Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (review)

Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City. By Edward L. Widmer (New York, Oxford University Press, 1999) 290 pp. $29.95

Widmer argues that what is known as the Young America movement of the mid-nineteenth century should be seen as two separate movements with largely different memberships and goals. The first, which he calls "Young America I," was a benign, nationalistic cultural movement dominated by young New York Democrats that influenced literature, art, and the law. It flourished from the late 1830s until it reached a "crisis of faith" between 1848 and 1851. "Young America II," which supplanted this cultural movement in the 1850s, was "a stupid farce of third-rate politicians using 'democracy' as a catch-all slogan for their unprincipled schemes to wrest foreign territory and divert attention from the slavery issue" (185). The only link between these two movements--one that has too often obscured their differences, according to Widmer--was the sponsorship of John L. O'Sullivan and the Democratic Review.

Since Widmer considers Young America I to have been the more important and attractive movement, he makes it the chief focus of the book. He maintains that it was, in part, a generational revolt of vibrant young Democrats against the stodgy culture of Whiggery and, in part, a revolution of New York (which he defines as a broadly inclusive area encompassing New York City, upstate New York, and some western sections of New England) against the cultural hegemony of Boston and Philadelphia. He traces the connections of writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, John Greenleaf Whittier, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville to O'Sullivan's Democratic Review to demonstrate the impact that literature had on politics and that politics had on literature during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Widmer also suggests that genre painters of the era, especially William Sidney Mount, shared some of the same outlooks as the Young America writers and that Young America and the Democrats were heavily invested in the American Art-Union. Finally, Widmer attempts to tie Young America's quest for a national literary culture to David Dudley Field's efforts at nationalistic legal reform.

Young America I reached a crisis of faith in the late 1840s as it drew back from the implications of the Mexican War and ultimately failed to accept Melville's penetrating glimpse of the evil inherent in the age in Moby-Dick (New York, 1851). Young America's cultural nationalism had always been idealistic, even innocent, in its outlook, Widmer argues, but it eventually drew back into a latent conservatism when confronted by the harsh reality of American expansionism. The Democratic Review and the Young America movement were then replaced by a militaristic nationalism that was "little better than European imperialism" (202). This Young America II had no connection with literature, language and the arts, but was "downright anti-intellectual" (202).

This sophisticated, wide-ranging work will certainly cause historians to think twice before offering the usual simplistic explanations of Young America. Widmer argues articulately, if not always persuasively, that this movement was not simply a screen for southern expansionists, but had important literary and artistic antecedents that had little to do with the uglier aspects of American imperialism. This argument should not be lightly dismissed, though the evidence is not entirely convincing.

Because Widmer is identified on the dust jacket as a White House speechwriter for President Clinton, one might wonder if this work were not a party brief intended to distance the Democrats from the worst aspects of nineteenth-century expansionism and attach the party to some of the most attractive figures of the American Renaissance. But the fact remains that the Democrats of the 1840s and 1850s precipitated an imperialistic war with Mexico, carried out a bellicose foreign policy with Europe, and called for the acquisition of more slave territory in Cuba. However innocent or...