(Re)view
Of Politics and Publics
Joanne Pope Melish
Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
In the past few years, scholars have been examining the development of nationalism, the nature and exercise of citizenship, and the emergence of "the public" in new ways. These developments have largely been inspired by the work of two political theorists. Benedict Anderson focused attention on imagining the nation-state as the principal project of modernity, and Jürgen Habermas located the work of this project in a discursive space called the "bourgeois public sphere," an arena of rational discourse constituted by the engagement of the bourgeois public with print culture and the emerging market. He defined this "bourgeois public" as all private persons who were sufficiently educated and prosperous to be so engaged. 1 Together, these approaches have refocused scholarly attention in useful ways: away from a small, elite, political leadership and toward a much broader middle class; away from a narrow range of party politics, formal political pronouncements, and private exchanges and toward a more expansive print culture and discursive sphere.
But, in the immortal words of Peggy Lee, "Is that all there is?" Was no one besides the bourgeoisie imagining the nation? On the other hand, however it was [End Page 157] constituted, was the civic imagination constrained from imagining anything but the nation? Might public political acts have been performing other kinds of cultural work? These questions provide a framework for considering the work of David Waldstreicher and Mary P. Ryan, who explore American parades, celebrations, and public gatherings as localized political practices with broad cultural and political meaning. Waldstreicher investigates these events in a wide variety of cities and towns between 1776 and 1820, while Ryan focuses on three cities, New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco, in the period from 1825 to 1880. Both of these books make important contributions to evolving discussions about the nature of politics, power, and "the public" in the century that followed the American Revolution.
Waldstreicher's project is to explore how localized festive practices reconciled "a divisive politics and a unifying nationalism" (2). He contends that American revolutionaries used public rituals and rhetoric to create a new public called "the nation" and to invent a national political culture. After the Revolution, the national debate over ratifying the Constitution was "a struggle over the nature of the political, the spaces in which politics would happen, and the character of 'the people' who would participate" (54). Federalists appropriated public celebration as reflective as well as constitutive of national virtue and mobilized sentimental nationalism in the interests of strengthening the national government. Celebrations and widely disseminated reports about them made ratification of the Constitution seem to be a national movement whose success was inevitable. When Federalists tried to restrict popular participation in nationalist celebration as "the unruly discourse of unvirtuous men" (61), they met stubborn resistance from the anti-Federalists who countered with their own parades; Federalists succeeded in strengthening the national government only after they "rebroadened the field of respectable citizenry" to include "middling sorts such as farmers, mechanics and artisans" (55).
Waldstreicher shows how, in the 1790s, national celebrations and the press about them became the locus of partisan political struggle and in fact mobilized the first opposition party. Partisan struggles to establish legitimacy as "the people" focused on virtuous citizenship. New civic festivals celebrating Washington's birthday and his tours, the French Revolution and French victories against England, celebrated in conjunction with the American Fourth of July, created partisan subcultures at the same time that they attempted, by taking over public space, to create unanimity.
The celebrations of Democratic-Republicans drew directly on Revolutionary referents, enacting sentimental allegories of national political events and using the press as a kind of repository of national character with which to reinvent national citizenship. They distinguished "the nation" from "the government" under Federalist control and carefully broadened participation across classes, mobilizing women as well. The Federalists in turn attempted to identify the state with the nation by reconceiving "the people" as the respectable citizenry together with its Federalist government [End Page 158] and by identifying Republicans as disreputable lower sorts. The renewed Federalist nationalism of the 1790s sought to unite religion, the state, and the nation, giving youth and the clergy a prominent role. Women were also mobilized by the Federalists, less as participants than as a "virtuous womanhood" that secured male citizenship (171).
In the Jeffersonian era, nationalist celebrations became vehicles for creating support for political leaders themselves at the polls. Both parties, by holding increasingly partisan nationalist festivals and linking biennial elections to the tradition of nationalist celebration, sought to embody the "true" revolutionary national spirit and virtuous citizenship in the interests of vote-getting. The emergence of partisanship within the nationalist frame made partisanship increasingly respectable, even as the ideal of a nation without factions remained strong.
It was the Republicans who did most of the celebrating in these years, while Federalists ridiculed Republican celebrations and attacked Republican celebrants as drunk, disorderly, and simply the "wrong" people--often, specifically, people of the "wrong color." What Waldstreicher calls the "literary blackface" attacks of Federalists on Republicans, made in ventriloquistic letters and proclamations in black dialect, racialized Republicans by suggesting that they placed blacks on an equal footing with whites, which excluded both from virtuous citizenship. After 1800, women became prominent participants in both Jeffersonian and Federalist parades, but their role was not as citizens per se, however, but as embodiments of republican motherhood who might renew revolutionary unity and function as an antidote to partisanship.
Thus, in diverse ways, celebratory politics in the early republic broadened participation in the public sphere. In contrast to Habermas, Waldstreicher also argues that it stimulated critical debate over national politics and produced a mutual dependency of rationality and ritual.
By 1800, political interests were diverging along regional lines, placing nationalism in growing tension with regionalism. Rather than regarding nationalism and regionalism as contrary ideologies, Waldstreicher recounts the emergence of what he terms "nationalist regionalisms" in New England, the West, and the South that foreshadowed antebellum sectional protest. New England Federalists and republicans each attempted to make claims and counterclaims to the true revolutionary heritage and cast the other as fomenting disunion. Waldstreicher argues that it was New England attacks that provoked a distinctive Southern nationalism. Both regions projected their conceptions of national destiny on the West, where the celebrations and publications of frontier citizens asserted national loyalty in the context of local interests.
After the War of 1812, Americans tried to submerge political partisanship as well as racial and regional divisions in celebrations of national unity. Waldstreicher demonstrates how whites used national celebrations to manage potentially disruptive [End Page 159] differences, as in identifying white homogeneity with the national good to support programs of African colonization and Indian removal, and invoking the revolutionary ideology of universal equality to appeal for an end to the national disgrace of slavery.
In the meantime, Waldstreicher contends that African Americans themselves appropriated whites' nationalist celebrational practices to resist both slavery and racism and to create a black nationalist political culture. (Here it might be argued that he underemphasizes somewhat the significance of the rich tradition of African American celebration with distinctly African roots--e.g., election and crowning ceremonies--in the development of black nationalism.) Waldstreicher notes that at first African American celebrations were met with silence; after 1820, however, they were greeted with ridicule. It might be argued that the parades heightened the visibility of a northern black culture that most whites fondly assumed would peter out in the wake of gradual emancipation, inspiring increasingly derisive attacks on blacks' "intrusion" into the public sphere.
It is tempting to look at Mary Ryan's Civic Wars as a chronological extension of Waldstreicher's project, since both works explore public political practices and culture, and hers begins in 1825, just after his leaves off in 1820. In some ways this is true, but their aims are distinct, and there are crucial differences in their approaches.
Ryan's stated project is prescriptive: to learn how to exercise citizenship in parlous times such as the imminent turn of the millennium, a time characterized by the "disintegration of the national consensus," the "rumored demise of a unified national narrative," and "withdrawal from the civic project" (1-2). To do this, she turns to the nineteenth century, and specifically to the period between 1825 and 1880 in three American cities "as full of cultural differences and as fractured by social and economic changes as any metropolis today": New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans (3). This new exploration extends her earlier study of the evolving public role and presence of women in civic rituals in the same three cities during the same time period. 2
Ryan has chosen to direct her exploration toward "the public," which she characterizes as "a symbol of the possibility of unification without homogenization, integration without assimilation," and also, on a personal level, views as representing liberation from privacy. Following Toqueville, she seeks "democratic public life," and she finds it in "dense human settlements," that is, in cities (9).
Like Waldstreicher, Ryan undertakes to explore the "political practices of associated Americans" in the street and in print. But the space that most interests Waldstreicher is discursive, and he finds the print culture that surrounded public celebrations and gave them meaning at least as important as the street activities themselves and indivisible from them. To Ryan, on the other hand, the face-to-face [End Page 160] association of citizens enacting a politics constitutes civic culture. She is deeply interested in locating a democratic public in real, physical space.
She begins by looking at the organization of public space itself in the three cities in 1825. Each boasted a central public space: In New Orleans it was the Place d'Armes or Plaza des Armas, which by 1850, after the American takeover of the city, had become Jackson Square; in San Francisco (Yerba Buena until 1849) it was the Plaza, later named Portsmouth Square; and in New York it was City Hall Park, laid out according to the New York Plan of 1811. By the 1840s, public space was venerated and carefully fenced, and public squares were understood to be sites for citizen recreation. A network of smaller public spaces--public halls, theaters, ethnic enclaves, public markets--served as additional "sites of sociability" (32-33). Taken together, these spaces and their uses constituted an evolving political economy of the street.
Ryan shows how civic culture developed in these public spaces. In all three cities, street populations consisted of all classes and races, speaking diverse languages, mingling together. Public ceremonies filled the central public spaces and usually included a civic procession with occupational and military groups, benevolent societies, fire companies, city officials, and citizens marching in orderly units. The civic cultures of the three cities in 1825 were democratic and participatory to differing degrees; everywhere, people of the lower sort were consigned to watching and cheering along parade routes. Some women participated, but in an honorific role, while female icons that allegorically represented liberty and justice were ubiquitous. In sum, in 1825 the spirit of public assembly filled the three cities studied, and the ceremonial public was diverse but observed a hierarchical order.
In the next twenty-five years, urban ceremonies proliferated and diversified. Ryan shows how, somewhat differently in each city, what she calls "the grammar, syntax, and vocabulary of ceremony" changed in the 1830s and 1840s (70). All three cities observed national holidays such as Washington's Birthday and Independence Day, while each commemorated at least one holiday of local origin. In civic processions, occupational units were joined by groups of skilled craftsmen and then common laborers. Irish Americans succeeded in institutionalizing St. Patrick's Day, and other ethnic fraternities, benevolent associations, and religious societies joined the ranks of what Ryan calls "ceremonial citizenship" (69). Units of official civic functionaries and political parties made patriotic holidays into partisan events.
As civic processions diversified, some groups, such as occupational elites and women, virtually disappeared from later ceremonies. The representation of others, such as free African Americans, was restricted; separate celebrations of African Americans initiated during the same period claimed a distinct place in public culture but did not constitute inclusion in any kind of unified public culture. Ryan notes that changes in ceremony between 1825 and 1850 essentially expanded the cultural representation [End Page 161] of white men, mirroring the expansion in white male suffrage, at the expense of free men of color and in disregard for women, in the same period.
City dwellers defined themselves as citizens by their partisan affiliations and in their public exercise of self-government at the local level. By 1850, public political meetings had become urban institutions in New York and, to a somewhat lesser degree, in New Orleans; in San Francisco, government itself was organized by public meetings to elect representatives to the territorial government formed in Sacramento in 1849. In all three cities, public meetings mediated between the city governments and the citizenry in defining the public good, negotiating public policy, initiating civic projects, and maintaining public order. Public political culture replaced deference with participation and built the spirit of democracy (109-10).
Public participation in electoral politics became a crucial act of citizenship as candidate selection was transformed from a private process to one achieved in the context of public meetings. Participation in formal public politics was limited, however. Women were excluded, and women's suffrage was seldom raised as a political issue; the exclusion of African Americans and Native Americans from citizenship, however, was actively debated and decided in local contexts, leading, for example, to the constitutional limitation of citizenship to affirmative categories of "white" and "male" in California, and to the defeat of efforts to end property restrictions for African American suffrage in New York.
The urban political culture of antebellum democracy was boisterous and fractious, and the expression of public opinion regularly turned violent. Mobs and riots occurred frequently, often in conjunction with election campaigns, and represented "not so much a breakdown of democratic process as its conduct by another means" (131). These "acts of civic warfare" were valued as a public right to be defended against government interference.
In the years Ryan characterizes as "the interregnum" between 1850 and 1865, the riots escalated and urban social and cultural divisions became violent power struggles that challenged Jacksonian principles of public democracy. In San Francisco and New Orleans, Committees of Vigilance assumed extralegal powers, seized control from the democratically elected municipal government, and provoked urban violence. In San Francisco, the vigilantes were nativists; in New Orleans, they were foreign-born Catholics challenging a nativist municipal government. In New York, competing nativist and ethnic interests eroded the party system and ultimately led to a different kind of municipal civic warfare, here between competing state and municipal police forces, with the participation of various partisan-affiliated gangs, several state militia regiments, and ultimately neighborhood groups of men, women, and children. The resulting civic disorder resembled "a popular insurrection" (155).
As race emerged as a central social issue in conjunction with the Civil War, people in all three cities began remaking racial (and class) distinctions in public life. [End Page 162] In New York, political leaders submerged ethnic as well as class differences among whites in a starker black/white binary, and people of color became the scapegoat for other kinds of deep social divisions. In New Orleans, in the context of occupation by the Union army, gens de couleur began to make alliances with newly freed slaves, mixed-race parades and public meetings were held, and racial difference became a topic of public discussion and decision-making. In San Francisco, blacks worked to eliminate racial distinctions and obtain guarantees of constitutional rights. During wartime, gender also was deployed in city politics in new ways. Not only were feminine symbols manipulated in the interests of patriotism, but women, in the context of war, were able to organize their own public meetings around African American emancipation and even demand women's rights.
After 1866, Ryan finds urban meeting-place democracy reconfigured again, partly as a consequence of a major reordering of urban space itself. Postwar urban population growth was accommodated by the concentrated use of space in the private development of apartment and commercial buildings. Urban development moved away from spaces that had facilitated public political functions and sociability, and municipal governments made little investment in new public squares or city halls. Many public parks were created, but they were less accessible and were conceived as spaces that would facilitate drives, rides, walks, and organized play of families and small groups rather than large-scale public assembly. Political meetings and posting bills were explicitly prohibited. Sociability now took place largely in corner groceries, street corners, and saloons--more intimate spaces. Private celebrations and ceremonies proliferated, while public civic commemorations became less frequent.
At the same time, literary representations of urban life began to emphasize its threatening disorder; hence, street control became a high priority to elite whites. Although street violence was directed largely against African Americans and Chinese, people of color were increasingly characterized as perpetrators of various kinds of vice. Campaigns targeting minorities coincided with efforts to segregate them, along with groups such as prostitutes characterized as deviant--a new ordering of public space protective of middle-class whites.
In this environment, Ryan argues that a new kind of public civic culture emerged that was more authoritarian in conception, emphasized spectacle rather than participation, and was conceived in private rather than public association. This new public culture brought constructions of difference, especially race and gender, into even higher relief. The ceremonial woman became visible and her voice heard--but as transcendent symbol, feminine supporter of masculine political positions barred from equal participation in public life. Racial differences too, were elaborated in postwar public ceremonies such as Mardi Gras by both blacks and whites. Difference was often articulated in terms of gender, so that black and Chinese men were depicted as threats to white women, while the exclusion of women from the [End Page 163] vote was used as a rationale for excluding Chinese men. Ethnic differences, too, were celebrated in ceremonial spectacle, and some groups, notably the Chinese in San Francisco, were effectively barred from public participation at all.
While the urban landscape no longer accommodated the kinds of public meeting-place democracy of the antebellum period, it remained a site in which public constructions of difference often erupted in confrontation and violence. Forty-five died in a New Orleans race riot in 1866, one hundred in New York's Hibernian riot of 1871; labor struggles that pitted the Workingmen's Party of California against Chinese workers in San Francisco in 1877 led 4,000 armed civilian vigilantes to patrol the streets. To keep peace in the cities, Ryan argues, urban politics changed in important ways that she terms collectively "the transformation of meeting-place democracy into the politics of publicity" (259). Debates over suffrage and worker identity reduced earlier struggles over difference to dualisms--black/white, Chinese/white, male/female. Reform efforts redefined citizens as taxpayers, bureaucratized municipal administration, privatized political organizing, and reoriented political struggles from the electoral arena to the media and the courts (282).
Ryan suggests that all of these changes in urban life constituted a retreat from the public sector, a restriction of democratic access and public participation, a shrinking of the public interest, and a reformulation of all issues in racial terms. At the same time, however, she sees the "civic wars" that produced these results as trial runs for a number of important challenges to industrial capitalism that would be launched in the next couple of decades--by organized labor, by women, and by African Americans. In these ways, she views the civic wars of the 1880s as a training ground for later social movements.
The lessons to be learned from this history, Ryan concludes, are that American democratic institutions thrived on face-to-face communication, conflict, and disorder in the urban context. She argues that the city continues to be a unique resource where social differences and inequities can become civic identities and where public contests nurture democracy, contain power, and foster social change. Such contests must not be suppressed, she warns, because a healthy, heterogeneous democracy requires "a refined and careful tolerance of civic warfare." The book ends with a call for a return to the "local, urban base of democratic practice" (315).
Both Waldstreicher and Ryan argue for an expanded conception of the nineteenth-century public sphere beyond Habermas's literate bourgeoisie. First middling sorts and partisan cultures, then groups who defined themselves in terms of ethnic, religious, and class difference were incorporated into the public sphere in an ongoing "democratization"--a process that stalled, however, after the Civil War. Blacks and women too, gained meaningful roles in public life, although they were excluded from formal politics through disfranchisement. In the postbellum period, [End Page 164] the diversity of the public sphere was not so much diminished as it was polarized by race and gender.
The very sociability of the diverse publics Waldstreicher and Ryan describe, their boisterous and sometimes riotous public discourse, serves to challenge Habermas's emphasis on the rationality of the public sphere. Reading these texts in conjunction with each other also raises anew the vexed question of the relation between language and the material world in the context of "sociability." Paine, Jefferson, and others were convinced that it was sociability, or social contact, that would hold a republic together in the absence of monarchy and its attendant hierarchies of authority and dependency. But in what domain(s) exactly does the public constitute itself and live its sociability, its civic life? In discursive space? In what we might call associational space? What exactly is the relation between print culture and the face-to-face culture of the street?
The celebrations Waldstreicher describes take place in a discursive space that might be termed "partisan/nationalist political culture." This means that while his parades are real enough, their participants frequently seem to be performing in the theater of ideology, a space somewhat difficult to bring into sharp focus, where the messages being conveyed are clear and compelling but the smells and sounds of the street are muffled. Oddly, this perception is heightened by reading this text in conjunction with Civic Wars. Crucial to Waldstreicher's interpretation is the conception of the celebrations themselves and the printed discourse that surrounded them as together constituting a national popular political culture. Treating street celebrations and the text about them analytically as making meaning in the same way, or as constitutive of culture in the same way, has a curious effect: the physical events Waldstreicher describes seem to take place in the same spatial dimension as that occupied by language itself. In other words, the equation of print culture and celebration seems to lift parades and other events out of their physical environment and project them into discursive space, a place where practices, people, language, ideas, and ideology all occupy the same dimension and reflect the same material, or immaterial, properties. This dissipates the powerful effects of events as constituting a politics of presence.
For Ryan, the politics of presence is the central issue, and she sees the public identity of individuals as emerging in face-to-face encounters that take place in physical spaces whose specificity is important to what happens there. Associational space and print culture constitute overlapping, but not completely merged, domains. Here the public itself is the collective actor and physical space the medium in which political culture jells, while print culture operates in a discursive space that intersects with and shapes, but does not subsume and is not identical with, associational space. In Civic Wars, the commotion in the streets seems vivid until the third, postbellum section, when Ryan shows how reformist interests come to rely on an [End Page 165] activist press instead of associational politics to achieve their ends, and the streets fade--precisely her point.
Along with the significance of physical space itself, the specificity of locale as context for Ryan's examination of the public sphere, in contrast to Waldstreicher's more broadly conceived survey of festive culture across the early republic, may be responsible for the relative materiality of Civic Wars, but it also raises other questions. Ryan follows Toqueville in defining democracy as composed of associated peoples, locating it in "relatively dense human settlements" (8-9). Her American public is thus spatially as well as socially constituted, living its civic life in the dense heterogeneity of cities. But how does the civic life of the countryside factor into the public sphere? Since the majority of Americans lived outside cities until almost the turn of the twentieth century, it seems relevant to consider the backcountry valences of national political culture. Waldstreicher examines festive culture across the full range of early national landscapes, making his public political culture perhaps more representative, although in general the distinctions he finds are subsumed within discussions of party differences.
Ryan's focus on selected urban contexts, however, allows specifically local interests, issues and identities to emerge more clearly in her study. All three of her urban sites have non-English origins, flavoring their civic cultures with political references, especially with respect to race, outside British-American experience. Because she looks at three cities over fifty-five years, she can cultivate a sustained relationship with their local politics and participants, spectators, and venues, and also with their print records. And because her interest is so broadly conceived--the public exercise of citizenship--she can look beyond national celebrations at public participation in all sorts of other ethnic and local cultural celebrations as civic expression. Not surprisingly, then, Ryan finds local political issues and identity formation to be salient in most public gatherings and partisan conflicts, in the context of national celebrations as well as other forms of civic participation.
These two texts show us a public sphere that was indeed heterogeneous; was it, then, a unitary public sphere at all? Nancy Fraser has suggested that there were many different publics imagining structures linked to religion, region, race, class, and gender instead of, or in tandem with, the nation. 3 The black nationalism described by Waldstreicher and the very localized struggles over municipal policy and control chronicled by Ryan would seem to confirm Fraser's conception of such a diversity of both publics and projects in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century public sphere.
What, then, binds "the people" together into a "public"? The citizens celebrating and demonstrating in both these texts seem most convincingly to share a conception of civic identity as the exercise of political and social agency per se, often, but not inevitably, in the interests of nation-building. While Waldstreicher demonstrates [End Page 166] that local political practices are the discursive tools with which citizens can imagine their nation, Ryan finds such practices, and the public spaces they occupied, to be the essential materials with which the public can imagine itself.
These two books expand our understanding of the nature and scope of the sphere of informal politics in which ordinary people shaped and exercised citizenship from the Revolution to the Gilded Age. They also offer fresh insights into the changing significance of race and ethnicity, gender, class, and religion in American civic life. Finally, they encourage us to raise new questions about the context in which civic identity emerges, the practices by which it is realized, and the ends to which it may be deployed.
Joanne Pope Melish received her Ph.D. in American civilization from Brown University and is an associate professor of history at the University of Kentucky. Her book Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780-1860 was published in 1998 by Cornell University Press. She has been awarded an NEH fellowship for 2000-2001 to work on a study of the shifting racial representation of the Narragansett Indians through two hundred years of struggle over land and sovereignty.
Notes
1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger, with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1989).
2. Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
3. Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere," in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
