America Needs a Single Manner Code to Avoid Fracture
“Manners are of more importance than laws,” Edmund Burke warned in his first Letter on a Regicide Peace (1796), for “upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex or sooth, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation.” The French Revolutionaries, by consciously inculcating “a system of manners, the most licentious, prostitute, and abandoned that ever has been known,” preserved their power more firmly than any mere law or “mechanical means” could have. “Not a phrase or a gesture” or “fashion of a hat or a shoe was left to accident.” All were one “body of systematick manners which secures . . . Regicide, Jacobinism, Atheism”—a “system of manners in itself at war with all orderly and moral society.”
As Burke understood, sophisticated codes of etiquette structured the Old Regime. In eighteenth-century English, “manners” had a double-meaning. The word in the plural referred both to the morals and general way of life of a person and to the specific rules of etiquette that governed that person’s social relations. Thus, Samuel Johnson could define the word as both “morals; habits” and “ceremonious behavior; studied civility”—with examples of both meanings dating back to the time to Shakespeare.
Civilized behavior was something to be acquired through study and effort. Eighteenth-century Europe—a culture mercifully free of Romantic obsessions with authentic inner selves—was awash with conduct guides and courtesy books, teaching morals, habits, and ceremonious behaviors of all varieties. The Reverend James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women was so tedious and moralizing that Jane Austen depicts Mr. Collins reading it as proof positive of his self-importance and bad taste. On the other end of the spectrum, the rakish Lord Chesterfield, in his best-selling Letters to his Son, advised his “natural” (i.e., illegitimate) heir about how to take an aristocratic mistress, who would polish his manners and hopefully improve his conversational French.
The French Revolutionaries correctly understood that remaking France meant transforming manners. And manners, indeed, altered quickly. (Burke’s Letter cites numerous examples.) Famously, the Revolutionaries substituted “citizen” for “monsieur” and “madame.” But the French also stopped bowing, curtseying, and doffing hats, and the formal “vous” was briefly outlawed. Jacobin leaders such as Maximilien Robespierre and Fabre d’Eglatine created a new liturgical year of republican festivals instead of Christian holidays. Tricolored cockades and sans-culottes replaced wigs, waistcoats, and décolletage, so that when Madame Tallien, wife of a prominent politician, began showing her breasts again in public, it was a symbol of Thermidorean reaction.
America’s revolutionaries were less systematic. Sparse colonies of farmers, woodsmen, and small craftsmen were never the best place to find high etiquette to begin with. Yet some habits of the Old Regime—such as bowing and the rituals around social introductions—grew uncommon in America too. During the House debates on what became the First Amendment, one congressman alluded to the story of how William Penn was found in contempt and imprisoned for refusing to doff his hat to a judge as an example of why an explicit bill of rights was necessary.
The Federalists, moreover, repeatedly insisted that common American manners—differing from those in Britian—were a central institution holding the nation together. “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people,” John Jay observed in the second essay of The Federalist Papers, “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.” And these common institutions demonstrated that “the people of America . . . should, to all general purposes, be one nation, under one federal government.”
Other Federalists agreed. Already at the Philadelphia Convention, Edmund Wilson had argued, citing Montesquieu, that “the British Model . . . was inapplicable to the situation of this Country” because America’s “manners [are] so republican, that nothing but a great confederated Republic would do.” Law and manners intertwined so that the abolition of entail and primogeniture in the states, for instance, both expressed and further developed the republican character of the people. During New York’s ratification convention, Alexander Hamilton dismissed Anti-Federalist warnings that “no general free government can suit” because “the interests, habits, and manners of the thirteen states are different.” On the contrary, Hamilton assured, “from New Hampshire to Georgia, the people of America are as uniform in their interests and manners as those of any established in Europe.” A newspaper column published before the New York convention stated that “Providence . . . will still make us one great, united, free and happy people. To that end we are blessed with the same language and manners, the same interests and laws, with a peculiar circulation of learning, and above all with the civilizing restraints of a most amiable religion.” George Washington’s Farewell Address could declare a decade later that Americans share “every inducement of sympathy and interest” for “with slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles.”
Manners, then, were in the view of many eighteenth-century thinkers a constituent element of national character. Nations ought to share a code of manners, and the regime governing each nation must befit its distinctive manners. A revolution against the governing regime should be secured by a revolution in the manners of the country.
Neither Edmund Burke nor Maximilien Robespierre, therefore, would be surprised to see that, over the last decade, Progressive efforts to remake that American government have accompanied the imposition of new manners. Students and workers all over the country have had to list their preferred pronouns before meetings; memorize new terms for familiar concepts (“unhoused,” “undocumented,” “cisfemale”); capitalize letters that were once lower case or lower case letters that were once capitals; embrace new policies on uniforms and workplace attire; wait while a two-paragraph-long land acknowledgment is read; and speak only at times and about topics appropriate to their place in a hierarchy of birth. These new codes of conduct are enforced in just the same way as eighteenth-century ones were—not only by making the unmannered boorish, ostracized, or déclassé at parties but also through the loss of employment opportunities. Even contempt of court is back. Some judges—undisturbed by the First Amendment—have enacted procedural rules mandating that litigants use a witness’s or party’s preferred pronouns or be held in contempt. (Hopefully, last week’s executive orders ended this, in federal court.)
Churches, moreover—even theologically traditional ones—have not escaped these novel manners. Some Protestant leaders, for instance, insist that true doctrine requires Christians to refuse to use “they/them” just as the Quakers once did “you/ye.” Others, that the divine command to love forbids misgendering.
Many cultural critics have demonstrated how Progressive manner codes reinforce hierarchy, elitism, and socioeconomic immobility. Indeed, they do. But revolutionary manners also seek to beget a new nation. America—no more than any country or denomination—cannot long survive having two separate peoples within it, divided along their manners, interests, worship, and political principles. Laws alone cannot unify what manners pull asunder.
Either the American people must coalesce around a single manner code, a single form of studied civilized behavior, or the fragile confederacy of mutually-distrusting states—as the Federalists feared—is the best we can hope for. I am not saying it has to be top hats and petticoats again. But they might be worth a try.
Image: Storming of the Bastille and arrest of the Governor M. de Launay, July 14, 1789.
The British abolitionist William Wilberforce also believed that manners were important, and saw advocating the reform of manners as one of his life’s callings alongside fighting for the abolition of slavery.