William Tudor, Willard Phillips, and Richard Henry Dana were not                  their fathers' Federalists. When these young New England intellectuals and their                  contemporaries attempted to carve out a place for themselves in the rapidly changing                  and increasingly unfriendly culture of the early nineteenth century, the key to                  their efforts was the founding, in 1815, of the North American                  Review.Raised as Federalists, and encouraged to                  believe that they had special responsibilities as "the wise and the good," they came                  of age within a cultural and political climate that no longer deferred to men of                  their education and background. But unlike their fathers, who retreated in disgust                  before the emerging forces of democracy, these young Federalist intellectuals tried                  to adapt their parents' ideology to the new political and social realities and                  preserve for themselves a place as the first public intellectuals in                  America. In                  Coming to Terms with Democracy, Marshall Foletta contends that by calling for a new                  American literature in their journal, the second-generation Federalists helped                  American readers break free from imported neo-classical standards, thus paving the                  way for the American Renaissance. Despite their failure to reconstitute in the                  cultural sphere their fathers' lost political prominence, Foletta concludes that the                  original contributors to the North American Review were enormously influential both                  in the creation of the role of the American public intellectual, and in the                  development of a vision for the American university that most historians place in a                  much later period. They have earned a prominent place in the history of American                  literature, magazines and journals, law and legal education, institutional reform,                  and the cultural history of New England.

Coming to Terms With Democracy: Federalist Intellectuals and the Shaping of an American Culture PDF

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