The individual and the community a productive tension in american history from the colonial era to 1860

The Individual and the Community: A Productive Tension in American History from the Colonial Era to 1860 by Quan Thach Hoang May 8th, 2009 A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The State University of New York at Buffalo In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of American Studies Copyright by Quan T Hoang 2008 ii Acknowledgement I would not have been able to complete this dissertation without the generous support, advice, and constructive feedback from my committee members I want to express my special thanks and gratitude to Dr Michael Frisch, my dissertation advisor, for his steadfast support, encouragement, and belief in the value of my project over the last two years I was especially fortunate to have had the opportunity to work under his guidance over the last years I am indebted to him for helping me formulate first the idea and then the outline of the dissertation The enormous amount of time he spent talking to me, urging me to aim for greater depth and scope, straightening out my thoughts and clarifying my methodology, but otherwise letting me freely exercise my creativity, was especially valuable to the completion of this dissertation, bringing clarity and unity to the project as a whole I would also like to express my gratitude to Dr Kari Winter for her sustained support and assistance throughout my entire time in the program Her thorough reading of my early drafts and her invaluable critical feedback helped lead me to many important insights, especially the importance of providing opportunity and room for dissent in a community, from the critical perspective of which I managed to give shape and organization to the first and most challenging chapter on New England towns Her excellent editing skills also helped improved the clarity and lucidity in much of my prose Dr Carl Nightingale’s valuable feedback, challenging though it was, broadened my thoughts and helped me see new ways to improve the academic merit of my dissertation Working as a teaching assistant with him for one semester in World Civilization was also a memorable and rewarding experience that I will not likely forget I owe special thanks to the Fulbright Program for sponsoring the two years of my master iii program Without their sponsorship, I would never have been able to come to Buffalo and take the first step in my graduate education The American Research Fellowship from the University of Buffalo and the four-year teaching assistantship from the Department of American Studies were indispensible to my continued pursuit and completion of the doctoral program Many professors and staff members in the department were also supportive and encouraging to me during the dissertation process, making my living here in Buffalo bearable and memorable I want to thank especially Dr Ruth Meyerowitz, Dr Donald Grinde, and Betsy Thornton for their assistance, support, and kindness that were most crucial in keeping up my spirits and keeping me going My great gratitude and thanks to my parents, sisters, and brother who provided me with numerous acts of love, support, and encouragement that have been indispensible to my persistence with and final completion of the dissertation My friends Ula, Nahirana, Patricia, Sami, Imen, Ayesha, Waseela, EunHyoung, Sunanda, Cait, and Katie did more for me with their precious friendships than I could ever hope to reciprocate The special undergraduate students in my recitations, while an unfailing source of distraction and, at times, nuisance, provided me with the necessary human interaction and kept my two feet on the ground iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments iii Abstract vi Introduction Chapter One Colonial New England Towns: The Struggle for a New Social Order and New Community 12 Chapter Two Benjamin Franklin: A Genius at Fusing Public and Private Interests 50 Chapter Three Paradigmatic Pluralism and Synthesis in the American Revolution 90 Chapter Four The Role of the Government in the Economy 125 Conclusion 167 Works Cited 173 v Abstract As a central, defining axis of American history and historiography, the individualcommunity dichotomy has polarized discussions about the nature of American society and produced endless dead-end debates Interpreted from within this binary framework, many important issues in American history are simply different variations on the theme of America being either individualistic or communalistic Through a critical reading of the historiography and a critical examination of the individual-community framework within which American historiographers have represented, wrestled with, or come to understand their history, this dissertation argues that it is the interplay between the two forces of individualism and community, connected and locked in an unstable tension as they are, that characterizes American history To illustrate this method, this dissertation examines, in a series of case study essays, four particular topics, each originating in a particular period in American history and historiography In each essay, I offer a critical survey of a well-developed discourse over a specific historical event from a particular historiographical vantage point, where sufficient historiographical mass had been achieved In these four essays, I aim to transcend the individual-community divide and offer a synthesis by examining the tension and interaction between the individual and the community, as opposed to assuming an analytical/interpretive position on or close to either end of the dichotomy In the first chapter, I re-visit a series of community studies that were conducted in the 1960s and 1970s in the New England region and re-view them, not through the binary framework of the individual versus the community to prove or disprove any particular thesis, as was done when these works were published, but through the lens of the tension vi between individual freedom and community cohesion In the second chapter, I examine the debate over whether Benjamin Franklin should be characterized as an icon of self-reliance and individualism or altruistic virtue By analyzing Franklin’s Autobiography and his other writings, I demonstrate how the complexity of Franklin’s character comes from his superb skills in blending private interests in public projects In the third chapter, I examine the intellectual history of the American Revolution, using as primary sources major historiographical works that place the origins of the American Revolution in classical republicanism or an emerging economic liberalism I then apply the resulting synthesis of the two to the question of whether the U.S Constitution received any influence from the Iroquois political structures and ideals The last chapter examines the political economy of the United States from after 1776 to the eve of the Civil War By re-viewing the historiographical works that emerged in the two decades after the New Deal to justify government interference in the economy, I examine the complex relationship, supportive at one point and antagonistic at another, between the government and the private enterprise during the national period In short, to overcome the conceptual weaknesses of the binary framework that pitted the individual against the community, this dissertation attempts a more integrated and synthetic conceptual framework that emphasizes the creative tension and interaction between the individual and the community Employing this conceptual framework, it aims to present both American history and the story of how Americans have wrestled with this history through the primary source lens of American historiography vii Introduction American history has been written and rewritten, interpreted and re-interpreted in different ways by successive generations of historians, each in light of the prevailing ideas, assumptions, and problems of their own age History, in this manner, becomes a source of wisdom for historians to turn to in an effort to understand and, in some hopeful manner, provide guidance to contemporary issues Yet, despite their different ideologies and methodologies, at the heart of many versions of history and interpretations they produce lie an unmistakable individualcommunity dichotomy New England, for example, is historiographically portrayed either as home to cohesive communities marked by traditional hierarchy and a strong vision of community,1 or alternatively, the birthplace of individualistic and egalitarian values, with firm emphasis on the spirit of individualistic self-reliance and an aversion to official control and authority.2 Similarly, in various interpretations of American democracy, there exists a tendency to see colonial America as fundamentally defined by an individual-community dichotomy The origin of American democracy, in these “either/or” terms, is explained either as an offshoot of the love of liberty and the spirit of independence and individualism,3 or a product of the congregation and town meeting in the New England communities.4 Unfortunately, the usual either/or approach, deeply-rooted in American intellectual history and historiography, that sees individualism and community in the form of binary For example, see John Fiske, The Beginnings of New England: Or, The Puritan Theocracy in Its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1889), 176 James Bryce Bryce, Modern Democracies (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1921), 6,7 Robert H Wiebe, Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 264 See, for example, Willis Mason West, The Story of American Democracy, Political and Industrial (New York: Allyn and Bacon, 1922), 126 oppositions, rendering mutually exclusive individual rights and well-being and those of the community, fails to appreciate the productive tension between individualism and community that lies at the heart of American society and history Quite early on in American history, Tocqueville noted this tension and placed it at the center of his book Democracy in America, referring to it as the tension between the ideals of freedom and equality, but American historians, for the most part, tend to privilege one or the other as more fundamental, more quintessential to their society American political culture, seen from within this dualistic approach, is either “the lengthened shadow of John Locke,”5 or some version of “classical republicanism.” There is no room in their accounts for Locke to dialogue and coexist with classical republican thinkers Seeing reality in binary terms, many historians tend to perceive the relationship between individual freedom and community cohesion as one dimensional, that is, if one increases, the other must necessarily decrease The development of American society thus follows a linear model, in which traditional hierarchy lies at one end of the continuum and modern individualism at the other The job of historians becomes one of “trac[ing] the gradual but ineluctable process by which cohesive communities of structured inequalities gave way to ‘typical American individualism, optimism, and enterprise.’”6 For historians who disagree with this model, their historiographical works, still grounded in this single dimension of individuation, swing the pendulum back to the other extreme by asserting America as essentially always individualistic and liberal Thus, “either America is born modern or America becomes modern.”7 The logic of the dichotomy dictates that the pendulum keeps swinging back and forth between the two extremes If it is ever held still for a moment in the middle––such as when historians encounter the puzzling anomaly of the Puritans who were simultaneously individualist and collectivist––it Richard J Ellis, American Political Cultures (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 28 Ibid., Ibid becomes “a midway point in a linear transition from traditional communitarianism to modern individualism.”8 Through a series of historical and historiographical essays, this dissertation aims to transcend this either/or paradigm by exploring the dialectical relationship between the individual and the community that can be traced through American history and historiography from the seventeenth century to the pre-Civil War era Instead of accepting the individual and the community as part of a dichotomous pair of terms that lie at opposite ends and that one, therefore, is compelled to choose between one or the other, my work intends to examine the space in between the binary pairs, the tension and interaction between the two that eventually determine the form and shape of American society and culture The history of the United States, through these essays, will emerge not as a monolithic ideology of individualism but a result of the push-and-pull process between the two forces of individual freedom and communal cohesion Avoiding the individualism-communitarianism dichotomy that seizes on one side of the picture at the expense of the other, my work offers a synthesis of the two by demonstrating a productive tension between the individual and the community that is central to the development of American society and history By drawing on historiographical work that has been published over the last several decades in the field of American history and re-viewing them through the lens of the tension between the individual and the community, my dissertation argues that the two forces of individualism and community are connected and locked in an unstable tension and, through an examination of the various forms the United States––society, government, and the individual––has worked out to resolve this tension, more coherence could be achieved in understanding the country’s history The primary sources for my work, as a result of this goal, are the historiographical works themselves––except in the case of Benjamin Franklin where I use Ibid., 12 adoption of the Constitution in 1787 If the Framers were all as pragmatic as Franklin––men who valued the practical and real over the abstract and philosophical––they certainly had referred in their discussion to the system of governance of the Iroquois’ Confederation as a working example of a strong central government holding the separate states together There is enough documentary evidence to believe that the Framers, particularly Franklin, were familiar with the Iroquois’ polities and were impressed by it In their effort to find a viable constitutional framework that could unite the thirteen separate and sovereign states into one nation, they did not have to rely entirely on pure imagination, for they had seen, in the flesh, a radical alternative to the British monarchical status quo The adoption of the Constitution solved the trade dispute crisis and laid the legal groundwork for the development of a national market But the future prosperity of the nation depended on improving the communication system between the seaboard and the new western lands to facilitate the transportation of products and create new markets The limited activity by the federal government in this area, however, did not discourage state governments from taking an active part in the internal improvements movement Everywhere states supplied investment capital to private transportation companies and became their essential partners Where this “mixed enterprise” method failed, state ownership was even adopted that allowed governments to become an entrepreneur running and operating transportation systems for a profit Contrary to the modern republican belief that the private business grew and succeeded on their own and that economic operations were best left to the private sector, state activism during the period 17761860 demonstrated that the state assistance was crucial to the development of the private enterprise as well as the economic growth of the country The popular support given to state activism during the period weakened and gave way to a new laissez-faire doctrine when the 170 private business community had grown sufficiently strong and competent to assume these economic operations from the states Aspiring to offer a synthesis on a number of rather broad historical and historiographical topics, each of the chapters in this dissertation necessarily contains certain limits The chapter on colonial New England would, as is obvious to all readers, benefit enormously from a greater inclusion of women’s history and the history of slaves and native Americans It is hardly imaginable that one could draw a picture of pre-revolutionary America without including these groups of people in it If the chapter has attempted to portray the process of social changes in New England from the perspective of social tension, then the histories of these groups must record more conflict and tension with the dominant social order than any groups of white males Their stories would no doubt help expand the width and depth of the narrative structure To explore the tension between self-interest and the public good in Franklin, the second chapter has limited its analysis largely to the first half of his life, disregarding Franklin’s political contributions How Franklin dealt with the conflict between public virtues and the corrupting influences of fame and power, itself another topic of endless debate among scholars and historians, deserves serious considerations and needs to be included in any debate over Franklin’s character While Chapter Three argued the liberal values of the radical bourgeoisie and the working people were grounded in their social and economic experience prior to the Revolution, it did not present sufficient historiographical information on their experiences and experiments with local participatory politics These experiences must made had considerable impact on their confidence in a non-aristocratic and non-monarchical free society Chapter Four’s discussion on the limited role of the federal government in developing the economy in the early republic is rather thin in 171 its use of historiographical materials, especially regarding the conflict between the two rival economic models as advocated by the federalists and the antifederalists More historiographical information in this area would create a more dynamic and accurate picture of the political struggle between the two factions in their attempt to fashion the federal government, and banking and commerce to their vision of a good society Despite these shortcomings, the approach illustrated in the four chapters here does demonstrate, as objective as I can be in my evaluation, a certain promise in constructing a new integrative framework within which many different voices can find a common narrative structure This synthesis needs to be applied to other historical issues in the subsequent periods to test its usefulness As more developing countries are experiencing 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American history To illustrate this method, this dissertation examines, in a series of case study essays, four particular topics, each originating in a particular period in American history and. .. creative tension and interaction between the individual and the community Employing this conceptual framework, it aims to present both American history and the story of how Americans have wrestled