The Marketplace of Revolution

 T.H. Breen. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Accounts of the origins of the American Revolution often struggle with how to portray--or explain--participation and support from masses of ordinary, free colonists. As Breen points out, ordinary people only appear in sporadically in standard accounts which focus on colonial leaders, assemblies, and published writings. Yet, without substantive willingness on the part of the masses, the Revolution never would have happened.

Breen's highly original interpretation of the coming of revolution locates the answer within the broadly shared social experience of participating in the growing Atlantic world economy as consumers. It was in the marketplace that diverse colonists from disparate parts of eastern North American found a common language of consumption, identity, and engagement. He does not argue that being consumers, in and of itself, radicalized colonial consumers. But the dynamic of being consumers pulled colonists out of their localized lives and, through the growing Atlantic economy, brought them into contact with British merchants and markets; and with each other as well. 

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, different colonial groups such as backwoods farmers in New Hampshire, Puritan shopkeepers in Boston, and slave-owning tobacco planters in Tidewater Virginia had little in common. But, in a process which began increasing both quantitatively and qualitatively in the middle third of the century, increasing participation in the consumer marketplace created opportunities for self-fashioning and expression, while simultaneously also creating a shared experience with far-flung strangers up and down the Atlantic seaboard and beyond.

Because Breen's argument is so radical, he takes pains to develop it methodically--this is a dense book, and the argument is developed slowly. Well over half the book is devoted to establishing the context--the "Empire of Goods" as he terms it--within which this revolutionary change of public consciousness will take place. The crux of this change is the development of trust; Breen convincingly argues that this is the missing element in nearly all previous historiography concerning the revolution. Until ordinary people in all thirteen mainland colonies could trust that strangers in different communities who were personally unknown to them would be willing to make the same sacrifices they were, revolutionary activity was bound to falter and fail.

The consumer boycott, then, was not a minor expression of broader ideological commitment to revolutionary activity--it was the mechanism by which that commitment was developed and learned. The experience of being consumers taught colonists how to work together for a shared purpose, and how to create a national identity where none previously had existed. 

Roads to Power

Jo Guldi. Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State. Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 2012.

Guldi seeks to reclaim the lost role of the State in the history of the British road network prior to the 20th century. This is a history of the development of the “infrastructure state,” something she argues has not been fully recognized or appreciated. The predominant role that private enterprise played in the later nineteenth century has overshadowed an early period; a full century ending in the mid 1830's when the British state, through increasingly centralized means, created a substantial and robust national road network where none had previously existed. In order to convert a scattering of locally-funded turnpikes and a sparse network of military roads built to solidify British control of Scotland into a much more rationalized network serving civilian and economic needs, visionary “centralizers” found the tools—physical, fiscal, and rhetorical—to sway political opinion towards their expansionist, nationalizing ends.

In this light, Guldi finds that the real accomplishment of long-celebrated heroes of civil engineering wasn’t their technical innovations in road- and bridge-building, but their persuasive and managerial talents. Creating a national road network was less a triumph over the physical environment than over parochial interests and deeply-rooted notions of British liberty. The genius of MacAdam, then, wasn’t the technique of road paving named for him (and Guldi notes that he should be regarded as a popularizer, not innovator, of his namesake “macadamized” roads). Rather, MacAdam developed methods of enforcing standardization without reliance on on-site experts, while managing a large, unskilled workforce.

In the end, opponents to the newly created national road network won the political battle within a few short decades of the ‘centralizers’ victory; the localization movement succeeded politically but the cost to British roads and to poorer regions of Great Britain was high. In the early 20th century, the pendulum would swing back towards centralization—in Britain and elsewhere—and then libertarian opposition to the concept of the ‘public good’ would make yet another comeback at the end of the century—an era we are still living through. Lobbying efforts by telecommunications interests to essentially turn the internet into a “toll road” of sorts is part of that same backlash.

Parlor Politics

Catherine Allgor. Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2000.

In 1801, Thomas Jefferson arrived in the still embryonic capital city of the nation he sought to lead away from what he saw as the anti-Republican tendencies of Federalist rule towards a purer, more perfect Republicanism. As the first President to reside in Washington City for his entire term, he also sought to use the social life of the small but growing new city as a means to set the tone of his administration but also to funnel the political life through channels he would mediate, oversee, and control. In the end, though, the growing social life of the city--managed by the elite women married to other political figures--would take on a life of its own. And those women would become an important component of the growing Republican society of Washington, and of the United States' ruling class.

Allgor's study begins with Jefferson and ends with Jackson. Jackson's conflict with the "ladies of Washington" over the Peggy Eaton affair is revealed here as a more substantive and fundamental conflict than many bemused (or amused) historians have allowed over the years. In the end, the ladies of Washington succeeded in banishing Eaton, but at the expense of some of their power, as the role of society in political life would recede in subsequent years and administrations.

By the end, the rise of Jacksonian democracy had undone earlier Republican qualms regarding personal ambition and the possibly corrupting role of government service on public virtue. The need for wives to serve as political proxies for their ostensibly disinterested husbands through Washington City's social life receded, as did the power those women had once held. As in many other ways, Jacksonian Democracy proved to be extremely riven by gender inequities.

America's Cold War

Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall. America's Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.

Craig and Logevall approach the Cold War from the vantage point of domestic politics. They acknowledge that this approach is somewhat out of step with the more internationalist vantage point may other scholars take, but while they concede that the internationalist view has ample merit and is an important endeavor, they point out that excessively “de-centering” the Cold War “runs the risk of assigning greater agency to these other actors than they deserve” (5). The power balance was asymmetrical; furthermore, the documentary records that so many historians rely on tend not to reflect domestic political considerations but rather internal foreign policy deliberations. Ultimately, the authors conclude that while the Cold War was largely a success for the United States, it went on too long and at too high a cost relative to the actual security threat posed by the USSR. Cold War policy was vested in the executive branch from the Truman Administration on, and too often, Presidents based policy on their own political fortunes as well as those of their party (LBJ in particular worried about the fate of his Great Society initiatives). Therefore, the United States often chose confrontation when containment would do, and all too often made moral compromises and inflicted military violence on foreign populations for no clear foreign policy advantage.

The structure of the book in chronological, beginning during the mid-years of World War II and ending during the Presidency of George H.W. Bush. This straight-forward structure is framed by a 1984 speech by one of the original architects of the Cold War containment strategy, George F. Kennan. Kennan had long been leery of the degree to which his original strategic approach to the Soviet threat had taken on a life of its own, un-moored from actual strategic considerations or the capabilities of the Soviet Union. By 1984, he was concerned enough to give a public speech in the midst of Ronald Reagan's reelection campaign on the subject.

The authors clearly agree with Kennan's larger view, but at the same time they argue that the Cold War was in arguably an American success; the Soviet Union was ultimately vanquished, and the American people were able to enjoy relatively peace and historically unparalleled prosperity during the conflict. In other words, Kennan's basic premise--that the USSR represented a genuine security threat, which could be best faced by boxing it in internationally and forcing its internal contradictions to undo it--was entirely correct. Had US Cold War policy adhered to the policy of containment, the triumph would have been relatively unambiguous.

But, unfortunately, domestic political pressures--the rightward shift of American foreign policy, the growing political clout and economic importance of the military-industrial complex, etc.--mitigated against restricting American policy to the parameters Kennan had sketched out. President after President felt compelled to prove himself "tough on Communism" and to escalate military posturing when diplomacy often might have been more effective. The Cold War was an American victory, but the cost was unjustifiably high.

The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It

Richard Hofstadter The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It. New York: Vintage Books, 1989, 1973, 1948

Hofstadter's book is justly regarded as a classic, and nearly 70 years after its initial publication it remains a compelling and readable interpretation of American political culture. The twelve chapters each focus on a particular figure, except for the first chapter on the Founders (which serves to establish the basis for the political culture which Hofstadter believes has a certain continuity through American history) and Chapter 7, "The Spoilsmen: An Age of Cynicism" which focuses on the politics of the Gilded Age (it culminates in a somewhat damning but not unsympathetic portrait of Grover Cleveland).

This edition is a 1989 reprint of the 1973 edition, which includes a forward by Christopher Lasch. In it, Lasch addresses the characterization of this book as an example of the "consensus" school of historiography to task, by pointing out that Hofstadter was no conservative; that he came to his conclusions from a left-wing perspective and that his understanding of the American political tradition of one of consensus was hardly without implied criticism or fault.

Indeed, it is hard to see how Hofstadter could have been understood as someone celebrating this aspect of American political culture (to the degree which one accepts that his conclusions are valid) given the degree to which his portraits pull these mostly venerated figures down to earth. Even the most sympathetic portrait--that of Lincoln--is moderated with a closing touch of tragedy; Lincoln's belief in the myth of the "self-made man", Hofstadter argues, ultimately let him down--the pressures of being President during a time of war, death, and sacrifice was too high a price for a man of such keen moral sensitivity. The prize he worked towards was a bitter one, and it would kill him.

Perhaps the arguments over whether Hofstadter is "really" a consensus historian are now dated; perhaps his book is now best approached as an important development in American historiography than as a vital interpretation. But perhaps not--Hofstadter's reader-friendly prose can still find audiences today, and surely there are many young readers who are hungry to dig beneath the cynical and tired hagiography surrounding so much of America's political history without succumbing to cheap radicalism and glib revisionism. There is criticism here, but also humanity--Hofstadter pulls these "great men" back down to Earth, but he doesn't thrown them down into the mud. By stripping away myth, he allows the actual people to stand before us. 

The Rise of American Democracy

Sean Wilentz. The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005.

Wilentz has written a history of the development and evolution of the American ideal of democracy over the course of several decades that simultaneously covers a lot of ground while in same ways remaining narrow in focus. The time span is implied in the subtitle--From the rise of Thomas Jefferson the election and inauguration of Abraham Lincoln.

After a brief consideration of the Federalist period immediately after ratification of the Constitution, the focus shifts to the Jefferson administration and how the Jeffersonian Republicans coped with their own ideological assumptions--forged in political battles with the Federalists and the conservative hierarchies they represented--as well as with the lingering "country" and "city" democracies which had been stirred up by the Revolution and which continued to flare up from time to time in response to political shifts. The book traces this democratic heritage through the decline of the Federalists, the split between "Democratic" and "National" Republicans, and onto the rise of the Jacksonian Democracy. 

Jackson looms large in this book, which in some ways appears to be Wilentz’s attempt to defend and update Schlesinger’s Age of Jackson for the 21^st century. Although Wilentz is sympathetic to the racial (and, to a much lesser degree, gender) inequities inherent in Jacksonian Democracy, he spends a lot more time defending Jackson’s legacy than in critiquing it, and Old Hickory and his political heirs (Martin Van Buren could not complain too much about his treatment here) generally get the benefit of the doubt in any political battle or ideological conflict.

That said, Wilentz does give the Whigs a more sympathetic hearing than he afforded the Federalists, and acknowledges that the Jacksonians managed to neither fully encompass the democratic yearnings of their era nor address the logical inconsistencies in some of their actions and beliefs.

Hovering over all of this was the institution of slavery and the questions it raised about the meaning and the limits of American democracy. Those contradictions and challenges would ultimately destroy the Whig party completely and split the Democracy in two.

If not already clear, it should be noted that the way in which this hefty study is narrow in focus is this—Wilentz has written an unapologetically political history of the period, which means that it is top-down in focus and pays little mind to the broader tapestry of social and cultural history. While perhaps unfashionable, this is appropriate given Wilentz’s assertion that 19^th century Americans located the center of their social and cultural arguments within the political realm. Politics were central to questions of what it meant to be American. It was a different world than the one we live in, and we can only begin to understand it if we try to see it as contemporaries did.