AP US FRQ 12- Exemplar #3 2014
THE AMERICAN REFORM IMPULSE AND THE PERCEPTION OF MORAL
DEGRADATION
The reformations that sought the removal of the perceived evils of American
sociopolitical culture between 1820 and 1860 were effective outgrowths of the doctrines that
burgeoned from the overarching antislavery crusade, which, in the so-called Age of Reform,
evolved to push for the complete dismantlement of slavery, an institution whose existence
inculcated a largely pessimistic societal prognosis in the notion of its being an opponent to
freedom and concomitant morality. With the individualistic American culture having been
charged by reformers with perpetuating the institution and thus the moral decay it spawned,
political sovereignty came to be placed subordinate to sovereignty of the self, the encouragement
through voluntary social organization of the latter having been perceived as a catalyst of moral
regeneration. Adopting the philosophy, utopian experimentation, education reform, and
feminism offered, through their movements, optimistic prognoses of human nature in their
respective critiques of (1) a far too individualistic and hierarchy-perpetuating economy as
mobilized by the market revolution, the decayed morals of which having been extrapolated into
the human conscience; (2) the inequality of social conditions, which too infringed individual
morality in the intrinsic failure of the universalization of moral character; and (3) an inescapably
patriarchal political structure, which descended into the private sphere and therein threatened
ownership of the self, all of which – as seen by reformers – were forces spawning human and
societal disintegration but could be purged through the moral revitalization offered by
reformation.
The experimentation with utopianism was motivated by, as education reform and
feminism, the collective desire to counter societal downfall, yet such improvement was pursued
by communitarianism, that is, societal reorganization on the lines of cooperation rather than
individualism, and the withdrawal from the overarching public so as to establish communal
settlements and therein demonstrate their superiority. While these utopias arose both from
religious conviction and secular roots, they were universal in their opposition to excessive
individualism and in such sought the abolition of private property, transferring productive
property to communal ownership, to secure economic and invariably conditional equality as
threatened by the American socioeconomic hierarchy. Religious rooted utopias critiqued surface
economic conditions, especially those pertaining to individual accumulation of property, as being
responsible for personal inequality. Nearly all of these moved that tangible private property
justified men having a property in women, rejecting capitalism as herein inculcating sinfulness.
Thereby, religious utopias were effectively retreats from this sinfulness. Indoctrinated to some
extent by the rhetoric of evangelical revivalism and transcendentalism, the religious utopian
experiments contended the impossibility of self-ownership in the wake of these evils inherent in
a capitalistic, individualistic society, which gave rise to enslavement by sin and, as it was called,
internal servitude. To solve for these harms, nearly all utopian communities did away with the
prospect of private property, allowing for equality of economic condition foremost. The
approach to abolishing gender and personal inequality varied. The Shaker community crippled
the notion of women as property by deeming God dual-gendered, allowing for the contention of
spiritual sexual equality, and furthermore imposed virgin purity to protect the woman’s selfownership. The Oneida community held that all were a single holy family, rejecting exclusive
affection and promoting open marriage, wherein, while a man could propose sexual relations to
any woman, that woman could reject, safeguarding the sovereignty over herself. The Owenite
community condemned and abandoned the notion of the natural incapability of women.
Irrespective of the varied methods of achieving transcendent equality, all Utopian experiments
were archetypes of perfectionism and promoted the capability of a human to achieve a complete
condition of sinlessness and moral purity by removing himself from the immoral but omnipotent
American culture, an effective reflection of the pessimistic prognosis of American society but the
otherwise optimistic outlook of the human condition.
The institution of public education would further seek to impart morality in an otherwise
immoral culture, remarkable in its departure from the perception of self-sovereignty as palpable
in utopian experimentation. As by other public institutions that proliferated with the American
reform impulse, the free individual was defined by the public education system as one who
internalized self-control and self-discipline, functioning effectively as a moral agent; therein, true
freedom was dependent upon some form of indoctrination of morality within them, an echo of
the notion of Christian liberty. Horace Mann, the chief educational reformer of the Age, sought
precisely this in his blueprint of a state-funded system. A Whig, Mann promoted the prospect of
upward mobility, wherein, irrespective of the inevitable social hierarchy set by industrial
America, individuals were not fixed in their positions and should be inherently endowed with
equality of opportunity to achieve socioeconomic advancement. Not only would common
education prepare students for a successful life in the framework of an industrial economy,
according to Mann, but it would furthermore construct their morality and rescue them from
upbringings that failed to do so. Effectively, Mann professed that public education was training
individuals to be truly free in their internalization of self-discipline and morality, moreover
reflective of the twofold pessimistic prognosis of an invariably morally decaying society as well
as the optimistic outlook of individual capability to escape their social context through allowing
the cultivation of their morality.
The notion of self-ownership that pervaded the reform impulse would ground
abolitionism of which feminism was an inevitable outgrowth. The awareness of women who
worked for abolition to the intrinsic subordination and dehumanization of slaves birthed
attentiveness to their own perceived condition of bondage in an American political culture
woven on patriarchy which effectively infiltrated the private sphere with the extrapolation of its
philosophical and intellectual grounds. The legally subordinate status of women was legitimized
by the notion of natural incapacity, that is, the philosophy that women, being ruled by emotions,
were not rational beings and therein not entitled to political independence and such political
endowments that sculpted male freedom as property, the right to vote, and deprivation of legal
status once married; the philosophy underpinned and legitimized the social exclusion of women
from access to education and employment as well as the transfer of control over women’s wages
to their husbands. Feminism exploited these concrete deprivations and the legal definition of
women as the property of the husband to explicate the conditions of their marriages, likened to
slavery. The legal provisions that enveloped domestic relations, women contended, presupposed
a husband’s right of sexual access to his wife, a violation of the autonomy of her body and quite
literally the ownership of herself; furthermore, these laws of marriage covenants implicitly
legitimized, in the feminist view, corporal punishment at the hands of her husband. These
convictions were not unlike those of the utopian experiments and the institution of public
education in declaring enslavement by one force or another and the inability to claim ownership
of the self, and the movement in women’s rights was an effective reflection of the pessimistic
outlook of the patriarchal American political structure yet the concomitant optimistic prognosis
of the capacity of women to escape their subordination.
Utopian experimentation, the institution of public education, and the birth of feminism as
outgrowths of the American reform impulse between 1820 and 1860 were dually reflective of
pessimistic societal prognoses in their critiques of excessive economic individualism,
prospective incapacity to escape a socially constructed hierarchy, and a patriarchal political and
domestic structure that each decayed self-ownership, yet an optimistic forecast of the human
condition in individual capacity to escape these injurious economic, social, and political contexts
through communitarianism, inculcation of morality, and dismantlement of natural incapacity
theories that shaped American culture.