Best of BackStory

The Time Peter Onuf Declared Independence

01.24.20

For close to ten years, Peter Onuf hosted BackStory along with Ed Ayers and Brian Balogh. Now, with the show coming to a close, Peter is back to help kick off a new series we’re doing on the show. These are episodes in which all five of our hosts will look back on their time with the show and highlight some of their favorite moments.

With so much time at BackStory, Peter had a lot of material to work with. But he has narrowed it down to three conversations that still stick out in his memory today. Each one captures something that he considers to be unique about the show.

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Segments

American Scripture

Peter talks to the late historian Pauline Maier about the most important parts of the Declaration of Independence (not the first paragraph!), and how meanings of “independence” have changed over time.

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BRIAN: Welcome to BackStory — the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Brian Balogh. If you’re new to the podcast, each week, along with my colleagues Nathan Connolly, Joanne Freeman, and Ed Ayers, we explore a different aspect of American history.

If you’re not new to the podcast, you might know that for close to ten years, Ed and I hosted BackStory along with our friend and colleague Peter Onuf. Peter is professor emeritus of history at the University of Virginia. Well, I’m pleased to tell you that Peter is back with us today. Hello Peter, and welcome back!

PETER: Hey Brian thanks, it’s great to be here.

BRIAN: Peter you’re probably wondering why you’re sitting in this studio. You’re there to help us kick off a new series we’re doing here at BackStory. These are episodes in which all five of BackStory’s hosts, yes Peter you are one, will look back on their time with the show and bring you — the listener — some of our favorite moments.

So think of this episode as the Best of BackStory — the Peter Onuf edition. Which means, Peter, you need to walk us through what we’ll be hearing today.

PETER: It’s a pleasure, and I’m really flattered to having a whole show devoted to some of the fun I had with you and Ed, and various people that I had the chance to interview. One of the great things about the show is the interview segment, especially when you get a good friend on and you get some good laughs.

So, I’ve chosen a couple of interviews and then a riff that you and Ed and I did, which was a lot of fun. So in this episode you’re going to learn how the meaning of independence has changed over time. And you’ll learn about the invention of Santa Claus in the 1820s.

PETER: Brian, if I asked you to quote something from the Declaration of Independence, what would it be?

BRIAN: Oh, c’mon Peter, that’s pretty self evident.

PETER: Well, Brian, good for you you got the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. I think as a serious student you have to read the whole thing, because it gets much more interesting at the end. In fact, it’s the last paragraph that’s the most important, at least according to the late Pauline Maier. And we had a nice conversation some years ago about July 4th.

So Brian as you listen to this you’ll see what good fun Pauline and I had, and it was always fun to talk with Pauline Maier, a great historian and a good friend. It’s not always easy to do interviews. It can be hard to get a good conversation going, but never with Pauline. On this occasion, she had some very fresh insights to share.

One of the things I want you to listen for is how unimportant that quotation that you lifted from the Declaration really is. All those ideas about equality, I know they’re important to you and me and to most Americans today, but that wasn’t the most important thing in 1776. It was in the last paragraph, where we actually declared independence.

But what does that mean to be independent? Because that’s the takeaway. It means that you have a people that declares independence. Where did that people come from? This is the creative magic of the Declaration of Independence is to conjure into existence a people and a nation.

BRIAN: I have to say Peter, that branding, calling it “Declaration,” that’s pretty smart.

PETER: You’re right, I do declare, I think you’ve got something there.

So, here is our conversation from the show Independence Daze – that’s with a “Z” folks – the History of July 4th.

PAULINE MAIER: When I was first asked to write a quote “modern history of the Declaration of Independence,” I turned it down. I said, that document is hyped out of all proportion to its real significance. I mean, obviously the Declaration of Independence was important, but what was its importance? We all think of it as important for the first couple phrases of the second paragraph, but that’s part of a later life of the document.
The most important part of the document in the summer of 1776 was the last paragraph. And people say, that last paragraph? That’s the part that– (SINGING) da da da da da da da– declared independence. And that was what was new. The statements of Enlightenment principles in the second paragraph that we all remember were not at all unique to the document. It appeared other places, most notably in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which had been drafted by George Mason and was adopted in June.

PETER: So the important parts of the Declaration at the time were all those grievances and complaints culminating in the Declaration, with the fanfare that you indicated. The first parts that we remember most are boilerplate potted social contract theory.

PAULINE MAIER: I think that’s pretty much the way it looked initially. The question is how attention turned from the last paragraph to the second paragraph. And that takes about 20 years. And I think the process of change starts in the 1790s, after we have the Constitution and we have what we remember as the Bill of Rights.
What is clear is that there is nothing in either the Constitution or the first 10 Amendments that repeats those assertions that are in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. There’s no statement about equality. There’s nothing about natural rights that God gave all men.
Now, as the children of Englishman, and we hadn’t quite stopped being the children of Englishmen in the 1790s, people felt the need of a document to cite to ground those beliefs. And the declaration was made to serve that function because it was the only national document that performed that function.

PETER: Pauline, one of the things I love about your book is that you ask us to think about the Declaration as a people’s declaration. The people identified with these principles, of course, they read them in different ways, and they explained them away in some cases. Is it still a people’s document in the same way it was during those decades of early American history when abolitionists and women at Seneca Falls in 1948–

PAULINE MAIER: –used it. Yeah. I think it is still a people’s document, in that people often justify whatever cause they’re defending, however flaky, in terms of the Declaration of Independence. I mean, people send me clippings all the time. I remember there was somebody off the coast of Maine who was having great trouble. He used to dig clams at a neighboring beach, and the town decided to make their beach residents only. And he argued he had the Constitution on his side because it said he had a right to pursue happiness. And his happiness was digging clams on the neighboring beach.

PETER: Happy as a clam. Right.

[LAUGHING]

PAULINE MAIER: Well, the problem is, of course, among other things, it wasn’t the Constitution. It wasn’t the Declaration of Independence, and it wasn’t at all clear that it referred to digging clams.

PETER: There seems to me a fundamental contradiction or tension. If you think about the Declaration in its own context, it makes a kind of a federal state that’s recognized by other powers of the Earth. That’s the whole point of the Declaration, is to get recognition. But as you were just saying about your clam digger, the Declaration really has a libertarian clause now, and a document that made the state is an anti-statist text.

PAULINE MAIER: That’s a point. That’s a good point.

PETER: So it suggests in a way that these founding texts or documents are subject to multiple infinite interpretations– of course, the Constitution is– and that every generation finds its own equilibrium, ways to read those text together.

PAULINE MAIER: You know, if it wasn’t true, they’d be dead. I mean, this is what Lincoln said when Stephen Douglas, let’s say, the Declaration was meant to declare independence. Historically, of course, Stephen Douglas was right. Morally, Abraham Lincoln was right. It is a protector of personal liberty, he said. If it wasn’t that, if it just declared independence, it’s history, in the bad sense. That is, it’s buried in the past. And he had that wonderful phrase, it’s like bandages left on the battlefield after the battle is over.
I mean, it’s really buried in the past. You had to find new meaning in it that was relevant to your life, to his life, to the lives of people of a later time, or it was just sort of some archival piece of for leftover junk from the past.

PETER: Well, thank you so much, Pauline, for helping us understand better the Declaration of Independence. It’s been great talking to you.

PAULINE MAIER: Thank you Peter. This was fun.

PETER: Pauline Maier was a professor of history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the author of many books, including “American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence.” She died in 2013 and is greatly missed.

The Invention of Santa

Peter speaks with historian Steve Nissenbaum about how and why we invent traditions, examining the way that Christmas was sentimentalized beginning in the 1820s.

Christmas

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PETER: Okay, the holidays are over. You might even say, they’re history. So what better time to look at the history of the holiday season?

BRIAN: I suppose there are worse ways we could peg that. What do you have for us, Peter?

PETER: Awhile back, I spoke with Steve Nissenbaum about the commercialization of Christmas that began in the 1820s.

In this segment, Steve Nissenbaum tells a fascinating story about how and why we invent traditions. In this case, how a holiday we think we know keeps being reinvented. You’ll look at Christmas a little differently after hearing this segment.

BRIAN: Now, I don’t want to get ahead of this Peter, and I really haven’t listened to this for years, but as I recall class warfare breaks out in this segment.

PETER: Yes, Brian it’s class warfare, at least it begins that way with rowdiness on the streets. But it turns into something more interesting. It turns into a transformation of family life. It’s the moment, you might say, when the kids took over.
Brian and Ed help introduce this interview from our show “Naughty & Nice: The History of the Holiday Season.”

BRIAN: We’re talking today about the history of the so called holiday season. When we left off, our 18th Century guy, Peter was explaining that the Puritans not only didn’t celebrate Christmas, but actually made the holiday illegal which wasn’t too surprising considering that for centuries it had basically consisted of a multi-day bonanza of booze-fueled partying. But despite the Puritan’s best attempts, people continued celebrating Christmas the old fashioned way well into the 19th Century.

AYERS: And then in the 1820’s, something began to change. Newspapers started running Christmas themed ads for local merchants. This was a new development; buying gifts for people, after all, it wasn’t a part of the old Christmas and a lot of those ads featured a certain character who is also a new addition to the holiday, Saint Nicholas AKA Santa Claus, first popularized in American newspapers in the form of a poem.

VOICEOVER: Twas the night before Christmas when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…

AYERS: A visit from Saint Nicholas was written in 1823 by Clement Clark Moore, a theology professor and a member of New York’s very upper crust. Now he owned a huge estate on New York’s West side. He was just the kind of guy likely to be visited by Christmas beggars demanding the masters’ best food and drink.

VOICEOVER: …When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter. I sprang from bed to see what was the matter.

AYERS: What was the matter of course was that there was a little old fat man on the lawn just the kind of guy who would have joined up with those traditional holiday beggars. Here is historian Stephen Nissenbaum.

Nissenbaum: He is dressed in sooty fur. He is carrying what amounts to a beggars pack on his back. He looks like a Plebeian but this particular figure of Santa Clause doesn’t come to make demands, he comes to give gifts to the narrators kids.

Onuf: Now the character of Saint Nick wasn’t entirely new to American audiences. He had first appeared in a mock history of old New York written by Morris’ good friend, Washington Irving, but that Saint Nick was portrayed as he had appeared back in Holland as a Patrician Bishop. It was Clement Clark Moore’s defrocking of Santa that signaled the beginning of Christmas as we know it.

Nissenbaum: The simplest, really over simplest way to put the deeper change that caused the new Christmas to come about in the 1820’s was really rapid urbanization and the early stages of capitalism and what those two things coming together did was it took the traditional kind of begging rituals, the traditional trick or treat rituals which had gone on for centuries and it sort of intensified the tension that was involved in them because now, since we’re dealing with densely populated cities, the poor who go around in bands, are no longer poor people who were known personally to the rich people whose houses they banged the doors of. Now they’re in an anonymous (to use a fancy word) proto proletariat, I mean they’re in the process of being transformed from being traditional apprentices and clerks into what’s within a generation going to become an urban proletariat.

Onuf: To some extent you’re talking about changing conceptions of the social order from a notion of status and familiar position in the community to a more anonymous what we might call “class” like the dangerous classes. The streets are dangerous places.

Nissenbaum: The streets are becoming dangerous places.

Onuf: But meanwhile the other thing that’s happening in the house is that children are in effect stepping up and demanding gifts. Where did kids get off becoming kids in the way they are today?

Nissenbaum: Well here is one way to talk about that: those bands of roving beggars at Christmastime would have consisted of the poor, but also would have consisted rather promiscuously of young people, even sometimes young people from wealthy households. That essentially is going to risk subverting the social order in a rather profound way. So white people in New York, some very wealthy, conservative people in New York, started doing in the 18 teens and 1820’s was in fact to come up with a new kind of holiday that barracked the doors, if you like, against beggars from the outside and that then sanctioned giving gifts to your own children within the family, so what you’re simultaneously beginning to get is the fortress household, the fortress family and the whole new idea of children as people who should be deferred to. Previously in a sense had been servants within their own households.

Onuf: Dependents in the household.

Nissenbaum: Dependents in the household, but on Christmas day, given this very old tradition of inverting the social order and now limiting that inversion to the internal workings of the family itself, I think for many families, Christmas is the first moment when you begin to look at your children in a new way and look at them as objects affection and objects of sentiment and I think that the new Christmas that gets devised in the 1820’s is really part of that process by which the family that we know of today, the modern family, which we think of as being traditional family is itself being invented.

Onuf: Steve, I was to press you on gift giving because it’s so central to our modern understanding of Christmas and it seems to me gifts carry a heavy burden. They’re supposed to be deeply personal expressions of the love that cements family relations and yet, at the same time, to put it simply they are commodities. How have Americans, particularly in this kind of founding era of modern Christmas, how do they resolve the tension of commodity exchange, after all that’s the nasty business of the marketplace that’s suppose to be what we’re escaping when we turn towards the home and we’re the heartless world outside, we come into the warm, sentimental bosom of our family. So how do Americans deal with the commodity status of gifts?

Nissenbaum: Yeah. In a phrase, Santa Clause, from the very beginning that part of it got disguised to use the bluntest word by saying that Santa Claus brought these gifts. Also the fact that they’re wrapped. They’re gift wrapped so they’re somehow special. So it’s a combination of gift wrapping and Santa Clause, essentially takes them out of the marketplace. They magically appear. In fact, by 1840, you’re, in a very common way, beginning to get Santa Clause used by merchants to advertise his wares. You get adds in the newspapers saying this is Santa Clauses’ favorite haunt and buy these goods and that’s, of course, defeating the whole purpose. And one of the most fascinating things that I’ve found is that beginning in the 1830’s, a group of wealthy Bostonians for the most part decided that they needed a new ritual that would de-commercialized Christmas in a way that Santa had failed to do and that new ritual was the Christmas tree. They thought, mistakenly, that the Christmas tree was an old German ritual in which children actually gave gifts to their parents.

Onuf: Does that ever actually happen Steve?

Nissenbaum: It apparently happened in one family in one town in Northern Germany called Ratzeburg and it so happened that that family was being visited in the 1790’s by the future poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge essay that he published around 1810 and what happened is that the press started picking this up in the 1830’s after the Coleridge essay got reprinted. The fact that it was limited to his observation of a single household got lost.

Onuf: And who said individuals don’t matter in history?

[laughs]

Nissenbaum: Individuals matter in history. Well of course Coleridge wanted to see something like that and Americans were ready for something like that so they decided that the Christmas tree was this pure completely uncommercial ritual that was common place in Germany which is was not.

Onuf: So in a way, folk rituals were juxtaposed to commercial practices when in fact they were part and parcel of the same thing.

Nissenbaum: They were. I mean I think that you can almost see the history of Christmas as an ongoing series of efforts to de-commercialize it and every effort to de-commercialize it and purify it then becomes appropriated or co-opted. It’s really almost inevitable.

Onuf: Well Steve, thanks so much. It’s been great talking to you.

Nissenbaum: You’re very welcome and thank you Peter so much for having me on the show.

PETER: Steve Nissenbaum is professor of history emeritus at the University of Massachusetts. He’s the author of The Battle for Christmas.

Home Today, Gone Tomorrow

Peter, Ed, and Brian riff on whether or not hurricanes are a great equalizer among social classes.

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PETER: This last segment I want to share with you comes from the show “Weathering the Storm: A History of Extreme Weather.”

It’s a riff with the three of us — me, you and Ed. And in it, we talk about the social impact of hurricanes.

BRIAN: Peter, I lost track of the number of riffs we’ve done together, and I have to tell you I love each and every one of them, but I am curious as you why you picked this one.

PETER: Well Brian, I think some of the magic of BackStory – well I’ll say all of it for me – was when the three of us were brainstorming together, when we didn’t prep, and we surprised each other. We had a lot of fun coming up with some new ideas and new insights right on the spot in conversation. As I like to put it, thinking with our mouths.

And we came up with an idea in this particular riff on hurricanes, and hurricanes just blew right through the centuries, we ended up developing a theme about the impact of hurricanes that seemed right, and you concluded it. You just brought it home at the end when you said “you know, even though we’ve tried in the 20th and 21st centuries to make the world safe for all Americans, because after all, we’re all created equal, it turns out that when a big storm comes along, guess who’s going to benefit from it? Not you, not me, not most of our listeners (forgive me if you’re rich), it’s the rich people.

So that was the big theme and it goes back to the 17th century, a big through line through our history and it just blew me away.

So Ed starts us off here with a question.

E. Ayers: So, I’ve got a question for you guys. I know both of you know all about the places where hurricanes hit. They were big storms, were the most extreme of extreme weather as the history of the United States goes. Whether it’s the Caribbean of the 18th century or Brian’s beloved Florida of the 20th and 21st centuries, it seemed to me that these hurricanes that blow through with such regularity must’ve been a great social equalizer. They must’ve sort of taken down the houses of the powerful and given—

P. Onuf: Levelers, so to speak.

E. Ayers: Levelers, yeah, and given other people a chance at a start. Would that be a fair supposition or not?

P. Onuf: No. No. Absolutely wrong, Ed, and the reason is this: hurricanes and extreme weather events generally have differential impact. Now, in the West Indies, the great development in the 17th century, before my century, as plantation societies emerge in the Sugar Islands, the big development is consolidation. It’s the people who have lots of labor, lots of land, and lots of credit back in the metropolis, back in Britain, those are the people who can ride out a storm and not only ride it out, but pick up the pieces afterward, and it’s the big slaveholders who pick off the small farmers who can’t rebound after extreme weather, after a hurricane, and in some ways, the places that best sustain middling sorts are the places without extreme weather, in the temperate climates, and hurricanes, I think, epitomize the ways that climate encourages the rapid consolidation of wealth.

E. Ayers: Because, it would strike me, the same places that would foster a hurricane also foster environments when you could grow very valuable crops.

P. Onuf: That’s absolutely the point, Ed.

E. Ayers: Yeah, but Brian, you don’t grow valuable crops in the 20th century—

B. Balogh: Hey, tourists are our most valuable crops…

P. Onuf: Whoa.

B. Balogh: Ed, so just watch what you’re saying, but I shouldn’t be mean to you because actually your supposition for the 20th century is kind of correct in an aspirational way.

E. Ayers: Right. Partial credit. That’s all I ask.

B. Balogh: Yep. And here’s the partial credit. We in the 20th century aspire to great projects of equality, egalitarian projects and we believe through construction methods and building codes on a house-by-house basis, are going to make houses safe, whether they’re the houses of poor people or of wealthy people—

P. Onuf: Sounds great, Brian.

B. Balogh: So your supposition is what fuels so much in the 20th century. Sadly, this does not pan out in reality and here’s why. A combination of hubris and federal insurance actually lures people to where the hurricanes are, only to see those people wiped out. Now, who benefits after that destruction?

E. Ayers: Well, Peter has told us it’s the rich.

B. Balogh: Yeah, and the story is pretty much the same thing in the 20th century. They have access to capital and what they tend to do is use these natural disasters to in a way fast forward the economy of an area, so if you had smaller houses and that fishermen lived in along the Gulf Coast at the very time that fishing is becoming less economically viable, people, let’s say a wealthy land developer who is trying to grow a cash crop which is called northern tourists—

P. Onuf: I like it.

B. Balogh: They use that natural disaster in a way to do part of their work, clear out the land, use capital to buy up large plots of land and really fast forward that economy to what today we called the Sun Belt.

E. Ayers: So, my question was freaking awesome because even though it turned out to be exactly wrong, it did show an important continuity across American history which is hard to find. [laughter] Really, things changed so radically, but here’s a case that extreme weather tends to create extreme social orders.