Republic of Taste: Art, Politics, and Everyday Life in Early America by Catherine E. Kelly (review)

In Republic of Taste: Art, Politics, and Everyday Life in Early America, Catherine E. Kelly traces the emergence of a distinctively republican—yet paradoxically transatlantic and Anglo-American—culture in the United States in the first few decades following independence, which she dubs "the republic of taste" (5). "Taste," Kelly argues, "accommodated social aspiration and encouraged political debate," as well as suggesting "the possibility of affinity grounded in a shared national identity" (5). She further contends that this intersection between politics, visuals, and text was a nonpartisan political aesthetic that "extended across the early national political spectrum" and served to translate "aesthetic ideals into everyday practice," rendering this "transatlantic culture of taste" American (5, 10). Kelly also explores the "connections that early national Americans drew between visual and material cultures … and literary cultures" (10). Kelly's conceptualization of the creation of an early American republican culture—her "republic of taste"—adds a unique contribution to the rich and growing body of works exploring the interlinking of material, political, and visual culture in post-Revolutionary America.

Kelly skillfully weaves her thesis of the interplay between aesthetics, materiality, and politics through chapters that span education, art, politics, museum exhibits, and political tours. Her early chapters on post-Revolutionary America in the late eighteenth and very early nineteenth centuries explore republican pedagogy through a gendered lens (chapter 1); gender-, class-, and race-inflected intersections between consumerism, artistry, and portraiture (chapters 2 and 3); and the integration of former Loyalists into post-Revolutionary society via art, horticulture, and architecture, viewed through a transatlantic case study of Loyalist William Hamilton (chapter 4). The later chapters are situated firmly in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, and analyze the meaning of museums and wax effigy exhibits (chapter 5), and the political portraiture of republican luminaries like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson (chapter 6). The book concludes with the mid-1820s tour of the Marquis de Lafayette, "The Nation's Guest in the Republic of Taste" (236), through the United States, which, Kelly contends, not only "offered proof of national becoming" but also "illuminated how much the public had changed in the intervening years" (240). These changes included the expansion of slavery, the increasing involvement of a "broader cross-section of the laboring classes" in politics, and a "Jacksonian feel" to the intersections among aesthetics and politics, "more lavish in size and scope than anyone could have imagined thirty-five years earlier" (241).

As the above cursory synopsis suggests, Kelly's sources are admirably broad in scope and nature, and bringing such disparate components of early republican culture under the focus of one analytic lens is remarkably imaginative and arguably the most original contribution of her book. She adds a fresh voice to a fertile field of scholarship that investigates early American and transnational Anglo-American culture in the early American Republic and its imbrication with market-based commerce, politics, visual and material culture, and civic performance. Such works include, for example, David Waldstreicher's now iconic In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (1997), Laura Rigal's The American Manufactory: Art, Labor, and the World of Things in the Early Republic (2001), and Trish Loughran's The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. National Building, 1770–1870 (2007), to name but a few works that have laid the scholarly edifice on which Kelly builds, as she is quick to acknowledge.

But Kelly does more than build: she innovates. Creating the category of "taste" allows her to bring together an array of concepts as well as enormously diverse bodies of evidence and sources in a highly creative way. "Taste," for Kelly, embodies eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century notions of sensibility, deportment, politics, Enlightenment natural science, and aesthetics—and all the interconnections between them. This capacious definition thus permits the author to, for example, situate pedagogy...