American Exceptionalism, American Anxiety: Wages, Competition, and Degraded Labor in the Antebellum United States.

By Jonathan A. Glickstein. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2002. Pp. [xii], 361. $39.50, ISBN 0-8139-2115-5.)

Jonathan A. Glickstein's new book is at once broad and narrow in scope. On the one hand, it is a careful exegesis of numerous representative texts from antebellum discourse about political economy. On the other, the book explores some of the most momentous questions of the antebellum period and, indeed, all of American history--the market revolution and its acceptance, slavery and its opposition, the justificatory ideology of American exceptionalism, and the nature of racism.

Glickstein first considers antebellum disputes over wage work and the labor market in general. He draws on many key texts from leading lights such as Joseph Tuckerman, Horace Greeley, and William Ellery Channing, but he also delves into working-class consciousness as it was expressed, often anonymously, in contributions to labor papers. Glickstein locates a tension between writers who subscribed to the notion that American workers were uniquely well rewarded and others who saw wage slavery in the nation's developing economy. He does a particulary fine job of probing working-class responses to the "buy cheap, sell dear" market ethos (chap. 3). Workers, Glickstein maintains, possessed a "divided mentality" (p. 100): they often voiced strong anti-capitalist sentiments, yet these were undercut both by aspects of their own consciousness and by the material success obviously accruing to some segments of the working class.

Later in the book, Glickstein uses a key 1856 address by antislavery writer George M. Weston as a point of departure to investigate what the author dubs "Gresham's law-like anxieties" (p. 144) over the fragile position of free labor. Gresham's law posits that cheap money will always win out in the end, and this economic imperative implied that cheap labor would eventually degrade, demoralize, and pollute honorable free labor. Writers like Weston, while sticking to their exceptionalist beliefs in the moral superiority of free labor, thus worried that competition from slavery would ultimately prove disastrous to northern workers; southern poor whites were, in such accounts, "the existing proof of the pudding" (p. 154). In one of the book's most interesting chapters, Glickstein examines similar fears about so-called pauper labor from the Old World (chap. 7), showing that twenty-first-century fears about labor competition under economic globalization have deep historical roots. Glickstein is not saying, of course, that antebellum writers directly used Gresham's law, but he does make a highly convincing case that these "anxieties" permeated antebellum thinking on many levels; indeed, be argues persuasively that such anxieties drove Whigs and free-soil Republicans as much as did their confidence in the emerging market economy. According to Glickstein, however, many historians who celebrate northern free labor, whether as a system or an ideology, have neglected to explore these aspects of antebellum thought.

In addition to his arguments directly about antebellum America, Glickstein winds two other important themes throughout the book. First, he raises significant questions about the current vogue for "whiteness studies" (p. 12), suggesting that its practitioners may have overemphasized the role that racial antipathy played in white working-class consciousness and underplayed the importance of other relationships, especially to groups above them. Second, while he is sympathetic to some of the assumptions of the "linguistic turn," Glickstein offers a needed corrective to poststructuralist interpretations through his insistence on "objective economic reality ... and the influence it wields" (pp. 26-27).

American Exceptionalism, American Anxiety is a sophisticated and subtle study, and its many important insights can hardly be captured in a brief review. Glickstein's book should be read by everyone interested in nineteenth-century history and the wider history of American ideas.

JAMES D. SCHMIDT

Northern Illinois University