New York in 1819: Defining a Local Public in the "Croaker" Poems of Joseph Rodman Drake and Fitz-Greene Halleck

Introduction

On March 11, 1819, amid the turbulence of the young nation's first great market crash, the New York Evening Post published a poem titled "To Ennui," a subtly ironic meditation on a current mood in the city, a mood that today sounds like a kind of modern alienation, but at the time was diagnosed as "hypochondria." ¹ The author signed the poem "Croaker," and it immediately generated a sensational buzz that in the next few months, as more "Croaker" poems appeared, resonated well beyond the boundaries of New York society. The Croaker poems were reprinted in newspapers around the country, and though in most cases they dealt specifically with the current political and social climate of New York City, they nevertheless had an enormous appeal for readers, perhaps because the city was rapidly becoming the commercial and cultural center of the new nation. What is more, through their satire, the Croaker poems helped define New York itself. They gave voice to what Michael Warner calls a "local public," a "social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse." ² The poems engaged the city on a level that converted an inchoate sentiment, "ennui," into a well-defined literary voice that expressed the complexities of an emerging metropolis and clearly had an impact on the national imagination.

Despite the popularity of the poems and the fame that they later brought to Joseph Rodman Drake and Fitz-Greene Halleck, the two poets who collaborated on them, the Croakers are mostly forgotten today. They simply do not lend themselves to broad historical surveys, nor do they hold up well for anthologies or collections. Nevertheless, the poems reveal a great deal about how early national literature was interwoven in US culture; moreover, by generating a distinct local public of readers and respondents, the Croaker poems served as an alternative to popular myths that located national identity on the western frontier. Biographies of Drake and Halleck are limited in their assessments of the Croakers, in part because neither poet ever openly acknowledged authorship, and Drake died less than a year after the poems appeared. Furthermore, the Croakers' publication in newspapers associated them with local journalistic ephemera, rather than the literary nationalism for which the era is more commonly remembered. Finally, the poems appeared serially over the span of several months, and although pirated collections were produced almost immediately, an authoritative edition did not appear until 1860. ³ By that time the poems had lost their referential power as local satire, and, ironically, the book form suggested a kind of "simultaneity" and coherence that the poems never projected in their original newspaper format. By 1860, the chief value of the poems was nostalgic; they were a relic from a former era in New York's history. As the Preface notes: "To New Yorkers, the CROAKERS will always have a special interest for their illustrations of the notable acts of notable men of the last generation in the city and state, and it may not be too much to say that what is in this way of real interest to New York, may not be altogether unworthy of attention in an historical point of view throughout the country." ⁴

Contrary to the 1860 Preface, the real power of the Croaker poems lies in their immediacy rather than their quaint nostalgia. 1819 was a year of radical changes in the US nation, and New York certainly was not immune to those changes. Just a few years before, following the War of 1812 and Andrew Jackson's unexpected triumph at the Battle of New Orleans, the country was elated. Party factionalism disappeared, commercial trade and manufactures exploded, western lands opened for unrestricted expansion, and Jackson emerged as a new hero of the common democratic nation. But post-war optimism also led to uncontrolled speculation and credit lending. In early 1819, the economy collapsed; cotton prices plummeted; mortgages defaulted; banks failed; credit disappeared. New York, having solidified its place as the metropolitan center for the new market economy and the country...