Cuisine and National Identity in the Early Republic

May/June 2006 · Historically Speaking profoundly important shift in sensory ratios in Western societies, a shift that elevated the eye and discounted, increasingly, the value of smell, taste, touch, and even sound? Among Americanists, Richard Rath comes nearest to supporting this position. As he argues in How EarlyAmerica Sounded, sounds were far more important in 1 7th-century America to a variety of constituencies, not least because the hypervisuality associated with text, reading, and the Enlightenment generally had yet to command center stage. Interestingly, though, Rath is in a minority, at least among Americanists. Either explicitly or implicitly, most see the nonvisual senses as either retaining relevance well into the 19th century (witness Leigh Eric Schmidt's argument in Hearing Things) or even later, as is the case with my own work on the way so-called premodern senses and senate stereotypes were resurrected to form the basis of a thoroughly modern classificatory system ofsegregation right through the 1960s. Supposedly premodern sensory understandings , ones that appealed to the nose, the tongue, the skin, and, to a lesser extent, the ear (which itself occupies a position straddling premodern and modern) were fugitive and promiscuous, so much so that we might want to rethink the value of the premodern/modern sensory divide. For the most part, American historians have yet to address these questions in an obvious or systematic fashion. When they do, they might listen carefully to turn-of-the-century southern segregationists. What such men and women had to say wasn't pretty, but their conversations and flinty, frightening pronouncements suggest the intellectual limitations of a heavily visual understanding of the world, past and present. Mark M. Smith is Carolina Distinguished Professor ofHistory at the University of South Carolina. His latest book, from which this essay is drawn, is How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (University ofNorth Carolina Press, 2006). Cuisine and National Identity in the Early Republic James E. McWilliams The first generation ofwhite Americans to come of age after the American Revolution had to perform a cultural balancing act. On the one hand, it had to forge a unique identity, one that disassociated the new republic from timeworn habits. The process ofestablishing a national persona was multifaceted and not easily summarized, but in general it required Americans to embrace the most conspicuous difference between their nascent society and the established customs of the motherland: the comparative "wildness" of the American environment. Charles Woodmason, an itinerant minister working in the 1750s, did more than echo empty rhetoric when he described himself as negotiating "the Wild Woods ofAmerica." For better or worse, he highlighted early America's roughhewn environment as its most telling point of distinction from Great Britain, which had effectively served as a prevailing role model. On the other hand, though, while young Americans eagerly sought to highlight the wooly virtues of their mythical frontier, they had to do so without tipping their praise too far in the "culture ofwilderness" direction. An overzealous advocacy of the "Wild Woods," after all, would have risked endorsing the worldview of the "savages"—the indigenous population that Anglo-Americans worked so diligently to dispossess and banish. To be sure, urgent political and diplomatic matters animated public life in the early republic—writing a constitution, staying out ofwar, fighting a war, avoiding secession, to name a few examples—and they all contributed to the process of national identity construction. But the pervasive challenge ofjuggling European refinement and Native American primitiveness persisted as an ongoing if subtle cultural concern that, in one way or another, touched the lives of every white American. The threat of going native, balanced against the threat of falling into overcivilized luxury, consistently tempered early Americans' efforts to conceptualize their national character. While scholarly approaches to understanding this dilemma are potentially endless, American culinary habits provide an especially clear lens through which to capture early Americans struggling with this important cultural negotiation. By the time ofthe American Revolution, America's diverse culinary landscape had coalesced into a rough but vaguely definable "American" mode of eating. Intensely regional cuisines, whose differences were further intensified by racial and ethnic contributions—not to mention radically different environmental conditions—had gently...