The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, in association with the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Louvre and the Galeries Nationales du Grand-Palais in Paris, presented a remarkable exhibition during 2006–2007 called “Public and Private Portraits 1770–1830.” It assembled sixty years of human portraits in Europe and the United States during a period when portraiture abandoned the convention that portrait painting concerned only rulers and the eminent in society, serving only political and monumental purposes. The period 1770 to 1830 was one of great cultural as well as political significance, that of post-Enlightenment and revolutionary consciousness, with the emergence of the United States signifying the arrival of a society consciously set on replacing the established European order.
This claim was asserted in the exhibition’s hanging, which deliberately confronted “old” Europe with new America. On one side of the gallery (in Paris, where I saw the exhibition) formal paintings were hung of the European monarchs, Louis XVI, George III, Ferdinand VII of Spain, and Pope Pius VII, all displayed with the accoutrements and conventional symbols of power, status, and remoteness: the pope on his throne, wearing the Ring of Peter; Ferdinand in royal costume with his orders, royal baton in his hand; George III similarly attired (the last British monarch whose titles included monarch of Great Britain and Ireland, Elector of Hanover, and the yet to be renounced British royal family’s claim to the throne of France), wearing an ermine robe, crown and a scepter beside him.
In sober contrast was a Gilbert Stuart standing portrait (formerly hung in the New York Public Library) of George Washington in a plain black suit with the sheathed sword of a former general. His hand touches a document on the table next to him, and a small republican shield ornaments the chair. Next to it was a Houdon bust, in Roman style, of Benjamin Franklin in plain coat and cravat, and a painting (commissioned by John Hancock from John Singleton Copley) of Samuel Adams, plainly dressed in a gentleman’s suit, as he pleaded the case of the colonists to the British governor following the Boston Massacre of March 1770.
The radical discontinuity, the caesura in the procession of Western civilization, is clearly indicated. The society of order, rank, and hierarchical religion that had lasted from before the Roman period to the fantastical seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European refinement of the trappings of monarchical power, empire, and inherited privilege had been broken. A new society of democratic order, merit, humane values, and earned distinction and service had made its appearance and, as the visitor to the exhibition was meant to understand, would triumph. The exhibition of that triumph in the year 2007 in the three symbolic cities of contemporary Western modernity—Paris, London, and New York—inevitably provoked reflection on the significance today of what then was understood as the succession of American simplicity and virtue to Europe’s display and pretension.
The exhibition provided social and political confirmation of another, equally significant and fateful mutation in the Western historical consciousness which had been presented in an earlier exhibition on the occasion of the American bicentennial mounted by the Cleveland Museum of Art, called “The European Vision of America,” that was also shown internationally to much attention.1 It displayed the revelation of the American continent and its indigenous civilizations to the Europeans in the centuries of discovery as an incitement to the radical reexamination and intellectual reconstruction of Europe itself in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment . It dealt with a succession of European fantasies assuming an American Eden populated by innocent and exotic native peoples, suggesting the original world of mankind. This was a fantasy inspiring speculation that America’s discovery might make possible a human recreation of lost innocence, in a land of unimaginably beautiful and implausible flora and fauna, Another Place. It suggested, as well, the possibility of the redemption and relaunch of human history.
Here, too, the exhibition presented contemporary European portraits of Washington and Franklin (the latter by Fragonard, “Le docteur Franklin crowned by Liberty” [1778]), as well as plates, candelabras, medals, and tapestries commemorating the foundation of the United States, classically virtuous and self-governing, an example to Europe of what the future might offer.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, only a narrow North American elite was part of the Enlightenment intellectual upheaval, experiencing its influence in the same way as Western Europe. The intellectual life of the United States in the colonial and federal periods was dominated by religious influences, despite the contrary impression given by the profundity and elegance of the nation’s founders’ published debates on the institutions of the new republic and their philosophies of government .
This transatlantic cultural difference offers an explanation for the phenomenal confidence of Americans over many generations in “the American system,” and their unwillingness to contemplate basic constitutional change. It helps to explain the exceptional and detached role the United States assumed in international affairs, and chiefly those of Western Europe. The conventional interpretation of the Enlightenment is that it constituted humanity’s “coming of age.” This meant a divorce from divine help and divine hope—a profound cultural mutation with dramatic political consequences, which geographically isolated North America did not share. America from the start was “God’s own country,” assumed to be a finished foundation, part of God’s fixed plan.
The United States was in the revolutionary and federal periods the undoubted scene of the great political achievement of the Enlightenment, the creation of the American republic, but the intellectual forces of Scottish and English philosophy were as important as those of France, even though today Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson are in France considered among the philosophes of the age. The Enlightenment, however, failed to produce a stable political result in Europe; instead, violent overthrow of the dynastic and hereditary system followed, and an incompletely achieved counter-revolution after Napoleon’s defeat. The United States in the same period had successfully established the constitutional representative republic that exists today.
With America’s escape from social revolution, and general rejection of Enlightenment paganism, the Enlightenment assumed different forms and produced different results on the two sides of the Atlantic. In doing so it confirmed the righteous view Americans have since held of themselves as free from continental European tendencies toward “extremist” politics, and instead as exemplars (and saviors) of democracy—humanity’s Next Step.
The landowners, farmers, professional men, and militia officers of British North America, under the conservative influences of British constitutionalism and common law, demonstrated that (with the military assistance of Bourbon France!) the old order could be replaced with a new one of representative and republican government, a society of democratic assumptions, manners, and individual responsibility. (To say this requires ignoring—as the founding fathers uneasily did—the continued institution of slavery in the new United States.) It was to learn about this achievement and describe it to his countrymen that Alexis de Tocqueville later wrote his great book Democracy in America.
The Enlightenment attack on established religion and the French Revolution had deeply negative effects on the eighteenth-century American mind. The French Revolution “burst forth like a volcano,” the American Presbyterian churchman Robert Baird wrote, “and threatened to sweep the United States into its fiery stream.” From 1790 to 1815, according to Perry Miller, Harvard’s eminent intellectual historian of the period, “an immense … literature [was written] of denunciation of the French Revolution, with proportionately nearly nothing on its behalf.” Miller says that the great wave of evangelical Protestant religious revivalism that occurred in America in the decades preceding and following the Revolution had little to do with continental European events. It was largely a local American religious undertaking, to rescue the United States “from a spiritual deterioration hardly to be equaled in the darkest chapters of Chr
istian history,” produced by the sins and iniquities of America (those of France were ignored), these being, as militant Methodists identified them, “our growing idolatry, which is covetousness and the prevailing love of the world,” manifested in “profanation of the Sabbath, disobedience of parents, and increase of drunkenness.” The American version of “the magnificent era of revivals inaugurated in or around 1800 [in England] … was in great part an internal convulsion, and it progressively endeavored to conceive of itself as exclusively internal.”2
The religious historian Mark A. Noll has consistently argued against the idea that there was from the beginning “a Christian America,” with specifically Protestant Christian influences at work to make American institutions what they have become today. This has been a popular notion among the Protestant religious right in recent years, the supposed Christian inspiration for American democracy having become an important part of conservative (and Republican Party) arguments concerning the origins of the United States and its form of government, part of the electoral argument that “liberals” have repudiated America’s cultural and religious legacy.* Noll says the origin of the United States was a notably secular event conducted (he quotes Ralph C. Wood of [Baptist] Baylor University) “by deistic Episcopalians who believed neither in original sin nor in Israel and Christ as God’s unique provisions for the world’s salvation.”3 When, at the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin moved the assembly to a prayer to God, the motion did not pass.
New England was the location of the most influential American literary and philosophical culture of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, that of “ministers and pedants,” as the late literary critic Alfred Kazin has said.4 The agrarian South remained under the cultural and literary influences of England and Scotland, where its commercial ties were greatest. The coastal and plantation “Cavalier” South was marked by the romantic royalism of the English Civil War, which had American repercussions. Illusions of the Southern elite’s class and cultural superiority (product of “the diseased imagination” of Southerners, according to Gideon Welles, who was to become Union Secretary of the Navy) were greatly exaggerated at the time of the Civil War, with mostly disastrous effect for the South, lasting well after the burning of Atlanta by General William Tecumseh Sherman in 1864 and the collapse of the Confederacy.5 The most important literary figure of the antebellum South was Edgar Allan Poe, and with him the transatlantic influence was west to east, with Poe’s eventual considerable effect upon the French Symbolists.
In New England, by the mid-1830s, the founding Calvinist Puritanism, and the denominational innovations and divisions that followed, gave way to the individualist rationalism of Unitarianism, subsequently reinterpreted for Americans by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker as a religion of natural reason and conscience, belief in innate human goodness, and universal salvation. Its literary and philosophical counterpart was Transcendentalism, affirming the inherent divinity of nature as well as man, and holding that the highest source of knowledge is individual intuition, rejecting traditional authority.
The Transcendentalists were particularly influenced by Emmanuel Kant, the German Romantics, and by William Wordsworth, Thomas Carlyle, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The movement began among a group of friends in Boston and Concord, and was to influence most major American writers of the time: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller (and Louisa May Alcott and her immortal Little Women). The Transcendentalists published the influential journal The Dial and inspired the Brook Farm cooperative social reform experiment.
Transcendentalism lives on in the American consciousness (or subconscious). It held that man finds divinity in himself, and that progress is inevitable, two enduring pillars of American national complacency. Its decisive development came when Emerson left the Unitarian ministry in 1834 and began his phenomenal career as American seer, inspirer, and enthusiastic preacher—although Kazin describes him as “blandness itself” on the lecture platform, with “ideas not original enough to make him a philosopher,” but good enough to make him the most influential essayist and lecturer of his day in America, promising that the past was dead and the future of America uniquely bright . His self-satisfied Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard in 1837, “The American Scholar,” was enormously influential and is anthologized even today.*
Emerson’s undemanding and self-reassuring religion of optimism became one of the distinguishing strains in American thought, inspiring best-selling books of religious reassurance that continue to appear, entering into incongruous civil unions with the popular psychology of self-realization and mainstream, quasi-fundamentalist evangelicalism—itself originally a poor man’s religion, which Transcendentalism certainly was not . This eventually gave birth to the late-twentieth-century phenomenon of suburban Pentecostal mega-churches that preach prosperity as evidence of virtue, and an all-embracing and uncritical God of American nationality.
It took Charles Darwin, not the Enlightenment, to shake American religious and cultural complacency and isolation. Evolution became and remains to the present day an issue in American presidential politics as well as in American public education (where school-board battles over teaching Darwinism persist). The great Middle Western populist reformer and unshakable fundamentalist believer William Jennings Bryan, who was the unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate in 1896, 1900, and 1908, and later Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state (resigning on principle when American entered the First World War), was ruined by the controversy over Darwinism.6
It seems fair to say that most American churchgoers from the eighteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century (and by and large, the religiously disposed or questing unchurched as well) have been opposed to what most Europeans considered fundamental tenets of the Enlightenment.
Serious literary and cultural relations with Europe in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took the form of American elite expatriation, as in the cases of Henry Adams (descendant of presidents, the author of a classic reflection on Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, who returned to Washington, D.C., to write an influential and disabused fictional account of American politics, Democracy), and the novelists Henry James and Edith Wharton. Their preoccupation was the American confrontation with European civilization and worldliness, a social issue as much as a cultural one. Henry James, in his 1878 novel The Europeans, has one of his Europeanized American protagonists tell his sister, after a trip to the United States to meet their Boston cousins: “What are they like … ? Like nothing you ever saw. They are sober; they are even severe. They are of a pensive cast; they take things hard. I think there is something the matter with them; they have some melancholy memory or some depressing expectation. It’s not the Epicurian temperament.”
“Christian America,” meaning Protestant America, was the ultimate outcome of the decline of a pitiless New England Calvinism by way of Transcendentalism and Emersonianism into the generally undemanding theology of the traditional Protestantism of America’s upper classes. Episcopalianism, Presbyterianism, and Congregationalism were the well-to-do accompaniment to a lower-class Protestantism of the poor whose religion came from the great evangelical revivals that began in Britain, and to the rapid spread in America of Methodist evangelism and eventual Baptist adherence. The “Holiness” current in Methodism, Pentecostal in character, took root in the United States and became a crucial element in the rise of popular Protestant fundamentalism.
This is the American form of Protestant Christianity that has since become the dominant popular religion, its pattern of devotion and action constant since the eighteenth century. The individual recognizes the inerrancy of the Bible, affirms in public his past sinfulness and faith in salvation through belief in Jesus Christ, testifies that he or she has emotionally experienced the transformation of being “born again,” and is then welcomed into the community of the saved.
The religion of the poor white South, Calvinist and ev
angelical, committed to private interpretation of the scripture and individual justification through personal encounters with the Savior (hence: “finding Jesus,” an avowal most ambitious American politicians even today find essential), was shaped by the thought of the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609), who influenced Charles and John Wesley and thus American Protestantism. He argued that “irresistible grace” was compatible with men’s achieving their own good through hard work, frugality, and consequent material success: thus the American Protestant association of riches and success with virtue, as visible signs of “election.”
This religion was faithful to the literal interpretation of the King James English translation of the Bible—particularly the Old Testament—that for many years (often through oral transmission) was the most important cultural force at work in a largely illiterate or poorly educated population. (A late-nineteenth-century Texas governor banned teaching foreign languages in Texas schools, saying that “English was good enough for Jesus.”)
Much of the Southern population was of “Scotch-Irish” origin, Calvinist predestinarian Protestants, first implanted in Northern Ireland by Britain in the seventeenth century by James I, as part of his effort to control or replace the original Catholic Irish population. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many of the Scotch-Irish emigrated to North America and had a great influence on the white culture of the American South, that of free yeoman farmers. Their individualism, intolerant religion, and, usually, their poverty were much more important in forming the lasting Southern “national character” than the Anglo-Irish romantic and aristocratic influences of the same period, cultivated by the prosperous in the plantation South, where large properties could be given over to slave-cultivated cotton production.
The Irony of Manifest Destiny Page 5