A Republic of Men. Mark E. Kann
and directs in the future these things shall be . . . left to be executed by proper authority.”53 Leaders worried that most men recognized no proper authority.
How could men reconcile democratic desire and political authority? Ideally, men showed self-restraint in the exercise of liberty and voluntarily obeyed their chosen leaders. However, John Adams felt that patriots’ demands for liberty were so excessive that self-restraint and obedience were doubtful. In 1776, he used Abigail’s plea to remember the ladies as an occasion to express his fear that Americans’ revolutionary claims jeopardized all authority: “We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bonds of government everywhere; that children and apprentices were disobedient; that schools and colleges were grown turbulent; that Indians slighted their guardians, and Negroes grew insolent to their masters.” Decades later, Adams argued that claims to liberty had become so extreme that men refused to defer to superior authority or even recognize their superiors. “Some years ago,” he explained, “a writer unfortunately made use of the term better sort. Instantly, a popular clamor was raised and an odium excited which remains to this day to such a degree that no man dares to employ that expression at the bar, in conversation, in a newspaper, or pamphlet, no, nor in the pulpit.”54 Critics lambasted Adams for saying aloud what many leaders quietly believed: American men were too disorderly to be trusted with liberty unless they learned to temper democratic passions and defer to the better sort.
American intellectuals were brilliant at making abstract distinctions between liberty and license to persuade men to temper passion and defer to authority. But their philosophical analyses had a little impact on men’s willingness to exercise self-restraint or obey government. Abstract political language had become so slippery that it was as easily used against as in favor of authority. Terence Ball, J. G. A. Pocock, and Joyce Appleby point out that concepts such as “liberty” and “equality” or “republic” and “democracy” were contested, revised, and recoined during the founding era. Most intellectuals did little to clarify their language. They were part of what Jay Fliegelman identifies as an “elocutionary revolution” that encouraged speakers and writers to de-emphasize the clarity, logic, and evidence that appealed to men’s minds and instead to emphasize the theatricality, metaphor, imagery, myth, and body language that moved men’s passions. Political leaders seeking to counteract democratic disorders needed to employ language and concepts that appealed to men’s passions, indeed, to their very identities as males.55
The Politics of Coercion and Consent
The American founders encompassed several generations of thinkers, speakers, writers, ministers, activists, soldiers, and statesmen who conceived and contributed to the struggle for independence and the creation of the Republic. They included local and national political elites who opposed the old regime and constructed new ones. Though a diverse lot, the founders shared an enduring and sometimes obsessive fear that disorderly men would generate chaos in society, endanger hard-won liberty, and imperil the Republic. They hoped to fend off democratic disorders by stabilizing gender relations and by promoting hegemonic norms to stigmatize disorderly men and reward stable men.
First, the founders stabilized gender relations by depoliticizing opposition between men and women and by reinforcing the ideal of the traditional patriarch. They mostly restricted gender turbulence to the cultural sphere and thereby fostered fraternal politics. They regularly discussed and debated men’s liberty, equality, citizenship, and leadership without mentioning women; they often heaped honors on patriotic men who fought the Revolution without giving much recognition to patriotic women who participated in it. When the war ended, “Women disappeared from the public eye.”56 Thereafter, the founders framed a new republic without considering women’s place in it or experiencing much pressure to question women’s exclusion from it. They could perpetuate women’s subordination because republican and liberal ideology invited them to do so, male misogyny and uncertainty gave them an incentive to do so, and their political priorities urged them to do so.
Republican ideology equated absolute kingship with absolute corruption. Republican thinkers were much less critical of family patriarchs, whose power was ostensibly limited by law and softened by affection. As such, their criticism of monarchy did not necessarily apply to domestic patriarchy. Liberal ideology widened the chasm between politics and family life by separating public and paternal power. It made the language of liberty and equality appropriate for the public sphere but allowed a traditional idiom of natural hierarchy to persist in the domestic sphere. The founders took advantage of these ideological openings to defy political tyranny and depoliticize men’s authority in their families. Revolutionaries fought against monarchy, not family patriarchy. Legislators disputed aristocratic laws, not patriarchal laws. Governors forfeited royal prerogative over men, but fathers and husbands maintained patriarchal prerogative over women’s bodies, behavior, and property. The result was that misogynists remained free to vent patriarchal rage against women, and ambivalent males were cued to resolve uncertainties about manhood in favor of the traditional patriarch, who retained the coercive authority “to intimidate, not to accommodate” women.57
Simultaneously, the founders’ political priorities urged them to keep women off the public agenda. Most founders feared that disorderly men threatened to destroy liberty by unleashing the twin evils of mob anarchy and demagogic tyranny. Accordingly, they focused much of their intellectual and political energy on encouraging men to defend liberty and show great restraint when exercising it. The founders would have had to compromise their focus on male mobilization and quiescence to debate women’s rights or deal with prejudices regarding public women. Politicizing gender certainly would have meant deepening male discontents, while admitting women to political discourse would have invited the sexual improprieties and political corruption often associated with the “public woman.”58 The founders focused on restoring order among men; they relied on still powerful family patriarchs to subdue disorderly women.
Historical possibilities for democratizing family life did not translate into enhanced prospects for political equality. Women were mostly eliminated from political discourse and politics—but they were not forgotten. Some founders sensed that women’s exclusion fortified fraternal unity among otherwise disorderly males. Carole Pateman explains that men’s monopoly of citizenship and leadership provided them “a common interest as men” in sharing power over women. Meanwhile, most founders believed that men were more apt to defend liberty and exercise it with self-restraint when courting, betrothed, or wed to respectable women. Noah Webster calculated that a man’s best defense against “a dissipated life” was a fondness for “ladies of character.”59 In sum, the founders appealed to men’s patriarchal interests and fraternal instincts by reaffirming their coercive power over women, reinforcing women’s exclusion from politics, and recruiting virtuous women to encourage men’s good behavior.
Second, the founders enlisted Christian morality, republican virtue, liberal self-interest, and public education along with women’s benign influence in the cause of taming men’s passions, encouraging male responsibility, ensuring their orderly conduct, and promoting mass compliance to legitimate authority. They also framed innovative political institutions to neutralize men’s passions and cushion the consequences of their disorderly conduct. And like most elites, the founders sought to establish hegemony and secure stability by soliciting men’s consent and quiescence.
Historically, Antonio Gramsci observes, elites not only “request” consent but “educate it.” They establish hegemony by raising “the great mass of the population to a particular cultural and moral level.” They use cultural norms to perform “a positive educative function” by promoting ways of thinking, speaking, and acting conducive to mass compliance; and they operate coercive institutions to discharge “a negative educative function” by penalizing subversive ideas, words, and deeds. Hegemony is “protected by the armor of coercion.” Elites’ attempt to establish hegemony is not always a self-conscious, systematic effort to make culture function as an instrument of mass subordination. Raymond Williams suggests that hegemony is more of “a lived, social process” in which elites organize the various and shifting “meanings and values” that saturate people’s lives. Hegemony is never static because it is continually