bcbm
5th April 2011, 04:21
If you associate the era of the American Revolution with individual liberty, youre right in more ways than you probably realized. In the lead-up to the War of Independence and during the revolution itself, prosecutions for prostitution, sodomy, and drunkenness were rare. Divorce was easy. Women entered a wide range of professions. Members of different races mixed freely in raucous taverns.
Such liberties shocked the more respectable classes, including the Founding Fathers; in what one historian calls a counterrevolution against the pleasure culture of the cities, the young countrys leaders called for new restrictions on disreputable recreations. Soon there were crackdowns on illicit sex, tighter controls on divorce, and a booming network of anti-vice groups that targeted gambling houses, brothels, dance halls, and lower-class taverns.
The historian speaking is Thaddeus Russell, 45, a professor at Occidental College and the author of a provocative and engaging new book, A Renegade History of the United States (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/141657106X/reasonmagazineA/) (Free Press). The books title deliberately echoes A Peoples History of the United States, Howard Zinns retelling of the American story from a New Left perspective. But Russells book takes a rather different vantage point, celebrating the prostitutes who seized new freedoms for women, the gangsters whose gay bars opened spaces for same-sex liaisons, the lower-class Birmingham blacks who threw bricks at racist cops, and the consumer revolution that expanded American pleasures. And while Russell is a man of the left, more or less, he doesnt have many kind words for the traditional pantheon of liberal heroes. One chapter of his book attacks Franklin Roosevelt for cartelizing the economy and regimenting the culture. Another highlights the puritanical side of Martin Luther King, who called for blacks to stop drinking and gambling and to curtail their desires for luxuries. Even the 60s counterculture gets a mixed review, with Russell finding an ascetic strain in a movement more famous for its hedonism.
Theres a lot here for libertarians to cheer, but this is no more a conventional libertarian account than it is a standard leftist tale. When Russell describes the Founders clampdowns on drinking and other pleasures, he doesnt merely point out that they felt such restrictions were necessary for democratic self-government. He forthrightly agrees with their analysis, with just one difference: He counts this as a mark against self-government. In one controversy-courting chapter, Russell celebrates the ways plantation slaves managed to resist their masters controls and build their own autonomous culture. That might not sound so controversial, except he argues that the slaves were able to create this culture not despite slavery, but because of it and that slaves enjoyed pleasures that were forbidden to white people. This isnt, he stresses, a defense of slavery. But it takes his critique of self-government into potentially precarious places.
continued:
http://reason.com/archives/2011/02/22/people-who-live-in-the-shade
Such liberties shocked the more respectable classes, including the Founding Fathers; in what one historian calls a counterrevolution against the pleasure culture of the cities, the young countrys leaders called for new restrictions on disreputable recreations. Soon there were crackdowns on illicit sex, tighter controls on divorce, and a booming network of anti-vice groups that targeted gambling houses, brothels, dance halls, and lower-class taverns.
The historian speaking is Thaddeus Russell, 45, a professor at Occidental College and the author of a provocative and engaging new book, A Renegade History of the United States (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/141657106X/reasonmagazineA/) (Free Press). The books title deliberately echoes A Peoples History of the United States, Howard Zinns retelling of the American story from a New Left perspective. But Russells book takes a rather different vantage point, celebrating the prostitutes who seized new freedoms for women, the gangsters whose gay bars opened spaces for same-sex liaisons, the lower-class Birmingham blacks who threw bricks at racist cops, and the consumer revolution that expanded American pleasures. And while Russell is a man of the left, more or less, he doesnt have many kind words for the traditional pantheon of liberal heroes. One chapter of his book attacks Franklin Roosevelt for cartelizing the economy and regimenting the culture. Another highlights the puritanical side of Martin Luther King, who called for blacks to stop drinking and gambling and to curtail their desires for luxuries. Even the 60s counterculture gets a mixed review, with Russell finding an ascetic strain in a movement more famous for its hedonism.
Theres a lot here for libertarians to cheer, but this is no more a conventional libertarian account than it is a standard leftist tale. When Russell describes the Founders clampdowns on drinking and other pleasures, he doesnt merely point out that they felt such restrictions were necessary for democratic self-government. He forthrightly agrees with their analysis, with just one difference: He counts this as a mark against self-government. In one controversy-courting chapter, Russell celebrates the ways plantation slaves managed to resist their masters controls and build their own autonomous culture. That might not sound so controversial, except he argues that the slaves were able to create this culture not despite slavery, but because of it and that slaves enjoyed pleasures that were forbidden to white people. This isnt, he stresses, a defense of slavery. But it takes his critique of self-government into potentially precarious places.
continued:
http://reason.com/archives/2011/02/22/people-who-live-in-the-shade