Tocqueville in America: An Interview with Leo Damrosch

Abstract

Tocqueville in America: An Interview with Leo Damrosch Randall J. Stephens LEO DAMROSCH IS THE ERNEST BERNBAUM PROFESSOR OF Literature and Harvard College Professor, Emeritus. He has written an array of biographies and works of literary history, including Samuel Johnson and the Tragic Sense (Princeton University Press, 1972); Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth (Princeton University Press, 1980); God’s Plot and Man’s Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding (University of Chicago Press, 1985); The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope (University of California Press, 1987); The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit (Harvard University Press, 1996); and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (Mariner Books, 2007), a National Book Award finalist. His latest book, Tocqueville’s Discovery of America (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010), uses the journey of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont to reveal the lively character of 1830s America. Historically Speaking editor Randall Stephens caught up with Damrosch at his Widener Library office and spoke to him about the work and influence of one of America’s keenest observers. Randall Stephens : There were many Europeans who traveled through America in the 1830s and 1840s and wrote about their experiences. Why has Tocqueville’s account withstood the test of time while the published observations of so many others have faded into obscurity? Leo Damrosch : Tocqueville had an overriding purpose. He wanted to understand American democracy. He was convinced that democracy was the way of the future. His family was very reactionary and had reason to be. They suffered in the French Revolution, and his parents barely escaped execution. They wanted to turn back the clock, and he was certain that that could never be. But he was also of two minds about democracy. He was interested but skeptical. He asked Americans a lot of really penetrating questions and was more open-minded than most visitors were, particularly when it came to politics. Most Europeans came to see what American manners were like. If they were interested in politics, they tended either to be quite conservative, so they came here to prove that democracy doesn’t work, or they were very liberal and came armed with even more radically egalitarian ideas for Americans to adopt. They had an ax to grind. He didn’t in that sense. He paid attention to anyone with something interesting to tell him. It didn’t matter if they were famous, as some of them were, or backwoods storekeepers. He wanted to know what Americans themselves had to say about American democracy. Sam Houston is a great example. I believe that he gave Tocqueville the kernel of his great chapter on race in America. Houston had grown up with the Cherokees and lived with them even in adult life. Houston said that the Indian has always enjoyed absolute liberty; he has been taught from infancy to make every decision for himself. You will never get him to assimilate into American society. And at the other extreme slaves had never been allowed to make any decisions for themselves. They wouldn’t know what to do with freedom because they’d never had any. This notion is the lynchpin of Tocqueville’s long chapter on race. And I think it came from Houston. When Tocqueville met him, he seemed at first like an absurd kind of backwoods raffish character. Tocqueville couldn’t believe he had ever been governor of one of the states, but when he got to know him he paid attention to what Houston had to say. When Tocqueville arrived in America, his English was only passable. He could read it better than speak it, which is true of my French. By the time he left he was pretty fluent, but he didn’t have an ear for slight differences in usage that drove English visitors up the wall. So what seemed to them vulgar or coarse or uneducated didn’t matter to Tocqueville. He was an aristocrat. He believed that it was his duty to work hard for the public good as had his father, an administrator of the French government. In America he saw that status was...