Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities Book

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.