Transcript
Who Reads an American Book?
Jan.–Feb. 1820
January 1820. A Yorkshire vicar, Sydney Smith, is reviewing a book of American statistics. He envies America's low taxes. He's tired of its bragging.
Rev. Sydney Smith In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?
Rev. Sydney Smith or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue?
He had a point. U.S. copyright protected only Americans, so printers reprinted British books without paying the authors. A British author cost a printer nothing. An American author cost money.
That February, a London bookseller named John Miller brought out a new book.
The United States had won its independence. Now it wanted a second one: stories, pictures and ideas of its own. What would that culture look like, and whose America would it show?
Rip Van Winkle Wakes Up
1809–1828
Geoffrey Crayon was Washington Irving, a New Yorker stuck in England after his family’s business went bankrupt.
Irving’s Rip Van Winkle sleeps twenty years in the Catskills, straight through the Revolution.
Back in the village, he announces he’s a loyal subject of the King. The crowd shouts: “a tory! a tory! a spy!”
James Fenimore Cooper wrote the frontier. Europe read The Last of the Mohicans in translation.
Cooper’s heroes were invented, and his title told readers a whole people was vanishing. It was a comfortable story, four years before the Indian Removal Act.
The real Mohicans were pushed west, not erased. Their nation lives in Wisconsin today.
Noah Webster As an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government.
Note the spelling.
Noah Webster spent more than twenty years on An American Dictionary of the English Language. He finished it in 1825, in Cambridge. Cambridge, England.
In his book, colour lost its u. Centre turned around. Tung, for tongue, didn’t catch on.
He also added American words, many from Native languages. Skunk: In America, the popular name of a fetid animal of the weasel kind.
The View from Mount Holyoke
1825–1840
The painter who taught Americans to love their wilderness grew up in an English mill town. Thomas Cole was born in Lancashire in 1801 and came to America at seventeen.
In 1825 he sketched up the Hudson and came back with three paintings. A New York shop asked twenty-five dollars each. John Trumbull, who painted the Declaration of Independence, bought one.
Cole painted in a European style called Romanticism, which trusted feeling over reason. Its favorite feeling was the sublime: nature big enough to scare you.
Thomas Cole the most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive, characteristic of American scenery is its wildness.
In 1829 a British naval officer, Basil Hall, published a sketch of the view from Mount Holyoke. Hall thought Americans paid too little attention to their own scenery. Cole made an exact tracing of it.
In 1836 he painted that view more than six feet wide, and told his patron why.
Thomas Cole Fancy pictures seldom sell & they generally take more time than views so I have determined to paint one of the latter.
A thunderstorm, leaving. Look closer.
Cole never says which side he's on. He mourned the axe in print. And he painted every fence and haystack with care. That tension is Romantic America in one picture.
Temples and Togas
1818–1841
Painters got the woods. Architects got Athens.
The capital's architects borrowed columns and domes from Greece and Rome. A republic wanted to look like the old republics.
In Philadelphia, the Second Bank of the United States copied the Parthenon. Jackson's enemy bank was a Greek temple.
Soon churches, courthouses and farmhouses grew columns. In the 1820s, Americans cheered the Greeks' own war of independence against the Ottoman Empire.
Congress ordered a statue of Washington. Horatio Greenough carved him as Zeus.
Twelve tons of marble, a toga, no shirt. In 1843, Congress moved it outdoors.
New York's former mayor Philip Hone wrote in his diary: It looks like a great Herculean, warrior-like Venus of the bath.
Trust Thyself
1832–1849
In 1832 a Boston minister, Ralph Waldo Emerson, quit his pulpit. In Concord he wrote a little book called Nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all.
Critics called his circle the Transcendentalists, a word borrowed from a German philosopher. Their idea: truth lives in you and in nature, not in a church.
In 1837 Emerson told Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa Society to stop copying Europe.
Ralph Waldo Emerson We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.
Many Americans met Emerson on a lyceum bench, not in a book.
Ralph Waldo Emerson Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
If everyone carries that spark, anyone can grow toward perfection. The next film follows the Americans who tried.
Margaret Fuller edited their magazine, The Dial. In 1843 she asked whether that spark belonged to women too.
Margaret Fuller We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to woman as freely as to man.
On July 4, 1845, Emerson's friend Henry David Thoreau moved into a house he'd built by Walden Pond. The date, he says, was an accident.
Henry David Thoreau I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life…
Henry David Thoreau The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer’s yard…
He listed the cost of the house to the half cent. Some of its boards came from the shanty of James Collins, an Irish railroad worker.
The Collins family carried away everything they owned in one bundle.
For years Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax to a government that protected slavery. In July 1846, with the country at war with Mexico, he spent a night in jail.
Someone paid the tax. The next morning he went huckleberrying.
Henry David Thoreau Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
Gandhi printed pieces of it in his newspaper. Martin Luther King Jr. read it as a student.
Whose America?
1829–1848
Edgar Allan Poe mocked the Transcendentalists as “Frogpondians,” after the pond on Boston Common.
Edgar Allan Poe TRUE!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been, and am; but why will you say that I am mad?
Emerson said people could perfect themselves. Poe wrote about guilt and madness.
Every region made its own version. Out west, George Caleb Bingham painted a fur trader and his son drifting down the Missouri.
In Virginia, novels like Swallow Barn showed the plantation as a gracious, happy home. The view was from the porch.
Some Americans were left out of these pictures. So they made their own.
William Apess, a Pequot minister, wrote one of the first book-length autobiographies by a Native American. In 1833 he asked white readers a question.
William Apess Now suppose these skins were put together, and each skin had its national crimes written upon it—which skin do you think would have the greatest?
In Cincinnati, a free Black painter, Robert S. Duncanson, painted the Ohio woods in Cole’s style.
Rev. Sydney Smith Finally, under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a Slave, whom his fellow-creatures may buy and sell and torture?
The census of 1820 counted 1,538,022 enslaved people. About one American in six. On this question, the critic was right.
Frederick Douglass You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.
Dublin printed his Narrative twice. It was translated into Dutch and French. Readers in Britain and Ireland were reading an American book.
Answer the Critic
1820 → 1848
Twenty-eight years later.
Sydney Smith died in 1845, the year Douglass's book came out. Here are his answers.
An American book? Europe read Irving and Cooper. A picture? The Oxbow. A statue? They laughed, but they looked.
American surgeons? In 1846, a Boston surgeon operated on a patient breathing ether. The first public demonstration of surgical anesthesia.
An American play? By the late 1840s, one of the most popular was the minstrel show. White men in blackface, mocking Black Americans.
And every sixth man a slave? That one took a war to answer.
Some Americans didn't wait for a war. If people could perfect themselves, they said, so could a country.