H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-SHEAR@h-net.msu.edu (October, 1997)
Michael Durey. _Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American Republic_. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997. xi + 425 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-7006-0823-0.
Reviewed for H-SHEAR by Paul K. Longmore <longmore@sfsu.edu>, San Francisco State University
America's First Immigrant Radicals
In this thoroughly researched study, Michael Durey examines the activities of late-18th century English (and Welsh), Scottish, Scotch-Irish and Irish radicals within the British Isles. He traces the subsequent exile of 219 of them to America between 1784 and 1806. Finally, he reports the political engagements and impact of some of those refugees in the early republic.
Durey's subjects are far from being a monolithic group. Instead, they constitute a category linked primarily by fierce alienation from the imperial Britain of their day and by the experience of exile. Otherwise, they were diverse in ethnicity, religion, and even politics. In their particular, British geographical locales, they opposed what they perceived as the loss of traditional liberties, whether English rights or Scottish, Scotch-Irish or Irish self-determination. In ideology, many took Thomas Paine, with his vehement denunciation of hereditary hierarchy, as their political mentor. Most were also strongly influenced by outsider religious views, usually dissenting Protestantism, whether Presbyterian or Unitarian or sectarian, but for some of the Irish, Roman Catholicism. And a large percentage were professionals, merchants, or artisans, who may have suffered from blocked opportunities toward upward mobility.
In his first three chapters, Durey recounts the political involvements and occasional conspiratorial plottings of, in turn, the English, Scottish, and Irish radicals. That tripartite geographical division may lead readers who are not deeply versed in British political history to lump these dissidents together by country. In fact, Durey shows that there were many variations and divisions within each region. Covering all of the British Isles and tracing the doings of dozens of historical actors, these chapters--almost half the book--offer a richly, sometimes bewilderingly, detailed narrative of late-18th century British radicalism.
Thwarted and threatened by the authorities, many dissidents found themselves sentenced to exile--or they pragmatically escaped into it to avoid prison or the gibbet. Durey describes the several waves of political refugees (Chapter 4: "Into Exile"), noting the significance for their personal and political futures of the timing of their departures from the British Isles and of their arrivals in the United States. Nearly all were young adults when they made the transatlantic crossing, but the conditions they left or met varied, and as they aged in exile many of them modified their views and endeavors. Again they were not a monolithic group. As with all immigrants, these transplants endured the hardships of the passage (Chapter 4) and of adjustment to the new land (Chapter 5: "Land of Opportunity?"). At home, they had looked to republican America as a model. Some succeded here. Some failed. A few eventually returned home. Many found themselves disappointed with a society that fell short of their expectations. The America they had imagined was not the America in which they had to live.
The vast majority of the exiled radicals seem to have withdrawn from public affairs to try to live quietly. Only about one-fifth continued their political activism in the young republic. It is this latter group, the subject of Durey's final two chapters, who will perhaps be of greatest interest to readers of this list.
Many of the refugees who involved themselves in American politics arrived with considerable experience in publishing and radical journalism. Skilled polemicists, they applied their talents to public issues from the mid-1780's through the teens of the next century. As newspaper writers and editors, book publishers and sellers, printers and translators, they were centrally positioned to help transform the public discourse of the new nation, democratizing it, vulgarizing it, making it accessible to an ever more-literate public, an ever-widening electorate. Their role in democratizing the American press helped bring to an end elitist Federalist domination of public sources of information.
In both style and substance, the radical journalists assaulted the pretensions of the gentlemen who expected to govern the republic. The most shocking of their attacks on elitism was their relentless iconoclasm against President George Washington, a figure who had hitherto remained virtually sacrosanct. Hostile to anything that smacked of British monarchy, the exiled radicals sought to discredit Federalist exploitation of the great man's reputation and public veneration of him. In the process, they pulverized his image in a way that disturbed many native-born Americans but helped delegitimize explicit elitism in American politics.
The exiles' anti-elitism reflected their political ideology. Egalitarians (at least initially), they advocated limited government, low taxes, and participatory democracy. Importing these radical British political principles with them, they found like-minded allies and a congenial home in the radical wing of the Republican Party. Indeed, they played a key role in founding and building the party and in promoting the perspective of its radically democratic contingent. They were also instrumental in bringing about the presidential election of their political hero, Thomas Jefferson, and in producing the Revolution of 1800.
The trouble was that while Jefferson's heart may have beat in time with the radicals' rhetoric, his head told him to act pragmatically in order to hold the wings of the Republican Party together and to reach out to moderate Federalists. The relationship of the exiles to Jefferson's administration presented two historical ironies. Some of them accused moderates such as James Madison of misleading the President or misrepresenting his views and implementing policies that they favored but that he opposed. This spin on events reprised the pre-Revolutionary radicals' claim that George III's ministers had deceived the king and distorted or violated his true sentiments. And in the end, the more radical of the exiles lost influence within the administration they had been pivotal in electing, as they sank into political irrelevancy.
But here again one must note that the exiles did not constitute a unitary group. Some, such as James Thomson Callender, held fast to their radical beliefs and fierce tactics and ended up as, in effect, internal political exiles, shut out of American politics just as they had earlier been excluded from British. Meanwhile, others, such as Mathew Carey, tempered their views and methods, fit into the moderate wing of the Republican Party and the mainstream of U.S. politics, and established themselves as prosperous citizens, the sort of successful immigrants American mythology has always elevated as models for later arrivals and vindicators of the promised land. In one other important and ironic respect, the politically active exiles divided. Many in the southern states became slaveholders and defended slavery; those farther north continued to oppose slavery as they had done before going into exile.
Durey's exiles stand as the first instance of what would become a pattern in American political history: A group of immigrants brought with them politically radical "European" ideas and militantly injected themselves, their perspectives, and their tactics into American politics and reform movements. That in turn provoked nativist hostility against what was condemned as their introduction of un-American beliefs. Critics not only denounced the exiles' temerity in telling native-born American what to think, they also excoriated them as enemies of American values and institutions, ultimately attempting to repress them through the Alien and Sedition Acts. All of this presaged the activism of later political transplants and reactions to them. Despite nativist venom and legal persecution, these first immigrant radicals, Durey shows us, forever changed the style and substance of American politics.
Reflections
Paul Longmore's kindly review of _Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American Republic_ has inspired me to offer some reflections on the book, a year after I finished writing it. In retrospect, indeed at the time also, it was not an easy book to write. I had made two decisions at the outset: that I would do my best to incorporate as many of the radical exiles in the text as possible; and that the exiles' experiences in their homelands were as important to an understanding of their roles and importance as their experiences after emigration. The first decision was based on my belief that the best history is that which is closely tied to the lives, experiences and beliefs of individuals in the past. It would have been easy to lump all 219 together as an undifferentiated mass, and write about "the radicals" doing this, or believing that. But as Paul Longmore points out, the exiles, although having certain very broad common characteristics, were ultimately a very varied lot. But trying to keep an eye on so many people at once was at times a struggle. Some, of course, I could find very little about; others had left behind large amounts of evidence. Eventually, the sources prevailed; key figures in the American environment, such as William Duane, James Thomson Callender and Thomas Addis Emmet, inevitably loomed large, although in their activities in America they were not truly representative of the exiles as a whole. In the writing of history, equality is impossible!
Having recognised the importance of the exiles' lives in Britain and Ireland, I was aware that the structure of the book had to be balanced with that in mind: approximately half on the period before exile and a half after it, with a fulcrum chapter on the process of emigration. The danger here was that the book might fall between two readerships: those interested in British and Irish history; and those interested in American history. Certainly, I expect most of the reviews to focus on one or other half of the book. Nevertheless, I still believe that this was the correct decision to take. How the exiles viewed the United States, what they hoped to do there, and how they responded to the reality of the new republic were significantly influenced by their experiences in the radical movements in Britain and Ireland. Indeed, even the timing of their exile had a significant impact on the ways they viewed the United States, for attitudes to foreigners in America fluctuated dramatically between 1793 and 1806.
Dealing with the exiles in the United States was fairly straightforward, once I had decided what to leave out. One long chapter on the exiles' lives in the asylum of liberty, and two chapters on the political achievements (divided logically at Jefferon's first presidential victory) covered most things I wanted to say, although I did eventually leave out some interesting topics. I could have said much more about their wideranging and fruitful views on political economy and about Jefferson's relations with those exiles who became newspaper editors and pamphleteers. But both of these subjects would have concentrated on a fairly small proportion of the exiles, who already were prominent in the two political chapters. I was always conscious of my desire to keep the exiles in balance within the manuscript (having already written a book on Callender, I had trouble keeping him out the limelight!). One subject I now regret omitting was the response of a dozen or so exiles to the Burr conspiracy of 1805-1807. The exiles were divided in their responses. Some, such as Harman Blennerhassett and a number of obscure Irish emigrants, were heavily involved in Burr's expedition to the west; others--such as Duane, James Cheetham and, perhaps equivocally, John Wood--were prominent in publicizing Burr's threat to the union through their newspapers. The Burr conspiracy is a good example of how the exiles divided ever further as they settled into American society. I eventually left out this episode for the rather prosaic reason that I could not obtain a copy of John Wood's crucial newspaper, the Western World.
I do not think I have said the last word on the exiles in the United States and I look forward to David Wilson's book on the United Irishmen in America, due out early next year. What happened to the sort of democratic radicalism that Duane et. al espoused during the presidencies of Jefferson and Madison? Being Painite in inspiration, did it founder with Paine's reputation in America, or did it meander on underground to resurface in the 1830s (the socialist aspect of this stream of political thought has been, in my view, greatly exaggerated)? There surely must be more to say about the exiles' divided response to slavery. If they can ever be accused of hypocrisy, it must be in reference to this topic, given the role that antislavery sentiment played in radical politics in Britain and, to a lesser extent, Ireland, in the 1790s. But then, slavery was an issue that led to similarly strange positions among libertarian Americans too in this era. Finally, Jefferson. He was happy to use their ferocious literary skills before he obtained the presidency, but hastened to distance himself from the most radical of them after 1800. He had, and played, favourites among the exiles, when for all of them (bar a small handful) he had been an icon. The presence of the exiles in America helped to bring out the multifaceted features of Jefferson's political character. In one sense, they highlight what America lost when Jefferson sought the support of the moderate Federalists after 1800: a democratic Painite radicalism that was forever lost to the American political mainstream.
Michael Durey
Murdoch University
mdurey@central.murdoch.edu.au
[Dr. Longmore thought it best to let the review stand with no follow-up reply from him.--Bruce]
I enjoyed reading both Paul Longmore's review of Transatlantic Radicals and the response by Michael Durey: I have been looking forward to reading this book ever since Durey's essay on 'Thomas Paine's Apostles' appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly.
I appreciate that the availability of sources and an interest in political radicalism encouraged Durey to focus on the one-fifth of exiles who continued as active political radicals in the United States. Yet I remain intrigued by the fact that the vast majority withdrew from public life and radical politics. This raises all sorts of interesting questions. For example:
I'm afraid that I do not have answers to these questions, but would instead like to see if others have any ideas.
cheers, Simon
Simon P. Newman
Director, American Studies, Modern History
2 University Gardens
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ
Telephone 0141-330-3585 (fax 0141-330-5000)
I don't know if I'm meant to respond before anyone else has had their say, but I'd like to answer Simon Newman's three queries as best I can.
Re radicalism rooted in local issues and experience: the answer is both yes and no!! Local issues were very important in Britain and Ireland, but they acted to focus larger ideological issues for many radicals. In the U.S, many radicals saw their vision existing in reality. There weren't the local issues to reignite their radicalism. That was especially the case for those arriving after Jefferson's victory in 1800. Those who arrived earlier did find "local" issues (mainly Hamilton's policies) and they tended to be the ones who became involved in American politics (even after 1800). On a more mundane level, emigration was a traumatic event for most (if not all) and they had livings to earn, new networks to create etc. All this took time and energy. Realistically, only those whose work was in the media could afford to be political activists. One can see the process at work with the English Unitarians (Priestley's followers mainly). They reknit their former networks through the church; played little or no political role while they sorted out their working and private lives (n.b. even Priestley and Thomas Cooper tried to keep out of politics for several years); and then found themselves in Jeffersonian America, which suited them very nicely (except, perhaps, the ideologically restless Cooper). For the Irish, one can see a similar pattern. In both Pennsylvania and New York they were mainly Jeffersonian-Republican voting fodder, although many kept up their views re Ireland (something which seems not to have changed much over the years!).
The old radicalism of the British Isles could appear irrelevant in the U.S because of Jefferson. For most, he represented the ideal republicanism. It is thus not a case of the end of ideology; rather, it was their ideology triumphant. In my book, I spend a few pages trying to show how close Jefferson and Paine were in their political thought and outlook. If one can accept that, then it was no big problem for British Painite radicals to become Jeffersonian Republicans. Only those who read both Paine and Jefferson as very advanced radicals were disappointed after 1800. For the rest, well, Philadelphia wasn't Dublin or New York London, but then Jefferson wasn't Pitt or George III!
Yes, in one sense Britain did win. The government's main objective was to get rid of the radicals, preferably as far away as possible. I am currently working on what happened to the Irish rebels after 1798. I have a file at the moment of 3000 Irish rebels who went through the government's hands in this period. Most were sent to the West Indies in the condemned regiments; 350 were sent to Prussia; about 350-400 were sent to Botany Bay; hundreds went to the U.S. But out of sight was not really out of mind.
The survivors in the West Indies were a nuisance; those in Prussia fought against Napoleon at Jena and the survivors joined the French-Irish Legion; the Irish in Botany Bay were at the bottom of numerous insurrections and attempted insurrections; and the exiles in the U.S fuelled anti-British sentiment. But I'm sure from, say, Lord Castlereagh's point of view, these were mere pinpricks. On balance, the British government won, but radicalism didn't die completely wherever it was transported. It was attenuated, but continued to lurk, ready to come out at salient moments. To a significant extent, the drive to make Australia a republic today is fuelled by resentments still felt by the considerable Irish population here.
Mike Durey
Re Mike Durey's conclusion:
>Yes, in one sense Britain did win. The government's main objective was
to
>get rid of the radicals, preferably as far away as possible.
Perhaps, then, we should revise the Halevy thesis: Maybe transportation, not Methodism, explains why Britain didn't have a revolution!
Rob Forbes
Visiting Assistant Professor in History
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
>Perhaps, then, we should revise the Halevy thesis: Maybe
transportation,
>not Methodism, explains why Britain didn't have a revolution!
>
>Rob Forbes
>Visiting Assistant Professor in History
>Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
I think there is an element of truth in that, although for all the huffing and puffing of the radicals, Britain remained too stable for revolution to be a serious threat in the 1790s. But certainly, unrest was reduced to a minimum by emigration. Empire and the army were the two great safety valves for Britain throughout the C19th, the former taking voluntary emigrants with the energy and talents that possibly were blocked in Britain; the latter syphoning off (perhaps) the more rascally energies to India etc. Perhaps we should divide modern British history into the period when Britain was a net exporter of people and the period when it became a net importer? Such a division would coincide with (reflect?) the rise and fall division of British history.
Mike Durey
One of the fascinating aspects of the migration of the British radicals - not just to America, but - into American politics is that those who wrote introduced a different kind of invective into political discourse. American participants tended to think that the stridency of debates in the 1790s and early 1800s was the result of partisanship which in part it was, but I feel quite certain that the rapier like wit and no-holds-barred vituperation of the Brits rather brutally stripped away the forms of decorum that the revolutionary elite had been used to, changing American political life in subtle ways. Joyce Appleby
And of course, the impact of British radicals doesn't cease as the nineteenth century progresses, The Owenite movement, the National Reform movement, the Anti-Rent movement, and the trade union movements in the American Northeast all benefit from timely injections of British radicalism, much of it with a class-conscious tinge.
Jamie Bronstein
Assistant Professor
History Department
New Mexico State University
jbronste@nmsu.edu
Joyce, this is a fascinating hypothesis which squares with research that a student of mine, Joshua Civin, has done which finds a remarakbly genteel form of party competition in Baltimore during this period, with "Federalists" and "Republicans" associating on cordial terms in debating societies, antislavery organizations, and workplaces, and paying little discernable attention in their private lives to the political invective of the extreme partisans--even while fully committed to one or the other set of political principles.
I have long felt that some of the most fervid political debates of the first party system--particularly in the religious field--owed far more to imported conflicts, badly translated from the European, than to authentic domestic concerns.
Rob Forbes
Seth Cotlar writes: "As for the localism of British and Irish radicalism of the 1790s, although the initial impetus for organization may have been particular, local issues, the language which these people used to critique power was profoundly universalist, cosmopolitan, and in some cases, millenarian. Although some of this extra-local language was rhetoric, many of these radicals (and a large number of their sympathetic readers) truly thought of themselves as engaged in a world-wide struggle. Indeed, much radical thought in this period was decidedly anti-localist, and this is what dramatically sets it apart from what would follow in the 19th century (especially in America)."
Which I think is exceptionally well put. I wonder, however, why it needs arguing these days, so long after the case for the internationalism of radicalism was made convincingly (at least to me) by R. R. Palmer in his *Age of the Democratic Revolution* and seconded by Jacques Godechot.
-Bill Everdell, Brooklyn
I don't have time for a long comment here, but I do feel a need to break up the cozy consensus developing on this topic. I am a great admirer of Michael Durey's work, including the recent book, the WMQ article from several years ago, and his magnificent biography of J.T. Callender. The radical exiles played a pivotal role in the politics of the 1790s and their experience with European radical politics and journalism was an important element in the development of newspaper politics as it would be conducted in the U.S. from that point on. Certainly they brought a franker tone, better-informed arguments, and broader concerns into American political debate. However, the tenor of this discussion has treated them as the ONLY sources of radicalism and partisan invective on the American scene, and this simply isn't true. Paine's Rights of Man was well-known here before most of the exiles arrived, and the Duanes and Callenders were welcomed, joined, supported and often protected by people such as John Beckley (who had the Rights of Man re-published here), Abraham Bishop, and the founders of Paineite radical journalism in Philadelphia, Benjamin F. Bache and Philip Freneau. If one moves beyond Philadelphia & New York, there were plenty of tough, radical editors who did not happen to be immigrants: Charles Holt (New London, CT), John Israel (western PA), James J. Wilson (DE & NJ), Benjamin Austin (Boston Independent Chronicle), and others. If one moves beyond 1800, the list gets much longer. Many of these people had strong European influences, at least in the form of an admiration for the Aurora, but it is too much to label all Jeffersonian Republican radicalism as a foreign import. Timothy Pickering couldn't have agreed more! Rather than condescendingly labelling the American debate a "mistranslation," we would be better off delineating the local modifications and applications of "Paineism" (if that's the term) in the U.S.
We also need to be careful with the category "radical." As I have seen the term used by post-1970 historians, radicals tend to be distinguished (and, in narrative "plot" terms, opposed), to conventional party politicians. Usually the scenarios is radical good guys versus politician bad guys. (See Chants Democratic, for instance.) 20th-century historians love radicals, but like talk-show hosts, automatically dismiss party politicians as liars and opportunists. Radicals stand up for plebeian or popular rights, while party politicians duplicitously defend the elite. The problem is that many of Durey's radical exiles don't fit well into this simplistic opposition at all. Party politics and politicians can't be artificially marginalized or demonized if they are to be discussed accurately. The political newspapers that so many immigrant radicals edited and whose format they popularized, became the critical and in some cases the only tangible component of the early party organizations. Duane, Binns, Cheetham, et al, embraced party politics and pursued it with as much ambition as anyone. Duane clearly had a more articulate and radical agenda than most party politicians, but a party politician he was. He considered himself the keeper of the Republican flame, and could be enough of a "pragmatist" himself to flirt with such a chameleonic and nonradical figure as DeWitt Clinton later on in his career. I would submit that radical exiles who became party politicians (and/or overbearing lobbyists for banks and manufacturing concerns, as John Binns and Mathew Carey did) were not so much betraying their Paineite ideology as reapplying it. Could one of you historians of political thought try that one out?
Durey, I think, is aware of all this, but our discussion of the topic so far made the usual move away from party politics into areas with which present-day historians are more comfortable. Here is the one point of criticism I have for the book reviewed on H-SHEAR: Jefferson did leave the radicals out of his administration, but not just the immigrants. Using standards that were as much social as ideological (though ideology played a role), Jefferson cast aside almost ALL the publicists and editors and of the 1790s, with the exception of a few certifiable blue-bloods with college degrees: Abraham Bishop in Connecticut (who got the New Haven collector's job by inheriting it from his pillar of the church and town father), Tench Coxe, and a few others. I go into this at length in my article on John Beckley in the Winter 1996 JER. The problem for Jefferson was vulgar partisanship rather than the radicalism of anyone's ideas. Duane always believed that Jefferson was on his side, and that the problem was with people around him such as Madison and Gallatin.
Jeff Pasley
Florida State University
Assistant Professor of History
Florida State University
Bellamy 419
(850) 644-9523 or 656-7996
jpasley@mailer.fsu.edu
http://mailer.fsu.edu/~jpasley
I deeply admire Thomas Paine and those who thought as he did, but I also agree with Jeff Pasley concerning the distaste for party-politics that seems to plague so many of our colleagues. I'm not sure where it comes from; some of it seems to be rooted in the failure in the 1960s of the antiwar movement, which led to a distaste for party-politics within the system across the board among historians who cast their lot with that cause. (To clarify my ideological position, I speak as one of the youngest of those who were antiwar, but who did not give up on politics "within the system.")
Another root of this scholarly disdain for party politics and professional politicians (even in an era in which the idea of a professional politician was an innovation, and probably not a welcome one) might well be the prevailing distaste for party politics and professional politicians that pervades American life today. (I have a student at Brooklyn College who asked me yesterday whether I thought that someone had bribed James Madison to veto that 1817 internal-improvements bill; I was speechless for a moment.) These are the depths to which corrosive cynicism leads us.
I also agree with the point made earlier that homegrown American political discourse contained radical elements, and that it was growing in partisan venom and (dare I say it?) paranoia, even before the arrival of the transatlantic radicals whom Durey studies.
Richard B. Bernstein
Adjunct Professor, New York Law School
Daniel M. Lyons Visiting Professor in American History
Brooklyn College/CUNY (1997-1998)
Assistant Book Review Editor for Constitutional History, H-LAW
<rbernstein@nyls.edu>
>I would be very curious to hear what Prof. Durey and other list
members
>think about this concept of an American Thermidor (which I have
borrowed
>from the Progressive historians in general and Linda Kerber's article
on
>Martin v. Massachusetts in particular).
The "real" Thermidor was the successful attempt by very frightened members of the French Convention to get rid of Robespierre before he got rid of them. Most of them were regicides whose politics differed little from the Jacobins'. In the year after 9 Thermidor they wrote a new constitution (1795) and created a system which served the interests of the propertied classes, particularly the new rich. In so doing they killed off the most popular elements of the revolution. But the political system after 1795, the Directory etc, remained unstable, because it took a middle line between two competing extremes, Jacobinism and Royalism, neither of which could be eliminated. Napoleon's Consulate was popular among the Thermidorians, because it stopped the see-saw swings between the extremes, consolidated the position of the new rich, and was successful in war.
For Thermidor to be applied to American history, one has to accept the Progressivist view that at Philadelphia in 1787 the propertied classes sought to "end the revolution". In other words, the American Thermidor was Thermidor avant la lettre. What happened in France was following what happened in America, and not vice versa. Perhaps French historians should be talking about a French Philadelphia, rather than American historians talking about an American Thermidor!
On balance, I think the shorthand term "an American Thermidor" obscures more than it illuminates, although in both America and France there were attempts to consolidate the gains of revolution. But when one ends with Jefferson and the other with Napoleon, I think the differences outweigh the similarities.
I should add that many of the British and Irish radical exiles would not have agreed with me, at least before 1800. They did see the Federalists as a counterrevolutionary, even antirevolutionary, force. But I don't.
Mike Durey
>Many of these people
>had strong European influences, at least in the form of an admiration
for
>the Aurora, but it is too much to label all Jeffersonian
Republican
>radicalism as a foreign import.
Jeff Pasley is right to make this point. I didn't intend to suggest this in the book, but one is always tempted to over-egg the pudding when making a case! However, Beckley was English-born; both Bache and Freneau were strongly French-influenced; and, as Benjamin Tagg points out, Bache's early years on the Aurora were politically equivocal. Only from 1794 did he become truly radical. This coincided with his use of two exiles as his main paragraphists: Callender and Dr. James Reynolds. The exiles certainly did not create a Jeffersonian radicalism in America, but they did revivify and expand what already existed.
> We also need to be careful with the category "radical."
Nothing gave me more anguish than trying to decide what to call my subjects. All the possible collective nouns carried ideological weight, which fitted some of the exiles better than others. In the end, having defined a "radical" as anyone who wished to change the political/social/religious status quo, I used three terms: radicals, exiles and emigres. Dick Twomey, from whose work I learnt an enormous amount, called them Jacobins (partly, I suspect, for alliterative reasons). That, I thought, was going too far, especially as I found one of the exiles, Mathew Carey, calling the New England Federalists in 1812 Jacobins! My definition worked well while they were in England; it showed signs of cracks in the American environment once many exiles settled for Jefferson after 1800 and thus the status quo. But I couldn't find a way of resolving this satisfactorily.
> As I have seen the
>term used by post-1970 historians, radicals tend to be distinguished
(and,
>in narrative "plot" terms, opposed), to conventional party
politicians.
>Usually the scenarios is radical good guys versus politician bad
guys.
>(See Chants Democratic, for instance.) 20th-century historians
love
>radicals, but like talk-show hosts, automatically dismiss party
politicians
>as liars and opportunists. Radicals stand up for plebeian or
popular
>rights, while party politicians duplicitously defend the elite.
Just yesterday here in Australia, the leader of the minority Democrat party, which holds the balance of power in the Federal senate, defected to the opposition Labor party. The Democrats campaigned on the slogan: Keep the Bastards Honest!. Political commentators here see her move as politically astute: she gets the chance of grabbing some executive power in the future. The Labor party gains because she is very popular. But I wonder how many of my students, who voted Democrat last year, will view it in this way? Why shouldn't they be cynical? I'm not saying that radicals have the monopoly of idealism, far from it (I, for instance, much prefer Hamilton to Jefferson, because the former was more idealistic). But in media, sound-bite driven democratic systems, political idealists working within the system get short shrift. "Scandal" is much more newsworthy (which brings us back to Callender!).
Mike Durey
Richard B. Bernstein's implication that somehow a distaste for party politics is inappropriate was worth making. ... And refuting.
Obviously, the 1790s were not the 1960s or their aftermath. One shouldn't confuse them. ...in either direction.
On the other hand, history demands that we learn from experience. We'd be pretty poor at it if we ignored experience to cherish our "faith" in "party politics" "within the system" for its own sake. We'd probably be even worse off as historians if we assumed that the simple flipping of calendar pages changes institutional structures, etc. to make a bankrupt procedure of 1968 somehow legitimate and functional in the 1970s, 80s, or 90s. But then again, academe is part of those procedures as well, isn't it?
--Mark Lause
Lause's Links