| Between the elections of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson the Federalist party collapsed. The death of the party, however, did not mark the end of the political culture which lay beneath. While one generation of Federalists met political defeat with retreat and despair, a younger generation of Federalist intellectuals attempted to transcribe the ideology of Federalism to the political and social realities of the nineteenth century.;More creative than their elders, most of these young Federalists rejected politics for careers in literature and academia. And within the North American Review they worked out a new role for "the wise and the good" within American society.;Central to this new role was a belief in the power of literature and literary criticism. Drawing upon romantic and neo-classical ideas they argued that as cultivators of a national literature they could advance public morality, strengthen national feeling, and exceed the contributions of their statesmen fathers. In addition, they advanced the professionalization of medicine, the law, and education, redefining "the wise and the good" as "the specialized and the scientific." At the center of their vision they placed the university, incorporating the eclecticism of the democratic society within its decorous walls, but disseminating back to that society a set of moral, legal, and religious truths.;The adaptations made by these young Federalists were crucial for America's cultural and institutional development. But these achievements came at a cost. Within their calls for a national literature lurked a view of art and the artist that threatened to separate "high culture" from the general public and remove the writer and critic from the center to the fringes of society. The new professional order they espoused proved less effective as a means of preserving their elite status than as a path to social advancement for the middle class. And consequently, as the century progressed, the success of their efforts to adapt the Federalist vision to republican society and preserve a role for themselves within it, only hastened the rate at which this class found itself eclipsed from below and pushed to the side. |
