SOURCE: “Crèvecoeur's Farmer James: A Reappraisal,” in Essays in Literature, Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall, 1976, pp. 206-13.

In the following essay, Kehler takes issue with some twentieth-century critics who suggest that Crèvecoeur's Farmer James is merely a straw man for demonstrating the inadequacies of Enlightenment principles.

Recent criticism of Letters from an American Farmer has focused more and more closely on the gradual psychological dissolution of St. John de Crèvecoeur's paradigmatic New World Man, Farmer James, seeing in it a case study in the souring of the American Dream. The concomitant trend has been to characterize James's observations in the pre-Charles Town Letters (I-VIII) as unrealistically optimistic and as ironic by intention in the overall design of the work. One commentator has gone so far as to call James “Crevecoeur's straw man” for proving the inadequacy of “reason,” “self-interest,” “agrarianism,” “the law of nature,” and other concepts...