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Deference and Class: A Comment on Michael Zuckerman, Gregory Nobles, and John Smolenski

A proper understanding of the character of deference and its meaning in different historical contexts is indispensable to our understanding of what John Smolenski calls the ‘‘culture of authority’’ in early America. Moreover, and speaking as an English observer of last year’s election, if President Bush’s penchant for dressing up (as a naval aviator, fireman, or what have you) and Senator Kerry’s efforts to look comfortable in a flannel shirt are any indication, some notion of deference remains just as essential to our understanding of contemporary American politics. Clearly, the deference displayed by colonial and modern Americans and by their respective ruling elites of wealthy men (and latterly some women) is not the same thing. As Greg Nobles reminds us, deference has assumed various cultural and linguistic forms in different times and places. Although they differ in other respects, the contributors concur that the long-held view of colonial American deferential attitudes and behavior stands in need of revision. While agreeing that the debate concerning early America has become a little stale, with the kind of fresh thinking on display at the conference from which these papers were drawn it is arguable that a reworked conception of deference can continue to inform our understanding of early American social relations in the future. Michael Zuckerman’s essay revisits an argument first presented in a Journal of American History forum in which he challenged the impressionistic view of colonial acquiescence by ordinary provincial settlers to their so-called social superiors—a mischaracterization of early American society he ascribed to scholars whose focus lay in the revolutionary and early national periods.1 Criticizing these historians for failing to appreciate the simmering discontent felt