Читать книгу The Art of Democracy - Jim Cullen - Страница 10

In some respects, the constitutionally ratified United States of 1789 was not very different from the thirteen still-loyal colonies of 1776 or, for that matter, those of 1676 (the year a violent insurrection was crushed in Virginia). Compared to Europe in the intervening century, the colonies exhibited somewhat less class stratification, though tensions with Indians were sharp and immediate and the slave system of the south solidified. But compared to what came later, the colonies were overwhelmingly rural—and Founding Fathers like Thomas Jefferson hoped they would stay that way.

For most people on the Eastern seaboard between the settlement of Jamestown in 1607 and the ratification of the Constitution, cultural life was rooted in folkways. For sure, there was a cultural elite, personified by Jefferson himself. People like him experienced the official culture of Europe, and brought it here via imported books, paintings, and ideas. For the rest of the country, however, artistic production was vernacular and localized.

One good example of this is music. Both Anglo-Celtic and African arrivals brought their songs with them, singing and playing them as an accompaniment to work, leisure, and religious rituals. Virtually none of this music was written down; it was transmitted orally and in the process mutated gradually into something new. Only oral tradition, combined with careful sleuthing by scholars and the serendipitous discoveries of folklorists such as John Lomax, who occasionally encountered isolated rural folk still performing music in traditional ways, give us an idea of what this music sounded like. Fortunately, the far-sighted New England publisher Isaiah Thomas published a collection of broadside song sheets “to show what articles of this kind are in vogue with the vulgar at this time, 1814,” leaving us an invaluable historical record.⁴ Later, greater mobility, along with the advent of recording and broadcast technology, would lay the foundations for an American popular music.

The first step in the creation of popular culture on these shores, however, was the establishment of printing presses. The future growth of this industry was important not only for reading materials, but also for products like sheet music, lithography, and photography, which would allow the unprecedented diffusion of artistic production across geographic, racial, and class lines. In general, the dissemination of these materials did not become widespread until well into the nineteenth century. I mention them here so that they can be kept in mind as I discuss the literary dimensions of popular culture.

The first printing press in the colonies was established in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1638.⁵ Given the religious imperatives of radical Protestantism, where individual effort might at least signal future salvation, it is not surprising to learn that Cambridge-Boston was the publishing capital of the colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that New England’s literary output outstripped that of the mid-Atlantic states and the South. (Georgia was apparently the last state in the colonies to establish a press, in 1763, suggesting just how long it took for publishing to diffuse throughout the colonies.⁶)

Nor is it surprising to learn that one of the most popular works in the colonial era had a religious orientation. In 1640, the Cambridge press published a quarto, or sheets of paper cut four ways and bound into a booklet, of 148 pages. Originally called The Whole Book of Psalms—and later to be known as the Bay Psalm Book—the volume was a collection of translations from Hebrew to English with some commentary by Richard Mather (forefather of the famous New England family that included Increase and Cotton). The first printing of 1,700 copies sold out. Since there were only about 3,500 white families in northern New England at the time, many of whom disliked the pieties of the Puritans in Boston, it seems likely that many were sold abroad. Wherever they went, by the end of the eighteenth century there were fifty-one editions of the Bay Psalm Book available in New England and Great Britain. For these reasons, it seems plausible to call it the first American bestseller.⁷

Despite its creation in an urban setting, the role of immigration in dictating the need for it, and the use of modern technology for its production, however, there are two reasons why we might have reservations about calling early versions of the Bay Psalm Book popular culture. Both are class-related. First, books were very costly commodities in the colonies, widely available only to the wealthy. Second, they had little value to poor and working people who could not read, which included most non-white males (and maybe even the majority of white men as well) in the colonies before the Revolution.⁸

By 1750, the first of these issues had been partially overcome by journalism: almanacs, newspapers, and magazines. While religious life remained a powerful cultural force throughout the Western world in the seventeenth century—nowhere was this more true than in New England—an early demand for practical, secular knowledge was evident. In fact, the Cambridge press had published An Almanack for the Year 1639 before the Bay Psalm Book. Almanacs, which included data on the weather and other information of use to farmers, were peppered with jokes, sayings, and political opinions. The most famous of these was Poor Richard’s Almanack, published in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin from 1733 to 1757. By the time he died in 1790, Franklin had completed a transformation from a poor boy in Boston to one of the most cosmopolitan men in the world, and the last edition of the almanac, which reflects his more genteel side, was published to widespread acclaim in France in 1776; it has decisively shaped popular perceptions of his persona ever since. The earlier editions, spiced with pungently colloquialized versions of dated epigrams (in the 1736 Almanac the English proverb “God restoreth health and the physician hath the thanks” became “God heals and the doctor takes the fee”), have a more democratic, class-conscious edge. Cheaper than most imported or domestically published books, Poor Richard sold 10,000 copies a year—or one copy for every one hundred people in the colonies—making it the most popular reading material other than the Bible. As one of Franklin’s more recent biographers notes, “Poor Richard had special flavor and was the foundation of a popular American culture.”⁹

One might expect newspaper publishing in the colonies to have preceded either books or almanacs, but in fact newspapers did not appear until a half-century later, leaving news-hungry colonists to rely on the English press or widely circulated personal correspondence. Besides the absence of an obvious market, the primary reason was political: printers could not risk the loss of property, or worse, should they publish material that offended local or English officials. The fate of the first newspaper is highly revealing in this regard. Published on September 25, 1690, Boston’s presumably monthly Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick was suppressed four days later by the colonial government, which issued a statement saying the paper did not have permission to operate. It was not until 1704 that the more cautious Boston Gazette became the first paper to survive more than one issue. Its price was sufficiently high that the famed Judge Samuel Sewall would give copies as gifts to the women he visited. Although newspapers were almost certainly passed around and read by those who could not afford subscriptions, it was not until the next century that it became possible to speak of a mass press that catered to working-class interests.¹⁰

Then there were magazines. An even more difficult proposition than newspapers, magazines were not indigenously produced until 1741, when Franklin published American Magazine and his rival Andrew Bradford launched A Monthly View of the Political State of the British Plantations of America, both in Philadelphia. A steady magazine industry did not take off until after the Revolution, and not until the mid-nineteenth century was there a flourishing periodical culture. Yet like newspapers, magazines reached far beyond urban elites. One study of New-York Magazine, a moderately sized monthly that counted George Washington, John Adams, and John Jay as readers, found that a significant percentage of the 370 subscribers in 1790 were shopkeepers and artisans—members of professions that had begun (or would soon begin) to experience proletarianization as a result of industrialization. Cartmen, laborers, and mariners also subscribed—a subscription cost $2.25 a year, at a time when the average workingman’s daily wage was $.50. Perhaps the most compelling evidence of wide readership concerns women, for while there were only seven who subscribed in their own names, there were numerous articles about or even specifically directed at women (such as “On the Choice of a Husband”), which indicated a wider readership.¹¹

The most popular form of reading material for poor and working people was the chapbook. The term “chapbook” did not come into general use until the nineteenth century, and these small, inexpensive books—pamphlets, really—at first went by a variety of names: “small books,” “chapman’s books,” or “small histories.” They were usually between sixteen and thirty-two pages, and were illustrated with simple woodcuts. Most were imported from England, and since they didn’t go out of date, like almanacs, they were profitable for the publisher. Paper shortages made chapbooks difficult to manufacture in the colonies, although they were sometimes published on the backs of sheets recovered from pirated Spanish ships, or on paper made from old rags. Ironically, their very availability then makes them very rare today. They were so commonplace that few people bothered to preserve them, and so cheaply made that the vast majority were, in the words of one scholar, “read to pieces.” Most evidence of their popularity comes from accounting records, advertisements, and other retailers’ documents.¹²

The subjects of chapbooks ranged from religious instruction to light entertainment. The reputedly factual story of Dick Whittington, a poor English boy who moved from rags to riches in medieval London, was widely read in the colonies and was a forerunner of Horatio Alger tales. But an indigenous chapbook tradition took root very early. Captivity narratives, or accounts of experiences as prisoners of Indians, were extremely popular, and the most famous of these, Mary Rowlandson’s, was published in chapbook form in 1682. “Richard Rum” tales, seriocomic stories about temperance that were published throughout the eighteenth century, were also a largely American phenomenon. Eventually chapbooks became associated with children’s literature, and remained available in this form through the nineteenth century.¹³

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were two major ways for literary products to be distributed: shops and peddlers. The former were largely based in the cities and sold printed matter alongside a variety of other products; the latter carved out a marginal existence by visiting inland settlements. In early Massachusetts, such people were stigmatized and even barred from bookselling, but by the late eighteenth century hawkers had become an important source of gossip, political discussion, and reading material. Occasionally all three would intertwine. The astounding success of Thomas Paine’s revolutionary manifesto Common Sense—which sold 100,000 copies between January and March 1776, or one copy for every twenty-five people in the colonies—was at least partially the result of the peddlers’ distribution network. Peddlers also knew their market. In 1799, the itinerant Mason Locke (or “Parson”) Weems had enjoyed success selling a variety of books, mostly in the mid-Atlantic states. But it was not until he got the idea of writing a biography of George Washington—and convincing Philadelphia publisher Matthew Carey to back it—that he really hit the jackpot. The Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington, published immediately after the president’s death in 1799 (the fifth edition of which included his apocryphal cherry tree story) became a huge hit and had gone through at least eighty-four printings by 1829. Weems also wrote successful biographies of Ben Franklin, William Penn, and Chief Justice John Marshall, although none could compare with the Washington biography.¹⁴

Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, there arose another form of literary distribution that had powerfully democratic ramifications: the lending library. Once again, Benjamin Franklin was at the vanguard, when he established a subscription library in Philadelphia in 1731. This was a private affair that required participants to put up a large sum of money in order to gain lending privileges. But before long the elitist subscription library was supplemented by the institutional library, which lent books to members (such as schools) and, more importantly, by the circulating library, which rented books at rates affordable to a common laborer. This contributed dramatically to an expansion of literary culture: as more books became available, growing numbers of people read them, and publishers then increased production. Wealthy merchants referred to lending libraries as “slop-shops of literature.”¹⁵

Yet there remains the larger question of exactly who could read by 1800. Certainly, the mere proliferation of books contributed to the growth of literacy in colonial America by giving more people access to reading materials. But other factors were also at work, factors that need to be taken into account for a fuller understanding of the creation of a large reading audience by the early nineteenth century.

The question of literacy in colonial New England has been strenuously explored by literary scholars, but no one has been able to come up with decisive figures. In part this is because there is no widely shared definition of the term. Do we measure literacy by the ability to read a legal contract, a personal letter, or a spelling book? And even if we have a clear definition, not all historical subjects were willing to be counted—slaves and some white women, for example, surely concealed what they (often illegally) knew. Finally, there is the matter of what means we use to count literacy, and how reliable they are. One modern study, for example, uses New Englanders’ ability to sign wills with their initials as an index of the ability to read. Even by this standard, literacy was low: barely one-half of white men and less than one-third of white women could read in 1660. Some studies contend that using a broader range of documents would yield higher rates, while one argues that reading and writing were separate skills and that women were far more likely to be able to perform the former than the latter. All of this demonstrates the ongoing resistance of history to empirical quantification.¹⁶

Nevertheless, some plausible generalizations can be made. Whatever we consider the baseline of literacy, it is clear that New England led the colonies (and perhaps even the world). As early as 1642, Massachusetts passed a law requiring reading instruction for all children. Connecticut followed in 1650, New York in 1665, and Pennsylvania in 1683. Many of the instructors hired to fulfill this task were women. Nevertheless, for quite some time “all children” only included a fraction of young people, and usually meant boys. Even when girls were taught, their training was not taken as seriously as that of boys. Massachusetts added a writing requirement for boys in 1703, but it was not until 1771 that a similar provision was made for writing instruction for girls.¹⁷

Despite such inequities, reading instruction was greatly facilitated by the growing availability of teaching materials. At first, hornbooks (single pages tacked onto a wooden board) were used, as were psalters (books of psalms), primers, and bibles. These texts were gradually replaced by spellers, the most famous of which, Noah Webster’s American Spelling Book, sold 24 million copies between 1783 and the author’s death in 1843, making it the best selling book in U.S. history before 1850. As these and other kinds of reading matter gave students an incentive to master the skill, literacy grew in the colonies and the fledgling United States in a manner unprecedented in the Western world. It has been estimated that by 1790 over 90 percent of the nation’s white population was literate.¹⁸

Again, the exact meaning of this statistic, if accurate, remains unclear, and also probably obscures the differential between men and women. On the other hand, some historians have noted the interest in—and official sanction of—female literacy that was part of the ideology of “Republican Motherhood” that emerged after the Revolution. According to this ideology, the success of the new nation rested on a virtuous, educated white male citizenry devoted to the common good, but the keystone for the development of such a populace was the virtuous, educated mother, who would inculcate the proper values and provide an atmosphere that would encourage the development of a leadership class (in some versions) or a more egalitarian population (in others). Thus, although Republican Motherhood fit into older patriarchal models that confined women to specific private, domestic tasks, its advocates also called for women to be provided with the opportunities and skills that would allow them to secure the future of the state.¹⁹

That was the theory, anyway. In practice, the constrictions on women were still considerable—women did not approach equity with men as readers or as teachers of readers until the second quarter of the nineteenth century—and U.S. education remained unequal in class and gender, not to mention racial, terms, a situation that still holds true today.²⁰ Yet while it would be a mistake to overestimate the possibilities afforded by these developments, it would also be a mistake to minimize their potential. “I thank God there are no free schools or printing, and I hope we shall not have these [for a] hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government,” said Virginia governor William Berkeley in 1619.²¹ A century and a half later, many colonists no doubt found such sentiments unrealistic, but the anxieties they reflected had by no means disappeared. Once people could read, there was no telling what they might think—or do. And while elites wanted women and working people to read and write so that they could contribute to the national economy, it was difficult to control the uses to which people would put these skills. This was particularly the case for a new kind of culture that was beginning to generate both attention and condemnation: the novel.