>> Aslihan Bulut:
Welcome, everyone.
Welcome to Live at the Library.
I'm Aslihan Bulut.
And I have the
privilege of serving
as the Law Librarian
of Congress.
I see-- Please come in.
[Laughing]
This event is titled
"Joining Together
in Tocqueville's America."
And our presenter is
Dr. Kevin Butterfield.
Dr. Butterfield will be
discussing his book,
"The Making of
Tocqueville's America:
Law and Association in
the Early United States."
This event supports the new
Library of Congress exhibition.
Join in Voluntary
Associations in America,
which we invite you to visit.
Dr. Butterfield is the Director
of the John W. Kluge Center
at the Library of Congress.
He is a historian of the Post
Revolutionary United States.
He most recently served as
Executive Director of
the Fred W. Smith
National Library
for the Study of George
Washington at Mount Vernon.
Dr. Butterfield earned
a B.A. in History
from the University of Missouri
and M.A. in History from
the College of William and Mary
and a PhD in History
from Washington
University in Saint Louis.
Dr. Butterfield will take ten
minutes of questions at the end
of the presentation.
We just ask that you hold up
your hand during the Q and A
segment and a staff
member will come
around to you with a microphone.
So thank you and enjoy.
>> Dr. Kevin Butterfield:
Joining Together
in Tocqueville's America
for a lot of us might
beg the question,
why are we calling it
Tocqueville's America?
He's a Frenchman.
He spent a total of 9 or 10
months in the United States in
1831 and 1832, and despite
having written a remarkably
influential book called
"Democracy in America,"
it's an interesting appellation
to call this period of American
history, Tocqueville's America.
And the reason is, as I'll come
to, is that he put his finger on
something that Americans were
just beginning to notice
themselves, and that is the
phenomenon of association,
joining together to do
things. Small and big.
And I'm struck by how
succinctly he put this
observation on this new
phenomenon in the world,
that stood in stark contrast to
what he saw in France and in his
readings about the past.
He saw something new here
and he called attention to it.
Americans of all ages and all
conditions, all minds
constantly unite.
Not only do they have
commercial and
industrial associations
in which they take part,
but they also have a
thousand other kinds.
Religious, moral, grave, futile,
very general, very particular,
immense and very small.
Everywhere that at the head of
a new undertaking, you see the
government in France and a
great Lord in England, count on
it that you will
perceive an association
in the United States.
This is something I think
we can connect with.
The most recent biography of
Alexis de Tocqueville
by Olivier Zunz,
published simultaneously
in French and English, says that
essentially, I think
persuasively, that Tocqueville
saw something that Americans
had yet to see themselves,
that he persuaded Americans
that this was something they
should take seriously about
themselves, because Democracy in
America was published in
English in 1835 and again in
1840. And the translations
come out quite quickly.
And the Americans were struck
by Tocqueville's observations on
exactly this point. Here I am
talking to Olivier when he came
last December to the Library of
Congress to talk about this new
and important work.
What do we have here?
When we describe
associations in America,
we have an interesting
question, right?
There's so many of them.
Why are they important?
What do they do?
Tocqueville observed.
And he noticed that they were
different and they were unique
here. But the literature, I
think, gets a little richer
following that. In the 1830s,
he is the first time you start
seeing voluntary associations
described as something that
stand out from the landscape.
"They peculiar glory
of the present age,"
as Francis Wayland said,
a century or so later,
you start to see American
scholars in particular
really latching on to this.
Arthur Schlesinger
famously called the nation
a nation of joiners.
I think, it's really with
the fall of the Iron Curtain,
that scholarship gets
interesting on this subject that
is trying to put their finger
on political scientists,
sociologists, historians,
trying to put their finger on
whether this is something that
helps explain why democracy
works here in the United States
and has had struggles in other
places. Trying to really put
their finger on on how useful
this civil society or this
landscape of associations might
be for emerging democracies.
So a really rich literature
emerges then and in the last
couple of decades since the
turn of the the 21st century,
I think we've just really
complicated and sort of dove
deep and tried to have a better
understanding of this
civil society, which
is a good catch all term
for that landscape of
associations and corporations
and all kinds of political
groups that shape democracy.
Here's a number of books,
including my own, that in the
last couple of decades have
really dove deep and helped us
to understand this phenomenon.
Arthur Schlesinger, by the way,
this is senior, not junior,
junior who worked hand in hand
with with President Kennedy, his
father, Arthur Schlesinger,
in this
Biography of a
Nation of Joiners,
I think gives us the fully
positive version of this,
for the most part. There's a
little bit of attention to
the ways in which associations
might have negative consequences
for society, too, but a
really positive and laudatory
version of this
nation of joiners.
When I mentioned civil society,
there's another term that gets
used in the beginning, in the
1980s and 1990s that comes out
of literature that was
deeply influenced by the
recipient of the John W. Kluge
Prize for Achievement in the
Study of Humanity
in the year 2015.
I'm the Director of that Center
and this biannual prize is a way
of recognizing serious
achievement.
Jurgen Habermas, his work
focused on this area between
basically the individual or the
family and the government and
all that stuff that happens,
clubs and societies, but also
politics, the media, people
chatting in a coffeehouse, that
phenomenon is something that
he found really useful and this
was useful in the post 1989
period of trying to work with
emerging democracies, he found
useful for explaining how
exactly public opinion is
formed and organizations and
clubs and societies helped to
play an important role there.
But I think this story
is really well told.
Not too far down the hall here
in the Jefferson Building
through the Great Hall and down
another hall right past Thomas
Jefferson's library in the new
Join In exhibit, which brings to
not just the history, but it
actually sort of also stops and
takes a good look at
the breadth, the scale of
association formation
in the United States.
When you walk around the
outside of this exhibit, you'll
be seeing things, fraternal
organizations all the way to the
Boy Scouts in the 21st century.
The, all kinds of organizations
and clubs and societies at all
parts of society that ring
around here and in the middle,
right underneath this wooden
framework here, you see things
like this. You see the colonial
background of the age of
associations, that is things
like the Mayflower Compact,
famously, right? This people
deciding to come together,
create a body politic out of
nothing, just out of signing a
piece of paper
and agreeing to it.
That phenomenon is a useful
background and has some
explanatory power.
Church covenants, colonial
charters and of course, famously
that Mayflower Compact.
When you go a bit further
into the colonial period,
Ben Franklin has a prominent
spot here, as he should
as a great pioneer in
association formation.
And I labeled this The
Technology of Association.
That's not actually
what the section is called, but
it really is a pretty useful
way of conceiving of it.
And the word technology does
appear in the exhibit because
once you learn how to form
clubs and societies,
it's a really replicable thing.
You can do it again, you can
copy a constitution, you can
copy bylaws, you can find a way
to form another debating society
from the next town over and
help to continue to expand
the civil and civic
life of the nation.
But right at the heart, you can
find a beautiful first edition
of Alexis de Tocqueville's
"Democracy in America" in its
original yellow wrappers
published in French after his
nine months of travel
in the United States.
And it's there where again,
we see a great touch, a great
connection to the American way
of life, that Americans were
somewhat blinded to themselves.
But I like talking about not
just Tocqueville, but
Tocqueville's America.
What is it that he saw?
Because he actually
went pretty far.
He went all the way after
landing on the East Coast.
He finds himself all the way
into Canada, but also Michigan,
where there were essentially
no white settlers.
Once he reached the farthest
point of his travels west of
Detroit, all the way to the
deep South through New Orleans,
hurried up through the Deep
South, spent a brief amount of
time in Washington,
D.C. and left again.
But in that time he saw quite a
bit of the United States and put
his finger on a lot of
interesting phenomena, including
this phenomenon of association.
But where everyone I think,
gives a lot of credit to
Tocqueville as being the
very first to describe this.
There is one American that I
think beats him to it just by a
smidge. William Ellery Channing,
any Unitarians in the room may
actually know this name, has
a really interesting essay.
Just about a year and a half
before Tocqueville winds up on
the shores of the United States.
And he says essentially the
same thing as Tocqueville does
and ask some interesting
questions about it.
He says he may be said without
much exaggeration that
everything is done
now by societies.
Men have learned what wonders
can be accomplished in certain
cases by union and seem to
think that union is competent to
everything. You could scarcely
name an object for which some
institution has not been formed.
Would men spread one set
of opinions or crush another?
They make a society.
Would they improve the penal
code or relieve poor debtors?
They make a society.
It is very easy to
conceive and I like this.
It is very easy. We conceive to
explain this great development
of the principle of cooperation
in so Tocqueville notices it and
he does try to explain it a bit.
But I could talk a little bit
about the limitations there,
perhaps in questions
and answers.
But Channing has an explanation
for why this happened.
And he says the main cause is
the immense facility given to
intercourse by modern
improvements, by increased
commerce and traveling by the
post office, by the steamboat,
and especially by the press, by
newspapers, periodicals, tracks
and other publications.
In other words, the
transportation revolution and
the communications revolutions
of the early 19th century
explain the phenomenon
of association.
And actually, he's
not far off, right?
If you look at the number of
post offices, particularly per
capital, it's astonishing
the growth in the postal
communication across three
decades between 1800 and 1830.
Same with newspapers.
The number of circulated and
the number of people reached by
these newspapers
massively grows.
And it's not just a
matter of population.
Right. The. population grows but
it roughly doubles plus a bit.
And a good portion of that
is the enslaved population.
As you see, some 2 million
people out of 12.8 million
in 1830 were enslaved.
So the population is growing,
but not at the rate that
communications and
transportation and effective
dispersal of ideas
is made possible.
So Channing puts his finger
there, and I think it's worth
taking note that there is
something when I describe a
technology of association,
it then needs a medium, right.
It needs a way to communicate
from place to place.
And the things that Channing
describes, actual transportation
as well as media, are key.
But I'm not going to talk
forever. In broad strokes,
I want to talk about two things.
Two obscure associations
that long predate Tocqueville's
arrival, long predate
Channing's birth that actually,
I think, tell us a lot about
joining in Tocqueville's
America.
One of them is the Patriotic
Society of Richmond, Virginia,
founded in 1786,
not very long lived.
If you've heard of it, I'd be
surprised, but there might be
1 or 2 that have. And
another is even more obscure.
I find even more interesting.
The Ladies Literary Society of
Norwich, Connecticut,
found that in 1800.
And you'll see here
that I've got a couple of
takeaways for each of them.
One of them is that is,
well, I'll get to them.
Okay. The Patriotic Society.
They met in Richmond, 1786.
A quick snapshot in time.
The revolution in successfully
with independence
and the Treaty of Paris in 1783
and the United States
Constitution is drafted in 1787.
That period in between, right.
Just a handful of years often
called the critical period
because no one was quite sure
what would happen, whether the
nation would spin apart,
whether the Articles of
Confederation would be enough.
And in this period in 1786,
a group of patriotic citizens
obviously gathered together at
the Richmond courthouse and
it was reported their, gathering
was reported as far north
as New Hampshire, as far
south as South Carolina.
George Washington is
a part of the story.
And a quick aside, as you
heard in my introduction,
I spent a good number of years
at Mount Vernon
as the Director of
the library there.
And so George Washington
and this beautiful library
where actually many
of the papers of
Bushrod Washington are collected
is a part of the story.
And Bushrod Washington
obviously is. Okay.
But if you remember one thing
about George Washington,
it might be his
farewell address,
his advice to the nation
on departing the presidency.
That's probably not the one
thing you remember, but it's one
of 5 or 6 things
you might remember.
This is a great and beautiful
print of the farewell address
from the Library of Congress
collections from the 1850s.
And you'll notice there that
Washington has all kinds of
anxiety about associations,
famously all obstructions to the
execution of the laws, all
combinations and associations
under whatever plausible
character with the real design
to direct control, counteract
or all the regular deliberation
and action of the constituted
authorities are destructive of
this fundamental principle and
a fatal tendency of this
fundamental principle of union.
They served to organize
faction, etc, etc.
But I think you
can go long before
George Washington's presidency,
during which he had all kinds of
challenges brought to his
political life by what were then
called democratic societies.
And in the early 1790s, long
before that, in this critical
period in the 1780s, you can
actually see George Washington
beginning to think through his
attitude towards associations in
the United States in the
context of the patriotic society
that his nephew Bushrod
Washington had helped to form.
So Bushrod Washington wrote to
his extraordinarily famous and
extraordinarily intimidating
uncle in September of 1786.
And he describes
what's going on.
He says, "We've lately
instituted a society in these
lower counties in Virginia
called the Patriotic Society."
And he describes
the purpose of it.
And the purpose essentially is
to talk about politics, to talk
about the the decisions that we
ought to make as Republican
citizens, the means of
attaining the happiness of the
people to inquire
into the conduct
of those who represent us.
Basically a political
discussion organization.
And they did meet, as we saw in
that newspaper from the
library's collections
in October of 1786.
Now, George Washington
responded to his nephew
and is not a fan of the idea.
And as you'll see in Bushrod's
response, he's chastened
very, very quickly by this.
Generally speaking, I have seen
as much evil as good result from
such societies as you describe
the constitution of yours to be.
They are a kind of imperium,
imperial, a government within a
government and as often clog as
facilitate public measures,
it appears, and I'll skip down,
it appears, a much wiser
and more politic
conduct to choose able
and honest representatives
rather than have
ordinary citizens
sit and talk about politics.
This is interesting.
And there is a little bit of a
classic 18th century anxiety
about associations that long
predates George Washington even,
and that is that they are the
nucleus of faction of
subversion. But it gets more
interesting than that because
George Bushrod is, as he goes
on to read in this letter,
is given a better sense of what
exactly is concerning,
his uncle George Washington.
What reason is there to expect?
The society itself may be,
according to an opinion on the
subjects that it discusses.
Different political issues. May
not a few members of this
society more sagacious and
designing than the rest direct
the measures of it to the
private views of their own.
And he begins to put his finger
on something that I think is an
important through line in the
discussion of associations in
American life. And that is
that as soon as you form an
association, you're giving up
some element of your autonomy,
your the individual autonomy
that you have as a
sui juris and voting Republican
citizen is in some ways
empowered by joining
an organization
that can then champion a cause.
But in other ways you're
all of a sudden a part of a,
of another body politic, one
that may lay claims to you or
take you in directions you
hadn't originally intended.
And George Washington is
sensitive to this in 1786.
But this is a fascinating letter
because farther down,
you can actually see George
Washington beginning to second
guess himself. He's thinking
this through and he says, these
are my first thoughts. I give
no decided opinion.
Society is very similar, such
as we speak have been formed.
And what has been the
consequence there is referring
to Shays Rebellion in
Massachusetts or the early
rumblings of it. You may say
that no such matters are in
contemplation by your society,
granted, but a snowball gathers
by rolling. He's just
thinking it through.
And this is how you know
he's thinking it through.
Hurried is this
letter is I'm sensible.
I am writing to you upon a very
important subject and I have no
time to copy, correct or even to
peruse it, for which reason I
could wish to have it,
or a copy returned to me.
He wants to continue thinking
this through, and so he actually
asks his nephew to send him
back a copy of this letter that
he doesn't have
time to copy himself.
The exchange, by the way, which
goes on in the papers of George
Washington, housed here at the
Library of Congress, continues.
And essentially Bushrod is
sheepish and say, well, we
didn't mean anything by it,
and your advice is useful.
And over the course of
the next couple of letters,
they move on to other subjects.
But that question of what
happens when you join an
organization, particularly
one for political action
takes real life with the
formation of those
Democratic clubs in the 1790s,
roughly in 1793,
particularly in 74 and
five, you see 1794 and five,
you see all the kinds of
political debating societies
and particularly
politically active groups
called Democratic or
Democratic Republican societies
that form up and down
the Atlantic seaboard.
And people begin to seize on
the exact issue that Washington
was troubled by.
The moment a man is attached
to a club, his mind is not free.
Right. The club can actually
begin to sort of shape his
thinking and warp it and
take it in new directions.
William Wilcox says that "I know
that in all societies, even in
legislatures, a few often have
led unsuspecting, honest,
meaning men to become
instruments of injustice and
designs they have detested
when it was too late."
Men who may be moral in
isolation become immoral if
they're acting in a mob. That
moral man and moral society
point. This is one that in the
1790s you see a lot of attention
to this. And it's an
interesting question that I
think helps us to understand
some of what happens with
joining together in
Tocqueville's America, because
by the 1820s, William Ellery
Channing is saying quite the
same thing, but with a new
power to it, there is cause to
fear and to withstand great
associations as far as they
interfere with or restrain
individual action, personal
independence, private judgment,
free self-originated effort.
They are perilous instruments.
They ought to be suspected.
What is he talking about here?
He's talking about things like
the American Temperance Society,
the early formation of
anti-slavery societies.
He is troubled by these really
causes he agrees with,
by the way. But he's troubled
by the way that these massive
politically mobilizing
organizations might begin to
chip away at the individual
freedom of thought that was so
important to him. Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Abraham Lincoln, great
examples of men who were
anti slavery and anti.
Excessive drinking.
Neither of them joined
anti-slavery societies or
temperance societies.
And they were very
articulate about why,
it's exactly this point. It's
this frustration or anxiety that
associations can
begin to not enhance
but limit the autonomy
of individual citizens.
And that is actually related
to, and I think closely related
to in a way that scholars
who have written on the subject
haven't paid quite
enough attention to.
One of the more interesting
phenomenon of the 1820s and here
you see an image of George
Washington as a Freemason.
And so the irony is
pretty clear here.
In the 1820s, particularly in
1826, there's a powerful
anti-masonic movement, a
backlash against Freemasonry
that's connected
intellectually, ideologically
to exactly the things that I've
been talking about that
Channing and George Washington
put their fingers on, because
the Anti-masonic movement,
this grassroots, it becomes the
first third party organization
in American life.
They actually run a new
candidate for president in a
third party forum, a
guy named William Wirt.
He's buried right here
in Washington, D.C.
This Anti-masonic movement,
even though it begins as a
missing persons movement,
there's a disappearance of a
prominent after he
disappears of a man who is
about to publish some Masonic
rituals and secrets, a man named
William Morgan in
upstate New York.
And with his disappearance and
the inability to actually
bring anyone to justice after
it was clear that he had been
kidnapped and then never seen
again, quite possibly, and I
would say probably drowned
in the Niagara River by some
overzealous Freemasons who
thought that they were silencing
someone who was being
who was about ready to
expose rituals that were
important to them.
But this is all essentially
unknown because of the inability
to solve that crime.
What began as a missing
persons movement becomes a full
blown, powerful anti
association movement, really,
but one focused on a particular
fraternal organization,
Freemasonry. The 500 lodges
that were in New York in 1825
are reduced to a shell By 1835,
100,000 Masons in 1826 is
reduced to 40,000, most of whom
are at this point not even
calling themselves Freemasons.
In 1835, a number of states ban
taking oaths outside of a
courtroom in a deliberate
effort to keep Masons from
having their members take oaths.
Grand Lodge is shut down
on a number of states.
William Wirt, whom I mentioned,
wins 8% of the national vote,
actually won some
electoral votes.
So any time you look at a
presidential election history,
you'll see an interesting third
party pop up in the 1832
election. This Anti-masonic
movement has its intellectual
origins, I think, in this
anxiety about people giving up
so much of themselves by taking
oaths or overly committing
themselves to a private
association and this.
that Motif that
throughline in Americans
embrace, but also anxiety about
associations in the early
United States is one that I
think helps us to understand
what are otherwise
quite inexplicable things
like a full blown backlash
to a pretty harmless
fraternal organization,
Freemasonry, in the 1820s.
Francis Wayland, president of
Brown University, a great moral
thinker, actually writes an
essay on this problem in the
1830s and puts his finger again
on this question of the
limitations of association
and how it can help to impair
private thought and
freedom of intellectual,
the intellectual freedom that
was so important to this first
generations of
American citizens.
He actually is--
when he's describing a pledge,
by the way, that's the pledge to
temperance societies and
anti-slavery societies
were the most common ones.
And again, he's a temperate man
and an anti-slavery man, but
he is concerned at people
giving up their own--
essentially their ability
to change their mind.
Should they ever be
persuaded by new information,
by taking a pledge or taking
an oath to a certain cause.
And in this essay, I think you
find something that kind of
seems like a
tempest in a teapot.
But again, it is an important
throughline across 2 or 3
generations of the first
American citizens as they think
through the dangers and the
possible benefits
of association.
But people like
to join together.
So we've talked about the
Patriotic Society of Richmond.
Let's talk now about the Ladies
Literary Society, because I find
this element of American
association formation so
fascinating. And that is the
and by the way, this is--
Abigail Adams has
nothing to do with
the Ladies Literary Society
of Norwich, Connecticut.
I have no portraits
of any of the women
involved with this organization
because it is fairly obscure.
Thankfully, it exists because
their minutes survive in the
Connecticut Historical Society.
But I did want to give you some
taste of the, oh, there she is.
I did want to give you some
taste of the ways in
which these associations were
such an important part of women
in early American life and into
the 19th and 20th centuries.
Finding a political voice.
And Abigail Adams, of course,
had a political voice and access
to political power in ways
that other women did not.
But you see it elsewhere
in the phenomena of association,
how they do it and
what they do with it.
Okay. In 1800 and this is--
there's a lot of backstory that
I could tell that I was able to
piece together in the
Connecticut archives.
These women all knew each other.
They'd been essentially joining
together informally since 1790
out of a congregational
church in Norwich.
And at some point, seemingly
out of thin air,
they decided that they wanted
to more formally organize.
They wanted to draw up a
constitution. They wanted to
keep a book of minutes, and
they wanted to do more together.
So actually in January of
1800, they draw up what looks
a lot like, frankly, the
Mayflower Compact or any other
voluntary association
constitution that you can see in
the early republic in
particular, they draw up
a document that says
when exactly they'll meet.
Why they're meeting?
We, the undersigned or we the
subscribers, is a really common
phrase that you'll see in the
constitutions and bylaws of
these kinds of organizations.
And they say that they want to
get together to
read and discuss.
When they come back
together periodically,
by March of 1800, they create
a committee to frame a set of
rules to be laid before the
society which approving they
shall pass into laws binding on
every member of the society.
Again, these are women that
have been hanging out for a
decade, have been plenty, have
had plenty of opportunities to
to do everything that they want
to do in this organization
without drawing up a
constitution and bylaws.
So it's just fascinating to me
that they do it and fascinating
to me the ways that
they go about doing it.
April 2nd, they draw up a
constitution that's adopted
almost unanimously. I'm curious
about that phrase, because
someone clearly
wasn't happy about it.
And in this constitution, they
actually have a number of
articles, all of which could be
amended with a two thirds vote.
Should the ladies change
their mind except for four.
And they're all right here.
These are the four articles
that just can't be amended.
The meeting will always be open
by reading from the Bible,
no matter what else they're
reading that night, the first
Wednesday of the month, they'll
collect some funds, but not too
many. There's actually a limit
on how much money the women
might be called on to pay.
Any member or dishonor yourself
can be expelled, but with a
certain vote, they want to make
sure you can't amend that and
sort of change the rules and
kick someone out unfairly and
that no religious or political
dispute shall ever enter the
society, on the
concurrence of two thirds,
they can amend any other part
of the Constitution, but here's
ways that they can't, right?
They're essentially tying
themselves to the mast in the
famous Odysseus or Ulysses
story of being able to prevent
yourself from doing something
that you really want to do, but
you've limited yourself by
a formal restriction, in this
case, a constitutional one.
So they draw up this
constitution, by the way,
the same night that they
adopt the Constitution.
One of their readings
for that night
is the United
States Constitution.
They actually sit
and read it together, which
they've already
written their own.
So it's not as if they're
reading it and cribbing from it
so much as they're just
embracing the constitutional
element, the
constitutional mindset.
When they come to another year
or two later, they're gathering
together. Oh, there is actually
one little anecdote
in 1800, right after they draft
this constitution and before
they've lived under it
very long, they wind up
violating one of those four
articles right away because the
very next time, after they've
adopted the Constitution, the
first thing that they read that
night is their own constitution.
And the second thing they read
is a passage from the Bible.
So it's just ironically enough,
their constitutional impulse is
so strong that they violated
their own constitution.
Come 1802.
You see, Miss Mary
Tyler, this is not her.
But I think this is
probably a similar age.
This is from the collections at
Colonial Williamsburg.
She is giving the annual
address an opportunity to stand
in front of roughly 30 or 40
women again, that she knows
very, very well and reminds
them we shall do well if we pay
a strict attention to the rules
of our institution.
They were formed by the most
judicious of our society and
calculated for the
good of the whole.
We can always change our minds
except for some areas where we
can't. But if we ever depart
from our rules, we are sure of
creating an easiness for
ourselves and others.
In 1803, another annual message.
A similar message comes
from another presiding,
a woman for the organization.
In that anniversary address,
they again point out the value
of these rules.
Now, this very idea, by the way,
of ordinary people drawing
up constitutions in the
aftermath of the state and
federal constitution making of
the 1780s, 1770s and 1780s.
It's a really interesting
phenomenon itself.
Right? That is ordinary people,
what I call in my book, everyday
constitutionalism, ordinary
people deciding to experiment
and work with constitutions in
their own clubs and societies is
in some ways it's mimicry.
It's learning more about what
it is to be a good citizen in
the United States. In this
case, these are women who can't
vote for another several
generations, but they're acting
politically. They're
drawing up a constitution.
But in other ways, I think
it goes beyond mere mimicry.
It's actually a sense of
how we as thinking and
cooperating individuals find
ways to, as Miss Mary Tyler
says, "Make things
easy for ourselves."
Procedure and procedural
regularity helps.
There is some value
in rules and procedure.
Felix Frankfurter famously says
the history of freedom in
America is, in no small part
the history of procedure,
some such thing.
And that phenomenon,
that way of thinking is deep
in the American mind.
That formality, that
formalistic approach to
association. Here you see an
image of William Lloyd Garrison.
I think the first person who
could be photographed that I've
talked about here tonight.
He actually, very interestingly,
writes to an organization, to
some white members of a ladies
Anti-Slavery society,
explaining to them why it is
that they should be
untroubled by bringing in
African-American members
to their organization.
Now, he, of course, wants
there to be multiracial advocacy
organizations fighting against
the institution of slavery.
He very much wants that.
But in writing to these
white members of the
Ladies Anti-Slavery Society in
New York,
he's simply essentially
reminding them that you're not
inviting them into your parlors,
you're not becoming best
friends with these people with
whom you might have
some racial animus.
What you're doing
is joining together.
You're contributing and
allowing them to contribute
their-- combine their
influence with yours.
And the formality, the fact
that becoming a member is a
formal process and not
an affectionate one.
Right. Finding ways to create
multiracial, cooperative
organizations by essentially
reminding people that that
membership is also about
process and about regular
procedure and not something
that you have to stop and
hesitate because you might be
joining hands with someone that,
again, in the 1830s
have real racial animus.
Now the Join In exhibit farther
down the hall here has other
great examples of women's
organizations, whether it's the
Women's Christian Temperance
Union from the much later 19th
century and into the end of 20th
or the clubs, the sort of civic
organizations of women's clubs
in the early 20th century.
And this phenomenon, this
way in which non-politically
active citizens can come
together and have a real impact
before the 19th Amendment
finally allowed women to vote
across the nation is something
that I think is an important
part of the story.
That is, the impact of these
organizations in transforming
civil society is, without
doubt, a major part of what we
should value and what we
should understand about
American associations. But
it's also quite interesting
that the civic practice
of just joining together
and finding ways to act
and think constitutionally,
legalistically, law
mindedly is a useful way of
describing this means
that women, Mary Tyler
and the women of Norwich,
Connecticut are acting
politically with one another
in ways that they find deeply
edifying. Clearly, they find
this to be an important part of
what they're doing together,
and I find that to be an
important part
of the story, too.
It's not simply about civic
empowerment and transforming the
public sphere so much as it is
being able to practice civics
on a day to day basis.
So to return to Tocqueville.
Why does all this matter?
I think that the stories
of American associations,
the positives, the negatives,
the anxieties,
the frustrations
are really deep.
A part of our. of the
American mind, of how we think
about these civic and political
phenomena that are so important
to our history.
George Washington and
Bushrod Washington's Exchange,
I find to be really
informative of an
anxiety that can seem a
bit silly at times, right?
No, I don't think
any of us feel deeply
disempowered because
we're members of the
American Automobile Association
or a similar organization.
But that's because I think
of the evolution of these
associations finding ways to
have attenuated limited
commitments and still be able
to join forces to accomplish
good things. And when you go to
the Ladies Literary Society of
Norwich, Connecticut, there
too, you see an interesting part
of the story. And I think
there's two things that stand
out to me. There's the
technology of association,
right? The finding ways to join
together that are similar to,
drawn from other examples that
they're reading out in the
world. Clearly, the newspaper
circulation of other
constitutions and bylaws,
hugely important to
telling the story.
But beyond that
technology of association,
there's also just the civic
practice, right?
That is, these women and many
women like them
all over geographically,
both north and south
and into the west.
You see these kinds of
organizations, female benevolent
societies, as a common
organization that you can find
in just about any town of any
size in the 1830 and '40s.
And that practice, finding ways
to join together even when
they're civically disempowered
and have no vote, have no real
connection to political power
in the United States, is such an
important part of the story and
an important part of how our
civic practices became so
deeply a part of our society.
To go back to that initial
question, can this nation of
joiners, can this public sphere
phenomenon help us to understand
what makes democracies work,
right, why they work in some
places and not in others?
Tocqueville very
clearly says yes.
Other Americans can--
I think actually, even those
who are quite critical of these
organizations found ways
that they could say yes to.
And I want to put my finger
on exactly one last point here
before I open it
up for questions.
That Anti-masonic
movement that I think
has this interesting
backlash to a
powerful fraternal organization.
There's so much
you could say about it,
but one of the ways
that Anti-masons
combated Freemasonry.
Forming associations,
all the time.
You can find Young Men's
Anti-masonic
Association of Boston
here and there and everywhere.
You can find association
formation of a certain kind
to combat what they saw
as an evil association.
And in these associations they
would have clearly articulated
dues. They would have a clear
constitutional description that
anyone could come
to their meetings.
There would be
nothing done in secret.
All the things that they wanted
to sort of wipe out about
Freemasonry, they wrote
out of their organizations.
So associations to combat
associations as another really
fascinating part of
the American story.
And with that, I'm
open to any questions.
Wait for the microphone, please.
Robert--
>> I had a couple of questions.
One is whether you also
think that the milieu
our early republic was also
kind of a helped form the
associations in terms of not as
much of a class society and not
having these other institutions
like a monarchy, a strong
national church and
that type of thing.
And the other thing is just a
question of whether Robert's
Rules of order,
is that an American?
Is that American, or is that
from somewhere?
>> Dr. Kevin Butterfield:
British, right?
>> Unitarians.
>> Unitarians wrote Robert's
rules of Order. Okay.
So there's an answer
for the last--
>> Another kind of like.
>> Dr. Kevin Butterfield:
And I love that answer.
That actually
syncs really nicely
with William
Channing's role here.
On the first one.
Yes, absolutely.
Tocqueville says this
and others say it as well,
that the flatness,
the general equality
of American society, that
there are no aristocrats.
And, of course, Tocqueville, I
think, is describing things a
little too succinctly to say
that all Americans were equal,
clearly, but that general
equality he described also
as an equal powerlessness
to accomplish much, right.
Everyone was equally powerless
to really do much individually,
and so they needed
to band together.
That was his explanation for
why Americans joined together,
more or less.
He's not quite as attuned to
the technology of association
and the fact that this just
becomes a replicable thing, and
he's not quite as attuned,
frankly, to what I think is to
your point about the culture of
the early republic, that is a
sense that this is also not
just what equal citizens do, but
what Republican
citizens do, right?
That is citizens that that have
already been experiencing the
self-government. And here,
Tocqueville does describe how
towns, jury service, town
governments help to sort of
disseminate some of these ideas.
But essentially, yeah,
you're exactly right that the
truncated-ness of American
society that there is no
powerful aristocrat is a part
of the explanation, which is why
Tocqueville's explanation for
the vibrancy of associational
life in the early United States.
It doesn't quite apply
to the 20th century
where we lack
aristocracy, but we
certainly have philanthropic
figures, the Carnegies and the
Mellons that can single
handedly transform
and make a cause happen.
That's something that doesn't
exist in Tocqueville's time.
I want-- Robert. Do you
want to choose? Thank you.
>> Seeing your slides brought up
the rules where they say
they would open their meeting,
the Women's Society of Norwich
with a member making a
reading of their own selection
from the Bible. But then the
rule was there would be no
religious or political disputes
at the meeting.
Where is the raising
religion versus disputes?
So the organization that's--
I'm trying to figure out
where he break that line
down if it's only disputes
that aren't allowed.
Whereas the discussion with
Tocqueville's
self-governing would be
people practicing
their religion.
Democracy, that
local community based,
doing the work of religion
would be self-governing.
>> Dr. Kevin Butterfield: This
might be an interesting example
of where kind of the
historical preciseness
of this situation is key.
They were all members
of the same church.
They initially got together
out of a congregational
prayer society.
So I don't think they
would ever have described
reading the Bible in a
way that was divisive.
But it's actually interesting
you say this because
the American Bible Society,
one of the first national,
really powerful and in some
ways really rich organizations
of the early 19th century.
They, too, believe that
printing the Bible, as long as
you didn't add notes to it or
any kind of commentary or say
anything at all that might be
divisive, that that was a
unifying thing and not a-- there
was nothing that might be--
that smack of a
religious dispute about
simply the text of the Bible.
As long as you don't
add anything to it.
I think that's just a fairly
common place approach to
things in the early
19th century.
Is that getting
at your question?
>> I'll be puzzling
on it for a while.
It's like it hasn't been--
is seeing America is
sort of where that line become
versus where it is democracy
that you have your religious
liberty and then where is it,
you know, dispute the aspects.
>> Dr. Kevin Butterfield:
Yeah.
That's that's a good that's a
good thing to puzzle over. Yeah.
Others.
>> Hi. So my question has
to do with banking associations.
I'm just sort of generally
how they fit into the story
you're telling. And then
secondly, you said something
towards the beginning about
sort of limitations simply with
forming associations to begin
with, that these aren't exactly
spontaneous and they
aren't exactly free flowing.
There are some restrictions on
how and when and where these
kinds of associations pop up.
So thank you.
>> Dr. Kevin Butterfield:
So banking associations,
the corporate form is
a part of this story.
It's one I didn't get into
tonight because it's a--
couple of other-- two
other elements of my work
that I didn't want to
dive into too deeply
are the formally legal side.
I was kind of talking about the
law mindedness of all this, but
the formally legal side of this
is that in this period between
the 1780s and the 1830s, you
see a massive proliferation of
corporation formation.
1832 is-- so basically
the year right after
Tocqueville wanders
around is when--
the very first treatise in the
Anglo-American law literature,
the very first treatise
on private corporations,
is published by two Rhode
Island lawyers in 1832.
And it's because Americans
were really leading in
this, right? They form
corporations at a greater pace
and with greater range of uses
than any other society.
And that's been described
in a couple of ways.
Pauline Maier famously says
that it's basically mimicking
the constitutions, right?
That it's part of that.
I think there's a little
more to it than that.
And again, technology I think
comes into it as well.
But when you say banking
associations, I think
corporate form and
there is a pretty
complicated but I think
parallel story to some of the
things that I'm describing
where what it was to be a member
of a corporation is being
worked out at exactly this time
between the 18 aughts and the
1830s, you see a lot of clarity
about what a member of a
corporation who happens to own
stock essentially in a
corporation is entitled to
how they can become one, right?
Can they become one
involuntarily? Up until 1803,
the answer was yes. You could be
compelled to become a member of
a corporation that was going to
build a street in your town or
whatever. But then famously in
1803, a Massachusetts court
says, no, that's not,
these should be voluntary
organizations, not
involuntary ones.
All of that, I think, is a part
of the story.
And the second part of
your question regarded...
>> Limitations on
the creation of these.
>> Dr. Kevin Butterfield:
Yeah.
>> In the beginning they
wanted to expand on it further.
>> Dr. Kevin Butterfield:
Yeah.
I'm not sure what
kinds of limitations
I was referring to when
I was describing this.
I think one of the things,
particularly in the 18th century
coming into the 19th, that
impeded, I think the initial
spread of these kinds of
organizations of all kinds,
particularly
politically minded ones,
was the sense that they were
factious and dangerous for
the republic and that
limitation, it becomes a
partisan thing, right?
The democratic--
The Jeffersonian side of things
forms these organizations,
whereas the other
side says, well, we're not
going to do that at all.
But then by the-- right around
1800, thereabouts, federalist
societies and they
tended to call themselves
Washington benevolent societies
decided they needed
to get into the game too.
And so then both
parties are doing it.
One of the biggest
limitations on this was a--
what I would describe
as an 18th century
anxiety about associations.
That starts to become morphed
into what I describe with
Wayland and Channing and others.
That is that these associations
are here and they're going to do
massively influential and
important things in American
political life and civic life.
But here are some things
you need to be cautious about.
So that's one of the limitations
that I would point to.
I see a question
in the background.
>> Thank you. This
is very interesting.
I'm curious if the democracy
requires associations for
involvement, because I'm struck
by the sociological commentary
now about "Bowling Alone," not
joining association and the
undermining of democracy in
democratic processes and getting
your voice heard. Do you see a
connection concern?
>> Dr. Kevin Butterfield:
Great question.
People used to bowling leagues.
Now if they go bowling at all,
they go bowling alone
or with a couple of friends.
That phenomenon largely is--
it bears out in a
lot of categories.
If you look at Freemasonry, for
instance, the peak membership
year for Freemasons was in
either 1963 or 1959.
For some reason I'm blanking on
which, but it's been a steady
decline ever since. And similar
organizations, some of which
no longer even exist.
Yeah, that's right.
Attending organized religious
services decline, all kinds of
decline. Now, Putnam would
say the danger to that,
Putnam and others, the danger
that poses for democracy
is a eroding of what
he called social capital.
This sense that you can trust
the people around you, that you
have enough interactions with
them, not just people who are
just like you, but, you know,
people from other walks of life,
too, that you spend
time with and you grow--
You develop a sense of trust
that is valuable
for the civic order.
You know, I don't know
the question of whether it's
essential to democracy.
I think it's certainly not
essential to a founding era
vision of what democracy needed
to be because the founders were
so deeply troubled by these
things that it's clear that
they could imagine a civic
life where everyone comes
to the poll, all white men come
to the polls and find ways to
participate without having much
mediation between them and the
government. But in practice,
that just didn't work.
A, it didn't work that way, and
B, I don't think it could have
worked that way as the
democratic societies became more
complex. So I do find these
kinds of organizations,
particularly political advocacy
organizations, that help to push
and advocate for a particular
cause as essential parts of the
order, whether political
parties are essential to the
order. I think essentially
e they're a permanent
fixture of it now. But again,
the founding era would have said
they ought not be a permanent
part of the order.
And well, under the 1830,
you find presidents
of the United States saying
we really don't need parties.
At this point, they're
somewhat disingenuous about it.
But so I really am--
I'm a historian and I'm going
to stop there as to whether
they're essential
in the 21st century.
But I do think that it
seems clear to me that
the Tocqueville explanation of
the value of them of, otherwise,
power was maybe too strong
a word, but otherwise
weak individuals finding ways
to join together to do something
and make something happen.
That seems really valuable
in a democracy.
And it creates for
Tocqueville a substitute for
relying on the hand of the
state to solve all problems.
Right. And that's why
Tocqueville is just as appealing
to both the left and the
right in the 21st century
in different ways.
And that's...
I'll stop there.
It's interesting
and it's a great question.
Putnam is
putting his finger on a problem,
just like I think
some of the people
I was talking
about tonight were.
But I don't know what
the answer is exactly to it.
See. three or four and...
You want me to stop
by 7:30, right? Okay.
>> Thank you.
This has been fantastic
and congratulations on the book.
I'm intrigued by your claim
that technology, how technology
factored into the age of
Tocqueville and the explosion of
sort of associations in the
middle, early middle part of the
19th century.
You show that technology with
the expansion of the printing
press and even the idea of
written constitutions helped
develop this idea of
associational life.
Can technology also, in your
judgment, this is maybe putting
on just another cap, but can
technology also sort of
undermine associational life?
I think people have written
recently, again, worrying about
the Robert Putnam effect that
modern 21st century technology
has a way of maybe undermining
associations with smartphones
and apps and things like that.
Do you have any thoughts on how
technology can kind of perhaps
undermine associational life?
>> Dr. Kevin Butterfield:
I will say one of the things
that stands out to me
about the value of early...
Early U.S. associationalism
is the practice of it.
It's not simply pooling of
resources to do something
kind of crowdfunding, the
kinds of things that technology
can allow for collective
action to do things very quickly
and very effectively. But just
the actual practice of it,
it seems to be a part--
it helps to build
that social trust.
Again, the ladies of Norwich,
Connecticut are not the perfect
example because they all knew
one another anyway.
But imagine a more
expansive organization.
It helps to build trust.
It helps to accomplish things,
and technologically enabled
cooperation doesn't seem
to do those same things.
Here I'd be building
on or just referring
to other people's work, thinking
about the ways that more--
there's more silo ization and
being connected with people
who think exactly like you do.
That's enabled by
modern technology.
That wasn't fully the case
in the earlier generations
of associations.
Yeah, I'm too much of a
historian to have much sense of
the 21st century possibilities
and dangers of
technologically enabled
association formation.
But I will say that I've seen
some descriptions recently
that point out ways in which
and crowdfunding actually is a
part of this. Ways in which it
is creating new approaches to
solving really classic
problems, like being able to
pool resources quickly
and effectively without
intermediaries and without
having to go to the state or
some rich or powerful person.
And that part I see is kind of
having a similar impulse to that
Tocqueville one, but no real
thoughts on whether technology
is going to destroy us
or make things better.
I'll puzzle over
this, as we've said.
Aslihan, do you want to pick
two more and we'll... Okay.
>> I was struck by Washington's
skepticism, which got me
thinking about how in his
career, right then he was sort
of in trouble with the society
of the Cincinnati that people
mistrusted because
they thought it was,
elites going to oppress them.
And then, of course, the
Sons of Liberty were voluntary
association before then, which
were disruptive and go down to
today, you know,
we've got Oath Keepers.
We've got lots of
voluntary associations that
are not necessarily benign.
So how do we-- Did
Tocqueville think about this?
How do we cope with this?
>> Dr. Kevin Butterfield:
Tocqueville didn't think about
it as much as others did.
You're exactly right. When
Washington saw private
associations, he had in his
mind, potentially dangerous
ones. But also I think he had
in mind ones that were very much
a part of his world.
That is the revolutionary
mobilization and actually the
associations, the Capital A
associations of the 1760s and
1770s, ways that people
effectively undermine an empire
just by joining together.
And Washington saw the power of
that potential association,
of that potential collective
action and that was real to him.
And very recently,
obviously post January 6th,
I think was an impulse for it.
There was a really good
gathering of scholarship
on your point about what--
the collection was
called uncivil civil society.
What are the ways in
which some organizations,
Oath Keepers, came were--
I think described explicitly
but also the rise of Nazism
in Weimar, Germany.
What are the ways that certain
kinds of associations that have
all the earmarks of everything
that we've just talked about and
the more laudatory kind of
tones, but are doing something
truly and dangerously
subversive.
And those things exist side
by side with one another.
And so I think the anxiety of
the founding era that Washington
nicely described in those
letters to his nephew
is one we should
still take seriously.
There is a potential
danger to associations.
And I think that-- the
fact that they have effectively,
in Washington's lifetime that
they had effectively toppled and
transformed the political world
he lived in is something
he would never forget.
And the site in
Cincinnati, very quickly.
Yes. That is a big part of
Washington's sense
of these things.
But it's also something
he joined.
He didn't hesitate to join
once asked, he joined and he was
the president, obviously,
because he was the president of
everything that he joined.
But that is another great
example of one, an organization
that, by the way, still exists.
I find to be really fairly
harmless in the 21st century.
But in the 18th century, it was
seen as deeply dangerous.
Okay.
>> Thank you for your talk.
I'm wondering, in the course
of your research, if you ever
came across associations being
interested in the right to
petition. The reason I ask this
is that the House has had a
functional right to
petition a public docket
until the '40s when
it sort of gave it
all away to the executive branch
in the form of agencies.
So these public grievance
process existed as a side door
into the lawmaking influence,
if you couldn't vote
which was most people.
And it seems to me
like reimagining the right to
petition in the modern world is
really key to figuring out how
public serving institutions
take that power back in the face
of you know now
ChatGPT or, you know,
the really advertising platforms
that are pretending
to be public squares.
>> Dr. Kevin Butterfield:
Well, we have--
I spent this entire conversation
not mentioning the
First Amendment,
which I easily could have,
because that right to
assemble and petition are
right next to each other and
the right of association,
which the Supreme Court
described most fully in 1958
with an NAACP case, is something
that comes out of that
sort of broad reading
of the First Amendment.
And if you go back
a generation...
in the generations that I'm
describing. So essentially
in the 18-- from the
1780s into the 1830s,
many of the organizations
that I'm describing
regarding the issue
of slavery and temperance,
that was an active part
of what they did, right.
They drew up petitions and they
found ways to submit them,
particularly the African
American organizations would
join together and work to
create these petitions that
would then be submitted.
There is a point
at which they--
most organizations
of those sorts
decide to act more directly
to try to accomplish
things rather than, kind of
Tocqueville's point that
associations were there to do,
not to get the government to do.
But it really was a key
part of that, of their work.
And I imagine now if we walked
around the outside
of the Join In exhibit,
the outer walls,
we would see a lot of examples
of 19th and 20th century
organizations that found ways to
mobilize petition efforts and
mobilize political efforts in
exactly the vein that
you're describing.
So I can just say
historically that
certainly in the 19th century,
it was an important way in which
many of these
associations found,
made their impact.
And I think you're
exactly right,
that it's obviously a much
different landscape in the 20th
and into the 21st.
Thank you, Aslihan.
[Applause]
>> Aslihan Bulut: Thank you
so much, Dr. Butterfield,
for that engaging and clearly
thought provoking discussion.
We do hope you will have
an opportunity to actually
visit the exhibit, which is
right past the South Gallery
there and behind the,
not an ostrich exhibition.
So and we also hope
that you will visit
the Law Library's Legal
Research Institute online,
where we post our
other events and webinars.
It's loc.gov, very
easy to remember.
And also please visit John W.
Kluge Center's website as well
at loc.gov.
And they obviously have
many upcoming events.
So thank you so
much for joining us.
Have a good evening.
[Applause]