The Antebellum Crisis and America's First Bohemians

Chapter 2. A Scandal in Bohemia: Free Love and the Antebellum American Culture Wars

21 In 1855, the horrified New York Times exposed the existence of “a Secret Society, or League” among the local radicals. On their behalf, Henry Clapp acknowledged the presence of “a complicated secret institution ...composed of reformatorymenandwomeninvariouspartsof theworld,whosecollective aim is the‘examination of all questions within the scope of human concern.’” With a literary straight face, he added—and the paper printed—that the organization had“no corporate existence,in the common sense of that term, since its members assume no joint responsibility; are not governed by the ballot; cannot, in the nature of things, have a creed; have no officers who are not self-elected to their functions; have no common fund.”Yet, that League had“numerous branches or‘Orders,’” that uncovered by the Times being its “Grand Order of Recreation.”1 Novel fears,the newfound power of the press, and the politics of the social imagination contributed to Clapp’s suggestion Chapter 2 A Scandal in Bohemia Free Love and the Antebellum American Culture Wars R It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us in trouble. It’s the things we know that ain’t so. —Artemus Ward 22 · The Antebellum Crisis and America’s First Bohemians that, beyond the trustworthy scrutiny of the respectable, lurked a secret society of people insidiously pursuing fun. As dangerous radical conspiracies go, twice-weekly lectures amounted to very little, but the ongoing political party crisis in the city, the state, and the nation frayed nerves all around. In the teeth of an organized Nativist hostility, veterans of the 1848–49 revolutions in France, Italy, Germany, and elsewhere sought to influence politics in New York. Although lacking such a revolutionary experience, American radicals—who had been building utopian communities or dabbling in independent politics for a generation— found themselves participants in an electoral coalition with some genuine prospects of success and began forming flexible new kinds of communities, grounded in a respect for radical individualism,including questions of sexual love. In their attempts to inject such issues into the public venue with the same frankness they used in addressing economics,they struck a particularly sensitivenervewiththenewmunicipaladministration.NewYorkhadreached a size and level of anonymity where a burgeoning sex industry emerged and compromised the integrity of city officialdom. The subsequent“Free Love” scandal of October 1855 contributed materially to the collapse of that administration and the emergence of a viable new Republican opposition. It also became the first great public debut of a group that Clapp transformed into a bohemian subculture. The hope of universal freedom had helped inspire revolts across the western world in 1848–49, and their defeat drove thousands of refugees across the Atlantic, where Americans faced a national crisis of their own. The so-called second-political-partysystem,inwhichDemocratsandWhigsviedforpower, had begun to unravel. The abolitionist Liberty Party, with which Clapp had been associated, had ignored William Lloyd Garrison’s objections and captured a limited but strategic base.About the time Clapp had left for Europe, the Mexican-American War moved the Pennsylvania Democratic congressman DavidWilmot to propose barring slavery from any territory acquired in the war. The Southern Democratic administration of James K. Polk rejected the Wilmot Proviso, after which former president Martin Van Buren and manyNorthernDemocratsboltedtoformanindependentFreeSoilPartythat includedabolitionists,landreformers,and“ConscienceWhigs.”Morethanone in ten voters in the national election of 1848 opted for the Free Soil version of Wilmot’s attempt to prevent the expansion of slavery into the west. A Scandal in Bohemia · 23 Althoughthemostprominentof theprofessionalpoliticianssubsequently returned to the major parties, those who remained had reorganized a Free Democratic Party,the kind of a fusion of overt abolitionism and land reform that Clapp had advocated.Free Democrats ran candidates such as the socialist Warren B. Chase for governor of Wisconsin and ceded great authority to the veteran abolitionist and Libertyman Gerrit Smith. Smith’s minority report to the 1852 national convention declared“our fraternal sympathies to the oppressed,not only of our own land,but of every other land”and calling for the party’s reorganization as a“Democratic League” to be“organized in everypartof theworld.”2 SoranganAmericanechoof theattemptsbyBritish Chartists to establish an international society of“Fraternal Democrats.” When veterans of these European revolutions began organizing themselves into a common association at New York, they hosted an address by SenatorJohnP.Hale,therecentpresidentialcandidateof theFreeDemocrats. This originated in a common effort to get a medal for U.S.naval commander Duncan N.Ingraham...