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Revolutions and Radicals: American Political Culture, 1765-1900

In order to more effectually promote the great purposes of human culture; to apply the principles of justice and love to our social organization in accordance with the laws of Divine Providence; to substitute a system of brotherly cooperation for one of selfish competition; to institute an attractive, efficient, and productive system of industry; to prevent the exercise of worldly anxiety, by the competent supply of our necessary wants; to diminish the desire of excessive accumulation, by making the acquisition of individual property subservient to upright and disinterested uses; and thus to impart a greater freedom, simplicity, truthfulness, refinement, and moral dignity, to our mode of life; - we the undersigned do unite in a voluntary Association.

- Constitution of the Brook Farm Association (1844)

It is impossible to survey the present condition of the world, the institutions of society, the general character of mankind, and their prevailing pursuits and tendencies, without perceiving the great evils that afflict humanity, and recognizing many of them as the direct consequences of existing social arrangements. Extreme ignorance and poverty in immediate juxtaposition with the most insolent licentiousness; adverse and contending interests; war, slavery, party corruption, and selfishness; sectarian exclusiveness and spiritual tyranny. The vices of the present forms and practices of civilization are so gross and palpable that no apology is required for the honest attempt to escape from them. Even if this attempt is neither wise nor successful.

                                        - Articles of Association of the Northampton Association (1845)

 

Course Description

From its foundations in the late 19^th-century, the American historical profession has been characterized by a consensus regarding the political culture of the United States: radicalism is not a characteristic of the nation’s political thought. According to this assumption (for which there is much evidence), America’s political culture is little more than a history of self-interest, conquest, aristocratic hierarchy, and hypocrisy. Critics of this history, which seem to include practically all professional historians, have been left with a question connoting disillusionment and wishful thinking: "why is there no socialism in America?"

This assumption has had enormous implications for the discipline of history. As a result, the dominant approach of professional historians has been progressive. According to this approach, the goal of the historian is to illuminate the "mistakes of the past" (those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it), to "debunk" myths, and to expose history’s devils – slave-owners, repressive prudes, and robber barons – to the withering light of day. The formula of political history is clear: from its beginnings American political thought has been dominated by entrepreneurial values; it is racist, sexist, elitist, marked by the maintenance of hierarchies and the expansion of commerce, and territory and white male supremacy. All else – social fairness, communalism, anti-capitalist reform - is radical. And radicalism does not exist in America – except with its victims, the crushed minority, the meek who shall inherit a brighter future once historians have led them out of history’s shackles.

Thus professional historians have found themselves in a curious position: their goal is to attack the very subject they are paid to study and teach. They have debunked the past. They have exposed "founding fathers" as slaveholding patriarchs and hypocrites. They have defined public interest in the past as an example of hackneyed "nostalgia" and escapism. In doing to they have placed their own discipline outside the realm of public interest – abdicating their role as cultural critics to a host of amateurs, air-heads and reactionaries from Ken Burns to Michael Beschloss and Stephen Ambrose.

The goal of this class will be to re-raise the question that the historical profession long-ago answered with a resounding "no." This question should not be considered an invitation to resurrect a history of "dead white males." As historians we know to much to do this, just as we know that women, people of color, and sub-altern groups of Americans count, that they were there in the making of the nation’s political culture. The question is simply this: does radical thought have a significant place in American political culture?

 

Course Requirements

1. SACLINK Accounts: All students enrolled in this class must have a SACLINK account in order to access additional articles on J-Stor. Any student who does not have a SACLINK account at the beginning of the class must have one by the second week of instruction.

2. Attendance: This class is a seminar. This means that each student in the course will be responsible for setting the tone of the class, establishing its schedule, and generating its subjects for discussion. In other words, your presence is crucial to the success of this course. Accordingly, regular, active attendance is mandatory and will be factored into your grade. If you miss a class, you will still be responsible for that day’s reading and discussion, even if the absence is "excused." If you disappear for an extended length of time (two or more classes in a row), you should consider yourself out of the class, and should not expect to be allowed back in.
3. Graded Work: Each student must complete the following sequence of assignments.

• A short – 3-4 page double spaced – warm-up essay analyzing the relationships between republicanism and democracy, as this relationship emerges in Wood’s Radicalism of the American Revolution and Taylor’s William Cooper’s Town.
• An extended [twenty-pages] event-based and historiographical time-line of the period we are studying, focusing on the drifts and eddies of historical controversy as they appear at certain specific historical moments.
• A ten page historiographical essay on the course readings. This essay should analyze the course readings, placing them in conversation to address the place of radicalism on American political culture. It must also integrate at least two primary sources of your own choosing as examples for your conclusions.

 

Readings [In order of appearance, available at the CSUS Bookstore]

• Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (N.Y.: Random House, 1993)
• Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (N.Y.: Vintage Books, 1996)
• Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (N.Y.: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1998)
• David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1989)
• Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Da Capo, 1991)
• Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: Griffin, 2000)
• James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (N.Y.: Ballantine, 1989)
• T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1994)

 

Tentative Schedule of Meetings, Readings and Topics

Week 1 - August 29: Orienteering

Week 2 - September 5: Tradition, Revolution and Radicalism

Reading: Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution,

Intro, parts 1-2

Week 3 - September 12: Patriarchy, Power, and Democracy

Reading: Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the

Frontier of the Early American Republic, parts 1-2

Week 4 - September 19: Republicanism

Reading: Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, part 3

Week 5 -September 26: Democratic Decline and the Reinvention of the

American Revolution

Reading: Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the

Frontier of the Early American Republic, parts 2-3

Papers Due – On Republicanism and Democracy

Week 6 - October 3: Middle Class Rising: Feminization and Utopia

Reading: Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture,

Intro-Chapter 4, pp. 3-120

[Hand-out] Donald Pitzer, "The New Moral World of Robert Owen and

New Harmony," and Carl J. Guarneri, "Brook Farm and the Fourierist

Phalanxes: Immediatism, Gradualism, and American Utopian Socialism,"

from Donald E. Pitzer, ed., America’s Communal Utopias (Chapel Hill:

UNC Press, 1997).

[From J-Stor]: Stuart Blumin, "The Hypothesis of Middle-Class Formation in Nineteenth-Century America: A Critique and Some Proposals" American Historical Review 90 [2] (April 1985), pp. 299-338.

Week 7 -October 10: Unrelenting Revolutionaries: African Americans and Slavery

Reading: Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists

[From J-Stor]: John W. Blassingame, "Using the Testimony of Ex-Slaves: Approaches and Problems" Journal of Southern History 41 [4] (Nov. 1975), pp. 473-492.

Week 8 -October 17: Markets, Morality, and the Literary Enterprise

Reading: From Ann Douglass, The Feminization of American Culture,

Chapter 6: "The Domestication of Death"

From David Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance, Intro, Chapter 2:

"The Reform Impulse and Paradox of Immoral Didacticism"; Chapter 3: "The

Transcendentalists, Whitman, and Popular Reform"; Chapter 6: "The Sensational

Press and the Rise of Subversive Literature;" Chapter 7: "The Erotic

Imagination."

[From J-Stor]: Ronald G. Walters, "The Erotic South: Civilization and Sexuality in American Abolitionism," American Quarterly 25 [2] (May 1973), pp. 177-201.

Week 9 - October 24: The Radicalism of Reform I

Readings: Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and

the Abolition of Slavery

From Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture, Chapter 7:

"The Periodical Press: Arena for Hostility"

From David Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance,

Chapter 12: "Types of American Womanhood."

Week 10 - October 31: The Radicalism of Reform II

Readings: Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and

the Abolition of Slavery; Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists

Week 11 - November 7: Political Crisis

Reading: James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, Chapters 1-14

Henry Mayer, All on Fire; Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists

Week 12 - November 14: Civil War and the Triumph of American Liberalism

Reading: James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, Chapters 15-28

Week 13 - November 21: Republican Left-Overs

Reading: T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the

Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920, Chapters 1-3

Week 14 -November 28: Liberalism and Its Discontents

Reading: T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the

Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920, Chapters 4-7

Week 15 - December 5: Last Class – Assignments Due