Or, as John Murrin has put it, as an "extremely sensitive barometer for measuring the hopes, aspirations, and anxieties expressed in American public life."

John M. Murrin, "Escaping Perfidious Albion: Federalism, Fear of Aristocracy, and the Democratization of Corruption in Postrevolutionary America," in Richard K. Matthews, Virtue, Corruption, and Self-Interest: Political Values in the Eighteenth Century (Bethlehem: Leheigh University Press, 1994), 103-115.