Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America's Founding Ideas (America: a cultural history) (VOLUME III) - Hardcover

Fischer, David Hackett

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195162536 ISBN 13: 9780195162530

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2004

Synopsis

Liberty and freedom: Americans agree that these values are fundamental to our nation, but what do they mean? How have their meanings changed through time? In this new volume of cultural history, David Hackett Fischer shows how these varying ideas form an intertwined strand that runs through the core of American life.
Fischer examines liberty and freedom not as philosophical or political abstractions, but as folkways and popular beliefs deeply embedded in American culture. Tocqueville called them "habits of the heart." From the earliest colonies, Americans have shared ideals of liberty and freedom, but with very different meanings. Like DNA these ideas have transformed and recombined in each generation.
The book arose from Fischer's discovery that the words themselves had differing origins: the Latinate "liberty" implied separation and independence. The root meaning of "freedom" (akin to "friend") connoted attachment: the rights of belonging in a community of freepeople. The tension between the two senses has been a source of conflict and creativity throughout American history.
Liberty & Freedom studies the folk history of those ideas through more than 400 visions, images, and symbols. It begins with the American Revolution, and explores the meaning of New England's Liberty Tree, Pennsylvania's Liberty Bells, Carolina's Liberty Crescent, and "Don't Tread on Me" rattlesnakes. In the new republic, the search for a common American symbol gave new meaning to Yankee Doodle, Uncle Sam, Miss Liberty, and many other icons. In the Civil War, Americans divided over liberty and freedom. Afterward, new universal visions were invented by people who had formerly been excluded from a free society--African Americans, American Indians, and immigrants. The twentieth century saw liberty and freedom tested by enemies and contested at home, yet it brought the greatest outpouring of new visions, from Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms to Martin Luther King's "dream" to Janis Joplin's "nothin' left to lose."
Illustrated in full color with a rich variety of images, Liberty and Freedom is, literally, an eye-opening work of history--stimulating, large-spirited, and ultimately, inspiring.

About this title

About the Author:

David Hackett Fischer is University Professor at Brandeis, and author of the New York Times bestseller Washington's Crossing as well as Bound Away, The Great Wave, and Paul Revere's Ride. This volume is a successor to his acclaimed Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America.

From The Washington Post:

In 1774, a committee established by the Continental Congress approved a design for a new seal, meant to give the nascent American cause symbolic and visual form. The design was a hodgepodge of signs that had been floating around during the last years of British rule: a marble column topped by a liberty cap resting on a copy of the Magna Carta, supported by 13 hands reaching in from the sides. The hands suggested unity, the Magna Carta recalled the tradition of limiting the sovereign's absolute rights, and the liberty cap, or pileus, was a classical reference to the rituals of freeing slaves from bondage. The elements all had good pedigree and clear meanings, but something went wrong in the execution. A soft-pointed liberty cap atop an upright marble column produced an image so clearly phallic that it brings a blush to the cheeks even today.

The seal of 1774 hasn't lasted; nor, for that matter, has the liberty cap, which was all the rage in the 18th century but is recognized today only by dutiful students of iconography. Recovering such details, and placing them in context, is the successful aim of David Hackett Fischer's Liberty and Freedom. Fischer's new book is the third in a series he is devoting to the cultural history of the United States (volume two is still in the works). It follows and builds on the central thesis of the first volume, Albion's Seed: that the early United States was the product of four great migrations from the British Isles -- Puritans, Royalists, Quakers and hardscrabble types from Ireland and the Scottish borderlands. Fischer doesn't reargue that bold claim, but he does rely on these distinctions to organize the sprawling contents of the new work.

And it does sprawl. At 851 pages, Liberty and Freedom is a big book, and a very loose-jointed one. The words "another," "also" and "others" recur again and again at the openings of Fischer's chapters, a rhetorical concession to a topic so huge that no single narrative or theme can really contain it. "The North also searched for emblems of its sacred cause," reads a typical transition, from a chapter that covers the Confederate flag and an anti-Union spittoon used in the South, to a chapter featuring an eagle named Old Abe who was used as a live mascot by a Union regiment from Wisconsin. The story of Old Abe's sad demise (in a fire years after the Civil War ended) is one of the book's many captivating digressions.

Even Fischer's title, and his brief effort to sketch a broader argument about liberty and freedom, don't give the contents much overarching unity. He argues that liberty and freedom were distinctly different understandings of the American project and that we have, throughout history, vacillated between conceiving our national ideal in limited, legalistic ways and more organic, responsible ones. Liberty, he writes, is built on the idea of being free from restraint, with what we think of today as rights conceived of more as privileges, granted and protected by the state. Liberty is a fundamentally Roman and usually hierarchical concept. Freedom, on the other hand, was derived from northern Europe and based on a more communal sense of equal rights and responsibility among all people. The two concepts are often used synonymously, Fischer acknowledges. "But ancient differences between liberty and freedom were not so easily erased," he argues. Occasionally, as in the images and ideals of liberty championed by Tory elites and loyalists, or the reciprocal rights championed by the Quakers, he can find the concepts clearly differentiated. But most of the time, they are intermingled or indistinct.

Despite this, and despite Fischer's reliance on the questionable idea of a collective memory or "folkways" that transmit symbolic meanings down through the ages, the book is endlessly entertaining. It offers the author a chance to fact-check and retell some of the great stories of American history (Francis Scott Key and "The Star-Spangled Banner," Betsy Ross and the flag) and dredge up icons that have been sadly forgotten. Among these is Brother Jonathan, a personification of the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries in the same vein as the British John Bull, or Yankee Doodle and Uncle Sam. Brother Jonathan was a bumptious sort who morphed, over time, into a figure of violence, hypocrisy (during the slavery debate) and nationalist myopia. To critics outside America, he was a nasty character and an apt representation of U.S. foreign policy. Inside this country, the author argues, he lost currency after the Civil War, in part because of increasing urbanization. And yet, with many in the United States roundly criticizing this country for precisely the things that Brother Jonathan once stood for, why has this particular folkway run dry?

There are, perhaps, larger conclusions to be drawn from the wealth of material Fischer has collected. It's interesting to see how little a role religious imagery plays. When religious meanings creep in, they tend to have a nasty edge: a satanic figure dictating the Emancipation Proclamation to Abraham Lincoln, or devil wings and horns drawn onto the image of the women's rights crusader Victoria Woodhull. It's also fascinating to note how vital a sense of grievance is to the perpetuation of a visual symbol. The Confederate flag survives because Southern resentment is still strong. Liberty trees and liberty poles, icons that emerged in Northern states during the Revolutionary era, have all but disappeared. In 2002, the U.S. Navy brought back the old "Don't Tread on Me" flag, with its angry serpent -- revivifying an old icon during a time of post-Sept. 11 anger.

Fischer mostly avoids the temptation to make these larger kinds of conclusions. He is interested in local context, close reading and connecting threads. He calls the books in this series "braided narratives," and while there are times when the braid is very loose, there are hundreds of fascinating strands in this volume, each of them worth tugging at.

Reviewed by Philip Kennicott

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0195162536
• ISBN 13: 9780195162530
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 851