Sipping From the Silver Spoon : THE REFINEMENT OF AMERICA: Persons, Houses, Cities, <i> By Richard L. Bushman (Alfred A. Knopf: $40; 544 pp.)</i>

Whether or not the title of Richard Bushman’s new book “The Refinement of America” sounds like an oxymoron to you depends on what you make of the United States. Has it been refined? Is it capable of refinement? Is there such a thing as a refinement, a gentility, that is distinctly American? Or is America a perpetually dark coast, its nature, its abundance raw in the extreme; its energies, its engine barbaric?

These are old questions. Emerson preached a rude self-reliance, and he was no meliorist where refinement was concerned. “Society never advances,” he wrote. “It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. . . . For every thing that is given something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.”

The new arts of gentility are the subject of “The Refinement of America,” whose subtitle is “Houses, Persons, Cities.” The scope of this book is enormous. It is about city planning, domestic and political and commercial architecture, gardening, sentimental fiction, Episcopalian novels, religion, manners, dress, domestic furniture, elocution, the contrasts between rural and urban living, Frederick Law Olmstead--in short, it is about all the manifestations of refinement visible in America between 1700 and 1850, all the elements that transformed a primitive, scapegrace backwater into a country with enough gentility--only in spots, it is true--to please a Parisian.

Bushman’s purpose is to show “how ideals interacting with materials changed the American environment and a large segment of American culture.” The ideals are courtly, aristocratic patterns of gentility, descended from the Renaissance largely through England to America, and the materials are the houses and habits of ambitious Americans.

An example of a genteel ideal might be found in George Washington’s “Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation,” 110 precepts copied by hand from a 17th-Century English courtesy book. They include such morsels as, “In the Presence of Others Sing not to yourself with a humming Noise, nor Drum with your Fingers or Feet.” By the same token, the presence of a silver spoon or an elegant table in the estate inventory of an otherwise primitive 18th- Century cabin or the existence of a neat garden in front of a modest roadside farmhouse were both signs of increasing gentility, the appetite for which seemed to grow rapidly in this country after 1690.

Bushman’s book is arranged in a “curatorial” manner--by classes of objects--rather than by “analytical themes,” and the book is broken down into two chronological sections: 1700-1790 and 1790-1850. Unfortunately, this leads to a certain amount of redundancy: Each class of objects, in each chronological section, seems, not surprisingly, to lead to the same conclusions about the character of gentility.

The prose is academic, but academic in an old-fashioned way: It aspires to gentility, the way most academic prose once did, and it pays no heed to the barbaric yawp of academic theorists lurking in the underbrush. Oddly enough, one misses the yawp, or at least the intellectual rigor behind it.

Bushman is a skilled researcher, and he has combed the archives of historical museums for his evidence, which he arranges neatly and intelligently before the reader. But “The Refinement of America” has the feel of a sumptuous museum exhibition that leaves the eyes tired, the feet sore and the mind not necessarily fuller than it was before. Much is displayed, many stories are told, and yet somehow little is explained.

There are two questions at the heart of “The Refinement of America.” The first is this: What evidence is there for increasing gentility in the material culture of 18th- and 19th-Century America? That question Bushman answers brilliantly. But behind it there lies a more important question: What are the dynamics that drive the spread of the culture of civility? And here Bushman is at a bit of a loss. He reserves only the final chapter, “Culture and Power,” for a discussion of the dynamics of culture, which he calls “emulation,” and only here does he address directly the role of women in the spread of gentility, though in fact their influence was enormous. (To be fair, Bushman draws much of his evidence for the spread of gentility from novels and reforming tracts written by women.)

What I missed from this book was an effort to translate the goods of genteel material culture--the china cups and walnut table and elegant manners--onto a symbolic level, to read their importance to the American character, the American conception of national self. I missed, too, any attempt to connect the increasing opulence and refinement of gentility--and its gradual spread through nearly every class--to the marketplace. This is a book written mainly from the perspective of the consumer, not the artisan. It takes for granted that the market for genteel objects, for carpets and sideboards and larger windows, was driven solely by the consumer, that in this aspect of American civilization market forces were uniquely of little consequence. It seems improbable.

And Although Bushman carefully sifts the correspondence of John and Abigail Adams for discussion of gentility, and though he provides an illuminating account of the Log Cabin Campaign of 1840, when William Henry Harrison, like George Bush (“I’m a yokel! Proud to be one!”), ran for President on a kind of anti-refinement platform, there is simply not enough discussion of the relations between political power, social power, and the trappings of gentility that Bushman so thoroughly catalogues. These are important matters. As Bushman acknowledges, the thirst for gentility is only one of many cultural forces in America and not, by far, the strongest. It gets what strength it has from the real power of those who embrace it. As appealing as the artifacts of gentility may be, its innate power is entirely abstract.

Gentility is also fleeting. In the late 18th Century, Oliver Wolcott of Litchfield, Connecticut, began a tree-planting campaign. This puzzled some people. “We have worked so hard in our day,” wrote one resident, “and just finished getting the woods cleared off, and now they are bringing the trees back again.” Gentility is not the same thing as fashion, but it is a fashion--that much is apparent in Bushman’s book--and a curiously self-negating fashion at that. What in one century appears to be the height of gentility--using a fork, for instance, or wearing clean underwear, or not spitting into the fireplace--is, in another century, taken utterly for granted, a minimum standard of decency. Gentility has a way of eating its kind, of shifting almost imperceptibly, so that those who think of it as a static quality--once gained, never lost--suddenly find themselves slightly uncouth. It is yet another of those fluid currents--like language itself--in which humans happily swim, adjusting almost unconsciously to minute fluctuations around them.

“The Refinement of America” stops in 1850, early enough to allow Bushman to be quite happily meliorist about the growing civility of America. It’s a fine parade, after all: from eating on one’s homespun trousers to supping from a china plate, from sitting, sullen, belching, in a dark log cabin to chatting brightly in a plastered parlor with a carpet under one’s feet and the certain knowledge that a wide-mouthed yawn would be unsuited to the company. And yet the witnesses to that fine parade dwelled, the vast majority of them, in dark log cabins, without a trace of refinement in their lives. Some would aspire to some sort of gentility and find it unsettling. Some would take to it like a fish to water, their own increasing delicacy a measure of the freedom this country offered. But after 1850, and 1865, and 1929, and 1945, and 1968, all the questions posed by Bushman need to be asked again, for they have very different answers in this more modern, and possibly less civil, world. Emerson was right, after all.

Note: the quotation from Emerson comes from the volume “Essays and Lectures” in the Library of America series.