Saturday Lecture:

{History is filled with fascinating details, complexities, and nuances that too often are left out of mainstream historical narratives and history textbooks. The following excerpt is from Woody Holton’s “Unruly Americans and the Oranges Origins of the Constitution”. As Holton explained, in the mid-1780’s, the American economy was in dire straits. Having declared and won its independence, America was foundering, unable to pay its debts and unable to obtain foreign credit. Farmers were particularly hard hit by debt, trade disruptions, and taxes, which led to the memorable Shay’s Rebellion in Massachusetts. Whose fault, however, was the farmers’ plight? While many blamed the state government—because of taxation, and because of its siding with bondholders against indebted farmers—others insisted the farmers had brought ruin upon themselves.}

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“The sons of liberty had become libertines.” (Woody Holton)

Woody Holton:

Were American farmers in trouble because the legislatures had failed to maintain a healthy flow of currency and then imposed excessively high taxes? Or was the real problem the Americans’ own tendency to spend more than they earned?

Noah Webster distinguished himself in the battle against plebian indolence and extravagance. It was not legislative policies that needed to be reformed, he insisted; it was the farmers themselves. At the end of the Revolutionary War, Webster began trying to rein in Americans’ spending. “Luxury rages among you,” Webster told his countrymen, "and luxury is the devil.”

Several groups of prominent Americans launched collective assaults on conspicuous consumption, forming anti-extravagance associations. The governor whose tax policies had helped stir Massachusetts farmers to revolt trumpeted his belief that the state’s distress was rooted in irresponsible consumer choices. Seventy-five state senators and representatives joined in a “solemn agreement and association” to reduce consumption of “articles of luxury and extravagance”. They affirmed that what was really “exhausting our circulatory medium” [i.e., the money supply] was “the excess use and consumption of articles of foreign manufacture”.

The anti-luxury associations of the 1780s were founded on the belief that, since it was emulation—the tendency of the poor and middling to mimic the spending habits of the wealthy—that had trapped Americans in debt, only emulation could save them. “Were the sons of affluence to deviate from the highway of wide-wasted extravagance,” a Virginia essayist declared in 1786, “the plebians of our country would, probably, more generally embrace frugality and virtue. Example,” he affirmed, “is more powerful than precept.” ¹

One writer told Connecticut farmers they could easily discharge their tax bills if they would simply drink less rum. “A stranger would think you to be a nation of Indians by your thirst for this paltry liquor,” he wrote. The same essayist urged men to “pull all the plumes from the heads of your wives and your daughters. Feathers and fripperies suit the Cherokees, or the wench in your kitchen, but they little become the fair daughters of Independent America.”

The Connecticut essayist joined in a growing tendency to pin the country’s economic decline on women. Another writer contended that farmwives “will annually spend as much money for gauze, ribbons, and other such trifling articles as would pay their taxes.” According to male authors, the woman who draped herself in luxury garments was not actually interested in increasing her comfort, just in keeping up with the neighbors or even standing “at the head of her acquaintance”. ²

While most women were castigated for exacerbating the economic downturn, others were celebrated as pointing the way to recovery. Small groups of female citizens launched ostentatious assaults upon their own extravagance. In the fall of 1785 newspapers published an extraordinary report from Boston: “Many ladies of the first character and fortune, in this metropolis, have in contemplation, in consequence of the present melancholy state of their country, to desist, the approaching season, from all public amusements; and to discourage all in their power, every species of luxury, extravagance, and dissipation.”

Women in several towns agreed to “unite their influence” and to embark upon frugality together. In November 1786, more than one hundred women in Hartford, Connecticut agreed to confront their conspicuous consumption together, signing a pledge “to dress their persons in the plainest manner”. They clearly did not agree with those who attributed the state’s economic problems to high taxes and a cramped money supply. “Our calamities,” they said, “are in a great measure occasioned by the luxury and extravagance of individuals.” Endorsing the widespread view that fashion was fueled by mimicry, they tried to divert the force of emulation into a positive direction. Their hope was the very “ladies who used to excel in dress” would now “endeavor to set the best examples” of frugality.

Men often called upon women to reform their husbands’ and sons’ habits along with their own. Since female influence had drawn men into the slough of luxury, who better to haul them out? The Andover, Massachusetts town meeting wished that female citizens “would by their engaging examples, as well as by other proper ways, devote that power of influence, with which nature has endowed them, to the purpose of encouraging every species of economy in living.”

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¹ Note, if you will, the existence and recognition of class distinctions ("sons of affluence" and "plebians") long before Karl Marx had even been born.  Color me shocked.

² Gender politics in the 1780s! Color me astonished.