A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution by Carolyn Eastman (review)

BOOK REVIEW 84 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY The cover of Carolyn Eastman’s awardwinning book, A Nation of Speechifiers, depicts a male figure apparently making a speech before a crowd. However, closer examination reveals that he is surrounded by retail goods, and as the back flap confirms, he is not a “speechifier” but an auctioneer. This stagecraft bodes ill for the reader who throughout this proverbial “Curate’s Egg” must distinguish between conclusions supported by evidence and less substantial extrapolations. A Nation of Speechifiers argues that “disenfranchised ” and “nonelite Americans . . . learned to conceive of themselves as members of a public and eventually to identify as national citizens” through the production and consumption of “writing and oratory” (4). According to Eastman, the study examines “a profusion of writing and oratory by nonelites and their active uses of the media,” and seeks to “emphasize that many nonelites were fully engaged in producing ideas about politics, manners, gender relations and a host of other topics” (5). In this way, Eastman suggests , nonelite and disenfranchised Americans wrote, read, spoke, and heard themselves into the “we” in “we the people” (1). However, her source base is insufficient to the task. Though she never defines “elites” and “nonelites,” and conflates “nonelites” with “disenfranchised,” the vast majority of Eastman’s sources were generated by Americans in the upper echelons of early republic society. Some of her historical actors were privileged men and women disenfranchised by age, transitional stage of life, and gender—attributes that did not diminish their economic status. Other sources were created by enfranchised editors and printers characterized by Eastman as nonelites but hardly excluded from the public sphere. The disenfranchised nonelites who do appear lack agency and are largely potential consumers of elite print and oratory. Eastman divides her argument into two parts, each a case study. The three chapters of part one explore elocutionary education for young men and women and the ways in which reprinted Indian oratory constructed an American identity. The three chapters of part Carolyn Eastman. A Nation of Speechifiers : Making an American Public after the Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 304 pp. ISBN: 9780226180199 (cloth), $37.50. A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution Carolyn Eastman BOOK REVIEW WINTER 2010 85 two examine “moments of contestation over the definition of the public” (116), looking at young men and journeymen’s clubs and debating societies, and the press reaction to Frances Wright’s 1829 speaking tour. These case studies represent a great deal of innovative research and analysis. Eastman’s reading of young men’s elocutionary education identifies important shifts in national identity and notions of citizenship, as the emphasis of school texts changed from encouraging civic participation to the creation of a passive “audience.” In her discussion of young women’s “speechifying,” Eastman convincingly captures the shifting soundscape of elite feminist oratory from “expansive ideas about women as public figures and as citizens” (72) to domesticity’s “increasingly narrow and private conceptions of female eloquence” (78). Regrettably, Eastman stretches her conclusions drawn from elite sources to include so-called nonelites. For example, working exclusively with oratorical and print productions created by and for elite young women, Eastman claims that these “models of womanhood . . . were available” to “nonelite and rural” (70) women who “would likely have read” (71) the narratives or “would likely have been aware” of the ideas (77). In her discussion of “the trope of Indian eloquence,” Eastman recasts this “founding fiction” as part of a “triangulation” of racial oppositions that through a complex process of confession and redemption evoked and defined a new “Americanness” (85-86). However, Eastman saddles this probing analysis to her thesis by identifying the editors and printers who published these tracts as “nonelites ” printing for “lay readers” (84). Similar problems mar otherwise strong analyses in the remaining chapters. Her discussion of the Calliopeian Society contributes to recent work by Seth Cotlar by detailing how a young men’s club emasculated their own political narratives in reaction to the French Revolution’s Terror. However, Eastman casts the Calliopeians as “nonelites” based on their fathers’ “vocations” listed in the city directory, ignoring the broad occupational categories utilized by the directories...