While Alexis de Tocqueville’s work Democracy in America is often held as one of the best critiques on America’s early political society, his ideas may have been about twenty years late to the party. Jill Lepore’s article “People Power” highlights famous American lexicographer and politician Noah Webster, a Federalist reactionary who cautioned against universal male suffrage and populist rhetoric. While Republicans such as Jefferson held the yeoman as the figurehead of American democracy, Webster held in his place the sage aristocrat. Although Republicans and Federalists had famed, heated debates over the federal government\u2019s role in banking, internal improvements, and tariffs, the true debate laid in whether or not the nation would continue centralizing influence amongst the elite or share it amongst all its (white male) inhabitants.<\/p>\n
This political debate reveals an integral problem in post-revolutionary America: democracy proved to not be a tangible object, but an elusive idea. Lepore notes a number of historians\u2019 interpretations on the nature of American democracy, such as Frederick Jackson Turner, Mabel Casner, Ralph Gabriel, Arthur Schlesinger, and Sean Wilentz. Casner and Gabriel\u2019s book The Rise of American Democracy, whose play adaptation casts rough, virtuous Westerners as the beacons of democracy, appears to be heavily influenced by ideas presented in Turner\u2019s essay \u201cThe Contributions of the West to American Democracy.\u201d Turner stresses the importance of the American frontier on the evolution of American democracy, from the need for full political participation amongst frontiersmen to the ideals of Western independence and individualism. To Turner, the rapid urbanization of the frontier and the civilizing of the frontiersman can only erode and corrupt American democracy. Wilentz and Schlesinger instead emphasize the role of economics in the progress of democracy. The rich and poor have separate interpretations of the word \u201cequality\u201d, and how it ought to be applied politically, socially, and, of course, economically, in American government.<\/p>\n
In the modern age, Webster\u2019s argument may cause even the most impassioned Hamiltonian to scratch his head: the limitation of voting rights and office holding to white, male, property owners. However, it is key to remember that Webster does not make his arguments out of elitism or malice. He believes that education and honor are the best determinants of good governance, and these qualities are best harbored in the aged aristocracy. Jefferson, however, does not believe that the common man is any more corruptible than the aristocrat, but rather represents the American tenets of individualism, equality, and self-determinism. To the likely dismay of a lexicographer such as Webster, Lepore proves how \u201cdemocracy\u201d in the early republic was not as definable as we may have thought. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
While Alexis de Tocqueville’s work Democracy in America is often held as one of the best critiques on America’s early political society, his ideas may have been about twenty years late to the party. Jill Lepore’s article “People Power” highlights famous American lexicographer and politician Noah Webster, a Federalist reactionary who cautioned against universal male … <\/p>\n