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"In asking how U.S. commitments to liberty and white supremacy have cohabited, this collection brings to bear state-of-the-art scholarship and a long historical view. Moreover, rather than only focusing on the white/African American color line, it shows that critically important variations have mattered where American Indians, Asian Americans, Latina/os, and 'white ethnics' are concerned."--David Roediger, author of "How Race Survived U.S. History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon"

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RACIALLY WRITING THE REPUBLIC

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................................................................................1Introduction...............................................................................................................................26George Washington: Porcelain, Tea, and Revolution JOHN KUO WEI TCHEN......................................................................44Jefferson's Legacies: Racial Intimacies and American Identity DUCHESS HARRIS AND BRUCE BAUM...............................................64Tocqueville and Beaumont, Brothers and Others LAURA JANARA................................................................................81"The Sacred Right of Self-Preservation": Juan Nepomuceno Cortina and the Struggle for Justice in Texas JERRY THOMPSON.....................96"Shoot Mr. Lincoln"? CATHERINE A. HOLLAND.................................................................................................112Sarah Winnemucca and the Rewriting of Nation CARI M. CARPENTER............................................................................128The Politics of the Possible: Ida B. Wells-Barnett's Crusade for Justice PATRICIA A. SCHECHTER............................................145Meat vs. Rice (and Pasta): Samuel Gompers and the Republic of White Labor GWENDOLYN MINK, ABRIDGED BY BRUCE BAUM..........................163Theodore Roosevelt and the Divided Character of American Nationalism GARY GERSTLE.........................................................196Margaret Sanger and the Racial Origins of the Birth Control Movement DOROTHY ROBERTS......................................................214W. E. B. Du Bois and the Race Concept JOEL OLSON..........................................................................................231Displacing Filipinos, Dislocating America: Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart ALLAN PUNZALAN ISAAC..................................247Looking through Sidney Brustein's Window: Lorraine Hansberry's New Frontier, 1959-1965 BEN KEPPEL.........................................263James Baldwin's "Discovery of What It Means to Be an American" BRUCE BAUM.................................................................281Afterword: Racially Writing the Republic and Racially Righting the Republic GEORGE LIPSITZ................................................301Bibliography...............................................................................................................................321Contributors...............................................................................................................................323

Chapter One

George Washington

Porcelain, Tea, and Revolution

On the evening of July 9, 1776, impassioned New York citizens and Continental soldiers pulled down the two-thousand-pound gilded statue of King George III on Bowling Green, breaking off its head and mutilating its nose. In the months to come, Manhattan, a half-evacuated trading port, would be the scene of the next battle of the Revolutionary War. General George Washington made plans for the city's defense.

At the same time, under Washington's personal supervision, his housekeeper, Mrs. Mary Smith, proceeded to furnish his New York home. Carefully kept accounts and receipts reveal the purchase of mahogany knife cases, a carpet, a damask tablecloth, a feather bed, pillows, a tureen, eight porcelain mugs, two dozen plates, and other miscellany. The pro-British Burling Slip merchants Frederick and Philip Rhinelander supplied numerous imported creamware dishes, sauceboats, plates, and fluted bowls, including three even more costly china bowls. And the Bayard Street retailer George Ball sold "burnt china cups & saucers" and other tea service items to the household. During this time the general and Mrs. Washington kept up "a high level of comfort in dining and furnishings," maintaining a "tolerably genteel" table. By September, miscalculations forced Washington's inexperienced troops to retreat. At great expense and trouble the general's household was packed up and reestablished at the Morris-Jumel Mansion in Haerlem Heights.

What explains General Washington's seemingly extraordinary desire for luxury in the midst of America's war for independence? It would be easy to caricature his material wants at this moment of battle. This enigmatic anecdote, however, opens up fresh insights into the founding generation's efforts to formulate a national identity. While these historical details may appear trivial to traditional interpretations of early American history, they illustrate how the Founding Fathers and mothers of the United States used tea, porcelains, and other representations of China to construct their new nation. These practices contributed to the racialization of the American republic and played a key role in the making of a hybrid Anglo-American identity. For elite white men, concepts of freedom, happiness, property, individuality, rational self-interest, and despotism were part of ongoing debates about how one tamed wild passions, harnessed them via self-cultivation, produced wealth, and became a gentleman without overindulging in luxuries and becoming "effeminate" and "corrupt."

"To Fix the Taste of Our Country Properly"

While based in West Point in 1779, Washington gave detailed instructions on which officers, staff, and surgeons should be issued what supplies. Tea was to be distributed as follows: "Fifty pounds of the best quality for future disposal: one pound of the best kind to each General Officer; half a pound of the same to each field officer and head of a staff department and a quarter of a pound pr. man of the remainder to any other officer of the army who shall apply." The general's careful deliberations on the apportioning of teas exemplified his proper role as a patriarch rewarding his officers. His insistence on having Chinese tea sets or Wedgwood Queensware reminded him and his officers, in the heat of battle, of his status and authority. Such luxury items were scarce during war, and their rarity made Washington's role in distributing tea all the more significant symbolically.

Before the war, Washington was well aware of the divide between the haves and the have-nots. In Virginia common people ate their meals from a communal family bowl, often using their hands to scoop out the food. In more settled areas the poor were more likely to eat their porridge with spoons. Wealth was measured throughout the century by the number of chairs one owned, whether one had a frame bed, or whether one lived in a dwelling of more than one room. For those aspiring to differentiate themselves from the practices of most Americans, learning the proper use of such "instruments" as knives, forks, and spoons, which signified luxury and elegance, became important. Washington worked tirelessly at uplifting himself from his humble origins to the status of landed gentry-as distinct from farmers, whom he called the "grazing multitude." His tea-drinking and porcelain-collecting habits embodied these efforts. They further embodied the contradictory crosscurrents of the emergent Anglo-American revolutionary culture. Washington strove to be both a proper British gentleman and an American revolutionary. In 1755 Washington made...