Читать книгу The Art of Democracy - Jim Cullen - Страница 18

There were three major influences on popular writing between 1820 and 1860. The first was regional folklore, an often humorous form that reached large national audiences through a rapidly expanding media infrastructure. The second was cheap, often sensational, fiction emanating from Eastern cities, much of which exhibited a radical edge infused by the content and style of the reform movements that were unfolding across the antebellum United States. The third was the conventional novel, a form in which women writers played an especially large role. These elements intersected at various points in time and in the work of a number of writers, creating a dynamic literary culture.

In the 1820s, as Brother Jonathan moved from a secondary to a major figure on the stage, his comic analogue appeared in print. He went under a variety of guises, the most famous of which was Jack Downing. Downing was the creation of Portland, Maine journalist Seba Smith. Starting in 1830, Smith’s fictional character wrote a series of letters on local politics for the Portland Daily Courier, the paper Smith edited. Jack Downing drew on what folklorists would call Down East humor: a clipped, understated sensibility that relied heavily on irony. (His spirit survives in contemporary folklore as the kind of person who, after prolonged reflection, advises lost tourists looking for help that “you can’t get there from here.”) Downing played the role of the country bumpkin who would visit cities like Portland or Boston and puncture urban pretensions. As his popularity grew—the Downing letters were published all over the country by the 1850s—Downing became an advisor to President Andrew Jackson and commented on the national scene.⁵¹

As with Brother Jonathan, Jack Downing (and Sam Slick, a similar Down East character) was a regional figure who simultaneously represented a more broadly national Yankee spirit. By the 1840s, however, it was the characters and humor of the Old Southwest, which stretched from Kentucky to Texas, that were capturing national attention. This regional sensibility, which revealed a good deal about the quest for national identity (and territory), also generated a pool of images and concepts that would later be refashioned by Northern intellectuals and urban purveyors of popular culture.

As mentioned earlier, the quintessential Southwesterner was Davy Crockett. What makes Crockett unusual is that, unlike fictional characters such as Downing or more generalized stereotypes like Sambo, he was a real person. A-veteran of the War of 1812, he acquired conquered Indian lands in Tennessee and became an ardent supporter of settlers’ rights against those of the Indians who were forcibly moved West and the land speculators back East. His image as a rugged frontiersman (he killed over one-hundred bears in one season alone) and his common-man demeanor (that famous coonskin cap, which later became part of his legend) made him a popular figure in state politics. Elected to Congress in 1827, the slaveholding Crockett began as a rank-and-file Jackson supporter, but a dispute over land policy led to a break with the Democrats. The party failed in its first attempt to unseat him with a rival candidate in 1829, but succeeded in 1831. Crockett then cast his lot with the Whigs, who gave him political and financial support and gained a frontiersman icon to compete against the appeal of Jackson. An avid expansionist, Crockett was executed by Mexican soldiers for his role as an insurrectionary at the Alamo in 1836.

But it was the mythic Crockett, not the real one, who won enduring fame. In 1832, just after he lost his Congressional seat, a Cincinnati newspaper published an account of Crockett’s adventures. Two years later, A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee, Written by Himself (actually written by a ghostwriter) became an immediate success, going through 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