The American Bourgeoisie
Distinction
and Identity in the Nineteenth Century
Edited by Julia Rosenbaum & Sven Beckert
Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History
Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010
Hardcover. ix-284 pp. ISBN 978-0230102941. £48.50
Reviewed by
Hélène Quanquin
Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris III
Most essays
published in The American Bourgeoisie:
Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century were initially presented
at a conference held by the Charles Warren Center
at Harvard University in 2003. Although the change
is subtle, the original title of the conference, “Distinction and Identity:
Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth Century America,” appears to be more appropriate
for the book, which investigates the development of bourgeois culture in
nineteenth-century American society. According to the editors, whose
introduction develops the argument of the book with clarity and efficiency, the
specificity of nineteenth-century American bourgeoisie lay in its ability to
combine “familiar forms of economic might and political power with a new form
of cultural clout,” thus leading to the formation of “a class culture” [1]. One of the contributions
of The American Bourgeoisie is its
contention that “[c]reating a common class culture, thus, was not just an
expression of the power of the American bourgeoisie, but one of its preconditions”
[2]. It is this very “process of negotiation and contestation” [3] that the
fifteen essays illustrate, although with different outcomes.
The papers,
some of which were previously published in other contexts, were collected with
a “multi-disciplinary view” [7] in mind. They are divided into three sections: Habits
and Manners; Networks and Institutions; the Public Sphere. Covering a wide
range of topics, which include, among others, food distribution, leisure travel
to Europe, bourgeois associations, the
development of genealogy, higher education, and the relation of the bourgeoisie
to public art, they account for the various dimensions of bourgeois culture in
the nineteenth century. Although two essays deal with the western part of the
United States—Paul DiMaggio’s “The Problem of Chicago” and John Ott’s “The
Manufactured Patron: Staging Bourgeois Identity through Art Consumption in
Postbellum America,” which examines the way economic elites influenced
California’s art world—the contributors have focused on the northern city—Philadelphia,
Boston, New York, Buffalo—, which provided the main background to the
development of bourgeois culture in the United States. Although the book covers
the long nineteenth century—occasionally making forays into the early twentieth
century—it is the postbellum period that proves the most significant, as many
of the phenomena and events described in the essays took place after the Civil
War.
Reading The American Bourgeoisie, one is under
the paradoxical impression that the term “bourgeoisie” is indeed an elusive
one. The definition offered by Sven Beckert in “Bourgeois Institution Builders:
New York in the Nineteenth Century”—“people who own capital, do not work for
wages, do not work manually, and do hire others to work for them in exchange
for wages” [103]—is useful, but does not necessarily account for the
elusiveness of the group encompassed by the term. As mentioned in Ethan Robey’s
“The Steady Supporters of Order: American Mechanics’ Institute Fairs as Icons
of Bourgeois Culture,” “[i]nasmuch as a bourgeoisie can perhaps be defined by a
degree of control over capital, cultural, and political power, it is never a
stable designation” [119]. Some of the contributors fail to address this issue
and do not systematically identify the composition and characteristics of the
groups under study, sometimes using the terms “upper class” and “elite”
interchangeably, which occasionally adds to the confusion. While the
intersections of class with ethnicity and race are addressed in some of the
essays, this lack of definition sometimes blurs the issues of race and
ethnicity at stake in the formation of a bourgeois culture, at a time when these
questions were most prominent in the United States. The most interesting
essays, such as Peter Dobkin Hall’s “Rediscovering the Bourgeoisie: Higher
Education and Governing-Class Formation in the United States, 1870-1914,” focus on the
“intentionality” [168] of the American bourgeoisie as a class, while also showing
its diversity.
Distinction
and appropriation are two of the main themes tackled in The American Bourgeoisie. In “Bourgeois Appropriation of Music:
Challenging Ethnicity, Class, and Gender,” Michael Broyles investigates how the
Boston and New York bourgeoisies appropriated concert music and opera in the
course of the nineteenth century, as a way to consolidate their power. Julia
Rosenbaum’s “Ordering the Social Sphere: Public Art and Boston’s Bourgeoisie”
on the controversy over the donation of Frederick MacMonnies’ bronze statue Bacchante and Infant Faun to the Boston
Public Library illuminates the power struggle for the control of the public
sphere and “civic values” [196] at play in the formation of a bourgeois
culture. Francesca Morgan’s “A Noble Pursuit?: Bourgeois America’s Uses of Lineage”
focuses on the development and institutionalization of genealogy, defining
descent as “a form of social capital” [135]. For American bourgeois, European
travel, Maureen E. Montgomery argues, also represented “an act of
self-identification” [28] associated with “class” as well as “national
identity” [30]. Anne Verplanck’s “Patina and Persistence: Miniature Patronage
and Production in Antebellum Philadelphia” offers another significant
perspective on the American bourgeoisie’s use of the past to foster
distinction.
Women were
important actresses in the formation of a bourgeois culture, as evidenced by
the role of women in the promotion of genealogy and in home decoration—the topic
of Katherine C. Grier’s “The ‘Blending and Confusion’ of Expensiveness and
Beauty: Bourgeois Interiors.” Using the example of Buffalo after the Civil War,
Mary Rech Rockwell’s “Elite Women and Class Formation” shows that “[e]lite
women created and solidified class position serving as gatekeepers to entry and
arbiters of fashion and manners” [164].
One of the weaknesses of the volume lies in the fact that it sometimes gives an impression of localism, which comparison, if
used as a more systematic point of entry, could have accounted for more
effectively. Too few essays highlight the local specificities of bourgeois
cultures in nineteenth-century American society, by adopting an explicitly
comparative perspective, such as Peter Dobkin Hall’s study of Harvard and Yale,
and Paul DiMaggio’s thought-provoking analysis of the specific relations of art
and wealth in Chicago, as opposed to Boston and New
York. And fewer contributions still hint at the way
the circulation of ideas and people, not only between Europe and the United States, but also within the United States,
contributed to the formation of bourgeois culture in the nineteenth century.
