I've had more than a thousand pages of US history in the past month, and I'm getting tired of it. Not that the books I'm reading aren't very good, and not that the subject isn't interesting, but I've had enough. Now I'm reading Middlekauf's The Glorious Cause. He's clear, funny, and detailed, but I miss Wilentz's passion. Wilentz could be funny too, but his humor was mordant; Middlekauf's is airy and light. He seems to think that everyone was getting a little too excited.* Of course, he never says this; it's in his tone. And actually I'm sure he doesn't think it either. In fact, I'm being terribly unfair, and perhaps it's just like what happened when I heard the Brahms Requiem and the Mozart Requiem in one day, in that order: the juxtaposition made Mozart sound like fluff. I hated myself for thinking that, but couldn't help it. Moral of the story: eighteenth century first, then nineteenth century. Never the other way around.
*which is one's suspicion about the American Revolution to start with. Middlekauf's introduction insists that there's no irony in the title. Later on, he admits, "On the surface the Americans' preoccupation with their property … seems petty, demeaning, poor stuff with which to make a revolution." He tries to explain why it wasn't, but... One just has to assume that the ideas of "rights" and "property" were on a seamless continuum — not such a hare-brained notion in the days when small farmers could be economically independent, before the crop-lien system. But still!
Monday, May 22, 2006
I've loved the past few days of rain. They've made me happier than I could ever be on a sunny day, brimming over with happiness, at one with the raining world.
And the curious thought occurred to me: it wouldn't be so awful to be dead if it rained like this on one's grave, one's humble mound. Partly in the banal sense, that even gray, sad things are necessary for life, partly like this:
Ninetta mia, crepare di maggio ci vuole tanto e troppo coraggio,
Ninetta bella, dritto all'inferno avrei preferito andarci d'inverno.
But largely, I think, because the wateriness of it all made the dissolution of identity seem less terrible.
Sort of the opposite of a thought that obsessed me when I was an impatient teenager: I can't falter, because I'm frozen. My frozenness makes me strong.
(Am I not still impatient? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! But the rain made me content to shrug my shoulders and stay indoors, instead of going out and devouring the world with my eyes.)
And the curious thought occurred to me: it wouldn't be so awful to be dead if it rained like this on one's grave, one's humble mound. Partly in the banal sense, that even gray, sad things are necessary for life, partly like this:
Ninetta mia, crepare di maggio ci vuole tanto e troppo coraggio,
Ninetta bella, dritto all'inferno avrei preferito andarci d'inverno.
But largely, I think, because the wateriness of it all made the dissolution of identity seem less terrible.
Sort of the opposite of a thought that obsessed me when I was an impatient teenager: I can't falter, because I'm frozen. My frozenness makes me strong.
(Am I not still impatient? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! But the rain made me content to shrug my shoulders and stay indoors, instead of going out and devouring the world with my eyes.)
Tuesday, May 9, 2006
Books:
February
Lucy Gayheart (Cather)
Storia della Linguistica (Mounin)
The Glimpses of the Moon (Wharton)
We (Zamyatin)
March
The Ruby in the Smoke (Pullman)
The Shadow in the North (Pullman)
Parallel Lives (Rose)
April
Only Yesterday (Allen)
The Book Against God (Wood)
The Rise of American Democracy, Jefferson to Lincoln (Wilentz)
February
Lucy Gayheart (Cather)
Storia della Linguistica (Mounin)
The Glimpses of the Moon (Wharton)
We (Zamyatin)
March
The Ruby in the Smoke (Pullman)
The Shadow in the North (Pullman)
Parallel Lives (Rose)
April
Only Yesterday (Allen)
The Book Against God (Wood)
The Rise of American Democracy, Jefferson to Lincoln (Wilentz)
I finished Sean Wilentz's The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln the other day. I highly highly recommend it — through all its 796 pages it never got boring. Even some of the footnotes were worth reading. Here are some of the most memorable quotations:
"You have come into Life with advantages which will disgrace you, if your success if mediocre," Vice President John Adams wrote to his son [John Quincy Adams] in 1794. "[I]f you do not rise to the head not only of your Profession, but of your Country, it will be owing to your own Laziness Slovenliness and Obstinacy." (p. 257)
And this, on Bleeding Kansas:
The Yankees originally found themselves outnumbered by thousands of pro-slavery Missourians who had crossed the border and set down stakes. Few of the Missourians or emigrants from other slave states actually owned slaves, but they despised the New Englanders for what they saw as their air of moral superiority and their sickly love of blacks. Mocked as "pukes" and "border ruffians" by the free-staters, the pro-slavery men were determined to harass the abolitionists out of Kansas by any means necessary. ("We will be compelled to shoot, burn & hang, but the thing will soon be over," the ever violent [Missouri] Senator David Atchison predicted.)
Elsewhere Wilentz describes Atchison as "profane and provocative." But this takes the cake:
The territorial legislative elections in March 1855 turned into an even nastier and more corrupt proceeding than the delegate elections four months earlier. With Atchison once again the chief instigator, thousands of Missourians — some of them members of a new semisecret pro-slavery society, and many identified by a badge of hemp, the area's chief slave cash crop — poured over the border to vote illegally. "There are eleven hundred coming over from Platte County to vote," Atchison shamelessly exclaimed, "and if that ain't enough we can send five thousand — enough to kill every God-damned abolitionist in the Territory." (p. 686)
There's a town in Kansas named Atchison; it's Amelia Earheart's hometown.
I now understand why Goodwyn is so scornful of Progressives; they're firmly in the Whig tradition of self-improvement. Some of Wilentz's best pages are on the Democrats vs. the Whigs:
There was, without question, a dominant antistatist cast, both symbolic and substantive, to Jacksonian economic politics. The neo-Jeffersonian motto of Blair's Washington Globe … — "That government is best, which governs least" — powerfully expressed the antigovernment creed. Yet as Jackson himself always made clear, the Jacksonians opposed large government not because it burdened business but because they believed it was a creature of the monied and privileged few, constructed in defiance of popular sovereignty, that corrupted democracy. "Experience will show," the New York Evening Post said, "that this power has always been exercised under the influence and for the exclusive benefit of wealth. Too rarely have historians understood or even taken seriously the Jacksonians' repeated claims, after as well as during the BUS veto battle, that they aimed not to liberate private business interests from a corrupt government, but to liberate democratic government from the corrupting power of exclusive private business interests. Too rarely have historians appreciated the Democrats' willingness to wield federal power forcefully, over economic issues no less than over nullification, when they thought doing so was necessary to protect the democratic republic. (p. 438)
From this rejection of archaic Federalist politics followed a number of important consequences. The Whigs contended that in the United States all freemen shared a basic harmony of interests that had effectively banished the existence of classes. The older, tough-minded conservatism of John Adams, shared, in part, by James Madison and other Republicans [Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans], assumed that the clash between rich and poor would forever shape politics and government, even in the American republic. In the new conservative view, America was a great exception among nations, fundamentally different from Europe, where, as Webster remarked, there was "a clear and well defined line, between capital and labor." Thanks to America's abundance of land and wealth, its shortage of free labor, and its lack of hereditary aristocracy, the idea of the few and the many had been banished — and, contrary to the Democrats, rendered permanently antithetical to the genius of American politics. In America, rich and poor alike were workingmen, and all workingmen were capitalists, or at least incipient capitalists, ready to strike out on the road to wealth that was open to everyone. The Jacksonians and their labor radical friends understood nothing about this blessed nation, where expanding commerce and manufacturing, according to the American Quarterly Review, placed "within the reach of even the very poorest, a thousand comforts which were unknown to the rich in less civilized ages." What was good for the wealthy of the country was inevitably good for those of aspiring wealth, and what was bad was bad — worse for the aspirants than for the already affluent. "It is moneyed capital which makes business grow and thrive, gives employment to labor and opens to it avenues to success in life," one Whig publicist observed. "The blow aimed at the moneyed capitalist, strikes over the head of the laborer, and is sure to hurt the latter more than the former."
A second corollary was political: Jacksonian politicians, and not privileged businessmen, were the true oppressors of the people. In place of the monied aristocrats whom the Democrats disparaged, the Whigs substituted what they described as a new class of selfish elected officials and appointees, led by King Andrew I — connivers who had turned government into their trough, robbing the people of their money as well as their power. (p. 486)
Democratic corruption was spiritual as well as material, the Whigs asserted. Playing off the stigma attached to freethinking radicals, Frances Wright above all, and the nativist fears of dissipated pro-Democratc immigrants, chiefly the Irish, Whig propagandists proclaimed their opponents dangerous to the very foundations of pious respectability and secure democratic government. If every Democrat was not an infidel, libertine, or a drunk, the Whigs assured the upright, surely every infidel, libertine, and drunk was a Democrat. "Wherever you find a bitter, blasphemous Atheist and an enemy of Marriage, Morality, and Social Order," Greeley charged, "there you may be sure of one vote for Van Buren."
For the Whigs to purport to represent the people, they had to talk more like the people, or how they thought the people talked. Some of the party's Federalist and National Republican predecessors had already experimented with popular campaigning… Some Jeffersonians-turned-National Republicans, most famously the gregarious Henry Clay, were excellent treaters and braggers on the campaign stump — forms of public performance that long predated the democratic breakthroughs of the Jeffersonian era. Suddenly, in the mid-1830s, Whig "cracker-barrel" philosophers and down-home wits began appearing in print. The most successful of them was the transformed fictional Major Jack Downing. As invented by Seba Smith, the sage of Downingville was a humorous figure who poked fun at Jackson and his coterie. In the mid-1830s, however, "new" Major Downings appeared — the most brilliant of them being the creation of Charles Davis, a close friend of Nicholas Biddle's and a director of the New York branch of the Second Bank of the United States. Davis's Downing was a Whig ideologue through and through, praising bankers as benevolent people who "in the nature of things" would "never do any thing agin the gineral prosperity of this country," and who were locked in a struggle against the true "monied aristocracy" of "politicians [who] manage to git hold of the mony of the people, and keep turnin it to their own account —… buy up a party with it." Better a government of enlightened businessmen than of politicians out "jest to git into office; and then, to keep themselves in office." The first modern conservative folk hero was born in a branch office of the Second BUS.
There were other Whig populist heroes, some real, some imaginary, and some a combination of the two. David Crockett's emergence as a buck-skinned Whig celebrity was widely imitated. Whig favorites suddenly showed a fondness for manly, plebeian nicknames, including Tom "The Wagon Boy" Corwin, Henry "The Natick Cobbler" Wilson, and Elihu "The Learned Blacksmith" Burritt. Henry Clay, known widely as "Harry of the West," "The Great Compromiser," and even "Prince Hal," began to favor a name supposedly pinned on him in his youth, "Mill Boy of the Slashes" — a bit wordy but definitely down-home. On a more elevated level, the Whigs tried to match the Democrats' hard-money pamphlets with popular defenses of the credit system, the BUS, and high tariffs, the best of them written by Matthew Carey's son, Henry C. Carey.
Binding together these new-school Whig themes — American classlessness and underlying social harmony, the oppression and corruption of Democratic government, Whig populism — was the doctrine of self-improvement and reform. Attacks on the Jacksonians' dishonesty and class-war demagogy could only carry the Whigs so far in reimagining America for the electorate. Even in the Whigs' classless pastorale, some citizens were better off than others, and despite rapid economic development, the curses of crime, pauperism, and drunkenness appeared to be growing worse, not better. How could these disparities and pathologies be explained? Not, the Whigs insisted, with sinister talk of systemic social inequalities, class warfare, or corrupt institutions (apart from those the Jacksonian politicians had inflicted). Rather, the problems were individual and moral and their solution lay in individual self-reform, or what Boston's eminent Whig Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing called "Elevation of the Soul" — an elevation that benign Whig government could help to encourage.
Whig self-reform adapted ethical precepts from across the spectrum of post-Calvinist American Protestant belief, evoking the emotional revivalism of the Presbygationals [a hideous word] and more proper of the southern evangelicals as well as Channing's rationalist Unitarianism. Their common theme, sacred and secular, was the all-surpassing importance of moral choice. The wealthy did not make the poor lazy and thriftless; the sober did not make the drunkards drink; law-abiding, decent men and women did not make murderers murder, or thieves rob, or wife-beaters beat their wives. Rather, the lazy, the drunk, and the criminal chose wrongly, succumbed to sensuous temptation, and failed to exercise human faculties of self-control that could elevate their souls. What was at stake in the United States, the Whigs proclaimed, was nothing less than a battale over these self-evident facts — a momentous conflict between those who understood the basic moral conditions of human existence and those who rejected them. "We have in truth, in the last eight or ten years, been in a continual state of moral war," the Tennessean John Bell said when he announced, in 1835, that he was joining the Whig Party. That war, as the Whigs depicted it, was essentially a democratic conflict, not between the privileged and the people or the wealthy and the poor, but between the righteous and the unrighteous.
Self-reform in turn became the basis for an uplifting idealism that defined Whiggery as a spiritual cause as well as a political party. Later writers have mistaken this aspect of Whig ideology as a belief in the corrective, liberal, "positive" state, in stark contrast to a Democratic laissez-faire, backward-looking liberal "negative" state. In fact, like virtually all American political parties and movements, the Whigs and the Democrats blended aspects of both "positive" and "negative" government. In some spheres, notably with regard to the currency and the national bank, Whigs greatly preferred private to public power. and tried to limit government regulation. They wanted to halt what they called the Democrats' "war on the currency of the country… on the merchants and mercantile interests" — a war they said was designed "to support the power of the federal government." But the Whigs did promote the uses of government to help direct and even coerce individuals toward what they considered personal improvement — the basis, as they saw it, for social and political progress. Materially, this program had already reached its apotheosis in Clay's American System, a coordinated plan of federal-supported commerical expansion anchored by a privately managed BUS. Morally, it led new-school Whigs in the late 1830s, most auspiciously the more liberal Whigs in New York, to call for increased state support of institutions that would help keep the young on the path of righteousness and help lead the fallen toward the elevation of their souls: public schools, benevolent societies, rehabilitative prisons, reformatories, and for the truly unfortunate, insane asylums.
"Of all the parties that have existed in the United States," John Quincy Adams's dyspeptic grandson Henry would later remark, "the famous Whig party was the most feeble in ideas." Given the subsequent intellectual history of other political parties, that judgment now seems severe. (pp. 486-489)
Among more orthodox religious liberals and evangelicals alike arose the more compelling feature of a new-school Whiggery, a broad Christian humanitarianism of the sort that had nourished the movements against Indian removal and, in the North, for the abolition of slavery. Just as post-Calvinist churchmen denounced human coercion and unbridled passion as unchristian, so they rejected everyday cruelties — the beating of children, wife abuse, the harsh treatment of convicts, and (according to some) the physical and mental torments of slavery — which other Americans took for granted as natural and even necessary forms of correction and social order. (p. 490)
The Democrats, scornful of the opposition's mediocre nominee, tried to exploit Clay and his supporters' bitter disappointment — with disastrous results. Shortly after the convention, the pro-Van Buren Baltimore Republican baited the Whigs with an insult reportedly delivered by a Clay man against Harrison: "Give him a barrel of hard cider, and settle a pension of two thousand a year on him, and my word for it, he will sit the remainder of his days in his log cabin." The superannuated general — "Old Granny" Harrison, some Democrats called him — was simply too old, too befuddled, too undistinguished to be a credible president. But the insult played directly into the hands of Weed as well as the old-guard Whigs. Richard S. Elliott, a Harrisburg Whig editor, was one of the first to grasp fully the implications, in a postconvention conversation over some rare Madeira with the banker Thomas Elder at Elder's mansion on the Susquehanna. The Van Burenites' mockery could, the two figured out, become the Whigs' pride, projecting Harrison and his party as paragons of plain rustic virtue while condemning the Democrats (the possibilities grew rich with each sip of the Madeira) as scornful, out-of-touch nabob politicos. And so the Whigs' famous Log Cabin and Hard Cider campaign began, with an enormous Harrison transparency mounted in Harrisburg depicting a log cabin with a cider barrel by the door. New-school party managers were fully aware of political genius behind the ballyhoo. "The Log Cabin is the symbol of nothing that Van Burenism knows, feels, or can appreciate," Weed later explained to the readers of the Albany Evening Journal. "It tells of the hopes of the humble — of the privations of the poor —… it is the emblem of rights that the vain and insolent aristocracy of federal office-holders have… trampled upon."
The Democrats, not taking this new Whig campaign symbolism at all seriously, entered the lists in their time-tested ways. Van Buren, outwardly unflustered as ever, did not reply to the volley of personal attacks on him, preferring to have his supporters calmly restate his positions on the issues and leave it to the state and local Democratic campaign committees to stir up the faithful.
…The length of the workday, said the self-proclaimed champion of labor Horace Greeley, ought to be left to "mutual agreement" between workers and employers: "What have Governments and Presidents to do with it?" Shipyard workers thought differently. Looking back, a free black Washington Navy Yard hand named Michael Shiner wrote in his diary that "the Working Class of people of the the United State Machanic and laboures ought to never forget the Hon ex president Van Buren for the ten hour sistom… his name ought to be Recorded in evry Working Man heart."
…Early in the campaign, Democrats remained confident that their old campaign weapons would suffice, and that the Whigs' demagogy about "Old Tippecanoe" Harrison, the heroic Indian fighter, would flop. "The Logg cabin hard cider and Coon humbugery is doing us a great service every where," Andrew Jackson wrote to Van Buren from his retirement at the Hermitage, "and none more so than in Tennessee." When the Whig chorus swelled ever louder, puzzled Van Buren men responded unavailingly with sweet reason. "The question is not whether Harrison drinks hard cider," William Cullen Bryant remonstrated, "… The question is what he and his party will do if they obtain the power." Bryant may have been right, but he missed the point by a mile.
The Democratic side contributed the only intellectually forceful product of the 1840 campaign, an astonishing, rebellious essay by George Bancroft's discovery, Orestes Brownson, entitled "The Laboring Classes."…
"The Laboring Classes," formally a review of a brief book on Chartism by… Thomas Carlyle, appeared in the Boston Quarterly just as the presidential campaign heated up. In part it was a biting restatement of the radical economic ideas that had become mainstream Democratic principles, directed against "the chiefs of the business community" — "nabobs, reveling in luxury," while "building miniature log cabins, shouting Harrison and 'hard cider.'" Some of the essay's fiercest diatribes pierced through the moral reformism typical of new-school Whigs — "priests and pedagogues," Brownson called them, who "seek to reform without disturbing the social arrangements which render reform necessary." (pp. 497-500)
(Jennie once e-mailed me long portions of Gibbons's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. "I wish I could be a professional transcriber!" she wrote.)
I'm glad I don't live in the last quarter of the nineteenth century — would I have voted after Emancipation & the end of Reconstruction (if I could have voted) for the party of big business and abolition, or the party of slavery and the common man? Today's manichean party system suits me much better. (But NB: There were antislavery Democrats — Van Buren eventually became one — though their star began to wane in 1852. The Whigs collapsed under the pressure of the slavery controversy, and the Republicans, who sprang up in their place, were a motley crew united only by opposition to slavery. They were admirable & admirably effective for a few decades, but they sold out with astonishing speed and thoroughness. I'm about to find out how that happened.) Frederick Lewis Allen calls the Democrats in the 1920s "that coalition of incompatibles." The same could be said of the Whigs.
Here's an interesting contrast: in the US the left-wing party has a more or less continuous genealogy; it's the right-wing party that has collapsed and recast itself again and again (Federalists - Whigs - Republicans). In the UK the opposite is true (Whigs - Liberals - Labour — oder?). The Tories and the Democrats are the two oldest political parties in the world.
"You have come into Life with advantages which will disgrace you, if your success if mediocre," Vice President John Adams wrote to his son [John Quincy Adams] in 1794. "[I]f you do not rise to the head not only of your Profession, but of your Country, it will be owing to your own Laziness Slovenliness and Obstinacy." (p. 257)
And this, on Bleeding Kansas:
The Yankees originally found themselves outnumbered by thousands of pro-slavery Missourians who had crossed the border and set down stakes. Few of the Missourians or emigrants from other slave states actually owned slaves, but they despised the New Englanders for what they saw as their air of moral superiority and their sickly love of blacks. Mocked as "pukes" and "border ruffians" by the free-staters, the pro-slavery men were determined to harass the abolitionists out of Kansas by any means necessary. ("We will be compelled to shoot, burn & hang, but the thing will soon be over," the ever violent [Missouri] Senator David Atchison predicted.)
Elsewhere Wilentz describes Atchison as "profane and provocative." But this takes the cake:
The territorial legislative elections in March 1855 turned into an even nastier and more corrupt proceeding than the delegate elections four months earlier. With Atchison once again the chief instigator, thousands of Missourians — some of them members of a new semisecret pro-slavery society, and many identified by a badge of hemp, the area's chief slave cash crop — poured over the border to vote illegally. "There are eleven hundred coming over from Platte County to vote," Atchison shamelessly exclaimed, "and if that ain't enough we can send five thousand — enough to kill every God-damned abolitionist in the Territory." (p. 686)
There's a town in Kansas named Atchison; it's Amelia Earheart's hometown.
I now understand why Goodwyn is so scornful of Progressives; they're firmly in the Whig tradition of self-improvement. Some of Wilentz's best pages are on the Democrats vs. the Whigs:
There was, without question, a dominant antistatist cast, both symbolic and substantive, to Jacksonian economic politics. The neo-Jeffersonian motto of Blair's Washington Globe … — "That government is best, which governs least" — powerfully expressed the antigovernment creed. Yet as Jackson himself always made clear, the Jacksonians opposed large government not because it burdened business but because they believed it was a creature of the monied and privileged few, constructed in defiance of popular sovereignty, that corrupted democracy. "Experience will show," the New York Evening Post said, "that this power has always been exercised under the influence and for the exclusive benefit of wealth. Too rarely have historians understood or even taken seriously the Jacksonians' repeated claims, after as well as during the BUS veto battle, that they aimed not to liberate private business interests from a corrupt government, but to liberate democratic government from the corrupting power of exclusive private business interests. Too rarely have historians appreciated the Democrats' willingness to wield federal power forcefully, over economic issues no less than over nullification, when they thought doing so was necessary to protect the democratic republic. (p. 438)
From this rejection of archaic Federalist politics followed a number of important consequences. The Whigs contended that in the United States all freemen shared a basic harmony of interests that had effectively banished the existence of classes. The older, tough-minded conservatism of John Adams, shared, in part, by James Madison and other Republicans [Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans], assumed that the clash between rich and poor would forever shape politics and government, even in the American republic. In the new conservative view, America was a great exception among nations, fundamentally different from Europe, where, as Webster remarked, there was "a clear and well defined line, between capital and labor." Thanks to America's abundance of land and wealth, its shortage of free labor, and its lack of hereditary aristocracy, the idea of the few and the many had been banished — and, contrary to the Democrats, rendered permanently antithetical to the genius of American politics. In America, rich and poor alike were workingmen, and all workingmen were capitalists, or at least incipient capitalists, ready to strike out on the road to wealth that was open to everyone. The Jacksonians and their labor radical friends understood nothing about this blessed nation, where expanding commerce and manufacturing, according to the American Quarterly Review, placed "within the reach of even the very poorest, a thousand comforts which were unknown to the rich in less civilized ages." What was good for the wealthy of the country was inevitably good for those of aspiring wealth, and what was bad was bad — worse for the aspirants than for the already affluent. "It is moneyed capital which makes business grow and thrive, gives employment to labor and opens to it avenues to success in life," one Whig publicist observed. "The blow aimed at the moneyed capitalist, strikes over the head of the laborer, and is sure to hurt the latter more than the former."
A second corollary was political: Jacksonian politicians, and not privileged businessmen, were the true oppressors of the people. In place of the monied aristocrats whom the Democrats disparaged, the Whigs substituted what they described as a new class of selfish elected officials and appointees, led by King Andrew I — connivers who had turned government into their trough, robbing the people of their money as well as their power. (p. 486)
Democratic corruption was spiritual as well as material, the Whigs asserted. Playing off the stigma attached to freethinking radicals, Frances Wright above all, and the nativist fears of dissipated pro-Democratc immigrants, chiefly the Irish, Whig propagandists proclaimed their opponents dangerous to the very foundations of pious respectability and secure democratic government. If every Democrat was not an infidel, libertine, or a drunk, the Whigs assured the upright, surely every infidel, libertine, and drunk was a Democrat. "Wherever you find a bitter, blasphemous Atheist and an enemy of Marriage, Morality, and Social Order," Greeley charged, "there you may be sure of one vote for Van Buren."
For the Whigs to purport to represent the people, they had to talk more like the people, or how they thought the people talked. Some of the party's Federalist and National Republican predecessors had already experimented with popular campaigning… Some Jeffersonians-turned-National Republicans, most famously the gregarious Henry Clay, were excellent treaters and braggers on the campaign stump — forms of public performance that long predated the democratic breakthroughs of the Jeffersonian era. Suddenly, in the mid-1830s, Whig "cracker-barrel" philosophers and down-home wits began appearing in print. The most successful of them was the transformed fictional Major Jack Downing. As invented by Seba Smith, the sage of Downingville was a humorous figure who poked fun at Jackson and his coterie. In the mid-1830s, however, "new" Major Downings appeared — the most brilliant of them being the creation of Charles Davis, a close friend of Nicholas Biddle's and a director of the New York branch of the Second Bank of the United States. Davis's Downing was a Whig ideologue through and through, praising bankers as benevolent people who "in the nature of things" would "never do any thing agin the gineral prosperity of this country," and who were locked in a struggle against the true "monied aristocracy" of "politicians [who] manage to git hold of the mony of the people, and keep turnin it to their own account —… buy up a party with it." Better a government of enlightened businessmen than of politicians out "jest to git into office; and then, to keep themselves in office." The first modern conservative folk hero was born in a branch office of the Second BUS.
There were other Whig populist heroes, some real, some imaginary, and some a combination of the two. David Crockett's emergence as a buck-skinned Whig celebrity was widely imitated. Whig favorites suddenly showed a fondness for manly, plebeian nicknames, including Tom "The Wagon Boy" Corwin, Henry "The Natick Cobbler" Wilson, and Elihu "The Learned Blacksmith" Burritt. Henry Clay, known widely as "Harry of the West," "The Great Compromiser," and even "Prince Hal," began to favor a name supposedly pinned on him in his youth, "Mill Boy of the Slashes" — a bit wordy but definitely down-home. On a more elevated level, the Whigs tried to match the Democrats' hard-money pamphlets with popular defenses of the credit system, the BUS, and high tariffs, the best of them written by Matthew Carey's son, Henry C. Carey.
Binding together these new-school Whig themes — American classlessness and underlying social harmony, the oppression and corruption of Democratic government, Whig populism — was the doctrine of self-improvement and reform. Attacks on the Jacksonians' dishonesty and class-war demagogy could only carry the Whigs so far in reimagining America for the electorate. Even in the Whigs' classless pastorale, some citizens were better off than others, and despite rapid economic development, the curses of crime, pauperism, and drunkenness appeared to be growing worse, not better. How could these disparities and pathologies be explained? Not, the Whigs insisted, with sinister talk of systemic social inequalities, class warfare, or corrupt institutions (apart from those the Jacksonian politicians had inflicted). Rather, the problems were individual and moral and their solution lay in individual self-reform, or what Boston's eminent Whig Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing called "Elevation of the Soul" — an elevation that benign Whig government could help to encourage.
Whig self-reform adapted ethical precepts from across the spectrum of post-Calvinist American Protestant belief, evoking the emotional revivalism of the Presbygationals [a hideous word] and more proper of the southern evangelicals as well as Channing's rationalist Unitarianism. Their common theme, sacred and secular, was the all-surpassing importance of moral choice. The wealthy did not make the poor lazy and thriftless; the sober did not make the drunkards drink; law-abiding, decent men and women did not make murderers murder, or thieves rob, or wife-beaters beat their wives. Rather, the lazy, the drunk, and the criminal chose wrongly, succumbed to sensuous temptation, and failed to exercise human faculties of self-control that could elevate their souls. What was at stake in the United States, the Whigs proclaimed, was nothing less than a battale over these self-evident facts — a momentous conflict between those who understood the basic moral conditions of human existence and those who rejected them. "We have in truth, in the last eight or ten years, been in a continual state of moral war," the Tennessean John Bell said when he announced, in 1835, that he was joining the Whig Party. That war, as the Whigs depicted it, was essentially a democratic conflict, not between the privileged and the people or the wealthy and the poor, but between the righteous and the unrighteous.
Self-reform in turn became the basis for an uplifting idealism that defined Whiggery as a spiritual cause as well as a political party. Later writers have mistaken this aspect of Whig ideology as a belief in the corrective, liberal, "positive" state, in stark contrast to a Democratic laissez-faire, backward-looking liberal "negative" state. In fact, like virtually all American political parties and movements, the Whigs and the Democrats blended aspects of both "positive" and "negative" government. In some spheres, notably with regard to the currency and the national bank, Whigs greatly preferred private to public power. and tried to limit government regulation. They wanted to halt what they called the Democrats' "war on the currency of the country… on the merchants and mercantile interests" — a war they said was designed "to support the power of the federal government." But the Whigs did promote the uses of government to help direct and even coerce individuals toward what they considered personal improvement — the basis, as they saw it, for social and political progress. Materially, this program had already reached its apotheosis in Clay's American System, a coordinated plan of federal-supported commerical expansion anchored by a privately managed BUS. Morally, it led new-school Whigs in the late 1830s, most auspiciously the more liberal Whigs in New York, to call for increased state support of institutions that would help keep the young on the path of righteousness and help lead the fallen toward the elevation of their souls: public schools, benevolent societies, rehabilitative prisons, reformatories, and for the truly unfortunate, insane asylums.
"Of all the parties that have existed in the United States," John Quincy Adams's dyspeptic grandson Henry would later remark, "the famous Whig party was the most feeble in ideas." Given the subsequent intellectual history of other political parties, that judgment now seems severe. (pp. 486-489)
Among more orthodox religious liberals and evangelicals alike arose the more compelling feature of a new-school Whiggery, a broad Christian humanitarianism of the sort that had nourished the movements against Indian removal and, in the North, for the abolition of slavery. Just as post-Calvinist churchmen denounced human coercion and unbridled passion as unchristian, so they rejected everyday cruelties — the beating of children, wife abuse, the harsh treatment of convicts, and (according to some) the physical and mental torments of slavery — which other Americans took for granted as natural and even necessary forms of correction and social order. (p. 490)
The Democrats, scornful of the opposition's mediocre nominee, tried to exploit Clay and his supporters' bitter disappointment — with disastrous results. Shortly after the convention, the pro-Van Buren Baltimore Republican baited the Whigs with an insult reportedly delivered by a Clay man against Harrison: "Give him a barrel of hard cider, and settle a pension of two thousand a year on him, and my word for it, he will sit the remainder of his days in his log cabin." The superannuated general — "Old Granny" Harrison, some Democrats called him — was simply too old, too befuddled, too undistinguished to be a credible president. But the insult played directly into the hands of Weed as well as the old-guard Whigs. Richard S. Elliott, a Harrisburg Whig editor, was one of the first to grasp fully the implications, in a postconvention conversation over some rare Madeira with the banker Thomas Elder at Elder's mansion on the Susquehanna. The Van Burenites' mockery could, the two figured out, become the Whigs' pride, projecting Harrison and his party as paragons of plain rustic virtue while condemning the Democrats (the possibilities grew rich with each sip of the Madeira) as scornful, out-of-touch nabob politicos. And so the Whigs' famous Log Cabin and Hard Cider campaign began, with an enormous Harrison transparency mounted in Harrisburg depicting a log cabin with a cider barrel by the door. New-school party managers were fully aware of political genius behind the ballyhoo. "The Log Cabin is the symbol of nothing that Van Burenism knows, feels, or can appreciate," Weed later explained to the readers of the Albany Evening Journal. "It tells of the hopes of the humble — of the privations of the poor —… it is the emblem of rights that the vain and insolent aristocracy of federal office-holders have… trampled upon."
The Democrats, not taking this new Whig campaign symbolism at all seriously, entered the lists in their time-tested ways. Van Buren, outwardly unflustered as ever, did not reply to the volley of personal attacks on him, preferring to have his supporters calmly restate his positions on the issues and leave it to the state and local Democratic campaign committees to stir up the faithful.
…The length of the workday, said the self-proclaimed champion of labor Horace Greeley, ought to be left to "mutual agreement" between workers and employers: "What have Governments and Presidents to do with it?" Shipyard workers thought differently. Looking back, a free black Washington Navy Yard hand named Michael Shiner wrote in his diary that "the Working Class of people of the the United State Machanic and laboures ought to never forget the Hon ex president Van Buren for the ten hour sistom… his name ought to be Recorded in evry Working Man heart."
…Early in the campaign, Democrats remained confident that their old campaign weapons would suffice, and that the Whigs' demagogy about "Old Tippecanoe" Harrison, the heroic Indian fighter, would flop. "The Logg cabin hard cider and Coon humbugery is doing us a great service every where," Andrew Jackson wrote to Van Buren from his retirement at the Hermitage, "and none more so than in Tennessee." When the Whig chorus swelled ever louder, puzzled Van Buren men responded unavailingly with sweet reason. "The question is not whether Harrison drinks hard cider," William Cullen Bryant remonstrated, "… The question is what he and his party will do if they obtain the power." Bryant may have been right, but he missed the point by a mile.
The Democratic side contributed the only intellectually forceful product of the 1840 campaign, an astonishing, rebellious essay by George Bancroft's discovery, Orestes Brownson, entitled "The Laboring Classes."…
"The Laboring Classes," formally a review of a brief book on Chartism by… Thomas Carlyle, appeared in the Boston Quarterly just as the presidential campaign heated up. In part it was a biting restatement of the radical economic ideas that had become mainstream Democratic principles, directed against "the chiefs of the business community" — "nabobs, reveling in luxury," while "building miniature log cabins, shouting Harrison and 'hard cider.'" Some of the essay's fiercest diatribes pierced through the moral reformism typical of new-school Whigs — "priests and pedagogues," Brownson called them, who "seek to reform without disturbing the social arrangements which render reform necessary." (pp. 497-500)
(Jennie once e-mailed me long portions of Gibbons's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. "I wish I could be a professional transcriber!" she wrote.)
I'm glad I don't live in the last quarter of the nineteenth century — would I have voted after Emancipation & the end of Reconstruction (if I could have voted) for the party of big business and abolition, or the party of slavery and the common man? Today's manichean party system suits me much better. (But NB: There were antislavery Democrats — Van Buren eventually became one — though their star began to wane in 1852. The Whigs collapsed under the pressure of the slavery controversy, and the Republicans, who sprang up in their place, were a motley crew united only by opposition to slavery. They were admirable & admirably effective for a few decades, but they sold out with astonishing speed and thoroughness. I'm about to find out how that happened.) Frederick Lewis Allen calls the Democrats in the 1920s "that coalition of incompatibles." The same could be said of the Whigs.
Here's an interesting contrast: in the US the left-wing party has a more or less continuous genealogy; it's the right-wing party that has collapsed and recast itself again and again (Federalists - Whigs - Republicans). In the UK the opposite is true (Whigs - Liberals - Labour — oder?). The Tories and the Democrats are the two oldest political parties in the world.
In 2004 I heard Angela Hewitt play Couperin's "Mysterious Barricades" on the radio. It reminds me of Handel's "Harmonious Blacksmith," or maybe just the connotations of the title — a quiet, joyful pleasure in work. Now I have all three of her CDs of Couperin's "Ordres." Here are some of my favorites:
Les langueurs tendres
Gazoüillement
Les Bergeries
Le Ménetou
Les lis naissans
Le rossignol-en-amour
Les favètes plaintives
Le Dodo, ou l'Amour au Berceau
Le Turbulent
Le tic-toc-choc
Le Gaillard Boiteux
La Muse Plantine
L'Amphibie
La Convalescente
L'Épineuse
Aren't the titles wonderful?! Not that I understand every single word. ("Ménetou"? "Gazoüillement"?) Here are the titles of the miniatures in the 25th order: (I was going to say sketches, but they're too finished. But "miniatures" may not be right either — some of them are five minutes long.)
1. La Visionaire
2. La Misterieuse
3. La Monflambert
4. La Muse Victorieuse
5. Les Ombres Errantes
It's like wandering through a formal garden full of statues at dawn.
A-ha! I just looked up "gazouille*" on artfl. Here's the definition:
GAZOUILLER. v. n. Faire un petit bruit doux & agreable, tel que celuy que fait le cours d'un petit ruisseau sur les cailloux, ou celuy des petits oiseaux. On entend le soir les oiseaux qui gazoüillent. ce ruisseau gazoüille agreablement sur les cailloux.
How appropriate.
Here's another extraordinary set of titles, the 13th order. None of these is more than a minute long:
1. La Virginité sous le Domino couleur d'invisible
2. La Pudeur sous le Domino couleur de roze
3. L'Ardeur sous le Domino incarnat
4. L'Ésperance sous le Domino vert
5. La Fidelité sous le Domino bleu
6. La Persévérance sous le Domino gris de lin
7. La Langueur sous le Domino violet
8. La Coqueterie sous le différens Dominos
9. Les Vieux Galans et les Trésorieres Suranées sous des Dominos pourpres et feuilles mortes
10. Les Coucous Bénévoles sous des Domino jaunes
11. La Jalousie Taciturne sous le Domino gris de maure
12. La Frénésie, ou le Désespoir sous le Domino noir
He can be as warm, confident, calm and expansive as Handel, in "Mysterious Barricades" and also in "Le Dodo, ou l'amour au berceau," but he's Bach's match for poisonous, paralyzing bitterness. See "La Muse-Plantine" for gentle bleakness. Or he can weave together extremes, as in "La Convalescente" — fleeting consonant intervals like hints of forgiveness.
Other pieces are simply the epitome of exquiteness and delicacy. You want to hold your breath so as not to disturb the birds and flowers.
I lent these to Mark and he said, "Some of them are run of the mill, but the best ones are astonishing." I would have agreed with him when I first became acquainted with the pieces, but the more I listen the more I think, "Couperin invented his own language, and anything he says in it is fascinating."
Because of the paintings on the covers of the CDs, I thought, "This is rococo music." And then it occurred to me that Marvell is rococo poetry — not just "Picture of Little TC in a Prospect of Flowers" and "On a Drop of Dew," but practically all the lyric poems, or all the ones that treat nature as art.
Les langueurs tendres
Gazoüillement
Les Bergeries
Le Ménetou
Les lis naissans
Le rossignol-en-amour
Les favètes plaintives
Le Dodo, ou l'Amour au Berceau
Le Turbulent
Le tic-toc-choc
Le Gaillard Boiteux
La Muse Plantine
L'Amphibie
La Convalescente
L'Épineuse
Aren't the titles wonderful?! Not that I understand every single word. ("Ménetou"? "Gazoüillement"?) Here are the titles of the miniatures in the 25th order: (I was going to say sketches, but they're too finished. But "miniatures" may not be right either — some of them are five minutes long.)
1. La Visionaire
2. La Misterieuse
3. La Monflambert
4. La Muse Victorieuse
5. Les Ombres Errantes
It's like wandering through a formal garden full of statues at dawn.
A-ha! I just looked up "gazouille*" on artfl. Here's the definition:
GAZOUILLER. v. n. Faire un petit bruit doux & agreable, tel que celuy que fait le cours d'un petit ruisseau sur les cailloux, ou celuy des petits oiseaux. On entend le soir les oiseaux qui gazoüillent. ce ruisseau gazoüille agreablement sur les cailloux.
How appropriate.
Here's another extraordinary set of titles, the 13th order. None of these is more than a minute long:
1. La Virginité sous le Domino couleur d'invisible
2. La Pudeur sous le Domino couleur de roze
3. L'Ardeur sous le Domino incarnat
4. L'Ésperance sous le Domino vert
5. La Fidelité sous le Domino bleu
6. La Persévérance sous le Domino gris de lin
7. La Langueur sous le Domino violet
8. La Coqueterie sous le différens Dominos
9. Les Vieux Galans et les Trésorieres Suranées sous des Dominos pourpres et feuilles mortes
10. Les Coucous Bénévoles sous des Domino jaunes
11. La Jalousie Taciturne sous le Domino gris de maure
12. La Frénésie, ou le Désespoir sous le Domino noir
He can be as warm, confident, calm and expansive as Handel, in "Mysterious Barricades" and also in "Le Dodo, ou l'amour au berceau," but he's Bach's match for poisonous, paralyzing bitterness. See "La Muse-Plantine" for gentle bleakness. Or he can weave together extremes, as in "La Convalescente" — fleeting consonant intervals like hints of forgiveness.
Other pieces are simply the epitome of exquiteness and delicacy. You want to hold your breath so as not to disturb the birds and flowers.
I lent these to Mark and he said, "Some of them are run of the mill, but the best ones are astonishing." I would have agreed with him when I first became acquainted with the pieces, but the more I listen the more I think, "Couperin invented his own language, and anything he says in it is fascinating."
Because of the paintings on the covers of the CDs, I thought, "This is rococo music." And then it occurred to me that Marvell is rococo poetry — not just "Picture of Little TC in a Prospect of Flowers" and "On a Drop of Dew," but practically all the lyric poems, or all the ones that treat nature as art.
Until I was switched to a fifth grade, I also taught the less good sixth grade; one of my students in that class, Jiwon, almost never spoke, either in class or during break. His voice has the muffled thickness of the voice of a boy I knew in high school who also never spoke — as if their vocal chords were out of shape, as if the machinery creaked when it was set in motion, and never got beyond the creaking stage. I think he's shy, but more importantly, he's only learning English. One might think, observing his awkward silence, that he had no English at all, but one would be wrong. He writes better, more fluently and more thoughtfully, than anyone in that class. Once we read a passage on Tecumseh's efforts to unite the midwestern tribes against the settlers. The students were then supposed to recreate the debate at the powwow where Tecumseh tries to convince the other chiefs to join him. Most students just gave two sentences summing up Tecumseh's position, but Jiwon produced a page and a half of dialogue, including Tecumseh's arguments, the chiefs' counterarguments, and Tecumseh's (and his allies') responses. He even had parenthetical directions: "[angrily]," "[hesitating]," "[with passion]." These stood out, because Jiwon himself speaks in a halting monotone.
I also teach a ninth grade consisting of four boys and one girl. It's no fun. They do what I tell them to do, and they study, but they never talk. But last week something interesting happened, finally. I'd asked them to write an essay on "a world upside down that you would like to see come true." Andrew wrote about a world where athletes and movie stars toil in obscurity while doctors, teachers, and garbage collectors are lionized and showered with praise. "What's this?" He'd erased something from his list of worthy professions. "Oh, uh, I originally included lawyers." His piece was a fierce rant, and he seemed surprised when I said that this kind of essay could be funny. I look forward to reading the second draft. [Update: it includes, on my suggestion, magazines and fansites on the social lives of plumbers and gardeners. I was a bit disappointed that he didn't go beyond my suggestion. But maybe he's not interested in being funny.]
Sixth grade:
In a sentence like "The dentist cleaned my teeth," they were supposed to label complements. They all got that "teeth" was the direct object, but one student labeled "my" as an indirect object. "It's just a plain old possessive adjective," I said. Then Diana showed me her paper. She had made the same mistake, and she understood why it was wrong, but, she explained (without using the terminology), she'd thought of "my" as a kind of dative of reference — which is exactly how that sentence works in other European languages. Could she and her classmate have had Spanish in mind?
I taught Mrs. Dalloway last week. It was a surprise to me, when I was re-reading the beginning in preparation for the class, how much I remembered of it, how clearly. I haven't opened it in nearly a decade, and yet I remembered so much of it, long descriptions as well as the tiny perfections — a look, a gesture that makes for a "decisive moment." I'd been half-afraid that I wouldn't be as impressed with it as I was when I first read it, but no, it still seemed perfect. And the rush of excitement that comes from teaching a work one loves to bits — there's nothing like it. Actually, there was something else: it's a hard book; the students knew it & I know it. And so I felt very useful. So often with novels I think, "What's there to explain or even talk about? It's all on the page." Of course, there's no telling what students won't understand, or, to put it more hopefully, what unusual interpretations they'll come up with, but I'm often disoriented.* That didn't happened in my Mrs. Dalloway class: I knew exactly what would be hard. (But actually I'm never at a loss for words when discussing works I love, even if they're as straightforward as The Witch of Blackbird Pond.)
*For example, Joyce thought that Henry Foster, in Brave New World, is being sincerely kind to Bernard when he offers Bernard soma. She'd missed the significance of "Let's bait him." And another example: Jae suggested that the Duke of Browning's poem is actually warning his future bride's emissary: "My next duchess had better have eyes only for me." I think that gives him rather too much credit for controlled calculation, but not for subtle cleverness, so it's a useful way of considering the poem.
I also teach a ninth grade consisting of four boys and one girl. It's no fun. They do what I tell them to do, and they study, but they never talk. But last week something interesting happened, finally. I'd asked them to write an essay on "a world upside down that you would like to see come true." Andrew wrote about a world where athletes and movie stars toil in obscurity while doctors, teachers, and garbage collectors are lionized and showered with praise. "What's this?" He'd erased something from his list of worthy professions. "Oh, uh, I originally included lawyers." His piece was a fierce rant, and he seemed surprised when I said that this kind of essay could be funny. I look forward to reading the second draft. [Update: it includes, on my suggestion, magazines and fansites on the social lives of plumbers and gardeners. I was a bit disappointed that he didn't go beyond my suggestion. But maybe he's not interested in being funny.]
Sixth grade:
In a sentence like "The dentist cleaned my teeth," they were supposed to label complements. They all got that "teeth" was the direct object, but one student labeled "my" as an indirect object. "It's just a plain old possessive adjective," I said. Then Diana showed me her paper. She had made the same mistake, and she understood why it was wrong, but, she explained (without using the terminology), she'd thought of "my" as a kind of dative of reference — which is exactly how that sentence works in other European languages. Could she and her classmate have had Spanish in mind?
I taught Mrs. Dalloway last week. It was a surprise to me, when I was re-reading the beginning in preparation for the class, how much I remembered of it, how clearly. I haven't opened it in nearly a decade, and yet I remembered so much of it, long descriptions as well as the tiny perfections — a look, a gesture that makes for a "decisive moment." I'd been half-afraid that I wouldn't be as impressed with it as I was when I first read it, but no, it still seemed perfect. And the rush of excitement that comes from teaching a work one loves to bits — there's nothing like it. Actually, there was something else: it's a hard book; the students knew it & I know it. And so I felt very useful. So often with novels I think, "What's there to explain or even talk about? It's all on the page." Of course, there's no telling what students won't understand, or, to put it more hopefully, what unusual interpretations they'll come up with, but I'm often disoriented.* That didn't happened in my Mrs. Dalloway class: I knew exactly what would be hard. (But actually I'm never at a loss for words when discussing works I love, even if they're as straightforward as The Witch of Blackbird Pond.)
*For example, Joyce thought that Henry Foster, in Brave New World, is being sincerely kind to Bernard when he offers Bernard soma. She'd missed the significance of "Let's bait him." And another example: Jae suggested that the Duke of Browning's poem is actually warning his future bride's emissary: "My next duchess had better have eyes only for me." I think that gives him rather too much credit for controlled calculation, but not for subtle cleverness, so it's a useful way of considering the poem.
A few weeks ago my second grade teacher got in touch to say that he was coming through the city. Could we meet? I hadn't seen or heard from him since second grade, so I was very surprised and really delighted. I remember him as tall, stern, demanding, authoritative; someone who would give a lot if you worked hard. I learned a great deal under his tutelage, but most importantly, he introduced me to the chronicles of Narnia. I had read the Little House in the Big Woods books, and many Nancy Drew books, and The Secret Garden (twice), and possibly The Little Princess (or maybe that was later?), and Bambi and Bambi's Children, and Mr. Popper's Penguins, and I loved all those, but Narnia was the world I lived in through the next few years.
He said he hadn't changed much in appearance, and this was true; he's still tall and physically imposing, and though he doesn't have a moustache anymore his face was as I remembered it. I hadn't noticed in second grade what a westerner he is — the drawl, the wide-brimmed hat which he never took off. But the biggest surprises had nothing to do with appearance. He said, for example, that he had learned a great deal in his year with us. At the time I thought he knew everything! He said he had been in awe of us, our parents, and the city. I have to confess that it was hard to hear this — one doesn't want an admired teacher to admit weakness, even years after the fact. On the other hand, everyone's human. He called himself a "farm boy," and in his case it's not a figure of speech — he had to miss several months of school every year to help out on his family's farm. There was only one book in his parents' house, the Bible, and nobody ever read that. Little by little, through his twenties, he challenged himself to read harder books — this the man who helped me so much as a reader when I was seven! If only he had had himself as a teacher.
As we spoke I couldn't help thinking of Jonathan Rose's The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes: "In the first years of the nineteenth century, shepherds in the Cheviot Hills maintained a kind of circulating library, leaving books they had read in designated crannies in boundary walls. The next shepherd who came that way could borrow it and leave another in its place, so that each volume was gradually carried through a circuit of 30 to 40 miles, on which the shepherds only occasionally met." They "drew inspiration from a whole subgenre of self-improving literature[, including] G.L. Craik's The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties (1830-31)."
He said he hadn't changed much in appearance, and this was true; he's still tall and physically imposing, and though he doesn't have a moustache anymore his face was as I remembered it. I hadn't noticed in second grade what a westerner he is — the drawl, the wide-brimmed hat which he never took off. But the biggest surprises had nothing to do with appearance. He said, for example, that he had learned a great deal in his year with us. At the time I thought he knew everything! He said he had been in awe of us, our parents, and the city. I have to confess that it was hard to hear this — one doesn't want an admired teacher to admit weakness, even years after the fact. On the other hand, everyone's human. He called himself a "farm boy," and in his case it's not a figure of speech — he had to miss several months of school every year to help out on his family's farm. There was only one book in his parents' house, the Bible, and nobody ever read that. Little by little, through his twenties, he challenged himself to read harder books — this the man who helped me so much as a reader when I was seven! If only he had had himself as a teacher.
As we spoke I couldn't help thinking of Jonathan Rose's The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes: "In the first years of the nineteenth century, shepherds in the Cheviot Hills maintained a kind of circulating library, leaving books they had read in designated crannies in boundary walls. The next shepherd who came that way could borrow it and leave another in its place, so that each volume was gradually carried through a circuit of 30 to 40 miles, on which the shepherds only occasionally met." They "drew inspiration from a whole subgenre of self-improving literature[, including] G.L. Craik's The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties (1830-31)."
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