Making America's Destiny Manifest

For decades scholars of antebellum culture have used Boston and Concord as an intellectual fulcrum with which to move all sorts of weighty arguments about America’s cultural coming of age. They commence their tales in the era of good feelings with such stolid institutions as the Anthology Club and the North American Review, luxuriate in the halcyon years of the Transcendental Club and The Dial, and rest in the mid-1850s in front of Ticknor and Fields’ stable of thoroughbred writers, whom the publishers touted in their Atlantic Monthly. Put another way, most people still piously recite the litany of Lewis Mumford’s “Golden Day” and F.O. Matthiessen’s “American Renaissance.” ¹ But as the latter admitted in his magisterial study by that title, to get America just right requires another book, one that takes into account “the economic and social forces of the time.” Alerted to this desideratum by his treatment of Melville and Whitman, writers who, for all their connections to New England, preferred Manhattan’s thick and hearty cultural chowder to Brook Farm’s dietary reform, Mathiessen placed at the center of this projected volume the “rise of the common man” (p. viii). The truly discerning scholar, in other words, would have to deal with New York City.

The significance of this topic, an analysis of what Matthiessen termed “The Age of Fourier,” did not escape his Harvard colleague, Perry Miller, who, after he published his indispensable critical anthology of the Transcendentalists, turned his attention to the group of cultural nationalists in New York known as “Young America.” ² For some reason, though, when Miller tried to unravel their tangled skein of intellectual discourse his usual acuity failed him; he as well as most critics found The Raven and the Whale (1956) the least satisfying of his works, what its author himself termed his “comic book.” ³ This is not to say that it is without merit. We need to be reminded, for example, how deeply “in the 1840s the political parties were involved with the concern for literature and education,” when a person’s understanding of protectionism was inseparable “from his style,” and his “stand on the Bank” depended on what he thought about “the romance” (p. 110). But when all is said and done, Miller’s book finally is not enough about the promise of radical Democrats who linked their destiny to the plight of the common man and too much what its subtitle announces—“The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville.”

Edward L. Widmer is the first since Miller to reconnoiter the cultural landscape worked by those who rallied around the slogan “Young America,” and his book’s primary recommendation is his assumption that, pace Miller, the real interest of these people lies not just in their engagement with American literary nationalism but in their full range of cultural politics. To be sure, Miller was hinting as much at the end of his life, in the sections on legal codification posthumously published in his Life of the Mind in America (1965). ⁴ But The Raven and the Whale remains so little satisfying because he mainly sought to explain what had puzzled so many other literary historians, the dismal reception accorded Moby-Dick, the one book that Young America should have welcomed with open arms. More willing than Miller to probe the Democrats’ broad cultural challenge to the Whigs, Widmer explores a group who, before their descent to jingoism, gave the nation the opportunity to define itself through genuinely inclusive democratic sentiments rather than the liberal individualism championed by their political opponents.

Widmer’s book rests on an important distinction overlooked by previous scholars of the topic. There were very clearly two separate phases (which he terms Young America I and Young America II) in the development of this intellectual coterie, and we oversimplify if we conflate them. The group’s first incarnation, which flourished from the late...