in the Great Plains was but one example of this pattern of ecological simplification.” 193

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“The causes of the destructions of the bison were inextricably both anthropogenic and environmental. The rise if Indian commercial hunting, for instance, was rooted in a host of ecological forces, including the incursion of horses and disease into the western plains. In the 1870s, drought was most devastating to the bison where cattle ranches prevented the bison from migrating in search of forage.” 196 Sources: ​ecological, anthropological Connections​: Cronon, ​Nature’s​, McMath, ​American​, West, ​Contested​, Limerick, ​Legacy​, Faragher, ​Sugar​, Warren, ​Buffalo Bill Elliott West, ​The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado​ (1998) Argument: “The great stampeded changed the plains at least as much as the mountains, and yet we have kept our gaze on what was rushed ​to rather than what was rushed ​over​…The Indians’ disaster could not possibly be explained simply by the sudden invasion of goldseekers and townmakers. Indians were partly responsible for their own difficulties…A few themes run clearly through this story: the ancient past of he plains and the mountains, the dense connections between Indian and white histories, and the continuous conversation between human action and its wondrously varied environment.” Xvii-Xviii ● “In 1858 gold was discovered along streams flowing out of the Rockies, and the next year more than 100,000 persons flooded across the plains to the new diggings. The Colorado gold rush attracted more than twice the number of persons who crossed to California in 1849. The scale of the event was impressive, the results profound, the details colorful.” Xv ● “The eastern Kansas that Sumner found on his return was not the one he had left. During the Cheyenne campaign American financial centers were swept by one of the most severe business panics of the century. The trouble started in midsummer with a calamitous decline of gold reserves in English banks, a hemorrhaging of specie that drove up London discount rate to such delicious levels that investors began shedding American securities and buying short-term English bonds. That drove down the prices of U.S. stocks, especially those in railroads. These investments represented many of the assets beneath most major banks and financial houses, and as the market nosed steadily downward, directors of these institutions grew increasingly nervous.” 6 ● “By the end of the year, the nation was in a full-blown depression. The panic alone was not to blame. The economy was badly overextended. The enormous output of California gold had doubled the amount of money in circulation and pushed prices steeply upward. The lusty growth of the 1850s had produced more goods than the public could buy, while the orgy of railroad construction far surpassed the needs of the day, and people invested merely on an imagined future. The panic of 1857 simply made the collapse more rapid and dramatic.” 6-7 ● “The devastation was much worse in some areas than in others. The South, protected by healthy prices for cotton on the Continent, suffered the least; secessionists soon would point to their immunity as proof the Dixie could go its own way. The middle Atlantic states and the Northeast were hit much harder, especially major financial centers. In New York City 40,000 jobless workers marched through the streets with banners reading “We Want Work” and “Hunger Is a Sharp Thorn.” In November the US district attorney called in troops to protect government property.” 7 ● “The full cuff of the depression was felt in the Midwest and the middle border. Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin were hit hard, and Iowa, Missouri, and the new state of Kansas even harder. By a rough justice, these states suffered most because they had prospered most during the past several years. If the United States grew prodigiously during the 1850s, far and away its lustiest expansion came in the lower Ohio valley and especially on the middle border.” 7 ● “From the 1820s to the 1850s, the Anglo-American frontier pressed out of the trans-Appalachian country and poured its families into the lower Ohio valley, western Great Lakes, the Mississippi valley, and the first tier of states beyond it.” 7 ● “Beginning tentatively in the early 1840s, then surging in 1849, emigrants to the Pacific Coast and Utah traveled up the Platte River on the great overland trail, also called the California and Oregon Trail. River ports on the Missouri saw themselves as launching places for traders and travelers. In 1854 this region felt a new surge of growth when Kansas and Nebraska were organized as territories.” 7 ● “The great majority of settlers stayed within 100 miles of the Missouri line…the region immediately to the east was growing almost as rapidly...Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Indiana grew by another million. Encouraging this headlong rush was the rising price of farm products, which were higher between 1854 and 1857 than they had been since 1818 and would be until the middle of the Civil War.” 8 ● “These years also saw an extraordinary expansion of the nation’s railroad system, and again the most frenzied growth was in the Midwest and the middle border. Indiana and Illinois together added more miles of track than the five mid-Atlantic states; Missouri and Iowa laid more than New England. Virtually all this construction ran generally to the west, linking the well-established systems of New York and Pennsylvania with cities of the Ohio valley and beyond. By the late 1850s, eight railroads offered passage to the Mississippi River…Construction in the South, though less vigorous, had a similar effect. A new line out of Chattanooga linked systems of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia with Memphis, and the Illinois Central connected New Orleans and Mississippi with Memphis and St. Louis.” 8-9 ● “Unfortunately, this feverish development came with a cost. Like all rapidly growing regions, the middle border lived by credit.

Farmers were “buying more land, buying machinery, carriages, sewing machines, melodeons, and fine furniture and generally running into debt”…farms were heavily mortgaged, businesses financed by loans, and keeping up with this debt demanded a brisk exchange of goods. Much of that business, furthermore, was done with notes issued by western banks, and the commercial

60 flow relied partly on faith that those banknotes were worth what they said they were. Ultimately, everything was buoyed by a general optimism; things kept going because people believed they would keep going.” 9 ● “But the battle on the Solomon and the panic of 1857 are reminders that no clean frontier existed between ways of life, between change and stasis, except in the minds of people.” 12 ● “The collapsing banks and frantic speculators were just one result of the explosive growth that for generations had unsettled the American interior. That turbulence had brought both crisis and opportunity to the Cheyennes and to other plains tribes and indeed had drawn them into the country they now considered their rightful homes. Various details of the clash along the Solomon—the Cheyennes’ horses and weapons and clothing, the cavalry’s methods, the presence of Delaware scouts, and even the name they went by—were grown from stories, folded together, that tied bison hunters to bond agents.” 12-13 ● “Sumners scrap and the panic of 1857, however, had more in common than a general involvement in the shared history of the continent’s peoples. They were preludes to a transforming moment in western and American history. Sumner’s victory at first hit painfully at the Cheyennes, but its influence, as usual, bled into white society to the east. It persuaded people there that the plains and the mountains beyond were suddenly a much safer and more alluring place to look for the main chance, whatever that might be. Whites thought they could probe western Kansas for possibilities without ending up as a story around a Cheyenne campfire. Simultaneously, the panic and depression gave tens of thousands of persons good reason to chase whatever possibilities came from reaching into this latest frontier.” 13 ● “One of the continent’s most remarkable stories, that of the nomadic plains Indians and their brilliantly imaginative culture, took a cataclysmic turn. In less than a decade the region was re-shaped—and more important, re-envisioned. The manic quest for gold and the rapidly spreading consequences gave mid-America a wholly new meaning within the continent and the nation.” 13 ● “In the summer of the gold rush a vicious drought set in, and in some places virtually no rain fell between June 1859 and February 1861. The more thickly settled counties close the Missouri suffered, but the worse effects were to the west among new emigrants on the edge of the plains. Fields in some areas yielded fewer than three bushels of corn and acre. Farther west cavalry reported Walnut and Cow Creeks and the Smoky Hill perfectly dry and the highland forage wispy at best; they often walked toe save their weakened, wobbly horses. As one rainless month followed another, farmers deserted the land. Many headed east, many for the goldfields, some onto the plains.” 327 Sources:​ anthropologic, newspapers, military papers, booster propaganda Connections:​ Cronon, ​Nature’s​, Isenberg, ​Destruction​, McMath, ​American,​ Limerick, ​Legacy​, Faragher, ​Sugar​, Warren, ​Buffalo Bill

​Patricia Nelson Limerick, ​The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West Argument: ​With no Revolution or Civil War-like watershed moment, Western historians needed to create a pivotal moment on which the history of the American West could be based. Turner created that moment with the closing of the frontier in 1890 in his “Frontier Thesis.” “”Population in the West,” Harold Simonson wrote, “had reached the figure of at least two persons per square mile, the basis for calling an area settled.” This is an odd definition. If population density is the measure of a frontier condition, then the existence of a city, a town, or even a small mining camp closes the frontier for that site. One could easily argue the opposite—that a sudden concentration of population marks the opening stage and that a population lowered through, for instance, the departure of people from a used-up mining region marks the end of the frontier and its opportunities.” 23 ● “The three big afflictions burdening the field [of Western American History]: [1] A focus on the westward movement of white men had obscured the fact that people converged on the American West from every starting point on the planet. The remedy was an easy one: reallocate attention to minorities, Indian people, Mexicans and Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and African Americans, and pay attention to the difference between women’s and men’s experiences, whatever their ethnicity…[2] A misguided and widespread preoccupation with the “end of the frontier” in 1890 has broken Western history into two disconnected parts: the distinctive frontier West (sometimes known as the Old West or even the Wild West) and the homogeneous, just-one-part-of-the-nation West. Here, too, an antidote quickly offered itself: recognized that the events of the nineteenth century shaped every dimension of Western life in the twentieth (and now twenty-first) century, and then put this reconnection to work in helping us to understand our own times. [3] The fuzzy and forgiving term “frontier” had drawn our attention from what westward expansion had meant to native people, as well as citizens of the Mexican North, and to the natural environment. But a quick dose of honesty could cure this problem: accept the applicability of the sharp and honest term “conquest” to the United States’ westward expansion, and national self-understanding would be beneficially enhanced.” 6-7 ● “Behind these diagnoses and prescriptions were two primary goals: to assert the value and vitality of the field of Western history by freeing it of tired and anachronistic habits of thought, and to present a more honest and revealing version of the past to public audiences, challenging the tyranny of academic jargon and specialization.” 7 ● “When Western historians yielded to a preoccupation with the frontier and its supposed end, past and present fell apart, divided by the watershed of 1890.” 18 ● “Like slavery, conquest tested the ideals of the United States. Conquest deeply affected both the conqueror and the conquered, just as slavery shaped the slaveholder and slave. Both historical experiences left deep imprints on particular regions and on the nation at large. The legacy of slavery and the legacy of conquest endure, shaping events in our own time.” 18

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“The center of American history, [Frederick Jackson] Turner had argued, was actually to be found at its edges. As the American people proceeded westward, “the frontier [was] the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization” and “the line of most effective and rapid Americanization.” The struggle with the wilderness turned Europeans into Americans, a process Turner made the central story of American history: “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.” But American development came to an unsettling close when the 1890 census revealed the no vast tracts of land remained for American conquest. “And now,” Turner noted at the conclusion of his essay, “four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has come the first period of American history.”” 20-21 From “the concept “frontier”…Exploration, fur trade, overland travel, farming, mining, town founding, merchandising, grazing, logging—the diverse activities in the nineteenth-century West were all supposed to fit into the category.” 21 “English-speaking white men were the stars of his story; Indians, Hispanics, French Canadians, and Asians were at best supporting actors and at worse invisible. Nearly as invisible were women, of all ethnicities. Turner was also primarily concerned with agrarian settlement and folk democracy in the comparatively well watered Midwest. Deserts, mountains, mines, towns, cities, railroads, territorial government, and the institutions of commerce and finance never found much of a home in his model.” 21 “Thus, a central irony: the very vitality of Western research, by exploding the [frontier thesis] model, made mainstream historians declare that the field [of Western History] was dead.” 22 “The fact remained: the West never went to war for its independence. There is, of course, plenty of revolutionary rhetoric: complaints of exploitation and colonialism; comparisons of the Department of the Interior to the ministers of George III; laments over autonomy lost to meddling bureaucrats—but no confederation of Western states, no war for independence, and thus no watershed comparable to the Revolution or the Civil War.” 23 “Left without a major turning point, Western historians had to create one. The opening and closing of the frontier were set up like flags marking the start and finish of a racecourse, to give the West its significant chronology.” 23 “The frontier is obviously worth studying as a historical artifact. The idea played an enormous role in national behavior, but so did the ideas of savagery and civilization, concepts that are currently not well respected as analytic terms…My point is that the historian is obligated to understand how people saw their own times, but not obligated to adopt their terminology and point of view. That one may study how Westerners depended on the Colt repeating revolver is not an argument for using a gun in professional debate.” 25 “If we give up a preoccupation with the frontier and look instead at the continuous sweep of Western American history, new organizing ideas await our attention, but no simple, unitary model. Turner’s frontier rested on a single point of view; it required that the observer stand in the East and look to the West.” 25-26 “Reorganized, the history of the West is a study of a place undergoing conquest and never fully escaping its consequences. In these terms, it has distinctive features as well as features it shares with the histories of other parts of the nation and the planet.”26 “First, the American West was an important meeting ground, the point where Indian America, Latin America, Anglo-America, Afro-America, and Asia intersected. In race relations, the West could make the turn-of-the-century Northeaster urban confrontation between European immigrants and American nativists look like a family reunion. Similarly, in diversity of languages, religions, and cultures, it surpassed the South.” 27 “Second, the workings of conquest tied these diverse groups into the same story. Happily or not, minorities and majorities occupied a common ground. Conquest basically involved the drawing of lines on a map, the definition and allocation of ownership (personal, tribal, corporate, state, federal, and international), and the evolution of land from matter to property. The process had two stages: the initial drawing of the lines (which we have usually called the frontier stage) and the subsequent giving of meaning and power to those lines, which is still under way. Race relations parallel the distribution of property, the application of labor and capital to make the property productive, and the allocation of profit.” 27 “The contest for property and profit has been accompanied by a contest for cultural dominance. Conquest also involved a struggle over languages, cultures, and religions; the pursuit of legitimacy in property overlapped with the pursuits of legitimacy in way of life and point of view. In a variety of matters, but especially in the unsettled questions of Indian assimilation and in the disputes over bilingualism and immigration in the still semi-Hispanic Southwest, this contest for cultural dominance remains a primary unresolved issue of conquest.” 27 “Western American history carried considerably significance for American history as a whole…Cultural pluralism and responses to race form primary issues in American social relations, and the American West—with its diversity of Indian tribes, Hispanics, Euro-Americans of every variety, and blacks—was a crucial case study in American race relations. The involvement of the federal government in the economy and the resulting dependence, resentment, and deficit have become major issues in American history and in contemporary politics, and the American West was the arena in which an expanded role for the federal government first took hold. Cycles of prosperity and recession have long characterized the American economy, and in that long-running game of crack-the-whip, the West has been at the far end of the whip, providing the prime example of boom/bust instability of capitalism.” 27-29

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“Beyond its national role, Western America has its own regional significance. Remoteness from both New York and Washington D.C; the presence of most of the nation’s Indian reservations; proximity to Mexico; ports opening to the Pacific Basin and Asia; dependence on natural-resource extraction; the undergoing of conquest at a time when the American nation was both fully formed and fully self-conscious; the association of the region with a potent and persistent variety of nationalistic myth; the aridity of many areas; all these factors give Western America its own, intrinsic historical significance.” 30 Sources:​ Secondary, it’s a synthesis Connections:​ Cronon, ​Nature’s​, Isenberg, ​Destruction​, West, ​Contested​, McMath, ​American​, Faragher, ​Sugar​, Warren, ​Buffalo Bill John Mack Faragher, ​Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prarie​ (1986) Argument: “Refuting the tradition view that pioneers were highly individualistic, Faragher contends that most of the early settlers of Sugar Creek had a strong commitment to community and that subsequent generations continued that commitment.” 205, Smith ● “Faragher maintains that kinship was extremely important in the early development of Sugar Creek. Cooperation in all kinds of activities by closely related families was the rule rather than the exception. As the community grew, however, certain families acquired greater wealth, prestige, and influence than others. Not surprisingly, the more successful families played a greater role in community affairs. Members of these families became church leaders, occasionally successful merchants, and local and county officials. Their landholdings increased while those of some newcomers and children and grandchildren of less fortunate earlier settlers declined. By 1850 many fo the area’s poorest farmers were tenants.” 206, Smith ● “Whereas Turner emphasizes the independence of the pioneer and the “unique and exceptional” aspects of westering, Faragher prefers to view the settlement process as “folk migration.” Individual mobility was high, but he maintains that migration was a family process and that representatives of departing families remained in the community in sufficient numbers to provide a persistent core.” 440, Bouge ● Faragher’s “book is divided into five parts that focus on the dispossession of Algonquin-speaking peoples (Kickapoo) from the Sugar Creek region, the process of European settlement, family life and relations between men and women, the communal nature of frontier society, and the transition to commercial agriculture.” 1348, Merrill ● “First, the European settlers did not simply have to clear the land of trees to grow their first crops. They had also to uproot a people who were keenly attached to the land as the new settlers would become. Second, the communities those “pioneers” (“foot-soldiers who cleared the way for an army”) created were based on fellowship, both figuratively and literally…The newcomers depended on that social support to establish themselves in the first years of settlement. Still, the frontier was a man’s world, and the dominant forms of fellowship were a male preserve…(Faragher is careful to point out that frontier women develop their own forms of conviviality and social support. Even so, he acknowledges, the farmer had a point.) Finally, Faragher helps locate the transition to commercial agriculture within the real history of the American countryside, in particular by showing that the most prosperous and successful farm families were not necessarily the most commercialized. On the contrary, small property holders of relatively modest ambitions and members of large extended families were far less vulnerable to the vagaries of the market than either the unpropertied laboring classes or the monied entrepreneurs for whom enough was never enough.” 1348-1349, Merrill ● “Westerners confronted the pressing realities of a settler society and an encroaching market. There were also the challenges of mass, democratic politics and religious diversity. But there was also much that was traditional. As they had been for centuries, the family and the household were the building blocks of society. The household was also the workplace, and the sexual division marked a line of great stratification in the ordering of work and authority. Endogamy resulted in kin relations that bound local households into what some have called “kinship relations that bound local households into what some have called “kinship communities.” Religion and the local church were of overwhelming importance for the way people thought and acted.”

Xv ● “Sugar Creek was a settler society, a minor example of the dynamic and fearful expansion of European civilization. As such, its very foundation anticipated change and transformation—from Algonquin to Anglo-American, from subsistence to commerce, from “wilderness” to “civilization.” Change, development, “improvement” were aspects of Sugar Creek’s history that have continued unabated to our own time.” 234 ● “The interstate highway has superseded the railroad, and ease of travel has turned much of local society into an anachronism.”

235 ● “The persistence of Irwin’s Grove as a site for extraordinary community gatherings for over a century and a half may stand as a symbol of the persistence of the original settler families themselves. In the Drennan’s Prairie neighborhood east of the grove, old families continued to hold substantial portions of the arable land and to participate in community institutions. From 1854 to 1913, half of the directors of the “Cherry Grove School,” near Irwin’s Park, were men from the Dodds, Barnes, Hutton, Irwin, and Mason families. And despite the influx of large numbers of Polish immigrants into the neighborhood to work the mines, at least a third of all the graduates of the school over the same period were descendants of original settlers. In 1914, half the land of Drennan’s Prairie remained in their hands.” 236 ● “By the second half of the nineteenth century…the settlers had accomplished much. They had transported a traditional social order to a new environment and had progressively transformed the landscape in way compatible with their own priorities. The

63 “semi-barbarism” that Fordham and others found amid the egalitarian conditions of the frontier had developed into the “civilization and refinement” of a society divided into classes of owner-operators, tenants, and hired laborers. The development of community was not contradicted by the regular turnover in the population of the creek. The community, in fact, assured the success of the persistent and the continuity of their culture amid the flux of change. Community did not “break down” with the approach of the modern world; community, in fact, provided a means of making the transition to it. Like the society that bound the households together, cultural sentiments along the creek were essentially traditional and conservative. Family and household remained the essential social building blocks; community continued to be constructed from the relations among kinship, neighborhood, and church. The individual, the celebrated achievement of western American culture, was surely important; but it was the community along Sugar Creek which prevailed.” 237 Sources:​ demographic sources, court records, early newspapers, memoirs of prominent Illinois citizens, and travel accounts Connections:​ Cronon, ​Nature’s​, Limerick, ​Legacy​, West, ​Contested​, Isenberg, ​Destruction​, McMath, ​American​, Warren, ​Buffalo Bill Susan Lee Johnson, ​Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush​ (2000) Argument: “Indeed the Gold Rush was not only among the most demographically male events in human history, it also—particularly as it transpired in the Southern Mines—was among the most multiracial, multiethnic, multinational events that had yet occurred within the boundaries of the United States.” It was also very gendered. 12 ● “It is the task of this book to both interrogate and to dismantle the stories white Americans have told themselves about the California Gold Rush, and to offer instead a pastiche of tales that will help us think as complexly and critically about the conquest of history as we have begun to think about the history of conquest.” 11 ● “I focus on the region that Gold Rush participants called the Southern Mines, or that area in the Sierra Nevada foothills drained by the San Joaquin River. The Southern Mines are particularly illuminating for my purposes because the region’s population was more diverse than that of the Northern Mines (the foothill area drained by the lower Sacramento River).” 11-12 ● “It is my contention that the Southern Mines have been neglected because the area fits dominant cultural memory of the Gold Rush—as it has evolved in the United States—less well. First, the south was by far the more demographically diverse region, in that Native Americans, Latin Americans, African Americas, East Asians, and Europeans frequently outnumbered Anglo Americans there. Second, it was the area that was less successful in following what came to be the expected trajectory of industrialization in western mining. The unruly history of the Southern Mines has stories of progress and opportunity that are linked to financial gain and identified with people racialized as white and gendered as male.” 316 ● “That one collective memory suggest the ways in which people named Murrieta have conceived of their past and the ways in which historians might further understand it. First, it is a past lived by women and men related to one another by marriage and by what is called blood; that is, it is a familial past of cousins, siblings, spouses, grandparents. Second, it is a past remembered primarily through the activities of men—mining, ranching, warring—and only incidentally through the deeds of women. Third, a historian might note, the Murrieta past is one of people living on the periphery, making commodities of natural resources and sending them off to more populated areas. Finally, it is a past of frontier people, of those in the New World who vied with native peoples for control of the land. This is the background against which occurred the troubles in California.” 29 ● “Mexicans from Sonora were among the first to arrive following on the heels of Californios and South Americans, as well as assorted North Americas and Europeans already in the territory.” 30 ● “Mexican women accompanied their menfolk to the diggings more frequently than women of any other immigrant group. After all, California was not women of any other immigrant group. After all, California was not only close to Mexico; until recently it had been ​part of Mexico. Once the gold region, the Murrieta clan, like a majority of Mexican gold seekers, went to work in the Southern mines.” 30 ● “Chances are, these women were not full-time gold washers; an ounce a day was not a particularly high take for 1848, and frustration at a half-dollar pan indicates that the second woman was hoping for a quick bonanza. Both probably mined in the time they could spare from their other tasks.” 30 ● “The other tasks must have been formidable, too. Although Mexican women were not so rare as Anglo American or European women in the mines, even among Mexicans, men made up the majority of immigrants. As a result, women’s perceived capabilities were in demand…a female servant not only cooked for her own party but sold frijoles and tortillas to other minors for one peso a plate…Both Mexican and non-Mexican men ate food prepared according to Mexican practices…Likewise, Mexican women not only washed the clothing of those with whom they had come to the mines but sold their laundry services to men who traveled without women.” 30-31 ● “The story of nativist agitation in the diggings is a complicated one, but Anglo American opposition to Mexicans in the mines took three basic forms: individual incidents of harassment; mining district “laws” that excluded Mexicans and other non-U.S. citizens from particular areas; and a statewide foreign miners’ tax, approved in 1850, that charged foreign nationals twenty dollars a month to work the placers.” 31-32 ● “If any group of people suffered most at the heads of thieves and murderers, it was the newest immigrants to the Southern Mines: Chinese men.” 34

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“The process by which Anglo Americans came to terms with Asian immigration in part by assimilating Chinese men to dominate notions of female gender is a complicated one, but one aspect of the invidious process began here, where white men momentarily proclaimed themselves defenders of Chinese miners.” 35 ● “To Anglos, particularly those from the northeastern United States, Joaquin had all the fortitude and bravery of a man, but none of the conscience, all of the lively impulses of a man, but none of the self-control. He was both “daring and reckless,” his deeds both “bold and heartless.” His thieving ways further challenged the emerging discourse of manliness by lampooning the belief that success, increasingly defined as economic gain, resulted from hard work and prudent plans.” 35 ● “For Anglo Americans, Joaquin must have been a sort of gender nightmare, embodying the potency of manhood without its customary restraints…For Anglo men, Joaquin was like their own worst selves set loose in the diggings—dark, sensual, impulsive, out of control.” 35 ● “The short-lived foreign miners’ tax of 1850, which similarly had sought to contain and control the Mexican presence in the diggings, had been a fiasco; so many Sonorans simply headed for home that commerce in the Southern Mines collapsed.” 37 ● “All sorts of U.S. men—northern men, free blacks, and displaced American Indians—had gone to California in search of gold, and most likely many sorts of American men joined the war on Joaquin. The particular discourse of manliness that pervaded newspaper accounts of 1853 indicates that northern, white, aspiring middle-class men were prominent actors in the struggle not only to catch the bandits but to mold perceptions of the problem of banditry as well.” 41 ● “I have tried to create a vivid but also mercurial picture of the decade at its midpoint in order to persuade you that the Gold Rush, particularly as it occurred in California’s Southern Mines, marked a time and place of tremendous contest about maleness and femaleness, about color and culture, and about wealth and power…All over the gold regions, the relative absence of women, the overwhelming presence of men of many nations and colors and creeds, and the wild fluctuation of local ecnomies ensured that white, American-born, Protestant men who aspired to middle-class status would be anxious about issues of gender, of race and culture, and of class. After all, many such men assumed that they, collectively, should subdue and rule the newest territorial acquisition of the United States.” 51 ● “By 1858, enough stories had been told about the Gold Rush that the event had been domesticated in both sense of the word: Anglo Americans had come to understand the Gold Rush in the context of nineteenth-century domestic ideology, and they also had claimed the event as a domestic episode—an episode in national history. That is to say that the diggings became as familiar a trope for fevered coupling of material gain and moral hazard as the city had become—a place where a man might “make himself,” but where he also might lose himself and his moral bearings to the excesses of a changing economy.” 322 Sources:​ journals, newspapers, pamphlets, novels, trials Connections:​ Limerick, ​Legacy​, West, ​Contested​, Isenberg, ​Destruction​, Warren, ​Buffalo Bill Louis S. Warren, ​Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show​ (2005) Argument: ​“Thus, Buffalo Bill’s show community became a touchstone for Americans seeking to understand their own rapidly urbanizing, racially conflicted, industrial communities and country, and for Europeans contemplating a host of concerns, including industrialism, colonialism, race progress, and race decay.” xv ● “For generations of Americans and Europeans, Buffalo Bill defined the meaning of American history and American identity.

From California to Main, and from Wales to Ukraine, crowds who came to see Buffalo Bill’s Wilde West show spoke so widely and fervently about it for years afterward that it became a defining cultural memory—or dream—of America.” Xi ● “Where the frontier centaur was wonderful to nineteenth-century Americans, to the generation raised on Vietnam he became, like so many frontiersmen, a very different type of monster. For many, his role in the wars against American Indians and in the near extermination of the buffalo made him a figure of revulsion. In Arthur Penn’s 1970 film, ​Little Big Man​, his character made a cameo appearance as a crass destroyer of Indian lifeway and a grasping materialist.” Xi ● “This book explores Cody’s real achievements, but also his many fabrications, less with an air of categorizing Cody as a real or fake than to understand how and why he mixed the two. Contemporary arguments over Cody’s truthfulness or heroism (or lack thereof) mirrored much wider debates about the meaning of the Far West, and the trustworthiness of the organs of popular culture through which most Americans learned about it: newspapers, advertising, literature, painting, and theater. William Cody’s method of promoting his real achievements was to mingle them with colorful fictions, making his own life and myth almost (but not quite) indistinguishable to a public that was sometimes awestruck, sometimes skeptical, but almost invariably amused by his artistic pose as the real embodiment of public fantasy.” Xiii ● “A key feature of my approach is to explore the most intimate social bond in Cody’s life, his marriage, which began during his time in frontier Kansas and continued through all his years in show business. Having a respectable family was fundamental to Cody’s appeal for his earliest entertainment patrons. As he developed a public image as defender of the white family, his private life as patriarch of a real family became wedded to his authenticity. Thus the tensions and divisions within that marriage, which was often troubled, offer us a valuable, and seldom seen, window into the personal cost of maintaining the illusion of a life lived in accordance with national myth.” Xiv ● “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show could not have functioned had it not become the destination for dozens of Pawnee Indians, and subsequently for hundreds of Lakota Souix (including Sitting Bull, who toured with the show in 1885). Just as important was

65 the show’s appeal to American cowboys, Mexicans vaqueros, women (including not only Annie Oakley but Indian women, too), and, later, Cossacks, gauchos, and others. These show performers necessarily shaped Cody’s performance imagination, leading him to reshape his personal mythology and his life story accordingly.” Xiv ● “This traveling show community, which required three trains to move the cast, props, animals, and equipment, including electric generators and a traveling kitchen, was more racially integrated than any real western towns.” Xv Sources: ​newspapers, dime novels, poems, movies, court proceedings, journals Connections:​ Johnson, ​Roaring Camp​, Limerick, ​Legacy​, West, ​Contested​, Isenberg, ​Destruction​, Faragher, ​Sugar,​ Cronon, ​Nature’s Daniel T. Rodgers, ​Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age​ (1998) Argument: ​“The making of the Atlantic era in social politics hinged on a new set of institutional connections with the industrializing nations of Europe. It required new sorts of brokers to span that connection. It required, finally, an intellectual shift, a sense of complicity within historical forces larger than the United States: a suspension of confidence in the peculiar dispensation of the United Stats from the fate of other nations.” 4 ● “The first aim of these pages, then, is to reconstruct a distinctive era in the American past, in which American social politics were tied to social political debate and endeavors in Europe through a web of rivalry and exchange.” 5 ● “Atlantic-era social politics had its origins not in its nation-state containers, not in a hypothesized “Europe” nor an equally imagined “America,” but in the world between them.” 5 ● “A key outpost for European trade and a magnet for European capital, the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century United States cannot be understood outside the North Atlantic economy of which it was a part.” 1-2 ● What Rodgers is saying is that the members of the liberal consensus were outward not inward looking. New Dealers wanted to borrow ideas and make them American. ● Rodgers does not talk about populists because they are not looking toward Europe. ● “Modern Liberalism in the United States—Arthur Schlesinger Jr., described it by saying, “there emerged the conception of a social welfare state, in which the national government had the express obligation to maintain high levels of employment in the economy, to supervise standards of life and labor, to regulate the methods of business competition, and to establish comprehensive patterns of social security.” Wikipedia ● Liberalism—popular sovereignty, consent of the governed. You can opt out of the social contract by leaving. Unlike 17​th century England the social contract is not enforced by the military. ● How is the social contract renewed over the generations? Nothing has absolute democracy. The Constitution just represents a bunch of promises. Liberalism is a necessary tool to get what you want done in the US. ● Liberalism is associated with the bourgeoisie or middle-class because they tend to be too rich to be poor and too poor to be rich—money but not power—tend to be urban dwellers and merchants. ● Working class complicates liberalism because they are too rich to be poor and too poor to be middle-class. These people own no means of production, they are not connected to their product, and the have no hope of social mobility. ● Americans were born liberal and have had no feudal past nor absolutism to rebel against. ● Rodgers wants everyone to see that everything that happens occurs in a trans-national world. ● In 1900 a conference was held by the Musee Sociale to find answers to social questions like apprenticeship, protection of child workers, wages and profit sharing, workers’ and employers’ associations, farm credit, regulation of work conditions, worker housing, co-op stores, institutions to develop workers’ intellect and morals, savings and insurance institutions, hygiene, poor relief, etc. 12 ● Social politics comes from “compassion, outrage, exposure, publicization, agitation, mobilization, invention, lobbying, pacification, preemption, calculation, bargaining, compromise, enforcement, administration, and manipulation.” 25 ● The welfare state was not a forgone conclusion and should not be taught as such—the “welfare state” term was coined by Republicans who were attacking the programs and the remnants of the New Deal. 28 ● The German Verein fur Sozialpolitik mapped the terrain of “social politics” before the First World War, studied strikes, and labor unions to housing and city administration, usury and credit agricultural conditions, trade and taxation. 29 ● North Atlantic Progressive Connection: 1. Convergent economic development of key nations 2. Emerging of transnational social-political networks. 33 ● As the New World, America was thought to be exceptional, US had almost full, white male suffrage, Europe did not. 35 ● No one is immune from the market revolution; uprooted peasants of North Atlantic economy ended up in the US 49 ● Vocabulary about social everything developed to characterize market capitalism 51 ● “Underneath the political and aesthetic contrasts, there was neither Old nor New World, but a common, economy-driven-New-World-in-the-making.” 52 ● Bureau of Labor was founded as a sop to the labor vote in 1885, but emerged s the key social investigative agency in Washington—making international queries into living standards, labor conditions, workmen’s comp policies, child labor laws 62 ● Jane Addams got ideas for Hull House from England in Stanton Coit’s Neighborhood Guild in the Lower East Side 64

66 First line of extended American contact with European social politics was in the seminars and lectures of the late 19​th century Germany—in the mid-1870s-1890s, Americans go to Germany for postgraduate education in economics. 76 ● Great cities were labs for social experiment. Young ambitious social-political reformers were drawn to cities 112-113 ● Maniciplaization was first important Atlantic-wide progressive program 159 ● 2 New Deals: 1. New Deal 1933-1934 2. New Deal 1935-1938. The New Deal was a time of extraordinary compassion for the poor and unemployed and it was shaped by the class and racial prejudices of white southerners who dominated the Democratic Party; the New Deal drew attention of European Progressives to the United States. 410 Sources:​ pamphlets, treatises, journals, government papers Connections: ​McMath, ​American​, Rauchway, ​Refuge​, Murdering, Blessed Sinclair, ​Prohibition​, Willrich, ​City​, Wiebe, ​Search​, Hays, Response​, Kloppenberg, ​Uncertain, ​Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism” ●

Michael Willrich, ​City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago​ (2003) Argument: ​“The Municipal Court of Chicago, established in 1906, was the first modern, metropolitan court system. It was the product of a series of factors, ranging from explosive urban growth and the influx of immigrants; to the birth of social science with its embrace of expertise; and to the growing belief among social reformers and leading jurists that individuals were not solely responsible for their actions and that society bore at least some of the burden for crime.” 292, Welke ● “Willrich treats the larger significance of the reform of municipal court systems across the nation during the Progressive Ear, making three important points: first, that tracing the roots of modern state formation requires looking at the local, not the federal, level; second, that legal institutions’ preeminence as sites of social governance increased, not withered, at the turn of the twentieth century; and, third, that at the core of socialized justice rested a paradox: Liberation of individuals from the burden of autonomous guilt paved the way for greater incursions against liberty by the state.” 293, Welke ● “Willrich’s argument is divided into an elegant three-part structure. In Part I (“Transformation”), he provides a fascinating, nitty-gitty glimpse into the workings of the justice of the peace courts and traces the intellectual and instructional journey that led to their replacement by the Municipal Court of Chicago. In Part II (“Practices”), Willrich explores the legal and social rationale for, and the workings of, four of the specialized courts—the court of domestic relations, the morals court, he boys’ court, and the psychopathetic laboratory. In Part III (“Misgivings”), he traces the challenge that America’s first “War on Crime” in the 1920s and the Great Depression in the 1930s presented to socialized justice.” 293, Welke ● Chicago shows us in concentrated form of what is important in America. It is also the modern social science birthday and has the 2 most corrupt political machines. Everything that make sup the progressive era is in Chicago ● Progressivism is the non-socialist response to the evils of capitalism. ● “A progressive understanding of the criminal implied a social conception of crime and criminal responsibility: a recognition that much of the human behavior called “crime” was in fact caused by forces of biological destiny or socioeconomic circumstance beyond the individual’s control.” Xxi ● Chicago led the nation in pioneering new approaches to crime an urban self governance. Xxii ● Formal Victorian understanding of crime—the product of the freely willed choices, flawed characters, or sinful natures of autonomous individuals. Xxvi ● At the local level, courts were the laboratories of progressive democracy. Xxvi ● Urban court systems incorporated therapeutic disciplinary techniques of psychiatry, medicine, and social work. Xxix ● Progressivism refers to 1. Rise of pluralistic, issue-centered politics of social responsibility and 2. An ideological commitment to professionalization, scientific rationalization, and administrative governance. Xxxviii ● Caseloads in court represent tensions of unprecedented industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. 4 ● It was said that the Justice of the Peace system was designed for farms, not for cities. Attacks on the Justice of the Peace system were filled with nativist sentiment as many 1​st and 2​nd generation Americans made up the fastest growing segments of the bar—19-20 ● Municipal court movement achieved the Municipal Court Act of 1905, it was a cultural urban movement. Municipal Court Movement played into “self-ownership “ of city resources. 30-31 ● Municipal reformers turned court movements into a larger cause: broad based movement to win a home rule charter for Chicago from Illinois state legislature. New Charter Convention met in 1902 to create a “more simplified, compact, and scientific plan of local government, adapted to the situation and wants of this great and growing city.” 33 ● “American court reforms also wanted to remove the power to make civil procedure from legislatures and hand it over to judges themselves. The democratic theory behind legislature-made procedure was that it would provide an important check upon the extraordinary power that judges wielded over the citizen…The Municipal Court Act of 1905 broke with American tradition by giving judges as a body power to make the court’s procedural rules.” 54 ● “The theory of specialized courts was that judges assigned to them would become experts in handling specific kinds of cases, and the wheels of justice would spin more swiftly.” 57 ● “Much of the pressure for legal change came from the cities, where local courts, buckling under hug civil and criminal caseloads, began to reach beyond individual defendants in order to address the root social causes of crime. Social activists and judges

67 championed new approaches to criminality and dependency, turning city courts into flexible, administrative instruments of social governance.” 60 ● “A crime had two elements: an act expressly forbidden by law and intent to do wrong. Lacking either, an act might be morally wrong, but not a crime.” 70-71 ● Prisons had become overcrowded and were falling apart and reformers insisted that the “treatment” of prisoners ought to be designed with an eye to the forces of heredity and environment as they lay at the root of criminality. Reformers gave lots of criticism towards convict labor and the new penology arrived with new disciplinary techniques at precisely the moment that prison officials needed new ways to control inmates. 75 ● The invention of the world’s first juvenile court occurred in Chicago in 1899. The rhetoric of the juvenile court campaign illustrates the strong connection between social conception of crime and the emerging progressive politics of needs. 79-80 ● Juvenile courts opened up the homes and lives of dependent and delinquent children and exposed to the public the effects of structural factors such as unhealthy housing and low wages surrounding children’s’ ability to go bad. The women reformers from Hull House created a new reform group called the Juvenile Protective Association or the JPA. 81 ● The Adult Probation Act of 1911 promised a system of penalty without punishment by giving criminal courts discretionary powers to release convicted lawbreakers if they agreed to comply with a system of state surveillance. 93 ● The liberal ideal of rule of law—“a government of laws, not of men”—was a pillar of America’s constitutional tradition and a core tenet of classical legal thought.” 100 ● Legal progressivism involved a fertile encounter of law with social science—especially the empirical science of economics, statistics, and sociology. (In the 1920s, a rising movement of law school academics, dubbed “legal realists,” would carry forth this progressive struggle to transform law into a social science.) 108 ● Progressive called upon local courts to make productive citizens of juvenile delinquents, to administer new state programs of aid to mother-headed families, to institutionalize hereditary mental defectives, and not least, to compel errant husbands to support their families. 130 ● Eugenics owed its considerable political success to the same broad progressive reorientation of law, liberalism, and democratic practice that had enabled reformers to turn the criminal courts of the great cities into experimental stations of modern social governance. 242 Sources: ​newspapers, court records, city legislation, reform propaganda Connections: Sinclair, ​Prohibition​, Rodgers, ​Atlantic​, Rauchway, ​Refuge, Murdering, Blessed​, Wiebe, ​Search​, Hays, ​Response​, Hofstadter, ​Age​, Kloppenberg, ​Uncertain​, Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism”, Buder, ​Pullman Andrew Sinclair, ​Prohibition: The Era of Excess​ (1962) Argument: ​“Mr. Sinclair concludes that the wet lobbies performed a similar if less sweeping disservice to the country by insisting upon absolute repeal and thus replacing overstrained and ineffective controls with no federal controls at all.” Viii, Hofstadter The compromise would have been to legalize only hard liquor and allow the government to control sales of wine and beer. ● “Sinclair is primarily concerned with the ugly aftermath to the constitutional ban on drinking, although he devotes one-third of his amply documented volume to the ideational roots of prohibition.” 97, Rischin ● “As Sinclair sees it, the prohibition movement succeeded because of the exploitation of the anxieties of the mass of the people, the rural mythology, the psychology of excess, the findings of science and medicine, the temper of reform, the efficiency of the dry pressure groups and their mastery of propaganda, the stupidity and self-interest of the brewers and distillers, the inevitable trimming of politicians and the weakness of elective representatives. In short, the prohibition movement has been the prime example of extremism triumphant in America.” 97, Rischin ● “Many Victorians felt in all honesty that progress and science, reform and learning were on the side of prohibition. The new and fashionable science of eugenics, developed by Sir Francis Galton, seemed to point towards the elimination of alcohol in order to improve the race. The progressive movement sided with the prohibitionists in trying to get rid of the corrupt city machines and the vice areas based on saloons. Most medical research seemed to be in favor of the banning of liquor for the sake of health and hygiene. The social work carried out by the settlements in the slums found drink as much an enemy as poverty and often pointed to the connection between the two evils. The rising tide of women’s rights seemed to make prohibition certain; a woman’s vote was presumed to be a vote against the saloon.” 4 ● “The foundation of the Woman’s Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League before the close of the nineteenth century gave the prohibitionists a disciplined army, ready to exploit politics and the American people in the interests of their chosen reform. The refusal of the liquor trade to regulate the saloons of its own accord and the national psychology created by the First World War were sufficient to give victory to the prohibitionists.” 4 ● “The farms were, however, too isolated to be of great help to the prohibitionists. Although the rich commercial farmers might support prohibition to get more work out of their hired hands, the political strength of the drys lay in the villages and small country towns, particularly among wealthier people…This dominant village middle class provided religious fodder for pulpit politics and prohibition and gave the Ku Klux Klan the majority of its four million members during its revival after the Great War.” 18

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“The Eighteenth Amendment could not have been passed without the support of the psychologically tolerant, made temporarily intolerant by the stress of war. But when the moderates deserted the drys in time of peace, the hard core of the movement was revealed. The main areas of prohibition sentiment were the areas where the Methodist and Baptist churches had their greatest strength. These were the areas that father the bigot crusade of the Ku Klux Klan, which supported prohibition, among other moral reforms. Although many sincere drys were not bigots at the beginning of the campaign for the Eighteenth Amendment, they became bigots or left the cause by the time of repeal. Prohibition, an extreme measure, forced its extremes on its supporters and its enemies. Its study becomes as study of social excess.” 23-24 ● “It was in this wish to extend their own repressions to all society that the drys felt themselves most free from their constant inward struggle. Indeed, they defended their attacks on the personal liberty of other men by stating that they were brining these men personal liberty…Of course, in reality the drys were trying to bring personal liberty to themselves, by externalizing their anguished struggles against their own weaknesses in their battle to reform the weaknesses of others.” 27 ● “Frued saw that the moderate use of liquor was necessary for driven men, who could not find other interests or gratifications against the miseries of the world. The prohibitionists, however, presumed that a man who was denied the bottle would turn to the alter. They were wrong. They closed the saloons, but the churches did not fill. Luckily, drugs, radios, motion pictures, automobiles, proliferating societies, professional sports, paid holidays, and the relaxed sexual ethics of the flaming twenties provided new outlets for the libidos of deprived drinkers.” 27 ● “The extremes of dry psychology were well suited to white Southerners. They had a special use for prohibition. It offered them a moral refuge from their guilty fear of the Negro, as well as a method of controlling on of his means of self-assertion. Liquor sometimes gave the Negro the strength to repudiate his inferior status. It also encouraged him to loose his libido on white women, incited, so it was said, by the nudes on the labels of whiskey bottles. Thus the Negro should be prevented from drinking alcohol. To a lesser degree, the same rule should be applied to white men, although this reform was not so urgent.” 29 ● “In 1840…The Washingtonians, a society of reformed drunkards, found out that hundreds of thousands could be made to sing the pledge after hearing the confessions of saved alcoholics. The techniques of persuasion of the Washingtonians appealed to the heart rather than to the head.” 37 ● “The original drives behind the temperance movement in America are clear. There was a sentiment of nationalism, a feeling that self-control was necessary to the working of American democracy. There was an urge towards social reform, a campaign against drunkenness and prostitution and crime. There was the need to protect the home, the wife, and the children of the drunkard against disease and want.” 38 ● “The struggle between the Protestant evangelical churches and the saloons was based on different views of the role of God and man in society. It was bound up with nativist fears of the Roman Catholic Church and of the corruption which the liquor trade had brought to politics and life in the large cities.” 81 Sources: ​pamphlets, sermons, congressional minutes Connections: Rodgers, ​Atlantic, Rauchway, ​Refuge​, Murdering​, ​Blessed​, Wiebe, ​Search​, Hays, ​Response, ​Hofstadter, ​Age​, Kloppenberg, Uncertain Eric Rauchway, ​The Refuge of Affections: Family and American Reform Politics, 1900-1920 ​(2001) Argument: ​“Parents legitimately enjoy authority over children only so long as they cultivate in their children an ability to live independently. Thus the family is a form of hierarchal social order that can justify its existence only when it undoes itself. If we understand how this conception of the family underlay Progressives’ sense of their social obligations, we will be able to see that Progressives did not desire either order or individualism per se. Rather, they sought to impose on society a moral system whose end was a progressively wider diffusion of rights and goods among the populace. As a model engine for this diffusion, the liberal family promoted this spread of liberties by a repeatable devolution of power from those who had it to those who could. The partnered marriages such as those in this study provide the beginnings of such families and the core of reformist institutions that fulfilled similar roles with respect to their dependents.” 16 ● “This book contains a history of three families, each of them a self-conscious creation of a married couple determined to make their lives together the basis for a career of political and social reform. It includes analyses of how these reformers used their ideas about family and social obligation to create the ​New Republic​, Ruskin College Oxford, the Bank Street Schools, and the New School for Social Research, among other efforts that all embodied (and to some greater or lesser extent continue to embody) this familial ethos. It also contains a variety of children: natural, adopted, and metaphorical. With all these elements its essays an explanation of what was progressive about Progressivism: the use of the family (in fact and in metaphor) as an engine to diffuse wisdom outward and pass it on to the next generation.” 2-3 ● “Instead, Progressives married with the explicit intention of making their new families into engines of reform.” 25 ● “The familial idea has further specific implications. First, it suggests that Progressivism has deep roots in the structure of the bourgeois family…Second…the idea of the liberal family encapsulated for Progressives the appropriate relations between powerful and powerless people in society, a relation akin to the process of civilization described by their contemporaries. For Progressives, ​civilization referred to the notion of social progress tending toward the equitable treatment of all citizens…Third, it suggests that we should reenvision separate female institutions as part of a continuum of new ways of living, a complement and

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not a counterpart to the restructured Progressive family…Fourth, it suggests why the war should have been a disheartening effect on Progressive idealism: it reinforced conceptions of family and of gender inconsistent with Progressive ambitions.” 26-27 “For historians—and for all of us interested in the nature of the society we inhabit—families are (as one scholar says) “the missing link for understanding the relationship between individuals and social change.” Social forces and political concerns tug at this link, but individuals have often pulled back quite as hard, and the purpose of the connection—a yoke, a leash, reins, a lifeline—changes as one side or the other gains an upper hand.” 2 “During the Progressive period at the start of the twentieth century, a generation of reformers began self-consciously to adapt traditional institutions to a modern and rapidly changing world, and in the process they took an especially keen interest in the meaning and purpose of families…Progressives used their idea of family to describe the appropriate relation between private lives and public action and between social elites and dependent classes, and also to give political meaning to the power of education—the principal Progressive method of child rearing—as a means of reform.” 2 “When historians of the United States talk about Progressivism, we refer to a politics of social responsibility that emerged in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, analogous to but distinct from similar tendencies in other industrialized countries.” 3 “Progressives sought an organizing principle for society that would accommodate liberties, encourage individual self-fulfillment, and, most important, erode invidious social distinctions. They turned—and returned—to the family because it was a unique form of social order that fulfilled itself in its dissolution—in the release of grown children, now self-governing adults, into the society.

For them the family was not a shelter from a harsh society, but a starting point in transforming such a society.” 4 “Progressivism in America also involved women much more thoroughly than the concurrent social politics of other countries did. The most important instance of women’s role in Progressivism was the settlement-house movement, which saw middle-class, university-educated women living together in large houses in urban, immigrant neighborhoods for the purpose of educating and enlightening the newly arrived Americans.” 5 “These women invented careers of their own, serving evident social needs. But mothering whole communities precluded (so the argument went) mothering one’s own children. A settlement house worker could have one or the other, but not both—certainly not easily. The women of the settlement houses tended to describe their careers as substitutes for family relations.” 6 “The marriage, which had been chiefly an economic and social institution, came now to symbolize, and provide, a primarily emotional satisfaction—and if it could not do that, then Americans felt licensed to dissolve the relationship.” 7 “Men were supposed to be interested in economics and politics, in rationalizing the workings of the economy through financial reforms, regulating industry, and providing benefits for male laborers…Women by contrast were supposed to be interested in abolishing child labor and making working conditions for women more humane—reforms that, though they impinged on public matters, grew directly out of women’s traditional, private concerns with home and family.” 7-8 “Thus women fulfilling the social claim were not only transferring their moral energy from the private to the public sphere but transferring their mothering role along with that energy.” 8 “Women did not enter the political lists unopposed, and the maternalist state did not suit all politicians or even all reformers.

The women’s movement did not therefore fall from prominence after suffrage: it was pushed off by masculinists, advocates of a paternalist state and a politics antithetical to maternalism.” 9 “Thus it became possible to see male reformers as opponents of a female agenda: the two Progressive eras that historians identify were not only contemporaneous, but at odds. Either male reformers drove female reformers out of the public sphere or, acting as the agents of a hegemonic political culture, they absorbed maternalist initiatives into their own agendas and deprived them of their distinctive and subversive character: “Male politicians used maternalist rhetoric…merely as a cloak for paternalism.” 9 “If the Progressive idea of the social good differed from men to women, we ​should find women and men defining themselves within their gender, and reasoning out from that notion of gendered virtue to a corresponding notion of public good.” 10 “Given this series of objections to a strictly gendered interpretation, the existence and eminence of married Progressive couples requires a closer look. In each of these couples, a man and a woman reformer worked each alongside the other.” 12 “[T] Roosevelt approved of an open approach to families that responded to social needs. For him, family also expanded outward into society: “the meaning of free government” included his notion that what he called “ the parent class” had to foster independence not only in their own children but in “the people as a whole.”” 15 “But both of them promoted an expansive vision of the family, extending beyond domestic walls into the larger society and forging kinship ties across class lines, and both of them referred to this idea of family when they discussed the potential of reform projects. Further, the socialized morals of the liberal family, advocated by both Addams and Roosevelt (in time of peace), helped during the Progressive period to foster the use of marriage and family as ideal models for a liberal society, and even the self-conscious remodeling of actual marriages and families in keeping with these political ideals.” 16 “In short, the liberal family tells us what was progressive about Progressivism. As we look closely at Progressive couples with attention to their ideas about themselves and their lives as reformers, we see these families forming, growing, and attempting to extend their influence out into society and onward into the future.” 17

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“Progressives drew their ideas about families from their experience, as indeed they did all their ideas about reform, and they found their experience at odd with social norms…the second problem: we often tend to blame the unhappy results of policy regimes on the ideas that inspired them, rather than on the incidents and the systems that see those ideas translated into policies.” ● “Reformers who sought to make their families into engines for transforming society saw instead the state—in its rude health after a world war—exert increasing control over social relations.” 19 ● “If Progressives were principally interested in the development of a welfare state, they would have been morally derelict in leaning on families and familial relations when they should instead have been arguing for a stronger state.” 19 ● “But the war did more than cause them to question their faith in the common man. More important, it forced them to confront the intransigence of gender norms as cultural myths that limited the behavior of people of their own class. In time of war, the state can draw on such myths to mobilize the population, in effect socializing human resources by an appeal to gender: men become warriors; women become self-sacrificing keepers of home front. Wartime propaganda and special wartime education programs—those to ready boys for war work—threatened Progressives’ special province and put the state in a position to “clip children” to fit its mold…The mobilization of sate and society for war forced a reconsideration of the means and probable end of education as a social reform, especially the utility of the family metaphor as a way of transforming social processes.” 22 ● “The liberal vision of the family inspired Progressive politics at a time when middle-class Americans had every reason to believe that the blessings they had enjoyed all their lives would apply not only to their children, but to the children of their less-fortunate neighbors as well.” 22 ● “First, the men and women involved had to reckon with prevailing social prescriptions for their behavior. As men or as women, they were supposed to fulfill certain roles both in society and in their families. They had to decide for themselves how they would ignore or modify these descriptions so they could pursue careers as reformers…Second, they had to decide how they would allow their newly chosen roles to shape their lives. If they would not set aside marriage in favor of a reformist carer, hen how would they incorporate the two?…“Third, having created for themselves marriages that answered their own political and social needs, they set about pushing the boundaries of these marriages outward by making them the model for the center of institutions that propagated reform-by-education. Each of them saw their own families as the bases for a progressively improving society…Fourth, and most revelatory about what they expected and why they did not get what they wanted, they withdrew from active politics, reconsidered their agendas, and even retreated form their optimistic positions when the war came.” 23 Sources:​ Straight, Beard, and Mitchell papers Connections: Rodgers, ​Atlantic​, Sinclair, ​Prohibition​, Willrich, ​City​, Rauchway, ​Murdering ​and ​Blessed​, Wiebe, ​Search​, Hays, Response​, Hoftstadter, ​Age​, Kloppenberg, ​Uncertain​, Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism”, Buder, ​Pullman Eric Rauchway, ​Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America​ (2003) ● Argument: ​McKinley’s assassination gave birth to Progressivism. “The anarchist murder of William McKinley in September 1901 forced American opinion makers to confront a terrible problem. As society became more urban and more complex, and individuals had less control over their own fates, people grew surer than the only way to keep a populace sane and healthy was to keep the social environment sane and healthy—the have good schools, clean streets, green parks. Social movements to create and sustain all of these benefits grew to fruition during the Roosevelt presidency in the years following the assassination, given shape ot the liberal political ideology Americans came to call Progressivism.” xi ● “Among the presidential assassinations, William McKinley’s had the most dangerously political motive. Abraham Lincoln’s murderer was waging the Civil War by other means; James Garfield’s assassin claimed divine inspiration. Whatever motive may have spurred John F. Kennedy’s killer remain murky. Ix ● “By contrast, McKinley’s assassin said plainly that he shot the President of the United States because he hated the politics of state-supported capitalism that the President and his party represented, and in so doing he echoed hosts of critics in the United States and around the world.” X ● “Because the United States was the richest and most powerful industrial country, the center of civilization and the capital of capital—he wanted to strike at the American leader to prove the nation vulnerable, and toe shatter its illusions of safety. He knew what he was doing, and he knew he would die if he succeeded. His reasoning was cruel, even inhuman; but however bereft of sympathy and decency his motive was, it did not lack logic. Nor was he mistaken as to its consequences.” X ● “Killing the President did terrify the leaders of the country. They began treating the immigrant working classes differently.

They tried the assassin, executed him, dropped him in a grave, and poured sulfuric acid over his body, but they could not forget the brutal lesson he had taught. Neither could they admit that a low criminal had accomplished so much, and so from the start they insisted he was insane, and his action an accident of a callous fate.” X ● “In a sense, therefore, William McKinley had two killers: the man who shot him and destroyed his body, and the man who succeeded him and erased his legacy. This book tells the story of how both earned their historical roles—anarchist assassin, progressive President—through an act people preferred to regard as mad.” Xii

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“Theodore Roosevelt plays a central part in the story of his predecessor’s assassination. OF al the early interpreters, he did the most to make the murder meaningful to Americans. When he argued strenuously that the assassin was a sane anarchist who threatened the social order, the progressive President played on his constituents’ legitimate fears so they would support him in his efforts to stamp out radical dissent. When he argued with equal energy that the assassin was a man made mad by society, Roosevelt played on his constituents’ legitimate hopes so that they would support him in his efforts to render American industrialism more humane. That he made both arguments points to what I regard as the essential fact of his personality: Theodore Roosevelt acutely understood that stories were a means to political ends.” Xii-xiii ● “The elements that gave the United States its peculiar industrial politics were all present in the episode that made Roosevelt President: the murder of William McKinley pressed Americans to give voice and clarity to their opinions on a working class that was largely immigrant in its composition, to the place of race in a developing democracy, to the position of the government with respect to social ills. Most important, the question of whether McKinley’s assassin was a sane radical or a deranged victim of society hinged on key assumptions about human nature in the age of industry. The notion that he was sane and responsible appealed to those keen to discipline the unruly elements of society and keep the tools of mischief—including, not least, citizenship and the ballot—away from them. The idea that the cruelties of modern machinery made a madman of someone ground by the teeth of modern machinery appealed to those hoping to improve living conditions and nurture society’s wounded health.” Xiii ● “For it was under McKinley that, in 1898, the United States stopped being a mere continental republic and became an international colonial empire. After a short war with Spain, sparked by conflict in Cuba, the U.S. Army and Navy occupied the former Spanish possessions of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the distant Philippine Islands, across the Pacific, off the coast of China.” 6 ● “Just three days after the shooting, and well before McKinley’s assassination became his assassin, Roosevelt first expressed what would become the popular explanation of the tragedy. A madman had shot the President—a weak-minded madman, preyed upon by delusions he found in the press, delusions given shape by the liberal writes of the day. It went without saying there was no justification for this act, but even beyond that, there was no conceivable rational explanation for it, not even one that deserved refutation. Imagining comprehensible motives behind such an act meant giving it more legitimacy than it deserved—and, as Roosevelt knew, it also meant suggesting one’s own complicity.” 13-14 ● “To most Americas at the turn of the century, anarchism meant the politics of terrorism and violence.” 17 ● “The prosecution argument—held that Czolgosz bore legal responsibility for his actions because he had put himself in the way of the corrupting influences of anarchism. He had allowed himself to be seduced by this decadent philosophy. Even if he was somehow mentally deficient…he made a fatal and responsible choice, whose importance and outcome he knew, and knew to be wrong.” 24 ● “The defense argument…held that Czolgosz could not possibly bear responsibility for his actions because the powerlessness and hopelessness of industrial life had driven him mad. Paid a poor wage, put routinely out of work by the tycoons to whom McKinley had close ties, despised for his ethnic origins and his Catholic heritage, he had gone insane and focused his delusions on the President. He could not possibly have chosen a better environment, flung about as he was by these mighty forces that were reshaping the whole world. Besides, the defense reasoned, it was far better to conclude that only a madman would shoot the President than to suppose that a perfectly sane and responsible person could come to the conclusion that it was now necessary to wage war on the symbols and leaders of American government.” 24 ● “Born a citizen in Michigan, Czolgosz was an American. Under the Constitution, he was eligible to be elected president, whereas, for example, an immigrant like Buffalo D.A. Thomas Penney was not. What made him seem un-American was the indelible taint of race in the sound of his name. And his alienation from American society, as well as his consequential action, helped cement a change in public language about national origin and race. Afterward, and throughout the earlier decades of the twentieth century, the violent, politically active African-American as the foremost racial threat to American society.” 61 ● “Under Roosevelt, the Republicans would begin to awaken to this change. Sometimes they would act as if they believed immigrants suffered from nurture, but they were constantly and increasingly concerned with the place of immigrant workers in the expanding American order, and correspondingly eager to ignore the fate of African-Americans.” 61 Sources:​ papers, trial transcripts, research notes, newspapers Connections: Rauchway, ​Refuge​, Willrich, ​City​, Sinclair, Prohibition​, Rodgers, ​Atlantic​, Rauchway, ​Blessed​, McMath, ​American​, Wiebe, ​Search​, Hays, ​Response, ​Hofstadter, ​Age​, Kloppenberg, ​Uncertain, ​Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism”, Buder, ​Pullman Eric Rauchway, ​Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America​ (2006) Argument: ​“The United States became the country we know today at the end of World War I, when it took over the role of “top nation” from Britain. The story of its rise to this position began at the end of the Civil War. After the demise of slavery, America spread west over the plains, swiftly settling the continent and bringing twelve new states into the union. With the winning of the West came the transformation of the United States into the world’ largest economy.” Immigration and foreign investment also made America possible. 7 ● “Capital and labor from overseas pushed American political development in noticeably unusual directions during a particularly important growth spurt…the effects of globalization helped the country become a powerful nation without developing (in comparative terms) a powerful central government.” 4

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“The world’s people must have felt much this sense of puzzlement and anxiety in 1918, when at war’s end the Americans suddenly emerged as the planet’s great power…Most of the world’s people knew little more about the United States in 1918 than theatergoers know about Fortinbras at the end of ​Hamlet​, and in significant ways we know little more now than they did then, because we have been telling this history as if we’ve been restaging ​Hamlet​, without any attention to the important offstage back story.” 6 “It remains now as it was in 1917, both immune to the trends of national development that elsewhere prevail and also apparently unable to persuade other peoples to follow its [the US’s] lead.” 9 “In the 1920s, at the close of the first modern era of globalization, American leadership preserved neither peace nor prosperity in the world. And in the early twenty-first century, after another decades-long bout of globalization, the United States still stands at the forefront of nations, still mighty, still apparently called to lead a world of people who do not—perhaps because they cannot—follow its example.” 9 “If today, Americans wish to avoid repeating the catastrophes of the 1920s we must understand why the United States became an unfollowed leader, and why other nations are still unlikely to imitate it….The answer is simple, if paradoxical: the United States’ extensive connections to the rest of the world have created and maintained the nation’s peculiar habits of government. No other nation enjoyed America’s unique place within the network of worldwide forces that commentators today summarize under the term ​globalization​, nor have these forces affected the development of other countries as they have America. To frame the idea as a hypothesis: globalization has reinforced American character.” 9 “Americans have long expressed a devotion to liberty, both political and economic, and a proportionate distaste for government power. This devotion explains much about American desires. But history does not always permit the expression of desires and ideals in law and customs.” 11 “The United States is today the world’s largest economy and the world’s greatest producer and consumer of energy resources, yet it depends on the investment of capital and labor from the rest of the world to carry on its routine affairs; and its government spends a smaller proportion of its people’s wealth than other rich countries’ governments do.” 12 “Specifically, during the half century following the Civil War, stretching up to the start of World War I in Europe in 1914, the United States became the America we recognize. During this time its economy quintupled in size, with its growth accounting for a quarter of the world’s economic growth.” 12 “when globalization was pushing more nations to become like one another, the United States was becoming less like other countries. Even if all nations were in some way unique, no nations differed so much form its fellows in so many important ways as did the United States.” 13 “The late nineteenth century saw modernizing nations lay the basic foundations of what would become modern welfare states.

Governments responded to the long-term and cyclical unemployment characteristic of industrialization by transferring private wealth to needy people for the public benefit.” 14 “During the years that saw the other major powers sinking deeper and deeper into the imperial entanglements that ultimately would stick them in the mud of the western front, the Americans were, with the help of investors from all over the world, sinking hteir resources into the fields of their western frontier.” 18 “[The United States] was most open to travelers, settlers, money, and ideas from the rest of the world. This openness was not by itself the factor that made the United States diverge from the pack. So open had the nineteenth-century world become to traffic in money and people among nations that some historians now call this period “the first great globalization boom.” 19 “The United States received not only more, and more different kinds, of immigrants than any other developing nation…but also most of the ocean-crossing migrants who went anywhere in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The United States also received more money from the international capital markets than any other developing nation, and more so than was the case elsewhere in the New World, this money came into the country through private banks instead of through investment in government…As a result of this involvement of international capital and labor in this critical phase of American development, the United States ended up with an empire and a government unlike any other country’s.” 19 “The newly settled West served the same purpose for America as overseas colonies served for the European powers, providing a wealth of natural resources that industrial metropoles could turn into finished goods.” 20 “The United States did not just have a smaller or cheaper government than other nations. It had a government developed form different causes and devoted to different purposes from those other nations.” 21 “For Americans, the most important colonial relationship was that between the colonial government and the white settlers, who chafed at the prospect of control from back East…Washington had a greater presence in the American West than in the eastern United States.” 22 “Whereas in 1880 the government literally occupied the American West with soldiers, by 1900 those troops had mainly gone…During the decades around 1900, the American West contributed to the growth of government not because it needed conquering, but because its voters, wishing to regulate private enterprise, supported the increase of government power.” 23 “Although it is broadly true that a critique of capitalism fueled the growth of state power in America just as it did in other countries, it is more precisely true that, because the U.S. government offered a disproportionate representation to its formerly colonized West, the government grew according to the dictates of different critique of capitalism than prevailed elsewhere. The

73 colonial settlers of the American West resented having to borrow money at what they saw as unfavorable rates of interests, resented conditions placed on loans, resented seeing the profits from moneylending leave the West to fund the further growth of the already rich East. They resented having to pay shipping rates to monopolist railroads to get their goods to market. And they focused their resentment on the owners of the banks and railroads, whom they saw—with some reason—as not only distant but foreign. Just as the influence of foreign capital contributed to the quick building and settlement of the West, it determined the essential nonsocialist character of the American response to industrial capitalism, which focused its ire on the outside ownership and control of American assets.” 24 ● “The arrival of millions of international workers in the United States pushed down the wages paid to American laborers and gave the United States a multicultural working class.” 25 ● “Under such circumstances, it was easier for the ordinary taxpayer to identify with the rich than with the poor, and the taxpaying American was that much less likely to sympathize with the worker…and thus less likely to support policies that would use public money to pay for social insurance.” 26 ● “This cultural difference between classes, added to the material difference, reduced the likelihood that Americans would support social policies like those of other nations, and ensured that whenever Americans thought about the problems of an industrial working class, they thought about the problems of immigration.” 27 ● “What made the United States different was its profoundly polyglot immigrant population. The country not only received far and away more immigrants than any other country, it received more kinds of immigrants form a wider variety of countries.

Workers who spoke different languages and worshipped at different alters were more sensitive to the cultural divisions among them and less attuned to their shared economic interests.” 27 Sources: ​statistics, economic information Connections: Rauchway, ​Refuge​, Rauchway, ​Murdering,​ Willrich, ​City, Rodgers, ​Atlantic​, Sinclair, ​Prohibition​, McMath, ​American​, Wiebe, ​Search​, Hays, ​Response​, Hosfstadter, ​Age​, Kloppenberg, ​Uncertain​, Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism”, Buder, ​Pullman Robert Wiebe, ​The Search for Order, 1877-1920​ (1967) Argument: ​“Preurban, industrial social organization, so Wiebe’s argument goes, rested on community, in which the focal point was a set of face-to-face primary group relationships through which life was understood, values generated, and economic and political institutions developed. But urban, industrial society created a new set of relationships, above and beyond community, linking people over far broader geographical areas. The scope of human thought expanded, understanding of reality came through impersonal media rather than personal contact, and organized group action joined specialists over wide areas rather than only those within a limited geographical community.”

1248, Hays ● “Social change in modern America, Wiebe argues, involved the decline of community and the rise of society. The protest movements of the late nineteenth century, for example, were rooted in the defense of community, and the reform movements of the early twentieth century involved attempts to work out the new forms of more cosmopolitan social organization.” 1248, Hays ● “Convincingly he argues that this sources was not the “old middle class,” the independent proprietor of the past, but the new group of professionals and organizational representatives who were constructing new systems, ordering life with large, rather than parochial, perspectives, and seeking to manipulate factors beyond community. In this context, reform was not the irrational expression of an attempt to regain a lost status, but a conscious and reasoned effort to shape institutions according to the values of the new social order.” 1249, Hays ● Wiebe “has taken advantage of his opportunity to argue that the decentralized small-community society of 1877 was replaced within a short but action-filled span of time by a new order. This order, Wiebe says, was largely the product of a new urban middle class. In the 1870s “cries for reform sounded much like the counsel of reaction” (4). But by the turn of the century the new reformers had a far different view: “The heart of progressivism was the ambition of the new middle class to fulfill its destiny through bureaucratic means” (166).” 392-393, Burke ● “By the 1870s, the United States as a distended society. The eruption of modern social and economic forces brutally undermined the autonomy of small-town America. International markets, a national credit system, the railroads, the mass movement of peoples from all over the globe to urban areas—these were some of the forces trampling what Wiebe called “island communities,” those small self-contained towns and neighborhoods that had organized the life experience of most Americans until the years after the Civil War.” 353, Cmiel ● “The story of the book is how the United States eventually shed its nostalgia for the island community and begun constructing the bureaucratic nexus needed to order a modern society. Central to the change, according to Wiebe, was “the new middle class,” those professionals and modernizing businessmen intent on curbing the unruly disorder but at the same time not fogged by any romantic ennui for the older ways of life.” 353, Cmiel ● “Wiebe argued that the pragmatic, rational attitudes toward social problems so important to modernization meant that bureaucracies would have to perpetually respond to new issues.” 353, Cmiel ● “For instance, although World War I had brought the outlines of a new order to America, that order remained “indefinable.” But if people did not yet understand the new system, Wiebe claimed that in “a general sense, the nation had found its direction”

74 (nothing unusual there), but that Wiebe can in the same breath claim that “the nation” (at this point apparently disconnected from any real people) has “found” its way.” 356, Cmiel ● “As late as 1920 the new order was still “undefinable,” the new middle class still laboring in “confusion” (301-302). Woodrow Wilson, his advisers, and Congress did a remarkable job managing the nation during World War I, Wiebe thought, but no one “could pretend…they followed a master plan” (221)356, Cmiel ● “It was not that democracy was being refigured to new ways of the world; it was that democracy was in decline. At times Wiebe made the contrast directly, setting the two systems against each other. As he put it in one such passage, socialists elected to union offices acted just like their non-socialist opponents, shelving “plans for democratic unionism in favor of a centralized command” (174). 360, Cmiel ● “It is Professor Robert H. Wiebe’s thesis that these years witnessed a fundamental shift in American values, from those of the small town in the 1880’s to those of a new, bureaucratic-minded middle class by 1920. Arguing that the United States at the end of the Reconstruction period was “a society without a core,” afflicted by “a general splintering process,” Mr. Wiebe shows how the nation was incapable of facing the challenges of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration.” Vii-viii ● “Ultimately it was none of these but a “new middle class”—largely urban professional men and women—who developed new values of “continuity and regularity, functionality and rationality, administration and management” in order to cope with twentieth-century problems. Inevitably this new value system, consciously in conflict with that of nineteenth-century America, led the new middle class to see “the need for a government of continuous involvement” and to emphasize executive administration. The Progressive movement was the triumph of this new middle class with its bureaucratic mentality.” Viii ● “My purpose is to describe the breakdown of this society and the emergence of a new system. The health of the nineteenth-century community depended upon two closely related conditions: its ability to manage the lives of its members, and the belief among its members that the community had such powers. Already by the 1870’s the autonomy of the community was badly eroded. The illusion of authority, however, endured. Innumerable townsmen continued to assume that they could harness the forces of the world to the destiny of their community. That confidence, the system’s final foundation, largely disappeared during the eighties and nineties in the course of a dramatic struggle to defend the independence of the community.” Xiii ● “Although no replacement stood at hand, the outlines of an alternative system rather quickly took shape early in the twentieth century. By contrast to the personal, informal ways of the community, the new scheme was derived from the regulative hierarchical needs of urban-industrial life. Through rules with impersonal sanctions, it sought continuity and predictability in a world of endless change. It assigned far greater power to government—in particular to a variety of flexible administrative devices—and it encouraged the centralization of authority. Men were now separated more by skill and occupation than by community; industrial society than by their reputations in a town or a city neighborhood. The new system, moreover, had applications as important in foreign as in domestic affairs. This, in sum, was America’s initial experiment in bureaucratic order, an experiment that was still in process as the nation passed through the First World War.” Xiv ● “While overbuilding the railroads that had brought depression, it had created a commercial reservoir which for years afterward sustained much of the economy, including the railroad themselves.” 1 ● “In fact, what Thorstein Veblen made famous as “conspicuous consumption” carried a far more exact meaning in the town where everyone looked on and cared than in the cities where only squandered millions would attract attention.” 3 ● “Even in the cities, life often retained much of the town’s flavor. Within the city limits yet detached from its core, neighborhoods provided fairly cloistered way stations between urban and rural living. In these years garden plots and a smattering of livestock came as standard accouterment to the city scene.” 3 ● “Americans were judging the world as they would their neighborhood. Their truths derived from what they knew: the economics of a family budget, the returns that came to the industrious and the lazy, the obnoxious behavior of a drunken braggart, the advantages of a wife who stayed home and kept a good house.” 4 Sources: ​secondary synthesis sources Connections: ​Rauchway, ​Refuge, Murdering, Blessed​, McMath, ​American​, Rodgers, ​Atlantic​, Sinclair, ​Prohibition​, Willrich, ​City​, Faragher, ​Sugar​, Hays, ​Response​, Hofstadter, ​Age​, Kloppenberg, ​Uncertain​, Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism”, Buder, ​Pullman Samuel P. Hays, ​The Response to Industrialism, 1885-1914​ (1957) Argument: ​“The variety of ways in which the people of the United States responded to these drastic innovations is the subject of this book. We shall examine how the circumstances of life were modified for different groups of people; how, in response, they altered or failed to alter their activities; how they joined with each other to cope with a new, impersonal economic environment; and how they struggled almost frantically, to preserve ways of life they felt were threatened. This period, the Populist-Progressive Era, is one of the richest in American History, for here one can observe changes in the experience and behavior of people under the impact of the most profound influence in the modern world. Industrialism opened vistas of vast human achievement; yet it produced a restless and strife-torn society and gave rise to nostalgia for a calmer, less perplexed, pre-industrial life. This is a story of human adjustment, of the ways in which Americans worked out their lives in a swiftly moving industrial age.” 3 ● “The emphasis in this book is on the intricate and impersonal nature of the changes wrought by industrialism and the resulting difficulties experienced by various groups in adjusting to them…Hays skillfully traces the reactions of farmers, businessmen,

75 workmen, politicians, and others to the shocks of an industrial age as its impact was felt across the country. The transition from the rural to urban life, the increased emphasis on material gain and its effect upon politics, as well as the mounting concern about individual values and its reflection in reform movements, receive their share of attention. In addition, the rise of the United States to a world power, though somewhat less satisfactorily tied to the response to industrialism, is included.” 153, Johnson ● “While Professor Hays attacks the “anti-corporation theory of history” as an oversimplification, he leaves the impression that there is a very substantial basis for it. Rejecting the attempts of the Populist-Progressive era to personalize corporate behavior, he substitutes impersonal economic forces which “engulfed” the individual enterpriser.” 153, Johnson ● “It is a book about movements: the Granger, Populist and Progressive movements; trade unions; co-operatives; the muckrakers; the ‘social justice movement’; the conservation movement; the Country Life Movement. Examining similar problems, the book draws heavily on Hofstadter’s ​The Age of Reform​.” 199, Potter ● “Destroying local and separate activities, the new forms of transportation and communication linked more tightly every group and section into one interdependent nation. Eager to use their capital, their skills, and their cunning for economic gain, millions of people from Europe and rural America poured into metropolitan nerve centers of the new economic order. The American people subordinated religion, education, and politics to the process of creating wealth. Increasing production, employment, and income became the measures of community success, and personal riches the mark of individual achievement.” 2 ● “By the time of World War I, few activities of the American people remained uninfluenced by industrialism. Whether on had sought to enhance his social prestige, or to gain material success, he had been forced to contend with the vast changes swirling about him. Industrialism provided for every American an opportunity to participate in great economic achievements and to enjoy a higher standard of living; but it also demanded drastic changes in their lives. It forced upon every one a new atmosphere, a new setting, to which he had to adjust to his thought, play, worship, and work. Although the citizen of 1914 might be most concerned with spiritual affairs and inward personal growth, as many were, he could not afford to ignore either the decline of interest in religion or those consequences of industrialism which hampered creative expression.” 2-3 ● “Even more significant, however, were the less obvious and the less concrete changes: the expansion of economic relationships from personal contacts within a village community to impersonal forces in the nation and the entire world; the standardization of life accompanying the standardization of goods and of methods of production; increasing specialization in occupations with the resulting dependence of people upon each other to satisfy their wants; a feeling of insecurity as men faced vast rapidly changing economic forces that they could not control; the decline of interest in non-material affairs and the rise of the acquisition of material wealth as the major goal in life.” 4 ● “The unifying theme of American history between 1885 and 1914, so many historians have argued, was a popular attack against corporate wealth. Through their state and federal governments, according to this interpretation, the discontented sought to curb corporations and thereby to promote greater economic opportunity for all. This analysis accepts, uncritically, the popular ideas of the Populist-Progressive Era. It is a far too simple explanation.” 188 ● “They comprised a reaction not against the corporation along but also against industrialism and the many ways in which it affected the lives of Americans. The people of that era sought to do much more than simply to control corporations; they attempted to cope with industrial change in all its ramifications. True, they centered their fire on the business leader, but he was a symbol of change which they could conveniently attack, rather than the essence of change itself.” 188 ● “Urban immigrants, for example, resenting the attack on the city political machine, opposed urban civic reforms. In the political upheaval of the 1890s, the industrial workingman refused to join the downtrodden farmer in capturing the Democratic party, and, in one of the greatest political transformations of modern American history, flocked to the Republican party, which was supposedly under corporate domination.” 189 ● “Finally, those in the South and West lived under the shadow of a far more highly developed area, which, they felt, deliberately imposed restraints upon the economic growth of their regions.” 190 ● “Industrialism increased the desire for material gain among all Americans; but economic motivation does not wholly explain the behavior of the American people during these years. Industrialism was less important in changing the motives of Americans than in profoundly altering the environment, the setting within which mean and women strove for many different goals.” 190 ● “Farmers fought back against the cities, often blindly and bitterly, temporarily imposing their patterns of life on the urban areas, but in the long runt to no avail. And the South and West appealed to the federal government for aid in economic growth and for laws to restrict the policies of northeastern corporations and thereby to foster a freer climate in which industry in their section could grow.” 191 ● “Industrialism also thrust Americans irrevocably onto the world scene.” 191 Sources: ​Secondary synthesis Connections: McMath, ​American​, Wiebe, ​Search,​ Hofstadter, ​Age​, Rauchway, ​Refuge, Murdering, Blessed​, Sinclair, ​Prohibition, Rodgers, ​Atlantic​, Willrich, ​City​, Faragher, ​Sugar​, Kloppenberg, ​Uncertain​, Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism”, Buder, ​Pullman Richard Hofstadter, ​The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R.​ (1955)

76 Argument: “The center of attention in these pages is…the ideas of the participants—their conception of what was wrong, the changes they sought, and the techniques they thought desirable. My them, then, is the conception the participants had of their own work and the place it would occupy in the larger stream of our history.” 6 ● “Though agricultural depression with failing prices admittedly sharpened the Populist movement, the middle-class, largely urban Progressive movement occurred at a time of high prosperity. In one of the most enlightening sections in his book, Hostadter interprets this second reform movement as the result of a status revolution. Relating the Progressives to the Mugwumps, he finds that the native American, well educated and earning a living through a profession, was thrust aside by new groups and new forces into a position where he felt his influence was, compared to the old days, negligible.” 667, Kirkland ● “The surge of reform, though largely turned back in the 1890’s and temporarily reversed in the 1920’s, has set the tone of American politics for the greater part of the twentieth century. The reform movements of the past sixty-five years fall readily into three main episodes, the first two of which are almost continuous with each other; the agrarian uprising that found its most intense expression in the Populism of the 1890’s and the Bryan campaign of 1896; the Progressive movement, which extended from about 1900 to 1914; and the New Deal, whose dynamic phase was concentrated in a few years of the 1930’s.” 3 ● “The Populist-Progressive age came to an end only with the first World War, and by the time we began to get serious histories of that age, we had been plunged into a new phase of reform brought about by the Great Depression.” 4 ● “By “Populism” I do not mean only the People’s (or Populist) Party of the 1890’s; for I consider the Populist Party to be merely a heightened expression, at a particular moment of time, of a kind of popular impulse that is endemic in American political culture. Long before the rebellion of the 1890’s one can observe a larger trend of thought, stemming from the time of Andrew Jackson, and crystallizing after the Civil War in the Greenback, Granger, and anti-monopoly movements, that expressed the discontents of a great many farmers and business men with the economic changes of the late nineteenth century.” 4-5 ● “Similarly, by “Progressivism” I mean something more than the Progressive (or Bull Moose) Party formed by the Republican insurgents who supported Theodore Roosevelt for the presidency in 1912. I mean rather that broader impulse toward criticism and change that was everywhere so conspicuous after 1900, when the already forceful stream of agrarian discontent was enlarged and redirected by the growing enthusiasm of middle-class people for social and economic reform.” 5 ● “Its general theme was the effort to restore a type of economic individualism and political democracy that was widely believed to have existed earlier in American and to have been destroyed by the great corporation and the corrupt political machine; and with that restoration to bring back a kind of morality and civil purity that was also believed to have been lost.” 5-6 ● “The American tradition of democracy was formed on the farm and in small villages, and its central ideas were founded in rural sentiments and on rural metaphors (we still speak of “grass-roots democracy”). For reasons I will try to explore, the American was taught throughout the nineteenth and even in the twentieth century that rural life and farming as a vocation were something sacred.” 7 ● “Another circumstance attending the rise of Populism and Progressivism in America was unique in the modern world. Here the industrialization and urbanization of the country were coupled with a breakdown in the relative homogeneity of the population.

American democracy down to about 1880, had been not only rural but Yankee and Protestant in its basic notions, and such enclaves of immigrants as had thus far developed were too small and scattered to have a major nationwide impact upon the scheme of its civic life. The rise of industry, however, brought with it what contemporaries thought of as an “immigrant invasion,” a massive forty-year migration of Europeans, chiefly peasants, whose religions, traditions, languages, and sheer numbers made easy assimilation possible. Populism and Progressivism were in considerable part colored by the reaction to this immigrant stream among the native elements of the population.” 8-9 ● “Out of the clash between the needs of the immigrants and the sentiments of the native there emerged two thoroughly different systems of political ethics, the nature and interactions of which I have tried briefly to define. One, founded upon the indigenous Yankee-Protestant political traditions, and upon middle-class life, assumed and demanded the constant, disinterested activity of the citizen in public affairs, argued that political life ought to be run, to a greater degree than it was, in accordance with general principles and abstract laws apart from the superior to personal needs, and expressed a common feeling that government should be in good part an effort to moralize the lives of individuals while economic life should be intimately related to the stimulation and development of individual character. The other system, founded upon the European backgrounds of the immigrants, upon their familiarity with hierarchy and authority, and upon the urgent needs that so often grew out of their migration, took for granted the political life of the individual would arise out of family needs, interpreted political and civic relations chiefly in terms of personal obligations, and placed strong personal loyalties above allegiance to abstract codes of law or morals. It was chiefly upon this system of values that the political life of the immigrant, the boss, and the urban machine was based.” 9 ● “The most prominent and pervasive failing is a certain proneness to fits of moral crusading that would be fatal if they were not sooner or later tempered with a measure of apathy and of common sense.” 15 ● “My criticism of the Progressivism of that period [1890 to 1917] is the opposite of Smith’s—not that the Progressives most typically undermined or smashed standards, but that they set impossible standards, that they were victimized, in brief, by a form of moral absolutism. It is possibly that the distinction between moral relativism and moral absolutism has sometimes been blurred because an excessively consistent practice of either leads to the same practical result—ruthlessness in political life.” 16

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“I believe it will be clear that what I am trying to establish is not that the Populist and Progressive movements were foolish and destructive but only that they had, like so many things in life, an ambiguous character.”18 ● “Actually, as I suggest in my final chapter, the spirit of the Progressive era was quite different from that of the New Deal [the new deal was economic, the Progressive era was more social]. While there are genuine points of similarity and continuity, which I do not wish to deny or minimize, my own interest has been drawn to that side of Populism and Progressivism—particularly that of Populism—which seems very strongly to foreshadow some aspects of the cranky psuedo-conservativism of our own time.” 20 Sources: ​Secondary Synthesis Connections: MacMath, ​American​, Woodward, ​Origins, Ayers, ​Promise​, Sinclair, ​Prohibition​, Rauchway, ​Refuge, Murdering, Blessed​, Willrich, ​City​, Wiebe, ​Search​, Hays, ​Response, ​Kloppenberg, ​Uncertain​, Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism”, Buder, ​Pullman James T. Kloppenberg, ​Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (1986) Argument: ​“The premise of the thesis is that ​certain doctrines, like Marxism, utopian socialism and, of course, ​laissez-fair, inhibited ​social reform. Though differing radically from one another, all of these social philosophies were, in some sense, anti-political: they assumed that mere political reform could have little or no positive impact on social problems. Scientific challenges to the determinism of these philosophies, as well as growing disenchantment with assertions of ethical certainty, animated intellectual radicalism in Germany, Britain, France and the U.S. between 1870 and 1920. The way to political reform was thus in the recognition that, absent a clear and compelling solution to society’s problems, work would have to be conducted in a more pragmatic vein.” 147, Robertson ● “Daniel Rodgers’s ​Atlantic Crossings shows how American reformers improved home and work life by drawing lessons from similar Atlantic nations between the late nineteenth century and the second World War. Rodgers’s book complements two earlier works on shared policy ideas: James T. Kloppenberg virtuoso portrait of the parallel struggles to elucidate a philosophy of social reform in several nations.” 145, Robertson ● “The converging market and industrial revolutions were forcing all these nations to confront similar social problems. Their best minds puzzled through new public solutions to the social maladies there revolutions brought about. For many reform-minded Americas, visits to European cities and studies at German universities opened “the transatlantic ‘moment’” in American social reform in the late nineteenth century. The international flow of ideas began to create a prevalent perception of similar problems, shared experiences, and common aspirations for a new social politics that transcended distinctive national experiences.” 146 ● “What ideas made it possible to leave ​laissex faire ​behind and to embrace social reform? In addressing this question, James T. Kloppenberg’s ​Uncertain Victory,​ provides an intellectual prologue to ​Atlantic Crossings.​” 147, Robertson ● “Kloppenberg identifies and analyzes six “philosophers of the ​via media [the middle way]” (Wilhelm Dilthey, T.H. Green, Henry Sidgwick, Alfred Fouillee, William James and John Dewey) who, in different nations, crossed similar philosophical bridges away from the certainty and determinism that were so widely accepted. Across that bridge each found existential uncertainty and an energizing social consciousness that made positive government action both positive and desirable. The way that each author elaborated on the practical consequences of moral and political uncertainty created the “epistemological and ethical pivot on which political theory turned from socialism and liberalism to social democracy and progressivism” in their respective nations (28). These thinkers insisted that knowledge was hermeneutic, that it proceeded from immediate social experience. History was no longer seen as a predetermined Hegelian or Marxist script; because humans remember and anticipate, history was view as contingent.” 147, Robertson ● Though these authors wrote primarily on philosophy and epistemology, their ideas clearly implied that the state should expand its reach to ensure effective, positive freedom in the context of growing social interdependence.” 147-148, Robertson\ ● “The social democrats Eduard Bernstein, Richard Ely, Walter Rauschenbusch, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and Jean Jaures each tried to reclaim socialism from utopianism and orthodox Marxism. These social democrats acknowledged the openness and historical contingency of social evolution. They denied class struggle as the motor of history, emphasizing instead the ideals of positive freedom and equality and the imperative need for political and economic reforms. Progressives Leon Bourgeois, L.T. Hobhouse, Max Weber, Herber Croly, Walter Lippmann, and John Dewy rejected the determinism of ​laissez-faire and the formality of negative freedom. Instead, they advocated the extension of democracy into the cultural, social, and economic realms, the establishment of progressive taxation and education, and the regulation of markets.” 148, Robertson ● “Kloppenberg’s synthesis complements Rodgers’s book by showing that the intellectual struggle against determinism played out similarly as a necessary prologue to reform in Britain, Germany, France, and the U.S. The notion of uncertainty as a central organizing concept brings a good deal of coherence to the meaning of the diverse experiments that Rodgers describes.” 148 ● “​Uncertain Victories suggests that policy makers in the U.S. would have lacked interest in other nations’ policies if philosophers had not first subverted the self assurance of nineteenth-century ideologies. ​Uncertain Victories also shows that intellectuals in different countries faced converging social circumstances, and in response articulated similar critiques of conventional wisdom.” ● “​Uncertain Victory seeks to change direction and shift the grounds on which we approach the philosophy of Progressivism. Not only, he concludes, did American Progressives have a fully developed and articulated political philosophy, but they and their fellow Social Democrats in Europe were also the heirs to a remarkable and forceful international philosophical reorientation,

78 which he names the ​via media​, a philosophy occupying the large and fertile delta between two tributaries of European thought, classical liberalism and Marxism.” 1000, Gilbert ● “Kloppenberg’s achievement is to demonstrate the integrity and the interlocking ties of this joint European/American effort, encompassing thinkers in the United States, Britain, France, and Germany. He suggests not only that there were philosophers who agreed on an extensive set of first premises and methods, but also that following them, a second group of activist thinkers tried to put their premises and methods into practice and thereby set in motion movements that helped to transform modern political thinking.” 1000-1001, Gilbert ● “While the philosophers and political thinkers of the ​via media “may have been able to live without faith in the redemptive power of theology or ideology, their societies have proved unable to do so.”” 1001, Gilbert ● “In this study I focus on those two successive processes of convergence in ideas about how we know and what we are to do, explore the connections between them, and suggest that the best of these ideas continue to be both philosophically and politically vital.” 3 ● “They denied both mind-body and subject-object dualism inherited from Descartes, and they considered both passive sensation and active decision essential and inseparable aspects of experience. Knowledge from their perspective, can neither be abstracted from nor entirely reduced to the historical circumstances of individual lives. Truth must be cut free from notions of eternity and necessity and grounded instead in human experience, never definite and subject always to revision. These mavericks insisted that ideas emerge from, and must be validated in, neither language nor logic but life…meaning is woven into the fiber of experience, that becoming rather than being is the mode of human life, and that people make rather than find their values. I will call this cluster of ideas the radical theory of knowledge, radical because it cut to the core of attempts to find an Archimedean point for epistemology and substituted an acceptance of contingency for the standard quest for certainty.” 4 ● “The theory of social democracy emerged in the 1890s when new ideas about knowledge and responsibility combined with new political circumstance to transform socialist doctrine.” 5 ● “Like the philosophers of the ​via media​, [social democrats] they located the foundation of knowledge in experience and maintained that history provides a source of judgment more reliable, despite its uncertainties, than metaphysical or ideological doctrine. Second, they shared a commitment to extend the democratic principle of equality from the civil and political sphere to the entire society and the economy. Third, they championed gradual, constitutional reform instead of revolution. Finally, although they embraced the means necessary for its realization, and for that reason they concentrated more on proximate reforms than on ultimate ends.” 6 ● “I do not hope to recover the ideas that animated the discourse of social democracy as it rose to prominence with the transformation of European and American politics from 1890 to 1920.” 6 ● “Lacking certainty about what we know and what we are to do, these wayward socialists claimed that such limited knowledge makes politics less a science than a perpetual search for ideals of justice constituted historically rather than intuited a priori, a goal to be approached neither by individuals seeking private visions of the good, nor by classes fulfilling their revolutionary potential, but by communities struggling to order themselves dramatically.” 6 ● “Accustomed to seeing one another from a distance, the heirs to socialist and liberal orthodoxy recognized only slowly that they were standing on common ground.” 7 ● “Without minimizing the very real and revealing difference separating social democrats from progressives, I will examine the convergence between those who sought to extend the democratic principle of equality and those who renounced possessive individualism and embraced an ideal of solidarity to supplement the customary liberal commitment to personal freedom.” 7 ● “Those who translated liberal theory into an idiom appropriate for twentieth century often called themselves progressives, in Europe as well as in the United States, and that is the term I will adopt in this study.” 7 ● “Those who searched for new ways of thinking about philosophy and politics from 1870 to 1920 were less an organized expedition than a number of independent-minded explorers who ended up neighbors in a territory of new ideas.” 7 Sources: ​papers, correspondence, pamphlets, books Connections: Rodgers, ​Atlantic​, Rauchway, ​Refuge, Murdering, Blessed, Hofstadter, ​Age​, Wiebe, ​Search, ​Willrich, ​City​, Hays, Response,​ Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism”, Buder, ​Pullman Daniel T. Rodgers, “In Search of Progessivism,” ​The Promise of American History: Progress and Prospects​ (Dec., 1982) p 113-132 Argument: ​“What made progressive social thought distinct and volatile, if this reading is correct, was not its intellectual coherence but the presence of all three of these languages at once. If we imagine the progressives, like most of the rest of us, largely as users rather than shapers of ideas, this was the constellation of live, accessible ways of looking at society within which they worked, from which they drew their energies and their sense of social ills, and within which they found their solutions. It did not give those who called themselves progressives an intellectual system, but it gave them a set of tools which worked well enough to have a powerful impact on their times.

To think of progressive social thought in this way is to emphasize the active, dynamic aspect of ideas. It is also to admit, finally, that progressivism as an ideology is nowhere to be found.” 127 ● “For decades the notion that the political and intellectual ferment of the Roosevelt and Wilson years cohered into an entity called progressivism was one of the central organizing principles of American history.” 113

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“Of these developments, one of the most significant has been the emergence of a pluralistic reading of progressive politics, in which the fundamental fact of the era is not reform in any traditional sense of the term, but the explosion of scores of aggressive, politically active pressure groups into the space left by the recession of traditional political loyalties.” 114 “Both historians [Filene and Buenker] began by insisting that the progressive movement was not, in the strict sense of the term, a “movement” at all. Those whom historians had labeled progressives shared no common party or organization. They were rent by deep disagreements over anti-trust policy, women’s suffrage, direct democracy, and any number of other specific issues.” 114 “Only by discarding the mistaken assumption of a coherent reform movement could one see the progressives’ world for what it really was: an era of shifting, ideologically fluid, issue-focused coalitions, all competing for the reshaping of American society.”

“That progressive politics was coalition politics, prone to internal fissures, was a commonplace. For a good many historians, in fact, the progressives had made most sense when divided in two. By the end of the 1970s one could take one’s pick of nearly a dozen dichotomies: “social” reformers vs. “structural” reformers, western democratic Byranites vs. eastern elitist Rooseveltians, “social justice” progressives vs. “social order” progressives, consumer conscious “insurgents” vs. job conscious “modernizers, or in Buenker’s case, heedless of his own theoretical advice, new-stock, urban liberals vs. old-stock patrician reformers.” 115 “Robert Wiebe’s immensely influential ​The Search for Order (1967), in which Wiebe had laid particular stress on the connections between “progressivism” and the surrounding organizational (or, as he called it, bureaucratic) revolution. In a nation rushing pell-mell out of its crisis-ridden villages toward new bureaucratic organizations and social values, none ran faster or worked harder than the progressives to rationalize and organize what they saw as their chaotic surroundings. Scratch the moralistic veneer off progressivism, Wiebe argued, particularly after 1910, and what you found was a movement of organization men caught up in dreams of social efficiency, systematization, and scientifically adjusted harmony. Progressivism was not “the complaint of the unorganized against the consequences of organization,” as Hofstadter had had it. It was, in Wiebe’s telling, precisely the reverse.” 117-118 “But professional goals and bureaucratic ​social visions, historians also found, were by no means identical. If the “professions” had nay trait in common, it seemed not to be a political ethos ut a common desire for job control. Professionally conscious lawyers, for example, if Jerold Auerbach is right, worked far harder to drive the “disrespectable,” night school educated elements out of their ranks than to straighten out legislation. Doctors, only a fraction of whom entered the field of public medicine, found the progressive state most useful as a guarantor of their private monopoly. Professionalization and the search for a rationalized social order it now seems clear, was no tightly organized expedition.” 118 “As Hays described it, the context of progressive politics began with a massive growth in “technical systems” (large-scale organizations dependant on mastery of large inputs of data: payrolls, oil reserves, truancy records, whatever); in occupational specialization, and in communications networks and “functional organizations” binding those specialists together; and in the scientific and bureaucratic values suited to the new organizational systems. Together these processes hastened the growth of “cosmopolitan” forces as opposed to “local” ones. And that, in turn, generated the essential dynamic of progressive politics, the flow of decision making upward, from ward bosses to city managers, townships to counties, school teachers to superintendents.”

“If progressivism qualifies as an an “ism” at all, surely it is a system of shared ideas; yet nowhere in the 1970s was the historiographical discord greater than when it came to describing progressive social thought.” 122 “To put rough but serviceable labels on those three languages of discontent, the first was the rhetoric of antimonopolism, the second was an emphasis on social bonds and the social nature of human beings, and the third was the language of social efficiency.” 123 “These three did not add up to a coherent ideology we can call “progressivism.” All three tended to focus on discontent on arbitrary, unregulated individual power—enough so to make the trust, the political bass, and the sweatshop terms of enormous bearing. But on a deeper level the three languages—full of mutual contradictions—did not add up at all. They had distinctly different historical roots, and they rose into currency and fell into disuse at distinctly different times. We can best imagine those who called themselves progressives as drawing from each of them—some more from one, some more from another—without undue concern for philosophical consistency. Together they formed not an ideology but the surroundings of available rhetoric and ideas—akin to the surrounding structures of politics and power—within which progressives launched their crusades, recruited their partisans, and did their work.” 123 “Of these languages, anti-monopolism was the oldest, the most peculiarly American, and, through the first decade of the century, the strongest of the three…but this understanding of economic and politics in terms of graft, monopoly, privilege, and invisible government had almost always before been the property of outsiders: workers, farmers, Democrats, Populists. What was new in the Progressive years was that the language of antimonopolism suddenly gained the acceptance of insiders: the readers of slick magazines and respectable journals, middle class family men, and reasonably proper Republicans.” 123 “The second cluster of ideas from which the progressives drew—the language of social bonds—was more specific to the Progressive years, and at the same time must less peculiarly American…still the most common explanations most Americans gave to political, economic, and social questions at the end of the century were couched in terms of largely autonomous individuals: poverty and success were said to hinge on character; the economy was essentially a straight sum of individual calculations; governance was a matter of good men and official honesty. Part of what occurred in the Progressive era was a concerted assault on all these assumptions, and, in some measure, an assault on the idea of individualism itself. That was what

80 the era’s “revolt against formalism” was all about: not a revolt against formal categories of thought, for progressive intellectuals were full of them, but against a particular set of formal fictions traceable to Smith, Locke, and Mill—the autonomous economic man, the autonomous possessor of property rights, the autonomous man of character. In its place many of the progressives seized on a rhetoric of social cohesion.” 124 ● “Like the language of antimonopolism, the language of social bonds focused its users’ anger on the irresponsible, antisocial act; but it directed its users’ longing no to honest but to a consciously contrived harmony.” 125 ● “Perhaps the most significant clue to its origin is that, of the three social languages on which the progressives drew, this was the one most tightly attached to the churches and the university lecture halls. Its roots stretched toward Germany and, still more importantly, toward the social gospel. When progressives talked of society and solidarity the rhetoric they drew upon was, above all, the rhetoric of a socialized Protestantism, though how that transatlantic reconstruction of Protestantism took place remains at the moment a very large and very open question.” 126 ● “The last of the three clusters of ideas to arrive…was the one we associate with efficiency, rationalization, and social engineering. Some of the progressives never stomached the new bureaucratic language of budgets, human costs, and system, nor felt comfortable translating social sins into the new-fangled language of social waste. For others, however, the language of social efficiency offered a way of putting the progressives’ common sense of social disorder into words and remedies free of the embarrassing pieties and philosophical conundrums that hovered around the competing language of social bonds.” 126 Connections: Rodgers, ​Atlantic​, Rauchway, ​Refuge, Murdering, Blessed, Hofstadter, ​Age​, Wiebe, ​Search, ​Willrich, ​City​, Hays, Response,​ Kloppenberg, ​Uncertain Paul Boyer, ​Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920​ (1978) Argument: “Even when the reformers were concentrating their fire on specific evils, their underlying purpose—or so I would contend—was to win adherence to a general standard of right conduct upon which an enduring urban moral order could be build.” ix ● “Between the moral reformers of the Jacksonian era, with their quaint fustian about wickedness in the city, and the Progressive environmentalists, with their soaring rhetoric of civic idealism and their confidence in the transforming power of parks, playgrounds, and city plans, the gap seems almost unbridgeable.” Viii ● “Yet beneath the differences run powerful currents of ideological continuity. Common to almost all the reformers considered in this book was the conviction—explicit or implicit—that the city, although obviously different from the village in its external, physical aspects, should nevertheless replicate the moral order of the village. City dwellers, they believed, must somehow be brought to perceive themselves as members of cohesive communities knit together by shared moral and social values.” Viii ● “It was in the 1820s that American began to awake to a fundamental transformation that was going on around them: a society that had been overwhelmingly rural since its foundation in the seventeenth century was entering a period of explosive urban growth.” 1 ● “The first organized response to the urban moral challenge was that of American evangelicalism—one of the more dynamic and expansive social forces of the early-nineteenth-century era. Though the evangelical churches and revivalists were frustrated in their efforts to influence urban America directly, the great evangelical voluntary organizations that flourished in these years—especially the Bible societies, and the Sunday schools—moved into the cities in a major way.” 1 ● 5”The most basic of these assumptions was that the key to dealing with the urban challenge lay in re-creating in the cities the moral order of the village.” 2 ● “The surge of urban growth after 1790 unleashed social forces that would ultimately shatter this cohesive pattern forever. As newcomers crowded in, long-settled families pulled up stakes, merchants moved away from their shops, and shipmasters fled the congestion of the wharves for more distant residences, leaving what had been stable, socially diverse neighborhoods to begin the long decline into slums. The protracted period of business depression and unemployment that has been labeled the “Panic of 1819” hastened this process of urban decay and also contributed to a high rate of population turnover: that ceaseless flow of people into and out of the cities which has from the beginning been a central feature of the American urban experience.” 4 ● “But the strangeness of the city was not simply a matter of size, physical expansion, or even of a shifting demographic profile.

The very rhythm and pace of life differed in ways that were as unsettling as they were difficult to define. From the early 1800s on, observers commented on the impersonality and bustle of urban existed, the lack of human warmth, the heedless jostlings of the free-floating human atoms that endlessly surged through the streets.” 4 ● Municipalities did not take the lead in reforming the moral order of the cities. 7 ● “What was needed, many became convinced, were sustained undertakings that would be firmly grounded institutionally, adapted to urban realities, not too forbidding economically, and independent of passing gusts of reformist excitement. For many urban reformers of evangelical leanings, the humble religious tract seemed to fit these specifications precisely.” 22 ● “Not only would Sunday school literature find its way to “ignorant and depraved families,” declared the ASSU, but as the scholars themselves were gradually transformed, they would become living models of respectable, orderly behavior…Sunday school periodicals were full of accounts of children who tearfully reproved their parents and other adults for intemperance, profanity, rowdiness, and other behavior alien to the sober world of the Sunday school.” 52 ● Cities and their problems were developing along with the lakes, canals and railroad lines.

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“Three organizations unknown in 1830: the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, the Children’s Aid Society, and the Yong Men’s Christian Association…Though very different from each other, these three movements possessed certain common characteristics distinguishing them from earlier efforts. The evangelical ethos remained an important shaping influence, but these three groups were distinctly more secular in their leadership and aims…Furthermore, all three focused their efforts exclusively on America’s cities…Finally, these organizations tried with considerable ingenuity to adapt their techniques and goals to urban realities…They worked to develop alternatives to the vanished order more attuned to the dynamic of urban existence and the structure of urban society.” 85-86 ● During the Gilded Age Charity organizations formed to move outside the workings of the Protestant Church. 143 ● “A charity organization society, declared a Boston leader, “orderly and effective relations,” among the city’s varied elements.

When each of the “individual units” of the urban mass had been “located, guided, helped, and controlled,” declared another speaker rather grandly in 1891, “we shall have a model state of society.” 150 ● “Of all the late-nineteenth-century challenges to the assumptions of the charity organization movement, none was more pointed that that which cam from the settlement houses.” 155 ● “But despite its eventual decline, the charity organization movement for a crucial twenty-year period in the Gilded Age provided a powerful rationale and institutional outlet for the urban social-control impulses of the American middle class. In these decades cities and their complex problems—fleeing to the suburbs, retreating into tight neighborhood enclaves, dismissing municipal politics with ridicule, and allowing the industrial capitalism that was shaping the city to proceed unchecked and uncontrolled—charity organization had provided the illusion that in the moral realm, at least, it was still firmly at the helm.” 161 ● “Whereas the earlier voluntarist movements had concentrated on influencing individuals or families, those of the Progressive era were based on the conviction that the moral destiny of the city would be most decisively influenced through broad programs utilizing a full panoply of governmental power and aimed at a fundamental restructuring of the urban environment.” 190 ● “Negative environmentalists,” we might call them—pursued a coercive and moralistic approach, concentrating two institutions that for them had come to epitomize urban moral and social breakdown: the brothel and the saloon. The other category of reformers—the “positive environmentalists”—took their cue from the more hopeful and visionary side of the late-nineteenth-century urban reformism. Their goal was to create in the city the kind of physical environment that would gently but irresistibly mold a population of cultivated, moral, and socially responsible city dwellers.” 190 ● Boyer sees the process of urban reform as a gradual shift from volunteered preoccupation with individual morality to professionalized concern with environmental factors. He divides this process into four chronological phases. [1] In the Jacksonian era, evangelical leaders, backed by business and professional groups, tried through Bible societies, tract societies and Sunday schools to recreate rural ideals and communities in the bewildering new urban world. [2] In the mid-century decades, the Children’s Aid Society, the YMCA, and other new institutions were directed exclusively at the city and based tentatively on the hope that city life engendered resources, as well as obstacles, for its own reform. [3] In the Gilded Age, new groups like those behind the Charity Organization Society and the early settlement-house ventures were confused and divided on the crucial issues of individual moral responsibility versus environmental influences and “coercive” versus “assimilative” reform. [4] Finally, in the Progressive era, reformers, whatever their differences, concentrated on the urban environment, launching crusades to purify municipal governments, abolish the saloon and organized vice, establish local parks and children’s playgrounds, create the “City Beautiful,” and instigate ideals of civic loyalty and virtue. Boyer closes his account with a look at the 1920s. He persuasively argues that the method of social uplift died in this decade the city was viewed not so much as a threat to social order, but rather as itself the social order, its diversity prized as “cultural pluralism” and its resources for pleasure and self-reform acknowledged.” 678, Douglas Sources:​ Synthesis Connections: ​Stewart, ​Holy, Walters, ​American​, Rauchway, ​Blessed, Murdering, Refuge, Hofstadter, ​Age​, Kloppenberg, ​Uncertain, Hays, ​Response, Willrich, ​City​, Rodgers, ​Atlantic​, “In the Search for Progressivism,” Wiebe, ​Search​, Ryan, ​Cradle​, Johnson, Shopkeepers’​, Thomas, “Romance of Reform,” Johnson and Wilentz, ​Kingdom, Cross, ​Burned, Hatch, ​Democratization​, Mohl, ​New, Kasson, ​Amusing, ​Monkkonen, ​America, ​Smith, ​Urban Disorder, ​Rosenzweig and Blackmar, ​The Park, ​Schuyler, ​The New, ​Buder, Pullman Lincoln Steffens, ​The Shame of the Cities​ (1904) Argument: “And there is my justification for separating from the bound volumes of the magazine and republishing, practically without re-editing my accounts as a reporter of the same of American cities. They were written with a purpose, they were published serially with a purpose, and they are reprinted now together to further that same purpose, which was an is—to sound the civic pride of an apparently shameless citizenship.” 1 ● “He is a self-righteous fraud, this big business man. He is the chief source of corruption, and it were a boon if he would neglect politics. But he is not the business man that neglects politics; that worthy is the good citizen, the typical business man. He too is busy, he is the one that has no use and therefore no time for politics. When his neglect has permitted bad government to go so far that he can be stirred into action, he is unhappy, and he looks around for a cure that shall be quick, so that he may hurry back to the shop.” 3

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“There is hardly an office from United States Senator down to Alderman in any part of the country to which the business man has not been elected; yet politics remained corrupt, government pretty bad, and the selfish citizen has to hold himself in readiness like the old volunteer fireman to rush forth at any hour, in any weather, to prevent the fire; and he goes out sometimes and he puts out the fire…The business man has failed in politics as he has in citizenship. Why? Because politics is business. That’s what’s the matter with it. That’s what’s the matter with everything—art, literature, religion, journalism, law, medicine,--they’re all business, and all—as you see them.” 3-4 ● “There are two great hindrances to their achievement of reform: one is that they are different from, but no better than, the politicians; the other is that politics is not “their line.”” 4 ● “The politician is a business man with a specialty. When a business man of some other line learns the business of politics, he is a politician, and there is not much reform left in him.” 4 ● “If our political leaders are to be always a lot of political merchants, they will supply and demand we may create. All we have to do is to establish a steady demand for good government. The bosses have us split up into parties. To him parties are nothing but means to his corrupt ends.” 5 ● “We are pathetically proud of our democratic institutions and our republican form of government, of our grand Constitution and our just laws. We are a free and sovereign people, we govern ourselves and the government is ours. But that is the point. We are responsible, not our leaders, since we follow them. We ​let them divert our loyalty from the United States to some “party”; we ​let ​them boss the party and turn our municipal democracies into autocracies and our republican nation into a plutocracy. We cheat our government and we let our leaders loot it, and we let them wheedle and bribe our sovereignty from us.” 7-8 ● “The people are not innocent. That is the only “news” in all the journalism of these articles, and no doubt that was not new to many observers…I meant to show simply how the people were deceived and betrayed. But in the very first study—St. Louis—the startling truth lay bare that corruption was not merely political; it was financial, commercial, social; the ramifications of boodle were so complex, various and far-reaching, that one mind could hardly grasp them, and not even Joseph W. Folk, the tireless prosecutor, could follow them all.” 9 ● “I know a man who is making a history of the corrupt construction of the Philadelphia City Hall, in three volumes, and he grieves because he lacks space. You can’t put all the known incidents of the corruption of an American city into a book.” 12 ● “The corruption of St. Louis came from the top. The best citizens—the merchants and big financiers—used to rule the town, and they ruled it well. They set out to outstrip Chicago.” 20 ● “The riffraff, catching the smell of corruption rushed into the Municipal Assembly, drove out the remaining respectable men, and sold the city—its streets, its wharves, its markets, and all that it had—to the now greedy business men and bribers. In other words, when the leading men began to devour their own city, the herd rushed into the trough and fed also.” 21 ● “But nothing was passed free of charge. Many of the legislators were saloon-keepers—it was in St. Louis that a practical joker nearly emptied the House of Delegates by tipping a boy to rush into a session and call out, “Mister, your saloon is on fire,”—but even the saloon-keepers of a neighborhood had to pay to keep in their inconvenient locality a market which public interest would have moved.” 23 ● “From the Assembly, bribery spread into other departments. Men empowered to issues peddlers’ licenses and permits to citizens who wished to erect awnings or use a portion of the sidewalk for storage purposes charged an amount in excess of prices stipulated by law, and pocketed the difference. The city’s money was loaned at interest, and the interest was converted into private bank accounts.” 23 ● “There was little difference between the two parties in the city; but the rascals that were in had been getting the greater share of the spols, and the “outs” wanted more than was given to them.” 25 ● “Political bosses rushed to the rescue. Mr. Folk was reminded of his duty to his party, and told that he was expected to construe the law in such a manner that repeaters and other election criminals who had hoisted Democracy’s flag and helped elect him might be either discharged or receive the minimum punishment.” 26-27 ● “The point is, that what went on in St. Louis is going on in most of our cities, towns, and villages. The problem of municipal government in America has not been solved. The people may be tired of it, but they cannot give it up—not yet.” 41 Connections: ​Boyer, ​Urban Masses,​ Willrich, ​City​, Hofstadter, ​Age​, Mohl, ​New​, Monkkonen, ​America, ​Smith, ​Urban Disorder Raymond A. Mohl, ​The New City: Urban America in the Industrial Age, 1860-1920​ (1985) Argument: “This book traces the broad outlines of the urban transformation of the industrial era. It begins with a discussion of the dynamics of urban change—the impact of dramatic population shifts, the influence of new technology in transportation and building, the significant role of the factory, and the power of individual urban booster, builders, and planners to shape the new city. The book’s second section analyzes the changing patterns of urban government in the industrial era. It focuses particularly on the mid-19​th century crisis in municipal government, the emergence of the political machine, and the rise of urban reformers who challenged the bosses. The final segment of the book addresses the important question of social order in the industrial city—how modernizing change undermined traditional society and how urban people responded to change and social disorder. The book ends with a short survey of 20​th​-century city development in the United States.” 4

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“The process by which a group of small colonial settlements grew into a highly industrialized and urbanized nation is a chief theme in American history.” 1 ● “The rise of the industrial city, perhaps more than any other feature of the national scene, characterized the social and economic development of the period…Pittsburgh had other problems as well. The city government was corrupt, Trevelyan wrote [in 1898]. The streets were filthy and unpaved, the polluted air almost unbreathable, the downtown area incredibly congested, the streetcars not only packed but dangerous, the noise levels intolerable. Labor conflict wracked the city, as workers and capitalists struggled to protect their separate interests. The Pennsylvania steel city, Trevelyan concluded, represented “industrial greatness with all the worst industrial abuses on the grandest scale.” 3 ● “The great growth of the American urban population in the industrial era was affected by changing rates of fertility and mortality. Demographers have noted that both birth rates and death rates declined during the industrial period…However, rural birth rates always exceeded urban birth rates. The great explosion in the urban population did not result from a rising birth rate among urban dwellers…Most important, improved water supplies drastically reduced death rates from typhoid, cholera, and other epidemic diseases. As with birth rate, however, death rates were always lower in rural areas than urban.” 17-18 ● “The city rather than the rural frontier supplied the safety valve for the nation’s surplus and economically discontented population.” 19 ● “Rural southern blacks began moving to northern industrial cities soon after the end of the Civil War. The movement gradually intensified in the late 19​th century. Between 1900 and 1920, some 750,000 blacks made the northward trek. Actually, the great black migration from the South was larger following 1920…The movement was especially strong during and after World War I, when the labor needs of American industry and simultaneous cotton crop failures and agricultural unemployment stimulated black migration. Discrimination, lynching, and white terrorism helped drive blacks out of the South, but it seems clear that the promise of economic opportunity in northern factories provided the essential pull attracting black sharecroppers and tenant farmers.” 21-22 ● “The new technology of the industrial era initiated changes in the internal structure of American cities. In particular, innovations in urban transportation and building construction altered the spatial arrangement of people and economic activities.” 27 ● Walking City ends in 1850s with horse drawn omnibus and commuter railways. This spreads the city limits out and encourages suburbanization. Ominbus gives way to horse drawn street cars which gives way to the cable cars, which gives way to electrified street trolleys, elevated rails and subways. People move out and the Central Business district forms and immigrants and the poor move into lapsed neighborhoods. Cities become less compact and close. ● Skyscrapers allow building upwards, apartments could be luxurious draws for middle and upper classes while tenement houses allowed 4 apartments per floor and no modern amenities, i.e. running water, bathrooms, windows, fresh air. ● Industry moved into city centers and along wharves. When property got too expensive, they moved out to outlying areas of the city or out of city lines and then created favorable governments that kept business taxes low. ● As municipal governments were slow to take care of urban needs, political machines and bosses took over. Ward controlled Tammany and many other cities. Patronage, the graft, and social welfare built up loyalty from immigrants especially, to the machine. Bosses even sponsored sporting events and built parks for baseball games to get support. Government was corrupt, always skimming off the top or buying businesses to do city business, but they took care of city problems. ● Mugwamps were elite, club oriented men, like Teddy Roosevelt, who believed that government needed to reform cities and business practices. They also believed that elite men were the best men for government and that the vote should be restricted to avoid corruption. They wanted a greater degree of home rule in the cities and to institute strong-mayor oriented governments.

Mugwamps paved the way for structural reformers of the Progressive era. Structural reformers wanted administrative bureaucracies to aid strong mayors. ● Social Reformers tried to reform society and Moral reformers tried to improve urban morality—like through prohibition.

Sources: ​Synthesis Connections: Boyer, ​Urban​, Hofstadter, ​Age​, Kloppenberg, ​Uncertain​, Steffens, ​Shame​, Rauchway, ​Refuge, Murdering, Blessed​, Willrich, ​City​, Cronon, ​Nature’s​, Kasson, ​Amusing, ​Leach, ​Land, ​Monkkonen, ​America, ​Smith, ​Urban Disorder, ​Rosenzweig and Blackmar, ​The Park, ​Schuyler, ​The New, ​Buder, ​Pullman John F. Kasson, ​Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century​ (1978) Argument: ​“Amusement parks emerged as laboratories of the new mass culture, providing settings and attractions that immediately affected behavior. Their creators and managers pioneered a new cultural institution that challenged prevailing notions of public conduct and social order, of wholesome amusement, of democratic art—of all the institutions and values of the genteel culture. Amusement complexes such as Coney Island thus shed light on the cultural transition and the struggle for moral, social, and aesthetic authority that occurred in the United States at the turn of the century.” 8 ● “Kasson sets up his argument by presenting two nineteenth-century versions of the well-ordered cityscape: Frederick Law Olmstead’s plan for Central Park and the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, each offering an alternative model to the chaotic reality of urban life. But at the World’s Fair the crowds preferred a third alternative, the boisterous and exotic Midway. The Midway’s

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great success inspired the creation of traveling carnivals and amusement parks in the following years, of which Coney Island became the greatest.” 391, McArthur “The appeal of these parks, says Kasson, derived from their ability to offer an alternative experience to the usual constraints of genteel culture. Where Victorian propriety demanded dignified bearing, correct dress, and formalized public interactions with others, the amusement parks suspended these rules, allowing a disregard of fashion, encouraging a freer deportment, and, in particular, tolerating public expression of affection between the sexes. It became an American carnival, overturning traditional social conventions. “Coney Island in effect declared a moral holiday for all who entered its gates. Against the values of thrift, sobriety, industry, and ambition, it encouraged extravagance, gaiety, abandon, revelry. Coney Island signaled the rise of a new mass culture no longer deferential to genteel tastes and values.” (50)” 391, McArthur “New York’s Central Park and Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Despite important differences in philosophy and form, the two projects represented a broad common effort: to provide a model of social order, cohesion, and tranquility for a fractious people; to elevate public taste and reform public conduct. Both enterprises were designed not simply to amuse but to instruct their users in lessons of aesthetic taste and social responsibility and to inspire them with a respect for cultural standards.” 11 “Town commons and greens had existed in America since the seventeenth century, of course, but the public park, specifically designed for recreation, remained an innovation of the nineteenth, a direct response to the new industrial city.” 12 “The planners steadfastly resisted any installations or practices that threatened to compromise the scenic integrity of the park as a whole. In this way, Olmsted hoped, the park would offer both physical and imaginative exercise and create a setting where people of all classes might promenade in large groups or picnic in small ones.” 13 “In fact, however, there were limitations to the park’s refining influence, as Olmstead himself was soon forced to acknowledge.

Although Central Park proved enormously popular, attracting an average of 30,000 visitors a day for a total of ten million in the year 1871, the park lay so far uptown from New York’s center of population that the great majority of citizens could afford the time and money for excursion only on special occasions. On ordinary days the park ministered to the more prosperous classes.”

“The Columbian Exposition, then, like Central Park, provided an alternative environment that expressed a strong critique of urban conditions and culture. But the remedies the two offered were radically different. While Central Park sought to distance the city by enveloping visitors in a picturesque rural retreat, the Exposition aimed to elevate the city by its example of monumental grandeur.” 18 “The Midway in effect formed a colossal sideshow, with restaurants, shops, exhibits, and theaters extending down a huge corridor, six hundred feet wide and a mile long, from the Exposition grounds westward to Washington Park.” 23 “The Midway, in short, offered a far different conception of cultural cosmopolitanism than the Court of Honor, one oriented both to the ordered and refined past but to the heterogeneous and boisterous present.” 26 “In the postwar decades investors seized upon the possibilities of Coney Island as a resort and poured money into it. The antiquated steamer was superseded by an increasing number of steamboat and railroad lines, and a colorful array of fancifully palatial hotels rose along the beach. In an effort to overcome Coney’s tarnished reputation, promoters coined new names for the Island’s various sections. The infamous Norton’s Point, rechristened the West End, faded in prominence as rivals sprang up to the east, assuming new identities as West Brighton, Brighton Beach, and Manhattan Beach.” 30 “Although the subway did not extend all the way to Coney Island until 1920, turn-of-the-century visitors made their way by a variety of routes and often a combination of conveyances. These included excursion boats, ferryboars, railroads, elevated trains, electric trolleys, subway trains, horsecars, hackney carriages, automobiles, and bicycles. The cheapest fare to the resort in the early 1890s had been forty cents, fifty for a steamer; but improvements in rapid transit beginning with the nickel trolley ride to Coney in 1895 forced these prices down and brought the excursion within the means of the great multitude.” 37 “Coney Island drew upon all social classes and especially upon the rising middle class and the more prosperous working-class visitors, salesmen, clerks, tradesmen, secretaries, shop attendants, laborers, and the like. Coney Island accommodated purses of varying sizes. Most individual attractions at Coney Island charged ten cents apiece. Sometimes, however, there were bargains; in 1905 Steeplechase Park began offering a combination ticket of twenty-five rides for twenty-five cents.” 38 “In addition to families, young men and women came by themselves to Coney, saving whatever spending money they could, sometimes skipping lunches and walking to work in order to have enough for a trip to the resort. Coney offered pleasures infinitely more thrilling than the dominant youthful pastimes of sitting on the front steps or hanging around on the street. Young working-class women in particular could plan to spend no more than the cost of their transportation, since they quickly attracted escorts eager to “treat.”” 39 “The liberating social setting was by no means limited to the beach. Indeed, as Coney Island’s attractions proliferated and crowds increased, journalists observed ironically that one could spend a day at the resort and never see the water. As visitors entered amusement area, they encountered an environmental phantasmagoria, combining characteristics of the beer garden, couty fair, Chicago Midway, vaudeville, and circus.” 49 “All combined to create the holiday atmosphere of Coney Island, an invitation to collective gaiety and release. Coney Island plunged visitors into a powerful kinesthetic experience that, like the surf itself, overturned conventional restraints, washed away everyday concerns, buoyed and buffeted participants as they submitted to its sway.” 49

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“The amusement complex presented scenes which were stunningly technological, urban, populous, egalitarian, erotic, hedonistic, dynamic, and culturally diverse. For painters in revolt against decorous traditional standards, Coney Island offered in profusion the ingredients of a powerful new aesthetic.” 88 ● “The problem Coney Island entrepreneurs faced by the 1920s was that the rest of the culture was catching up. The authority of the older genteel order that the amusement capital had challenged was now crumbling rapidly, and opportunities for mass entertainment were more abundant than ever. A long-time Coney Island resident would later observe, “Once upon a time Coney Island was the greatest amusement resort in the world. The radio and the movies killed it. The movies killed illusions.” More accurately, radio and movies made amusements ubiquitous, and the movies in particular presented elaborate, convincing illusions at a price Coney Island could not match.” 112 ● “It was not that attendance at Coney declined in the 1920s—on the contrary, it increased—but the experience was less extraordinary and hence less meaningful. The extension of the subway from New York to Coney Island in 1920 also reduced the element of contrast, the distinctive sense of entering a special realm operating under its own laws.” 112 Sources:​ journals, newspapers, photos Connections: ​Boyer, ​Urban​, Rosenzweig, ​Eight​, Mohl, ​New​, Leach, ​Land, ​Rosenzweig and Blackmar, ​The Park, ​Schuyler, ​The New William Leach, ​Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture​ (1993) Argument: ​“This book examines how this older culture [agrarian, rural, and 1870s] was challenged and was gradually superseded by the newer culture. It deals with the new national corporations and the investment banks as they moved almost overnight into the everyday lives of Americans. It focuses on mail order houses, on chain stores and dry goods houses, on hotels and restaurants, and especially on department stores, and it does so in part because most historians have for too long looked down on them—indeed, on the entire field of marketing, distribution, and merchandising—as subjects of only secondary importance compared to the fields of agricultural and industrial production and, therefore, as subjects unworthy of detailed study. But this approach is mistaken; these institutions were—and are—indispensable to the capitalist economy. They brought the reality of capitalism—the dream life of capitalism, that is—directly, concretely home to generations of men and women.” 8 ● “In its sheer quest to produce and sell goods cheaply in constantly growing volume and at higher profit levels, American business, after 1890, acquired such power and, despite a few wrenching crises along the way, has kept it ever since. From the 1890s on, American corporate business, in league with key institutions, began the transformation of American society into a society preoccupied with consumption, with comfort and bodily well-being, with luxury, spending, and acquisition, with more goods this year than last, more next year than this. American consumer capitalism produced a culture almost violently hostile to the past and to tradition, a future-oriented culture of desire that confused the good life with goods. It was culture that first appeared as an alternative culture—or as one moving largely against the grain of earlier traditions of republicanism and Christian virtue—and then unfolded to become the reigning culture of the United States. It was the culture that many people the world over soon came to see as ​the​ heart of American life.” Xiii ● “This book deals with the crucial formative years of this culture, 1880 to 1930. It seeks to illuminate its power and appeal as well as the tremendous ethical change it brought to America. Today, as mass consumer capitalism seems to be spreading across all frontiers, it is urgent for us to understand how it first came into being and what was gained or lost or repressed in that process.” Xiii-xiv ● “This book attempts a fuller assessment of the culture of consumer capitalism. It discusses the economic reality that ushered it into being—the national corporations, the mass market retailers, and the banks. The book deals with the advertisers and promoters, the display artists and fashionists, and the huge number of brokers and confidence men and women who devised the riveting enticements to serve business. But the book goes well beyond an economic analysis to see the culture as a whole, as a complex set of relations and alliances among different kinds of people and groups—cultural and noneconomic, religious and political—that worked together to create what merchant John Wanamaker called the “land of desire.”” Xiv ● “Behavior is not the key subject of the book, although plenty of behavior is described in its pages, plenty of people affirming the new culture, opposing or hating it, celebrating it. Still, my subject is not consent but the ​creation of this culture. Consent, to be sure, played some kind of role, but it was not decisive.” Xiv ● “Yet, I do not believe that consent was key to the creation and perpetuation of this new phenomenon. Indeed, the culture of consumer capitalism may have been among the most nonconsensual public cultures ever created, and it was nonconsensual for two reasons. First, it was not produced by “the people” but by commercial groups in cooperation with other elites comfortable with and committed to making profits and to accumulating capital on an every-ascending scale. Second, it was nonconsensual because, in its mere day-to-day conduct (but not in any conspiratorial way), it raised to the fore only one vision of the good life and pushed out all others. In this way, it diminished American public life, denying the American people access to insight into other ways of organizing and conceiving life, insight that might have endowed their consent to the dominant culture (if such consent were to be given at all) with real democracy.” Xv ● “In the decades following the Civil War, American capitalism began to produce a distinctive culture, unconnected to traditional family or community values, to religion in any conventional sense, or to political democracy. It was a secular business and market-oriented culture, with the exchange and was a secular business and market-oriented culture, with the exchange and was a

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secular business and market-oriented culture, with the exchange and circulation of money and goods at the foundation of its aesthetic life and of its moral sensibility. This book is about the growth of that culture, about its character, and about the people and groups that brought it into being.” 3 “By World War I, Americans were being enticed into consumer pleasure and indulgence rather than into work as the road to happiness.” 3-4 “A cult of the “new” belonged to this new culture…“The world and the books are so accustomed to use the word ‘new’ in connection with our country,” wrote Mark Twain in ​Life on the Mississippi​, “that we early get and permanently retain the impression that there is nothing old about it.” It was hard under these circumstances to defend any tradition, any inherited custom or belief, when the past itself was hostage to the new.” 4 “By the end of the century, however, commercial capitalism had latched on to the cult of the new, fully identified with it, and taken it over. Innovation became tied to the production of more and more commodities. Fashion and style were at the center, appropriating folk design and image, reducing custom to mere surface and appearance. The cult of the new was, perhaps, the most radical aspect of this culture, because it readily subverted whatever custom, value, or folk idea came within its reach.” 5 “But after 1885, in the wake of the rapid industrializing of the country, the idea of democracy, like the idea of the new and the idea of paradise, began to change radically. Gradually, wealth lay less in the land and more in capital or in the money required to produce new goods. This pecuniary wealth was owned by a small minority; but at the same time, growing numbers of Americans were losing control over their work, becoming dependent on others—on the owners of the capital—for their wages and well-being. In this context a new conception of democracy developed, fostered by growing incomes and a rising standard of living and espoused alike by capitalists and many progressive reformers, a democracy at once more inclusive and more confining than before.” 6 “This highly individualistic conception of democracy emphasized self-pleasure and self-fulfillment over community or civic well-being…The concept had two sides. First, it stressed the diffusion of comfort and prosperity not merely as part of the American experience as heretofore, but instead as its centerpiece. Thus, progressive Herbert Croly, inspirer of President Theodore Roosevelt, wrote that the “promise of American life” consisted foremost in a “promise of comfort and prosperity for an ever-increasing majority of good Americans…Second, the new conception included the democratizing of desire, or, more precisely equal rights to desire the same goods and to enter the same world of comfort and luxury. American culture, therefore, became more democratic after 1880 in the sense that everybody—children as well as adults, men, and women, black and white—would have the same right as individuals to desire, long for, and wish for whatever they pleased. The Land of Comfort was becoming the Land of Desire.” 6 “As late as 1870 the average number of workers in any given factor was still fewer than ten. Most markets were local or regional, and the majority of businesses were individually owned and managed. The culture was largely agrarian, republican, and religious; and more people—white people—controlled their own property or land.” 8 “​Land of Desire deals with three other matters central to an understanding of why and how the culture of consumer capitalism emerged in the way it did: the development of a new commercial aesthetic, the collaboration among economic and noneconomic institutions, and the growth of a new class of brokers. After 1880, American business began to creat a new set of commercial enticements—a commercial aesthetic—to move and sell goods in volume. This was the core aesthetic of American capitalist culture, offering a vision of the good life and of paradise.” 9 “From the 1880s onward, a commercial aesthetic of desire and longing took shape to meet the needs of business. And since that need was constantly growing and seeking expression in wider and wider markets, the aesthetic of longing and desire was everywhere and took many forms. After 180 this aesthetic appeared in show windows, electrical signs, fashion shows, advertisements, and billboards; as free services and sumptuous consumer environments; and as the artifacts or commodities themselves.” 9 “At the heart of the evolution of this commercial aesthetic were the visual materials of desire—color, glass, and light. Used for centuries by royal courts and by the military to excite devotion, loyalty, and fear, and by religions to depict otherworldly paradises, these materials were now mobilized in the United States and other industrialized countries to suggest a ​this-​worldly paradise that was stress-free and “happy.”” 9 “By 1910, American merchants, in their efforts to create the new commercial aesthetic, took command over color, glass, and light, fashioning a link so strong between them and consumption that, today, the link seems natural. By the 1920s so many commercial institutions and people had exploited “color” that, according to ​The New York Times​, the word itself had been “worn to a frazzle.”” 9 “National corporations, department stores, investment banks, hotel chains, and the entertainment industry joined this circuit, but so did the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, the Harvard Business School and the Wharton School, Cornell University, New York University, Pratt Institute, and the New York School of Design. Even the nation’s most radical labor union, the Industrial Workers of the World, participated inadvertently in the building of this new culture.” 10 “And, I hope this book demonstrates, many groups and individuals raised their voices against the new cultural changes taking place and rebelled against them. These included farmers and workers who fought the large corporations; the small, independent merchants of the era who took part in the “retail wars” against the big department stores; religious believers and leaders as well

87 as Congressional democrats and municipal socialists; insurgent economists and literary intellectuals; and numerous “ordinary” citizens. Many of these people were principally loyal to the older democratic producing tradition, a powerful tradition that claimed people themselves should determine the fate of their culture, the shape of their politics, and the conditions of their labor.” 12 ● “Journalists James Roty took a trip across America in the midthirties and encountered little to show that the Depression had dampened the power of what he called the “dream culture.” If anything, he wrote, both economic misery and the profit motive had “augmented the demand for dreams.”” 382 ● “There seems to be much truth in this concept, as such great writers as Emerson, Whitman, and William James long ago explained. It appears that many human beings not only seek but also ​need ​new goods, new adventures and experiences, and new insights to feel alive and fulfilled. There may be no inherent limit to what people can or might desire or to what they can or might be invited and tempted to do—economically, sexually, politically, morally. Human beings are infinitely flexible and endowed with considerable imaginative powers.” 385 ● “At the same time, the conception of the desiring self, as expressed in capitalist terms and exploited by capitalism, offers a one-sided and flawed notion of what it means to be human. It rejects what is also “human” about human beings: their ability to commit themselves, to establish binding relationships, to sink permanent roots, to maintain continuity with previous generations, to remember, to make ethical judgments, to seek pleasure in work, to remain steadfast on behalf of principle and loyal to community or country (to the degree that community or country strives to be just and fair), to seek spiritual transcendence beyond the self, and to fight a cause through to the end.” 386 Sources: ​Wanamaker’s archives, advertising, newspapers, journals, catalogues Connections:​ Cronon’s ​Nature’s​, Kasson, ​Amusing,​ Mohl, ​New Eric H. Monkkonen, ​America Becomes Urban: The Development of U.S. Cities & Towns, 1780-1980​ (1988) Argument: ​“The history of our cities is, then, the history of how they came to their corporate status, what they have done with this status, and how they have shaped themselves. Our cities are what we have made them. They will be what we make them. Not everyone shares evenly in the power to shape and make them, and this is a part of the story.” Xiv ● “This book captures a different American city, a city epitomized by suburbs and freeways as well as high-rise downtowns. This city, the unglamorous place where most Americans through history have lived, is not the ideal city and does not even represent necessarily the kind of place where people should live.” Xi ● “The United States has two major kinds of government: territorial and corporate. Territorial governments include counties and states. Cities, on the other hand, have corporate governments, and their territorial bounds are not rigidly set. As corporate legal creatures, American cities are more akin to the business corporation than to other governmental entities.” Xi ● “Yet, until the changes wrought by the New Deal and World War II, local governments handled almost all of the welfare, education, infrastructural building (bridges, sewers, wharves, streets) and regulation in the United States. Physically diffuse, the power of the U.S. cities pervades the lives of their residents.” Xii ● “As a consequence, the United States is urban but not urbane. I wish to amend this partial, rural self-understanding through a study that implicitly addresses the history of U.S. cities from a world historical context. This history is about U.S. cities, thus it compares indirectly. It is designed to account for the American side of the differences between cities of Western Europe and the United States which are so apparent in the late twentieth century but which had their roots in much earlier events. In so doing it deliberately bridges several different research traditions, incorporating and building on “old” and “new,” political and social, urban histories.” 1-2 ● “A central historical precondition underlies the larger course of American urban history: timing. Richard Hofstadter emphasized this aspect of American development, reminding us that the United States was “the first post-feudal nation, the first nation in the world to be formed and to grow from its earliest days under the influence of Protestantism, nationalism, and modern capitalist enterprise.” This aspect of historical timing meant that by the nineteenth century, when the United States city formation began in earnest, cities began building under the protective aegis of the nation state, which in its grasp for political power assumed the cost and management of the military. Cities were freed to be more than fortified, mercantile warehouses, to design themselves as service oriented, debt financed, growth (and therefore capital) promoting, economic (not social) centers.” 3-4 ● “The city’s acceptance of responsibility for problems within its purview constituted a historically significant act worth yof our careful attention. Cities could have chosen to ignore sewage, crime, unschooled children, and slow transportation simply by tolerating higher disease rates, offense rates, illiteracy rates, and traffic tangles. That there is indeed wide variation in tolerance between cities today illustrates that no “natural” level generating a response to problems exists. Instead, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, cities chose to intervene aggressively in the local economic setting, intentionally creating what they hoped would be ideal environments for economic growth. By these actions individual villages, towns, and cities attempted to amplify their existing locational or economic advantages. Success, defined as population growth, increased wealth of all real property owners.” 4 ● “The basic chronology of U.S. cities has three parts: First, the premodern era, which came to a close in the period 1790-1830, retained a deep similarity to and continuity with European cities. Containing about 5 percent or less of any region’s population,

88 cities functioned as commercial and political centers…Second, the century-long period of local economic and population growth from 1830 to 1930 saw a dynamic and historically unprecedented expansion of cities—in absolute size, in proportion of the total population, and in number. Prior to this century, cities had been much more responsive agents. But during this phase, cities began to work out their new mode of providing services, acting positively in local affairs, and doing so as competitive entrepreneurs. Local governments financed two transportation revolutions, in railroads and hard surfaced roads…the Great Depression, which abruptly terminated the era…Finally, post-Depression cities made the innovations of the previous century permanent and somewhat invisible, by creating bureaucracies to accomplish the new services. New federal government actions during the Depression helped dissipate intense local concerns about cities.” 6 ● More of a book on how to write urban history Sources:​ maps, census, records, government records, secondary sources Connections: ​Cronon’s ​Nature’s, Mohl, ​New​, Boyer, ​Urban​, Steffens, ​Shame​, Smith, ​Urban Disorder, ​Schuyler, ​The New, ​Rosenzweig and Blackmar, ​The Park,​ Buder, ​Pullman Paul Krause, ​The Battle for Homestead, 1880-1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel​ (1992) Argument: ​“​The Battle for Homestead convincingly argues that the 1892 strike, as well as a dozen or so others that occurred in the Pittsburgh industrial area, was not an isolated event; they were all the result of a prolonged struggle for control of the rapidly changing production process in the iron and steel industry. Whoever controlled the shop floor controlled the key to immense wealth and power. In the minds of the industrialists, it was technology, not workers’ skill, that controlled the pace and capacity and ultimately, the costs of production. The union, whether the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers or the Knights of Labor, was viewed as the only significant barrier to the ultimate Darwinian victory.” 702-703, Weber ● “Specifically, it explore the politics, culture, and morality of steelmaking in late nineteenth-century America by tracing the circuitous path that led businessmen, engineers, political leaders, and metalworkers to Homestead, Pennsylvania—sit of the world’s largest and most “progressive” steel mill and of America’s most infamous debate over the politics, culture and morality of steelmaking.” Xiv ● “For many people, the story of the Homestead Lockout is as famous for the violent events that punctuated it as for the way it ended—with a resounding defeat for unionism in the steel industry.” 3 ● “On 1 July, the workers seized the mill and sealed off the town to prevent scabs from resuming operations. In the infamous battle of 6 July, 300 Pinkerton “detectives,” dispatched to the mill by darkened river barge under an arrangement with the county sheriff, fought virtually the entire town; 3 Pinkertons and 7 workers were killed. Four days later, 8,500 national guardsmen were called out at the request of Frick to retake the town and the mill. On 23 July, Alexander Berman, a Russian Jewish anarchist, attempted to assassinate Frick but missed his mark. Soon after, guardsman W.L. Iams was hung by his thumbs for having jumped to his feat and shouted, “Three cheers for the man who shot Frick!” 3 ● “The AAISW held out until November; with its final defeat in Homestead, unionism in the national steel industry came to a virtual halt for four decades.” 4 ● “The story of Homestead dramatizes the broadest issues and problems of nineteenth-century industrial America. It is about the endless conflict between the pursuit of private interest and the defense of the common good. It is about the right of individuals to accumulate unlimited wealth and privilege versus the right of individuals to enjoy security in their jobs and dignity in their homes. It is about the aspirations and the frustrations of Americans who wanted their country to be republic in fact and not merely in name. In short, as the nineteenth century was with us still: Can—or how can—the new land of industry and technological innovation continue to be “the land of the free”? That is, how does one reconcile the undeniable attractions of material progress, implying as they invariably do a host of social and economic inequities, with the American commitment to democracy for all?” 6 ● “The technological innovations that transformed American industry in the 1860s and 1870s—in particular the Bessemer process of steelmaking—elicited a wide variety of responses.” 7 ● “Hesitations about the impact of the new technologies invading the workplace were compounded by the broader uncertainties bequeathed to workers, and all Americans, by the Civil War. Among the most troubling of these was the place of labor, white and black, within the new social order. In the view of many Americans, the “free” enterprise system—the very system that promoted technological innovation and industrial efficiency—rather than ensuring their freedom, had effectively locked them into an insidious form of wage slavery. Thousands of working Americans responded to these circumstances by demanding a new kind of abolitionism.” 7 ● “To end wage slavery and half the drift toward permanent “dependence,” labor leaders in greater Pittsburgh knew that the workers’ movement had to cope with two specific challenges. Not surprisingly, the first was that posed by technological innovation in the struggle for control of the workplace.” 7 ● “The second challenge, which labor leaders saw as inextricably bound to the first, lay outside the shop floor, in the political arena. Here the question was how to mobilize the workers of Pittsburgh to wrest the reins of government from the supporters of “organized capital.”” 8

89 “The principles labor sought to establish, according to the ​Tribune​, were grounded in notions of right and justice markedly different from the belief that self-interest is the universal, beneficent arbiter of human relations.” 9 ● “A shared desire to ensure such happiness by securing what American workers since the Revolutionary Era had called a “competence”—a sufficiency of means for living comfortably—provided the raw material out of which skilled industrial craftsmen and their less skilled colleagues tried to forge the requisite solidarity to attack the “unnatural” wage system.” 9 ● “Here, then, was the undergirding of a politics that did indeed indict nineteenth-century industrial civilization: a notion of right that ensured a competence.” 10 ● “The idea of a competence did not merely challenge the putative right to unlimited appropriation, however: it also asserted an important moral and political distinction between property for use and property for accumulation. Locke seemed to have removed the distinction. Labor reformers understood that it existed. However, in the end, they lacked a coherent strategy that would: (1) provide all citizens with sufficient property for a competence; (2) check unlimited property accumulation; and (3) ensure the individual pursuit of happiness that stood at the center of their cherished republicanism.” 10 ● “The late nineteenth-century conflicts between organized capital and organizing labor thus embodied, to no insignificant degree, a contest over the meaning of republicanism in modern America. The defenders of capitalism privileged the rights of property and translated the republican emphasis on the development of moral personality into a quantitative process measured by the calculus of the market. The adversaries of capitalism saw a discrepancy between republican ideals and daily experience and sought to stave off the “corrupt” encroachments of a new tyranny of capital. At stake in this contest over the meaning of republicanism and the control of instruments of power and production was the very definition of public culture and the public interpretation of reality.” 10 ● “it is the assault on the Pinkertons, along with the other bloody events of the day, that has haunted the memory of Homestead. 14 ● “It was precisely at this point that, in swarming across the mill yard and onto the wharf, Homesteaders crossed an important legal boundary, for until now, they had followed the Advisory Committee’s stricture against trespassing on company land to avoid any suggestion of an assault on property rights.” 17 ● “The loss of Morris, Wain, Striegel, Fares, and Sotak and the wounding of their colleagues touched all of the principal ethnic and occupational groups in Homestead and underscored their unity…Whereas the misfortunes the befell these Homesteaders seemed to fortify and further consolidate the workers’ determination to resist the Pinkertons, morale plummeted inside the ​Iron Mountain and the ​Monongahela​ over the course of the morning of 6 July.’ 23 ● “But Burgoyne and other observers also recognized the Frick and Lovejoy had been counting on the ultimate authority of the state from the outset; they knew that the more chaotic Homestead became, the more likely it was that Governor Robert E. Pattison would order out the militia, thereby clearing the way for nonunion laborers to enter the steelworks.” 25 ● “This much, however, is certain: Frick went to great lengths to ensure that if such a mobilization proved necessary, it would be presented to the public at large as the logical, legal response to a brazen revolt of insubordinate workers. For this reason, Frick and Philander C. Knox, chief lawyer for Carnegie Steel, had sought to deputize the Pinkertons prior to their arrival in Homestead.” 27 ● “At union headquaters the men were cheered by scores of encouraging telegrams sent by workers from across the country. The workers in Homestead sensed “that they were fighting not only their own battle,…but the battle of organized labor as a whole, and that the eyes of workingmen all over the content were upon them.” 23 ● “On the other hand, the proposal that came forth from the crowd envisioned their prosecution for murder. To Burgoyne men and women who had charged the riverbank on 6 July in defense of their jobs and homes, and who had watched their co-workers die, it was the essence of American justice—a justice that required the Pinkerton “invaders” to be treated as criminals.” 34 ● “Thousands of men, women, and children had gathered to witness the surrender, and they greeted the Pinkertons with vengeful hoots and calls.” 34 ● “The Pinkertons, Arthur Burgoyne wrote, “had to run the gauntlet, and if the experience before them was not destined to be almost as trying as the attributed to the victims of the gauntlet torture in tales of Indian life, it was not because the mob did not show all the signs of thirsting for a fierce carnival of revenge.” 35 Sources: ​newspaper, journals, telegrams, letters, Connections: ​ Smith, ​Urban Disorder,​ Rosenzweig, ​Eight Hours, ​Buder, ​Pullman ●

Carl Smith, ​Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, The Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman​ (1995) Argument: Smith “argues that public discussion of late-nineteenth-century Chicago tells us much about the changing anxieties associated with modernity in American culture.” 442, Fahs ● “This book examines the imaginative dimensions of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Haymarket bombing of 1886, and the celebrated model town of Pullman, Illinois, from its founding in 1880 to the famous strike of 1894. By imaginative dimensions, I mean the context of through and expression that suffuses individual and social life.” 1 ● “The city’s resurrection from the flames, its ability to overcome and apparently even benefit from adversity, demonstrated to many the vitality of a Chicago occupied a critical position. The pious rhetoric in which the reconstruction process was described

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meanwhile revealed how important it was to American in 1871 to see the determination to rebuild the stricken city as reaffirming the sacred purposes on which they believed that the country and their lives were founded, and to which they believed that the country and their lives were founded, and to which they had so recently rededicated themselves through the struggle and sacrifice of the Civil War.” 2 “The bomb hit a cultural nerve. Immediately perceived as a critically representative event at this time of social conflict, it became the focus of a continuing debate over several pressing issues going back to the fire, central among them the instability of a concentrated and mixed urban population. The backdrop of this debate included the emergence of certain modes of thinking and speaking about city life and social disorder that dictated how the eight men charged with the crime were prosecuted, convicted, and punished . Their trial was the place where the state, speaking for and to the people of Chicago, America, and the world, tried to force these defendants to take the blame for the bomb and other civil unrest in a way that reinforced the value and legitimacy of the current order and discouraged opposition to it. The defendants resisted the role in which they were cast, using their day in court to indict their accusers for creating the sources of the distress for which thy were being blamed.” 2-3 “During the tumultuous 1880s, the town of Pullman, located just outside Chicago, seemed to demonstrate that it was possible to have a healthy, humane, prosperous, and productive urban order free of the kinds of conflicts and dangers that the fire and Haymarket revealed, and that this order could be sustained without police or troops, guns or gallows.” 3 “George Pullman staked his fortune, his energy, and his reputation on building an industrial town so carefully planned and managed that it would unite labor and capital in social harmony. In order to do this, however, he was convinced that one had to entrust the responsibility for urban order to a single owner (in this case his Pullman Palace Car Company) in possession of all the property and in charge of all the rules.” 3 “If the model town could provide a way out of the apparently inescapable syndrome of urban disorder, then its lead was worth following, even if to do so required, among the other ideas about social reform that it advanced, a major modification in the concept of American citizenship.” 4 “Like the fire and the Haymarket riot before it, the Pullman strike became the event through which many Americans tried to make sense of the larger patterns of change and conflict that seemed to dominate cultural life as the country headed into the twentieth century.” 4 “In this era of urban expansion, no other city grew so quickly and so much as Chicago.”5 “Between 1870 and 1890 it moved from fifth to second largest city in the country. The 1880s were the years of Chicago’s mightiest expansion, from half a million to over a million, with an increase of over 125,000 between 1885 and 1886.” 5 “At the same time, partly because of the fire and this population increase, but also because of the immense changes in transportation, communications, structure of the workplace (both factory and office), and building technology, Chicago’s identity was constantly transforming, so that the city that was rocked by the Haymarket bomb was physically as well as demographically different from the one that had burned down fifteen years before. This combination of sudden titanic growth out of a virtually nonexistent past and continuing constant alteration combined to make Chicago seem a place hostile to traditional ideals of order and stability.” 5 “In common definition, ​disorder​, however large or small, is a specific event or resulting condition that is opposed to order—the way things normally are.” 6 “As I shall show, the contemporary understanding of the fire, the bomb, the strike, and of Chicago itself as disastrous, cataclysmic, calamitous, or catastrophic derived from existing ideas which were already in place and which affected how people integrated these events and this city into their lives.” 6 “None of these urban disorders that struck Chicago were imagined or, in some abstract sense, socially constructed, as anyone burned or blasted or beaten in the course of each of them could readily attest. But we should be aware that the occurrences that people consider most disruptive are those which seem to offer the greatest challenge to their ideas of order.” 6 “Thus, the Haymarket bomb, which killed or wounded a few dozen people and caused virtually no property damage, was a cataclysm of a deeper and broader kind than the fire because of its more extraordinary and enduring imaginative reverberations.

While the fire forced the physical re-creation of Chicago, the bomb remade the mental map of the metropolis.” 7 “Through the last three decades of the nineteenth century, Americans increasingly agreed that the modern American city, and Chicago in particular, was the disorderly embodiment of instability, growth, and change. They also agreed that it was the center of political, economic, and social power in America, and, as such, was contested ground—another reason why it seemed so unstable.” 7 “The struggle was over the future of America, with which the rise of the city was so closely linked, and the matters at issue were the rules and principles that formed the basis of this setting, from those relating to wages and working conditions to ones of fairness, truth, and of course, order.” 7 “Many of the individuals examined here were speaking to a much broader group of Americans who eagerly wanted the city interpreted for them so that they could know what to believe about the world and how to act within it. They were willing to accept that the urban world was often disorderly, but not that their beliefs were incoherent or lacking a sound basis. This mean that they wanted an interpretation of urban experience that seemed neutral, apolitical, and stable, all the more so since the urban setting struck them as so contested, politicized, and unstable.” 7

91 Sources:​ city histories, newspaper and magazine articles, government and corporation reports, memoirs, speeches, and pamphlets Connections: ​Mohl, ​New​, Krause, ​Battle​, Cronon, ​Nature’s​, Boyer, ​Urban​, Steffens, ​Shame, Monkkonen, ​America​, Rosenzweig and Blackmar, ​The Park​, Schuyler, ​The New, ​Buder, ​Pullman Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, ​The Park and the People: A History of Central Park​ (1992) Argument: “Yet they do remind us that America’s most important naturally landscaped park is an ​urban space​, best understood in relation to its city. That reminder in particularly important since most nonfiction about Central Park (as distinguished from imaginative representations) has tended to view it as isolated from city life and conflicts, as a landscape of vistas, birds, bridges, buildings, rocks, and tress. Few have written about the ​people​ who made, maintained, and above all, enjoyed the park that was their own.” 3 ● “Historians have shared the tendency to study this public space apart form the city’s people.” 3 ● “To be sure, it is impossible to comprehend Central Park fully without understanding its appeal as a designed natural landscape…our goal in this book is to offer a different perspective on the park’s history—one that puts people at the center and relates the park to the city. We tell the story of the park’s people—the merchants and uptown landowners who launched to project; the immigrant and black residents who lived on the land seized for the park; the politicians, gentlemen, and artists who disputed its design and operation; the German gardeners, Irish laborers, and Yankee engineers who actually built it; and the generations of New Yorkers for whom Central Park was their only backyard.” 3 ● “We begin this history of Central Park as a social institution and space, an aspect of the city rather than just a natural or designed landscape, by asking a seemingly easy question: What was a “public park”?” 3 ● “Just as there are two traditions in the definition of Central Park as a park, its meaning as a public institution also has two dimensions: its political character as property and its cultural character as open space. ​Public, in one sense, signifies property rights, government ownership, and control of land removed form the real estate market. Public property, owned by the government, thus contrasts to private property, owned by individuals or corporations who can exclude others from their land.

But public property also differs from common property, that is, land or resources to which all members of a community have unrestricted access. The right to control public property is vested in government officials who determine who has access to it and under what conditions.” 5 ● “Because Central Park is public property, the management of its grounds has also continually been negotiated through the city’s tension-ridden political system. Who has the authority to control the park and define “proper” behavior with in it? What sorts of restrictions on use should be set? According to what standards should the park be maintained? Should new facilities be added?

What kind? Who is permitted to participate in the public decision-making process?” 6 ● “The ​public of a public park has a cultural and spatial as well as a political and property-based dimension. We think of public spaces as territories open to all visitors. As open, nonexclusive spaces, parks assume their character not through political powers of ownership or control but through patterns of use. The people who claim access to this public space constitute the cultural public. This cultural dimension of a park as a public space overlaps with its political and property-based definition in sometimes confusing ways. Some “public” space can be privately owned, as, for example, a theater or salon, and proprietors can regulate access by price, if no longer by racial or gender categories. Public spaces defined as territories open to all people suggest the ideal type of the village commons, but historically such common property has served closely knit, homogenous communities.” 6 ● “Property-based definitions of ​public and ​private tend to be absolute (rooted in legal rights of ownership and control), but the idea of public space as nonexclusive territory is a relative concept. In the modern American city, few, if any, spaces can be said to be entirely open or entirely restricted. Degrees of exclusivity and access are shaped by economics, politics, and culture. A variety of structural constraints determine whether people possess the means to make use of the public space. In the 1860s, for example, long work hours, low wages, the cost of public transportation, and distance from downtown neighborhoods restricted working-class New Yorkers’ use of Central Park. Further, formal prescriptive rules can control access. Rules that forbade commercial wagons on its drives, for example, originally prevented the city’s bakers and butchers from taking their families there for Sunday outings. Also, informal rules or codes of social conduct can determine whether particular groups want to use different public spaces and whether they will feel welcome. In the early twentieth century black children who went to the park faced the taunts of white youths. Although Central Park has always been a nonexclusive “public” space, it has not always been equally accessible to all New Yorkers.” 7 ● “Organized political pressure, for example, overturned the strict “keep-off-the-grass” rules and the restrictions on Sunday use imposed by the original board. But the most important pressure for change came from patterns of everyday use as the park became increasingly accessible and appealing to immigrant and working-class New Yorkers. They transformed the elite park of the 1860s into a more eclectic and popular space by the 1880s and 1890s, and by the end of the century Central Park was beginning to fulfill some of the democratic promises implicit in its creations as a public space. This democratization also affected the three cultural institutions situated within the park. The zoo, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art drew new crowds to the park, but the museum’s trustees sought to control popular uses of “their” institutions by fashioning a novel arrangement that gave private boards control over the management of institutions subsidized by public money.” 9 Sources:​ memoirs, government records, maintenance reports, newspapers, secondary material

92 Connections: Mohl, ​New​, Smith, ​Urban Disorder, Kasson, ​Amusing​, Rosenzweig, ​Eight,​ Boyer, ​Urban​, Schuyler, ​The New​, Monkkonen, ​America, ​Buder, ​Pullman David Schuyler, ​The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth-Century America ​(1986) Argument: ​“Despite the very real limitation, in its attempt to reconcile the increasing economic dominance of cities with traditional values of home, family, and nature, the new urban landscape was one of the most creative and enduring contributions to civilization undertaken in nineteenth-century America.” 8 ● “Promoters of these projects attempted to redirect and control American urban development at what was arguably its most crucial period—the years between 1840 and 1900—when cities were growing and changing at the most rapid rates in the nation’s history, when they were becoming increasingly complex as physical and social spaces, and when they were taking the shape of modern metropolitan areas.” 1 ● “They had studied the historical lessons of other countries and had concluded that the propertyless residents of cities were “sores” on the body politic. Distinguished spokesmen representing this group—Jefferson, Madison, and John Taylor of Caroline—celebrated the virtues of an agrarian way of life and institutionalized their distrust of urban areas by locating the national capital not in an existing city but in a new federal territory far from a metropolis.” 1 ● “This shift from country to city, from farm to factory, was perhaps the most fundamentally dislocating experience in all of American history. It demanded innovative solutions that would protect public health, provide areas for recreation to ease the psychological adjustment to a new urban environment, and redirect the spatial growth of cities.” 2 ● “Beginning roughly in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, some leaders of a new generation, born primarily in New England and New York after the Revolutionary War, perceived these challenges and sought to redefine urban form and culture.

Like its predecessor, this generation also cherished nature as the best environment, but what it meant by ​nature was quite different: instead of the plantation or the farm, these rising cultural spokesmen more and more celebrated a specific set of scenic qualities and social values they identified with a pastoral or domesticated environment, one in which man and nature had achieved the state of balance Leo Marx has termed the “middle landscape.” The individuals who became promoters of the new urban landscape had witnessed the transformation of New England and the beginnings of a dramatic expansion of the nation’s cities in the antebellum years, and they especially regretted what by then had become the prototypical urban form, the gridiron.” ● “The conception of the city as a new urban landscape that evolved in nineteenth-century America differed from its precursors in three principal ways. First, to a greater degree than in western Europe, with its long tradition of metropolitan centralization, the idea of creating a more openly built urban environment began as a repudiation of the commercial city.” 3 ● “Second, this new conception of the city and its possibilities was middle-class in orientation. With the rise in urban property values during the nineteenth century, the density of building and stress of apartment and tenement life seemed to undermine traditional values associated with family and community…to counter this instability promoters of public parks created communal spaces for family outings, places where the naturalistic landscape offered relief from cramped, dark, poorly ventilated dwellings, and where rural scenery might sooth the “nerves and mind” of visitors.” 3 ● “Third, advocates of the new urban landscape broke with older patterns of city form by attempting to achieve the differentiation of space and land use within the metropolis. Because workers needed to live near their places of employment, in the colonial and early national years cities usually mixed commercial and residential functions on the same block. Too often this resulted in the congestion, filth, crime, and disease that contemporaries feared. But beginning in the 1830s, urban transportation systems made possible the separation of workplace and domicile, thereby creating the potential for eliminating what reformers considered the worst environmental failings of the older commercial city.” 4 ● “The conception and creation of the new urban landscape began in the antebellum years, when more and more Americans recognized that existing recreational spaces within cities were hopelessly inadequate.” 4 ● “However pleasant, such cemeteries did not address fundamental problems of urban form: they were didactic landscapes full of monuments of contemplation. Moreover, these cemeteries were at best only semipublic institutions and were located so far from the city as to make it all but impossible for working people to escape to them from their neighborhoods.” 4 ● “Thus, during the 1840s and 1850s proponents of the new urban landscape applied the lessons of cemetery design and crusaded to create large public spaces within the city. They began with the notion that the country was somehow inherently superior to the city, that what the urban environment most needed was a large recreational ground—a park.” 4 ● “New York’s Central Park was the first major attempt to achieve these goals. Almost immediately after its construction, however, Olmsted recognized that even so large a public landscape was not equal to the task of refining and civilizing a city.

Because of the high cost of urban land, Central Park was located far to the north of the built area of Manhattan ans was virtually inaccessible to the people who most needed it. Consequently, Olmsted and his contemporaries urged the creation of parkways and park systems that would extend the benefits of parks to all neighborhoods of the city.” 5 ● “In place of the old urban structure he envisioned a modern city that included the morality of nature as well as the economic functions of urban life. Such a city would combine “more compact and higher building in business quarters” with “broader, lower and more open building in residential quarters.”…They struggled to create a new city with a compact commercial center,

93 spacious parks for recreation, openly built residential subdivisions, and suburban communities—each an integral and interdependent part of the modern metropolis.” 5 ● “A concern for maintaining social order pervades much of the writing of Olmstead and his colleagues, in large part because these promoters of parks and suburbs thought of themselves as reformers” 6 ● “Andrew Jackson Downing, Olmstead, Calvert Vaux, Charles Eliot, and other planners whose works this book analyzes attempted to create landscapes that they hoped would promote the highest potential of civilization in America.” 6 ● “He confessed that public school education was not enough, and to raise Americans to a higher level of civilization Downing advocated a program of “popular refinement,” which involved the creation of a whole series of institutions—publicly supported libraries and museums as well as parks and gardens. If implemented, he predicted, these institutions would “banish the plague spots of democracy.” 6 ● “Unable to alter the shape of older neighborhoods as well as the commercial center, advocates of a new urban landscape created recreational and domestic spaces on the periphery of cities. They could not remedy inequalities in the existing social structure, or provide housing and play facilities for the poor, which compromised their vision of the new city.” 6-7 ● “[Schuyler] begins by examining the two most notable examples of American city planning at the beginning of the century, Pierre L’Enfant’s plan for the nation’s capital and the Commissioners Plan of 1811 that imposed a rigid gridiron on Manhattan.

Schuyler views both as “flawed visions” with unfortunate consequences for Washington and New York City. L’Enfant’s grandiose baroque plan with broad radical boulevards and monumental squares and circles was ill-suited to the small capital city of the nineteenth century and contributed to the dismal emptiness that so many visitors observed in early Washington. The commissioners’ gridiron created a city more suitable for real estate speculation than for decent living and made inadequate provision for parks or open spaces. According to Schuyler, in the field of city planning nineteenth-century Americans were off to a bad start.” 657, Teaford ● “By the mid-nineteenth century, however, American city dwellers would find inspiration for a better life in the unlikely confines of the rural cemetery. Beginning in the 1830s with the opening of the famous Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a series of rural burial grounds offered a welcome resort for families seeking a weekend escape from the city.

With curving lanes and romantic landscaping, the new cemeteries presented a sharp contrast to the repetitious grid of city streets and the grim brick and stone tenements and townhouses.” 657, Teaford ● “But they also instructed city fathers in the desirability of developing parks for the growing number of urban dwellers. The thousands of urban residents who converged on the cemeteries each weekend were ample testimony to the need and demand for sylvan breathing spaces in the city.” 657, Teaford ● “Olmsted and Vaux’s naturalistic park was intended to be a rural island amid an urban environment. A thick border of trees would shut out the surrounding city and prevent unwanted urban intrusions into the oasis of rural meadows, glens, ponds, and groves that Olmstead and Vaux desired to create [for Central Park].” 657-658, Teaford Sources:​ memoirs, papers, journals, newspapers Connections: ​Rosenzweig and Blackmar, ​The Park​, Kasson, ​Amusing, Mohl, ​New​, Rosenzweig, ​Eight​, Smith, ​Urban Disorder​, Boyer, Urban, ​Monkkonen, ​America​, Buder, ​Pullman Stanley Buder, ​Pullman: An Experiment in Industrial Order and Community Planning: 1880-1930​ (1967) Argument: ​“Long dismissed as mere paternalism, Pullman’s town was actually his effort at employing a business system for public as well as personal ends. He hoped to show that industrialization need not lead to social disintegration and that the chaotic concentration of men and machinery in unmanageable urban neighborhoods could be reversed by the planned order of an industrial community. The model town was an experiment in reform, but one placed in a business context and intended to illustrate that social reform and good business practices were complementary.” Xi The Strike: ​“The panic of 1893 had caused the Pullman Palace Car Company to cut wages by about 25 percent. At Pullman, its company town near Chicago, no corresponding reduction was made in rents and other charges, which led to a local strike initiated May 11, 1894, by members of the American Railway Union. After the company president, George M. Pullman, had refused arbitration of the dispute, the union's national council, led by its president, Eugene V. Debs, called for a nationwide boycott of Pullman cars. Sympathy strikes by union locals occurred in 27 states and territories from Ohio to California, and violence of disputed origin and intensity broke out, centring in Chicago. Governor John P. Altgeld of Illinois, sympathetic toward the strikers, refused to call out the militia. On July 2, in part acceding to railroad management requests, U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney procured an injunction from federal judges to halt acts impeding mail service and interstate commerce; on July 4, President Grover Cleveland, acting on Olney's advice, ordered 2,500 federal troops to Chicago. The strike ended within the week, and the troops were recalled July 20. When Debs was convicted of contempt of court and conspiring against interstate commerce, leaders of both industry and organized labour recognized that the Sherman Antitrust Act could be enforced against unions and, even more ominous from the viewpoint of labour, federal injunctions could be employed to defeat action by the unions.” Britanica.com ● “This system was given dramatic setting in a model town built in 1880 to prove its validity for community as well as factory.

Pullman wished to demonstrate that American industry could plan and construct a town which would solve the social problems of the time by providing adequate housing for workers and thus encourage their development of proper middle-class standards.xi

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“[George Pullman’s] model town was built to reinforce virtues of self-help and personal discipline such as industry, frugality, and cleanliness, which he perceived as threatened by the impact of industrialization and immigration on the cities. A harmonious community of contended workingmen living in comfortable housing amidst rural surroundings and enjoying superior facilities would be created not through philanthropy or utopian ideas but by practical recognition of interlocking self-interest rationally organized along a business philosophy of order and efficiency.” 228 ● “The community was expected to encourage workers to remain in one place while fostering advancement and improvement within the company. This desired stability was not achieved…By the end of the nineteenth century, Americans knew full well that attachment to community must be subordinated to the advantages of mobility.” 228-229 ● “Rules intended to insure control from above and provide equity at the bottom wound worker, resident, and company officer in red tape. Decisions made at all levels of authority often resulted in injustices which only strengthened the impression of a ubiquitous company and made inhabitants and employees rankle at its arbitrariness. No clearly defined manner of expressing and resolving industrial or community grievances existed, so that they tended to overlap and fester. As an early experiment in what the twentieth century would call social engineering, the model town of Pullman was a disappointment.” 229 ● “When events underscored Pullman’s shortcomings, they were assumed to be the consequences of paternalism rather than planning…all of its flaws were attributed to George Pullman’s imposition of his tastes and self-interest on the town.” 230 ● “To urban reformers, the experiment seemed to indicate that planning would work only when combined with self-government.

Jane Addams, Richard Ely, and Graham Taylor feared the concentration of community power in a company, but believed government could enlist the voluntary support of all groups to meet social problems effectively through democratically originated planning.” 230 ● “Though his experiment failed, it was the forerunner of the later garden city movement and other efforts to resettle men and industry in planned communities away from the cities.” 231 ● “Pullman, Illinois, was also many things. It was the most elaborate attempt ever made by an American businessman to centralize, motivate, and control his workforce. It was George M. Pullman’s response to social disintegration and moral decay, yet it was an $8,000,000 investment that he expected to pay a 6 per cent per annum return. It was also a notable, if not lasting, experiment in urban planning.” 1250-1251, Baughman ● “Buder’s best writing and analysis are devoted to the value system that Pullman sought to express in his town and to engender in his workers; to the planning process and physical appearance of the town; to the social characteristics of workers and residents; and to Pullman’s gradual loss of “community identity.” The watershed in the life of Pullman and in the image of his town, of course, was the strike. The author summarizes quite well the proximate causes: an organization grown too large for personal supervision by top management and a lack of managerial sureness at lower levels; a complex system of piecework and inplant transfer or pricing that often discriminated among workers by factors other than skill or performance; layoffs and wage reductions in response to declining orders, with a refusal to reduce rents or costs of living in the town; and Pullman’s conviction that management, not unions, had his employees’ best interest at heart.” 1251, Baughman ● “Following the strike, public criticism and internal dissent eroded the town’s original concept and destroyed the credibility of George Pullman’s previously humanitarian image; neither was ever the same again. The suburban expansion of Chicago interdicted and then subsumed the town.” 1251, Baughman Sources:​ newspapers, memoirs, journals, maps, union records Connections: ​Krause, ​Battle, Rauchway, ​Refuge​, Blessed, Murdering, Hofstadter, ​Age​, Rosenzweig, ​Eight​, Rosenzweig and Blackmar, The Park, Schuyler, ​The New​, Boyer, ​Urban​, Smith, ​Urban Disorder​, Mohl, ​New​, Willrich, ​City​, Hays, ​Response, Kloppenberg, Uncertain​, Weibe, ​Search James R. Grossman, ​Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration​ (1989) Argument: “Grossman argues that the migration was not simply an unorganized and unthinking rush of people northward. On the contrary, there was a structure to the process. Before leaving the South, wary blacks read up on the opportunities in Chicago, relying in part on letters from kin and friends who had already moved north. They were also avid consumers of the boosterish propaganda printed in Chicago’s leading black newspaper, the ​Defender​, and they corresponded with both the ​Defender and the Chicago Urban League to obtain information on jobs and housing. Having decided to depart, black migrants often banded together in migration clubs to take advantage of the cheaper group fares offered by the railroads.” 221, Teaford ● “Once they arrived in Chicago, black newcomers reveled in the newfound freedom but also became aware of the limitations on their new home. They enjoyed being able to sit anywhere they wished on the streetcar and felt empowered by the experiences of castings a ballot. On the other hand, racial discrimination in employment and housing prevented blacks from winning promotions and establishing their residence wherever they wished. Because of their inadequate schooling in the South, the children of newcomers were relegated to special classes reserved for “retarded” youths, and when they graduated, racial barriers often prevented young blacks form obtaining jobs commensurate with their education. Moreover, the leadership elite of Chicago’s black community had mixed feelings toward the immigrants, claiming that the vulgar, unrefined behavior of the newcomers could give the entire race a bad name. Though the migrants were overwhelmingly working class, they also received a mixed reception from the labor unions, and consequently black workers generally proved to be lukewarm in their support for

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unionization. The ​Defender adopted an ambiguous position on unions, and such black institutions as the Wabash Avenue YMCA actively served the interest of employers and undermined the labor movement.” 221, Teaford “Wright soon learned that Chicago had its own racial etiquette, its own unwritten laws and patterns of discrimination.

Regardless, of how honest and hardworking a black Chicagoan might be, he noted in 1901, only the most menial and lowpaying jobs were available.” 2 “Most migrants viewed the North as a land of opportunity. During World War I, northern cities were just that, especially compared with the South and within the context of the migrants’ short-term expectations and early experiences. Despite race riots and a severe depression during the winter of 1920-21, most black migrants retained their faith in the promise of the northern city; few returned South, except for an occasional visit.” 3 “With northern employers unwilling to hire blacks as long as white immigrants from Europe remained available, northward migration had played little role in southern black life until World War I shut off immigration. Catalyzed in early 1916 by recruiters from northern railroads suffering from the wartime labor shortage, the Great Migration soon generated its own momentum. “Northern fever” permeated the black South, as letters, rumors, gossip, and black newspapers carried word of higher wages and better treatment in the North. Approximately one-half million black southerners chose to “say fair wel to this old world” and start life anew in northern cities during 1916-19, and nearly one million more followed in the 1920s.” 3-4 “Among the many cities offering new employment opportunities, Chicago represented a logical destination for black men and women preparing to leave homes in southern communities. “The packing houses in Chicago for a while seemed to be everything,” observed one man from Hattiesburg, Mississippi…The meat-packing firms were known even in the rural South, where their storage facilities dotted the countryside. Many black southerners had heard of the “fairyland wonders” of Chicago’s spectacular 1893 Columbian Exposition. Others knew of Chicago as the home of the Overton Hygienic Manufacturing Company, maker of High Brown Face Powder. Baseball fans might have seen or heard of Chicago’s black American Giants, who barnstormed through the South every summer in a private railroad car. The Chicago ​Defender, the most widely read newspaper in the black South, afforded thousands of prospective migrants glimpses of an exciting city with a vibrant and assertive black community. Finally, the city was easily accessible via the Illinois Central Railroad, whose tracks stretched southward from Chicago into rural Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana, with easy access from adjoining states as well…From 1916 to 1919, between fifty and seventy thousand black southerners relocated in Chicago, and thousands more passed through the city before moving on to other locations in the North.” 4 “This book explore the meaning of the Great Migration from the perspective of its participants, with a particular focus on their adjustment to a northern industrial city and on their perceptions of their place in that city.” 4 “The key to a full understanding of the Great Migration and its meaning is to place the movement within the context of southern history, class formation in the North, ghettoization, and radical ideology.” 5-6 “This investigation, therefore, begins in the South, in particular the broad region from which Chicago drew its migrants—Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, Arkansas, and parts of Georgia and Tennessee.” 6 “Part One of this book establishes both a narrative and analytical foundation for understanding what black southerners did and thought after they arrived in the North. The ways in which migrants approached urban schools, politics, workplaces, unions, and other institutions grew out of their experiences as black southerners and participants in the Great Migration itself. Adjustments clearly took place within certain constraints, most of which have been comprehensively analyzed by scholars interested in the emergence and development of northern urban ghettos.” 6-7 “The second half of the book will focus on the experiences of migrants in Chicago, which offers a variety of attractions as the locus of a case study. The broad reach of the ​Defender meant that even to many who migrated elsewhere, Chicago symbolized the promise of the North. More particularly, the city already had a black community sufficiently established to permit the emergence of a complex relationship between “Old Settlers” and newcomers. At the workplace the nature of the migrants’ non-domestic employment in Chicago—largely in steel mills and packinghouses—required a sharp transition form nonindustrial to industrial work patterns. Unionization campaigns, especially in the meat-packing industry, forced the newcomers to define their relationship to an industrial economy whose accessibility had been central to migration itself. Part Two examines the environment black southerners found in Chicago and explores the ways in which the migrants’ backgrounds and experiences shaped their perceptions of and responses to that environment.” 7 “What they would eventually learn was that access defined as mere entry was not enough. Jobs did not mean promotions or economic power; votes and patronage implied neither political power nor even legitimacy as civic actors; seats in classrooms did not set their children on the road toward better jobs or places of respect in the city. Their initial optimism might seem naïve in this retrospective light, and in many ways it was. But they had come from a society legally, socially, and seemingly economically defined by racial categories, and it was not at all illogical for them to assume that, freed from racial proscriptions, they would share American freedom and prosperity. Seventy years after the Great Migration it is clear that many of the migrants’ hopes foundered on the shoals of northern racism, the business cycle, and class relations.” 8 “In Chicago, black men and women did not have to truckle to whites. They could vote, a right that symbolized their full citizenship and the legitimacy of their participation in the affairs of the broader community. They could send their children to schools whose quality seemed guaranteed not only by the apparent political influence of black aldermen, but by the more

96 tangible presence of white children sitting alongside black pupils. They could work in factories, where they earned high wages, envisioned the possibility of promotion, and made meaningful choices on the crucial issue of unionization.” 259 ● “While southern racial violence usually resulted from a symbolic transgression of racial etiquette, Chicago’s riot grew out of a competitive situation that suggested the importance of blacks in the city’s political and economic life as well as in its housing market. Moreover, the riot revealed a black militancy that would have provoked either repression or expulsion in the South: when whites attacked, blacks fought back, and the ​Defender​ kept score on the front page.” 259 ● “School integration, while attributable in part to whites’ disinclination to enact de jure segregation, persisted mainly because the Board of Education had not yet been able to gerrymander districts efficiently. Integrated schools were doomed, their demise awaiting only continued black migration into a city committed to ghettoizing its black inhabitants.” 260 ● “Frustrations and conflicts at the workplace, racial violence, and various forms of exclusion and discrimination did indeed mark visible boundaries of Chicago as a Promised Land during and immediately after the Great Migration, but the barriers seemed neither as systematic nor as unbreachable as they had in the South.” 260 ● “These distant employers, unlike landlords or merchants with a lien on the crop, neither pressured wives and children to work nor related social order and the availability of a work force to what blacks did outside the workplace. Welfare capitalism through black institutions like the YMCA and YWCA, and behavior modification campaigns originated from sources that were essentially nonthreatening. White reformers could safely be ignored, and even the advice of the black middle class seemed authoritative only when relations with the unfamiliar world of white institutions were at stake. No attempts to reshape behavior outside the workplace carried coercive implications.” 261 ● “Migrants, paid in cash, valued the freedom to spend or save according to their priorities and inclinations. Newcomers who had come from a sharecropper economy based on credit had little experience with a regular cash income. Labor in turpentine and lumber camps, where wages were paid monthly and often in scrip or some other form of credit at the company store, had been only slightly more likely to generate cash.” 261 ● “Embracing the emerging mass consumer culture more quickly and less ambivalently than European immigrants, they bought radios, frequented movies, attended baseball games, crowded cabarets and vice resorts, and patronized chain store.” 262 ● “Within the black community, the white world posed neither threat nor opportunity. There, differences among blacks, especially along class lines, could not be ignored, partly because class in the black community depended so heavily on activity in the very arenas in which blacks exercised the greatest autonomy: leisure and church…Inside the black metropolis, where whites exercised little overt institutional influence, class tensions emerged clearly and constituted a significant aspect of the migrants’ sense of their separateness from others in the community.” 264 ● “What their early experiences in Chicago confirmed for many migrants was the potential of a variant of pluralism. Venturing North to share in both the process and the rewards of democracy and industrialism, they did not necessarily expect or wish to abandon their identity as black Americans. Indeed, they expected that what Chicago offered was an environment that would permit them to choose to interact with white only in settings essential to economic and political citizenship. The political process, the workplace, and the school were the most important of these settings; to many, the decisions surrounding unionization turned on whether unions fell into a similar category.” 264-265 ● “The dreams embodied in the Great Migration eventually collapsed under the weight of continued racial oppression and the failure of industrial capitalism to distribute its prosperity as broadly as the migrants had expected.” 265 Sources: ​journals, newspapers, union literature, literature, speeches, government records Connections: ​Smith, ​Urban, Woodward, ​Origins, Ayers, ​Promise​, Mohl, ​New​, Boyer, ​Urban, ​Litwack, ​Been​, Foner, ​Reconstruction, Lehman, ​Promised Leon F. Litwack, ​Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery​ (1979) Argument: ​“But for the black men and women who lived to experience the Civil War, there would be the moment when they learned a complex of new truths: they were no longer slaves, they were free to leave the families they had served, they could negotiate the terms of their future labor, and they could aspire to the same rights and privileges enjoyed by their former owners. It is that moment—and the days, months, and years that immediately followed—which this book seeks to capture: the countless ways in which freedom was perceived and experienced by the black men and women who had been born into slaveyr and how they acted on every level to help shape their condition and future as freedmen and freedwomen.” xii ● “The various dimensions of slavery’s collapse—the political machinations, the government edicts, the military occupation—should not be permitted to obscure the principal actors in this drama: the four million black men and women for whom enslavement composed their entire memory. For many of them, the only world they knew ended at the boundaries of the plantations and farms on which they toiled; most of them were several generations removed from the African immigrants who had been torn from their homeland and shipped in chains to the New World. The distant voices of Africa still echoed in their music, in their folk tales, in the ways they worshipped God, and in their kinship relationships. But in 1860 they were as American as the whites who lorded over them.” Xi ● “But the education acquired by each slave was remarkably uniform, consisting largely of lessons in survival and accommodation—the uses of humility, the virtues of ignorance, the arts of evasion, the subtleties of verbal intonation, the

97 techniques by which feelings and emotions were masked, and the occasions that demanded the flattering of white egos and the placating of white fears.” Xi ● “Whether they chose to recall bondage with terror, nostalgia, or mixed feelings, their thoughts, concerns, and priorities at the moment they ceased to be slaves emerge with remarkable clarity and seldom conflict significantly with the contemporary historical evidence.” Xiii ● “Never before had black people in the South found any reason to view the future with more hope or expectation than in the 1860s. The war and freedom injected into their lives the excitement of anticipation, encourage a new confidence in their own capabilities, and afforded them a rare insight into the vulnerability and dependency of their “white folks.” For many, these were triumphs in themselves. If their optimism seemed misplaced, the sights which greeted newly freed slaves suggested otherwise—black armies of occupation, families reunited, teachers offering to instruct them, Federal official placing thousands of them on abandoned and confiscated lands, former masters prepared to bargain for their labor, and black missionaries organizing them in churches based upon a free and independent expression of their Christianity. To measure the significance of emancipation is not to compare the material rewards of freedom and slavery, as many contemporaries were apt to do, but to appreciate the many and varied ways in which the newly freed moved to reorder their lives and priorities and the new assumptions upon which they acted.” Xiv ● “Unprecedented in the disruptions, stresses, and trauma it generated among both whites and blacks, the Civil War threatened to undermine traditional relationships and dissolve long-held assumptions and illusions. Even if many slaves evinced a human compassion for masters and mistresses caught in the terrible plight of war, invasion, and death how long before these same slaves came to recognize that in the very suffering of their “white folks” lay their own freedom and salvation?” 4 ● “Based upon the information they had peeved together from various sources, slaves not only kept themselves informed of the progress of the war but, more critically, the began to appreciate its implications for their own lives and future. By 1863, at least, the assumption prevailed among vast numbers of slaves (including even those who did not entirely welcome the prospect) that if the Union Army prevailed on the battlefields, the Confederacy and slavery would expire together.” 27 ● “Deprived of what they deemed essential protection, often frustrated in their attempts to anticipate black behavior, many anguished whites forgot all that talk about contended and loyal slaves and described a situation fraught with the most terrifying implications.” 30 ● “Whether by guarding prisoners, marching through the South as an army of occupation, or engaging Confederate troops in combat, the black soldier represented a sudden, dramatic, and far-reaching reversal of traditional roles—as spectacular as any in the history of the country. What made this reversal even more manifest, however, was the conduct of the slaves on the plantations and farms that lay in the path of the advancing Union Army.” 103 Sources:​ journals, newspapers, WPA narratives and oral histories Connections:​ Grossman, ​Land,​ Foner, ​Reconstruction,​ Lehman, ​Promised,​ Ayers, ​Promise​, Woodward, ​Origins Nicholas Lemann, ​The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America​ (1991) Argument: ​“What the mechanical cotton picker did was make obsolete the sharecropper system, which arose in the years after the Civil War as the means by which cotton planters’ need for a great deal of cheap labor was satisfied. The issue of the labor supply in cotton planting may not sound like one of the grand themes in American history, but it is, because it is really the issue of race. African slaves were brought to this country mainly to pick cotton. For hundreds of years, the plurality of African-Americans were connected directly or indirectly to the agriculture of cotton; at the time of the demonstration on the Hopson plantation, this was still true. Now, suddenly, cotton planters no longer needed large numbers of black people to pick their cotton, and inevitably the nature of black society and of race relations was going to have to change.” 5-6 ● “The shift from an industrial to an information economy, argues Lemann, coupled with the instability of the rural southern culture that many of these migrants brought north, was largely responsible for the family instability, high unemployment, irresponsibility, and violence that became ever present in northern cities.” 1510, Broussard ● Howell Hopson wrote “In his memorandum, he wrote that “the introduction of the cotton harvester may have been comperatble to the unveiling of Eli Whitney’s first hand operated cotton gin…” He was thinking mostly of the effect on cotton farming, but of course the cotton gin’s impact on American society was much broader that that. It set off some of the essential confulsions of the nineteenth century in this country. The cotton gin made it possible to grow medium- and short-staple cotton commercially, which led to the spread of the cotton plantation from a small coastal area to most of the South. As cotton planting expanded, so did slavery, and slavery’s becoming the central institution of the Southern economy was the central precondition of the Civil War.” 5 ● “This compelling book tells two interrelated stories: one, the story of the migration between the early 1940s and the late 1960s of more than five million black Americans from the cotton plantations and small towns of the rural South to the ghettos of the urban North; the other, the story of the evolution of the federal social policy in the 1960s and early 1970s in response to this extraordinary demographic shift.” 635, Weiss ● “The political institution that paralleled sharecropping was segregation; blacks in the South were denied social equality from Emancipation onward, and, beginning in the 1890s, they were denied the ordinary legal rights of American citizens as well.

98 Segregation strengthened the grip of the sharecropper system by ensuring that most blacks would have no arena of opportunity in life except for the cotton fields. The advent of the cotton picker made the maintenance of segregation no longer a matter of necessity for the economic establishment of the South, and thus it helped set the stage for the great drama of segregation’s end.”6 ● “In 1940, 77 per cent of black American still lived in the South—49 per cent in the rural South. The invention of the cotton picker was crucial to the great migration by blacks from the Southern countryside to the cities of the South, the West, and the North. Between 1910 and 1970, six and a half million black Americans moved from the South to the North; five million of them moved after 1940, during the time of the mechanization of cotton farming. In 1970, when the migration ended, black American was only half Southern and less than a quarter rural; “urban” had become a euphemism for “black.”” 6 ● “The black migration was one of the largest and most rapid mass internal movements of people in history—perhaps ​the greatest not caused by the immediate threat of execution or starvation. In sheer numbers it outranks the migration of any other ethnic group—Italians or Irish or Jews or Poles—to this country. For blacks, the migration meant leaving what had always been their economic and social base in America and finding a new one.” 6 ● “The great black migration made race a national issue in the second half of the century—an integral part of the politics, the social thought, and the organization of ordinary life in the United States. Not coincidentally, by the time the migration was over, the country had acquired a good measure of the tragic sense that had previously been confined to the South. Race relations stood out nearly everywhere as the one thing that most plainly wrong in America, the flawed portion of the great tableau, the chief generator of doubt about how essentially noble the whole national enterprise really was.” 7 ● “The United States as a whole was in a kind of moral slumber about segregation in the South; white liberals were officially against it, but they held out little hope that it could be eliminated. The South was still an essential part of the Democratic Party’s coalition in presidential politics—John F. Kennedy carried the old Confederacy in 1960. Southern Democrats held the highest leadership positions and controlled the most important committees in Congress. The white champions of civil rights were mostly people like Eleanor Roosevelt, religious leaders, and figures from the Congress of Industrial Organizations side of the labor movement, like Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers—in other words, not members of the tough, pragmatic tendency within the Democratic Party, Kennedy, as a senator preparing to run for president, voted with his Southern colleagues to put an amendment in to the Civil Rights Act of 1957 that guaranteed jury trials (that is, certain acquittal) to people accused of violating blacks’ voting rights.” 111 ● “As the years pass, it has become clear that Johnson, in whose own soul was lodged a measure of the fundamental white American ambivalence about blacks, was the only president in this century who was willing to put the American dilemma firmly at the center of his domestic agenda.” 221 ● Gangs, ghettos, better, but still low paying jobs, racisim, riots, and segregated neighborhoods with poor urban housing project screening plagued Chicago.

Sources:​ memoirs, interviews, newspapers, government records Connections: ​Grossman, ​Land,​ Foner, ​Reconstruction,​ Litwack, ​Been,​ Ayers, ​Promise​, Woodward, ​Origins

Begin 20th Century Reading List Notes

1 20​th​ Century Notes Ellis W. Hawley, ​The Great War and the Search for Modern Order: A History of the American People and Their Institutions, 1917-1933​ Second Edition (1992) Argument: ​“My purpose in the following pages is to reexamine America’s historical development during the years from 1917 to 1933, focusing in particular on wartime mobilization and action, the rise and collapse of the world’s first mass consumption economy, and the continued search for a modern managerial order geared to the realization of liberal ideals. This search moved away from the paths projected by the New Nationalists and New Freedomites of the prewar period. But from the wartime experience came an enhanced vision of enlightened private orders enlisted in the national service and working with public agencies to advance the common good, and the economic expansion of the postwar period seemed to support this vision. Not until the subsequent economic contraction had unmasked the weaknesses in New Era ideology and practice did the search move onto other paths. Even then it could not ignore the legacy left by New Era organizers and policy makers. Much of what followed would consist of increased support for those still seeking to realized the New Era vision, and much that did break from this pattern would be limited and shaped by the organizational framework erected between 1917 and 1933.” V ● “In the domestic sphere, New Era policy makers—with Herbert Hoover the key figure—were animated by the “vision of enlightened private orders enlisted in the national service and working with public agencies to advance the common good” as an alternative to a rudderless and anarchical laissez-faire and an initiative-stifling, freedom destroying statism.” 181-182, Braeman ● “For some it was the dividing line between an era of reform and one of reaction, for others the threshold of a new urban and managerial order, and for still others the end of a promising epoch of human progress and the beginning of an era in which the forces of progress were nearly submerged by irrational destruction and social malignancies.” 1 ● “In the business sphere, the prewar search for greater order had brought forth three elites, each aspiring to the role once filled by master entrepreneurs and leaders of local communities. For many businessmen and for business-supported social science, the great enemies had become “social chaos,” “destructive competition,” and “defective coordination.” It was these disorders that were threatening both liberty and progress, and in different ways the developments that brought forth master financiers, systematic managers, and associational bureaucracies were all responses to these perceptions of social need and group interest.” 5 ● “the new financial elite had won substantial acceptance as part of a new and more socially conscious national leadership.

During the panic of 1907 it had been called on to check economic demoralization. Subsequently it had become a partner of the State Department in efforts to stabilize troublesome areas abroad, and under the new Federal Reserve Act of 1913 it was to work with public representatives in exercising expert and apolitical controls over the money supply and credit availability…a second and at times competing elite was also emerging, primarily in the large corporate organizations with their expanding array of technical specialists coordinated and directed by professional administrators…The third development in the business sphere was an immense growth of business associations.” 6 ● “Culturally, then, the heritage of the Progressive Era consisted of mounting tensions between the established order of the Victorian age and the challenges posed by immigrations, the activism of submerged minorities and women’s groups, and the attitudes emanating from cultural modernists and promoters of a pleasure ethic.” 12 ● “If the Progressive Era laid the basis for modern America, the war experience of 1917 and 1918 catalyzed the process of organizational change and set the pattern for future economic and social management. It brought, above all, a new reliance on the private organizational elites that had emerged in the prewar years.” 16 ● “In large measure the wartime pressure for organizational change stemmed from two decisions about the type of war that the nation would attempt to fight. In the first place, it was decided, the stream of war materiel moving across the Atlantic must be substantially expanded…Second, it was decided shortly thereafter, the United States must raise a large expeditionary force and deploy it to France. Without such actions, so the reasoning ran, the war could not be brought to a successful conclusion, nor could America expect to play a major role in shaping the peace. The consequences, however, were to subject the economy to massive demands for a new type of consumerism, and from the outset it was widely conceded that trying to meet these demands through existing economic and political institutions was likely to bring economic chaos and social breakdown. ● “Whether or not Wilson himself was responsible, his vision of a new international order would remain unrealized. Taking shape instead would be two weaker and more national-oriented systems, one built around the Anglo-French alliance and their extension of the League apparatus, the other around a new set of American-sponsored treaties, expert commissions, and cooperative arrangements.” 36 ● “[By 1919] Unions no longer had government support; they were being blamed for the rising cost of living and lagging productivities, and to a public inflamed with anti-Bolshevik hysteria the distinction between good American unions and those bent on social revolution had become increasingly blurred. The stage was set for major labor defeats. In late 1919, as the issue of communism diverted more attention from legitimate grievances, unionism suffered one setback after another. The great steel strike, which began on September 22, was soon crumbling under the weight of massive public disapproval, stern repression of union activities, and armed protection for strikebreakers.” 39

2 ●

“Historians have long looked on the presidency of Warren G. Harding as a major debacle. “Normalcy,” they have explained in great detail, really meant the transfer of government to corrupt officials, incompetents, and rapacious special interests.

Often missing from their accounts is the fact that the Harding era also came close to combining full employment and rising living standards with stable prices and international peace.” 47 ● “Beneath the surface indications of stability, however, the economy of 1928 was already in deep trouble. Markets for the new mass production industries—for automobiles, appliances, radios, and similar items—were already becoming saturated.

The call for capital in these industries and ancillary fields was slackening. And new areas of spending that could take up the slack were failing to develop.” 80 ● Hoover wanted to 1. End poverty and 2. Achieve equality. 128 ● “The Hooverites, it now seemed clear, were not the laissez-faire fundamentalists excoriated in New Deal rhetoric. Nor were the New Dealers the collectivizing anti-capitalists depicted in Hooverian oratory…Far from being an application of socialist theory or a radical kind of redistributionism, much of the early New Deal might more aptly be labeled “Hooverism in high gear.”…the transfer of power in 1933 stands as a major watershed. It marked the end of efforts to implement a “new liberalism” that in theory could allow Americans to meet modern needs without developing a welfare and regulatory state. It removed the barriers against the kind of government-backed cartelization, public works spending, and administrative state that the outgoing administration had strongly resisted.” 188 Sources: ​synthesis Connections: ​Kennedy, ​Over Here​, Leuchtenburg, ​Perils​, Grossman, ​Land​, Lehman, ​Promised​, Cohen, ​Making​, Brinkley, ​End​, Leuchtenburg, ​FDR David M. Kennedy, ​Over Here: The First World War and American Society​ (1980) Argument: ​“My premise was that the urgency of the war crisis sharpened many of the questions that had roiled American society in the preceding two decades, especially, those that dealt with the relations between government and civil society. It followed that a study of wartime America might lay bare the core assumptions, ambitions, and limitations of the progressive mentality—and of the modern liberal tradition which it did so much to shape—with more clarity than they exhibited in peacetime.” 374-375 ● “Wilson had waited so long for war with reason. “It was necessary for me,” he wrote a friend, “by very slow stages indeed and with the most genuine purpose to avoid war to lead the country on to a single way of thinking.”…Moreover, the United States in 1917 stood at the end of two decades of extraordinarily divisive political and social upheaval. Deep social fissures had been opened by the enormous concentration of private capital and economic power in “trusts,” by the efforts of progressive reformers to bring the corporations under public control, by labor disturbances, and by the arrival in America of over twelve million immigrants since the turn of the century.” 11 ● ““Every reform we have won,” Wilson had said as early as 1914, “will be lost if we go into this war. We have been making a fight on special privilege. We have got new tariff and currency and trust legislation. We don’t yet know how they will work.

They are not thoroughly set.”” 11 ● “The Espionage Act, as it was known when finally enacted into law on June 5, 1917, furnished the government with ample instrumentalities for the suppression of those who opposed the war…The Socialist Party was among the first groups to feel the whip of official wrath…During the summer months of 1917, the Post Office Department withdrew the mailing privileges of more than a dozen socialist publications, including major organs like ​Appeal to Reason, which had a prewar weekly circulation of more than half a million.” 26-27 ● “Support for the war, Gompers believed, provided the opportunity to gain for labor a voice in the making of defense policy, a modicum of assurance that, as he told the A.F. of L. executive committee, war measures would not be exclusively drawn up by people “out of sympathy with the needs and ideals of the workers.” In return for its cooperation, Gompers reasoned, the trade-union movement could ask for stronger government guarantees of the right to organize and bargain collectively and for the preservation of union standards of pay and working conditions…Gompers knew that to realize the opportunities the war afforded, he needed a united labor movement behind him.” 28 ● “Many blacks, for example, contemplated with horror the prospect of a war-fueled wave of lynching and terrorism, as rumors swept the South in the spring of 1917 of a German plot to set the country ablaze with a black insurrection. But other blacks saw in the war a great opportunity, “a God-sent blessing,” as one Negro newspaper put it, to earn white regard and advance the standing of the race by valiant wartime service. The Central Committee of Negro College Men petitioned Woodrow Wilson and the War Department “to establish a special officers’ training camp of the training of colored officers for the colored regiments in the New Federal Army.” Though their ultimate goal was the eradication of Jim Crow, said the committee “our young men are so anxious to serve their country in this crisis that they are willing to accept a separate camp. ● “Europe had always represented to Americans a version of that very ethos—a perverted version, to be sure, one that exemplified the perils of regimentation, the miseries of individual unfreedom from which millions had fled westerly across the Atlantic, but a model nonetheless of the social philosophy that many people found so harmfully absent in the United States.”44

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“To an unusual degree, the Progressive Era was economically innovative, culturally protean, politically tumultuous, and intellectually fecund. It was the moment when modernity irrevocably overtook American society, compelling wrenching changes in familiar ways of life, values, and institutions…In the years around the turn of the century, the rapidly maturing industrial revolution compelled a nation of farmers to transform itself into a nation of city-dwelling factory employees and office workers.” 373 ● “many historians have seen in the Progressive Era the incubator of modern America society, and in progressivism the harbinger of twentieth-century political liberalism. It is now clear that the progressives adjusted only imperfectly to the abundant challenges they faced. But it is not too much to say that they invented much of the vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, and at least the rudiments of the institutional apparatus, with which their descendants comprehended and coped with the remainder of the twentieth century.” 374 ● “The structures that had sustained the long European peace of the nineteenth century were visibly crumbling, ironically enough, under the pressure of two nineteenth-century creations: the industrial revolution and nationalism.” 376 ● “The war against Spain announced America’s debut on the stage of world affairs…The Spanish-American War merely confirmed the world’s growing sense that the Americans had acquired the capacity to work their will well beyond their own shores. Whether they had the stomach to continue doing so, and to what purposes, were other questions, answers to which the prevailing powers now anxiously sought.” 378 ● “The United States had grown to maturity in a uniquely isolated and secure environment. It had even managed to fight its civil war without foreign intervention, a rare accomplishment in the annals of nation-states. Shielded by two oceans with no powerful neighbors to fear, it had been undistractedly absorbed for more than a century in the great project of consolidating its own continental domain, with scant energy or interest to spare for events elsewhere. Those peculiar historical circumstances had bred stubborn habits of mind, including the cherished belief that the United States could ​choose whether, when, and how to participate in the world.” 378-379 ● “America, in short, should jettison its isolationist heritage, embrace its standing as a great power, and behave in the only way such a power could…As president, [Theodore] Roosevelt sought to amplify American strength and make the weight of the United States felt in the geopolitical scales. He secured the Panama Canal Zone in 1903, announced the “Roosevelt Corallary” to Monroe Doctrine in 1904, mediated an armistice in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, intervened in a European squabble over Africa the following year, and in 1907 dispatched the “Great White Fleet” to flex America’s naval muscle around the world.” 380 ● “When he left office in 1909, he regarded it as among the principal disappointments of his presidency that he had not succeeded in turning the United States away from the isolationist alters at which it had long worshipped.” 381 ● “Two bedrock assumptions underlay Wilson’s thinking: that the circumstances of the modern era were utterly novel, and that providence had entrusted America with a mandate to carry out a singular mission in the world.” 382 ● “The advent of mass democracy, meanwhile, had made modern governments inescapably beholden to their electorates.

Avoiding war thus became diplomacy’s supreme objective, and attending to public opinion became an indispensable element of statecraft.” 383 ● “The unshakable conviction of Americans that they were a people apart, anointed by history with a special destiny, could logically yield only tow possible diplomatic consequences: isolationism, in order to preserve America’s uniqueness, its innocence, and its ideological purity; or messianic universalism, in order to translate America’s national achievements into the international arena.” 387 ● “In the end, of course, Wilson, like Theodore Roosevelt, failed to wean his country from its commitment to isolation. The Senate rejected the Versailles Treaty and refuse to take the United States into the League of Nations. The United States did not merely revert to isolationism in the years after World War I; it entered what was arguably the most isolationist phase of its history. It testily insisted that the Allied governments repay their wartime debts to the United States Treasury, even at the price of gravely disrupting international financial markets and capital flows. It enacted the forbiddingly high Smoot-Hawley Tariff in 1930, seriously aggravating the worldwide Great Depression. It deliberately stood aloof from the gathering crisis that became World War II, entering that conflict only when attacked and, as in World War I, more than two years after the war’s outbreak.” 387 Sources: ​government papers, speeches, newspapers, propaganda Connections: ​Hawley, ​The Great War​, Leuchtenburg, ​Perils​, Cohen, ​Making​, Grossman, ​Land of Hope​, Lehman, ​Promised​, Brinkley, ​End​, Leuchtenburg, ​FDR William E. Leuchtenburg, ​Perils of Prosperity, 1914-1932​ (1958) Argument: ​“The age itself [1914-1932], Mr. Leuchtenburg reminds us, cannot be taken in isolation from its past and future. He finds movements in the period which reach back to the nineteenth century: the rise of the city, the change from handicraft to assembly lines, the ascent to the world stage. He sees the beginnings of institutions which would produce the New Deal and with it the changed attitude toward government that has stayed with us ever since. For him the age was not a frolic, in which a people stepped out of character, but a climax of passions long brewing.” vi

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“one unifying theme of the book: that the kind of prosperity experienced by that generation contributed to the concentration of power in a “business class with little tradition of social leadership,” to the investment of world power in a nation unready to assume its responsibilities, to the triumph of a shallow and vulgar culture in which money became the measure of man.”

522, Chambers “Leuchtenburg portrays the years 1914-1932 as an era of transition, tension, and paradox. It marked an uncomfortable way station between a nation predominately rural, traditional, and provincial, fundamentalist in its religion, with a premium still on the virtues of craftsmanship, neighborliness, and equalitarianism, and an America urban, mechanized, secular, and sophisticated. The nation’s reform impulse was in transition from “old-style evangelical reformism,” not yet dead, to a “new-style urban progressivism,” not yet fully arrived. Its tensions and insecurities arose out of the acceleration of historical change. Its paradoxes are explained as the reluctance or incapacity of the American people to come to terms with the new realities of American life: “a strong state, the dominance of the metropolis, secularization and the breakdown of religious sanctions, the loss of authority of the family, industrial consolidation, international power politics, and mass culture.” 522 “the supremacy of rural, small-town America was being challenged by the rise of the city to the dominant position in American life. The city represented a challenge for economic power: the determination of finance capitalism to regain the political pre-eminence it had forfeited in the Progressive era. The city threatened to disrupt class stability through the tumultuous drive by unskilled labor to form mighty industrial unions. The city imperiled the hierarchy of social status through the clamor of new immigrant groups for social acceptance. Most of all, the older America was alarmed by the mores of the metropolis. The city represented everything—Europe, Wall Street, religious skepticism, political radicalism, sophistication, intellectual arrogance—which prewar America feared most.” 7-8 “”Even more important, a century of tranquility had taught the country that it was safe from the threat of foreign invasion and that it need have no concern with the disorders of Europe.” 9 “Through the decade, the United States moved quietly away from the rigid isolationism of 1920. By 1930, the United States had participated in more than forty League conferences, and by the following year, there were five permanent American officials in Geneva.” 10 “American entrance into the war cannot be seen apart from the American sense of mission. The United States believed that American moral idealism could be extended outward, that American Christian democratic ideals could and should be universally applied. This sense of national mission was combined with a new consciousness of national power.” 34 “The war for democracy had ended in triumph, and the way was now cleared for the creation of the great postwar federation of nations.” 49 “Wilson’s most spectacular triumph had come when the Conference on January 25, 1919, voted to incorporate the League of Nations as an integral part of the treaty.” 56 “The 1920s represent not the high tide of laissez-faire but of Hamiltonianism, of a hierarchical concept of society with a deliberate pursuit by the government of policies most favorable to large business interests. No political party, no national administration, could conceivably have been more co-operative with business interests.” 103 “American foreign policy in the 1920’s was build on disillusionment with World War I—a dirty, unheroic war which few men remembered with any emotion save distaste. There had been earlier wars which, no matter how great the cost, the nation recalled with affection. This was a war it chose to forget.” 104 “The war left a determination in millions of American never to fight again; at no time in our history has the hold of pacifism been stronger than in the interlude between the first and second world wars.” 104 “Even more important, it left a deep cynicism about American participation in European affairs, a cynicism caught in the statement attributed to Lloyd George at Versailles: “Is it Upper or Lower Selisia that we are giving away?”” 105 “The revolution in morals routed the worst of Victorian sentimentality and false modesty. It mitigated the harsh moral judgments of rural Protestantism, and it all but wiped out the awful combination of sanctimoniousness and lewdness which enabled Anthony Comstock to defame Bernard Shaw as “this Irish smut-dealer” and which allowed Teddy Roosevelt, with unconscious humor, to denounce the Mexican bandit Villa as a “murderer and a bigamist.”” 176 “After World War I, the United States, reaping the harvest of half a century of industrial progress, achieved the highest standard of living any people had ever known. National income soared from $480 per capita in 1900 to $681 in 1929.” 178 “The aftermath of the Scopes trial is symbolic of the fate of political fundamentalism in the 1920’s. Immigration restriction, the Klan, prohibition, and Protestant fundamentalism all had in common a hostility to the city and a desire to arrest change through coercion by statute. The anti-evolutionists won the Scopes trial; yet, in a more important sense, they were defeated, overwhelmed by the tide of cosmopolitanism. Such was the fate of each of the other movements. By the end of 1933 the Eighteenth Amendment had been repealed and the Klan was a dim memory. Immigration restriction, which apparently scored a complete triumph and certainly did win a major one, was frustrated when (since the law did not apply to the Western Hemisphere) Mexicans, French Canadians, and Puerto Ricans, most of them “swarthy” Catholics, streamed in. Ostensibly successful on every front, the political fundamentalists in the 1920’s were making a last stand in a lost cause against the legions of the city.” 224

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“Never was a decade snuffed out so quickly as the 1920’s. The stock market crash was taken as a judgment pronounced on the whole era, and, in the grim days of the depression, the 1920’s were condemned as a time of irresponsibility and immaturity.” 269 ● “It was a time of paradoxes: an age of conformity and of liberation, of the persistence of rural values and the triumph of laissez faire but also of government intervention, of competition and of merger, of despair and of joyous abandon. Many of the apparent paradoxes can be explained by the reluctance of the American people to accept the changes that were occurring and by their attempt to hold on to older ways of thought and action at the same time that they were, often against their will, committed to new ones.” 272 ● “The 1920’s, despite rhetoric to the contrary, marked the end of nineteenth-century liberalism…Hoover sounded the praises of laissez faire and business-minded administrators like Andrew Mellon attempted to diminish the role of government, the state continued relentlessly to augment its power. Both the civil and military functions of the federal government doubled between 1915 and 1930.” 272 Sources: ​synthesis, papers, treaties Connections: ​Kennedy, Over Here​, Hawley, ​The Great War​, Grossman, ​Land of Hope, Lehman, ​Promised​, Cohen, ​Making​, Brinkley, End​, Leuchtenburg, ​FDR John W. Dower, ​War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War​ (1986) Argument: ​“In countless ways, war words and race words came together in a manner which did not just reflect the savagery of the war, but contributed to it by reinforcing the impression of a truly Manichaean struggle between completely incompatible antagonists.

The natural response to such a vision was an obsession with extermination on both sides—a war without mercy.” 11 ● “To understand how racism influence the conduct of the war in Asia has required going beyond the formal documents and battle reports upon which historians normally rely and drawing on materials such as songs, movies, cartoons, and a wide variety of popular as well as academic writings published at the time.” X ● “To nations everywhere, World War Two meant technological innovation, bureaucratic expansion, and an extraordinary mobilization of human resources and ideological fervor. Governments on all sides presented the conflict as a holy war for national survival and glory, a mission to defend and propagate the finest values of their state and culture.” 3 ● “The Axis powers declared they were creating a virile new world order that both revitalized traditional virtues and “transcended the modern,” as some Japanese intellectuals phrased it. Allied leaders rallied their people under the banner of combating tyranny and oppression and defending an ideal moral order, exemplified by the Atlantic Charter and Franklin Roosevelt’s “four freedoms.” 3 ● “At the same time, there occurred a “hidden Holocaust”—that is, a conveniently forgotten one—in which the annihilation of Jews was actively supported by French and Dutch citizens, Poles, Hungarians, Rumanians, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Latvians. It is now also well documented that anti-Semitism in the United States and Great Britain prevented both countries from doing as much as they could have to publicize these genocidal policies or mount a serious rescue campaign.”4 ● “Blacks raised questions about “fighting for the white folks,” and called for “double victory” at home and abroad. Asians, especially Chinese and Indians, decried the humiliation of being allied to a country which deemed them unfit for citizenship; and for a full year in the midst of the war, the U.S Congress debated the issue of revising the suddenly notorious Oriental exclusion laws. In such ways, World War Two contributed immeasurably not only to a sharpened awareness of racism within the United States, but also to more radical demands and militant tactics on the part of the victims of discrimination.” 5 ● “Japan did not invade independent countries in southern Asia. It invaded colonial outposts which the Westerners had dominated for generations, taking absolutely for granted their racial and cultural superiority over their Asian subjects.

Japan’s belated emergence as a dominant power in Asia, culminating in the devastating “advance south” of 1941-42, challenged not just the Western presence but the entire mystique of white supremacism on which centuries of European and American expansion had rested.” 5-6 ● “The media in the West were frequently even more apocalyptic in their expression of such fears. Thus, the Hearst newspapers declared the war in Asia totally different from that in Europe, for Japan was a “racial menace” as well as a cultural and religious one, and if it proved victorious in the Pacific there would be “perpetual war between Oriental ideals and Occidental.” 7 ● “An endless stream of evidence ranging from atrocities to suicidal tactics could be cited, moreover, to substantiate the belief that the Japanese were a uniquely contemptible and formidable foe who deserved no mercy and virtually demanded extermination.” 9 ● “Their leaders and ideologues constantly affirmed their unique “purity” as a race and culture, and turned the war itself—and eventually mass death—into an act of individual and collective purification. Americans and Europeans existed in wartime Japanese imagination as vivid monsters, devils, and demons; and one had only to point to the bombing of Japanese cities (or the lynching of blacks in America) to demonstrate the aptness of this metaphor.” 9 ● “The war words and race words which so dominated the propaganda of Japan’s white enemies—the core imagery of apes, lesser men, primitives, children, madmen, and beings who possessed special powers as well—have a pedigree in Western

6 thought that can be traced back to Aristotle, and were conspicuous in the earliest encounters of Europeans with the black peoples of Africa and the Indians of the Western Hemisphere. The Japanese, so “unique” in the rhetoric of World War Two, were actually saddled with racial stereotypes that Europeans and Americans had applied to nonwhites for centuries: during the conquest of the New World, the slave trade, the Indian wars in the United States, the agitation against Chinese immigrants in America, the colonization of Asia and Africa, the U.S. conquest of the Philippines at the turn of the century. These were stereotypes, moreover, which had been strongly reinforced by nineteenth-century Western science.” 10 ● “Idioms that formerly had denoted the unbridgeable gap between oneself and the enemy proved capable of serving the goals of accommodation as well. To the victors, the simian became a pet, the child a pupil, the madman a patient. In Japan, purity was now identified with peaceful rather than martial pursuits, and with the purge of corrupt militaristic and feudalistic influences rather than decadent Western bourgeois values, as had been the case during the war. Victory confirmed the Allies’ assumptions of superiority, while ideology of “proper place” enabled the Japanese to adjust to being a good loser.” 13 ● “The merciless struggle for control of Asia and the Pacific gave way, in a remarkably short time, to an occupation in which mercy was indeed displayed by the conquerors, and generosity and goodwill characterized many of the actions of victor and vanquished alike.” 13 ● “As announced in official policy statements, the ultimate goal of the war effort was a world in which Asian peoples would be free of Western domination, a harmonious international order which would allow “all nations and races to assume their proper place in the world, and all peoples to be at peace in their own sphere.” (205) Unfortunately, the road to such a new world became a bloody one, full of atrocities both random and official, including the 1937 Rape of Nanking; the devastating policy of “kill all, burn all, destroy all” in rural China; the massacres of Chinese in Singapore, Dutch in Borneo, and Filipinos in Manila; and the criminal treatment of tens of thousands of laborers in Korea, Indonesia, and Burma.” 468, Rosenstone Sources: ​ movies, propaganda, newspapers, cartoons, books, speeches, journals, letters Connections: ​Takaki, ​Double Victory,​ Lilenthal, ​History Wars

John Lewis Gaddis, ​The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947​ (1972) Argument: ​“The central argument of this learned and judicious book is that domestic political pressures had a great deal to do with the shaping of American foreign policy during and after World War II. “Revisionists are correct in emphasizing the importance of internal constraints, but they had defined them too narrowly: by focusing so heavily on economics they neglect the profound impact on the domestic political system on the conduct of American foreign policy.” (357) On the assumption that Stalin was less severely constrained by domestic Soviet political pressures, John Lewis Gaddis concludes that the USSR should bear a larger responsibility for the onset of the Cold War than the United States, whose political leaders were effectively hemmed in by public opinion and party jockeying for electoral advantage.” 287, McNeill ● “The Cold War grew out of a complicated interaction of external and internal developments inside both the United States and the Soviet Union. The external situation—circumstances beyond the control of either power—left Americans and Russians facing one another across prostrated Europe at the end of World War II. Internal influences in the Soviet Union—the search for security, the role of ideology, massive postwar reconstruction needs, the personality of Stalin—together with those in the United States—the ideal of self-determination, fear of communism, the illusion of omnipotence fostered by American economic strength and the atomic bomb—made the resulting confrontation a hostile one. Leaders of both superpowers sought peace, but in doing so yielded to considerations which, while they did not precipitate war, made a resolution of difference impossible.” 361 ● “But surprisingly few scholars since have looked at the role party and Congressional politics played in shaping foreign policy during World War II and the early Cold War.” X ● “I have sought to analyze the evolution of United States policy toward the Soviet Union from the formation of the Grand Alliance in 1941 to the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine in 1947. I have proceeded on the assumption that foreign policy is the product of external and internal influences, as perceived by officials responsible for its formulation.” Xiii ● “If there is a single theme which runs through this book, it is the narrow range of alternatives open to American leaders during this period as they sought to deal with problems of war and peace.” Xiii ● “In contrast to much recent work on the subject, this book will not treat the “Open Door” as the basis of United States foreign policy. Revisionist historians have performed a needed service by stressing the influence of economic considerations on American diplomacy, but their focus has been too narrow; many other forces—domestic politics, bureaucratic inertia, quirks of personality, perceptions, accurate or inaccurate, of Soviet intentions—also affected the actions of Washington officials. I have tried to convey the full diversity and relative significance of these determinants of policy.” Xiii-xiv ● “By early 1946, President Truman and his advisers had reluctantly concluded that recent actions of the Soviet Union endangered the security of the United States. That decision grew out of a complex internal and external pressures, all filtered through the perceptions and preconceptions of the men who made American foreign policy.” 353

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“World War II had produced a revolution in United States foreign policy. Prior to that conflict, most Americans believed that their country could best protect itself by minimizing political entanglements overseas. Events of 1939-40 persuaded leaders of the Roosevelt Administration that they had been wrong; Pearl Harbor convinced remaining skeptics. From then on, American policy-makers would seek security through involvement, not isolation: to prevent new wars, they believed, the whole system of relations between nations would have to be reformed. Assuming that only their country had the power and influence to carry out this task, United States officials set to work, even before formal entry into the war, to plan a peace settlement which would accomplish such reformation.” 353-354 ● “Determined to avoid mistakes which, in their view, had caused World War II, American planners sought to disarm defeated enemies, give peoples of the world the right to shape their own future, revive world trade, and replace the League of Nations with a new and more effective collective security organization.” 354 ● “Kremlin leaders, too, looked to the past in planning for the future, but their very different experiences led them to conclusions not always congruent with those of their American allies. For Stalin, the key to peace was simple: keep Russia strong and Germany weak…He showed little interest in Washington’s plans for collective security, the reduction of tariff barriers, and reform of the world monetary system. Self-determination in Eastern Europe, however, he would not allow: the region was vital to Soviet security, but the people who lived there were bitterly anti-Russian. Nor could Stalin view with equanimity Allied efforts…to limit reparations removals from Germany. These two conflicts—Eastern Europe and Germany—became major areas of contention in the emerging Cold War.” 354 ● “Moscow’s position would not have seemed so alarming to American officials, however, had it not been for the Soviet Union’s continued commitment to an ideology dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism throughout the world. Hopes that the United States might cooperate successfully with the USSR after the war had been based on the belief, encouraged by Stalin himself, that the Kremlin had given up its former goal of exporting communism. Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe in 1944 and 1945, together with the apparent abandonment of popular front tactics by the world communist movement, caused Western observers to fear that they had been misled.” 354-355 ● “It seems likely that Washington policy-makers mistook Stalin’s determination to ensure Russian security through spheres of influence for a renewed effort to spread communism outside the borders of the Soviet Union... But the Soviet leader failed to make the limited nature of his objectives clear. Having just defeated one dictator thought to have unlimited ambitions, Americans could not regard the emergence of another without the strongest feelings of apprehension and anger.” 355 ● “ The United States had come out of the war with a monopoly over the world’s most powerful weapon, the atomic bomb, and a near-monopoly over the productive facilities which could make possible quick rehabilitation of war-shattered economies…Washington officials assumed that these instruments would leave the Russians no choice but to comply with American peace plans. Attempts to extract concessions from Moscow in return for a loan failed, however, when the Soviet Union turned to German reparations to meet its reconstruction needs.” 355 ● “Nor can there by any question that the general principle of “getting tough with Russia” evoked overwhelming public approval: a generation seared by the memory of Munich would not tolerate appeasement, however unpleasant the alternatives might be.” 356 ● “A fairer approach is to ask why policy-makers defined their alternatives so narrowly. Important recent work by revisionist historians suggests that requirements of the economic system may have limited the options open to American officials in seeking an accommodation with Russia. Leaders of the United States had become convinced, revisionists assert, that survival of the capitalist system at home required the unlimited expansion of American economic influence overseas. For this reason, the United States could not recognize legitimate Soviet interest in Eastern Europe, Germany, or elsewhere. By calling for an international “open door” policy, Washington had projected its interests on a worldwide scale. The real or imagined threat of communism anywhere endangered these interests, and had to be contained.” 357 ● “The delay in opening the second front, nonrecognition of Moscow’s sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, the denial of economic aid to Russia, and the decision to retain control of the atomic bomb can all be explained far more plausibly by citing the Administration’s need to maintain popular support for its policies rather than by dwelling upon requirements of the economic order.” 358 ● “[Revisionists] assert that the United States, because of its military and economic superiority over the Soviet Union, could have accepted Moscow’s prewar demands without endangering American security. Because it did not, they hold leaders of the United States responsible for the way in which the Cold War developed, if not the Cold War itself.” 358 Sources: ​US government documents, newspapers, periodicals, journals Connections: ​LeFeber, ​America, Russia, and the Cold War,​ ​Gaddis, ​The Cold War​, Hixson, ​Parting,​ Brinkley, ​End Lizabeth Cohen, ​Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939​ (1990) Argument: ​“Cohen’s central argument is clear: that rank-and-file workers “made” the New Deal, based on the ways working-class culture had changed during the 1920s and early 1930s; that they were motivated ideologically as well as practically, seeking to instituted a “moral capitalism”; and that this “moral capitalism” rested on two new institutions, an interventionist state and the industrial unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).” 1307, Rachleff

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“The Great Depression furthered the deterioration of many ethnic institutions and their replacement by New Deal agencies and programs. But this very development was pushed forward, Cohen argues, by workers who saw themselves as part of a larger entity than their ethnic group, largely because of their participation in this new mass culture. Cohen also argues that, far from leading workers to see themselves as part of an amorphous middle class, this new mass culture actually enhanced a class consciousness among American workers.” 1307, Rachleff “Factory workers at these Chicago plants had tried before the 1930s to organize themselves in unions, but despite occasional short-term success, they had never managed to sustain broad-based unionization over a significant period of time. Workers’ most recent, and successful, efforts had followed World War I. In Chicago’s steel mills, packing plants, and agricultural equipment factories, manufacturing workers came close to building viable industrial unions, but they did not last.

Fragmentation of workers along geographic, skill, ethnic, and racial lines—along with repression by employers and government and weak national union structures within the craft-oriented American Federation of Labor (AFL)—led to the defeat of workers’ once promising challenge.” 3 “While for the last quarter of the nineteenth century the native-born and northern European steelworkers who dominated in skilled jobs managed to impose their own standards of wages, hours, and work rules through their craft union, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, mechanization made their skills increasingly obsolete by the early twentieth century. Steel companies then had little trouble destroying the union and hiring nonunion, unskilled, and eastern and southern Europeans to do more of the work.” 3 “Craft unions of skilled butchers in Chicago’s packing plants proved more successful in incorporating the unskilled, new immigrants who were finding increasing opportunities for work in packing as in steel, but even their best efforts to challenge the autocracy of employers in the period from 1900 to 1904 ultimately failed.” 3-4 “For several months skilled and unskilled workers together carried out an effective strike. Then a bomb explosion at a mass meeting involving McCormick workers at Haymarket Square killed seven policemen and unleashed an enormous wave of employer repression and employee fear. As a result, unionization was effectively destroyed at McCormick by the end of 1886.” 4 “Just as Chicago’s factory workers did not have labor unions to voice their complaints and defend their rights until the thirties, so too most of them expected little government, particularly the federal government.” 5 “This book is devoted to explaining how it was possible and what it meant for industrial workers to become effective as national political participants in the mid-1930s, after having sustained defeats in 1919 and having refrained from unionism and national politics during the 1920s.” 5 “But I will argue in this book that these external influences by no means tell the whole story, that their effectiveness in thwarting or encouraging workers’ efforts depended as much on working people’s own inclinations as on the strengths of their opponents or allies. This book will contend that what matters most in explaining why workers acted politically in ways they did during the mid-thirties is the change in workers’ own orientation during the 1920s and 1930s. Working-class Americans underwent a gradual shift in attitudes and behavior over the intervening decade and a half as a result of a wide range of social and cultural experiences. Daily life both inside and outside the workplace and factors as diverse as where workers turned for help in good times and bad, how they reacted to their employers’ “welfare capitalist” schemes, and whether they were enticed by the new chain stores, motion picture palaces, and network radio shows or preferred the comfort of more familiar ethnic associations all are important in analyzing how workers’ politics evolved.” 5-6 “Chapters on the 1920s explore the fate of workers’ ethnic identity after massive immigration stopped with World War I and the restrictive legislation that followed it, the way workers encountered the explosion of mass consumption and mass culture, and how large employers’ ideological commitment to “welfare capitalism” was experienced by those at whom it was aimed.

Similarly, for the 1930s, investigation into what the Great Depression meant to its working-class victims, how workers viewed the New Deal, and why they came to identify with the CIO gives a new perspective to phenomena that frequently are analyzed more in terms of institutional policy than popular experience.” 6 “This book tells the story of how industrial workers in one American city made sense of an era in our recent history when the nation moved from a commitment to welfare capitalism to a welfare state, from a determination to resist the organization of its industrial work force to tolerating it, and from diverse social worlds circumscribed by race, ethnicity, class, and geography to more homogenous cultural experiences brought about by the triumph of mass culture, mass consumption, mass unionization, and mass politics.” 8 “Whereas once many had not voted, particularly in national elections, and often had harbored fears of the government infringing on their freedom, by the late 1930s most were loyal Democrats invested in an interventionist national government.

Similarly, whereas previously, most recently in the 1919 era, factory workers’ efforts to organize industrial unions had rarely survived for long, workers at last succeeded in organizing unions under the umbrella of the national CIO. Whereas earlier, working-class families had depended for their welfare needs on the informal networks and formal organizations of their ethnic communities and less reliably on their welfare capitalist employers, they now looked to the government and unions for protection against threats as diverse as job layoffs, illness, and unstable banking institutions. Whereas once distinctive ethnic communities had circumscribed the cultural life of their members, workers’ exposure to mass culture, the Democratic Party,

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and the CIO gave them more cultural experiences in common. National affiliations ranging from network radio fan to Democrat to CIO unionist had replaced workers’ local, more parochial dependencies on neighborhood, ethnic group, and employer.” 362 “Ethnic organizations proved to be crucial conduits providing new members and resources to the CIO. And as ethnic benefit societies declined with the Great Depression, individuals within ethnic neighborhoods frequently funneled their communities’ insurance dollars into commercial companies by becoming insurance agents. In these ways, ethnic elites managed to regain some of the credibility they had lost when working-class members of their ethnic communities felt abandoned by them in the crisis of depression.” 362 “Nonetheless, ethnic identity continued to have meaning in the daily lives of Chicago workers during the 1930s, even though ethnic institutions no longer satisfied members’ needs on their own. At best they served as liaisons to mainstream alternatives, helping to ease ethnic Chicagoans into a world of nonethnic unions and government and commercially provided services, where ethnicity became more a sensibility than a support system.” 363 “As blacks overcame their long-standing distrust of Democrats and labor unions in the 1930s and joined with white workers in supporting the New Deal and the CIO, they were in some ways abandoning less of an alternative culture than ethnics but in other ways risking more. By casting their fate so much with other workers, they gave up protectors like Republican Party leaders and employers and grew dependent on the egalitarian commitment of government, union, and fellow workers. The decades that followed the thirties, filled as they were with continued discrimination, would only demonstrate how limited these commitments were.” 363 “During the 1920s, the legendary transformative forces of Americanization, consumerism, mass culture, and welfare capitalism had not integrated Chicago’s workers into the homogeneous and compliant “middle-class mass” that many had hoped for, where workers were indistinguishable from Chicagoans of other classes and ethnicities. Rather, during the twenties ethnic communities proved remarkably adaptable in their confrontation with such homogenizing forces. They strengthened their ethnoreligious institutions in the face of the Americanizing intentions of the Chicago Catholic Archdiocese. They adapted their fraternal organizations to compete with the alternative insurance scheme of commercial companies and employer and in a way that broadened workers’ ethnic identity beyond narrow geographic or cultural boundaries.” 364 “For much of the 1920s, moreover, most working-class Chicagoans continued to shop at their neighborhood, ethnic-owned “Mom and Pop” stores, not at the new national chains; to listen to radio programs produced locally, often by members of their own ethnic and religious communities; and to watch motion pictures at their neighborhood theaters rather than in the great movie palaces of the era. Finally, even as Chicago workers came to embrace the basic premise of their employers’ welfare capitalism, that capitalism could be fair to workers if employers lived up to their lost sight of the continuing antagonism between capital and labor. Workers’ efforts to influence the way welfare capitalism functioned in the factory, furthermore, strengthened alliances among workers of different ethnicities and races. Workers found themselves by the end of the 1920s cooperating increasingly across ethnic, racial, and skill lines on the job while still depending upon the institutions of their ethnic communities outside of it.” 364 “The Great Depression upset the survival strategies workers had developed during the 1920s and forced new solutions. As it weakened the welfare and financial institutions of workers’ ethnic and racial communities and drove employers to eliminate most of their welfare capitalist programs, workers had to look beyond their ethnic networks and bosses for help. In the late 1920s hatred of Prohibition had finally galvanized ethnic workers to unify as Democrats and had helped them recognize the usefulness of state action in alleviating the oppression. When local and private welfare efforts failed to meet the depression crisis, turning to the national government seemed the best way of redressing this wrong as well as offered an assistance to workers that they felt they had rightfully earned through their increased participation as Democratic voters.” 364 “To complement the welfare in protecting their interests, moreover, workers enlisted in the battle to create strong industrial unions. Beginning in the mid-1930s they laid the groundwork, with the help of the New Deal and national CIO leaders, for the organization of most of America’s mass production plants by the end of World War II.” 364 “More of them were second-generation American, they had come to trust each other in mounting collective responses to employers’ welfare capitalist schemes in the twenties and early depression, and the particular way that mass culture reached workers during the 1920s and 1930s did not absorb them into a classless cultural mainstream. By the thirties, consolidation in the dissemination of mass culture through fewer and stronger chain stores, chain radio networks, and chain theaters combined with hardships the depression brought to their smaller competitors meant that workers came to inhabit a more similar cultural world regardless of their race or ethnicity…the CIO recognized how much the success of its efforts to unionize the nation’s mass production factories depended on workers’ new common ground, and it developed an organizational strategy that built on this new potential for unity.” 365 “The Democratic Party came out of the war committed to using the powers of government to ensure economic growth and no longer as concerned about balancing the goal with efforts to tame capitalism’s excesses. For labor, this meant that during the biggest strike wave ever, in 1945-6, the Truman administration intervened on the side of employers, and the next year congressional Democrats cooperated in the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, which deprived workers of many of the benefits

10 they had gained under the NLRA. Government in industrial relations in the 1930s had protected workers’ rights now presided over their restriction. It became harder for workers and their unions to strike, to establish the closed shop, to influence employers’ hiring and firing, to take sides in the ranks.” 366-367 ● “The racial conflicts, the ideological divisions, and the centralization of authority would come to characterize CIO unions later have led many postwar labor analysts to minimize the achievements of ordinary workers in the 1930s. By keeping its focus on the interwar years, this book has tried to recapture what rank-and-file workers accomplished in building a successful CIO movement, without romanticizing who they were or denying the imperfections in what they achieved.” 368 Sources:​ Labor papers, ethnic papers, radio broadcasts, ethnic surveys, newspapers, government records Connections: Rosenzweig, ​Eight​, Grossman, ​Land of Hope, Lehman, ​Promised​, Hawley, ​The Great War, Kennedy, ​Over, Leuchtenburg,​ Perils​, Brinkley, ​End​, Leuchtenburg, ​FDR Alan Dawley, ​Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State​ (1991) Argument: ​“In summary the crux of American history from the 1890s to the 1930s was the imbalance between a bustling society and the existing liberal state. The dynamics of social change and overseas expansion created contradictions that could not be contained within the political framework handed down from the nineteenth century. As a result of struggles between industrialist and worker, Victorian moralist and New Women, nativist and immigrant, the old governing system had to change.” 4-5 ● “The crux of American history in the early twentieth century, then, lay in the reckoning between a dynamic society and the existing liberal state. The story of that reckoning unfolded in three stages”: 1. The imbalance of state and society, 1890s-1913, 2. Confronting Issues, 1914-1924, and 3. Resolving the imbalance, 1925-1938. 1-4 ● “In the first period [the imbalance of state and society, 1890s-1913]…American society was on a collision course with its own political system. The dominant feature of the nineteenth-century political landscape was liberalism…liberalism had long emphasized constitutional checks and balances as against the arbitrary power of centralized authority…by the time the Carnegies and the Rockefellers came along, the emphasis was on opposition to government intervention in the marketplace.

Insofar as this laissez-faire liberalism was taken as a license for the accumulation of unlimited wealth, it underwrote the growing gap between urban workers and captains of industry.” 2 ● “In every case, reform struggles ran up against one aspect or another of the liberal state. Although giant corporations no longer played by the rules of family capitalism, laws devised in an earlier era made hard to bring big businesses to heel.

Despite the increasing influence of women in public life, male suffrage lay across the path of women’s emancipation. Even though poverty on a mass scale made a mockery of the Protestant ethic of individual self-reliance, laissez faire prevented the community from addressing the needs of the urban multitude. In the face of new demands for civil rights, segregation held fast.” 2 ● “The more the United States assumed an imperial posture, the more it denied its own cherished principle of self-government.” 3 ● “But all that was as nothing compared with the level of state intervention after the declaration of war in 1917. “War is the health of the state,” warned one critic; and as if to confirm the warning, the Wilson administration mobilized, propagandized, regulated, repressed, and taxed the population as no government had every done before.” 3 ● “A governing system is defined to include, first, the state apparatus proper—army, police, courts, legislatures, electoral systems, and constitutional structures such as federalism and separation of powers. Second, it includes the means of access to state power, such as parties, elections. Lobbying, and bribery. Third, it encompasses ruling ideas, patterns of authority in family, workplace, and community, and prevailing morality. In short, a governing system is the state embedded in society.

Because state and society were linked in a dialectical relationship, it was impossible for one to change without affecting the other.” 4 ● “​3. Resolving the imbalance, 1925-1938​. The imbalance was finally resolved in the 1930s when the Great Depression triggered the same kind of national emergency as the Great War and called forth the same level of state intervention…Putting a bridle in the mouth of untamed capitalist empire-builders, Roosevelt’s New Deal instituted a fledgling welfare state and imposed new regulations on industrial relations with the aim of restraining individual liberty for the good of society. If at the end of the decade America was still governed by a liberal state—and that is subject to interpretation—then it was liberalism with a social face.” 4 ● “The overriding purpose of reform was captured in the name of one of the New Deal’s major accomplishments: Social Security…the new social liberalism…differed from constitutional checks and balances in terms of its centralization of power and creation of new bureaucracies that became the “fourth branch” of government. It also differed from the liberalism of laissez faire in terms of its extensive regulation of the market.” 4 ● “Driven by the necessity of circumstance, the United States shifted from the individual toward the social, from personal liberty toward social security, from less government toward more government. In short, Americans were dragged kicking and screaming toward social responsibility. The task of this book is to show why that shift took place.” 5 ● “Two kinds of comparisons are made in the following pages. First, within the United States, North and South are measured against each other as a means of exploring regional differences in industrial relations, race and gender, and ideas of liberty.

11 Second, within the international framework, the United States is compared with Germany. With respect to the evolution of corporate capitalism and bureaucratic controls over social reproduction, the United States and Germany were closer to each other than to Britain or France.” 10 ● “In one aspect, the dynamics arose out of internal contradictions among opposing social forces, and, in another, out of imbalance between the changing life of the society and the existing form of the state.” 410 ● “With the social weight of industrial workers mounting to its all-time peak, it is not surprising that industrial conflict climaxed in 1919-1920 with the largest strike wave in all of American history. It is not too much to say that the tension between corporate elite and laboring mass was the main dynamic of social change in this period.” 410 ● “Breaking free from her gilded cage, the New Woman claimed sexual equality as a human right against the more conventional assertion of women’s special virtue and peculiar needs. As the middle-class family collapsed toward its nuclear core and as women increasingly entered the job market and public life, the old doctrine of separate spheres increasingly became an anachronism.” 410-411 ● “The fact that corporate elites were largely college-educated Yankee Protestants whereas the mass of urban wage earners were culturally diverse and poorly educated meant that the relative strength of the various groups hung in the balance around the outcome of political battles such as those over immigration restriction and Prohibition.” 411 ● “If the leading public issues of the day arose from the cockpits of social conflict, then the place to look for an explanation for the rise of the new liberalism is in the impact of contending social forces upon the governing system.” 411 ● “The old governing system—that is, legislatures and courts devoted to laissez faire, buttressed by Victorian forms of gender, and imbued with Social Darwinist myths of race—lost its capacity to govern.” 411 ● “The first inkling that a great transformation was in store came in the Progressive Era when social reformers first laid siege to laissez faire.” 411 ● “U.S. entrance onto the world stage laid heavy strains on the existing governing system. Even more than the acquisition of an overseas empire, the exigencies of the First World War proved that the old state structures were simply not up to the task of mobilizing, regulating, and propagandizing the civilian population.” 412 ● “Roosevelt began by following in his predecessor’s managerial footsteps, only when government-assisted corporate planning failed to end the Depression did he embark on new experiments of his own. Wedded to no particular philosophy, he supported the Wagner Act and Social Security, which, along with numerous other innovations, curbed private property and gave birth to a welfare state.” 413 ● “Whereas crusading liberals at the time of the Red Scare had seen socialism as their mortal enemy, the new liberals of the “Red Decade” were willing to use watered-down socialist ideas against the would-be tyranny of archconservative industrialists. It may have been the case that the best in liberal values could no longer be realized within a capitalist society; even so, a more human capitalism was better than a less humane one.” 414 ● “the New Deal simply ducked the issue of equality between the sexes. Indeed, in excluding many of the poorest wage earners—often female—from state protection and in seeking to shore up the consumer family it displaced many of the burdens of inequality onto women. With respect to race relations, the New Deal never confronted “the American dilemma” head on. As a consequence, the unanswered question of sex and race were left to become the burning issues of the 1960s.” ● “For that matter, the New Deal’s reform of liberty was never intended to usher in the reign of equality. Roosevelt was determined at all times to save the capitalist system, even if that meant saving it from the capitalists themselves.” 414 Sources: ​synthesis Connections: Leuchtenburg, ​Perlis​, Cohen, ​Making​, Grossman, ​Land of Hope​, Lehman, ​Promised​, Hawley, ​Making, Kennedy, ​Over​, Brinkley, ​End​, Leuchtenburg, ​FDR Alan Brinkley, ​The End of Reform​:​ New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War​ (1995) Argument: ​“The new liberalism that evolved in response to this changing world wrapped itself in the mantle of the New Deal, but bore only a partial resemblance to the ideas that had shaped the original New Deal. It was more coherent, less diverse, and on the whole less challenging to the existing structure of corporate capitalism than some of the ideas it supplanted. For at least twenty years after the end of World War II, it dominated liberal thought and liberal action. To some extent, battered and reviled as it has become, it remains near the center of American political life still. How and why it emerged is the subject of this book.” 4 ● “Like the progressives before them, few New Dealers were genuinely hostile to capitalism. But they were not uncritical defenders. The belief that something was wrong with capitalism and that government should find a way to repair it was, therefore, a central element of liberal thought throughout much of the 1930s.” 5 ● “Beginning early in the twentieth century, a competing form of liberalism emerged: a “reform” liberalism, skeptical of laissez-faire claims that an unrestricted social and economic marketplace would produce a just and open society. Reform liberals (most of whom at first called themselves progressives) embraced so many different goals that historians have at times despaired of establishing any definition at all of the concept of “progressivism” or “reform”…the ways in which progressives distinguished themselves from laissez-faire liberals was their belief in the interconnectedness of society, and thus in the need

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to protect individuals, communities, and the government itself from excessive corporate power, the need to ensure the citizenry a basic level of subsistence and dignity, usually through some form of state intervention.” 9 “New Dealers had little interest in the moral aspects of progressive reform; they generally avoided issues of race, ethnicity, family, gender, and personal behavior—in part because they feared the cultural and political battles such issues had produced in the 1920s, battles that had done great damage to the Democratic party and ones many liberals had come to interpret as a form of popular irrationality.” 9 “In the aftermath of the New Deal, and partly as a result of it, a third form of liberalism emerged—one that has now dominated much of American political life for several generations. This new liberalism has focused less on the broad needs of the nation and the modern economy than on increasing the rights and freedoms of individuals and social groups. It has sought to extend civil rights to minorities, women, and others previously excluded from the mainstream of American life. It has also attempted to expand the notion of personal liberty and individual freedom for everyone.” 10 “Liberalism after 1945 achieved much in the area of rights, but in the end it had taken a wrong turn. Administering a welfare state that failed to solve the poor’s problems and increasingly engaged in “divisive cultural battles” (270), liberals retreated from the unfinished assignment to reform capitalist institutions in the public interest. Liberalism gradually lost its way as a guide to America’s trouble in a globalizing economy.” 210-211, Graham “by the end of 1937 the active phase of the New Deal had largely come to an end…On the whole, however, the Roosevelt administration in those years no longer had the political capital—and at times, it seemed, no longer the political will—to sustain a program of reform in any way comparable to its earlier efforts. The result was a political stalemate that continued into an beyond World War II.” 3 “The new liberalism…emerged, rather, from innumerable small adaptations that gradually but decisively accumulated. It emerged because by the late 1930s it had become evident that the concrete achievements of the New Deal had ceased to bear any clear relation to the ideological rationales that had supported their creation, and thus that liberals needed new rationales to explain and justify them. It emerged because the recession of 1937, the changing climate of the late 1930s, and the emergence of World War II substantially altered the environment in which liberals thought and acted.” 4 “”Above all, it developed because, as in all eras, political ideas were constantly interacting with, and adapting to larger changes in the social, economic, and cultural landscape.” 4 “Most of all, perhaps, it was a world in which both the idea and the reality of mass consumption were becoming central to American culture and to the American economy, gradually supplanting production as the principal focus of popular hopes and commitment. In an economy driven by consumer spending, and in a culture increasingly dominated by dreams of consumption, it is not surprising that political thought began to reflect consumer-oriented assumptions as well.” 4 “A decade later, in 1945, the ideology of American liberalism looked strikingly different. The critique of modern capitalism that had been so important in the early 1930s (and, indeed, for several decades before that) was largely gone, or at least so attenuated as to be of little more than rhetorical significance. In its place was a set of liberal ideas essentially reconciled to the existing structure of the economy and committed to using the state to compensate for capitalism’s inevitable flaws—a philosophy that signaled, implicitly at least, a resolution of some of the most divisive political controversies of the industrial era.” 6 “When liberals spoke now of government’s responsibility to protect the health of the industrial world, they defined that responsibility less as a commitment to restructure the economy than as an effort to stabilize it and help it grow. They were no longer much concerned about controlling or punishing “plutocrats” and “economic royalists,” an impulse central to New Deal rhetoric in the mid-1930s. Instead, they spoke of their commitment to providing a healthy environment in which the corporate world could flourish and in which the economy could sustain “full employment.” 7 “Fiscal policy—the getting and spending of money by the federal government—had become the focus of liberal hopes for the economy; “planning” now meant an Olympian manipulation of macroeconomic levers, not direct intervention in the day-to-day affairs of the corporate world.” 7 “All liberals claim to believe in personal liberty, human progress, and the pursuit of rational self-interest by individuals as the basis of a free society. But there is considerable, often intense, disagreement among them over what those ideas mean.” 8 “At the beginning of the century, and for many decades previously, “liberalism” generally referred to a belief in economic freedom and strictly limited government [it meant laissez-faire liberalism]” 8 “Laissez-faire liberalism envisioned a fluid, changing society in which the state would not protect existing patterns of wealth and privilege, in which individuals could pursue their goals freely and advance in accordance with their own merits and achievements.” 9 “signs of the change abounded. It was visible, for example, in the character of the postwar liberal community. Most of the “planners,” “regulators,” and “anti-monopolists” who had dominated liberal circles eight years earlier were no longer central figures in the discussion of public policy.” 267 “many liberals were preoccupied with international questions and with the emerging schism within their ranks over the Soviet Union, and were paying less attention to domestic issues than they once had. But those who did attempt to define a domestic agenda were largely people fired with enthusiasm for the vision of a full-employment economy, people who considered the

13 New Deal’s principal legacy the idea of effective use of fiscal policy and the expansion of social welfare and insurance programs.” 267 ● “The Democratic party platform in 1944 was another sign of the changing political landscape. Four years earlier, the party platform had called for measures against the “unbridled concentration of economic power and the exploitation of the consumer and the investor.” It had boasted of the New Deal’s regulatory innovations, its aggressive antitrust policies, its war on “the extortionate methods of monopoly.” The 1944 platform also praised the administration’s anti-monopoly and regulatory efforts—in a perfunctory sentence near the end. But most of its limited discussion of domestic issues centered on how the New Deal had “found the road to prosperity” through aggressive compensatory measures: fiscal policies and social welfare innovations.” 268 ● “The liberal vision of political economy in the 1940s rested…on the belief that protecting consumers and encouraging mass consumption, more than protecting producers and promoting savings, were the principal responsibilities of the liberal state.

In its pursuit of full employment, the government would not seek to regulate corporate institutions so much as it would try to influence the business cycle. It would not try to redistribute economic power and limit inequality so much as it would create a compensatory welfare system (what later generations would call a “safety net”) for those whom capitalism had failed. It would not reshape capitalist institutions. It would reshape the economic and social environment in which those institutions worked.” 268 ● “The importance of the New Deal lies in large part, of course, in its actual legislative and institutional achievements: the Social Security System, the Wagner Act, the TVA, the farm subsidy programs, the regulation of wages and hours, the construction of vast systems of public works, the new regulatory mechanisms for important areas of the economy, and others—achievements that together transformed the federal government and its relationship to the economy and to the American people. But the New Deal’s significance lies as well in its impact on subsequent generations of liberals, and, through them, on two decades of postwar government activism.” 268 ● “They had, in effect, detached liberalism from its earlier emphasis on reform—its preoccupation with issues of class its tendency to equate freedom and democracy with economic autonomy, its hostility to concentrated economic power. They had redefined citizenship to de-emphasize the role of men and women as producers and to elevate their roles as consumers.”

Sources: ​government documents, speeches, democratic records, newspapers, intellectual thinkers Connections: ​Leuchtenburg, ​FDR and ​Perils​, Dawley, ​Struggles, Cohen, ​Making​, Kennedy, ​Over​, Gaddis, Origins of the Cold War​, Hawley, ​The Great William E. Leuchtenburg, ​Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal​,​ 1932-1940​ (1963) Argument: FDR re-created the Presidency and his New Deal programs helped save America through economic reform and by recognizing other, non-elite groups. ● “Franklin Roosevelt re-created the modern Presidency. He took an office which had lost much of its prestige and power in the previous twelve years and gave it an importance which went beyond what even Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had done…Under Roosevelt, the White House became the focus of all government—the fountainhead of ideas, the initiator of action, the representative of the national interest.” 327 ● “Roosevelt’s most important formal contribution was his creation of the Executive Office of the President on September 8, 1939. Executive Order 8248, a “nearly unnoticed but none the less epoch-making event in the history of American institutions,” set up an Executive Office staffed with six administrative assistants with a “passion for anonymity.” 327 ● “At his very first press conference, Roosevelt abolished the written question and told reporters they could interrogate him without warning…To a degree, Roosevelt’s press conferences introduced, as some observers claimed, a new institution like Britain’s parliamentary questioning; more to the point, it was a device the President manipulated, disarmingly and adroitly, to win support for his program. It served too as a classroom to instruct the country in the new economic and the new politics.” ● “Roosevelt was the first president to master the technique of reaching people directly over the radio.” 330 ● “There was a real dialogue between Roosevelt and the people,” [Eleanor Roosevelt] reflected. “That dialogue seems to have disappeared from the government since he died.” 331 ● “For the first time for many Americans, the federal government became an institution that was directly experienced. More than state and local governments, it came to be ​the​ government, an agency directly concerned with their welfare.” 331 ● “Franklin Roosevelt personified the state as protector.” 331 ● “When Roosevelt took office, the country, to a very large degree, responded to the will of a single element: the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant property-holding class. Under the New Deal, new groups took their place in the sun.” 332 ● “Franklin Roosevelt had quietly brought the Negro into the New Deal coalition.” 332 ● “The devotion Roosevelt aroused owed much to the fact that the New Deal assumed the responsibility for guaranteeing every American a minimum standard of subsistence.” 332 ● “The Roosevelt administration gave such assistance not as a matter of charity but of right. This system of social rights was written into the Social Security Act. Other New Deal legislation abolished child labor in interstate commerce and, by putting a floor under wages and a ceiling on hours, all but wiped out the sweatshop. Roosevelt and his aides fashioned a government

14 which consciously sought to make the industrial system more humane and to protect workers and their families from exploitation.” 332-333 ● “Nearly everyone in the Roosevelt government was caught up to some degree by a sense of participation in something larger than themselves.” 333 ● “The federal government expanded enormously in the Roosevelt years. The crisis of the depression dissipated the distrust of the state inherited from the eighteenth century and reinforced in diverse ways by the Jeffersonians and the Spencerians.” 333 ● “The New Dealers were convinced that the depression was the result not simply of an economic breakdown but of a political collapse; hence, they sought new political instrumentalities. The reformers of the 1930’s accepted almost unquestioningly the use of coercion by the state to achieve reforms…This elephantine growth of the federal government owed much to the fact that local and state governments had been tried in the crisis and found wanting.” 333 ● “Under the New Deal, the federal government greatly extended its power over the economy. By the end of the Roosevelt years, few questioned the right of the government to pay the farmer millions in subsidies not to grow crops, to enter plants to conduct union elections, to regulate business enterprises from utility companies to air lines, or even to compete directly with business by generating and distributing hydroelectric power.” 335 ● “In the Roosevelt era, the conviction that government both should and could act to forestall future breakdowns gained general acceptance. The New Deal left a legacy of antidepression controls—securities regulation, banking reforms, unemployment compensation—even if it could not guarantee that a subsequent administration would use them.” 335 ● “Reform in the 1930’s meant ​economic ​reform; it departed from the Methodist-parsonage morality of many of the earlier Progressives, in part because much of the New Deal support, and many of its leaders, derived from urban immigrant groups hostile to the old Sabbatarianism. While the progressive grieved over the fate of the prostitute, the New Dealer would have placed Mrs. Warren’s profession under a code of authority.” 339 ● “Many of the early New Dealers…did…hope to achieve reform through regeneration: the regeneration of the businessman.

By the end of 1935, attempting to evangelize the Right, they mobilized massive political power against the power of the corporation. They relied not on converting industrial sinners but in using sufficient coercion.” 339 ● “The New Dealers denied that depressions were inevitable events that had to be born stoically, most of the stoicism to be displayed by the most impoverished, and they were willing to explore novel ways to make the social order more stable and more humane.” 344 ● “The New Deal left many problems unsolved and even created some perplexing new ones. It never demonstrated that it could achieve prosperity in peacetime. As late as 1941, the unemployed still numbered six million, and not until the war year of 1943 did the army of the jobless finally disappear. It enhanced the power of interest groups who claimed to speak for millions, but sometimes represented only a small minority. It did not evolve a way to protect people who had no such spokesmen, nor an acceptable method for disciplining the interest groups. In 1946, President Truman would resort to a threat to draft railway workers into the Army to avert a strike. The New Deal achieved a more just society by recognizing groups which had been largely unrepresented—staple farmers, industrial workers, particular ethnic groups, and the new intellectual-administrative class. Yet this was still a halfway revolution; it swelled the ranks of the bourgeoisie but left many Americans—sharecroppers, slum dwellers, most Negroes—outside of the new equilibrium.” 347 Sources: ​synthesis Connections: Brinkley, ​End, Dawley, Struggles, Cohen, Making​, Leuchtenburg, ​Perils​, Kennedy, Over​, Halwey, The Great​, Gaddis, Origins of the Cold War,​ Rodgers,​ Atlantic Crossings​, Schulman, ​From Cotton​ and ​Seventies Bruce J. Schulman,​ ​The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics​ ​(2001) Argument: ​“The Seventies transformed American economic and cultural life as much as, if not more than the revolutions in manners and morals of the 1920s and the 1960s. The decade reshaped the political landscape more dramatically than the 1930s. In race relations, religion, family life, politics, and popular culture, the 1970s marked the most significant watershed of modern U.S. history, the beginning of our time.” Xii ● “If one date delineated the end of the Sixties and the beginning of the Seventies, it was the year 1968. It struck many observers, then and now, as a revolutionary moment. Nineteen sixty-eight marked simultaneously an ​annus mirabilis and an annus horribilus​, a year of miracles and a year of horrors.” 1 ● “Then during the Seventies, the tides of American life turned. A booming economy and burgeoning population transformed the South and Southwest. Renamed the Sunbelt, this outcast region wrested control of national politics, sending the winning candidate to the White House in every election after 1964.” Xviii-xiv ● “The Sunbelt South’s issues and outlook, Nixon recognized, would soon define the contours of an emerging new majority in American politics.” Xiv ● “This southernization of American life also translated into new-found respect for religion—a broad, nationwide interest in the experience of spiritual rebirth.” Xiv

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“A new ethic of personal liberation trumped older notions of decency, civility, and restraint. Americans widely embraced this loosed code of conduct. Even those who had never been hippies, or never even liked hippies, displayed a willingness to let it all hang loose.” Xv “the United States would not prove immune to violent confrontation. An explosion of racial outrage after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., brought smashed windows and tense confrontations between police and protesters within blocks of the White House…After King’s death, his vision of racial harmony—even the modest hope of the races living side by side in peace—evaporated. 1968 marked the fourth consecutive year of massive racial violence in America’s cities. The end was no where in sight, and indeed a race war on the nation’s streets seemed a real possibility.” 2 “If those assassinations [King and RFK] did not extinguish the extravagant hopes of the era, one small, historically insignificant event in the fall of 1968 signaled the end of the optimistic, liberal 1960s. On October 20, thirty-nine-year-old Jacqueline Kennedy, widow of the martyred president, married a sixty-two-year-old Greek shipping magnate, Aristotle Socrates Onasis. The mystery of this event—why would she? how could she?—shocked the nation for weeks…For most, it was no laughing matter but the tawdry end of Camelot. The shining knight had died, and now the swarthy villain carried off his noble lady. The dream that was the 1960s, it seemed, had died. The stormy, uncertain Seventies had begun.” 4 “The continuous expansion of the federal establishment, even under Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower, pointed to a key element of the postwar era: the liberal consensus that made big government possible…Most Americans accepted the activist state, with its commitments to the protection of individual rights, the promotion of economic prosperity, and the establishment of some rudimentary form of political equality and social justice for all Americans.” 5 “The liberal coalition in turn relined on northern regional ascendancy…The old manufacturing centers, what would be called the Rustbelt, still dominated American economic life, supplying the nation’s most prominent business leaders and labor chieftains.” 5 “Tet turned out to be a decisive engagement—not on the battlefields of Vietnam as General Westmoreland hoped, but in the living rooms of America. The offensive made clear that there was plenty of fight left in the enemy, that it could attack at will; even the U.S headquarters in Saigon were at risk. Support for the war drained away instantly; Tet vividly demonstrated that U.S strategy had failed.” 7 “Disturbing as that was, the loss of global economic hegemony and the bursting of the postwar boom might have been even harder to accept. Since World War II, the dollar had been the world’s currency, the global economic stabilizer. But by 1970, the all-powerful greenback faced sustained attack as foreign investors dumped dollars, driving down its value and forcing the United States to take extraordinary steps to preserve the international monetary system. In 1968, the Federal Reserve Board raised interest rates to 5 ½ percent, their highest level since 1929 , the eve of the Great Depression.” 7 “The shocking financial news hinted at the approaching end of that greatest of great rides, the long postwar boom. That phenomenal economic growth—the nation’s vaulting advances in productivity, output, and wages—had allowed Americans to accomplish unprecedented achievements. The United States had fought the cold war and rebuilt Europe and Japan. It incorporated millions of working Americans into a home-owning, college-educated middle class. And it still had enough left over to lift millions of American out of desperate poverty and to establish a social safety net for all citizens.” 7 “The Seventies would grapple with the problems of stagflation—the crippling coupling of high rates of inflation and economic stagnation, the seemingly impossible combination of rising prices with high unemployment, slow growth, and declining increases in productivity.” 8 “the Yippies planned not a protest but a Festival of Life—music, nakedness, drugs. They would not so much protest the war in Vietnam as dramatize a more fundamental internal conflict: the confrontation of a liberated, authentic culture with the phony, straitlaced, inhibited, greedy one that had brought on the war.” 12 “The F-U-C-K chant, with is deliberate attempt to shock sensibility by rejecting established, repressive standards of propriety, asked why Americans could find such language profane, but not the war in Vietnam. It suggested an alternative, more liberated, and supposedly more honest and authentic way of being. The obscene chant was as much a political protest as the antiwar song that followed; political protest and countercultural sensibilities went hand in hand.” 15 “Certainly 1984 marked a turning point, the end of the long 1970s. The economy had recovered, taming the ruinous inflation that had cast such a pall over American life. Malaise and Jimmy Carter had vanished; they became subjects of mockery, symbols of the bad old days forgotten in the boosterism and patriotic exuberance of Reagan’s America.” 254 “By 1984, disco and punk had disappeared, director’s cinema had retreated into a small, insignificant corner of the film industry, and the most ambitious experiments in communal life and spiritual renewal had disbanded or become conventional.

Rap, with its militarist lyrics and contempt for racial integration, competed with country, the most conspicuous component of a southernized national culture, for control of the airwaves.” 254 “Similarly, he argues that other ethnic minorities—including Latinos, Japanese Americans, and American Indians—came to emphasize the preservation of distinctive racial and cultural ideals instead of fighting for integration into the mainstream.”

336, Jay “the meaning of disco, which he claims “held out the allure of integration” to disenfranchised groups, especially African Americans, Latinos, gay men, and urban youth and allowed for easy crossover to white audiences wager to shake their

16 booties (and to white artists ready to capitalize on the genre’s success)…For Schulman, the intense hatred of disco signaled the final end of a commitment to liberal universalism. Instead, he argues, the 1970s proved to be a moment when many citizens, not only minorities, turned toward a politics of identity which emphasized the wonders of diversity, but made it more difficult to find common ground between Americans.” 336, Jay ● “Schulman argues that the Watergate scandal and the ensuing national cynicism about government only furthered Nixon’s original goals of shifting the country to the right. According to Schulman, Watergate provided a boost to conservativism and conservative Republicans because the basic lesson was that Americans could not trust their government.” 336, Jay ● “By the 1980s, Schulman argues that taxpayers and politicians alike turned “to the private sector to provide the amenities, the services, the essentials of community that the public had once provided for itself” (215). In this way, the 1970s marked a critical transformation from trust in government policies and programs to a faith in capitalism and its possibilities for personal and community growth.” 337, Jay ● “a man who earned the nickname “Tricky Dick” by systematically undermining liberal programs without ever publicly attacking them. Using the examples of federal funding fort he arts, low-income housing, and environmental programs, as well as the never-implemented Family Assistance Plan, Schulman demonstrates how Nixon seemed to support traditional liberal issues while simultaneously undermining the liberal power base. In arts funding, for example, Nixon allocated a huge infusion of money to the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, but carefully reappropriated how the money would be spent, shifting the fiscal power to regional and local levels and away from the traditional northeastern cultural elite.” 334, Jay Sources: ​Newspapers, music, propaganda, government records, journals Connections:​ Leuchtenburg, ​Perils ​and ​FDR,​ Brinkley,​ End​, Dawley,​ Struggles,​ Cohen, ​Making​, Schulman, ​From Cotton Belt John M. Findlay, ​Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture After 1940​ (1992) Argument: ​“This book…argues that the ability of the West to influence the nation grew with its population and its urbanization. The West during the twentieth century remained a distinctive part of the United States, and it continued to exert a regional effect on American civilization. In fact, a primary source of its separate identity and influence was its expanding cities. The Far West stood apart from other sections not only because it had a higher percentage of urbanites, but also because its cities assumed a clearly regional form and then transmitted that form to the rest of the country.” 2 ● “Cities have been important to the Far West since the first onrush of Anglo-Americans during the mid-nineteenth century, yet is proportion of urbanites as late as 1920 remained near the national average. After 1930, however, while urban growth in other regions slackened, in the Far West it maintained its rapid pace. By the time of the 1970 census the West had become the most highly urbanized of the four American sections, with 83 percent of its population dwelling in urban areas.” 1 ● “By the mid-twentieth century, if not sooner, virgin cities had begun to replace virgin land in the minds of many Westerners as the key image in defining the region. People imagined that the urban West (that is, the western metropolis with its central city, suburbs, and nearby countryside) offered Americans a unique opportunity to live according to their preferences. In contrast to other sections of the country, the region seemed less troubled by urban problems and more open to the improvements in metropolitan design, social relations, and styles of living.” 2 ● “The subsequent opening of Disneyland on July 17, 1955, marked a new era of western land development that affected the culture of the entire nation. The world’s first theme park applied Hollywood’s movie-making techniques to a three-dimensional setting for fun-seekers in the Los Angeles area. Its impact, however, traveled far beyond the world of entertainment, and far beyond the world of design and architecture across the United States.” 3 ● “The land development began in 1951 as an undistinguished district intended to increase Stanford University’s income through leases to light-industrial tenants. In 1954 and 1955, the park’s purpose changed. Frederick E. Terman, Stanford’s dean of engineering, incorporated the park into his program to transform Stanford into a great research university by creating a “community of technical scholars.” The university began to restrict tenancy in the industrial park to research-based companies that would benefit Stanford academically as well as financially.” 3 ● “Sun City was carefully tailored to senior citizens’ tastes and needs, as identified by market research. Capitalizing on the growing financial independence and lengthening lifespan of the elderly, Sun City evolved from a population of strangers with relatively modest means into a cohesive community of self-selected migrants from among the more affluent retirees in American society.” 4 ● “In 1955, businessmen conceived of a public project in downtown Seattle which would produce another innovative western cityscape. Their proposal to host a world’s fair ultimately led to the Century 21 Exposition of 1962. Their chief motive was to stimulate growth and renewal in the city’s central business district in order to help it compete against expanding suburbs.

And, indeed, the 1962 fairgrounds exerted lasting influence after the exposition by becoming the Seattle Center, perhaps the most successful civic complex of its kind in the country. Contrary to the expectations of its planners, however, the Seattle Center contributed less to renewing downtown than to dramatizing the increasing impact of suburban patterns on central cities.” 4

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“More than earlier expositions, it was modeled on such suburban forms as theme parks and shopping malls, and it attracted a crowd that was rather suburban in outlook and orientation. The cold war encouraged Century 21 to emphasize those economic and technological forces responsible for the prosperous and futuristic character of Seattle and other western metropolitan areas after World War II.” 5 “The four cityscapes were by no means typical American metropolitan districts, yet the constituted influential landmarks that acted both as exemplars of the idea of virgin cities and as antidotes to the apparent chaos of their respective urban milieus.” 5 “But despite the country’s adherence to certain arguably unprogressive attitudes after World War II, it experienced tremendous convulsions in the realms of material and popular culture that boldly challenged traditional ways, and in some instances offered creative or liberating alternatives. During the years 1940-70, inventions ranging in size from the birth-control pill and the microprocessor to the Saturn rocket and Apollo spaceship helped to usher in attitudes that sometimes differed radically from their predecessors. The American landscape experienced dramatic changes, too, facilitated by such innovations as Levittowns and fast-food franchises and a national interstate highway system.” 6 “Cities were affected by the same, ofttimes liberating forces that were at work throughout American material culture.” 6 “The new American metropolis was depicted as “chaotic” and “formless,” “sprawling” and “fragmented,” a landscape in “disequilibrium” and a society infected with “anomic”…Historians…have portrayed the recent American inner city as an economic and social wasteland, the outer city or suburb as a cultural and moral wasteland, and the entire unmanageable entity as a political wasteland.” 7 “Although critics pointed to real and severe problems—environmental degradation, racial tension, urban poverty, a weakening sense of community—many of them clung inflexibly to an increasingly obsolete ideal of city life, rooted in the urban experience of the Northeast, in which strong central cities with vital downtowns dominated metropolitan areas.” 7 “In the context of the traditional understanding of the city, the new urban shape indeed looked formless and sprawling and chaotic. But in historical perspective it is easier to see changes in the city not as declension from a single ideal but as movement away from an eastern model, based on nineteenth-century technologies, toward a western model, shaped more by twentieth-century culture and by a distinctly different natural setting.” 7 “this study relies heavily on a micro view of the western city in an attempt to understand how average people created, and were affected by, a mid-twentieth-century urban culture. It relies especially on two types of information. First, it seeks to understand how specific controlled environments were planned, built, managed, and used. Instead of looking at cities as wholes, the following pages focus primarily on smaller parts of cities to see how designers created them and to see how people experienced them—which was often in ways their designers had not anticipated. Because of their smaller scale, to average citizens these special environments seemed more comprehensible than entire cities.” 8 “The second level of micro analysis requires an examination of how inhabitants may have made sense of the cities in their minds. Westerners embraced magic kingdoms not only because they were high-quality environments but also because they made the surrounding metropolis seem more legible and more congruent with regional ideals…Average people proved adept at drawing mental maps that found coherence in urban settings which struck others as chaotic.” 8 “Many Westerners arrived at some sort of understanding of the metropolis only by simplifying it through mental maps, by designing away contradictions in the cultural landscape, and by walling themselves off from the complications of city life.

Magic kingdoms attempted to exclude diversity and misery form their idealized settings, substituting in their stead a world indexed to the middle-class standards of an affluent society. An understanding of these special environments, and of their respective urban contexts, requires recognition of their implications of those minority and working-class groups who made up a large part of the population of the western metropolis.” 9 “Westerners also often excluded from their magic kingdoms much awareness of the escalating costs of the region’s pattern of urban growth. They tended to treat carefully planned districts as refuges from the aesthetic and ecological realities of cities.

Only belatedly did they begin to perceive the detrimental implications of rapid expansion, and even of magic kingdoms, for the special regional environment. Cities that had seemed virgin in 1950 or 1960 were by 1980 struggling to overcome severe, unforeseen problems.” 9 “Magic kingdoms of the urban West helped to define a new standard for what was normal on the American cityscape, and their proliferation sustained at least some of the thinking that had helped to create them during the postwar years.” 10 “In the pages that follow, the West is defined as a place, a process, and a state of mind. First it is understood to include the eleven Mountain and Pacific states as defined by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, but not Alaska and Hawaii…Finally, the West is understood to be the place that its inhabitants ​thought it was. This place of the mind was defined in large part by the efforts of Westerners to contrast their region to a pervasive but rather ill-defined perception of the East. Seattle and Pheonix and Denver were all different from one another, yet they shared not only their far western location and certain processes of growth and change, but also their inhabitants’ tendency to identify with one region by explaining their presence there as the rejection of another.” 10 “Chapter 6 closes the book with the argument that magic kingdoms epitomized the process by which people came to terms with their ever-changing cities in a manner that contributed to their identity as Westerners. Magic kingdoms played a key role in reconciling city-dwellers to fluid settings. They acted as landmarks that heightened the legibility of the urban scene,

18 and they accelerated the growth of a feeling of maturity in relatively new cities by strengthening the sense of cultural attainment.” 12 Sources: ​Disney papers, Stanford archives, municipal records, marketing research Connections: Mohl, ​New​, Dawley, ​Struggles​, Goodman, Land​, Lemann, Promised​, Limerick, ​Legacy​, Avila, ​Popular Culture​, Self, American Babylon, ​Segrue, ​Urban,​ Jackson, ​Crabgrass​, Kasson, ​Amusing​, Cohen, ​Consumer’s Eric Avila, ​Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles​ (2004) Argument: “Tracing the evolution of the spatial and racial divides of the city back to the Progressive Era, [Avila] argues that the period from 1940 to 1970 marked a watershed in Los Angeles history in which the heterosocial vision of New Deal liberalism was replaced by the homogeneous and privatized perspective of New Right conservativism. Such popular culture institutions as film noir, Disneyland, Dodger Stadium, and freeways—all of which came of age after the proliferation of the automobile—reflected and reinforced a racial and spatial order of “chocolate cities and vanilla suburbs” in which a “privatized, consumer-oriented subjectivity premised upon patriarchy, whiteness, and suburban home ownership” dominated urban policy making.” 272, Simpson ● “Essentially, cultural history is the history of stories that people tell about themselves and their world.” Xiii ● “Race is a primary category of analysis in this study of popular culture; space is another. Spaces, like time, is an arbiter of social relations, and the identities we inhabit—race, class, gender, sexuality—are codified within a set of spaces that we describe as neighborhoods, homes, cities, streets, suburbs, parks, factories, office buildings, freeways, and so on. More than providing a physical setting for the formation of such identities, space—its organization, construction, destruction, and representation—plays an active role in shaping social consciousness.” Xiv ● “In the age of urban renewal, highway construction, and suburbanization, the spatial reorganization of the American city gave rise to a new racial awareness that, for better or for worse, still grips our collective imagination.” Xv ● “In their pursuit of new cultural experiences, postwar Americans opted for something different—an emergent sociospatial order that promised a respite from the well-known dangers and inconveniences of the modern city: congestion, crime, pollution, anonymity, promiscuity, and diversity. The search for order provided an underlying impetus for the post-World War II phase of mass suburbanization and it is the subject of this book.” Xv ● “In 1970, Bob Carpenter, owner of the Philadelphia Phillies, removed his team from its inner-city locale. The owner based his decision on his conviction that baseball was no longer a “paying proposition” at Shibe Park and that the park’s location in “an undesirable neighborhood” meant that white baseball fans “would not come to a black neighborhood” to see a ball game.” 2 ● “Ebbets Field, Riverview Park, Coney Island, and their counterparts in other American cities all depended on the streetcar to bring a steady influx of pleasure seekers and sports enthusiasts, but that too became a relic after World War II. The mass adoption of the automobile began during the 1920s, but by the postwar period, public and private agencies concentrated their resources on the construction of an elaborate network of highways, leaving streetcars to fall into disrepair. The disappearance of the streetcars undermined the popularity of urban ballparks, amusement parks, and other urban cultural institutions whose inner-city location lost favor with a new generation of motorists whose daily activities became increasingly dictated by the availability of parking space.” 2 ● “The inclusiveness of modern city culture, however, was predicated on the strict exclusion of African Americans an, to a lesser extent, other racial groups. European immigrants to the American city at the turn of the twentieth century converged on the shared spaces of work, housing, and leisure, but African Americans encountered rigid racial barriers that blocked their access to white neighborhoods and jobs in cities of both the North and the South.” 3 ● “The operators of amusement parks, nickelodeons, dance halls, and ballparks typically adopted a whites-only policy, forcing African Americans to pursue their appetite for diversion in separate and sometimes inferior cultural facilities.” 3 ● “The cosmopolitan culture of the turn-of-the-century metropolis was thus achieved only by aggressively excluding and stereotyping African Americans and by upholding entrenched patterns of racial segregation. In short, the new mass culture reinforced a mutually constitutive relationship between ​public​ and ​white​.” 4 ● “The New Deal and the subsequent outbreak of World War II profoundly unsettled the spatial and racial organization of American society. The intersection of technological innovations, government policies, demographic upheaval, and other factors linked not by causality but rather by coincidence anticipated the arrival of the postwar urban region, which did not fully materialize until the 1950s and 1960s.” 4 ● “In particular, World War II initiated yet another mass migration of African Americans into the nation’s cities, arguably the most significant demographic shift of the twentieth century. Fleeing a legacy of poverty and racism in the South, millions of African Americans converged on urban centers in the Northeast, Midwest, and Far West, where the wartime economy was at its most vibrant. Black migrants ot the cities met substantial hostility there: a spate of race riots during the early 1940s signaled the intense level of competition among racially diverse peoples in search of steady employment and affordable housing.” 4 ● “If ​black became increasingly synonymous with ​urban during the war years and thereafter, suburban development after World War II sanctioned the formation of a new “white” identity.” 5

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“federally sponsored suburbanization removed an expanding category of “white” Americans from what deteriorated into inner-city reservations of racialized poverty. The collusion of public policy and private practices enforced a spatial distinction between “black” cities and “white” suburbs and gave shape to what the Kerner Commission, a presidential commission appointed to assess the causes of the 1965 Watts Riots in Los Angeles, identified as “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”” 5 ● “Clinton delivered a wake-up call to white America to signal that it could not maintain its distance from black America much longer; “Movin’ in on ya, gainin on ya! Can’t you feel my breath, heh…All up around your neck, heh heh.” Striking a chord of defiant pride, “Chocolate City” envisioned black urbanizaion as nothing less than a national insurrection led by James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and other luminaries of Afro-American culture.” 5 ● “Like suburbanization, urban renewal hastened the racial and spatial polarization of postwar Southern California, and the imposition of Dodger Stadium upon a working-class Chicano community nourished the regional development of a racialized political culture. The westward migration of the Brooklyn Dodgers signified the shifting paradigms of race and space in postwar America, as racial succession dislodged the Brooklyn Dodgers from Ebbets Field and racial dislocation under the guise of urban renewal placed them in Los Angeles’ Chavez Ravine. As the nation’s first racially integrated ball club, the Dodgers elicited the patronage of various racial and ethnic groups, but the substitution of Dodger Stadium for Ebbets Field reveals not only the westward drift of cultural capital, but also how the spacial culture of postwar suburbia redefined the public experience of spectator sports as well as that of the inner city itself.” 9 ● “Southern California’s pattern of suburban decentralization during the postwar period reinforced race as a common dominator in the dialectic between the production and consumption of the new “new mass culture.” It enabled Walt Disney to inundate Disneyland with stereotypical representations of mammies and Indian “savages.” It allowed Walter O’Malley to build his stadium atop a working-class Chicano community. It granted the imposition of freeways in the middle of expanding ghettos and barrios, and it empowered men such as Ronald Reagan to mobilize white suburban homeowners as a political constituency.” 14 Sources: ​municipal records, government records, Disney records, Dodgers records Connections: Findlay, ​Magic​, Mohl, ​New​, Dawley, ​Struggles​, Goodman, Land​, Lemann, Promised​, Limerick, ​Legacy​, Self, ​American Babylon, ​Segrue, ​Urban,​ Jackson, ​Crabgrass​, Kasson, ​Amusing​, Cohen, ​Consumer’s Kenneth T. Jackson, ​Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States​ (1985) Argument: ​“This book…suggests that the space around us—the physical organization of neighborhoods, roads, yards, houses, and apartments—sets up living patterns that condition our behavior.” 3 ● “Suburbia symbolizes the fullest, most unadulterated embodiment of contemporary culture; it is a manifestation of such fundamental characteristics of American society as conspicuous consumption, a reliance upon the private automobile, upward mobility, the separation of the family into nuclear units, the widening division between work and leisure, and a tendency toward racial and economic exclusiveness.” 4 ● “American suburbs come in every type, shape, and size: rich and poor, industrial and residential, new and old.” 5 ● “Dozens of peripheral communities are heavily industrial, while others have such rigid zoning restrictions that all apartments are excluded from their quiet precinct.” 5 ● “The first distinguishing element of metropolitan areas in this nation is their low residential density and the absence of sharp divisions between town and country. In all cultures, the price of land falls with greater and greater distance from city centers.

Thus, the amount of space devoted to a single dwelling will always logically be greater on the periphery than at the center. In international terms, however, the structure of American settlement is loose, the decline in density (the density curve) is gradual, and land-use planning is weak.” 6 ● “The second distinguishing residential feature of American culture is a strong penchant for homeownership.” 7 ● “The third and most important distinguishing characteristic of our housing pattern is the socioeconomic distinction between the center and the periphery. In the United States, status and income correlate with suburbs, the area that provides the bedrooms for an overwhelming proportion of those with college educations, of those engaged in professional pursuits, and of those in the upper-income brackets.” 8 ● “The fourth and final distinguishing characteristic of the United States residential experience is the length of the average journey-to-work, whether measured in miles or minutes.” 10 ● “This book attempts to account for the divergence of the American experience from that of the rest of the world. How and why did Americans change their assumptions about the good life in the industrial and postindustrial age?” 10 ● “This book then investigates the dynamics of urban land use, the process of city growth through the past, and the ways in which Americans coming together in metropolitan areas have arranged their activities.” 10 ● “The working definition of suburbs in this book has four components: function (non-farm residential), class (middle and upper status), separation (a daily journey-to-work), and density (low relative to older sections).” 11 ● “Thus, the suburb as a residential place, as the site of scattered dwellings and businesses outside city walls, is as old as civilization and an important part of the ancient, medieval, and early modern urban traditions. However, suburbanization as a process involving the systematic growth of fringe areas at a pace more rapid than that of core cities, as a lifestyle involving a

20 daily commute to jobs in the center, occurred first in the United States and Great Britain, where it can be dated from about 1815.” 13 ● “The revolutionary nature of the suburbanization process can best be demonstrated by reviewing the five spatial characteristics shared by every major city in the world in 1815…The first important characteristic of the walking city was congestion…The second important characteristic of the walking city was the clear distinction between city and country…The third important characteristic of the walking city was its mixture of functions. Except for the waterfront warehousing and red-light activities there were no neighborhoods exclusively given over to commercial, office, or residential functions…The fourth important characteristic of the walking city was the short distance its inhabitants lived from work…The final important characteristic of the walking city was the tendency of the most fashionable and respectable addresses to be located close to the center of the city.” 15 ● “Suburbs, then, were socially and economically inferior to cities when wind, muscle, and water were the prime movers of civilization. This basic cultural and spatial arrangement was essentially the same around the world, and metropolises as different as Edo (Tokyo), London, Melbourne, New York, and Paris were remarkably alike. Even the word suburb suggested inferior manners, narrowness of view, and physical squalor.” 19 ● “Between 1950 and 1970, the suburban population doubled from 36 to 74 million, and 83 percent of the nation’s total growth took place in suburbs.” 283 ● “The term “sprawl” became a new Americanism as subdivisions and shopping centers sprouted across the landscape.” 284 ● “As larger numbers of affluent citizens moved out, jobs followed. In turn, this attracted more families, more roads, and more industries. The cities were often caught in a reverse cycle. As businesses and taxpayers left, the demand for middle-to upper-income dwelling units in older neighborhoods declined. At the same time, population increases among low-income minorities, coupled with the demolition of inner-city housing for new expressways, produced an increase in the demand for low-income housing. The new residents required more health care and social-welfare services from the city government than did the old, but they were less able to pay for them. To increase expenditures, municipal authorities levied higher property taxes, thus encouraging middle-class homeowners to leave, causing the cycle to repeat.” 285 Sources:​ census data, secondary sources Connections: ​Findlay, ​Magic​, Mohl, ​New​, Dawley, ​Struggles​, Goodman, Land​, Lemann, Promised​, Limerick, ​Legacy​, Self, ​American Babylon, ​Segrue, ​Urban,​ Kasson, ​Amusing​, Cohen, ​Consumer’s, ​Avila, ​Popular Culture

Linda K. Kerber, ​No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship​ (1998) Argument: ​“I hope that this book has persuaded its readers that the basic obligations of citizenship have always been demanded of women; it is the ​forms and ​objects of that demand that have varied over time. Impoverished women, whether black or white, have never been able to claim the fictional “constitutional” right to be “ladies.” Women with property have at least the responsibility to be realists: to ask at whose expense they have claimed that fictive right. And even if, having considered the situation, a majority of women should conclude that they do indeed want to be “ladies” and to collect the “wages of gender,” as a historian I can only reply that those wages are not there to be collected.” 309 ● “In this book I have tried to emphasize the distinction between social duties voluntarily undertaken and obligations imposed by the state. As long as married women were understood to owe virtually all their obligation to their husbands they could make no claims of rights against the political community. The ​femme covert​, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court had been told in 1805, had “no ​political relation to the ​state any more than an alien…Not until 1992 did the Supreme Court specifically announce that it would no longer recognize the power of husbands over the bodies of their wives. That is the moment when coverture, as a living legal principle, died.” 305-307 ● ““Citizen” is an equalizing word. It carries with it the activism of Aristotle’s definition—a citizen is one who rules and is ruled in turn. Modern citizenship was created as part of the new political order courageously constructed in the era of the American Revolution. Reaching back to the Greeks and reinventing what they discovered, the founding generation produced a new and reciprocal relationship between state and citizen. They used a capacious rhetoric that ignores differences of gender, race and ethnicity, religion and class; any free person who had not fled with the British or explicitly denounced the patriots was a citizen. After the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment permitted no formal categories of first- and second-class citizens. Philosophically, all persons (whether or not they are citizens) are entitled to equal protection of the laws, and all citizens are bound equally to the state in a web of rights and obligations.” Xx ● “Women have been citizens of the United States as long as the republic has existed. Passports were issued to them. They could be naturalized; they could claim the protection of the courts. They were subject to the laws and obliged to pay taxes.

But from the beginning American women’s relationship to the state has been different in substantial and important respects from that of men.” Xx-xxi

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“In the liberal tradition, rights are implicitly paired with obligation. The right to enjoy a trial by jury is mirrored by an obligation to serve on juries if called upon. The right to enjoy the protection of the state against disorder is linked to an obligation to bear arms in its defense. The right to enjoy the benefits of government is linked to an obligation to be loyal to it and to pay taxes to support it. Obligation is the means by which the state can use its power to constrain the freedoms of individual citizens.” Xxi “But in this book I use [obligation] only in its primary sense—to be bound, to be constrained, to be under compulsion. I treat as obligations only those duties that invite state punishment if they are not performed.” Xxi “In this book I treat five distinct obligations that rest on American citizens. Two are shared with all inhabitants: the obligations to pay taxes and to avoid vagrancy (that is, to appear to be a respectable working person.) Two are occasionally also imposed on resident aliens: the obligation to serve on juries and the obligation to risk one’s life in military service, to submit to being placed in harm’s way when the state chooses. (This obligation has slipped out of common conversation since the advent of the All-Volunteer Force in 1975, but it is a real one, and when we consider the meanings of citizenship we ignore it at our peril.) Only citizens bear the obligation to refrain from treason. Two of these obligations are negative ones.

We do not try to measure the loyalty of citizens, but we think we can know when they are traitors. Instead of an enforceable obligation to be loyal—we have no legal obligation to say the Pledge of Allegiance, for example, nor does the state normally seek to measure degrees of loyalty—we have a negative obligation to refrain from treason. Similarly, as a society we have valued work but have never insisted that every person must work.” Xxii “But the United States absorbed, virtually unrevised, the traditional English system of law governing the relationship between husbands and wives. The old law of domestic relations began from the principle that at marriage the husband controlled the physical body of the wife….There followed from this premise the elaborate system of ​coverture​. By treating married women as “covered” by their husbands’ civic identity, by placing sharp constraints on the extent to which married women controlled their bodies and their property, the old law of domestic relations ensured that—with few exceptions, like the obligation to refrain from treason—married women’s obligations to their husbands and families overrode their obligations to the state.”xxii “Coverture originally encompassed relations between parents (especially father) and children and between masters and servants. The early republic did away with many of those elements, but the asymmetrical relationship outlined in “the law of baron and feme” (master and woman, or lord and lady) remained.” Xxiii “But the wages of gender are not privelege. They are the residue of the old system of domestic relations, the system of coverture that excused married women from civic obligations ​because married women owed their primary obligation to their husbands. Women never collected the “wages of gender.” They paid the wages of gender directly to their husbands rather than directly to the state. Unless we look at the entire system of rights and obligations, we will not understand that.” 304 “Rights and obligations are reciprocal elements of citizenship. Rights are pleasing to contemplate: it is invigorating to be assured, as historian Hendrik Hartog has phrased it, that Americans share “an intense persuasion that…when we are wronged there must be remedies, that patterns of illegitimate authority can be challenged, that public power must contain institutional mechanisms capable of undoing injustice.”” 304 “As women’s independent rights to property, suffrage, and bodily integrity were slowly established, the complementary practices of substituting family duties for civic obligation slowly crumbled. The role of the Republican Mother, who fulfilled her civic obligations through her service to her family, substituting private choices for public obligation, had been marked as problematic as early as the 1840s by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her colleagues. But well into the twentieth century, American law and practice continued to breathe oxygen into the customs of coverture, for all the world as though the Republican Mother were the Resusci-Annie manikin now widely used in cardiopulmonary resuscitation training.” 305 “The agenda of Second Wave feminism, the women’s movement of the late twentieth century, included many items that attacked elements of the old law of domestic relations still vibrant after more than two hundred years.” 305-306 “The 1963 report of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women clearly revealed that women—whether single, married, or formerly married—were severely disadvantaged in seeking credit, on the job market, or when they turned to alimony for support. Second Wave feminism was soaked with suspicion of republican motherhood and maternalist credits, permeated by skepticism that civic credits banked as wives and mothers could be reliably reclaimed, filled with anxious warnings to young women to distrust the promises of coverture.” 306 “Central to the agendas of feminism, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s time to our own, has been a program of legal change that sought to eliminate the legacies of coverture. The ending of coverture has been an extended process, accompanied by an almost willful insistence by many scholars that coverture and the problems it raised never really existed, or existed so long ago as to be antique.” 306 “The political history of women in the United States is generally told as three separate stories. The first is the long struggle for suffrage, successful in 1920; the second, sometimes omitted entirely, is the period 1920-70 that some historians have called “the doldrums,” during which little progressive change was made; the third is the account of Second Wave feminism, energized by the Supreme Court’s decision in 1971 that discrimination on the basis of sex could indeed be recognized as unequal treatment in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.” 306-307

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“But the political history of women in the United States is better understood as a single narrative. Different generations brought to their tasks different energies and faced different opponents, some more formidable than others. Even after suffrage, the agenda that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her colleagues had articulated at the Seneca Falls convention in 1848 largely remained to be accomplished. Rather than describing the years after 1920 as “the doldrums,” we can now see them as a period when the resistance to progressive change for women was powerful and successful. The American Medical Association had not seriously resisted suffrage, but it did fight vigorously the Sheppard-Towners legislation of the 1920s, which sought to expand prenatal care for pregnant women; the National Association of Manufacturers had not resisted suffrage, but it did fight effectively against the Child Labor Amendment; the opening of vast educational opportunities to male World War II veterans was accompanied by attacks on women for taking up classroom seats that could be held by a man. Reformers who learned their politics in the years of “the doldrums” would be indispensable to the successes of the 1970s and thereafter; they are part of the same narrative.” 307 ● “There is no constitutional right to be a lady or a gentleman, excused from obligations borne by ordinary women and men.

Equality is the great principle, and in Anglo-American legal tradition equality has always meant simultaneously common law and equity, sameness and difference shaped to authentic equality in the world which living people inhabit.” 310 Sources: ​legal records, diaries, newspapers, movement literature Connections: Rosen, ​World​, Kerber, ​Republic​, Norton, “Evolution,” Cott, ​Grounding​, May, Homeward​, Wulf, ​Not All Wives​, Meyerowitz, ​Not June Cleaver, ​Cohen, ​Consumer’s,​ Douglas, ​Where the Girls​, de Hart and Mathews, ​Sex, Gender​, Lemann, Promised Nancy F. Cott, ​The Grounding of Modern Feminism​ (1987) Argument: ​“The standard of interpretation of the early twentieth-century women’s movement marks the 1920 as the year of the critical divide: before 1920 the suffrage movement flourished, and after 1920 women’s activism declined. In this impressive work, Nancy F. Cott reinterprets the 1910s and 1920s as years of crucial transition when modern feminism first challenged the older “woman movement.” 983, Meyerowitz ● “Unlike the nineteenth-century “woman movement,” feminism emphasized women’s diversity rather than women’s shared sphere. Thriving within the networks of the suffrage coalition, feminists elevated women’s rights over women’s duties.

Often with self-conscious flamboyance, they called for individuality, full political participation, economic independence, and vaguely defined sexual freedom.” 983, Meyerowitz ● “Feminists wanted equality with men but also emphasized women’s differences from men. While they sought women’s unity, they recognized women’s diversity. They wanted gender consciousness but also hoped to eliminate gender roles.

Those paradoxes generated conflict in the 1920s as the possibility of an ebullient feminist movement foundered.” 983, Meyerowitz ● “Meanwhile, advertisers and psychologists undermined the feminist language of choice and freedom by using it to promote consumerism, femininity, and traditional domesticity.” 984, Meyerowitz ● “By 1930 many women activists had turned to a “compromise area” on which they could agree: They called for equality of opportunity and individual advancement rather than collective action. The feminism of the 1910s was thus “unfulfilled,” making the resurgence of feminism “necessary as much as it made it possible.” 984, Meyerowitz ● “Her story of “the birth of feminism” in its American variety begins in the tumultuous 1910s. Advanced college girls, strong-willed society matrons, union maids, independent careerists displayed a new image of womanhood. Their very existence challenged older notions of female decorum and difference from men. They saw their lives as social statement, and their politics were often explicitly radical, demanding the vote but also economic independence and sexual freedom.” 448, Palmer ● “Cott’s first chapter captures the excitement when women felt that they might march toward the future as men’s comrades, rather than their helpmates.” 448, Palmer ● “Even though [Cott’s] demonstration of intellectual and organizational energies directed to improving women’s lot proves that feminism did not expire when suffrage was won, the 1920s look anemic compared to the vibrance of “birth.” 449, Palm ● “Activists of the 1920s limited themselves to advocating reforms ​within traditional marital, maternal, feminine norms.

Women’s clubs concentrated on international peace (women’s most radical postwar activity and one Cott returns to in her valedictory chapter), and improvement of conditions for mothers and housewives, as well as protection for low-paid workers.

Ambitious women aspired to recognition in male-dominated professions and partisan politics. A legislative measure, an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, was their most extreme demand. Worthy though these aims were, they seem to retreat from prewar advocacy of socialism, suffrage militancy, sexual freedom, and abolition of marriage.” 449, Palmer ● “Contrary to the view the feminism was crushed along with other prewar radicalism, Cott stresses that women’s organizations remained strong during the 1920s; indeed, “it is highly probable that the greatest extent of associational activity in the whole history of American women took place in the era between the two world wars, after women became voters and before a great proportion of them entered the labor force” (97). They joined groups to influence public decisions—from

23 disarmament and peace to birth control and better housekeeping. Women affiliated on ethnic, religious, patriotic, professional, parental, and racial lines.” 450, Palmer ● “Before the war, Cott notes, when women took public stands, they implicitly upheld a principle that women were capable of more than domesticity and obedience to men. In the postwar, postsuffrage era, women were simply exercising their newly-confirmed civic standing; they were being good citizens just like men. “Most [women’s club] members [would not] have recognized themselves as feminists”; indeed, some opposed feminism.” 450, Palmer ● “[Alice] Paul single-mindedly created a loyal band committed to what she saw as the essential next battle—the fight for an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to guarantee full legal equality with men. Her focus had the advantage or simplicity and directness (which were to be immensely attractive to American women in the 1970s ERA battle), but it also “broke Feminism’s connection with sex rights and social revolution (81).” 450, Palmer. ● The National Women’s Party’s “narrow-minded hostility to what Alice Pail considered diversionary issues split Afro-American and working-class, labor union women off from white, middle-class, official feminism. When black women would-be-voters asked for help to protest southern intimidation against their voting, Paul saw this as a “racial” and not a ‘feminist’ issue” (69). When labor reformers advocated protective laws to ease the exploitation of poorly-paid nonunion women workers, Paul responded with stores of qualified women denied jobs that protected men from competition.”451, Palm ● “Alice Paul and other feminists held a romantic vision that a job guaranteed economic independence and self-respect; they were unmoved by Women’s Bureau research showing that most women’s jobs did not pay a living wage. Political animosities grew from a feminism divided between aiding women as a class, and seeking the advancement of individuals of the female sex—when the only model of achievement was male.” 451, Palmer ● “Feminism, [Cott] suggests, pointed women toward two contradictory paths—individual liberty ​or female solidarity—and feminists were thereby rendered immobile. White, middle-class, heterosexual women generally, however, found that feminism articulated ideals and promises of self-development; it defined “modernity.” The second half of the book describes how these women thought out their lives, forced to choose between a Human Self or a Female Self.” 451, Palmer ● “Using feminism as a context reveals that women wanted to be modern, informed, productive, scientifically-competent at their old jobs of housework and child rearing, and at new jobs in professions. Far from being traditionalists hostile to social change, women sought up-to-date ideas.” 451, Palmer ● “First, they sought to be better wives, mothers, and housekeepers, pursing new disciplines in home economics, child development, and parent education. Advertisers rapidly directed aspirations into consumption, and readers scanned their messages seeking to be wiser mothers, more efficient houseworkers, and sexier wives.” 451, Palmer ● “Women also sought incomes, when the “proposal of economic independence…was as radical as the proposal of political citizenship for all women had been” in 1848 (185). Since state marriage laws upheld a basic contract in which husbands provided income and wives owed domestic services, in which women who advocated a division of their labor between career and marriage were essentially taking back part of their labor output for themselves. Cott points out that only middle-class women whose earnings paid for housework subsistutions envisioned this as liberation. In the working-class, employment outside simply meant being a “two-job wife,” the 1920s version of what 1980s feminists call the double day.” 452, Palmer ● “By the end of the 1920s, Cott concludes, feminism looked either “archaic,” since, by contrast to earlier centuries, women had educational, sexual, and political rights, or it looked revolutionary: demanding that women move beyond gender roles.

Reconciliation awaited the revival of feminism in the 1960s.” 452, Palmer ● “Cott herself argues that white, middle-class, heterosexual women who debated which feminist course to follow (or which course ​was feminism) could afford to see sex difference as the only issue of concern to women, because other social inequalities—or race, class, sexual orientation—were not problems for them.” 452, Palmer ● Feminism’s “proponents explicitly distinguished it from suffragism, despite their vital connections with the suffrage movement. The meaning of Feminism (capitalized at first) also differed from the woman movement. It was both broader and narrower: broad in intent, proclaiming revolution in all the relations of the sexes, and narrower in the range of its willing adherents. As an ​ism ​(an ideology) it presupposed a set of principles not necessarily belonging to every woman—nor limited to women.” 3 Sources: ​NWP literature, journals, newspapers, legislation, propaganda Connections: ​Rosen, ​World​, Kerber, ​Republic​, Norton, “Evolution,” Kerber, ​No Constitutional​, May, Homeward​, Wulf, ​Not All Wives​, Meyerowitz, ​Not June Cleaver, ​Cohen, ​Consumer’s​, Douglas, ​Where the Girls​, de Hart and Mathews, ​Sex, Gender​, Lemann, Promised Elaine Tyler May, ​Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era ​(1988) Argument: “May argues that the ideology of the Cold War had a major impact on American domesticity during the 1950s, affecting everything from the design of suburban houses to relations between the sexes. “The context of the cold war,” she writes, “points to previously unrecognized connections between political and familial values” (10). Thus, phenomena such as the baby boom and the feminine mystique did not develop in a snug domestic cocoon, isolated form the other events of the postwar years. They were direct responses to the Cold War and to the anxieties it created. In May’s view, the postwar rush to marriage and baby-making, white middle-class Americans’ embrace of traditional gender roles, and their new-found commitment to family life were all responses to

24 “the terrors of the atomic age” (23). Both foreign policy and family life were characterized by a quest for security and an attempt to contain potentially dangerous forces.” 301-302, Boylan ● “This is a powerful image of the nuclear family in the nuclear age: isolated, sexually charged, cushioned by abundance, and protected against impending doom by the wonders of modern technology.” Ix ● “For in the early years of the cold war, amid a world of uncertainties brought about by World War II and its aftermath, the home seemed to offer a secure private nest removed form the dangers of the outside world.” Ix ● “The bomb-shelter honeymooners were part of a cohort of Americans who lowered the age at marriage for both men and women, and quickly brought the birthrate to a twentieth-century high after more than a hundred years of steady decline, producing the “baby boom.”” Ix ● “Americans of all racial, ethnic, and religious groups, of all socio-economic classes and educational levels, married younger and had more children than at any other time in the twentieth century.” Ix ● “Scholars and observers frequently point to the family boom as the inevitable result of a return to peace and prosperity. They argue that depression-weary Americans were eager to put the disruptions and hardships of war behind them and enjoy the abundance at home. There is, of course, some truth to this claim, but prosperity followed other wars in our history, notably World War I, with no similar increase in marriage and childbearing.” Xiii ● “The demographic explosion in the American family represented a temporary disruption of long-term trends. It lasted only until the baby-boom children came of age.” Xiv ● “Poverty excluded many from suburban affluence; racism excluded others. Nevertheless, experts and officials ignored these realities and insisted that the combined forces of democracy and prosperity would bring the fruits of the “good life” to all.

They perceived class divisions as particularly dangerous, because dissatisfied workers might be drawn to left-wing political agitation, leading to socialism or even communism. According to the cold war ethos of the time, class conflict within the United States would harm our image abroad, strengthen the Soviet Union, and weaken the nation, making it vulnerable to communism.” Xviii ● “many leaders, pundits, and observers worried that the real dangers to America were internal ones: racial strife, emancipated women, class conflict, and familial disruption. To alleviate these fears, Americans turned to the family as a bastion of safety in an insecure world, while experts, leaders and politicians promoted codes of conduct and enacted public policies that would bolster the American home. Like their leaders, most Americans agreed that family stability appeared to be the best bulwark against the dangers of the cold war.” xviii ● “These widely held beliefs and the public policies they generated led to some dramatic transformations in American society; beyond the rush into marriage, childbearing and domesticity. Most importantly, they blurred class lines while sharpening racial divisions. The massive infusion of federal funds into the expansion of affordable single family homes in suburban developments made it possible for white working-class families to achieve a middle-class lifestyle. Second generation European immigrants moved out of their ethnic neighborhoods in the cities, leaving their kinship networks, along with their outsider status, behind. Postwar prosperity and the promise of assimilation made it possible for ethnic Americans with white skin to blend into the homogenous suburbs. Jews and Catholics joined Anglo-Saxon Protestants in these all-white communities, even if they could not join their country clubs or social gatherings.” Xviii ● “People of color were excluded from these suburban communities, and denied the benefits of American prosperity even if they could afford them. With very few notable exceptions, residential segregation defined the postwar suburbs.” Xix ● “But the strategic alliance between the national government and Civil Rights leaders required that the movement remain limited to legal and political rights, which were consistent with principles of equal opportunity.” Xix ● “The focus on political rights allowed the government to support aspects of the Civil Rights Movement, such as the dismantling of the Jim Crow system in the South, while doing nothing to alleviate residential segregation or the widespread poverty that kept Americans of color at the bottom of the society.” Xix ● “In ​Homeward Bound, public policy and political ideology are brought to bear on the study of private life, locating the family within the larger political culture, not outside it. This approach illuminates both the cold war ideology and the domestic revival as two sides of the same coin: post-war Americans’ intense need to feel liberated from the past and secure in the future.” Xxi ● “The cosmopolitan urban culture represented a decline in the self-reliant entrepreneurial spirit, posing a threat to the national security that was perceived as akin to the danger of communism itself. Indeed, the two were often conflated in anticommunist rhetoric. The domestic ideology emerged as a buffer against those disturbing tendencies. Yet domesticity ultimately fostered the very tendencies it was intended to diffuse: materialism, consumerism, and bureaucratic conformity.

This inherent tension defined the symbiotic connection between the culture of the cold war and the domestic revival.

Rootless Americans struggled against what they perceived as internal decay. The family seemd to offer a psychological fortress that would protect them against themselves. Bolstered by scientific expertise and wholesome abundance, it might ward off the hazards of the age.” Xxi

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“It was not, as common wisdom tells us that last gasp of “traditional” family life with roots deep in the past. Rather, it was the first wholehearted effort to create a home that would fulfill virtually all its members’ personal needs through an energized and expressive personal life.” Xxii ● “The most severe censure was reserved for gay men and lesbians. Harsh repression and widespread institutionalized homophobia followed quickly in the wake of wartime, when gay and lesbian communities had flourished. As anti-communist crusades launched investigations to root out “perverts” in the government, homosexuality itself became a mark of potential subversive activity, grounds for dismissal from jobs, and justification for official and unofficial persecution.

To escape the status of pariah, many gay men and lesbians locked themselves in the stifling closet of conformity, hiding their sexual identities and passing as heterosexuals.” Xxiii-xxiv ● “The responses of individuals to the KLS breathe life into contemporary values and reveal how postwar Americans fortified the boundaries within which they lived. They wanted secure jobs, secure homes, and secure marriages in a secure country.

Security would enable them to take advantage of the fruits of prosperity and peace that were, at long last, available. And so they adhered to an overarching principle that would guide them in their personal and political lives: containment.

Containment was the key to security.” xxiv Sources: ​E. Lowell Kelly survey, movies, magazines, newspapers, government records Connections: ​Rosen, ​World​, Cott, ​Grounding​, Meyerowitz, ​Not June Cleaver, ​Cohen, ​Consumer’s,​ Douglas, ​Where the Girls​, de Hart and Mathews, ​Sex, Gender​, Lemann, ​Promised,​ Kerber, ​No Constitutional​, Gutierrez, ​Walls and Mirrors,​ Sanchez, ​Becoming​, Joanne Meyerowitz, ​Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960​ (1994) Argument: ​“Taken together, the essays point first the diversity among women and the multifarious activities in which they engaged.

The essays demonstrate that women’s sense of themselves included not only gender identity—their sense of themselves as women—but also their interrelated class, racial, ethnic, sexual, religious, occupational, and political identities. The essays also suggest that the postwar public discourse on women was more complex than often portrayed. The address the postwar domestic stereotype and its meanings, how and where it was produced, and the manifold ways that women appropriated, transformed, and challenged it. They investigate the competing voices within the public discourse on women and the internal contradictions that undermined and destabilized the domestic stereotype even as it was constructed.” 2 ● “Until recently, U.S. women’s historians paid less attention to the years from 1945 and 1960 than they did to the years before and after them. For historians, women of the postwar era, it seems, were less captivating than women workers during World War II or political activists of the 1960s.” 2 ● “In the postwar era, Friedan argued, social scientists, educators, advertisers, and magazine editors promoted a conservative ideal, “the feminine mystique,” that portrayed women as happy housewives whose fulfillment derived solely form marriage, motherhood, and family. This ideal, Friedan claimed, damaged American women and trapped them in the suburban home.

With ​The Feminine Mystique, ​Friedan gave a name and a voice to housewives’ discontent, but she also homogenized American women and simplified postwar ideology; she reinforced the stereotype that portrayed all postwar women as middle-class, domestic, and suburban, and she caricatured the popular ideology that she said had suppressed them.” 3 ● “While no serious historian can deny the conservatism of the postwar era or the myriad constraints that women encouraged, an unrelenting focus on women’s subordination erases much of the history of the postwar years. It tends to downplay women’s agency and to portray women primarily as victims. It obscures the complexity of postwar culture and the significant social and economic changes of the postwar era. Sometimes it also inadvertently bolsters the domestic stereotype.

Especially in works on the 1950s, the sustained focus on a white middle-class domestic ideal and on suburban middle-class housewives sometimes renders other ideals and other women invisible.” 4 ● “This anthology is a sampler of current work on postwar U.S. women’s history, a first attempt to bring new pieces of scholarship into one volume.: 5 ● “Several themes emerge from these essays, suggesting the contours of a new and multifaceted history of women and gender in the postwar United States. First and foremost, these essays displace the domestic stereotype, the June Cleavers and Donna Reeds, from the center of historical study. To give just one example, Xiolan Boa’s essay on Chinese women garment workers in New York City reminds us that postwar women included immigrants fresh off the boat, newcomers to the city. As federal immigration policy changed, a massive influx of Chinese women transformed a predominantly male Chinese American community. Despite the postwar growth of suburbs and the service sector, the new immigrants moved into and revitalized an urban ethnic neighborhood and an urban industry. Along with the other essays in this volume, Bao’s study demonstrates what should be obvious: that American women were culturally and ethnically diverse during the postwar years, just as they were during other historical eras.” 5 ● “Postwar women reformers, Susan Lynn explains, showed a concerted interest in issues of race. As the civil rights movement blossomed, black and white women worked together, not without difficulty, to battle racism. They employed the traditional pressure-group tactic of earlier women’s organizations, but they also emphasized the transformative power of interpersonal relations. In this way, they foreshadowed the “personal politics” and consciousness raising of the 1960s.” 7

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“Just as black women engaged in community organizing and protest in the African American South, so Chicanas engaged in community organizing and protest in the Mexican American West. In the Community Service Organization (CSO), Margaret Rose reports, women and men, predominately Mexican American and working class, forged a coalition of local organizations in which “women’s issues”—neighborhood safety, education, health care—moved to the center of civic activism.” 7 Connections: ​Rosen, ​World​, Cott, ​Grounding​, Cohen, ​Consumer’s​, Douglas, ​Where the Girls​, de Hart and Mathews, ​Sex, Gender​, Lemann, ​Promised,​ Kerber, ​No Constitutional​, Gutierrez, ​Walls and Mirrors,​ Sanchez, ​Becoming​, May, ​Homeward Donald G. Mathews and Jane Sherron Dr Hart, ​Sex, Gender, and the Politics of the ERA​ (1990) Argument: ​“Essentially, the conflict [over ERA] was about gender. The amendment’s focus was “on account of sex.” And “sex” was the activating word even thought it was misleading. As on North Carolina activist recalled, “The debate on the Equal Rights Amendment was about gender; people got excited about it because they thought it was as ‘sex.’” “Gender” is the meaning our society and culture attaches to sexual differences. “Sex” is the biological distinction between male and female that—at least before the performance of sex-change operations and chromosome counts in East German female athletes—was thought to be natural and immutable. “Sex” is also an obsession in American life, whether in entertainment, politics, religion, or commerce. While “sex” was the word written into the amendment and the word opponents used to give their position an explicit concreteness, the issue of “gender” suffuses ratification discourse. This issue transformed the contest for ratification from the politics of sex to the politics of gender.” xii ● “the struggle for ERA had politicized women as had no other issue since suffrage. The nature of that poiliticization was especially evident in those important unratifying states where the length and intensity of conflict revealed a complex mixture of emotions, convictions, and values that made of the ratification process something far more complicated than a referendum on equal rights for women.” Ix ● “With respect to the ERA, for example, why did women oppose a measure designed to benefit women? The question, however, should not be taken to imply that our work is designed merely as an explanation of why ERA failed; it failed essentially because of timing and the fact that a constitutional amendment requires not only a two-thirds majority in each house of Congress but also a majority vote of over 50 percent (three-fifths in Illinois) in the legislatures of three-fourths of the states. Ratification of the amendment would not have changed the value of our study because the book is not about political calculation, but about meaning.” X ● “the ERA controversy was over exactly what opponent women said was—sex. And sex meant something much broader and more complicated than physical distinctiveness.” Xi ● “The perception on the part of anti-ERA women that proponents had repudiate womanhood in order to be men was born of the former’s commitment to traditional obligations defined at birth (i.e. sex) that the believed to be part of the essential order of creation. We soon learned that we were dealing with two different ways of understanding the universe. One was comfortable with modern social analysis and challenges to tradition; the other believed such critiques eroded the foundations of self and community.” Xi ● “The issues were not Southern issues; the same arguments were used in Massachusetts…” xi ● “But we are ultimately not trying to explain why ERA failed so much as what the debate surrounding the issue tells us about the women’s movement and its place in this country during the 1970s.” xi ● “What at first glance appears to have been a legislative battle over ratification of a constitutional amendment emerges as something more. It was more than community conflict in which political decisions were made simply to avoid increasingly rancorous debate. It was more than symbolic conflict in which groups jockeyed for the legitimation conferred by having their own values inscribed in the Constitution—although it was most certainly that, too.” Xii ● “By 1976, the “ERA had become linked in the public mind with feminism, abortion, civil rights, secularism, and nontraditional gender roles,” all carrying negative connotations (92)” Debusk Precis ● “The difference between the perceptions of the two sides is radical, reflecting their different worldviews. For instance, where proponents of the ERA saw equal rights for education, jobs, and military service to be beneficial to all women, opponents of the amendment negatively identified these concepts with a denouncement of family, maternity, femininity, and the woman’s role within the private sphere. (131-32)” Debusk Precis ● “Opponents viewed feminists as allowing men to shirk their familial duties by pushing women to accept “the draft, and jobs, and careers; to assume the support of their children; to keep their own names and to do “​everything that men refused to do​” (172)” Debusk Precis ● “Most importantly, opponents felt as if proponents were aksing them to give up being women and all benefits that came with femaleness. In other words, if women became truly equal in society, they could no longer rely on ‘women’s work’ and legal protection. They would instead be called upon to be ‘men,’ giving up maternity leave, the right to stay home from war, the ability to raise their children at home, and working conditions favorable to their physical strength and family obligations.” DP ● “For proponents, support of the ERA revolved around the facts (i.e. benefits for women); for opponents, it was an ideological war to preserve traditional gender roles.” DP Sources: ​North Carolina Congressional Records, Samuel James Ervin Jr. papers, oral histories Connections: ​Rosen, ​World​, Cott, ​Grounding​, Meyerowitz, ​Not June Cleaver, ​Cohen, ​Consumer’s,​ Douglas, ​Where the Girls​, May, Homeward​, Lemann, ​Promised,​ Kerber, ​No Constitutional​, Gutierrez, ​Walls and Mirrors,​ Sanchez, ​Becoming​,

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Susan J. Douglas, ​Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media​ (1994) Argument: “Those who regard much of the 1960s pop culture as sexist trash, and who remember all too well how the network news dismissively convered the women’s movement in the 1970s, may be loath to regard the mass media as agents of feminism. But here’s the contradiction we confront: the news media, TV shows, magazines, and films of the past four decades may have turned ​feminism into a dirty word, but they also made feminism inevitable.” 10 ● “Unlike popular culture featuring boys, the major impact of kitsch for girls was supposedly reactionary, not subversive: it urged us to be as domestic as June Cleaver, as buxom and dumb as Elly May Clampett, and as removed from politics as Lily Munster. There is a crucial contradiction here: baby boom culture for girls didn’t matter at all, yet it mattered very much. It was laughable and historically insignificant, but at the same time, it was a dangerous and all too powerful enforcer of suffocating sex-role stereotypes. What’s more, neither of these premises helps explain the rise, and persistence, of one of the most important social revolutions since World War II: the women’s liberation movement.” 6 ● “For somehow, millions of girls went from singing “I Want to Be Bobby’s Girl” to changing “I am Woman (Hear Me Roar).”

Girls like me, who gorged ourselves on all these pop culture pastries, evolved from cheerleaders, experts at the Bristol stomp, and ​Seventeen magazine junkies to women impatient with our continued second-class status, committed to equality and change, and determined to hold our own in a man’s world.” 6-7 ● The truth is that growing up female with the mass media helped make me a feminist, and it helped make millions of other women feminists too, whether they take on that label or not…The moment the women’s movement emerged in 1970, feminism once again became a dirty word, with considerable help from the mainstream news media. News reports and opinion columnists created a new stereotype, of fanatics, “bralees bubbleheads,” Amazons, “the angries,” and “a band of wild lesbians.” 7 ● “In a variety of ways the mass media helped make us the cultural schizophrenics we are today, women who rebel against yet submit to prevailing images about what a desirable, worthwhile woman should be. Our collective history of interacting with and being shaped by the mass media has engendered in many women a kind of cultural identity crisis. We are ambivalent toward femininity on the one hand and feminism on the other.” 8 ● “To explain this schizophrenia, we must reject the notion that popular culture for girls and women didn’t matter, or that it consisted only of retrograde images. American women today are a bundle of contradictions because much of the media imagery we grew up with was itself filled with mixed messages about what women should and should not do, what women could and could not be…The media, of course, urged us to be pliant, cute, sexually available, thin, blond, poreless, wrinkle-free, and deferential to men. But it is easy to forget that the media also suggested we could be rebellious…” 9 ● “The mass consumption of culture, the ways in which the shards got reassembled, actually encouraged many of us to embrace feminism in some form. For throughout this process, we have found ourselves pinioned between two voices, one insisting we were equal, the other insisting that we were subordinate. After a while, the tension became unbearable, and millions of women found they were no longer willing to tolerate the gap between the promises of equality and the reality of inequality.”

10 ● “Like millions of girls of my generation, I was told I was a member of a new, privileged generation whose destiny was more open and exciting than my parents. But, at the exact same time, I was told that I couldn’t really expect much more than to end up like my mother.” 25 ● “But her [Marilyn Monroe] suicide did represent the death of a certain kind of femininity, and a certain kind of female victimization. When she died, it seemed to me, even back then, that an era had passed, and that the seemingly dumb-blond, busty bombshell would no longer exert the cultural or sexual pull that she once did.” 42 ● “No wonder so many of our mothers were pissed. They worked all the time with little or no acknowledgement, while their ingrate kids watched TV shows that insisted that good mothers, like true princesses, never complained, smiled a real lot, were constantly good-natured, and never expected anything form anyone.” 44 ● “Born in the 1920s and ‘30s, our mothers had been whipsawed first by the Depression, then by World War II, and finally by the postwar recovery, each of which was accompanied by dramatically different cultural messages about proper female behavior, messages with all the subtly of a sledgehammer.” 45 ● “In the 1930s the message to women had been “Don’t steal a job from a man,” and twenty-six states had laws prohibiting the employment of married women. Single, white women could find work as salesgirls, beauticians, schoolteachers, secretaries, and nurses; women of color were much more restricted, consigned to jobs like maid, cook, and laundress. Although over three-fourths of the women who worked did it because they had to, the common wisdom was that most women worked for a more frivolous reason—because they wanted something called “pin money.” 45-46 ● “By the end of the war, most of these women had discovered that they liked working outside the home—they liked the money, the sense of purpose, the autonomy. Polls showed that 80 percent wanted to continue working after the war. Women also wanted to be reunited with their husbands or sweethearts, and they wanted to start families. This was a very real desire, but they didn’t want to give up everything for it.” 46-47

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“But there was an ideological component as well, stemming form the postwar hysteria over Communism. If the United States was going to fight off contamination from this scourge—and the disease/infestation metaphor was rampant—then ​our women had to be very different from ​their women. Their women worked in masculine jobs and had their kids raised outside the home in state-run child-care centers that brainwashed kids to become good little comrades. Therefore, our kids had to be raised at home by their moms if we were going to remain democratic and free. There actually were politicians and newspapers that proclaimed day care a “Communist plot.”” 47 ● “On September 7, 1968, Robin Morgan…organized several busloads of women to attend the annual Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. What these women did there was, by the standards of the day, completely shocking. They were not there to attend the pageant and choose who was prettier or had a better butt; they were there to put down the pageant, and put it down they did…This was a completely outrageous event and marked a watershed in American history, a watershed virtually ignored in retrospectives on the 1960s in general and 1968 in particular.” 139-140 ● ““Women Versus Women” was how the debate over the ERA was headlined in news articles, TV shows, interviews, and documentaries. All the news media’s initial responses to the women’s movement—the demonizing of feminists as out of the mainstream, the exaggeration of the movement’s internal divisions, the erasure of male opposition to feminism—became even more pronounced during the coverage of the ERA…Focusing on leaders implied that not all women shared the same talents or the same plight—some were more, or less, equal than others.” 226 ● “[Phyllis] Schafly headed a highly effective grass-roots organizing project that quickly developed enormous political clout.

Congress had finally passed the Equal Rights Amendment in March 1972, and within a year twenty-eight states had approved the new amendment: ratification seemed a foregone conclusion. But then the tide turned, and as early as 1973 the ERA was in trouble. By 1975, thirty-four states had ratified the ERA, but after that date only one more state voted yes (Indiana in 1977), and several states that had passed the amendment voted to rescind approval. After a ten-year fight to the finish, the ERA died in July 1982, only three states shy of the number required for ratification. Schlafly achieved this victory, in part because she was brilliant at exploiting media routines, biases, and stereotypes to make the ERA seem both dangerous and unnecessary. She became a media celebrity, and the media became her most powerful weapon.” 233 ● “Most of all, [Schafly] she appreciated that by organizing women to oppose the ERA, she automatically gave men, who held the overwhelming majorities in every state legislature in the country, permission to oppose women’s liberation without looking like sexist pigs. Phyllis Schlafly knew she couldn’t lose once she transformed the ERA from a struggle between women and a male-dominated political system into a catfight between the girls.” 233 Sources: ​mass media, music, TV shows, newspapers, news programs, pamphlets Connection: ​Rosen, ​World​, Cott, ​Grounding​, Meyerowitz, ​Not June Cleaver, ​Cohen, ​Consumer’s,​ May, ​Homeward​, de Hart and Mathews, ​Sex, Gender​, Lemann, ​Promised,​ Kerber, ​No Constitutional​, Gutierrez, ​Walls and Mirrors,​ Sanchez, ​Becoming Mary L. Dudziak, ​Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy​ (2000) Argument: ​“​Cold War Civil Rights traces the emergence, the development, and the decline of Cold War foreign affairs as a factor in influencing civil rights policy by setting a U.S. history topic within the context of Cold War history.” 17 ● “As presidents and secretaries of state from 1946 to the mid-1960s worried about the impact of race discrimination on U.S. prestige abroad, civil rights reform came to be seen as crucial to U.S. foreign relations.” 6 ● “As Wendell L. Willkie put it,” Our very proclamations of what we are fighting for have rendered our own inequalities self-evident. When we talk of freedom and opportunity for all nations the mocking paradoxes in our own society become so clear they can no longer be ignored.” 7 ● “the impact of American racism on the war effort were played out in Axis propaganda. Pearl Buck reported that “Japan…is declaring in the Philippines, in China, in India, Malaya, and even Russia that there is no basis for hope that colored peoples can expect any justice” from the U.S. government.” 8 ● “Civil rights groups capitalized on the nation’s new focus on equality, and World War II spurred civil rights activism. The NAACP developed, for the first time, a mass membership base.” 9 ● “By 1947, the Cold War came to dominate the American political scene. As the Truman administration cast Cold War international politics in apocalyptic terms, “McCarthyism” took hold in domestic politics. If communism was such a serious threat world-wide, the existence of communists within the United States seemed particularly frightening. As the nation closed ranks, critics of American society often found themselves labeled as “subversive.” Civil rights groups had to walk a fine line, making it clear that their reform efforts were meant to fill out the contours of American democracy, and not to challenge or undermine it.” 11 ● “Civil rights activists who sought to use international pressure to encourage reform in the United States also found themselves under increasing scrutiny…This new international forum, dedicated to human rights, might pressure the U.S. government to protect the rights of African Americans. However, to criticize the nation before an international audience and to air the nation’s dirty laundry overseas was to reinforce the negative impact of American racism on the nation’s standing as a world leader. It was seen, therefore, as a great breach of loyalty.” 11-12

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“In addressing civil rights reform form 1946 through them mid-1960s, the federal government engaged in a sustained effort to tell a particular story about race and American democracy; a story of progress, a story of the triumph of good over evil, a story of U.S. moral superiority. The lesson of this story was always that American democracy was a form of government that made the achievement of social justice possible, and that democratic change, however slow and gradual, was superior to dictatorial imposition. The story of race in America, used to compare democracy and communism, became an important Cold War narrative.” 13 “In 1965 the most liberal administration in American history—Lyndon Johnson’s—led the United States into a full-blown war in Vietnam, pushing the limits of Cold War containment farther than any administration before (or after, as things turned out). By 1975 liberals had long since abandoned Vietnam, and they were in full flight from containment and anything that smacked of what now seemed that nasty old Cold War…Led by recent recruits to the conservative cause—the so-called neoconservatives—they decried détente, Richard Nixon’s de-escalation of the Cold War, and beat the drums for a revival of the armed struggle against communism.” 298, Brands “Solidarity at home was essential; hence Harry Truman’s loyalty probes, Joseph McCarthy’s search for communists, and the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.” 298, Brands “Typically the realm of government contracted after each war, although, political friction being what it is, rarely quite back to its prewar level. The expected contraction commenced after World War II, but the outbreak of the Cold War halted it, then reversed it. In essence, throughout the 1950s and 1960s the country remained on a permanent war footing. As they had during earlier wars, so during the Cold War Americans looked to government to defend them; and as they had during earlier wars, they gave government great benefit of the doubt in defining what the national defense required.” 299, Brands “The struggle for the hearts and minds of the peoples of what was coming to be called the Third World assumed an importance that rivaled the military-strategic contest between the American and Soviet alliance systems. This last aspect of the Cold War forms the heart of Mary L. Dudziak’s story. Dudziack traces the connection between the struggle for racial equality in America and the contest between the United States and its communist rivals overseas. Her story starts with the murders of four African Americans in Georgia in the summer of 1946…[these murders] might have gone unnoticed against a history of violence toward southern blacks, except that one of those killed was a recently discharged Army veteran. The fact that George Dorsey had survived the war against fascism only to be felled by domestic racism struck many in America and overseas as intolerable.” 299-300, Brands “The blot grew bigger as black soldiers, many of whom had lost the habits of deference that long allowed African Americans to avoid vigilante violence, returned home. Lynchings mounted, as did the international attention they drew. Dudziak demonstrates that whatever else they yield historians, the files of the Department of State and the United States Information Agency offer a window on the world essential unobtainable otherwise.” 300, Brands “In his March 1947 speech unveiling the Truman Doctrine, Harry Truman asserted that the peoples of the world had to choose between two ways of life, one modeled on America’s, the other on Russia’s. With every lynching of an American of color that made international headlines—and at times it seemed that every lynching ​did make international headlines—choosing the American way came harder to the hundreds of millions of people of color in other countries.” 300, Brands “As a result, even a president as indifferent to racial equality per se as Dwight Eisenhower was driven to use the strongest means to enforce the 1954 ​Brown v. Board decision outlawing school segregation. What triggered Eisenhower’s action was the international hammering the United States took when Arkansas governor Orval Faubus encouraged riots in Little Rock against the integration of that city’s Central High School.” 300, Brands “On travels to America, black African diplomats often suffered the same indignities as American blacks. Secretary of State Dean Rusk recalled how this frustrated American policy: “A black delegate to the United States landed in Miami on his way to New York. When passengers disembarked for lunch, the white passengers were taken to the airport restaurant; the black delegate received a folding canvas stool in the corner of the hangar and a sandwich wrapped with waxed paper. He then flew on to New York, where our delegate asked for his vote on human rights issues.” (167).” 301, Brands “Yet like Eisenhower, Kennedy required a crisis to push civil rights to the tope of his political agenda. In 1963 Alabama governor George Wallace blacked integration of the University of Alabama, promising “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” By this time television spanned the world, and the images of Wallace in the schoolhouse door damned America in the eyes of much of the world. Kennedy responded by calling for sweeping civil rights legislation, and like Eisenhower, he linked reform in America to American security abroad.” 301, Brands “Lyndon Johnson didn’t require the Cold War to sensitize him to the race issue; more than any president before or since, Johnson perceived civil rights as a compelling moral issue. Not long after Kennedy’s death, Johnson told segregationist senator Richard Russell of Georgia not to oppose him on civil rights.” 301-302, Brands “The same national-security arguments that brought Eisenhower and Kennedy around to civil rights helped Johnson fashion the majorities that approved the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.” 302, Brands “During the Cold War, the imperatives of national security seemed to require efforts by government to solve all manner of problems heretofore left to the private sector or the states. As long as the Cold War went well for America—as it did, in

30 general terms, until the late 1960s—Americans were willing to give government great latitude, as they historically had during wartime. Johnson didn’t have to harp on the Cold War to support his civil rights initiatives. He could rely instead on the legacy of deference to government that had built up since the late 1940s.” And Vietnam killed this deference and Watergate did further damage to the government’s image. American liberalism was destroyed. 303, Brands Sources: ​Department of State and Information Department’s newspapers Connections: ​Gaddis, ​Origins of the Cold War, The Cold War​, Lefebre, ​America, Russia​, Payne, ​I’ve Got the Light​, Chaffe, ​Civil Rights​, Rosen, ​World​, Douglas, ​Where​, May, ​Homeward​, Avila, ​Popular​, Findlay, ​Magic​, Leuchtenberg, ​FDR​, Schulman, ​The Seventies​, Brinkley, ​End​, Kennedy, ​Over​, ​Freedom from Fear, Takaki, ​Double​, Dawley, ​Struggles, ​Dower, ​War​, Goodman, ​Land, Lemann, ​Promised​, Litwack, ​Been William H. Chafe, ​Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina and the Black Struggle for Freedom​ (1980) Argument: ​Greensboro represents a microcosm of North Carolina and its path towards integration. Important not only for its supposedly progressive attitudes towards race relations, Greensboro was also home to the sit-in that started a mass wave of black protest for civil rights across the country. In the end, Greensboro proved no more willing to integrate than many parts of the South. ● “In the late 1940’s, North Carolina had the lowest rate of unionization in the country. The state ranked forty-fifth in per capita income, possessed one of the highest levels of illiteracy in the South, and placed almost last among the states in average manufacturing wage…Even though the University was known throughout the country for its excellence, school children in the state received less public support per pupil than in almost any other state. Thus, North Carolina represented a paradox: it combined a reputation for enlightenment and a social reality that was reactionary. Greensboro was a microcosm of the state at large.” 5 ● “Appropriately, the story of civil rights in Greensboro from 1945 to 1975 embodies the paradox that lies at the heart of North Carolina’s history. In 1954 Greensboro became the first city in the South to announce that it would comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling, in ​Brown v Board of Education​, that segregation in the schools must end. Six years later the city was the birthplace of the sit-in movement—an act of protest that would help to transform the nation. By 1963 the number of people demonstrating in Greensboro’s streets exceeded that in any city except Birmingham, and a young Greensboro black named Jesse Jackson had begun his rapid rise to the leadership in the civil rights ranks. Six years after that, armed confrontation between National Guard troops and black college students accompanied Greensboro’s emergence as a center of the Black Power movement in the Southeast. Finally, in 1971—seventeen years after the ​Brown decision—Greensboro integrated its public schools, becoming one of the last cities in the South to comply with federal desegregation order.” 6 ● “Greensboro prided itself on being cosmopolitan—a place where progressive attitudes were a hallmark of political discourse and where the “good life” of affluence and cultural sophistication was available to large numbers of people.” 13 ● “The relatively better economic opportunities of black Greensboro severed as a double-edged sword, attracting ambitious black recruits to the town but also generating anger at the persistence of white oppression.” 18 ● “It was the black colleges in Greensboro, however, that most exemplified the pride and hope of the [black] community.” 20 ● “In fact, two different styles of leadership existed side by side in black Greensboro. One was willing to challenge directly the oppressiveness of white power; the other sought to work within the structures of white power for black advancement.” 21 ● “As elsewhere, World War II brought an acceleration of black political and protest activity.” In 1951 a black is elected to the city council causing widespread optimism in the black community.” 25-28 ● Greensboro was one of the first to vote to integrate schools, but one of the last cities to integrate. The problem was that many of the white board of education members voted for desegregation but did not establish a firm timeline—many wanted it slow. ● “The [NC Governor’s] advisory committee recommended passage of a Pupil Assignment Act removing control over education from the state and returning it to local school boards. The purpose of the change…was “to be sure that the state is not involved in any state-wide [desegregation] suit” by the NAACP or others. More importantly, the pupil assignment bill established multiple criteria such as residence, previous schools attended, and other “local conditions” that could serve as the basis for perpetuating segregation without mentioning race.” 50 ● Later, “the Pearsall Plan—a local-option clause permitting a school district, or any portion thereof, to close its schools by public referendum if desegregation occurred, and a constitutional amendment granting state tuition aid for white students in those districts to attend private schools…Ingeniously, the Pearsall Plan thus became a progressive alternative to extremism.” ● “In the end the Pearsall Plan accomplished all the objectives its sponsors had envisioned. It postponed meaningful desegregation in North Carolina for more than a decade—longer than in some states where massive resistance was practiced.” 60 ● “In the end, therefore, North Carolina’s progressivism consisted primarily of its shrewdness in opposing racial change. The state’s leaders failed to broaden the beachhead that the ​Brown decision had established. Instead, with the Pearsall Plan as its instrument and token desegregation in places like Greensboro as primary defense [they integrated 6 kids], North Carolina set out to forestall integration.” 70 ● “Within a year, more than one hundred cities had engaged in at least some desegregation of public facilities in response to student-led demonstrations. The 1960’s stage of the freedom movement had begun. The Greensboro sit-ins constituted a

31 watershed in the history of America. Although similar demonstrations had occurred before, never in the past had they prompted such a volcanic response.” 71 ● After 5 months of demonstrations the lunch counters were open. After that protests and sit-ins occurred at other Greensboro segregated dining facilities and stores.

Sources:​ newspapers, government records, oral histories Connections: ​D’Emilio, ​Last Prophet, Payne, ​I’ve Got the Light​, Takaki, ​Double, Dower, ​War Without Mercy, Dudziak, ​Cold War Civil Rights, Goodman, ​Land​, Lemann, ​Promised, Litwack, ​Been​, Avila, ​Popular, ​Findlay, ​Magic, ​Oropeza, ​Guerra, ​Sanchez, ​Walls​, Guttierrez, ​Becoming Charles M. Payne, ​I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle​ (1995) Argument: “Payne’s narrative structure embodies the thesis of his book that the Mississippi movement was a movement of the people.” 626, Dudziak ● “In part, this book is an examination of that campaign. How was it possible, within a few years, to move large numbers of dependent and, to all appearances, apolitical people—none of them having any semblance of legal rights at the local level, all of them vulnerable to violence—how was it possible to move these people to a position of actively working to change the conditions of their own lives?” 2 ● “There was what he labels the community-mobilizing tradition, focused on large-scale, relatively short-term public events.

This is the tradition of Brimigham, Selma, the March on Washington, the tradition bets symbolized by the work of Martin Luther King [and Bayard Rustin]. This is the movement of popular memory and the only part of the movement that has attracted sustained scholarly attention.” 3 ● “The Mississippi movement reflects another tradition of Black activism, one of community organizing, a tradition with a different sense of what freedom means and therefore a greater emphasis on the long-term development of leadership in ordinary men and women, a tradition best epitomized, [Bob] Moses argues, by the teaching example of Ella Baker—and, I would add, by that of Septima Clark. That tradition, and placing the history of Grenwood within it, is the second major theme of this book.” 3-4 ● “Chapters 1 through 3 argue that in fact the initiative that made change possible was far more widely dispersed in Black communities than we ordinarily realize.” 4 ● “Between the end of Reconstruction and the modern civil rights era, Mississippi lynched 539 Blacks, more than any other state. Between 1930 and 1950—during the two decades immediately preceding the modern phase of the civil rights movement—the state had at least 33 lynchings.” 7 ● “Negro veterans played an important role in the change. Like their predecessors from the First World War, some of them returned to the South with a new sense of the proper order of things. All across the South Negro veterans tried to register [to vote] an protested attempts to keep them from doing so.” 24 ● “After [Senator Theodore] Bilbo’s reelection in 1946, the national NAACP, in conjunction with organized labor and other groups Bilbo had offended, led a drive to convince the Senate to refuse to seat him, on the grounds that Biblo had been a leader in the disenfranchisement of Blacks. At the hearing held in Jackson, Black veterans testified for three days.

Moreover, Negroes packed the courtroom, perhaps the most significant act of public defiance from Negroes the state had seen in decades.” 24-25 ● “Characteristically, Mississippi made less progress between the late forties and the early fifties than did nearby states. In that period, Mississippi saw a fourfold increase in Black registration.” 25 ● “A part of the appeal of the Regional Council [of Negro Leadership] was its stress on economic issues, an area the NAACP was frequently criticized for underemphasizing…It was seen as being too committed to producing change through litigation to allow local leaders much initiative.” 32-33 ● “The developers of the community organizing tradition [Ella Jo Baker, Septima Clark] focused on the education of women and young people. As passing an extensive written test was required in order to vote in many states, organizers concentrated on raising the literacy rate of the African American community in the South. The community organizers hoped to use “the vote as a collective tool” (135). By utilizing the community as a collective, the organizers took the emphasis off the individual and placed it on the group. This tactic turned the “ordinary people” into heroes.” Butler Precis ● “Payne contests the popular notion hat African American churches were central to the Civil Rights movement; African American churches, according to Payne, entered the arena of Civil Rights late in the game, and somewhat reluctantly. Payne contends that the African American churches resisted involvement in the Civil Rights movement because of the charitable donations they received from white patrons.” Butler Precis ● “Though the African American churches finally embraced their position in the Civil Rights movement, eventually the grassroots works, such as the community organizing of Ella Jo Baker, Septima Clark, Myles Horton, and Bob Moses, fell into decline. With the lack of organizing came the decreased attention in the media, which, thereby led to a lessened watchfulness by the academic community.” Butler Precis Sources: ​oral histories, newspapers, organizational records

32 Connections: ​Chafe, ​Civilities and Civil Rights, Dudziak, ​Cold War Civil Rights, D’Emilio, ​Last Prophet​, Goodman, ​Land, Lemann, Promised, Takaki, ​Double, Dower, ​War Without Mercy, Litwack, ​Been​, Avila, ​Popular, ​Findlay, ​Magic​, Oropeza, ​Guerra, ​Sanchez, Walls​, Guttierrez, ​Becoming Marilyn B. Young, ​The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990​ (1991) Argument: ​“By offering a detailed rendering of the conflict, [Young] she hopes to show that “in the daily, weekly, monthly, yearly progress of the war lay many of its most decisive reasons and irrationalities” (x). Her general appraisal of the evidence states that “there was no conceivable justification for the horrors daily inflicted on and suffered in Vietnam” (ix).” Costanzo Précis ● “Young’s treatment of the history of Vietnam can be divided into three general sections. The first begins in the twilight of the Second World War and concludes with the death of President Kennedy…after supporting France in their losing effort to retain the colony, U.S. policy in the wake of the armistice which divided Vietnam relied upon the puppet government installed in the South...Young describes the Kennedy administration as primarily concerned with “how the war ​looked at home and abroad” (92). In addition, she notes that they used Vietnam “as a laboratory for counterinsurgency techniques and weapons” (82).” Costanzo Precis ● “The next [second] third of the book deals with the Johnson administration’s escalation of the war. Young explains that, after gaining a free hand from Congress by grossly exaggerating the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Johnson faced three options for handling Vietnam: bombing the North, intensifying the war in the South and attempting to pacify the countryside. LBJ chose to attempt all three simultaneously. In addition, Johnson determined that the war would be fought “on the side,” without requesting a tax increase or declaration of war from Congress (160).” Costanzo Precis ● “Of the conclusion of the war, she states that “The Nixon administration had it both ways: the illusion of peace, the reality of ongoing war” since bombing continued in Cambodia and Laos (277). Young concludes the book with a review of US foreign policy and international intervention from the end of the war through 1990. She detects little change in what she sees as the basic tenet of Cold War policy, that “change not sponsored or sanctioned by the United States or its agents” is treated as a threat (317).” Costanzo Precis ● “At first we were in Vietnam for the sake of stability in France, which held the American plan for European security and recovery hostage to its colonial war in Indochina. We were also there to provide Japan with Southeast Asian substitutes for the China trade the United States had embargoed. In the largest sense, the United States was in Vietnam as a crucial part of the enterprise of reorganizing the post-World War II world according to the principles of liberal capitalism.” Ix ● “Paralleling the development of the question “Why are we in Vietnam?” from inquiring about motives to denouncing the acts of war, I have come to believe that in the daily, weekly, monthly, yearly progress of the war lay many of its most decisive reasons and irrationalities.” Ix-x ● “war continues to be a primary instrument of American foreign policy and the call to arms a first response to international disputes.” X ● “Those who fought the war and died in it were disproportionately poor, badly educated, and black. (A high school dropout who enlisted had a 70 percent chance of being sent to Vietnam, a college graduate only 42 percent; until 1971, student deferments protected the majority of students from the draft altogether.)” 319 ● “Between 1966 and 1972, a special Great Society program—Project 100,000—scooped up over 300,000 young men previously considered ineligible for the military because of their low test scores. Project 100,000, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara declared, was the “world’s largest education of skilled men.” With lower admissions scores, the “subterranean poor” would have an opportunity to serve their country in Vietnam; simultaneously, the program had the advantage of avoiding the politically unpleasant alternative of requiring students or reservists to do the same. The benefits, especially to young black men, were said to be especially striking. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out, the military was “an utterly masculine world. Given the strains of disordered and matrifocal family life in which so many Negro youth came of age, the armed forces are a dramatic and desperately needed change, a world away from women, a world run by strong men and unquestioned authority, where discipline, if harsh, is nonetheless orderly and predictable, and where rewards, if limited, are granted on the basis of performance.” In its first two years of operation, 41 percent of those brought in to the military through Project 100,000 were black, 80 percent had dropped out of high school, 40 percent could read at less than sixth-grade level, and 37 percent were put directly into combat. Court-martialed at double the usual rate, over eighty thousand of those veterans left the military without the skills and opportunities McNamara assured them would be theirs, and many of them with service records that would make civilian life far more difficult than if they had never served at all.” 320 ● “The war gave many women responsibilities and a sense of power usually denied them in civilian life. But this new status too was confusing and even dehumanization that were its occasion.” 323 ● “In 1982, the Veterans Administration acknowledged that women were truly Vietnam vets: for the first time groups were established for women suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.” 323 Sources: ​secondary sources, newspapers, oral histories, government records Connections: ​Appy, ​Patriots,​ Herring, ​America’s Longest War,​ Gaddis, ​Origins, New Cold War,​ Lefabre, ​America, Russia

33 George C. Herring, ​America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975​ Fourth Edition (2002) Argument: ​“I have attempted to explain American decision making on Vietnam in the broader context of the nation’s domestic politics and especially of its global outlook and foreign policies for the quarter century between 1950 and 1975. Fear of the domestic political consequences of “losing” Vietnam haunted American policymakers from Harry Truman to Richard Nixon. More important, I think, U.S involvement in Vietnam was a logical, if not inevitable, outgrowth of a world view and a policy—the policy of containment—that Americans in and out of government accepted without serious question for more than two decades. The commitment in Vietnam expanded as the containment policy itself grew. In time, it outlived the conditions that had given rise to that policy. America’s failure in Vietnam called into question some of the basic premises of that policy and provoked a searching reappraisal of American attitudes toward the world and their place in it.” xiii ● “This is not primarily a military history. Rather, in keeping with the purpose of the “America in Crisis” series, it seeks to integrate military, diplomatic, and political factors in such a way as to explain America’s involvement and ultimate failure in Vietnam. My focus is on the United States, but I have sought to provide sufficient analysis of the Vietnamese side to make these events comprehensible. I have attempted to show the important role played by other nations such as the Soviet Union and China in the origins and outcome of the war.” xii ● “I believe now, as I did then, that U.S. intervention in Vietnam was misguided. It can be argued that the containment policy worked in Europe, contributing significantly, perhaps even decisively, to the outcome of the Cold War. This said, I still believe that containment was misapplied in Vietnam. Obsessed with their determination to stop the advance of communism, abysmally ignorant of the Vietnamese people and their history, Americans profoundly misread the nature of the struggle in Vietnam, its significance for their national interests, and its susceptibility to their power.” Xiii-xiv ● “After the Korean War, however, United States leaders discarded this view [that Ho Chi Minh was a Communist but primarily a nationalist], seeing Vietnam’s struggle for independence as part of the Chinese scheme of expansion, and gave all-out help to France in her colonial war. Later, the events at the Bay of Pigs and in Berlin might have further spurred the United States to stand firm in South Vietnam, but the view of all of the socialist countries as a monolithic force, led by the Soviet Union and China and bent on expansion, was the main element behind the blind anticommunism of the United States vis-à-vis Vietnam. This view distorted United States foreign policy and turned a country that is tangential to its national security into a strategy and ordnance focus.” 1464, Huynh ● “Herring…believed that presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson often chose the “middle ground” in making decisions.” 1465, Huynh Sources: ​government records, secondary sources Connections: ​Appy, ​Patriots,​ Young, ​The Vietnam Wars,​ Gaddis, ​Origins, New Cold War,​ Lefabre, ​America, Russia David G. Gutierrez, ​Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity​ (1995) Argument: ​“Gutierrez argues that the influx of Mexican immigrants into the United States reconfigures Mexican Americans’ notions of identity and community.” 230, Chavez ● “In the three decades since 1960 the growth of the United States’ Hispanic, or Latino, population has become an increasingly controversial issue. Increasing at a rate that far exceeds that of any other minority group, the number of Americans of Latino descent rose from just under 7 million persons in 1960 to approximately 10.5 million in 1970, 14.6 million in 1980, and an estimated 20 million in 1990.” 1 ● “Although Mexican Americans and, more recently other U.S. Latinos have been among those most directly affected by sustained immigration from Mexico and Latin America, relatively little is known about how they have reacted to the steady influx of immigrants into their communities over the course of this century. There are probably many explanations for the relative dearth of knowledge about this question, but I would argue that one of the primary reasons researchers have not pursued the issue is that until fairly recently few Americans have recognized much of a distinction between long-term U.S residents of Mexican and Latin descent and more recent immigrants form Mexico and other nations of Latin America.” 2 ● “By focusing on the historical origins and evolution of Mexican Americans’ views about Mexican immigrants, I hoped eventually to shed light on what appeared to me to be an intriguing contradiction. My belief was that by exploring the differences that divided and the commonalities that bound the two groups—the walls and mirrors that so clearly characterized their relationship in the United States—I could illuminate some puzzling, unexplored dimensions of Mexican American political and social history, of the processes involved in immigrant settlement and adaptation, and of the larger national debate over immigration policy toward Mexico.” 4 ● “One end of the spectrum of opinion has been occupied by those Mexican Americans who tend to view Mexican immigrants as a threat…they believe that unrestricted immigration has undermined Mexican Americans’ life chances by increasing economic competition and contributing to the reinforcement of negative racial and cultural stereotypes held by white Americans…Logically, Mexican Americans who subscribe to this set of assumptions have also tended to argue that immigration from Mexico should be tightly controlled.” 4-5 ● “Seeing themselves reflected in the people they call ​los recien llegados (recent arrivals), Mexican Americans occupying this end of the spectrum of opinion have tended to express more empathy for immigrants from Mexico…this sympathetic point of

34 view stems from belief that the affinities between Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants based on ties of culture, kinship, and friendship are much more important than any differences that divide them… Noting that Americans seem to discriminate against Mexicans whether they are U.S. citizens or not, Mexican Americans oriented in this way can see little difference between their position in American society and that of more recent immigrants.” 5 ● “On February 2, 1848…the Treaty of Guadalupe hidalgo [was signed]…With most of the terms dictated by the victorious Americans, the treaty established a new border between the two nations, provided official recognition of the United States’ previous annexation of Texas, and provided for the payment by the United States of 15 million dollars to Mexico in exchange for Mexico’s former northern provinces.” 13 ● “By the turn of the century most Mexican Americans found themselves in a position in society not much better than that occupied by Indians and African Americans elsewhere in the Untied States. Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, these hardships played an important countervailing role by laying the foundation for the eventual emergence of a new sense of solidarity among Mexican Americans in the Southwest.” 14 ● “In technical, political terms, although Mexican Americans, by virtue of their new status as American citizens, were no longer Mexicans, American racism and Mexican Americans’ de facto subordinate status in the new social order encouraged them to consider themselves Mexicans in a way they never had before.” 37 ● “In developing a new sense of community based both on a common Mexican cultural heritage and the common experience of racial prejudice in the United States, Mexican Americans were able to transform Anglo Americans’ efforts to stigmatize them as racial inferiors into a positive strategy of self-affirmation as Mexicans in American society. At the same time, Mexican Americans’ success in generating such new bases for solidarity went a long way toward guaranteeing the survival and growth of a distinct, if syncretic, variant of Mexican culture in what had become part of the United States.” 37’ ● “Forced to compete against the recent arrivals for scarce jobs, housing, and access to social services in a social and political context in which Mexicans were already stigmatized, many Mexican Americans argued that large-scale immigration represented a clear danger to ethnic Mexicans already living in the United States.” 66 ● “Although few observers were aware of it at the time, the primary reason sustained Mexican immigration created tensions in Mexican American communities was that immigration had strongly altered the context of social relationships in the region.

Before 1900 Mexican Americans had effectively utilized their sense of Meixcanness as a boundary-marking mechanism that in many ways protected them from, or at least buffered, the prejudice and discrimination they experienced in American society.

By maintaing elements of Hispanic-Meixcan culture and identifying themselves as Mexicanos, as Hispanoamericanos, or as members of the more metaphysical La Raza, Mexican Americans had asserted an oppositional set of defining characteristics that helped demarcate their community from Norteamericanos…The influx of large numbers of immigrants from Mexico after the turn of the century upset this bifurcated social ordering by introducing a huge new set of actors.” 66-67 ● “Such activitists insisted that Americans in good conscience could not have it both ways—they could not simultaneously exploit the labor and the goodwill of ethnic Mexican people, deny them any real possibility of assimilating into the social or cultural mainstream, and then expect them not to continue to cherish and defend their own cultural traditions and practices.” ● “By the late 1970s internal debate among Mexican Americans and Chicanos over the most basic questions of ethnic and cultural identity, the steadily increasing class, generational, and regional diversity of the population, and the fundamental historical disagreements over the best political strategy for the United States’ ethnic Mexican minority combined to foil concerted Mexican American-Chicano action.” 205 Sources: ​oral histories, organizational literature, newspapers, immigration debates and legislation Connections: ​Oropeza, ​Raza Si, Sanchez, ​Becoming Mexican American, Chafe, ​Civilities and Civil Rights, D’Emilio, ​Last Prophet​, Goodman, ​Land, Lemann, ​Promised, Takaki, ​Double, Dower, ​War Without Mercy, Litwack, ​Been​, Avila, ​Popular, ​Findlay, ​Magic​, Payne, ​I’ve​, Foley, ​The White Scourge, ​Jacobson, ​Whiteness​, Daniels, ​Guarding George J. Sanchez, ​Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945​ (1993) Argument: ​“[Sanchez] he argues tat because Mexican migrants move between two countries, they have been the first to experience the “postmodern condition.” Not only did Mexican immigrants live in a postmodern world, but by moving from one country to another, they also had to invent new traditions and discard old customs in an effort to make sense of their new terrain. Ultimately, Sanchez believes that ethnicity was “not a fixed set of customs surviving from Mexico, but rather a collective identity that emerged from daily experience in the United States” (11).” 225-226, Chavez ● “David M. Potter…argued that because virtually all Americans descended from immigrants, they were compulsively preoccupied with the question of national identity. Americans feel deprived of an organic connection to the past, especially when confronted with their diverse religious, linguistic, and political heritage. The result has been an obsessive fixation on the elusive tenets of “Americanism.” 4 ● “For example, the concept of a dual or segmented labor market has been used to explain the disadvantaged position of Mexican workers in the Southwest. This structural approach argues that while those in the primary sector enjoy relatively decent wages, labor conditions, job security, and union membership, those in the secondary sector, including racial minority groups such as Mexicans, are relegated to low-paying, “dead-end” jobs.” 7

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“Recently, Chicano scholars in art, literature, and anthropology have begun to develop notions of “trans-creation” to describe the process of cultural formation among Chicanos and other Latinos in the United States. The movement between Mexican and American cultures is not so much a world of confusion, but rather a place of opportunity and innovation.” 9 “Yet “Mexico,” maybe even more so than other nations, was a national community that had to be “imagined” to exist, particularly given its racial and regional diversity. Not only was culture never static in Mexico, nor U.S. influence ever far removed in shaping in contours, but the construction of a Mexican national identity was never more ferociously persuaded than in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution—at the very moment thousands of Mexicans were making their way north.”

“Thus, my own study necessarily begins with an examination of the rural villages and burgeoning towns of Mexico. Mexico during the early twentieth century was undergoing fundamental socioeconomic upheaval. Partly because of this tumult, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans crossed the border into the United States, usually seeking temporary residence and better wages in order to help their families survive through difficult times…moving north signified a momentous occasion. Though back-and-forth migration continued, increasingly durable settlement north of the border was a result of tightening immigration restriction.” 9-10 “The growth of the Chicano community in Los Angeles created a “problem” for Anglo American residents, one which resulted in public efforts to alter cultural loyalties among Mexican immigrants. American officials launched programs to teach these newcomers idealized versions of American practices, customs, and values. The Mexican government, for its part, worked through its consulate office to instill loyalty to Mexico, trying to persuade citizens to return to their native country.

Neither of these efforts had their intended effect, but both ironically served to stimulate the process of self-recognition as ethnic Americans among the immigrant population.” 10 “The struggle which forged a Mexican American identity was powerfully rooted in the decade of the 1930s. The onset of the Great Depression forced many Chicano residents to reconsider their decision to remain in the United States. Moreover, the deportation and repatriation campaigns launched against Mexicans in Los Angeles profoundly disrupted the cultural centeredness of the community. Los Angeles lost one-third of its Mexicans residents, and those who remained were made keenly aware of the fragility of their social position. The sons and daughters of the immigrant generation, entering adulthood during the late 1930s and early 1940s, became acutely sensitive to America’s lack of tolerance. Hence, many became more active in American unions and struggles for civil rights. They found themselves profoundly affected by a generation of labor leaders, both Chicano and Anglo, who dedicated their lives to the fight for social equality in the era of the New Deal.” 12 “This new cultural identity was forged within the context of a hostile, racist environment which sought to deny Mexican Americans a claim to being “Americans.” The so-called “Zoot Suit Riots” in Los Angeles in 1943 were only the most outward manifestation of the racism they experienced. As a result, parents and children alike forged an ambivalent Americanism—one distinguished by a duality in cultural practices and a marked adaptability in the face of discrimination.”13 “Central to my thesis is the argument that Mexican American cultural adaptation occurred without substantial economic mobility, particularly since it was rooted in the context of the Great Depression. This book is in part a study of how cultural change can take place ​without social mobility. Previous studies of Chicanos in Los Angeles have been helpful in understanding the forces which militated against upward mobility among Mexican Americas. But, as we shall see, these earlier works have neglected to tell the fascinating story of cultural invention which must also be included in any portrait of working class life in these years.” 13 “I argue that the emphasis in Chicano history on bipolar models that have stressed either cultural continuity or gradual acculturation has short-circuited a full exploration of the complex process of cultural adaptation.” 13 “Historical writing on immigration in the United States surely suffers from this severe regional imbalance; most studies still focus on the Northeast and selected cities of the Old Northwest. The fact that the American Southwest has been the locus of one of the most profound and complex interactions between variant cultures in American history is repeatedly overlooked.

“Rarely did migration to the United States uproot all vestiges of one’s native culture, but neither did Mexican culture remain unchanged in the United States. Rather, cultural adaptation occurred gradually, particularly among those who made conscious decisions to remain north of the border. Though changes were evident in the values and practices of the immigrant generation, a more profound adaptation usually occurred among their children.” 272 “The million Mexican-origin residents of Los Angeles would appear to him to be no longer Mexican and yet not quite American either, but suspended between two cultures. To this elite Mexican intellectual, the mostly working-class Mexican American population appeared unable to ever truly be at home in their new homeland. Yet Mexican Americans themselves did not necessarily concur. Most had no difficulty seeing themselves as both Mexican and American. They knew that they had become cultural bridges between the two lands; in fact, they had created a new borderlands in the east-side barrios in which cultural revival and re-creation were ever-present.” 272 “The back-and-forth nature of Mexican migration throughout the twentieth century—with the exception of the 1930s—insured the constant infusion of Mexican culture into Chicano communities in the United States. Moreover, it also guaranteed that American culture would be brought deep into Mexico by returning migrants.” 272

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“Being witness to the repatriation of thousands of Mexicans early in the decade, Mexican American adolescents struggled to find their identity on American soil without benefit of recent newcomers. As Americans, they attempted to take a middle ground—searching for ways to reconcile their Mexican heritage with a new role as citizens of the United States.” 273 ● “Most adaptation to American society occurred within the confines of the working class. During the 1920s, this meant that Mexicans learned about American life in the ethnically mixed neighborhoods in central and east Los Angeles…During most of the period from 1900 to 1945, however, Mexicans were integrated into American working-class life, living among other ethnics also coming to terms with what it meant to be American.” 273 ● “Neither Americanization nor Mexicanization programs succeeded in eliciting intended responses among immigrants in Los Angeles. At best, these programs encouraged the creation of an identity as ethnic Americans among the Mexican immigrant population. Economic, social, and cultural forces in the city and relations between the two nations had more influence on motivating particular behavior or attitudes than organized governmental efforts.” 273 ● “Indeed, it is possible to argue that Los Angeles provided Mexican immigrants more latitude than any other community in the Southwest in shaping a Mexican American identity. Far enough away from the border to encourage experimentation with new cultural influences, newcomers there were still close enough to the population centers of Mexico to receive constant input from newly arrived immigrants.” 274 Sources: ​postmodern philosophy, mutalista literature, newspapers, Mexican Consulate records, municipal records Connections: ​Oropeza, ​Raza Si, Gutierrez, ​Walls, Chafe, ​Civilities and Civil Rights, D’Emilio, ​Last Prophet​, Goodman, ​Land, Lemann, ​Promised, Takaki, ​Double, Dower, ​War Without Mercy, Litwack, ​Been​, Avila, ​Popular, ​Findlay, ​Magic​, Payne, ​I’ve​, Foley, The White Scourge, ​Jacobson, ​Whiteness​, Daniels, G ​ uarding Mathew Frye Jacobson, ​Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race​ (1998) Argument: ​“This book proposes to map the significance of the racial designations that have framed the history of European immigration—white and Caucasian on the one hand, and narrower distinctions such as Anglo-Saxon, Celt, Hebrew, Slav, Alpine, Mediterranean, or Nordic on the other—in order to make sense of pervasive racial articulations that scholars have too conveniently passed over simply as ​misuses​ of the word “race.”” 6 ● “Thus sexuality is one site at which all the economic advantages, political privileges, and social benefits inhering in a cultural invention like ​Caucasian​ converge and reside.” 3 ● “As races are invented categories—designations coined for the sake of grouping and separating peoples along lines of presumed difference—Caucasians are made and not born. White privilege in various forms has been a constant in American political culture since colonial times, but whiteness itself has been subject to all kinds of contests and has gone through a series of historical vicissitudes.” 4 ● “American scholarship on immigration has generally conflated race and color, and so has transported a late-twentieth-century understanding of “difference” into a period whose inhabitants recognized biologically based “races” rather than culturally based “ethnicities.” 6 ● “Nonetheless, the history of whiteness in the United States is divisible into three great epochs. The nation’s first naturalization law in 1790 (limiting naturalized citizenship to “free white persons”) demonstrates the republican convergence of race and “fitness for self-government”; the law’s wording denotes an unconflicted view of the presumed character and unambiguous boundaries of whiteness. Fifty years later, however, beginning with the massive influx of highly undesirable but nonetheless “white” persons from Ireland, whiteness was subject to new interpretations. The period of mass European immigration, from the 1840s to the restrictive legislation of 1924, witnessed a fracturing of whiteness into a hierarchy of plural and scientifically determined white races.” 7 ● “Finally, in the 1920s and after, partly because the crisis of over-inclusive whiteness had been solved by restrictive legislation and partly in response to a new racial alchemy generated reconsolidated: the late nineteenth century’s probationary white groups were now remade and granted the scientific stamp of authenticity as the unitary Caucasian race—an earlier era’s Celts, Slavs, Hebrews, Iberics, and Saracens, among others, had become the Caucasians so familiar to our own visual economy and racial lexicon.” 8 ● “Two premises guide my approach to these questions. First, race is absolutely central to the history of European immigration and settlement…The second premise guiding this work is that race resides not in nature but in politics and culture.” 8-9 ● “Ultimately, I would argue, this treatment of the racial history of European immigration counters any facile comparisons of the African-American experience with the white immigrant experience: it is not just that various white immigrant group’s economic successes came at the expense of nonwhites, but that they owe their now stabilized and broadly recognized whiteness ​itself​ in part to these nonwhite groups.” 9 ● “And so this history of whiteness and its fluidity is very much a history of power and its disposition. But there is a second dimension: race is not just a conception; it is also a perception…The American eye sees a certain person as black, for instance, who Haitian or Brazilian eyes might see as white. Similarly, an earlier generation of Americans ​saw Celtic, Hebrew, Anglo-Saxon, or Mediterranean physiognomies where today we see only subtly varying shades of a mostly undifferentiated whiteness.” 10

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“My narrative takes three separate tacks on the problem, each illuminating one particular dimension of race and its workings in American culture: race as an organizer of power whose vicissitudes track power relationships through time; race as a mode of perception contingent upon the circumstances of the moment; and race as the product of specific struggles for power at specific cultural sites.” 11 ● “The contending forces that have fashioned and refashioned whiteness in the United States across time, I argue, are capitalism (with its insatiable appetite for cheap labor) and republicanism (with its imperative of responsible citizenship).

Citizenship was a racially inscribed concept at the outset of the new nation: by an act of Congress, only “free white” immigrants could be naturalized.” 13 ● “The period from the 1920s to the 1960s saw a dramatic decline in the perceived differences among these white Others.

Immigration restriction, along with internal black migrations, altered the nation’s racial alchemy and redrew the dominant racial configuration along the strict, binary line of white and black, creating Caucasians where before had been so many Celts, Hebrews, Teutons, Mediterraneans, and Slavs.” 14 ● (It is worth recalling, in this connection, that the “wild Irish” and the violent colonization of Ireland had provided the template for English understanding of North American savages and the course of North American colonization in the first place.” 38 ● “The limitation of naturalized citizenship to “free white persons” profoundly shaped Asian-American history, for instance. It was this law, still in effect in the 1870s and 1880s, that denied Chinese immigrants the political might with which to challenge the rising tides of exclusionism or to protect themselves against the violent white mobs…It was this law, still in effect in 1942, that left Japanese immigrants so vulnerable to the wartime hysteria that would become a federal policy of internment.” 39 ● “What is too easily missed from our vantage point, however, is the staggering ​in​clusivity of the 1790 naturalization law. IT was this law’s unquestioned use of the word “white” that allowed for the massive European migrants of the nineteenth century, beginning with the Famine Migration from Ireland, and ultimately including the ‘48ers from Germany, the Italians, Greeks, Poles, Rutheians, Slovenians, Magyars, Ukrainians, Lithuanians—none of whom the framers had even envisioned swelling the polity of the new nation when they crafted its rules for naturalization.” 40 ● “The main currents in this period (c. 1840s-1920s) included, first, a spectacular rate of industrialization in the United States, whose voracious appetite for cheap labor—combined with political and economic dislocations across industrializing Europe—brought unprecedented numbers of migrants to New World shores; second, a growing nativist perception of these laborers themselves as a political threat to the smooth functioning of the republic; and third, consequently, a fracturing of monolithic whiteness by the popular concerns over the newcomers’ “fitness for self-government.” 41 ● “First, nativism was a response to the political crisis created by the 1790 naturalization law—the over-inclusivity of the category “white persons.” Hence, second, the history of American nativisim from the 1840s to the 1920s is largely the history of a fundamental revision of whiteness itself.” 68 ● “Rather, the racialism expressed in simian caricatures, naturalistic novels, and acts of Congress are more fruitfully examined within the broader pattern of race-bound notions of “fitness for self-government” that had characterized American political cultural since the framers first plumbed the “utopian depths” of experimentation with republican government.” 68 ● “Several circumstances conspired in the early and mid-twentieth century to heighten the premium on race as ​color and to erode the once-salient “differences” among the white races. Not least, the triumph of the eugenics movement in making the Johnson formula into law quickly reduced the threat posed by inferior white races to the body politic, and so decreased the political and social stakes that had kept such distinctions alive. With this dramatic decrease in the flow of new arrivals, moreover, the overall center of gravity of these immigrant populations shifted toward an American-born generation for whom the racial oppressions of the Old World—if significant grist for the plaintive songs and heroic stories of a group’s subculture—were far less significant than American white privilege where immediate racial experience was concerned.” 95 ● “The massive migrations of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North and West between the 1910s and the 1940s, too, produced an entirely new racial alchemy in those sections. Mid-century civil rights agitation on the part of African-Americans—and particularly the protest against segregation in the military and discrimination in the defense industries around World War II—nationalized Jim Crow as ​the ​racial issue of American political discourse.” 95 ● “The notion that Irishness, like other “ethnic” whitenesses, was a cultural trait rather than a visual racial cue became deeply embedded in the nation’s political culture between the 1920s and the 1960s.” 96 ● “The chapters of part two explore the fluidity of race by focusing upon a rather narrow slice of time, 1877, and upon a single social group, Jews. The conflicting racial discourses in 1877 indicate the political character of race: civil strife over Negro rights in the South, anti-Chinese agitation and Indian Wars in the West, labor agitation and violence in the Midwest and East, reports of war in the Caucasus—each arena generated its own racial lexicon, invoked its own patterns of racial difference, introduced its own racially inscribed dramatis personae.” 137 Sources: ​eugenics reports, newspapers, nativist literature

38 Connections: Oropeza, ​Raza Si, Gutierrez, ​Walls, Chafe, ​Civilities and Civil Rights, D’Emilio, ​Last Prophet​, Goodman, ​Land, Lemann, ​Promised, Takaki, ​Double, Dower, ​War Without Mercy, Litwack, ​Been​, Avila, ​Popular, ​Findlay, ​Magic​, Payne, ​I’ve​, Foley, The White Scourge​, Sanchez, ​Becoming,​ Daniels, G ​ uarding Neil Foley, ​The White Scourge:Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture Argument: ​“I suggest that the scourge of the South and the nation was not cotton or poor whites but whiteness itself—whiteness not simply as the pinnacle of ethnoracial status but as the complex social and economic matrix wherein racial power and privilege were shared, not always equally, by those who were able to construct identities as Anglo-Saxons, Nordics, Caucasians, or simply whites.

Poor whites, always low-ranking members of the whiteness club, were banished in the early twentieth century on the grounds that they were culturally and biologically inferior. The “wages of whiteness” conferred privilege on those who were able to claim whiteness, as historian David Roediger has ably shown, but they also invoke the biblical injunction that the “wages of sin” is death—death to the notion of racial, and therefore social and economic, equality.” 7 ● “The cotton culture of central Texas represents a special case for the study of class formation and white racial ideology precisely because it brings together two sets of race and class relations—blacks and whites in the South, and Mexicans and Anglos in the Southwest.” 4 ● “White Texans has a long history of invoking the color line in their social, economic, and political interactions with African Americans, but they had little experience in plantation society with what one contemporary sociologist called partly colored races.” Were partly colored Mexicans, in other words, white or nonwhite? As a racially mixed group, Mexicans, like Indians and Asians, lived in a black-and-white nation that regarded them as neither as black nor as white. Although small numbers of Mexicans—usually light-skinned, middle-class Mexican Americans—claimed to be Spanish and therefore white, the overwhelming majority of Texas whites regarded Mexicans as a “mongrelized” race of Indian, African, and Spanish ancestry.

In Texas, unlike other parts of the South, whiteness meant not only not black but also not Mexican.” 5 ● “While immigrant Jews, Slavs, Italians, and Irish were “becoming white” in the urban areas of the East, poor whites in Texas and elsewhere in the South were heading in the opposite direction—losing whiteness and the status and privileges that whiteness bestowed. Poor whites in the cotton South came not only to be seen as a social problem but also to be located in the racial hierarchy as the “trash of whiteness.” 6 ● “Successful whites—cotton growers, merchants, bankers, and those whom eugenicists often called Nordic whites—began to racialize poor whites as the “scrubs and runts” of white civilization, both as an excuse to displace them and as a justification for the impoverished condition of those who remained.” 6 ● “The emergence of a rural class of “white trash” made white conscious of themselves as a racial group and fearful that if they fell to the bottom, they would lose the racial privileges that came with being accepted for what they were ​not​—black, Mexican, or foreign born.” 7 ● “The Irish, for example, remained outside the circle of whiteness until they learned the meaning of whiteness and adopted its racial ideology. Texas Germans who belonged to the Republican Party did not share the racial animosity of other whites toward Mexicans and blacks and were frequently suspected of being traitors to their race.” 8 ● “Since not all European groups became white at the same time or came to enjoy the “property right” in whiteness equally, the fissuring of whiteness in the region into Nordic white businessmen farmers and poor white tenants is a central concern of this study, for “white trash” ruptured the convention that maintained whiteness as an unmarked and normative racial identity.” 8 ● “Tenant farmers occupied a higher class position on the agricultural ladder than did sharecroppers, mainly because they owned their own plows, work animals, and tools…As true renters, they owned the crop and therefore were legally entitled to sell it themselves.” 10 ● “As one might expect, therefore, the majority of share tenants in central Texas were white, whereas most Mexicans and blacks, who often owned little or no capital, were sharecroppers or migrant workers.” 10 ● “this study assumes that whites are raced, men are gendered, and women are marked by class.” 11 ● “The interests of men and women were not necessarily identical in a society that subordinated women to men in the family and denied women any power in politics….For men and women of different races the “genderic” experience of class position is even more profound: A world of difference existed between the experience, for example, of an African American wife of a sharecropper and that of a white male sharecropper. Any race and class analysis of farming culture must therefore account for the labor of women (and children), because farming, by definition, was a collective endeavor that required their labor in the fields and in the household. Single men imply did not operate farms, and certainly the work provided by the hands of women and children was a prime consideration for owners in renting to share tenants or sharecroppers.” 12 ● “The image of men plowing the fields behind their mules obscures the fact that men could not be tenants and sharecroppers in the first place were it not for the labor power of their wives and children.” 12 ● “In the first chapter I explain how the Texas Revolution and the War with Mexico laid the foundation for racializing Mexicans as nonwhites.” 13

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“In chapter 2 I argue that immigration of Mexicans into Texas after 1910 constituted a “second color menace” in the western South and sundered the racial dyad of white and black. In the South the color line separated monolithic whiteness from debased blackness; in central Texas, however, Mexicans walked the color line.” 13 ● “The intersection of race and technology on large-scale cotton ranches is the subject of chapter 5. The growth of cotton ranches accompanied, and in many ways abetted, changes in the racial geography of the workforce. Large business farms like the Taft Ranch demonstrated the feasibility and efficiency of producing cotton profitably through mechanization and the “scientific management” of its Mexican, black, and white workers.” 14 ● “Chapter 6 is an analysis of the ways in which the ideology of yeoman manhood served as the linchpin of gendered whiteness. Mexican, black, and white farm women shared overlapping identities as women, mothers, wives, and daughters as well as owners, tenants, sharecroppers, and wage workers. Women of different classes and races contested gendered notions of farm life by transgressing the boundary between men’s work and women’s work and attacking the agrarian, patriarchal ideology that praised the role of the farmer’s helpmate while ignoring her needs entirely.” 14 ● “In the last two chapters I consider the impact of the New Deal programs on the racialization of the rural workforce and the efforts of agricultural workers—Mexicans, blacks, and whites—to organize against the worst abuses of the new order.” 15 ● “The story thus ends with the massive disruptions to the farm order of the South and Southwest caused by New Deal agricultural programs in the 1930s. At the national political level, the interstate migration of displaced white—“Okies” and “Arkies”—brought to the nation’s attention the growing social, political, and economic problems associated with the rapid development of agribusiness farming in the Southwest and West and its growing reliance on immigrant Mexican labor—a discovery that reified the racial boundaries of farmwork around “off-white” Okies and Mexicans.” 15 ● “The white scourge was thus not simply an allusion to the immiseration of thousands of white tenants on cotton farms in Texas but also to the menace of poor whites—the trash of whiteness—to what the contemporary eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard called “white and world supremacy.” 204 ● “The Great Depression undermined the eugenicist notion that Nordic whites were inherently more successful than poor whites and nonwhites because it affected the biologically fit as well as the unfit. Yet those who suffered least in the rural areas of the South were in fact those who best fit the eugenic description of Nordic whites—the successful owners of cotton farms, large and small, who were able to take advantage of government programs to purchase more land and tractors as they rid themselves of superfluous tenant farmers. In their places they hired poor white, Mexican, and black sharecroppers whom they could “scientifically manage” in a fashion not unlike the way in which eugenicists hoped to manage the “germ plasm” of the white race.” 204 ● “Wartime industry created a labor scarcity in agriculture that formalized the bilateral agreement between the United States and Mexico to provide Mexican “guest workers” in the United States—the Bracero Program.” 205 ● “Despite their objections to the program, Texas growers formally asked for braceros in 1943. However, the Mexican government refused to allow braceros to work in Texas until the state guaranteed their fair treatment and an end to de facto segregation and over discrimination against all Mexicans…Texas cotton growers nevertheless desired braceros to keep wages low and the labor supply abundant. In an effort to persuade the Mexican government that Texas no longer regardd Mexicans as targets for racial discrimination…the state legislature in 1943 to pass the so-called Caucasian Race Resolution.” 206 ● “Not only did growers prefer Mexican barceros in order to avoid paying wages at domestic levels, they also used braceros as a reserve labor supply to undercut attempts at farm unionization, especially by the NFLU and the NAWU.” 207 ● Mexicans and blacks tried to marry each other to claim whiteness for their children and better schools.

Sources:​ state papers, journals, theory Connections: Oropeza, ​Raza Si, Gutierrez, ​Walls, Chafe, ​Civilities and Civil Rights, D’Emilio, ​Last Prophet​, Goodman, ​Land, Lemann, ​Promised, Takaki, ​Double, Dower, ​War Without Mercy, Litwack, ​Been​, Avila, ​Popular, ​Findlay, ​Magic​, Payne, ​I’ve​, Sanchez, ​Becoming, ​Jacobson, ​Whiteness​, Daniels, ​Guarding Seymour Martin Lipset & Gary Marks, ​It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States ​(2000) Argument: “It is the purpose of this book to examine the validity of the main lines of explanation that have been put forward in these literatures. In doing so, we hope to provide not only a political sociology of socialism’s failure in the United States, but larger insights into American society and polity. Our project has been guided from the beginning by the conviction that however politicized the intellectual terrain, we could offer an explanation as plausible to a person whose sympathies lie on the right of the political spectrum as to one whose sympathies lie on the left.” 10 ● “Our goal is the explore the explanatory power of comparison—within the United States across (and within) different national contexts, and over time—for a classic question of American historiography.” 10 ● “For radicals, “American exceptionalism” meant a specific question: Why did the United States, alone among industrial societies, lack a significant socialist movement or labor party.” 15 ● “The strong egalitarian commitment of the Workingmen’s parties did not lead them to advocate socialism, collective ownership, or equality of result. Rather, they wished to open up opportunity for all and to reduce the advantages of those

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born to privilege. In this sense, their leaders were premature social Darwinists, not Marxists. The parties secured sizable votes in state and municipal elections, as Marx was glad to note.” 20 “One source of the movement’s failure was “the taking up of some of its most popular demands by one of the old parties.”

The Jacksonian Democrats responded to the electoral successes of this third-party movement by showing “greater concern than ever before for the various reform provisions of the Workingmen’s program.” 20 “Like subsequent generations of Progressives and liberals, the Workingmen’s parties protested the growth of private and public monopolies and limits on competition. They did not try to curtail free enterprises or inequality of income; instead they sought meritocracy within capitalism.” 21 “Racial heterogeneity and large-scale immigration were two obvious related differences between the United States and Europe. The former was generally ignored as a source of socialist weakness by socialist writers; the latter received much more attention. However, Marx and Engles pointed to the role of ethnic diversity in undermining class consciousness by giving native-born white workers a privileged position, thus enabling the bourgeoisie to play workers of different racial and ethnic backgrounds against one another.” 29 “The American ideology, stemming from the Revolution, can be subsumed in five words: antistatism, laissez-faire, individualism, populism, and egalitarianism.” 30 “While Tocqueville emphasized the role of non-state supported denominations in fostering politically relevant voluntary associations, Marx and Engels stressed how Protestant sectarianism underpinned competitive individualism and produced moralistic and political sectarianism in America. These, in turn, impeded collectivist politics.” 34 “Lenin…emphasized that the weakness of socialism in America stemmed from “the absence of any at all big, nation-wide democratic tasks facing the proletariat.” American socialism was weak precisely which confront the proletariat with purely socialist tasks.” 35 “Engels also noted other ways that America’s political system contributed to the weakness of organized radicalism. In 1893, in listing factors preventing the growth of a workers’ third-party alternative, he emphasized “the Constitution…which causes every vote for any candidate not put up by one of the two governing parties to appear to be ​lost​. And the American…wants to influence his state; he does not want to throw his vote away.” He stressed the difficulty of creating a ​third party, where there was no second ballot (runoff), and concluded, during the period of the greatest strength of the Populists in the 1890s, that “there is no place yet in America for a third party,” because of the size, complexity, and heterogeneity of the country.” 37 “The Depression Europeanized American politics and American labor organizations. Social class became more important as a source of party support. Conservatives, increasingly concentrated in the Republican party, remained antistatist and laissez-faire, though many became willing to accommodate a somewhat more activist role for the state as envisaged in the Roosevelt New Deal. This accommodation, however, gradually dissolved after World War II, in response to long-term prosperity, which helped to produce a return to classic libertarian values, i.e. conservativism, American-style. The lessening of class tensions which reached their height in the Depression has been reflected in the marked decline in union membership since the mid-1950s and in the declining salience of class position for voting. Even before Ronald Reagan entered the White House, the United States had a lower rate of taxation, a smaller deficit as a proportion of GNP, a less-developed welfare state, and fewer government-owned industries that other western industrialized nations.” 40 “We have argued that basic rules of the political game in the United States—the plurality electoral system, the presidency, the separation of powers, and primaries—sustain a two-party duopoly at the national level. The American political system creates incentives and disincentives for two, and only two, broad, porous, ideologically diffuse national political parties. The efforts of the Socialist party to survive as a third party alongside the two major parties was doomed by institutional arrangements over which it had little or no power. From this standpoint the fate of the Socialist party may be regarded as a particular example of the inability of all minor-party attempts to survive in competition with the major parties.” 82 “No socialist candidate has ever become a vehicle for major protest in the United States. Voters in the country of classical liberalism, antistatism, libertarianism, and loose class structure have not turned to statist or class-conscious parties even when under severe economic stress.” 82 “The effect of federalism for socialism is double-edged. It weakened the state as an instrument of reform and denied to socialists the possibility of organizing against national exploitation. Yet federalism also allowed socialists the possibility of electoral success and executive control in political units much smaller than the country as a whole.” 83 “The gift of suffrage appears to be a more convincing explanation for socialist weakness. Suffrage for white males prior to industrialization helped integrate labor into the mainstream parties along ethnic and religious lines and thereby diminish class as a source of party-political cleavage. The strength of the major parties within organized labor and the relative weakness of the class cleavage narrowed the political space available to the Socialist party in the early years of the twentieth century.”

“In the United States, alone among the English-speaking democracies, the major working-class-oriented party operated in isolation from the mainstream of the union movement. Not only was the Socialist party established autonomously from the American Federation of Labor, but, for the most part, the two organizations were locked into intense mutual hostility. This harmed the party in several ways. It severely weakened the party’s membership and resource base. The Socialist party never

41 became a mass party, but remained a small organization spread thinly across a very large country. Like other socialist parties it lacked powerful or rich supporters, but unlike them it could not draw on mass organization to even the balance.” 123 ● “The party appealed to members more on ideological than on interest grounds, and as a result its membership fluctuated wildly over time.” 123 ● “Ethnic diversity hurt socialists, who appealed to workers along class lines, and helped Democrats and Republicans, who had no inhibitions in making ethnic appeals. The difficulties faced by socialists were aggravated because craft unions in the American Federation of Labor (AFL) were also organized along ethnic lines, encompassing native workers and “old” immigrants from Northern Europe and largely excluding “new” immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, along with Chinese and African-Americans.” 125 ● “Moreover capitalism, which, unlike socialism, does not promise to eliminate poverty, racism, sexism, pollution, or war, appeals only weakling to idealism inherent in the position of young people and intellectuals.” 293 Sources: ​Intellectual theory works Connections: Leuchtenberg, ​FDR, ​Perils​, Kennedy, ​Over, Brinkley, ​End​, Daniels, ​Guarding​, Jacobsen, ​Whiteness​, Gerstle, ​American Crucible​, Foley, ​White Scourge​, Hartz, ​The American Liberal Tradition David M. Potter, ​People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character​ (1954) Argument: ● “Professor Potter’s study really falls into three parts. The first is an elaboration of his perception that all historians implicitly employ the concept of national character as part of their underlying assumption that history can be written, that something more than geography and the accidents of political dominion unify members of a society which is being studied, that a society is something more than an arbitrary conglomerate of persons.” 182, Goer ● “The main section of Professor Potter’s book is an examination of the impact of the idea and fact of American economic abundance on various American institutions; and the key of this section is the reevaluation of F.J. Turners’ epoch-marking Significance of the Frontier in American History​, which as Professor Potter pertinently points out, could have, with perfect validity, been entitled “the Influence of the Frontier on American Character.” Professor Potter emphasizes that although the description of American characteristics in this classic essay stand the test of time, the conclusions about the disappearance of the frontier do not; and further that the reasons why these conclusions have been falsified is because Turner was, though only tacitly, a physiocrat, who thought that the only source of real wealth was the undeveloped fertility of the soil and that consequently, when all the fertile soil was owned or cultivated, expansion would cease. But wealth is created by the interaction of technology on the environment, not by the environment along; the better mousetrap, as well as the two blades of grass, constitutes a psychological frontier.” 184, Goer ● “[Potter] He argues that American political forms are the result, not the cause, of the economic abundance, and that the major reason for the consistent failure to export “Americanism” has been because the attempt has always been to export the political forms without the prosperity or the attitude to production which alone can give them validity.” 184, Goer Sources: ​Behavioral studies books Connections: Cohen, ​Consumer’s​, Leach, ​Land of Desire, ​Hartz, ​The Liberal Tradition​, Kloppenberg, ​“In Retrospect: Louis Hartz’s,” Matusow, ​The Unraveling of America​, Potter, ​People of Plenty​, Davies, ​From Opportunity Louis Hartz, ​The Liberal Tradition in America​ (1955) Argument: The uniqueness of America is that it was born free. It lacked a feudalistic past, which resulted in a lack of social revolution and Marxian movement. ● “The author’s tone is polemical, for his purpose is revisionist. Critical of a scholarship that separates American from European history, he also clobbers “progressive historians” for stressing social conflicts instead of Lockian, and therefore liberal, consensus so pervasive and so continuous as to constitute the “American Way of Life.” 653, Mann ● “By Lockian, the author means that antithesis of feudal and clerical oppressions, the Enlgihtenment: private property, the atomistic society, popular sovereignty, limited government, and natural rights. Unlike Europe, America skipped feudalism and so achieved these values without a revolution against an ​ancien regime​. Therein, Mr. Hartz observes, lies the uniqueness of the New World. Lacking both feudalism and a social revolution, the nation was spared a restoration. It was also spared a major Marxian movement, whose categories, deriving from feudalism and the struggles to obliterate and restore it, are native to the Old World but alien to the New.” 653, Mann ● “Until 1840, the wealthy middle class in America, whether Federalist or Whig, took the American democrat for the mob.

Jeffersonians and Jacksonians, in their turn, regarded the Whigs and the Federalists as aristocrats…The Federalists and Whigs were identical to the liberal European bourgeoisie, lacking, however, a landed aristocracy to bring out their liberalism.

As for the American democrat, he was a small capitalist or an incipient Whig—a discovery that the Whigs made in the Log Cabin Campaign of 1840 and exploited until the crash of 1929.” 654, Mann ● “The America described by Louis Hartz is the America discovered by Europeans in America and by Americans in Europe.”

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“Dr. Hartz…sticks to the older and more universal meaning, of European origin: his liberal—the “American democrat”—is one who believes in individual liberty, equality, and capitalism and who regards the human marketplace, where a person succeeds or fails by his or her own efforts and ability, as the proper testing ground of achievement.” Ix ● Hartz “argues persuasively that the liberal tradition in America was the natural consequence of a phenomenon noted by Tocqueville: “The great advantage of the Americans is, that they have arrived at a state of democracy without having to endure a democratic revolution; and they are born equal, instead of becoming so.” X ● “Even the New Deal, in the Hartz analysis, was conceived not as a revolutionary doctrine or from any “systematic social thought” but out of “a submerged and absolute liberal faith.” It was devised, presented, and seen by most Americans as “experimentation” and “problem solving” permissible within that faith. Therefore Herbert Hoover, though “hurling liberal abstractions” in dissent, was ineffective as a critic of a pragmatic program, many of whose ideas “liberal Republicans” later were able to adopt. Yet in a time of economic and social crisis the New Deal was sufficiently “radical” in practice to satisfy the need for action and to prevent socialism from making political headway against ingrained American liberalism.” xi ● ““The basic ethical problem of liberal society,” Dr. Hartz argues, is “not the danger of the majority which has been its conscious fear, but the danger of unanimity, which has slumbered unconsciously behind it.” This near-unanimity of fundamental belief means that when Americans face “military and ideological pressure from without”—as they have in contemporary times—the national response to a threatening heresy is an instinctive closing of ranks that “transform eccentricity into sin” and dissent into danger of subversion and betrayal.” Xi ● “Hence, most prominently, the “red scares” of the 1920s and 1950s, during which, Dr. Hartz tartly observes, “the American liberal community contained far fewer radicals than any other Western society, but the hysteria against them was much vaster than anywhere else.”” Xi ● “The analysis which this book contains is based on…that America was settled by men who fled from the feudal and clerical oppressions of the Old World. If there is anything in this view, as old as the national folklore itself, then the outstanding thing about the American community in Western history ought to be the non-existence of those oppressions, or since the reaction against them was in the broadest sense liberal, that the American community is a liberal community.” 3 ● “It is not accidental that America which has uniquely lacked a feudal tradition has uniquely lacked also a socialist tradition.

The hidden origin of socialist thought everywhere in the West is to be found in the feudal ethos.” 6 ● “law has flourished on the corpse of philosophy in America, for the settlement of the ultimate moral question is the end of speculation upon it. Pragmatism, interestingly enough America’s great contribution to the philosophic tradition, does not alter this, since it feeds itself on the Lockian settlement.” 10 ● “There has never been a “liberal movement” or a real “liberal party” in America: we have only had the American Way of Life, a nationalist articulation of Locke which usually does not know that Locke himself is involved; and we did not even get that until after the Civil War when the Whigs of the nation, deserting the Hamiltonian tradition, saw the capital that could be made out of it…Ironically, “liberalism” is a stranger in the land of its greatest realization and fulfillment.” 11 ● “When a liberal community facees military and ideological pressure from without it transforms eccentricity into sin, and the irritating figure of the bourgeois gossip flowers into the frightening figure of an A. Mitchell Palmer or a Senator McCarthy.” ● “What we learn from the concept of a liberal society, lacking feudalism and therefore socialism and governed by an irrational Lockianism, is that the domestic struggles of such a society have all be projected with the setting of Western liberal alignments. And here there begin to emerge, not a set of negative European correlations, but a set of very positive ones which have been almost completely neglected. We can thus say of the right in America that it exemplifies the tradition of big propertied liberalism in Europe, a tradition familiar enough…” 15 Sources:​ theory Connections: ​Leuchtenberg, ​FDR, ​Perils​, Kennedy, ​Over, Brinkley, ​End​, Kloppenberg, “In Retrospect: Louis Hartz,” Lipset & Marks, ​It Didn’t Happen Here James T. Kloppenberg, “In Retrospect: Louis Hartz’s ​The Liberal Tradition in America​” ​Reviews in American History​ 29 (2001) Argument: “I advance two arguments. First, despite itse importance as a historical document, ​The Liberal Tradition in America provides an inadequate account because Hartz focused exclusively on issues of economics and psychology and missed the constitutive roles played by democracy, religion, race, ethnicity, and gender in American History. He therefore misunderstood…the complicated and changing dynamics of the democratic struggle that has driven American social and political conflict since the seventeenth century…Second, acknowledging the inaccuracies of ​LTA is important for us, because the widespread acceptance of its argument has had consequences unfortunate for the study of American political thought and poisonous for political debate. The time has come to refocus our attention away from the Cold War era controversies over liberalism and socialism, and away form more recent controversies over liberalism and republicanism, and turn our attention toward democracy.” 460 ● “The stubborn persistence of belief in an American liberal tradition of the sort Hartz described obscures both our understanding of our nation’s past and our ability to envision strategies toward a more democratic future.” 465

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“In order to grasp this all-encompassing liberal tradition, Hartz argued, we must compare America with Europe. Only then can we understand not only the absence of socialism and conservatism but the stultifying presence and “moral unanimity” imposed by “this fixed, dogmatic liberalism of a liberal way of life.” 461 “Whereas Tocqueville did indeed stress the absence of feudalism in America, he also emphasized the importance of religion, the legacy of English law and liberty, the fact of slavery, the uniquely elevated status of women, the law and liberty, the fact of slavery, the uniquely elevated status of women, the distinctive pattern of decentralized settlement in North America, a set of sturdy political institutions and wise founding documents, and other socio-cultural, geographical, and demographic factors that together constitute the history of the United States.” 462 “Hartz skirted the issue of evidence and reiterated his earlier proclamation of American uniqueness: “The United States is distinctive as against Europe, and its distinctiveness derives from the fact that the ​Mayflower left behind in Europe the experiences of class, revolution, ad collectivism out of which the European socialist movement arose…then explains that “ Hartz was all along basically using history for the sake of eliciting answers to some theoretical queries in connections with the nature of a free society; and those fundamental issues remain with us today.” 463 “Before examining the particular arguments of ​LTA​, I want to note the almost complete lack of absence from Hartz’s analysis of four issues that now seem to American historians essential to understanding our nation’s past: race, ethnicity, gender, and religion.” 463 “Hartz contended that because religion in eighteenth-century America generated neither iconoclasm nor anticlericalism, it was of only minor significance. Colonial religious diversity “meant that the revolution would be led in part by fierce Dissenting ministers.” In Europe, “where reactionary church establishments had made the Christian concept of sin and salvation into an explicit pillar of the status quo, liberals were forced to develop a political religion—as Rousseau saw it—if only in answer to it.” But American liberals, “instead of being forced to pull the Christian heaven down to earth, were glad to let it remain where it was. They did not need to make a religion out of the revolution because religion was already revolutionary” (40-41)” 464 “First, because the standard continental European—or, more precisely, French and Italian—division between an anticlerical republican left and an entrenched Church hierarchy generated cultural and political warfare that American religious divisions did not, Hartz concluded that religion in America could safely be fitted within the liberal consensus. Second, Hartz did not realize how corrosive to his argument was his concession that American “religion was already revolutionary,” perhaps because, like many secular Jewish intellectuals in the middle of the twentieth century, he either failed to see or refused to acknowledge the pivotal role of Christianity in shaping American public life.” 464 “In America religious identity (like racial, ethnic, and gender identity) has…been a central, constitutive component of American culture from the seventeenth century to the present. Almost all Americans’ “structures of meaning,” to use a phrase of David Hall’s, have derived from an unsteady blend of religious and secular, elite and popular, male and female, white and nonwhite cultures. For that reason religion does not shrink to insignificance but exerts a powerful force shaping individual decisions, interpretations of experience, and social interactions. The diversity of Americans’ religious commitments prevented the emergence of a state church, as Hartz noted, but the depth and persistence of those commitments likewise undermined the simple, straightforward Lockean attachment to self-interested property-seeking that Hartz defined as the essence of America.” 646 “As I examine the principal arguments Hartz advanced, I will briefly compare his characterizations of (1) the American Revolution, (2) antebellum American politics, (3) the progressive era, (4) the New Deal, and (5) the culture o the post-World War II United States with the findings of more recent historical scholarship.” 465 “The significance of the American Revolution lay not so much in the founders’ liberalism, which was complicated by its mixture with republican and religious values, as in their commitment to nourishing the seeds of a democratic culture. They constructed or altered institutions that made possible continuous mediation, the endless production of compromise, a system deliberately calculated to satisfy some of the aspirations of all citizens and all of the aspirations of none.” 466 “It is ture that such comfort with compromise did indeed distinguish the American founders from later Jacobins and Blosheviks. But it is crucial to see that they emphatically did not agree to codify atomistic individualism, because that idea appealed to practically no one—neither Federalists nor Anti-federalists...[Adams] He and his contemporaries were not trying to make a world safe for bankers—whose work Adams described acidly in a letter to Jefferson as “an infinity of successive felonious larcenies”—but were seeking instead to create a liberal republic safe for worldly ascetics, a “Christian Sparta” in the phrase of Samuel Adams, where even those who failed to reach that lofty ethical ideal might not only survive but thrive.”

“Hartz argued that even though laissez faire did not exist in early America, the activity of state governments served only to facilitate economic activity. The same assumption also drove his interpretation of antebellum America in ​LTA​.” 467 “From Hartz’s perspective, the quarrels were between Whigs and Democrats betrayed “a massive confusion in political thought” that stemmed from both sides’ refusal to concede their shared commitment to liberal capitalism. Whereas Whigs really should have become Tories, and Jacksonians really should have been socialists, instead they all mutated into the “American democrat,” a “pathetic” figure “torn by an inner doubt,” not quite a Hercules but a Hurcules with the brain of a Hamlet.” (117-19).” 467

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“Likewise Hartz, when confronting Whigs who advocated reform in a language of self-discipline and harmony and Jacksonians who spoke in terms of equality and democracy, refused to admit that antebellum Americans saw themselves, each other, and their culture in terms quite different from his. Rather than modifying or abandoning his theory, Hartz “blamed the world” of American history.” 467 ● “Careful analysis of nineteenth-century America shows instead that within as well as between North and South, Americans differed on many fundamental issues. Only the culture and institutions of democracy…provided ways to mediate those deep disagreements.” 468 ● “Hartz understood progressivism, as did many of his contemporaries, including Richard Hoftstadter, as Woodrow Wilson’s futile harkening back to a lost world of small towns and small businesses, an exercise in nostalgia with no political or economic consequences.” 468 ● “Diverse and incompatible as their strategies were, progressives nevertheless constructed from the materials they inherited a new order in governance, law, business, social organization, and culture. Louis Brandies lost his battle against bigness, yet the government regulation of private enterprise became a permanent fact of life. The NAACP failed to enact all of its program, yet the civil rights movement, launched as ​LTA appeared, employed not only rights-talk but images of deliverance and salvation from Exodus and Mathew rather than Hartz’s language of the main chance. The crusade for women’s rights reached only a limited fulfillment in the franchise, yet feminists have invoked a variety of ideals concerning moral autonomy, civic responsibility, and more egalitarian households equally incompatible with Hartz’s framework. Finally, the social democrats among American progressives failed to achieve their goals of a more egalitarian structure for work or wages, yet, from the platforms of the Populist Party in 1892 and the Progressive Party in 1912 through the agendas of the New Deal and the Fair Deal, such ambitious plans were at the heart, rather than on the margins, of political debate.” 469 ● “Given his Eurocentric framework, Hartz understandably placed the piecemeal, pragmatic New Deal, limited as it was by Roosevelt’s ability to forge a consensus from the fractured pieces on his party’s coalition, comfortably within the liberal tradition.” 470 ● “ FDR’s 1944 State of the Union Address called for a “second bill of rights” assuring all Americans access to education, a job with a living wage, adequate housing, medical care, and insurance against old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.

FDR campaigned—and was reelected—on just such a platform in 1944. Such proposals, which formed the core of the G.I Bill, were also central to Truman’s Fair Deal. This far-reaching legislative program, caught in the cross-fire between an incipient Cold War aversion to government activity and southern Democrats’ animosity toward equal treatment of African Americans, was defeated so decisively in Congress that historians refuse to believe either FDR or Truman could have been serious about them…Hartz’s judgment: since the New Deal did not try to bring socialism to America, its reformism must have been tepid at best.” 470 ● “Hartz persuaded political theorists that there is no reason to study American political thought. Because America had no social conflict, he argued, Americans contributed “relatively little political thought at all.” 472 Sources:​ Hartz, ​LTA Connections: ​Leuchtenberg, ​FDR, ​Perils​, Kennedy, ​Over, Brinkley, ​End​, Hartz, ​Liberal Tradition, Marks, ​It Didn’t Happen Here Hartz, ​The Liberal Tradition​, Matusow, ​The Unraveling of America,​ Potter, ​People of Plenty​, Davies, F ​ rom Opportunity

Rogers M. Smith, “Beyond Tocquevile, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America” ​The American Political Science Review​ Vol 87. No. 3 (Sep., 1993) Argument: “Tocqueville’s thesis—that America has been most shaped by the unusually free and egalitarian ideas and material conditions that prevailed at its founding—captures important truths. Nonetheless, the purpose of this essay is to challenge that thesis by showing that its adherents fail to give due weight to inegalitarian ideologies and conditions that have shaped the participants and the substance of American politics just as deeply. For over 80% of U.S., history, its laws declared most of the world’s population to be ineligible for full American citizenship solely because of their race, original nationality, or gender. For at least two-thirds of American history, the majority of the domestic adult population was also ineleigble for full citizenship for the same reasons.” 549 ● “The Tocquevillian story is thus deceptive because it is too narrow. It is centered on relationships among a minority of Americans (white men, largely of northern European ancestry) analyzed via reference to categories derived from the hierarchy of political and economic statuses men have held in Europe: monarchs and aristocrats, commercial burghers, farmers, industrial and rural laborers, and indigents.” 549 ● There was no heredity monarchy or aristocracy in America but there were ascriptive systems. “Men were thought naturally suited to rule over women, within both the family and polity. White northern Europeans were thought superior culturally—and probably biologically—to black Africans, bronze Native Americans, and indeed all other races and civilizations. Many British Americans also treated religion as an inherited condition and regarded Protestants as created by God to be morally and politically, as well as theologically, superior to Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and others.” 549

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“Over time, American intellectual and political elites elaborated distinctive justifications for these ascriptive systems, including inegalitarian scriptural readings, the scientific racism of the “American school” of ethnology, racial and sexual Darwinism, and the romantic cult of Anglo-Saxonism in American historiography.” 549 ● “Thus to approach a truer picture of America’s political culture and its characteristic conflicts, we must consider more than the familiar categories of (absent) feudalism and socialism and (pervasive) bourgeois liberalism and republicanism.” 550 ● “To be sure, America’s ascriptive, unequal statuses and the ideologies by which they have been defended have always been heavily conditioned and constrained by the presence of liberal democratic values and institutions. The reverse, however, is also true. Although liberal democratic ideas and practices have been more potent in America than elsewhere, American politics is best seen as expressing the interaction of multiple political traditions, including ​liberalism​, ​republicanism​, and ascriptive forms of Americanism​, which have collectively comprised American political culture, without any constituting it as a whole.” 550 ● “Ascriptive outlooks have had such a hold in America because they have provided something that neither liberalism nor republicanism has done so well. They have offered creditable intellectual and psychological reasons for many Americans to believe that their social roles and personal characteristics express an identity that has inherent and transcendent worth, thanks to nature, history, and God.” 550 ● “My chief aim here is to persuade readers that many leading accounts of American political culture are inadequate. I will also suggest briefly how analyses with greater descriptive and explanatory power an be achieved by replacing the Tocquevillian thesis with a ​multiple-traditions ​view of America. This argument is relevant to contemporary politics in two ways. First, it raises the possibility that novel intellectual, political, and legal systems reinforcing racial, ethnic, and gender inequalities might be rebuilt in America in years ahead…Second, the political implications of the view that America has never been completely liberal, and that changes have come only through difficult struggles and then have often not been sustained, are very different from the complacency—sometimes despair—engendered by beliefs that liberal democracy has always been hegemonic.” 550 ● “I argue that Tocqueville himself was much more perceptive than his modern “Tocquevillian” followers…Finally, I shall illustrate the merits of a multiple-traditions approach by showing how it offers more insight into the qualified but extensive creation of new systems of ascriptive inequality during the post-Reconstruction and Progressive eras.” 550 ● “The multiple-traditions thesis holds that Americans share a ​common culture but one more complexly and multiply constituted than is usually acknowledged. Most members of all groups have shared and often helped to shape all the ideologies and institutions that have structured American life, including ascriptive ones: A few have done so while resisting all subjugating practices. But members of every group have sometimes embraced “essentialist” ideologies valorizing their own ascriptive traits and denigrating those of others, to bleak effect.” 558 ● “As its heart, the multiple-traditions thesis holds that the definitive feature of American political culture has been not its liberal, republican, or “ascriptive Americanist” elements but, rather, this more complex pattern of apparently inconsistent combinations of the traditions, accompanied by recurring conflicts.” 558 ● “In sum, if we accept that ideologies and institutions of ascriptive hierarchy have shaped America in interaction with its liberal and democratic features, we can make more sense of a wide range of inegalitarian policies newly contrived after 1870 and perpetuated through much of the twentieth century.” 562 Sources: ​Tocqueville, Hartz, Myrdal, and Theory Connections: ​Hartz, ​The Liberal Tradition​, Kloppenberg, ​“In Retrospect: Louis Hartz’s,” Matusow, ​The Unraveling of America​, Potter, ​People of Plenty​, Davies, ​From Opportunity

Gareth Davies, ​From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism​ (1996) Argument: ​“In narrow terms, this book seeks to illuminate the unique transformation in liberal perspectives on entitlement and dependency that occurred during the Great Society era. It also hopes to expose the dynamics of a broader ideological and tactical shift that had profound political consequences.” 6 ● “Considering the great social reform eras of the twentieth century more generally, it soon becomes clear that the most successful reform-minded politicians have been those who responded to changing social and economic conditions by adapting rather than replacing the language of individualism. The language of opportunity has remained central to American discourse about economic security, and in this context Moynihan’s proposal was entirely unexceptional. Like Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt, he understood that a liberal political agenda could not be advanced unless it was seen to respect the nation’s dominant social philosophy.” 2 ● “The principal reason why traditional and authentically liberal notions of self-help and personal independence sounded novel or conservative in the 1980s and 1990s is that these ideals largely disappeared from liberal discourse during the late 1960s

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and 1970s. In their place came radical notions of income by right, and American liberalism remains associated in the public mind with an entitlements doctrine that in reality lies outside its broader political tradition.” 3 “Although the history of twentieth-century reform does indeed include the extension of new entitlements to deprived or otherwise deserving populations, the notion of an unconditional right to income clearly exceeds the bounds of that tradition.

Accordingly, when Democrats today employ the language of obligation, it is wrong to depict them as representatives of a new breed, freed from the permissive doctrines of New Deal—Great Society liberalism.” 3 In 1964, when President Johnson unveiled his War on Poverty, liberal legislators enthusiastically endorsed its individualistic approach. For reasons both of convenience and conviction, the Economic Opportunity Act characterized welfare as part of the poverty problem rather than as a mechanism for eliminating want. Eight years later…According to the new orthodoxy, which the NWRO [National Welfare Rights Organization] proposal embodied, the federal government had an immediate obligation to raise all poor Americans above the poverty level by guaranteeing them an income, no questions asked. By the time of McGovern’s ill-fated quest for the presidency, the dominant strain of American liberalism had come to share this view, and to denigrate those who made demands on the poor of the sort that had won universal approval in 1964.” 3 “This book asks how American liberals came to repudiate a venerable and politically valuable individualist tradition, in favor of radically “un-American” definitions of income entitlement.” 3 “In an environment of acute social tension and political dislocation, it is argued, previously unattractive income redistribution schemes acquired new appeal. Characteristic of much of this scholarship is the belief that the “income strategy,” for all its seeming novelty, represented a logical outgrowth of the earlier initiative. Antipoverty officials, according to this view, were drawn to the income strategy from an early stage, motivated by the manifest insufficiency of the Economic Opportunity Act as a response to structural poverty.” 4 “An important aspect of the failure of the War on Poverty to achieve its goals was the development of a supposed “welfare crisis.” Three elements of this widely identified but variously defined crisis were the rapid growth of the unpopular Aid to Families with Dependent Children program (AFDC), continued inequality of benefits between states, and the growing incidence of single parenthood in the ghetto. Radicals, liberals, and conservatives alike were drawn to the idea of a radical overhaul of the welfare system, and each could find some merit in guaranteed income strategy.” 4 “The problem with existing analyses of the guaranteed income movement…They explain why activists, bureaucrats, social workers, and academics were drawn to the income strategy; in each case, conviction was matched by political interest…But they ​fail to explain why American liberalism was drawn to such radically unpopular versions of that strategy as the Adequate Income Act of 1972. It is important to distinguish the income strategy of Richard Nixon—motivated by efficiency, concern for the working poor, and hostility to New Deal-Great Society bureaucracies—from that of George McGovern—fueled by extravagant definitions of income by right.” 5 “On the face of it, their advocacy revealed a suicidal disregard for popular sensibilities: Polled in 1969, even the poor had expressed their opposition to the guaranteed income concept.” 6 “In retrospect, it is clear that the decline of the New Deal coalition after the mid-1960s facilitated the rise of the right to political dominance. At the time, however, many liberals found reason for hope in a phenomenon that came to be labeled the New Politics. Committed to the politics of protest, and fundamentally hostile to traditional liberalism, New Politics radicals seized control of the Democratic Party nominating process during the early 1970s...“the rise of an alternative coalition of Democratic elites, different in social background, political experience, and policy preference from the coalition which had previously dominated the national Democratic elites.””6 “This book presents is [income by right] as a largely unsuccessful challenge to a social welfare system that has remained wedded to the connection between economic security and employment” 7 “The principal ambition of the War on Poverty was to ensure that Mead’s “government clients” ceased to be dependent on federal largesse. If many methods and ambitions of the Economic Opportunity Act were imprecise and unrealistic, it yet remains that their intention was directly opposite to that which Mead has adduced. And if, as he maintains, these programs were largely noncoercive in nature, than it is also true that their intended benefits were reserved for those prepared to seize opportunities.” 7 “In tracing the evolution of liberal perspectives on poverty and dependency during the Great Society era, this book exposes itself to a number of serious potential objections, not least concerning the nature, extent, and practical relevance of American individualism. It departs from most recent works on the United States’ welfare state in viewing popular individualism as a more consistently powerful determinant of social policy than race, gender, or dynamics internal to an autonomous state.” 7 “Both government policies and popular attitudes have upheld the conviction that employment should be a prerequisite for economic security in most cases; only infrequently has the abandonment of this link been seriously proposed. The tenacity of the national work ethic is evidenced by American perspectives on public policy toward the jobless. On the one hand, the unemployment compensation system remains unusually limited, presumably reflecting disquiet at the notion of supporting inactive, able-bodied adults. But on the other hand, opinion poll data reveal a high level of public support for the alternative principle that the federal government should be the employer of last resort.” 9

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“How did entitlement liberals come to abandon the link between income and work, at a time when the public’s devotion to the link was so obvious? This book explains the remarkable process by which disaffected Great Society liberals were propelled along a road that had been almost universally rejected in 1964. The political consequences of this development are apparent to this day.” 9 ● “Nevertheless, the concept of an unconditional entitlement to income was singular in a number of respects. First, it boldly confronted notions of reciprocal responsibility that had been long-accepted and retained widespread support, even among the poor. Second, such proposals as the Adequate Income Act of 1972 rested on the assumption that the causes of poverty were inseparable from its consequences: poverty was caused as well as defined by inadequate income. Such a judgment validated the redistributionist approach that had bee rejected in 1964.” 235 ● “In 1964, liberals had shared the general tendency to equate dignity with self-sufficiency and to define dependency as its destructive opposite: long-term reliance on federal support.” 235 ● “But by 1972, it had become more common for liberals to define dignity as freedom both from hardship and from the stigma hitherto attached to dependency. In turn, independence, far from connoting self-sufficiency in the conventional sense, meant freedom from want, however achieved.” 235 ● “The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 was founded on two vulnerable premises concerning the practicability of self-help.

First, it tacitly assumed that the deserving poor could be raised to comfortable self-sufficiency were they furnished with appropriate skills and values (self-esteem, motivation, education, vocational skills). The War on Poverty thereby operated on the basis that the U.S. economic system was fundamentally beneficent. Second, the program was ostensible colorblind; it proceeded from the claim that black and white poverty could be treated by the same individualistic methods.” 239 ● “With the War on Poverty now so strongly associated with the black struggle for equality, supports of the Economic Opportunity Act felt inevitably reluctant to demand that the rights of the poor be contingent on their behavior.” 240 ● “Vietnam’s importance to the entitlement revolution is profound, albeit indirect. First, the bitterness and ill will it generated within liberal ranks inevitably impeded cooperation on domestic matters, and not simply because the war diverted funds from Great Society programs. Second, the language and style of protest represented by the growing antiwar movement came to be viewed by some dissenting politicians as embodying a New Politics through which the progressive spirit might yet emerge ascendant from the ashes of 1960s liberalism.” 241 ● “Only in 1970 did radical definitions of income entitlement gain important support among liberals.” 241 Sources:​ speeches, papers, legislation, polls, lobbyist information Connections: ​Hartz, ​The Liberal Tradition​, Kloppenberg, ​“In Retrospect: Louis Hartz’s,” Matusow, ​The Unraveling of America​, Potter, ​People of Plenty​, Smith, “Beyond Tocqueville” Kevin M. Kruse, ​White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism ​(2003) Argument: ​This study, however, seeks to explore not simply the effects of white flight, but the experience. While many have assumed that white flight was little more than a literal movement of the white population, this book argues that it represented a much more important transformation in the political ideology of those involved. Because of their confrontation with the civil rights movement, white southern conservatives were forced to abandon their traditional, populist, and often starkly racist demagoguery and instead craft a new conservatism predicated on a language of rights, freedoms, and individualism. This modern conservatism proved to be both subtler and stronger than the politics that preceded it and helped southern conservatives dominate the Republican Party and, through it, national politics as well. White flight, in the end, was more than a physical relocation. It was a political revolution.” 6 ● “In his book ​White Flight​, historian Kevin Kruse takes a look at Atlanta, Georgia, to make a case for this other form of [non violent segregationist] white resistance. He examines the transformation white Atlantans made from more radical and overt racism into a strategy of rights as taxpayers and homeowners. By “toning down their racist rhetoric and stressing their own rights,” segregationists encompassed larger and larger groups of white willing to go along with, and even advocate for, the perpetuation of segregation.” Metz Precis ● “Kruse points out, however, how difficult this white unification proved to be when it played out along class lines. As urban middle-class whites began to leave the city in large numbers, they sold their homes to black residents, breaking up the white solidarity of many neighborhoods. For working-class whites who could not afford to make the move out, it became clear that “the reality of individuality…would always trump the rhetoric of community.” (81).” Metz Precis ● “As Atlanta became systematically desegregated at schools, public pools, lunch counters, and even golf courses, the more affluent whites retreated into private clubs and schools where they could legally maintain segregation; this was not possible, in contrast, for lower-class whites. By the end of the 1960s, the flight of most all whites into Atlanta suburbs marked “the racists’ retreat,” (234) leaving behind the black community, a handful of white liberals and moderate elites. This group left behind began to run a city government no longer confronted with the resistance of reactionist whites” (242). But, as Kruse points out, this was not “because such white segregationists changed their minds; it was because they changed their addresses” (242).” Metz Precis ● “When Atlanta successfully desegregated its public schools in 1961, even national observers paused to marvel at all the city had accomplished. The city found countless admirers across the country, form the press to the president of the United States,

48 but it was ultimately its own Mayor William Hartsfield who coined the lasting motto. “Atlanta,” he bragged to anyone in earshot, “is the City Too Busy to Hate.” 3 ● “Just a year later, this image came crashing down. Trouble surfaced in an unlikely place, a quiet, middle-class subdivision of brick ranch houses and loblolly pines called Peyton Forest. And the trouble started in an unlikely way, as city construction crews built a pair of roadblocks on Peyton and Harlan Roads. The barriers seemed to have no significance. They were simply wooden beams, which has been painted black and white, bolted to steel I-beams, and sunk into the pavement. But their significance lay at their location. As all Atlantans understood, the roadblocks stood at the precise fault line between black and white sections of the city. Over the previous two decades, black Atlantans had escaped the overcrowded inner city and purchased more and more homes in neighborhoods to the west; during the same period, white Atlantans to the south had grown increasingly alarmed as those areas “went colored.” The roadblocks were meant to keep these two communities apart and at peace, but they had the opposite effect. Indeed, the barricades immediately attracted intense national and even international attention. Civil rights activists surround the racial “buffer zone” with picket lines…” 3 ● “In spite of the movement to insure its permanence, the “Peyton Wall” was short-lived. Local courts quickly ruled against the roadblocks and the mayor, relieved to find a way out of the public relations nightmare, had them immediately removed.” 5 ● “This book explores the causes and course of white flight, with Atlanta serving as its vantage point. Although it represented one of the largest, most significant, and most transformative social movements in postwar America, white flight has never been studied in depth or detail.” 5 ● “This study, however, argues that white resistance to desegregation was never as immobile or monolithic as its practitioners and chroniclers would have us believe. Indeed, segregationists could be incredibly innovative in the strategies and tactics they used to confront the civil rights movement.” 7 ● “The original goals of massive resistance were, in fact, frequently revisited and revised as the struggle to defend the “southern way of life” stretched on.” 8 ● “Ultimately, the mass migration of whites from cities to suburbs proved to be the most successful segregationist response to the moral demands of the civil rights movement and the legal authority of the courts. Although the suburbs were just as segregated as the city—and, truthfully, often more so—white residents succeeded in convincing the courts, the nation, and even themselves that this phenomenon represented de facto segregation, something that stemmed not from the race-conscious actions of residents but instead from less offensive issues like class stratification and postwar sprawl.” 8 ● “The conventional wisdom has held that they were not only fighting ​against the rights of others. But, in their own minds, segregationists were instead fighting ​for rights of their own—such as the “right” to select their neighbors, their employees, and their children’s classmates, the “right” to do as they pleased with their private property and personal businesses, and, perhaps most important, the “right” to remain free from what they saw as dangerous encroachments by the federal government.” 9 ● “Indeed, form their perspective, it was clearly they who defended individual freedom, while the “so-called civil rights activists” aligned themselves with a powerful central state, demanded increased government regulation of local affairs, and waged a sustained assault on the individual economic, social, and political prerogatives of others. The true goal of desegregation, these white southerners insisted, was not to end the system of racial oppression in the South, but to install a new system that oppressed them instead.” 9 ● “At the same time, segregationist resistance inspired the creation of new conservative causes, such as tuition vouchers, the tax revolt, and the privatization of public services. Until now, the origins of those phenomena have been located in the suburban areas of the South and Southwest, a region since christened the “sunbelt.”” 10-11 ● “Indeed, a community-level approach helps illuminate the realities of white resistance to desegregation in a number of ways.

First, such a perspective best brings into focus the complex relationships between people and places, which are always their clearest at the local level…Second, this work employs a community-level approach to demonstrate the interconnected nature of different stages of white resistance.” 11 ● “This study demonstrates, almost counterintuitively, that whites in this segregated city were generally less violent in their resistance and less successful than their counterparts in the urban North.” 12 ● “ This study argues that desegregation had just as significant an impact on the structures and spaces of the urban and suburban Sunbelt.” 13 Sources: ​newspapers, journals, eye-witness accounts, legal rulings, municipal debate Connections: ​McGirr, ​Suburban Warriors, Goodman, ​Land​, Lemann, ​Promised​, Gerstle, ​American Crucible​, Findlay, ​Magic​, Avila, Popular​, Segrue, ​Origins of an Urban Crisis​, Self, ​American Babylo​n, Jackson, ​Crabgrass​, Chafe, ​Civilities​, Powe, The Warren Court​, D’Emilio, ​Lost Prophet​, Oropeza, ​Raza Si!, ​Sanchez, ​Becoming​, Gutierrez, ​Walls​, Jacobsen, Whiteness​, Foley, ​White Scourge​, Davies, ​From Entitlement​, Brinkley, “The Problem of American Conservatism,” Edsall, ​Chain Reaction, ​Oshkinsky, ​Worse than Slavery, ​Litwak, ​Trouble in the Mind

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Alan Brinkley, “The Problem of American Conservatism,” ​The American Historical Review​ Vol. 99 No. 2 April, 1994 Argument: “And so the “problem of American conservatism,” as I define it here, is not a problem facing conservatives themselves and not a problem conservatives may have created for others. It is a problem of American historical scholarship, the problem of finding a suitable place for the Right—for its intellectual traditions and its social and political movements—within our historiographical concerns.” 410 ● “it would be hard to argue that the American Right has received anything like the amount of attention from historians that its role in twentieth-century politics and culture suggests it should. Given the history of the last twenty years, that is coming to seem an ever more curious omission. This essay is an effort to understand why that omission has occurred.” 409 ● “Conservatism has not always been the orphan within American historical scholarship it is today. The progressive historians who dominated the writing of American history through much of the first half of this century placed conservatives at the center of their interpretive scheme, a scheme that portrayed American history as a long and often intense struggle between popular democratic elements and entrenched anti-democratic interests. But theirs was a constricted view of conservatism, focused almost exclusively on economic elites and their efforts to preserve wealth and privilege.” 410 ● “The consensus scholars did take note of one of the most serious shortcomings of the progressive view of conservatism.

They recognized that the Right did not consist only of elites defending wealth and privilege, that there was a popular, grass-roots Right—most immediately visible to them in the alarming rise of “McCarthyism” in the early 1950s—that needed explanation. But little in their explanations of what such scholars at times called the “radical Rights,” the “New Right,” or the pseudo-conservative revolt” suggested that conservatives were people whose ideas or grievances should be taken seriously or that the Right deserved attention as a distinct element of the American political tradition.” 411 ● “New Left scholarship, which attacked the consensus with great effectiveness for ignoring or marginalizing the Left, had relatively little to say about the Right. That was in part because of the way much of the New Left celebrated, even romanticized, “the people.” Having repudiated the liberal suspicion of “mass politics” and embraced instead the concept of “participatory democracy,” scholars of the Left had difficulty conceding that mass movements could be anything but democratic and progressive; they found it difficult to acknowledge that they could emerge from the Right. But New Left scholars also neglected conservatism because, no less than the consensus historians they were challenging, they were in large measure preoccupied with the Cold War and the liberalism they believed supported it.” 412 ● “New Left political scholarship has, therefore, generally been more interested in discrediting liberalism—and, within the academic world, in wresting leadership and initiative from liberal scholars—than in confronting what it has generally considered a less formidable foe: the self-proclaimed Right.” 412-413 ● “The organizational approach, therefore, tends to portray conservatism (when it considers it at all) in the same way it considers other forms of dissent: as the futile, and dwindling, resistance of provincial or marginal peoples to the inexorable forces of modernism.” 413 ● “American Conservatism is not easy to characterize…Conservatism encompasses a broad range of ideas, impulses, and constituencies, and many conservatives feel no obligation to choose among the conflicting, even incompatible impulses, the fuel their politics…Conservatism is not, in short, an “ideology,” with a secure and consistent internal structure. It is a cluster of related (and sometimes unrelated) ideas from which those who consider themselves conservatives draw different elements at different times…Still, conservatism is no more inchoate than liberalism, progressivism, socialism, or any other broad political stance that describes a large and diverse groups of people.” 414 ● “Nor, prior to 1945, did American conservatives often constitute and effective political force, as the abysmal performance of such organizational efforts as the Liberty League in the 1930s suggests. Not until the postwar era did large numbers of conservatives manage to articulate a serious and important critique of liberal culture. And only in the 1970s did they begin to make the critique the basis of an effective political 1970s did they begin to make that critique the basis of an effective political movement by creating (among other things) a network of publications, think tanks, and political action committees that have come to rival and often outperform their powerful liberal counterparts. Conservatism as an intellectually serious and politically effective movement is, in short, a relatively new phenomenon—born of the frustrations of political exile in the 1930s and 1940s, the passions of the anticommunist crusades of the late 1940s and early 1950s, and perhaps above all the political and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s.” 415 ● “A better explanation for the inattention of historians may be that much American conservatism in the twentieth century has rested on a philosophical foundation not readily distinguishable from the liberal tradition, to which it is, in theory, opposed.”

415 ● “Indeed, the defense of liberty, the preservation of individual freedom, has been as central to much of American conservatism in the twentieth-century as it has been to American liberalism. Many conservatives would argue that in the twentieth century it has been much more central to their concerns than it has to the concerns of liberals.” 415

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“What came to be known as “liberalism” in mid to late twentieth-century America has been to a significant extent a conscious repudiation of the anti-statist elements of that classical tradition. It has been, instead, and effort to build the case for a more active and powerful state (even if one in which ideas of individual rights played an important, often central role).

The anti-statist liberal tradition of nineteenth-century America has, therefore, increasingly become the property of those who in the twentieth century are generally known as conservatives (or, as some of them prefer, libertarians).” 415-416 ● “Conservatism has been an important presence in every area of the United States. But the dramatic rise of the Right in the last half-century may owe more to the West than to any other region.” 417 ● “Resentment of presumed domination by the East is one of the oldest themes in western American history. It has helped produce the populist revolt of the late nineteenth century and periodic movements of social and economic protest since. In the past half-century, moreover, many westerners have rechanneled the resentments that created populism—away from the great private economic institutions that were created populism—away from the great private economic institutions that were the traditional targets of western anger and toward the federal government, which many westerners believe has assumed the intrusive and oppressive role that banks and railroads once played as the great obstacle to western freedom.” 418 ● “The federal government is the greatest landowner in the West. (It owns, for example, 44 percent of the state of Arizona, 90 percent of the state of Alaska). It controls an enormous proportion of the natural resources on which western economic growth largely depends. Many of its environmental regulations impinge on western preferences and western enterprises much more directly and severely than on their eastern counterparts.” 418 ● “That intrusive federal presence has been particularly difficult for many westerners to accept, because it has coincided with, and (According to many conservatives) obstructed, the West’s rise to economic eminence. In reality, the West’s rise to eminence is itself in large part a produce of government largesse. Without the great federally funded infrastructure projects of the twentieth century—without highways, airports, dams, water and irrigations projects, and other facilities the government has provided—the economic development of the Southwest in particular would have been impossible. But few western conservaties have show much inclination to confront such contradictions.” 418 ● “The so-called neo-conservatives, most of them former socialists, began in the 1960s to embrace and promote a form of normative conservatism in their effort to discredit the New Left…their denunciations of the radicalism and relativism of the 1960s, their calls for a relegitimation of traditional centers of authority, and their cries for a refurbishment of American nationalism and a recognition of the moral claims of American democracy came increasingly to resemble the appeals of other, more longstanding conservatives.” 422 ● “The goals of the fundamentalist Right was to challenge the secular, scientific values of modern culture, values most liberals have come to consider norms of modernity. Many liberals were, therefore, surprised and even baffled by the suddenly powerful assaults on such symbols of “progress” as the secularization of popular culture, the teaching of evolution, even the principle of the separation of church and state. Fundamentalists revived ancient quarrels over the banning of books and movies. Some used religious arguments to frame positions on seemingly non-religious issues, claiming, for example, that the Bible mandated a massive expansion of the American defense budget (an argument that Ronal Reagan, on occasion, seemed to endorse). Others argued that biblical prophesies of the coming millennium should be a factor in the shaping of public policy…Many mixed their religious fervor with an essentially secular fundamentalism, which rested on a normative view of “traditional” middle-class constructions of family, community, and morality.” 423 ● “Indeed, the most powerful single strain within fundamentalist conservatism through much of the 1970s and 1980s may have been its assault on the efforts of modern feminists to redefine gender roles. Battles over abortion, birth control, the Equal Rights Amendment, and other gender-based issues (and, more recently, battles over homosexuality) have mobilized the fundamentalist Right more successfully and energetically than any other issue.” 423 ● “The nature of the modern fundamentalist Right suggests, in short, that it has been possible to be a stable, affluent, middle-class person, to have become part of the modern bureaucratic world and to have embraced the consumer culture, to have achieved and enjoyed worldly success, and to have clung nevertheless to a set of cultural and religious beliefs that are at odds with some of the basic assumptions of modernism. And these possibilities serve as a challenge to the assumptions of most historians that intense religious faith and fundamentalists morality should be understood as secondary or dependent characteristics, products of economic or social maladjustment, to be discarded as their adherents move into the cosmopolitan world.” 426-427 ● “Much of the history of the postwar United States had been the story of two intersecting developments. One is the survival of fundamentalist private values among people who have in other ways adapted themselves to the modern public world. The second is the unprecedentedly vigorous assault on those values by liberal, secular Americans.” 427 ● To study and leave out conservatism in the historiography “Is to admit that modernism is not yet truly secure; that, even in America, some of the most elementary values and institutions of modern society still have not established full legitimacy with a large, and at times politically powerful, segment of our population.” 429 Sources: ​Secondary Connections: ​McGirr, ​Suburban Warriors, Goodman, ​Land​, Lemann, ​Promised​, Gerstle, ​American Crucible​, Findlay, ​Magic​, Avila, Popular​, Segrue, ​Origins of an Urban Crisis​, Self, ​American Babylo​n, Jackson, ​Crabgrass​, Chafe, ​Civilities​, Powe, The Warren

51 Court​, D’Emilio, ​Lost Prophet​, Oropeza, ​Raza Si!, ​Sanchez, ​Becoming​, Gutierrez, ​Walls​, Jacobsen, Whiteness​, Foley, ​White Scourge​, Davies, ​From Entitlement​, Kruse, ​White Flight,​ Edsall, ​Chain Reaction, ​Oshkinsky, ​Worse than Slavery, ​Litwak, ​Trouble in the Mind Heather Thompson, “Rescuing the Right,” ​Reviews in American History​ 30 (2002) 322-332 Argument: ​Lisa McGirr gives due respect to conservatism in her work, ​Suburban Warriors ● “​Suburban Warriors opens with a direct challenge to previous understandings of American conservatism as “fringe” or “marginal.” While Lisa McGirr concedes that such a view of the Right was thoroughly logical to those “consensus” scholars of yesteryear who assumed that New Deal liberalism was the natural stick by which all other ideologies should be measured, she insists that this perspective reflected mere wishful thinking. Explicitly rejecting the now decades-old analysis of conservatism espoused by the likes of Richard Hoftstadter and Seymour Martin Lipset, McGirr argues that right-wing ideology actually became mainstream over the course of the 1960s, and became an extremely powerful force in American politics in the years after that.” 323 ● “She is, however, one of the first to do so through a close examination of the ideas and actions of the most ordinary Americans who gravitated to conservatism. Indeed, this is one of McGirr’s most notable contributions to the existing historical literature on the American Right. Traditionally this “history from the bottom up” approach to studying the past has been utilized primarily by those who seek to understand the ordinary forces at work ​against American conservatism. In adopting this methodology to examine conservatism itself, McGirr greatly expands our collective wisdom about the postwar Right.” 323-324 ● “As McGirr’s social history of postwar conservatism unfolds, readers are introduced to the numerous men and women who either originated from, or migrated to, the quasi-frontier oasis of Orange County, California, and then set about turning it into a haven for the Right.” 324 ● “According to McGirr, it was this altogether unremarkable group of conservative suburbanites that both catapulted Barry Goldwater into the national political limelight, and then assured Ronald Regan’s gubernatorial victory in California.

Ultimately, McGirr notes, these California conservatives, in concert with Americans like them all across the country, were also the ones to hand Reagan the presidency in 1980.” 324 ● “It quickly becomes clear in ​Suburban Warriors​, for example, that Orange County conservatives were anything but the poorly educated, overly anxious, and status-obsessed misfits that “consensus” scholars imagined them to be. Significantly, the conservatives in McGirr’s study are all upwardly mobile, white, educated members of the American middle class, and their reasons for being conservative seem far from irrational or “kooky.” According to McGirr, conservatism made sense to Orange County residents because it resonated with their own life experiences. For example, these particular Californians were highly successful both economically and professionally, and thus, McGirr suggests, they naturally believed in the power of the individual and disliked any incursion of the state into the personal lives of its citizenry. In addition, she argues, the isolated and decentralized locale of the American West where these conservatives lived itself fostered and reinforced a hostility to “liberal Washington intellectuals” since it often seemed as if those in the East were completely disinterested in the needs or opinions of westerners. And yet, according to these westerners, those “distant elites” repeatedly tried to legislate their lives (166).” 324 ● “But McGirr is not content simply to illustrate that America’s conservatives were far more politically untied than we might have thought (and of course more economically successful, more emotionally stable, and more ideologically rational). She also wants to prove that they were more numerous, more politically active, and more instrumental, than we have really appreciated. To do this, McGirr explores the grassroots organizing and activism that brought individual moms and dads in California to the politics of conservatism and also allowed them to forge a mass movement.” 325 ● “She is quite clear that extremist groups such as the John Birch Society directly shaped Orange County’s grassroots conservative movement in California during the 1950s and early 1960s. And, McGirr argues, it was just this sort of virulent conservatism that led Orange Countians to put all of their energy into trying to elect Goldwater president in 1964.

Significantly, however, she does not argue for the ​ultimate triumph of extremist views in Orange County. Quite the contrary, McGirr wants to make the case that extremism died when the Goldwater campaign did. As she sees it, when Orange Countians were forced to reckon with the humiliating electoral defeat of their man Goldwater, they decided to break their ties to extremism. This, in turn, placed them firmly on the road to forging a more modern and more mainstream conservative movement—the one that ​would inherit the future, according to Goldwater’s defeat and the new opportunities brought about the social turbulence of the decade, conservatives moved increasingly into the respectable mainstream” (186). And, such respectability, McGirr claims, was necessary for conservative Republican Ronald Reagan first to win the governorship of California and then to take his agenda into the White House itself.” 326 ● “McGirr maintains that a conservative movement of ordinary Orange County men and women grew stronger from the 1950s onward (evolving, of course, from a group unified by anti-communist zeal to a less extreme group mobilized around specific anti-liberal initiatives), but her own evidence could add up to quite different, but equally possible, interpretation: perhaps McGirr’s grassroots movement was always a far more politically contested entity than she recognizes.” 328

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“This brings us full circle back to those scholars who, nearly a decade ago, called upon academics to stop privileging the history of the Left, or liberalism, over that of the grassroots conservatives who also shaped our postwar past. Over the last ten years, historians of various right-wing groups have certainly met this call enthusiastically and, without question, they hae dramatically furthered our understanding of American conservatism.” 331 ● “Ironically, however, historians’ new dedication to the task of rescuing the history of the Right has rendered the historiography of postwar conservatism too narrowly focused. By substituting focus solely on the ideology and activism of the Left or of the liberals with a focus solely on conservatives, even our best new contributors to the historiography of American conservatism are missing a golden opportunity to deepen our understanding of postwar politics ​as a whole​. Our task now, it would seem, is to reexamine our past and grapple not only with how those to the right, to the left, or in the middle of the political spectrum acted and evolved on their own, but also ​in relation to one another​. To accomplish this task, we must view each of these constituencies as a contender for the future, and not a preordained inheritor of it. It will be many a decade into the future before we can dispassionately assess who triumphed politically in the United States after 1980 or what the myriad implications of that victory might be—either for the past or for our present.” 331 Connections: McGirr, ​Suburban Warriors​, DeHart, ​ERA, Brinkley, “The Problem of Conservatism,” Kruse, ​White Flight​, Cohen, Consumer’s

Walter LaFeber, “The Constitution and United States Foreign Policy: An Interpretation” ​The Journal of American History Vol. 74 No. 3 (December, 1987) 695-717 Argument: ​“Imperial presidencies, weak congresses, and cautious courts, which have been endemic to modern United States foreign policy formulation, appeared at the turn of the century. At the same time, the nation’s foreign relations became global rather than continental; they were driven more by corporate than by agrarian interests, and they were tracked by telegraphs and airplanes instead of by couriers and stage coaches. Those changes radically challenged the constitutional forms that had governed the continental foreign policy for a century. Presidents and courts met the challenge simply and directly: they largely severed foreign policy from traditional constitutional restraints by declaring that international and domestic relations could be dealt with separately. Actions in the world arena were not unduly to affect liberties at home.” 696 ● “As the first century of United States foreign policy had been characterized by landed expansion that involved many Americans and occurred largely on contiguous territory, so next century’s foreign policy was to be dominated by economic and military interests that involved relatively few Americans and was often carried out far from the North American continent.” 702 ● “The turn from Madison’s sensitivity for the delicate balance between power and liberty to NSC 68’s assumption that foreign policy ends justify the means occurred not in the early days of the Cold War but between 1890 and 1920.” 696 ● “The framers of the Constitution believed such a separation between foreign and domestic realms to be both artificial and perilous. In their view, the inability of individual states to cooperate in foreign policy produced continual crises in the 1780s.

The effect was also reciprocal: The inability to control overseas trade, which could bring badly needed specie into the country, and to protect the western settlements had produced explosive internal unrest. The Shays uprising in western Massachusetts and the threat of western settlements leaving the confederation to join adjacent British or Spanish empires dramatized the dangers.” 696 ● “An equal peril, of course was that in establishing a central government capable of dealing with European powers, a monster would be created that could also suppress individuals and states.” 696 ● “Nothing contributed more directly to the calling of the 1787 Constitutional Convention than did the spreading belief that under the Articles of Confederation Congress could not effectively and safely conduct foreign policy.” 697 ● “Madison believed “the means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.

Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.” 697 ● “Hamilton and Madison argued that the Constitution’s provisions could protect liberty at home while they also safeguarded United States interests abroad. That belief later produced divisions between Federalists and Antifederalists. At no time, however, did either side disconnect foreign and domestic policies: liberty and order at home led to effective overseas policy.” ● “The first presidents, moreover, never made two claims often heard after 1940: that the executive “may use whatever raw power he had—monetary, diplomatic and military—in the national interest”; and that he held inherent powers as chief executive and as commander in chief that “are beyond legislative control. No early President suggested that Congress was significantly limited in the control it potentially had over assigned executive powers.” 699 ● “The nature of United States foreign policy interests until the Civil War helps explained such presidential deference. Those interests usually had two characteristics. First, they touched large numbers of Americans in ways that cut across various economic interests and involved entire regions of the country. Second, they were not to be located on the other side of the glob or in secret military installations but across the next river or mountain range where lands and ports claimed by Indians,

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Mexicans, Canadians, or Europeans coveted. Those characteristics not only closely linked foreign policy with the immediate, individual rights of Americans but also made large numbers of citizens aware of the link. They believed they were able to shape the nation’s foreign affairs.” 699 “Abraham Lincoln, then a young Whig congressman who disliked most of Polk’s Democratic program, warned that if the president succeeded with his scheme to have a war by invading a neighboring nation, “see if you can fix any limit in his power in this respect.” In Lincoln’s view, Polk, by taking away Congress’s right to the proper and informed exercise of its power to declare war, had committed “the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions” feared by the Constitutional Convention.” 700 “The years from 1846 to 1861 were frenetic precisely because so many Americans believed the survival of their liberty and property interests at home depended on following certain foreign policies. Polk first discovered that dangerous relationship when he asked for funds to buy peace with Mexico. The House of Representatives responded with the Wilmot Proviso, which prohibited slavery in any territory taken by a treaty with Mexico. The president, through ignorance or willfulness, refused to see the link. “What connection slavery had with making peace with Mexico,” he wrote, “it is difficult to conceive.” 700-701 “A drive for Cuban annexation led by both northeastern and southern factions, new involvements in Central America, and the application of the Monroe Doctrine’s principles to Hawaii, the question between 1846 and 1861 was not whether but when, where, and how American expansion would strike next.” 701 “The ​Dred Scott decision was a powder keg. If Roger B. Taney’s decision held, then (as Lincoln and others argued) American expansion anywhere would automatically carry with it the expansion of the slave state interests. On that issue, Stephen A. Douglas, who was determined not to allow his policy of rampant expansionism to be politically corrupted by the Dred Scott decision, took a position that split the Democratic party. Into the breach moved Lincoln and the Republicans.

They were committed in the long run to overturning ​Dred Scott by making fresh appointments to the Supreme Court and in the short run to containing the slave states by denying them annexation of Cuba.” 701 “In late 1860, Lincoln slashed a knot tied in the 1780s by Madison and other founders. The newly elected (but not yet inaugurated) president refused to allow expansion to be used to maintain a constitutional balance.” 701 “The nation that emerged from the civil war had lost interest in landed expansion. William Seward’s success in maneuvering the Senate into purchasing Alaska from Russia was accompanied by a congressional resolution opposing any further acquisition of territory.” 701-702 “Since the Civil War, Americans had been simultaneously blessed and damned by their new industrial and mechanized agricultural complexes—blessed in that the United States suddenly acquired wealth that made it the world’s greatest economic power by the early twentieth century; damned in that the domestic market became so glutted with goods that prices fell and unemployment rose. Out of that domestic crisis, which became dangerously acute during the long economic depression of 1873 through 1897, arose new American interests in Asian, Latin American, and African markets, as well as the military power needed to protect the developing overseas lifelines. The Spanish-American War and President William McKinley’s dispatch of United States troops to the mainland of China in 1900 brought home to many Americans the possibility that a constitution written in the age of horses and muskets might need altering to fit an era of transoceanic cables and machine guns.” 702 “In 1890 the Supreme Court decided ​In re Neagle. ​The justices actually were ruling on the president’s power to provide them with personal bodyguards…Declaring that the president could provide such protection, the Court by a 6 to 2 vote argued that presidential duties were not limited to carrying out treaties and congressional acts according to their express terms but rested on broad implied powers: “the rights, duties, and obligations growing out of the Constitution itself, out international relations, and all the protection implied by the nature of the government under the Constitution.” With that decision, the Court recognized immense and indefinite presidential power.” 702-703 “McKinley stretched the constitutional restrains on his power until they assumed an entirely new shape. During 1897 and 1898 he stopped several congressional attempts to “declare” war on Spain; than in April 1898 he led the way to war himself and destroyed the Senate’s attempt to bind his hands with a resolution attached to the declaration of war that automatically recognized the Cuban revolutionary regime…Six weeks into the war, United States territorial holdings suddenly moved thousands of miles across the ocean when McKinley, uncertain that he could obtain the necessary two-thirds Senate majority to pass a treaty of annexation of Hawaii, obtained the islands with a joint resolution requiring a mere majority in both houses.

The president unilaterally committed American forces and prestige to the distant Philippines, then moved to neutralize native Filipino forces fired on United States troops.” 704 “McKinley used the outbreak of fighting to push the Philippine annexation treaty through a rebellious Senate by one vote. In the Caribbean he treated newly conquered Puerto Rico as neither a state nor a full-fledged colony; for the first time in American history, a treaty acquiring territory held out no promise of future citizenship. Cuba became a protectorate through the Platt Amendment, which allowed Cubans to have the problems of day-to-day governing but the American government holding the right of military and economic intervention whenever Washington officials desired.” 704

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“Anti-imperialists expressed many objections, but their concern about the Constitution was primary. They did not believe that the document’s powers could be stretched so far and used so broadly by the president without snapping fundamental constitutional restraints and transforming the republic into a centralized colonial empire.” 704 “In the fast-changing realm of the Untied States foreign affairs, the Constitution was undergoing its own far-reaching transformation between 1890 and 1905. One transformation could be described as a centrifugal-centripetal effect: as American military and economic power moved outward, political power consolidated at home. The expansion of American power abroad has historically had such a centripetal political effect, but with the possible exception of the early Cold War years, never was it as striking as during the 1890 to 1905 era that ushered in modern American foreign policy. Not only did McKinley and Roosevelt master Congress but, using the new telegraphic networks and exploiting their power as commanders in chief to the full, the chief executives also pulled power into their own hands by minutely supervising the movements of their military commands and by controlling information made available to the public.” 706 “The second historic transformation was a direct cause of Watterson’s “Caesarism.” That change resolved the terrible tension emerging between the new foreign policy and the traditional Constitution by separating the two. Mahan’s “lion in the path” was reduced not merely to a watchdog but to a chained kitten. ​In re Neagle forged the first link in that chain by accepting the theory of inherent presidential power in international affairs. The Insular Cases created another link by ratifying McKinley’s conquests and by allowing the United States government to rule the conquests as it saw fit. Theodore Roosevelt further severed presidential powers from constitutional restraints when during 1904 and 1905 he ordered the United States Navy to protect American interests in Santo Domingo by stopping an internal revolution. Roosevelt justified his action by referring to unspecified “police” powers. He then signed a treaty giving his officers control of Santo Domingo’s main revenue source, the customs houses. When the Senate rejected the treaty on the ground that it wanted no part of a de facto Rooseveltian protectorate, the president circumvented the Senate’s constitutional powers by negotiating an executive agreement. He justified that and other presidential actions with a “stewardship” theory: his “insistence upon the theory that executive power was limited only be specific restrictions and prohibitions appearing in the Constitution or imposed by the Congress under its Constitutional powers.”” 707 “Executive agreements were important in foreign policy at least as early as the 1817 Rush-Bagot pact that demilitarized the United States-Canadian border. New, however, was the claim made by post-1897 presidents that the stewardship theory allowed extraordinary enlargement of the powers of commander in chief overseas. New also was the extensive use of executive agreements.” 707 “Unlike Lippmann, who viewed the period 1917 to 1920 as crucial because it proved that “the people” were incapable of shaping rational foreign policy, Corwin believed the era was seminal because during those years a dangerously centralized security state had been created.” 709 “The Senate’s defeat of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s plan to join the World Court, the Neutrality Acts that restricted the executive’s foreign policy alternatives between 1935 and 1939, and the president’s delicate handling of foreign economic initiatives illustrated the turn that had occurred in the chief executive’s treaty powers, and powers as commander in chief.

But it was a short-lived turn. By 1940, as the spreading war threatened the United States, Roosevelt began recentralizing powering the White House. Sometimes, as in the Lend-Lease legislation of 1941, he showed deference to Congress. More often, as when he executed the destroyers-for-bases deal in 1940 or when he secretly ordered United States convoys for British ships in 1941 and apparently even angled for German attacks on American vessels that would force the nation into war, Roosevelt acted with little deference to congressional restraints. The centrifugal-centripetal effect again appeared, and this time it was to have a long life.” 710 “the Supreme Court handed down in 1936 the landmark decision that justified expansive presidential power in foreign affairs.

In ​United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation et al., ​the Court upheld the president’s right to prohibit the sale of arms and munitions to specific belligerents in Latin America, especially because Roosevelt had done so pursuant to congressional authorization.” 710 “That the federal government’s “powers of external sovereignty” antedated the Constitution and came from the British king in the Revolution; that therefore “federal power over external affairs [is] in origin and essential character different from that overt internal affairs”; and that “in this vast external realm…the President along has the power to speak or listen as a representative of the nation.” To emphasize the last point Sutherland declared that there is “the very delicate, plenary and exclusive power of the President as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations—a power which does not require as a basis for its exercise an act of Congress.” 711 “Bipartisanship in foreign policy peaked between 1947 and 1950 when the process helped produce the Marshall Plan and United Sates membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.” 714 “Diplomacy could not be separated from domestic politics: An emergency abroad could not be stopped at the water’s edge.”

“Secretary of State Dean Acheson fought back with a blunt statement that would probably have surprised most of the founders: “Not only has the President the authority to use the armed forces of the United States in carrying out the broad foreign policy of the United States and implementing treaties, but its is equally clear that this authority may not be interfered with by the Congress in the exercise of powers which it has under the Constitution.” 714

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“Another measure of presidential power was revealed when investigation showed that in 1930 the United States had made twenty-five treaties and nine executive agreements, but by 1972 it had signed 947 treaties and 4,359 executive agreements.” ● “Acheson testified in 1971 that the 1936 case allowed the president to withhold any information from Congress if he believed that it affected national security interests. Others argued that it allowed withholding information deemed important by the executive to national security, even if the information was obtained without warrant through electronic surveillance of defendants whose rights might be affected.” 715 ● “As the Vietnam experience demonstrated, Congress had difficulty controlling presidential actions once troops were committed to distant alliances and battlefields. To remedy that weakness, Congress passed the War Powers Act in 1973.”

Sources: ​presidential papers, aide papers, congressional minutes and legislation, secondary sources Connections: ​Hoganson, ​Fighting​, Young, The Vietnam Wars​, Appy, ​Patriots​, Herring, ​America’s Longest War​, Kennedy, ​Freedom from Fear​, Leuchtenberg, ​FDR​, LeFeber, ​America, Russia​, LaFeber,​ The New Empire​, Gaddis, ​Origins​, ​Cold War Walter LaFeber, ​The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898​ (1963) Argument: ​“I have emphasized the economic forces which resulted in commercial and landed expansion because these appear to be the most important causes and results in that nation’s diplomatic history of that period.” Xxxi ● “This monograph attempts to examine the crucial incubation period of the American overseas empire by relating the development of that empire to the effects of the industrial revolution on United States foreign policy.” Xxxi ● “that those historians who label this era as the Age of the Robber Barons or as the time when “Industry Comes of Age” are correct, and that foreign policy formulators were not immune to the dominant characteristic of their time.” Xxxi ● “These themes suggest two conclusions implicit in this work. First, the United States did not set out on an expansionist path in the late 1890’s in a sudden, spur-of-the-moment fashion. The overseas empire that Americans controlled in 1900 was not a break in their history, but a natural culmination. Second, Americans neither acquired this empire during a temporary absence of mind nor had the empire forced upon them.” Xxxi ● “In the eight years between Benjamin Harrison’s ascendancy to power in 1888 and the success of the next Republican presidential nominee in 1896, the United States transformed its foreign relations…Gently urged by Harrison, Blaine, and the McKinley tariff and then frightened by the economic and social maladjustments of the 1893-1897 depression, many of the most powerful American industries began to believe that their survival depended upon the markets of the world.” 326 ● “Renewed commercial and investment interests in the Far East, plus the flouting of open-door principles by the continental European powers, forced the United States to change long-standing Asiatic policies, increase State Department support of these interests, and reorder the list of the nation’s traditional friends and enemies.” 326 ● “Major McKinley (a rank received for bravery in the Civil War) had early accepted Rutherford B. Hayes’s advice that a thorough knowledge of the tariff was the key to a successful political career. In the 1880’s he became a leading spokesmen on this issue, showing unshakable devotion to high tariff principles.” 328 ● “He had always been a close friend of the working man [William McKinley]…As Governor, McKinley had begun to comprehend some of the same labor-management problems which troubled Walter Quintin Gresham. The Ohioan responded by encouraging the formation of unions and whipping through the state legislature an industrial arbitration bill. This measure proved somewhat effective in the strike-ridden years of 1894-1895. But when the threat of violent strikes began to spread across the state, McKinley did not hesitate to order out in force the state militia, believing, as he remarked later, that when a brigade met a division there would be no battle.” 329 ● “When he entered the White House in 1897, the depression surged on “entailing idleness upon willing labor and loss to useful enterprises…McKinley had no intention of allowing the business cycles to take its course. One of the more striking themes which emerged from his post-1896 speeches was his emphasis on the necessity for an active national government to cooperate in friendly fashion with the businessman.” 329 ● “The President wanted to stimulate, not regulate. Production had to climb, financial stability had to be ensured, and markets had to be found. Government could become a partner with business in achieving these objectives.” 330 ● “The President thought he had found the key to the doors of foreign markets in the formula of reciprocity.” 331 ● “At the first N.A.M. [National Association of Manufacturers] convention in 1895, McKinley outlined the perfect trade program: “our own markets for our manufactures and agricultural products” and “a reciprocity which will give us foreign markets for our surplus products.”…”The end in view always [should] be the opening up of new markets for the products of our country.” After three months in office he could remark that “no worthier cause can engage our energies at this hour” than the enlargement of foreign markets; these markets allow “better fields for employment, and easier conditions for the masses.” ● “three obstacles to American economic prosperity—the Cuban revolution, the threatening situation in the Far East, and the lack of adequate demand for the glut of American goods.” 333 ● “There were other indications that McKinley would pursue a militant foreign policy. Each new day of the warfare devastated more American investments and trade. These investments had mushroomed to more than $33,000,000 since the conclusion of the Ten Years’ War in 1878, United States trade had soared to new heights after the 1890 tariff had opened Cuban markets to American flour and industrial goods and had made mainland consumers dependent upon the Cuban sugar grower. These

56 economic links, along with the inhumanities of the ​reconcentrado policies, added to the rising city that the revolution had to end quickly. If Spain could not terminate the warfare, the United States would have to intervene.” 334 ● “After stating bluntly that Spain could never again subdue the island, the State Department demanded that somehow the revolution must be immediately halted. The serious danger posed to American material interests (interests which were “not merely theoretical or sentimental”) necessitated the immediate cessation of warfare. These material interests were more than direct investments in, and trade with Cuba. The “chronic conditions of trouble and violent derangement” on the island, the State Department warned, “keeps up a continuous irritation within our borders, injuriously effects the normal functions of business, and tends to delay the conditions of prosperity to which this country is entitled.”” 335-336 ● “The administration decided on the twenty-fourth to send the armored cruiser “Maine” to Havana. The Spanish Minister fully supported the decision to send the vessel. The ostensible purpose of the sailing of the “Maine” was to resume friendly visits of American ships to Spanish ports. In the context of McKinley’s reaction to the Havana riots and Long’s maneuvering of the fleet, however, the sending of the “Maine” was an attempt to discourage future outbreaks on the island and to provide notice of the administration’s concern over the inadequacy of the Spanish reforms.” 344 ● “The McKinley administration continued Olney’s attempts to open new areas of China for American merchants and missionaries. An important result of this policy was the first movement of American missionaries into the rich Hunan province in 1897. In the long report to Washington, Denby reiterated his belief that the trader would follow the missionary into Hunan, listed limitless economic possibilities of the province, but strangely neglected the religious significance…” 352 ● “On November 18, 1897, Germany seized the key port of Kiaochow on the Shantung Penninsula. The seizure menaced the large American exports flowing into Manchuria and North China through Shantung and threatened to set off a series of European attempts to carve China into exclusive spheres of interest.” 354 ● “The threat of war with Spain in Cuba, combined with the dangerous threat to the open door in Asia, had constrained the administration ot make thorough preparations for offensive operations in the Pacific.” 362 ● “Senator Frye told the National Association of Manufacturers’ annual convention on January 28, 1898, that, although the home market was a great one, “four years ago we had a new teacher,” the depression, which taught Americans to undertake “a determined advance and march upon the foreign market.” “The first market you are trying to propose to reach,” Frye continued, “is the market in the Orient. You don’t propose to leave that to be closed against you.” In this context the Nicaragua canal project and the annexation of Hawaii were crucial policy steps.” 366 ● “Finally, and most important, the United States had decided that its interests in the far Pacific could be preserved only if the Hawaiian Islands were politically stabilized and if American naval and commercial holdings were freed from all foreign threats.” 369 ● “By 1899 the United States had forged a new empire. American policy makers and businessmen had created it amid much debate and with conscious purpose…Three years later it was rescued from a growing economic and political dilemma by the declaration of war against Spain. During and after this conflict the empire moved past Hawaii into the Philippines, and, with the issuance of the Open-Door Notes, enunciated its principles in Asia.” 417 Sources: ​papers, government records, speeches, NAM papers, diplomatic dispatches, State Department records Connection: ​LaFeber, “The Constitution and United States Foreign Policy,” Hoganson, ​Fighting​, Young, The Vietnam Wars​, Appy, Patriots​, Herring, ​America’s Longest War​, Kennedy, ​Freedom from Fear​, Leuchtenberg, ​FDR​, LeFeber, ​America, Russia​, Gaddis, Origins​, ​Cold War Kristin L. Hoganson, ​Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars​ (1998) Argument: ​“Gender beliefs fundamentally shaped U.S. politics. Arguing that electoral politics should remain male terrain, opponents of women’s suffrage frustrated efforts to win political equality for women. Besides keeping women on the sidelines of electoral politics, gendered understandings of political power was associated with manhood, political leaders faced considerable pressure to appear manly in order to maintain their political legitimacy. The ideas about gender that affected the allocation of political authority also affected understandings of American democracy. Late-nineteenth-century Americans commonly believed that their political system ultimately rested on manly character, something defined in different ways but generally in reference to contrasting ideas about womanly attributes. This meant that policy-makers tried to legitimize their policies by presenting them as conducive to manhood.

The political pressure to assume a manly posture and appear to espouse many policies gave gender beliefs the power to affect political decision-making. This book investigates how they helped lead the nation into war at the turn of the century.” 3-4 ● “This book investigates the cultural roots of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars. It is based on the premise that the conduct of foreign policy does not occur in a vacuum, that political decision makers are shaped by their surrounding cultures. In trying to understand why the United States went to war at the turn of the century, it is tempting to overlook the cultural frameworks that shaped contemporaries’ outlooks and instead to focus on precipitating incidents, political and diplomatic wranglings, closed-door meetings, and the like. But to focus exclusively on immediate causes is to skim the surface of the past, to assume that earlier generations understood their world as we understand ours. To fully understand the descent into war, we need to understand how contemporaries viewed the precipitating incidents, what seemed to be at stake in

57 their diplomatic and political wranglings, and what assumptions they brought to their high-level meetings—and to do that, we need to understand something of their culture.” 2-3 ● “But by stipulating social roles for men and women, gender beliefs have significantly affected political affairs. In the nineteenth century, middle class Americans commonly believed that men and women had very different capabilities and destinies. Men were thought to be well-suited for “public” endeavors, chief among them politics, and women for the “private” realm of family and home. This is not to say that gender beliefs were universally agreed upon or that they went unchallenged, but that most nineteenth-century Americans turned to inherited ideas about gender to order their world.

Although they differed on the details of male and female natures and spheres, most nineteenth-century Americans agreed that there were important differences between men and women and that these should affect individual identities, social practices, and political organization.” 3 ● “It was, indeed, a fairly popular one [war]. More men tried to volunteer than the armed forces could accept; contemporary observers exulted that the war had “brought us a higher manhood” and “compelled admiration for American valor on land and on sea.” 6 ● “Following the armistice, Spain and the United States sent delegates to Paris to negotiate a peace treaty. The final draft stipulated that Spain would relinquish sovereignty over Cuba and ceded Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the United States.” 6 ● “In addition to taking the territories ceded by the peace treaty, the United States occupied Cuba from 1898 to 1902. A measure introduced in Congress in 1901 by the Connecticut senator Orville H. Platt spelled out the terms for U.S. withdrawal. The so-call Platt Amendment stipulated that the United States could intervene to preserve Cuban independence or maintain a stable government. Realizing that acceptance of the amendment was a precondition for self-government, Cuban leaders included its provision in their constitution, thereby leaving their nation vulnerable to future interventions, the first of which came in 1906.” 6-7 ● “The irony is hard to miss. After entering the Spanish-Cuban War with loud proclamations of its humanitarian and democratic objectives, the United States refused to cooperate with the Cuban revolutionaries and ended up fighting another war halfway around the world to deny independence to Filipino nationalists.” 7 ● “But they did agree that war had redeeming social implications, chief among them that it would bolster American manhood.

What brought jingoes together was a shared enthusiasm for war, predicated on common gender assumptions.” 8 ● “On the one hand, gender served as a cultural motive that easily lent itself to economic, strategic, and other justifications for war. On the other, gender served as a coalition-building political method, one that helped jingoes forge their disparate arguments for war into a simpler, more visceral rationale that had a broad appeal. As both motive and method, gender helped men from different regions, parties, and walks of life to come together to form a powerful political movement.” 8-9 ● “Jingoes did not hesitate to phrase economic, political, and other arguments in gendered terms.” 9 ● “To start with the economic and annexationist arguments, jingoes often claimed that the nation needed overseas markets and territories in order to provide an outlet for men’s robust energies. In addition to promising material gains, expanded markets and colonial holdings seemed attractive as a means of preventing American men from falling into idleness and dissipation and enabling them to meet the basic male obligation of providing for their families, something that many men found themselves unable to do during the depression of 1893-1897. Economic and annexationist arguments reflected convictions about what it meant to be manly; their persuasiveness relied on a commitment to fostering manhood in the United States.

Some advocates of assertive politics undoubtedly regarded Cuba primarily as an opportunity for markets or as a choice piece of real estate, but those who held that a war—any war—would be good for American men also saw it as an opportunity to build manhood. To these jingoes, the prospect of combat enhanced Cuba’s allure.” 9 ● “Besides providing a richer cultural context for economic and annexationist arguments, adding gender to the picture can help explain why, rather than regarding the United States as a beacon for the world, as earlier generations of American foreign policy theorists had done, late-nineteenth-century strategists advocated a more active and aggressive role for the nation.”9 ● “A look at the press coverage of the Cuban revolution suggests that gender also can illuminate the substantial humanitarian sympathy for the mixed-race Cubans, a surprising development given the racist sentiments common among white Americans in the late nineteenth century. In accounts of the Cuban revolution published in the United States, positive gender convictions often counterbalanced negative racial ones, thereby fostering sympathy for the Cuban cause. American correspondents frequently depicted Cuban women as pure and virtuous victims of Spanish lust and Cuban men as chivalric fighters who had proven their manly character and hence capacity for self-government in combat. Such accounts portrayed Spanish soldiers as effeminate aristocrats, best embodied by their queen regent or boy king, or as savage rapists who lacked the moral sensibility and self-restraint of civilized men. The Spaniards’ apparent lack of manhood seemed to indicate that they were ill-suited to govern.” 11 Sources: ​newspapers, pamphlets, debates, congressional minutes Connections: ​LaFeber, “The Constitution and United States Foreign Policy,” Young, The Vietnam Wars​, Appy, ​Patriots​, Herring, America’s Longest War​, Kennedy, ​Freedom from Fear​, Leuchtenberg, ​FDR​, LeFeber, ​America, Russia​, LaFeber, The New Empire​, Gaddis, ​Origins​, ​Cold War

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David M. Oshinsky, ​“Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice​ (1996) Argument: ​“In design, it [Parchman] resembled an antebellum plantation with convicts in place of slaves. Both systems used captive labor to grow the same crops in identical ways. Both relied on a small staff of rural, lower-class whites to supervise the black labor gangs. And both staffs mixed physical punishment with paternalistic rewards in order to motivate their workers. What this meant, in simple terms, was the ability “to drive and handle niggers.”” 139 ● “Parchman is the state penitentiary of Mississippi, a sprawling 20,000-acre plantation in the rich cotton land of the Yazoo Delta. Its legend has come down from nay sources: the work chants and field hollers of the black prisoners who toiled there; the Delta blues of ex-convicts like Eddie “Son” House and Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter; the novels of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Shelby Foote, and, most recently, John Grisham, who seem mesmerized by the mystique of the huge Delta farm.” 1 ● “White Southerners liked to believe that blacks did not much mind going to prison—that there was no shame to it, no loss of status, no fear of what lay ahead. Not surprisingly…[whites] viewed Parchman as a smooth and simple extension of normal black life: “They do the same work, eat the same food, sing the same songs, play the same games of dice and cards, fraternize with their fellows, attend religious services on Sunday mornings and receive visitors on Sunday afternoons.”” 136 ● “The black convicts took a rather different view. Their songs in Mississippi and Tennessee portrayed Long-Chain Charlies as an evil man who stole their freedom and brought them despair.” 136 ● “The convicts who reached Parchman with Long-Chain Charlie must have been surprised by what they saw—and what they did not see: no walls or guard towers, no cell blocks or stockades. From the outside, it looked like a typical Delta plantation, with cattle barns, vegetable gardens, mules dotting the landscape, and cotton rows stretching for miles.” 137 ● “By 1915, Parchman already was a self-sufficient operation. It contained a sawmill, a brick yard, a slaughterhouse, a vegetable canning plant, and two cotton gins.” 139 ● “Well into the 1960s, Parchman hand-picked much of its cotton on the grounds that “the product is cleaner, the crop is picked more completely, and a tired cotton-picking inmate is less likely to promote mischief than one who stands around watching a machine do his job.” 225 ● “Blacks came to Parchman as field workers and left the same way. That was their lot in life. Anything more was anathema in a culture where white supremacy and unskilled Negro labor went hand in hand. In Mississippi, rehabilitation was a dangerous word.” 224 ● “The end of racial segregation, for example, led to a surge of gang activity in the cages, as white and blacks squared off to protect themselves, boost their status, and gain territorial control. Integrating a prison was not like integrating a high school or a restaurant, a Parchman official complained: “In most cases we are dealing with the scum of the earth…Power is the game. It is won in two ways: by physical force and by appeals to the worst prejudices.” 250 ● “The number of homicides dropped as civilian guards took the place of gun-toting trusties. Yet in an odd way, the federal court had shifted the balance of terror from the keepers to the inmates—from Black Annie and trusty-shooters to homemade weapons and prison gangs.” 250 ● “Following ​Gates, the great bulk of Parchman’s prime land—more than 13,000 acres—was leased to local growers. The prison no longer fed and clothed its inmates with home-grown crops. The once-profitable, self-sufficient plantation disappeared. Nothing fully took its place. Prison support jobs, such as maintenance and cooking, did not provide inmates with nearly enough work. Well-intentioned efforts at adult education and vocational training were poorly funded, and attempts to create small prison industries ran into strong opposition from competing private firms. The result was too many convicts with too little to do.” 250-251 Sources: ​Mississippi prison records, court records, interviews, journals Connections: ​Litwack, ​Trouble, ​Lemann, ​Promised, ​Goodman, ​Land of Hope​, ​Payne​, ​I’ve Got the Light​, D’Emilio, Lost Prophet​, Chafe, ​Civilities​, Litwack, ​Been in the Storm

Leon F. Litwack, ​Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow​ (1998) Argument: ​“The most intense years—the focus of this book—were between 1890 and the Great Migration, but the seeds had been planted in the forcible overthrow of Reconstruction in the 1870s, and the Age of Jim Crow would span more than half a century. This is the story of how the first generation born in freedom, more questioning of their “place” and less inclined to render absolute deference to white, encountered (and in a certain sense helped to provoke) the most violent and repressive period in the history of race relations in the United States.” Xiv ● “When black Southerners in 1865 staked out their claims to becoming a free people, they projected a very different vision of the future. They aspired to a better life than they had known, to a life once thought impossible to contemplate. They wanted

59 what they had seen whites enjoy—the vote, schools, churches, legal marriages, judicial equity, and the chanve not only to work on their own plots of land but to retain the rewards of their labor.” Xiii ● “But any experiment in biracial democracy was bound to be perilous. Neither military defeat nor the end of slavery suggested to whites the need to reexamine racial relationships and assumptions. Confronting a society “suddenly turned bottom-side up,” the white South responded with massive resistance. The language white employed to describe Reconstruction, the methods used to subvert the Radical governments and black voting, and the determination to indoctrinate future generations with the idea of Reconstruction as a “tragic era,” betrayed white fears that this experiment might actually succeed in restructuring the South and racial relationships. Whites employed terror, intimidation, and violence to doom Reconstruction, not because blacks had demonstrated incompetence but because they were rapidly learning the uses of political power, not because of evidence of black failure but the far more alarming evidence of black success.” Xiii ● ““Jim Crow” had entered the American vocabulary, and many whites, northern and southern, came away from minstrel shows with their distorted images of black life, character, and aspirations reinforced.” xiv ● “But by the 1890s, “Jim Crow” took on additional force and meaning to denote the subordination and separation of black people in the South, much of it codified, much of its still enforced by custom and habit.” Xiv-xv ● “This book will draw largely from the perspectives and experiences of people who spent their lives in relative obscurity, who never shared the fruits of affluence, who never enjoyed power. This is the story of what they confronted, how they struggled, worked, tried to educate themselves, and found ways to temper their accommodations to the new racial order. And it is the story of what happened to their aspirations and expectations. This is not much a study of black leadership and ideology as it is a story of daily struggles by black men and women to wrest some meaning and value out of their working lives. It is less a study of the institutional life of blacks than of the experience of being black in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century South.” Xv ● “This is no easy history to assimilate. It is the story of a people denied the basic rights of citizenship in the land of their birth, yet fully expected to display as much patriotism as their white brethren, who enjoyed the full exercise of such rights. It is the story of a people stamped as inferior, based on the idea of race, yet fully expected to provide the basic labor of the South even as they complied with the perverse etiquette of Jim Crow.” Xv-xvi ● “Violence and the fear of violence helped to shape black lives and personalities.” Xvi ● “What helped to sustain them through bondage and a tortured freedom had been a rich oral expressive tradition, consisting of folk beliefs, proverbs, humor, sermons, spirituals, gospel songs, hollers, work songs, the blues, and jazz. Through a variety of expression, black men and women conveyed not only their disillusionment, alienation, and frustration, but also their joys, aspirations, triumphs, and expectations; they used such expression both to confront their situation and to overcome and transcend it.” Xvii ● “The black community was divided over strategies of accommodation and resistance; over aspirations, priorities, and perceptions of whites and themselves; and along lines of class and color. Throughout their history in this country, they were also divided over how to designate themselves as a people.” Xvii ● “Through the first four decades of the twentieth century, the essential mechanisms, attitudes, and assumptions governing race relations and the subordination of black Southerners remained largely intact. The same patterns of discrimination, segregation, unequal justice, and racial violence persisted. Sporadic breakthroughs were made by individual blacks, and the New Deal injected a measure of hope, but the great mass of black men and women in the South still lived out their lives in a severely restricted, isolated, and relatively static world. More than a million black Americans fought in World War II, as they had in World War I, to make the world safe for democracy. After the war, even larger numbers developed new strategies and tactics to make the United States safe for themselves. On some new battlefields—Montgomery, Selma, Birmingham, Jackson, Little Rock, Detroit, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles—still another struggle would be waged over the meaning of freedom.” Xvii-xviii Sources: ​songs, journals, newspapers, civil rights groups, books, art Connections: ​Oshinsky​, Worse than Slavery, ​Lemann, ​Promised, ​Goodman, ​Land of Hope​, ​Payne​, ​I’ve Got the Light​, D’Emilio, Lost Prophet​, Chafe, ​Civilities​, Litwack, ​Been in the Storm