The bavarian illuminati, the early American novel, and histories of the public sphere

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 62, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 9-30

  Waterman, Bryan ^a  

^a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949566306     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3491620     Document Type: Review

References (107)

1. These studies have flowed steadily from academic presses since the English translation of Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation ofthe Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans.Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass., 1989),
2. followed closely by Michael Warner's influential use of Habermas in The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
3. For useful interpretations of this scholarly trend and other overviews ofthe historiography, see Bruce Robbins, "Introduction: The Public as Phantom, " in The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis, Minn., 1993);
4. David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England (Princeton, N.J., 2000), chaps. 1, 2;
5. James Van Horn Melton, "Introduction: What Is the Public Sphere?" in The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (New York, 2001);
6. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, "Toward New Imaginaries: An Introduction, " Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 1-19, which leads off auseful special issue;
7. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York, 2002), esp. theintroduction and chaps. 1, 2.
8. John Brooke, in a review essay that considers Habermas's influence onhistorians of early American culture, suggests that "the public ... mayhold promise for renewed conversations across lines of specialization anddiscipline - and even for conversations across the boundary dividing the academyfrom the world at large." See Brooke, "Reason and Passion in the Public Sphere: Habermas and the Cultural Historians, " Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29, no. 1 (Summer 1998-99): 43-67 (quotation, 44).
9. For a less sanguine evaluation of disciplinary problems in studies of thepublic sphere, see Harold Mah, "Phantasies of the Public Sphere:Rethinking the Habermas of Historians, " Journal of Modern History 72, no. 1(March 2000): 153-82.
10. For the major statements on the paranoid style, see Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and other Essays (New York, 1965);
11. David Brion Davis, ed., Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion fromthe Revolution to the Present (Ithaca, N.Y., 1971)
12. Gordon S. Wood, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century, " William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 39, no. 3 (July 1982): 401-41.
13. For a defense of conspiracy theory, see Ed White, "The Value of Conspiracy Theory, " American Literary History 14, no. 1 (Spring 2002):1-31.
14. John L. Brooke, "Ancient Lodges and Self-Created Societies:Voluntary Association and the Public Sphere in the Early Republic, " in Launching the "Extended Republic": The Federalist Era, ed. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville, Va., 1996), 273-377;
15. David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997), 62-173;
16. Leon Jackson, "Jedidiah Morse and the Transformation of Print Culture in New England, 1784-1826, " Early American Literature 34, no. 1(Winter 1999): 2-31;
17. Albrecht Koschnik, "The Democratic Societies of Philadelphia and the Limits of the American Public Sphere, circa 1793-1795, " WMQ 58, no. 3(July 2001): 615-36;
18. Seth Cotlar, "The Federalists' Transatlantic Cultural Offensive of1798 and the Moderation of American Democratic Discourse, " in Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic, ed. Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher(Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004), 274-99.
19. Several additional essays in the last volume cited emphasize competingpartisan styles in and conceptions of the public sphere. The scholarship on thissubject conceives of the public sphere in a variety of ways - sometimes ascompeting publics, competing conceptions of the public, or publics andcounterpublics. I prefer a definition suggested by Charles Taylor, whodistinguishes between "topical common space" (defined as "commonspace arising from assembly in some locale") and the "publicsphere, " whose definition he refines as "a plurality of spaces [knittogether] into one larger space of nonassembly, " which is"metatopical" in nature. See Taylor, "Modern Social Imaginaries, " Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 91-124 (quotations, 113-14).
20. See, esp., Warner, Letters of the Republic, chap. 6;
21. Larzer Ziff, Writing in the New Nation: Prose, Print, and Politics in the Early United States (New Haven, Conn., 1991), chaps. 4, 7;
22. Christopher Looby, Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (Chicago, 1996), chap. 3;
23. Jay Fliegelman, "Introduction, " in Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist (New York, 1991),
24. which should be read in tandem with Fliegelman's Declaring Independence:Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, Calif., 1993).
25. For a standard political history, see Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (New York, 1993).
26. For a classic treatment of Jeffersonian ways of knowing, see Daniel Boorstin, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1948).
27. For more recent historical treatments, see Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes;
28. Saul Cornell, The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999).
29. For the influence of partisanship on literary culture, see classicstudies by William Charvat, The Origins of American Critical Thought, 1810-1835(Philadelphia, 1936);
30. Lewis Simpson, "Federalism and the Crisis of Literary Order, "American Literature 32, no. 3 (November 1960): 253-66.
31. Important recent work includes Laura Rigal, The American Manufactory:Art, Labor, and the World of Things in the Early Republic (Princeton, N.J., 1998);
32. William Dowling, Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson (Columbia, S.C., 1999).
33. Wieland's unfinished sequel, Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, appeared inserial form in Brown's Literary Magazine, and American Register between November 1803 and March 1805, though a substantial portion was completed in thefall of 1798.
34. On the composition and publication dates, see Michael Cody, Charles Brockden Brown and the Literary Magazine: Cultural Journalism in the Early American Republic (Jefferson, N.C., 2004), 184 n. 13.
35. In Wieland, after the disastrous effects of Carwin's agency are all tooclear, a character named Ludloe shows up in Philadelphia hunting for Carwin. Hewarns his American acquaintances that Carwin is "engaged in schemes, reasonably suspected to be, in the highest degree, criminal, but such as nohuman intelligence is able to unravel" (Brown, Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin, 149). In the fragmentary Memoirs, the action of which takes place beforethe events narrated in Wieland, Carwin counters Ludloe's accusations bydisclosing that Ludloe is an agent for a secret society whose membershiprequires "inviolable secrecy" (322) under pain of death. If Carwinsubmits himself to Ludloe's rigorous reeducation and testing, he is told, he mayearn a "post, in which you will be invested with divine attributes, andprescribe the condition of a large portion of mankind" (320). Theincomplete sequel ends before we learn whether Carwin was ever admitted to theorder.
36. William Dunlap, The Diary of William Dunlap ..., ed. Dorothy C. Barck(New York, 1930), 339 (Sept. 14, 1798).
37. For example: "The fact that the strongest members of the Friendly Club were staunch Federalists accounts, in part at least, for Brown's gradualconversion to more conservative principles" (David Lee Clark, Charles Brockden Brown: Pioneer Voice of America [Durham, N.C., 1952], 131).
38. Robert Levine, Conspiracy and Romance (New York, 1989), 42.
39. Levine, in a discussion of the relationship between the Illuminati scareand Brown's second novel, Ormond (1799), views Brown "in the late 1790s, particularly in his association with the conservative members of New York's Friendly Society, as a Federalist in the making" (25). Reading Carwin as astand-in for the Illuminati also accords with influential interpretations of Wieland as anti-Jeffersonian, such as Jane Tompkins's important recuperation of Brown in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860(New York, 1985), chap. 2.
40. Though she neither invokes Brown's connections through the Friendly Clubto the Dwights nor raises the specter of the Illuminati, Tompkins maintains that Brown's novel (a copy of which he sent to Jefferson) was intended as Federalistpropaganda, as "a plea for the restoration of civic authority in apost-Revolutionary age" (61). For a similar reading, which sees Wieland asantideist as well as anti-Jeffersonian, see Shirley Samuels, "Infidelityand Contagion: The Rhetoric of Revolution, " EAL 22, no. 2 (Fall 1987):183-91;
41. Samuels, "Wieland: Alien and Infidel, " EAL 25, no. 1 (Spring1990): 46-66;
42. Samuels, Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Early American Nation (New York, 1996), chap. 2.
43. For a different view, see Wood, WMQ 39: 436-37, who long ago noted, butdid not account for, Brown's difference from the anti-Illuminati conspiracytheorists.
44. John Limon, The Place of Fiction in a Time of Science: A Disciplinary History of American Writing (New York, 1991), 31.
45. For examples, see Michael Schnell, "'The Sacredness of Conjugal and Parental Duties': The Family, the Twentieth-Century Reader, and Wieland, "Christianity and Literature 44, nos. 3-4 (Spring-Summer 1995): 259-73;
46. Marshall N. Surratt, "'The Awe-Creating Presence of the Deity': Some Religious Sources for Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, " Papers on Language and Literature 33, no. 3 (Summer 1997): 310-24.
47. For an effort to make him unambivalently a Quaker author, without fullyacknowledging either his reservations about religion or Wieland's satirical takeon the Quaker notion of "inner voice, " see Richard P. Moses, "The Quakerism of Charles Brockden Brown, " Quaker History 75, no. 1(1986): 12-25.
48. Efforts to read Wieland as Calvinist gothic include Joel Porte, "Inthe Hands of an Angry God: Religious Terror in Gothic Fiction, " in The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism, ed. G. R. Thompson (Pullman, Wash., 1974), 42-64;
49. Michael Gilmore, "Calvinism and Gothicism: The Example of Brown's Wieland, " Studies in the Novel 9, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 107-18.
50. Elihu Hubbard Smith, The Diary of Elihu Hubbard Smith, 1771-1798, ed.James E. Cronin (Philadelphia, 1973), 55 (Sept. 12, 1795), 77 (Oct. 22, 1795).
51. Jedidiah Morse, A Sermon, Preached at Charlestown, November 29, 1798. Onthe Anniversary Thanksgiving in Massachusetts (Worcester, Mass., 1799), 8.
52. Elsewhere I have made a similar argument regarding the voluminousliterary and medical writing Brown and his friends produced on the subject ofyellow fever. These writings are frequently reduced to national or partisanallegory, in part based on Martin Pernick's classic interpretation of thepartisan effects of Philadelphia's epidemic of 1793 (Martin S. Pernick, "Politics, Parties, and Pestilence: Epidemic Yellow Fever in Philadelphiaand the Rise of the First Party System, "
53. Pernick, "Afterword, " in A Melancholy Scene of Devastation:The Public Response to the 1793 Philadelphia Yellow Fever Epidemic, ed. J.Worth Estes and Billy G. Smith [Philadelphia, 1997], 119-46).
54. On closer examination, particularly when professional alliances betweenspecific New York and Philadelphia doctors are taken into account, partisanframeworks fail to account for competing attempts to disseminate moral andmedical knowledge. See Bryan Waterman, "Arthur Mervyn's Medical Repositoryand the Early Republic's Knowledge Industries, " American Literary History15, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 213-47.
55. Though much of the controversy over the Illuminati conspiracy took placein newspapers, the earliest rumblings - the ones that coincide with thecomposition of Brown's major fictions in 1798 and early 1799 - came in Fast and Thanksgiving Day sermons and Fourth of July orations (many of which weresubsequently printed and disseminated widely) between the spring of 1798 and thespring of 1799. Much of Brown's relevant exposure to these debates and thecomposition of his novels came from these sources and predated, for example, thefamous newspaper exchanges between Morse and an anonymous William Bentley, whochallenged key pieces of Morse's evidence for the conspiracy. On the Bentley-Morse newspaper exchange, see Larry E. Tise, The American Counterrevolution: A Retreat from Liberty, 1783-1800 (Mechanicsburg, Pa., 1998), 348-52.
56. For a broad-ranging overview that places the Illuminati scare in thecontext of larger antidemocratic initiatives, see Cotlar, "Federalists'Transatlantic Cultural Offensive."
57. For other studies that similarly seek to replace religion in theintellectual culture of the early American public sphere, see, esp., Christopher Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999).
58. See also Colin Wells, The Devil and Doctor Dwight: Satire and Theology inthe Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002);
59. Jonathan Sassi, Republic of Righteousness: The Public Christianity of the Post-Revolutionary New England Clergy (New York, 2001).
60. For an earlier study that remains extremely valuable, see Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756-1800 (New York, 1985).
61. The definitive account remains Vernon Stauffer, New England and the Bavarian Illuminati (New York, 1918).
62. See also Gary Nash, "The American Clergy and the French Revolution, " WMQ 22, no. 3 (July 1965), 392-412;
63. Henry May, The Enlightenment in America (New York, 1976), 252-77;
64. Tise, American Counterrevolution, chaps. 18, 19;
65. Michael Leinesch, "The Illusion of the Illuminati: The Counterconspiratorial Origins of Post-Revolutionary Conservatism, " in Revolutionary Histories: Transatlantic Cultural Nationalism, 1775-1815, ed. W.M. Verhoeven (New York, 2002), 152-65.
66. For a useful overview of Robison, see Stauffer, New England, 199-214;
67. See Smith, Diary, 319 (May 31, 1797), 325 (June 14-16, 1797), 331 (July4, 1797).
68. Theodore Dwight, An oration, spoken at Hartford, in the state of Connecticut, on the anniversary of American independence, July 4th, 1798(Hartford, Conn., 1798), 30.
69. Smith, Diary, 412-13 (Jan. 1, 1798);
70. Dunlap, Diary, 241 (Apr. 11, 1798).
71. Timothy Dwight, The Nature, and Danger, of Infidel Philosophy ... (New Haven, Conn., 1797);
72. Dunlap, Diary, 339 (Sept. 14, 1798).
73. Dunlap, Diary, 264 (May 30, 1798), 323 (Aug. 6, 1798), 324 (Aug. 10, 1798). For the installments Dunlap completed, see 152-59, 163-65, 168, 172, 322, 345 (Oct. 1, 1797-Oct. 14, 1798).
74. Smith, Diary, 265 (Nov. 22, 1796).
75. The passage is taken from a forty-page letter to Theodore Dwight in which Smith defends his disbelief in Christianity. For Brown's arguments against Christianity to a fellow Quaker, his friend Joseph Bringhurst, see Bernard Rosenthal, "The Voices of Wieland, " in Critical Essays on Charles Brockden Brown, ed. Rosenthal (Boston, 1981), 104-25.
76. Brown's most recent biographer underestimates the sincerity of Brown'sreligious crisis of the 1790s and its effect on his fiction. See Peter Kafer, Charles Brockden Brown's Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic(Philadelphia, 2004), chap. 3.
77. Smith, Diary, 390 (Nov. 7, 1797);
78. Grasso, Speaking Aristocracy, 350.
79. As early as 1795, Brown had contemplated an anti-Christian novel, scrapsof which survive in what Brown's biographer Steven Watts calls the"Ellendale" fragment See Watts, The Romance of Real Life: Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins of American Culture (Baltimore, 1994), 57-58.
80. Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York (New Haven, Conn., 1821), 1: 515 (this portion of Dwight's work was composed in the late 1790s andearly 1800s);
81. Elihu Hubbard Smith, Charles Brockden Brown, and William Johnson to William Dunlap, Sept. 4, 1798, transcribed in Dunlap, Diary, 336 (Sept. 5, 1798);
82. Smith, Diary, 122 (Jan. 18, 1796), 156 (Apr. 13, 1796).
83. Smith, Diary, 213 (Sept. 4, 1796).
84. Benjamin Franklin V, ed., The Poetry of the Minor Connecticut Wits(Gainesville, Fla., 1970).
85. Theodore Dwight belonged to this group in the early 1790s along with Smith and others. For an account of this mode of periodical publishing and itsrelationship to the British public sphere in the same period, see Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832 (Madison, Wis., 1987).
86. Nancy Ruttenburg, Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship (Stanford, Calif., 1998), 267.
87. On republican print culture, see Warner, Letters of the Republic, esp.chap. 2;
88. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, chap. 2.
89. For only one of many examples of Carwin as author figure, see Walter Hesford, "'Do You Know the Author?': The Question of Authorship in Wieland, " EAL 17, no. 3 (Winter 1982-83): 239-48.
90. In his discussion of the sociology of secrets and secret societies, Georg Simmel identifies the secret as the core of modern individual consciousness.See Simmel, "The Secret and the Secret Society" in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (Glencoe, Ill., 1950), 307-78.
91. Brown, Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin, 246, 5, 3.
92. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), esp. chap. 4;
93. Jodi Dean, Publicity's Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy(Ithaca, N.Y., 2002);
94. John Cosens Ogden, A View of the New England Illuminati: who areindefatigably engaged in Destroying the Religion of the United States; under afeigned regard for their safety - and under an impious abuse of true religion(Philadelphia, 1799), 3, 9.
95. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 35.
96. The distinction between spatial relations and print culture as groundsfor the public sphere, argues Harold Mah, reveals a disciplinary gulf betweenhistorians whose focus on public space or assembly allows for a more inclusivepublic sphere than print-based models allow, and literary critics who viewpublics as imagined relations among readers (Mah, "Phantasies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of Historians, " Journal of Modern History72, no. 1 [March 2000]: 153-82).
97. For an influential example of the former approach, see Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, Calif., 1997), which places particular emphasis on publicspace and "access" to the public sphere.
98. For the latter, see Warner, Letters of the Republic and Publics and Counterpublics.
99. For literary critical approaches that, though primarily text based, stillseek to account for social institutions and to accommodate the relationshipbetween texts and bodies in the public sphere, see David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997);
100. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalismand the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford, Calif., 2004).
101. For a particularly detailed example, see Zaret, Origins, chap. 3.
102. John L. Brooke has argued that, for "thousands of aspiring youngmen" in the new nation, "an introduction to - and indoctrination in -the cultural configuration of the public sphere would come in the blue light ofthe lodge-room, as they were inducted into the mysteries of Freemasonry."See Brooke, "Freemasonry and the Public Sphere in New York State, 1784-1830" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Louisville, Ky., April 1991), 5 (quoted with permission).
103. John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies. Collected from Good Authorities (New York, 1798), 150-51, 155.
104. Timothy Dwight, The Duty of Americans, at the Present Crisis: Illustratedin a Discourse, Preached on the Fourth of July, 1798 (New Haven, Conn., 1798), 13.
105. Dwight had sarcastically dedicated his satirical poem The Triumph of Infidelity (1788) to Voltaire. See Wells, Devil and Dr. Dwight, 34.
106. Timothy Dwight, A Discourse on Some Events of the Last Century: Deliveredin the Brick Church in New Haven, on Wednesday, January 7, 1801 (New Haven, Conn., 1801), 16;
107. Dwight, Duty of Americans, 17.