- Star Wars series in 10 minute bits (I can't believe the copyright lawyers haven't taken this down!)
- Contemporary re-use of the "tea party protest" (ironically, another anti-radical "rebellion" manipulated by powerful interests)
In the headnote it’s mentioned that “the first newspaper was appeared in 1704, and by the time of the Revolution there were almost fifty papers and forty magazines” (156). I wonder what the role of these media played during the not-mentioned 70 years. Who are the major audience of these media? How strong their voices were and what proportion of people in American at that time was literate? In my anticipation, there were little people who were literate; therefore, the media were, in some way, controlled by them. If this was true, was the outcome of the revolution truly “public”? I would like to know whether my theory is correct or not.
I gave a preliminary answer at the end of class, and you can see how this relates to the broader concepts we discussed. In the Enlightenment/Rationalist/Modern European political theory, every person is a writer and a reader because every person can create knowledge. Society is artificially composed of the collaboration and/or competition between these people to create and apply their knowledge. In PreModern/Medieval Europe, the only sources of knowledge are the monarch, the academic authorities (interpreters of Greek philosophy, principally Aristotle), and the religious authorities (interpreters of the Bible... and in truth these last two are a single intellectual class, which is affiliated with the monarchies!). Traditional knowledge is considered to be belong only to some people (a central language of power - Latin, like its equivalent Mandarin), and the content of this knowledge is always the same. What is its content? Well, its content basically says that on heaven all can be equal but on earth there are people who naturally will/should control power and information (the Christian synthesis: "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's"). It's a big circle. Even if the circle "overturns" in revolution, you have a new ruling dynasty with a very similar ideology.
During the PreModern/Medieval era, the centers of learning in the West were the Islamic kingdoms, where human reason was taken to be a force for good in the universe. (We tend to forget this now!) Literacy and knowledge were highly concentrated in Europe; in truth Europe was intellectually dead. With the European "Renaissance" you have the re-adoption of the true content of ancient Greek & Roman learning and knowledge, but more importantly of the true spirit... this means that new knowledge is possible, new political forms are possible. And new languages... consider the invention of new non-Latin languages that we see come to flower in Cervantes (Spanish), Shakespeare (British), Dante (Italian), and Rabelais (French). Another important development is the invention of the printing press in Germany by Gutenberg. Of course the press had already been invented in China, but in Europe its usage spread much more rapidly and its political character changed more rapidly. We can see how the printing press, together with the new science of a "rational universe" and the new political philosophy of an "artificial" society created by human agents that approximated rational natural/physical laws, could threaten the traditional power of the monarchs and the Catholic church. (We must also consider how the age of exploration and trade, the early colonialism of Columbus, Cabeza de Vaca, Smith, etc. created the "volatility" and interchange that made these shifts possible.)
Now where does America come in? Literacy in the "vernacular languages" (that is, languages newer than Latin, as mentioned previously) developed most rapidly in England, because England was the nation with a political and economic system (and geographic position) most favorable to the emergence of capitalism. But literacy would develop even more quickly in Britain's American colonies. The printing technology in America was worse and the transportation problems were greater, but we may say that the incentive to read and write was greater, because political and economic "volatility" on the outskirts of the British empire made it possible to realize the Modern political theory of political subjects creating their own destiny. You want to be able to read and write because you have the ability to conduct small scale business and small scale politics without an imperial authority over-ruling you (it is too distant, and in the commercialistic British system too disinterested). I simplify, of course. This is not necessarily how British-Americans viewed their life at the time. Many believed in a "natural" or cyclical process of revolution or change; they believed they were returning to be more like the primitive British or perhaps the primitive Christians/Jews or perhaps the primitive Romans. But we may say in hindsight that the underlying structural conditions encouraged the growth of Modern tendencies in their politics.
So Americans are readers and writers. And the American printing network has a unique character; it is radically decentralized unlike the one in England. This, along with the high literacy (perhaps 40% of all people in the northeast - even some women, remember Ann Bradstreet - perhaps more like 5% in the southeast - but that includes the slaves, so still 20% of the creoles), makes the system itself democratic in character even if the messages transmitted in the system are not. Once the printers were radicalized against the British rule by the Stamp Act, the system of printing and distribution becomes a kind of revolutionary network, one of the first areas in which British, Dutch, German, Scotch, etc. "creoles" living under the British empire begin to imagine that they were / could be be a union with common interests. The printers, of course, are also aligned with commercial interests, with the merchants and small bankers of New England in particular (i.e. Boston and the far northeast region). And New England has the highest literacy of all. So it becomes the revolutionary core, and the challenge is then to motivate others to join. First, to motivate those who control the agricultural centers in the Southeast. Second, to motivate the lower social classes who do not hold their own farms or their own capital. Neither of these groups has any special motivation to resist British power.
Here we see the broadening of revolutionary rhetoric in Jefferson and Paine, men whose thinking has a somewhat more radical character than that of the Boston men like John Adams, Samuel Adams, Hancock, etc., and their conservative allies in the southeast and middle states like Madison, Franklin, Washington, Hamilton. Once the door is opened, once a revolutionary panic has been declared, all creoles (and perhaps even some blacks and aboriginals) can be united temporarily by the "broad" or "plastic" concepts like liberty, freedom, etc. The decentralized nature of the printing network encourages this. Thus when the revolution is successful and the creole ruling class (those who hold land and capital; those who actually wanted this "revolution" to defend their rights as British subjects) want to re-establish their power, to re-centralize their power, the printing network is now actually a source of irritation. Because the printing network is still decentralized. It can still transmit more "radical" sorts of messages to a broader public. One of these radical messages is that any man who has basic reading skills can be a political participant, and if this man has no land or capital, he can be freely given land on the western frontier. So now any (white) man can become one of Crevecouer's virtuous farmers. This is the true political message of Thomas Jefferson. This is what he means by "all men created equal," an idea actually more radical than that of the Congress or the eventual political Constitution.
So you see, Rea's excellent question is anticipates our entire class discussion!
Other details that we were unable to discuss... what about the specific editorial changes made by the revolutionary Congress to Jefferson's Declaration? Sherry and Jennie offer some very good theories in the previous blog comments. Jennie, for instance, observes that Jefferson's accusation against the British king for causing the African slave trade is deleted because for the American creoles, "blaming the British on this point is blaming themselves too." The logic here is so ludicrously absurd and hypocritical that it deserves mention, given that this is the founding political document of the most powerful country in the history of the world. How could it be the British king's sole fault that British-American agriculturalists and merchants practice slavery? The deletion is made not only for persuasive or rhetorical reasons, but also for practical reasons... the American creoles in the southeast want to continue to practice slavery! And the ones in the northeast want to continue to benefit financially from it! Jefferson himself is a slaveholder when he writes this document! This is an example of the door swinging wider than he can control; the Declaration will be used for 230 years thereafter as proof that African-Americans should have equal political and economic rights. Now you may ask why a southeastern man, a slaveholder like Jefferson, was asked to author this document representing the revolutionary philosophy of the northeastern merchants. The first reason is because he was a southeasterner and would give the appearance of a broader political coalition. The second is because somewhat like Paine he had a true writing genius for expressing modern political thought in simple terms.
You can also see Jefferson's somewhat more radical cast of mind with his use of "expunge" the British government at the bottom of 342. The Congress changes it to "alter" the British government, as Jennie points out. This is an important difference. As you see by reading Hamilton's first issue of the "Federalist," it isn't even clear that the revolutionary class wanted to alter the government. They liked the British government in theory, but they thought it was corrupt in practice. So they wanted to create their own Britain. Perhaps even their own British "empire"; I see Hamilton's use of the term on 347 as a kind of slip or mistake. Usually he uses happy words for power like "energy" and "vigor" to conceal that he is re-interpreting the revolutionary panic toward his specific interest, along conservative lines.
Jennie also points out that even after the revolution, the main cultural twin and economic ally of the U.S. is Britain. So why antagonize them unnecessarily (thus "he, he, he, he")? There would even be a second war between the U.S. and Britain from 1812-1815, a kind of offshoot of Britain's war with Napoleon, but also a war over territorial and commercial control of U.S. lands and shipping routes. And Americans would "hate" the British until the end of the 1800s. But they were still the main cultural and economic center for the U.S.; almost like the relationship between ROC and PRC in some ways (perhaps in reverse?). Another notable difference... see how the Congress inserted a long religious addition on the right column of 346 ("the supreme judge of the world") which is entirely absent in Jefferson's original. Because as I have said, he is essentially a secularist or modernist when it comes to religion; a radical. The limit of his radicalism is his philosophy about the aboriginals and the blacks, which we will encounter later in the course. Jefferson's idea of all (white) men being (more or less, relatively speaking) political and economic equals would soon become true in practice as well as theory.
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