Alexis de Tocqueville arrives in America

One hundred and eighty years ago this week, Alexis de Tocqueville and his friend and fellow magistrate Gustave de Beaumont began the nine-month tour that would result in the landmark Democracy in America (1835–1840).

They reached land on May 9 after thirty-seven torturous days at sea. The captain of their ship had badly mismanaged provisions: many passengers were sick and there had been little to eat during the last days of the voyage. No sooner had Long Island come into view than strong winds from the west threatened to delay the ship’s arrival in New York. Alarmed and desperate, the passengers rose up to persuade the captain to dock in Newport, Rhode Island, instead. Tocqueville’s letter home to his mother a few days later describes his first experience of America:

At eight o'clock in the evening we dropped anchor in the outer harbor of Newport. A fishing dory soon came to reconnoitre us. We were so happy to find ourselves at land that all the young people and the captain himself immediately embarked in the dory, and a half hour afterwards we arrived, not without wetting our seats a little, at the wharf of Newport. Never, I guess, were people so glad to be alive. . . 

We jumped ashore and each of us made more than a dozen awkward gambols before we got ourselves solidly on our feet. In this way we went to an inn where the captain treated us to supper. What I for one liked best about this meal was something that has no merit in your eyes, water. Ours hadn't been drinkable for several days.

The two tourists visited Newport early the next morning and Tocqueville’s keen anthropological insights begin:

We went to visit the town, which seemed to us very attractive. It’s true we weren’t difficult. It’s a collection of small houses, the size of chicken coops, but distinguished by a cleanness that is a pleasure to see and that we have no conception of in France. Beyond that, the inhabitants differ but little superficially from the French. They wear the same clothes, and their physiognomies are so varied that it would be hard to say from what races they have derived their features. I think it must be thus in all the United States.

Beaumont was even less kind:

We had been told that the women of Newport were noteworthy for their beauty; we found them extraordinarily ugly. This new race of people we saw bears no clear mark of is origin; it’s neither English nor French nor German; it’s a mixture of all the nations.

After observing Newport’s natives for three hours, they boarded the steamship President for the eighteen-hour ride to New York and their next excellent adventure.

Also of interest:

• A map of Tocqueville’s tour of America with links to journal entries for each site
• Watch the three-hour C-Span program "Tocqueville in Rhode Island"
• “The human young Alexis de Tocqueville is much more impressive than the cold abstraction . . .”—a previous Reader’s Almanac post

Related LOA works: Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America

New study of American character recalls Tocqueville’s Democracy in America

Is it still possible to define the American character? Was it ever? Recent reviews of Claude S. Fischer’s Made in America: A Social History of America’s Culture and Character are stirring lively debates. Writing in Boston Review, David M. Kennedy applauds Fischer, a sociologist, for undertaking a time-honored pursuit abandoned by historians in the 1960s. Kennedy finds in Fischer’s book echoes of Alexis de Tocqueville’s path-breaking two-volume study, Democracy in America (1835–40), which “remains the most astute analysis of American society ever penned, a touchstone and inspiration for all subsequent efforts to grasp the elusive essence of America’s national character.”

In his book, Fischer locates the central trait of the American character in voluntarism. Sarah E. Igo in her review for The American Prospect finds Fischer rediscovering (and sometimes straining to find) this “key trait that binds Americans together.” Similarly, Kennedy writes:

[Fischer] creatively fuses Tocqueville’s familiar observation about Americans as inveterate joiners and his equally famous notion of individualism. Voluntarism, for Fischer, embraces both the recognition of each person as a “sovereign individual” at liberty to pursue his or her own destiny, and the belief that “individuals succeed through fellowship—not in egoistic isolation but in sustaining, voluntary communities.”

On dagblog Donal interweaves thoughts about Fischer’s book with his reaction to watching the New Year’s Day Twilight Zone marathon and laments that “voluntarism isn’t uniting us.” But is it supposed to? What’s appealing about voluntarism as a unifying principle is that it can explain the impulse for some Americans to identify with the Tea Party and for others to join MeetUp or the Green Party or to attend the Rally to Restore Sanity.

The diversity and contrariness of the American character was exactly what de Tocqueville celebrated:

There is perhaps no country on earth where one meets fewer idle people than in America, or where all who work are more passionately devoted to the quest for well-being. . . An American will attend to his private interests as though he were alone in the world, yet a moment later he will dedicate himself to the public’s business as though he had forgotten them. At times he seems animated by the most selfish greed, and at other times by the most ardent patriotism. The human heart cannot be divided this way. The inhabitants of the United States alternately exhibit a passion for well-being and a passion for liberty so strong and so similar that one can only believe that the two passions are conjoined and confounded somewhere in their souls.

Also of interest:

• Claude S. Fischer’s blog Made in America includes ongoing comments about the nature of American life
• Find a portrait of the young Tocqueville in a previous Reader’s Almanac blog post

Related LOA works: Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America

“The human young Alexis de Tocqueville is much more impressive than the cold abstraction . . .”

Sean Wilentz catches the wandering eye of 26-year-old Alexis de Tocqueville in his review of Leo Damrosch’s Tocqueville’s Discovery of America:

When the energetic, young French liberal aristocrats Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont toured the United States in 1831 and 1832 ostensibly to study America’s prisons, their minds, not surprisingly, often turned to more alluring subjects. “In addition to a very fine library, our host has two charming daughters with whom we get along very well,” Tocqueville wrote to his sister-in-law from a well-appointed home in Canandaigua, New York. “Suffice it to say that we gazed at them even more willingly than at their father's books.”

Author Leo Damrosch’s response when The Juvenile Instructor blog asked which is the best translation of Democracy of America:

Tocqueville’s language was a mixture of florid prose and seventeenth century aristocratic French dialect, while still remaining quite lively. Unfortunately, because of his old-fashioned vocabulary, most English translations end up being too dull or dead to really capture the text’s beauty. To Damrosch, the translation that comes the closest to recreating Tocqueville’s playful prose is Arthur Goldhammer’s edition in the Library of America series.

Damrosch makes the same recommendation in this recent interview on C-Span

Related LOA works: Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America