American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class American Culture

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class American Culture. By Brian Roberts. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Pp. xii, 328. Illustrations. Cloth, $49.95; paper, $19.95.) American Alchemy offers fresh look at familiar episode in U. S. history: the dramatic and rapid migration of fortune-seekers to California during the late 1840s and early 1850s. In contrast to earlier scholarly assessments of the Gold Rush, Brian Roberts places class and gender at the center of his analysis. It is difficult to do justice to Roberts's complex and multifaceted treatment of class in short review, but his argument can be sketched as follows. Noting that large proportion of northeastern forty-niners were-or aspired to be-members of the middle class, he maintains that the Gold Rush was a rebellion against certain middle-class values; this revolt, in turn, was largely carried out by middle-class individuals(5). Middle-- class northeasterners, Roberts contends, experienced tensions between the dictates of polite culture and the necessities of the marketplace (50-51). Being morally upright gentleman in the cutthroat world of antebellum American business, it seemed, tended to doom one's chances of achieving economic success and the social position that accompanied it. And even if one achieved success, one could hardly elude the mind-numbing routine of commercial work or the enervating round of respectable social gatherings that characterized bourgeois life. The prospect of boundless wealth in the gold fields, from this perspective, offered middle-class men both an escape from the stultifying existence of parlor and counting house and the opportunity to get rich without engaging in ruthless competition or immoral business practices. Though few middle-class forty-niners realized their hopes of quick and easy wealth, they nonetheless shaped American culture, Roberts argues. By presenting successfully their interpretations of events and justifications of their ultimate failure as the literal, unmediated truth of the Rush, forty-- niners helped to create middle-class culture that seems liberated without being liberal, capable of committing mutiny against itself on daily basis without losing class status (274). Yearning for an escape from competitive capitalism, but disillusioned by their experiences in the gold fields, forty-- niners reestablished class distinctions they had hoped to leave behind, this time filtering them through gendered discourse. The better sort of forty-- niner -- that is, the middle-class argonaut-did not endorse the violent excesses of the frontier that were ruining California, for he had wife or sweetheart in the East, the memory of whose salutary influence restrained and redeemed him (230). Middle-class argonauts portrayed their inability to strike it rich as the consequence of the depravity of the ethnic and racial others they found in California, the rugged and difficult natural landscape, and the intrinsic violence and disorder of the frontier. In this world of masculine violence, untempered by the salutary and ennobling influence of middle-class women, merely surviving uncorrupted became laudable achievement. In California, unlike the East, failure did not mean they were failures; and even if they had failed, they should be pitied rather than blamed (161). Roberts uses gender as well as class to interpret the Gold Rush. Women, he argues persuasively, should be considered participants in the Rush, not just passive observers, even though they remained in the East. Women's work attending to the businesses and families that many middle-- class forty-niners left behind made men's journeys to California possible. In addition, women's expectations that their sacrifices and toil while husbands, fathers, and lovers were absent would be rewarded with wealth and social position shaped men's experience and retelling of their activities. …