In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America (review)

Konstantin Dierk's In My Power is a sprawling and ambitious book. Indeed, in its depth and breadth, it covers ground enough for several books. Therein lay its strength and weakness.

First, it serves as an introduction to practices of bourgeois letter-writing and its material culture in the future United States, from the late seventeenth through the eighteenth centuries. For his examples of practices, Dierks draws extensively on collections of manuscript letters to spotlight a number of individuals. The resulting collective biography running throughout is so rich with lavish quotes and analysis, it could stand as its own book apart from his wide-ranging interpretative account of correspondence.

Second, Dierks advances a new heuristic model for the period. Establishing the centrality of correspondence, he trisects the period's history successively into overlapping commercial, consumer, and revolutionary-military domains. For each, he provides dual chapters, one general, in which letter-writing plays an active but supporting role, and one specific, in which it takes the lead. Indeed, the three chapter-dyads themselves, particularly the one on the American Revolution, which is the most energetic and enlightening of all, could have been expanded into their own books.

Third, Dierks surveys the emergence, among the coalescing Empire-minded middle class, of what Pierre Bourdieu calls in his Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977), "habitus," a concept that considers how human agency hinges with social systems of domination. Dierks, without referencing Bourdieu's concept, identifies "the ideology of agency"—hence, "in my power" in the book's title, taken from a shibboleth in commercial correspondence—as the source of this habitus, intimately related to letter-writing practices (5). This habitus myopically focused attention on the personal, while ethically blinding the Imperial (and then Revolutionary) bourgeoisie to their investment in a system involving massive and persistent patterns of violence against Native Americans and uprooted black Africans.

Keeping these three-or-more "books" confined between the covers of a 458-page volume presents Dierks with a significant challenge he does not always surmount. Articulation between the "books" is occasionally muffled, prompting questions about how some episodes he treats relate to letter-writing. His sometime detail-laden diachronic mode of presentation too much collides with his broad-stroke synchronic glosses, causing confusion over how far over time his many generalizations extend. He can cram so much in only through an intense compression yielding an almost unfathomable textual density accompanied by thematic under-development. Consequently, he lacks space to position his topic adequately in its cultural field and attendant scholarship. Readers, say, of Patricia Bonomi's work, may wonder how does religion fit into this picture?; or, of James Henretta's, nonmarket-oriented mentalities?; or, of Mary Kelley's, late eighteenth-century women's role in civil society? Above all, readers of Richard D. Brown's magisterial Knowledge is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865 (1989), which Dierks does not address, will perhaps wonder why this author is re-inventing so many of Brown's wheels.

Still, despite these shortcomings, at least three "books" in one is an unbeatable deal, especially since some recently published monographs hardly amount to one book in one.