TheYoung America Movement was an American political, cultural andliterary movement in the mid-19th century. Inspired by European reform movements of the 1830s (such asJunges Deutschland,Young Italy andYoung Hegelians), the American group was formed as a political organization in 1845 byEdwin de Leon andGeorge Henry Evans. It advocatedfree trade, social reform,expansion westward and southward into the territories, and support for republican, anti-aristocratic movements abroad. The movement also inspired a drive for self-consciously "American" literature in writers such asNathaniel Hawthorne,Herman Melville, andWalt Whitman. It became a faction in theDemocratic Party in the 1850s. SenatorStephen A. Douglas promoted its nationalistic program in an unsuccessful effort to compromise sectional differences. The breakup of the movement left many of its adherents discouraged and disillusioned.
John L. O'Sullivan described the general purpose of the Young America Movement in an 1837 editorial for theDemocratic Review:
All history is to be re-written; political science and the whole scope of all moral truth have to be considered and illustrated in the light of the democratic principle. All old subjects of thought and all new questions arising, connected more or less directly with humanexistence, have to be taken up again and re-examined.[1]
HistorianEdward L. Widmer places O'Sullivan and theDemocratic Review in New York City at the center of the Young America Movement. In that sense, the movement can be considered mostly urban andmiddle class, but with a strong emphasis on socio-political reform for all Americans, especially given the burgeoning European immigrant population (particularlyIrish Catholics) in New York in the 1840s.
Historian Yonatan Eyal argues that the 1840s and 1850s were the heyday of the faction of young Democrats that called itself "Young America". Led byStephen Douglas,James K. Polk andFranklin Pierce, and New York financierAugust Belmont, this faction broke with the agrarian and strict constructionist orthodoxies of the past and embraced commerce, technology, regulation, reform, and internationalism.[2]
In economic policy Young America saw the necessity of a modern infrastructure of railroads, canals, telegraphs, turnpikes, and harbors; they endorsed the "Market Revolution" and promoted capitalism. They called for Congressional land grants to the states, which allowed Democrats to claim thatinternal improvements were locally rather than federally sponsored. Young America claimed that modernization would perpetuate the agrarian vision ofJeffersonian Democracy by allowing yeomen farmers to sell their products and therefore to prosper. They tied internal improvements to free trade, while accepting moderate tariffs as a necessary source of government revenue. They supported the Independent Treasury (the Jacksonian alternative to the Second Bank of the United States), not as a scheme to quash the special privilege of the Whiggish moneyed elite, but as a device to spread prosperity to all Americans.[3]
The movement's decline by 1856 was due to unsuccessful challenges to "old fogy" leaders likeJames Buchanan, to Douglas' failure to win the presidential nomination in 1852, to an inability to deal with the slavery issue, and to rising isolationism and disenchantment with reform in America.[4]
When O'Sullivan coined the term "Manifest Destiny" in an 1845 article for theDemocratic Review, he did not necessarily intend for American democracy to expand across the continent by force. In effect, the American democratic principle was to spread on its own, self-evident merits. TheAmerican exceptionalism often attached to O'Sullivan's "Manifest Destiny" was an 1850s perversion that can be attributed to what Widmer called "Young America II".[5] O'Sullivan even contended that American "democracy needed to expand in order to contain its ideological opponent (aristocracy)".[6] Unlike Europe, America had no aristocratic system or nobility against which Young America could define itself.[7]
Aside from Young America's promotion ofJacksonian Democracy in theDemocratic Review, the movement also had a literary side. It attracted a circle of outstanding writers, includingWilliam Cullen Bryant,George Bancroft,Herman Melville, andNathaniel Hawthorne. They sought independence from European standards of high culture and wanted to demonstrate the excellence and "exceptionalism" of America's own literary tradition. Other writers of the movement includedEvert Augustus Duyckinck,Cornelius Mathews,[8] It was Mathews that adopted the name for the movement. In a speech delivered June 30, 1845, he said:
Whatever that past generation of statesmen, law-givers and writers was capable of, we know. What they attained, what they failed to attain, we also know. Our duty and our destiny is another from theirs. Liking not at all its borrowed sound, we are yet (there is no better way to name it,) the Young America of the people: a newgeneration; and it is for us now to inquire, what we may have it in our power to accomplish, and on what objects the world may reasonably ask that we should fix our regards.[9]
One of Young America's intellectual vehicles was the literary journalArcturus.Herman Melville in his bookMardi (1849) refers to it by naming a ship in the bookArcturion and observing that it was "exceedingly dull", and that its crew had a low literary level.[10] TheNorth American Review referred to the movement as "at war with good taste".[11]
Apart from literature, there was a distinct element of art associated with the Young America Movement. In the 1820s and 1830s, American artists such asAsher B. Durand andThomas Cole began to emerge. They were heavily influenced byromanticism, which resulted in numerous paintings involving the physicallandscape. But it wasWilliam Sidney Mount who had connections to the writers of theDemocratic Review. And as a contemporary of the Hudson River School, he sought to use art in the promotion of the American democratic principle. O'Sullivan's cohort at theReview,E. A. Duyckinck, was particularly "eager to launch an ancillary artistic movement" that supplemented Young America.[12]
In late 1851, theDemocratic Review was acquired byGeorge Nicholas Sanders. Similar to O'Sullivan, Sanders believed in the inherent value of a literary-political relationship, whereby literature and politics could be combined and used as an instrument for socio-political progress. Although he "brought O'Sullivan back into the fold as an editor", the periodical's "jingoism achieved an even higher pitch than O'Sullivan's [original] dog-whistle stridency".[13] Even DemocraticRepresentativeJohn C. Breckinridge remarked in 1852:
TheDemocratic Review has been heretofore not a partisan paper, but a periodical that was supposed to represent the wholeDemocratic Party ... I have observed recently a very great change.[14]
The change in tone and partisanship in theDemocratic Review that Breckinridge referred to was mostly a reaction by the increasingly divided Democratic Party to the growth of the Free Soil movement, which threatened to dissolve any semblance of Democratic unity that remained.
By the mid-1850s,Free Soil Democrats (those who followedDavid Wilmot and hisProviso) andanti-slavery Whigs had combined to form theRepublican Party. Young America's New York Democrats who opposedslavery saw an opportunity to express theirabolitionist sentiments. As a result,Horace Greeley'sNew York Tribune began to replace theDemocratic Review as the central outlet for Young America's ever-evolving politics. In fact, Greeley'sTribune became a major advocate of not only abolition, but also of land and labor reform.[15]
The combined cause of land and labor reform was perhaps best exemplified byGeorge Henry Evans' National Reform Association (NRA). In 1846, Evans stated:
National Reformers didnot consider the Freedom of the Soil apanacea for every social and political wrong, but anecessary step in progress which would greatly facilitate all desirable reform, and without whichno plan of reform could prevent the downward course oflabor.[16]
Eventually, former members of the radicalLocofoco faction in the Democratic Party recognized the potential for reorganizing New York City's labor system around principles such as thecommon good.[17] In contrast to the Europein the days of the 1848 revolutions, America had no aristocratic establishment against which Young America could define itself in protest.[18]
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