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He strikes me as one of those "grand" historians who whitewashes and denies true American history... Re: The RIse of American Democracy Peer criticism: This argument was made in the broadest terms in 1945 by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., in The Age of Jackson, and it has now been made once again, with even greater scope, by Sean Wilentz in The Rise of American Democracy. No one, in fact, is more aware of the line that connects The Age of Jackson with The Rise of American Democracy than Wilentz himself, who pays lavish tribute to Schlesinger in his preface. (Schlesinger returned the favor in an essay published in the New York Review of Books, April 27, 2006.) According to Wilentz, it was Schlesinger's great achievement to place "democracy's origins firmly in the context of the founding generation's ideas about the few and the many...seeing democracy's expansion as an outcome of struggles between classes, not sections." This is an elegant, and somewhat deceptive, way of saying that Schlesinger rescued the history of the Democratic Party from the opprobrium with which Charles Beard and J. Allen Smith had covered all the founders, as the evil twins of the robber barons, who constructed the Constitution in order to rob ordinary folk of the economic egalitarianism promised by the Declaration of Independence. No, replied Schlesinger, the Jacksonian Democrats were genuine keepers of the Progressive flame; Andrew Jackson was a sort of antebellum FDR (and FDR a latter-day Jackson) restoring democracy and care for "the little guy" to the republic. This is the gauntlet Wilentz sees himself taking up.---- The most important survey since Schlesinger's of the Jacksonian era, Charles Sellers's stupendous The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846, essentially jettisoned both Jackson and politics from Jacksonian democracy and re-envisionsed it as a cultural struggle which only incidentally erupted in political shape. Sellers never had any doubt, writing in 1992, but that "capitalism commodifies and exploits all life.... Relations of capitalist production wrench a commodified humanity to relentless competitive effort and poison the more affective and altruistic relations of social reproduction that outweigh material accumulation for most human beings." The warfare of capitalism against yeoman republicanism, and the market "penetration" (sounding as though it were a rape) into every corner of American life, were the real story of Jacksonian America. Andrew Jackson and his party were, at best, marginal players, ultimately unsuccessful at resisting the ravishment. Even Jackson's Bank War, which Sellers cast as "the acid test of American democracy," could not be a total victory for Jacksonian democracy because it "was distorted from the start by a Constitution designed to frustrate majorities." The Constitution had made "democracy safe for capitalism." American politics was not a vehicle for implementing democracy, but an obstruction to it. ---- And that someone was not likely to have been an avaricious coalition of bankers, merchants, factory-owners, and stock-jobbers, if only because there simply weren't enough of them in antebellum America to win an election; just as, for that matter, there weren't enough alienated urban workers to create the kind of proletarian Democratic Party Wilentz so fondly describes. Wilentz, who first made his mark in 1984 with Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850, continues in The Rise of American Democracy to see New York City as the nation. But Jacksonian America was still an overwhelmingly agricultural republic, and the winning or losing of elections turned a good deal more on the skill with which parties organized voters—especially new voters—and capitalized on the other party's policy mistakes than it did on the clash of class interests. Even at the apogee of Jackson's presidency, only a little more than 7% of Americans lived in towns or cities larger than 2,500 people, and only 7% of American manufacturing took place under chartered corporations. As late as the 1850s, the average industrial concern employed only 14 workers in New England, eight in the mid-Atlantic, and four in the trans-Appalachian West. But Wilentz is correct in at least one respect: the Democracy was consistent in its commitment to some form of equality. The difficulty is that this notion of equality was an equality of restraint and suspicion, the conviction that no one deserves to have more than I do; and if they do have more, it can only be because of unjustifiable luck or illegitimate scheming. Despite Wilentz's struggle to dissociate the racism of the "bad" Democrats from the shining virtues of his "good" Democrats, an idea of equality based on restraint means narrowing the field of those whom equality can afford to admit to its ranks—which is why Wilentz's workingmen were so strangely indifferent to slavery. In a world of limited resources, lines had to be drawn defining who would be allowed to exploit those resources, and the racial line was a convenient one for white slaveholders and white workingmen alike. The Whigs, on the other hand, were not so much the critics of democracy as they were the partisans of an entirely different concept of democracy, built on the openness of a competitive economic society but also accepting the up-and-down risks of open markets. What Jackson's Democrats thought of as the ideal political economy was a pyramid in which everyone was guaranteed a fixed place, so that the justly rich were secure and the poor were subsidized (and in the South, literally subsidized through slaveholding and appropriations of Indian land). http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1110/article_detail.aspFrom this review, it would seem that Wilentz does a very poor job of understanding the relationship between agrarian capitalism and republicanism. The NYTimes Book Review: Wilentz is well aware of the new political history. Indeed, elsewhere he has expressed his contempt for it, assailing it as filled with "bargain basement Nietzsche and Foucault, admixed with earnest American do-goodism, that still passes for 'theory' in much of the academy." In opposition to the fashionable emphasis on culture, he wants, he says, to highlight the independent existence and importance of politics. However significant social and cultural developments were to the American people in the early Republic, these developments, he claims, were perceived primarily in political terms - "as struggles over contending ideas of democracy." From the late 19th century to our own day we are apt to see economics, society or culture as the ground for politics and political institutions. But, Wilentz says, for the people of the early Republic, politics, government and constitutional order, not economics, not society, not culture,were still the major means by which the world and the men who ran it were interpreted.He therefore feels justified in making this in-your-face challenge to the new political historians and in writing this old-fashioned narrative. By focusing on men like Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln, however, he does "not mean to say the presidents and other great men were solely responsible for the vicissitudes of American politics," since ordinary Americans had a profound influence on the exercise of power. "But just as political leaders did not create American democracy out of thin air, so the masses of Americans did not simply force their way into the corridors of power." Leaders were always important. It is a fact of life, he writes, "that some individuals have more influence on history than others," even if they cannot make history as they please. ---- We can get some idea of where Wilentz is coming from by noting the book that seems to have most influenced him - Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s Pulitzer Prize-winning history, "The Age of Jackson." Before Schlesinger's book appeared in 1945, Wilentz writes, "historians thought of American democracy as the product of an almost mystical frontier or agrarian egalitarianism." But Schlesinger, reflecting the New Deal perspective of the time, "toppled that interpretation by placing democracy's origins firmly in the context of the founding generation's ideas about the few and the many, and by seeing democracy's expansion as an outcome of struggles between classes, not sections." "The Age of Jackson," Wilentz says, located the origin of modern liberal politics in the belief of Jefferson and Jackson that the demands of the future, in Schlesinger's words, "will best be met by a society in which no single group is able to sacrifice democracy and liberty to its own interests." In 1945, the interest group Schlesinger was most worried about was what he labeled "the business community" or "the capitalists." Although Wilentz is too sophisticated to posit something as crude as "the business community," he nevertheless believes that some sort of class struggle lay behind the politics of the antebellum period. In other words, he writes as a good liberal, but an old-fashioned New Deal one. Like Schlesinger in 1945, he wants in 2005 to speak to the liberalism of the modern Democratic Party. By suggesting that the race, gender and cultural issues that drive much of the modern left are not central to the age of Jackson, Wilentz seems to imply that they should not be central to the future of the present-day Democratic Party.http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/13/books/review/13wood.html?ex=1289538000&en=82083ddf254df389&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rssSean Wilentz is an apologist for the failures of the Old Left and seeks to deny the progress of the New Left by mythologizing the history of the Old Left. To deny that societal, cultural, and sectional concerns were not central in resisting a linear narrative of American democracy is to deny the existence of the United States of America before 1861. He also does not seem to understand Marxist theory at all. Expansionism is a foreign concept to Wilentz. His denunciation of elitism in American politics is elitist itself and that is why Wilentz is ultimately unconvincing, he does not understand the common man because he lives in an ivory tower, Bob Dylan and all. And no I have not and will not read 1,000 pages of drivel... I prefer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Appleman_Williams:hi: }( |
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