American Philhellenes and the Poetics of War

ABSTRACT

Between 1821 and 1829, the Greek War for Independence attracted widespread and enthusiastic support in the United States. While most were content to simply follow along with the war’s proceedings, a small but vocal group of “philhellenes” took the remarkable step of making Greece’s cause their own. American philhellenes used nationalistic appeals couched in the language of an emergent middle-class sentimentality to raise funds for the Greeks while also lobbying for deeper American involvement in the conflict. Greece’s revolution, American philhellenes argued, was not a foreign war to be avoided; it was an occasion for reaffirming the nation’s moral and political commitments. By studying the poetical justifications for American involvement with the Greek Revolution, we are afforded a glimpse of an important development in popular perceptions of U.S. foreign policy. Philhellenic poetry presents a case study in how popular reading habits blended with nationalistic rhetoric to“sentimentalize” popular perceptions of America’s place in the world. Philhellenes used the nation’s expanding market for print material to forward normative claims about the nation’s responsibility toward the Greek revolutionaries, bringing into sharp relief the permeable boundaries between popular culture and public perceptions of foreign policy.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The “classical” thesis was first put forth by Edward Mead Earle in a 1927 essay appearing in The American Historical Review. Earle argued that “educated men in America had sat in reverence at the feet of the ancient Greeks,” and therefore felt that “the modern Greeks were entitled to the aid of all Western civilization” (Earle 1927, 45). For other takes on Mead’s Classical thesis, see: Cline (1930), Dakin (1955), St. Clair (1972), and Larrabee (1957).

2. Michael Kammen argues that poetry is “utterly central to a proper understanding of … Americans’ belief in the uniqueness of their culture” (2001, 109). As Mary Louise Kete argues, sentimental poetry “both affected the cultural parameters of the nineteenth-century American world and shaped the esthetic expectations of later Americans” (2000, 2).

3. By “myth,” I refer to the “cultural image of perfection” (Balthrop 1984, 341) that shapes an “audience’s identity and … prescribe its social behaviors” (Dorsey 1995, 1). Myths rest atop a culture’s hierarchy of values and symbolically orient its members toward particular vectors for action. Mythopoesis, therefore, refers to the re/making (poien) of such myths, typically in narrative form and in accordance with a socially prescribed structure.

4. By “republican virtue,” I refer to the broad sense of a “devotion to the public good.” As J. G. A. Pocock (1985) explains, the term signifies “the practice, or the preconditions of the practice, of relations of equality between citizens … since citizenship was above all a mode of action and of practicing the active life.” (41).

5. In 1822, Emerson wrote a poem in his journal titled “Marathon,” which carried all the markers of philhellenism: …They have digged a thousand gravesIn Marathon today;Their dirge is sounded by the wavesWhich wash the slain away.The hearth is forsaken, the Furies are fed, – Wake, Maidens of Athens! your wail for the dead. …Io! Minerva! Hail!What Argive Harp is dumb?The triumph loads the gale,The laureled victors come!There ‘s a light in Victory’s eyeWhich none but God can give;And a name can never dieApollo bids it live.The daughters of Music have learned your name,And Athens, and Earth, shall reëcho your fame.(1909, 1, 143-44).

6. M. H. Abrams discusses the widespread Romantic trope of a sudden, immanent “total revolution,” that would “bring about abruptly, or in a remarkably short time, the shift from the present era of profound evil … to an era of peace, justice, and optimal conditions for general happiness” (1971, 62, 329-34).

7. See Winterer (2002), Richard (2009), Wills (2006), and Whedbee (2003).

8. These lines allude to the Delphic Oracle’s pronouncement to Leonidas:

Either your great and glorious city will be destroyed

By men descended from Perseus [i.e. the Persians], or that will not be,

But the borders of Lacedaemon will mourn the death

Of a king descended from Heracles.

(Herodotus 1998, 481-82).

9. For just a few examples, see: J. M. D (1824), James Gates Percival (1859a, 1859b, 1859g)), “Greece” (1827), and Leonidas (1827).

10. American characterizations of the Islamic world during the Greek Revolution is an important topic, and worthy of deeper analysis than I am able to offer here. For more on nineteenth-century American characterizations of the Muslim world, see Allison (2000), Battistini (2010), Baepler (1999), Dzurec (2009), Marr (2006), and Peskin (2009).