Early American Literature

“And after becoming independent, the Americans had decided not just to allow communication and education to develop, but to promote them in a deliberate effort to create a new society and a more powerful nation.” (Chapter 2, page 49)

In thinking about how to conceptualize/summarize Chapters 2 and 3 of The Creation of the Media, I keep returning to Starr’s surprisingly confident (though always implicit) assertion that what fueled America’s exceptional rise to prominence was America’s own exceptional nature—that we shied away from the abuse of government power (via the national media, post office, census, and common schools) because of a dignity and respect for others that inhered in the American mind; that we turned out better than England and France because we were better than England and France. And though I admit that my characterization here of Starr’s analysis is a tad oversimplified, one doesn’t have to look very hard for “proofs” of American superiority in these chapters. From remarks about the “radical” nature of the Massachusetts freeman’s oath (51) to assurances of the government’s “credible commitments not to control” the content of personal and/or public correspondence (110), Starr portrays a young American nation that possessed the miraculous ability to conceive of itself in near-total opposition to the European tradition which it had just recently repudiated. If I somehow fail to present his account in full detail, it is only because he seems to be doing a similar thing in his romanticization/narrativization of the Early National Period.

This is not, however, to say that Starr’s account fails to provide a robust and fairly interesting story about the beginnings of a national media (or, as I prefer to conceive of it, a national system of correspondence). His analysis of the post office’s origins seems especially apt/illustrative in light of the USPS’s recent economic hardships, and his discussion of newspapers as “the organizational base on which a more modern party politics began to take shape” (85) highlights the crucial role that access to information plays in creating and sustaining a well-informed population of voters. Starr returns often to his central concepts of the “constitutive choice” and the “constitutive moment,” and he makes some powerful claims regarding the political and economic choices that created the various systems of correspondence American still take advantage of (to a greater or lesser extent) in today’s society.

Perhaps owing to my own biases, I found Starr’s section on the beginnings of the American public school system the least riddled with jingoistic sentiment. The “emerging system of ‘common schools’” really did represent “a break from the traditional [i.e., European] hierarchy of upper-tier Latin grammar schools and lower-tier ‘dame’ schools” (101), and the notion of educating the public en masse was a radically democratic idea for the time. As the debate over national versus state control of public schooling shows, this idea was even radical within the republic itself: “the U.S. Constitution did not refer to [education] at all—and no single piece of national legislation encapsulated the liberal republican vision” (100). That the early American schools only educated women for “republican motherhood” (102) and all but ignored the educational needs of African Americans (especially in southern states) shows how limited the scope of this “radically democratic idea” still was. But it certainly represented a step forward from the aristocratic networks of professional tutors and private academies that constituted the European ‘educational system’ at this same time, and Starr’s closing words from his section on “The Democratization of Competence” captures perfectly the achievement of American educational thinkers of this period:

“What distinguished American education in the half century after the Revolution was not the advance of the arts, sciences, and scholarship, but the diffusion of competence to ordinary people.” (107)

I may not agree with all of Starr’s vainglorious pronouncements about the uniquely American advances of this time period, but I think he got it right with this one. Through a host of constitutive choices that created and promoted a national system of correspondence, the early American nation incentivized literacy on a scale that had not been seen before (109), and this emphasis on literacy had far-reaching effects for the United States. I think Starr is on much more solid intellectual footing when he argues that it is because of these specific choices—and not because of some inherent American goodness—that the nation charted a very different path through the nineteenth century than did its European counterparts.