Post-Revolutionary leaders, alarmed by Shays' Rebellion and other evidences of unrest among the lower orders, sought to create a government of checks and balances that would express but also restrain the popular will. A suspicion of unmediated democracy pervades the political discourse of the era, including The Federalist Papers of James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay. Conservatives of the early republic were appalled by the French Revolution and frontier turbulence closer to home, such as the Whiskey Rebellion.
With the rise of the frontier hero Andrew Jackson, the term gained more positive connotations. Democratic Party intellectuals such as historian George Bancroft and journalist John O'Sullivan, editor of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review (1837�1849), furthered the rehabilitation process. The French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, however, offered a decidedly mixed assessment in Democracy in America (1835, 1840). Tocqueville's informants on his 1831�1832 American tour were mostly conservative Whigs, and, while finding much to admire, he shared their distaste for Jacksonian America's rampant individualism (a word he coined), rootlessness, cultural leveling, and conformist pressures.
Antebellum writers conveyed a similar ambivalence about democracy. Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper deplored the cultural degradation and social turbulence they saw as its inevitable byproducts. Irving, in his parody History of New York (1809 and later revisions), offered a conservative critique of democratic excesses. Cooper, in Home as Found and The American Democrat (both 1838), denounced with a vehemence based on personal experience the Jacksonian era's commercialism, lack of decorum, and scorn for established ways and aristocratic values. Nathaniel Hawthorne distrusted the optimistic view of human nature and progress.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, while considerably more sympathetic to America's democratic aspirations, nevertheless in essays such as "Self-Reliance" (1841) defended individual freedom and autonomy and "the infinitude of the private man" against the compulsions of mass opinion. In his 1837 Phi Beta Kappa lecture, "The American Scholar," Emerson offered his vision of a distinctive and democratic American culture and intellectual life worthy of the nation's egalitarian political ideology.
Of this pre�Civil War generation of writers, Walt Whitman�active in Democratic Party politics as a young man and proud of the catholicity of his early cultural experiences ("going everywhere, seeing everything, high, low, and middling")�perhaps most fully embraced the goal of a democratized culture. "To have great poets," he insisted, "there must be great audiences, too." In "Song of Myself," which comprises a large part of the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), Whitman struck a deliberately inclusive and democratic note as he wove in allusions to Americans in all walks of life, including the most marginal and disreputable.
In this age of reform Americans committed to radical social change made effective use of the language of democracy. Abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass and women's rights advocates such as Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony attacked the hypocrisy of an alleged democratic nation that enslaved or disfranchised millions of its members. The "Declaration of Sentiments" adopted at the 1848 women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, was deliberately modeled on the Declaration of Independence.
By the late nineteenth century, democracy had largely shed its negative connotations. The steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie unashamedly published Triumphant Democracy in the strife-torn year 1886, insisting that because the United States was expanding economically, had no monarchy or titled nobility, and held free elections, American democracy was therefore thriving. Many others, however, disagreed with Carnegie's sanguine and self-serving view. Appalled by the era's crass materialism, political corruption, and widening class divisions, a host of reformers bemoaned the disparity between democratic ideology and the realities of urban-industrial America. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's The Gilded Age (1873), Henry George's Progress and Poverty (1879), Henry Demarest Lloyd's Wealth against Commonwealth (1894), Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), and William Dean Howells's A Traveler from Altruria (1894), along with scores of other fictional and nonfiction works, viewed late-nineteenth-century American democracy as gravely imperiled. Henry Adams, in choosing the ironic title Democracy for his 1880 novel about Washington tawdriness and corruption, underscored the point. In Democratic Vistas (1871) a chastened Walt Whitman reaffirmed his vision of an authentic and vibrant cultural democracy but lamented the materialistic and antidemocratic forces so ascendant in a competitive postwar society bent on money-getting.
In the reformist climate of the early twentieth century, the discourse about democracy became considerably more hopeful. Progressive-era social thinkers and reformers not only reaffirmed the vitality of democratic ideology but expanded the concept to incorporate social and economic justice. As Walter Lippmann wrote in Drift and Mastery (1914), "Before you can begin to have a democracy you need a country in which everyone has some stake and some taste of its promise." These thinkers viewed democracy not as a static set of electoral arrangements but as an evolving social vision reanimated and redefined by each new generation. Democracy, asserted Jane Addams in Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), "must be a rule of living as well as a test of faith." Herbert Croly in The Promise of American Life (1909) similarly urged Americans to expand the term to encompass broader social and cultural goals, and the democratic-socialist John Dewey emphatically agreed. In such works as Democracy and Education (1916), Dewey saw the public school as the means of achieving his conception of democracy.
The disillusioned post�World War I generation, by contrast, typically dismissed democracy as a high-sounding but essentially hollow term. H. L. Mencken's Notes on Democracy (1926) ridiculed politicians who brayed of democracy while hoodwinking the electorate. In Public Opinion (1922), Walter Lippmann questioned the conventional faith in the wisdom of "the people" and stressed how easily voters could be manipulated.
But the climate shifted once again in the 1930s, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt regularly appealed to a conception of democracy that incorporated social justice as well as political rights. In The Battle for Democracy (1933), presidential adviser Rexford G. Tugwell explicitly linked the New Deal to such a capacious understanding of the term. In many respects, the 1930s brought to fruition the long effort to redefine democracy as a process with economic, social, and cultural dimensions. Carl Sandburg's "The People, Yes" (1936), Thornton Wilder's Our Town (1938), John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Frank Capra's film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and the New Deal arts programs all contributed to this enlarged vision of democracy rooted in the wisdom and virtue of ordinary Americans. This mood continued to find voice in World War II, as the nation battled antidemocratic forces abroad, in such cultural products as Capra's "Why We Fight" series, Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man (1942), and Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth (1942). Norman Rockwell's wartime illustrations of Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms," particularly the rough-hewn worker speaking at a town meeting, memorably evoked this inspiring image of democracy.
The rhetoric of "democracy" played multiple roles in postwar America. While cold war ideologists insisted that its protection and expansion justified the anticommunist struggle at home and abroad, critics noted that in the name of democracy, Washington supported right-wing dictatorships, suppressed constitutional freedoms, and devastated the peasantry of Vietnam. Emulating Henry Adams, Joan Didion detailed U.S. economic exploitation and backing of dictators in Latin America in a 1984 novel she called Democracy. Novels such as Lillian Smith's Strange Fruit (1944) and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), the essays of James Baldwin, and the oratory of Martin Luther King, Jr., and others exposed American racism and challenged the nation to honor its democratic principles. The 1963 Port Huron Statement of Students for a Democratic Society envisioned a "participatory democracy" in which the poor and disadvantaged would exercise real political power.
As the twentieth century ended, political observers, cultural producers, and Americans generally expressed fears for democracy's future in a political system increasingly driven by money, media manipulation, and interest-group lobbying. In contrast to the hopeful, idealistic moods of the 1930s and the 1960s, journalistic expos�s; novels such as Joe Klein's Primary Colors (1996); movies including Wag the Dog (1997), Bulworth (1998), and Election (1999); and television series such as the National Broadcasting Company's West Wing exposed cynicism about public life and a sense of democratic promise betrayed. Whether the new century would witness a renewal of the long quest to realize the elusive, ever-evolving promise of American democracy remained to be seen.
University of Virginia Hypertext Archives
Encyclopedia of American Studies, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), s.v. "Democracy" (by Paul Boyer), http://eas-ref.press.jhu.edu/view?aid=594 (accessed August 23, 2018).
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