gentility between the ugly and the sublime

"Gentility being neither ugly nor sublime, belonged wholly to the beautiful. Gentility, whether in dress, personal manners, or architecture, was harmony, smoothness, polish, gradual rather than abrupt variation, the subduing of harsh emotions. Gentility beatified the world in Burke's sense. Eighteenth-century portraits, with their graceful and easy postures, fine clothes, and composed faces, present people who have overcome their baser impulses and learned to conceal the fearful secrets of their hearts....
"...Gentility's devotion to beautiful nature put it at odds with the ugly and the sublime. Horror and awe, emotions evoked by the sublime, were repressed in genteel natures, as were all things base and disturbing -- the dissonant, the plebeian, the filthy."

-- The Refinement of America, Persons, Houses, Cities, Richard L. Bushman, 1992, p. 98.
   

the Versailles of the middle-class

"At the court of Versailles, the royal presence brought the exquisite sensibilities of refined behavior to the highest pitch. No effort was spared to enhance the king's glory and to beautify his environment. His very presence demanded perfection of manners and gave a point to the necessary self-discipline. Back in their parlors, middle-class people had to subject themselves to the discipline of genteel conduct without the compelling presence of a monarch and with only the vaguest idea of court life. But a faint light from the court still shone in their rooms. Genteel behavior always reflected the belief that somewhere a glorious circle existed where life was lived at its highest and best, where fashions were set, where true gentility was achieved, where perfect harmony, grace, and beauty could be found."

-- The Refinement of America, Persons, Houses, Cities, Richard L. Bushman, 1992, p. 37.
   

Fichte, "...making it...incomprehensible to the educated public..."

"Fichte's search for his God-given mission as a young Lutheran had culminated in his philosophical view of himself as an instrument of 'speculation'".

"'Popular philosophy' became one of the major targets of Fichte's polemical wrath. His attacks were testy reactions to the charge that Kantians were returning philosophy to obscurantism and that his own writings were a particularly egregious case in point....Having tried but failed to popularize Kantianism in the Contribution*, Fichte now preferred to make philosophy rigorous, even if that meant making it, as least for a while, incomprehensible to the educated public as well as the uneducated masses."

-- Fichte, The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799, Anthony J. La Vopa, 2001, p. 206, 211.

* A Contribution toward Correcting the Judgment of the Public about the French Revolution, 1793.
   

Goethe's Werther, Kant's Critiques -- heart- and headbreak

"In the late 1780s and the 1790s Kantian philosophy made a good number of converts among Germany's educated youth. It was not the first time that an eighteenth-century author had struck a chord in a generation coming of age. From the mid-1770s onward, a veritable youth cult had developed around Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers. But even to today's readers Goethe's novel conveys an extraordinary sense of emotional immediacy. It is not hard to understand why the book overwhelmed young men, and indeed why, to the author's consternation, they found Werther a hero to be emulated. Kant is quite another matter. Piece by piece, he was building an awesomely abstract and intricate philosophical system, and he did not pretend to be able to explain it in a layperson's language. The new philosophy was, in Fichte's apt description 'headbreaking.'"

--  Fichte, The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799, Anthony J. La Vopa, 2001, p. 46.
   

"...behind a mask that conceals the real self." 1933

"'Secondary relationships,' the nemesis of early psychologists, suddenly ceased to be destructive. Impersonality no longer led to disintegration of rural mores but to increased freedom for individuals to choose the roles they wished to play. 'Since the major portion of social contacts in the city are of the touch-and-go type, external appearance assumes a pronounced social value,' they [Gist and Halbert, in Urban Society, 1933] concluded; 'because of the exaggerated emphasis on external form, many urban persons live behind a mask that conceals the real self.' City dwellers learned to express their personalities by closely adhering to conventions and customs symbolic of their attitudes to life.

As Gist and Halbert concluded:

"This masquerading, posing, playing a role, gives the outward impression of hypocrisy, and to the rural person, who deliberately avoids artificiality and who cannot understand the basis of urban relationships, the metropolite is hypocritical, untrustworthy, a 'slicker.' Yet withal it is a natural phenomena, a form of social adjustment that has grown out of the exigencies of urban life.'"

-- Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America, Peter J. Schmitt, 1969, p. 187.
  

1925 traffic jams in NY, et al

"Traffic controls were frequently as primitive as sewage disposal. With the development of the skyscraper, two to six new 'cities' rose from the streets of the old; massive traffic jams became a daily hazard of urban life. 'Every day the congestion increases,' [Clarence] Stein concluded, ' in spite of traffic policemen, curb setbacks, one-way streets, electric traffic signals.' Subways were equally crowded by 1925."

-- Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America, Peter J. Schmitt, 1969, p. 178.
   

organizing play

"Play was no longer a means of exercise but an end in itself, a science conforming to the needs of an urban culture. The rural image of informal outdoor exercise gave way to an urban ideal for town and country alike. In the 1920's, the National Recreation Association found rural play patterns woefully inadequate. Country children had nowhere to go but the open fields and nothing but their own inventiveness to guide them. In 1929, the Association published a rural recreation handbook to bring the social games of urban society to those who still lived in the country."

-- Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America, Peter J. Schmitt, 1969, p. 75.
   

RIP American Romantic Style

"Old-fashioned attitudes toward death and burial were conditioned by crowded old-world graveyards in London, where, as one writer put it, corpses are 'buried in standing postures because not room is left to lay them down.' In many such graveyards, the dead were periodically removed to make more room, and in other cases, whole cemeteries were leveled as building sites. The American cemetery seemed by contrast 'a special kind of park with a peculiar dignity and sacredness,' which offered visible signs of grace and immortality with the changing seasons. Romantic melancholy inspired the first 'rural' cemeteries...."

-- Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America, Peter J. Schmitt, 1969, p. 67.
   

false values, John Burroughs, 1912

"The show and splendor of great houses, elaborate furnishings, stately halls, oppress me, impose on me. They fix the attention on false values, they set up a false standard of beauty; they stand between me and the real feeders of character and thought."

-- John Burroughs, 1912, "The Gospel of Nature", in Century 84, cited in The Simple Life, Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture, David E. Shi, 1985/2007, p. 199.
   

differing equalities: Jefferson's and Putin's

"We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal." V. V. Putin, Op/Ed NYTimes September 11, 2013

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." US Declaration of Independence, July 2/4, 1776, written mainly by Thomas Jefferson.

the 99% in NY in 1765

"Is it equitable that 99, rather 999, should suffer for the Extravagance or Grandeur of one, especially when it is considered that Men frequently owe their wealth to the impoverishment of their Neighbors?" 

-- From a letter to the editor of the New–York Gazette, cited in The Simple Life, Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture, David E. Shi, 1985/2007, p. 53.

   
See full text: http://libertystreeteconomics.typepad.com/.a/6a01348793456c970c0167644d814f970b-popup
from http://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2012/04/historical-echoes-we-are-the-99-percent-1765-edition.html
 

"...to defend the subordination or even extermination of..."

"...but in a larger sense the Southerners were sharing in, and taking advantage of, the general shift toward racialist thinking in Europe and the United States. This racialist thinking was used to justify more than the southern institution of slavery. It served to defend the subordination or even extermination of non-European peoples throughout the world and was believed by Europeans to explain the ever-increasing gulf of power and progress that separated them from the peoples they were overrunning."

-- Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, Reginald, Horsman, 1981, p. 122.
   

Karamzin with Kant, 1789, on future life

Konigsberg, June 19, 1789 [notes of conversation with Immanuel Kant]

"...I [Kant] take comfort in the fact that I am already sixty and that soon I shall reach the end of my life, for I hope to begin another, a better one.
"When I consider the joys I have known, I now feel no pleasure, but when I remember those occasions when I acted in conformity with the moral law inscribed in my heart, I am gladdened. I speak of the moral law. We might call it conscience, a sense of good and evil -- but it exists. I lied. No one knows of my lie, yet I feel ashamed. When we speak of the future life, probability is not certainty; but when we have weighed everything, reason bids us believe in it. And suppose we were to see it with our own eyes, as it were? If we were much taken with it, we would not longer be able to interest ourselves in the present life, but would be in a continuous state of languor. And, in the opposite case, we would not be able to comfort ourselves by saying, midst the trials and tribulations of the present life, 'Perhaps it will be better there!' But when we speak of destiny, of a future life, and so on, we presume the existence of an Eternal Creative Reason which created everything for some purpose and everything good. What? How? But here even the wisest man admits his ignorance. Here reason extinguishes her lamp and we are left in darkness. Only fancy can wander in this darkness and create fictions."

-- Letter of a Russian Traveler, 1789-1790, N. M. Karamzin, [Columbia University Press, NY, 1957], p. 40-41. 
   

"the greatest nation in the history of...", 1840s

"It was unusual by the late 1840s to profess a belief in innate human equality and to challenge the idea that a superior race was about to shape the fates of other races for the future good of the world. To assert this meant challenging not only popular opinion, but also the opinion of most American intellectuals."


-- Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, Reginald, Horsman, 1981, p. 250.

   

"...could rest easier if the sufferings of other races...", 1830s

"By the 1830s the Americans were eagerly grasping at reasons for their own success and for the failure of others. Although the white Americans of Jacksonian America wanted personal success and wealth, they also wanted a clear conscience. If the United States was to remain in the minds of its people a nation divinely ordained for great deeds, then the fault for the suffering inflicted in the rise to power and prosperity had to lie elsewhere. While Americans could rest easier if the sufferings of other races could be blamed on racial weakness rather than on the white's relentless search for wealth and power."

-- Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, Reginald, Horsman, 1981, p. 210.
   

Jefferson and the Saxons, 1825

"Near the end of his life, in 1825, Jefferson contrasted the Saxon and the Norman conquests of England  'the former exhibiting the genuine form and political principles of the people constituting the nation, and founded in the rights of man; the latter built on conquest and physical force, not at all affecting moral rights, nor even assented to by the free will of the vanquished. The battle of Hastings, indeed, was lost, but the natural rights of the nation were not staked on the events of a single battle. Their will to recover the Saxon constitution continued unabated.' [TJ letter Oct. 25, 1825]. This view of Anglo-Saxon England was in its way as unreal as those writings which depicted Arthur's England as a Camelot of brave knights, fair ladies, and magic swords, but it persisted in English and American thinking long after Jefferson's death."

-- Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, Reginald, Horsman, 1981, p. 21.
   

the erred optimism of Mill?

"[Sir James] Stephen's response to [J. S.] Mill, in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity [1873] was that the facts did not support Mill's optimistic view. Look at actual men and you will see that they are a mixed bag, but that on the whole one cannot rely on their non-vicious or non-selfish characteristics. Large numbers of mankind are bad and indifferent, selfish, idle and sensuous, incapable of advance from ignorance through argument and discussion. To bestow liberty on such people does not improve them; nor is it necessarily to their advantage to have freedom to indulge the impulses of their character. Because man's nature is untrustworthy, to grant free rein to it is likely to be socially pernicious rather than beneficial. It is desirable, therefore, upon occasion, perhaps many occasions, to coerce others for our good and theirs."

-- Wilhelm von Humboldt and German Liberalism, A Reassessment, John Roberts, 2009, p. 97.
   

"The consequent German intellectual emphasis on private culture..."

"The French Revolution had revealed, at least in the view of most Germans of the educated class, the disastrous effects of trying to remodel society in accordance with purely rational theories. But, equally, the paternalism of the German principalities was insufficient and even worse, self-defeating, as a means of reforming society to achieve the conditions of human dignity, in that it treated men as means rather than as individuals in themselves. The consequent German intellectual emphasis on private culture reflected disenchantment with the conditions that public life presented. It justified for some (though not for Humboldt and Schiller) a flight from politics when the alternative approaches to political questions appeared either unpalatable, impractical, or both.
"Humboldt's thought is an attempt to make this conception of the cultured man within a civilized society the criterion for the political arrangements of society."

-- Wilhelm von Humboldt and German Liberalism, A Reassessment, John Roberts, 2009, p. 72.
  

Bildung and Kultur, to Herder and Humboldt

"For Herder and [W. v] Humboldt, Bildung, the inner constitution of the individual, and Kultur, the external constitution of the world are not isolated but two elements in one relationship. Kultur revealed in history, speech and knowledge is the outside force with which the individual must unite to find his true individuality. Realising individuality has become the process of assimilating and adapting the external cultural environment into one's own personality."

-- Wilhelm von Humboldt and German Liberalism, A Reassessment, John Roberts, 2009, p. 63-64.
  

W. v Humboldt on Kant vs Jacobi, 1789

"A year later, in October 1789, [Wilhelm von] Humboldt writes that the arguments of [Christian] Wolff have collapsed and 'Kant is the king of the castle.' In fact, the philosophies of Kant and Jacobi were opposed to each other. Kant relied on the intellect and reason to direct men to moral action and Jacobi relied on intuition. Humboldt came to see that Jacobi's system was entirely different from Kant's, and for Humboldt both were inadequate. Kant was too rationalistic, too abstract, placing reliance on a priori reason divorced from the world of sense; Jacobi placed too much reliance on unverifiable feelings with the consequent difficulty of distinguishing truth from delusion."

-- Wilhelm von Humboldt and German Liberalism, A Reassessment, John Roberts, 2009, p. 3. 
  

collegians in '27...

"Students today are much more alike than they were. . . . They wear the same kind of caps, the same cut of trousers, the same variety of 'slickers' and coonskin overcoats -- they talk the same slang and have much the same easy air of knowing the world. You may tell a collegian today whenever you meet him".

-- cited from Eight O'Clock Chapel, 1927, by "two elderly professors", in The American College and the Culture of Aspiration, David Levine, 1988, p. 122.

"the Humanities"?

"The word humanities emerged after 1850 in America as a neologism to describe a kind of elevating, holistic study of literature, music, and art. It derived from the academic meaning of the fifteenth-century word humanity, which distinguished the secular study of Greek and Latin texts (literae humaniores) from theological studies: humanity contrasted with divinity. Humanity in the antebellum era meant primarily study of Greek and Latin texts. But after 1850 it acquired it plural form and hitched itself to those studies that bestowed liberal culture."

-- The Culture of Classicism, Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life 1780-1910, Caroline Winterer, 2002, p. 118.

the stadium versed the serious student

"Athletics played a most important role on the college campus of the 1920s. A football victory set an optimistic tone at many schools in the interwar period. Furthermore, a successful sports program raised the visibility of an institution: it provided a means of entertainment and identification for the local community -- and that community could include an entire state -- as well as for the college's alumni and students. In the eyes of most people, students and others alike, the stadium was the most important building on campus, and the achievements of a school's athletes there overshadowed the achievements of faculty and students in the laboratory and in the classroom.
...
"Amidst the activities and fraternities, one type of student was bound to be unhappy -- the serious student."

-- The American College and the Culture of Aspiration, David Levine, 1988, p. 120, 121.