American Exceptionalism, American Anxiety: Wages, Competition, and Degraded Labor in the Antebellum United States (review)

Glickstein's scholarship is about the onset of wage work in antebellum America. In an earlier book, Glickstein asked what this inexorable development meant for the dignity and intrinsic worth of manual labor.¹ This companion book shifts the focus to the extrinsic returns "sweetening" the passage of pre-industrial self-employment. Glickstein's concern is not with the transformation of work itself—although he is at pains to report the empirical findings of economic and labor historians—but with the resulting debates that reverberated across the political spectrum, as commentators of many persuasions came to grips with the emergence of an American working class.

Methodologically, what distinguishes Glickstein, as "a kind of intellectual historian" (112), is his rigorous treatment of these debates. His preferred mode is, where possible, to identify representative texts and subject them to close readings that reveal complex, often ambiguous "perceptions"—to use a favorite Glickstein word—of wage labor's prospects. Substantively, his key finding is that, within the exceptionalist boasts of a uniquely favorable environment for workers, there lurked a dark streak of anxiety that was rooted in fears of vulnerability to a Gresham's law of labor competition with, and contagion by, the nation's degraded and servile forms of labor. Glickstein is illuminating about the many-sided manifestations of these fears in the antebellum debates about labor reform, Jacksonian democracy, Whig conservatism, and, most important, slavery.

It is obligatory by now for a historian like Glickstein, whose stock in trade is "perceptions" of reality, to situate himself on the structuralist/poststructuralist spectrum. Does he believe that artisan skills are social constructions? Yes and no. He recognizes "a certain validity" in Joyce's views, but "remain[s] too much of a structuralist of sorts ... to be comfortable with more extreme claims" (26-27).² One sympathizes with Glickstein's dilemma. Since he does not study artisan work itself, he has no way of testing the poststructural position, and his own stance—"flexible" yet skeptical (28)—seems mostly a matter of personal taste, which might be as good a way as any of negotiating the linguistic turn. More satisfying is Glickstein's historiographical commentary, which is comprehensive and figures prominently both in the text and the voluminous notes. His critical handling of whiteness especially deserves the reader's attention.

Glickstein has written an estimable book, deeply researched and formidably argued, the most searching treatment available of the intellectual reception of wage labor in antebellum America. By the same token, his book is not for the faint-hearted. Glickstein is not helped by a writing style short on active verbs and long on abstract locutions. Any author who regularly uses "Gresham's law like" as an adjective is only courting trouble with his readers. American Exceptionalism, American Anxiety will be admired, but very likely, from afar.