Political Culture

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Political Culture

Political culture, a concept popular among scholars, takes an anthropological approach to political life. In other words, rather than concentrate on systematic political theories, the study of political culture is attuned to cultural symbols and "unstated premises." Studies of political culture often boil down to identifying the implicit rules of political behavior in a given context—the boundaries of legitimate, effective political action. Political culture has been particularly useful for studying the early Republic because only at the end of this period did anything much resembling the familiar U.S. party system take shape.

conspiracy theories

The books often said to have inaugurated the study of political culture among historians of early America were Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967) and its companion volume, The Origins of American Politics. Locating the sources of American political thought in a then little-read collection of tracts from the fringes of British politics, Bailyn exposed the founding fathers as conspiracy theorists whose campaign against the British imperial regime was full of hysterical rhetoric and outlandish beliefs, most of them revolving around a secret British design to impose an unconstitutional tyranny on the American colonies—or, as worried American slaveholders tended to put it, to reduce America to slavery. Living far from the centers of a British authority that was rarely exercised before the 1750s, Americans came to regard power itself as a fearsome, evil, hungry thing with an "endlessly propulsive tendency to expand itself beyond legitimate boundaries."

Colonial Americans still considered themselves Britons, but their reading and often limited experience of the mother country led many of them to believe that the free British constitution had been corrupted by what historians now know were the beginnings of the modern parliamentary system: the consolidation of power in the hands of a "prime" minister who controlled a majority in the House of Commons. Many came to see America as the last bastion of British constitutional liberty and their own local governments as reflecting the "true" British constitution. When the British tried to tighten up

the governance of the empire a bit, seriously enforcing their languishing customs laws and asking their now-wealthy colonies to contribute some tax revenue for the first time, Americans saw something far more sinister at work. Building on what by 1776 was a long tradition of over-the-top charges against the British, Thomas Jefferson made the Declaration of Independence into a long conspiracy theory about the king himself, charging him with introducing slavery and causing America's racial problems with both blacks and Indians.

The success of conspiracy theories in recruiting popular support for the Revolution, and the lurid fears of political power that underlay the theories, made such scare-mongering a permanent part of American political culture. Nearly every major social and political development of the period would generate such theories, which were often central to the political messages and methodologies of major movements in this period and all the early national political parties from the Federalists and Democratic Republicans to the anti-Masons, Whigs, and Know-Nothings. The major conspiracy theory "villains" in the early Republic included the French revolutionaries, the Masons, both the Jeffersonian Republicans and the opposing Federalists, the Irish, the Catholic Church, Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, the Bank of the United States, the abolitionists, southern slaveholders, and more. It often seemed that an all-out plot to subvert liberty was the only thing that could motivate large numbers of Americans to political action.

Historians have differed over whether conspiratorial thinking should be considered a psychological problem, a genuine political philosophy, or something else. What can be said with certainty is that, from the very beginning of American political history, Americans have been notably moralistic and Manichean in their approach to political debate, tending to see politics as a war between the forces of light and darkness, order and chaos, good and evil.

republican virtue, political character, and antipartyism

Directly related to the outsized fears of conspiracy and corruption was a somewhat paradoxical set of political ideals that many historians have come to label "classical republicanism." These notions had their origins in a certain idealized view of classical antiquity that was encouraged by many of the favorite political texts. Classical republican thought was communitarian in orientation, holding that representative government and republican liberty were safe only when both leaders and citizens virtuously abstained from self-interested behavior and acted for the common good. In terms of political culture, however, republican virtue demanded individualism, more commonly rendered in this period as "independence": a virtuous statesman could never submit his own political conscience to interest, ambition, or external pressure if his actions were to have legitimacy or influence.

Virtuous citizens were also necessary in a republic, and citizens showed their virtue by always putting self-interest and passion aside and choosing virtuous "characters" to lead them. During and after the Revolution, there was much concern among the Patriot leaders about the possible corruption of the citizenry. The anti-British protestors of the 1760s organized boycotts of British luxury goods out of a desire to pressure British merchants, but from that time on there were recurrent campaigns against luxurious living in general, as Patriot agitators like Samuel Adams sought a moral and political regeneration they believed went hand in hand. The first Continental Congress proclaimed a moral code for the new nation that banned theaters, horse racing, and cock-fighting, and local controversies over luxury items and frivolous entertainment broke out periodically thereafter. Dr. Benjamin Rush proposed a system of public education that would "render the mass of the people more homogeneous, and thereby fit them more easily for uniform and peaceable government."

Obviously these conformist political values were not especially friendly to the later American ideal of participatory democracy. The ideal of republican virtue affected political behavior, especially among the members of the Virginia dynasty. A virtuous republican could never actively seek power: candidates did not "run" for office, they were asked by others to "stand." Though lifelong politicians almost to a man, the founders went to great lengths to convey their utter disinterest in political power or financial gain to any who would listen.

The quest for republican virtue made early American political culture rather schizophrenic concerning such basic elements of democratic politics as parties and campaigning. Though many parts of America had experienced vigorous political competition along clear partisan lines since colonial times, most early American leaders did not regard this as a normal or acceptable state of affairs. Thomas Jefferson expressed the feelings of many early American leaders about the idea of joining a political party: "Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all." Nevertheless, Jefferson soon became the figurehead of the country's first political party. And antipartyism remained a common sentiment even as parties became the norm. Americans congratulated themselves on the seeming collapse of national party divisions during the "Era of Good Feeling" in the 1810s, then promptly rejoined them with renewed fervor in the decades that followed while always remaining open to reformers' attacks on the corruption and divisiveness of parties. The contradictions are symbolized by the fact that one of the most organizationally aggressive and innovative national parties, the anti-Masons, had antipartyism as a major part of its message.

Antipartisanship shaped actual political behavior as well as attitudes. Candidates for high office could not be seen as active public participants in their own campaigns during this period. (Even the nakedly ambitious Aaron Burr, who campaigned aggressively for the Democratic Republicans in 1800, had to stand for office in a district far away from the scene of his campaign activities in New York City.) Presidential candidates made no national speaking tours until the middle of the nineteenth century, and even then the practice was widely criticized. High officeholders had to rely on friends and surrogates, including newspaper editors, if they wanted to seek broad public support for their actions or win a higher office.

While newspapers, congressional debaters, and other partisans carried out public battles over ideology and policy, American statesmen themselves operated in a highly pressurized environment in which political battles seemed to be more about personal character and "honor." In the absence of any agreed-upon standards or mechanisms for dealing with questions of personal integrity, like ethics laws, aspersions on a statesman's character, and many other political quarrels, were settled according to prevailing social mores. Aaron Burr's killing of Alexander Hamilton in a duel was only one of many political duels and near-duels in the early Republic, though it was somewhat unusual in ending with an actual death. The political duel was largely limited to a subculture of gentlemen politicians who had once been military officers. If someone beneath that station insulted a gentleman or tried to issue a challenge, he was more likely to get "cowhided" in the street than to be dueled.

Violence, however, remained an important part of American political culture throughout this period. Teams of thugs at polling places were an integral part of the "get out the vote" (or keep down the vote) efforts in many cities. Rioting mobs were also an occasionally critical political factor, and at several key points, a tool. The Sons of Liberty encouraged mobs to intimidate local British officials during the Stamp Act crisis, a campaign of terror that included the dismantling of Massachusetts Chief Justice Thomas Hutchinson's mansion. During the 1830s prominent politicians in the North and South helped organize mobs that shut down abolitionist meetings and destroyed abolitionist newspapers and pamphlets. Abolitionist editor Elijah P. Lovejoy was murdered during one of these riots in 1837.

celebratory politics

Although classical republican virtue was a deep strain in American political culture, it was hardly universal. The "disinterestedness" it required could be practiced only by the wealthiest, best-placed politicians in any case, and it had little to say about the more active and democratic forms that early on became a basic part of American political life. Governments that were in the end based on public opinion and popular voting inevitably spawned practices that sought to marshal those forces one way or another. It was only at the end of this period that the familiar institutions of the American party system really took shape.

In the early Republic, therefore, popular political culture was necessarily creative, adaptive, and variable. Because the early political parties were organizationally almost nonexistent, the work of building support for them was conducted by scattered groups of local activists, with little centralized direction or funding. Necessarily reliant on local resources and personnel, these typically self-appointed activists simply made partisan use of whatever existing traditions, institutions, and practices they could, including many that were long-standing features of Anglo-American culture. Among these were holiday celebrations, parades, taverns, toasts, songs, town meetings, petitions, militia company training days, and various products of local printing presses, including broadsides, handbills, almanacs, poems, pamphlets, and, especially, the small-circulation local and regional newspapers that sprang up everywhere after the Revolution.

Some of the most interesting political artifacts of this type are the plethora of songs published on the back pages of partisan newspapers and sometimes as sheet music or in songbooks, many of which were presumably sung in taverns or at partisan gatherings. The musical output included not only "Jefferson and Liberty" and "The People's Friend," but also such unlikely numbers as "Adams and Liberty," "Huzzah Madison Huzzah," and even "Monroe Is the Man." Especially popular among local partisans were innumerable sets of new lyrics to popular tunes such as "Yankee Doodle," "Hail Columbia," and the "Anacreonic Song," better known today as the United States national anthem.

Each region of the country had its own particular local practices that were drawn into partisan politics and became part of a distinctive regional political culture. In the South, the famous court-day barbecues were transformed from rituals of noblesse oblige into competitive partisan debates, initiating the Southern stump-speaking tradition. In the cities and larger towns, fraternal orders, voluntary associations, and militia companies were politicized, with the so-called Democratic Republican societies and the Tammany Society being two of the best-known examples on the Republican side. These groups formed the beginnings of the highly disciplined neighborhood-based political organizations that would in time become known as urban political "machines."

In New England, where churches and the clergy had always played an unusually prominent role in public life, many aspects of religious culture were adapted to partisan use. The Congregational establishment was heavily and intemperately Federalist, and its members did not hesitate to put partisan political instructions into their sermons. At the same time, the traditions of the jeremiad and the publication of sermons gave rise not only to a large number of published political sermons and books by the clergy, but also the practice of secular politicians giving and publishing formal orations that often took on a distinctly homiletic tone.

Although always locally controlled and thus highly varied in tone and content, certain practices were nearly universal in this political culture. Among the most important were the holiday celebrations that dotted the civic calendar, each of which brought many of the elements mentioned above together into a single political event. For Republicans, the most important day was the Jefferson-centric Fourth of July, which they had championed as a more republican and democratic alternative to Washington's birthday or government-mandated thanksgiving and fast days. The highlights of such banquets were the toasts, drunk at the end and accompanied by cheers or cannon blasts if possible. Afterward, an account of the celebration would be published in a sympathetic local newspaper, including a verbatim transcript of the toasts. No mere drinking game, political banquet toasts served, and were intended to serve, as informal platforms for the community, party, or faction that held the gathering.

One form of political statement that was unique to Jefferson's Democratic Republicans and befit a party claiming to champion ordinary farmers and mechanics was the creation and presentation of an outsized foodstuff. As the city's Democratic Republicans prepared for their first March 4th celebration (the anniversary of Jefferson's election to the presidency) in 1801, "a monstrous large ox" was festooned with flowers and ribbons and the logo "Jefferson and Burr" between its horns and then processed through the streets, "followed," as one outraged Federalist lady remembered it, "by such a despicable rabble as you never saw." The Baptists of Cheshire, Massachusetts, established the mature version of the fad with the half-ton mammoth cheese that Elder John Leland had delivered to Thomas Jefferson on New Year's 1802, bearing the inscription: "THE GREATEST CHEESE IN AMERICA, FOR THE GREATEST MAN IN AMERICA." Be they edible or tuneful, all of these homely, locally produced tributes were part of a significant, democratizing shift in the culture of American political leadership that occurred after 1800. The imagery and iconography surrounding Washington depicted a stern patriarch bestride a warhorse, lifted to heaven by choirs of angels, or enrobed and enthroned in the clouds like Zeus. The images of Jefferson that circulated, however, were simple portraits, and the language used to praise him often strikingly intimate. As one song put it in 1801: "Invited, by the friendly voice, / Of freemen, in a prudent choice; / Kind JEFFERSON, with love replete, / Accepts, th' important helm of state."

This was not "merely" a verbal or linguistic change; it reflected and authorized concrete changes in the way that politics was conducted at the local, retail level. Even some Federalists learned to approach voters in a different way after Jefferson's accession. Following the Republicans' lead, it was now imperative for all political activists—whether in how they wrote, spoke, or personally behaved when they encountered citizens in taverns, public meetings, polling places, or homes—to approach the people as friends and equals, not as children or subjects to be guided.

bibliography

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——. Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Enlarged ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992.

Baker, Jean H. Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983; New York: Fordham University Press, 1998.

Beeman, Richard, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter II, eds. Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

Formisano, Ronald P. "The Concept of Political Culture." Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31 (winter 2001): 493–526.

——. The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s-1840s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Freeman, Joanne B. Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001.

Gendzel, Glen. "Political Culture: Genealogy of a Concept." Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28 (1997): 225–250.

Goldberg, Robert Alan. Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.

Horn, James, Jan Ellen Lewis, and Peter S. Onuf, eds. The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002.

Ketcham, Ralph. Presidents Above Party: The First American Presidency, 1789–1829. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

Pasley, Jeffrey L. "Conspiracy Theory and American Exceptionalism from the Revolution to Roswell." Paper read at Bernard Bailyn festschrift, Harvard University, May 21, 2000. Available at http://conspiracy.pasleybrothers.com/CT_and_American_Exceptionalism_ web_version.htm

——. "The Tyranny of Printers": Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001.

Pasley, Jeffrey L., Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, eds. Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Rosenbaum, Walter A. Political Culture. New York: Praeger, 1975.

Waldstreicher, David. In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Withington, Ann Fairfax. Toward a More Perfect Union: Virtue and the Formation of American Republics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Jeffrey L. Pasley

Encyclopedia of the New American Nation