Finally, Washington Irving and the American Enterprise

The First Man of Letters from – and for – America

Any casual or serious student of American letters or of American history — that probably includes anyone who grew up in the United States and has at least elementary school familiarity with her lore — knows Washington Irving’s stories, even if you can’t place his name.  You know Rip Van Winkle.  You know the “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Ichabod Crane, the Headless Horseman.  Those belong to Washington Irving.  He is a background character in America, like Mark Twain or Harriet Beecher Stowe, except he is from a much earlier time, so you may have a fingertip awareness of his creations without ever having read a line of his work.  Reading him is therefore a kind of deliberate recovery effort, a spadework for you know not what when you set out.  When something is already part of you, part of your firmament, researching it can feel almost superfluous.  I suppose that’s why so many educated people have never read the Bible.  

The analogy is apt.  If studying Irving is a form of American literary archaeology, then it reveals a writer who was much more foundational to our canon than I, for one, had previously understood.  He was there at the very beginning of our national history, literally and figuratively, born at the tail end of the Revolutionary War, and he introduced America’s emerging city and countryside culture to a hungry audience domestically, and, as I think I have learned, more importantly, overseas.  We owe him some of our lexicon, like Gotham and Knickerbocker.  He was a pioneer and entrepreneur, a marketing genius, and the first American to earn a living by writing.  That is already fairly astonishing to realize.  Think of how many tens of thousands of writers have paid for their heating bills by writing since, and think of how many hundreds of thousands write today as their so-called side hustles.  Irving paved the way for all of it.  He was the first American man of letters.  Indeed, I think would be hard to overstate his importance.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Herman Melville, for example, who have all eclipsed Irving in our national consciousness, were nearly literally born, in 1803, 1804, 1807, and 1819, into the idiom Irving created.  For many of us who love and cherish the United States, Irving is a character who has been, perhaps like one of his literary creations, hiding in plain sight.

Unlike so much of the writing that has come since, from authors celebrated in their days and now forgotten to those still remembered, a lot of his oeuvre continues to stand up.  Some of the stories remain fresh, some of his characters still alive and plausible, and even many of his turns of phrase, which is more surprising, since he wrote them down two hundred years ago.  It should go without saying, but maybe it can’t nowadays, that of course not all of what he wrote is or could be either au courant or even acceptable today.  He was a man of his time, okay, without some of the sensibilities we have since prosperously developed, though he was certainly ahead of his century on many that most among us would find important, such as the status of American Indians, and on others that might not even occur to us but probably should, such as how a national union is forged from the mixing of previously incompatible and even hostile groups, including the industrious and righteous Anglo-Saxons on the one hand and the indolent and somnolent Dutch burghers on the other, and the sharp and hapless Swedes on yet another.  Irving was, and remains now, a man of wisdom, insight, and, we can be thankful, humor.

Funny was his primary business.  After reading his work, my conception of him is that he was like an eagle sitting on his high perch atop a mountain somewhere in the Hudson Valley, watching the great and small from New York City to the hinterland, living out their lives in ancient manners that they inherited unwittingly from long-dead grandparents, copied from pamphlet reports of fashionable European capitals, and made up for themselves as they went along, informed by their inheritances and pretensions.  This solitary eagle, smiling to himself as he puffed occasionally on a pipe, generously and patiently captured the foibles of the personalities he saw in the city and surrounding hamlets, being as careful to tell the truth of what he perceived as to avoid mockery or disdain.  He evidently loved people, never more than when he was making fun of them.  I found myself liking him, and his easygoing, open-handed, intelligent, truth-speaking style, rarely taking himself very seriously, knowingly creating some uncertainty from time to time as to whether he was being earnest or dry.  I found in him, finally, those qualities I often perceive in America, and I think we have him to thank in some considerable part for them. 

His writing first gained great notoriety while he was living in Britain.  He launched a magazine with his brother and another fellow called Salmagundi (that’s the name of the magazine, not of the other fellow), which was a kind of four-decade precursor to Punch and a century-and-a-half ancestor of Mad.  It, and its companion collection of the Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, were riotous combinations of what we might today call blogging, gossip column, and political commentary.  Not to mention sock puppeting.  One of Irving’s main conceits was to write about American life, particularly New York life, from the perspectives of a diverse clutch of concocted spokespeople, including the persona Mustapha, who comments on America from his chair as the roving ambassador of a North African sultan; Jonathan Oldstyle, a constantly crotchety theater-goer; Launcelot Langstaff, a pebble-throwing music critic; and various other elderly and younger exasperated parties, including supposed nephews of other named contributors who sent in their letters to the editors of these periodicals to denounce and disavow the comments of the others.  Very early, Irving developed one of his signature moves: take on the super-identity of an honest editor who is merely discovering, curating, or publishing the excitable or dull thoughts of eccentrics.  It was a good trick, and one he mastered, even if he didn’t entirely invent it.

The chief technique of Irving’s early work was humorous and sometimes ribald gossip about America’s and Gotham’s social life.  But the main thrust wasn’t.  He was capturing, in real-time, the emergence of a country quickly coming into its own.  His readers in England, still smarting from the loss of the most pristine and valuable colonial jewel in the history of the earth, must have eaten up the delicious depictions of New Yorkers’ uncouth night-time exploits, squalid fashion ambition, and tasteless electioneering.  The more astute readers would have seen, just as well, the story of a still-infant nation, already flexing its economic muscles, claiming its distinct strengths, unafraid of the future, marching brightly toward a destiny it confidently knew it had.  For Irving, unique foibles were part of the package of a successful power.  Like Britain or France, America would have its own.

Here, he compares what it takes to be great in the United States, in contrast with the requirements for greatness in other nations:

Every nation has its peculiar coin, and peculiar great men; neither of which will, for the most part, pass current out of the country where they are stamped. Your true mob-created great man is like a note of one of the little New-England banks, and his value depreciates in proportion to the distance from home. In England, a great man is he who has most ribands and gew-gaws on his coat, most horses in his carriage, most slaves in his retinue, or most toad-eaters at his table; in France, he who can most dexterously flourish his heels above his head—Duport is most incontestibly the greatest man in France!—when the Emperor is absent. The greatest man in China is he who can trace his ancestry up to the moon; and in this country our great men may generally hunt down their pedigree until it burrows in the dirt like a rabbit. To be concise; our great men are those who are most expert at crawling on all-fours, and have the happiest facility in dragging and winding themselves along in the dirt like very reptiles.

. . .

In a logocracy, to use the sage Mustapha’s phrase, it is not absolutely necessary to the formation of a great man that he should be either wise or valiant, upright or honourable. On the contrary, daily experience shows that these qualities rather impede his preferment, inasmuch as they are prone to render him too inflexibly erect, and are directly at variance with that willowy suppleness which enables a man to wind, and twist, through all the nooks and turns and dark winding passages that lead to greatness. The grand requisite for climbing the rugged hill of popularity,—the summit of which is the seat of power,—is to be useful. And here once more, for the sake of our readers, who are of course not so wise as ourselves, I must explain what we understand by usefulness. The horse, in his native state, is wild, swift, impetuous, full of majesty, and of a most generous spirit. It is then the animal is noble, exalted and useless. But entrap him, manacle him, cudgel him, break down his lofty spirit, put the curb into his mouth, the load upon his back, and reduce him into servile obedience to the bridle and the lash, and it is then he becomes useful. Your jackass is one of the most useful animals in existence. If my readers do not now understand what I mean by usefulness, I give them all up for most absolute nincoms.

To rise in this country a man must first descend. The aspiring politician may be compared to that indefatigable insect called the tumbler, pronounced by a distinguished personage to be the only industrious animal in Virginia; which buries itself in filth, and works ignobly in the dirt, until it forms a little ball of dirt, which it rolls laboriously along, like Diogenes in his tub; sometimes head, sometimes tail foremost, pilfering from every rat and mud hole, and encreasing its ball of greatness by the contributions of the kennel. Just so the candidate for greatness:— he plunges into that mass of obscenity, the mob; labours in dirt and oblivion, and makes unto himself the rudiments of a popular name from the admiration and praises of rogues, ignoramuses, and blackguards. His name once started, onward he goes struggling and puffing, and pushing it before him; collecting new tributes from the dregs and offals of the land as he proceeds, until having gathered together a mighty mass of popularity, he mounts it in triumph, is hoisted into office, and becomes a great man, and a ruler in the land.

Clearly, Irving has strong opinions on the requirements for successful aspirations to high office.  When I read this, I was reminded of Hunter S. Thompson’s take on Bill Clinton from his 1994 book Better than Sex:

Bill Clinton would have played the Jew’s harp stark naked on 60 Minutes if he thought it would help him get elected. He is the Willy Loman of Generation X, a traveling salesman from Arkansas who has the loyalty of a lizard with its tail broken off and the midnight taste of a man who’d double-date with the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart.

Irving admits freely that there is a kind of distastefulness to electioneering.  And his point is that this is the only way to greatness in America.  You can just picture the satisfied aristocrats and petite bourgeoisie of London cackling and smirking to themselves about how déclassés their poor American cousins had proven themselves to be.

But Irving’s joke was on them.  Like some of the world’s most successful writing, his was frequently a perfect mirror for its readership, reflecting back on them what they thought most important about themselves.  For the American audience, he must have come across as a Benjamin Franklin testifying before Parliament.  You know, the old Aw Shucks, I am a Poor Simple American, let me see if I can make myself plain.  I love this move (here’s yours truly doing it in 2015 at the Oxford Union – see about 50 seconds into the clip).  It is quintessentially American.  Though Ben Franklin beat Irving to it by nearly four decades (see Franklin’s masterful testimony to the House of Commons on the 1765 Stamp Act), Irving did it better.  To anyone paying attention, his point was clear as a bell.  It was no major concession to allow that elected men had to get down and dirty to win.  But compare that to the moneyed decadence of England; the puerile foppery of France; and China’s indelible family preferment.  Give us America every time.  Give us the useful man, the industrious one.  It might even do us some good that he has to grub around sometimes to get great.

Perhaps the principal basis for Irving’s regular ribbing of American culture was in its regular pretension to copy Europe’s less “useful” habits, especially as the country was rapidly proving it could afford them.  He saw that an American family’s “attainment of wealth” could, socially speaking, “change . . . at once the pert airs of vulgar ignorance, into fashionable ease and elegant vivacity.”  He observed – at first glance, either approvingly or disapprovingly, depending on which voice he was using to make the observation – that New Yorkers were increasingly infatuated with French people and French fashion, silk from China, and the delights of the theater.  So much theater.  Irving’s interest in Gotham’s interest in theater probably outpaced its actual attendance.  He spilled a great deal of ink making fun of both the theater-going public and the self-appointed novel class of theater critics.  One of his favorite creations was such a character, who felt entitled to review all of the city’s plays, including, as in the case of Othello, ones he had not actually seen.  He complained also, earnestly I would like to think, of the disturbing noises that had invaded the theater since the public had taken such a fashionable interest in it.  He deplored the “habit of talking loud that has lately crept into our theatres, and which particularly prevails in the boxes.  In old times people went to the theatre for the sake of the play and acting; but I now find it begins to answer the purpose of a coffee-house, or fashionable lounge, where many indulge in loud conversation, without any regard to the pain it inflicts on their more attentive neighbors.”  I found myself immensely sympathetic to this complaint, and I can only imagine how he would have felt about the arrival of speakerphones in restaurants in our times.  I sometimes wish they were uninvented.  

Irving was at his most charming, and at his most charmed, when he was writing about the Dutch.  The old Dutch, the ones who were defeated and absorbed – though not quite defeated and absorbed, maybe like the indomitable village of Gauls who comprise the heroics of Asterix and Obelix and their holdout compatriots from Goscinny and Uderzo – contained a timeless amiability, arising perhaps chiefly from their modest ambitions and quietist domiciliary habits.  Tolkien could just as easily have found inspiration for his hobbits among Irving’s New York Dutch as he did from Warwickshire countryfolk.

Irving’s portrait of an early governor of New Netherland, Wouter van Twiller, who managed the colony for the Dutch West India Company from 1632 to 1638, is illustrative.  Notice the – well, never mind what I suggest you notice, as you’ll doubtless notice it for yourself:

The renowned Wouter (or Walter) Van Twiller, was descended from a long line of dutch burgomasters, who had successively dozed away their lives and grown fat upon the bench of magistracy in Rotterdam; and who had comported themselves with such singular wisdom and propriety, that they were never either heard or talked of—which, next to being universally applauded, should be the object of ambition of all sage magistrates and rulers.

. . .

[H]e was a very wise dutchman, for he never said a foolish  thing—and of such invincible gravity, that he was never known to laugh, or even to smile, through the course of a long and prosperous life.  Certain however it is, there never was a matter proposed, however simple, and on which your common narrow minded mortals, would rashly determine at the first glance, but what the renowned Wouter, put on a mighty mysterious, vacant kind of look, shook his capacious head, and having smoked for five minutes with redoubled earnestness, sagely observed, that “he had his doubts about the matter”— which in process of time gained him the character of a man slow of belief, and not easily imposed on. 

The person of this illustrious old gentleman was as regularly formed and nobly proportioned, as though it had been moulded by the hands of some cunning dutch statuary, as a model of majesty and lordly grandeur.  He was exactly five feet six inches in height, and six feet five inches in circumference.  His head was a perfect sphere, far excelling in magnitude that of the great Pericles (who was thence waggishly called Schenocephalus, or onion head)—indeed, of such stupendous dimensions was it, that dame nature herself, with all her sex’s ingenuity, would have been puzzled to construct a neck, capable of supporting it; wherefore she wisely declined the attempt, and settled it firmly on the top of his back bone, just between the shoulders; where it remained, as snugly bedded, as a ship of war in the mud of the Potowmac. His body was of an oblong form, particularly capacious at bottom; which was wisely ordered by providence, seeing that he was a man of sedentary habits, and very averse to the idle labour of walking. 

His legs, though exceeding short, were sturdy in proportion to the weight they had to sustain; so that when erect, he had not a little the appearance of a robustious beer barrel, standing on skids.  His face, that infallible index of the mind, presented a vast expanse perfectly unfurrowed or deformed by any of those lines and angles, which disfigure the human countenance with what is termed expression. 

These Dutch represented for Irving a time lost and perhaps an opportunity lost.  What could have been.  It would be too much to say that Irving was a devoted backwards-looker (as might be said of, for example, William Faulkner) or even a sentimentalist.  He wasn’t.  His work is permeated by the acknowledgment that the engine of the future somehow mustmuscle on.  In his own life, at the age of nearly 60, he served four years as America’s Minister to Spain, one of the most important states in the world, and during a period of disruptive political turmoil in that country, to boot.  (Imagine for a minute that Joyce Carol Oates were suddenly elevated Ambassador to Italy or Brazil.)  Irving certainly believed in the progress of history and civilization, and he threw his lot in with it all the time.  But even though he seemed somehow to “know” that the Dutch who found their way to the New World (set aside, for the moment, the Native Americans, as we’ll have more on that story in a moment) must inexorably give way to more ambitious peoples like the English, he allowed that something was lost with the tossing out of the old furniture, and he appeared to toy with the idea that it all might have gone another way and that there was magic or quality now nearly forever lost, except in some unattended valleys and hidden villages.  This is the stuff of the “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and of Irving’s masterwork on the subject, A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, which was purported to be by the eccentric historian Diedrich Knickerbocker.  The Dutch, according to Irving, were cherub-type creatures whose hold on New York was doomed from the start.

One exemplary passage goes far in explaining his view.  Here he describes the government of New Amsterdam:

As most of the council were but little skilled in the mystery of combining pot-hooks and hangers, they determined, most judiciously, not to puzzle either themselves or posterity with voluminous records. The secretary, however, kept the minutes of the council with tolerable precision, in a large vellum folio, fastened with massy brass clasps; the journal of each meeting consisted but of two lines, stating in Dutch, that, ‘the council sat this day, and smoked twelve pipes on the affairs of the colony.’  By which it appears that the first settlers did not regulate their time by hours, but pipes, in the same manner as they measure distances in Holland at this very time; an admirably exact measurement, as a pipe in the mouth of a true born Dutchman, is never liable to those accidents and irregularities that are continually putting our clocks out of order.

In this manner did the profound council of New Amsterdam smoke, and doze, and ponder, from week to week, month to month, and year to year, in what manner they should construct their infant settlement: meanwhile, the town took care of itself, and like a sturdy brat which is suffered to run about wild, unshackled by clouts and bandages, and other abominations, by which your notable nurses and sage old women cripple and disfigure the children of men, increased so rapidly in strength and magnitude, that before the honest burgomasters had determined upon a plan, it was too late to put it in execution — whereupon they wisely abandoned the subject altogether. 

You can, of course, spot the treasure of compliment amidst the charges of indolence and parody of impotence.  Today we would call it a kind of benign libertarianism.  The Dutch governors were just ineffective enough and just lazy enough that their people could flourish from what turned out to be their laissez-faire outcome, if not attitude.  This worked in building an admirable life for the colonists.  That is, until the better-organized guys with better guns showed up to conquer them.  When I read Irving, I was reminded several times of the current cultural wars.  One of the loudest and possibly most explosive assertions I’ve seen and heard in the past few years is that “hard work” and “efficacy” are somehow white supremacist notions.  I wonder if the people shilling this line have read enough Irving. 

There is indeed a great deal our contemporaries could learn from or admire in this author.  He was not only a popular and interesting writer and popular and somewhat interesting historian and useful and effective diplomat, he was also a successful entrepreneur and a pioneering marketing genius.  I think my readers will relish learning that Irving’s massively successful first major venture, the magazine Salmagundi, collapsed due to co-founder dispute.  He and his brother fell out with their third partner, the publisher, over the just allocation of royalties.  The Finally audience will enjoy this even more knowing that Irving pressed on, undaunted, to ever greater entrepreneurial successes.

The key to Irving’s most meteoric achievement was a marketing ploy that would seem ingenious even today.

He had labored hard preparing his long and detailed History of New York.  The minor predicate conceit of the entire work was that it was a recovered artifact, a history written by an idiosyncratic academic, Diedrich Knickerbocker, who had spent decades accumulating unique records and special information about the early Dutch colonies, and who had disappeared from his boarding house after finishing his magnum opus.  Of course, this was all bollocks.  Knickerbocker was Irving’s invention, an example of the author’s not infrequent move of creating a fictional meta-author behind whom he could hide.

In this case, Irving went much further.  Before launching the publication of the History of New York, Irving placed missing person ads in New York newspapers seeking information about the mysteriously and suddenly disappeared Diedrich Knickerbocker.  As the story of the lost scholar gained traction, Irving pressed on with the invention.  He distributed a demand from the supposed boarding house owner from whose residence Knickerbocker had disappeared, threatening to publish the historical manuscript he had found among the missing guest’s personal effects in order to recover monies owed from the unpaid lodging bill!  This was entirely fabricated – from the name of the proprietor to the existence of the hotel.  But it generated enough social interest in the book that, upon its publication in 1809, it was an immediate and roaring success.  When I learned this, I was reminded of the original marketing campaign for the movie The Usual Suspects, which came out when I was in high school.  My web searches for confirmatory images were not successful, but I remember seeing posters around New York City featuring only the words – no image – “Who is Keyser Söze?”  It was a brilliant guerilla campaign for a film that proved to be a sneak attack blockbuster. 

Washington Irving figured it out two hundred years earlier.  Maybe some of my readers will point me to earlier examples, and I would welcome them.  But I am not aware of any.

Irving could be serious.  That is to say, he could strike, when he wanted, a serious and somber tone.  While in England, he enjoyed the habits of the flaneur, walking around both the less famous corners of London, admiring everyday life and distinctive architecture, and countryside villages, which he would explore slowly enough that he would sometimes find himself the unexpected and uninvited – but not unwelcome – guest at a church service, even a funeral.  He seems to have loved moping around churchyards and graveyards, and he reported – writing expressly in his own voice – how moved he was by what he described as the simple, poignant feelings of poor countryfolk whose lives are marked by small bounty and frequent tragedy.  For whatever reason, both in England and at home, Irving was often on the hunt for a simpler, truer time.  He certainly liked simpler virtues.

I think this likewise must have informed his view of Native Americans.  Irving did not write often on this subject, but, when he did, he was closest to what we call the Romantic school.  Irving was an almost exact contemporary of the first great American Romantic novelist James Fenimore Cooper, who wrote, among other works, The Last of the Mohicans.  He was born six years before Cooper and outlived him, also by six years.  Most readers will have some sense of the “Noble Savage” image made famous by Cooper and his progeny, and no doubt this kind of stereotyping will and should generate all manner of vexation.  But it is not hard to imagine that it was a sincere expression of both empathy and severe political misgiving about the ongoing European assault on the American Indian.  In this, Irving reached the height of his solemnity.  It’s almost as if it were a topic about which he could not find even an ounce of humor.

There is something in the character and habits of the North American savage, taken in connection with the scenery over which he is accustomed to range, its vast lakes, boundless forests, majestic rivers, and trackless plains, that is, to my mind, wonderfully striking and sublime. He is formed for the wilderness, as the Arab is for the desert. His nature is stern, simple, and enduring, fitted to grapple with difficulties and to support privations. There seems but little soil in his heart for the support of the kindly virtues; and yet, if we would but take the trouble to penetrate through that proud stoicism and habitual taciturnity which lock up his character from casual observation, we should find him linked to his fellow-man of civilized life by more of those sympathies and affections than are usually ascribed to him.

It has been the lot of the unfortunate aborigines of America in the early periods of colonization to be doubly wronged by the white men. They have been dispossessed of their hereditary possessions by mercenary and frequently wanton warfare, and their characters have been traduced by bigoted and interested writers. The colonists often treated them like beasts of the forest, and the author has endeavored to justify him in his outrages. The former found it easier to exterminate than to civilize; the latter to vilify than to discriminate. The appellations of savage and pagan were deemed sufficient to sanction the hostilities of both; and thus the poor wanderers of the forest were persecuted and defamed, not because they were guilty, but because they were ignorant.

Irving went further, specifically expressing a greatly unpopular opinion: empathy for Native American violence.  He recounts in ample detail, for example, the intricate and ancient traditions of venerating family and tribal sepulchers.  He then asks how his fellow countrymen can be so blind to the “deep and generous motives” of revenge for the ravaging of these sacred places.  “[O]ur inattention to Indian character and customs,” he writes, “prevents our properly appreciating” these justifiable feelings, and the responses they catalyze.

This is not the kind of sentiment you’d expect to find in the work of the most famous American writer of his time.  But he is plainly earnest, almost funereally so; he is serious; and he leaves no room for doubt.  This is not easily dismissed, even by today’s Olympian standards, as mere condescension.  It is closer to polemic, and it reflects a political opinion that was as unlikely as it was, finally, doomed. 

I wish Irving had found a way to put forward his views on Native Americans with humor.  He was undoubtedly on his best footing – and most effective – when funny, and at his best when in parody.  For reasons I have not yet discovered and do not yet comprehend, Irving was willing to take on many sacred or at least venerated subjects through comedy, but not all.  He made good Federalist fun of Thomas Jefferson, not by name but as an attack a clef, as a stand-in for one of the most-roasted Dutch governors; and also explicitly, for that matter, when he took aim at Jefferson’s red breeches, which must have been seen as some extreme example of ambitious foppery.  Knickerbocker, his historian creation, wrote, in 1809, a sendup of the so-called discovery of America by colonizers.  Irving, ever artful and erudite (here is a man who could write as easily of Giraldus Cambrensis, that is, Gerald of Wales, as he could about pipe smoking), even took on the national sacred cow of the jeremiad, which must be the most essentially and original American expression.  Here he is, in literary palimpsest, bemoaning, in behalf of his fictitious author, the lost epoch of the Dutch:

Luckless Diedrich! born in a degenerate age – abandoned to the buffettings of fortune – a stranger and a weary pilgrim in thy native land; blest with no weeping wife, nor family of helpless children – but doomed to wander neglected through those crowded streets, and elbowed by foreign upstarts from those fair abodes, where once thine ancestors held sovereign empire. Alas! alas! is then the dutch spirit forever extinct? The days of the patriarchs, have they fled forever? Return – return sweet days of simplicity and ease – dawn once more on the lovely island of Manna hata! – Bear with me my worthy readers, bear with the weakness of my nature – or rather let us sit down together, indulge the full flow of filial piety, and weep over the memories of our great great grand-fathers.

He was as relentless as he was relentlessly tongue-in-cheek.  In reading his work, I sometimes wished he were around today or that more writers tackling our current social challenges followed his example and used a lot more funny when doing so.  Bill Maher is mostly alone as a kind of “public intellectual” good-humoredly and effectively ribbing the Woe Betide Woke or Trumpian right.  Most of the others who attempt comedy veer toward a mocking, contemptuous tone, which is not the same thing and is not, finally, as effective.  Consider this passage from Irving on liberty of conscience.  It could easily have been written today as a comment on woke religion:

The zeal of these good people to maintain their rights and privileges unimpaired, betrayed them into errors, which it is easier to pardon than defend. Having served a regular apprenticeship in the school of persecution, it behooved them to show that they had become proficients in the art. They accordingly employed their leisure hours in banishing, scourging, or hanging, divers heretical Papists, Quakers, and Anabaptists, for daring to abuse the ‘liberty of conscience,’ which they now clearly proved to imply nothing more than that every man should think as he pleased in matters of religion, provided he thought right; for otherwise it would be giving a latitude to damnable heresies. Now as they were perfectly convinced that they alone thought right, it consequently followed that whoever thought differently from them, thought wrong; and whoever thought wrong, and obstinately persisted in not being convinced and converted, was a flagrant violator of the inestimable liberty of conscience, and a corrupt and infectious member of the body politic, and deserved to be lopped off and cast into the fire!

And here is Irving on, almost quite literally, Cancel Culture (the context reveals the underlying humor better than the particular selection, but you can get a flavor of it, and I don’t want to overload the moment):

Now I'll warrant, there are hosts of my readers, ready at once to lift up their hands and eyes, with that virtuous indignation with which we always contemplate the faults and errors of our neighbours, and to exclaim at these well meaning but mistaken people, for inflicting on others the injuries they had suffered themselves—for indulging the preposterous idea of convincing the mind by toasting the carcass, and establishing the doctrine of charity and forbearance, by intolerant persecution.—But soft you, my very captious sirs! what are we doing at this very day, and in this very enlightened nation, but acting upon the very same principle, in our political controversies. Have we not within but a few years released ourselves from the shackles of a government, which cruelly denied us the privilege of governing ourselves, and using in full latitude that invaluable member, the tongue? and are we not at this very moment striving our best to tyrannise over the opinions, tie up the tongues, or ruin the fortunes of one another?

Our politics of today – our own intolerant Hébertists – could do with such deft skewering.

Irving understood his country.  America’s limitless future potential, and its enormous current power, derive from its sense of its own rectitude.  We believe in doing the right thing, and we believe we do it.  That idea contains a few parts, each and all of them necessary: the right thing, believing we do the right thing, and (unlike, say, Irving’s Dutchmen) doing the right thing.  America gets it wrong.  But then we get it right again.  What we do not do – what we do not do well or aim to do well – is clever, savvy, unctuous compromise.  It is not in our national self-conception.  Other countries uphold conciliation as a principal virtue.  We contemn it.  Our national project was almost stillborn due to the massive social and political rupture arising from a perceived theological backsliding called the Halfway Covenant.  For over a century, the Missouri Compromise has been nearly universally derided in our shared consciousness as a devil’s bargain.  In our business and personal lives, we negotiate and accommodate, but we expect that the other party will do so squarely.  And in our national political life, our most fundamental assumption is that there is right, there is wrong, and we, our country, our people will choose to do the right thing, even if we have to do it alone.  This belief system permeates our culture, and it, perhaps more than any other single thing, has given us dominion over the world.

And – not really but, but and – we are at our very best when we hold these truths quietly, when we wear them lightly.  Lord knows we have had our humorless pietistic phases.  The Puritans were downright unfunny, and the Great Awakening was nearly so.  But we are not natural Victorians, clucking our tongues at one another for modest deviations from the prescribed, extreme mean.  At our best, we are convinced of our righteousness, but we don’t have to preachify.  In fact, we distrust nasty scolds, and our correct instinct is that they are often quite awful themselves and even more often hiding their baser agendas.  This is part of why Joseph McCarthy, after a brief heyday, failed.  This is part of why the humorless Woke will fail.  Americans neither admire nor require grave moralizing, because we know it is usually a disguise for ugliness.  We know it has no actual relation to identifying or doing the right thing.  On the contrary: we are so sure of ourselves that we can laugh.  We can use humor, we can make fun of, and we can simultaneously enjoy and love, the people at home or abroad whom we consider to be off the rails.

Washington Irving got this exactly.  He knew what we all, somehow, know, even if we don’t know how to say it.  And I think he was among the very first, perhaps the very first, to teach us this about ourselves.  Irving knew that we are a special and marvelous nation; that we were and are part of the future, still undefined but which we shall certainly help define; that we are vigorous and truthful, even if imperfect; and that we are at our very best when we have, while we strive and invent and break new ground in every field of human endeavor, a twinkle in our eyes that says we do not need to take ourselves altogether too seriously, because, finally, we know what is right, we know what we must do and will, and we know we have the singular, awesome enterprise of the United States at our backs.