CLASS NOTES: NATIONALISM
The Great Awakening
Great Awakening The revitalization of spirituality and religious enthusiasm that swept through the American colonies from 1734 until around 1750. Ministers like Jonathan Edwards and the itinerant preachers George Whitefield and Gilbert Tennent promoted what they called a "religion of the heart," through which converts would move beyond mere adherence to moral duties into an ecstatic experience of spiritual grace. Great Awakening conversions were often characterized by physical reactions such as shouting, shaking, fainting, or even falling to the ground.
The Great Awakening was a watershed event in the life of the American people. Before it was over, it had swept the colonies of the Eastern seaboard, transforming the social and religious life of land. Although the name is slightly misleading--the Great Awakening was not one continuous revival, rather it was several revivals in a variety of locations--it says a great deal about the state of religion in the colonies. For the simple reality is that one cannot be awakened unless you have fallen asleep.
Neither the Anglicans who came to dominate religious life in Virginia after royal control was established over Jamestown, nor the Puritans in Massachusetts Bay, were terribly successful in putting down roots. The reality was that on the frontier, the settled parish system of England-- which was employed by Puritan and Anglican alike--proved difficult to transplant. Unlike the compact communities of the old world, the small farms and plantations of the new spread out into the wilderness, making both communication and ecclesiastical discipline difficult. Because people often lived great distances from a parish church, membership and participation suffered. In addition, on the frontier concern for theological issues faded before the concern for survival and wrestling a living from a hard and difficult land. Because the individual was largely on his own, and depended on himself for survival, authoritarian structures of any sort--be they governmental or ecclesiastical--met with great resistance. As a result, by the second and third generations, the vast majority of the population was outside the membership of the church.
Up and down the Eastern Seaboard, the landscape was littered with the dry tender of the unchurched. All that was required was a spark of revival to set the landscape afire with religious enthusiasm. And when that spark ignited, those who led the revival were so surprised by what was taking place, that they "attributed it entirely to God's inscrutable grace."
The First Signs of Awakening
The sparks of revival were struck in New England. Solomon Stoddard's sermons in Northampton, Massachusetts had led to revivals breaking out as early as 1679. And after that, periodic revivals would occur and then die out. One of the reasons they would be extinguished was the smothering influence of the Enlightenment. With the publication of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica in the 17th century, traditional religious formulations had been under pressure. That is because implicit in the work of Newton and others was the assumption that human beings had the ability to discover the secrets of the universe and thereby exert some control over their own destiny. If human beings could in fact think the thoughts of God--if they could discover and read the blueprints whereby God had made and ordered the world--the result was a lessening of the gulf between God and man. This tended to undercut traditional Calvinism which held that the gap between the Deity and his creatures was quite large. This affirmation of human ability and reason had an extremely corrosive effect on the reigning orthodoxy which held that one's destiny was solely in God's hands. The result was a growing emphasis on man and his morality, with religion becoming more rational and less emotional.
JONATHAN EDWARDS AND THE GREAT AWAKENING
One of those who attacked this growing rationality, and who was also one of the principle figures in the Great Awakening was Jonathan Edwards. Edwards has received a bad press for his "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." In that sermon he used the image of a spider dangling by a web over a hot fire to describe the human predicament. His point was that at any moment, our hold on life could break and we'd be plunged into fires of eternal damnation. But if you read his sermons, you will find that he spoke quietly, reasonably, and logically. Indeed, he was dry and even a bit boring. But he began to experience a harvest of conversions that were accompanied by exaggerated behavior. People would bark, shout, and run when they were converted.
Why did people listen to Edwards? Why did his preaching provoke such a response? For one thing, he was speaking about a matter they were vitally interested in. If I were to tell you I heard on the radio on the way over that someone had found a cure for cancer, you would want to know the details. And so it was for the Puritans who were growing deeply concerned by what they perceived to be a striking decline in piety. The youth of the second and third generation were given to mirth and frivolity and would spend the greater part of night in co-ed parties. They would go riding in wagons under layers of quilts and blankets. Edwards and others were deeply concerned about these excursions and the impact they might have on the state of their morals. And there is reason to believe that Edwards had cause to be concerned about these activities. Evidently something was taking place under these quilts because there was a striking rise in the number of children conceived out of wedlock which confirmed in the Puritan's mind that a general decline in piety was occurring. The new generation had inherited the Puritan theocracy, but had begun to forget it, and the older generation was gravely concerned about this development. They had come to this country to found a biblical commonwealth, but their vision did not seem to be shared by community's youth.
Yet another problem weighing on Puritan consciences for a long time was that of election. As they studied this issue, the question was raised as to why should anyone preach? Certainly not to elicit a decision for Christ. Such decisions had been made before the foundation of the world according to Calvinist orthodoxy. If preaching were simply for the edification of the Saints, then it was like preaching to the choir, in that you were preaching to the already converted. The result was a decline in worship attendance.
And then quite by surprise there was a tremendous outpouring of response to the preaching of Edwards. This movement of the Spirit surprised people because it produced something unexpected: people professing conversion. What Edwards said in these sermons was pure Calvinism. "You can't control salvation." But Puritans heard him say, "if you try, God will aid your salvation." Here's one example. Jonathan Edwards talked about "Pressing into the Kingdom". "It was," he said, "not a thing impossible." By that, Edwards was referred to God's power to save whomever he pleases. But what the Puritans heard was there was a chance they could achieve election. Phrases like "It is in your power to use means of grace" and "One can strive against corruption" were similarly misunderstood. Edwards wanted to make the point that salvation ultimately is in the hands of God, and that he empowers the elect to resist evil. But people heard something else. And they responded to what they viewed as an invitation to seek after salvation.
Despite the response to his preaching, Edwards did not remain popular forever. His downfall occurred when a group of young people got hold of an obstetrics book, and looked at the illustrations of the female anatomy. It was, I guess, the eighteenth century equivalent of looking at a Playboy. In any event, Edwards responded to his incident by preaching against it, and condemning those involved from the pulpit. As a result, he alienated the parents who drove him from his position. Exiled to Stockbridge to work with the Indians, he died there
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
auto-American-biography: A term coined by literary critic Sacvan Bercovitch for an autobiographical text in which the narrator self-consciously foregrounds his narrative construction of himself as an ideal American citizen. Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography is often understood as an auto-American-biography.
Franklin is often cited as the individual responsible for creating the American myth of the "self-made" man that rises from humble beginnings and becomes successful beyond his wildest imaginings.
DEISM
Deism Eighteenth-century religious belief that privileges reason over faith and rejects traditional religious tenets in favor of a general belief in a benevolent creator. Deists do not believe in original sin and instead assume that human beings are basically good.
Both Franklin and Jefferson were considered Deists. Keep in mind that they both signed the Declaration of Independence. This document was primarily written by Jefferson, but Franklin aided in its drafting.
Frequently Asked Questions about Deism
What is the basis of Deism? Reason and nature. Deists see the design found throughout the known universe and this realization brings us to a sound belief in a Designer or God.
Is Deism a form of atheism? No. Atheism teaches that there is no God. Deism teaches there is a God. Deism rejects the "revelations" of the "revealed" religions but does not reject God.
If Deism teaches a belief in God, then what is the difference between Deism and the other religions like Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, etc.? Deism is, as stated above, based on nature and reason, not "revelation." All the other religions make claim to special divine revelation or they have requisite "holy" books. Deism has neither. In Deism there is no need for a preacher, priest or rabbi. All one needs in Deism is their own common sense and the creation to contemplate. Deism stresses rational thought and science as a way of discovering truth,
Do Deists believe that God created the creation and the world and then just stepped back from it? Some Deists do and some believe God may intervene in human affairs. For example, when George Washington was faced with either a very risky evacuation of the American troops from Long Island or surrendering them he chose the more risky evacuation. When questioned about the possibility of having them annihilated he said it was the best he could do and the rest is up to Providence.
Do Deists pray? Only prayers of thanks and appreciation. Deists don't dictate to God.
How do Deists view God? Diests view God as an eternal entity whose power is equal to his/her will. The following quote from Albert Einstein also offers a good Deistic description of God: "My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God."
Is Deism a cult? It's impossible for Deism to be a cult because Deism teaches self-reliance and encourages people to constantly use their reason. Deism teaches to "question authority" no matter what the cost.
Unlike the revealed religions, Deism makes no unreasonable claims. The revealed religions encourage people to give up, or at least to suspend, their God-given reason. They like to call it faith. For example, a Deist would ask if it is logical to believe that Moses parted the Red Sea, or that Jesus walked on water, or that Mohammed received the Koran from an angel? Suspending your reason enough to believe these tales, they argue, only sets a precedent that leads to believing a Jim Jones or David Koresh.
What's Deism's answer to all the evil in the world? Deists believe that much of the evil in the world could be overcome or removed if humanity had embraced God-given reason from man's earliest evolutionary stages. After all, they claim, all the laws of nature that we've discovered and learned to use to our advantage that make everything from computers to medicine to space travel have existed eternally. But, they argue, we've decided we'd rather live in superstition and fear instead of learning and gaining knowledge. They feel it's much more soothing to believe we're not responsible for our own actions than to actually do the hard work required for success.
Deism doesn't claim to have all the answers to everything, Deists just claim to be on the right path to those answers.
There is no Hell in Deism. Deism is one aspect of the Quaker religion.
Enlightenment Philosophy developed by thinkers such as Isaac Newton and John Locke, who argued that the universe is arranged in an orderly system, and that by the application of reason and intellect, human beings are capable of apprehending that system. Their philosophy represented a radical shift from earlier notions that the world is ordered by a stern, inscrutable God whose plans are beyond human understanding and whose will can only be known through religious revelation.
Every Man for Himself: American Individualism
Although the term "individualism" was not in general use until the 1820s, the foundational principles behind the concept were established by the mid-eighteenth century. Enlightenment philosophers like Newton and Locke argued that the universe is arranged in an orderly system, and that by the application of reason and intellect, human beings are capable of apprehending that system. This philosophy represented a radical shift from earlier notions that the world is ordered by a stern, inscrutable God whose plans are beyond human understanding and whose will can only be known through religious revelation. Enlightenment philosophy encouraged thinkers like Franklin and Jefferson to turn to Deism, a religion that privileges reason over faith and rejects traditional religious tenets in favor of a general belief in a benevolent creator. By privileging human understanding and the capacity of the individual, these new ideas reordered the way people thought about government, society, and rights.
The Declaration of Independence is emblematic of the eighteenth-century regard for the interests of the individual. Taking as unquestionably "self evident" the idea that "all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," the Declaration makes the rights and potential of the individual the cornerstone of American values. The fact that these lines from the Declaration are among the most quoted in all of American letters testifies to the power and resonance of this commitment to individual freedom in American culture. The Second Continental Congress affirmed the Declaration's privileging of the individual by making the signing of the document an important occasion. That is, by using the representatives' signatures as the means of validating this public document, they attested to the importance of individual identity and individual consent to government. John Hancock's famously large signature is thus a graphic emblem of the revolutionaries' commitment to individualism. Of course, the Declaration's assertion that "all men are created equal" conspicuously left out women and did not even seem to include "all men": when America achieved independence, many individuals found that their right to liberty was not considered self-evident. For African American slaves, Native Americans, and many others, the new nation's commitment to individual rights was mere rhetoric rather than reality.
But even though slavery and systemic inequality were an inescapable reality for many Americans, the nation nevertheless embraced the myth of the "self-made man" as representative of its national character. According to this myth, America's protection of individual freedom enabled anyone, no matter how humble his beginnings, to triumph through hard work and talent. One of the earliest and most influential expressions of this version of the "American dream" is Benjamin Franklin's narrative of his own rise from modest beginnings to a position of influence and wealth. So exemplary is Franklin's story that his Autobiography is often considered, in literary critic Sacvan Bercovitch's term, an "auto-American-biography." In other words, Franklin self-consciously uses the autobiographical form to foreground his narrative self-construction as an ideal American citizen. He repeatedly plays on the potential for self-making that print and authorship offer the individual, likening his own life to a book that can be edited, amended, and corrected for "errata." As he puts it in the opening lines of the Autobiography, "I should have no objection to a repetition of the same life from its beginning, only asking the advantage authors have in a second edition to correct some faults of the first." Franklin's conception of self thus hinges on the idea that the individual is the author of his own life, with full power to construct it as he wills. Franklin's presentation of himself as the ideal American individual was widely accepted. While he lived in France, he was celebrated as the embodiment of the virtue, naturalism, and simplicity that supposedly characterized the New World--an image he carefully maintained by shunning French fashion to dress plainly and wearing a primitive fur hat around Paris. So effective was Franklin's physical self-presentation that he became a kind of cult figure in France. Paintings, prints, busts, medallions, clocks, vases, plates, handkerchiefs, and even snuffboxes were manufactured emblazoned with Franklin's portrait. His American individualism had become a popular commodity.
EMERSON AND SELF RELIANCE
By the nineteenth century, many Americans were more radical in their commitment to individualism. A growing concern over the people left out of the American dream fueled reform movements designed to extend individual rights to the historically disenfranchised and oppressed. Calls for the abolition of slavery, Native American rights, women's rights, prison reform, and help for the impoverished challenged American society to make good on its proclamation that all people are created equal. The industrialism that was transforming the American workplace became increasingly troubling to reformers, who felt that factories were stifling individual creativity and self-expression. As social critic Albert Brisbane put it in 1840, "Monotony, uniformity, intellectual inaction, and torpor reign . . . society is spiritually a desert." Ralph Waldo Emerson agreed, warning that "society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members ... the virtue in most request is conformity."
Emerson's remedy for this stifling conformity was a radical call for self-reliance. His essay on this subject, "Self-Reliance," is a manifesto of what has come to be called Romantic Individualism. More radical and more mystical than Enlightenment ideas about individualism, Romantic Individualism asserts that every individual is endowed with not only reason but also an intuition that allows him to receive and interpret spiritual truths. Individuals thus have a responsibility to throw off the shackles of traditions and inherited conventions in order to live creatively according to their unique perception of truth. Emerson's intoxicating ideas about the power of the individual captivated many of his contemporaries, giving rise to the Transcendentalist movement (the group believed that only by transcending the limits of rationalism and received tradition could the individual fully realize his or her potential). Writers and thinkers like Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, and Henry David Thoreau heeded Emerson's call and built on his ideas. Fuller pushed Romantic Individualism in the direction of women's rights, while Thoreau (Unit 12) embarked on a personal project to practice self-reliance by living alone in the woods at Walden Pond, free from the suffocating influences of modern commercial and industrial life.
auto-American-biography A term coined by literary critic Sacvan Bercovitch for an autobiographical text in which the narrator self-consciously foregrounds his narrative construction of himself as an ideal American citizen. Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography is often understood as an auto-American-biography.
The Awful Truth: The Aesthetic of the Sublime
sublime: An aesthetic ideal formulated by British philosopher Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century. Burke was interested in categorizing aesthetic responses and distinguished the "sublime" from the "beautiful." While the beautiful is calm and harmonious, the sublime is majestic, wild, even savage. While viewers are soothed by the beautiful, they are overwhelmed, awe-struck, and sometimes terrified by the sublime. Often associated with huge, overpowering natural phenomena like mountains, waterfalls, or thunderstorms, the "delightful terror" inspired by sublime visions was supposed both to remind viewers of their own insignificance in the face of nature and divinity and to inspire them with a sense of transcendence.
In Jefferson's famous description of the "Natural Bridge" rock formation in Notes on the State of Virginia, he declares that the bridge is a perfect example of a sublime view: "It is impossible for the emotions, arising from the sublime, to be felt beyond what they are here: so beautiful an arch, so elevated, so light, and springing, as it were, up to heaven, the rapture of the Spectator is really indescribable!" Despite his claim that the scene and the feelings it inspires are beyond description, Jefferson characteristically goes on to describe the Natural Bridge and his response to it in eloquent detail and in doing so provides a useful statement of the eighteenth-century aesthetic of the sublime in the process. While Jefferson clearly sees the scenery as thrillingly spectacular, he is also uncomfortably overwhelmed by it. He warns the reader that upon looking over the edge of the bridge "you involuntarily fall on your hands and feet, and creep to the parapet and peep over it. Looking down from this height ... gave me a violent headache." Jefferson makes the effect of this "involuntary" and even "violent" physical response even more vivid for his reader by employing the second-person "you" and thus implicating the reader in these intense feelings. For Jefferson, the powerful effects the bridge has on its spectators are just as important to narrate as the conventional details of its size, measurements, and geological characteristics.
Jefferson's analysis of the Natural Bridge's sublimity is indebted to the aesthetic ideas formulated by Englishman Edmund Burke earlier in the eighteenth century. Burke was interested in categorizing aesthetic responses and distinguished the "sublime" from the "beautiful." While the beautiful is calm and harmonious, the sublime is majestic, wild, even savage. While viewers are soothed by the beautiful, they are overwhelmed, awe-struck, and sometimes terrified by the sublime. Often associated with huge, overpowering natural phenomena like mountains, waterfalls, or thunderstorms, the "delightful terror" inspired by sublime visions was supposed both to remind viewers of their own insignificance in the face of nature and divinity and to inspire them with a sense of transcendence. Thus Jefferson's seemingly paradoxical response of falling to a crouch, developing a headache, and then claiming that the "sensation becomes delightful in the extreme" is in fact a standard response to the sublime.
The idea of the sublime exerted an enormous influence over American art in the early nineteenth century. Hudson River School painters like Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and Albert Bierstadt (featured in Unit 5) sought to capture the grandeur they found in the American wilderness as an expression of the greatness of the young nation. So ubiquitous was this aesthetic interest in the sublime that by mid-century, when Margaret Fuller visited Niagara Falls (a mecca for seekers of sublime views), she was disappointed to realize that her experience was inescapably mediated by other writers' and artists' descriptions of the scene's sublimity. She was left to lament, "When I arrived in sight of [the falls] I merely felt, "ah, yes, here is the fall, just as I have seen it in pictures.' ... I expected to be overwhelmed, to retire trembling from this giddy eminence, and gaze with unlimited wonder and awe upon the immense mass rolling on and on, but, somehow or other, I thought only of comparing the effect on my mind with what I had read and heard. ... Happy were the first discoverers of Niagara, those who could come unawares upon this view and upon that, whose feelings were entirely their own." However overused the visual and linguistic vocabulary of the sublime had become by the mid-nineteenth century, it was nonetheless an important category through which Americans conceived of and organized their aesthetic experiences.
As European Americans moved west, they encountered more natural phenomena that fit within their view of the sublime. The Rocky Mountains, the Grand Canyon, and the geysers at Yellowstone, for example, were all described by early visitors in terms of their sublimity. Americans eventually came to ascribe sublime characteristics to humanmade objects as well: Whitman's description of the power of steam locomotives and Edward Weston's early-twentieth-century photographs of industrial architecture participate in the foundation of an aesthetic of the "technological sublime."
Questions
Comprehension: According to eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, what is the difference between the "beautiful" and the "sublime"? Give an example of each, either from literature or from your own experience.
Context: In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, the idea of the sublime was usually applied only to natural objects (and sometimes to encounters with Native Americans, who were perceived as "primitive" and more in touch with the natural world than whites). But sometimes the vocabulary of the sublime was used to describe other experiences. Do you think some individuals might have discussed their conversion experiences during the Great Awakening in terms of the sublime? How might listening to Jonathan Edwards's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" compare to the experience of looking off the Natural Bridge or viewing Thomas Cole's painting The Falls of the Kaaterskill?
Exploration: Does a sense of the sublime still infuse contemporary American culture? Can you think of a late-twentieth-century novel, film, or painting that seems to participate in the aesthetic of the sublime?
A New Rome: Neoclassicism in the New Nation
In Act III of Royall Tyler's The Contrast, the model American character, Colonel Manly, delivers an impassioned soliloquy: "When the Grecian states knew no other tools than the axe and the saw, the Grecians were a great, a free, and a happy people.... They exhibited to the world a noble spectacle--a number of independent states united by a similarity of language, sentiment, manners, common interest, and common consent." Manly's speech may sound strange to modern readers since his disquisition on ancient Greece seems to have little to do with the play's setting in eighteenth-century New York. Indeed, even the first reviewer of Tyler's play complained that the soliloquy seemed out of place: "A man can never be supposed in conversation with himself, to point out examples of imitation to his countrymen." Yet Tyler's seemingly unmotivated inclusion of comments on ancient Greece in his play was perfectly in keeping with the fascination with classical antiquity that characterized the early national period. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the United States, in search of foundational models to replace its former reliance on Great Britain, turned to examples from the ancient world, particularly the Roman republic, and, to a lesser extent, ancient Greece. Americans associated classical Greece and Rome with the virtuous, anti-aristocratic political and cultural ideals they hoped would prevail in the United States. Ancient Romans founded the first republic--a representational government in which power is held by the people and representatives are charged with the common welfare of all the people in the country--and Americans were anxious to emulate this model. Their growing interest in the art and culture of the ancient world was part of an aesthetic movement known as neoclassicism. The American neoclassical ideal did not entail a lavish imitation of ancient forms but rather demanded a modern interpretation and revitalization of old forms.
Neoclassicism may have found its most congenial home in the political climate of the new United States, but it did not originate there. The neoclassical aesthetic arose in Europe around the middle of the eighteenth century, an irony that many Americans, who wished to believe they were rejecting European examples, chose to ignore. In any case, classical models caught on quickly in the early republic. By the end of the eighteenth century, American newspapers and almanacs regularly quoted lines from Horace and Virgil. Correspondents to these periodicals often signed their pieces with Roman pseudonyms. (The authors of the Federalist Papers--Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison--famously adopted the pen name "Publius" in honor of one of the founders and consuls of republican Rome.) George Washington was so fascinated by the self-sacrificing Roman patriot Cato that he had a play about him staged at Valley Forge to entertain and educate the American troops. After the Revolution, American army officers formed an honorary society named after the Roman hero Cincinnati. Even the names of some of the branches of government--"Senate" and "Congress," for example--hearkened back to the ancient Roman republic.
Neoclassical ideals also permeated American art and architecture. Artists eagerly adopted Roman models, creating statues of political and military leaders like George Washington wearing togas and crowned with laurel wreaths. Influenced by archaeological discoveries in Greece, Rome, and Egypt, furniture makers like Charles Honore Lannuier and Duncan Phyfe created pieces that incorporated classical motifs and design. But it was in architecture that the American neoclassical aesthetic achieved its best expression, a fact that was largely the result of Thomas Jefferson's commitment to infusing American buildings with classical principles of order and reason. Jefferson's passion for architecture was reinforced by his experiences in Paris, where he lived as the American minister to France from 1785 until 1789. Impressed both by the beautiful new houses built in Paris in the late eighteenth century and by ancient structures such as the Maison Carée (a Roman temple in Nimes), Jefferson was anxious to reproduce and translate the French neoclassical aesthetic into American buildings.
When the Virginia legislature called upon him to find a designer for the Virginia State House, Jefferson decided to design the building himself. He created a neoclassical temple based on the model of the Maison Carée, thus symbolically infusing the site of the Virginia state government with ancient republican values of harmony and simplicity. Jefferson also modeled his own gracefully proportioned home, Monticello, on classical principles. A record of Jefferson's varied architectural ideas, Monticello was designed and redesigned many times in accord with its owner's ever-changing interests. In its final form, the house was built to resemble a single-story dwelling, even though it has two floors, and was divided into public and private areas arranged around a central parlor. Situated on an immense hill, Monticello commands an expansive view of the surrounding landscape, its central dome acting as a sort of symbolic eye asserting control and mastery over the countryside beneath it. Although Monticello is justly celebrated as an expression of Jefferson's aesthetic values, his true masterpiece is the design for the University of Virginia. Conceived of as an "academical village," the central campus of the university is composed of five neoclassical pavilions which housed five different branches of learning, along with a central domed "temple of learning" (based on the Pantheon in Rome) which housed the main library. Jefferson intended teachers and students to live together in this complex, working and residing in an integrated expression of the educational mission of the university. Jefferson also had an important hand in the design of Washington, D.C., the new federal city created as the site of the national government. Because the city was built from scratch on a rural landscape, Jefferson and the other planners were able to plan it as a carefully designed exercise in neoclassical order and harmony. Although bureaucratic disorganization, a lack of funding, and land use problems prevented the project from ever living up to its designers' visions, Washington, D.C., was conceived of as a grand neoclassical city made up of orderly avenues and imposing government buildings. The White House and the Capitol Building were the first to be designed and constructed, though each took longer to complete than expected and neither is a true example of neoclassicism. Noted neoclassical architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe, however, used his influence to add an American neoclassical touch to the Capitol once he was appointed Surveyor of Public Buildings in 1803. When he designed columns for the Senate wing and Senate rotunda, Latrobe Americanized the classical forms by substituting cornstalks and tobacco leaves for the traditional Corinthian acanthus decorations on the capitals of the columns. Latrobe's celebrated "corncob and tobacco capitals" exemplify the ideals behind American neoclassicism: they borrow from classical sources with originality and freedom, combining the stateliness of a traditional form with a tribute to American agriculture and natural productions. Although Latrobe certainly did not intend it, the agricultural decorations on the Senate building also serve to remind viewers that, just as Greece was a city-state whose economy was indebted to the institution of slavery, so was America's economy built on the slave labor that produced tobacco, cotton, rice, and sugar crops.
PHYLLIS WHEATLEY & MISS AMERICA: THE IMAGE OF COLUMBIA
In 1775, the African American poet Phillis Wheatley opened the poem she addressed to George Washington with the lines "Celestial choir! enthroned in realms of light, / Columbia's scenes of glorious toils I write." She goes on to describe the goddess Columbia as "divinely fair," with olive and laurel branches in her "golden hair." With these lines, Wheatley became the first writer to personify the new nation as the goddess "Columbia"--a feminized reference to Columbus, who was widely recognized as the "father" of America. Wheatley's use of the Columbia image is interesting both for its insistence on the goddess's Caucasian looks and for the profound influence it had on American culture. By the end of the Revolution, the figure of Columbia was everywhere. Popular songs and poems celebrated her; towns and cities were named for her (most notably the new seat of the federal government, the District of Columbia); and King's College in New York was renamed Columbia University. The adjective "Columbian" came to function as a kind of shorthand for patriotic allegiance to national ideals.
Although the image of Columbia was new when Wheatley developed it in 1775, iconographic representations of America as a woman had existed since the sixteenth century. The name "America," after all, is a feminization of explorer Amerigo Vespucci's Christian name. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drawings almost always repre-sented the New World as a woman, and usually as a Native American. Pictured half-clothed in primitive garb, America in these representations is sometimes a savage cannibal woman and sometimes a regal Indian queen offering to share her natural bounty. British political cartoons produced during the Revolutionary War continued to portray America as a Native American woman, often picturing her as a rebellious Indian princess at war with her European mother, Britain.
As they fought to assert their independence, Americans apparently began to desire a new allegorical image to represent their nation. Scholar John Higham has suggested that Native American imagery may have become problematic because "white Americans were too close to real Indians in the eighteenth century to feel comfortable about identifying with any such personifications, no matter how idealized." In any case, Wheatley's Caucasian Roman goddess struck a chord. Her association with classical antiquity and the values of the Roman republic must have made her appealing to a nation that liked to conceive of itself as "a new Rome." Columbia was usually represented dressed in a white, toga-like gown, wearing a helmet, and carrying a liberty cap on a pole. She was often accompanied by the flag, the eagle, and documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. She appeared in paintings, statuary, and even on most of the coins produced by the United States Mint through the nineteenth century. Fearful that profiles of presidents or leaders would smack of imperialism and aristocracy, the young nation instead featured Columbia's profile on its money, accompanied by the word "Liberty."
Ironically, this celebration of the female figure as emblematic of American virtue and national character did not result in political gains for actual American women. Afforded only a symbolic and decorative position, they could not vote and were not considered citizens. In fact, the veneration of the feminized figure of Columbia in some ways displaces and obscures the important contributions that real women made to American society. The creation of the image of Columbia was probably not what Abigail Adams had in mind when she enjoined her husband, future president John Adams.
EMERSON AND TRANSCENDENTALISM
The Transcendental Movement dramatically shaped the direction of American literature, although perhaps not in the ways its adherents had imagined. Many writers were and still are inspired and taught by Emerson and Thoreau in particular, and struck out in new directions because of the literary and philosophical lessons they had learned. Walt Whitman was not the only writer to claim that he was "simmering, simmering, simmering" until reading Emerson brought him "to a boil." Emily Dickinson's poetic direction was quite different, but she too was a thoughtful reader of Emerson and Fuller. In his own way, even Frederick Douglass incorporated many lessons of transcendental thought from Emerson.
Other writers would deliberately take their direction away from transcendentalism, toward realism and "anti-transcendentalism" or what Michael Hoffman calls "negative Romanticism"; Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville
Aesthetics is defined by Random House as "having a sense of the beautiful." This can certainly be said of such Transcendental writers as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Both writers were constantly seeking beauty, not only in terms of nature, but also in terms of the individual spirit.
Many critics consider his ideas on the role of the poet, or writer, to be revolutionary. However, those same critics are less than thrilled about Emerson's own poetry. He is said to have influenced such famous writers as Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman
Overall, the major elements of aesthetics that we can attribute to the Transcendentalists include a new definition of the role of the poet and a different perspective of nature. The transcendentalists believed that the poet was representative of everyman or everywoman, but simultaneously different, in that he or she could observe the world, nature in particular, and express its beauty through his or her own verse. They believed that function was just as important, if not more so, as form, and that art lies in the process, or the experience, and not so much in the product. In fact, the Transcendentalists usually eskewed anything that was said to be definitive or all-encompassing. They believed in the circularity of ideas, in that as long as people are using their intellect, ideas are always evolving and never-ending.
Note: Nineteenth Century American Transcendentalism is not a religion (in the traditional sense of the word); it is a pragmatic philosophy, a state of mind, and a form of spirituality. It is not a religion because it does not adhere to the three concepts common in major religions: a. a belief in a God; b. a belief in an afterlife (dualism); and c. a belief that this life has consequences on the next (if you're good in this life, you go to heaven in the next, etc.). Transcendentalism is monist; it does not reject an afterlife, but its emphasis is on this life.
The Assumed, Presumed, or the Self-Identified Transcendentalists:
The Big Three:
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller.
Central Points of Agreement:
NOTE : The Transcendentalists, in keeping with the individualistic nature of this philosophy, disagreed readily with each other. Here are four points of general agreement:
Basic Assumption:
The intuitive faculty, instead of the rational or sensical, became the means for a conscious union of the individual psyche (known in Sanskrit as Atman) with the world psyche also known as the Oversoul, life-force, prime mover and God (known in Sanskrit as Brahma).
Basic Premises:
1. An individual is the spiritual center of the universe - and in an individual can be found the clue to nature, history and, ultimately, the cosmos itself. It is not a rejection of the existence of God, but a preference to explain an individual and the world in terms of an individual.
2. The structure of the universe literally duplicates the structure of the individual self - all knowledge, therefore, begins with self-knowledge. This is similar to Aristotle's dictum "know thyself."
3. Transcendentalists accepted the neo-Platonic conception of nature as a living mystery, full of signs - nature is symbolic.
4. The belief that individual virtue and happiness depend upon self-realization - this depends upon the reconciliation of two universal psychological tendencies:
a. the expansive or self-transcending tendency - a desire to embrace the whole world - to know and become one with the world.
b. the contracting or self-asserting tendency - the desire to withdraw, remain unique and separate - an egotistical existence
Basic Tenets of American Transcendentalism:
Note : This list must not be considered to be a creed common to all transcendentalists. It is merely a grouping of certain important concepts shared by many of them.
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1. Transcendentalism, essentially, is a form of idealism.
1. Transcendentalism, essentially, is a form of idealism.•2. The transcendentalist "transcends" or rises above the lower animalistic impulses of life (animal drives) and moves from the rational to a spiritual realm.
2. The transcendentalist "transcends" or rises above the lower animalistic impulses of life (animal drives) and moves from the rational to a spiritual realm.•3. The human soul is part of the Oversoul or universal spirit (or "float" for Whitman) to which it and other souls return at death.
3. The human soul is part of the Oversoul or universal spirit (or "float" for Whitman) to which it and other souls return at death.•4. Therefore, every individual is to be respected because everyone has a portion of that Oversoul (God).
4. Therefore, every individual is to be respected because everyone has a portion of that Oversoul (God).•5. This Oversoul or Life Force or God can be found everywhere - travel to holy places is, therefore, not necessary.
5. This Oversoul or Life Force or God can be found everywhere - travel to holy places is, therefore, not necessary.6. God can be found in both nature and human nature (Nature, Emerson stated, has spiritual manifestations).
•7. Jesus also had part of God in himself - he was divine as everyone is divine - except in that he lived an exemplary and transcendental life and made the best use of that Power which is within each one.
7. Jesus also had part of God in himself - he was divine as everyone is divine - except in that he lived an exemplary and transcendental life and made the best use of that Power which is within each one.•8. "Miracle is monster." The miracles of the Bible are not to be regarded as important as they were to the people of the past. Miracles are all about us - the whole world is a miracle and the smallest creature is one. "A mouse is a miracle enough to stagger quintillions of infidels." - Whitman
8. "Miracle is monster." The miracles of the Bible are not to be regarded as important as they were to the people of the past. Miracles are all about us - the whole world is a miracle and the smallest creature is one. "A mouse is a miracle enough to stagger quintillions of infidels." - Whitman•9. More important than a concern about the afterlife, should be a concern for this life - "the one thing in the world of value is the active soul." - Emerson
9. More important than a concern about the afterlife, should be a concern for this life - "the one thing in the world of value is the active soul." - Emerson•10. Death is never to be feared, for at death the soul merely passes to the oversoul.
10. Death is never to be feared, for at death the soul merely passes to the oversoul.•11. Emphasis should be placed on the here and now. "Give me one world at a time." - Thoreau
11. Emphasis should be placed on the here and now. "Give me one world at a time." - Thoreau•12. Evil is a negative - merely an absence of good. Light is more powerful than darkness because one ray of light penetrates the dark.
12. Evil is a negative - merely an absence of good. Light is more powerful than darkness because one ray of light penetrates the dark.•13. Power is to be obtained by defying fate or predestination, which seem to work against humans, by exercising one's own spiritual and moral strength. Emphasis on self-reliance.
13. Power is to be obtained by defying fate or predestination, which seem to work against humans, by exercising one's own spiritual and moral strength. Emphasis on self-reliance.•14. Hence, the emphasis is placed on a human thinking.
14. Hence, the emphasis is placed on a human thinking.•15. The transcendentalists see the necessity of examples of great leaders, writers, philosophers, and others, to show what an individual can become through thinking and action.
15. The transcendentalists see the necessity of examples of great leaders, writers, philosophers, and others, to show what an individual can become through thinking and action.•16. It is foolish to worry about consistency, because what an intelligent person believes tomorrow, if he/she trusts oneself, tomorrow may be completely different from what that person thinks and believes today. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." - Emerson
16. It is foolish to worry about consistency, because what an intelligent person believes tomorrow, if he/she trusts oneself, tomorrow may be completely different from what that person thinks and believes today. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." - Emerson•17. The unity of life and universe must be realized. There is a relationship between all things.
17. The unity of life and universe must be realized. There is a relationship between all things.•18. One must have faith in intuition, for no church or creed can communicate truth.
18. One must have faith in intuition, for no church or creed can communicate truth.•19. Reform must not be emphasized - true reform comes from within.
19. Reform must not be emphasized - true reform comes from within. President Polk, the Mexican-American War, Thoreau and Civil Diobiedience
When Thoreau was a young man, the United States extended from the east coast to the states just west of the Mississippi River. The states we know today as Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah and Colorado all belonged to Mexico. Yet there were many Americans who felt that it was our "manifest destiny" (or God given right) to control the entire land "from sea to shining sea." The fact that these lands belonged to Mexico was a small inconvenience to then U.S. President James Polk, who had hoped to gain these lands peacefully, but was ready to go to war if Mexico put up a fight.
Since Mexico had no intention of handing half of their land over to the United States, President Polk forced the issue. In 1845, he annexed Texas (which had claimed independence from Mexico in 1836, although Mexico did not recognize it) as a U.S. territory, angering Mexico's government. Then Polk ordered U.S. troops to station themselves at the Rio Grande River in Texas, and Mexico attacked the US forces in defense of what they still considered their land. This gave the president the excuse he needed to ask congress to declare war on Mexico. And so they did, believing that Mexico had shed U.S. blood on our lands.
True, American soldiers had been killed by Mexicans, but did those American soldiers have any right to be there in the first place? Where was the US/Mexico borderline exactly? A brand new US congressman from Illinois felt that President Polk was not being fair to Mexico. He challenged the President to specify the exact spot of "American soil" where our blood was shed. This representative, named Abraham Lincoln, spoke poignantly for his political party when he said that "the marching an army into the midst of a peaceful Mexican settlement, frightening the inhabitants away, leaving their growing crops and other property to destruction, to you may appear a perfectly amiable, peaceful, unprovoking procedure, but it does not appear so to us."
The President had been looking for a reason for war so that the United States could acquire the lands from Texas to California from Mexico. Many Americans at the time wanted those lands as well, agreeing with an 1847 New York Herald article that remarked, "we believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country." Polk made sure this war would happen by antagonizing Mexico when he placed those American troops on an imaginary borderline.
So the war was, of course, controversial among the American public. While some people felt that the entire continent should belong to the US, others recognized that the land belonged to Mexico. Many citizens would agree with the young lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant who believed that the Mexican American War was "one of the most unjust [wars] ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation." In addition to the division over manifest destiny, slavery also came up as an issue for Americans. Southern slave states were hoping to add more territory in the south through this war, which would give them more representation in congress. Fearing that more slave states would be added to the union, U.S. abolitionists were totally opposed to the war and Polk's expansionist policies.
Enter philosopher Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau grew up around great thinkers and abolitionists (people who wanted to end slavery) in his mother's boarding house in Concord, Massachusetts. He was extremely opposed to slavery, and to the war that President Polk had entered with Mexico. In order to make his disapproval known, Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax to the government. Since a portion of his tax money would go to the military budget, which paid for the war in Mexico, Thoreau considered it his moral obligation not to contribute. He would later write that he did not want "to trace the course of [his] dollar... till it buys a man or a musket to shoot one with." Not paying his taxes, however, was illegal, and his crime caught up with him one day as he walked to the local cobbler to have a shoe mended. On his way, he ran into the tax collector who told Thoreau that he needed to pay up soon. Thoreau responded that he was certainly not going to pay his tax, and if the tax collector (who was his friend) did not like it, he could quit collecting taxes. Rather than leave his job, the collector took Thoreau to jail. Thoreau spent only one night in jail, (because a mystery person paid Thoreau's tax for him), but those few hours would be the beginning of something huge; an entire movement of peaceful protest. His actions would later be called "Civil Disobedience," and practiced from India to Denmark as a way for common people to change things about the system that they don't like.
Thoreau was against using violence to solve problems, but was willing to go to jail to protest something he didn't think was right. In his writings, Thoreau talked of obeying a "higher law" than the law of the government. He believed in following his conscience, or "inner voice" to tell him what was right and what was wrong. If the government law and his idea of higher law did not agree, he felt it was his duty to "deliberately violate the law of the land" and be willing to go to jail for his actions. Thoreau hoped that going to jail would call attention to the wrongs of the Mexican War, and help bring an end to the bloodshed it caused. Ultimately, he felt that if enough good men went to jail for their peaceful protests, their acts would "clog the machinery of the state," which would force an end to the war.
Unfortunately, Thoreau's act of Civil Disobedience did not clog any government wheels, because it didn't catch on at the time. He noted that although "there are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war," these people "do nothing to put an end to them..." Since he was not joined by the masses in his protest, this unjust war against Mexico went on, and the United States eventually took 500,000 square miles of land from Mexico. However, Thoreau's idea of peacefully protesting something to create change did not go away. Instead it echoed throughout the world as a way for people to affect change in something that they did not think was right.
*In India, Mahatma Gandhi brought Thoreau's idea of Civil Disobedience into the limelight when he practiced it himself. His hunger strikes and famous march to the sea were demonstrations against offensive laws that had been passed by the Imperialist government. These demonstrations brought the world's attention to the injustices that were occurring there, and eventually won India's complete freedom in 1945.
*In Denmark during World War II, the Nazis issued a law requiring all Jewish people to wear a six-pointed yellow star on their clothing. Rather than isolate their Jewish neighbors, the citizens pulled off a great act of Civil Disobedience. "Virtually every citizen in Denmark, Jew or Gentile (non Jew), appeared in the streets wearing the yellow star." The Nazi law then became worthless because no one obeyed it.
*In the United States, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached Civil Disobedience as a way for African Americans to demand equal rights. King believed that "he who passively accepts evil... without protesting against it is really cooperating with it."
