The Decline of American Gentility (review)

48CIVIL WAR HISTORY is highly questionable. But, as has been noted by George Tindall and others, perhaps the myth is the central theme of Southern history, and possibly the answer to the historian's quest for the Southern identity lies not in attacking the myths but in understanding them. Jack B. Scroggs North Texas State University The Decline of American Gentility. By Stow Persons. (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1973. Pp. xii, 336. $11.95.) To put Stow Persons' subtle but diffuse argument briefly, a new "mass society" of mobile, democratic, but antisocial and leaderless individuals developed in the half-century after the American Revolution, although the process was not complete until after the Civil War and not fully perceived until the twentieth century. The gentry who thought themselves the legitimate heirs of what Persons calls the "powerful and self-assured ruling class" of colonial days gradually dwindled to a coterie of the merely genteel, identifiable by their college education and other "high cultural activity." They were superficially emulated by the social-economic elite of new-rich entrepreneurs who were displacing them from power; mass society affected to disdain them; and almost their only successors today are academic intellectuals, notoriously alienated from both the elite and the mass that they theorize about. Such a thesis needs a good deal of economic, social, and ideological data from the period 1776-1825, when no doubt the "major social transformation " did occur. Persons mainly relies, however, on post-1825 expressions of gentry opinion, most of it self-critical, mostly from New England, and, as he observes, "not always coherent." He does sketch in a few such institutions as gentlemen's clubs and families and the Liberal Republican party of 1872, but as much as a third of the book consists of extended redactions of the writings of fewer than a dozen unusually articulate gentlemen or their confidants. It is sometimes hard to distinguish Persons' analysis from what Tocqueville, Godkin, Howells, Charles W. Eliot, Henry Adams, or William Graham Sumner variously thought about society, and unfortunately the biases of a George W. Curtis or Charles Eliot Norton were part of the problem. Like such other leading students of nineteenth-century ideas as Henry Nash Smith and Leo Marx, Persons touches somewhat blindly on certain vestiges of the Anglo-American republican ideology of the Revolutionary era with which Isaac Kramnick, Bernard Bailyn, Gordon S. Wood, and others have only very recently made us better acquainted . One of the book's dominant themes, the recurrent nostalgia for a golden age of social harmony and "democracy"—defined in terms of homogeneity, stability, and "kindly" relations between people of different classes—has particularly to do with a much more specific nexus BOOK REVIEWS49 of eighteenth-century circumstances and ideas than the generalized "liberty and natural rights" that the nineteenth century remembered. Colonial society had not been literally as harmonious as it appeared in retrospect, but those who qualified for a part in the provincial polity —especially the yeomen and gentry who together figured as the virtuous , independent citizenry upon which the political ideology of the English "Country" party and the American Revolution was basedhad constituted a more coherently structured society than that of the next century. As the emphasis of the doctrine of the new nation rapidly shifted toward economic liberty and social equality, it not only eroded the hierarchical values of the old society but ultimately made it impossible to check the structural disintegration of the oncoming industrial society, since the successful businessman was generally admired as an exceptionally virtuous citizen of the most exemplary independence. In a short concluding passage on liberalism Persons observes that the entrepreneur embodied the "economic side" and the gentleman the "ethical aspect" of the once common ideology. But he does not pursue that insight much farther than the gentry did, nor examine why they were the only Americans greatly troubled by the divergence. Mass society, which likewise troubled conservative gentlemen from James Fenimore Cooper to Irving Babbitt, had its roots in the same colonial society of independent citizen-freeholders, large and small, and in the Old Whig ideology that they had adopted for their Revolution . While Persons notes that...