Sketching the Demagogue: Social Nonreproduction in the Boston Evening Post and Crèvecoeur's "Ingratitude Rewarded"

Abstract: While most accounts of demagoguery consider the figure of the demagogue as a function of political crisis, the demagogues portrayed in two sketches from the Revolutionary period, "A Solemn Warning to Authors," published in the Boston Evening Post , and "Ingratitude Rewarded," by Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, function as figures of social rather than political crisis. This essay examines the demagogues portrayed in these sketches as the literary subjects of a particular genre, the eighteenth-century sketch, whose sociologically inclined perspective understands character as a product of social relations. However, unlike the typical characters of eighteenth-century sketches, whose characteristics are grounded in the habits of particular classes, these demagogues are defined by their social mobility. That is, they are not bound by the habits and behaviors of a particular social position; rather, they accustom themselves to mobility, slipping between social positions and accumulating characteristics that detach them from typical social behaviors and social obligations. To put it another way, the demagogues portrayed in these sketches are figures of social nonreproduction. Thus, the demagogue's most essential characteristics, such as contagious rhetoric, self-indulgence, and political opportunism, all originate, for these authors, from the slippery social position of upward mobility. These sketches thus give us a way to rethink the demagogue as a figure whose primary characteristics are generated not from political opportunism but from the breakdown of a society undergoing historical change.