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3. Can a Citizen of the World Be a Citizen of the United States?: The Reaction against Popular Cosmopolitanism
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82 3 ߬ Can a Citizen of the World Be a Citizen of the United States? The Reaction against Popular Cosmopolitanism U NTIL 1794 popular cosmopolitanism had drawn little critical attention in America’s public prints, but that quickly changed once the French Revolution took its turn toward mass violence and mainstream American support for the French cooled. Using events in France as their justification, American Federalists developed an increasingly coherent critique of popular cosmopolitanism. Deriding the “citizen of the world” as an unnatural and undesirable identity for the good American to adopt, Federalists recast previously uncontroversial practices as suspicious and even dangerous. They countered the idealized figure of the politically engaged, internationally minded artisan,mechanic,orfarmerwithitsdeviantmirrorimage—theselfish,immoral, demagogic democrat—the foreign disorganizer whose talk of universal justice simply masked his own sexual, political, and economic passions. As this caricature of the dangerous democrat became a stock character in the popular print culture of the late 1790s, the choice for an ordinary American to identify as a cosmopolitan friend to the rights of man became increasingly freighted with a host of negative connotations. Over time, more Americans became convinced that the citizen of the world could simply not be a good citizen of the United States. American Painites tried to counter the Federalists’ attacks on their proFrench and democratic sympathies, but events in Europe forced them to constantly qualify and defend their position. Opposition editors continued to use news of European radicalism to encourage their readers to think in cosmopoli- can a citizen of the world be a citizen of the u.s.? 83 tan terms.The growing United Irish movement, for example, became a frequent topic of sympathetic discussion in American democratic newspapers in the years preceding the 1798 Irish Rebellion. Despite occasional good news from Ireland and other parts of Europe, however, events in France forced editors and writers to improvise new and only marginally successful arguments that distinguished between admirable French principles and sometimes misguided French practices . This distinction proved hard to maintain, however, for the increasingly ominous news of the Terror enabled American anti-democrats to reframe the utopian political discourse of the early 1790s as the rantings of potentially genocidal demagogues. As the editor of the Federalist Gazette of the United States put it: “Every species of crime has found apologists and applauders in the writings of some persons who call themselves friends of France, friends of mankind.”¹ Although it became easier for the Federalists to demonize the democrats’ French heroes, they could not merely elevate Britain to the status of a model to be emulated. American knowledge of British repression and widespread Anglophobia made this tactic impossible. What emerged slowly to replace the French-inflected citizen of the world as the ideal American citizen was the figure of the proudly xenophobic American patriot who had little interest in or desire to emulate European politics. But this chauvinistic image of the ideal citizen, like the democrats’ distinction between principle and practice, was a tenuous improvisation. In the absence of an unproblematic foreign ideal to emulate, American nationalists began the difficult process of formulating a substantive conception of the unique, non-British and non-French, American character.² It was thus the contingencies of European political developments, as much as domestic affairs, that drove Americans to begin thinking and talking in earnest about their unique national character. Convincing Americans to absorb this nationalistic conception of themselves, however, required a delegitimation of the cosmopolitanism that many of them had embraced in the first years of the 1790s.³ Just as international events had set the stage for the emergence of popular cosmopolitanism in the early 1790s, the reaction against it was part of a transatlantic movement as well. In their assault on Painite cosmopolitanism, Americans looked to British anti-Jacobinism for their models, some even going so far as to advocate an American society that resembled Edmund Burke’s portrayal of traditional Britain. After 1794, Americans did not have difficulty finding printed arguments against Painite cosmopolitanism, for in that year Federal- [44.200.191.146] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:19 GMT) 84 tom paine’s america ist printers and newspaper editors began importing and disseminating British, anti-Jacobin propaganda in the hopes of changing the minds and the politics of American readers. In Britain, the government and conservative elites had sponsored a formidable anti-Jacobin printing campaign, and thanks to the efforts of American printers and editors like William Cobbett...