Rhetoric and the Republic: Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America

3. Yale 1701–1817

3 Yale 1701–1817 Lux et Veritas —Yale University motto In 1700, Connecticut was largely ¤lled with farming communities led by church elders. Though there were strict social distinctions, people’s lives were marked by economic austerity and common piety. By 1800, commerce had crept into even the most remote corners of Connecticut life. Markets not only affected every endeavor, but some people made their principal living trading, manufacturing, or selling some non-ministerial professional service. Christian piety was challenged by urban cosmopolitanism . Puritan plainness was being replaced by bourgeois elegance. At the perimeter of these dramatic cultural and economic changes,a national government was taking shape. Connecticut’s citizens worried about what they would become and how they would ¤t into the United States. Connecticut ’s economy was changing, its culture, likewise. Its governing citizens scrambled to manage these events without losing their privilege. To say the least, eighteenth-century Connecticut was bursting with possibility . In the midst of all this was the third university founded in British America (est. 1701), a tense site where the aforementioned changes were negotiated and where Connecticut’s privileged sons struggled over hegemony . In Connecticut more broadly tension existed between the residual political economy of seventeenth-century Puritan settlements and the emergent political economy of bourgeois capitalism.1 Commercially temperate, principally agricultural communities would ¤nd themselves steadily confronted with new markets, new opportunities to accumulate wealth, new cultural sophistication. The governing Connecticut order®inched at capitalism’s pro¤teering, its self-serving market participants, its externalities: luxury and secular urbanity.They were even more aghast at the potential for liberal democratic reform. In various cultural institutions , Connecticut’s elite struggled over the colony’s economic, cultural, and political fate. Some were conservatives, unwilling to entertain the most innocent bourgeois bauble. Some welcomed re¤nement and elegance but refused liberal political reforms. They fought over how to accommodate their changing economic circumstances, their new cultural interests, their authoritarian social hierarchy, and their deeply rooted religious beliefs. These struggles played out at Yale as several efforts at rhetorical education articulated the different economic circumstances in eighteenth-century Connecticut to the bourgeois mores creeping into her taverns and salons, to the Puritan tenor of Connecticut’s leadership, and to the developing national republican vocabulary. Tracing the century-long history of rhetorical education at Yale demonstrates that changes regularly happen in hegemonic orders. Over the course of 120 years, Connecticut witnessed three distinct hegemonic blocs: an austere Puritan government as articulated to subsistence agriculture ; a bourgeois Puritan genteel leadership as articulated to a tempered New England capitalism and to the Federalist Party in national U.S. politics;a bourgeois,religiously plural alliance among dissenters as articulated to free-market capitalism and to the Democratic-Republican Party. Each was a contingent intersection of economic and political interests that depended on local work performed in cultural institutions like the university. Each effort at rhetorical education connected these various semiautonomous social factors in an effort to advance a hegemonic constellationatYale . Setting Yale’s rhetorical education in its historic and hegemonic circumstances demonstrates that rhetorical pedagogies contributed to various hegemonic blocs. This analysis also shows how speci¤c rhetoricians participated in large developments through local actions in the classroom. Rhetoric professors did not simply accommodate the shift from subsistence agriculture to commercial capitalism. They often resisted, often accepted parts of the new political economy while refusing others.They did not necessarily welcome coffeehouse sociability. Some countered with a distinctly Puritan vision of public exchange, one marked by devotion, prayer,and collective worship.Some educators tried to advance bourgeois 80 / Yale 1701–1817 civility by teaching its rhetorical norms. This chapter offers the long history of Yale’s rhetorical paideia in the interest of demonstrating two points already mentioned. First, hegemony is contingent on its articulations among cultural institutions. Pedagogy and publicity are two important sites where these articulations get formed. Second, hegemony is dependent on the local actions performed by citizens engaged in what Gramsci called the “trench warfare” of modern political struggle. This struggle might better be termed “the agon of everyday life,” a locution that emphasizes the push and pull that happens whenever disparate political and economic interests clash over local sites such as rhetorical education. By recounting and situating Yale’s curricular struggles in these contested circumstances, this chapter demonstrates that any effort at rhetorical education engages, constitutes, and sometimes challenges the hegemonicshapeofahistoricalmoment.Theworkofrhetoricaleducation is a...