Racially Writing the Republic: Racists, Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity - Brossura

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0822344475 ISBN 13: 9780822344476

Casa editrice: Duke University Press, 2009

Riassunto

Racially Writing the Republic

investigates the central role of race in the construction and transformation of American national identity from the Revolutionary War era to the height of the civil rights movement. Drawing on political theory, American studies, critical race theory, and gender studies, the contributors to this collection highlight the assumptions of white (and often male) supremacy underlying the thought and actions of major U.S. political and social leaders. At the same time, they examine how nonwhite writers and activists have struggled against racism and for the full realization of America’s political ideals. The essays are arranged chronologically by subject, and, with one exception, each essay is focused on a single figure, from George Washington to James Baldwin.

The contributors analyze Thomas Jefferson’s legacy in light of his sexual relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings; the way that Samuel Gompers, the first president of the American Federation of Labor, rallied his organization against Chinese immigrant workers; and the eugenicist origins of the early-twentieth-century birth-control movement led by Margaret Sanger. They draw attention to the writing of Sarah Winnemucca, a Northern Piute and one of the first published Native American authors; the anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett; the Filipino American writer Carlos Bulosan; and the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who linked civil rights struggles in the United States to anticolonial efforts abroad. Other figures considered include Alexis de Tocqueville and his traveling companion Gustave de Beaumont, Juan Nepomuceno Cortina (who fought against Anglo American expansion in what is now Texas), Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and W. E. B. Du Bois. In the afterword, George Lipsitz reflects on U.S. racial politics since 1965.

Contributors. Bruce Baum, Cari M. Carpenter, Gary Gerstle, Duchess Harris, Catherine A. Holland, Allan Punzalan Isaac, Laura Janara, Ben Keppel, George Lipsitz, Gwendolyn Mink, Joel Olson, Dorothy Roberts, Patricia A. Schechter, John Kuo Wei Tchen, Jerry Thompson

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Bruce Baum is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity. Duchess Harris is Associate Professor of American Studies at Macalester College. She is the author of Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton (forthcoming).

Duchess Harris is Associate Professor of American Studies at Macalester College. She is the author of Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton (forthcoming).

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

RACIALLY WRITING THE REPUBLIC

Racists, Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2009 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4447-6

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................................................................................1Introduction...............................................................................................................................26George Washington: Porcelain, Tea, and Revolution JOHN KUO WEI TCHEN......................................................................44Jefferson's Legacies: Racial Intimacies and American Identity DUCHESS HARRIS AND BRUCE BAUM...............................................64Tocqueville and Beaumont, Brothers and Others LAURA JANARA................................................................................81"The Sacred Right of Self-Preservation": Juan Nepomuceno Cortina and the Struggle for Justice in Texas JERRY THOMPSON.....................96"Shoot Mr. Lincoln"? CATHERINE A. HOLLAND.................................................................................................112Sarah Winnemucca and the Rewriting of Nation CARI M. CARPENTER............................................................................128The Politics of the Possible: Ida B. Wells-Barnett's Crusade for Justice PATRICIA A. SCHECHTER............................................145Meat vs. Rice (and Pasta): Samuel Gompers and the Republic of White Labor GWENDOLYN MINK, ABRIDGED BY BRUCE BAUM..........................163Theodore Roosevelt and the Divided Character of American Nationalism GARY GERSTLE.........................................................196Margaret Sanger and the Racial Origins of the Birth Control Movement DOROTHY ROBERTS......................................................214W. E. B. Du Bois and the Race Concept JOEL OLSON..........................................................................................231Displacing Filipinos, Dislocating America: Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart ALLAN PUNZALAN ISAAC..................................247Looking through Sidney Brustein's Window: Lorraine Hansberry's New Frontier, 1959-1965 BEN KEPPEL.........................................263James Baldwin's "Discovery of What It Means to Be an American" BRUCE BAUM.................................................................281Afterword: Racially Writing the Republic and Racially Righting the Republic GEORGE LIPSITZ................................................301Bibliography...............................................................................................................................321Contributors...............................................................................................................................323

Chapter One

JOHN KUO WEI TCHEN

George Washington

Porcelain, Tea, and Revolution

On the evening of July 9, 1776, impassioned New York citizens and Continental soldiers pulled down the two-thousand-pound gilded statue of King George III on Bowling Green, breaking off its head and mutilating its nose. In the months to come, Manhattan, a half-evacuated trading port, would be the scene of the next battle of the Revolutionary War. General George Washington made plans for the city's defense.

At the same time, under Washington's personal supervision, his housekeeper, Mrs. Mary Smith, proceeded to furnish his New York home. Carefully kept accounts and receipts reveal the purchase of mahogany knife cases, a carpet, a damask tablecloth, a feather bed, pillows, a tureen, eight porcelain mugs, two dozen plates, and other miscellany. The pro-British Burling Slip merchants Frederick and Philip Rhinelander supplied numerous imported creamware dishes, sauceboats, plates, and fluted bowls, including three even more costly china bowls. And the Bayard Street retailer George Ball sold "burnt china cups & saucers" and other tea service items to the household. During this time the general and Mrs. Washington kept up "a high level of comfort in dining and furnishings," maintaining a "tolerably genteel" table. By September, miscalculations forced Washington's inexperienced troops to retreat. At great expense and trouble the general's household was packed up and reestablished at the Morris-Jumel Mansion in Haerlem Heights.

What explains General Washington's seemingly extraordinary desire for luxury in the midst of America's war for independence? It would be easy to caricature his material wants at this moment of battle. This enigmatic anecdote, however, opens up fresh insights into the founding generation's efforts to formulate a national identity. While these historical details may appear trivial to traditional interpretations of early American history, they illustrate how the Founding Fathers and mothers of the United States used tea, porcelains, and other representations of China to construct their new nation. These practices contributed to the racialization of the American republic and played a key role in the making of a hybrid Anglo-American identity. For elite white men, concepts of freedom, happiness, property, individuality, rational self-interest, and despotism were part of ongoing debates about how one tamed wild passions, harnessed them via self-cultivation, produced wealth, and became a gentleman without overindulging in luxuries and becoming "effeminate" and "corrupt."

"To Fix the Taste of Our Country Properly"

While based in West Point in 1779, Washington gave detailed instructions on which officers, staff, and surgeons should be issued what supplies. Tea was to be distributed as follows: "Fifty pounds of the best quality for future disposal: one pound of the best kind to each General Officer; half a pound of the same to each field officer and head of a staff department and a quarter of a pound pr. man of the remainder to any other officer of the army who shall apply." The general's careful deliberations on the apportioning of teas exemplified his proper role as a patriarch rewarding his officers. His insistence on having Chinese tea sets or Wedgwood Queensware reminded him and his officers, in the heat of battle, of his status and authority. Such luxury items were scarce during war, and their rarity made Washington's role in distributing tea all the more significant symbolically.

Before the war, Washington was well aware of the divide between the haves and the have-nots. In Virginia common people ate their meals from a communal family bowl, often using their hands to scoop out the food. In more settled areas the poor were more likely to eat their porridge with spoons. Wealth was measured throughout the century by the number of chairs one owned, whether one had a frame bed, or whether one lived in a dwelling of more than one room. For those aspiring to differentiate themselves from the practices of most Americans, learning the proper use of such "instruments" as knives, forks, and spoons, which signified luxury and elegance, became important. Washington worked tirelessly at uplifting himself from his humble origins to the status of landed gentry-as distinct from farmers, whom he called the "grazing multitude." His tea-drinking and porcelain-collecting habits embodied these efforts. They further embodied the contradictory crosscurrents of the emergent Anglo-American revolutionary culture. Washington strove to be both a proper British gentleman and an American revolutionary. In 1755 Washington made his first order for Chinese porcelains. Sending three hogsheads of tobacco, he prevailed upon the London "Chinaman" Richard Washington to choose a set of goods "agreable to the present taste" and "good of their kind." (Significantly, eighteenth-century British porcelain merchants, male and female, were called Chinamen and Chinawomen, and their china was sold in china shops.) Introduced by a fellow planter, Washington had to place his trust in this unknown merchant. Desperately hoping to be treated fairly, Washington emphasized their shared surname. "I should be glad to cultivate the most intimate corrispondance with you, not only for names-sake but as a friend, and shall endeavour in all things to approve myself worthy your Regard." Such was the nature of the British empire that a Virginia planter was at the mercy of a British shopkeeper.

When they couldn't get the authentic goods, Europeans and some Americans copied them "after the Chinese taste." The French term chinoiserie referred to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fashion for European-made imitations of Chinese goods. These were the creations of craftsmen who had no firsthand experience of the distant and highly romanticized "Cathay." Gold-embroidered tapestries of small people living in a willow-patterned world, elaborate gardens with "gossamer pavilions," architecture with pagoda-styled roofs, faux porcelains, fantastic latticework, fanciful stage sets, faux variations of lacquered furniture, and various other decorative notions formed the material expression of this European orientalism.

Once elected president, George and Martha Washington moved into the first presidential palace at Pearl and Cherry streets in New York. George Washington wrote the New York merchant Gouverneur Morris, who was in Paris, asking him to shop for stylish porcelains. Morris wrote back, "You will perhaps exclaim that I have not complied with your Directions as to Economy, but you will be of a different Opinion when you see the Articles. I could have sent you a Number of pretty Trifles for very little Cost, but ... your Table would have been in the Style of a petite Maitresse of this City, which most assuredly is not the Style you wish." Morris's use of the gendered and classist phrase "the Style of a petite Maitresse" convinced Washington to accept a grander role: "I think it of very great importance to fix the taste of our Country properly, and I think your Example will go so very far in that respect. It is therefore my Wish that every Thing about you should be substantially good and majestically plain; made to endure."

For a new nation in which the majority of people still lived in humble dwellings and possessed modest material belongings, Chinese commodities signified what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has termed "distinction." Upwardly striving Americans wanted not just tea sets, porcelains, and tea. As the historian Richard Bushman has illustrated, such desires also led citizens to adopt housing styles designed to show their wealth and accommodate more and more personal belongings. Multistoried houses with hallway stair entry areas and separate rooms for entertaining, dining, cooking, and living came to set a new standard for genteel living. The tasteful display of these passionately coveted things from the "Orient" and the "Indies" (and elsewhere in the non-European world) distinguished one moneyed space from the other.

Corrupting Virtues and Revolutionary Passions

While Washington coveted Chinese luxuries, other revolutionaries argued that consumption of luxuries corrupted virtue. While many New Yorkers emulated and envied the wealth and refinement of Chinese court culture, some radicals urged a boycott of all foreign luxuries. They argued, with little support, that Americans could make their tea from local flora. The love of luxuries from China and the Indies came to represent the antithesis of Anglo-American republican virtue-such things were deemed addictive and corrupting. Earnest moralists read and took to heart the observation of the English radical Catharine Macaulay in a New York edition of her address to the people of Britain in 1775, that a "long succession of abused prosperity" lured the empire into a "ruinous operation by the Riches and Luxuries of the East." The British novelist Tobias Smollet wrote, "Roman Commonwealth of old" and other civilizations were ruined because "Luxury and Profuseness" from the Orient "led the Way to Indigence and Effeminacy; which prepared the Minds of the People for Corruption; and Corruption for Subjection; as they have constantly succeeded one another, and will do so again, in the same Circumstances, in all Countries, and in all Ages." Benjamin Franklin worried about new dependencies. In the Columbia Magazine he stated, "One is astonished to think of the number of vessels and men who are daily exposed in going to bring tea from China, coffee from Arabia, and sugar and tobacco from America: all commodities which our ancestors lived very well without." Indeed, many believed the East India Company and the new financial order were ruining "old England."

The procommerce political philosopher David Hume disagreed. He acknowledged that "all the Latin classics ... are full of these sentiments, and universally ascribe the ruin of their state to the arts and riches imported from the East." The belief in corrupting "Grecian and Asiatic luxury," however, "mistook the cause of the disorders," which really proceeded from an "ill model'd government" and the "unlimited extent of conquests." For now the desire for Oriental goods superseded the threat of "Oriental despotism."

Indeed, the right to easy access to desired Chinese consumer goods threatened to overwhelm radical boycott positions. The freedom to consume such foreign items as teas, to wear what one wanted, or to set one's table with porcelains had been subject to a long tradition of social controls in England. Such actions led to the organization of a popular revolt, or, as T. H. Breen notes, created a unifying issue for private consumers to rally around. Boston merchants urged their customers not to buy British goods, sloganeering: "Save your money and you can save your country." The New York Sons of Liberty resolved an even more dramatic position during the tea boycott: tea drinkers threatened "the liberties of America."

Nevertheless, American boycotters gained their radical goals largely because the smuggling of teas continued unabated. In practice, Americans often appropriated without controls consumables deemed foreign and therefore taboo. Tea smuggled by Americans became acceptable to consume, while British East India Company tea was not. Freedom, in part, was defined as the unfettered access to the "baubles of Britain." After all, it was the British Crown's augmentation of the East India Company's power to monopolize the consumption of Chinese goods that precipitated the various tea boycotts. During the New York Tea Party, held months after the Boston protest, one of the leaders of the Sons of Liberty, Alexander McDougall, also known as "Hampden," wrote to his "Fellow Citizens" in self-consciously Lockean terms. "The chief end of all free government, is the protection of Property, from Injuries without it." He conceived of property "in the large sense, in which Mr. Locke uses it, as comprehending Life, Liberty, and Estate," and he asserted propertied male citizen's "natural liberty" and the right to "defend themselves" against "the control and Tyranny of others"-ergo the right to rebel against the despotic authority King George had bequeathed to the East India Company. As long as Americans worked hard for their material objects of desires, why should they not have the unfettered right to trade and consume Chinese luxuries?

Elite Community Building

Chinese goods were not used simply to satisfy materialist desires, however. For Gouverneur Morris's fellow New Yorkers, the culture of consuming and giving luxury objects became intrinsic to the formation of a merchantled patrician elite. Rituals of using, giving, and passing on Chinese objects were a means of community building. As the elite practice of separating the workplace from the home became more commonplace in late eighteenth-century America, women became responsible for "raising the standards of the quality of domestic life in the household, raising the standards for rearing and educating children, and assuming the moral guardianship of all family members and even of society as a whole." With the assistance of servants and slaves, elites came to employ the home as a vehicle for cultivating genteel moral virtue. Chinese objects of distinction were critical to this process. Most notably, teatime and the family dinner were turned into secular rituals in which social interactions among family, friends, and guests could take place.

Teatime, in contrast to time ordinary folk spent in the common taverns (which John Adams described as "the eternal haunt of loose disorderly People"), represented a social space where one could demonstrate one's skills at the art of conversation with American women who displayed their "Wit," good "Sense," and "Virtue." Performed according to British and Continental standards, the serving of tea required having the proper "Tea Geer," which included the teapot, cups, saucers, tea table, caddie spoon, tea caddie, and other items. The more stylish the "equipage" the more refined the server. In private homes proper and improper norms of interaction between the genders were transacted. Adams complained of a coarse woman who embarrassed some "shoe string fellows that never use Tea" about the awkward manner in which some people behaved at a tea she had held. While scolding the indiscreet woman, Adams did not challenge the firmly entrenched attitude that one's skills at having tea revealed one's sophistication and pedigree. Indeed, in this Anglo-American world the lack of such refinement brought on derision. Patriarchal disapproval sanctioned those who did not conform and kept proper women in their place, while displays of refinement merited compliments and reinforced chains of acceptable social relationships.

Women had a more intimate, memory-keeping relationship to these Chinese things than men. They were largely responsible for developing and maintaining bonds of sentiment. The giving of valued gifts became an important means by which networks of sentiment were woven, a shared sphere of meanings, power, and hierarchy. Sentimental values were consolidated between the givers and the receivers. In effect, the process of giving helped to reinforce the authority of certain traditional core values. This paradox of "keeping-while-giving" can be amply demonstrated by the manner in which New York patricians used their most prized porcelains. Important events in life were marked by the giving of gifts to bring those with established wealth and the nouveau riche together into a shared civic society.

A Chinese enameled punch bowl given by the Schuyler family to Alexander Hamilton and the Schuylers' daughter Elizabeth in 1780 to commemorate their marriage, for example, signified acceptance of Hamilton into the family and its social circles. The marriage (and bowl) marked Hamilton's rise in New York society. The Schuylers' closest friends and associates (often kin) were the Hudson Valley Knickerbocker elite: the Delanceys, Livingstons, Van Rensselaers, and Van Cortlandts. A year later, General Washington offered Hamilton command of a battalion, and the following year he was appointed Continental receiver of taxes and admitted to the New York bar.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from RACIALLY WRITING THE REPUBLIC Copyright © 2009 by DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Duke University Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2009
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0822344475
• ISBN 13: 9780822344476
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 342
• Redattore: Baum
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile