Three Strikes.

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Poet's Coroner

Mr. Peperium

 

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The St. Louis public library is a wondrous thing. With only two exceptions so far, books I run across in my rambles at Amazon.com are in the library’s online catalog, ready to be reserved with a click and picked up a few days later. This gives me two distinct advantages over all you history geeks who are less happily located. First, for my 1% city earnings tax I get access to the very best new stuff (and overdue fines in this burg are almost non-existent). Second, I avoid paying top dollar for those regrettable works, the fist six pages of which read so deceptively well on Amazon.com.

Unfortunately, I failed to peruse the first six pages of T. H. Breen’s The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. Yes, I know, I should have known better. The title alone is redolent of the rarified atmosphere of the faculty lounge. But my recent reading has helped me understand more deeply just how important economics was—not just taxes but trade, industry, agriculture, the whole shebang—in driving the colonies to their break with England. Charles McLean Andrews’s essays, collected and published under the title The Colonial Background of the American Revolution, make a very good case for that break happening in large part because, after 1763, the thirteen plantations that were part of Britain’s mercantilist system suddenly became thirteen colonies in a worldwide British Empire. So when, based on my past searches, Amazon.com burped up Marketplace of Revolution, I figured it was worth a walk at lunchtime to the Central Express branch.

At least I can take comfort in the fact that the walk did me some good. Like someone you’re meeting for the first time, a new book gives off definite signs. Is this is the start of a beautiful friendship, or just one of those awkward acquaintanceships that make you double-check Caller ID before picking up? In the case of Marketplace of Revolution, the signs were bad from the beginning.

And when I say “from the beginning” I really mean “even before the beginning”. In the first paragraph of the Introduction, we’re told of a gallery in the basement of a former 19^th Century hospital at Williamsburg, Virginia. It houses a collection of 18^th Century British manufactured goods that were imported into the colonies. According to Breen, “These are not the things that usually draw modern visitors to Williamsburg. Such people seem to prefer spending their time among the craftsmen who tell them how a revolutionary generation made various household items such as furniture and candles. Perhaps these products strike tourists as more authentic, or as more American, than do the imported articles displayed in the Wallace Gallery.”

Is it just me, or do you get the same aroma of condescension that hit my mental nostrils? There is a world of loathing compressed into that “Such people”. “[S]eem to prefer” drips with an almost aristocratic disdain for the common herd and our fathomless idiocies. And as for “more authentic…more American” he may as well come right out, call us Bitter Clingers and be done with it.

Actually, the “tourists” he belittles are normal, everyday people trying to give their kids and themselves a glimpse of their nation’s past. If the emphasis of the exhibits is wrong, if the truly illuminating artifacts are hidden in a basement, isn’t that the fault of the folks who run Colonial Williamsburg?

Strike One.

On the next page of the Introduction (yes, we’re still lingering on the veranda of this intellectual house of horrors) we encounter a teapot. Round, with a handle and spout that seem to have been modeled to resemble tree branches, its side proclaims in large letters, “No Stamp Act”. You remember. It’s in dozens of books on our Revolution. What I didn’t know (and, to be fair, I now do know thanks to Professor Breen) is that this teapot was manufactured in England. Yes, some canny entrepreneur saw the unrest across the sea and, since the automobile was still some 150 years in the future, made the next best thing to a bumper sticker. I sincerely hope he cleaned up big. (And the irony of an anti-Stamp Act slogan on a teapot is just too, well, ironic.

Unfortunately, the pleasure of this discovery is quickly overshadowed by Professor Breen’s need to show us he’s one of the Elect. This teapot, he intones, reminds “those who reflect on such matters today that common goods once spoke to power.”

This is a double whammy, and should really count for two strikes. After all, here again we are treated to the towering contempt of the More Aware and Highly Educated. Professor Breen (and, by extension, you the reader) are clearly in that rarified class, that exclusive club that spends its time thinking about the stuff that matters. It’s the NPR effect in printed form. Then we have “speaking truth to power”, a phrase I last heard when Whoopi Goldberg and a bunch of other Hollywood elites gathered to show how courageous they were by bashing President Bush and then taking off in limos for their gated mansions. (Talk about common goods speaking to power…)

Strike Two.

And in case you think I’m being overly sensitive, here’s the windup for the final pitch.

In section One of the Introduction (yes, until now we were still in the preamble to the Introduction) Breen begins to opine about what the Revolution can teach us. One lesson is aimed at, “a current generation which seems uncertain of its ability to construct meaningful political solidarities.” From the Revolutionary generation, according to Breen, this misguided generation can “learn something valuable about overcoming the divisions that compromise our own ability to cooperate effectively for the general political welfare, however defined.”

Ok, let’s unpack this.

First, political solidarities, if constructed, are by definition artificial. They are theoretical models. Paper palaces. Utopias. They are…the product of faculty lounges. Real, workaday people recognizing and following their own best interests—that is the spontaneous brick and mortar of any real political solidarity. One example is, of course, (are you sitting down, professor?) the Tea Party. But I’m betting that’s not the type of solidarity of which he approves, let alone recognizes.

Then we encounter another predictable, shopworn gambit: handwringing about people not getting along. We need to “overcome divisions” and “cooperate effectively”, all for the “general political welfare”. Then comes the really disingenuous part: “however defined”.

Memo to Professor Breen: it is by debating the general political welfare that that welfare is defined—and in that process divisions naturally, inevitably arise. Without those divisions we are either in Paradise (which I doubt) or a Worker’s Paradise (which I fear). I’m sure you have your definition of the general welfare and I’m pretty certain it doesn’t tally with mine. After all, you’re using the same mendacious rhetoric I heard in the Episcopal Church and still hear from the Democratic Party whenever they want to push an agenda no one really wants (“Can’t we all just get along?”). There is no “however” to your definition of the way things should be. Nor is there for mine. As our current president was once so fond of lecturing us, that’s why we have elections.

Strike Three.

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Comments

[S. Petersen]

Excellent post. Academic writing is poison. Most of the sensible writing done by academics is outside of the recognized publications of their various fields. And, the sensible writers are salted around at random--one of the best is at some no-name jr. college in LA.
(Incidently, we had here in Michigan a system just as effective as your St. Louis library--just about any book can be obtained by computer request from the aggregate state-wide libraries' holdings. But, rather than cut unionized bureaucrats' salaries or defund the highway commisars' making messy cross-hatching down the middle of all the paved 2-lanes, they cut down the interlibrary loan system.)

[Mr. P]

Thank you very much. It was a pleasure geting that stuff of the diaphragm. Yes, academics should be spelled "ack!-ademics!" Or possibly "hackademics". Like junk scientists, the conclusion is reached before the evidence is sifted, if it ever is.

One of my favorite historians, John Ferling, teaches at the University (or College) of Western Georgia (or someplace like that). Among other works, his comparative history of Jefferson, Adams and Washington, "Setting the World Ablaze", is a revelation. I admit I may like him because he agrees with my prejudices (on the whole pro-Adams and anti-Jefferson). Also there is Gordon Wood (emeritus at Brown, so he can say what he really thinks).

As far as the Michigan Library system, I, too have experienced it. My problem was that it only allowed two weeks for any one book. An impediment to any enjoyment when you've just received a 700-page tome, have a job, two kids and a marriage. Probably made that rule so those messy lines could be on the bike paths, too.

[MOTUS]

Excellent disassembly of the tedious and irrelevant class, Mr. P. Unfortunately, since Prof Breen and his ilk are card carrying members of the state sponsored propaganda squad, they aren’t nearly as irrelevant as they should be.

[Mr. P]

Thank you, MOTUS. And just when I'd packed up my tool box and put it back on the shelf in the garage, along comes Robert V. Remini.

His latest is entitled, "At the Edge of the Precipice: Henry Clay and the Compromise that Saved the Union". It's about, if you haven't already guessed, the Compromise of 1850. At 150 pages, its a good overview of the story--sometimes a little too much of an overview, as when Remini comments that "in this democratic age" both Clay and Webster were "misfits . They really belonged with generations that had gone by. Sadly, the electorate seemed to know this." One Democratic Senator said to Webster, "How unfortunate for the Country that you adopted opinions adverse to the democracy! had you not, you would have been President!"

Exactly what these opinions were or to what generation they belonged ("generations gone by" doesn't necessarily mean the Founders)is never stated. Later Calhoun observes that the original Federal Republic had since degenerated into "a great national consolidated Democracy." That's a hint, but nothing more.

Still, it's a good primer for a period I've gown out of touch with of late. But again, the real problems lay in the Preface.

Like with Breen, the period under discussion is held up as a great example to our times. We face, according to Remini, "myriad problems...that defy easy solution, and that will, in all likelihood, require both major political parties to agree to compromise their differences." (Tell that to the man who said "I won".) Then as if we didn't know, Remini enumerates those problems: "severe economic problems that threaten to pitch the nation into a deep recession [this was written, mind you, just last year]...health care, energy, immigration, and social concerns such as abortion and gay marriage..."

Ok, let's just take abortion. Like slavery, a moral evil. How do we compromise with it? Only permit every other abortion to be performed? How do you picture the forces behind abortion compromising? Exactly.

Remini's thesis is the usual one about 1850--that the Great Compromise put off the Civil War for 10 years, until the North had Lincoln and was good and ready to win it. Which is, of course, sheer speculation. In the meantime, how many more families were torn apart, how many lives embittered, how many beatings and deaths sanctioned by law?

[Robbo]

So the Revolutionary Generation can teach us something valuable about "overcoming the divisions that compromise our own ability to cooperate effectively for the general political welfare, however defined?”

Um, does he mean that we ought to paper over our deepest divisions with emergency stop-gap expedients and let the next generation fight a civil war over them? (Oh, that's right...this is what we're doing about Entitlement Reform.)

And, of course, in the spirit of ye goode olde days of the Constitutional Convention, perhaps we should only allow two out of every three abortions.

[Old Dominion Tory]

A superbly executed dismantling of a bit of arrant snobbery, Mr. Peperium.
Unity usually is the fetish of totalitarians. Everyone stands united, loyal to the leader or the party. Those who aren't . . . well . . .
In democratic systems, expressions of a desire for unity usually are expressions of a desire for your opponents to shut up.

[Mr. P]

You're probably right, Robbo. When I suggested permitting only one out of every two abortions as a fitting compromise, I knew I was being too optimistic. As ODT points out, unity, compromise, shared suffering, it's all another way of saying shut up these days.

Professor Breen doesn't seem to realize that with all their splendid ability to form political solidarities that overcome divisions, the colonists still went to war--eight years of it--with their cousins across the sea.

Remini doesn't seem to realize that compromise just kicks the can down the road, and that perhaps the war wouldn't have been as bloody if it had taken place 10 years before 1860. In 1850 Scott was still active, for example, fresh from a campaign in Mexico which the Duke of Wellington himself admired. If the north was less prepared, the south was as well. I finished the book today and must say I have seldom come across a better (or rather, worse) example of history being written backwards. As he runs on to the election of Lincoln and the resulting secession of South Carolina, Remini ends the book with a wistful, "If only Henry Clay had been alive."

Really. Do you really think that, after Kansas and Nebraska had become a battlefield, Harper's Ferry and Lincoln's election, Clay could have worked something out? How would the south have been accommodated with a man in the White House who openly opposed the extension of slavery into the territories?

Like War on the Run, that book about Rodgers, Remini became a captive of his subject.

[Andrew Cusack]

"the colonists still went to war--eight years of it--with their cousins across the sea."

And their neighbours across the street, don't forget.

[Old Dominion Tory]

The trouble with such wishful thinking (and that's what it is) is that the country in 1860 was vastly different than it was in 1850. Politically, the Whigs were dead, the Democrats increasingly fractured, the secessionists even more emboldened (or frightened), and the politics of the North was dominated by a political party that had its roots in "free soil" politics.
Moreover, many in the North were heartily tired of the ever-heightening demands of many of the fire-eaters. Some, yes, would have been happy to see them go; others, however, were tired of accommodation.