H-SHEAR FORUM ON DANIEL WALKER HOWE'S _WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT_

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NEXT MONDAY: Mary P. Ryan on Women's History
TODAY: David Henkin on the "Communications Revolution"

Back when the study of history was largely confined to narratives
about nations and their political development, short time periods
provided convenient devices for dividing those narratives into
manageable chapters, courses, or lectures. American historians could
speak confidently of a Progressive Era or an Era of Good Feelings
without worrying too much about the aptness of those titles as
descriptions of all the events and experiences that took place because
it was understood that the period's moniker implied a far narrower
claim. As the discipline expanded its charge to embrace ordinary life,
powerless people, landscapes, material objects, popular beliefs, and
virtually every documentable facet of human experience, it made less
sense to speak of eras. Instead, academic historians designed their
college courses increasingly around specific themes (labor, gender,
religion, sexuality, law, cities) and presented them over larger time
periods, typically a century or longer. If I'm not mistaken, more
recent scholarly trends have further accelerated the shift toward
longer time frames, at least in studies of America before 1920.
Thematic specialization continues, of course, but the frequency with
which younger scholars produce first books (often with the forceful
encouragement of university presses) that traverse traditional
boundaries between historical eras and cover fifty, sixty, one hundred-
sixty year periods is striking. Though works of academic history
embrace all time frames long and short (both 1816 and 1831 have been
subjects for book-length studies in recent years), the conventional
ways of carving up the past seem especially unstable.

Daniel Walker Howe's new book on the history of the United States
between 1815 and 1848 returns to an older model, offering a synthetic
account (if one can accuse a 900-page behemoth of synthesis) of the
period between the end of the War of 1812 and the end of the Mexican-
American War. The Oxford History of the United States, under whose
imprimatur Howe's work appears, reflects and preserves the traditional
approach to American history as consisting of discrete eras, but _What
Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848_, the sixth
title in that eminent series, implicitly offers readers some newer
grounds for thinking about the utility of the concept of the short
period. For starters, the suggestion (not in itself unique to this
period survey) that America entered modernity within the book's 33-
year stretch might support the argument that some short eras are
especially deserving of more chronologically focused attention. But on
a deeper level, Howe's pervasive preoccupation with accelerating rates
of communication raises the possibility that this period was
characterized by changing conditions and perceptions of
contemporaneity--and therefore might warrant a particular approach to
the passage of time.

At the outset, Howe announces that the period under consideration is
best understood as a "communications revolution," and his narrative is
consistently sensitive to two themes in the history of that subject.
First and foremost, he underscores the point that the time it took for
messages to travel from one place to another was crucial to the
unfolding of momentous historical events, especially in the realms of
war and diplomacy. Howe's emphasis on the introduction of the
electromagnetic telegraph (the event from which his Biblical title is
drawn) reflects his larger interest in the diminishing time lag for
information transmission and diffusion. Second, Howe reminds readers
that major religious and social movements depended and capitalized
upon new institutions of long-distance communication (and here he
emphasizes the postal system and the newspaper more than the railroad
and the telegraph, though by the end of his story a powerful
relationship between news gathering and telegraphy was forged in the
form of the Associated Press) to reach their expanding audiences and
achieve their profound impact.

Still, the nature of this communications revolution is hard to pin
down.  Howe prefers this term to two related titles that have been
famously applied to the period--George Rogers Taylor's transportation
revolution and Charles Sellers's market revolution--but the stakes and
implications of this preference are not always clear. Howe
acknowledges that accelerations in communications reflected and
reinforced advances in transportation and that both processes extended
and served market forces, but the overlap among the three terms is
even more significant. Transportation and communication are hard to
distinguish, both in practice (mail carriages, steamboats, and
eventually railroads conveyed both persons and messages in antebellum
America) and even as a matter of definition. The circulation of goods,
persons, and information in the decades Howe studies did not entail
discrete processes, and the argument for privileging information over
the other two never emerges explicitly.

Howe's rejection of the term "market revolution" reflects numerous
developments in the current scholarship, including new research into
the transition to capitalism during earlier periods, that make it
harder to describe market relations or market mentalities in the years
after 1815 as revolutionary in the sense of being profoundly new. Long-
distance communication, of course, was not new to this period either,
but Howe's particular approach to the subject, which emphasizes
technological inventions and innovations, easily embraces the language
of novelty and continually marks new thresholds crossed.  Whether (and
when) innovations such as the telegraph and the railroad
revolutionized experiences of distance, connection, or the passage of
time between 1815 and 1848 (experiences that Sellers associated with
the market) is an important and interesting question that Howe's
narrative cannot satisfactorily answer. A full account of what was
revolutionary about this period in the history of communications in
the U.S. would need to pay sustained attention to more users (rather
than designers and administrators) of networks, would need to expand
the subject beyond long-distance communication and beyond measures of
speed, and would probably de-emphasize technology. As Howe knows well,
information circulated in more forms, along more routes, and with more
complex social implications than the familiar story about steam and
electricity implies.  And adding the post office to the story does not
necessarily explain what was revolutionary about the period presented
in this book. In 1840, Howe notes, the average American received twice
as many live Methodist sermons as posted letters (though posted
newspapers were another story). That disparity would disappear over
the following two decades, but the book's communications revolution
thesis offers little guidance for thinking about the meaning of that
shift.

_What Hath God Wrought_ is not in fact a history of communications,
and does not pretend to be.  Instead it is an updated version of a
traditional narrative about national politics during the period of
American history that is still typically labeled Jacksonian.  Howe's
version of the story is more thorough, patient, and judicious than
that of Sellers and far broader in scope than the corresponding volume
of Sean Wilentz's recent work (and on the whole more persuasive than
either), but Howe shares their overarching pursuit of the ideological
meaning of political conflict during the Second Party System. Howe
studiously avoids (rejects) the term Jacksonian America, not because
it posits partisan politics as the key to understanding life and
thought in the United States, but because it privileges one side of
the partisan divide. _What Hath God Wrought_ essentially privileges
the other side. It is a Whig history, not in Herbert Butterfield's
sense, but in that it confers coherence, centrality, and far-reaching
significance upon a political program of national economic
development, public education, religious revival, and moral self-
improvement that created and defined the opposition to Jackson.

Though tendentious, Howe's approach reflects an unmistakable trend in
the current scholarship toward rosier assessments off the Whigs at the
expense of their Jacksonian adversaries. Fifteen years ago it was far
more common for historians to contrast the Democrats' populism,
commitment to democracy and equality (not simply of opportunity but
also of condition), openness to new immigrants and non-Protestants,
and comfort with the grittiness of an expressive big-city culture with
the Whigs' stuffy gentility, nativist bigotry, evangelical self-
righteousness, and quiescent attitude toward economic inequality. Many
historical factors probably contributed to the decline of this
interpretation, including the end of the Cold War and renewed interest
in globalization and modernization during the telecommunications boom
at century's end, but sympathetic treatments of Jackson and company
suffered most obviously from a growing consensus that slavery, white
supremacy, Indian Removal, and the violent culture of honor (all of
them older topics to which historians were devoting increasing
attention) were central rather ancillary features of the Jacksonian
program. Juxtaposed against that program, Whig interest in restraint,
self-fashioning, and salvation has garnered more sympathy. To Howe,
and to the dominant interpretation his narrative epitomizes, the Whigs
offered a coherent alternative vision that linked economic growth,
technological progress, literacy, and personal transformation. The
nineteenth-century term that encapsulates this vision is
"improvement," and Howe's book is really more about improvement, in
its multiple senses, than it is about communications.

It is worth noting that the current rehabilitation of the Whigs does
not return us to the counter-Progressive view of rival parties without
meaningful ideological differences.  Howe accepts several of the basic
components of the approach that took Jacksonians seriously as
democratic anticapitalists, but simply evaluates them differently.
Democrats were in fact less optimistic than Whigs about the prospects
of economic growth, he allows, but that meant that the Whig program
was better positioned to spread education and revolutionize gender
relations. Democrats were more committed advocates of popular
sovereignty, Howe suggests, but at the expense of the rule of law and
with consequences that promoted neither democracy nor equality. That
Howe tends to overcompensate for some of the biases of earlier
scholarship (underemphasizing or depreciating the experiences and
perspectives of non-Protestants, traditionalist artisans, working-
class rowdies, sporting men, sex workers, sensationalist authors,
popular performers, immigrant pamphleteers, and others) should not
obscure how much his work shares with Sellers and how compatible their
accounts of the period actually are. Even Sellers's notoriously
reductionist distinction between arminian and antinomian religious
outlooks corresponds to Howe's (subtler and more accurate) taxonomy of
premillennialist and postmillennialist strains of evangelical ferment.

Persistent homologies between Howe's pro-Whig survey and the accounts
of its pro-Jackson predecessors underscore how this latest attempt at
synthesis remains attached to an older model of political history.
Howe has read widely in the recent scholarship and touches upon
countless areas of everyday experience that earlier synopses of the
Jacksonian era studiously avoided or blithely ignored. The erudition
is impressive and the versatility admirable. Only in the chapter
entitled "American Renaissance," where he ill-advisedly uses the
Transcendentalists as a springboard for a thin and anemic discussion
of literature and theater, did a subject's distance from the author's
intellectual comfort zone noticeably undermine his command of the
material. For most of the trek, readers will find themselves learning
new things about issues far from the home base of national politics.
But the promise of a survey of social, cultural, and economic change
in this era goes unredeemed.  A communications revolution, like a
market revolution, could form the basis of a more integrated account
of how people's lives changed between 1815 and 1848, but not if
communications (or the market) is treated primarily as an object of
political debate rather than as a social process at work in everyday
life.

Perhaps future attempts by a new generation of historians to justify
the detailed study of a short period of time in nineteenth-century
America will forsake the coherence of established markers of political
transition and try to make their case based on accelerated changes in
lived experience. Howe sets up the expectation early on that such an
argument might be forthcoming, by calling attention to the fact that
Jackson's 1815 victory in New Orleans significantly postdated the
signing of the Treaty of Ghent ending the war. Of course to dwell
excessively on that irony is to retroject later expectations of
simultaneity onto a set of historical circumstances to which they do
not apply. Only within the context of particular experiences of news
transmission do soldiers or commanders take the battlefield in a multi-
continental war imagining a real-time audience for their actions
several thousand miles away. Did railroad tracks, improved roads,
regular transoceanic steam travel, the proliferation of post offices,
the profusion of partisan newspapers, more precise reckoning of time
spent in the workplace, expanded educational opportunities, widespread
participation in rituals of mass consumption, the industrial
production of timepieces, the coordination of presidential election
days, or the arrival of Morse's telegraph create (or mark) by 1848 a
world in which meaningful experiences of long-distance simultaneity
had taken hold? Howe's narration of the time lags that framed both the
onset of hostilities and the peace negotiations during the invasion of
Mexico might suggest otherwise.  More frustratingly, the question
itself is faintly posed.

David M. Henkin
University of California at Berkeley

Catch up on previous parts of Howe Forum:

INTRODUCTION (Oct. 27)
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-SHEAR&month=0810&week=d&msg=/eKgyeicCgpYSkmSDVdJng

JAMES HUSTON ON ECONOMIC HISTORY (Oct. 27)
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-SHEAR&month=0810&week=d&msg=xC7PayA4egD0XIRVNPkdcA

MICHAEL A. MORRISON ON POLITICAL HISTORY (Nov. 3)
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-SHEAR&month=0811&week=a&msg=7lyPqVnVCIx6iIXmEMx2ig

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