The Art of Democracy. Jim Cullen
compelled to take up such overlooked issues in the years following the Revolutionary War. Adams’s wife Abigail admonished him to “remember the ladies” while drafting the Declaration of Independence with Franklin and Jefferson, and Jefferson’s ambivalent writings on race in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1784) ranged from a sunny optimism that an enlightened harmony between the races was possible to a belief that African Americans were inherently inferior human beings. His recognition of the evils of slavery—which he unsuccessfully proposed abolishing on a number of occasions, including an early draft of the Declaration—also led him to “tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”1
To greater or lesser degrees, many of the Founding Fathers realized that the Revolution had unleashed powerfully egalitarian tendencies, and a number of steps, including the repression of the Shays’ and Whiskey rebellions, as well as the drafting and ratification of the Constitution itself, were measures designed to check the radical possibilities inherent in the Declaration of Independence. Adams himself went to even greater lengths to suppress any challenges to governmental authority by signing the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which provided for the deportation of foreign refugees and the imprisonment of anyone convicted of writing, printing, or uttering comments deemed to be false, scandalous, or malicious to the government. The acts were revoked by Jefferson when he assumed the presidency in 1801.
Given the legacy of discrimination that has marked U.S. life in the centuries since the Alien and Sedition Acts, it would be easy to conclude that such attacks on the principle of equality have largely been successful. Nonetheless, monumental political achievements, such as the Emancipation Proclamation, women’s suffrage, and the revocation of legal segregation, all drew intellectual sustenance from the Declaration of Independence, and it would be difficult to imagine such victories without it. At the same time, the intense resistance to these developments, and the amount of time it took to secure them, remind us that “progress” rarely moves in a straight line. Nor can it be considered inevitable.
Long before the fuller social or economic dimensions of the Declaration of Independence were on the national agenda, however, the promises it offered loomed large on the cultural horizon. Certainly, many of the inequities common in other areas of U.S. life could be found here, as well as a viciousness toward those on society’s margins. Women were second-class citizens even in the artistic realm, Native Americans were subjects rather than objects of cultural discourse, and African Americans tended to influence popular culture rather than participate directly in it. Still, even in the nineteenth century there were signs that these inequities were not monolithic. The most racist artists were often fascinated by black forms, and often drew on their expressive power. By the end of the century, African Americans were literally and figuratively beginning to take the stage on their own terms, a process that will be traced in Chapter 3.
This chapter is bound by Andrew Jackson’s rise in U.S. politics in the 1820s and the end of the Civil War. At the beginning of this period, popular culture was a fairly tentative phenomenon, but a series of transformations that affected U.S. society as a whole led to its emergence as a recognizable social force. By the end of the period, popular culture had become remarkable in its dazzling diversity.
The first societal transformation was demographic. As we have seen, one element in the development of popular culture in the eighteenth century was the steady rise in literacy among the white population, which created a large market for reading materials. The expansion of that market was greatly amplified by the burgeoning of the population, which grew from 3.9 to 9.6 million between 1790 and 1820, and to 17 million by 1840, by which time the United States had the largest reading audience ever created. The nation had about 200 newspapers in 1800, 375 in 1810, and 1,200 by 1835. And between 1820 and 1829, 128 novels were published—five times the number published between 1810 and 1820, and almost forty more than in the entire period from 1770 to 1820.2
The distribution of these materials was facilitated by dramatic improvements in the nation’s transportation system. The completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the beginnings of a national railway system a decade later created a vast infrastructure that laid the foundation for a national market. Philadelphia, and later New York, displaced Boston as the publishing capital, providing an intellectual and economic nexus for cultural products that could now reach people across the continent. Meanwhile, a series of interior cities (Cincinnati, St. Louis, and eventually Chicago in the West; Charleston, New Orleans, and eventually Atlanta in the South) served as regional cultural centers and points of connection with the rest of the country.
Changes in modes of production were also a factor in this larger revolution. Mirroring developments in other industries, new processes in typesetting, bookbinding, paper manufacturing, and mechanical reproduction made publishing a wide variety of materials—newspapers, magazines, sheet music, lithographs, books, and later, photographs—faster and cheaper than ever before.3 By the middle of the nineteenth century, more people had more access to ideas and art forms outside their immediate surroundings than at any previous point in human history.
All these gains, however, inevitably brought losses. In the case of the publishing industry, the gains meant the end of a guild system that had provided class mobility to generations of workers who had been able to prosper by moving from apprentice to journeyman to master. Technological innovation greatly simplified jobs, which made them less fulfilling—and less remunerative, as employers turned to unskilled labor that could be exploited more cheaply than journeymen who had dedicated their lives to learning their craft. Nor, of course, could unskilled laborers hope for the training that might lift them out of poverty. Moreover, the great sums of money involved in acquiring the new methods of production put them out of the reach of all but the wealthy few, who grew more wealthy still. It was during this period that a pattern emerged that shapes the course of U.S. popular culture to this day: ever larger organizations controlling the production of art for common people while depending on those same people not only to buy, but often to produce, the individual works.
In its best and worst aspects, the new order emerged first in the world of journalism.
CLASS OPERATIONS:THE BIRTH OF THE MASS PRESS
For all their differences (which at some points in their fifty-year relationship led to bitter enmity), Thomas Jefferson and John Adams shared a belief that the American Revolution had been waged to replace a corrupt established aristocracy with what they called a “natural” one. In such a world, the plowman and the professor would have equal standing before the law, and there was the chance—even the hope—that any plowman could, by dint of effort, become a professor. It was always assumed, however, that the professor, whatever his origins, would lead the plowman.
Over the course of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, this last assumption became increasingly difficult to take for granted. The rapid growth of the Union through the addition of new states, many of which lacked elites comparable to the monied, privileged Federalist faction of 1789-1800, created new democratic pressures. So did increasing agitation by reformers and working people back East who were seeking to organize the growing numbers of men who lacked the vote because they did not own property. Many of these people flocked to the banner of the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican party, which offered a vision of an agrarian republic rooted in equality. Yet even before the last dyed-in-the-wool Jeffersonian, James Monroe, left office in 1825, many Democratic-Republicans realized that their vision of a natural aristocracy was ebbing. The increasing prominence of Andrew Jackson—a (pseudo) “plowman” with no interest in becoming a “professor”—following his victory at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 and culminating in his election to the presidency in 1828, was taken by many as emblematic of a new breed of frank, colorful, decisive Americans ready to take destiny into their own hands. Jackson, a wealthy, authoritarian slaveholder, was in some ways an unlikely champion of the Little Man. But even if the movement he supposedly represented was far more limited than its supporters then and since have claimed, a bona fide reorganization of politics was taking place, one whose effects would subsequently ripple outward.
This political reorganization is clearly reflected in the transformation