Alexander Saxton. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America.

Alexander Saxton. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. London: Verso, 2003. 2nd ed. 415 pp. $23.00.

What Alexander Saxton grapples with in this book is one of the most puzzling questions in American history: namely, why the United States, a country proudly founded on democratic principles, has long since suffered the persistence of such an obviously undemocratic condition as racial inequality. The key to answering this question is provided here by an exploration of the course taken by the ideology of white racial superiority in the cultural as well as political arena of nineteenth-century American society.

"Introduction: Historical Explanations of Racial Inequality" lucidly expounds the scope and value of this project. In search of "a set of plausible and economical explanations for known developments, which [he] "take[s] to be the closest one can come to demonstrating causality in history," Saxton takes great pains to avoid the familiar proclivity to circular argument in the previous explanatory strategies. As his analysis shows, Gunnar Myrdal's and Ashley Montagu's arguments, for example, might be said to be circular in that they boil down practically to the view that racism came into existence as a result of racism. While, upon concise examination of some causal explanations of racism such as economic, psychological, and ideological approaches, he concludes, "the ideological appears the most promising," Saxton is rightfully wary of an ideological interpretation stripped of most of its class linkages. According to his diagnosis, ideological explanation was suppressed in Cold War America, and even later remained debilitated due to the lack of class analyses. Ideological investigations without accounts of class politics are doomed to circularity. In view of such a quandary, Saxton seeks "an ideological explanation for the initial act of differential treatment that does not invoke racism or any variant under some other name as a causal factor."

Another problem for historical explanation is the continuity of racism in American history: why and how it has lasted for more than three centuries through shifts of ruling class power. Since it could not have been the same all the time from the beginning to the present, its modification and readjustment through the changing formations of American society must be traced at length. Moreover, its changes could not have been the product of natural evolution. So many people exerted their originality and ingenuity to adapt racial discourses for the emerging necessities of each era. Each sfage brought out its own new adaptations and inventions that were the products of efforts to cope with new situations in class politics. By illuminating the relation of ideological innovations at each stage to the needs of dominant groups in the changing class coalitions that have ruled the nation, Saxton manages to shun circularity.

In this book's formulation, ideological innovators are considered contributors to the enterprise by a particular class that sought to achieve hegemony. Since hegemony, a concept borrowed from Antonio Gramsci, implies a much broader range than the older notion of ideology, the scope of examination in this book is vast, including literature and art as well as socialization, education, and political debate.

The framework of the book, however, is constructed upon a descriptive history of the rise and fall of political parties. It is small wonder that the book deals primarily with the speeches and writings of political leaders. In delineating the basic movement in the politics of nineteenth-century America, the terms of dialectics are used: National Republican thesis, Jacksonian antithesis, and Republican synthesis. The three-term sequence governs the structure of this study so felicitously that the tripartite organization of the book helps the reader frame an overview of the nineteenth-century history of the United States. Though this terminology might give the impression that the formulation should be under the spell of the grand Hegelian design, it is actually free from such a restraint. As the author takes pains to note, this method of argument is employed here in order to trace the process that "developed not automatically but within a shaping matrix of historical continuities, which remained contingent to, yet prior to and independent of, that sequence."

Elucidating the interaction of such historical events as territorial expansion, industrialization, and immigration, among others, Saxton reveals what was needed for the ruling power to retain hegemony. Speaking for a coalition of landholding and commercial affluence, National Republicanism leading to the Whig party, for instance, resulted in anti-Indian racism whether "soft racial policies" were preferred or not. Rivaling the Jacksonian Democrats in the power struggle, it was compelled to abandon the politics of deference, vying for popular support indispensable for party politics and co-opting David Crockett as their popular hero. The Democrats in turn strove for the alliance of urban working people with the planter interest in the South. As the power structure invariably found it necessary to build a class coalition, the class politics of each stage ended up with a newly adjusted system for the exclusion of people of color from Native Americans to African Americans to Mexicans and Chinese.

It is not only political parties that are deliberated here. Labor movements and populist causes also come in sight. Lower-class organizations and little-known individuals are thus shown to have contributed to the continuation of racism. Their complicity may not present a pleasant picture, but perhaps this has to be squarely confronted as the other side of the political truth that in the contest for hegemony even the defeated can have their demands, if only partially, attained as the triumphant perforce make some concessions in an effort to establish their legitimacy.

Of particular interest in this book as an exploration of the history of racism is the dimension of mass culture. From the necessity to solicit popular support, mass mediators working in penny press, dime novels, theater, and blackface minstrelsy had to assist in forming a class coalition needed at a particular stage by developing acceptable discourses about races and thus capturing segments of their audiences. Saxton gives an account of the ways in which the mediators exercised great ingenuity in evolving the rhetoric and ideology of racism against the background of egalitarianism among white ethnics only.

Such major writers as James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, and others are also discussed, if tangentially, without interpretation of their literary texts. Some pregnant comments, however, suggest the possibility for a whole range of investigation. Cooper, for example, is regarded as an intellectual "whose socialization has contained 'organic' links" to deprived people, which enabled him to "gain access to uniquely far-reaching views of the human condition." If Cooper was engaged like other authors in the task of ideological innovation, his art was different from the one-dimensional rhetoric used by ordinary writers and entertainers. Saxton argues that the implications of the contradiction the unique hero Leatherstocking presents "have remained central to the American experience of opening a wilderness in the midst of the age of science and industrialization." Upon raising the question "Did Cooper's inspiration have socio-economic sources?" Saxton suggests, "One may at least speculate that the circumstances of Cooper's class situation lent hunger and teeth to his creative imagination." This is indeed a significant proposition for Cooper study.

As David Roediger writes in the "Foreword" to this reissue of the original 1990 edition, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic has been one of the finest "critical white studies," comparable to such great works as Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land, Richard Slotkin's Regeneration Through Violence, and Eric Foner's Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men. Saxton, however, does not rely on the concept of myth so much as Smith or Slotkin, while his scope is broader than Foner's in taking in culture as well as politics. By skillfully blending history with criticism, Saxton's book conduces toward a better understanding of the relation of culture to society through a solid historical portrayal of nineteenth-century America.

Kiyohiko Murayama

Tokyo Metropolitan University