Harnessing Harmony: Music, Power, and Politics in the United States, 1788–1865 by Billy Coleman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Harnessing Harmony: Music, Power, and Politics in the United States, 1788–1865 by Billy Coleman Todd Estes Harnessing Harmony: Music, Power, and Politics in the United States, 1788–1865. By Billy Coleman. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. xviii, 249. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-5887-2; cloth, $95.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-5886-5.) Scholars have found political culture—campaigns, debates, parades, fashion, food, protests, symbols, and music—to be an enormously valuable tool for studying the myriad dimensions of the past that both reflected and shaped politics. Billy Coleman's Harnessing Harmony: Music, Power, and Politics in the United States, 1788–1865 uses music to demonstrate how "the practices of popular politics were often designed consciously from above in the interests of serving, rather than challenging, established elite power" (p. 5). This process began with the Constitution, and Federalists in the 1790s "may bear more responsibility for the rise of popular American political culture than commonly thought" (p. 9). In a fascinating chapter on the politicization of the "Star-Spangled Banner," Coleman shows that as Federalists began governing, they hoped to make the nascent republic "both better and distant from all that had come before it. . . . [U]nity was the precondition for achieving their postcolonial dreams" (p. 18). Similarly, in the famous 1840 presidential campaign, Whigs used campaign songs less to energize voters than to rein in and control the work of active campaign participants. In turn, Democrats in 1840 did not criticize the Whigs' use of music but denounced instead "the supposed hypocrisy of a party whose use of campaign songs betrayed . . . a preference for improving the people rather than submitting to their will" (p. 10). Coleman ably underscores the point that "[c]ombinations of music and politics often ended up supporting the thoroughly conservative objectives of Americans who valued order and unity at a time of expanding democracy and deepening sectional tensions" (p. 161). In short, "harnessing harmony could also mean preserving privilege" (p. 163). Harnessing Harmony's first chapter examines the Federalist musical tradition through the War of 1812, while the third chapter is a riveting, nuanced account of the 1840 presidential election. The second and fourth chapters focus [End Page 518] on musical organizations and on the aesthetic influence of music in the life of one man, S. Willard Saxon, as seen through his diary. But the even-numbered chapters neither land as effectively nor feel as significant as their odd-numbered counterparts. This uneven quality is exacerbated by the book's episodic treatment of events from 1788 to 1865, resulting in thin coverage and in a work whose efforts to address broad, expansively conceived topics are underdeveloped. Its brevity (only 163 pages of text) also frustrates the attempts to grapple fully with the important issues raised in the book's stimulating introduction, prologue, and conclusion. What was the role of music in political campaigns after 1815 and post-1840? What was the evolution of the Federalist/Democratic-Republican musical tradition in the rise of the second party system? If music played such a key role in 1840, what of the subsequent 1844 election, also a tense, significant, and divisive contest? Did music play a role for southern Whigs and Democrats as a part of their conservative defense of slavery? And what of those Federalist elites who turned away from politics to print, literature, and letters as exemplified in the scholarship of William C. Dowling and Marshall Foletta, whose studies of Federalist literary and educational culture could deepen the focus on Federalism? How did the Federalists' embrace of music as an agent of conservatism, harmony, and order track with the related project undertaken by Federalist writers and editors? Coleman also might have engaged more fully with recent scholarship by Liam Riordan, Rebeccah Bechtold, and Kirsten E. Wood to show how his work fits with theirs and to consider the state of the music history subfield to which his work is a significant addition. In short, Coleman has read widely and thought deeply about the provocative entanglements between music and political culture. But not all the potential results of his work and ruminations are fully realized in...