Eclipse of Empires: World History in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture

Chapter 1 - American Principles and Italian Things: Cooper’s Political Gleanings in Italy

1 Ameri­ can Principles and Italian Things Cooper’s Po­ liti­ cal Gleanings in Italy James Fenimore Cooper provides a useful place to begin, because in his representations of early modern Italian history, he explicitly discusses where the United States fits into the his­ tori­ cal model that seemed to govern the imperial trajectory of the great Italian city-­states. In the other narratives of imperial eclipse examined in this book, authors merely hint at the position of the United States within the patternofimperialriseandfall,byanalogytopreviousinstancesofimperialeclipse involving other empires. In contrast, Cooper locates the United States within the pattern, depicting it as having eclipsed Italy in its ascent to a position of global prominence but in danger of triggering its own decline by repeating the mistakes that Italy made in the early modern era. Inspired by his 1828–30 trip to Italy and his sojourns in Florence, Rome, and Venice,Cooperwrotetwonovelsintheearly1830sthatdealtwithItaly:TheWater-­ Witch (1830) and The Bravo (1831). In The Water-­Witch, a primarily comic novel about the maritime smuggling culture operating near New York City in the early eighteenth century, Cooper explicitly argues that the United States had surpassed the Italian city-­ states in commercial power, if not yet in cultural achievement. In The Bravo, a darkly gothic romance set in Venice and detailing the corruption that riddled the city-­ state’s supposed republicanism, Cooper sets out to applaud the superior merits of U.S. republicanism but discovers disturbing resemblances between trends in the U.S. po­ liti­ cal scene and the oligarchic tyranny of pseudo-­ republican Venice.1 Both stories take place in the early eighteenth century, both discuss the relationship between the United States and Italy, and both rely on the idea of cyclical history—theinescapableriseandfallofempires.Takentogether,TheWater-­Witch and The Bravo explore the full imperial cycle: ascendance, then decline and eclipse by another imperial power engaged in its own ascent. The Water-­Witch focuses on the ascendance portion of the cycle; as John Lothrop Motley would later do in his Rise of the Dutch Republic, Cooper uses The Water-­Witch to articulate a sense Cooper’s Political Gleanings in Italy / 21 of pride in the rise of the United States. But with The Bravo, Cooper confronts the flipside of the imperial cycle. He produces an archetypal narrative of imperial eclipse, in which Venice’s decline raises the specter of a possible U.S. decline, resulting from some of the same po­ liti­ cal malfunctions. To understand what allowed Cooper to yoke the United States to Venice’s fate inthisway,wewillfirstbrieflyexaminehistheoryofthenation-­stateasarticulated in the 1834 pamphlet A Letter to His Countrymen. Cooper posits a distinction between “Ameri­can principles” and “Ameri­can things” that allows him to relocate Ameri­ canness to foreign settings. This move opens the floodgates of national relevance ;internationalscenesandsituationssuddenlybecomerifewithintra­national meaning. Unfortunately, The Bravo provides Cooper with an opportunity to discover more similarities between Venice and the United States than he would have liked.Cooper’sstatedmotiveinthenovelistoglorifyU.S.republicanismbypainting a picture of its inverse—oligarchical Venetian tyranny. However, his project falters when his depiction of Venice starts to resemble certain problematic aspects of nineteenth-­ century U.S. po­ liti­ cal culture. Cooper feared that the Whig Party in the United States had ambitions to become a permanent governing aristocracy, and precisely this kind of aristocratic class had exploited and ultimately doomed Venice. Ironically, given Cooper’s repugnance for and fear of po­ liti­ cal aristocracy, he believed in the cultural importance of a gentry class, landowners whose refined way of life could temper the crass mercantilism of U.S. society. His critics, who responded very negatively to The Bravo, lambasted him for his aristocratic attitudes , seemingly so starkly at odds with his vociferous advocacy of popu­lar rights, republicanism, and the Democratic Party. Cooper seemed intent on promoting a U.S. version of the class that had derailed republican Venice and propelled it into decline and eclipse. Cooper’sdiscussionsof ItalyinTheBravoandTheWater-­Witchshowhimwrestling with the relevance of Italy to U.S. national identity. Although The Water-­ Witch affords him the opportunity to celebrate the New World’s eclipse of the Old World, The Bravo forces him to dwell on the example of a failed republic, supposedly to affirm a different future for the United States but in actuality showing him the likelihood of a similar U.S. fate. In presenting such a clear example of the rise and fall of empires, Italy provokes Cooper to speculate on his own country’s position within this his­tori­cal cycle...