Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts (review)

Since World War II, historians and political scientists have stressed the significance of voluntary associations in American society, especially the rapid upsurge in such groups during the antebellum period. They took their cue from Tocqueville's observation that "Better use has been made of association, and this powerful instrument of action has been applied to more varied aims in America than anywhere else in the world."¹ Interpreting associations as emblematic of democracy and "modernization," Cold War–era scholars emphasized their role in achieving consensus in politics and society. Now, drawing on the insights of Habermas, Skocpol, and other writers on civil society, Neem offers a thoughtful, nuanced, re-evaluation of voluntary associations in Massachusetts between the Revolution and the Civil War.² His argument stresses the tensions and conflicts surrounding their emergence in the Early Republic.

At the end of the Revolution, republican theory held no place for a sphere of "civil society" between the people and government. Though there was a constitutional right of assembly, there was no right of "association." Voluntary organizations, like political factions or parties, were viewed as potential threats to the common good. With few exceptions, Massachusetts law required the formal incorporation of such groups. Neem traces the developments and contests that altered this situation during the next half-century. The rivalries of Federalists and Republicans, the diversification of economic and cultural endeavor, and struggles about state involvement in education and religion forced re-evaluations of voluntary association. Neem focuses partly on constitutional conflicts involving churches, colleges, and the rights of incorporated bodies, but he also stresses the formation of a "grassroots public sphere" during the 1810s and 1820s, through the efforts of clergy to organize men and women in charitable, educational, and moral-reform associations that could counter political hostility to church–state alliances.

According to Neem, purposive action of this kind, not an inevitable development in democracy, turned Americans into "joiners," making voluntary associations ubiquitous by the time Tocqueville visited America. Change was registered in the notable Commonwealth v. Hunt decision of 1842 that legalized trade unions. Assembly, once regarded as a conspiracy against the common good, became recognized as a right. There was no consensus regarding associations, however. National Republicans and Whigs began to employ them as counterweights to direct democracy that could remove certain functions from political control. Democrats suspected them as pockets of privilege or monopoly power beyond majority influence. The emergence of abolitionism demonstrated the power of an organized minority to precipitate political and social conflict.

Neem's clear, incisive, and informative study deserves to be read widely by historians of early America and by social scientists interested in voluntary action and in the influence of associational groups on political change. It demonstrates that voluntary associations did not resolve the tensions in democracy between the "people" and the state, or between majorities and minorities. Abolitionism, for instance, both sharpened conflict over slavery and challenged the boundaries of citizenship by including African Americans and women in public action. But scholars will also be prompted to apply Neem's insights to a broader range of activities than his book addresses. What was the influence, for example, of developments in manufacturing, public improvements, agricultural societies, the academy movement, and even freemasonry in the creation of early American civil society?