Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature (review)

At the end of his Letters on Aesthetic Education of Man (1794–95), Friedrich Schiller, full of high hopes, dreams of an “aesthetic State” guided by a mixture of taste and intellect. He settles back to earth, however, with the admission that a beautiful State remains impractical and visionary on any large scale. A beautiful society, Schiller admits, seems unlikely for an entire republic and is probably found only in a “few select circles.” In the story that Bryan Waterman tells of an eclectic association of professionals and intellectuals living in New York City at the turn of the eighteenth century, dramatists, medical men, letter writers of both sexes, lawyers, and novelists all confronted this problem of scale in their experiments with public and private discourse. Some, like the playwright and theater owner William Dunlap, enjoyed a broad give-and-take with audiences, adjusting his productions to a fine line between enhancing the public’s moral interests and feeding its appetite for popular patriotism. Others, like Susan Bull Tracy, the wife of a United States senator, experienced a narrower sphere of conversation and letter-writing in which participants debated gender norms and other social conventions. For at least one participant, Elihu Hubbard Smith, it might be said that indiscriminate exposure to the new American republic proved lethal in a most literal way: ministering to colleagues and patients at the start of the yellow fever outbreak in fall 1798, he contracted the disease and was dead by mid September.

In Smith’s life and death, Waterman finds the center to his narrative of the Friendly Club, an association dedicated to promoting the arts, sciences, and professions for the combination of self-improvement and public good. Squarely in the mold of the eighteenth-century “gentlemen’s conversation club” (7), the Friendly Club, echoing Smith’s example as a doctor, took as its concern public welfare. Waterman’s signal contribution is to show how this concern did not abide by the narrow disciplinary boundaries to which we are accustomed today. Instead, mixing medical discourse, belles lettres, drama, and juridical review, members of the Friendly Club, like Smith, who sought to produce rational knowledge on several fronts and not science alone, construed “literature” as a porous term that allowed for collaboration, beneficial association, and civic interest. In this way, the Friendly Club did not limit itself to the small set of activities that no doubt would be the province of Schiller’s “select circles” but participated widely across multiple forms of writing—legalistic, fictional, poetic, medical—that had potential bearing on the public good. And yet, the Friendly Club, as Waterman acknowledges, was steered by a veritable “who’s who of American cultural aristocracy” in the early republic (6). How this elite intersected with a raucous popular print culture so recently characterized by broadsides and vitriol, how selective this circle remained, and how far its debates extended beyond the polite sphere of the salon is not always clear, but it is also this uncertainty that makes The Republic of Intellect, from its title onward, a source of productive tension.

So while a republic of intellect may prove a rather small domain after all, the Friendly Club was also the locus of enough instability that its members found both purpose and place in post-revolutionary society. Its most famous member was Charles Brockden Brown, who, while mourning Smith, nonetheless found fodder for his novelistic imagination in epidemic and fever. For Brown, as Waterman argues in one of his final chapters, contagion served as a convenient, if anxious, metaphor for reflecting upon the young nation’s health and its compromised immunity to unreason. But well before this concluding point Waterman wisely rejects a familiar literary historical approach that would organize investigation around a single literary personage. Rather than orient his book around Brown, Waterman focuses on friendships, tracing the networks of connection...