There is, conservatives argue, a virtual iron curtain descending across our country. An ill-timed tweet or troubling stance from the past sends it slamming down on old heroes and ordinary folks alike, crushing reputations, wrecking livelihoods, and threatening the foundations of the American republic.
This, of course, is cancel culture, and Donald Trump and his followers intend to hang it around the neck of every Democrat they can find, stoking what they believe to be widespread fears among workaday Americans of being “driven from society” for rejecting liberal orthodoxy.
Put mildly, the right’s anti-cancellation crusade has its inconsistencies. Chief among them are conservatism’s longstanding efforts to cancel its own opponents, a list that includes the LGBTQ community, Goodyear Tires, your LDS ward’s token liberal, Colin Kaepernick, mail-in ballots, Tinky Winky, and, somehow, Liz Cheney.
If only for egghead historians such as myself, however, the Trumpian right’s most problematic claim may be that cancel culture is both new and un-American. For better or worse: not so. Indeed, the United States would never have gained independence without it.
The social excommunication of political heretics has a long history, but the practice gained new currency in British North America during the 1760s. As Parliament asserted its right to impose taxes on American colonists, the authority of British officials evaporated in the face of patriot resistance. Ordinary people filled the void with committees — associations that functioned as de facto local governments while energetically promoting the revolutionary cause.
By the early 1770s, committees of inspection and safety were enforcing a patriot boycott of British consumer goods by shaming offenders on the era’s social media: broadsides and newspapers. In Philadelphia, committees explicitly threatened to impoverish and shun those who broke ranks. Peddlers of forbidden goods, one broadside warned, would be deemed “Enemies to American Liberty; their Names will be made public; their Companies avoided; and every Stigma fixed upon them to make them despicable.”
Broadcasting widely was key. A committee in Wilmington, North Carolina, actually founded its own newspaper – the Cape Fear Mercury – for the sole purpose of publishing the names of politically wayward townspeople. Those townspeople also endured non-virtual harassment from Wilmington’s old-timey Twitter mob; the entire committee went “in a body” to “all Housekeepers,” extracting front-porch pledges of loyalty and subjecting holdouts to the “Contempt they merit” via the Mercury’s next issue.
And contempt took a toll. New York haberdasher Samuel Cooley’s business all but collapsed after a committee deemed him a “Reptile” unworthy of patriots’ patronage — all for selling the wrong hats. Such tactics were not just for rabble-rousers. Even the wealthy Virginia slaveholder and constitutional expert George Mason declared approvingly that “the Sense of Shame & the Fear of Reproach must be inculcated & enforced in the strongest Manner.”
Public groveling rescued some from the committees’ wrath. Others fled. But while Tories bemoaned cancel culture (in familiar terms) for tearing the “bands of society,” by the mid-1770s the patriots’ bruising campaigns had helped build a vibrant republican culture from the wreckage.
Throwing social media shaming into the mix with the Founding Fathers complicates the American Revolution, and our own era, in unsettling ways. Like the revolution’s opponents, many today appear shocked that popular politics in a moment of technological and cultural change produces volatility, partisanship and painful reckonings that generate new standards. They should not be.
And while civic life in a democracy offers many opportunities to remake the bonds of fellowship (most of those targeted by revolutionary committees wound up back in their town’s good graces, and like it or not, Nick Sandmann seems to be doing OK), the rough-and-tumble tradition of cancel culture will necessarily continue to inform our politics – in hindsight, often for the better.
Christopher Hodson | Associate Professor, Department of History, Brigham Young University
Christopher Hodson, is an associate professor in the Department of History at Brigham Young University.
