El diseño en la industria creativa
37Figura 2. Exportaciones e importaciones de bienes creativos en México 2005-2014
For John Quincy and Louisa Catherine, their fledgling family’s spiritual health centered on adhering to general Christian tenets, making it a microcosm of young America’s struggle. When they were separated by the hardships of diplomatic travel, letters between husband and wife framed news of daily life around the “blessings of Providence” and lunges at understanding why God afflicted or blessed their small
family.266 Both trusted in an abiding and benevolent God, each Adams turning to
Scripture for renewal when affliction roused symptoms of doubt. Largely representational of other antebellum citizens who were struggling to sustain faith despite multiple cultural challenges to religious authority, John Quincy and Louisa were quite exceptional in
where they worked through those issues: the imperial court of tsarist Russia.267
Between 1809 and 1815, events and experiences in Russia altered the Adamses’ modes of religious practice and led them to write more intimately on themes of faith and doubt. Often, Louisa and John Quincy were the sole Americans in a packed ballroom, made exotic by their republican politics and their Protestant-hybrid faith. Repeatedly, John Quincy pledged to be a “profitable” man to his family, mainly through the completion of American foreign service.268 If, however, diplomacy heightened John Quincy’s profile and expanded his religious tolerance, it did not always suit his wife’s temperament. The glamour of cosmopolitan life took a physical and spiritual toll on Louisa. Her adherence to Protestant Christianity, tinged with quasi-Catholic interest in Marian compassion and the holy virtue of motherhood acted as a buffer to the aesthetic upheaval that Louisa experienced in racing from culture to culture. “I assure you one of the greatest taxes I have to pay is that of concealing that I am a travelled Lady,” she wrote.269 Their joint depiction as both “profitable” and “travelled” paints John Quincy
266 As she prepared her memoirs, Louisa referred to John Quincy’s more precise diary entries to sharpen recollection of people or events. While we cannot know if Adams ever read his wife’s diary, it is worth noting that most of her entries took the form of “journal letters” that she edited and sent either to John Quincy or to her father-in-law, John.
267 Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity, 3-48. 268 John Quincy Adams, 11 November 1813, Diary.
and Louisa as self-identifying cosmopolitans; in Russia, they evidently learned to amplify their Christianity, too.
Frequently, the young ambassador spent his New Year’s Eve diary entries
agonizing over who might improve the soul of John Quincy Adams more: Providence, or the man himself. When Louisa experienced a series of miscarriages—at least four in the first three years of marriage, all suffered abroad—the stress and agony of repeated disappointment caused them to seek out faith to heal. Another tragedy, the death of their infant daughter Louisa in St. Petersburg in the fall of 1812, shattered much of John Quincy’s mental world. Louisa’s namesake was buried on Vasilevsky Island, a Lutheran cemetery for those not of the Russian Orthodox faith.270 John Quincy could not fathom the providential reasoning that justified so many consecutive episodes of loss. His daughter’s death upended Adams’s highly intellectualized notions of what constituted good and evil, and her loss triggered some very direct questions in his diary about the kind of God that let it happen. Grappling with the great ends of existence, he now saw, required a religious dexterity he had yet to achieve. More than once, Adams confessed that he was horrified by his apparent shortcoming as a professed Christian who would not submit to divine judgment.
Inaugurating what became his characteristic way of coping with family tragedy, John Quincy Adams turned to Christian literature for solace. His poetic effort to address the problem of theodicy, titled “The Death of Children,” relayed the sad event in ultra- Romantic imagery: “But when the Lord of mortal breath / Decrees his bounty to resume. /
And points the silent shaft of death, / Which speeds an infant to the tomb.”271 Feeling melancholy, Adams turned to any and all forms of religion in St. Petersburg to seek peace from the “bitter sorrows” and “rebellion of the Heart” that came from God’s “chastening hand.” He was aware, perhaps, of how such private outbursts of emotion might be “read” in an age of revival. When Adams looked over his diary, using it as a self-improvement manual of sorts, the Christian self that he saw emerging was less than ideal. “Religious Sentiments become from day to day more constantly habitual to my mind. They are perhaps too often seen in this Journal,” Adams wrote. “God alone can make even Religion a Virtue; and to him I look for aid that mine may degenerate into no vicious excess.”272
By contrast, Louisa’s religious writings brimmed over with emotion, full of passionate punctuation (“!!!”) and melancholy poetry dedicated to the family tragedies that she endured. Haunted by her daughter’s death long after her stay in Russia, she wrote in 1812 that the “babes image pursues me where ever I go bitter reflection adds to my pangs and in religion alone do I find consolation.”273 In Russia, Louisa’s role as wife and mother (of a splintered, and often damaged family unit) also cemented her religious formation. Louisa came to reject affiliations with “Romanism,” but, like many American women, she supported notions of Marian compassion and the kind of “family love” that expanded into feelings of social communion—just the sort of “softer” image that a
271 John Quincy Adams, “The Death of Children,” in Poems of Religion and Society (Auburn and Buffalo: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1854), 58-59.
272 John Quincy Adams, 31 December 1812, Diary.
polarizing politician like Adams needed his wife to exhibit in public.274 Often, Louisa compared her own plight to that of a Catholic martyr in search of “true religion.”275 Her providentialist theology of grace, Louisa wrote, was “so simple so clear and so striking that the tawdry dress in which its precepts are sometimes taught to the publick by men who have mistaken their genius, almost always mortifies me as it casts a shade of ridicule on things in themselves the most sacred.”276 Certain that sustaining Christianity at home foretold that the entire family would reunite in heaven, Louisa sacralized her role as wife and mother.277
The multiple losses that John Quincy and Louisa suffered abroad led the former to redouble his efforts to instill Christian morality in their surviving children via a
transatlantic program of Bible study. “Let us impress that…Education is the business of human life—that our religion is the religion of a book—and that the meaning of that book is intrusted by divine Providence to the deliberate judgment of our own understandings,” he wrote.278 John Quincy and Louisa felt that Christian nurture was, as the American theologian Horace Bushnell later advised, a way to ensure that the nation maintained a ready supply of godly help.279 Eying the American future, Adams harbored “lively and
274
Franchot, Roads to Rome.
275 Louisa Catherine Adams, 27 February 1820, Diary, 2:477-478. 276 Ibid.
277
Colleen McDannell, The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840-1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 105, 128, 139, 147, 159-160.
278 John Quincy Adams, A Discourse on Education. Delivered at Braintree, Thursday, Oct. 24, 1839. (Boston: Perkins & Marvin, 1840), 36.
279
For his promotion of Christian nurture to strengthen the American family, see Horace Bushnell, Christian Virtue (New York: C. Scribner, 1861) and David L. Smith, ed., Horace Bushnell: Selected Writings on Language, Religion, and American Culture (Chico: Scholars Press, 1984). On Bushnell’s cultural influence, see Theodore T. Munger, Horace Bushnell: Preacher and Theologian (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, &Co., 1899); Barbara M. Cross, Horace Bushnell: Minister to a Changing America
confident…hopes” that his heirs would become “useful citizens to their country,
respectable members of society, and a real blessing to their parents.”280 The painful fact that Adams and his wife spent nearly six years separated from two of their sons did not excuse them from the task of Christian parenting. Dutiful reports from the distant boys, who were shuffled between aunts and uncles in Quincy and Atkinson, New Hampshire, hinted that their religious education was fitful at best. A throwaway line from one of George Washington’s letters in 1811, reaching his parents nine months later when the waterways melted enough to allow for mail, prompted great concern. His son’s fondness for reading aloud Bible chapters to his elderly aunt was laudable, John Quincy wrote reprovingly, but it was not enough.
The remedy was vintage Adams. Over the course of the next two years, he issued a series of pedantic and personal Letters on the Bible describing how his sons should read Scripture, when to apply its lessons, and why it merited special distinction in world literature. “No book in the world deserves to be so unceasingly studied, and so
profoundly meditated upon as the Bible,” he wrote.281 Here, John Quincy was echoing his own parents’ advice, and that of an antebellum generation that still relied on Scripture as the point of departure for living a moral life. Nor was Adams alone in his quest to
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); William R. Adamson, Bushnell Rediscovered (New York, United Church Press, 1966); and Robert Bruce Mullin, The Puritan as Yankee: A Life of Horace Bushnell (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002).
280 John Quincy Adams, Letters of John Quincy Adams, to His Son, on the Bible and Its Teachings (Auburn: Derby, Miller, & Co., 1848), 10. The letters were first gathered for publication by his son Charles, and published in the New-York Tribune shortly after Adams’s death in 1848. Hereafter cited as John Quincy Adams, Letters. A full transcription of the letters is in the Adams Papers, prepared by Charles for publication, for which see Chapter 3.
reinvent the Bible in popular understanding. The Bible, widely venerated by Americans as an “aesthetic touchstone,” had attracted a fresh and vigorous round of cultural interest. Aside from arming Christian republicans, there was another reason for the large-scale appeal of biblical inquiry. Among Protestants, Bible reading encouraged the converts who emerged from the Second Great Awakening and subsequent evangelical revivals (ca. 1790-1840). At the same time, biblical inquiry offered new intellectual projects for lay elites. President Thomas Jefferson scrap-booked his own version of Scripture, and Herman Melville reconsidered biblical themes for the basis of his novel Moby-Dick (1851).282 In Philadelphia and New York City, the Presbyterian lawyer Elias Boudinot began campaigning for the $10,000 he needed to found the American Bible Society in 1816.283 The Romantic painter Washington Allston overlaid parables on quasi-American landscapes, while scholars—often Harvard-trained Unitarians just like John Quincy— tussled over how to use the Bible as a form of rational, scientific evidence.284
His own mastery of Biblical scholarship, Adams thought, was amateurish. Sometimes Adams could not find a decent copy to peruse during his travels, even in one of the five or so languages that he could read. Though he rose to study several chapters
282
Thomas Jefferson, The Jefferson Bible, or The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & English (New York: Akashic Books, 2004 reprint); Ilana Pardes, Melville’s Bibles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Paul C. Gutjahr, An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777-1880 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
283 William Peter Strickland, History of the American Bible Society, From Its Organization to the Present Time (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1849).
284
William H. Gerdts and Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., “A man of genius”: The Art of Washington Allston (1779-1843) (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1979); Jerry Wayne Brown, The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America, 1800-1870: The New England Scholars (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1969); and Michael J. Lee, The Erosion of Biblical Certainty: Battles over Authority and Interpretation in America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
before breakfast, sometimes his attention slid away. “Sometimes I say to myself, I do not understand what I have read; I can not help it; I did not make my own understanding: there are many things in the Bible ‘hard to understand,’ as St. Peter expressly says of Paul’s epistles,” Adams acknowledged.285
He cautioned his sons to persevere in the task. The Bible, as Adams lectured in his letters home, should be read in four ways: as divine revelation, historical record, evolving system of morality, and finally, as an unparalleled literary composition.286 Further, the Bible provided several layers of history: universal, national, institutional, family, and individual. Rediscovering the Old and New Testament with the intention of sharing it with his children, John Quincy found fresh illustrations to support his case that the Bible was “an invaluable and inexhaustible mine of knowledge and virtue.”287 He emphasized that the Sermon on the Mount held the most eloquent expression of Christianity’s major tenets, including the principles of nonviolence, the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes, and the Golden Rule. Writing from Russia, John Quincy Adams found special resonance in the history of Abraham, whose trials of character tested his obedience to God as he coped with a childless wife and the divine mandate to build a new nation.
Such was the religious life of the mind for John Quincy Adams in St. Petersburg between 1809 and 1815, as he settled into marriage, fatherhood, and a high-profile diplomatic career. He had first traveled to the city as Francis Dana’s translator almost 30 years earlier, part of a failed mission to secure Empress Catherine II’s recognition of
285 John Quincy Adams, Letters, 13. 286 John Quincy Adams, Letters, 120. 287 John Quincy Adams, Letters, 20.
American independence.288 Now, as a professional diplomat, Adams keyed into religion to decode Russian culture and press ahead with trade talks. As the American minister labored over a commercial treaty with Alexander I, diverse religious rites captivated his interest, offering Adams a unique way to apprehend Russian civilization. In a three- month stretch, he sampled Sunday services, baptisms, weddings, funerals, and high holy days at a Catholic church, a Kazan Church, and the English Factory Church (the Anglican outpost in St. Petersburg). Adams interviewed Greek Orthodox priests, curious as to how they calculated the date for Easter. He interrogated the Jesuit headmaster regarding the academic minutiae of schoolboys’ curricula. He documented the retail operations at the “Frozen Market” by the Monastery of St. Alexander Nevsky, noting the commercial accommodations that merchants made for religious observance.289 He recorded how various laity and clergy marked the life cycle, where the faithful buried their dead, what they wore to service, and the gestures of supplication that they used in prayer. No detail of how people “lived” religion in Russia escaped John Quincy’s dogged capacity for wonder, curiosity, or outright judgment. One of Adams’s chief interests was how new Christians found their way to religion and whether the performance of ritual shored up belief in God. A generation later, his son Charles would seize on the same question, wondering what—if anything—outward “shows” of piety could “tell” of one’s inner faith.290 John Quincy’s rage to quantify varieties of religious experience coalesced in
288 For the unsuccessful Dana mission of 1781-1782, see volumes 12 and 13, passim, of Papers of John Adams.
289 John Quincy Adams, 2 January 1812, Diary. 290 See Chapter 3.
Russia, but it did not end there, and his own international celebrity began to change how Adams prayed.
After a brief stint in Paris to negotiate the Treaty of Ghent that ended the War of 1812, he and Louisa reunited with all of their sons in London. The period that John Quincy spent there serving as American minister, from 1815 to 1817, was a relatively happy time. Living eight miles outside of London in the suburb of Ealing (“Little Boston”), the Adamses attended service at the newly repaired Anglican church of St. Mary’s.291
As a famous model of American life in miniature, the Adamses respected but largely evaded adopting British ways, seeking out dissenting traditions that challenged the established Church of England. The three Adams boys attended the local Presbyterian school and went to service at the nonconformist chapel there, too.292 Following New England religious instincts, the Adams family preferred the Presbyterian service as an occasional nonconformist respite from Anglican life. Adams found Presbyterian worship to be nearly the “same form as that of our congregational churches,” featuring one-hour sermons that he thought were “written in a very good plain style, and the delivery was above mediocrity.”293 He cast a critical eye on the Anglican pulpit, calling the St. Mary’s preachers haughty and obsessed with preventing the “infection of Methodism.” He loathed how Anglican clergymen spoke, dressed, and walked. With every step, he thought they conveyed “arrogance, intolerance and all that is the reverse of Christian
291
Beyond John Quincy Adams’s Diary entries of his London tenure, held in the Adams Papers, see also Duncan Cameron et al., An American President in Ealing (Ealing: Little Ealing History Group, 2014), 56- 84.
292 John Quincy Adams, October 1816, Diary. 293 John Quincy Adams, 26 January 1817, Diary.
humility.”294
Once again, Adams derided what he perceived to be manifestations of religious intolerance, lay malaise, and clerical overreach.295
In Ealing, the rising son of John Adams learned that his family name was one of the few American cultural connections that most British citizens readily made, for better or for worse. John Quincy’s efforts at Christian statesmanship, then, had to extend beyond the Court of St. James to an attempt to charm his reluctant small-town hosts. For the cosmopolitan Adams, some of his thorniest diplomatic work was excruciatingly local in scope, and it meant mending British perceptions of Americans by reminding them of a shared Protestant pedigree. In one of his frequent chats with John Quincy, St. Mary’s elderly pastor, Colston Carr, nearly cited “the rebellion of the colonies” but (barely) reeled himself in before giving offense. Carr “softened his expressions with an evident effort,” Adams wrote, “and called it the time when America was throwing off the yoke.”296
John Quincy, in turn, worshipped at St. Mary’s but he grumbled privately about its practices: use of the Athanasian creed, lavish pine garlands hung after Advent, and the paltry ten parishioners who lingered after service to receive communion, or, “as they call it the most comfortable sacrifice of the body and blood of Christ.”297 And, as in Russia, Adams investigated the English holy days’ impact on the local marketplace. Minutes after the “indifferent” crowd of Christmas worshippers shuffled out of St. Mary’s, Adams wrote wonderingly, the bakers’ shops of Ealing were already “illuminated” and open for
294John Quincy Adams, 20 August 1815, Diary. 295 Ibid.
296 John Quincy Adams, 15 December 1815, Diary. 297 John Quincy Adams, 25 December 1815, Diary.
business.298 An extravagant display of evergreens notwithstanding, John Quincy Adams was never fully persuaded that the daily actions of the Anglican faithful constituted any true Protestant piety.
In 1817, readying to serve as President Monroe’s Secretary of State and as an officer of the American Bible Society, a mature John Quincy Adams channeled his cosmopolitan Christianity toward new beginnings in his native country. Pausing at the Paris studio of bronze-worker Antoine-André Ravrio, Adams had purchased six busts of Cicero, Homer, Plato, Virgil, Socrates, and Demosthenes. 299 These statues became the