Chapter 2 - Conservatism: Tradition, Hierarchy, and Fictions of Social Change

Summary

Before the 1950s, there was no ideologically coherent conservative movement in the United States to speak of, and no single party up to that point had a monopoly on conservatism as either a political expression or an ideological framework. The roots of American conservatism, however, stretch back to Edmund Burke’s critique of the French Revolution, John Adams’s contributions to the Federalist Party, and John C. Calhoun’s defense of southern regionalism, among other sources. During the nineteenth century, conservatism functioned in two registers: as an argument against precipitous social change and as an attitude in favor of the social and institutional hierarchies handed down through history. The tension between conservativism’s attitude in favor of hierarchy and its argument against change animates Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857). These three novels test arguments for social change – women’s rights, abolition, and interracial marriage, respectively – against attitudes in support of hierarchy, ultimately bringing conservatism into a reckoning with its own fundamental assumptions about history and authority.