Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts (review)

In 1817, well before Alexis de Tocqueville set foot on American shores, the Rev. Samuel Worcester, a leading figure in the missionary movement, exulted that "the present is an age of benevolent associations; of combined counsels and labours, for the improvement and happiness of mankind." Two decades later, Tocqueville famously discerned the same thing, putting voluntary associations at the heart of his enduring account of Democracy in America. In the "immense assemblage" of associations flourishing in the new republic, the visiting Frenchman detected a defining feature of democracy and a remedy for its defects. On their own in a society marked by "equality of condition," individuals were isolated and ineffective; acting together in voluntary concert, they exercised considerable power. Cooperative effort widened horizons, built social bonds, achieved practical goals, and shaped public opinion. It made for democratic citizens, reliant upon themselves and not the government and capable of resisting "the tyranny of the majority." And, as the Rev. Worcester would surely have added, it enabled Christians to do the Lord's work of advancing the millennium and redeeming the world from sin.

So deep has been the evangelicals' impress upon American culture and so compelling Tocqueville's logic that it is easy to assume voluntary associations have been vital agents of popular self-government since the beginning of the republic. Not so, argues Johann Neem in this valuable inquiry into "democracy and civil society" in the new nation. Far from embracing civic activism, "Americans were uneasy about becoming a nation of joiners and accepted it only when other options had failed" (3). Attentive to interdisciplinary conversations about civil society and the public sphere, Neem, associate professor of history at Western Washington University, brings a much needed historical perspective to a subject long clouded by nostalgia for a lost world where supposedly nobody bowled alone. In his telling, the landscape of associations that greeted Tocqueville in the early 1830s was antithetical to the social vision animating the Revolutionary generation. Its efflorescence constituted an inadvertent achievement, marking the eclipse of the founders' world view and the rise of a competitive, pluralistic society nobody had foreseen.

Creating a Nation of Joiners focuses on the experience of Massachusetts, the state leader in chartering business corporations and the nursery of moral reformers. Drawing on a rich public record of legislation, judicial decisions, organizational reports, and commentary from pulpit and press, Neem builds a powerful case against the notion that voluntary associations sprang up, as if spontaneously, in the free air of the New World and from the imperatives of democratic life. In keeping with recent work by the sociologist Theda Skocpol and historians John Brooke and Albrecht Koschnik, he stresses the dependence of civil society on the state. That was the proper blueprint for a republic, as envisioned by the leaders of the Revolution. Hostile to the concentrations of wealth and power that Old World monarchies vested in privileged bodies, republican statesmen were determined to keep corporations on a tight leash. Some states, notably Jefferson's Virginia, resisted the award of corporate charters. But not Massachusetts, whose leaders took seriously its designation as a "commonwealth" under the Constitution of 1780. Article VI of that frame of government placed tight restrictions on the grant of charters and other "particular and exclusive privileges"; such advantages were conditional on "services rendered to the public." The Federalists at the helm on Beacon Hill took the provision as warrant for enlisting the energies of private groups for the common good. Over three decades, from 1780 to 1810, the General Court incorporated a host of institutions—colleges, academies, libraries, charities, and medical and legal societies, as well as banks, turnpike companies, and other businesses—for civic ends, while denying special privileges to petitioners, such as the Society of Cincinnati and mechanics' associations, who appeared to put their well-being above the public interest. Jeffersonian...