Title: Uncivil Speech: Invective and the Rhetorics of Democracy in the Early Republic
Abstract: Abstract Robert Owen's "Declaration of Mental Independence," declaimed on the Fourth of July, 1826, was one of the most ill-received speeches in the early Republic. The attendant controversy provides an opportunity to theorize invective's role in democratic culture. Invective was useful in the early Republic, and continues to be useful today, because it is both constitutive of national identity and a curative rhetoric for managing cultural anxiety. However, there are limits to what invective can achieve, and invective's place in democracy is consequently ambivalent. Rather than curing democratic anxiety, invective tends to perpetuate it, disrupting democracy's emphasis on controlled conflict and pushing it ever closer to violence. Keywords: InvectiveDemocratic CultureEpideicticRobert OwenCultural Anxiety Acknowledgements He would like to thank Eric Fuchs for his research assistance, and Greg Goodale and Chuck Morris, as well as the anonymous reviewers and editor John Lucaites, for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of the essay. Notes 1. Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 3. 2. 1]Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers 1815–1860 (1978; New York: Hill and Wang, 1997), 65. 3. Robert Owen, "Oration, Containing a Declaration of Mental Independence, Delivered in the Public Hall, at New-Harmony, Ind., by Robert Owen, at the Celebration of the Fourth of July, 1826," New Harmony Gazette, July 12, 1826. 4. Albert Post, Popular Freethought in America, 1825–1850 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 179. 5. Reprinted in "Robert Owen's Community," Portsmouth Journal of Literature and Politics (Portsmouth, NH), July 14, 1827. 6. Here, I refer to Franklin, "To the Editors," Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, DC), September 20, 1826; Candidus, "Mr. Owen and New-Harmony," New York Telescope, September 30, 1826; and Daily National Intelligencer, August 12, 1826. 7. Andrew Burstein, America's Jubilee (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 6; for a sweeping history of this period, see Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 8. Philip S. Foner, ed., We, the Other People: Alternative Declarations of Independence by Labor Groups, Farmers, Woman's Rights Advocates, Socialists, and Blacks, 1829–1975 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976). 9. See Roderick Phillips, Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 403–78, for divorce laws in the United States during the 1820s; for background on how divorce was perceived in the United States in the early Republic, see Lynne Carol Halem, Divorce Reform: Changing Legal and Social Perspectives (New York: Free Press, 1980), 9–26. 10. National Gazette and Literary Register (Philadelphia), August 4, 1826; Eastern Argus (Portland, ME), August 11, 1826; Richmond Inquirer (Richmond, VA), August 11, 1826; Pittsfield Sun (Pittsfield, MA), August 17, 1826; New-Hampshire Sentinel (Keene, NH), August 18, 1826; Farmers' Cabinet (Amherst, MA), August 17, 1826; Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia), August 19, 1826; Watch-Tower (Cooperstown, NY), August 21, 1826; American Mercury (Hartford, CT), August 22, 1826; Vermont Gazette (Bennington, VT), August 22, 1826. 11. Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 147. On the newspaper politics of the early Republic, see Jeffrey L. Pasley, "The Tyranny of Printers": Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001); Eric Burns, Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2006). 12. On June 8, 1732, the American Weekly Mercury of Philadelphia rejected a submission on the grounds that it was "too full of personal Invectives to claim with any decency a Place in our News-Paper." Thus began a long history in the American press of censoring nastiness as the first generations of Americans went after invective with the same fury with which they deployed it. On February 29, 1748, the editor of the New-York Gazette claimed that because "[t]he Press is look'd on as the grand Bulwark of Liberty, Light, Truth, and Religion … [i]t has indeed been much against my Will to print any Thing that favour'd of Forgery, Invective or Partyism; but being too dependent, can't always avoid it." Refusing to "patronize invectives," the editor of the New-York Journal, and State Gazette similarly turned back a submission on September 23, 1784. Attempting to delineate the boundaries of civilized conversation and set forth a standard for acceptable public argumentation, these editors invoked doctrines associated with the eighteenth-century "public sphere" as described by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. These papers positioned the press as a vehicle for "rational-critical" debate between equals outside of the immediate influence of government and not a platform for emotional appeals, character assassination, and abusive language. On the public sphere, see Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (1962; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); on America's newspapers in the early Republic, see Mel Laracey, "The Presidential Newspaper as an Engine of Early American Political Development: The Case of Thomas Jefferson and the Election of 1800," Rhetoric and Public Affairs 11 (2008): 7–46. 13. When American papers were not rejecting articles for their employment of invective, they were complaining about the politics of blaming in other periodicals. On November 13, 1797, the Time Piece of New York City attacked invective with a little jab of its own, asking, "When a printer is notorious for calumny, invective and abuse, may it not properly be said that his types have been filled with something more dirty than the contents of an hogstye?" The Daily National Journal of Washington, DC, complained on August 10, 1826, that a rival paper had "degenerated" its former "dignity and temperance, into violence and invective." This same paper derided the "system of personal invective and political proscription which the leaders and Editors of the Opposition party have so undeviatingly pursued" on December 8, 1827, noting that such rhetorical politics have "excited a general feeling of disgust, not only among those who differ from them in opinion, but even in that circle of their own friends in which reason and patriotism are yet allowed to remain." Invective was here positioned as the antithesis of reason and patriotism; no properly educated American, the Daily National Journal implied, would indulge in the base rhetorical politics of blame. 14. In 1826, America's newspapers stood on the precipice of a sensational revolution: the invention of the penny press and the daily reporting of everyday events. However, this invention of the modern newspaper—and the rise of an emphasis on objectivity—was still a few years off. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 12–60. 15. The role that the press played in the development of nationalism is emphasized in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London: Verso, 1991), 37–46. 16. James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 79. 17. Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004), 149–85. 18. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser (1690; New York: Dover Publications, 1959), 2: 432. 19. In The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault described the eighteenth-century transformation of medicine through professionalization, nosology, and the birth of the clinic, setting "the sick" against the healthy. In Madness and Civilization, Foucault described how the "enlightened" constructed insanity in a manner that set "the insane" against the civilized. See Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (1963; New York: Vintage, 1994); Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (1961; New York: Vintage Books, 1988). 20. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 226–29. 21. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). On the Second Great Awakening, see Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989). 22. Russell L. Hanson, The Democratic Imagination in America: Conversations with Our Past (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 92–154. On the campaigns, see Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 293–311, 493–507. 23. Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: W. Morrow, 1990), 62–64. 24. Celeste Michelle Condit, "The Functions of Epideictic: The Boston Massacre Orations as Exemplar," Communication Quarterly 33 (1985): 291. 25. Aristotle, The Rhetoric of Aristotle, trans. Lane Cooper (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1932), 1358b; Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Dublin: Whitestone, Colles, etc., 1783), 2: 224; Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation (1959; South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 51. 26. John Quincy Adams, Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, Delivered to the Classes of Senior and Junior Sophisters in Harvard University (Cambridge: Hilliard and Metcalf, 1810), 1: 238. 27. The key work, here, is Anderson's Imagined Communities—but this point is also made and extended by other scholars. See, for example, Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983); Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983); E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (1988; London: Verso, 1991); Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (1990; London: Routledge, 2000); Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994); Christopher Looby, Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Tom Nairn, Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited (London: Verso, 1997); and David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 28. Maurice Charland, "Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois," Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987): 138. 29. See Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 14–15, 39. 30. According to historian Merle Curti: The typical oration began with a recital of American history in the colonial era and traced the hand of God at every point, emphasized the love of liberty of the early Americans, described the events leading up to the Revolution with considerable animus against the British, glorified the heroism of the struggle for independence, expressed reverence for the Revolutionary leaders, urged the importance of attacking existing problems in their spirit, took pride in the amazing material and social progress of the country, and expressed loyalty to the nation and faith in its future. Merle Curti, The Roots of American Loyalty (1946; New York: Russell and Russell, 1967), 140. For discussions of the rhetorical strategies common to early American Fourth of July Addresses, see Cedric Larson, "Patriotism in Carmine: 162 Years of July 4th Oratory," Quarterly Journal of Speech 26 (1940): 12–25. 31. On the rhetoric of mission, see Ronald F. Reid, "New England Rhetoric and the French War, 1754–1760: A Case Study in the Rhetoric of War," Communication Monographs 43 (1976): 281–82; for historical explorations of America's guiding sense of mission, see Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (1956; Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984); and Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993). 32. Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York: Vintage, 2000), 225. 33. Daniel Webster, A Discourse in Commemoration of the Lives and Services of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Delivered in Faneuil Hall, Boston, August 2, 1826 (Boston, MA: Cummings, Hilliard and Co., 1826), 10. 34. Webster, Discourse in Commemoration, 7. 35. Webster, Discourse in Commemoration, 62. 36. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776–1787 (1969; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 46–90. 37. Consensus is a primary tension in the republican style: see Robert Hariman, Political Style: The Artistry of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 114–15. 38. "First Inaugural Address," in Thomas Jefferson, Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson, Library of America Series (New York: Literary Classics of the U.S., 1984), 493. The strategy of appealing to timeless, unobjectionable principles is what Stephen Howard Browne calls "the Jeffersonian style": [I]n appealing to that which all would agree, the speaker appealed to that which was now beyond debate and dissent, to the "creed of our political faith." Jefferson sought accordingly to speak to a citizenry for whom these verities were no longer at issue, no longer subject to dispute. His was an argument that presumed argument no longer necessary. This Jeffersonian style was just one manifestation of the republican style in the United States—a style that characterized the politics of the period that historians label the Era of Good Feelings. Stephen Howard Browne, Jefferson's Call for Nationhood: The First Inaugural Address (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003), 90, 110. 39. Caleb Cushing, A Eulogy on John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Pronounced in Newburyport, July 15, 1826, at the Request of the Municipal Authorities of the Town (Cambridge: Hilliard and Metcalf, 1826), 46–47. Similarly, William Alexander Duer advised Americans to take the following lesson from the founders' lives: Should the institutions of our country be assailed by intestine violence, or their existence threatened by local jealousies and geographical distinctions, let us revert to the national principles and catholic feelings of the two great chieftains of the North and South. William Alexander Duer, An Eulogy on John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson; Pronounced by Request of the Common Council of Albany, at the Public Commemoration of their Deaths, Held in that City, on Monday the 31st of July, 1826 (Albany: Office of the National Observer, 1826), 19. 40. Benjamin R. Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (1984; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 94. 41. 1]See Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2000), 211–47; Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007); and Terry Bouton, Taming Democracy: "The People," the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 42. On American attitudes toward the French Revolution, see Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 303–73. 43. John Adams to John Taylor, April 15, 1814, in The Political Writings of John Adams, ed. George W. Carey (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2000), 406. 44. See James Arnt Aune, "Tales of the Text: Originalism, Theism, and the History of the U.S. Constitution," Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 (1998): 267; Sandra M. Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 237. On fears of rhetorical abuse and stupid people in the early Republic more generally, see Joseph M. Bessette, The Mild Voice of Reason: Deliberative Democracy and American National Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 45. James Madison, "Federalist No. 58," in The Federalist, intro. and notes by Robert A. Ferguson (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2006), 326. 46. On the continued democratic fears of the early Republic, see Kimberly K. Smith, The Dominion of Voice: Riot, Reason, and Romance in Antebellum Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), 118–61; Altschuler and Blumin, Rude Republic. 47. Hanson, Democratic Imagination in America, 122. 48. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (1835; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 244–46. 49. Kenneth Cmiel, "'A Broad Fluid Language of Democracy': Discovering the American Idiom," Journal of American History 79 (1992): 913–36; and on the value placed on communication, see James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (New York: Routledge, 1989), 1–9. 50. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 262. 51. I take the idea of "cultural fictions" from Stephen John Hartnett, Democratic Dissent and the Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002). 52. This anxiety is prevalent in the fiction of the period—see David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 53. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1941), 202. 54. Robert L. Ivie, Democracy and America's War on Terror (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 10. 55. On the Cunningham and Pickering controversies, as well as Clay's penchant for dueling, see Burstein, America's Jubilee, 255–57, 181–204. Dueling was, of course, part of the larger culture of honor. See Freeman, Affairs of Honor, 159–98. 56. Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 9. 57. This is, we should note, just the latest moment in the politics of negative self-definition—see David Green, The Language of Politics in America: Shaping Political Consciousness from McKinley to Reagan (1987; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 249–70. 58. On the rhetorical strategies of talk radio, see Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella, Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). For helpful discussions of contemporary Republican rhetorical strategies, see Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004); Geoffrey Nunberg, Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show (2006; New York: PublicAffairs, 2007). 59. 1]Sarah Palin, "Republican Vice Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech" (Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN, September 3, 2008), http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/convention2008/sarahpalin2008rnc.htm/. 60. Sarah Palin quoted in Michael Cooper, "Palin, On Offensive, Attacks Obama's Ties to '60s Radical," New York Times, October 4, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/us/politics/05palin.html?scp=2&sq=palling%20around%20with%20terrorists&st=cse/. 61. Editorial, "Politics of Attack," New York Times, October 7, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/opinion/08wed1.html?_r=1&oref=slogin/. 62. Robin Hayes, quoted in Lyndsey Layton, "Palin Apologizes for 'Real America' Comments," Washington Post, October 22, 2008, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/21/AR2008102102449.html/. 63. Lawrence W. Rosenfeld, "The Practical Celebration of Epideictic," in Rhetoric in Transition: Studies in the Nature and Uses of Rhetoric, ed. Eugene E. White (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980), 131–55. 64. The idea of "structural evil" is developed in Robert Hariman, "Speaking of Evil," Rhetoric and Public Affairs 6 (2003): 515. 65. Condit, "Functions of Epideictic," 289. Additional informationNotes on contributorsJeremy EngelsJeremy Engels is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State University
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-08-01
Language: en
Type: article
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