Early American Horror Show, the Salem Witch Trials Remain a Hideous Yet Disturbingly Familiar
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Early American horror show, The Salem Witch Trials remain a hideous -- yet disturbingly familiar -- By Laura Miller
Oct. 29, 2002 | The Salem Witch Trials are America's original home-grown horror. The crisis happened over 300 years ago in a world very different from today's -- and to people seemingly very different from ourselves -- and yet so many of its elements keep cropping up again and again in our public life. A panic that spreads like a virus, intimations of a vile conspiracy, children and young women horribly abused, a fog of accusations, shocking confessions, sensational trials, reputations destroyed, culprits (or scapegoats) located and harshly punished, and an aftermath in which anyone with a conscience looks back and asks, "What just happened? Did we really do that?"
Salem, too, is a challenge to everyone, whether on the left or the right, who sentimentalizes or idealizes the Way Things Used to Be. Feeling nostalgic for the peace and safety of small town life? Convinced that what the world needs now is a return to Christian values? Think that the trouble with contemporary society is that we've lost our sense of community? Well, Salem was a small town, as Christian as they come, and it's got to be Exhibit A on the list of what sucks about living in a place where everybody knows your name.
At first glance, we seem in no danger of letting the memory of Salem fade. Fifty years ago, the Witch Trials served as a metaphor for McCarthyism in Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible." A decade or two later they provided fodder for cheesy horror movies starring Hope Lange in Pilgrim drag or Vincent Price with bushy sideburns. If you visit Salem today, you'll find a town so intent on using witch-oriented tourism to revive its faltering economy that it has enlisted such wax-museum-style attractions as Dracula's Castle, the Vampire Vortex and Boris Karloff's Witch Mansion, all of which, as David J. Skal observes in his book "Death Makes a Holiday," owe "more to Hollywood than to historical New England." The town throws a big, spooky Halloween celebration each year, even though Oct. 31 has no relevance to the Trials and meant nothing at all to the Puritans.
The trouble is, the ways we choose to remember the Salem Witch Trials bring us perilously close to forgetting them. The crisis was and is terrifying, but not because it had anything to do with the occult. It offers the bewildering and horrific spectacle of a small community plunging into senseless self-destruction -- as nightmares go, its closest cousins may have transpired in other small towns in Poland and the Ukraine during World War II or Rwanda in the 1990s. Worst of all, the institutions intended to provide Salem's people with justice ended up perpetrating hideous crimes, a spectacle not limited to the pre- modern world. The Salem crisis remains fundamentally mysterious, which may be one reason why historians keep coming back to it, telling the story over and over again, placing the emphasis on different factors each time, looking for an answer to a question that will probably never be satisfied: Why?
The bare bones of the story are as follows. In mid-January 1692, two girls living in the parsonage in the settlement of Salem Village began to have strange fits. When their condition did not improve, witchcraft was suspected and one of the household servants, a slave of Caribbean descent, attempted a counterspell with the intention of either relieving the girls or identifying the culprint. The fits worsened, but the girls named some local women as their tormentors, claiming these "witches" appeared in a spectral form visible to them alone.
Over the next few months, more people, mostly girls and young women, were afflicted, accusing an ever- increasing number of their neighbors of spectrally torturing and threatening them. The accused were arrested, questioned by magistrates, imprisoned in Salem and Boston and, in some cases, officially tried for witchcraft, a capital crime in colonial Massachusetts. During that summer, the afflictions and accusations multiplied at a fevered rate, spreading throughout Essex County. By the end of September, 19 of the convicted had been hanged and one man was pressed to death under heavy stones, an ordeal intended to get him to agree to a trial. Doubts about the proceedings began to well up at that point and
1 the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony ordered the proceedings suspended. The crisis would take another year or so to entirely blow over, by which point an additional four accused persons had died in the region's jails, which were described by a visiting Englishman as "suburbs of Hell." The rest of the accused were gradually released.
The exact details of how this happened are difficult to pin down. Contemporary records are inconsistent and incomplete, and as Mary Beth Norton notes in "In the Devil's Snare," her new account of the crisis, descendants of some participants destroyed documents in an attempt to erase their family's role in what was soon regarded as a shameful debacle.
What's more, 17th-century people seldom set down the kind of information that seems meaningful to us. Contrary to what you might conclude from seeing Miller's "The Crucible," for example, virtually everyone believed that witches existed, even if not everyone thought that witchcraft was the source of the afflicted's troubles. They didn't psychologize, and their reasoning was frustratingly unsystematic. Salem's residents inhabited "a pre-Enlightenment world that had not yet experienced the scientific revolution, with its emphasis on the careful study of physical phenomena through controlled experimentation and observation." They believed in a vast, invisible reality populated by throngs of spirits. "Wonders of the Invisible World" was the title the famous Puritan cleric Cotton Mather chose for the book he wrote in defense of the Trials.
Salem's weren't the first witch hunts, either; many people were executed for witchcraft in medieval Europe as well as in England and Scotland no more than a few decades before the crisis in Massachusetts. What makes Salem extraordinary, as Norton points out, were the sheer numbers of accusers and accused, as well as the variety of people charged. Usually the people targeted as witches were what Norton calls the "usual suspects": quarrelsome older women of "dubious reputation." (The idea that witch hunts were church-run persecutions of wise old herbalists carrying on the remnants of pre-Christian woman-centered nature religions is regarded as wishful thinking by serious historians.) In Salem, many men were accused (and six were executed), as were prominent citizens and respectable, pious members of the church.
Also remarkable was the nature of their accusers, mostly young and female; the two girls who launched the crisis were 11 and 9. Most of the afflicted were in their teens, and only one was over 30, though Norton argues that their complaints of bewitchments were taken much more seriously when Ann Putnam, a 30-year-old wife and mother, joined their ranks. Although the afflicted were not the solid adult citizens who were the usual complainants in witchcraft trials, their charges were uncustomarily treated as very credible. And contrary to yet another popular misconception, there's no evidence that the afflicted had as a group engaged in any spell-casting of their own, although fortune-telling and countermagic (to protect against evil enchantments) were common, if forbidden, folk practices of the time. (And while we're at it, no one was burned at the stake in Salem, or accused of flying through the air on a broom.)
Historians have come up with at least a half-dozen explanations for what was wrong with those girls and why so many people around them were willing to see their neighbors hang for it. Feminists have called the Trials both a misogynist rampage (ignoring how many men were accused) or a rebellion on the part of young women, many of them servants (including Mercy Lewis, a 19-year-old whom Norton figures for the informal ringleader), who were disgusted with their dismal, powerless lot in life. Other scholars have dismissed this interpretation and claimed that the Trials actually constituted a proxy battle for contesting factions among the town's male leaders. Still others have suspected epidemics of ergot poisoning or encephalitis that supposedly induced the afflicted's fits and visions of spectral tormentors.
Norton (who writes that she began her history expecting to advance another feminist interpretation) offers the theory that the Trials were a displaced response to the trauma of the Indian Wars on the frontiers of the British settlements in New England. She traces the connections the various participants had to Maine, the location of some especially bloody conflicts with the Wabanaki tribes and their French allies. Today, knowing as we do that the Indians would ultimately lose everything, it's easy to forget how fragile those early British settlements felt to their residents, especially in 1692, when it seemed that the Indians and French were enjoying "continued and seemingly unstoppable successes," and the Indians were boasting that they'd soon have the continent to themselves again.
Norton traces some of the hideous spectral visions of the afflicted (witches were seen roasting human beings on spits, for example) to reports of similar Indian atrocities. Some of the afflicted girls saw friends
2 and relatives tortured and killed before their eyes and were forced to become servants when they lost everything after Maine homesteads were attacked and had to be abandoned. Norton insists that revenge against the leaders who failed to protect them must have at least unconsciously motivated the afflicted girls. (Two of the high-status men accused were the reverend of a Maine congregation and a naval captain said to have sold arms to the Indians.) The judges and clergymen who accepted the girls' accounts were eager to blame their inability to defend their people on the evil designs of Satan, who was said to have sent both the Indians and the witches to destroy the Christian enclave of New England.
It's a persuasive argument, even if Norton does wind up pushing it too hard. She's more convincing when she's merely asserting that "the conflict created the conditions that allowed the crisis to develop as rapidly and extensively as it did," than when she appears to be presenting the Indian Wars as the primary cause of the crisis. It's easy to see how the threat at the frontier and the lack of clear-cut authority at home (Salem Village -- now the city of Danvers -- was still unhappily dependent on Salem Town, while the very governance of Massachusetts was in flux at that time, awaiting a new charter from London) made the prevailing atmosphere jumpy and irritable, a feeling the youngsters no doubt picked up on even it they didn't entirely understand it.
Yet however plausible Norton's theory, like the others, it doesn't feel quite complete. At the end of "In the Devil's Snare," there's an appendix in the form of a chart listing the cases heard by the court with the various relevant dates. Scanning down through the column marked "Outcome," the entries read "Hanged, July 19," "Hanged, Sept. 22," "Hanged, Aug. 19," "Pressed, Sept. 19" and so on -- a chill litany that speaks of some irreducible darkness in human nature that can't ever be fully explained. Norton's theory is an interesting part of a fascinating conversation, but it's not the last word. Furthermore, while Norton claims that her book is a straightforward chronological history of the crisis, in fact, "In the Devil's Snare" is a lamentably confusing and often tedious read. For the curious nonscholar, Marilynne K. Roach's new book, "The Salem Witch Trials," offers a more lucid "day-by-day chronicle," as promised by its subtitle, much better written, theoretically noncommittal and as gripping as, say, "Into Thin Air," another meticulous dissection of a catastrophe.
The truth is that even without a frontier war, ours is a nation peculiarly prone to hysterias and conspiracy theories. The Red Scare of the 1950s is not even the best example; Communists, at least, do actually exist. More than one observer has noticed the parallels between the Salem Witch Trials and the ritual satanic abuse panic of the 1980s, in which dozens of people (many of them childcare providers) were charged with crimes in connection with an alledged underground network of cultists who molested and even killed children in bizarre rituals. Eventually, the existence of any such conspiracy was thoroughly debunked by law enforcement officials, but not before innocent people were sentenced to long prison terms (most of them since overturned) and even a confession or two was elicited. (Several of the Salem accused confessed, an example of the unreliability of even this most apparently damning form of evidence.) All of this occurred without the influence of superstition and religious fervor, two factors that have also been blamed for the Salem crisis.
No one, fortunately, was executed for committing ritual satanic child abuse in the 1980s. To revisit Salem is to be reminded of how important the much-maligned principle of due process can be, how it's often the only thing standing between an innocent citizen and that irreducible darkness mentioned above. No monster movie or ghost story could ever be as scary as the surviving records of the Salem investigations (almost all transcripts of the actual trials have been lost). Frightened and baffled people try to defend themselves against the insane, circular logic of magistrates who've already decided they're guilty. The sizable crowd of onlookers always includes a pack of the afflicted girls, raving hysterically, claiming to be pinched and struck and threatened by specters (thus "proving" their charges) and reducing the proceedings to chaos. The voices of the accused as they desperately and vainly protested their innocence in the face of this certain and utterly pointless death should never be forgotten -- because whatever possessed Salem in 1692 will never entirely go away. http://archive.salon.com/books/feature/2002/10/29/salem/
3 The Devil's Cup: Coffee, the Driving Force in History, BY STEWART LEE ALLEN, NONFICTION, SOHO PRESS, 231 PAGES
Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World. BY MARK PENDERGRAST, NONFICTION, BASIC BOOKS, 520 PAGES
By Richard Reynolds
Nov. 23, 1999 |Coffee was first banned in 1511, by the head of Mecca's religious police. In 1675, Charles II banned coffeehouses from England. Frederick the Great followed suit in 1777, forbidding coffee roasting in Prussia except in official government establishments.
Since its discovery some 2,000 years ago, coffee has given the authorities pause, for wherever people gather to drink it, you will find controversy, political debate and innovative ideas. (The modern insurance industry was born in a London coffeehouse that grew into Lloyd's of London.) The world's most widely consumed psychoactive drug has also fueled artists, musicians and writers -- and inspired a plethora of books on coffee itself. Recently that literature has seen two notable additions.
Stewart Lee Allen's "The Devil's Cup" is one-third history of coffee, two-thirds gonzo travelogue. This is the work of a traveler who braves bandits, border skirmishes and life-threatening sea voyages to sample exotic (and often wretched) brews that have played a role in the history of coffee. The reader joins him on a caffeinated trip from Harrar, Ethiopia, where coffee was discovered, to Adrien, Texas, where Allen finds what he dubs the "all-American joe ... awful and terrifying and beyond compare." He traveled 20,000 miles in researching this adrenaline-filled book, wading into his subject neck-deep and capturing its mystique.
In Harrar, Allen spends an afternoon drinking kati (a precursor to coffee made by steeping the coffee tree's leaves) and chewing qat leaves (the addictive "evil sister to coffee"), then bribes his way into a Zar healing ceremony, an ancient mystical ritual involving the roasting of green coffee beans, whose roots go back to the earliest days of coffee. He sets off for Al-Makkha, Yemen, in a 30-foot dhow that proves to be seriously overloaded with "booze and AK-47s" and nearly sinks in the Red Sea. It was in Al-Makkha, or Mocha, that the first coffee is said to have been brewed from beans, and Yemen controlled the world's supply for centuries.
Traveling by train, dhow, rickshaw, cargo freighter and donkey, Allen follows the trail the coffee tree took as it spread around the planet. Along the way he offers a running commentary on (and makes an intriguing case for) 19th century French historian Jules Michelet's theory that Europe's transformation into a coffee-drinking society led to the birth of enlightened Western civilization.
Allen takes everything in stride, and he has the rare ability to capture his characters' unsavoriness without denigrating them. (He seems almost fond of Yangi, an Indian who swindles him out of $1,200 in a bizarre scheme to smuggle fake antique Rajasthani paintings into France.) When he reaches Campo Grande, Brazil, his journey comes full circle as he discovers a Western equivalent of the Zar ritual he attended in Harrar -- presumably carried to Brazil with the 8 million African slaves who for two centuries tended that country's coffee and sugar plantations.
Mark Pendergrast's "Uncommon Grounds" passes over the early history that is the subject of Allen's book in a few quick chapters, then focuses on its central topic: the coffee business in the 20th century. It is a weighty tome, with nearly 100 pages devoted to footnotes, a bibliography and other back matter. Pendergrast previously chronicled the story of Coca-Cola in "For God, Country and Coca-Cola," and he brings a similar thoroughness to this examination of the "second most valuable exported legal commodity on earth (after oil)."
4 Brazil, which has long been the world's largest exporter of coffee, also plays a central role in Pendergrast's book, and the picture he draws is not a happy one. Especially painful is his account of the relentless destruction of Brazil's rain forest to produce a massive overabundance of mediocre coffee.
Pendergrast details the cutthroat history of the giant coffee companies whose colorful cans dominated the supermarket shelves for decades: Chase & Sanborn, Maxwell House, Folgers, Hills Brothers, MJB and the rest. The advertising industry also receives a good deal of scrutiny as he explores the groundbreaking marketing campaigns the industry developed to sell the wretched stuff our parents brewed in their percolators.
If you want to understand the coffee business, "Uncommon Grounds" is a must-read. Pendergrast did a huge amount of research -- the list of people he interviewed totals 246 -- and his level tone inspires trust in his information. But at times there's an academic quality to "Uncommon Grounds." Pendergrast toured Central America and visited various coffee operations there, but if he left his study at any other time during the writing of the book, there's little evidence of it. "The Devil's Cup," on the other hand, manages to convey a surprisingly thorough basic history of coffee in an entertaining package that no one could mistake for a textbook. salon.com | Nov. 23, 1999 http://archive.salon.com/books/review/1999/11/23/allen_pendergrast/
5 Built on the buzz, Drugs like alcohol and tobacco created the modern world, argues one historian, but caffeine still rules it. By Maria Russo
May 03, 2001 | "Nature is parsimonious with pleasure," writes historian David Courtwright in "Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World." Or, as we used to say in high school, "life sucks, and then you die." But human ingenuity has stepped in to lessen the miseries and add to the delights of earthly existence. Courtwright calls it "the psychoactive revolution": Compared with 500 years ago, people across the planet now have easy access to a, well, mind-blowing variety of consciousness-altering substances. The menu of options differs from culture to culture -- one man's vodka martini is another's kava brew -- but the drive to take a temporary vacation from our normal waking state has made some drugs into perhaps the only truly global commodities. Virtually every language on earth has words for coffee, tea, cacao and cola, the plants that produce caffeine. The 5.5 trillion cigarettes smoked each year in the 1990s represent a pack per week for every living man, woman and child.
Alcohol joins caffeine and tobacco to round out what Courtwright calls the "big three" of currently legal psychoactive drugs. As he sees it, modern civilization is practically unthinkable without this trio. But why have they fared so well while equally intoxicating substances -- like, say, marijuana -- are banned and stigmatized, and others -- like kava, khat and betel -- are popular only in distinct geographic areas? And why is tobacco currently falling in popularity, while alcohol and caffeine are holding their grip on us? These questions are only partly answered in Courtwright's otherwise excellent book, but that's not really his fault. Drugs are as deceptive and multifaceted as the human beings whose metabolisms they mess with; a history of drugs may be possible, but an analysis of their role in culture is bound to be incomplete and provisional. There are simply too many ways to tell the story.
Still, Courtwright's historical investigation is solid and fascinating: Once the big three caught on among European elites, they became crucial components in the ocean-crossing commerce and empire building that shaped modern economies. Tobacco, coffee, tea and spirits were lucrative; users quickly grew dependent on them, guaranteeing a steady demand for commodities that could be heavily taxed. These drugs have also always been an ideal way to control and pacify laborers, providing them with temporary relief from the fatigue and boredom of agricultural and, later, industrial life. Some of these workers -- such as those Eastern European peasants paid in vodka for the potatoes and grain they delivered to distilleries or West Indian distillery workers paid in rum -- found themselves caught in devastating economic traps.
As habits, the big three also work with and reinforce one another nicely. Had too much to drink last night? You'll be especially eager for that morning cup of coffee to clear your head. If you smoke, you'll need to pour another cup, since smokers metabolize caffeine more quickly than nonsmokers and must drink more coffee or tea to get the same buzz. Feeling too wired now? Time for a cocktail!
Over time, as you ingest more of these substances, your body's tolerance for each of them increases, so you need more and more to get the same result. These endless cycles, "Forces of Habit" suggests, not only tap into a vulnerability in the human psyche -- we're hard-wired to seek to mitigate pain and increase pleasure -- but are also the essential building blocks of capitalism:
The peculiar, vomitorious genius of modern capitalism is its ability to betray our senses with one class of products or services and then sell us another to cope with the damage so that we can go back to consuming more of what caused the problem in the first place.
The economic impact of legal drugs extends from barley farmers to bartenders to the social workers who run drug rehab clinics to the lawyers who defend drunken drivers to, Courtwright playfully acknowledges, the scholars who study the history of drugs. 6 But drugs are, of course, not just pleasurable and profitable -- they're also dangerous. Before the late 19th century, governments were aware of the destructive properties of a wide range of drugs, but the revenues to be had from taxing the drug trade were more compelling than the moral imperative to outlaw it. Gradually, as the booming print media made the downside of certain drugs more visible -- readers learned of desperate Chinese peasants enslaved to opium and crazed students overdosing in 1890s Berlin cocaine dens -- public demand mounted to ban some drugs outright.
The losers during this time were what Courtwright calls the "little three" -- opium, cannabis and coca. With narcotics like opium and cocaine, governments justified bans by pointing to extreme and visible health problems and social costs. Marijuana, however, appears to have been the victim of historical bad luck: Its health effects are no more dire than those of alcohol or tobacco, but over the centuries the plant lacked "international corporate backing or fiscal influence."
Unlike tobacco and alcohol, which was banned temporarily in the United States during Prohibition but was quickly reinstated to legal (albeit heavily regulated) status, marijuana never became part of "the personal habits of influential leaders and celebrities." (That makes sense, of course, given the go-go nature of capitalism and the traits required for success -- anyone who did make marijuana part of his personal habits would most likely not have become an influential leader or celebrity in the first place.) Instead, the mellow plant lodged itself first in peasant and then in youth subcultures, where it gained a reputation as a "gateway drug" to harder, harsher illegal substances like heroin and cocaine. (It is a gateway drug, but then so are nicotine and alcohol.)
Of Courtwright's big three, alcohol has the most fascinating and contradictory history, and the kinds of cultural questions that its history raises point up the limitations of Courtwright's project most obviously. Alcohol is as lethal as they come; its score on pharmacologist Maurice Seevers' famous 1957 "addiction liability rating" -- the degree to which a drug produces tolerance, emotional and physical dependence, physical deterioration and antisocial behavior in those under its influence or those withdrawing from it -- is 24, much higher than that of heroin (16) and cocaine (14), and ridiculously higher than that of marijuana (8). Yet alcohol is not just tolerated in many cultures, it's frequently exalted.
Courtwright points to the alcohol industry's "size and fiscal importance" to account for the drug's unassailable legality and social cachet. He does note that scientists have found moderate drinking to be healthful, and he observes that "humanity ... has long experience of alcohol, and has evolved all manner of rules and taboos to reduce the harmfulness of drinking." But human beings have done more than just ameliorate alcohol's negative effects. We've turned the making and drinking of alcohol into a venerable tradition, one that may depend on the high that alcohol delivers but one that also can't be reduced to a mere buzz.
Cartwright doesn't acknowledge it, but the process of making alcoholic beverages has given rise to sophisticated craftsmanship -- some might even call it art. To wine drinkers, the difference between a New Zealand sauvignon blanc and a California cabernet is vast and important, and matching them with the proper foods requires knowledge and imagination. And as he notes, in France, Italy and Spain, alcoholism rates are very low and public drunkenness is frowned on, yet nearly every adult drinks. In these cultures, alcohol has been integrated into the social fabric and is inextricable from the concept of "the good life."
In contrast to the array of alcoholic beverages that Western civilization has developed and matched to particular moments of life (champagne goes with celebrations, white wine goes with elegant fare, beer goes with watching football on the tube and so on), the distinctions between brands of cigarettes are mainly a matter of marketing. Perhaps that's partly why, of the big three, tobacco is faring the worst these days; its cultural roots are just not deep enough. With many municipalities banning smoking in restaurants and even bars, cigarettes have been largely exiled from the civilized table, where caffeine and alcohol have been prettied up by the gourmet delivery systems of wine and coffee. Connoisseurship disguises well the irresistible craving for a buzz. As Courtwright puts it, "Tobacco ... is becoming a loser's drug." While their caffeine-addicted friends can now find a Starbucks on every corner beckoning them in for a quick hit in a cozy environment, smokers are reduced to hopping around on freezing sidewalks outside office buildings.
7 No longer do cigarettes serve as "the small change of sociability," in Courtwright's phrase, or help a woman appear more independent and sophisticated, as they once did for countless Hollywood actresses. "I would date a woman who smokes," a male friend once told me, "as long as she doesn't walk down the street smoking." At first I thought he was making some sort of distinction between "feminine" and "unfeminine" behavior, but now I think his prejudice has more to do with the fact that a walking smoker announces the fact that she's addicted to nicotine, not just engaged in the elegant little social ritual of lighting up in a restaurant with friends or while lying in bed with a lover. Dragging on a cigarette while she's navigating the street, she lays bare the fact that she is an addict, engaged in the self-directed spiral of feeding her own high.
Stripped of its social trappings as it increasingly is, smoking is beginning to appear as nothing more interesting than a smelly, breath-fouling, teeth-staining, illness-causing personal addiction. That doesn't mean that the cigarette has gasped its last -- there still is, for many people, a surge of pleasure that comes from lighting up. That's not going away soon, but it certainly will become more difficult to get as regulation spreads from restaurants to outdoor spaces such as parks. What Courtwright calls the growing "lower-class concentration" of tobacco also makes it more politically vulnerable as well.
Caffeine, in Courtwright's book, emerges triumphant among its mind-altering brethren as the least harmful, most life-enhancing drug yet discovered. It's the earth's most widely used drug, with a per capita consumption of 70 milligrams a day. Caffeine alters brain chemistry in notable ways, producing euphoric effects such as a rush of energy and an elevation of mood. It's addictive in the sense that tolerance increases the more you use it and withdrawal can lead to symptoms such as headaches and lethargy. Nonetheless, the drug's negative side effects, however troublesome, are not dire; too much caffeine causes nothing worse than insomnia or tremors.
Precious few lives are ruined by caffeine, though intrepid researchers, Courtwright reports, have isolated a "syndrome" that affects some serious users -- a condition that would no doubt make an addict of any other substance laugh derisively: These people "go to extremes to obtain caffeinated drinks, use them in dangerous or inappropriate situations, and continue drinking them despite adverse health consequences and warnings by their physicians." The famously coffee-mad French novelist Honoré de Balzac is often used as an example; he died from heart disease apparently exacerbated by his habit. And doctors like to warn that the jury is still out on other potential health problems that may be caused by regular caffeine consumption.
Still, all in all, the social costs of our love affair with caffeine are remarkably low, and its role as a spur to productivity and an aid to coping with the more difficult, sad and painful aspects of life gives the plucky little molecule a strongly positive aura. Even more than the other players in Courtwright's "psychoactive revolution," it's hard to imagine the modern world without it. Yet like the well-behaved daughter who watches as her noisier, more unruly siblings suck up her parents' attention, caffeine mainly lingers in the margins of Courtwright's history.
Fortunately -- for hardcore caffeine aficionados at least -- another recent book, "The World of Caffeine" by Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K. Bealer, is very likely the ultimate compendium of the political and social history, science, lore and arcana of "the world's most popular drug," as the subtitle brags. This fact- packed book is the work of a science writer (Bealer) and a scientist (Weinberg), but it's written at such a fever pitch of interest in its subject that its authors appear to have been dipping into the research material with an extremely liberal hand. "Can there be any doubt that, if and when there are settlements on Mars, coffeehouses will be among the first amenities available to the emigres?" they enthuse.
There's much to be learned in this book about such mysteries as the chemistry that makes caffeine so effective, even if you have to wade through the authors' insistent, overblown and often repetitive prose. They come at you with such aggressively tumescent notions as "caffeine is like the air." As they explain that one, "You don't see it and usually hardly notice it, but it's there all the same, and it becomes part of you in a critical metabolic exchange that involves every cell in your body." If caffeine is really all this book cracks it up to be, demagogues looking to start a new religion should pay close attention: When science shades so easily into zealotry, you know you're in the presence of something truly powerful. http://dir.salon.com/books/feature/2001/05/03/drugs/index.html?sid=1027938
8 Smoke gets in your eyes, Cigarette smoking is a metaphor for sex, says the author of a book on tobacco. By David Bowman
April 3, 2002 | Torch singers used to sing sexy nicotine songs like "Don't Smoke in Bed" and "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." Then the lounges became discos and the torch singers all ended up dead.
It's been years since smoking was sexy, years since a fellow would flip a Camel in the air and catch it with his lips, or a blond would lift her chin toward the moon and release her own little halo of smoke. Ancient history.
Iain Gately is one Brit who remembers the old days. A few years back, he abandoned the "no smoking zone" of London and expatriated himself to Tarisa, on the Spanish side of the Straits of Gibraltar. The citizens of his town still smoke like chimneys. Gately even wrote a history of smoking there, "Tobacco: The Story of How Tobacco Seduced the World." It's a cultural history of the weed, from American Indian prehistory up to present. And seduction is the operative word.
Gately recounts the gender differences: Gentlemen once seduced women with smoke signals as if they were both Cherokees; the masculine style of smoking was to puff tersely with as little effort as possible. Women were expressionistic -- waving the cigarette in the air, puckering their lips.
And the author remembers the first time he was seduced by a woman wanting cigarettes.
"It was in Spain," he says over the phone, standing in his favorite bar in Tarisa, where I have reached him from New York. "A girl came up and said, 'Can I have a cigarette?' I handed her one and she walked off.
"One of my mates said, 'That girl is interested in you. Go over and talk to her.'
"I said, 'How do you know?'
"'She asked you for a cigarette.'"
Gately pauses and smiles. "I went over and that was true. Cheers."
I imagine Gately enjoying a post-coital smoke, considering the entire sexual history of cigarettes spread out before him like the Mediterranean Sea. Six thousand years ago, smoking was a fertility rite. A shaman would blow smoke over the loins of virgins about to be married.
"The cover of my book has got a picture of a naked blond descending from the sky with a leaf of tobacco," Gately says. "That derives from a Native American myth. There was a great famine in the land. The Great Spirit sent down a naked blond woman who sat cross-legged on the ground. Under her left hand sprung up wheat and from under her right sprung up corn, but in the damp patch where she's been sitting there came tobacco."
"The Native Americans made this up before they'd ever seen white people?" I ask.
"Yeah," Gately says. (I think I hear him lighting up.) "Remember Cortez being told that the gods had sent a white man to help them? When Europeans first got to the New World, tobacco was still associated with sex because the conquistadors caught syphilis for the first time, and they used to smoke to ease the pain 9 of this new disease. Then monks started taking up snuff, partly to try to get the Aztecs into their churches because Aztecs associated smoking not just with sex, but with God. The monks were frowned upon back in Europe because snuff promotes sneezing and sneezing was considered the brother of an orgasm. So Westerners negatively associated tobacco with sex for a period of, say, 300 years. Until the end of the 19th century, it was more 'smoking and sexism,' than 'smoking and sex.' Normal working women smoked cigarettes, but in decent society it was frowned upon. It was a black period for the weed and seduction. You didn't find people even using smoking as a metaphor for lust."
That all changed in 1874 with the George Bizet opera "Carmen." "It was originally a French 1845 novella [by Prosper Mérimée] about this very sexy cigarette seller," Gately explains. "The narrator meets Carmen on a bridge where women are bathing naked underneath. He offers her a cigar, which she rejects. Then he offers her a cigarette, which she accepts. That's probably the first instance where you got cigarettes acting as a go-between in an act of seduction between a man and a woman. From now on smoking and sex start getting together."
"From here on out men and women start blowing smoke screens at each other," I venture.
"That certainly comes into it," says Gately. "In romantic literature you'd have smoking heroines and you'd have men giving girls cigarettes. By the First World War, when women became much more emancipated, they enjoyed the newfound freedom of smoking. Dance halls opened up and smoking became a go- between."
"Cigarette smoking is self-evidently a metaphor for sex," says Gately. "That's what all these smoking fetish sites on the Internet are about. Cigarettes were once an elegant extension of the body, like fingernails. They make the body look longer -- Audrey Hepburn with her long cigarette holder epitomizes how cigarettes made you look more elegant."
I ask when the post-coital cigarette was invented and I can almost hear Gately frown. "I don't know. I'm trying to think of the earliest example in English literature. I'm sure there are post-coital cigarettes in 'Vile Bodies' by Evelyn Waugh, which was written in 1930."
I ask him how many times in his life he has enjoyed post-coital cigarettes. "It depends on post-coital with a smoker or nonsmoker. In both those situations I always recant to the wishes of the lady."
"Can too many cigarettes make a man impotent?" I ask. Gately takes a professional tone. "Smoking puts stress on your heart," he says. "It's going to make you prone to any debilitations resulting from that. In the U.K. they loaded smoking studies with obese smokers. It was probably fat that killed them or caused impotence. There are, however, tobacco shamans in South America that are so addicted to strong tobacco they have gray skin -- because nicotine causes your skin temperature to drop 10 degrees, which does have an effect on impotence because you can't feel what's going on."
That said, who is the sexiest male smoker?
"Who did it well?" Gately asks rhetorically. "Humphrey Bogart did it well. Robert Mitchem did it well too." How about women? "Let me think. You mean someone famous? I was going to say my old lover, but she's given it up. People know her in New York and I won't pass on her name. She's got beautiful lips that concentrate your attention, and beautiful fingers, and she's beautifully coordinated. Juggling spoons, she'd look sexy."
I confess a prejudice: "Women shouldn't walk down the street with cigarettes dangling out of their mouths. Bogart can smoke that way, but never Bacall."
"That's something I don't find particularly attractive. Maybe it makes women look slovenly."
Gately is asked if there are any women smoking in the tavern. "There are." How do women drink and smoke in Spain? "They probably sip more than they swallow," Gately says. "They'll light up, gesture and wave it around in the air. Probably they smoke more, but not quiet as heavily. The women here have
10 been renowned since Caesar's time for their beauty and alluring dress." He tells me there is a woman near him who is smoking.
"This one is somewhere between 18 and 20. She has long dark hair tied with a red ribbon. She has what look like blue eyes that are quite common down here.
According to Gately's book, one is not supposed to blow smoke in a person's face unless you want to have sex with them.
"If you blow smoke in someone's face, it means that you love them," Gately says. "It is a substitute for poetry. I suppose because cigarette smoke is so acrid and dry, the chance of making the recipient cough instead of returning your adoring gaze is sort of 50-50." He chuckles. "'Blow Some in My Direction' came from a Camel ad in the 1930s."
Then we discuss the sorry sight of citizens huddling in the cold to smoke in both Manhattan and London.
"Having people smoking in an ugly, furtive way is more likely to discourage smoking than any government campaign," Gately observes. "If you ban something or frown on it, you give it evil powers and turn it into a fetish. Smoking has gone underground. It is seen as a deviance and can be aligned with other deviancies."
"Let's go from the groin to the mouth," I say. "You spend a lot of pages ragging on Sigmund Freud and his theory of 'lip eroticism.'"
"Freud as usual is full of contradictions," Gately sighs. "He was a very heavy smoker himself -- about 20 cigars a day. The habit nearly killed him. He got gum cancer in the most appalling manner." Gately pauses. "Freud delved into human sexuality and in my opinion made up a language to describe it. He ascribed every aspect of human behavior to some sexual or Oedipal impulse. Men smoke because they're seeking breasts to suckle." Why do women smoke? "There's a contradiction in that, isn't there? Obviously women already have breasts."
I bring up another prejudice of smoking: Pipe smokers aren't sexy.
"There was one sexy pipe smoker, or supposed to be," Gately says. "Was it Clark Gable? Cary Grant? You know that 300-year period I described before smoking became sexy? That was when the pipe ruled. That would be the best way to kill off sexiness and smoking -- to introduce pipes."
Background noise indicates a boisterous party has just begun in Gately's Spanish bar. http://www.salon.com/sex/feature/2002/04/03/tobacco/index.html
11 BY SCOTT ROSENBERG | A dangerous new substance is flooding into the country from abroad. It causes potent, speedy changes in the user's brain, and it's powerfully addictive. Users huddle in special rooms, breathing in its intoxicating fumes. Religious authorities pontificate against it; political leaders declare war on it. Yet people keep using it in growing numbers.
Coffee -- for that is the menacing substance we are talking about -- was a big "drug problem" in 17th and 18th century England, and indeed sporadically throughout Christian Europe, where this new import from the Muslim East was viewed with great suspicion. Gradually, Western culture made its peace with the undeniably popular (and profitable) stuff, classifying it as a harmless beverage, and today it's big business -- the working person's daily wake-up fix and the cafe philosopher's stimulant of choice.
It doesn't take more than a moment's contemplation of the history of coffee -- or similar legal mind-altering substances like tobacco and alcohol -- to realize that American society is deeply confused, inconsistent and ambivalent about drugs. In truth, the only constant in our relationships with drugs of every stripe is that they all carry a strong emotional charge. Call anything -- chocolate, windsurfing, online chat -- a "drug" and people nod their heads, understanding what you mean: You're deeply attached to it and you can't live without it, even though you suspect that there's something wrong with it.
Some drugs we declare illegal and wage war upon; other drugs we embrace and build vast industries upon. Whether a drug lands in one category or the other seems to depend on historical circumstance, social custom, economic influence and sheer chance. Sometimes -- as with Prohibition, the legal marijuana movement or the recently proposed "tobacco settlement" -- there's pressure to move a popular drug from one category to the other; but such efforts typically create social upheaval and meet great inertial resistance. In the U.S. today, bureaucracies like the Food and Drug Administration have jurisdiction over the line between what's considered food and what qualifies as a drug; but it's the popular media that alternately and selectively romanticize some drugs and demonize others.
We live in a nation that has fought a losing "war on drugs" for decades. But while our election-year-timed spasms of drug-war militancy keep our eyes fixed on the violent crimes that surround the illegal-drug business, we are quietly but steadily becoming more and more devoted users of a vast spectrum of legal drugs. While crack took the headlines, Prozac, Ritalin and their many brethren began to take over our daily lives. And they're just the start.
Even setting aside anti-drug hysteria and pharmaceutical-industry hype, it's difficult to master the calculus of fear and desire that seems to govern our assessment and categorization of various drugs. One casualty of the drug wars is our very ability to draw any kind of useful distinctions among different drugs.
The substances that captured the imagination and bloodstream of the '60s generation -- from marijuana to LSD -- were celebrated as drop-out mechanisms, exits from middle-class conformity and doorways to higher consciousness. Opponents, reacting out of generational fear, medical concern or puritanical mistrust, held that the drug culture's promises were shams or scams. The result was a stalemate that's with us to this day; these drugs are still illegal yet still widely used -- and the kind of rigorous, fair studies that might begin to lead us toward saner judgments remain unperformed, unfundable, unthinkable. Other illegal drugs, from cocaine to heroin, go in and out of fashion but also remain taboo as objects of
12 genuinely unbiased scientific inquiry -- which leaves us in the strange position of knowing far less about them than we do about tobacco, which, despite its deadly effects, remains quite legal.
It's hard to find clear thinking about such drugs, but a strong dose of it can be obtained from Andrew Weil's 1972 classic, "The Natural Mind." Written long before Weil's current popularity, "The Natural Mind" argues that the desire for "periodic episodes of altered consciousness" is an innate drive in human beings. (The only culture in the world that lacks a tradition of natural drug use is the Eskimo, according to Weil.) Drugs are simply one means people adopt toward this end; though they may not be the best or most effective one, they are "with us to stay." We can either keep fighting them and keep losing -- or learn from other cultures about effective methods of living with them, minimizing the harm they do to people and maximizing their potential benefits.
Weil later also co-wrote the encyclopedia of mind-altering drugs, "From Chocolate to Morphine," an equally lucid work that, among other things, attempts to clarify the difference between drug use and abuse. "Any drug can be used successfully, no matter how bad its reputation, and any drug can be abused, no matter how accepted it is. There are no good or bad drugs; there are only good and bad relationships with drugs." These are the book's guidelines for "good relationships with drugs": "Recognition that the substance you are using is a drug and awareness of what it does to your body"; "experience of a useful effect of the drug over time"; "freedom from adverse effects on health or behavior"; and "ease of separation from use of the drug."
But sometime between the '60s, the period that shaped Weil's perspective, and the '90s, during which he emerged as an alternative-medicine guru, the drug landscape radically shifted. The legal prescription drugs that make up the fastest-growing part of the pharmaceutical arsenal -- like Prozac and Ritalin -- are, for the most part, tailored not to offer release from everyday consciousness but rather to provide support for it.
A social theorist would explain the popularity of these drugs by pointing out that they efficiently transform malcontents and misfits into docile employees and sedate schoolkids. An economist would note that they provide our cost-cutting health system with cheap alternatives to long-term therapy. Anyone with a humanist philosophical bent -- including authors like Peter Kramer ("Listening to Prozac") and Kay Redfield Jamison ("Touched With Fire") -- will wonder whether they don't provide a superficial fix for deeper existential concerns while cutting off the roots of artistic creativity in human discontent.
And yet a person who has been genuinely helped by such drugs -- say, someone who has found real relief from the horrors of chronic clinical depression -- might hear all these objections and respond, who cares? Whatever else you can say about them, these new drugs, like the consciousness-altering drugs celebrated by the '60s generation, have gained wide acceptance because they work. For some sufficiently high percentage of the population, they do what people expect them to do.
Our problem with these drugs is that we don't seem to know when to stop prescribing them. Prozac and similar antidepressants can plainly help a lot of depressed people. But tens of millions of people? Are there really that many depression sufferers -- or has the desire to squeeze profits from expensive new drugs inspired a stretching of the definition of full-blown depression to include virtually any bummed-out situation? And what about the increasing prescription of these drugs for children?
No matter how narrowly drugs like these are targeted at specific chemicals in the brain and no matter how few side-effects they may induce, they are still serious stuff. They deserve to be distributed with the kind of attentive care doctors are supposed to provide every time they write a prescription. But these very same doctors are under pressure from the HMOs paying the bills; a quick drug regimen is a lot more cost- effective than the slow, uncertain progress of serious therapy (sometimes, true, it's also simply more effective).
As the drug companies roll out wave upon wave of new pills -- promoting them in TV ads worded with discreet care to stay inside the law -- our societal dependence on drugs is only going to accelerate. As it does, here's a useful exercise for us all: Take Weil's guidelines for a "good relationship with drugs" and apply them collectively. Are we, as a nation, honest with ourselves about our drug use? Do we get the "useful effects" we seek, or are there diminishing returns? Are there adverse effects on our collective health? And can we stop any time we want to? 13 July 14, 1997 http://www.salon.com/july97/drugintro970714.html
14 What Tocqueville Missed, Government made all that "volunteerism" possible. By Theda Skocpol, Posted Friday, Nov. 15, 1996, at 12:30 AM PT
Nostalgia is rampant among public commentators today as they look for some critical juncture when U.S. democracy was flourishing more than it seems to be now, hoping to draw inspiration and lessons for what might be done to revive our apparently ailing civic life.
Those who still admit to being liberals usually locate the golden era of U.S. democracy in the 1930s and 1940s, when, it is thought, Franklin Delano Roosevelt provided bold, progressive leadership. Those of conservative or center-right proclivities characteristically look at America's past through the eyes of Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat who toured the fledgling United States in the 1830s, gathering observations and ideas that were, in due course, published in Democracy in America. Tocqueville's opus has become one of the modern world's most influential political ethnographies--that is, a set of densely descriptive observations of another nation, written to influence political debates back in one's own country.
That message-to-home aspect of Tocqueville's work is important in understanding its limitations. Alarmed by the simultaneous expansion of democracy and an ever-more-centralized bureaucratic administrative state in post-revolutionary France, he used his explorations of early Republican America to make the case to his own countrymen that they should encourage voluntary associations in civic society as a new buffer against state centralization.
"Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming associations," Tocqueville reported in a famous, oft-quoted passage. This happy situation was possible, he felt, because extralocal government seemed barely present. "Nothing strikes a European traveler in the United States more," wrote Tocqueville, "than the absence of what we would call government or administration. ... There is nothing centralized or hierarchic in the constitution of American administrative power."
Given Tocqueville's anti-statist purposes, it is not surprising that contemporary critics of the U.S. federal government celebrate the great Frenchman's stress on voluntary associations (understood as functioning in opposition to bureaucratic state power). Still, before Americans plunge forward on a fool's errand, we might want to notice that the best historical social science challenges the claims of conservatives and centrists about when, how, and why democratic civic engagement has flourished in the United States.
Before the American Revolution, many towns of the requisite size for commercialization and urbanization had already emerged, but without a vibrant set of voluntary associations. By the early 1800s, however, the emergence of associations in both smaller and larger communities was outstripping commercial and demographic change. Social historian Richard D. Brown emphasizes that the Revolution, political struggles over the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and deepening popular participation in national, state, and local elections served to spur associational life. So did religious and cultural ideals about self- improvement, and growing awareness of extralocal commercial and public affairs through widespread newspaper reading.
Tocqueville himself was well aware of many of these extralocal influences. Present-day conservatives often overlook how much he stressed political participation, marveling at the United States as the "one country in the world which, day in, day out, makes use of an unlimited freedom of political association," which, in turn, encouraged a more general "taste for association."
In retrospect, it is obvious that what social historian Mary P. Ryan has dubbed the pre-Civil War "era of association," from the 1820s to the 1840s, coincided with the spread of adult male suffrage and the emergence of competitive, mass-mobilizing parties: first the Jacksonian Democrats, then the Whigs, and finally, the Free Soilers and the Republicans.
Democracy in America took note of early U.S. newspapers, too. "Newspapers make associations, and associations make newspapers," Tocqueville wrote. "Thus, of all countries on earth, it is in America that one finds both the most associations and the most newspapers." Yet, blinded by his negative passions
15 about state power in France, Tocqueville failed to grasp what his observations meant about the early American state.
As historian Richard John cleverly points out in Spreading the News: The American Postal System From Franklin to Morse, Tocqueville traveled by stage coach in the "hinterland of Kentucky and Tennessee," remarking on the "astonishing circulation of letters and newspapers among these savage woods." Yet the Frenchman's travels might not have been possible if many stage-coach companies had not been subsidized--through Congress--so that mail could be carried, and representatives travel home, to remote districts.
A well-known quip has it that early modern Prussia wasn't so much a state with an army, as an army with a state. Similarly, the early United States may have been not so much a country with a post office, as a post office that gave popular reality to a fledgling nation. John points out that by 1828, only 36 years after Congress passed the Post Office Act of 1792, "the American postal system had almost twice as many offices as the postal system in Great Britain and over five times as many offices as the postal system in France." In the 1830s and 1840s, the system accounted for more than three-quarters of U.S. federal employees.
Obviously, the institutional structure of the U. S. government had everything to do with the spread of the postal network. The legislative system gave senators and (above all) members of the House of Representatives a strong interest in subsidizing communication and transportation links into even the remotest areas of the growing nation. Special postal rates made mailing newspapers cheap and allowed small newspapers to pick up copy from bigger ones.
The postal system was even more important for civil society and democratic politics than for commerce. Congress could use it to communicate freely with citizens. Citizens, even in the remotest hamlets, could readily communicate with one another, monitoring the doings of Congress, and state and local governments. Voluntary associations soon learned to put out their message in "newspaper" formats, to take advantage of the mail. Emergent political parties in Jacksonian America were intertwined with the federal postal system. Party entrepreneurs were often newspaper editors and postmasters, and postmasterships quickly became a staple of party patronage.
In short, the early American civic vitality that so entranced Alexis de Tocqueville was closely tied up with the representative institutions and centrally directed activity of a very distinctive national state. The non- zero-sum nature of U.S. governmental and associational expansion becomes even more apparent when we consider that most of the big voluntary associations founded in the 19th century prospered well into the 20th, often building toward membership peaks reached only in the 1960s or 1970s and in full symbiosis with public social provision.
The Grand Army of the Republic spread in the wake of state and national benefits for Union veterans of the Civil War, for example. The Fraternal Order of Eagles was so active in promoting state and federal old-age pensions that the Grand Eagle himself received an official pen when FDR signed the Social Security Act of 1935. The great women's federations of the early 20th century were champions of local, state, and federal regulations, services, and benefits for mothers and children. New Deal laws and administrative interventions were vital aids for nascent industrial unions. And the American Legion sponsored the GI Bill of 1944.
Lessons for Today
Maybe the problem today is that many Americans, quite rightly, no longer feel they can effectively band together to get things done either through, or in relationship to, government. The problem may not be a big, bureaucratic federal government--after all, the U.S. national government still has proportionately less revenue-raising capacity and administrative heft than virtually any other advanced national state. The issue may be recent shifts in society and styles of politics that make it less inviting and far harder for Americans to participate efficaciously in civic life, except locally or on very narrow issues.
Data do show an explosion of Washington, D.C.-based advocacy groups between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s. But apart from a few on the right--notably the National Right to Life Committee, the Christian
16 Coalition, and the National Rifle Association--the few new big voluntary associations that have been founded have been structured like thousands of smaller ones: They are staff-led, mailing-list associations.
Obviously, societal conditions so propitious for encompassing voluntary federations have changed a lot. Higher-educated women--once leaders of many such associations--now have nationally oriented careers, and crowd into cosmopolitan centers. Indeed, by the 1960s, the United States developed a very large professional-managerial elite that was, arguably, more oriented to giving money to staff-led national advocacy organizations than to climbing the local-state-national leadership ladders of traditional voluntary associations.
Voters these days are rarely contacted directly by party or group workers. Politicians may not care much about them at all if they aren't relatively well-off or members of targeted "swing" groups of voters. This has happened in electoral politics at the same time that all our mailboxes are full of computer-generated mailings from single-issue advocacy groups seeking to raise money from paper "memberships."
Were Alexis de Tocqueville to return to the late 20th century United States for another visit, he would be just as worried about these national trends as about possible declines in purely local or small-group associationalism. After all, one of Democracy in America's insights was that vital democratic participation served as a kind of "school," where Americans learned how to build social and civic associations of all sorts. He would also surely be surprised that today's conservatives are using his Democracy in America to justify a depoliticized and romantic localism as an improbable remedy for the larger ills of national politics. http://slate.msn.com/id/2081
17 Enlightenment--term applied to the mainstream of thought of 18th-century Europe and America.
Background and Basic Tenets The scientific and intellectual developments of the 17th cent.–the discoveries of Isaac Newton, the rationalism of Réné Descartes, the skepticism of Pierre Bayle, the pantheism of Benedict de Spinoza, and the empiricism of Francis Bacon and John Locke–fostered the belief in natural law and universal order and the confidence in human reason that spread to influence all of 18th-century society. Currents of thought were many and varied, but certain ideas may be characterized as pervading and dominant. A rational and scientific approach to religious, social, political, and economic issues promoted a secular view of the world and a general sense of progress and perfectibility.
The major champions of these concepts were the philosophes, who popularized and promulgated the new ideas for the general reading public. These proponents of the Enlightenment shared certain basic attitudes. With supreme faith in rationality, they sought to discover and to act upon universally valid principles governing humanity, nature, and society. They variously attacked spiritual and scientific authority, dogmatism, intolerance, censorship, and economic and social restraints. They considered the state the proper and rational instrument of progress. The extreme rationalism and skepticism of the age led naturally to deism; the same qualities played a part in bringing the later reaction of romanticism. The Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot epitomized the spirit of the Age of Enlightenment, or Age of Reason, as it is also called.
An International System of Thought Centered in Paris, the movement gained international character at cosmopolitan salons. Masonic lodges played an important role in disseminating the new ideas throughout Europe. Foremost in France among proponents of the Enlightenment were baron de Montesquieu, Voltaire, and comte de Buffon; Baron Turgot and other physiocrats; and Jean Jacques Rousseau, who greatly influenced romanticism. Many opposed the extreme materialism of Julien de La Mettrie, baron d' Holbach, and Claude Helvétius.
In England the coffeehouses and the newly flourishing press stimulated social and political criticism, such as the urbane commentary of Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele. Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope were influential Tory satirists. Lockean theories of learning by sense perception were further developed by David Hume. The philosophical view of human rationality as being in harmony with the universe created a hospitable climate for the laissez-faire economics of Adam Smith and for the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham. Historical writing gained secular detachment in the work of Edward Gibbon.
In Germany the universities became centers of the Enlightenment (Ger. Aufklärung). Moses Mendelssohn set forth a doctrine of rational progress; G. E. Lessing advanced a natural religion of morality; Johann Herder developed a philosophy of cultural nationalism. The supreme importance of the individual formed the basis of the ethics of Immanuel Kant. Italian representatives of the age included Cesare Beccaria and Giambattista Vico. From America, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin exerted vast international influence.
Some philosophers at first proposed that their theories be implemented by "enlightened despots" –rulers who would impose reform by authoritarian means. Czar Peter I of Russia anticipated the trend, and Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II was the prototype of the enlightened despot; others were Frederick II of Prussia, Catherine II of Russia, and Charles III of Spain. The proponents of the Enlightenment have often been held responsible for the French Revolution. Certainly the Age of Enlightenment can be seen as a major demarcation in the emergence of the modern world.
Bibliography See E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (tr. 1951, repr. 1955); P. Hazard, The European Mind: The Critical Years, 1690—1715 (tr. 1953, repr. 1963) and European Thought in the Eighteenth Century (tr. 1954, repr. 1963); F. E. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (1959, repr. 1967); P. Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (2 vol., 1966—69); A. Cobban, ed., Europe in the Age of the Enlightenment (1969); L. G. Crocker, ed., The Age of Enlightenment (1969); N. Hampson, The Enlightenment (1970); F. Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (1971); J. Engell, The Creative 18 Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (1981); W. E. Rex, The Attraction of the Contrary: Essays on the Literature of the French Enlightenment (1987). http://education.yahoo.com/reference/encyclopedia/entry?id=15575
19 Romanticism--term loosely applied to literary and artistic movements of the late 18th and 19th cent.
Characteristics of Romanticism Resulting in part from the libertarian and egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution, the romantic movements had in common only a revolt against the prescribed rules of classicism. The basic aims of romanticism were various: a return to nature and to belief in the goodness of humanity; the rediscovery of the artist as a supremely individual creator; the development of nationalistic pride; and the exaltation of the senses and emotions over reason and intellect. In addition, romanticism was a philosophical revolt against rationalism.
Romanticism in Literature England Although in literature romantic elements were known much earlier, as in the Elizabethan dramas, many critics now date English literary romanticism from the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads (1798). In the preface to the second edition of that influential work (1800), Wordsworth stated his belief that poetry results from "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," and pressed for the use of natural everyday diction in literary works. Coleridge emphasized the importance of the poet's imagination and discounted adherence to arbitrary literary rules.
Such English romantic poets as Byron, Shelley, Robert Burns, Keats, Robert Southey, and William Cowper often focused on the individual self, on the poet's personal reaction to life. This emphasis can also be found in such prose works as the essays of Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt and in Thomas De Quincey's autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822). The interest of romantics in the medieval period as a time of mystery, adventure, and aspiration is evidenced in the Gothic romance and in the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott. William Blake was probably the most singular of the English romantics. His poems and paintings are radiant, imaginative, and heavily symbolic, indicating the spiritual reality underlying the physical reality.
Germany In Germany the Sturm und Drang school, with its obsessive interest in medievalism, prepared the way for romanticism. Friedrich Schlegel first used the term romantic to designate a school of literature opposed to classicism, and he also applied the philosophical ideas of Immanuel Kant and J. G. Fichte to the "romantic ideal." Major German writers associated with romanticism include G. E. Lessing, J. G. Herder, Friedrich Hölderlin, Schiller, and particularly Goethe, who had a mystic feeling for nature and for Germany's medieval past.
France and Other European Countries The credo of French romanticism was set forth by Victor Hugo in the preface to his drama Cromwell (1828) and in his play Hernani (1830). Hugo proclaimed the freedom of the artist in both choice and treatment of a subject. The French romantics included Chateaubriand, Alexandre Dumas père, Alphonse de Lamartine, Alfred de Vigny, Alfred de Musset, and George Sand. Other leading romantic figures were Giacomo Leopardi and Alessandro Manzoni in Italy, and Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov in Russia.
The United States In the United States romanticism had philosophic expression in transcendentalism, notably in the works of Emerson and Thoreau. Poets such as Poe, Whittier, and Longfellow all produced works in the romantic vein. Walt Whitman in particular expressed pride in his individual self and the democratic spirit. The works of James Fenimore Cooper reflected the romantic interest in the historical past, whereas the symbolic novels of Hawthorne and Melville emphasized the movement's concern with transcendent reality.
Romanticism in the Visual Arts In the visual arts romanticism is used to refer loosely to a trend that appears at any time, and specifically to the art of the early 19th cent. Nineteenth-century romanticism was characterized by the avoidance of classical forms and rules, emphasis on the emotional and spiritual, representation of the unattainable ideal, nostalgia for the grace of past ages, and a predilection for exotic themes.
20 Romantic artists developed precise techniques in order to produce specific associations in the mind of the viewer. To convey verbal concepts they would, for example, endow inanimate objects with human values (e.g., the wild trees and shimmery moonlight used in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich to suggest an infinity of human longing, the weltschmerz of his time). The result was often sentimental or ludicrous. In the case of Delacroix, however, his painterly style and color sense exalted the romantic attitude in a singularly effective fashion.
In England landscape gardening was used to express the romantic aesthetic by means of deliberate imitation of the picturesque in nature. In architecture Wyatt's preposterous, mock medieval Fonthill Abbey displayed the romantic building style in extreme form. The host of lesser artists of the romantic tradition included the French Géricault, the Swiss-English Henry Fuseli, the Swiss Arnold Böcklin, the English Pre- Raphaelites, the German Nazarenes, and the American artists of the Hudson River school.
Romanticism in Music Romanticism in music was characterized by an emphasis on emotion and great freedom of form. It attained its fullest development in the works of German composers. Although elements of romanticism are present in the music of Beethoven, Weber, and Schubert, it reached its zenith in the works of Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, and Wagner. Less totally romantic composers usually placed in the middle period of romanticism are Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Dvořák, and Grieg; those grouped in the last phase include Elgar, Puccini, Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Sibelius.
Many romantic composers, including Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, and Brahms, worked in small forms that are flexible in structure, e.g., prelude, intermezzo, nocturne, ballad, and cappriccio, especially in solo music for the piano. Another romantic contribution was the art song for voice and piano, most notably the German lied (see song). Romantic composers, particularly Liszt, in combining music and literature, created the symphonic poem. Berlioz also made use of literature; much of his work is described as program music. Romantic opera began with Weber, included the works of the Italians Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi, and culminated in the work of Wagner, who aimed at a complete synthesis of the arts in his idea of Gesamtkunstwerk [total work of art].
While Tchaikovsky was inspired by a more universal romanticism, the movement in Russia was nationalist in nature, exemplified by the works of Mikhail Glinka. The music of the Czech composers Bedřich Smetana and Dvořák and that of the Norwegian composer Grieg also expressed romantic nationalism. Toward the end of the 19th cent. interest in classical forms was revived by Bruckner, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Franck. The end of the romantic period–frequently described as decadent and grandiose–is often referred to as postromanticism and is represented by the works of Holst, Elgar, Mahler, and Richard Strauss.
Bibliography See J. Barzun, Romanticism and the Modern Ego (1944); L. R. Furst, Romanticism in Perspective (1970); R. F. Gleckner and G. E. Enscoe, ed., Romanticism (2d ed. 1970); M. Praz, The Romantic Agony (tr., 2d ed. 1970); I. Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (1999).
For treatment of romanticism in the visual arts, see K. Clark, The Romantic Rebellion (1974); H. Honour, Romanticism (1979); C. Rosen and H. Zerner, Romanticism and Realism (1984); A. K. Wiedmann, Romantic Roots in Modern Art (1984). In music, see A. Einstein, Music in the Romantic Era (1947); R. M. Longyear, Nineteenth Century Romanticism in Music (1969); P. Conrad, Romantic Opera and Literary Form (1981). http://education.yahoo.com/reference/encyclopedia/entry?id=40753
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