| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Ruthless Democracy: A Multicultural Interpretation of the American Renaissance. By Timothy B. Powell. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. vii, 227 pp. Cloth, $47.50, ISBN 0-691-00729-2. Paper, $15.95, ISBN 0-691-00730-6.)

This book follows the standard formula. The thesis: that American history is multicultural, not monocultural. The topic: generally, white violence (actual and discursive) upon nonwhites; specifically, the erasure of nonwhites and women by nineteenth-century writers. The argument: readings of selected canonical and noncanonical texts, with some historical context thrown in. The result: a mixture of tendentious description, derivative thinking, and quasi-moral interpretations of plots and characters. 1

Timothy B. Powell devotes chapters largely to six works and their historical setting: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851); Ireneo Paz, The Life and Adventures of the Celebrated Bandit, Joaquin Murrieta, translated by Frances P. Belle (1925); Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854); Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852); William Wells Brown, Clotel (1853); and Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851). Between the chapters he places "Historical Interludes" detailing events such as the 1786 murder of a Shawnee chief by soldiers, the 1848 founding of Liberia, and the 1840 census. The episodes of butchery and mayhem, of "cultural aphasia" and "the United States' conflicted will to empire," stack the deck such that every text becomes a parable of victimization. The parable is validated by citations of critics—"As so-and-so remarks," "So-and-so has argued"—who affirm the multiculturalist outlook and whom Powell treats as truth givers. . . .

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