If you are going to get into the issue of "Was the American Revolution really a "revolution" in the sense of the French Revolution," you should at least start with the numerous essays that came out in the mid-1970s on that subject -- both because the concepts of "revolution," "evolution," and "radical politics" were quite hot in the academy after the '60s, and also because of the 200th anniversary of the American Revolution in 1976. For example, I believe there's a nice set of essays edited by Jack Greene and J.R. Pole (may be conflating two different sets) -- but a literature search of the topic and the mid- to late-1970s will bring up a LOT of discussion of precisely this issue.
There were also numerous good dissertations, which took a long time to become books, reopening the whole Becker question of whether this was a war over home rule, or over who shall rule at home. In brief, I really think it depended on where you were -- if you want to find big battles over who shall rule at home, for example, go study New York or Philadelphia. If you're looking for a very quick squelching of the issue of who shall rule at home, study Virginia. For home rule, eastern Massachusetts; for who shall rule at home, western Massachusetts. Apathy? Delaware. Pragmatism? Connecticut and New Jersey. (Downright weird? Rhode Island ...)
I feel funny even beginning to list this literature because there is so much out there that has been missing -- although John Murrin's project with Greenwood Press publishing clasic dissertations has been a godsend. But the job market disaster of the 1970s hit a particular generation of historians very hard, the generation tht was writing on this very subject. I was pleased to hear that Jesse Lemisch's dissertation was finally published, as was George Rappaport's, and early, Doug Arnold's; Richard Ryerson's often overlooked book on revolutionary committees in Pennsylvania; Steve Rosswurm's work on the Pennsylvania militia; Eric Foner's still brilliant book on Paine this is just Pennsylvania/Philadelphia, and I know I'm leaving a lot out. I would counsel anyone looking into this area to do a REALLY thorough search not only of published material, but also look for articles that came out of dissertations and go back and find the dissertations if they weren't published (of course look through dissertation abstracts too) -- there's still gold out there.
What does it also mean that the Revolution segued into a 100-year war of national conquest? We tend to emphasize the three segments: the war of New England, the war of the Middle States, and the war of the South -- and downplay the part of the Revolution that destroyed the Iroquois nation and continued on to nations further west, without pause. Yes, the outcome of the war did determine the political economy of the "midwest" -- but we're missing a step here. It also determined how and when (is whether a possibility?) the existing nations east of the Mississippi would be decimated, destroyed, exiled. Given the later stance against slavery in England, perhaps it determined that issue as well -- while ironically also laying, in the territories, the legal boundary between free and slave that in one sense spread east to create a North and South. Is this evidence of tensions and conflicts and controversies, many still swirling, or manifestations of a coherent ideology? No easy answers there.
Finally, when talking about the discourse of the Revolution, how can we not include the way the politics of the last 200 years have influenced the way we perceive the word "Revolution" itself? The efforts by historians to disassociate OUR Revolution, OUR defining experience, from THOSE Revolutions -- the French and, even worse, the Russian. The result was a dichotomization of the concept of revolution. As has already been noticed, this dichotimization dates back to the 1790s, but we still have to be very careful to distinguish between what Adams or Jefferson or backcountry writers meant in the context of their world, and how their words were later used in the context of the rigid political science categories of the early-mid 20th century, and then the Cold War. Beware of dichotomies of "tame" and "crazy" Revolutions, or "reasonable" and "emotional", or "bourgeois" and "popular"; beware also of the trap of linear thinking that would categorize political activity as necessarily fitting a spectrum called reactionary-conservative-moderate-liberal-radical. Beware of deciding ahead of time what is "good" and what is "bad", and centering your study of the Revolution upon those deductivelyarrived concepts.
Ultimately, however, those of us who are American who study the American Revolution cannot escape its role in our self-definition. While trying to be self-aware, we will yet be influenced by the issues of the next century. The Cold War is over. Can we find a new vocabulary with which to talk about political/social/economic change? I believe that a fresh look at the Revolution could help.
I believe that we are at a time in our nation's history where we have to redefine what "change" means, and as such will find ourselves redefining the major turning points in U.S. history. Which means a new interpretation of the Revolution. What we have to bring to the table now is a LOT of GOOD research on different localities during the time period. A lot of good research on different social and economic groups, on race, on gender. How can you pull it back together -- is a metanarrative possible -- can you tell a "story" of the Revolution that does not betray its rich and varied manifestations? If you can't, does that in itself have meaning? If you can, how?
Mary Schweitzer, Dept. of History, Villanova University (on leave)
E-Mail: schweit2@ix.netcom.com
URL: http://pw1.netcom.com/~schweit2/history.html
E. Wayne Carp's reply to Richard Gildrie has "neo-progressives" Nash and Countryman projecting contemporary identity politics back into the eighteenth century.... presumably because it occurs to them to ask, what about women and natives and slaves and free blacks? I wonder, will we ever get over this idea that somehow only left-leaning scholars, who put their politics on the table, have politics? Wouldn;t it be just as easy to say that Bailyn's stress on the wonderful liberating ideas that came out of the Revolution, in its very stress on ideas, read Cold War ideology into the eighteenth century? On this, see Colin Gordon's terrific essay in the William and mary Quarterly, 1989/1990 I believe, "Crafting a Usable Past: Consensus, Idelogy, And Historians of the American Revolution."
A perspective I prefer: the politics of the present often helps us see aspects of the past that we missed before. At least looking at it this way allows for both the importance of new approaches and for the possibility that looking back at older historiography might help remind us of things that got taken for granted and then forgotten. I think a guy named Countryman taught me this by making me read, not only Bailyn, but Charles McLean Andrews....
David Waldstreicher
American Studies Program
Yale University
On Thu, 28 Aug 1997, E. Wayne Carp wrote:
> Professor Gildrie might find Bernard Bailyn's _The
Ideological
> Origins of the American Revolution_ useful here. The most important
book
> on the Revolution (whether you disagree with what he says or not),
almost
> half of it is devoted to the unintended radical consequences of
the
> Revolution. It's not that the radicalism of the American Revolution
has
> been overlooked, rather the issue is where it is located. Bailyn
locates
> in the realm of ideas after 1776 -- freedom and equality spilling
over
> into areas never intended by the revolutionaries. Neo-progresives
like
> Nash and Countrymen (at least in their published works) want to read
back
> 20th century identity politics into the 18th century and locate
radicalism
> before 1776 in volitional mobilization and consciousness raising
of
> blacks, women, urban artisans, etc. Its an old, but crucial, issue
in
> Revolutionary historiography.
>
> E. Wayne Carp
> Pacific Lutheran University
>
> On Mon, 11 Aug 1997, Richard Gildrie, H-Tennessee wrote:
>
> > Professors Saillant and Countryman are raising important, if
oft
> > discussed, matters about Revolution in the early modern world.
I have
> > long thought that the radicalism of the American Revolution has
been
> > understated, if not in its origins, then certainly in its
consequences.
> > Countryman's example of the Land Ordinances of 1780s is a good
one.
> > I also think that Paine's version of republicanism has been
too
> > neglected, despite Foner's work on it. That the radicalism of
the
> > Americans were largely rooted in the convoluted English and
Scots
> > experience of the 17th century does not seem to me to make
the
> > Americans "conservative." The radicalism of Algernon Sidney
and
> > Locke, while differing in nuance, was truly "innovative" in
the
> > context of early modern political theory and practice.
> > Richard P. Gildrie
> > Austin Peay State University
> > a href="mailto:gildrier@apsu01.apsu.edu">gildrier@apsu01.apsu.edu
I have another quick recommendation for those who are interested in the effects of the Revolution, Richard B. Morris's THE FORGING OF THE UNION, 1781-1789 (Harper & Row, 1987), whose pivotal chapter, "A Cautiously Transforming Egalitarianism," addresses many of these issues. It's one of his best.
Richard B. Bernstein
Adjunct Professor, New York Law School
Daniel M. Lyons Visiting Professor in American History, Brooklyn College,
(1997-1998)
Assistant Book Review Editor for Constitutional History, H-Law
<rbernstein@nyls.edu>
Regretfully, I must disagree with Professor Gildrie's dismissal of those who would note what he might deem a conservative component in the events, ideas, and arguments leading up to the declaration of American independence and the American Revolution. For one thing, the argument did indeed begin, as John Phillip Reid of New York University Law School has proved almost beyond a reasonable doubt, as a sharp conflict over the nature and meaning of the unwritten English constitution. In that argument, the majority of Americans, who clung to the 17th-century understanding of that unwritten constitution as a set of restraints on arbitrary power from whatever source, were dismissed as hopelessly reactionary by their adversaries at Whitehall and Westminster (and their American intellectual/ideological colleagues) who viewed the unwritten English constitution as a constitution vesting supremacy and sovereignty in Parliament, the great guardian of the people and the constitution against Stuart tyranny. Even Paine, who was a leading-edge of radical sentiment all by himself, began COMMON SENSE as a sharply-worded critique of monarchy, for that was the sole remaining linchpin of Americans' loyalty to the English constitution and constitutional system.
Further, I don't think that Pauline Maier is seeking either to minimize or to marginalize Paine or those who we might denominate as radicals; she instead is seeking to recover the political contexts of the movement toward independence. Paine's COMMON SENSE and Jefferson's Declaration haven't benefitted from that sort of contextualizing scholarship in a long time (despite Eric Foner's great book on Paine), and I don't think it makes sense ot regard that necessary effort as some sort of negation of radicalism of whatever type.
In a way, the whole argument over conservative/radical seems out of place, for what makes a radical radical in 1770s America? What defines a conservative as conservative? In some ways, Paine's nationalism makes him a natural ally of Gouverneur Morris, who also was a nationalist, yet Morris was a conservative by the standard of his oft-expressed distrust of the people and Paine was a radical by the standard of his oft-expressed trust of the people. (And we get into even more trouble a decade later, with the argument over the proposed Constitution, of course.) What measuring stick do we use to define radicals and conservatives?
Richard B. Bernstein
Adjunct Professor, New York Law School
Daniel M. Lyons Visiting Professor in American History, Brooklyn College
(1997-1998)
Assistant Book Review Editor for Constitutional History, H-Law
<rbernstein@nyls.edu>
With deepest respect to Jesse Lemisch, the recongition that the American Revolution was in part an event in legal, constitutional, and intellectual history neither forecloses the utility of social history nor segregates the Revolution as something within the sphere of thought and action of the upper classes.
I agree that this argument seems to me pretty dated, and I also agree with Professor Lemisch about the vintage of the older version, but I still don't see why, for example, the origins of the Revolution as a constitutional argument between Britain and her colonies (and the valuable reworking of our understanding of those constitutional origins) is a well-kept secret among legal and constitutional historians who have read John Phillip Reid's work. Indeed, John Phillip Reid's work suggests the pervasiveness of law-mindedness in many different strata of colonial America, not just among the law-making, law-enforcing, and law-interpreting elites.
Richard B. Bernstein
Adjunct Professor, New York Law School
Daniel M. Lyons Visiting Professor in American History, Brooklyn College
(1997-1998)
Assistant Book Review Editor for Constitutional History, H-Law
<rbernstein@nyls.edu>
What a wonderful "thread" has emerged on radicalism and the American Revolution! And just when I feared that the Revolution had been forgotten or considered "solved." Thank goodness it's not.
With that, let me suggest two responses to the issue of the radicalism of the American revolution. One is the familiar one: the Revolution as the catalyst of social change. According to this tale, the Revolution broke down old hierarchies and accelerated the democratization of American society. It's a story that was told many years ago by Jameson and Jensen (my mentor) and more recently, and more fully, by Nash, Countryman, Lemisch, Wood, and others. Whether this change is truly "radical" or not depends on your perspective. Certainly, American society was transformed far less than French society during the French Revolution. And clearly in some areas (African-Americans and perhaps women) there was little progress. But with all these qualifications there seems little doubt that the Revolution helped replace the habits of deference with those of a more egalitarian society.
But I'd argue the Revolution involved radical change in a second, more fundamental sense: it focused and released the energies of an expansive imperial people. The nation that relentlessly drove the aboriginal people from their land, and which has exercised its might around the world was forged by the Revolution. I've discussed these ideas in my book, A Mighty Empire: The Origins of American Revolution (1988). This change lay at the heart of this colonial revolution. Social change, by comparison, was a by-product, if an important one.
Thomas Clark, M.A.
Institut fur England- und Amerikastudien
(Institute for English and American Studies)
Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitdt
Frankfurt/Main, Germany
The recent thread on revolution and radicalism is a pleasure to read and quelches doubts about whether everything on the subject has been said. I can't start to say how valuable this listserver is to folks like me in the scholarly backwaters of Germany - providing the opportunity to listen in on the current debates in the coffeehouses of the metropolis.
The conservative/radical terminology as applied to the revolution is a slippery affair, as Richard Bernstein suggested, and perhaps as misleading as the dichotomy between liberalism and classical republicanism. The struggle over the "radical" 1776 constitution of Pennsylvania (the subject of my dissertation) points to the social conservatism of many revolutionary leaders, who deemed the "anarchy and licentiousness" of government by too many people a threat to order, property, and liberty. Yet these same people bitterly opposed price controls and other remnants of the old "moral economy" while supporing free trade and modern credit instruments, thus giving birth to the modern liberal-capitalist society which,according to Gordon Wood, constitutes the "Radicalism of the American Revolution". Similarly, the Pennsylvania "radicals" seem enmeshed in a tangled discourse of democratization and popular power as well as restrictive and exclusionary virtue (a point made by Richard Ryerson, I believe).
The Revolution was a mixture of many different intentions and interests, and many of its actual results were unintended. In understanding it in all its complexity the perspectives of intellectual, social, political, economic, and military history, of race, class, and gender should all be welcome to enhance our understanding (I don't envy whoever is going to synthesize all that, however).
As a defining moment of American history the Revolution will always remain the subject of controversy and revision in the face of present developments, crises and antagonisms. Yet what I find most intriguing is to discover the otherness and distinctiveness of 18th century thought which can have the enlightening effect of bringing into question our own comfortable assumptions and prejudices.
> there seems little doubt that the Revolution helped replace the
habits
> of deference with those of a more egalitarian society.
As a former TA and student of Gordon Wood's, I'd like to echo this idea.
The problem of defining radicalism is that the term is relative and not absolute. SO we have to ask what is being changed and how much. To appreciate the radicalism of the Revolution, it is important to appreciate the extent to which Western culture was still ensnared in the hierarchical deferential patterns of feudalism. I think it is hard for students today to see the radicalism of the American colonies because we have gotten so far beyond the worldview that their radicalism was rebelling against. Instead, my students look for today's radicalism, which if anything wants to return to centralized authority and control, and they don't find it. One reads Marx's nostalgia for the old manor system and one can see the problem. THe radicals of 1776, even Tom Paine, sound a lot like Newt Gingrich. Which makes sense, since their radicalism ushered in today's status quo which 200 years later radicals today would undo.
My one ongoing argument with Wood, however, was over the origins of this radical rebellion against the deferential society. I saw it clearly coming out of the Reformation and Luther's "priesthood of all believers," in his insistence that authority flows not from the top down from the hierarchical structures of society but from the bottom up from the hearts of individuals who have had their souls touched by God. But Wood remains one of those "obtuse secularists" who won't buy it. If you look at a book like Mike Walzer's "Revolution of the Saints" however, you can see an argument for the Puritans as the original Leninists, a cell of revolutionaries overturning the whole established social system of their day. Even if historians have missed it, there is plenty of evidence that the Brits of 1776 saw the revolutionaries as the descendants of Cromwells regicidal elect.
-Dave WIlliams gmu
Mr. Williams has pointed to two sources of anti-hierarchical radicalism: the Reformation and Walzer's "Saints." He is also right to emphasize the British sense that the revolutionaries were connected to Cromwell's allies and Scots Presbyterianism. I would also add traditional English popular culture (Piers Plowman, Alan Macfarlane's book, Origins of English Individualism) as a source of anti-authoritarian individualism. I suspect that much of this background appears in Tom Paine, for instance.
Then, too, I think this combination is the raw material
behind what Gary Nash was looking for some time ago in an essay I
vaguely remember to the effect that there was an alternative ideology
in the Revolution to that of the Whig high command. I believe he
tended to define it in communalist ways and thus perhaps missed the
fierce individualism, even competitive aggressiveness, of this
attitude.
R.P. Gildrie
Austin Peay State University
gildrier@apsu01.apsu.edu
Re: Radicalism of the American Revolution ( Thu, 11 Sep 1997 16:37:40 EDT)
I would like to express my strong disagreement with David R. Williams' suggestion that you can see Newt Gingrich in the ideology of the revolution -- and even more so that there is any resemblance between Tom Paine and Newt Gingrich except that they spoke English and were both male. I fail to see a parallel between Newt Gingrich and any individual of the era except perhaps the pragmatist self-promotor Aaron Burr.
As for the "radicalism" of the American Revolution in the context of Wood's book -- well, no. Whereas the Creation of the American Republic was a brilliant masterpiece, this one does not really say a lot that others haven't said before (including an analysis of paper money that's remarkably similar to the one in my 1987 book, Custom and Contract). And although I disagree with the Gary Nash's attempts at fixing the emergence of class struggle so rigidly in time (conveniently ignoring all that disagree with his simplistic interpretation of traditional-to-bourgeois), it can't be denied that at least he has a better fix on what a "radical" revolution meant -- and it has been enormously influential, if the work itself wasn't the most accurate. (For Philadelphia, at least read Foner, Arnold, Billy Smith, Rosswurm, Ryerson, oh, forgive me, brainfog has now set in.) Wood does not do justice to these works -- nor to the immense differences between New England and other regions, or within New England itself.
One does see a little resemblance to the language of Newt Gingrich in the insistence that "change" means "radical" (hence Cong. Gingrich can refer to his views as radical conservatism) -- but to call all change "radicalism" is to lose any sense of an ideological component to the term.
And one cannot escape the reality that in many ways, in many places, the goal of the Revolution was to preserve a system of government and way of life that was already in existence in many of the colonies. In Pennsylvania, at least, the "radical" elements were only asking for retention of the same policies that had been followed by the commonwealth since 1720 -- it was a new breed of professional lawyers and real estate speculators who had cropped up in 1760 in Philadelphia that were starting to, uh, screw things up, in the perspective of the so-called "radicals". Who really wanted "change", and who really wanted continuity?
If we define radicalism as extreme liberalism, and liberalism as individual freedom to think, to follow one's own path as long as it does not interfere with that of others, then the Puritan village hardly qualifies. If we define radicalism as socialism or communism, the Puritan village definitely qualifies as the first of many communal religious utopias that have formed a subtext throughout the social history of the U.S. What is liberal? What is radical?
If liberalism is free marketeer individualism, what could be more "liberal" than Virginia? if liberalism is a belief in individual freedoms, what could be more liberal than Pennsylvania? Is radicalism liberalism taken to extremes in this view? Hardly.
If liberalism is belief in the people, then radicalism is extreme belief in the role of "the people." Against the aristocracy, against rigid institutions. Now where are your liberals, where are your radicals? What is the difference between liberalism and demagoguery? Is radicalism demagoguery? Or is it the full expression of "the will of the people"?
In New England, what could have been more radical than the original set-up of communal villages centering on a single institution, the church? Or was that a nostalgic attempt at recreating an imaginary past Utopia, the same type of Utopia that William Penn tried to recreate when he originally asked of his colonists that they create the same communal village structure (except they flatly refused).
The bottom line is that the spectrum of reactionary-conservativemoderate -liberal-radical is simply too restrictive to analyze the political economy, political sociology, of early modern British America. It forces us into anachronistic interpretations (such as a comparison with Newt Gingrich). We are back to seeking "the origins of democracy", instead of listening to the times themselves.
Even worse, the definitions of those terms vary greatly depending on where you stand along the "line". That's easy to see in the irony that "radicals" of the late '60s chastized the "liberals" in much the same way that "conservatives" of the '80s-'90s do -- not as anything that could coherently be called "liberalism", but as being what a "radical" or a "conservative" is not. YOU don't want to be like THAT, is pretty much the sum of the analysis. Not helpful. In Wood's case, he so tamely defines "radical" as to rather (forgive the expression) emasculate the word.
Better terms for what he tried to convey might be "creative" or "path-breaking" -- perhaps "revelations" instead of "revolution".
It is a mistake to underestimate the degree to which citizens of the commonwealths were continuing their own political development as it had been progressing for, in some cases, seven generations.
I do agree that the Revolution was a transforming experience for a number of reasons. That it changed not only institutions but the way individuals felt about themselves and the world around them. One word, especially one with so many multiple (and unexamined) meanings in 1997, cannot possibly do the period justice.
It was what it was.
If what we are searching for is the meaning of what happened as it pertains to our own lives, our own dilemmas, we must do so explicitly -- not by framing THEIR lives in OUR terms, but rather by examining OUR concepts, institutions, expectations, perceived options, in light of the traditions THEY established. >From them to us, not vice versa.
Mary Schweitzer, Assoc. Prof. of History, Villanova University
(on medical leave since Jan. 1995 with CFIDS)
<schweit2@ix.netcom.com>
http://pw1.netcom.com/~schweit2/history.html
Richard Gildrie's point about the colonists' aggressive individualism and competitiveness is a good one. Wood is only able to achieve his notion that the revolution was a radical one that smashed hierarchy and deference by ignoring chronology and place and erecting a straw man that these monarchical tendencies were dominant everywhere in the colonies. For a contrary (and IMHO convincing) view that argues that deference was practically nonexistent in the colonies, see Jack P, Greene's article in Ronald Hoffman, Thad Tate, and Peter Albert, _An Uncivil War: The Southern Backcountry During the American Revolution_.
I might add that I'm unsure of what Dave Williams is talking about when he suggests that religion has been ignored in the history of the Revolution. I would start with Alan Heimert's classic and then move on to Ruth Bloch's, Visionary Republic and Patricia Bonomi's _Under the Cope of Heaven_. Believe me, there are many other works on the history of religion in the American Revolution that I'm sure other list members can identify.
E. Wayne Carp
Pacific Lutheran University
Dept. of History
On Tue, 9 Sep 1997, DAVID R. WILLIAMS wrote:
> > there seems little doubt that the Revolution helped replace the
habits
> > of deference with those of a more egalitarian society.
>
>
> As a former TA and student of Gordon Wood's, I'd like to echo this
idea.
> THe problem of defining radicalism is that the term is relative
and not
> absolute. SO we have to ask what is being changed and how much.
To
> appreciate the radicalism of the Revolution, it is important to
> appreciate the extent to which Western culture was still ensnared in
the
> hierarchical deferential patterns of feudalism. I think it is hard
for
> students today to see the radicalism of the American colonies because
we
> have gotten so far beyond the worldview that their radicalism was
> rebelling against. Instead, my students look for today's
> radicalism, which if anything wants to return to centralized
authority
> and control, and they don't find it. One reads Marx's nostalgia for
the
> old manor system and one can see the problem. THe radicals of 1776,
even
> Tom Paine, sound a lot like Newt Gingrich. Which makes sense, since
their
> radicalism ushered in today's status quo which 200 years later
radicals
> today would undo.
> My one ongoing argument with Wood, however, was over the origins
of
> this radical rebellion against the deferential society. I saw it
clearly
> coming out of the Reformation and Luther's "priesthood of all
believers,"
> in his insistence that authority flows not from the top down from
the
> hierarchical structures of society but from the bottom up from
the
> hearts of individuals who have had their souls touched by God. But
Wood
> remains one of those "obtuse secularists" who won't buy it.
> If you look at a book like Mike Walzer's "Revolution of the
Saints"
> however, you can see an argument for the Puritans as the original
> Leninists, a cell of revolutionaries overturning the whole
> established social system of their day. Even if historians have
missed
> it, there is plenty of evidence that the Brits of 1776 saw the
> revolutionaries as the descendants of Cromwells regicidal elect.
> -Dave WIlliams gmu
On Thu, 11 Sep 1997, Mary Schweitzer wrote:
> I would like to express my strong disagreement with
> David R. Williams' suggestion that you can see Newt Gingrich
> in the ideology of the revolution -- and even more so that
> there is any resemblance between Tom Paine and Newt Gingrich
> except that they spoke English and were both male. I fail to
> see a parallel between Newt Gingrich and any individual of the
> era except perhaps the pragmatist self-promotor Aaron Burr.
Mary says quite a mouthful here, as well as ever, and there is no way to even begin to address all of it, much of which stands on its own. But this refusal to see the connection between Paine and Gingrich is quite historically myopic. One may like Paine and dislike Gingrich, as I do, but that is irrelevant. In point of transmission of ideas and ideology, they are twins.
Eric Foner's Book on Paine makes this quite clear. Paine, like many of the radicals of the Revolution, came from the extremely anti-deferentialwing of Protestantism. His family's brand of radical egalitarianism, already as Mary says, embedded in colonial life, was at the heart of his ideology. He was also a child of Cromwell's "good old cause." This was a belief that hierarchial structure was itself the problem, that the rigid centrally controlled economic and social structures of Europe got in the way of commerce and prosperity. THey wanted to do away with mercantilism and planned economies like that of the British empire and allow the "invisible forces" of the market to prevail. That way, all people, not just the sons of the elite, would have a chance at success. THey wanted to do away with the kind of centralized bureaucracy that allowed favorites to amass power at court. It is no coincidence that Adam SMith's "Wealth of Nations" was published in 1776. Its spirit and the spirit of American radicalism went hand in hand. It was a libertarian spirit that sought to create a society of free individuals competing on equal terms without any centralized corruption tilting the balance unfairly. Smith, after all, was one of those Scots COmmon Sense philosophers who taught that there is a common moral sense in every human consciousness which, if left alone, serves a sure guide. Jefferson owed much to this school of thought as Gary Wills has shown. Note the chapter in Foner's book in which he describes how Paine refused to go along with a group of Philadelphia mechanics who wanted to create a union. Freedom is the freedom to compete as individuals, Paine said. He was trying to do away with organized structures, not reproduce new ones.
This individualism was what came out of the Reformation. It was carried to the colonies throughout the 150 years before the revolution. It was, as Mary shows, already a part of colonial consciousness when the Revolution occurred. The radicalism that I referred to was not created in the 1770s; far from it. If Wood gives that impression, he is wrong. When Gingrich today calls for an end to regulation, when he attacks statism, he is echoing the individualistic ideology of 1776. WHen he sees a rich guy like Ted Kennedy wanting to centralize taxes in Washington and then distribute them to the poor, he sees the creation of a bureaucracy like that of the King and his inner circle. Note how often the conservatives claim that all anti-poverty programs do is enrich a bureaucratic elite who make big government salaries. Read the beginning of Thoreau's essay on "Civil Disobedience" for a good example of the ideology of both Paine and Gingrich. It is so Reagan/Gingrich, it'll make your hair stand on end.
This seems to me basic. I was a bit taken aback by Mary's not seeing it. Am I wrong?
-Dave Williams gmu
> I might add that I'm unsure of what Dave Williams is talking
about
> when he suggests that religion has been ignored in the history of
the
> Revolution. I would start with Alan Heimert's classic and then move
on to
> Ruth Bloch's, Visionary Republic and Patricia Bonomi's _Under the
Cope
> of Heaven_. Believe me, there are many other works on the history
of
> religion in the American Revolution that I'm sure other list members
can
> identify.
>
> E. Wayne Carp
> Pacific Lutheran University
> Dept. of History
Yes indeed, and let's not leave out my own "Wilderness Lost" or my collection of Evangelical Patriotic Revolutionary War Sermons put out by scholars Facsimiles. But as a former student of Heimert's and Bill McLoughlin's (whom you omitted), I can tell you that both these gents felt very ignored. A few books there are, but they are not widely read or known, not widely taught, and their messsage rarely gets into general accounts of or arguments over the Revolution. It is an approach which is, if I may use a current faddish phrase, marginalized.
-Dave WIlliams
David Williams mentions only some of Gingrich's activities, and only some of the actions of conservatives, that appear to be anti-statist. They become much more statist when we examine other aspects of their agenda. First, while Gingrich may not have the same kind of wealth that Kennedy has, he is still quite a "rich guy" and his income far exceeds that of most Americans. As far as being an anti-statist, and here Professor Williams puts Gingrich and Reagon together, Republican presidents and conservative leadership greatly increased the size of the bureaucracy. Further, Gingrich and other conservatives talk about limiting the size of government, especially when they are talking about social welfare and the public's health, but they are more than willing to increase the size of the government when they turn their attention to illegal immigrants from Mexico and Republican plans for social welfare reform simply shift the burden of disributing aid from the federal government to the states, which are not necessarily prepared to perform those duties. States would be forced to hire more people to administer these programs, and the federal government would maintain a number of federal positions to oversee these programs. The end is overall increase in governmental employees and increasingly tangled bureaucracy.
Other such conservative reform would also increase the number of governmental employees, and increase spending as well to support the added bureaucracy. Dole's platform to allow students to attend schools outside their school district was one, and this remains relevant because many conservative governors are trying this or have tried it. See George Voinovich's attempt to pass such legislation in Ohio. The provisions, the one proposed by Dole and by Voinovich, offers money to families who send their children to schools outside their district and sets up state agencies, with some federal money, to administer these decisions. Thus, government pays twice for education--once for local schools, which receive some federal money, and once more for those children to go to schools outside their home district. So far, these attempts have proved unsuccessful.
There are many other examples, but the point remains the same. Conservatives such as Gingrich may appear to be anti-statist, and Clinton also ran on an anti-statist platform, but manyof their programs, again Clinton included, increase the overall size of governmental bureacracy. They increase the size and power of the thing they attest they are against. None of this really sounds like Paine.
cheers
Tom Humphrey