Sartorial Ideologies: From Homespun to Ready-Made

MICHAEL ZAKIM

	Frontispiece: A Spinning Machine. An exciting vision of the homespun future, as presented in 1775 in the Pennsylvania Magazine, edited by Tom Paine. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

The place of clothing in the political imagination is a familiar one. We need only recall Gandhi's mobilization of the spinning wheel as a symbol of colonial resistance, almost two hundred years after the Americans first employed it against the same empire, to recognize how clothing has consistently served as both material and metaphor for the social question. When sovereignty was located in the king's body, for example, courtiers' access to his toilette—to the appareling of that body—signaled their proximity to power. When such embodied monarchical authority began to wane, Goethe's Romantic individual, Werther, appeared on the scene in an anti-courtly ensemble of blue jacket, yellow vest, and leather breeches, which soon became a popular style of bourgeois masculinity. Indeed, a historical inventory of sartorial politics constitutes an impressive list of classical togas, liberty caps, silk stockings, sans-culottes, bloomers, brown shirts, denim jeans, Mao jackets, and burning bras.1	1
The elevation of homespun to a political ideology in America on the eve of independence was an especially striking expression of the wider social implications of dress. Breaking flax and shearing sheep, and then transforming the raw fibers into cloth through a chain of tasks mobilizing the entire family, rehearsed the republican credo of propertied independence. When yeomen donned the coarse products of their home industry, they embodied an equally republican frugality. In both instances, the homespun constituted a conscious opposition to British luxury and corruption. In so doing, it also bridged the dual meaning of "domestic manufactures"—tying the productive efforts of the household to those of the nation—thus also becoming a most tangible expression of the citizen's attachment to the public's happiness.	2
Such coarseness did not long remain in the wardrobe, particularly not among those political classes who talked most about it. Nevertheless, homespun exhortations of industry and simplicity became a fixture of American ideological discourse over the following century. By then, the mass-produced suit emerged as the badge of a uniquely virtuous American polity, the only place in the civilized world where people could not be classed by their appearance, as contemporaries never tired of explaining. Plain woolen coats, vests, and pantaloons—the products of hundreds of men's clothing firms based in northern cities making up one of the country's most valuable commodities—represented the same industriousness, modesty, resistance to fashion's corrupting influences, and common civic life that homespun had. The "simple dress of an American citizen," in fact, emerged as a political slogan in the 1850s, referring to Benjamin Franklin's countrified appearance as American representative to the court of Versailles in 1776 as a model of civic behavior for life in an industrial democracy.	3
This essay traces the improbable evolution of homespun into its ostensible opposite, the ready-made. As such, it is an account of how sartorial virtue changed from homemade to mass-produced, how it moved from a Malthusian world of scarcity to a machine-driven cornucopia of plenty, how it no longer signaled the self-sacrifice of elites but, rather, the propertied mobility of all, and how, from being a family effort, it became a male prerogative—all the while continuing to represent the same transcendent notions of productive citizenship. This history of dress is, consequently, a political narrative of capitalist revolution and America's "great transformation" into a democracy—an attempt to understand how the industrial nation-state was credibly presented by its advocates as a legacy of the country's republican beginnings.2	4
A patriot donned the unrefined products of his household's labor in order to renounce imperial hubris and augment its antithesis, domestic manufactures. In 1765, Daniel Dulany declared that tyranny would be resisted with the "Spirit, and Vigour, and Alacrity" manifest in such productive efforts. In 1767, after British passage of the Townshend Acts seeking additional revenue from the colonies, Boston's town meeting voted to resuscitate linen production throughout the colony. Bounties were proposed for each yard of Massachusetts homespun produced. Newspapers published instructions for raising flax, the raw material for making linen, and in Providence, Rhode Island, a prize was offered to whomever produced the most. The goal was to "prevent the unnecessary Importation of European Commodities, which threaten the Country with Poverty and Ruin." Mercantilist anxieties over the drain of specie and artisanal worries over competition from abroad were not the only concerns, however. Political principles no less informed the homespun campaign. As Benjamin Rush, president of the United Company of Philadelphia for Promoting American Manufactures, argued, "A people who are entirely dependent upon foreigners for food or clothes must always be subject to them."3	5
"Industry and Economy" were the antidote. They would ensure American independence, which meant that when "thirty-three respectable ladies . . . met about sunrise, with their wheels, to spend the day . . . in the laudable design of a spinning match," they became actors in the great revolutionary drama. "At an hour before sunset, the ladies then appearing neatly dressed, principally in homespun, a polite and generous repast of American production was set for their entertainment, after which . . . Mr. Jewett delivered a suitable and instructive discourse from Rom. xii. 11: 'Not Slothful in business; fervent in spirit; serving the Lord.'" The Boston Gazette reported in 1768 that a number of women from South Kingston, Narragansett, had been invited to the "House of a Gentleman of the first Rank and Figure in the Town, to celebrate the New-Year Anniversary in a festival Manner; where they all appeared in homespun Manufactures." Reports from Providence, Salisbury, Byfield, Newbury, Rowley, Ipswich, Beverly, and Boston told of Daughters of Liberty gathering to spin in coordinated displays of "industry" designed to "save their sinking country." Harvard College's graduating class of 1768 wore homespun at commencement ceremonies. So did the graduates at Yale and the College of Rhode Island. The South Carolina Gazette described the appearance in Charleston of a gentleman "completely clad in the Product and Manufacture of his own Plantation." In Virginia, too, genteeler types dressed in home manufactures in order to register their dissatisfaction with English imperial policy in America. Robert Wormely Carter wore a whole suit of clothes made by a favored slave that became the envy of Williamsburg. At the House of Burgesses' ball in December 1769, men and women effected "a genteel appearance . . . chiefly dressed in Virginia cloth." And a Virginian declared that "the Whirling of our Spinning Wheels afford us the most delightful Musick, and Man is the most respected who appears clad in Homespun; as such a Dress is a sure Evidence of Love to his Country." In the Pennsylvania Gazette, "A Freeborn American" was even more adamant. "The skin of a son of liberty will not feel the coarseness of a homespun shirt! The resolution of a Pennsylvanian 'should be made of sterner stuff' than to be frighted at the bug bear—fashion!"	6
"The bug bear—fashion" that so exercised "A Freeborn American" was the thoughtless emulation of metropolitan style. It was fueled by love of luxury and was inimical to liberty. As "Brutus" explained in 1769, luxury bred immorality and excess, which made persons vulnerable to corruption. According to the Virginia Gazette in 1778, luxury had even precipitated the war. It "begot Arbitrary Power," which "begot Oppression," which, in turn, begot resentment and revenge. It was a credible syllogism. John Adams later recalled how "scarlet and sable robes, of broad bands, and enormous tie wigs" became the sartorial standard in Massachusetts imperial courts exactly in these years when popular discontent with British rule intensified. The Yankee Doodle dandy, born a generation earlier as a British caricature of the uncouth colonial who could only dream of emulating a London macaroni, now proudly inverted his tastelessness into a symbol of patriotic simplicity.4	7
"Sterner stuff" was consequently required. For to resist luxury and so preserve their liberties, Americans would have to forsake the "conveniences and superfluities" (Franklin's categories in testimony to the House of Commons in 1766) regularly imported from Britain. Were colonials capable of such sacrifice? Did they have the requisite virtue to "consider their interests as [in]distinct from those of the public"?5 George Washington assured his London merchant in 1765 that, once domestic manufacturing became widespread in the colonies, "the Eyes of our People will perceive, that many of the Luxuries which we have heretofore lavished our Substance to Great Britain for can well be dispensed with whilst the Necessaries of Life are to be procured . . . within ourselves." Franklin, polemicizing under the pseudonym of "Homespun," promised that Americans would be able to give up their English tea, and breakfast instead on Indian corn, which was no more "indigestible [than] the Stamp Act." Proof of their resolution was evidenced already in the innumerable calls to stop eating lamb and deliver the extra fleeces to colonial spinners. The logic, as explained in the Boston Gazette, was simple. "Suppose that one half of the Woolen that is used in this Province is manufactured here of our own Wool: If therefore, they who keep Sheep would but double their Flocks . . . we might be enabled to make all our Woollen Clothing; and to prevent the Importation of any more from Europe." The Cordwainers Fire Company in Philadelphia likewise declared, "Whereas the Increase of our Woollen Manufactories will greatly conduce to the Benefit of this Country, it is therefore agreed . . . that we will not purchase any Lamb, nor suffer any to be purchased or used in our Families, during the Present Year."6	8
The industrious American householder thus confronted the empire simultaneously as the guarantor of political sovereignty and of material independence. Planting, harvesting, shearing, cleaning, drying, rippling, wetting, braking, hackling, dyeing, separating, and combing, and only then spinning for three weeks and weaving for another to produce the six yards of cloth necessary for a plain dress, to be made with material inferior to imported goods from England or the continent—this was the stuff of virtuous politics. In surveying the progress of the patriot cause in 1767, the Boston Gazette congratulated Ebenezer Hurd of Connecticut for having made "in his own Family this present Year, by only his Wife and Children," no less than 500 Yards of linens and woolens, "the whole of the Wool and Flax of his own raising," and Capt. Simon Newton of Providence for spinning and weaving 364 1/4 yards of linen cloth and having another 300 skeins of yarn unwoven, "the greatest part of the whole (and all the fine) spun in his own house." William Attlee similarly reported to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia on cloth production in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, for 1769: 3,744 yards of striped cotton, 4,091 yards of flax linen, 4,232 yards of tow linen, 1,394 yards of linsey; in all, more than 30,000 yards of household manufactures, "so great is the Spirit for Homespun among our good Females at present." Attlee identified each family "who had manufactured any Part of the above Quantity, and also the Number of Yards of each Kind manufactured by each of them . . . all digested in proper columns." The rhetoric of res publica thus became infused with the less sublime grammar of skeins and yards, a political arithmetic that allowed observers to gauge the respective dedication of their neighbors to the patriot cause.7	9
That cause sought to put an end to business as usual: the ever-growing amount of imported manufactures reaching America. This was the trade that led Adam Smith to call America "a nation of customers." It satisfied mercantilist economics and offered English cultural refinement to an increasing number of colonials. Cloths constituted half of American imports and an even higher percentage of the goods shipped out from the port cities into the countryside for sale. The number of sheep in eastern Massachusetts had declined by almost a quarter per capita during the four decades preceding the Stamp Act. Who needed to grow wool and flax, let alone spin it, when shopkeepers listed such an extensive inventory of "broad-cloths, serges, cambets, ozenbrigs, cotton checks, damasks, calicoes, cambricks, sattins, taffeties, [and] highland plads," whose prices had been dramatically dropping since the end of the previous century? The significance of this surfeit of cloth for Americans was evident in the extensive column inches devoted to merchants' advertisements. It was no less evident in one of the most important cultural projects of the day, John Singleton Copley's hundreds of portraits of the colonial elite, which faithfully reproduced the plush interior tapestries and, most of all, the effusive materiality of his sitters' raiment. Neither Copley nor, apparently, his contemporaries could avert their gaze from these cloths. They were, in fact, the real subjects of the pictures. Even the famous painting of the shirt-clad Paul Revere, noticeably shorn of the usual layers of genteel outer dress, his artisanal hand tools ostentatiously arrayed before him, was no less a study in the fineness of linen and the semiotics of sleeve ruffles.8	10
American concern about all this fine cloth was nothing new. In 1722, a young Franklin was already bemoaning the "Pride of Apparel" that had overtaken the colonies "ever since we parted with our Homespun Cloaths for Fourteen Penny Stuffs." The rise of fashionableness, Franklin complained, allowed persons with no real claim to social distinction to draw "Crowds of Imitators who hate each other while they endeavor after a similitude of Manners. They destroy by Example, and envy one another's Destruction." Fourteen-penny stuffs, that is, spawned a miasma of social pretension and, with it, a betrayal of the civic order. The natural hierarchy was obfuscated by people dressing beyond their rank. "A Fall was the natural consequence."9	11
Franklin's eschatology drew, in part, of course, on a puritanical legacy. That was evident in "The Forefather's Song," which continued to circulate in the eighteenth century:	12
Our clothes we brought with us are apt to be torn—
They need to be clouted [patched] soon after they are worn—
But clouting our garments they hinder us nothing;
Clouts double are warmer than single whole clothing.
Puritans had welcomed such straitened circumstances as an opportunity to resolve their "dilemma" between success in this world and their more stringent obligations to the next. Franklin's jeremiad, however, contained no such metaphysics. His condemnation of luxury rested on a notion of civic sobriety and a view of the conflict between material advance and social stability that had nothing to do with the Calvinist sense of sin. Both the solution and the problem, as he understood them, were entirely of this world. Franklin, who eventually became the colonies' leading publicist for the distinctly non-Puritan idea that virtue could be acquired through regular habits, described the sartorial ideal he had in mind: "He appear'd in the plainest Country Garb; his Great Coat was coarse and looked old and thread-bare; his Linnen was homespun; his Beard perhaps of Seven Days Growth, his Shoes thick and heavy, and every Part of his Dress corresponding." What made such a dismal sight the object of universal respect? "It was not an exquisite Form of Person, or Grandeur of Dress that struck us with Admiration." Indeed, it was the opposite. Authority would issue from the fact that "he always speaks the Thing he means." The virtuous, in sum, eschewed artifice as they did fashion, for these were the languages of corruption. They favored, instead, the "homespun Dress of Honesty," which Franklin associated with "the first Ages of the world." It was a foundation myth of simpler and more frugal times designed to help establish the basis for social order in a secularizing, post-sumptuary world. A similar impulse informed the religious awakenings that swept the colonies in these same years. James Davenport notably instructed his followers to burn fancy clothing in addition to books. This would ensure that the accumulation of the ever-growing number of goods for sale did not "destroy" society. What appeared as nostalgic on Franklin's part, or a reactionary religious impulse represented by Davenport, was actually a new kind of response to a distinctly modern dilemma.10	13
The 1767 portrait of Nicholas Boylston, by John Singleton Copley (1738—1815). The real subject of Copley's portraits of the colonial elite was their dress. Apparently, neither he nor anyone else could keep their eyes off the clothes. Courtesy of the Harvard University Portrait Collection, bequest of Ward Nicholas Boylston, 1828.     Daguerreotype, circa 1840s, of Edward Knight Collins, businessman (1802—1878). Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Daguerreotype Collection, Prints and Photographs Division. Produced by Mathew Brady's studio. By 1850, 3 million Americans were having their portraits made each year, in black-and-white daguerreotypes that cost them 25 cents.
One practical attempt to "virtuously" contain the effects of ambition in the New World took place in the newest American colony, Georgia. The colony's high-minded trustees, sitting in London, were highly apprehensive about the nefarious effects of commerce on social life. But they also recognized that, because America offered unprecedented material opportunity, newer and freer forms of economic association were unavoidable. Perhaps, it was hoped by the optimists among them, such opportunities would present a way to reconcile what had become, since Thomas Hobbes, a proverbial tension between doing good for others and doing good for oneself. In Georgia, the preferred method for striking that balance was to make everyone a primary producer. Even slavery was banned in the colony in accordance with that principle. Property would be widely distributed. The independent household was to be the predominant economic and social unit of the colony. And while production was thus facilitated, commerce would be strictly inhibited. That is because exchange was not the goal of the citizen's productive efforts. Credit was restricted and accumulation inhibited. In this way, it was thought, the luxurious aggregation of the householder's hard work would be avoided.11	14
Georgia exemplified the unique role America played in seeking answers to what was emerging as a central political question of modern life: how to reconcile the individual aspiration for material improvement with anxieties about its social consequences. Transatlantic sentiment regarded America as a "middle landscape," no longer an untamed wilderness but not yet the site of refined artifice characteristic of Europe. It was where a "comfortable subsistence [without] the Pressures of Poverty and [with] the Surfeits of Abundance" was uniquely possible. Plainness was the mark of this life, an aesthetic complement to grazing flocks, rural idylls, and industrious farmers. One finds it, for example, in the simpler, visually flatter copies of English engravings that circulated in the colonies during the first half of the eighteenth century, or in the political pastoral of "independent and hardy YEOMANRY, all nearly on a level—trained to arms . . . clothed in homespun—of simple manners—strangers to luxury—drawing plenty from the ground."12	15
But the Georgian experiment failed. The anticommercial zealousness by which the productive autonomy of each household was supposed to be maintained actually became an obstacle to the society it was intended to nurture; and anyway, the advantages of commerce proved irresistible. The problem was a basic one: while commerce served as the source of corruption because it made the pursuit of luxury possible, it was no less an agent of civilization. This was because the absence of material improvement was as much an affront to virtue as it was its guarantor. (It was also antithetical to the whole colonial project.) That tension was to be found in Adam Smith's new political economy as well, Smith having assigned acquisitiveness a positive social role while recognizing that the public's general happiness depended on the restraint of wants. The conundrum begged for a homespun solution that would wed industry and frugality, personality and society.13	16
The colonial household seemed to offer such a synthesis. While its origins lay in the distant past, it also proved to be thoroughly modern. The steady climb of prices for livestock and wheat after mid-century had generated a new division of labor within the family by which men increasingly stayed outside tending the herds, mowing the fields, planting feed for the livestock, and building their barns while women assumed increasing authority over household tasks. The result was a domestic system of production developing in response to the pressures and opportunities of the commercializing economy. It was this very commercialization—the growing number of things being grown for sale—that was the context for homespun politics. Making one's cloth and then wearing it, instead of trading or selling it (often in exchange for imported cloths of finer quality), was a dramatic protest against the imperial system because of the attendant sacrifice of its material benefits. At the same time, the homespun protest was implicit acknowledgement that the world of goods had become integral to any discussion of public happiness.14	17
And, indeed, the patriotic boycotts of British goods first organized in response to the Sugar and Stamp Acts opened up new opportunities for commerce in domestic manufactures. In the mid-1760s, farmers in Chester County, Pennsylvania, increased the size of their flocks. They invested in improved pasture grounds and then hired weavers to turn the resulting yarns into cloth. They were happy to report that they had found "an encouraging small Profit" when selling their woolens in the Philadelphia market. These patriots certainly had no intention of replacing commercial relations with a simpler system of exchange. Their efforts rested on extensive social cooperation—the labors of spinners, weavers, fullers, dyers, bleachers, combmakers, cardmakers, among others—which was commensurate with the fledgling market. Revolutionaries accepted the reasoning of Maryland's Governor Sharpe when he assured a nervous Lords of Trade in 1767 that no one "will think much of Manufacturing for themselves while they can with the produce of their Lands purchase such Goods as they may have occasion for." But the rebels now sought to turn such logic to their own advantage. Their aim was to replace imported commodities—and by mid-century, most of the population of Chester County no longer wore clothing made at home—with American-manufactured ones. The Continental Congress's "non-importation, non-consumption, and non-exportation" policy in 1774 was far less concerned with ascetic self-denial, for instance, than with encouraging the development of a national economy. Non-consumption, in other words, did not mean anti-consumption, and American agriculture, arts, and manufactures—"especially that of wool"—were explicitly encouraged.15	18
Homespun proved to be a business venture. In New York City, American-made woolens were rumored to be selling for three times their original value. And a Chester County farmer actually protested when the Stamp Act was repealed. "What security [will be] given us," he inquired of proponents of non-importation, to make the patriotic call to sacrifice materially viable?16 Virtuous self-sacrifice did not rest on the effacement of private desires, in other words, but on their successful integration with public needs. Even Cato could be enlisted in this cause: "What is the public, but the collective body of private men, as every man is a member of the public?" The Boston Gazette gave this clear expression in 1768: "Every Man who will take Pains to cultivate the Cost of Homespun may easily convince himself that his private Interest, as well as [that of] the Publick, will be promoted by it." Or, as the same paper more pithily expressed it on another occasion, "SAVE YOUR MONEY, AND YOU SAVE YOUR COUNTRY!" Profit was the happy result of a virtuous coordination of private and public. The patriot cause could even be turned into an advertising strategy. Daniel Mause, a Philadelphia hosier, announced in 1766 that he had "lately erected a Number of Looms, for the manufacture of thread and cotton stockings and other kinds of Hosiery of any size or quality, hoping the good people of this and the neighboring Provinces will encourage this, his undertaking, at a time when AMERICA calls for the endeavors of Her Sons." In Virginia, where the non-importation campaign found widespread support among the largest planters, home production facilitated a long overdue economic reform intended to alleviate chronic debts by shifting the plantations to full seasonal labor, crop diversification, and a more profitable use of otherwise idle children and elderly slaves.17	19
A homespun economy would rectify imperial corruption by supporting an alternative commercial logic, monopolized not by government but by a civil society resting on the energies of independent householders who subsequently created a society, so it was believed, impervious to any monopolization at all.	20
The homespun imbued this public sphere with another novel characteristic: democracy. When sophisticates appeared in Boston and Charleston bereft of their figured silks and broadcloth woolens, they celebrated the coarseness that had long since become a sign of social marginality, the exclusive dominion of "Laborers&Servants." In his diaries, Alexander Hamilton described the homely effect on his landlady, for instance, by dressing her in homespun and then barely containing his distaste at the sight. A young apprentice, Joseph Gilman, newly arrived in Boston, wrote home to New Hampshire to request his mother send him additional garments, warning that if she dared include his homespun jacket, "I shall not wear it."18	21
Making the homespun a symbol of civic membership was, thus, a consciously leveling moment. Homespun erased the textured fineness of the cloth by which the "respectable Ladies" of Narragansett and Newport had traditionally maintained their status. "Rich and Poor all turn the Spinning Wheel," someone approvingly declared as a maxim for the times. The "indifferently cloathed," those heretofore considered incapable of virtue precisely because of their unpropertied and consequently dependent status, were now promoted to full citizenship by homespun.19 For the first time in the history of democratic thought, necessity—the desiderata of material subsistence—became a legitimate subject of political life. The long-denigrated oikos, or household, was transformed into the pan-gendered basis of sovereignty in which civic virtue rested on a person's very proximity to the production of basic necessities. This elevated the simple artisan to the same civic stratum as the philosopher-statesman.20 That was unprecedented, even in America. When he waxed nostalgic in 1732 about lost homespun innocence, Franklin had actually bemoaned the mixing of the classes. And when the Pennsylvania Associators sought to express "the Union of all Ranks" in 1748, they carried banners depicting three arms in brotherly embrace—respectively clad in ruffled, plain, and checked sleeves—or three Associators marching abreast with shouldered muskets "and dressed in different Clothes, intimating the unanimity of the different Sorts of People in the Association." The American Revolution's homespun ideology promoted a very different version of political unanimity, one no longer stratified into permanent ranks. Quite the opposite: the homespun now joined all on an equal footing in a manufacturing economy. And it prepared them for sovereignty by tying together their individual efforts through an ethos of vita activa that abolished, or at least suggested the abolition of, what had heretofore been an axiomatic division of humanity between the polite classes and the meaner sorts. As such, it was a most practical expression of what Thomas Jefferson would soon call the equality of all men.21	22
Nor did concerns about luxury and admonitions toward frugality abate after independence. In fact, they escalated. Sovereignty brought Americans face to face with their republican revolution, and questions about how to institutionalize public happiness only assumed greater urgency. The homespun ideal proved no less relevant in the 1780s than it had twenty years earlier in searching for the answers. In the wake of a huge influx of British goods, there were calls to renew the pre-war boycott of British imports. Chastisements of the citizenry for "fluttering about in foreign dress" were common. In Philadelphia, the fashion-conscious fop was a subject of scorn,	23
His scarlet coat, that ev'ry one may see,
Mark and observe and know the fool is he,
With buttons garnish'd, sparkling in a row
On sleeves and breasts and skirts to make a show.
Timothy Dwight opened his patriotic verse Greenfield Hill by comparing American simplicity to European pretense and locating the former in that	24
Farmer plain,
Intent to gather honest gain . . .
In solid homespun clad, and tidy.22
Matthew Carey's American Museum filled up with notices from Patriotic and Economical Associations around the country addressing "those ladies, who used to excel in dress, . . . [to] endeavor to set the best example, by laying aside their richest silks, and superfluous decorations [and] dress their persons in the plainest manner." The exhortations to plainness and sacrifice seemed to borrow verbatim from the previous generation's virtuous rhetoric. "No tax," the New-York Gazette and General Advertiser declared in discouraging women from adopting the new European fashions, "is more unreasonable and oppressive than that of Fashion." Or, as appeared elsewhere: "Surely the man who is clothed in American manufactures, which he wears for the sake of enriching his native country, and relieving his fellow citizens, may be allowed to have some claims to patriotism, which is the most honorable garb that can be worn." Public spinning matches were reinstituted. "Œconomy and Household Industries" were back in vogue. Tench Coxe promised that American manufactures would lead the country "once more, into the paths of virtue, by restoring frugality and industry, those potent antidotes to the vices of mankind, and will give us real independence by rescuing us from the tyranny of foreign fashions, and the destructive torrent of luxury."23	25
But Coxe, the assistant secretary of the treasury, was no longer remonstrating against the king's ministers. He was nation building. And his good friend Matthew Carey was doing the same in proposing that all federal officers take an oath to perform their official duties "dressed principally in the manufactures of the united states." Carey actually called for the institution of a national costume. "We do not count it an honour to imitate the forms of government that prevail in Europe—why should we think it honorable to imitate the fashion of their coats!" A distinctly American dress would attach citizens to each other by forging a common identity, especially important since so much of American culture was inherited from a corrupted England.24	26
Carey did not describe what such national dress would look like, but his was not an entirely quixotic concern. From across the political spectrum, Thomas Paine also exhorted Americans to cease being "the servile copyists of foreign manners, fashions, and vices." The creation of a republican system of government clearly required the establishment of a commensurate civic culture. And so, when the Virginia state legislature commissioned a sculpture of Washington from Jean- Antoine Houdon in the 1790s, a debate erupted over the subject's costume. An earlier commission by Congress of a statue of Washington had already resulted in a figure draped in classical robes. But Benjamin West now advised Houdon to dress Washington in contemporary garb. This would not only satisfy the emergent Romantic sensibility in the arts but would articulate a recognizably American point of view. In comparison, the new French republic had commissioned a design for a national uniform from Jacques-Louis David that was supposed to be a sartorial representation of the new civic status of its citoyens. David submitted a thoroughly un-modern amalgam of Renaissance silhouettes, medieval guild motifs, and classical drapery. His hybrid idealization of virtuous pasts apparently satisfied French notions of the republican present: the Committee of Public Safety distributed 20,000 engraved copies of David's proposal throughout the country. American republicans looked elsewhere for inspiration in inventing their public life. Washington himself endorsed West's recommendation to Houdon and wrote to Jefferson, in questioning the togas popularly invoked to symbolize civic virtue, that a "servile adherence to the garb of antiquity might not be altogether so expedient." It was now necessary, rather, to face the "new realities of republican life."25	27
This is exactly what Washington did at his first inauguration, where his appearance excited considerable public comment. The Gazette of the United States wrote: "The President of the United States . . . appeared dressed in a complete suit of homespun cloaths; but the cloth was of so fine a Fabric, and so Handsomely finished, that it was universally mistaken for a foreign manufactured superfine cloth. His excellency the Vice President, appears also in a suit of American Manufacture and several members of both Houses are distinguished by the same token of attention to the manufacturing interest of their country."26 Washington had recently visited the Hartford Woolen Company on a tour of New England. The company was a highly touted manufacturing project and the subject of adulation by patriots and the state of Connecticut, which exempted it from taxation. While there, Washington solicited a sample of their best cloth. This was then made up into the suit he so purposefully wore for the inaugural ceremonies, together with American-made silk stockings and plain silver shoe buckles.27	28
The most significant aspect of Washington's sartorial embrace of the "new realities of republican life" was the fact that the Hartford Company's commercial output was assigned the same homespun status as the coarse product of the householder's wheel and loom, flock of sheep, and patch of flax. That equation underlined what had been implicit during more than two decades of homespun politics—"domestic" had a dual meaning, simultaneously connoting the household and the nation. Popular sovereignty, of course, was based on the same equation of household and nation. As in the past, it was homespun that gave material tangibility to such abstract notions.	29
All sorts of arrangements fell under this rubric. The appearance in Philadelphia's grand Federal Procession on July 4, 1788, of a Mrs. Hewson, together with her four daughters, all attired in homespun cottons under the auspices of the city's Manufacturing Society, was one. The Hartford Company was another. So were the several hundred spinning wheels put under William Molineux's charge in 1770, Molineux being a leader of Boston's non-importation campaign, which had consequently produced so much yarn it became necessary to expand the project into an integrated cloth "apparatus" of warping and twisting mills, weaving looms, a furnace, hot and cold presses for finishing the goods, and a complete dyehouse with a large assortment of dyestuffs—a proto-factory based on mechanical innovations, such as one that allowed two boys to keep fifty looms supplied with yarn. These same patriot proponents of domestic manufacture had also made concerted efforts to secure a working model of James Hargreaves's spinning jenny in the years before independence. Meanwhile, the traditional household remained a locus of economic activity. Alexander Hamilton was the first to recognize the centrality of "family manufactures" to his post-independence development plans. The family's ability to clothe itself, he wrote in his seminal Report on Manufactures in 1791, was important "both in a moral and political view." Flax became a specific subject of federal encouragement precisely because of its role in household industry. "The ease, with which the materials can be produced at home to any requisite extent—the great advances, which have already been made, in the coarser fabrics of them, especially in the family way, constitute claims, of peculiar force, to the patronage of government."28	30
But manufacturing societies and woolen companies were ultimately not the same thing as households, and the axiomatic unity of all forms of domestic industry began to unravel. The end of the revolution's homespun ideology was discernible in the flurry of republican pageants—rife with imagery and symbol—by which Americans celebrated their new political order.	31
Boston's official reception for the president in the fall of 1789 was a testament to revolutionary maxims. A military troop led the town's public procession. They were followed by town, county, and state officials, clergymen, and representatives of the professions. These notables were given no fanfares. They appeared without the accompaniment of a scarlet liveried guard, in telling contrast to monarchical British practice. Even more significant, however, was what followed, for marching behind them were Boston's tradesmen. These representatives of productive vigor and the common classes were, thanks to their homespun status, full participants in Washington's reception rather than the passive onlookers of yore. They marched in forty-six separate groups, organized by trades arranged in alphabetical order, from bakers to wheelwrights. Their presence turned the event into a popular demonstration of "industry and economy." True, each trade's representatives marched in a strict hierarchy of masters, journeymen, and apprentices, but this was indicative of corporate mutuality, certainly not yet of any class division.	32
In New York City, that same year, another procession "in honor of the Constitution of the United States" took to the streets. It, too, celebrated productive effort and located the citizen-craftsman at the center of the new political order. But in New York, this was done in entirely different terms than those that guided the thinking in Boston. In New York, gentlemen of the bar, merchants and traders, the president and students of the college, clergy, physicians, and militia officers all marched. However, they took their place at the rear of the procession. At the front was the requisite military detachment. Behind the artillery pieces marched foresters attired in their work frocks, carrying axes. Then a figure representing Columbus appeared, recognizable by his antique dress. More foresters followed, and after them, in order, came a plow, a sower, a harrow, farmers, and gardeners. Once the land was thus symbolically cleared and the most basic subsistence ensured, the tailors came marching, suppliers of the other elemental necessity of raiment. And so it was that in New York, too, all the trades were conspicuous participants in the new social order. This was not, however, in the static, neutral terms of Boston's alphabetization, but in a highly dynamic recounting of the material history of America, from European discovery to the present republican apotheosis. The procession narrated a story of progress, from pristine primitiveness, through productive effort, to the flowering of republican civilization as represented in the respectable personages at the rear of the parade. This was no less than a political economy acted out along Broadway.29	33
In spite of its conscious republican schema and embrace of the victorious homespun ethos, Boston's procession already represented an anachronism. The street drama in New York advanced a different homespun narrative, one recognizing that the same industriousness that had turned a savage wilderness into a bucolic middle landscape showed no signs of abetting. This was an America, as Hector St. John de Crevecoeur observed, where "the idle may be employed, the useless become useful, and the poor become rich." Thus, for instance, what excited the most comment about Washington's homespun costume at his inauguration was not its domestic provenance per se but the quality of the American-made woolen, "so handsomely finished, that it was universally mistaken for a foreign manufactured superfine cloth."30	34
The virtuous opposition between coarse and fine showed signs of fraying. Political sovereignty and the developing market destabilized homespun's meaning, pulling "industry" and "frugality" apart into separate, and even opposing, categories. The success in replacing imports with home manufactures now rested on the latter's relative fineness. John Chester, one of Hamilton's correspondents, wrote auspiciously from Connecticut that the state's more substantial farmers and mechanics had begun to wear Sunday dress made up at home. The improved quality of such manufactures, it was hoped, meant that the practice would become more common. "An American Farmer" could likewise still proudly declaim that in America there were none of "the works of luxury [and] the gorgeous temples" that characterized a decadent Europe. Underneath this familiar lexicon, however, was an altered grammar. "Those degrees of improvements will appear in time," was the happy prediction, once Americans removed more trees and cleared more swamps. The difference was that in America, unlike Europe, the effort would not benefit "greedy landlords" but, instead, the toilers themselves. Similar indications of the changing meaning of homespun virtue were also discernible in Royall Tyler's play The Contrast, the "first dramatic production of a citizen of the United States," staged in New York in 1787. Tyler, John Adams's not-so-favorite son-in-law, created a plot centering on the familiar opposition between the fashionable, self-centered Billy Dimple and the austere, upright Colonel Manly, who, characteristically, continued to dress in his wartime regimentals. Nevertheless, Tyler's contrast was no longer as stark or as elementary as it had once been. For while the foppish Dimple could never be a model of republican civility, Tyler suggested that Manly's naïve and even puerile self-abnegation promised no better a basis for responsible self-government. It was no longer so obvious with whom society's future best lay.31	35
The homespun had never been a utopian protest, frozen in time. Its prosaic, historical nature, in fact, was the key to its success as a symbol of the revolution. And that history, as New York's Constitutional Procession demonstrated, was now a distinctly linear narrative of commercial advance. Homespun augured progress. True, Franklin assigned it to "the first Ages of the world." However, that was in relation to European finery. Aboriginal status really belonged to the animal skins of Indians, whose atavism was measured precisely by their lack of a cloth-making tradition. Jefferson, who, in his Notes on the State of Virginia of 1787, famously opposed all manufacturing, including the household kind, as a mortal threat to American virtue—"Let us never wish to see our citizens occupied . . . twirling a distaff"—lectured the Cherokee chiefs as president in 1806 on the civilizing value of spinning and weaving their own cotton cloths. By 1812, on the eve of another shooting war with England that had grown out of a trade conflict, Jefferson reconciled with John Adams on the basis of a homespun vision of commercial progress. As Jefferson wrote back to Massachusetts:	36
I thank you . . . for the specimens of homespun you have been so kind as to forward me by post. I doubt not their excellence, knowing how far you are advanced in these things in your quarter. Here we do little in the fine way, but in coarse and middling goods a great deal. Every family in the country is a manufactory within itself, and is very generally able to make within itself all the stouter and middling stuffs for it's own cloathing and household use . . . For fine stuff we shall depend on your Northern manufactures . . . The economy and thriftiness resulting from our household manufactures are such that they will never again be laid aside.32
This homespun was the same old celebration of productive energies and national improvement. It was still intended to mediate between material and political progress. However, the balance it now struck reflected a new kind of middle landscape, one in which luxury and virtue were no longer implacably opposed. That, for instance, was how the self-consciously refined members of the exclusive Sans Souci club in Boston countered familiar charges of "luxury, prodigality, and profligacy" directed against them by Sam Adams and other revolutionary veterans in 1785. Their cultural ambitions no longer signaled moral decline, they argued, but rather an ascent from primitivism to civilization.33 Such logic was entirely consistent with the homespun's desiderata of production and national improvement. Indeed, luxuries could now become the best proof of liberty's success. "If you wish to separate commerce from luxury," a supporter of the Sans Souci wrote in referring to the dismal alternative in the Boston Observer, "you expect an impossibility; let us break the bands of society, refuse all connection with the arts and sciences which live under the patronage of commerce and retire to the woods; let us learn of the savages simplicity of life, to forget humanity, and cut each other's throats without remorse."34	37
What's more, in the new terms of this old debate, homespun admonitions toward frugality now often served to freeze the social order and stem the democratic tide. When hard-strapped farmers in western Massachusetts protested in favor of tax relief, debtor protection, and greater amounts of circulating currency, their political opponents countered with apocryphal stories about thrifty farmers succumbing to (their wives') taste for silk and porcelain, which had subsequently bankrupted them. "Luxury and extravagance, both in furniture and dress"—thus Abigail Adams analyzed the causes of Shays's Rebellion. Concern for public virtue, in other words, expressed conservatives' wariness of the ambitions of the less propertied. As Adam Smith explained, once "luxury" was accessible to the lowest ranks of society, "the labouring poor will not now be contented with the same food, clothing, and lodging which satisfied them in former times." The problem with luxury, a conservative complained, was that it confounded "every Distinction between the Poor and the Rich, [allowing] people of the very meanest parentages . . . if fortune be but a little favorable to them [to] vie to make themselves equal in apparel with the principle people of the place."35 This was ironic mimicry of Franklin's plaint from half a century earlier about "Crowds of Imitators who . . . endeavor after a similitude of Manners." The republican creed of government by the disinterested and uncorrupted was now threatened by the same industriousness and self-exertion Franklin had considered to be the best safeguard against such corruption and social confusion in 1728. Franklin, in fact, supported the Sans Souci in the Boston cause célèbre. Others did not so easily update their homespun axioms to the new times. College orators debated "Whether Sumptuary Laws ought to be established in the United States?" A last historic attempt at legislative prescriptions on dress—a vestige of a political order when social arrangements rested on containing the effects of commerce, rather than vice versa—was actually made at the Constitutional Convention, where George Mason protested "the extravagance of our manners . . . and the necessity of restricting it." The convention appointed a committee to report on the question. It never did. Certainly, no such initiative found its way into the Constitution, which not only assumed that political sovereignty resided in the independent households of propertied citizens but also recognized the self-interested nature of their industrious independence. Popular government was thus tied to material improvement, as the use of homespun had long signaled.36	38
By the time New York's Society for the Promotion of Useful Arts endorsed the importation of high quality merino sheep in 1807—so that American cloth manufacturers, the vast majority still working in the family, would have an improved raw material during the embargo—the postrevolutionary transformation of homespun ideology was complete. The independence of American farmers, the society declared, is what made it possible for them to advance beyond the mere necessities of life and to aspire to life's "conveniences and comforts." ("Conveniences and superfluities" were what Franklin denounced as inimical to homespun liberty in 1766.) "Such men will take pride and pleasure in being dressed in clothes whose softness and pliancy give warmth to the body, pleasure to the touch, and grace to the wearer. And they will be doubly proud of this, if it is the product of their own farms, and of the industry of their wives and daughters."37 Americans, in other words, still wore too many foreign clothes, and only their own industry could wean them of the bad habit. But such efforts should now result in prosperity, not frugality. "Softness," "pleasure," and "grace"—no longer "the coarseness of a homespun shirt"—were the basis of a proper civic life.	39
By the end of the second decade of the new century, it was clear that the industrial production of cloth no longer required the household. The homespun era was officially over.38 The relationship between republican politics and clothing, however, was not. In a commodifying world, in fact, material considerations could only be expected to assume a greater role in the political imagination. Accordingly, in 1829, the new president, Andrew Jackson, issued instructions to American diplomats to appear in foreign capitals attired in proper civic costume. Jacksonian sartorial propriety was defined by its "comparative cheapness" and by its "adaptation to the simplicity of our institutions." The president prescribed a black coat, either a black or white vest, a three-cornered chapeau bras, and a sword to be worn in a white scabbard. The costume certainly struck a polite, even dignified, appearance. Its ideological provocation issued from the fact that foreign governments required the diplomatic corps to dress at court not only in a dignified manner but in the martial regalia of the monarchical aesthetic. The only ornamentation Jackson allowed was a single gold star affixed to the bottom of each coat collar.	40
Adoption of a civic costume was not directed just at European ostentation. It was no less a remonstration against what the Jacksonian considered to have been the aristocratic predilections of previous administrations that had approved a diplomatic uniform consistent with foreign manners: a blue coat lined with white silk, a gold-embroidered cape with cuffs to match, white cassimere breeches, gold knee buckles, white silk stockings, and gold or gilt shoe buckles. The new directive, in other words, far from being a curiosity, was an element of Jackson's democratic program for American politics. Indeed, the issue had arisen during the fierce presidential campaign of the year before when a young congressman, James Buchanan, delivered a diatribe in the House of Representatives aimed at the sartorial habits of American diplomats posted abroad. He berated the ridiculous spectacle of American ministers "bedizened in all the colors of the rainbow." American manners, Buchanan insisted in rhetoric reminiscent of revolutionary proclamations, "ought to be congenial to the simplicity and dignity of our institutions. In every attempt to ape the splendor of the representatives of monarchical Governments, we must fail."39	41
Twenty-five years later, Buchanan himself was the American ambassador to the Court of St. James when the diplomatic dress code reemerged as the subject of ideological polemic. In 1853, William Marcy, the secretary of state in Franklin Pierce's new administration, issued a circular ordering American ministers in foreign capitals to appear at court in "the simple dress of an American citizen." Such a presentation was thought to best express their "devotion to republican institutions." Again, the pronouncements were intended principally for domestic consumption. Letters of support poured into the State Department from all over the country, or so it was reported. The New York Herald, contemptuous of a foreign policy carried out by symbols and gestures, nevertheless recognized the measure of public approbation "from Cape Cod to California" that Marcy's patriotic self-flattery was sure to elicit. And, in fact, one such expression could be read the same day in the pages of the New York Post, which applauded Marcy's contribution to the creation of a "national individuality." An American minister abroad, the Post elaborated, "should be an American; he should look like an American, talk like an American, and be an American example." The nativism was palpable, but so was the familiar grammar of homespun virtue, for the Post defined such an American national identity as resting, first and foremost, on the rejection of livery and all other badges of "servility," "barbarity," and personal dependence characteristic of despotism and markedly absent from the American style of governance.40	42
In London, James Buchanan was given the opportunity to practice the sartorial fidelity to republican principles he had so fervently preached a generation earlier. He did not disappoint. "A minister of the United States should . . . wear something more in character with our democratic institutions than a coat covered with embroidery and gold lace," he wrote to Marcy in February 1854, after his absence at Parliament's opening—necessitated by his refusal to wear court costume—was noticed by all the London papers and had provoked the threat of an official inquiry in the House of Commons. In fact, Buchanan had been negotiating with Sir Edward Cust, master of ceremonies, since the previous October in search of a compromise that would satisfy his instructions while respecting the exalted character of the queen, "both as a sovereign and a lady." One tentative solution allowed Buchanan to appear at court in the same attire he wore to the president's levees in Washington, with the single addition of a black-handled, black-hilted dress sword whose monochrome plainness made it "more manly and less gaudy." Victoria, however, took umbrage at Buchanan's pantaloons, and a different arrangement had to be found. Someone suggested to Buchanan that he adopt for this purpose the civilian dress worn by President Washington. No one could question its republican authenticity. At the same time, such an anachronistic appearance would satisfy the court's sumptuary bias toward the mock heroic. Buchanan considered the idea,	43
but after examining Stewart's portrait, at the house of a friend, I came to the conclusion that it would not be proper for me to adopt this costume. I observed, "fashions had so changed since the days of Washington, that if I were to put on his dress and appear in it before the chief magistrate of my own country, at one of his receptions, I should render myself a subject of ridicule for life."41
It was a telling observation. The fact is, Marcy's paean to "the simple dress of an American citizen," for all its banal symbolism, touched on fundamental questions about political life in an industrial age. It was not enough to flatter the United States by comparison to a decadent Europe, or even democracy to monarchy (and here Buchanan's description of the "democratic" nature of republican simplicity finally made explicit what the homespun ideology had long intimated). American democratic identity had to rest on the country's own political inheritance, that "simple and unostentatious course which was deemed so proper, and was so much approved in the earliest days of the republic," as Marcy described it in his circular. Franklin—"our first and most distinguished representative at a royal court"—was promoted to archetype: he had purportedly (contemporary accounts are conflicted) appeared at Versailles in plain dress devoid of embroidery, and even in his own hair, not a wig. But just as no one in 1853 could wear Franklin's high-waisted coat and knee breeches, so the "simple and unostentatious" politics of virtue of his times had to be adapted to a new social and material reality.42	44
There was no lack of sartorial images of civic virtue available in the mid-nineteenth century. The Nation, synopsizing "the Great Dress Question" in 1867, when the issue yet again erupted into political controversy, correctly observed that "the 'simple dress of an American citizen' is, of course, a very vague term inasmuch as it includes all varieties of costume from full evening dress down to shirt sleeves and homespun pantaloons."43 In fact, every such variation was in evidence. An 1835 statue of Hamilton erected at the exchange on Wall Street depicted him in contemporary eighteenth-century garb and then wrapped him in an outer layer of classical drapery, a medley that made Hamilton a son of 1776 while according his revolutionary times a transcendent status based on classical Roman provenance.44 The same iconographical strategy was evidenced in the engraved frontispiece of J. Franklin Reigart's United States Album, which featured Washington on a steeply elevated pedestal standing before a craggy wilderness, dressed in a hunting shirt—which had its own virtuous associations from the revolutionary era, not to mention an obvious pertinence to nineteenth-century continental expansion—over which, as with Hamilton, classical robes were draped.45 There was, perhaps, no more telling metaphor for the transition from an agrarian to an industrial world than the incongruity of these separate layers, but this was a style of dress better suited to statuary than to citizens going about their daily business. In the rest of Reigart's United States Album, an image-laden testament to national identity published in 1844, a more practical range of sartorial symbols was on display. The peruser could find inspiration in Maine's state seal, depicting a sailor and farmer standing side by side, attired in their respective working denims and linseys; or in Indiana's pioneer, stripped to his waist while felling trees in clearing the prairie; or in Kentucky's two fastidiously groomed gentlemen dressed in morning coats and closely tailored pantaloons, clasping each other's hand in civic affection amidst a well-appointed interior of books, Doric columns, and plush sofas; or in Massachusetts's half-naked Indian warrior, undressed not as a result of strenuous labor like the Indiana pioneer but as testament to his antediluvian innocence.46	45
"The 'simple dress of an American citizen' is, of course, a very vague term inasmuch as it includes all varieties of costume from full evening dress down to shirt sleeves and homespun pantaloons." Thus explained The Nation in 1867. J. Franklin Reigart had already illustrated that range of sartorial virtue in his United States Album, Embellished with the Arms of Each State (Lancaster City, Pa., 1844), four of which appear here. Courtesy of the Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection, Winterthur, Delaware.
What the Indian, the working man, the pioneer, and the civilized bourgeois shared were distinct roles in the nation's material history. Each represented a stage in America's march to industrial greatness, as New York's Constitutional Procession had first displayed it sixty years earlier. Progress had been great indeed. In seeking to prove that industry could no longer be sustained by the agrarian republic, Niles's Weekly Register devoted most of a single issue in 1817 to showing that agricultural production fell $128,459,000 short in paying the costs of clothing and feeding the nation, the same two criteria of sovereignty applied by revolutionary patriots fifty years earlier when Benjamin Rush proclaimed that "a people who are entirely dependent upon foreigners for food or clothes must always be subject to them." A generation later, in 1840, Hunt's Merchant's Magazine happily declared that "the art of household manufacture is fast being totally lost." The farmer was now entirely dependent on the city manufacturer for his garments. In place of a neighborhood division of the labor of spinners, weavers, fullers, and tailors, a transcontinental specialization of farmers, factories, and middlemen had arisen. This gave birth to a clothing industry led by innumerable "new men" coordinating a transatlantic market in cloth, a continental market in credit, and a metropolitan market in labor. "Aided by cheap and rapid communication with all parts of the country . . . with all the advantages of large capital and machinery, [clothiers] supply every town and village with ready-made clothing, at the lowest prices." This was how the federal census of 1860 presented the meteoric rise of what had become one of the country's biggest businesses. Ever attentive to the relationship between the social and sartorial, it went on to note that "the manufacture and sale of clothing [is] a branch of trade which is everywhere directly dependent upon the progress of wealth and refinement."47	46
And so, if Americans still measured their greatness "by the comparative lack of elevation of any one man above the rest," as Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed they did, this leveling now took place not on the coarse, homemade terms of homespun but on those of a fine suit of factory-manufactured (and usually imported) broadcloth, cut in a modern style (invariably originating in London or Paris) and organized into a continental system of clothing wholesalers and merchant tailors. In "the age of mechanical philosophy, of general physical comfort, and productive industry," as Hunt's defined the ultimate epoch in the progress of civilized nations, sartorial virtue was no longer a paean to scarcity and self-sacrifice but to industrial plenty and cultural refinement, and to that refinement's availability to all citizens. Thus Reverend Henry W. Bellows delivered an oration on "The Moral Significance of the Crystal Palace," where an Exhibition of Industry of All Nations opened in New York City in 1853: "Luxury is debilitating and demoralizing only when it is exclusive . . . The peculiarity of the luxury of our time, and especially of our country, is its diffusive nature; it is the opportunity and the aim of large masses of our people; and this happily unites it with industry, equality, and justice." Public happiness was attained not by means of frugality but by its opposite, mass production. This was an "industrial luxury," a middle landscape for the new century, which, no less than the homespun before it, was supposed to include all citizens. "Now the interests of everyone are all intertwined together," as Hunt's celebrated the industrial division of labor that brought an end to household manufacturing.48	47
There was nothing strange, therefore, when the New York merchant tailor George P. Fox declared his ambition "to adorn the Doric simplicity of American principles by the inimitable grace and elegance of an appropriate cosmopolitan costume," or when Putnam's Magazine proclaimed in 1857 that "we reject the Spartan theory of republican life which simply leads us back to the barbarities of Spartan or Puritan despotism." The same 1860 census, whose manufacturing schedule was actually published in 1865 as an ex post facto validation of northern industrial greatness, accordingly described the homespun practices of the past as "a compulsory frugality" forced on colonists by the "straitened pecuniary means of the underdeveloped state of all domestic arts."49 "Without fashion," the men's tailoring journal Mirror of Fashion insisted, echoing Franklin during the Sans Souci controversy, "commerce would be reduced from a wealthy giant to a sickly lilliputian." And so, Horace Greeley reviewed the industrial exhibition at New York's Crystal Palace and concluded that "every sober mechanic has his one or two suits of broadcloth, and, so far as mere clothes go, can make as good a display, when he chooses, as what are called the upper classes." The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, Greeley's partisan rivals, called that achievement no less than "revolutionary." "Articles of clothing are now at the command of the lowest members of society, which, but a century since, were scarcely within the reach of crowned heads." The first thing that attracted one's attention upon arriving in New York, a Welsh immigrant wrote in 1844, were the city's people, "all so neatly and comfortably clad." "The stranger is involuntarily led to enquire," he continued, as to "where are the working classes—the tattered and half-fed, miserable-looking starvelings . . . of his native land." The American contrast with Europe was no less dramatic—or flattering—than it had been a century before. However, now America offered plenty, while Europe was identified with scarcity.50	48
It was a distinctly democratic plenty. The Mirror of Fashion wrote: "Even in Paris—'the city of taste,'—par excellence, there are not more persons that wear coats, than in [New York]." And that, in fact, was the point Marcy wanted to make in dressing the country's diplomats in the "simple dress of an American citizen." For in so doing, he proclaimed that in America the common man was king, and popular taste ruled. Fashion was not handed down from the social elites to a sycophantic public. Rather, in the United States, as the Englishman Thomas Gratton wrote after a visit, everyone was, "as might be said, 'his own gentleman' [and] there is no standard for them, from the want of a permanent class in society to be looked up to and imitated." This was the difference between the "freaks and follies of foreign fancy," as the Mirror of Fashion defined European manners, and those fashions "strictly consonant with American feelings and predilections" that issued from the bottom up, like social power in general.51	49
Those feelings and predilections were to be espied in Cornelius Mathews's "Man in the Republic" (1843),	50
With plainness in thy daily pathway walk—
And disencumbered of excess.52
"Excess," however, was not entirely banished from American life. In fact, it now proved immanent to the female condition. In the era of ready-made virtue, women's dress became uniquely identified with corrupting pretense: the hoop skirt, for example, embodied encumbering artifice in much the same way that wigs had in the eyes of homespun patriots a century earlier. Both men and women, however, had worn wigs. Only women wore hoop skirts. And so, the "bug bear—fashion" no longer divided aristocrat and republican but, rather, women and men. This was a pointed instance of how sex replaced class as the great social divide in industrial democracies, disguising the asymmetrical nature of power in societies that otherwise promoted equality as a tenet of political life.53 In 1828, Sarah Hale had actually sought to ally her new Lady's Book with the Jacksonian dress campaign, pledging to keep fashion plates out of its pages. Fashion was a European blight, the Lady's Book declared, unsuited to American life. Hale apparently aspired to tie female politesse to national virtue, in the same way that middle-class men were developing a sartorial aesthetic of "republican simplicity" to consolidate their civic status. However, she failed. Within two years, Hale's magazine was regularly featuring the latest styles from London and Paris, and women's dress was becoming an inverted reflection of male citizenship.54	51
Nineteenth-century dress reform consequently addressed female irrationality. The best-known campaign promoted a costume named in 1851 for the reform activist Amelia Bloomer. It heightened the skirt to avoid dragging in the filth of the streets (long skirts, like tight lacing, were an old subject of reform protest). More to the point, it replaced the voluminous underskirts with pantaloons gathered at the ankle, or a little above. Skirt and pants were to be made of the same materials. The "Bloomer" appeared at the end of a decade of escalating physical constriction in woman's fashions and was designed to forge a new, truer relationship between a woman and her dress and, as a consequence, a more rational relationship to the world at large. Elizabeth Cady Stanton embraced the innovation, after having witnessed her Bloomer-clad cousin, "with a lamp in one hand, a baby in the other, walk upstairs, with ease and grace, while, with flowing robes, I pulled myself up with difficulty, lamp and baby out of the question."55	52
Stanton and her cousin, Elizabeth Miller, like Bloomer, were all active campaigners for women's equal rights, and the new costume was an explicit expression of their feminism. As Susan B. Anthony asserted, "I can see no business avocation, in which woman in her present dress can possibly earn equal wages with man." Amelia Bloomer wrote in The Lily, which she edited, that the new outfit was ideally suited for women who were active and did their own housework. "We wash and iron, bake and brew, cook and wash dishes, make beds and sweep the house, etc.etc., and we find the short dress much more convenient than the long one." Flowing robes, Bloomer continued, could only appear graceful on women who solely struck poses. The argument had a distinctly homespun inflection. Indeed, the non-feminist Ladies Wreath described the Bloomer as "a dress altogether American and unique in its character, distinguished from any of those imported from abroad by its surpassing neatness and simplicity." And certainly, the cultural perfectionism that motivated these reformers could be compared, if not actually traced, to the ascetic self-sacrifice of the non-importation crusades of the previous century, when daughters of the genteel classes foreswore their English tea and silks. Proponents of the Bloomer were engaged in a similar sartorial politics directed against the corruptions of fashion. Their dress reform, it was accordingly declared, would obviate "distinctions of physical force, birth and rank . . . and [things] fashionable, aristocratic, and European."56	53
But that was precisely the problem. For, in telling contrast to the homespun era, attempts by women in the industrial age to adopt a dress of virtuous protest required them to don male attire. And wearing trousers—the sole right of men, as contemporaries repeatedly proclaimed—bordered on "pantaloonery."57 Thus the Ladies Wreath, despite its enthusiasm for such a uniquely virtuous American dress, still refused to endorse it. A costume that made it easier for women to walk would allow them to walk away from their duties. Peterson's Magazine observed that women lost all their natural grace when dressed in attire designed for a man's straightforward gait. Harper's conjured up a dystopian future in which women proposed marriage to men. Others warned that Wellingtons, canes, and even cigars were not far off.	54
Women, in other words, had no way to participate in sartorial virtue without betraying their nature. That is not to say they did not have a virtuous nature, only that it was a private one, now disconnected from questions of political economy and civic life represented in republican dress. Appropriately enough, there was no mass production of ready-mades for women before the Civil War. And, in fact, Godey's Lady's Book, the leading proponent of women using fashion to define a separate sphere for themselves, paid only scant attention to the whole Bloomer issue, hoping it would go away, which it soon did.58	55
Men's industrial-age appearance, on the other hand, was successfully tied to a tradition of virtuous simplicity. The Scientific American wrote: "The fine arts flourish best amidst a luxurious people, where wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few . . . Objects of utility rather than objects of ornate ability, are the characteristics of American genius." In contrast to women's ornate nature, men dressed in a style of linear utility and monochrome plainness. An explosion in measuring and drafting technologies after 1820 turned the male body into a subject of rationalization and profit. Utility, in fact, proved to be the bridge from republican simplicity to industrial abundance: it tied men's raiment to the progress of the age. The Mirror of Fashion explained:	56
We have made great improvements in dress since the days of the Toga; but then we should not forget that the main argument in favor of the personal appearance of the moderns, is utility. Our dress being mathematically cut, discloses the shape of the figure, and yields to the conveniences of locomotion without restraint to limb, muscle, or joint, and yet without the inconvenience of carrying a surplus of cloth.
Marcy's "simple dress of an American citizen," in short, turned out to be what, at mid-century, contemporaries had begun to call "business dress"—daytime wear known for its convenience, comfort, and lack of pretension. And so, we find a business directory in 1855 describing the era's "self-made" man in terms dis-tinctly reminiscent of Franklin's "homespun dress of Honesty": "They need no golden helmet or other blazon of wealth to win them the public gaze; in the shock of the conflict, fierce though friendly, the unknown knight, with his plain unostentatious black armor, without page or esquire, proved himself the victorious champion."59	57
Not everyone was happy with this transformation. Nathaniel Willis, the self-appointed copywriter for New York's Upper Tendom, complained that he lived in a "nation of black coats." It was little wonder, he lamented, that his fastidious British friends characterized Broadway as "a procession of undertakers." Willis, with his neo-Federalist suspicions of the nouveau riche and other self-made types, recognized that just because no elite was dictating fashions, that did not mean there was no dictatorial control over appearance. Indeed, if, as Thomas Grattan claimed, each American was "his own gentleman," then why did they look so much the same?60	58
It was the question Tocqueville had asked, and then answered with his famous discovery that democratic community rested on each individual's anxious pursuit of his own material interest. For some, this was an unhappy situation. It led Horace Bushnell to protest the commercial saturation of life, in a centenary oration delivered in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1851, which he entitled "The Age of Homespun." According to Bushnell, the age of homespun was a simpler, more virtuous time, free of the perpetual accumulation and striving of the present age. And it was here, in Bushnell's rendering of homespun as the antipode of modern industry, that the capitalist inversion of republicanism was completed.	59
Bushnell described an older world of work and modesty. It was an age, he claimed, when housewives made coats for children, sons built stone fences, and millers took an honest toll of rye. It was a time characterized by the "beautiful simplicity of nature." "Primitive and simple in their character . . . intelligent without refinement," homespun was the opposite of "all the polite fictions and empty conventionalities of the world." Bushnell reveled in a past in which people appreciated the true value of things because they produced them themselves. When no ready-made commodities were available, they knew just how much labor and effort were required to maintain their own material existence. "No mode of life was ever more expensive," he observed in sarcastic allusion to the bargain hunters of a wholesale age.61	60
The homespun, the original ideology of production, had thus become by the middle of the industrial century a protest against the fate of man's productive energies in a world where industry and frugality were no longer complementary. For Bushnell, however, such irony had little meaning. He propounded a collective memory of an era before "affectation of polite living [and] languishing airs of delicacy and softness in doors, had begun to make the fathers and sons impatient of hard work out of doors, and set them at contriving some easier and more plausible way of living."62 As such, whether or not his idealized "home factory" ever really existed in such a pristine form, it contained redemptive powers for a far more ambiguous age.	61
Bushnell's was not the only expression of homespun nostalgia. In a story entitled "Dependence: or, What Made One Woman Meanly Penurious," which appeared in the feminist journal Una in 1853, the heroine redeems her profligacy by rededicating herself to labor—in this case, to sewing, for no one seriously thought about spinning anymore63 —and to its corollary, the rejection of fashion. In fact, the homespun ideology now seemed to unite disparate malcontents in the era of industrial revolution. Brigham Young declared in virtuous defiance that "I would rather wear gray homespun than your fine broadcloth. I would as soon wear a good home-made coat as a coat of the finest cloth in the world." And the radical working-class Subterranean denounced the sophism of those who wore white silk gloves and gracefully lifted their hat upon meeting an acquaintance. It presented an alternative image of "true politeness": "The man who lays aside all selfishness, in regard to the happiness of others . . . is a polite man, although he may wear a homespun coat, and make a very ungraceful bow."64	62
However, none of the protesters could escape the dialectics of homespun ideology. Even Bushnell, who ignored homespun's actual role in the colonial exchange economy, had to acknowledge its relationship to market success:	63
It is because they have gone out in the wise economy of a simple, homespun training, expecting to get on in the world by merit and patience, and by a careful husbanding of small advances; secured in their virtue, by just that which makes their perseverance successful. For the men who see the great in the small, and go on to build the great by small increments, will commonly have an exact conscience too that beholds great principles in small things, and so will form a character of integrity.
This was the same ethos that guided the entrepreneur. "Although I realize only a small profit on each sale, the enlarged area of business thus secured makes possible a great accumulation of capital and assures the future," as A. T. Stewart explained his business success.65	64
Meanwhile, proponents of industrial revolution dismissed homespun as a distant memory. This is not to say they had forgotten its original importance to industry. "It was [British suppression of manufacturing], rather than taxation, that was the probable ground of the Revolution," as Hunt's Merchant's Magazine now interpreted the nation's founding impetus. "The colonists, simple in their habits of life, were contented to ride from farm to farm upon pillions, dressed in cloths woven from their own looms, and to acquire their subsistence between the handles of the plough." But the "progress of civilized nations" relegated homespun to the status of artifact. Its very antiquatedness, in fact, became a gauge of progress: homespun emerged as the negative reflection of productive achievement.66	65
This was most obvious in the escalating polemic between North and South. In his condemnatory travelogue of the Cotton Kingdom written on the eve of the Civil War, Frederick Law Olmsted quoted a letter from an Illinois farmer published in the New York Times that disapprovingly observed the backward condition of citizens in a slave society. "For the most part, the people of these regions manufacture all their every-day clothing, and their garments look as though they were made for no other purpose than to keep them warm and to cover their nakedness; beauty of colouring and propriety in fitting are little regarded." Likewise, Olmsted himself wondered how it was that while "in Ohio the spinning-wheel and hand-loom are curiosities, and homespun would be a conspicuous and noticeable material of clothing, half the white population of Mississippi still dress in homespun, and at every second house the wheel and loom are found in operation?"67	66
If there were any doubt left about homespun's contemporary identification with political reaction, one had only to observe how the coming of the war provoked a rush of enthusiasm for homespun throughout the South. When Carrie Long graduated from College Temple in Georgia in the spring of 1861, her class chose homespun as the material for their dresses. "The whole county praised the act." On that day, everybody was singing:	67
Hurrah, Hurrah! For the Southern girls, Hurrah!
Hurrah, for the homespun dresses that the Southern Ladies wear!
Another popular song was even closer to eighteenth-century origins:	68
My home-spun dress is plain; I know my hat's common too,
But then it shows what Southern girls for Southern rights will do.
The governor of Alabama was reported to have appeared in a suit of homespun made by a wife of one of the state's legislators, there being no better "practical illustration of Southern Independence."68	69
And so, homespun once again became a patriotic symbol of virtuous sacrifice in the face of a political and military threat posed by a corrupt economic giant. And while the homespun ideology thus tied the Confederacy to the original revolutionary impulse in a way the abolitionist Horace Bushnell would have had trouble explaining, or dismissing, the democratic North—which supplied its recruits with standard factory-issue blue kersey and flannels—had long since begun to buy its clothes at Brooks Brothers.69	70
Michael Zakim teaches American history at Tel Aviv University. The present essay, "Sartorial Ideologies," is part of a larger project, entitled "Ready-Made Democracy," which is a political history of men's dress in the United States during the first century of industrial revolution. "Ready-Made Democracy" was awarded Columbia University's Bancroft Dissertation Prize in 1998. Zakim is interested in the social history of American capitalism and particularly in the relationship between politics and material culture. His current research is focused on the making of the American middle class. Notes The author wishes to acknowledge the critical contributions of Eric Foner, Elizabeth Blackmar, and Richard Bushman to this essay. In addition, thanks are due to the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation for important financial support. Early versions of "Sartorial Ideologies" were presented to the Electronic Text Services Series of Columbia University, and at the Tzaharei Yom Gimel seminar of the School of History, Tel Aviv University. 1 For Gandhi's conviction that the khadi would bring "economic freedom and equality of all," see M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, Anthony J. Pavel, ed. (Cambridge, 1997), 173–74; Norbert Elias, "Etiquette and Ceremony: Conduct and Sentiment of Human Beings as Functions of the Power Structure of Their Society," in Elias, The Court Society, Edmund Jephcott, trans. (New York, 1983), 78–116; Daniel Purdy, The Tyranny of Elegance: Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe (Baltimore, 1998), 147–79. On the political role of dress in liberal democracies, see Stuart Ewen and Elizabeth Ewen, Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness (Minneapolis, 1992), 75–187; Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, Catherine Porter, trans. (Princeton, N.J., 1994); Philippe Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century, Richard Bienvenu, trans. (Princeton, 1994). For a more idiosyncratic, and insightful, rumination on the significance of clothing, see Peter Stallybrass, "Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning, and the Life of Things," Yale Review 81 (1993). 2 "Great transformation," of course, is borrowed from Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, 1944). Any similarity between Polanyi's book and this essay is intentional. 3 This and the following paragraph are based on Edmund Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1953), 86; Pennsylvania Chronicle, February 20, 1769; Boston Chronicle, March 28, April 4, 1768; Rush quoted in John F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776–1900 (New York, 1977), 9–10; William R. Bagnall, The Textile Industries of the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1893), 37–38, 58–59; Jack P. Greene, ed., Colonies to Nation: 1763–1789 (New York, 1967), 47; Boston Gazette, January 18, 1768; Alice Morse Earle, Two Centuries of Costume in America (New York, 1903), 741; Gail Gibson, "Costume and Fashion in Charleston, 1769–1782," South Carolina Historical Magazine 82, no. 3 (1981): 240; Patricia A. Cunningham and Susan Voso Lab, eds., Dress in American Culture (Bowling Green, Ohio, 1993), 191; Arthur Harrison Cole, The American Wool Manufacture (Cambridge, Mass., 1926), 61–62; Bruce Allan Ragsdale, "Nonimportation and the Search for Economic Dependence in Virginia, 1765–1775" (PhD dissertation, University of Virginia, 1985), 101, 137; Pennsylvania Gazette, July 19, 1770, May 12, 1768; Alice Morse Earle, Colonial Dames and Good Wives (Boston, 1900), 240–75; Elizabeth W. Smith, "A Reminiscence," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 46, no. 1 (1922): 55–56. 4 Brutus quoted in Greene, Colonies to Nation, 157; Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York, 1987), 505–06; Adams quoted in Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992), 16–17; Ferenz Fed