Republicanism and the American Gothic. Marilyn Michaud

      In 1985, the American Quarterly devoted an entire issue to the topic of republicanism and in the following year, the William and Mary Quarterly indexed the term for the first time in its ninety-four year history. The addition of the category ‘republicanism’ in these two eminent journals of history and culture reflects the intense interest and often-acrimonious debate orbiting the term since the 1960s. As one critic observed, republicanism was the one concept that could unlock the riddles of American politics and culture.¹ It represented an agreeable substitution for the increasingly pejorative term ‘national’ and a new found interest in language and ideology as an expression of the American political and cultural condition. Yet, for others, it was imbued with vagueness and contradiction:

      [t]o insist on the ‘essence’ of republicanism had the effect of driving the term republican into the realm of metaphor and uncertainty, making it vulnerable to a host of alternate and conflicting definitions. It would be available to signify almost anything so long as it was nonmonarchical. It would become rich in overtones, useable in alternate contexts: we find ourselves speaking of republican religion, republican children, republican motherhood.²

      By the 1980s republicanism had become a ‘protean concept’, a ‘vocabulary’ and an ‘ideology’, useable for a host of interpretative needs: ‘The recent discovery of republicanism as the reigning social theory of eighteenth-century America has produced a reaction among historians akin to the response of chemists to a new element. Once having been identified, it can be found everywhere.’³ The interest in republicanism represented a sea change in how historians approached revolutionary history and eighteenth-century American culture. The change took place after the Second World War and the coming of the cold war when the values and beliefs that had clarified American political and social culture were being re-evaluated and reformulated in what historians have called a ‘paradigm shift of major proportions’.⁴ Whether viewed as the rhetoric of classical political theory or an explanation of how ideas actually shaped events, the shift revealed that the concept of republicanism is ‘bound up . . . with a complex of theories about language and consciousness . . . and has surreptitiously inserted into our history the conviction that reality is socially constructed’.⁵

      In order to grasp the magnitude of this change, a short overview of the prevailing approaches to American history during the interwar and post-war years is useful. Certainly, interpretations of the American Revolution and the early national period have undergone numerous transformations from the beginning when participants began to record their impressions of what was happening to subsequent views of the revolution in the setting of British imperialism. However, in the first half of the twentieth century, ideas, or the intellectual context, of early American culture receded from view and new methodologies emerged to explain the character of the nation. From the socioeconomic theories of Carl Becker and Charles Beard to the liberal consensus model advanced by Louis Hartz, Daniel J. Boorstin and Richard Hofstadter, revolutionary historiography was decidedly anti-ideological. For Progressives, who combined Marxist and Freudian thought to understand the underlying drives and interests that determine social behaviour, the revolution and the formation of the constitution was explained primarily as a conflict between different power groups where ideas were seen as merely rhetorical disguises for some hidden interest, detached from the material conditions that produced them.⁶ In his introduction to An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, Beard claimed that ideas were ‘entities, particularities, or forces, apparently independent of all earthly considerations coming under the head of “economic”’.⁷ In this evaluation, ideas were simply rationalizations modified to suit the needs of the elite and the extravagant language used to express their interests could not be taken seriously. Claims that the Tories were all ‘wretched hirelings, and execrable parricides’; George III, the ‘tyrant of the earth’, a ‘monster in human form’; that British soldiers were a ‘mercenary licentious rabble of banditti’ did not represent reality but merely a form of calculated deception.⁸ Moreover, Americans knew very little about past republics and what they did know was ‘clearly irrelevant to the discussion of the origins of republican institutions in America’. After the restoration in 1660, republican and democratic ideas ‘passed into unpopularity and oblivion . . . not to be revived and re-popularized until the nineteenth century’.⁹ For Progressives, the ideas of the great republican authors of the English Civil War were dead until after the American Revolution. John Locke dominated American thought and the impetus to republicanism emerged with Jefferson only after confederation:

      The colonists already had textbooks of revolution in the writings of Englishmen who defended and justified the proceedings of the seventeenth century—above all, John Locke’s writings, wherein was set forth the right of citizens to overthrow government that took their money or their property without consent.¹⁰

      However, after the Second World War, this progressive interpretation of the early national period came under assault. The shift from what has been called a Beardian paradigm to a liberal interpretation occurred just as the nation moved from political isolationism to the international arena, from the rhetoric of national exceptionalism and the concentration on social movements to the asocial politics of consensus. No longer seen as a struggle between economic interests, for liberal consensus historians American history was, and always had been, dominated by class harmony centred on self-interest. Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution, Daniel Boorstin’s The Genius of American Politics (1953) and The Americans: The Colonial Experience (1958), and Richard Hofstadter’s The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington outlined the new liberal interpretation for a post-war generation. To these post-Progressives, American thought was Lockean in its marrow:‘Locke dominates American political thought, as no thinker anywhere dominates the political thought of a nation. He is a massive national cliché.’¹¹ Americans took to Locke, they argued, because American society was individualistic, ambitious, protocapitalist or, in a word, ‘liberal’.¹² The ubiquity of Locke’s theories of the sanctity of property and of self-regarding individuals voluntarily restraining their passions in the face of a multiplicity of interests helped to explain the reasonableness of the revolution. As Hofstadter wrote, Locke represented ‘the legalistic, moderate, nonregicidal, and largely nonterroristic