H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-SHEAR@h-net.msu.edu (August 2008)

J. M. Opal. _Beyond the Farm: National Ambitions in Rural New England_.
Early American Studies Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2008. 280 pp. Illustrations, list of abbreviations, notes, index.
$39.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8122-4062-6.

Reviewed for H-SHEAR by Johann Neem, Department of History, Western
Washington University

Making Self-Made Men

Rural Americans in the early Republic discovered that they were capable of
being much more than what their fathers had been.  This assumption, that
hard work--what was then called enterprise and self-improvement--could make
one better than one's original lot, was a fundamental change in how young
rural American men thought about their own identities and lives.  It
required, first, recognizing that change was good, and that one could and
even should reject one's family's longstanding practices.  The second,
central to J. M. Opal's argument in this insightful, well-written book, was
ambition--the fostering of a desire to improve one's self, to better one's
own lot in life.

Opal frames his study around the lives of six young rural New England men
who grew up in relative obscurity but were transformed by the emergence of a
new American nation committed to encouraging their ambition by providing
them new opportunities to improve themselves.  As they left home to try new
things in new places, they also became more cosmopolitan, more aware of what
life might offer a young man on the make outside the provincial farm and
town where he had grown up.  Moreover, as they moved from town to city and
as they gained education in the young Republic's new academies, they
experienced tension between the expectations of their parents and the
community in which they were raised and the new opportunities and
possibilities before them.  What kind of man ought one to be in this new
nation?

Opal helps us understand the nuanced, tension-fraught, and uncertain ways in
which ordinary people negotiated major changes in society and in their own
lives.  His biographical approach illuminates how large abstract trends
identified by other historians--modernization, democratization, the market
and industrial revolutions, the transportation revolution, the spread of
consumer culture and its embodiment in the ideal of refinement, and
domesticity--all intersected with a new nationalism that sought to transform
parochial, isolated individuals into citizens of a nation committed to
progress.  As young men following the Revolution were self-consciously
encouraged to participate in national public life, their entire
self-conception changed--what they had taken for granted now seemed backward
and limited.  New horizons were opened up that enabled them to enter,
participate in, and further all the major trends listed above.

Gordon S. Wood has traced the broad contours of these changes.  In his
_Radicalism of the American Revolution_ (1991), Wood explains how a
relatively traditional colonial society became, by the 1830s, an
individualistic, egalitarian, free market society in which ordinary people
were urged to pursue their own interests.  Alexis de Tocqueville observed
this transformation in American life in _Democracy in America_ (1835, 1840).
Set loose from the moorings that had once held people in place in a
vertically organized society, democracy--as an idea and an
experience--liberated people from inherited positions.  It also sundered the
chains that had once held society together, connecting peasants to nobles,
nobles to the king, and the king to God.  More recently, Charles Taylor in
_Modern Social Imaginaries_ (2004) argues that modernity itself depends on
the disruptions Tocqueville witnessed and Wood articulated.  People long
assumed that the social order and their place within it were eternal, but
now it could be changed.  They also assumed that the social order was
natural and divine, but now we see it as a product of human artifice.  This
transformation in Americans' understanding of the social order allowed young
men, like those Opal follows, to leave their farms to find their own
fortune.

But how did this happen?  It took not just the democratic revolution in
ideas about individuals and society but the market revolution as well.  And
here, Opal provides a new perspective on how and why rural Americans
embraced market behavior following the American Revolution.  Modifying
Christopher Clark's argument, in _The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western
Massachusetts, 1780-1860_ (1990), that eighteenth-century rural Americans
sought to sustain independent households, Opal argues that intellectual
changes connected with the formation of the new Republic--a national
government that created a new social imaginary--preceded the material forces
that Clark and others have invoked to explain the market revolution.  In
other words, ideas about personal economic behavior shifted before economic
realities made it necessary to do so.[1]

But what were these ideas and where did they come from?  One of the ongoing
debates concerning America's embrace of capitalism has to do with who is to
blame or, depending on one's persuasion, thank.  For many historians, there
are clear villains (or heroes)--elites who had the most to gain and imposed
their monetary policy, corporations, and industrial labor systems on an
unwilling, hesitant population.  Others respond that, whatever one may wish
to say, ordinary Americans embraced what markets made available.  They
enjoyed the opportunity to sell more surplus in return for consuming more
goods and gaining access to the refinement that had once been reserved for
elites.  Even if many Americans resisted the specific economic policies of
the Federalist and later Whig elite, they were thrilled by the freedoms and
opportunities that free markets made available--in other words, they fought
over specifics but not over capitalism and markets themselves.  Clark
provided a middle ground, an exploration of how and why household heads, in
their effort to sustain their family's traditional independence, their
"competence," slowly embraced more market activities as economic conditions
made doing so necessary.  The result was a gradual transformation in
economic practices that, over several decades, undermined the economic
foundations for the traditional New England household economy.[2]

Opal disagrees.  Following ratification of the Constitution, Opal writes,
"came a widespread effort to uproot households and communities from their
provincial identities and align them with national judgments of self and
success, value and virtue, public need and personal worth."  This was a
"discernable project" undertaken by cosmopolitan national elites who
envisioned a great Republic that could rival Europe (p. ix).  This project
required inculcating ambition in the rising generation, a generation that
assumed that it would inherit its place in society rather than make it.
Opal's key point is that economic necessity initially did not spur young men
to embrace market behavior.  Rather, it had to do with new ideas that
connected economic improvement, both collective and individual, to the new
nation: "Before it became a casualty of the market and industrial economy
... the independent home was the target of a cultural endeavor.  Ambition
had emerged in the United States as a personal and national ideal before it
evolved into a social necessity" (p. 180).

Opal notes that ambition was long understood as both a threat and a benefit.
Since classical times, ambition could endanger society--as Julius Caesar
did--but it could also spur heroic acts for the public good.  America's
enlightened founding fathers hoped not just to inculcate ambition in
America's youth but to channel it to serve the public good.  They did not do
so by employing Bernard Mandeville's method, letting private vices free in
the faith that ultimately they would serve the common good.  Instead, they
hoped that ambitious young men would connect their efforts to improve their
own lot in life to serving the Republic.  Progress depended on improving the
Republic's economic, social, and intellectual life, and this required
striving individuals who would seek to move beyond their condition.  In
essence, national elites urged Americans to improve themselves as an act of
patriotism, and to be careful that as they embraced new careers, they
consciously connected their own actions to the larger public good.  An
ambitious young man must not only make himself but also must earn a
reputation as a public servant.

Opal's book offers a new twist on the Progressive interpretation of the
founding.  While Opal's nationalist elites--the Hamiltonians and their
ilk--are now no longer serving their base economic interests as Charles
Beard (_An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States_
[1913]) and more recently Woody Holton (_Unruly Americans and the Origins of
the Constitution_ [2007]) argue, they are still imposing a new conception of
social and economic life on rural people to further their own goals.  Opal
argues that the broad changes in young men's lives that he chronicles are
due to elites' power to effect cultural change or, if one was a bit more
skeptical, their hegemony.  By imposing new ideas on unsuspecting young men,
by taking them out of their homes and into a larger, national life in which
they could make themselves wealthy and famous, America's national elite
fundamentally transformed the relationship between self and society,
consciously bringing traditional men into modernity.  Opal's founders are
the modernizers, the ones who used the new Constitution to replace
traditional, collective values with modern, liberal, individualistic ones.

Opal helps us understand why a new national social imaginary, premised on
the ambitious, striving behavior of young men, replaced the traditional
household embedded in local, relatively isolated communities.  But his
conclusion reveals the real lesson he takes from his research.  The founders
authorized a selfish society in which individuals sought to better
themselves.  By the antebellum era, Americans celebrated the "self-made
man," forgetting that the self-made man was initially a collective project,
and that the selves they made connected fame and fortune to public service.
The men Opal studies would have been lost in the selfish, individualistic
capitalist society that the American founders inadvertently had created,
because they, like the founders, believed that one's reputation was still
premised in service.  As Opal writes, the men he studied "had all left home
and found society, left family and discovered themselves....  But no matter
how amazed they were at their own passage, they could never have guessed
that the nation they reflected would reinvent them once again, as
'self-made' men within a society to which they owed nothing" (p. 178).

Yet Opal is on to something.  His neo-Progressive subtext is transcended by
his discussion of how new ideas affected the lives of the six young men he
studies.  What he calls ambition is, in fact, the basis of American
liberalism and its liberating spirit.  Opal's case studies, thus, reinforce
recent work by Joyce O. Appleby (_Inheriting the Revolution: The First
Generation of Americans_ [ 2000]) and Daniel Walker Howe (_Making the
American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln_ [1997]) about how and
why Americans learned to engage in self-making, and whether this process was
democratic or whether, as historians inspired by Michel Foucault argue,
liberalism is nothing more than a new form of socially imposed discipline on
unsuspecting people.[3]  Opal helps us see that the combined democratic and
market revolutions helped create a new conception of the self, of
personhood, that cannot be captured by the Foucauldian perspective.
Instead, we must recognize the ways in which the revolutions that
transformed the early American Republic enabled ordinary people to learn
about their innate dignity and inner potential.

More important, Opal argues that it was the national state that helped
liberate people from what Thomas Jefferson described as the "the chains,
under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind
themselves."[4]  National elites had to pry open households to gain access
to their sons, and to teach their sons that they were not obliged to follow
in their fathers' and grandfathers' footsteps but could instead use their
unique talents--their genius--to engage in self-making.  Nationalism,
national greatness, and individual freedom reinforced each other under the
rubric of ambition.

No institution was more important than the academy.  In Opal's best chapter,
he demonstrates how the national elites' goals for the new Republic spurred
the proliferation of private academies around New England.  These academies
were often met with hostility by local communities who saw in them both a
cosmopolitan challenge to their traditional values and a threat to each
household's dependence on their children's labor.  But to the teachers who
opened the academies and the young men who forced, often after much
disagreement, their parents to let them attend, the academies brought new
ideas about the world.  They made their graduates feel that they were
destined for better things than the farm.  At times, they, like many who
leave home, looked back to their upbringing with disdain.  But the academies
also provided opportunities for young men to develop their talents and
discover their potential.  The academies prove that the liberal self was a
social project, one that offered exciting new opportunities for self-making
to young men following the Revolution.  In Opal's assessment, which is
reinforced by Mary Kelley's _Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education,
and Public Life in America's Republic_ (2006) about the transformative
effect of liberal education for young women, the "school became a crucial
vehicle of cultural and personal change, an institutional base for new ways
of thinking and aspiring" (p. 97).

Democratic ambition rejected the classical fear that ambitious elites would
threaten society.  Instead, it redefined ambition as a healthy spur to
self-improvement for all citizens.  If today that drive has led to a
materialistic, shallow, overly individualistic society, we cannot forget
that in the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War it also
liberated the human spirit.  Let us thank Opal, therefore, for historicizing
ambition and its public spiritedness in the past and hope with him that if
ambition "worked differently in the past it might do so in the future" (p.
192).

Notes

[1]. Lawrence A. Peskin, _Manufacturing Revolution: The Intellectual Origins
of Early American Industry_ (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
2003) makes a similar argument about the important role of ideas in laying a
foundation for economic change.

[2]. For discussions of the market revolution, among many sources, see "The
Transition to Capitalism, A Panel Discussion," _The History Teacher_ 27
(1994): 264-288; Michael Merrill, "Putting 'Capitalism' in Its Place: A
Review of Recent Literature," _William and Mary Quarterly_ 52 (April 1995):
315-326; and Gordon S. Wood, "The Enemy is Us: Democratic Capitalism in the
Early Republic," _Journal of the Early Republic_ 16 (summer 1996): 293-308.

[3]. Compare Appleby's and Howe's studies to Michael Meranze, _Laboratories
of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760-1835_
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and James E. Block,
_A Nation of Agents: The American Path to a Modern Self and Society_
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).

[4]. Thomas Jefferson to Roger C. Weightman, June 24, 1826, in _Thomas
Jefferson: Writings_, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America,
1984 ), 1516-17.


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