Peddlers of Progress
05/29/2010 16:03
Jaffee, D. (1991). "Peddlers of Progress and the Transformation of the Rural North, 1760-1860." The Journal of American History 78(2): 511-535.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2079532
Jaffee 1991: Draws heavily on Kulikoff, and talks a little too much about the bourgeoise cultural transformation, the “self-fashioning of new identities,” and the “democratization of gentility.” (513) After the Civil War, he says, the “grass-roots character of rural marketing disappeared as the flow and agents of cultural change in the countryside reversed direction, rural agents becoming urban.” (534) He spends a lot of time on Massachusetts’ Hawkers and Peddlers Act of 1846, “which established a graded level of licenses based on ‘morals and citizenship.’” (533) This was an attempt, he says, by local people to “reduce the number of itinerants in the interior settlements and maintain the dominant role of the storekeeper as mediator between producer and consumer.” (532) Not suprisingly, I’m again dissatisfied with this either-or approach to the issue. Rural is good, urban bad? But by 1846, Massachusetts peddlers (many of them based in rural towns like Ashfield) were covering not only the northeast, but the west and south on behalf of urban and rural manufacturers. So whose interests were being served by the 1846 bill? Who was behind it? Who voted against it?
Maybe I’m particularly hard on these types of accounts, because they come so frustratingly close, and then miss the mark. “The creation of the Yankee peddler in antebellum popular literature served as a rich vehicle to convey the meaning of the charged encounter...[and as] symbolic representations to rural people of changing economic transactions between individuals,” Jaffee says. (527) But then he doesn’t take it anywhere. He lets it stand as just another example of what he seems to imagine is a straightforward, black vs. white conflict in the transition to capitalism: “the market became dislodged from an actual sense of place and became an amorphoous entity, a free-floating concept” (quoting Agnew, 527). If anything, the presence of peddlers in the economic lives of rural people (both as suppliers of stuff, and as brothers, sons, and neighbors engaged in the business) argues that rural people had a more complex, layered engagement with commerce than these accounts from the Kulikoff school would suggest. Their responses to “itinerants” are as ambivalent as their responses to “capitalism,” because in both cases, they’re not engaging with those categories, but with the particulars of the situations they find themselves in.
Along the way, some interesting facts: “in the 1850s the ‘full-line, full-service wholesaler begain to market most standardized consumer goods’” (quoting Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., 534). The change from merchants maintaining a variety of supply relationships, to the one-stop wholesale shop seems to imply a radical change in power and agency. And: “By 1860...In Massachusetts as a whole, there were 1,648 peddlers, 5 percent of the total commercial population of 35,937.” (522) That’s a low percentage, but I wonder what counts as commercial population. And “Rufus Porter [founder of Scientific American]...would stroll into villages with his brightly decorated camera box, a camera obscura...Porter advertised his profiles (silhouettes) at twenty cents apiece and could produce perhaps twenty in an evening.” (521) Another guy who needs to make a cameo appearance in a story!
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2079532
Jaffee 1991: Draws heavily on Kulikoff, and talks a little too much about the bourgeoise cultural transformation, the “self-fashioning of new identities,” and the “democratization of gentility.” (513) After the Civil War, he says, the “grass-roots character of rural marketing disappeared as the flow and agents of cultural change in the countryside reversed direction, rural agents becoming urban.” (534) He spends a lot of time on Massachusetts’ Hawkers and Peddlers Act of 1846, “which established a graded level of licenses based on ‘morals and citizenship.’” (533) This was an attempt, he says, by local people to “reduce the number of itinerants in the interior settlements and maintain the dominant role of the storekeeper as mediator between producer and consumer.” (532) Not suprisingly, I’m again dissatisfied with this either-or approach to the issue. Rural is good, urban bad? But by 1846, Massachusetts peddlers (many of them based in rural towns like Ashfield) were covering not only the northeast, but the west and south on behalf of urban and rural manufacturers. So whose interests were being served by the 1846 bill? Who was behind it? Who voted against it?
Maybe I’m particularly hard on these types of accounts, because they come so frustratingly close, and then miss the mark. “The creation of the Yankee peddler in antebellum popular literature served as a rich vehicle to convey the meaning of the charged encounter...[and as] symbolic representations to rural people of changing economic transactions between individuals,” Jaffee says. (527) But then he doesn’t take it anywhere. He lets it stand as just another example of what he seems to imagine is a straightforward, black vs. white conflict in the transition to capitalism: “the market became dislodged from an actual sense of place and became an amorphoous entity, a free-floating concept” (quoting Agnew, 527). If anything, the presence of peddlers in the economic lives of rural people (both as suppliers of stuff, and as brothers, sons, and neighbors engaged in the business) argues that rural people had a more complex, layered engagement with commerce than these accounts from the Kulikoff school would suggest. Their responses to “itinerants” are as ambivalent as their responses to “capitalism,” because in both cases, they’re not engaging with those categories, but with the particulars of the situations they find themselves in.
Along the way, some interesting facts: “in the 1850s the ‘full-line, full-service wholesaler begain to market most standardized consumer goods’” (quoting Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., 534). The change from merchants maintaining a variety of supply relationships, to the one-stop wholesale shop seems to imply a radical change in power and agency. And: “By 1860...In Massachusetts as a whole, there were 1,648 peddlers, 5 percent of the total commercial population of 35,937.” (522) That’s a low percentage, but I wonder what counts as commercial population. And “Rufus Porter [founder of Scientific American]...would stroll into villages with his brightly decorated camera box, a camera obscura...Porter advertised his profiles (silhouettes) at twenty cents apiece and could produce perhaps twenty in an evening.” (521) Another guy who needs to make a cameo appearance in a story!
