Marketing Middle-Class Morality

Rodney Hessinger. Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn: Visions of Youth in Middle-Class America, 1780–1850. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. 280 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, and index. $45.00.

Few topics have gripped historians of early America as powerfully as the post-Revolutionary demise of patriarchal authority. From Jay Fliegelman's Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority (1982) to Gordon Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991) to Joyce Appleby's Inheriting the Revolution (2000), scores of studies have shown how colonial America's rigidly structured social relationships softened under democratic values that challenged older notions of heredity, status, and manhood. The upshot of this decline in starchy paternalism was a widespread bourgeois embrace of affection and benevolence—rather than blunt coercion—as the proper approach to strengthening the strained ligaments of private and public power. The solidification of these kinder, gentler, more feminized bonds, moreover, ultimately helped create one of America's most influential social constructs: the middle class.

As convincing as this conventionally described transition might be, it obscures a minefield of interpretive problems. While the customary foundation of power certainly creaked under the weight of republican expectations, it did not, as Carole Shammas has argued in A History of Household Government in America (2002), collapse into irrelevance. Indeed, patriarchal authority and its authoritarian precepts persisted well into the early republic, most notably shaping habits of property management and domestic control in households across the eastern seaboard. Looking at the issue from another angle, recent investigations of colonial Virginia question the extent to which uncontested paternalism exclusively defined social relations in the colonial period. Studies by Kathleen Brown and Rhys Isaac, for example, uncover a complex social landscape populated with "anxious patriarchs" and insecure elites holding tenuously to the authority that scholars of the early republic have traditionally imputed to them.¹ Further complicating the American bourgeoisie's stark transition to early-nineteenth-century dominance is the concomitant emergence of a nascent working class. This group—best glimpsed in Sean Wilentz's Chants Democratic (1984) and Billy Smith's The "Lower Sort": Philadelphia's Laboring People (1990)—failed to embrace the emerging bourgeois ethic and, as a result, implicitly insists that the connection between class tension and middle-class development be duly considered. Factor in the analytical challenges posed by race, gender, and geography and it quickly becomes clear that any scholar hoping to negotiate this interpretive morass must possess an instinctual knowledge of the historiography, a keen ability to parse distinctions, enough judiciousness to avoid overstatement, and the restraint not to try and iron out every wrinkle in a single book.

Rodney Hessinger, in Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn, demonstrates all these attributes. His thesis is two-fold. First, he argues that in the relatively fluid urban environment of the early republic—an environment in which "substantial new freedoms and opportunities were available and being seized by the young"—parental control over youth slackened just enough for young people to become subject to a variety of potentially disruptive seductions. With America's urbanized youth gradually exposed to a predacious "rake culture" that "celebrated licentiousness" in an "urban underworld," grownups "scrambled to gain hold of youth" through the carrot of persuasion rather than the stick of coercion. As the "dialectic that developed between youth and elders" evolved, a "Lockean paradigm" emerged to accommodate "the desire for liberty in youth." At the same time, however, this paradigm respected the "normalizing judgment of experts" and their ability "to persuade youth to buy into their values." The result, in short, was nothing less than a battle for cultural control over potentially wayward youth (pp. 7, 2, 11, 13).

The second part of Hessinger's thesis builds on the first to argue that the rhetorical weapons brandished in this battle directly shaped the formation of the early American middle class. The middle class, Hessinger writes, was about more than "what one wore or the home one lived in." It was also about...