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How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop
How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop
Radio, Rap, and Race
Amy Coddington
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
University of California Press Oakland, California
is work is licensed under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) license. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses.
Suggested citation: Coddington, A. How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop: Radio, Rap, and Race Oakland: University of California Press, 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.165
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Coddington, Amy, 1986– author
Title: How hip hop became hit pop : radio, rap, and race / Amy Coddington
Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identi ers: LCCN 2023004223 (print) | LCCN 2023004224 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520383920 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520383937 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Rap (Music)—History and criticism. | Popular music—United States—History and criticism. | Radio and music—United States History—20th century. | Music and race—United States—History—20th century.
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023004223
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023004224
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Formatting Race on Commercial Radio Too Black, Too Noisy
Broadcasting Multiculturalism and Rap on Crossover Radio
Hip Hop Becomes Hit Pop
Containing Black Sound on Top 40 Radio
Conclusion: Formatting Race in the New Century
Notes Bibliography
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
e norm for these sorts of acknowledgements is to save your family for last, but let’s be honest: this wouldn’t have happened without them. ank you to my parents Al and Caroline, who have fed, housed, encouraged, pushed, and loved me, and have never stopped supporting me and my musical interests. anks to my grandparents, who showed me that there is nothing better in the world than learning more about it and made me believe that this career was at all possible. My extended family, I love you all. To my sisses, Kate and Beth, who have always set the bar: thank you for being my best friends since I was born. And a huge shout-out to their signi cant others, Marshall and Matt, for being with me every step of this process. My nieces and nephew Ellie, Charlie, Ruth, and Lydia have all come into my life as I’ve researched and written the dissertation and, now, the book. You are simply the best; to be frank I wouldn’t have gotten much done if you weren’t on the other side of every deadline.
I’ve written most of this book while employed in the music department at Amherst College. To my visiting and permanent colleagues over the past six years, Arianne Abela, Mallorie Chernin, Bruce Diehl, Jeffers Engelhardt, Suzette Farnham, Bradford Garvey, Darryl Harper, Noah Horn, Yvette Janine Jackson, Ted Keyes, Klára Móricz, Alisa Pearson, Kate Pukinskis, Jason Robinson, Eric Sawyer, David Schneider, Dylan Schneider, and Mark Swanson: thank you for making me feel like I’ve belonged in this place since the day I interviewed and for mentoring and commiserating with me. I’m really fortunate to have been welcomed into many overlapping communities here in the Happy Valley made up of friends and colleagues, including the members of the Five College Ethnomusicology Committee (in particular Steve Waksman, who has offered kind guidance and mentorship), as well as
Dwight Carey, Sonya Clark, Michael Cohen, Li Cornfeld, Nora Dillon, Nisse Greenberg, Alberto Lopez, the Macomber family, Adeline Mueller, the South Hadley Boys (and associates), Triin Vallaste, and Matthew Watson.
is book has been abundantly supported by the Provost and Dean of the Faculty’s Office at Amherst College through research funding, the Gregory S. Call Academic Intern program, a grant from the Faculty Research Award Program funding a manuscript workshop, and a tenure-track sabbatical fellowship. anks to both the Amherst College Library and the Provost and Dean of the Faculty’s Office for the nancial support to make this book available open access.
I’m grateful for the work of around a dozen research assistants who spent many boring hours compiling the data sets in this book and who also completed a few other side projects. Christian Daniels, Sarah Duggan, Kai Glashausser, Oliver Kendall, Meredith King, Anna Peloso, Michael Purvis, Josue Sanchez Hernandez, Lorelle Sang, and Ella Yarmo-Gray: thank you for working alongside me. I’m also grateful for all of the other students I’ve taught at Amherst College who have made my job such a blast, helped me think through many of the ideas on these pages, and brought a necessary dose of optimism into my life.
anks to Raina Polivka and the entire team at the University of California Press, who have helped shape every part of this book. I’m grateful for the generative feedback from all of the other editors and reviewers I’ve worked with on this material in chapter, article, or book form, including Justin Burton, David Garcia, Loren Kajikawa, Jason Lee Oakes, and Oliver Wang, as well as some anonymous reviewers. ank you to the staff at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the William and Gayle Cook Music Library at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music for their help tracking down archival materials, and to Sara Smith at the Amherst College Library for providing fair use guidance. An extra special thank-you goes to Matthew Vest and Tyler Magill of the University of Virginia library system, who found and gave me access to a complete run of Radio & Records in a very cold section of Alderman Library. And above all else, this research would not have been possible without the radio and music industry archivists at sites like worldradiohistory.com, who have digitized an extraordinary number of primary sources, and the radio-obsessed people
who upload airchecks and other radio broadcasts to YouTube and other sites who have kept the sounds of this era alive.
Portions of How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop were rst published as the following: “‘Check Out the Hook While My DJ Revolves It’: How the Music Industry Made Rap into Pop in the Late 1980s” in e Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music Studies, edited by Justin D. Burton and Jason Lee Oakes, Oxford University Press, 2018; “A ‘Fresh New Music Mix’ for the 1980s: Broadcasting Multiculturalism on Crossover Radio” in Journal of the Society for American Music 15, no. 1 (February 2021), 30–59. anks to both presses, as well as to the University of California Press, for graciously allowing me to include this material in the book. And I’m grateful for the vision and artistry of Roger Andrews whose work appears on the cover.
I started this project during my graduate studies at the University of Virginia where I worked with some admirable scholars, including those who advised me on this project: Bonnie Gordon, Grace Hale, Jack Hamilton, Fred Maus, and Richard Will. A huge thank-you is owed to Karl Hagstrom Miller, who taught me just about everything I know on writing a historical narrative about the music industry. My time in graduate school was nancially supported by my job at Blue Mountain Brewery, whose rock-star team kept me happy, healthy, and hydrated.
Before coming to the University of Virginia I found my love for music history rst in Richard Long’s orchestra class at South Eugene High School and in my piano lessons with Sandy Holder, and discovered it again in the classes taught at Macalester College by Chris Gable, Mark Mazullo, Marjorie Merryman, and Robert Peterson. I’ve been encouraged along the way by a kickass group of old friends Catherine Biringer, Adrian Croke, Emily Erickson, Anna Goldberg, Elyse Gordon, Anne Grossardt, Jenna Harris, Franne Kamhi, Curtis Kettler, Mandy Kolbe, Laura Krider, Sophia Kast, Clara Osowski, Emily Parks, Anna Popinchalk, Marika Tsolakis, Lauren Vick, Emily Wagenknecht, and Cassie Walters: I’m not here without all of you.
At the University of Virginia and along the merry road aer, I’ve been welcomed into the world of popular music and media scholarship by a warm and damn-smart group of people whose perspectives have contributed to this project. ese include (but are certainly not limited to): Vilde Aaslid, Alena Aniskiewicz, Christa Bentley, Mark Butler, Matt Carter, Mark
Campbell, Gretchen Carlson, eo Cateforis, Kyle Chattleton, Norma Coates, Kevin Davis, Pete D’Elia, Mike D’Errico, Aldona Dye, Stephanie Doktor, Liza Sapir Flood, Andy Flory, Emily Gale, Shana GoldinPerschbacher, Daniel Goldmark, Kaleb Goldschmitt, Peter Graff, Jasmine Henry, Robin James, Jake Johnson, Brian Jones, Matt Jones, Mark Katz, Lauron Kehrer, Courtney Kleis, Steven Lewis, Elizabeth Lindau, Emily Lordi, Sean Lorre, Deirdre Loughridge, Joanna Love, Kim Mack, Amanda Marie Martinez, Jane Mathieu, Michaelangelo Matos, Chris Molanphy, Carmen Moreno Diaz, Tiffany Naiman, Sam Parler, Justin Patch, Sean Peterson, Matthew Pincus, Elliott Powell, Chris Reali, Patrick Rivers, Will Robin, Griff Rollefson, Marcel Rosa-Salas, Nick Rubin, Alex Russo, Nick Seaver, Mandy Smith, Tracey Stewart, Joey ompson, David VanderHamm, Kristina Warren, Jada Watson, Eric Weisbard, and Liz Wollman.
anks to AMS, IASPM-US, SAM, SCMS, the Transcultural Hip Hop Conference, and PopCon for providing me with spaces to present this work, and for all who offered feedback on papers given at these conferences. Several chapters of this book were much improved thanks to the feedback from sessions at three separate AMS Popular Music Study Group Junior Faculty Symposiums, as well as a COVID-era writing group with Paula Harper, Kate Galloway, Byrd McDaniel, and Landon Palmer. Brian Wright and Andrew Mall (the gang!) have given feedback, provided moral support, and helped me dream big. Kathleen Kearns provided her expert guidance, helping re ne the book’s argument and scope. I’m grateful for Kwame Harrison and Murray Forman’s generous and spirited feedback on this manuscript offered during a beautiful day in San Juan. Many thanks to the NCFDD Faculty Success Program for teaching me how to get my work done and introducing me to Marissa Burgermaster and Melissa Charenko, who are owed their own round of gratitude; our weekly accountability calls have pushed this project to completion and have provided a welcome dose of friendly sanity amidst the chaos.
e family Craig Comen, Ian Coyle, Jarek Ervin, Stef Gunst, and Vic Szabo (yes, lil old you) have celebrated every victory, shared every cocktail, ridden every wave, and given me shit every chance they’ve had. Oh, and they’ve offered me feedback on almost every single idea and sentence in this book. I couldn’t and wouldn’t want to do this without you.
And to my sweet love, Colin: thanks for helping me nd the right word when I’m stuck (regardless of whatever else you might be doing), for always telling me to go back in there and try again when things get hard, and for loving me every single day of our lives together.
Introduction
Formatting Race on Commercial Radio
In July 1992, Seattle rapper Sir Mix-a-Lot topped the Billboard “Hot 100” chart with his insatiably catchy hit “Baby Got Back.” His ode to ladies who “look like those rap guys ’ girlfriends” wasn’t anywhere near the only rap song that year to do well on the “Hot 100,” which recorded the most popular songs in the United States as measured by record sales and radio airplay.1 By the early 1990s, rap songs frequently and consistently appeared in the chart’s upper reaches, indicating the genre ’ s broad popularity. is was an extraordinary transformation: what began in the 1970s as just one element of a minority New York City subculture had become an essential part of the sound of popular music in the United States. And rap ’ s move from the margins to the mainstream, according to Sir Mix-a-Lot, had the potential to reshape racial attitudes. Rap, he thought, had the unique ability to “foster cross-cultural appreciation” by encouraging white audiences to engage with Black culture.2
But US listeners tuning in to their local Top 40 radio station to hear the most popular new music might have missed this opportunity. Many Top 40 stations were playing the number one hit every few hours, giving it the airplay appropriate to such an achievement. And, indeed, these stations had contributed to the genre ’ s growth since the late 1980s, when they began regularly adding rap songs to their playlists, thereby introducing rap to new listeners across the country. But there were still some holdouts against rap ’ s radio ascendance: other Top 40 stations refused to play the genre even as they claimed to play all of the hits. Programmers at these stations were so opposed to playing rap that they pressured the nationally syndicated countdown shows to obscure its popularity when counting down the hits.3 Listeners tuning in to these stations and countdowns had an entirely different idea of
what music was topping the charts. For them, “Baby Got Back” wasn’t on top it had barely cracked the top twenty.
If you ’ re confused, it’s understandable. By 1992, rap was somehow both ‐mainstream and marginal. It was an integral part of musical culture in the United States, selling millions of records, appearing on Top 40 radio playlists, and regularly topping Billboard’ s charts. But many within the radio industry considered the genre tangential to the popular-music mainstream, and they worked to keep it on the periphery, denying listeners the opportunity to engage with it and denying rappers like Sir Mix-a-Lot the chance to change racial attitudes in the United States. To some, rap was another style of hit music; to others, not so much.
is book interrogates rap ’ s place in the popular-music mainstream in the United States by examining how the commercial radio industry programmed the genre during the 1980s and early 1990s. Above all else, the industry’s business model dictated the terms of rap ’ s inclusion within the musical mainstream that Top 40 radio stations broadcast, as these stations negotiated the increasing popularity of the genre against advertisers’ demands for more white adult listeners. Many in the radio and advertising industries understood rap to be antithetical to the type of music these pro table audiences wanted to hear. In a country coming to understand its multiculturalism, rap was a sonic symbol of Blackness and a touchstone for white anxiety about the diversi cation of the mainstream.4
Centering the voices of radio programmers ghting over whether to play rap, How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop explores how rap songs like “Baby Got Back” came to be played on radio stations aimed at mainstream audiences and argues that this exposure had profound consequences for the genre and the radio industry. Rap changed the radio industry; programmers found space for the genre only once they had recon gured the industry’s race-based organization to make space for multicultural audiences. But the radio industry also changed rap. Artists grappled with pressure to conform to programmers ’ musical preferences and struggled to maintain the genre ’ s identity as those programmers took control of its mainstreaming. And all of this in uenced the racial politics of rap and the cultural identity of the United States more broadly.5
Rap music is at the center of this narrative. But this history is really a story about money, about how the business model of the radio industry affected
rap ’ s relationship to the mainstream. And it’s a story about race, about how the racial prejudice central to radio’s business model in uenced rap ’ s mainstream potential. But most of all, it’s about how these two stories are inseparable: rap ’ s racial politics are inextricably intertwined with its role as a commodity. Offering a sobering account of rap music’s history and its political potential, this narrative illuminates the consequences of mainstream exposure and makes clear the political, economic, and social costs of how rap became the most popular genre in the United States.6
MAKING RACE AUDIBLE IN THE MUSIC INDUSTRIES
While hip hop scholarship is a gloriously diverse eld, most academic and critical work on rap music in the United States focuses on the direct path from musicians to consumers, exploring how artists make music that people engage with. is has resulted in vital and signi cant work that highlights the music’s radical political potential by focusing on artists whose music voices the concerns of marginalized young people of color, whether they are superstars like Public Enemy, Queen Latifah, and Kendrick Lamar or underground voices competing at local cyphers and performing at open mic nights. ese accounts present critical reminders of the music’s subcultural resistance and associated politics, but oen at the expense of acknowledging what could be considered the elephant in the disciplinary room: rap has become the most popular genre in the world, and global superstars including Blondie, New Kids on the Block, the Spice Girls, the Black Eyed Peas, Pitbull, and Ed Sheeran all engage with hip hop’s aesthetics if not its more radical politics. is book takes the opposite approach, examining rap ’ s move to the mainstream without highlighting its most politically vocal artists.7
e authors who do chronicle rap ’ s growth into the most popular genre in the world typically examine this transition from an insider perspective. Documentaries like Hip-Hop Evolution and books such as e Big Payback and Can’t Stop Won’t Stop focus on those within the burgeoning rap music industry who advocated for the genre, including hip hop artists, mix-show DJs, rap record-company personnel, and journalists at rap-oriented periodicals such as e Source. ese works, together with John Klaess’s history of rap mix shows in New York City, tell compelling stories of how those devoted to hip hop culture fought for their music by challenging the racism and complacency of the music industries and forcing the mainstream to bend toward hip hop. But the history of rap is far more complicated than this heroic narrative reveals; regardless of how insiders understood the genre, rap music was (and still is) indelibly in uenced by mainstream sensibilities as radio programmers and record-label personnel endeavored to sell the genre to an increasingly broad audience. And these industry members, many of whom knew little of the genre ’ s political ambitions and musical nuances,
framed it for listeners, oen in ways that directly contradicted the aspirations of those insiders invested in hip hop culture.
To understand how rap became mainstream, it’s necessary to look to those who construct the mainstream. is entails turning toward the spaces between creators and consumers, to see how the genre sied through the various layers of the music industries and how its position within these industries in uenced its racial politics.8
For most of the last century, the recording industry has been organized ‐according to two intertwined principles: the assumption and subsequent demand that Black and white artists make different styles of music, and the simpli cation that consumers and performers of a genre share similar racial, ethnic, or class identities. is organizational structure in uences how music is produced, promoted, and consumed. Record companies separate music made by and for people whom they consider outside the mainstream into Black, Latin, country, or other departmental divisions, and these departments encourage artists to design their musical wares for what they consider to be the same sorts of nonmainstream audiences.9 While this structuring is most oen described using the language of genre, it is primarily about identity. “No other industry in America,” reported the NAACP in 1987, “ so openly classi es its operations on a racial basis.”10
e organization of the music industries affects how music sounds its politics of race, how it can, in musicologist Loren Kajikawa’s theorization, “make race audible.”11 In their work on racial identity in the United States, sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant write that racial categories are formed through “historically situated projects in which human bodies and social structures are represented and organized,” projects that become ways of making sense of people in the world through repetition and reproduction.12 e record industry is one such racial project; its organization of musical activities produces and reproduces understandings of race.13 While racial categories in the real world are far more complex than a simple Black/white binary, the music industries primarily operate along this axis of racial categorization, demonstrating what scholar Jennifer Lynn Stoever describes as the “deliberately reductionist racial project constructing white power and privilege against the alterity and abjection of the imagined polarity of ‘blackness.’”14 Even as artists’ own work expresses their complex
identities, the recording industry tidily boxes them into this reductive racialized framework to more efficiently sell their music.
Cultural intermediaries such as radio programmers, promoters, diskjockey pool organizers, and record store owners also affect popular music’s meaning.15 As artists work, the eventual placement of their music by intermediaries on Spotify playlists, festival bills, and record-store shelves is taken into consideration. ese intermediaries don’t just put music into consumers ’ ears; they also in uence its production and consumption. Creating additional layers of (mostly race-based) organizational frameworks for songs to navigate on their way to consumers, cultural intermediaries “reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines,” contributing to the process of racial formation.16
e commercial radio industry in the United States introduces an additional wrinkle. To an average listener, a radio station is another intermediary, responsible for introducing music to the public. But a radio station is also a cultural producer, selling the attention of a speci c audience (most oen de ned by race, gender, and age) to companies that place ads on the station.17 Music, in this business model, is merely an “evocative and economical” tool that stations use to cultivate speci c audiences.18 Relying on understandings of musical taste that link musical consumption with sociocultural differentiation, radio programming uses musical taste as a proxy for demographic difference to create sellable audience segments out of the diverse US public.19
Since the 1970s, the radio industry has used the “programming weapon ” of music to divide local audiences in similar ways across the country, creating a national organizational structure de ned by formats.20 e term format has two meanings: the industry’s grouping together stations that play similar music to attract similar types of listeners and an individual station’s programming, including music, advertising, and DJ patter.21 During the 1980s, ve music formats emerged as the most important to the radio and record industries, as shown in table 1.22 ese formats neatly aligned with record-company divisions and altered these companies’ musical products; the radio industry exerted in uence over the sound and popularity of musical genres because record companies cognizant of radio’s promotional role paid close attention to what found space on playlists.23 But formats are also bound by the economics of the radio industry, as the demographic
preferences of companies advertising on the radio determine a format’s viability. In the 1980s and 1990s, most of these companies targeted white adult audiences and, in particular, prized white women under the age of y, who they thought controlled household spending and were willing to experiment with new products. A format’s advertising rate and thus its pro tability depended on its playlist attracting advertiser-friendly adults, rather than the young audiences that were the primary consumers of records.24
1
By drawing a direct line from playlists to audiences, radio programming systematizes the ambiguous relationship between musical sound and people. In so doing, the radio industry participates in the construction of racial identity in the United States; it produces and reproduces correspondences between songs and racially de ned audiences.25 Prior to the development of the contemporary format structure, radio played an important role in the creation of what Stoever terms the “sonic color line,” the expectation that certain racialized people produce certain types of sounds.26 In the rst half of the twentieth century, nationally broadcast shows like Amos ’ n ’ Andy and local shows alike helped produce a sonic Black/white binary, reinforcing white identity among assimilating European immigrants by rendering Blackness in opposition to this melting-pot white identity.27
TABLE
Five most important radio formats in the 1980s
But contemporary formatting more thoroughly connects identity to sound. Radio programmers those who determine a station’s playlist act as both producers and pedagogues of identity, creating and teaching what Omi and Winant term racial “ common sense ” for understanding who listens to what.28 Designed to deliver speci c demographics, station playlists offer a window into racial attitudes, delineating whom the music and advertising industries deem certain styles of music to be for. And although the radio industry is oen incapable of accurately measuring audiences’ complex identities, playlists also articulate the intersection of race with other social identities such as gender, sexuality, and class.29 Paying attention to the logic of radio programming thus lends insight into the relationship between musical style and audiences, illuminating how genres come to be understood as for some people and not for others. In rap ’ s case, looking at its inclusion on radio playlists reveals the genre ’ s transforming audience and its shiing relationship to the popular-music mainstream throughout the late 1980s and into the early 1990s.
DEFINING THE MAINSTREAM
While the more literal meaning of mainstream brings to mind the combination of disparate strands into a major tributary, the mainstream is not a natural representation of popularity or consensus. Rather, it is a profoundly ideological term, delineating which people, ideas, and behaviors t within a historically contingent set of norms and which fall outside into more “marginal” categories.30 Whether referring to political viewpoints or belief systems, media sources or artistic movements, the term is about belonging, about who and what has been deemed part of the ideological center. e media is a central actor in framing discourse about belonging, helping consumers make sense of what is part of mainstream behavior and what deviates from these norms.31 e cultural mainstream of the United States throughout most of the twentieth century was white; within this mainstream, “the interests and values of white people [were] positioned as unmarked universals by which difference, de cit, truth, and justice [were] determined.”32 But the boundaries of all mainstreams are constantly in ux, as new ideas and movements push their way in and force those in power to adjust their conception of the ideological center.33
Within the realm of popular music, the ideology of the mainstream nds grounding in the music industries’ business practices.34 Recent academic work on the popular-music mainstream expands beyond the oppositional understanding prevalent within the cultural studies tradition, where the concept of the mainstream gained salience in distinction from a subculture or a marginal genre. Scholars including Alison Huber and Jason Toynbee have lent shape to the concept of the popular-music mainstream, arguing that mainstreaming is a process rather than a xed characteristic of a type of music.35 e boundaries of the mainstream, Huber argues, indicate power relations within the music industries in ways that replicate systemic inequalities. She writes, “ a musical mainstream consists of music that is culturally dominant because of practices that coalesce to produce that dominance; there is no inherently ‘mainstream music.’”36 But the music industries those in the best position to produce cultural dominance turn this process into a product, pro ting from the construction of a center through the creation, marketing, and sale of particular styles.
As with other mainstreams, the media shapes the popular-music mainstream’s contours. No segment of the music industries more conspicuously de nes the boundaries of what counts as mainstream popular music than the commercial radio industry, which unceremoniously decides which artists have the correct demographic appeal to become superstars.37 Radio formats throughout the twentieth century, scholar Eric Weisbard contends, have constructed multiple, overlapping mainstreams owing alongside each other so that hits can cross over from one “rival mainstream” to another.38 But in the 1980s and early 1990s, these rivalries were lopsided, as one mainstream carried the most weight within the music industries: the Top 40 format.39 During these years, the Top 40 format was one of the clearest examples of the popular-music mainstream, dictating the terms of inclusion into this ideological center.40
Since its establishment in the 1950s, the Top 40 format has primarily played the music that is charting well on the Billboard “Hot 100” (in the twentieth century, the chart was calculated by combining reported airplay on Top 40 stations with sales gures).41 As a chart measuring the most popular songs in the country, the “Hot 100” is made up of songs in a variety of genres, and the relative popularity of any one of these genres changes from month to month or year to year. e Top 40 format’s dependence on the “Hot 100” has oen led to stylistically heterogeneous playlists throughout its history: in the 1970s, it wouldn’t have been surprising to hear Captain and Tennille’s syrupy yacht-rock classic “Love Will Keep Us Together” alongside the perhaps rightfully uncommon occurrence of a piccolo melody in the disco anthem “e Hustle” by Van McCoy & the Soul City Symphony.42
But by the 1980s, this musical variety was mostly passé, as nancial realities prompted Top 40 programmers to tighten their playlists to appeal beyond the format’s longstanding teen base to white adult female listeners. Even as they claimed to play all the hits, Top 40 programmers in the 1980s centered their stations’ playlists around the historically white genre of pop and carefully managed the inclusion of other genres.43 Most Black artists had to nd their way onto these playlists through a circuitous process known as crossing over, developing their act in their record company ’ s Black division and proving themselves on Black-Oriented stations before being considered by the Top 40 format.44 In an attempt to adhere to the sound of pop music played on the Top 40 format, most artists hoping to cross over reduced other
genre-speci c stylistic characteristics.45 Attuned to these crossover nuances, record-company employees and radio programmers routinely thought about songs in relation to format expectations, describing songs in ways that referenced their ability to t within a format, such as “urbanish but not too urban.”46
De ned by its intended consumption by particular listeners as well as its stylistic proximity to other music played on Top 40 stations, mainstream popular music in the 1980s and early 1990s resembled a genre. As a general concept, mainstream popular music doesn’t necessarily suggest a speci c sound or genre; rather, it is music aimed at a particular idea of what a mainstream audience is. But as Weisbard contends, radio formats since the 1970s have adopted the logic of genres (matching a “set of songs and a set of ideals”) in place of the logic of formats (matching a playlist to an audience of people).
47 In her work on genre, philosopher Robin James reduces Weisbard’s distinction between formats and genre to “formats categorize people; genres categorize music.” But on the radio, music implies people and vice versa. e more that programmers buy into the connection between playlists and audiences which they have done increasingly since the 1980s to pacify advertisers looking for more targeted audiences the less difference there is between a format and a genre.48 Indicating both a set of listeners and a set of musical expectations, Top 40 playlists in the 1980s and early 1990s were, like genres, “musico-discursive process[es]” that stabilized as listeners, programmers, and musicians created expectations for what the format should sound like.49
Top 40 radio’s business model of playing music for a mostly white audience determined the popular-music mainstream’s racial identity. Neither the Top 40 format nor the mainstream music it played were explicitly characterized as white.50 e format has historically been a primary channel through which Black artists have been marketed toward white audiences, and today all of the music these stations play takes in uence from Black American musical traditions regardless of a performer’s racial identity. But whiteness is rarely so overtly stated; instead, it is apparent within the industry structure. Like the more general concept of the mainstream, the Top 40 format implied mass popularity and yet its playlists were bound by ideological constraints concerning the pro tability of its audiences. By claiming that it played the top hits (regardless of whether it did), this format
constructed consensus, turning the musical tastes of its mostly white audience into the sound of the popular-music mainstream.51 In order to be played on Top 40 stations, Black artists needed to make music that Top 40’s mostly white programmers would think had appeal among their mostly white audiences, indicating that many Top 40 programmers and record companies considered the mainstream potential of Black artists to be conditional.52 e crossover process turns mainstream inclusion into what T. Carlis Roberts describes as “ an arena of racial confrontation and negotiation,” where entry onto playlists indicates what sorts of Black identities and sounds are considered part of the popular-music mainstream.53
MAKING THE MAINSTREAM MULTICULTURAL
For rap to cross over into the popular-music mainstream, it had to convince white programmers of its multiracial appeal. Black artists performing in other genres throughout the 1980s were doing just that, prompting Top 40 programmers to expand the boundaries of the popular-music mainstream. At the dawn of the 1980s, Top 40 radio playlists were mostly white; concerned about disco’s declining popularity and the moral panic regarding disco’s nonwhite and nonheteronormative identity, programmers added fewer songs by non-white performers to their playlists.54 But by the mid-1980s, their discriminatory programming practices had loosened to embrace Black superstars like Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, and Whitney Houston, all of whom were pressured by their record labels to make crossover music aimed at wider (and whiter) audiences.55 In 1985, Billboard’ s Paul Grein reported that the year ’ s charts featured an increased number of crossover artists: Prince and Billy Ocean both cracked the top ten in the year-end tallies for three different radio formats; Kool & the Gang appeared in the top twenty in four different formats; Stevie Wonder’s “Part-Time Lover” reached number one on four different charts during the course of the year; and Sade appeared on year-end charts in ve different formats.56 A year later, Grein heralded what he saw as the “breakdown of the color line between pop and black radio,” as six out of the top seven pop hits were by Black artists.57 Further down the chart, almost a third of the top 100 pop singles that year were by Black musicians. White artists too participated in this crossover moment by appropriating Black musical styles in a “ reverse crossover ” ; three of the top ten songs on the “Hot Black Singles” chart in 1986 featured white performers. Many people working in the music industries praised the abundance of crossover music. Some commentators thought that the increased mainstream acceptance of Black artists might prompt record companies to more equitably distribute resources and compensate artists.58 Critic Greg Tate, for example, hoped that what he called “the age of Radio Utopia” would push record companies to grant Black musicians more artistic latitude.59 But for others, the diversi cation of radio playlists indicated changing racial attitudes: Benny Medina of Warner Bros. connected the increase in Black artists on Top 40 stations to an “intermingling of the races ” outside the music business, and
Billboard columnist David Nathan wrote that the popularity of crossover music was “ re ective of important social developments [such as] the effects of integration in high schools.”60 Musical taste perhaps signi ed something more than sonic preference.
ese interpretations of the diversi cation of the popular-music mainstream aligned with contemporary attention to the diversity of the United States’ cultural mainstream. Increased immigration from Asian and Latin American countries following the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 as well as the (slow and unequal) desegregation of public spaces in the post–civil rights era made the United States a more noticeably diverse place, and racial and ethnic diversity was to continue increasing.61 Radically minded artists, activists, and educators throughout the 1960s and 1970s advocated for a new understanding of cultural affinity in the United States, one which cast aside the assimilationist impulses of the melting-pot ideal of monoculturalism and advocated for the redistribution of the nation’s resources. Multiculturalism, as the movement came to be known, demanded recognition of the diverse ethnic and racial groups in the US and advocated for reinventing public school curricula, highlighting minority artists’ work, and creating ethnic studies departments at colleges and universities.62 But by the 1980s, what had once been associated with more radical politics was simply a new way of making sense of the United States’ population.63 e country was no longer a melting pot but instead according to one market professional a salad bowl, where all of the different “pieces comingle in one setting, juxtaposed yet distinct.” Together, this multicultural medley could “yiel[d] complex, but harmonized avors each ingredient contributing its unique essence to the mix.”64
is move toward a multicultural understanding of the cultural mainstream was visible in popular and consumer culture more broadly: on nationally broadcast network television shows starring non-white actors, at local community events celebrating a myriad of cultural traditions, and in stores selling tortillas and collard greens in one aisle and children’s toys with a diverse range of skin tones in another.65 As historian Lizabeth Cohen notes, the roles of citizen and consumer were linked in the United States throughout the twentieth century, meaning that the increased recognition of the diversity of the US population went hand in hand with selling to these various segments.66 Many companies in the 1970s and 1980s began using marketing
techniques targeted toward Black and Hispanic consumers that highlighted and recognized racial, ethnic, and cultural differences.67 What the industry referred to as multicultural marketing understood race and ethnicity as foundational to how minorities consumed, and these practices incorporated more diverse actors and more targeted approaches. Dockers, for example, began casting Black and white models in its ads, and Avon started translating its lipstick commercials into Spanish.68
RAP’S DISTANCE FROM THE MAINSTREAM
As some non-white Americans were welcomed into marketplaces, enacting multicultural inclusion through consumption, others, including those involved in hip hop’s creation, were systematically excluded from this possibility.69 A devastating combination of racial segregation in housing, employer abandonment of major urban areas, and rampant workplace discrimination led to racialized poverty in urban areas in the post-war period, including in the South Bronx, where hip hop was about to be born. e federal government further exacerbated these inequities by cutting entitlement programs aimed at helping these communities, meaning that those without the means to move out of cities including the young people of color who began tagging, breaking, rapping, and DJing in the South Bronx were le without jobs and social services in neighborhoods that had little hope of increased government investment.70
e South Bronx in the 1970s was about as far from the mainstream as one positioned within this ideological center could imagine. As the government demolished and failed to adequately rebuild the neighborhood, and as city officials abdicated their responsibility to local citizens through planned or unplanned shrinkage policies, the South Bronx became what critic Nelson George describes as “America’s dark side,” the national representation of urban decay in movies like Fort Apache: e Bronx and Tom Wolfe’s novel Bonfire of the Vanities. 71 By the mid-1970s, many outside the neighborhood saw it as a “spectacular set of ruins, a mythical wasteland, an infectious disease,” as Jeff Chang writes.72 A 1981 CBS News Sunday Morning special report, for instance, described the neighborhood using a Kurt Vonnegut quote about World War II ruins in Dresden: “It was like the moon now, nothing but minerals.”73 And as politicians and pundits debated solutions, they called attention to perceived differences between upwardly mobile people who resided elsewhere and the people of color who lived in similar neighborhoods; for example, Time magazine cast economically disadvantaged people living in urban areas like the South Bronx as “the unreachables” in a 1977 story about this “ group of people who are more intractable, more socially alien and more hostile than almost anyone had imagined.”
74 Sociologist Herman Gray argues that the media particularly cast
socioeconomically disadvantaged Black men outside of the multicultural normative public such that they acted as the “symbolic basis for fueling and sustaining panics about crime, the nuclear family, and middle-class security.”75 Reagan-era discourse shied public perception of inequality to questions of personal responsibility, rendering young people of color such as those participating in hip hop culture as menaces to “law and order,” framing typical of the times that disguised race-baiting as moral panic.76
When rap music expanded out of the South Bronx, it assumed many of these racialized outsider associations. Multiple studies have demonstrated that, as it was introduced to those outside of the New York area through print media, rap “ was constructed such that [it] was aligned with, or homologous to, the social category of race ” and was characterized as “the expression of an essential racial difference: an authentic expression of ‘blackness’ and particularly of urban underclass ‘blackness.’”77 is connection has, if anything, strengthened in the intervening years, such that the genre regardless of an individual performer’s racial identity is inextricably linked to its Blackness.78
e music industries were hesitant to incorporate the genre into their ‐diversifying mainstream. In part, this was due to its racial identity. While rap ’ s audience and its creators were never exclusively Black—since the genre ’ s beginnings, rap songs have been produced and consumed by a racially and ethnically diverse public the genre was created, marketed, and bought by people who understood rap to be the sound of urban Black teenage life.79 Rap’s racial identity in uenced its placement within the segregated record industry; rappers were most oen signed to small Black-music–focused record labels, and as major labels gained interest in rap they either directly signed rappers into their Black divisions or signed distribution deals rather than get involved with artist development and promotion.80 Either way, this separated rap from the white mainstream divisions at record labels.81
But rap ’ s perceived distance from the mainstream went further than the music industries’ understanding of who the music was made by and for aer all, Top 40 stations regularly played Black artists. Rap music was developed in spaces outside of the typical purview of the pro t-seeking music industries, its very essence craed from the materials and creative possibilities of the South Bronx. e music industries didn’t instantly recognize the potential of a genre consumed by economically disadvantaged
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England could have borne with patience the punishment of the West Indies had not the American cruisers inflicted equally severe retribution nearer home.
Great Britain was blockaded. No one could deny that manifest danger existed to any merchant-vessel that entered or left British waters. During the summer the blockade was continuous. Toward the close of 1812 an American named Preble, living in Paris, bought a small vessel, said to have belonged in turn to the British and French navy, which he fitted as a privateer-brig, carrying sixteen guns and one hundred and sixty men. The “True-Blooded Yankee,” commanded by Captain Hailey, sailed from Brest March 1, 1813, and cruised thirty-seven days on the coasts of Ireland and Scotland, capturing twenty-seven valuable vessels; sinking coasters in the very bay of Dublin; landing and taking possession of an island off the coast of Ireland, and of a town in Scotland, where she burned seven vessels in the harbor. She returned safely to Brest, and soon made another cruise. At the same time the schooner “Fox” of Portsmouth burned or sunk vessel after vessel in the Irish Sea, as they plied between Liverpool and Cork. In May, the schooner “Paul Jones” of New York, carrying sixteen guns and one hundred and twenty men, took or destroyed a dozen vessels off the Irish coast, until she was herself caught in a fog by the frigate “Leonidas,” and captured May 23 after a chase in which five of her crew were wounded.
While these vessels were thus engaged, the brig “Rattlesnake” of Philadelphia, carrying sixteen guns and one hundred and twenty men, and the brig “Scourge” of New York, carrying nine guns and one hundred and ten men, crossed the ocean and cruised all the year in the northern seas off the coasts of Scotland and Norway, capturing some forty British vessels, and costing the British merchants and ship-owners losses to the amount of at least two million dollars. In July the “Scourge” fell in with Commodore Rodgers in the “President,” and the two vessels remained several days in company off the North Cape, while the British admiralty sent three or four squadrons in search of them without success. July 19, after Rodgers had been nearly a month in British waters, one of these squadrons drove him away, and he then made a circuit round Ireland
before he turned homeward At the same time, from July 14 to August 14, the “Argus” was destroying vessels in the British Channel at the rate of nearly one a day. After the capture of the “Argus,” August 14, the “Grand Turk” of Salem, a brig carrying sixteen guns and one hundred and five men, cruised for twenty days in the mouth of the British Channel without being disturbed. Besides these vessels, others dashed into British waters from time to time as they sailed forward and back across the ocean in the track of British commerce.
No one disputed that the privateers were a very important branch of the American navy; but they suffered under serious drawbacks, which left doubtful the balance of merits and defects. Perhaps their chief advantage compared with government vessels was their lightness,—a quality which no government would have carried to the same extent. The long-range pivot-gun was another invention of the privateer, peculiarly successful and easily adapted for government vessels. In other respects, the same number or even half the number of sloops-of-war would have probably inflicted greater injury at less cost. The “Argus” showed how this result could have been attained. The privateer’s first object was to save prizes; and in the effort to send captured vessels into port the privateer lost a large proportion by recapture. Down to the moment when Admiral Warren established his blockade of the American coast from New York southward, most of the prizes got to port. After that time the New England ports alone offered reasonable chance of safety, and privateering received a check.436 During the war about twenty-five hundred vessels all told were captured from the British. Many were destroyed; many released as cartels; and of the remainder not less than seven hundred and fifty, probably one half the number sent to port, were recaptured by the British navy. Most of these were the prizes of privateers, and would have been destroyed had they been taken by government vessels. They were usually the most valuable prizes, so that the injury that might have been inflicted on British commerce was diminished nearly one half by the system which encouraged private war as a money-making speculation.
Another objection was equally serious. Like all gambling ventures, privateering was not profitable. In the list of five hundred privateers furnished by the Navy Department,437 three hundred were recorded as having never made a prize. Of the remainder, few made their expenses. One of the most successful cruises of the war was that of Joshua Barney on the Baltimore schooner “Rossie” at the outbreak of hostilities, when every prize reached port. Barney sent in prizes supposed to be worth fifteen hundred thousand dollars; but after paying charges and duties and selling the goods, he found that the profits were not sufficient to counterbalance the discomforts, and he refused to repeat the experiment. His experience was common. As early as November, 1812, the owners of twenty-four New York privateers sent to Congress a memorial declaring that the profits of private naval war were by no means equal to the hazards, and that the spirit of privateering stood in danger of extinction unless the government would consent in some manner to grant a bounty for the capture or destruction of the enemy’s property
If private enterprise was to fail at the critical moment, and if the government must supply the deficiency, the government would have done better to undertake the whole task. In effect, the government in the end did so. The merchants asked chiefly for a reduction of duties on prize-goods. Gallatin pointed out the serious objections to such legislation, and the little probability that the measure would increase the profits of privateering or the number of privateers. The actual privateers, he said, were more than enough for the food offered by the enemy’s trade, and privateering, like every other form of gambling, would always continue to attract more adventurers than it could support.438
Congress for the time followed Gallatin’s advice, and did nothing; but in the summer session of 1813, after Gallatin’s departure for Europe, the privateer owners renewed their appeal, and the acting Secretary of the Treasury, Jones, wrote to the chairman of the Naval Committee July 21, 1813,439 —
“The fact is that privateering is nearly at an end; and from the best observation I have been enabled to make, it is more from the deficiency of remuneration in the net proceeds of their prizes than from the vigilance and success of the enemy in recapturing.”
In deference to Jones’s opinion, Congress passed an Act, approved Aug. 2, 1813, reducing one third the duties on prize-goods. Another Act, approved August 3, granted a bounty of twenty-five dollars for every prisoner captured and delivered to a United States agent by a private armed vessel. A third Act, approved August 2, authorized the Secretary of the Navy to place on the pension list any privateersman who should be wounded or disabled in the line of his duty.
These complaints and palliations tended to show that the privateer cost the public more than the equivalent government vessel would have cost. If instead of five hundred privateers of all sizes and efficiency, the government had kept twenty sloops-of-war constantly at sea destroying the enemy’s commerce, the result would have been about the same as far as concerned injury to the enemy, while in another respect the government would have escaped one of its chief difficulties. Nothing injured the navy so much as privateering. Seamen commonly preferred the harder but more profitable and shorter cruise in a privateer, where fighting was not expected or wished, to the strict discipline and murderous battles of government ships, where wages were low and prize-money scarce. Of all towns in the United States, Marblehead was probably the most devoted to the sea; but of nine hundred men from Marblehead who took part in the war, fifty-seven served as soldiers, one hundred and twenty entered the navy, while seven hundred and twenty-six went as privateersmen.440 Only after much delay and difficulty could the frigates obtain crews. The “Constitution” was nearly lost by this cause at the beginning of the war; and the loss of the “Chesapeake” was supposed to be chiefly due to the determination of the old crew to quit the government service for that of the privateers.
Such drawbacks raised reasonable doubts as to the balance of advantages and disadvantages offered by the privateer system. Perhaps more careful inquiry might show that, valuable as the privateers were, the government would have done better to retain all military and naval functions in its own hands, and to cover the seas with small cruisers capable of pursuing a system of thorough destruction against the shipping and colonial interests of England.
CHAPTER XIV.
G and Bayard, having sailed from the Delaware May 9, arrived at St. Petersburg July 21, only to find that during the six months since the Czar offered to mediate, Russia had advanced rapidly in every direction except that of the proposed mediation. Napoleon after being driven from Russia in December, 1812, passed the winter in Paris organizing a new army of three hundred thousand men on the Elbe, between Dresden and Magdeburg, while a second army of more than one hundred thousand was to hold Hamburg and Bremen. Russia could not prevent Napoleon from reconstructing a force almost as powerful as that with which he had marched to Moscow, for the Russian army had suffered very severely and was unfit for active service; but the Czar succeeded in revolutionizing Prussia, and in forcing the French to retire from the Vistula to the Elbe, while he gained a reinforcement of more than one hundred thousand men from the fresh and vigorous Prussian army. Even with that assistance the Czar could not cope with Napoleon, who, leaving Paris April 17, during the month of May fought furious battles at Lützen and Bautzen, which forced the allied Russian and Prussian armies back from the Elbe to the Oder.
At that point Austria interfered so energetically as to oblige Napoleon to accept an armistice for the purpose of collecting new forces. During the armistice the Czar stationed himself at Gitschin in Bohemia, nine hundred miles from St. Petersburg, and about the same distance from London by the path that couriers were obliged to take. When Gallatin and Bayard reached St. Petersburg, July 21, the armistice, which had been prolonged until August 10, was about to expire, and the Czar could not be anxious to decide subordinate questions until the issue of the coming campaign should be known.
Meanwhile the government of England had in May, with many friendly expressions, declined the Russian mediation.441 Castlereagh probably hoped that this quiet notification to Lieven, the Russian envoy in London, would end the matter; but toward the month of July news reached London that the American commissioners, Gallatin and Bayard, had arrived at Gothenburg on their way to Russia, and Castlereagh then saw that he must be more explicit in his refusal. Accordingly he took measures for making the matter clear not only to the Russian government but also to the American commissioners.
With the Russian government he was obliged by the nature of their common relations to communicate officially, and he wrote instructions to Lord Cathcart, dated July 5, directing communication to be made.
“I am afraid,” said Castlereagh’s letter,442 “this tender of mediation which on a question of maritime right cannot be listened to by Great Britain, however kindly and liberally intended, will have had the unfortunate effect of protracting the war with the United States. It is to be lamented that the formal offer was made to America before the disposition of the British government was previously sounded as to its acceptance of a mediation. It has enabled the President to hold out to the people of America a vague expectation of peace, under which he may reconcile them with less repugnance to submit to the measures of the Government. This evil, however, cannot now be avoided, and it only remains to prevent this question from producing any embarrassment between Great Britain and Russia.”
Embarrassment between Great Britain and Russia was no new thing in European politics, and commonly involved maritime objects for which the United States were then fighting. Castlereagh had much reason for wishing to avoid the danger. The most fortunate result he could reasonably expect from the coming campaign was a defeat of Bonaparte that should drive him back to the Rhine. Then
Russia and Austria would probably offer terms to Napoleon; England would be obliged to join in a European Congress; Napoleon would raise the question of maritime rights, and on that point he would be supported by Russian sympathies. Napoleon and Russia might insist that the United States should take part in the Congress, and in that case England might be obliged to retire from it. Castlereagh felt uneasy at the prospect, and ordered Cathcart to “press the Emperor of Russia in the strongest manner not to push his personal interference on this point further.” Cathcart was to use his utmost endeavors to persuade the Czar “pointedly to discountenance a design so mischievously calculated to promote the views of France.”
Another week of reflection only increased Castlereagh’s anxieties, and caused the British government to take a step intended to leave the Czar no opening for interference. July 13 Castlereagh wrote Cathcart new instructions,443 directing him to present a formal note acquainting the Czar that the Prince Regent was “ready immediately to name plenipotentiaries to meet and treat with the American plenipotentiaries in the earnest desire” of peace, either in London or at Gothenburg; although he could “not consent that these discussions should be carried on in any place which might be supposed to imply that they were in any way connected with any other negotiations.” He wrote privately to Cathcart that the mere knowledge of the intervention of a third power in any arrangement with the United States would probably decide the British people against it.444
Thus in July, 1813, when the war was barely a year old, Castlereagh reached the point of offering to negotiate directly with the United States. This advantage was gained by the Russian offer of mediation, and was intended not to pacify America but to silence Alexander and Roumanzoff. Castlereagh was frank and prompt in his declarations. His offer of direct negotiation was dated July 13, at a time when Alexander Baring received a letter from Gallatin announcing his arrival at Gothenburg and inviting assistance for the proposed mediation. Baring consulted Castlereagh, and wrote, July 22, a long letter to Gallatin, to inform the American commissioners
what the British government had done and was willing to do. “Before this reaches you,” said Baring,445 “you will have been informed that this mediation has been refused, with expressions of our desire to treat separately and directly here; or, if more agreeable to you, at Gothenburg.” To leave no room for misunderstanding, Baring added that if the American commissioners were obliged by their instructions to adhere pertinaciously to the American demands in respect to impressments, he should think negotiation useless.
In regular succession all these expressions of British policy were received at St. Petersburg in the Czar’s absence, and in the doubtful state of mind which followed the battles of Lützen and Bautzen. Alexander had left Count Roumanzoff at St. Petersburg, continuing to act as Chancellor of the Empire and Foreign Secretary; but in truth the Minister of Foreign Affairs, as far as the Czar then required such an officer, was Count Nesselrode, who attended Alexander in person and received his orders orally. Nesselrode at that time was rather an agent than an adviser; but in general he represented the English alliance and hostility to Napoleon, while Roumanzoff represented the French alliance and hostility to England.
Of English diplomacy Americans knew something, and could by similarity of mind divine what was not avowed. Of French diplomacy they had long experience, and their study was rendered from time to time more easy by Napoleon’s abrupt methods. Of Russian diplomacy they knew little or nothing. Thus far Minister Adams had been given his own way. He had been allowed to seem to kindle the greatest war of modern times, and had been invited to make use of Russia against England; but the Czar’s reasons for granting such favor were mysterious even to Adams, for while Napoleon occasionally avowed motives, Alexander never did. Russian diplomacy moved wholly in the dark.
Only one point was certain. For reasons of his own, the Czar chose to leave Roumanzoff nominally in office until the result of the war should be decided, although Roumanzoff was opposed to the Czar’s policy. The chancellor did not stand alone in his hostility to the war; probably a majority of the Russian people shared the feeling.
Even the army and its old General Koutousoff, though elated with an immense triumph, grumbled at being obliged to fight the battles of Germany, and would gladly have returned to their own soil. The Czar himself could not afford to break his last tie with the French interest, but was wise to leave a path open by which he could still retreat in case his war in Germany failed. If Napoleon should succeed once more in throwing the Russian army back upon Russian soil, Alexander might still be obliged to use Roumanzoff’s services if not to resume his policy. Such a suspicion might not wholly explain Alexander’s course toward Roumanzoff and Koutousoff, but no one could doubt that it explained the chancellor’s course toward the Czar. Indeed, Roumanzoff made little concealment of his situation or his hopes. Adams could without much difficulty divine that the failure of the Czar in Germany would alone save Roumanzoff in St. Petersburg, and that the restoration of Roumanzoff to power was necessary to reinvigorate the mediation.
Castlereagh’s first positive refusal to accept the mediation was notified to Count Lieven in May, and was known to Roumanzoff in St. Petersburg about the middle of June. Early in July the Czar received it, and by his order Nesselrode, in a despatch to Lieven dated July 9, expressed “the perfect satisfaction which his Imperial Majesty felt in the reasons which actuated the conduct of this [British] government on a point of so much delicacy and importance.”446 The Czar was then in the midst of difficulties. The result of the war was doubtful, and depended on Austria.
Just as news of the armistice arrived in St. Petersburg, Minister Adams went to Roumanzoff, June 22, to inform him of Gallatin’s and Bayard’s appointment. Roumanzoff in return gave Adams explicit information of England’s refusal to accept the Czar’s offer. Adams immediately recorded it in his Diary:447 —
“He [Roumanzoff] said that he was very sorry to say he had received since he had seen me [June 15] further despatches from Count Lieven, stating that the British government, with many very friendly and polite assurances that there was no
mediation which they should so readily and cheerfully accept as that of the Emperor of Russia, had however stated that their differences with the United States of America involving certain principles of the internal government of England were of a nature which they did not think suitable to be settled by a mediation.”
Adams expected this answer, and at once assumed it to be final; but Roumanzoff checked him. “It would now be for consideration,” he continued, “whether, after the step thus taken by the American government [in sending commissioners to St. Petersburg], it would not be advisable to renew the proposition to Great Britain; upon which he should write to the Emperor.” Not because of any American request, but wholly of his own motion, Roumanzoff proposed to keep the mediation alive. His motives were for Adams to fathom. The chancellor did not avow them, but he hinted to Adams that the chances of war were many. “Perhaps it might be proper not to be discouraged by the ill success of his first advances. After considerations might produce more pacific dispositions in the British government. Unexpected things were happening every day; ‘and in our own affairs,’ said the count, ‘a very general report prevails that an armistice has taken place.’” A Congress had been proposed, and the United States were expressly named among the Powers to be invited to it.
Adams reported this conversation to his Government in a despatch dated June 26,448 and waited for his two new colleagues, who arrived July 21. Personally the colleagues were agreeable to Adams, and the proposed negotiation was still more so, for the President sent him official notice that in case the negotiations were successful, Adams’s services would be required as minister in London; but with the strongest inducements to press the mediation, Adams could not but see that he and his colleagues depended on Roumanzoff, and that Roumanzoff depended not on Alexander, but on Napoleon. Roumanzoff’s only chance of aiding them was by clinging to office until the Czar should be weary of war.
Unwilling as Gallatin was to be thus made the sport of imperial policy, he was obliged, like his colleagues, to submit. Two days after
their arrival, Roumanzoff told them that he meant, if possible, to begin the whole transaction anew.
“The count said he regretted much that there was such reason to believe the British would decline the mediation; but on transmitting the copy of the credential letter to the Emperor, he would determine whether to renew the proposal, as the opposition in England might make it an embarrassing charge against the Ministry if they should under such circumstances reject it.”449
Roumanzoff had written soon after June 22 to ask the Czar whether, on the arrival of the American commissioners, the offer of mediation should be renewed. The Czar, overwhelmed with business, wrote back, about July 20, approving Roumanzoff’s suggestion, and authorizing him to send a despatch directly to Count Lieven in London renewing the offer. The Czar’s letter was communicated to Adams August 10450 by Roumanzoff, who was evidently much pleased and perhaps somewhat excited by it.
Such a letter warranted some excitement, for Roumanzoff could regard it only as a sign of hesitation and anxiety. Alexander was in a degree pledged to England to press the mediation no further. While he assured England through Nesselrode, July 9, that he was perfectly satisfied with the British reasons for refusing his offer of mediation “on a point of so much delicacy and importance,” he authorized Roumanzoff only ten days afterward to annoy England a second time with an offer which he had every reason to know must be rejected; and he did this without informing Nesselrode.
Gallatin and Bayard found themselves, August 10, condemned to wait two or three months for the British answer, which they knew must be unfavorable, because Gallatin received August 17 Baring’s letter announcing the determination of Castlereagh to negotiate separately. Roumanzoff’s conduct became more and more mysterious to the commissioners. He did not notify them of Castlereagh’s official offer to negotiate directly. He confounded
Adams, August 19, by flatly denying his own information, given two months before, that England rejected mediation in principle because it involved doctrines of her internal government. Roumanzoff insisted that England had never refused to accept the mediation, although he held in his hands at least two despatches from Lieven, written as late as July 13, officially communicating England’s determination to negotiate directly or not at all. Castlereagh, foreseeing the possibility of misunderstanding, had read to Lieven the instructions of July 13 for communication to Roumanzoff, besides authorizing Cathcart to show them in extenso to the Czar.451 In denying that such instructions had been given, Roumanzoff could not have expected the American commissioners to believe him.
The motive of Roumanzoff’s persistence might be open to the simple explanation that the chancellor hoped to recover power, and within a few months to re-establish his policy of antagonism to England. Alexander’s conduct could be explained by no such obvious interest. When Castlereagh’s letters of July 13 and 14 reached Cathcart at the Czar’s headquarters in Bohemia about August 10, they arrived at the most critical moment of the war On that day the armistice expired. The next day Austria declared war on Napoleon. The combined armies of Russia, Prussia, and Austria concentrated behind the mountains, and then marched into Saxony. While starting on that campaign, August 20, the Czar was told by Lord Cathcart the reasons why his offer of mediation was rejected, and answered at once that in this case he could do nothing more. 452 Cathcart wrote to Nesselrode a formal note on the subject August 23 or 24, but did not at once communicate it,453 because the campaign had then begun; the great battle of Dresden was fought August 26 and 27, and the allies, again beaten, retired into Bohemia August 28. The Czar saw his best military adviser Moreau killed by his side at Dresden, and he returned to Töplitz in no happy frame of mind.
At Töplitz, September 1, Cathcart delivered to Nesselrode his formal note,454 refusing Russian mediation and communicating the offer of England to negotiate directly. In an ordinary condition of government Nesselrode should have taken care that the British note
should be made known without delay to the American commissioners at St. Petersburg, but the Czar kept in his own hands the correspondence with Roumanzoff and the Americans, and neither he nor Nesselrode communicated Cathcart’s act to Roumanzoff.455 Possibly their silence was due to the new military movements. August 29 the French marshal Vandamme with forty thousand men, pursuing the allies into Bohemia, was caught between the Prussians and Austrians August 30 and crushed. During the month of September severe fighting, favorable to the allies, occurred, but no general advance was made by the allied sovereigns.
Alexander next received at Töplitz toward September 20 a letter from Roumanzoff enclosing a renewal of the offer of mediation, to be proposed in a despatch to Lieven, read by Roumanzoff to the American commissioners August 24, and sent to London August 28. The Czar must have known the futility of this new step, as well as the mistake into which Roumanzoff had been led, and the awkward attitude of the American commissioners. Only a fortnight before, he had received Cathcart’s official note, and a few days earlier he had assured Cathcart that he should do no more in the matter. Yet, September 20, Alexander wrote with his own hand a note of four lines to Roumanzoff, approving his despatch to Lieven, and begging him to follow up the affair as he had begun it.456
The Czar’s letter of September 20 completed the embroglio, which remained unintelligible to every one except himself. Cathcart was the most mystified of all the victims to the Czar’s double attitude. At the time when Alexander thus for the second time authorized Roumanzoff to disregard the express entreaties of the British government, Cathcart was making an effort to explain to Castlereagh the Czar’s first interference. If Castlereagh understood his minister’s ideas, he was gifted with more than common penetration.
“I believe the not communicating the rescript of the Emperor concerning the American plenipotentiaries to have been the effect of accident,” wrote Cathcart457 from Töplitz September 25;
“but what is singular is that notwithstanding his [Nesselrode’s] letter of the ninth [July], by the Emperor’s command, to Count Lieven, this communication from and instruction to Roumanzoff was not known to Count Nesselrode till this day, when I mentioned it to him, having received no caution to do otherwise, and he was not at all pleased with it. It was during the advance to Dresden. But I cannot help thinking that there must have been some policy of Roumanzoff’s stated in regard to keeping hold of the mediation, which, whether it was detailed or not, would not escape the Emperor’s penetration, and upon which he may have been induced to act as far as sanctioning the proposal of treating at London under Russia’s mediation, which the Prince Regent’s government might accept or reject as they pleased; and that not wishing to go at that time into a discussion of maritime rights with either Nesselrode or me, he afterward forgot it.”
Cathcart’s style was involved, but his perplexity was evident. His remarks related only to the Czar’s first letter to Roumanzoff, written about July 20, not “during the advance to Dresden.” He knew nothing of the Czar’s second letter to Roumanzoff, dated September 20, renewing the same authority, only five days before Cathcart’s labored attempt to explain the first. Of the second letter, as of the first, neither Nesselrode nor Cathcart was informed.
The Czar’s motive in thus ordering each of his two ministers to act in ignorance and contradiction of the other’s instructions perplexed Roumanzoff as it did Cathcart. Lieven first revealed to Roumanzoff the strange misunderstanding by positively refusing to present to Castlereagh the chancellor’s note of August 28 renewing the offer of mediation. Roumanzoff was greatly mortified. He told Gallatin that the mediation had been originally the Czar’s own idea; that it had been the subject of repeated discussions at his own motion, and had been adopted notwithstanding Roumanzoff’s hints at the possibility of English reluctance.458 The chancellor sent Lieven’s despatch immediately to the Czar without comment, requesting the Czar to read it and give his orders. The British officials, unwilling to blame Alexander, attacked Roumanzoff. Lord
Walpole, who came directly from Bohemia to St. Petersburg to act as British ambassador, said “he was as sure as he was of his own existence, and he believed he could prove it, that Roumanzoff had been cheating us all.”459 Cathcart wrote, December 12, to Castlereagh,—
“I think Nesselrode knows nothing of the delay of communicating with the American mission; that it was an intrigue of the chancellor’s, if it is one; and that during the operations of war the Emperor lost the clew to it, so that something has been unanswered.”460
Perhaps the Czar’s conduct admitted of several interpretations. He might wish to keep the mediation alive in order to occupy Roumanzoff until the campaign should be decided; or he might in his good nature prefer to gratify his old favorite by allowing him to do what he wished; or he took this method of signifying to Roumanzoff his disgrace and the propriety of immediate retirement. Apparently Roumanzoff took the last view, for he sent his resignation to the Czar, and at the close of the year quitted his official residence at the Department of Foreign Affairs, telling Gallatin that he remained in office only till he should receive authority to close the American mission.
The American commissioners in private resented Alexander’s treatment, but were unable to leave Russia without authority. Gallatin learned, October 19, that the Senate had refused to confirm his appointment, but he remained at St. Petersburg, chiefly in deference to Roumanzoff’s opinion, and probably with ideas of assisting the direct negotiation at London or elsewhere. Meanwhile the campaign was decided, October 18, by Napoleon’s decisive overthrow at Leipzig, which forced him to retreat behind the Rhine. Still the Czar wrote nothing to Roumanzoff, and the American commissioners remained month after month at St. Petersburg. Not until Jan. 25, 1814, did Gallatin and Bayard begin their winter journey to Amsterdam, where they arrived March 4 and remained a month.
Then Gallatin received, through Baring, permission to enter England, and crossed the Channel to hasten if he could the direct negotiation which Castlereagh had offered and Madison accepted.
The diplomatic outlook had changed since March, 1813, when the President accepted the offer of Russian mediation; but the change was wholly for the worse. England’s triumphs girdled the world, and found no check except where Perry’s squadron blocked the way to Detroit. The allied armies crossed the Rhine in December and entered France on the east. At the same time Wellington after a long campaign drove Joseph from Spain, and entering France from the south pressed against Bordeaux. The government and people of England, in their excitement and exultation at daily conquests, thought as little as they could of the American war. Society rarely mentioned it. Newspapers alone preserved a record of British feelings toward the United States during the year 1813. The expressions of newspapers, like those of orators, could not be accepted without allowance, for they aimed at producing some desired effect, and said either more or less than the truth; as a rule, they represented the cool opinion neither of the person who uttered nor of the audience who heard them; but in the absence of other records, public opinion was given only in the press, and the London newspapers alone furnished evidence of its character.
The “Morning Chronicle”—the only friend of the United States in the daily press of England—showed its friendship by silence. Whatever the liberal opposition thought in private, no one but Cobbett ventured in public to oppose the war. Cobbett having become a radical at the time of life when most men become conservative, published in his “Weekly Register” many columns of vigorous criticism on the American war without apparent effect, although in truth he expressed opinions commonly held by intelligent people. Even Lord Castlereagh, Cobbett’s antipathy, shared some of Cobbett’s least popular opinions in the matter of the American war.
English society, whatever shades of diversity might exist, was frank and free in expressing indifference or contempt. Of the newspapers which made a duty of reflecting what was believed to be the prevailing public opinion, the “Times,” supposed to favor the
interests of Wellesley and Canning, was probably the ablest. During the early part of the war, the “Times” showed a disposition to criticise the Ministry rather than the Americans. From the “Times” came most of the bitter complaints, widely copied by the American press, of the naval defeats suffered by the “Guerriere,” the “Java,” and the “Macedonian.” British successes were belittled, and abuse of Americans was exaggerated, in order to deprive ministers of credit. “The world has seen President Madison plunge into a war from the basest motives, and conduct it with the most entire want of ability,” said the “Times” of February 9, 1813. “The American government has sounded the lowest depth of military disgrace, insomuch that the official records of the campaign take from us all possibility of exulting in our victories over such an enemy.” The “Times” found in such reflections a reason for not exulting in ministerial victories, but it bewailed defeats the more loudly, and annoyed the Ministry by the violence of its attacks on naval administration.
As the year passed, and England’s triumph in Europe seemed to overshadow the world, the “Times,” probably recognizing the uselessness of attacking the Ministry, showed worse temper toward the United States. The Americans were rarely mentioned, and always with language of increasing ill humor. “Despicable in the cabinet, ridiculous in the field,”461 the Americans disappeared from sight in the splendor of victory at Vittoria and Leipzig. No wish for peace was suggested, and if the “Times” expressed the true feelings of the respectable middle class, as it was supposed to aim at doing, no wish for peace could be supposed to exist.
Of the ministerial papers the “Courier” was the best, and of course was emphatic in support of the American war. The Ministry were known to be lukewarm about the United States, and for that reason they thought themselves obliged to talk in public as strongly as the strongest against a peace. When the Russian mediation called for notice, May 13, the “Courier” at once declared against it:—
“Before the war commenced, concession might have been proper; we always thought it unwise. But the hour of concession and compromise is passed. America has rushed unnecessarily
and unnaturally into war, and she must be made to feel the effects of her folly and injustice; peace must be the consequence of punishment, and retraction of her insolent demands must precede negotiation. The thunders of our cannon must first strike terror into the American shores.”
The “Courier” felt that Americans were not Englishmen, and could not forgive it, but was unable to admit that they might still exercise a considerable influence on human affairs:—
“They have added nothing to literature, nothing to any of the sciences; they have not produced one good poet, not one celebrated historian! Their statesmen are of a mixed breed,— half metaphysicians, half politicians; all the coldness of the one with all the cunning of the other. Hence we never see anything enlarged in their conceptions or grand in their measures.”
462
These reasons were hardly sufficient to prove the right of impressing American seamen. The literary, metaphysical, or social qualities of Americans, their “enlarged conceptions,” and the grandeur or littleness of their measures, had by common consent ceased to enter into discussion, pending a settlement of the simpler issue, whether Americans could fight. For a long time the English press encouraged the belief that Americans were as incapable of fighting as of producing poets and historians. Their naval victories were attributed to British seamen. Perhaps the first turn of the tide was in November, 1813, when news of Perry’s victory on Lake Erie crossed in London the news of Napoleon’s defeat at Leipzig. Perry’s victory, like those of Hull, Decatur, and Bainbridge, was too complete for dispute: “It may, however, serve to diminish our vexation at this occurrence to learn that the flotilla in question was not any branch of the British navy, ... but a local force, a kind of mercantile military.”
463
By a curious coincidence, Castlereagh’s official letter to Monroe, offering direct negotiation, was dated the same day, November 4, when news of the victory at Leipzig met in London news of the
defeat on Lake Erie, and Castlereagh probably meant to allow no newspaper prejudices to obstruct a peace; but public opinion was slow to recover its balance. When news arrived that the Americans had captured Malden, recovered Detroit, and destroyed Proctor’s army on the Thames, the “Courier” showed the first symptom of change in opinion by expressing a somewhat simple-minded wish to hear no more about the Americans:—
“The intelligence is unpleasant, but we confess that we do not view, and have never from the beginning of the war viewed, the events in America with any very powerful interest. The occurrences in Europe will no doubt produce a very decisive effect upon the American government; and unless it is more obstinate and stupid in its hostility than even we think it, it will do as the other allies of Bonaparte have done,—abandon him.”
If the national extravagance could be expected to show its full force in one direction rather than in another, naturalized Americans taken in arms were certain to produce it. The issue was regularly raised after Van Rensselaer’s defeat at Queenston in 1812. When the American prisoners arrived at Quebec, they were mustered, and twenty-three native-born subjects of Great Britain, belonging to the First, Sixth, and Thirteenth U. S. Infantry, were taken from the ranks and shipped to England to be put on trial as British subjects for bearing arms against their king. The American agent in London reported to the President that the men had arrived there for the reason given. Secretary Armstrong, May 15, 1813, then ordered twenty-three British soldiers into close confinement as hostages. The British government directed Sir George Prevost to put double the number of Americans in close confinement, and Sir George, in giving notice of this measure to General Wilkinson, October 17, 1813,464 added:—
“I have been further instructed by his Majesty’s government to notify to you for the information of the government of the United States that the commanders of his Majesty’s armies and
