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

John Steinbeck inspires summer travel and memories of another era

“We do not take a trip. A trip takes us.”—John Steinbeck

Several bloggers have found John Steinbeck an inspiring traveling companion this summer.

Jim Terry found echoes of the four months in 1960 Steinbeck chronicled in Travels with Charley in his two-week cross-country road trip from Dallas, TX, to Watkins Glen, NY.

I found my old yellowed, cracked page paperback copy which I had read nearly fifty years ago and read it again.

Steinbeck realized he had lost touch with the country he had been writing about for thirty years. He said, "I, an America writer, writing about America, was working from memory, and the memory is at best a faulty, warpy reservoir. I had not heard the speech of America, smelled the grass and trees and sewage, seen its hills and water, its color and quality of light."

Diane, Evan, and Maia are a family on a multi-year sailing trip aboard a 40-foot catamaran. This week, upon arriving at the Sea of Cortez, they turned to Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez to describe what they are seeing and feeling:

I’ve been struggling to find the words to describe this place—beyond snippets of stories and moments out of our life. Fortunately I don’t have to. John Steinbeck did. He was here 70 years ago on a research vessel. His book is a must have for every visitor to the Sea of Cortez:

We wondered why so much of the Sea of Cortez was familiar to us…coming to it was like returning rather than visiting. Some quality there is in the whole Sea that trips a trigger of recognition so that in fantastic and exotic scenery one finds oneself nodding and saying inwardly, “Yes, I know.”

If it were lush and rich, one could understand the pull, but it is fierce and hostile and sullen. The stone mountains pile up to the sky and there is little fresh water. But we know we must go back, and we don’t know why.

The pull they feel to turn to Steinbeck as they travel is likely to be shared by many attending the 30th Annual Steinbeck Festival—Journeys: Steinbeck Around the World, which runs from August 5 to August 8 at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, CA. A Travels with Charley essay contest has already begun and continues until July 31: describe your favorite journey with your dog in 300 words or less.

The Steinbeck Festival also features talks by three authors who have been affected by Steinbeck’s travel writing: Ted Conover, author of The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing The World and the Way We Live Today; Thomas R. Hummel, author of A Journey Through Literary America; and Ruby Bridges, author of Through My Eyes. The talk by Bridges may prove to be the emotional high point. Fifty years ago, when Bridges was six years old, she was the first black student to enroll at the all-white William Frantz Public School in New Orleans. In Travels with Charley, Steinbeck witnessed her historic first steps into that school:

The show opened on time. Sound the sirens. Motorcycle cops. Then two big black cars filled with big men in blond felt hats pulled up in front of the school. The crowd seemed to hold its breath. Four big marshals got out of each car and from somewhere in the automobiles they extracted the littlest negro girl you ever saw, dressed in shining starchy white, with new white shoes on feet so little they were almost round. Her face and little legs were very black against the white.

The big marshals stood her on the curb and a jangle of jeering shrieks went up from behind the barricades. The little girl did not look at the howling crowd, but from the side the whites of her eyes showed like those of a frightened fawn. The men turned her around like a doll and then the strange procession moved up the broad walk toward the school, and the child was even more a mite because the men were so big. Then the girl made a curious hop, and I think I know what it was. I think in her whole life she had not gone ten steps without skipping, but now in the middle of her first step, the weight bore her down and her little round feet took measured, reluctant steps between the tall guards. Slowly they climbed the steps and entered the school.

Ken Laird Studios offers more background on this event and the Norman Rockwell painting it inspired.

Related LOA works: John Steinbeck: Travels with Charley and Later Novels 1947–1962; John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath and Other Writings 1936–1941 (includes The Log from the Sea of Cortez)

“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