How Old Were You During the Age of Jackson?
I'm in the midst of Sean Wilentz's massive The Rise of American Democracy. I will be for a few days more, I'm sure. It's a real doorstop. Not a page turner, but, just when I'm ready to shelve it, I run across an elegant description of something that always puzzled me, like the diplomacy over the Haitian Revolution or the Panic of 1819, and decide to keep at it. A very sound book. It will not dazzle you with new insights, and in fact is resolutely conventional, from its opening invocation of Arthur Schlesinger's Age of Jackson on; once again you will believe that history is past politics.
One of the reasons I keep on with the book is that it's so involved with the history of the press. Anyone familiar with Wilentz's other great book, Chants Democratic, will expect this. His history is deeply informed by and has a deep appreciation of the newspapers of the early republic. But he does not foreground them, and takes it for granted that they were powerful organs of influence without necessarily 'mediating' politics in any significant way. This surprises me especially because Wilentz is relying on scholarship by people like Jeff Pasley (a much better writer, by the way) that does just that. Pasley argues that it was the printer editors of the early Republic who invented popular politics. I think he stretches the point a bit, but is essentially correct. I put in another way in my own work. The press represented public opinion, which was the indispensable element of generating political legitimacy, and hence political power.
This is why people got so bent out of shape about marginal political movements from the Democratic-Republican societies in the 1790s to the abolitionist press. These were novel attempts to hijack the representation of public opinion away from its authorized mechanisms--the legislatures, in the first case, and the parties in the second. Wilentz comes tantalizingly close to making a marvelous argument about anti-abolitionism when he notes the earlier appearance of antislavery activism. The argument he could and should make is that the reaction against antislavery did not arise as a reaction against the RISE of antislavery (As Leonard Richards and Larry Ratner have it) but as an expression of the rise of the Jacksonian party system as a regulator of the representation of public opinion. Whipping up an antiabolitionist hysteria legitimated the power of the party press.
The other counterintuitive argument you might make here involves the popularity of the press. The political press of the early Republic was 'popular' not because a lot of people read it but because it stood for the people, or stood in the place of the people in relation to the transaction of power.
OK, I sound mystifying there. But ask yourself this. Why were the founding fathers so worked up about the Democratic Republican societies? It's because they knew exactly what those little groups could do. The founding fathers themselves had made their merchants' committees and mechanics' committees and non-intercourse associations and committees of correspondence, and they had a name for what their groups had done: Revolution. Simply existing as groups representing public opinion had been the first step in the Revolution. There's nothing so abstract or mystifying about that.
The title of this post comes from an old story about a debate between Leo Ribuffo and AM Schesinger on the origins of the Cold War. Schlesinger, the story goes, gets pissed off and asks Ribuffo, 'How old were you when the Truman Doctrine was announced?' and Ribuffo replied, ....
I'm in the midst of Sean Wilentz's massive The Rise of American Democracy. I will be for a few days more, I'm sure. It's a real doorstop. Not a page turner, but, just when I'm ready to shelve it, I run across an elegant description of something that always puzzled me, like the diplomacy over the Haitian Revolution or the Panic of 1819, and decide to keep at it. A very sound book. It will not dazzle you with new insights, and in fact is resolutely conventional, from its opening invocation of Arthur Schlesinger's Age of Jackson on; once again you will believe that history is past politics.
One of the reasons I keep on with the book is that it's so involved with the history of the press. Anyone familiar with Wilentz's other great book, Chants Democratic, will expect this. His history is deeply informed by and has a deep appreciation of the newspapers of the early republic. But he does not foreground them, and takes it for granted that they were powerful organs of influence without necessarily 'mediating' politics in any significant way. This surprises me especially because Wilentz is relying on scholarship by people like Jeff Pasley (a much better writer, by the way) that does just that. Pasley argues that it was the printer editors of the early Republic who invented popular politics. I think he stretches the point a bit, but is essentially correct. I put in another way in my own work. The press represented public opinion, which was the indispensable element of generating political legitimacy, and hence political power.
This is why people got so bent out of shape about marginal political movements from the Democratic-Republican societies in the 1790s to the abolitionist press. These were novel attempts to hijack the representation of public opinion away from its authorized mechanisms--the legislatures, in the first case, and the parties in the second. Wilentz comes tantalizingly close to making a marvelous argument about anti-abolitionism when he notes the earlier appearance of antislavery activism. The argument he could and should make is that the reaction against antislavery did not arise as a reaction against the RISE of antislavery (As Leonard Richards and Larry Ratner have it) but as an expression of the rise of the Jacksonian party system as a regulator of the representation of public opinion. Whipping up an antiabolitionist hysteria legitimated the power of the party press.
The other counterintuitive argument you might make here involves the popularity of the press. The political press of the early Republic was 'popular' not because a lot of people read it but because it stood for the people, or stood in the place of the people in relation to the transaction of power.
OK, I sound mystifying there. But ask yourself this. Why were the founding fathers so worked up about the Democratic Republican societies? It's because they knew exactly what those little groups could do. The founding fathers themselves had made their merchants' committees and mechanics' committees and non-intercourse associations and committees of correspondence, and they had a name for what their groups had done: Revolution. Simply existing as groups representing public opinion had been the first step in the Revolution. There's nothing so abstract or mystifying about that.
The title of this post comes from an old story about a debate between Leo Ribuffo and AM Schesinger on the origins of the Cold War. Schlesinger, the story goes, gets pissed off and asks Ribuffo, 'How old were you when the Truman Doctrine was announced?' and Ribuffo replied, ....
posted by jnerone at 8:37 AM
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