Crime and Other Forms of Cozenage: Crime on Fleet Street, London, 1550-1750, Part I.

Posted on May 10, 2012 by J.K. Friefeld

By: Albert Vogt III

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam,
And sign your will before you sup from home.
Some fiery fop, with new commission vain,
Who sleeps on brambles till he kills his man;
Some frolic drunkard, reeling from a feast,
Provokes a broil, and stabs you for a jest.
Yet even these heroes, mischievously gay,
Lords of the street, and terrors of the way;
Flushed as they are with folly, youth, and wine,
Their prudent insults to the poor confine;
Afar they mark the flambeau’s bright approach,
And shun the shining train, and golden coach;
In vain, these dangers past, your doors you close,
And hope the balmy blessings of repose: Cruel with guilt, and daring with despair,
The midnight murderer burst the faithless bar;
Invades the sacred hour of silent rest,
And leaves, unseen, a dagger in your breast.[i]

- Samuel Johnson, from London: A Poem

 

Fleet Street begins where it connects with Ludgate Hill outside the city walls at a malodorous ditch generously called Fleet River.  Along with the Strand, Fleet Street outlines the main thoroughfare linking London proper inside the city walls with the seat of government at Westminster.[ii]  From Roman times up through the Medieval Ages to 1550, both London and later Westminster grew in significance for the whole of England, the former as a source of money and the latter as the nexus of political power.  Concurrently the two became increasingly important to one another, especially for English kings at Westminster who relied on the favor and wealth that London generated as a seedbed for political power.  The more prudent monarchs used London to their advantage by giving the city the freedom to reap profits from trade, and in turn London flourished.  With London’s growth came the stench and a general trend, in stages over the centuries, of movement westward through Ludgate.  To escape the smells concomitant with demographic overcrowding inside the city walls, Londoners progressed down Fleet Street and the Strand and towards Westminster, the site of the Royal Courts.[iii]  Fleet Street and the Strand developed as neutral ground between Westminster and London, first settled by clergymen and later, after the Reformation, by the press and legal London who found themselves situated between the two poles of London life.  Fleet Street was in the middle of London life.[iv]

Because of Fleet Street’s strategic location near the pillars of the City, the Church (symbolized by nearby St. Paul’s Cathedral), and the State in Westminster, it evolved as a logical place for people to congregate in order to disseminate information.  Whether before the Reformation when the Catholic Church controlled the area or after, Fleet Street remained a logical place to converge between these centers of London life.  As a result, when secular presses emerged, people came to recognize Fleet Street as a place to obtain the news of the day.[v]  One of the main reasons Fleet Street earned its reputation as a place to go to obtain the news was its proximity to St. Paul’s Cathedral.  The cathedral edifice formed the eastern terminus of Fleet Street and served as an early center for book sellers in the sixteenth century.  Publishers came to St. Paul’s because of the Stationers’ Company, established by Royal Ordinance of Queen Elizabeth I in 1559, operated out of St. Paul’s churchyard inside the walls of London.  The company sold many of its books in the churchyard.  The Stationers’ Company functioned as a guild and earned the license to publish all books in London through the ordinance which organized the company.  But because of the Stationers’ Company’s guild status, their authority extended only as far as the walls of London.  Fleet Street began just outside the walls, after Ludgate Hill crossed over the Fleet Bridge and River.  As such, and due to its quasi-unattached status as neutral ground between the two official towns of London and Westminster, information flowed through here along with the traffic.  Precisely because of its rising status as a nexus of information, in 1500 Wynkyn de Worde opened the first press independent of Guild control here.  Most printing businesses, though, did not earn official sanction for over a century.[vi]  Fleet Street also acquired a reputation as a place for those seeking to escape the reach of the law not only for printers, but also for more hardened criminals.[vii]

Scattered amongst wayward printers there dwelled an unruly set of denizens in the buildings lining and surrounding Fleet Street, centered on the Whitefriars area.  Ironically, one of the institutions established to train people to prosecute unruly behavior was situated next to Whitefriars. It was located on ground originally claimed by the Knights Templar in the thirteenth century and became known as the Temple and the Inns of Court.  Younger sons of the gentry and nobility came here to learn how to practice law and it formed the western boundary of Fleet Street where it met up with the Strand.[viii]  At the other end of Fleet Street, around the corner to the north where Fleet Street joined Ludgate Hill at Fleet Bridge and just inside the city walls on Newgate, lay the Old Bailey.  There the lawyers trained at the Temple and Inns of Court practiced their trade during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.[ix]  Across the walls from the Old Bailey to the west and southwest, two destinations for the criminals judged in the courtroom stood on either side of Fleet Street and the Fleet River. These included Fleet Prison on the north side of the street and east of the river, and Bridewell to the south of the street and west of the river.[x]  In between these structures and the Temple resided Whitefriars, known by the characters who haunted it as Alsatia.[xi]  The Temple and Inns of Court, the Old Bailey, Fleet Prison and Bridewell, the independent printers, and Alsatia taken together constituted a liminal space that encompassed the entire life of many criminals at the time.  When scholars study Fleet Street in the early modern period, the history of the press occupies much of their attention rather than its less respectable aspects.  But between 1550 and 1750 anyone dwelling in the environs of Fleet Street, even printers at times, could find themselves in disrepute, either as an accused on the docket or prosecuting at the bar.

Primary sources abound describing the people and institutions that inhabited the confines of Fleet Street, both criminal and legal.  Some, such as two royal ordinances from 1643 and 1649 which sought to curtail the activities of printers on Fleet Street, demonstrated the various ways in which the press ran afoul of the law.  Additionally, the proceedings of the Old Bailey contain several court cases where printers came before the judge’s bench on charges such as seditious libel.  The documents left behind by the Old Bailey describe a multitude of crimes perpetrated by the occupants of Fleet Street or crimes committed in the area, including murder, theft, highway robbery, bigamy, freedom or Fleet marriages (marriages performed without a license), “assault with sodomitical intent,” and other forms of cozenage too great to enumerate at once.  As to the economic motivations for such crime, sources like the Middlesex Session Rolls¾particularly of 1646 and 1656¾and the lists from the Four Shillings in the Pound Aid from 1693/1694 offer a glimpse into the limited finances of many of those who lived in the area.  These documents, along with firsthand accounts like those gleaned from the diaries of Samuel Pepys and James Boswell provide contemporaneous views of the events and buildings that shaped Fleet Street.  Finally, A New History of London: Including Westminster and Southwark from 1773 contains a large section on Fleet Street’s ward¾Farrington Ward Without¾and renders a possible history of many of the buildings under discussion here and the people who frequented them.

In addition, collections of secondary sources exist for both the press of Fleet Street and the legal and criminal worlds that co-mingled along this important thoroughfare.  Despite the fact that interconnectedness of the press and crime between 1550 and 1750, early historiographical works began the trend of separating the histories of the press and crime.  Volumes like W. G. Bell’s Fleet Street in Seven Centuries; Being a History of the Growth of London Beyond the Walls in the Western Liberty, and of Fleet Street to Our Time from 1912¾which pointedly opens with the quote, “Fleet Street is all newspapers!”¾and E. Beresford Chancellor’s The Annals Fleet Street: Its Traditions & Associations also from 1912, showcase the less sordid, more respectable sides of Fleet Street like the press and the Temple.  On the other hand, Luke Owen Pike’s 1876 A History of Crime in England delved into that seedier side with only passing references to those other parts of Fleet Street.  In modern times, in regards to the press, the best narratives include Ray Boston’s The Essential Fleet Street: Its History and Influence and editors Michael Harris and Alan Lee’s The Press in English Society from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries which both establish the central role Fleet Street boasted in the rise of a free press in London.[xii]  London law and crime historiography also comprises many significant works such as Gamini Salgado’s The Elizabethan Underworld, John L. McMullan’s The Canting Crew: London’s Criminal Underworld, 1500-1700, Douglas Hay, et. al., Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England, Lincoln B. Faller’s Turned to Account: The Forms and Functions of Criminal Biography in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England, and Peter Linebaugh’s The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century.[xiii]  All these texts, whether dealing with the press or crime, acknowledge the centrality of Fleet Street as a physical setting for printers, lawyers, and criminals, but seldom do they connect these varied characters to one another.

 

[i] S. Johnson, “London: A Poem,” in The Oxford Anthology of English Literature: The Reformation and Eighteenth Century (New York: ? 1973), reprinted in “London Life and Culture Readings,” (Course Packet, 2006, available at Beck’s Bookstore), 474.

[ii] B. Weinreb and C. Hibbert, The London Encyclopaedia (Bethesda, MD: Adler & Adler Publishers, Inc., 1986), 282-286.

[iii] J. Richardson, London & Its People: A Social History from Medieval Times to the Present Day (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1995), 17, 31, 33, 43.

[iv] R. Boston, The Essential Fleet Street: Its History and Influence (New York: Sterling Publishing Co., 1990), 14-33.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] F. C. Avis, Printers of Fleet Street and St. Paul’s Church Yard in the Sixteenth Century (London: Glenview Press, 1964), 10-21; See also M. Harris and A. Lee, The Press in English Society From the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1986).

[viii] R. Hudson, The London Guides: Fleet Street, Holborn & the Inns of Court (London: Haggerston Press, 1995), 113-123.

[ix] Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, 20 March 2008).

[x] For a information on Fleet Prison, see P. Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 180; For a description of Bridewell, see R. C. Latham, and W. Mathews, A Pepys Anthology: Passages from the Diary of Samuel Pepys, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 1/167, 2/116, 7/187, 7/190-191, 8/6; For a general history of London prisons, H. Mayhew and J. Binny, The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life (New York: A. M. Kelley, 1968).

[xi] Information on Whitefriars, a.k.a. Alsatia, can be found in G. Salgado, The Elizabethan Underworld (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977), 20.

[xii] See also Avis, Printers of Fleet Street and St. Paul’s Church Yard in the Sixteenth Century.

[xiii] See also J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England, 1550-1750 (New York: Longman, 1999); C. Elmsley, Crime and Society in England, 1750-1900 (New York: Longman, 1987); P. King, Crime, Justice, and Discretion in England, 1740-1820 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); S. Joyce, Capital Offenses: Geographies of Class and Crime in Victorian London (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003); F. McLynn, Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth Century England (New York: Routledge, 1989); J. Landers, Death and the Metropolis: Studies in the Demographic History of London, 1670-1830 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

This weeks header comes courtesy of 1st-art-gallery.com

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Spring Break, Vogt’s Return, and New Contributors

Posted on April 16, 2012 by J.K. Friefeld

As we break during the busy academic period from the middle of March to the end of April, we look forward to the summer when Albert Vogt III returns with a new article entitled “Crime and Other Forms of Cozenage: Crime on Fleet Street, London, 1550-1750.” Along with Vogt’s article, we look forward to welcoming new contributors Rebecca S. Wingo and Jeremiah J. Bauer.

-Jacob K. Friefeld

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Complicating Identity: Men, the Middle-Class, and Identity Construction in the Nineteenth-Century

Posted on March 5, 2012 by J.K. Friefeld

By: Jacob K. Friefeld

Last month I dealt with different people’s identities within a social hierarchy focusing on how people at a single point in time shaped their identities based on their relations to other people. However, focusing on rigidly formed identities at a single fixed point in time is too narrow of an approach. In the short story “Borges and I,” Jorge Luis Borges ponders the difference between the literary, academic Borges and his private identity. Borges considers how his academic identity takes his private identity’s interests and “turns them into the accoutrements of an actor.”[1] Borges’ uncertainty about his public and private identities should be instructive for historians. Historians need to consider identity as Borges considered his own—as changing depending on the space one occupies.

Men of the emerging middle-class in nineteenth-century America constructed their identities across space. In The Emergence of the Middle Class, Stuart Blumin points out how middle-class men increasingly defined themselves at work. With Blumin’s help, Richard Bushman shows how these same men constructed genteel, home identities. In Civic Wars, Mary P. Ryan paints a portrait of American public, political identity. Finally, in City of Eros, Timothy Gilfoyle shows how middle-class men constructed their identities as they moved into the underworld of illicit sex.[2]

In emerging nineteenth-century cities, a new type of non-manual businessman began developing in industries like furniture and clothing that had traditionally only employed manual laborers.[3] Many of these non-manual businessmen “continued to identify with their old trades” even as their personal identities in the work place revolved around managing other men.[4] Similarly, due to specialization that allowed men to work and become experts on the sales floor, men working in retail achieved a higher level of respectability and began to identify themselves with a non-manual class of worker.[5] This identification with a non-manual class became easier as urban space split between shop spaces close to the city’s center while factories full of manual laborers moved to the metropolis’ edge.[6] Through the type of non-manual work in which they engaged and the spatial separation between that work and manual labor, men of the emerging middle-class created identities as non-manual shop workers at the city’s center.

As these laborers made their way from their shops to their homes, their non-manual laborer identity gave way to the genteel head of household. Within urban space, non-manual laborers generally lived near those employed similarly and decorated their houses differently than their manual laboring counterparts.[7] Men in the home-space deferred the decoration to their wives who purchased durable goods like carpets, pianos and sofas.[8] While this suggests a more passive role for middle-class men in the feminized home-space, luxury items like the piano also pointed to a genteel home.

Middle-class families fashioned genteel identities purposely and took their cues from etiquette guides that led them along the path of gentility.[9]  Sentimental fiction served the even more important role of showing middle-class families who could not afford a life centered entirely on leisure how “to adapt genteel values to middle-class life.”[10] One of the most important of these values was the aesthetic value of one’s house. Houses were judged in letters between friends and became tied so intricately with genteel identity that the houses themselves could have been considered performers in the genteel drama.[11] Middling men, once home from work, identified themselves as part of a family unit in a feminized home-space that, itself, was a performer in the larger world of gentility. In this way, men at home were genteel heads of households.

If the home served as a feminized space, then men controlled public spaces of civic engagement; women occupied these spaces only ironically as representations of the Republic’s liberty while they were excluded from the political world.[12] However, the absence of women made public spaces like town squares or even streets a place where men could interact socially.[13] Furthermore, men could let their animosities, political or otherwise, flare within these public venues—without proper police forces, cities were not yet ready to enforce civility.[14] These animosities in public, political space could turn deadly as in the case of killings and intimidation of Know-Nothings in New Orleans.[15] In this rowdy public, political space, men formed their identities against the multitude of those around them. From moment to moment a man’s identity in public could range from overtly, electorally, and even violently political to leisurely and engaged in public debate. In this way, men’s identities in public, unlike at work and home lacked clear boundaries as the public spaces changed from one moment to the next depending on those who were practicing them.

Finally, men in disorderly civic spaces could easily find the company of prostitutes. Middle-class men in this sporting subculture reveled in what their genteel, home culture would label promiscuous sexuality as these men “’kept women,’ paid their rent and assumed aliases to hide such activities.”[16] However, men unable to afford the price of secrecy could easily find brothels, as many did.[17] Like the genteel courtesy book and sentimental fiction that helped guide families on the genteel course, sporting men had their own literature to guide them through the world of gambling, blood sport, and sex. The sporting press, including such newspapers as the Rake and the Sporting Whip defended male sexual freedom encouraging “heterosexual indulgence.”[18] The men who occupied this underground subculture of sporting men crafted virile identities as they moved about in a homo-social world of leisure between sexual interactions.

While identity changes over time, it also changes depending upon the space a person occupies. Combining Blumin’s study on the middle-class, Bushman’s work on gentility, Ryan’s scholarship dealing with public space, and Gilfoyle’s work on prostitution paints a picture of middle-class men behaving differently and constructing different identities as non-manual laborers, genteel heads of household, civic actors, and sporting men depending upon the space they occupied. This complicates the view of identity from last week’s essay that assumed a single identity for a single individual. However, complicating that narrow view with spatially differentiated identities remains too simplistic. As I’ve identified four different identities middle-class men may have had, there were likely even more. Religion has been notably left out of my telling while a nineteenth-century man could have easily gone to church instead of a brothel, or after visiting a brothel. Furthermore, accepting the four identities described above, middling men no doubt had moments at home in which they did not feel genteel and identified more with the sporting world or were overly concerned with work. In other words, identity, while corresponding to space, changes from moment to moment. So, nineteenth-century men were not so different than Borges who, at the end of his story, admits of his two identities, “I am not sure which of us it is that’s writing this page.”1


[1] Jorge Luis Borges, “Borges and I,” in Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 324.

[2]  Gilfoyle’s work is necessary for understanding the full range of middle-class life-styles outside of the appropriate life of home and work. Similarly, Ryan’s book deals with an active public sphere entering into the argument on the early political republic on the opposite side of Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000).

[3] Stuart M. Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 70.

[4] Ibid., 71-72.

[5] Ibid., 80-83.

[6] Ibid., 86-87.

[7] Ibid., 178.

[8] Ibid., 185.

[9] Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 280-281.

[10] Ibid., 281.

[11] Ibid., 132-133.

[12] Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 67.

[13] Ibid., 33-43.

[14] Ibid., 53.

[15] Ibid., 137.

[16] Timothy J. Gilfoyle. New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 17900-1920 (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1992), 98.

[17] Ibid., 103-104.

[18] Ibid., 99.

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Review: Conflict, Family, and Gender Relations in the Mexican Borderlands

Posted on February 25, 2012 by J.K. Friefeld

Laura M Shelton. For Tranquility and Order: Family and Community on Mexico’s Northern Frontier, 1800-1850. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. 2010.

By: Jacob K. Friefeld

In this book, Laura M. Shelton argues that family, gender, and labor relations in the midst of ethnic violence on Mexico’s northwestern borderlands in the early nineteenth-century increasingly became defined in terms of civilized, as opposed to savage, behavior. This change, Shelton asserts, had profound effects on nation making and the relation between the state and its citizens in the early republic and particularly in Sonora region. In making her argument she organizes the work into six sections broadly dealing with gender, family bonds, sexuality, inheritance, intergenerational relations, and labor.

Unlike most previous studies of Mexico’s northern borderlands that emphasized the incompetence of the colonial and early republican judicial system, Shelton follows the scholarly work of Charles Cutter and focuses on the reach and power of the judiciary in the borderlands in spite of any personnel shortcomings. As one might expect in a study that emphasizes the reach of the judiciary, court cases represent the largest portion of Shelton’s documentary evidence. However, she sharpens her study beyond the sometimes narrow gaze of court records using census records, military and missionary reports, travel accounts, and church records to look more closely at gender issues in several aspects of Sonora life.

In analyzing her numerous sources, Shelton finds a degree of continuity between life in colonial and republican Sonora. In many cases, both plaintiff and accused desired reconciliation as the final outcome of a dispute rather than punishment. This desire correlated more closely with the traditional value of community harmony and the utility of conflict in achieving that harmony than the twentieth-century judicial paradigm of punishment and restitution.

However, changes took place in spite of the continued value of community harmony. Changes in the Sonora economy, particularly an increase in ranching, mining, and wheat farming, re-shaped legal responses to account for labor shortages. These legal responses in turn helped to reshape gender relations in the region. Court officials buttressed the concept of legitimate marriage as a marker of civilized society even though the strict blood-heritage of family honor had ceased to have meaning. Without this emphasis on family honor, conduct became ever more important, and judges cracked down on non-traditional sex practices emphasizing purity and obedience to a familial patriarch. This crackdown on non-traditional mores occurred during a time of increased resistance from Apaches and Yaquis suggesting a link between uncertain security and attempts to solidify social norms in response to this uncertainty and the presence of the Indian other.

As judges upheld male dominance in the home, they also buttressed patriarchal dominance over younger males and servants. Courts wanted to uphold liberal ideals of individuality and citizenship, but the liberal economy they were also trying to advocate required greater amounts of labor. Ironically, the prerogatives of liberalism generally associated with free labor and citizenship caused judges to strengthen control of miners, ranchers, and farmers over their workers thereby buttressing the colonial debt peonage system.

While Shelton expands our understanding of gender relations on the Mexican borderlands, one wonders if she focuses too heavily on discontinuity and the prerogatives of the liberal republican state. Judicial officials and law makers had come from a society in which family honor played an important role; while Shelton suggests that court documents did not deal with honor, it seems possible that the ideology implicit in family honor became encoded into the republican legal statutes and continued to exercise its power implicitly within judicial decisions. Furthermore, her reliance on legal documents limits her study. One could understand limiting a longer study to primarily legal considerations, but, at 155 pages, Shelton could easily add a chapter on gendered leisure activities in Sonora to deepen her analysis. She could have also added a chapter dealing with wider Mexican representations of life in Sonora to build a greater understanding of the broader cultural context from which judicial decisions emerged. These criticisms aside, Shelton has created a compelling work of gender history in the Mexican borderlands that complicates the traditional historiographical emphasis on continuity.

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“What Do the Simple Folk Do?”: Adventures in Early Amreican Identity

Posted on February 10, 2012 by J.K. Friefeld

This is part one of a two part reflection on American identity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries growing out of work done in a graduate readings course. This piece looks at identity in the work of Gordon Wood, Bernard Bailyn, and Richard Bushman.

By: Jacob K. Friefeld

In a musical number during the second act of the Broadway production of Camelot, Guenevere asks Arthur, “What do the simple folk do?” By the end of the song, Arthur finally suggests that, “They sit around and wonder what Royal folk would do.”[1] Gordon Wood would appreciate this sentiment as he suggests in his The Radicalism of the American Revolution that American colonists formed their identities in relation to their superiors. Bernard Bailyn agrees with Wood in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution suggesting that Revolutionary ideology was created from five different strains of colonial thought and disseminated from the top of the colonial hierarchy and accepted by most at every level of that social hierarchy. Richard L. Bushman also seems to agree with Arthur’s response to Guenevere as he suggests that the upper level of colonial hierarchy created their identity around the idea of gentility which future generations of Americans would aspire to. While all three works deal with American identity, Wood and Bailyn complement each other directly while Bushman both buttresses the Wood-Bailyn Revolutionary stew with his additional ingredient of gentility and presents new challenges to Wood’s claim of a radical American Revolution.

In The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Wood approaches an American identity in flux between a hierarchical society and a more egalitarian early national period focusing mainly on the boundaries between social stations. Unlike modern societies, Wood suggests that the eighteenth-century American colonies lacked the type of class consciousness and cohesion that would characterize late-nineteenth and twentieth-century societies. Instead, colonists in America saw themselves as part of a hierarchical, monarchical order that related numerous Britons through a common tie with the king.[2] These numerous individual ties to a monarchical hierarchy coupled with small cities, compared to those of the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries, created a world in which people who knew those around them interacted with these numerous other people with a clear idea of where each of them fit within this social hierarchy. In this way, colonists in America created their identity in relation to their place on the social-ladder or who they were above and below on that ladder. Identity boundaries were quite literal in the eighteenth-century world described by Wood; there were definite ways to act around one’s superiors and one’s inferiors. For example, one advice manual directed one to be “courteous and fair spoken” with superiors and “not overly familiar or surly” with inferiors.[3] Furthermore, one’s title indicated his identity within the social order. Wood argues that titles like “‘Mr.,’ ‘Esq.,’ [or] ‘Yeoman,’[…] were virtually part of a person’s name.”[4] Through both their relation to others in the social order and the tying of a title to their bodies, Wood suggests that American colonists structured their individual identities within the larger social order against those immediately (and locally) above and below them.

Structuring one’s identity in a hierarchical, monarchical structure did not mean that the men and women in the America did not value liberty. With a tradition of habeas corpus, trials by jury, freedom of speech, and opposition to a standing army, the English and their colonists in America saw themselves as the freest people on earth.[5] Bernard Bailyn pays particular attention to this ideology of liberty in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, in which he concentrates on how American colonists created an ideological identity that caused the colonies to separate from Britain. Political writers during the mid to late eighteenth-century disseminated the intellectual material that helped to solidify this ideological identity within political pamphlets. The Revolutionary identity that formed as a result of these writings was structured by five strains of thought. First, educated American colonists were learned in the classics and quoted the likes of Homer and Aristotle, but these classical writers supplied more of a vocabulary of Revolution than an intellectual framework.[6] Next, Revolutionary writers often cited  Enlightenment texts like those of Locke, Montesquieu, and Beccaria to sharpen their critiques of government, liberty, and law, while writers, like Hobbes, who were seen to be enemies of the Enlightenment were scorned by Revolutionary pamphleteers.[7] Third, pamphleteers used British common law to emphasize their writings’ relationship to British liberty and past precedent.[8] The fourth strain of thought, Puritanism, served to imbibe the Revolutionary generation with the sense that its actions had cosmic repercussions and the American colonies were meant to be an ideal society crafted by God.[9] Finally, all four of these strains, the Classics, the Enlightenment, British common law, and Puritanism were filtered through the thought that came out of the English Civil War, specifically the thoughts of eighteenth-century radicals who applied the ideas of the Civil War, with all its fears of liberty under siege, to eighteenth-century politics.[10] Once the first four strains were combined with the tradition of the English Civil War, the ideological identity fostered by the pamphleteers in the American colonies was, foremost, a paranoid, Revolutionary identity convinced “of a comprehensive conspiracy against liberty throughout the English speaking world.”[11]

Taken in tandem, Bailyn’s study fits well with Wood’s. While Bailyn shows how the upper echelon of Wood’s colonial hierarchy formed the ideology of revolution, Wood’s volume gives readers a roadmap that shows how these ideas would have flowed from the top of colonial society to the lower levels. In this way, the colonial identities that Wood and Bailyn discuss form a single identity that consists of paranoia concerning liberty under assault seated well within a hierarchical, monarchical system. However, according to Wood, the Revolution changed this structured, paranoid American identity radically destroying the bonds of kinship, patriarchy and patronage that had held colonial society together.[12]

While Wood and Bailyn’s studies, taken together, provide a seemingly complete picture of American identity during the Revolutionary period, Richard Bushman complicates Wood’s argument for the post-revolution collapse of the structures that helped create that identity. In The Refinement of America, Bushman looks at the material culture in the colonial period and the nineteenth-century. He suggests that public performance of genteel manners, construction of elaborate houses, and consumption of goods such as silverware and candlesticks helped create an elite society with a “genteel” identity.[13] Unlike the identity of Wood’s colonists who were steeped in the social hierarchy of face to face interactions, Bushman emphasizes performance and consumption as creating the boundaries of genteel society. For example certain objects, like a fine tea set, aside from being genteel in their price and look imply rituals, like high-tea.[14] Similarly, building a mansion could set oneself apart from others in society as genteel.[15] In this way, American colonists created a literal material hierarchy of gentility that would not have been so easily destroyed by political revolution. Gentility provided structure to Wood’s eighteenth-century boundaries and, seemingly continued to provide a rather sound hierarchical identity differentiating the genteel from middling sorts and eventually the middle-class and the working-class. Even in the post- Civil War period one could observe the buttressed boundaries of gentility particularly through the ways in which popular publications mocked the black middle-class for identifying with gentility.[16] The resilience of the boundaries of gentility should give one pause about accepting Wood’s argument about a radical change in American identity in the post-revolution period.

So, if the simple folk truly “sit around and wonder what Royal [or at least genteel] folk would do,” then Wood, with Bailyn’s help, and Bushman have painted a convincing picture of American identity. Wood’s depiction of a ridged hierarchy instrumental in eighteenth-century identity construction seems logical considering the successful dissemination of Revolutionary ideas from the top down in Bailyn’s work. However, when Bushman focuses the reader’s gaze on gentility, Wood’s assertion of a social order falling apart in the post-revolution era seems suspect as Bushman’s subjects maintained material boundaries denying entry into the genteel society and claims to genteel identity.

 

[1] Camelot, Alan J. Lerner and Frederick Loewe, directed by Moss Hart, 1960.

[2] Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 11.

[3] Ibid; 24.

[4] Ibid, 21.

[5] Ibid., 13.

[6] Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), 23-26.

[7] Ibid., 27-28.

[8] Ibid., 31.

[9] Ibid., 32.

[10] Ibid., 34-35.

[11] Ibid., xiii.

[12] Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 229.

[13] Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities  (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), xiv.

[14] Ibid., 19.

[15] Ibid., 24.

[16] Ibid., 438-440.

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Review: The Corporate-Matrimonial Complex: Masculinity in the Twentieth-Century

Posted on January 22, 2012 by J.K. Friefeld

Ehrenreich, Barbara. The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment. Garden City, NY, Anchor Press, 1983.

By: Brandon Locke

Barbara Ehrenreich’s The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment examines the economic agreement between men and women in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Barbara Ehrenreich earned a PhD in Cellular Biology, but has worked as a journalist and author for the better part of the last four decades. She is a noted feminist, democratic socialist, and political activist, best known for her 2001 book on the working poor, entitled Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. In The Hearts of Men, Ehrenreich focuses on the effects of the financial system that consumed marital life during the time, and the eventual flight from it. She argues that the single-breadwinner home is damaging for both men and women, though she focuses primarily on the ills it brought to men and the ways in which they responded. Through this examination, Ehrenreich examines the roots of the flight from marriage and shows that the well-studied Feminist Movement (which focused on work and fair wages) was only one side of a larger rejection of this system. She closes by showing that men were able to break the constraints of the single-breadwinner marriage first, but left women behind, stuck in the same economic prison.

Ehrenreich begins in the 1950s, with the breadwinner ethic that created the dependence of women upon men in a single-income family. Her explanation of the path leading to this system is a bit sparse, but she puts most of the blame on the rise of the industrial economy. The agrarian family of the pre-industrial era was a unit of production that was bound to each other for economic survival.[1] Following industrialization, men began earning a “family wage,” and women, generally unable to secure well-paying jobs, were completely reliant upon men for survival. Building on Claude Levi-Strauss’s gendered labor divisions, well paying jobs were labeled ‘male,’ leaving women dependent upon men for economic survival.[2] This social constraint made it difficult (if not impossible) for women to financially survive on their own.

From this introduction to the system, she moves into the social factors that were used to keep men restrained to this economic role. Although a number of government policies backed the institution of marriage, including welfare and social security benefits, she primarily focuses on the social side of the economic system that perpetuated inequality and forced the breadwinner role upon men. Psychiatry developed many theories that supported the idea that marriage and the breadwinner role were the only normal state for adult males, with unwanted diagnoses to explain men that desired other roles.[3]  These men were often labeled as homosexual or mentally inept.[4] Homosexuals were thought to be in a perpetual state of adolescence and immaturity, and homosexuality was thought to be the ultimate escapism for men that just couldn’t handle the burdens of the family.[5] Riesman’s “other-directed men,” who exhibited feminine “softness” were deemed to be far too focused on their feelings to tackle the hard tasks that were required as a male breadwinner.[6] Because of the centrality of the workplace to masculine conceptions and economic needs, men who were feeling overwhelmed began complaining about the imposition of women in their lives, and talking about the strains of the growing American “matriarchy” rather than blaming the corporate world.[7]

Ehrenreich argues that men began to rebel against this corporate-matrimonial complex (my words) in a number of ways throughout the 1950s, and many influential social critics and respected scientists backed the cause. Hugh Hefner’s “Playboy,” first published in 1953, encouraged men to take their economic advantage and use it to pursue their own pleasures. Hefner and the writers at Playboy recognized the earning power of men, and depicted women as a needless limit on the freedom and fun that could be attained with earnings. Hefner created an image of women as money hungry and as controlling men. Playboy was among the leading proponents of the “marriage is prison” ideology, and did so in an incredibly misogynistic way. Ehrenreich places Hefner’s new male persona not in the realm of sexuality, but in male consumption and “freedom” from domestic life. Though many see Playboy as the harbinger of sexuality and sexual freedom, she places much more weight on its cultural impact. “Playboy was not the voice of the sexual revolution, which began, at least overtly, in the sixties, but of the male rebellion, which had begun in the fifties.”[8] She argues that nude women in Playboy were simply a counter-balance to the ideas they were pushing about leaving the marriage behind.[9] If a man were to do as Hefner encouraged, to brush aside women and marriage to pursue his fine tastes, he would be outcast by other men, accused of being homosexual, having a mental disorder, or having a serious lack of responsibility. By placing nude women amongst the encouragement to spurn marriage and enjoy wine and fine art, Ehrenreich argues that the magazine was bolstering the idea of heterosexuality for these new gender rebels.

The Beat writers also represented a major departure from the idea of single-breadwinner households. Unlike Hefner, they threw both the corporate world and the institution of marriage aside, and embraced the rebel ideal. In a departure from the machismo-ridden rebellion from the era, the Beatniks’ pursued free (sometimes homosexual) sex, the bohemian lifestyle, and the fine arts. The Beats were a target of ridicule from the mainstream, government, and even Playboy, charging them with all of the classic ideas about men who resisted the breadwinner role: childish, effeminate, criminal, and mentally ill. The Beats were widely smeared by many different facets of society, being labeled as anti-intellectual and violent, though both were resoundingly untrue.[10]

While many men were rebelling against the “confines” of marriage, scientists were beginning to argue that the standard male breadwinner role was harmful to men, both physically and mentally. The 20th Century brought a peculiar shift in the life expectancy between the sexes. Throughout the 19th Century, men outlived women. In 1920, women outlived women by two years, and by 1970, women’s life expectancy was 8 years longer than men’s.[11] Women, who previously had much shorter life expectancies than men, were beginning to outlive men at increasing rates, and the predominant medical opinion began to shift from genetic factors to social factors that influenced lifestyles.[12] Heart disease and unhappiness was blamed on the stresses of work and living up to expectations, lending credibility to the dissent away from the breadwinner economy and familial struggle.

Ehrenreich finds the (re)emergence of women in the workplace through the 1960s to be essential to women’s liberation, though it ultimately failed to re-center the gendered economic system. Through the 1960s, women were entering the workforce at about one million per year, meaning that, “…the old financial pact between the sexes could, at the very least, be renegotiated…”[13] Men remained attached to their privilege, and the male workforce was still central to masculine conceptions during the era, with men that avoided the burden of breadwinning labeled as a “failure or a faggot.”[14] Ehrenreich argues for a slight shift in this masculine binary during the late 1960s, owing to the unpopularity of the Vietnam War and the horrific stories of returning veterans. [15] Cold War machismo also began to die off, leading to an “androgynous drift,” where mainstream American men slowly warmed up to the traits of the counterculture, such as sideburns, art, and wine. Ehrenreich argues that the loosening of machismoist masculinity was the primary reasoning behind women’s emergence, rather than the acceptance of women’s skills or the acknowledgement of civil rights and fairness. Ehrenreich also suggests that homosexuals were distanced from heterosexuals; either as a distinct alternative lifestyle, or that of a gay people throughout the early 1970s.[16] This distinction made it easier for men to “soften” without being labeled effeminate or homosexual.

As more women entered the workplace, social forces against single men loosened, further freeing men from marriage and the breadwinner role.  The men’s liberation movement allowed men to air their grievances about marriage as a criticism of the system, rather than a criticism of women.[17] In 1974, Warren Farrell came out with a successful book entitled The Liberated Man where he laid out twenty-one areas where men can benefit from women’s liberation.[18] Ideas about a “liberation from marriage” became much more accepted amongst the population through the 1960s and 1970s. In 1957, 53 percent of Americans believed that unmarried people were “sick,” “immoral,” or “neurotic;” by 1976, 33 percent had negative attitudes towards the unmarried, and many more were neutral or approving.[19]

Just as men were becoming more accepting of the feminist movement and an equalization of gender roles, an antifeminist assault began on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The backlash against the ERA, which would have rendered unconstitutional many state laws that limited women’s rights, was largely executed by women. These “antifeminists,” as Ehrenreich dubs them, hailed the ERA as an assault on women, which limited their “right to be housewives” and eliminated similar “privileges” that some women felt they had by not being expected to earn incomes.[20] Many of the women argued that the ERA would give men the full right to abandon women and no longer pay their way.[21] Ehrenreich compares several quotes from Phyllis Schlafly and other antifeminists to quotes from the misogynist Playboy, arguing that women spend all of men’s money and are dependent upon them to survive. Ehrenreich’s criticism of the antifeminist movement delves deeply into the movements connections with the John Birch Society and other right-wing organizations.[22]

Ehrenreich is, foremost, an activist and journalist, not a historian, and her background and focus do show through and cloud her historical analysis from time to time. She shows a lack of historicism, situating her narrative of ill-feelings, female dependence, and entrapment towards marriage as largely beginning in the 1950s. She blames this financial dependence on urbanization and industrialization, trends that began long before the 1950s, and she cites complaints that have been quite ubiquitous for at least a century, often flaring up during times of social change.[23] She doesn’t acknowledge that these predated her rebellion by quite some time. Though this may not derail her argument, she should acknowledge that these feelings existed for at least a generation, and these men may have had their own methods of rebellion that should be included or acknowledged. While her chosen time period may be the result of a tipping point that accelerated the issues or a variety of other factors, the past issues should not be ignored.

Ehrenreich’s study of the Beat Generation is a bit simplistic and underdeveloped, missing a very important aspect of their relationship with mainstream society. She cherry picks some examples of irresponsibility and rebellion against marriage (Kerouac and Cassidy abandoning women, Burroughs accidentally shooting his wife, Ginsberg’s homosexuality), and sums everything up by saying that they had their own sort of rebellious masculinity.[24] She ignores that these men were outcast by society at the same time that they were rejecting the socially prescribed responsibilities and norms. The three major Beat writers (Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs) were all disqualified from military service, thus alienating them from their generation, the “manly obligation” to serve their country, and the benefits that came to veterans. Although they did rebel against the corporate-matrimonial complex, they all carried these sorts of masculine suspicions prior to their rebellion, and were not subject to the “breadwinner subsidies” afforded to many other men of their generation. While this does not necessarily disqualify her argument, it certainly requires more delicate research and explanation than she currently has.

Ehrenreich’s final chapter on the ERA does something of a disservice to her overall argument. There is no doubt that her book is an appeal to men (and, to some extent, “antifeminists”) to pick up the feminist cause. Although her political motives are clear, her book is generally fair, well-researched, and informative. Her argument gets a bit lost in her section on antifeminists, as much of the chapter reads as a personal attack on Phyllis Schlafly and the other opponents of the ERA. Much of her criticism is focused on their ideas about women’s financial dependence on men and the “privilege” of not working, but the individual histories of antifeminists and their associations with the John Birch Society stand outside of the necessary arguments. Besides this slight departure, her argument stayed on track and was generally strong and concise. There were, however, a few places where she either missed an important topic, or could have scrutinized a topic more closely.

Although her focus was on the social and economic forces that created and upheld the breadwinner system, she fails to acknowledge the government’s role. Social security and some other welfare programs were only paid to men for much of this time, meaning that women were completely dependent for any public assistance.[25] There were many rules about property ownership that made it difficult or impossible for women to own businesses or land. Government support of the male breadwinner is an essential part of this narrative, and created a major barrier for women and excluded men to overcome.

Despite these shortcomings, however, Ehrenreich’s economic study of the family is a valuable contribution to the understanding of the changes that occurred to marriage in the 1950s and 1960s. Ehrenreich’s work certainly problematizes the long-standing idea of companionate marriage, which is largely based on the idea that marriage was becoming centered on mutual decision making, love, and affection. The historiography generally regards it as blossoming in the 1920s and coming to full fruition in the 1950s. However, Ehrenreich’s work places the financial bond between spouses – not shared decisions and emotions – as the underpinnings of marriage. Ehrenreich’s work clashes with the existing companionate narrative, showing that women were yet to have financial (that is, earning) power, and were tied to marriage by the system. Her work therefore calls for a serious re-situation of companionate marriage; reinserting the economic and necessity of marriage to men and women alike, with the companionate turn as a function of the slow undercurrent of a feminine presence in the public sphere. Once this economic and social dependence was loosened, companionship could more truly flourish.


[1]Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1983), 4.

[2] Ehrenreich, 7-8.

[3] Ehrenreich, 15.

[4] Ehrenreich, 24, 34.

[5] Ehrenreich, 24.

[6] Ehrenreich, 34.

[7] Ehrenreich, 36.

[8] Ehrenreich, 51.

[9] Ehrenreich, 51.

[10] Ehrenreich, 58.

[11] Ehrenreich, 70.

[12] Ehrenreich, 70.

[13] Ehrenreich, 99.

[14] Ehrenreich, 104.

[15] Ehrenreich, 105.

[16] Ehrenreich, 128.

[17] Ehrenreich, 118.

[18] Ehrenreich, 118.

[19] Ehrenreich, 120.

[20] Ehrenreich, 146.

[21] Ehrenreich, 149.

[22] Ehrenreich, 157-60.

[23] Michael Kimmel’s Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, 1996) describes the way in which men in the 1920s complained about demanding women and the supposed feminization of the workplace. Sharon Ullman’s Sex Seen: The Emergence of Modern Sexuality in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) finds that men during this time period created the “nag” archetype in movies that depicted women as overbearing and demanding in response to anxieties about the constraint of men.[23]

[24] Ehrenreich, 54.

[25] Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 132.

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Happy New Year!

Posted on January 5, 2012 by J.K. Friefeld

Happy 2012, everyone! We’ll have a new article up soon. Until then, I hope everyone attending AHA 2012 has an enjoyable (and safe!) weekend. Hope to see you there.

-J.K. Friefeld

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Review: Myths in Military History

Posted on December 22, 2011 by J.K. Friefeld

William Weir, Secrets of Warfare: Exposing the Myths and Hidden History of Weapons and Battles (Pompton Plains, New Jersey: New Page Books, 2011).

By: Jacob K. Friefeld

The holiday season often features grown children wandering through bookstores (or Amazon) searching for popular histories to buy dad (or perhaps mom) . This year, William Weir’s Secrets of Warfare: Exposing the Myths and Hidden History of Weapons and Battles could be just what the history lover in the family wants. In his new book, Weir attempts to set the record straight on several misconceptions in military history. At times his work achieves its goal like when it undermines narratives of deep cultural and historical roots for “Western” military supremacy or when it points out that while English archers may have been superior in number and firing speed to French crossbowmen, the longbow was not the perfect weapon as myth has raised it to be (17-26 and 48-49). However, at times, Weir is less helpful. For example, his claim that the first ironclad battle took place between Korea and Japan in the 1500s is problematic and hotly contested by a number of historians. Furthermore, more than one of his myths are awkwardly constructed. As in the case of his myth that “Latin American Warfare was Never Serious,” this myth seems little more than a straw man manufactured simply to allow Weir to discuss Latin American warfare. While I discourage professional historians from using this volume for anything other than supplementary readings in undergraduate courses, the lay reader may find Secrets of Warfare an entertaining introduction to military history.

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The Corrupt Network: Meanings of the Grand Rapids Water Scandal

Posted on December 16, 2011 by J.K. Friefeld

Brian Sarnacki developed “The Corrupt Network” during History 970: Digital History Seminar at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This digital project visualizes and explores some of the ideas from his Master’s thesis on the Grand Rapids water scandal and its larger meanings in the context of men of the slow adaptation of Progressive ethics.

The Corrupt Network

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On Our Way for the Sunny South, Land of Chivalry: Northern War Travelogues and the Southern Landscape

Posted on November 5, 2011 by J.K. Friefeld

By: Kaci Nash

“On Our Way for the Sunny South, Land of Chivalry,” is a work of digital scholarship initially created by Kaci Nash in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a graduate research seminar in Digital History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Both the project and research will be integrated into Nash’s Master’s thesis.

 

On Our Way for the Sunny South, Land of Chivalry

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