American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture

American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture. By Brian Roberts. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xii + 328 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. Cloth, $49.95; paper, $19.95. ISBN: Cloth 0-807-82543-3; paper 0-8078-4856-5.

Reviewed by John L. Brooke

Does Brian Roberts's American Alchemy fit within the traditional rubric of "business history"? Probably not. Will his book be of interest to anyone thinking about the inner tensions in the culture and psyche of the American middle class? Absolutely.

The history of the rise of middle-class culture has become inseparable from that of respectability. From provincial England in the 1740s to Rochester, New York, in the 1830s, the emergence of the middle class has been seen through a cultural as well as an economic lens. As much as levels and sources of wealth, middle-class identity has been seen as bound up in adherence to rules of politeness, decorum, cleanliness, temperance, and predictability. These qualities of respectability, rather than inherited property and station, or sheer physical labor, marked men as suitable for clerkships or credit in the new urban capitalist economies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, the massive Dunn and Bradstreet volumes housed deep in the bowels of Baker Library at Harvard Business School were efforts to assess the relation between respectability and creditworthiness of individual American businessmen, beginning in the 1840s. Here, we might suggest that David Riesman had it only half right in The Lonely Crowd: middle-class culture certainly was grounded in the self-adjusting gyroscopes of "inner direction"-but the interpersonal communication of these qualities was as important as they were in themselves.

Brian Roberts's central theme is that middle-class respectability had reached a breaking point in the mid-nineteenth century and that the Gold Rush provided a psychic and emotional outlet and touchstone for an entire class in formation. First and foremost, Roberts stresses that the real "Forty-Niners" were not the legendary wild men of the West, but men of some means, drawn primarily from the cities and towns of the American Northeast. Emerging from the depressed 1840s, California seemingly offered a quick and easy prosperity. It also offered, without any question, an escape from the rigid boundaries of respectable culture.

Roberts describes the Gold Rush as a sudden enthusiasm striking the industrial Northeast, impelling young married men to organize mining companies, and negotiate their separation from wives and families. The gender dynamics of the Forty-Niners' migration is probably the most consistently developed strand of his analysis, both in the ambivalence of men toward the restrictions of Victorian marriage and in women's abilities in the face of abandonment by their husbands. In perhaps the most surprising part of his book, Roberts carefully explores Yankee encounters with Latin America, on the Isthmus and in Mexico, in light of how understandings of the "ethnic other" contributed to defining American respectability. Against this tableau of gender and ethnic relations, his account of culture in San Francisco and the gold fields-stressing an aggressive individualistic ethos in the struggle for gold, a growing sense of disillusionment, failure, and sporadic violenceis almost anticlimactic.

There have been similar treatments of the emergence of middleclass culture in nineteenth-century America. Roberts's book bears comparison with Karen Halttunen's Confidence Men and Painted Women (1982), on the perils and seductions of the urban life, T J. Jackson Lears's No Place of Grace (1981), which describes a crisis of cultural confidence in the culture of respectability leading to "the rise of the therapeutic," and Mark Carnes's Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (1989), which posits exotic Masonic and fraternal theater as a cathartic ritual outlet. Behind all these analyses, if often unacknowledged, lies Sigmund Freud's Civilization and its Discontents (1930), situating neurosis in the growing constraints of modernity. Freud would have found Roberts's Gold Rush California grist for his mill, as middle-class men cast off the constraints of civilization for an explosive riot of self-interest, violence, and plain old dirt. The contribution of Roberts's book is to argue that the Gold Rush was a conceptual, cultural event, as much as it was an extractive one. He argues that it represents a rebellion against the constraints of the culture of respectability, which was perhaps essential in its contributions to the ethos of American capitalism. The "forty-niners were slumming" (p. 219); they were experimenting with a life free of civilized constraint in every sense before they returned to the traces of American business. And if too many of them found no monetary profit, they went through a collective "alchemical" transmutation: the Gold Rush experience opened the doors "to future market pathways" (p. 210), where "the competitive world of business required a heavy touch of the savage within" (pp. 265-6). Domesticated by supportive and capable wives, the Gold Rush experience generated "a bourgeois utopia, a space in which respectability and the elevation of carnal desires necessary to run market capitalism blended perfectly together" (p. 249).

One does walk away from Roberts's book with questions. Some of the Forty-Niners must have turned a monetary profit from their ventures in the gold fields; the national economy certainly did. One also has to wonder about the other collective masculine experiences that bracketed the Gold Rush. The explosive organization of mining companies at the news of California gold had qualities of a religious revival, but, more important, it resembled mobilization for war. The Mexican War, which set off the Gold Rush, and the Civil War, which can be seen as a not-so-distant consequence, are barely mentioned. However, many of the Forty-Niners would have served in one of these wars, and some in both. The ways in which military service provided an escape from familial respectability might have provided Roberts with some useful comparative material. And Carnes's Secret Ritual and Manhood also makes one wonder about the role of fraternal organizations in the culture of the gold fields, since they were ubiquitous in the army camps. A comparison with the mid-century wartime experience also would have provided an interesting frame of reference for his gender analysis by examining the experience of men's absence from home for self- and family interest in California against the experience of their absence, for grander national purposes, in the Civil War.

Despite these necessary quibbles, Brian Roberts's American Alchemy is an important book, convincingly relocating the opening cultural crisis of the American middle class from the turn of the century back to the late 1840s.

[Author Affiliation]

John L. Brooke is Stern Professor of American History at Tufts University. He is the author of The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844 (1993) and is presently drafting a manuscript on civil society and the public sphere in postrevolutionary New York State from 1776 to 1846.