Gender & History ISSN 0953-5233Gervase Phillips, ‘Defining Citizenship and making a Public: Rhetoric, Writing and Welfare Policy in Nineteenth-Century America’Gender & History, Vol.23 No.1 April 2011, pp. 170–172.

THEMATIC REVIEWDefining Citizenship and Making a Public:Rhetoric, Writing and Welfare Policy inNineteenth-Century America

Gervase Phillips

Carolyn Eastman, A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public afterthe Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. xi + 290. ISBN978 0226180199.

Gunja SenGupta, From Slavery to Poverty: The Racial Origins of Welfare in NewYork, 1840–1918 (New York: New York University Press, 2009), pp. 352. ISBN978 0814741078.

It is easy to forget what a fragile union flowered from the American Revolution.Pronounced parochial loyalties, the corrosive and divisive survival of chattel slaveryand a pervasive suspicion of a strong state made the early republic seem, initially,unpromising soil for the growth of a cohesive nationalism. Yet a distinctly Americanidentity, confident of its own self-worth, of the success of its political institutions and ofthe potential to develop indigenous literature and art to compare with anything Europecould offer, would in fact emerge. It had its origins, Carolyn Eastman suggests, in theway Americans began to develop first a shared sense of themselves as a ‘public’, aprocess she believes owed much to the engagement of men and women, elite and non-elite, in rhetoric, oratory and a burgeoning print culture. From the new republic’s ‘messybeginnings’, Eastman’s ‘nation of speechifiers’ essentially talked and wrote themselvesinto existence. Although, at first glance, SenGupta is examining a very different topic,her analysis of the relationship between racial ideology and the provision of welfarein New York from 1840 to 1918 illuminates a closely related theme; having defineda citizenry, it became necessary to establish precisely its membership. The provisionof welfare to the urban poor proved particularly contentious, raising the spectre ofdependency (an aberrant condition for an American citizen) and starkly illuminatinghow racialised the concept of citizenship, and discourses over welfare, had become.

Eastman has immersed herself in her source materials, from the texts that taughtoratory and elocution to schoolchildren through to the rhetoric generated by debating

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societies, the print culture of artisan groups, the press and the ‘speechifiers’ of the publiclecture circuit. There is a clear demonstration of how oratory and rhetorical skills werevalued across society, and were practised as eagerly by schoolgirls as schoolboys inrough frontier schoolhouses and wealthy colleges alike. Given the pervasive importanceattached to oratory that Eastman has demonstrated, it no longer seems such a mysterythat even the patchiest of backwoods educations could produce public speakers as giftedas Abraham Lincoln. This is a very tightly focused and specialist study; neverthelessfor the student of the early republic it illuminates some very important broader themestoo. Political historians will be struck by the radicalism of the young Jeffersoniansof New York’s Calliopean Club in the 1790s, addressing each other as ‘citizen’ onthe French model. Economic historians will see the impact of the ‘market revolution’on the artisans of America in Eastman’s chapter on journeymen printers, jealous oftheir status, proud of their skill and erudition, but drawn into a reluctant strugglewith ‘masters’ embracing the benefits of large-scale production using a low-skilledworkforce.

For historians of gender, the transformation from ‘the vindication of female elo-quence’ through to sneering denunciations of women public speakers as ‘un-sexing’themselves will reflect the loss of the (relative) female autonomy of the colonial pe-riod and its replacement with the more restrictive bonds of ‘true womanhood’ thatcharacterised the early republic. Eastman’s chapter on the experiences of the Britishradical Frances Wright in America is particularly telling. Wright arrived in the US in1818, dazzled by the young nation’s promise of liberty. Within a few years she hadgrown disillusioned with the reactionary influence of organised religion, lack of socialequality and the seeming impregnability of the institution of race slavery. She beganher career as a public lecturer in 1828. Inevitably she provoked vehement criticism,particularly in the press. Yet those who scorned her failed to debate with her: theydid not engage with her ideas; they did not point to fallacies in her logic. Instead theyinsulted her as ‘a bold lady-man’ and emphasised ‘the incongruity and impropriety’ ofa woman public speaker.

From the sharp-witted young scholar Anna Harrington, arguing in 1793 thatwomen’s ‘natural’ facility for speech made it imperative that girls should be well edu-cated in order to use this gift for good purpose, to that busy New Yorker on-the-makeJohn Barent Johnson, with his multiple club memberships and his unhappiness at hisprolonged bachelorhood, Eastman gives us a sense of real people and real lives. Sen-Gupta has achieved that same immediacy in her examination of welfare in New York.She has skilfully teased out the life stories of the poor, and has credited the pennilessimmigrant, the working mother and the emancipated slave with considerable agency inthe ways they utilised charitable institutions within their survival strategies (mothersfor example, would use children’s homes as ‘day care centres’, temporarily leavingtheir offspring where they knew they would be cared for). Yet the poor had to contendwith the identities imposed upon them; race was clearly the most significant factor.The Irish immigrant could (eventually) claim ‘whiteness’ and thus full citizenship.His most distinguishing and potentially threatening (to the host society) characteristic,his Catholicism, could then be defended under the Constitutional guarantee of reli-gious freedom. For the native-born but ‘colored’ poor, however individually virtuousor worthy of charity, the possibility of such assimilation was denied.

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SenGupta is very keen to provide a historical context for current debates about wel-fare in the United States, and indeed much of the rhetoric is strikingly similar. Yet thereis a potential danger in stretching such comparisons to the point where they become his-torically anachronistic. To take one example, SenGupta identifies nineteenth-centuryRepublican philanthropists closely with the ideologies of free labour and the market(as one might modern Republicans). They were certainly advocates of free labour, butnot necessarily the market: the legacy of the Whig Henry Clay’s ‘American System’was evident in their statism; their advocacy of publicly financed ‘internal improve-ments’; their commitment to protectionism and their hostility to free trade. Overall,however, the comparison is as thought-provoking as the rest of this study. SenGuptaand Eastman both offer valuable insights into the difficult and protracted birth of aninclusive American citizenry.

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