The Art of Democracy. Jim Cullen
seven printings in the first year alone. Three more Crockett books had been published by 1836, the last of which claimed to be based on a diary found on his body at the Alamo. Written in homespun Southwestern dialect, these books described a series of adventures, rendered in a tone of masculine bravado that pleased male readers in city and countryside alike. “On the subject of my style, it is bad enough, in all conscience, to please critics, if that is what they are after,” Crockett explained in the first book. “They are a sort of vermin, though, that I shan’t even so much as stop to brush off.” His widely quoted maxim, which appeared on the title page and in the books’ advertising, was “I leave this rule for others, when I’m dead: Be always sure you’re right—THEN GO AHEAD.”52
In terms of the direction of popular culture, perhaps even more important than the “official” Crockett books were the approximately fifty “Crockett almanacs” published between 1835 and 1856. These capture the essence of Southwestern literary vision in two important ways. First, the humorous anecdotes show the same exaggerated, legendary quality that marked the plethora of tall tales from the region. In one such almanac, Crockett is asked by Andrew Jackson to wrestle a comet. “I was appointed by the President to stand on the Alleghany [sic] Mountains and wring the comet’s tail off,” he relates with deadpan surrealism. “I did so, but got my hands most shockingly burnt, and the hair singed off my head, so that I was as bald as a trencher. I div right into the Waybosh river, and thus saved my best stone blue coat and grass green small clothes.”53 In such tales of superhuman exploits, Crockett joined a pantheon of heroes that emerged in the nineteenth century, including riverboatman Mike Fink, his sidekick Sal Fink, and the black railroad worker John Henry, mightier than the machine.54
A second important dimension of the Southwestern narrative style was its reliance on vivid and violent imagery. When Crockett’s uncle gets married, he presents his beloved with two eyes he has gouged. She dries them out, makes earrings out of them, and wears them to church. Sal Fink escapes from the stake to which she was bound by fifty Indians and then ties her captors together by their heels. Crockett, for his part, deals with a swindling squatter by forcing him to eat pig dung. Such violence and exaggeration, which crossed gender and race lines, can be understood in a number of ways: as a commentary on the real crudity and danger of frontier life; as a form of compensation for a sense of cultural insecurity; or as an assault on the niceties of respectable opinion. Whatever the case, the power and appeal of this imagery went far beyond the region of its origin (indeed, its spread depended on Eastern publishing houses). It could be seen in the horror stories of Edgar Allan Poe and the often bizarre images in some of Herman Melville’s work. Even Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous depiction of the artist as a “transparent eyeball” was an adaptation of the imagery common to a Crockett almanac.55
Regional humor and storytelling were just two of the elements in the antebellum popular cultural matrix. A third was the blizzard of reform literature that blanketed the country in the first half of the nineteenth century. In one sense, reform had little impact on many forms of popular culture because much of it came from the emerging middle class and was directed at working people, as a kind of social control. Efforts to stop the consumption of alcohol (the first American “Just Say No” campaign was the temperance movement of the early nineteenth century), police public morals, and enforce religious piety were often aimed at the people who went to the theater or spent time sampling the amusements of the Bowery. At the same time, however, many reforms—antislavery and women’s rights, to name two examples—had at least some relevance to those outside the middle class, not least because in many cases the problems addressed by reformers were very real. For instance, one temperance group, the Washingtonians, were themselves reformed alcoholics, and one of the most popular plays of the period was William Henry Smith’s The Drunkard (1844), in which an upright man is lured into alcoholism and his family blackmailed by an evil lawyer. This motif would recur in T.S. Arthur’s Washingtonian-influenced novel Ten Nights in a Barroom (1854), which later became The Drunkard of the late nineteenth century (see Chapter 3).56
The wellspring of antebellum reform was a religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening. Like the First Great Awakening that surged through New England and the middle colonies in the 1730’s and 40’s, the Second Great Awakening was a powerful evangelical movement that stressed personal power and responsibility Central to any transformation. was the concept of perfectibility, whereby individuals could identify and destroy evil within themselves and thus collectively usher in a paradise on earth before, not after, the return of Christ. Rejecting the more formal and intellectual foundations of established religions, the key institution of the Awakening was the revival meeting, at which people gathered from far and wide to worship, as well as to interact in social and even commercial ways.57
Beginning in the South and West in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and especially affecting poor black and white communities, the Second Great Awakening fanned out across the country over the first half of the century. Along the way, it became diffused and secularized. Personal perfectibility increasingly moved into the realm of social perfectibility, and moral suasion gradually took on more aggressively political dimensions. The classic case in point is antislavery agitation, which moved from churches to secular organizations and eventually into the political parties. By the 1850s, the religious impulse remained strong, but it joined with a patchwork quilt of movements that ranged from bourgeois attempts to close working-class saloons to proto-socialist Utopian communities that emphasized communitarian values in work and even sex.58
Such increasingly political reform projects depended on proselytizers. Some were preachers, who in African-American communities adopted a dramatic style that would have an incalculable influence on future black culture, especially music. In the emerging middle class, there arose the institution of the lecture circuit, which created opportunities for former clerics like Emerson to make a living by giving speeches and catering to the mania for self-improvement among the upwardly mobile. A third form of transmission was written: small, cheap pamphlets that exploited the same possibilities tapped by newspapers in the Jacksonian era.
The most prolific publisher of such pamphlets—or, for that matter, any printed material at the time—was the American Tract Society. Tract publications were distributed by colporteurs, or missionary salesmen, and at commercial outlets. By the 1850s, the ATS had published over 500 tracts, and its smallest printing was 6,000 copies. The largest, “Quench Not the Spirit,” numbered almost 1 million. The ATS was only one of a number of tract publishers, and spiritually oriented material was only one component in a field that included conduct manuals, self-help books, and sociopolitical exposes.59
This rich world of printed matter provided the backdrop for the emergence of one of the most important popular cultural forms of the nineteenth century: the dime novel. Perhaps the best known were the Westerns that were published in the decades after the Civil War (see Chapter 3), but these cheaply made booklets, usually bound in yellow covers, first emerged in the 1840s. They represented only one of the forms this highly sensational fiction took. Another common vehicle was the story paper, which serialized novels before their publication in dime-novel format. The most famous story paper was the New York Ledger, which was founded by Robert Bonner, a Scotch-Irish immigrant who began as a printing apprentice and built a newspaper empire. In the early 1850s, he bought an old mercantile paper and transformed it by publishing fiction, verse, and moral essays. Bonner scored an editorial and publicity coup in 1855 when he persuaded Sara Willis Parton—a.k.a. Fanny Fern—to write a regular column for the Ledger (see below). At its peak, the paper had a circulation of 400,000, the largest of any periodical in the country.60
A CLOSER LOOK: The Art and Life of Fanny Fern
The boardinghouse was shopworn and oppressive, and Ruth Hall was faint with hunger. Ever since her husband had died the previous winter, leaving her with two daughters to raise, her financial straits had become increasingly desperate. There were no jobs for schoolteachers, sewing did not pay enough to support the children,