MICHAEL ROGIN
101
mother ," "monster hydra" Bank, which "devoured" the western cities in its
"jaws"; the "sea-Leviathan" England , conspiring with Indians in 1812 and
with antislavery Mexico in 1844; and the slave power conspiracy. To cite
just one illustration, the "many-headed Hydra" Bank, in one anti-Bank
cartoon, resembles a Medusa head. Each snake-like tentacle represents a
minion of the Bank, and "the old Hero" Jackson stands ready
to
sever them
all.
As the picture of Jackson suggests, there are two sorts of Jacksonian
individuals: the mass of anonymous selves, who are
to
benefit neither from
family tradition nor special privilege; and the hero who rises to slay demons
which threaten them. Establishing authority over himself, the hero-as
Indian fighter, slave owner, textile manufacturer, President-also estab–
lishes paternity over soldier, Indian, or slave children, over textile mill
girls, and even over the nation of free white men as a whole .
The self-made man had
to
face the achievements offounding fathers as
well as the weaknesses of fathers closer
to
home. The founding document of
transcendental culture, Emerson's
Nature,
begins, "Our age is retrospec–
tive.
It
builds the sepulchres of the fathers ." Emersonian nature sought to
free men from "the dry bones of the past, " the bones of that "father now in
his grave,"
to
whom Parson Weems, in his influential
Li/e o/Washington,
demanded obedience. In politics, however, the self-made man used nature
not
to
challenge the dead founding fathers but
to
match their achievements
and reconstitute their world . Parricide was danger, not acknowledged goal,
in antebellum society .
So
Lincoln reaffirmed his kinship with " the fathers '"
Declaration of Independence on the free soil, literally a self-sustaining
principle that "as each man has one mouth
to
be fed, and one pair of hands
to
furnish food ... that particular pair of hands should feed that particular
mouth. " That jackson's western refounding advanced commodity
capitalism, and Lincoln's led to Civil War, has something to do not only
with the forces at work within society, but within the self-made hero as
well .
The self-made man established paternity over the world; he also
dreamed of giving birth
to
it . The exponents of Quentin Anderson's
"Imperial self," and the anti institutional reformers Stanley Elkins, George
Fredrickson, and John Thomas have described, generated from personal self
an ideal world freed from historical , institutional, and inter-human limits .
As in the attack on fathers, Emerson's
Nature
sounds the narcissist im–
perium . His transparent eyeball first merges with nature; then "the solid
seeming block of matter" is "pervaded and dissolved" by "thought," and
"my beautiful mother" is reborn from the regenerated self. What is the
relationship between monsters slain
to
achieve paternity , and a world
