Smart interview at Reason magazine of the exceptionally interesting and provocative historian Thaddeus Russell. I'll only summarize a bit of it, because the whole thing is well worth reading.

One comment: Russell narrates a history of"people having fun, people having sex, people avoiding work, people fighting the cops in the street," and puts that world into opposition with the moral world of the self-improving middle class and an upper class that sought to impose order on those below:

reason: You write, “On nearly every block in every eighteenth-century American city, there was a public place where one could drink, sing, dance, have sex, argue politics, gamble, play games, or generally carouse with men, women, children, whites, blacks, Indians, the rich, the poor, and the middling.” Could you describe how the Founders reacted to this kind of activity?

Russell: They were so horrified that several of them at times during the war wished for a British victory. They believed that a British victory would force Americans to discipline themselves.

reason: You also make the argument that they believed democracy would force Americans to discipline themselves.

Russell: That’s the bigger argument. That’s the major argument. The Founders argued that democracy requires what they called virtue, which is really a system of self-discipline, self-sacrifice, social order.

Of course -- and I'm sure Russell is well aware of this, so this isn't exactly a criticism -- many of the virtuous moralizers never were especially virtuous, and led lives that contained their own competing narratives.

Sexual pleasure isn't a historically working class phenomenon, thank god; the evidence suggests that most historical actors ended up with their pants on the floor at some point or another."In late eighteenth-century America," Jack Larkin writes,"pregnancy was frequently the prelude to marriage...In the 1780s and 1790s, nearly one-third of rural New England's brides were already with child." American pregnancy rates declined during the nineteenth century, but did so in conjunction with an increase in contraceptive practices.

Sizable portions of the emerging nineteenth-century middle class were less disturbed by drinking and fucking than they were concerned with indiscreet drinking and fucking: going too far, being too obvious, not being able to handle it. And so Mabel Loomis Todd and her married neighbor, Austin Dickinson, sustained a long sexual affair in late-nineteenth century Amherst; whenever he came home, her husband"obligingly whispered a familiar tune to warn the adulterous couple that their time together must end." Other people quietly made room for their pleasure, but with the expectation that they would pay consideration with consideration. There were, I'm guessing, as many respectable people having extramarital sex -- gay and straight alike, with plenty of overlap between those two categories -- as there were respectable people warning about the dangers of extramarital sex (with plenty of overlap between those two categories).

And about those founders...