A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution , and: Rhetoric and the Republic: Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America (review)

Abstract

A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after Revolution. By Carolyn Eastman. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Pp. 340. Cloth, $37.50).Rhetoric and Republic: Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America. By Mark Garrett Longaker. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007. Pp. 266. Cloth, $39.95).Reviewed by Robert G. ParkinsonTime was, Ernst Gellner wrote in his landmark book Nations and Nationalism, education was a cottage industry, when men could be made by a village or clan. That time has now gone, and gone forever.1 These two books explore twilight ofthat fading era, as educators, politicians, and ordinary people - female students, journeyman printers, aspiring young men - tried to shape relationship between education and civic identity in early American republic. By mid nineteenth century, Gellner's industrial age had dawned and education quickly became an essential cog in nationalism. The interesting first steps educators, politicians, and ordinary people took as they sketched out, debated, and wrangled over a definition of the American public are subjects of these two interesting studies.Historians of early republic wall not find much new in Mark Garrett Longaker's Rhetoric and Republic, but they are not author's intended audience. Longaker's book is aimed at scholars of rhetoric on both ends of political spectrum who pine for a return to pedagogy, either to oppose neoliberalism (such as Gregory Clark) or to reinvigorate a civic-minded ethos a la ancients (such as Victor Davis Hanson). Both believe in an Edenic narrative (214) of republican education in early American republic, Longaker argues, and both are equally misguided. The result is a version of Jack Rakove's Original Meanings for rhetoricians.2 Just as Rakove sought to debunk originalism (with diminishing returns, sadly), Longaker now historicizes republicanism in America's universities from early eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. Though findings hardly surprise political historians-John Dickinson's political ideology differed from that of Tom Paine! Alexander Hamilton's vision of republicanism was not shared by either Timothy Dwight or Thomas Jefferson! - he does offer a careful, grounded analysis of how educators manipulated diffuse and openended ideology of republicanism on college campuses in early republic.He does so guided by Antonio Gramsci. Longaker contends that rhetorical publicity and pedagogy is a key site of how hegemony is articulated. Republican rhetors and educators espoused a specific hegemony that stemmed from and reinforced certain political and economic conditions. The republican rhetoric they employed promoted unity, but was equally a source of contention. In same way, there were many competing notions of republican education: Different schools employed different pedagogies because of different historical (political, economic, rhetorical) factors and agendas. They used common discourse of republicanism to achieve very different goals. Again, for historians this is familiar ground.Three of book's five chapters contextualize Longaker's thesis that there was never an Edenic narrative of republican or civic education. Analyzing how college presidents at Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and University of Pennsylvania tried to set pedagogical agendas, these chapters put Longaker's skill as a historian on display. For answers to whether constituents wanted their college to provide cultural polish or professional training, Longaker explores changing political economy of Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, or Pennsylvania; for issues such as whether Berkeley's religious idealism, Locke's scientific empiricism, or belletristic aesthetics would be ascendant in college curriculum, he explores personal desires of particular college presidents, especially their religious dedication. …