Double Standards
Ralph Waldo Emerson wondered why New Yorkers elected to Congress the kind of man they would turn out of their own homes.
1860
Queen Victoria 1837-1901 James Buchanan, US President 1857-1861
‘Dandy Pickpockets Diving: Scene Near St James Palace’ (1818) by Isaac Robert Cruikshank.
By Isaac Robert Cruikshank (1789–1856), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.
‘Dandy Pickpockets Diving: Scene Near St James Palace’ by Isaac Robert Cruikshank (1789-1856), published in 1818, shows a gentleman and his lady window-shopping for prints, while two well-dressed men relieve the gentleman of his wallet. The broad thrust of Emerson’s essay, which was entitled Worship, was that politicians had dethroned God and left the public with nothing to believe in except today’s dollar and the politicians who promised them more dollars tomorrow. Such a morality coarsened politicians and the public alike, and corrupted the entire democratic system. See John Adams on A Moral and Religious People.
Introduction
American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson was unimpressed with the quality of the Representatives that the people of New York sent to Congress. They were the kind of men most people would banish from their homes, but New Yorkers were quite happy to send them to the House if it meant their Party secured a majority and dipped into the pork barrel.
HOW prompt the suggestion of a low motive! Certain patriots in England devoted themselves for years to creating a public opinion that should break down the corn-laws and establish free trade. “Well,” says the man in the street, “Cobden got a stipend out of it.”* Kossuth fled hither across the ocean to try if he could rouse the New World to a sympathy with European liberty.* “Aye,” says New York, “he made a handsome thing of it, enough to make him comfortable for life.”
See what allowance vice finds in the respectable and well-conditioned class. If a pickpocket intrude into the society of gentlemen, they exert what moral force they have, and he finds himself uncomfortable, and glad to get away. But if an adventurer go through all the forms, procure himself to be elected to a post of trust, as of senator, or president, — though by the same arts as we detest in the house-thief — the same gentlemen who agree to discountenance the private rogue, will be forward to show civilities and marks of respect to the public one: and no amount of evidence of his crimes will prevent them giving him ovations, complimentary dinners, opening their own houses to him, and priding themselves on his acquaintance.
* Richard Cobden was an English mill owner and MP for Rochdale who was widely celebrated in his lifetime as a champion of free trade and a higher standard of living for working men, and as an opponent of American slavery and Britain’s militaristic foreign policy. The New Yorkers were wrong about his comfortable stipend, however. Cobden’s personal finances suffered so badly as a consequence of his dedication that he had to be rescued from bankruptcy by public subscription. See posts relating to Richard Cobden.
* Lajos Kossuth (1802-1894) was a liberal Hungarian statesman who campaigned to free Hungary from rule by Austria, and briefly led the country after the revolution of 1848. In 1849, the status quo ante was restored under pressure from Russia, and Kossuth fled to Turkey, where he taught himself English by reading the King James Bible and the plays of William Shakespeare. In 1851, he made a well-received visit to New York, and then went on to London where he settled for a time. Contrary to the assumptions of the cynical New Yorkers whom Emerson knew, he spent much of his political life in exile and died nearly penniless.
