Tea Sets and Tyranny: The Politics of Politeness in Early America by Steven C. Bullock

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tea Sets and Tyranny: The Politics of Politeness in Early America by Steven C. Bullock Carrie Tirado Bramen (bio) Tea Sets and Tyranny: The Politics of Politeness in Early America steven c. bullock Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017 304 pp. In our own time when political leaders have resorted to vitriol, expletives, and even hate speech, it is good to be reminded that this was not always the case. For historian Steven Bullock in his Tea Sets and Tyranny: The Politics of Politeness in Early America, one has to go back to the long eighteenth century to find a period when leadership was predicated on behavioral restraint. George Washington famously opposed profanity to such an extent that he prohibited cursing among his officers and soldiers; and remarkably, there is only one instance—and this is apparently still debated—when Washington cussed and it was on June 28, 1778, at the Battle of Monmouth. According to a frequently cited passage in Paul Van Dyke's George Washington: The Son of His Country (1931), an officer present at the battle noted that General Washington "swore that day until the leaves shook on the trees" (216). Washington appears in the epilogue of Bullock's narrative as a model of self-control and moderation, even though privately he was known to have a "fierce and irritable disposition" (217). By the end of the eighteenth century, politeness played a crucial role in Revolutionary-era politics, providing an important way to understand how sociality informed the political behavior of Anglo-American elites. Although Bullock's study concludes with George Washington's presidency, in an era when the culture of politeness had become hegemonic, the majority of the book focuses on the years between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution nearly a century later. The emphasis is on the evolution of politeness as a political strategy of leadership that is inextricably tied to notions of authority. For Bullock, politeness represents an important social practice that played a foundational political role [End Page 828] in the transition from authoritarian styles of governance to more democratic ones. The book's introduction provides a superb overview of the argument and a clear sense of its intervention in the long-standing scholarship on eighteenth-century politeness. In reference to this earlier scholarship, Bullock notes that historian Richard Bushman's The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (1992) and literary scholar David Shields's Civil Tongues and Polite Letters (1997) focus on the social aspects of Anglo-American elite culture with little reference to governing approaches. Where Bushman turns to material history and the emergent culture of consumerism by looking at houses and picket fences, handkerchiefs, and even pickle dishes, Shields understands the social life of Anglo-American elites in their taverns, clubs, and coffeehouses. Neither Bushman nor Shields links politeness explicitly with political authority. More recent scholarship that addresses eighteenth-century theories of government in terms of restraint from John Locke to Thomas Jefferson tends to focus on institutions and structural concerns related to elections and checks and balances. Sociality plays an insignificant role. The foundational premise of Tea Sets and Tyranny is that notions of political authority cannot be discussed in a vacuum, but must involve sociality, culture, and interpersonal relations. Politeness is ultimately about power, where the social and the political are inextricably interwoven. Bullock writes, "Eighteenth-century discussions about manners were intimately intertwined with fundamental political issues, closely linking politeness (discipline of the self) with power (discipline of others)" (2). "Politeness" refers less to social hierarchies of good taste and more to how manners can inform a model of restrained authority and personal refinement through "sympathetic and responsive leadership" (2). The book's most significant contribution is the way it demonstrates how the political is personal, and conversely, how the personal is political in early America. By linking interpersonal behavior with political dynamics, Tea Sets and Tyranny places questions of power firmly at the center of a study of sociality. At the outset, Bullock asserts that he wants to avoid abstraction. To do this, he anchors his analysis in the biographical stories of six individuals: Francis Nicholson, the Virginia governor known for...