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I the People: Autobiography in the American Political

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I the People: Autobiography in the American Political I THE PEOPLE: AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN THE AMERICAN POLITICAL TRADITION A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Nolan Bennett January 2015 © 2015 Nolan Bennett I THE PEOPLE: AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN THE AMERICAN POLITICAL TRADITION Nolan Bennett, Ph. D. Cornell University 2015 Why do so many political thinkers in the American tradition turn to autobiography? What, if any, is the relationship between autobiography and democratic politics? To answer these questions, I consider four texts: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom, The Education of Henry Adams, and Emma Goldman’s Living My Life. Each of these authors wrote his or her life story as a response to an issue of political authority: Franklin built autonomy out of a rejection of paternalism, Douglass looked for justice wherein people of all races may judge, Adams sought civic education at the end of American republicanism, and Goldman motivated the people to consciousness without coercion or violence. To solve these problems, each author turns to autobiography to appeal to popular authority, distinguishing the genre from other appeals in democratic theory such as the invocation of law, reason, deliberation, or morality. More than a claim to readers’ consciences, preferences, or intellects, autobiography analyzes an injustice’s cause and effect in historical, personal experience. Each author I study appeals to popular authority by engaging readers in the interpretation of personal experience: Franklin provides a model of citizenship for readers to imitate, Douglass indicts readers for complicity within the injustices of slavery, Adams encourages readers to their own self-inquiry in modern times, and Goldman raises readers’ social consciousness by capturing broad politics networks and her experiences as a radical. Political thinkers in the American tradition turn to autobiography to satisfy an essential need in democratic politics: how to make private experience a shared social reality. By reading autobiography as a democratic genre of self-examination, political theory can better understand historical trends in how Americans have interrogated issues of political authority through declarations of personal experience. iii Biographical Sketch Nolan Bennett is broadly interested in the history of American political thought and the mutual influence of democratic politics and literature in the United States and elsewhere. Having received his doctorate from Cornell University, he is currently a postdoctoral fellow and the Manley Visiting Assistant Professor at Duke University's Program in American Values and Institutions. Before Cornell, Nolan pursued undergraduate research at the University of California, Los Angeles, and attended high school in the California Bay Area. iv Acknowledgments Without my parents’ love and support, I’d have neither the ambition nor aptitude, motivation nor money to have chosen this career. To my mom, Denise Witzig, I owe my love of literature and independence. To my dad, Dan Bennett, I owe my love of laughter and craft. Hopefully you’ll find a bit of each in what follows. I would like to thank Jennifer Weber, who continued to inspire and support me through five years of patience: years endured through five hour bus rides from New York to Ithaca, years improved by upstate day trips and downstate night life. A number of great educators have made me the student I still am. At Cornell, none have been more influential than those overseeing my dissertation: Jason Frank, Isaac Kramnick, Diane Rubenstein, Shirley Samuels, and Alexander Livingston. I would also like to thank Aziz Rana, for having stepped in as an outside reader in the project’s final stages. Before Cornell, Kirstie McClure, Joshua Dienstag, Sonya Winton, and Paul Osher helped push me to commit myself to political theory at UCLA. Before Los Angeles, Catherine Mahoney, Jeff Rogers, Antone Olivier, and Br. Victor Kenneth motivated my interest in politics, performance, language, and the world around me while a high school student in the Bay Area. A dissertation is as strong as its author’s colleagues, and for that I thank Thomas Balcerski, Alex Black, Jill Spivey Caddell, Michael Dichio, Kevin Duong, Joe Florence, Aaron Gavin, Simon Gilhooley, Michael Gorup, Colin Gottlieb, Sinja Graf, Murad Idris, Ulas Ince, Desmond Jagmohan, Pinar Kemerli, Alison McQueen, Matt Mornick, Vijay Phulwani, Bécquer Seguín, and Kyong-Min Son for having built my confidence and checked my enthusiasm when needed. Finally, and with some trepidation, I would like to thank Beetle. Though she will never read this, surely I would have never survived so many Ithaca winters without her company. v Table of Contents Biographical Sketch iii Acknowledgments iv Introduction The People’s Author: 1 American Politics and Autobiography Chapter I To Be Franklin: 37 Inheritance and The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin Chapter II To Narrate and Denounce: 79 Frederick Douglass and the Dissent of Personal Narrative Chapter III The Statesman and the Dynamo: 121 Authority in The Education of Henry Adams Chapter IV Attentat and Autobiography: 190 Social Consciousness through Emma Goldman’s Living My Life Conclusion The Politics of Personal Narrative 266 in the Twenty-First Century Bibliography 285 1 Introduction The People’s Author: American Politics and Autobiography Few genres appear as frequently in the American political tradition as autobiography. From Benjamin Franklin to Barack Obama, we could write a history of American political thought from autobiography alone, full of moments like these: In a pamphlet written to preface his 1829 autobiography, William Apess offered “The Experiences of Five Christian Indians,” which briefly detailed how he and they “had met with great misfortunes” at the hands of white Americans: “When you read this,” he told his audience, “ask yourselves if ever you had such trials.”1 After spending two years alone in the woods of Massachusetts (having left on Independence Day), the critic of nineteenth-century industrial modernization, Henry David Thoreau, wrote his 1854 Walden, therein proposing for readers an autobiography not “to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.”2 When she was just twenty-eight, only a few years after her arrest and prison sentence, Angela Davis wrote what she later described as a “political autobiography.” 1 William Apess, “The Experiences of Five Christian Indians,” in On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, ed. Barry O’Connell (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 119. According to Barry O’Connell, Apess likely wrote the pamphlet before his 1829 autobiography, A Son of the Forest, though he would publish the pamphlet after Forest in 1833. See Barry O’Connell, “Introduction,” in On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, by William Apess, ed. Barry O’Connell (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), xiv. 2 Henry David Thoreau, “Walden,” in The Portable Thoreau, ed. Carl Bode (New York: Penguin Books, [1854] 1982), 337. Bennett, I the People, Introduction 2 Looking back on her 1974 text, she reflected on why she had been moved to autobiography at the time of her incarceration: I knew that my potential as an autobiographical subject was created by the massive global movement that successfully achieved my freedom. So the question was how to write an autobiography that would be attentive to this community of collective struggle. I did not want to write a conventional autobiography in which the heroic subject offers lessons to readers. I decided that I would write a political autobiography exploring the ways in which I had been shaped by movements and campaigns in communities of struggle.3 More than merely individualist and self-aggrandizing, Davis wrote, her autobiography could “demystify the usual notion that history is the product of unique individuals possessing inherent qualities of greatness.”4 Though separated by decades and distinct political contexts, and though producing drastically different forms of narrative, these authors share a refrain: in times of injustice, an account of personal experience can never encourage the writer’s introspection alone. The readers, and the people to whom they belong, must in some way see themselves in that intimate, printed history. Why do so many political thinkers in the American tradition turn to autobiography? What, if any, is the relationship between autobiography and democratic politics? To answer these questions, I consider four texts: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom, The Education of Henry Adams, and Emma Goldman’s Living My Life. 3 Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 17. 4 Angela Y. Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography (New York: International Publishers Co., [1974] 2008), viii. Bennett, I the People, Introduction 3 Each of these authors wrote his or her life story in response to a crisis of authority: Franklin built autonomy out of a rejection of paternalism, Douglass looked for justice wherein people of all races may judge, Adams sought civic education at the end of American republicanism, and Goldman motivated the people to consciousness without coercion or violence. An autobiographer’s most basic goal is to supplant competing authorities – father, god, state or king – with one formed through experience, an autonomy rooted in mastery over the author’s past and identity. This is an idea of authority borne from the Enlightenment: to make the self anew in overcoming history. Autobiography is thus an appeal to authority grounded in the author’s experience, distinct from other forms of textual authority such as law, fact, or scripture.5 It is a genre in which an author can be truly autonomous, can truly dictate the themes and narratives that frame her life. But autobiography does more than build its author’s authority.
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