'emize
^ tM-OfltZM ?
THE ARTIST AS A WHIG POLITICIAN
By Keith L. Bryant*
A continuing problem faced by the cultural community of this
country has been the question of involvement in partisan political
activity. At no time was the dilemma more significant in American
history than in the three decades prior to the Civil War. The
intellectuals divided into four major segments, with some following
the lead of George Bancroft and William Cullen Bryant in giving
active support to the Democratic party. Others joined Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in rejecting any form of
organized political effort. Another refrained from association with
either party, but with James Fenimore Cooper and Samuel Morse
attacked both the Jacksonian "mobocracy" and the Federalist-Whig
aristocrats. The fourth group, composed principally of New England Brahmins, took up the cause of John Quincy Adams, Daniel
Webster, and the Whigs. Literary figures such as Henry Wads-
worth Longfellow, Edward Everett, and John Greenleaf Whittier
supported the Whig party and contributed to its intellectual organ,
The American Whig Review. From the frontier state of Missouri
* Keith L. Bryant, M.A., currently is an instructor of history at the University of Missouri,
Columbia. He will receive his Ph.D. degree from the University of Missouri in August, 1965, and
has been appointed assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee,
beginning in September.
448
