Thomas N. Baker responds to Chapter 3—From Republican to Romantic (1800-1850) in Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History.
Sticking to Tradition
Why write a “brief history” of American ideas? A straightforward, if cheeky, answer is that someone at Oxford University Press encouraged the author to create a concise textbook to meet the presumed demand for teaching intellectual history. This helps explain why The Ideas That Made America is just 220 pages (including notes and index) and reads like a semester’s worth of lectures. The book provides today’s teachers an alternative to Charles Capper and David Hollinger’s two-volume The American Intellectual Tradition reader, which features “representative texts” with explanatory headnotes.[1] Ratner-Rosenhagen’s text is a more narrative approach, with one author guiding the way with brevity rather than two editors offering extensive commentaries on primary sources.
In fact, back in the 1990s, my own journey into intellectual history began as a teaching assistant in Charles Capper’s undergraduate course titled “American Thought, 1630-1865.” In contrast to Capper’s slow-cooked approach alongside Hollinger in The American Intellectual Tradition, however, Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas That Made America presents a fast-paced chronological overview, inviting students to “eavesdrop” on a parade of interesting historical figures whose ideas are said to have “made America.” The key question is whether today’s readers will find this different approach to intellectual history engaging or relevant.
Writing a concise history of American ideas for today’s students is challenging due to the sheer number of concepts to consider. Choosing which ideas to highlight and which ones to ignore can spark debates about just what constitutes an “American” narrative, exactly. These questions have long been central to the field and are increasingly important in our diverse society. While The Ideas That Made America aims to update the story of American ideas for a new generation, however, its structure and cast of characters remain remarkably traditional. Why is this so? And what does it suggest about the situation with US intellectual history today? To address these questions, we can take a look at how Ratner-Rosenhagen handles the chapter titled “From Republican to Romantic (1800-1850).”
The Ghost of American Studies
The conceptual and chronological framework of “From Republican to Romantic (1800-1850)” can be traced back through key terms to the original version of Cold War-era American Studies, before its turn toward ethnic studies in the 1990s and 2000s. In this earlier approach, America’s story was framed as a conversation between influential thinkers. A rhetoric of unity and a broad sense of American identity inspired books with titles such as The Mind of America. Hence, the once-prevailing perspective: from close readings of a few intellectuals, we could discern what all Americans were thinking.[2]
Without announcing itself as such, The Ideas That Made America carries this approach into the twenty-first century. Ratner-Rosenhagen presents many of the usual suspects found in this grand tradition: J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and even Noah Webster—who appears as the maker of the American lexicon, but without discussion of his stint as a partisan newspaper editor or his angling for patronage among Federalist gentlemen to support his studies “unraveling the mysteries of language.”[3] This is telling: Ratner-Rosenhagen wants to survey ideas, but often leaves behind their more sordid, material origins and social locations.
Another way to get a sense for lineage found in The Ideas That Made America is to recall how Van Wyck Brooks (who, starting in the 1920s, sought to establish a usable “native” American cultural tradition and particularly celebrated Walt Whitman’s legacy) featured a similar cast of worthies in his American literary histories. From this beginning, American literary studies codified a normative literary canon, which was then elaborated upon in countless histories of American literature—and subsequently debated urgently in tens of thousands of graduate student lounges and coffee houses. Regrettably, as literary history in this tradition, The Ideas That Made America comes across as breezy and incomplete. To be fair, it is a survey intended for new audiences, but even in this case, the book’s choices often seem antiquated and full of missed opportunities, even within the older framework for ideas and their significance in society.
An instance that highlights the shortcomings of the book is its literal marginalization of Herman Melville, in which a page of the novelist’s marginalia on Emerson’s Essays is reproduced to illustrate his dissatisfaction with Waldo’s mystical declarations. But what could an alternative approach to the chapter on moving from the “Republican to Romantic” be? How might it not ignore figures such as Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, but rather widen inclusion even within a continued focus on “classic” individuals of US intellectual history?
Isn’t It Romantic?
The term “Romantic,” as used in The Ideas That Made America, is grounded—and arguably makes the most sense—in relation to the “crossing,” as Ratner-Rosenhagen likes to call it, of German “romantic” intellectual and philosophical currents to the United States via William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. These inspired Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalists. Yet while a vast scholarly literature traces this story, the necessary brevity of “From Republican to Romantic” (and the book as a whole) means we get only a cursory sketch of the transatlantic sources and borrowings of Americans interested in Continental and British thought in this era. Consequently, despite the advantage of having read the preceding chapter on the transatlantic enlightenment, undergraduate readers will be ill-equipped to evaluate the degree of originality or derivation within the intellectual culture of antebellum (or “Romantic”) United States. There is a sense that American intellectuals borrowed from Europe, but less of a clear explanation of what was original in their adaptations of the new ideas.
Similarly, students may struggle to identify concepts that gained recognition overseas and how their origins within the United States led to acceptance in other, specific times and places. Ratner-Rosenhagen strives to place “crossings” at the center of her narrative, yet without a better sense of what happened at the end points, a chasm opens up within the guiding metaphor. Even in a brief survey, with all its challenges, more weight given to these matters might help, but only if readers are shown why, where, and with whom the term “romanticism” is applicable.
The problem is that sometimes that turn of phrase seems to be just a catch-all. The chapter “From Republican to Romantic” covers the era’s African American thought by genuflecting to representative figures such as Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano (who’s arguably more British than American and who predates the chapter’s timeframe), and novelist Harriet Jacobs, but the book’s coverage of Black Americans is so spotty and muddle-headed as to be embarrassing (later in the volume, for instance, we get a smattering of W.E.B. Dubois, but no Booker T. Washington or Marcus Garvey).
And at times, The Ideas That Made America is positively mystifying. I, for one, am baffled by the book’s pronouncement about Douglass and his antebellum compatriots, that “Each of them, in their own way, expressed the very Romantic sensibilities and republican assumptions articulated by white authors.” Is one a “romantic” merely by virtue of occupying the national scene in the so-called “American romantic age?” Or has “romanticism” become a term of art that masks as much about American culture and thought as it seeks to explain?[4]
What’s Republicanism Got to Do with It?
When it comes to the chapter’s other keyword, namely “republicanism,” we perhaps ought to blame a lingering hangover from the 1970s, when the “republican synthesis” held sway in US historiography. Initially formulated to explain the significance of eighteenth-century Commonwealth True Whig pamphleteers in relation to the American revolutionaries, this approach to intellectual and political history made an argument that underscored the prominence of paradigmatic discourses. Scholars of Anglo-American republicanism observed that people tend to think and act in conformity with inherited sets of ideas. According to this line of thought, the American Patriots rebelled against British authority because they were influenced by a libertarian discourse that instilled a fear of encroachments on their liberties by tyrannical forces.
From this historiographical approach came a thorny question that bedeviled a generation of American scholars: Was the fledgling nation’s essence fundamentally “republican” or “liberal”?[5] After a time, this semantic debate grew tiresome. Today, most contemporary political historians and scholars of politics have moved beyond this conceptual debate, and younger scholars instead have become engrossed in examining the role of race, indicting antebellum American politics as being irreparably tainted by racism. So too, the history of capitalism has roared to the front of historical inquiry into the time period, with many scholars investigating how it adversely affected eighteenth and nineteenth-century US political, cultural, and social dynamics. The new focus on racism and capitalism has meant that the prevailing understanding of the new nation no longer revolves around being simply “republican” or “liberal,” but rather as being ideologically entangled in a repugnant form of “settler colonialism.”[6]
Amid this ferment, Ratner-Rosenhagen clings implicitly to the traces of the older historiographical tradition through her use of republican terminology. However, because The Ideas That Made America falls short in adequately exploring currents of American political ideology and practice, its explanatory framework is unconvincing. One notable example of this problem is the coverage of Thomas Paine, the Enlightenment revolutionary, whose later embrace of deism is deemed peripheral to American intellectual trends. This leaves readers pondering the reasons behind the apparent rejection of Paine’s ideas, despite the enduring inspiration of works such as his “Rights of Man.”
Part of the difficulty stems from the almost complete absence of the French Revolution and its repercussions within the pages of The Ideas That Made America. Although the book’s index refers to page thirty-three on the subject, the relevant passage merely mentions the guillotine without delving into the larger crisis’s titanic political and cultural significance. The Ideas That Made America also has trouble addressing a crucial question of American intellectual history due to this deficiency: what was at stake, in terms of ideas as well as political and social power, during the transition from “republican” to “romantic”? And if, invoking the spirit of Alexis de Tocqueville, we substitute “democracy” for the term “romantic,” even more difficulties arise. When it comes to politics, were the “Ideas That Made America”—whether “republican,” “romantic,” or “democratic”—emancipatory or regressive? Furthermore, who championed these ideas? Were they Federalists of the old school like Noah Webster, slaveholding Unitarian libertarians like Thomas Jefferson, or expansionist Democrats like George Bancroft?
Morse Code
Naturally, a book such as The Ideas That Made America raises fundamental questions about intellectual history and how it should be approached. What exactly is intellectual history, and how might we go about “doing” it? One approach that scholars have used to engage these questions is to establish the institutional framework within which American thinkers interacted and to hazard an analysis about the sociology of ideas. This approach involves considering various aspects of social relationships, such as the groups of people who formed intellectual circles, the ideas they advocated, the individuals they trained (and marginalized), and the interests they served.[7]
The outcome of such an investigation would necessitate a more institutionally focused historical analysis than the one Ratner-Rosenhagen presents. For instance, students could be invited to examine the membership and interests of the American Philosophical Society and similar manifestations of Enlightenment thought. This approach would reveal some of the political and social factors mentioned earlier, as intellectuals in the Federalist orbit often criticized the “roving naturalists” associated with a group such as the American Philosophical Society.[8] It would also shed light on American contributions to the fields of natural history and the development of conceptions of ethnology, which eventually gave rise to the discipline of anthropology, with its fascination with Indigenous societies and culture. Today’s student might greatly benefit—indeed, many already think this way—from an introduction to ideas that locates them more firmly within institutional settings rather than in free-floating discourse.
An alternative perspective could encourage exploration of the era’s significant intellectual conflicts. Although a framework built on a competition of ideas proves effective in The Ideas That Made America’s Darwin chapter, its possibilities are neglected in the “From Republican to Romantic” chapter. Here we get a helpful genealogy of Emersonian liberal Christian/self-culture, but an insufficient explanation of conservative/evangelical currents of thought, which served as a foil to the era’s secular/liberal intellectual trends.
Let’s take one example of a more institutional approach that still foregrounds individual thinkers within the era’s intellectual conflicts: Rev. Jedidiah Morse (father of the more famous Samuel Morse, inventor of the single-wire telegraph). Although Morse doesn’t chime the “Greatest Hits: Classic Thinkers of US Intellectual History” bell, here is an opportunity to trace the influence of German ideas regarding the cultural contagion of the French Revolution, as transmitted through the University of Edinburgh’s professor John Robison (author of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s article on Natural Philosophy) and his American correspondents. Fun fact. During the 1790s, Robison suffered severe physical ailments, for which he relied on heavy use of laudanum. While he was vehemently denouncing French and German atheists, accusing them of infiltrating freemasonry and instigating the French Revolution, he often found himself drugged into insensibility and sidelined from his lecturing duties (a nice preview of a subtext of drug use and intellectual history found among figures ranging from William James to 1960s counterculturalists).
Despite its eccentricities, the so-called Illuminati conspiracy, propagated by Robison and adopted by Morse, earnestly embraced the power of ideas, and, for this reason, its explanation of historical trends gained considerable traction among orthodox Congregationalist, Presbyterian, and Dutch Reformed divines in the United States. Enter once again the specter of the French Revolution, given such short shrift in the “crossings” of The Ideas That Made America. These religious leaders perceived Gallic “Jacobinism” and its associated conceptual innovations (including Antoine Lavoisier’s “godless” breakthroughs in chemistry) as a tangible and immediate threat to American thinkers and institutions.[9] In response, the socio-religious habits of mind they inculcated and ideas they promoted played a significant role in justifying a form of New England separatism, which reached its zenith during the Hartford Convention and resonated throughout the nineteenth century in the form of self-satisfied Yankee exceptionalism.
Morse, who belonged to the same generation as Noah Webster and shared his Federalist sentiments, was also a pioneer in popularizing and commercializing American geographical knowledge. Furthermore, he was a tireless institution builder. His beloved Andover Theological Seminary (founded 1807) became a stronghold of Calvinist Congregational theology, revivalist energy, and Federalist orthodoxy, standing in contrast to the dominance of liberal Christians at Unitarian Harvard College. Morse’s efforts also laid the groundwork, both intellectually and institutionally, for the Benevolent Empire of Protestant reformism that exerted a significant influence on American antebellum society.[10] Examining Morse’s thinking within its institutional context helps us better grasp the reaction to the French Revolution’s most radical implications as well as an emerging dominant strain of Protestant reform that would shape the fight against slavery, responses to an emerging industrial capitalism order, and other historical factors that arose in the nineteenth-century United States. Students first encountering US intellectual history might be able to pull themselves into its stories by way of these institutional handholds.
The fact that “From Republican to Romantic” also overlooks a raft of recent scholarship exploring the rich diversity of American popular religiosity highlights gaps in training and focus that often exist between intellectual historians and historians of religion.[11] In relation to a time marked by the flourishing of diverse religious practices, the chapter completely ignores the perspectives of American Catholic thinkers (about whom I admit my own ignorance). It also neglects the concerns of Universalists, Baptists, Mormons, and Campbellite “Christians,” to mention a few of America’s many religious denominations. Although the following chapter on late-nineteenth-century America briefly examines the Methodists through the lens of the Chautauqua movement, it provides insufficient background information for a generation of students who possess limited knowledge about the nation’s religious history. An entrée into these matters is one of my favorite novels, Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), which deftly explores the interplay and conflicts of Darwinism, evangelical Methodism, and Catholicism in a fictionalized upstate New York village.
I mention these examples fully recognizing the danger of straying down this path: a history of American ideas can easily get sidetracked into the worst sort of “church history,” which tends to amplify sectarian quarrels and presumes that modern students are interested in plunging into antique theology. Nonetheless, nineteenth-century American Calvinist thinkers undeniably did as much to shape the era’s ideas and intellectual commitments, especially in the South, as did Emerson and the Transcendentalists. Homegrown faiths such as Mormonism also shaped Americanism by carrying its values and ideas abroad through missionizing zeal. Religion—and particularly religious diversity across popular culture—remains a crucial domain of US intellectual history that appears sporadically but still needs more integration into some kind of synthesis for introductory purposes.
All the Culture That’s Fit (or Unfit) To Print
Admittedly, Ratner-Rosenhagen faced a daunting task in writing this slender book: how to engage and resonate with the Twitter generation while delving into the history of ideas, a challenge not unfamiliar to intellectual historians generally, even before the era of 140-letter character limits. In the 1980s, this subdiscipline, once considered the pinnacle of the field, had fallen out of favor. Seeking to regain relevance, practitioners began intertwining their work with cultural history, resulting in courses and books advertised as “cultural and intellectual history.” These volumes often referred to Clifford Geertz and his Balinese cockfights (notice that the connection lives on in the very focus of The Carryall on both subfields).[12]
Although the “From Republican to Romantic” chapter occasionally attempts to construct an argument rooted in cultural origins, it consistently falls short in demonstrating how these ideas permeated society through cultural artifacts and forms of expression. Here is a kind of retreat from the cultural turn in US intellectual history. Notably, it overlooks the significant influence of public lectures, which Emerson and others used to great effect, as well as the role played by Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune in popularizing European socialist and communitarian concepts during the 1840s and 1850s—a phenomenon that extended beyond a select few Transcendentalists and free lovers.[13]
Moreover, The Ideas That Made America inadequately addresses the emergence of popular print culture, driven by technological advancements such as the steam press and stereotype plates. It also fails to recognize the expanding cultural marketplace that propelled New York City to become the epicenter of American popular culture. Here, conservative populists like James Gordon Bennett, Sr. of the New York Herald, who gained substantial influence by crusading against the “Satanic Socialists” associated with Horace Greeley’s circle, helped shape the nation’s cultural landscape and its prevailing tastes.
By disregarding these drivers of culture as well as the analytical tools developed by historians such as David Hall in studying the book trades, the chapter misses an opportunity to explore the influence exerted by cities like New York, Boston, or Philadelphia on the cultural economy and marketplace of ideas, including their impact on small-town culture.[14] Once again, a more institutional approach to intellectual history might better convey the popular cultural dimensions of ideas and thinking in the United States during the early antebellum era, helpfully complicating the narrow story of cultural transition presented in the chapter and helping students locate ideas as crucial to broader historical activities during the time period.
For an Institutional, Global US Intellectual History
At this point, the concise and traditional approach of The Ideas That Made America seems like a drawback. The lack of a clear framework for understanding how ideas operated during the antebellum era may be partially due to the book’s empirical method. Some will argue that inquiries into the workings of ideas must lie beyond the purview of abbreviated historical surveys, but I contend that equipping students with tools to explore fundamental questions in intellectual history is crucial. If they can recognize how ideas shape moral values and how traditions influence the concepts we can conceive, students will be able to grasp more profoundly how the past connects to the present.
Moreover, in our contemporary era of globalization, we should also consider whether a national historical perspective is the most effective approach. As Ratner-Rosenhagen notes, ideas are inherently transnational and have crossed borders for centuries. So why do we continue to teach survey students history within a primarily national framework?
Although educators can certainly broach these questions with their students, the chapter “From Republican to Romantic” offers limited support for that purpose. By adopting a more institutional approach, we could explore a new kind of intellectual history, one precisely steering in the directions that Ratner-Rosenhagen herself proposes. Tracking the shift from a Republican vision to a Romantic one through an institutional lens with a global awareness would help students understand the lingering ideological forces still at play in contemporary partisan politics, so-called culture wars, and other twenty-first-century issues. Rather than just featuring prominent figures like J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Noah Webster, an institutional intellectual history positioned within an increasingly interconnected world would serve students better at the introductory level. Ratner-Rosenhagen starts to point the field in this direction; now we need to chart the course and take it.
About the Author
Thomas N. Baker is professor of history and associate director of the Lougheed Center for Applied Learning at the State University of New York, Potsdam College. He regularly teaches courses on American cultural history and occasionally publishes on topics in the field.
Notes
[1] Charles Capper and David Hollinger, The American Intellectual Tradition, Volumes 1 and 2 (1989; 7th edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
[2] Rush Welter, The Mind of America, 1820-1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975).
[3] For attempts to raise a subscription among New England men to support his studies, see Noah Webster to Oliver Wolcott Jr., New Haven, 30 January 1810, Oliver Wolcott Jr. Papers, Box 27, Connecticut Historical Society.
[4] A recent commentary helpfully reminds us that, as early as 1924, noted intellectual historian Arthur O. Lovejoy proposed abandoning the term: “the word ‘romantic’ has come to mean so many things that, by itself, it means nothing.” Quoted in Virginia Jackson, “American Romanticism, Again,” Studies in Romanticism 55, issue 3 (2016): 319.
[5] See Daniel Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79, 1 (June 1992): 11-38.
[6] Michael D. Hattem, “Where Have you Gone Gordon Wood?” and comments, blog post for The Junto, 21 January 2013, https://earlyamericanists.com/2013/01/21/where-have-you-gone-gordon-wood/; and the Twitter-fueled brouhaha over a recent plenary panel on Andrew Jackson at the annual SHEAR meeting, as reported by Jennifer Schuessler, “Clash of the Historians: Paper on Andrew Jackson and Trump Causes Turmoil,” New York Times, 25 July 2020.
[7] Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge Massachusetts, 1860-1930 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977) is a model for this approach.
[8] George D. Oberle III, “Science, Skepticism, and Societies: The Politics of Knowledge Creation and the Early Republic,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, Volume 111, 4, Networks: The Creation and Circulation of Knowledge from Franklin to Facebook (2022), 83, 85-100.
[9] Mike Jay, “Darkness Over All: John Robison and the Birth of the Illuminati Conspiracy,” The Public Domain Review, 2 April 2014, https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/darkness-over-all-john-robison-and-the-birth-of-the-illuminati-conspiracy/.
[10] See Richard J. Moss, The Life of Jedidiah Morse: A Station of Peculiar Exposure (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995); and Yale University’s Online Exhibition, “The History and Special Collections of Andover Newton Theological School,” https://onlineexhibits.library.yale.edu/s/history-of-andover-newton/page/andover.
[11] Nathan O. Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991) is a foundational text.
[12] Geertz’s “Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight” was republished in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973) and quickly became required reading for aspiring cultural historians.
[13] Adam-Max Tuchinsky, Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune: Civil War-era Socialism and the Crisis of Free Labor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).
[14] A History of the Book in America, Volume 1—The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, eds. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall; Volume 2—An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840, eds. Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley; Volume 3—The Industrial Book, 1840-1880, eds. Scott E. Casper, Jeffrey D. Groves, Stephen W. Nissenbaum, and Michael Winship; Volume 4—Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880-1940, eds. Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway; Volume 5, The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, eds. David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Michael Schudson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).