The permeable public: rituals of citizenship in antebellum men's debating clubs.

• Author: Ray, Angela G.
• Position: Argumentation & Advocacy

The antebellum era often is understood as a period of "democratic transition": changes in family life, patterns of work and leisure, religious practices, educational possibilities, print journalism, and political organization contributed to increased expectations of widespread democratic participation, particularly among white men (Schudson, 1998, chap. 3). States had altered or were altering voting rights, expanding the franchise for non-property-owning white men, although often restricting it for women, African Americans, and Native Americans (Keyssar, 2000). Many white men were, or could imagine themselves to be, beneficiaries of a new political identity: the citizen who accesses power by participating in "the being of the sovereign," the people (Warner, 2002, p. 69). These men sought sites in which participation could be practiced and enacted. In local settings, they made both literal and figurative spaces in which to produce discourses for circulation and reflection. They made space to perform as publics.

This essay considers the antebellum voluntary association, specifically the nonsectarian, nonpartisan men's debating club, as an instantiation of an emergent public. It argues that antebellum men's debating clubs were places where participatory citizenship was produced rhetorically, through word and ritual, through repetition of patterned, formal, rule-governed action. Describing a debating club as an emergent public--or, in Rosa Eberly's terms, as a kind of "protopublic" (2000, pp. 168-170)--is not meant to convey only that a specific group of men who gathered on a particular Wednesday night spoke before a "public" (that is, to assembled spectators). It also is meant to convey that the ubiquitous debating clubs, as a site of quotidian practice, discursively constructed an imagined national "public" (see Warner, 2002, chap. 2). In producing and reproducing the discourses of publicity, antebellum men developed a form of localized public opinion (see Herbst, 1995, p. 96). The construction of public opinion, however, required the creation of a prior entity that could propound collective opinions. Rituals of debating marked the imagined public as deliberating, rational, and fair-minded. The repetition and sharing of this social imaginary could establish it as a normative and even foundational model that later would provide argumentative justification for further debate or public action.

So part of this essay is a history of one neglected site of emerging dominant norms. The history of antebellum men's debating clubs is largely one of the production of discourses manifesting the power of elites. Yet there is more. If "all publics are particular," as Melissa Deem notes (2002, p. 451), then reading the particularities of instantiations of publics enables a more complex account. The history of the formation even of the bourgeois public sphere resists a totalizing narrative. The story of antebellum men's debating clubs is not one of univocality or consensus, and not simply because club members engaged in debate. Indeed, responding to Robert Asen's suggestion that "persons, places," and "topics" create "constellations" of meaning (2000, p. 426), this essay identifies the interrelationships among various elements of the practices of debating clubs. Especially, a reading of vernacular discourse as it adapts dominant norms evinces fissures in the rhetoric of consensus that dominant discourse overtly promotes. Thus, the history of the antebellum men's debating clubs also is a history of permeability, a demonstration of interrelationships among the discourses of dominance and challenge, at moments of their emergence in everyday ritual.

To demonstrate the complex permeability of multiple discourses, of private behavior and public action, this essay reads the practices of several antebellum men's debating clubs, focusing especially on the ritualistic creation of the participating member of the public, the citizen. In an environment of changing social and political norms, questions about citizenship were rife: What did citizenship mean? What rights and duties did citizens have? Who could enact these rights and perform these duties appropriately? If, as this essay argues, the practices in antebellum debating clubs bodied forth civic myths of public participation, then the details of rituals offer traces of those myths. This essay first briefly describes the origins of the antebellum men's debating clubs, and then depicts the rituals of debate on two different scales: a single instance of debating in Camden, New Jersey, offers a rich portrait of one club's activities; and a comparison of proceedings at multiple clubs from New England to the Old Northwest (now the Midwest) reveals patterns of topics and participation that speak to the question of who counts as part of the wider public.

Although debating clubs were numerous, especially in the 1830s and 1840s (Bode, 1956), extant documents about individual clubs are sparse and widely scattered, existing as minutes of meetings or, more rarely, descriptions in participants' journals and diaries. Consequently, the sources for this essay do not represent anything like a statistically representative sample. Instead, the clubs examined herein were selected for the accessibility, depth, and richness of their records, and for their geographic breadth. The diary of a participant describes the Camden debate in detail, offering an unusually thorough account of debating rituals and behavioral norms. Sources for the comparative review consist primarily of minutes of meetings from debating clubs in Concord, Massachusetts, Downingtown, Pennsylvania, and Euclid, Ohio. Minutes typically are spare, listing participants, the question debated, and sometimes the verdict of the officers or membership. The minutes of these three clubs are supplemented with additional, sometimes anecdotal, evidence from other locations, from Rhode Island to Iowa. Although local circumstances differed, the characteristics of participants, places of engagement, and topics for debate are sufficiently similar to enable provisional conclusions about the ways that such local organizations participated in the emergence of a mythic national public.

History of Men's Debating Clubs

In the 19th-century United States, debating was associated firmly with learning, having been part of Western pedagogy since the Greek Sophist Protagoras of Abdera in the fifth century B.C.E. (Reid, 2000; Schiappa, 1992, pp. 701-708). A debating society was in evidence as early as 1716 at Harvard, and such groups, founded and run by students, flourished after 1750 (Harding, 1971, pp. 19, 21; see Potter, 1944, pp. 64-93, 1954, 1963). College societies conducted debates in English, not Latin, and argued a variety of issues, including questions of contemporary public policy. For example, the Linonian Society at Yale in 1816 debated the question, "Were the members of Congress justifiable in voting themselves an addition to salary?" (Harding, 1971, p. 345). The activities of noncollegiate debating societies corresponded closely to those of the student groups. Some men who participated in college debating societies founded or joined similar groups after college, and others who lacked access to higher education found local debating groups to be a means to educate themselves-to acquire "culture"--in a socially desirable, club-like context of collective education and "improvement."

Civic debating societies proliferated in U.S. towns and cities after 1826. In that year the Yale-educated scientific lecturer and educational reformer Josiah Holbrook began vigorously to promote a "lyceum movement," urging the establishment of "associations of adults for mutual education" ("Associations," 1826; see Antczak, 1985; Bode, 1956). The term lyceum, referring to Aristotle's school, illustrated the classical commitments of Holbrook and other elite promoters. Although usage changed during the 19th century, the term, as historian Carl Bode observes, "continued to stand, grandly if a little vaguely, for learning" (1956, p. xii). Holbrook's vision of scientific education for men and women of varying social classes did not reach fruition, but by the early 1840s thousands of communities across the country had lyceums that typically sponsored members' debates and public lectures (Scott, 1980, p. 791). (1) Debating was not an explicit part of Holbrook's design: he preferred mutual study, collecting of rocks and minerals, and writing and reading of members' essays, especially on scientific topics. Already by 1828, however, the American Journal of Education, an important vehicle for the promotion of lyceums, noted with approval that some lyceums were sponsoring debates on political and legal affairs ("American Lyceum," 1828, p. 630). The great number of associations called lyceums that were chiefly debating societies suggests that the college literary societies--as well as European gentlemen's clubs--provided models for local lyceums. This also lends credence to historian Joseph F. Kett's assertion that Holbrook "did not invent the popular literary society; rather, he baptized existing societies as lyceums" (1994, p. xvii). Yet zealous promotional activity by Holbrook and others dramatically increased the number of societies, and thousands of new local groups adopted the name lyceum, rhetorically affiliating with a national impulse for self-education.

Most lyceums that began sponsoring members' debates in the 1820s, 1830s, and early 1840s experienced cycles of interest and disinterest, and many groups survived only briefly. In Davenport, Iowa, for example, between late 1838 and early 1842 three different debating societies emerged and dissolved: the Stephenson Lyceum, the Davenport Lyceum, and the Davenport Institute. In late 1842 a meeting was called to "revive or organize a Lyceum in Davenport," and a year later another meeting sought to "reorganize the Davenport...