CHAPTER SIX
NO MORE CULTURE WARRIORS
Everyone knows the story of Rip Van Winkle. The tale of a Dutch American villager who saunters into the woods for a 20-year nap has endured for 190 years, sliding comfortably up and down the cultural scale from college English classes to afternoon cartoons in dozens of renditions. The vignette entertains young and old, and the idea of waking up to find everything changed must exercise some deep timeless appeal, for the outlines of the story long preceded Washington Irving’s version. When Irving adapted the age-old tale to a Hudson River setting in the eighteenth century, however, he added a political element, and it may explain why “Rip Van Winkle” has remained so popular a token of American literary history.
Irving’s addition centers on the time frame of the plot. Rip lives in a small village in the Catskills, a quiet hamlet founded more than a century earlier by Dutch colonists roving up the Hudson. At the hub sits a small inn where the elders sit in the shade of a large tree and beneath a portrait of King George III, puffing pipes while they “talk listlessly over village gossip, or tell endlessly sleepy stories about nothing.” Sometimes an old newspaper falls into their hands, and “how sagely they would deliberate upon public events some months after they had taken place.” Rip enjoys his seat on the bench, for he is “a simple, good natured man” of creature comforts, and the children and dogs toy with him daily. Indeed, his only dislike is “profitable labour,” for while he will help a neighbor husk corn or pile rocks, his own fences go unmended, his garden unweeded, his fowling piece unfired. Rip would while away his life in easeful penury, in fact, letting his inherited land dwindle to ruin if not for his wife, a hardworking, long-suffering woman who scolds her husband for his laziness until he slinks away with a timid sigh.
Then comes the fateful autumn afternoon. Rip sets out for the hills half in search of game, half of peace. An hour of squirrel shooting leaves him panting. On a precipice above the river, he muses on the setting sun and the reception he expects at home when a voice calls out his name. A peculiar hairy fellow approaches dressed in “antique Dutch fashion” and hauling a keg on his shoulder. Rip follows him up the ravine until they reach a hollow where a company of more men like him mingle and drink with melancholy expressions on their faces, playing “nine pins” over and over. They refill their flagons from the fresh keg and Rip imbibes as well. “One taste provoked another,” Irving writes, until his eyes roll and Rip slides into a deep sleep.
The next paragraph directly begins, “On awaking, he found himself on the green knoll . . .” Rip worries he might have slept through the night. His dog has disappeared, and instead of his well-oiled gun a rusty firelock lies in the grass beside him. He rises and moans, his joints stiff and tender, and he’s terribly hungry.
Stumbling back to the village, he faces the first shock. He doesn’t recognize anybody. They pass by with blank looks, touching their chins as they peer at him. He does the same and discovers “his beard had grown a foot long!” Strange children cluster around as Rip presses on seeking a familiar face or landmark. The hills rise just where they used to, and the silver Hudson flows where it always had, but “The very village seemed altered.” Unfamiliar faces lean out of unfamiliar doorways, and dogs bark suspiciously. When he reaches his own grounds, he finds a decrepit, abandoned house with no wife and no children. He rushes to the old inn down the road only to encounter a rickety structure with broken windows and “The Union Hotel, by Jonathan Doolittle” painted over the door. The shade tree is gone, and in its place stands a tall pole with an odd flag at the top, a “singular assemblage of stars and stripes.” He recognizes only one thing, “the ruby face of King George” still beaming upon his minions, but now wearing a blue coat instead of a red one, a sword in hand, not a scepter, a cocked hat on his head, and a different title: “GENERAL WASHINGTON.”
The signs place the moment roughly in time. Rip has slept through the American Revolution. He leaves a colonial village and returns to a new nation, missing out on a providential sequence in world history. Independence has been declared, a bloody war has been fought, a government has formed, and a Constitution has been ratified. The villagers have lived through a cataclysm, but Rip knows nothing about it.
People surround him, “eyeing him from head to foot, with great curiosity.” Rip gazes back and notes that the changes in the village go beyond countenances and dwellings. “The very character of the people seemed changed,” Irving narrates. “There was a busy, bustling, disputatious tone about it, instead of the accustomed phlegm and drowsy tranquility.” No local sages recline in the shade telling and retelling homespun yarns. Rip always found their society soothing, and public life for him meant respite from private cares and tasks. But now, the public square rings with command. A man with pockets stuffed with handbills cries out to the rest, “haranguing vehemently about rights of citizens—election—members of congress— liberty—Bunker’s hill—heroes of seventy-six—and other words, that were a perfect Babylonish jargon to the bewildered Van Winkle.” He spies Rip and queries “which side he voted?” Rip stares uncomprehendingly when another man sidles up and inquires “whether he was Federal or Democrat.”
The terms pin down the actual year, 1796, and isolate the foundational act of the new nation, a national election. Rip has come back home only to step into party politics, Federalists vs. Democrats (Adams vs. Jefferson in the ’96 race), and the men want him to declare himself accordingly. He doesn’t understand, and when another man asks him if he’s brought a gun to an election with a “mob” in tow in order to “breed a riot,” Rip can only splutter, “I am a poor quiet man, a native of the place, and a loyal subject of the King, God bless him!”
“A tory!” they yell. “A spy!” Hardly, but “subject” is the only public identity Rip has ever known, and it’s a thin, reflex one. He can’t elaborate, and his only rejoinder is personal. He asks about his comrades, but they’ve mostly died, some in battle. He calls out his own name, and the people point to a young man slouching beneath a tree, careless and ragged, who looks just like him, or like he used to, and it turns out to be his son. The answers overwhelm him, the sights are too much, and he mumbles in a swoon,
“I’m not myself—I’m somebody else—that’s me yonder— no—that’s somebody else, got into my shoes—I was myself last night, but I fell asleep on the mountain, and they’ve changed my gun, and everything’s changed, and I’m changed, and I can’t tell what’s my name, or who I am!”
The disorientation is funny, the comic tension lying in the contrast between Rip’s old-world indolent ways and the vigorous public mores of a post-Revolution village. But a serious issue underlies the humor. Irving singles out 1776 to 1796 as the absent years, making Rip’s return represent not just one individual’s experience, but a nation’s experience, illuminating just how much things have changed for everyone. If Irving chose 1755 to 1775, the changes would have been all local, the persons and place alone, not the very
character
of things. Rip’s sojourn would have no political or civic meaning, just a private one. The selected time frame, then, highlights the advent of democracy itself, and what it does to people deep down. Irving dramatizes the transformation by throwing a simple-minded colonial denizen of a remote village into the newly formed United States at its most political moment, Election Day. How better to illuminate the civic burdens thrust upon the people?
Thus the amusing tale of a 20-year sleep becomes a parable of civic life. Rip’s vertigo discloses the taxing responsibilities of American citizenship. Before, the villagers were subjects. Now they are political agents, voters, and they tell Rip that he, too, is “now a free citizen of the United States.” Rip used to dwell wholly within the immediate circumstances of his life, all in the present, but the times now demand that he attend to faraway affairs, and to remember formative events of the past (“heroes of seventy-six” etc.). Before, villagers found an old newspaper and debated public matters months after they had played out, but now they participate directly in those outcomes. In fact, one of his old cronies sits in Congress, an elevation Rip cannot even imagine. The public square is no longer a place for idle talk and an afternoon smoke, the people relating on common, natural interests. They gather beneath a political sign, the American flag, not a giant swaying shade tree, and the discourse divides them into partisans.
And the community won’t let him alone. In the polling booth, one must take sides, and if Rip can’t then he isn’t quite a full and legitimate citizen. Only his confusion holds them back, and they realize that the newfound ideals of citizenship don’t mean anything to him. A few old folks in the crowd recognize him, and one of them recalls his disappearance 20 years earlier. Rip recounts his experience with the weird Dutch band in the hills, and the villagers smile and shake their heads, judging him either loony or lying. In any case, “the company broke up and returned to the more important concerns of the election.” Rip’s wife has died—“she broke a blood vessel in fit of passion at a New-England pedlar”—but his daughter takes him in, and with time he settles back into idleness happier than before. Still, the villagers try to make him “comprehend the strange events that had taken place during his torpor,” Irving’s language emphasizing not the glory of the Revolution but its radical adjustments. Rip didn’t live through them, however, and the latest civic realities never sink in, for “the changes of states and empires made but little impression upon him.” The others fill in the lost decades, explaining how “there had been a revolutionary war—that the country had thrown off the yoke of old England,” but the knowledge affects him not. It’s as if the assumption of democratic citizenship requires many years of adaptation, for this is a change of character, not just circumstances, and a change of character in the people will happen only through daring and hardship.
Nevertheless, the villagers find a significant place for him in the civic life of things. He represents the past, pure and simple. Rip doesn’t much care about what’s happened, the knowledge of recent history and contemporary politics, but he does serve as a reminder of what the villagers have left behind—a "subject” identity. He becomes a throwback, “a chronicle of the old times ‘before the war.’ ” That’s his role, or counter-role, a pre-citizen who assumes none of the political duties of the present, but who reminds the others of a contrasting past.
The knowledge factor is crucial, not for Rip, but for the others, and it extends the meaning of democratic citizenship. The villagers explain to him what has happened, recounting revolutionary events one by one as part of their own need to remember, to arrange a sequence of changes that ensures continuity with the past. That makes the abrupt independence of the States a bit less overwhelming. We assume today the freedom-loving, self-reliant, don’t-tread-on-me spirit of early American citizens, but Rip’s quick identification as a subject of King George shows its flip side, and that not every New World inhabitant aimed to live free or die. For even the most rebellious colonists, not to mention Rip and similarly contented subjects, losing that symbolic father was a psychic blow, and the patient instruction of the villagers serves to lighten it. As the literary scholar Donald Pease puts it, “While apologists for the Revolution may have claimed that it liberated America from her past, that liberation was more easily managed in their abstractions than in the lives of many Americans. As a figure in transition from a town life before the war, Rip enabled the townspeople to elaborate upon the changes the war made in their lives.”
In the post-War village, they vote, they declaim, they assume powers, and the highest laws and central documents of the land encourage them. It’s a heady charge, prone to drift, as the Founders understood, especially with no long-established institutions to regulate it and nothing but the fuzzy concept of “We the people” to contain it. Knowledge helps guarantee its beneficence. That’s why the electioneer isn’t just grabbing votes when he recalls Bunker Hill and “seventy-six” in his harangue to the populace. Yes, he acts as a partisan, but he also ties the day’s voting to a historical legacy, demonstrating that democratic action must unfold in the shadow of civic ideals lest it descend entirely into cheap self-interest. No longer subjects of any kind, citizens have gained their freedom but lost a measure of guidance. They don’t have King or Landowner or Church to tell them what to do and how to think. In the United States, aristocratic lineages are dubious, families are mobile, and the churches too splintered and dissenting to convey a dominant civic tradition. People must do and think for themselves without the counsel of institutions that have presided for centuries.
Civic knowledge fills the void left by Old World institutions whose authority has collapsed. This is why Thomas Jefferson counted so heavily on public schools to ensure the continuance of the Republic. Only the broad education of each generation would sustain the nation, “the diffusion of knowledge among the people,” he wrote in 1786. If “we leave the people in ignorance,” he warned, old customs will return, and “kings, priests and nobles . . . will rise up among us.” Indeed, Jefferson would have it that no person would qualify as “a citizen of this commonwealth until he or she can read readily in some tongue, native or acquired.” Education would preserve the sovereignty of the people, and without it the very system designed to represent them would descend into yet another tyranny in the dismayingly predictable course of nations. He even relied on public schools to identify promising young men of merit but lacking wealth and birth, who would be supported in higher education by public funds. They would join a vigilant citizenry in tracking the actions of leaders and setting them against the ideals and examples of the Founders, a lineage passed along through books and in schoolrooms. Without watchful constituents, officials in power would stray and government would no longer reflect the will of the people. Jefferson, Madison, and the other Founders expected men in government to behave all too humanly, letting the influences they wield tempt them away from public goods and toward special interests. The scrutiny of informed citizens checked their opportunism, which is why the Founders valued a free press. In truth, they despised journalists, but they acknowledged the essential watchdog role newspapers played. They are the eyes and ears of the people, popular informants keeping vested powers under inspection. A free electorate pledges to safeguard civic life, not only promoting some candidates and interests over others, but also guarding its prerogatives against any infringement, consciously controlling the powers their representatives assume. To do so, they need information they cannot obtain on their own.