David Hoffman and the Shaping of a Republican Legal Culture

In recent years scholars have paid increasing attention to the concept of republicanism as a measure of cultural change in America during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. To the Revolutionary generation republicanism connoted most obviously a representative form of government, based upon popular sovereignty and limited in its powers by a written constitution. But republican ideology encompassed far more than the restructuring of political institutions. It called for a regenerated society as well, in which men should be encouraged to pursue their individual destinies with a minimum of interference from public authorities. Civic morality and self-determination were closely linked in republican thought, and the theme of a virtuous and productive citizenry permeated much of the literature and art of the new nation

Mirror for Businessmen: Bronson Howard’s Melodramas

Every nation has its master theme, Bronson Howard observed around 1886. In France, this perennial topic is marital infelicity; in England it is caste; in the United States, it is business. The remark may seem trite today, when business ideals have permeated all corners of American society, when businessmen-novelists are celebrating the virtues of the great American game and when business-oriented historians are demanding that we scrap the term robber barons in referring to the founders of our industrial fortunes. The businessman has become the dominant symbol of our age, but in 1886 his status and popular appeal remained uncertain. While success literature of all kinds flooded the markets of the day, the emphasis was on character training and morality; next to nothing was said about actual conditions in the business world. William Dean Howells is generally regarded as the first great American writer to deal with the businessman as a human being. His fine case study of a self-made man, The Rise of Silas Lapham, appeared in 1885. Seven years earlier, Bronson Howard had produced the first of four successful melodramas in which he explored the business theme. By 1886 he was polishing up the last, and greatest, of them all

Lawyers and Public Criticism: Challenge and Response in Nineteenth-Century America

In the folklore of American legal history the middle decades of the nineteenth century mark the nadir of professionalism in national life. While acknowledging the brilliant achievements of individual practitioners and judges during the years from 1830 to 1870, commentators from Charles Warren and Roscoe Pound to W. Raymond Blackard and Anton-Hermann Chroust have insisted upon the overall deterioration of the bar under the assaults of a militant democracy. The standard picture of professional development in the United States begins with a Golden Age of jurisprudence in the early Republic, fostered by a self-regulating fraternity of educated judges and lawyers. Then come the Barbarian Invasions, as the semi-literate masses force their way into legal practice, aided by sympathetic state legislatures. Finally, after several decades of disorder and demoralization, an elite leadership arises to purge the profession of its populist standards of recruitment and achievement, through the creation of the first modern bar associations in the eighteen-seventies. In its broad outlines this pattern of alternating light and shadow appeals strongly to the imagination, while providing at least a plausible account of the interplay between legal groups and the forces of social change. But the closer one scrutinizes the thesis, the less satisfactory do its major assumptions appear

Creative Writers and Criminal Justice: Confronting the System (1890–1920)

By the early twentieth century the modernization of American criminal law had become an issue of widespread public concern, both in professional circles and in the popular press. Bar leaders, such as Roscoe Pound and William Howard Taft, proposed to improve the machinery of criminal justice by tightening procedural rules and enhancing the authority of trial judges. Their efforts at “scientific” law reform led to the creation of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology in 1909. Creative writers, on the other hand, influenced by the rise of literary realism, tended to produce popular novels and plays that sympathized with the powerless defendany caught up in a dehumanizing bureaucratic process. This essay explores the interplay of legal norms and imaginative literature as it affected two subjects of great public interest in the Progressive Era: (a) changes in the substantive law of crimes and (b) the problem of the criminal corporation

Law vs. Politics: The Self-Image of the American Bar

The advent of Jacksonian democracy in American politics coincided with a vigorous leveling movement in American law. In one sense the latter crusade was nothing new: hostility toward the elitism of the legal fraternity had been rife since the days of the Revolution. But whereas earlier critics had worked to simplify the content of the law, reformers in the 1830\u27s and 1840\u27s attacked the problem from a different angle. Eschewing substantive changes, they sought instead to bring the administrators of the law under more direct popular control. Their program embraced a wide range of legislative measures in which worried conservatives read portents of mob rule

Law vs. Politics: The Self-Image of the American Bar

The advent of Jacksonian democracy in American politics coincided with a vigorous leveling movement in American law. In one sense the latter crusade was nothing new: hostility toward the elitism of the legal fraternity had been rife since the days of the Revolution. But whereas earlier critics had worked to simplify the content of the law, reformers in the 1830\u27s and 1840\u27s attacked the problem from a different angle. Eschewing substantive changes, they sought instead to bring the administrators of the law under more direct popular control. Their program embraced a wide range of legislative measures in which worried conservatives read portents of mob rule

William Sampson and the Codifiers: The Roots of American Legal Reform

The transition from colony to nation involved difficult readjustments in the thinking and behavioral patterns of the American people, and nowhere were the inherent tensions more evident than in the field of law. Prior to the revolution, Americans had willingly accepted the legal principles and practices of the mother country, although modifying them somewhat to suit the more fluid social and economic environment of the New World. But the achievement of political independence from England soon led to demands that all other ties with the former metropolis be severed as well. Radical agitators in various states thus urged the complete abandonment of the common law during the years from 1783 to 1815. Generally their attacks were motivated by political considerations, becoming more virulent with the rise of the French-oriented Republicans led by Thomas Jefferson. Twisting the British lion\u27s tail in matters legal proved a popular vote-getting device in the early nineteenth century, and alarmed conservatives feared the successful subversion of all law and order