The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities

by Richard L. Bushman

This lively and authoritative volume makes clear that the quest for taste and manners in America has been essential to the serious pursuit of a democratic culture. Spanning the material world from mansions and silverware to etiquette books, city planning, and sentimental novels, Richard L. Bushman shows how a set of values originating in aristocratic court culture gradually permeated almost every stratum of American society and served to prevent the hardening of class consciousness. A work of immense and richly nuanced learning, The Refinement of America newly illuminates every facet of both our artifacts and our values.

Genres: History, American History, Nonfiction, Material Culture, 18th Century, Architecture, The United States Of America

504 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Richard Lyman Bushman obtained a Ph.D. from Harvard and published widely in early American social and cultural history before completing his most well-known work, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, a biography of the founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Among his books were From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 and The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. He teaches courses on Mormonism in its broad social and cultural context and on the history of religion in America, focusing on the early period. He has special interests in the history of Mormon theology and in lived religion among the Mormons. He has taken an active part in explaining Mormonism to a broad public and in negotiating the tensions between Mormonism and modern culture.

Reviews

[Sluggo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Horace Bushnell, a congregationalist minister, was one of the people who attempted to resolve some of the contradictions between belief in a republican form of government and an emulation of the gentility handed down from european monarchies. I found this interesting:

"The creation of human taste, he went on to say with astounding confidence, were extensions of the original divine creative act. 'Architecture, gardening , music, dress, chaste and elegant manners- all inventions of human taste- are added to the rudimental beauty of the world, and it shines forth, as having undergone a second creation at the hand of man.' Through taste, people participated in God's great work of beautifying the world. The Hartford merchant who erected a fine house and surrounded it with a pleasure garden and invited elegantly dressed friends to dine was on God's errand. All of this made the cultivation of taste one of man's divine duties. 'Taste is God's legacy to him in life, which legacy he can not surrender, without losing the creative freedom and dignity of his soul.'

The moral for Americans, of course, was to cultivate taste and avoid fashion. 'Fashion is an eminently unrepublican influence.' .... 'Taste is possible to all. The humblest and poorest man may look on the face of beauty with as much freedom, and love it with as high a relish, as the most favored.' Besides merely valuing the beauty he can see, 'the poor man's house can be as tasteful as the rich man's; for taste does not consist in the abundance of the things that it possesseth, but in the use which is made of what it has."


Dude. I feel ya on the contradictions, there. I kind of agree with what he was saying. Its why Hank Williams will always be better than the current pop diva.

And can I say, Im happy to have had an opportunity to type the word "possesseth"?

lol.

[David Bates · Rating 4 out of 5]

In his 1992 work The Refinement of America Richard Bushman proposes that an aristocratic culture of gentility shaped early American society and capitalism. Drawing on the material culture of 18th and 19th century American city planning, architecture, fashions and luxury objects Bushman traces its progressive diffusion from the colonial elite into the middle class of the early republic. From its inception in the styles of the aristocratic courts that clustered around centralizing monarchs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the refined lifestyle, turning on artful words, fashions, manners and possessions was tied to social aspiration. The cultural display of refinement bolstered the social apartness of the colonial elite, credentialed the claims of aristocratic republicans to virtuous leadership in the first decades after the revolution, and became an important signifier of respectability in socially fluid and anonymous antebellum America.

Indeed, Bushman suggests that the material goods associated with refinement such as fine china, books, quality furniture, a home with a parlor for socializing, was a key cultural driver for early capitalism, marrying social and financial aspiration and promoting luxury consumption in a colonial culture geared for thrifty production. “Books on gentility depicted a world of leisure and consumption where the inhabitants engaged in conversation, dancing, and cards, where they surrounded themselves with fanciful, costly, and decorative objects that were useless for purposes of production” Bushman tells us. Indeed, “[r]efined persons were never shown at work or taught to save . . . Capitalism and gentility should have been enemies. But they were not.”

And yet Bushman paints a portrait of gentility that is not entirely dependent on consumption. Gentle manners, cleanliness and some measure of display were available even on meager funds, and Bushman suggests that while as a cultural system refinement remained anchored in the emulation of the elegance of the wealthy, its symbolism became available to middle class Americans in the nineteenth century, serving an almost egalitarian purpose; a culturally “independent variable, cutting across society.” Anyone might gain some measure of increased cultural prestige by cultivating the desired qualities. Bushman believes that the staying power of the idea of refinement over centuries was its attraction for aspiring people.

While acknowledging that refinement was rooted in exclusion of the unrefined as much as emulation and that it deepened social divisions, he chooses not to dwell too much on this aspect aside from a brief consideration of socially ambitious northern blacks. “Gentility was particularly useful in securing one’s identity along the lower boundary of the middle class,” Bushman notes, “where people were emerging from a cruder traditional culture and were uneasy about the validity of their refinement. Had they truly cast off their simple and rude pasts?” That is, along this cultural class boundary, Bushman imagines an individual’s insecurity about their refinement in terms of self-measurement, despite a lengthy work about refinement as an important signifier by which other people evaluated an individual. What becomes clear is that material evidence, like literary evidence, captures historians with the source’s perspective. Examining objects of refinement, Bushman admires the inclusion their possession signifies. Exclusion, both in its costs to those outside the charmed circle, and the panic to keep up appearances within the ranks of the refined, is signified by no objects Bushman undertook to study. Even mahogany tables need to be read against the grain sometimes.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this one so much that I chose to apply Bushman's main thesis to the settlement of Maine for one of my final papers. Granted, this is pretty dense, and not every chapter is enthralling all the way through. The wealth of information Bushman packs into this thing, though, is pretty impressive. I don't see how he could cover anything else, he gets to: fancy houses in eighteenth century Delaware, courtesy books, grand staircases and gardens, the fancifying of the old stodgy New England meetinghouses, the ambivalent embrace of the American parlor...the list goes on. This is probably one of those books that is mined for data, however, rather than read through in one go. Pick the element of gentility you want to learn about and just use that chapter, then repeat as needed.

[Jen Geigle Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was so helpful to me when I wrote His Lady in Hiding. Going from Regency England to America required some research. I loved every minute.

[K. P. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is a book of tremendous detail, very interesting to see roots of materialistic pursuit. Good history.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book really eye-opening. It helped me understand a great deal about how we live now and how we got where we are. For instance, I could see why we all have living rooms that we don't use. So the book offered a unique bridge from the past to the present.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bushman has done a wonderful job of examining material culture and the idea of refinement in 18th century etiquette books. At the level of an physical description and examination of homes, churches, gardens, and the layout of cities it is endlessly interesting and includes wonderful illustrations. He traces the American absorption of aristocratic forms of behavior and living. On the level of analysis it is a bit hamhanded, giving little time to works that examine things like class, religion, consumerism, women's roles, and on and on, all of which paint a more subtle and nuanced position of the changes he describes. Bushman's explanation is also heavy on a moralistic decrying of the advent of gentility and he also really blurs the 19th century making it difficult to see the nature of change over time. Still, a good entrance into material and social changes in American society from 1700 until 1850.

[Sam Newton · Rating 4 out of 5]

American colonists had an "obsessive desire to achieve gentility." They tried to refine themselves and be British.

• Why did the parlor become so important?
• Wealthy families built mansions, European goods, mastering polite behavior, handwriting, body, speech, dress. “Obsessive desire to achieve gentility”
• Americans used to be functional, in two room houses. Now they're in mansions, parlors, etc.
• Social life was an unrelenting performance. Big parlors, grand staircases, balls, concerts
• The lower classes didn’t look down on gentility. “Common people observed gentility with great interest”
• In the nineteenth century, refinement spread downwards.
• Gentility transformed to middle-class respectability.
• Democracy brought new gentility: people saw it as refinement but Bushman says what came was democratic but “mediocre respectability”

[Jon Frum · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would have given this book 4.5 stars if I could. If you're interested in cultural rather than political history (generals and kings), this is a book for you. There are chapters that lean towards the academic - dense with specific detail - but don't let that stop you from reading on. The idea that gentility, which started in the aristocratic life of Italy, filtered down through the British gentry and American businessmen to farm houses and immigrant log cabins is a remarkable story. Was your (or a friend's) parlor kept for use of 'company?' this book explains why.

One negative is the lack of a bibliography to browse through - if you don't see it in the Notes section, you're out of luck.

[Samuel · Rating 3 out of 5]

By the early years of the 19th century, members of the emerging bourgeois class were increasingly preoccupied with the acquisition and display of particular modes of behavior and kinds of objects associated with the civilized “genteel” culture of the old aristocracy: a culture of “refinement” (Carter 30). Possessions made the man and status of people/communities could be judged by the way people carried and presented themselves.

In an era when Americans were obsessed with the performance of refinement, “all that distinguished [gentility] was the manner of the people and the style of the objects that surrounded them” (xviii).

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very entertaining book that goes into a lot of interesting depth about the role manners and material culture played among ambitious Americans in the colonial period. It also makes strong connections to how many of these objects/styles/modes of thought derived from European practices. It's not as strong in talking about political and social context in America, in distinguishing different regions, or in mixing its analysis with a more overt discussion of women, African-Americans, or Native Americans.

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

I learned a lot about the culture of the American elite through the mid-19th century, and how that is reflected in their possessions, houses, and city development. However, it is a very academic book. The first two chapters were a difficult introduction, if you are unfamiliar with the topic, but once you "get" them, you "get" the book. Later chapters get repetitive.

[Kristine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book about the changing of early log cabin, plain living America to the emergence of a separate wealthier class who built grand homes and lived more refined lives during the late 1700's and early 1800's.

[Theresa Rothschadl · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has profoundly changed the way I think about material culture, both as a former museum professional and as a current thinking person. Turns out beautiful things aren't just aesthetic pleasures--they're also tools for domination.

[Joshua · Rating 4 out of 5]

TOTALLY JAWSOME

[Lclawson · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent commentary about Americans, their bewildering array of stuff, and what it all meant.

[Amelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my all time favorites...18th century America, houses, I love them all!

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want to understand Jane Austen and her books better read this book.