Emblems of American Community in the Revolutionary Era: A Study in Rhetorical Iconology by Lester C. Olson (review)

232 Canadian Review of American Studies gender. This book illuminates an important body of poetry and the ideological world in which it arose, a world which is a precursor of our own. Bert Almon Universityof Alberta •••• +. Lester C. Olson. Emblems of American Community in the Revolutionary Era:A Study in Rhetoricallconology. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. The first purpose of the author of this book was to identify and categorize nearly 400 items of iconography: pictorial images representing English America from the beginning of the French and Indian War, 1753, to the Peace of Paris that ended the Revolution in 1783. Lester Olson, a communications professor at the University of Pittsburgh, confesses to at least ten years of hard labour in thirty archives on both sides of the Atlantic. Systematic, painstaking research is followed by an equally methodical manner of presentation. Three chapters are devoted to major images: "The Colonies are a Snake," "The Colonies are an Indian," and ··Toe Colonies are a Child." Each of the three is divided by identical headings: "The Image in America,'' "The Image in Britain," and "Conclusion." Olson places the spillovers,·'experimental images" such as the limbs of Britannia, barnyard animals, a zebra, a buffalo, and various neoclassical goddesses in the fourth and final chapter of a volume containing fifty-six illustrations of what he found. So far so good. If Olson had done no more we are greatly in his debt for a fonnidable job that has long needed doing. As for the analysis, Olson explains in his preface (xv) that various historical and cultural studies have examined the messages directed to literate Americans that are contained in pamphlets, broadsides, newspapers , and the like. Singling out Bernard Bailyn's now classic volume, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), the author complains that the thoughts and beliefs of illiterate and semiliterate Americans have been ignored. Pictorial images that influence these people through the medium of "rhetorical iconology" have proved to his satisfaction that equality in status with the English was as fundamental a concern of all Americans before the Revolution as was the apprehension of a conspiracy that Bailyn uncovered. Thus, Olson concludes that his volume has "extended and revised scholarship on ideology by studying the pictorial messages of the Revolutionary era" (xv). BookRernrws 233 "Extended" is an acceptable tern1, but the revision of commonly accepted iJeological origins of the Revolution may be questioned. Was ··status anxiety," to borrowa term from the late Richard Hofstadter, a driving force toward a consensus thatwould result in revolution? Olson thinks so. To prove his case, the author places heavyemphasis upon the changing pictorial images of themselves that the colonists used as independence approached. Between 1763 and 1776, the three major symbols of America, in prints and elsewhere, evolved. Benjamin Franklin's harmless, segmentedsnake , accompanied bythe message "join or die," became a fierce American rattler,even a uroboros; a nonthreatening Indian maiden changed sex, reappearing asan aggressivewarrior, an innocent child attained adulthood and demanded respect fromthe Motherland. The evolving emblems, says Olson, constitute evidence for a newsense of identity, a body politic, an emerging American community. How many of these emblems did average Americans see, and how accurately dtd they reflect their thought? The jacket '"blurb" affim1s that Olson has studied ''beliefs and attitudes of the illiterate and semiliterate colonists, who relied strongly oniconographic imagery for their sense of political identity," but the author wisely avoidsmaking so bold a claim. He does hint, however, that the underlying beliefs of a large segment of society that left no literary legacy may be discerned in the em- , blemshe has uncovered. He admits that some of the images were designed to speak to the learned and the affluent, and that most of the prints were produced in London, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Did the symbols circulate widely, as Olson claims (xiv), and were the political cartoons distributed among all ranks, 3.ppearingin '"pubs, shop windows and coffeehouses'''? Unfortunately, we can not know.Many of the fifty-sixillustrations, with some notable exceptions, would mean littleto someone who could not read. Political cartoons, abundantly illustrated in this volume, are a case in point. Who would know that the...