Abstract
These steady supporters of order, these skilled artisans, shop masters, engineers, scientists, teachers, lawyers, and others involved with American mechanics’ institutes in the first half of the nineteenth century were bound together by commercial ties and a shared interest in encouraging practical innovation. This essay examines the social norms, preoccupations, and aspirations promulgated by such organizations, and their role in defining a particular strain of the American bourgeoisie. Inasmuch as a bourgeoisie can perhaps be defined by a degree of control over capital, cultural, and political power, it is never a stable designation. Who might be considered bourgeois depends on the nature of cultural institutions and the structure of the economy. Changes over the course of the century—in the scale and organization of a craft shops, in retail strategies, in relations between commercial production and capital, and in the meaning of shop-made goods—created ever more complex economic interdependencies and cultural standards, redefining the makeup and shared beliefs of the American bourgeoisie.
The middling classes—our city’s yeomanry, the steady supporters of order, law, and religion—enjoyed a rich feast.
—Report of the Third Annual Fair of the American Institute of the City of New-York, Held at Masonic Hall, October 1830 1
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Notes
American Institute of the City of New York, Charter and By-laws of the American Institute [adopted 1866] (New York: American Institute of the City of New York, 1872), 3.
American Institute of the City of New York, The American Institute and Its Mission [pamphlet] (New York: American Institute of the City of New York, 1871), 3.
Henry Clay was appreciative enough of the policies of the American Institute to write to the managers: “Such an unsolicited association of my name with an Institute having in view an object so patriotic as that of the American System is inexpressibly gratifying to me” (June 3, 1831), quoted in Edwin Forrest Murdock, “The American Institute,”, A Century of Industrial Progress, ed. Frederic William Wile (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1928), xiv.
Mahlon Dickerson, “Address, Delivered at the Opening of the Nineteenth Annual Fair of the American Institute, of the City of New-York, at Castle Garden, October 5, 1846,”, Fifth Annual Report of the American Institute (Albany, NY: C. Van Benthuysen, 1847), 277.
Zadock Pratt, Address Delivered Tuesday Evening, January 16th, 1849, before the Mechanics’ Institute of the City of New-York (New York: H. R. Piercy, Printer, 1849), 5 (emphasis in original).
Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 61–64.
Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 71–73.
Walt Whitman, “What we thought at the Institute Fair, this morning,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 6 October 1846.
Thaddeus B. Wakeman, “Introductory Lecture Delivered Before the American Institute of the City of New-York, the Second Thursday in January, 1835,” Mechanics’ Magazine 5 (1835): 73 (emphasis in original).
Tristram Burges, Address Delivered before the American Institute of the City of New-York at the Third Annual Fair (New York: John M. Danforth, 1830), 14–15.
Thomas Seir Cummings, Historic Annals of the National Academy of Design, New York Drawing Association, Etc., with Occasional Dottings by the Way-side, from 1825 to the Present Time (Philadelphia: G. W. Childs, 1865), 134.
James J. Mapes, Address, Delivered at the Opening of the 18th Annual fair of the American Institute, at Niblo’s Garden, Tuesday, Oct. 7, 1845 (New York: James Van Norden, 1845), 6.
Minard Lafever, “Judges’ Report, 13th Annual Fair of the American Institute” [1840], manuscript, New-York Historical Society (emphasis in original).
Asher B. Durand, “Letters on Landscape Painting: Letter IV,” The Crayon 1, no. 7 (1855): 97.
Dell Upton, “Inventing the Metropolis: Civilization and Urbanity,”, Art in the Empire City: New York, 1825–1861 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000), 35–38.
“Class F. Fine Art Hall. Paintings, Statuary, &c.,”, Report of the Fourth Annual Fair of the St. Louis Agricultural and Mechanical Association, of September, 1859. (St. Louis: George Knapp & Co., Printers and Binders, 1860), 121–26;William McPherson, “Class F. Fine Art Hall,”, Report of the Fifth Annual Fair of the St. Louis Agricultural and Mechanical Association, of September, 1860 (St. Louis: George Knapp & Co., printers, 1861), 94.
Lillian Miller, Patrons and Patriotism: The Encouragement of the Fine Arts in the United States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 194–95.
Alan Wallach, “Long-Term Visions, Short-Term Failures: Art Institutions in the United States, 1800–1860,”, Exhibiting Contradictions: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 21. See also Wallach, “The Birth of the American Art Museum” in this volume.
William T. Andrews et al., “Fine Arts,”, Fifth Exhibition and Fair of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association, at Faneuil and Quincy Halls, in the City of Boston, September 1847 (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1848), 20.
E. G. Squire, address before the 1871 American Institute fair, reported in New York Times, September 3, 1871.
C. F. Chandler, “On Combustion,” Annual Report of the American Institute of the City of New York for the Years 1871–72 (Albany: The Argus Company, Printers, 1872), 237.
Gary J. Kornblith, “Self-Made Men: The Development of Middling-Class Consciousness in New England,” The Massachusetts Review 26, nos. 2–3 (Summer/Autumn, 1985): 469–70.
For models of earlier developments leading up to this consolidation, see Robert Babcock, “The Decline of Artisan Republicanism in Portland, Maine, 1825–1850,” The New England Quarterly 63, no. 1 (March 1990): 9.
Sean Wilentz, “Artisan Republican Festivals and the Rise of Class Conflict in New York City,” in Michael H. Frisch and Daniel J. Walkowitz eds. Working-Class America: Essays on Labor, Community and American Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983).
George Gifford, An Address Delivered at Castle Garden, on Invitation of the American Institute, during its Twentieth Annual Fair (New York: Joseph H. Jennings, 1847), 13.
George G. Foster, New York by Gaslight and Other Urban Sketches (1850; repr., Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 72. Perhaps in response to such reports, James Mapes, a scientist and former president of the New York Mechanics’ Institute, insisted in an 1851 article that the fine arts were such a refining influence that one finds at exhibitions of Academies and Art Unions “youth of both sexes innocently enjoying each other’s society” (“Usefulness of the Arts of Design,” Sartain’s Union Magazine 8, no. 3 [March 1851]: 213).
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© 2010 Sven Beckert and Julia B. Rosenbaum
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Robey, E. (2010). The Steady Supporters of Order: American Mechanics’ Institute Fairs as Icons of Bourgeois Culture. In: The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230115569_8
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