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Screening
Scarlett Johansson
Gender, Genre, Stardom
Edited by Janice Loreck
Whitney Monaghan · Kirsten Stevens
Screening Scarlett Johansson
Janice Loreck · Whitney Monaghan ·
Kirsten Stevens
Editors

Screening Scarlett
Johansson
Gender, Genre, Stardom
Editors
Janice Loreck Whitney Monaghan
Screen Arts and Cultural Studies Film and Screen Studies
Curtin University Monash University
Bentley, WA, Australia Caulfield, VIC, Australia

Kirsten Stevens
Culture and Communication
University of Melbourne
Parkville, VIC, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-33195-5 ISBN 978-3-030-33196-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33196-2

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
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 Preface

Ingénue, sex symbol, cyborg, muse: American actor Scarlett Johansson

has many incarnations. She is, by several measures, one of the most suc-
cessful performers working in Hollywood today. Her career began over
twenty years ago when she took a small role in North (Rob Reiner,
1994), and she has been a consistent screen presence ever since. In
July 2016, Johansson was named the highest-grossing actor of all time
in North America (Robehmed 2016), beating several high-profile
male stars. This was a considerable feat given that only a small number
of women stars can open a film on their status alone (Hollinger 2006,
55). Johansson has also achieved renown as a superlatively beautiful and
desirable individual, a feature that has been a central part of her image
for over a decade. Since 2005, Johansson has frequently topped “sexi-
est woman alive” polls in men’s magazines such as Maxim, Esquire, GQ,
Playboy, FHM and Men’s Health. Johansson is thus extraordinarily suc-
cessful in her stardom. Elena Gorfinkel (2016) calls her “the sex symbol
of our precarious times.” This assessment rings true: the decade follow-
ing the millennium saw no other Hollywood actress positioned as an
object of desire more than Johansson.
Screening Scarlett Johansson began its life at the Deletion-Deviation
science fiction symposium held at Deakin University in Melbourne in
February 2015. This event was dedicated to exploring science fiction and
the “pleasure gained from its fictive forms, and the perversions of facts
and flesh within its speculative futures” (Hancock 2015). At that time,
Johansson was appearing in a rush of science fiction films, specifically as

v
vi PREFACE

an artificial intelligence in Her (Spike Jonze, 2013), an alien in Under

the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013) and chemically augmented human
in Lucy (Luc Besson, 2014). She was therefore an exciting star to con-
sider in relation to the genre, and our panel at the symposium, entitled
“Crowning the New Sci-fi Queen: The Films of Scarlett Johansson,”
featured three accounts of Johansson’s roles in these films. Whitney
Monaghan offered insight into the opacity of Johansson’s star image,
exploring the perversion of her early indie-darling and sex symbol per-
sonas within her recent films; Kirsten Stevens examined the threat of
the non-reproductive female within Johansson’s sci-fi roles; and Janice
Loreck examined how Johansson’s character in Under the Skin evoked
anxieties about humanity and industry in intensive farming practices.
A lively discussion followed, but it did not entirely satiate our desire to
interrogate Johansson’s stardom. On closer inspection, it appeared to
us that Johansson was more than an emergent star of science fiction or,
indeed, a young actress who fulfilled the role of sexiest woman alive for
the post-millennium decade. While her science fiction roles made her
more visible—more conspicuous as an image that could be appropri-
ated for different genres—we realised that she had always “been there.”
Johansson is a consistent presence and a figure of central, and growing,
importance in contemporary Hollywood.
It is easy to focus on the label of “sexiest woman alive” when discuss-
ing Johansson, yet what appears on closer inspection is a persona that
is rich, surprisingly diverse, and characterised by paradox and dichot-
omy. Johansson’s work stretches across popular cinema and independ-
ent film milieus. She has appeared in action films (The Island [Michael
Bay, 2005]; The Avengers [Joss Whedon, 2010]), period dramas (Girl
with a Pearl Earring [Peter Webber, 2003]; The Other Boleyn Girl
[Justin Chadwick, 2008]) and comedies (Rough Night [Lucia Aniello,
2017]). She has taken roles as American flâneuse and tourist in Lost in
Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Woody
Allen, 2008), as well as parts in blockbusters like the Marvel Cinematic
Universe (MCU) Avengers franchise. Lastly, before Johansson was a
woman deemed the sexiest alive, she was a girl. At age nine, Johansson
made her film debut as a wholesome child in North, which she followed
with more significant roles as a runaway in Manny & Lo (Lisa Krueger,
1996) and a wounded thirteen-year-old in The Horse Whisperer (Robert
Redford, 1998). Overviewed in this way, Johansson’s career reveals a
shifting, multifaceted identity that has many incarnations. Her persona
 PREFACE vii

is a phenomenon of simultaneous sex-goddess warmth in texts like The

Island and Vicky Cristina Barcelona—undoubtedly a dominant narrative
that frames her image—and cyborg coldness in Under the Skin and Ghost
in the Shell (Rupert Sanders, 2017). She performs fresh-faced youth in
early works such as Girl with a Pearl Earring, which contrasts against
(and converses with) the knowing maturity of femmes fatales in The
Avengers and Lucy. Johansson comes into greater relief the more roles
she plays—as Sophia Nguyen (2014) writes, “[t]o watch Johansson per-
form remoteness is to suddenly realize that she had performed intimacy.”
With this comes the awareness that her persona is not stable, but instead
self-referential, self-negating and thus paradoxical.
Screening Scarlett Johansson investigates Johansson’s stardom to
understand her complex persona more fully. That said, there is an addi-
tional case for launching an analysis of her as a female film star. Celebrity
studies has reached what Elena D’Amelio (2013) calls “the post-Dyer
years”; rather than focusing solely on the kind of classical stars that
Richard Dyer examined in his foundational work—such as Marilyn
Monroe or Judy Garland—various kinds of celebrity are now ascendant
as objects of study, including reality television stars like Kim Kardashian
(Sastre 2014), video bloggers such as Charlie McDonnell (Smith 2014)
and “lifestyle experts” like British chef Jamie Oliver (Lewis 2008). As
Su Holmes and Sean Redmond explain, celebrity is “a broad category”
which refers to fame in all its manifestations (2010, 4). The diversifi-
cation of star studies into celebrity studies has meant that objects of
enquiry other than professional Hollywood performers are rightly under
investigation. Celebrity and celebrity culture are now the objects of anal-
ysis rather than just film actors. However, film stars are by no means an
extinct or irrelevant category of celebrity. The advent of “post-Dyer”
celebrity studies does not indicate a “post film star” culture.
A critical study of Johansson is also warranted because recent
extended studies of female film stardom attend predominantly to stars
of yesteryear: examples include Vivien Leigh: Actress and Icon (Dorney
and Gale, 2017); Growing Up with Audrey Hepburn: Text, Audience,
Resonance (Moseley, 2002); Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity,
and Hollywood Stardom (McLean, 2004); Elizabeth Taylor: A Private
Life for Public Consumption (Cashmore, 2016); and Brigitte Bardot
(Vincendeau, 2013) and Brigitte Bardot: The Life, The Legend, The
Movies (Vincendeau, 2014). Such historical analyses are valuable for the
way in which they complete our knowledge of how stardom develops
viii PREFACE

and evolves historically, yet it is striking how seldom scholars devote full-
length studies to female stars under seventy years of age: Pam Cook’s
Nicole Kidman (2012) and Ann Davies’s Penélope Cruz (2014) are two
exceptions. The focus on stars of earlier generations is understandable.
Such an approach circumvents the need for scholarly reconsideration
that a working actor might generate as they progress in their careers. Yet
we note that such challenges do not affect the publication of books on
the works of contemporary directors, for instance. Moreover, the ten-
dency to reserve extended studies for stars whose acting careers are effec-
tively “over” has consequences for the field, reinforcing the notion that
film stardom is a phenomenon of the past. The presence and power of
Johansson’s stardom in the contemporary media landscape indicate that
it is not.1 Studying Johansson provides an excellent opportunity to main-
tain (and update) understandings of film stardom as it operates here and
now.
The chapters herein approach Johansson as both text and sign. They
deploy Johansson’s persona as a discursive conduit, a phenomenon
that facilitates an analysis of gender, sexuality, celebrity and subjectiv-
ity. We consider a range of Johansson’s film works as part of this pro-
ject, from her early roles as a child actor to more recent performances
in Hollywood blockbusters such as the Avengers franchise. A diversity
of texts factor into our study, yet Johansson’s later films such as Under
the Skin and Ghost in the Shell prove central due to their reflexive use of
Johansson’s persona and the insights they yield about her celebrity.
Precedence is also given throughout this volume to Johansson’s film
performances. While Johansson’s place as a contemporary celebrity exists
in parallel to and often exceeds her film roles, this volume is first and
foremost interested in addressing Johansson as film star. In making this
distinction, we align with Sabrina Qiong Yu’s observation that “film star-
dom is a distinct type of stardom… [with] its own sets of research ques-
tions and priorities” (2017, 13–14). In exploring how Johansson acts as
a catalyst and focus point for discussions of gender, genre and contem-
porary female film stardom, this book prioritises an engagement with
her film texts above extensive engagement with the more extra-textual

1Star studies has also moved to fill a significant blind spot around celebrity and ethnicity,

race and nationality, considering actors from national cinemas other than the United States.
Collections on Indian, Latin, East Asian and European films stars, as well as transnational
stars, have resulted (D’Amelio 2013).
 PREFACE ix

material that shape celebrity culture. Although Johansson’s off-screen

and extra-filmic work, as well as the way her image has circulated beyond
her films and through fan texts, factors into many of the chapters in
this volume, and substantially in the chapter by Daniel Palmer and Kate
Warren, the overwhelming focus of this volume rests with Johansson’s
films.
The first chapter of this collection provides an overview of
Johansson’s career, setting the scene for this volume and highlighting the
importance her films have had in shaping her stardom. It traces how her
image emerged and evolved through key career turning points, from her
early roles as a child actress in Manny & Lo and The Horse Whisperer,
to sex symbol status in adulthood, to her recent reflexive turn as a
­science fiction performer in Her, Lucy, Under the Skin and Ghost in the
Shell.
Whitney Monaghan explores the early period in Johansson’s career
in her chapter “Young Scarlett Johansson and the Liminal Perspective.”
While Johansson gained notoriety as a starlet in her late teenage years,
she began her acting career at age eight. Reflecting upon Johansson’s
film roles from 1996 to 2001, Monaghan reads Johansson’s emer-
gent star persona through theories of child stardom and the frame-
work of “liminality.” Drawing on analyses of Manny & Lo, The Horse
Whisperer, An American Rhapsody (Éva Gárdos, 2001), Ghost World
(Terry Zwigoff, 2001) and The Man Who Wasn’t There (Joel and Ethan
Coen, 2001), Monaghan highlights how Johansson’s roles present lim-
inal perspectives to destabilise dominant representations of girlhood
on screen. Through her analysis, Monaghan argues that this liminality,
established in Johansson’s early career, contributes to the understanding
of Johansson as a contemporary star.
Progressing from Johansson’s early years, Kirsten Stevens’ chapter,
“Blank Stares and Blonde Hair: Performing Scarlett Johansson,” looks to
elements of Johansson’s performance across her body of work. Described
as an actor who “oozes” on screen—not one to “fiz” but rather always
“slightly behind the beat” (Cousins 2016, 15)—Johansson’s perfor-
mance is marked by a distinct relationship to time and space within the
frame. This chapter engages with current turns in the analysis of acting,
screen performance and stardom to consider what marks Johansson out
as an actor. Looking across her body of work both within and outside
of film, including her supporting roles, Hollywood breakthroughs, inde-
pendent films, as well as her music videos and advertising work, this
x PREFACE

chapter charts Johansson’s style in performance as a distinctive element

of her stardom.
Edward Lamberti’s contribution “‘Certain Only of What She Didn’t
Want’: Scarlett Johansson’s American Outsiders in Woody Allen’s Match
Point, Scoop and Vicky Cristina Barcelona” focuses on Johansson’s three
roles in Allen’s films. Johansson’s work with Allen proved to be an
important and formative stage of her career as a young actress. Lamberti
contends that these films provide a vital opportunity to consider
Johansson’s abilities not merely as a celebrity in the making, but as an
actor and performer. The chapter focuses specifically on how Johansson’s
youth and femininity combine to fulfil the trope of the American travel-
ler in Europe, undergoing formative experiences in the “old world.”
Chris Davies’ chapter “‘Who Do You Want Me to Be?’ Scarlett
Johansson, Black Widow and Shifting Identity in the Marvel Cinematic
Universe” attends to Johansson’s place in popular cinema and main-
stream screen culture. Davies explores Johansson’s role as Natasha
Romanoff/Black Widow in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).
As the first female superhero in this otherwise male-dominated fran-
chise, Johansson’s character has a significant presence in the MCU.
Interrogating Johansson’s appearance in this role, Davies parallels
Johansson’s career trajectory with Romanoff’s narrative journey. In
doing so, he illustrates how both Johansson and Romanoff have been
associated with the figure of the femme fatale but have actively shifted
their identity to become action heroines. Analysing the impact of this
shift with regard to Johansson’s star persona, Davies explores how
Johansson converges the sexual allure of the femme fatale with the
agency of the action star to redefine her stardom.
Troy Michael Bordun’s chapter moves away from the visually allur-
ing to take up an analysis of stars-as-sounds. In “On the Off-Screen
voice: Falling in Love with Her,” Bordun reflects on the ways in which
the play on Johansson as star and as voice in the film is essential to the
perceived romantic authenticity at the heart of the film. Exploring the
place of sound within classic narrative form and realism, Bordun takes up
Spike Jonze’s Her as a film that at once complicates but ultimately reas-
serts established relationships of sound to image within narrative cinema.
Within this discourse, Bordun further implicates the Star, exploring how
iconicity forms through the perception of embodied attributes—even
when a visible or physical body is withheld.
 PREFACE xi

From voice to image, Daniel Palmer and Kate Warren’s chap-

ter explores the place of celebrity in online visual culture. “Scarlett
Johansson Falling Down: Memes, Photography and Celebrity Personas”
hones in on single image of Johansson falling over while filming a scene
in Under the Skin. As Palmer and Warren highlight, this image provides
significant insight into celebrity culture in the era of digital malleability
and social media shareability as it was promptly transformed into the
viral meme “Scarlett Johansson falling down” and shared widely online.
Through analysis of this meme and its rapid proliferation, Palmer and
Warren explore the relation between contemporary celebrity culture and
online photosharing practices. They highlight the central role of pho-
tography and online image-based sharing practices in producing and cri-
tiquing celebrity personas.
Fulvia Massimi’s contribution “Remapping Femininity: Johansson’s
Alien Transnationalism in Under the Skin” considers Johansson’s casting
in Jonathan Glazer’s art film, which was conspicuously set and released
in the period close to the Scottish independence referendum of 2014.
Massimi examines Johansson’s performance and stardom in the con-
text of Scottish national cinema more broadly, which has long gendered
Scotland as a masculine realm. Massimi considers how Johansson’s cast-
ing as a feminine wanderer exposes uncertainties in Scottish cinema
about the national character at a crucial historical moment. Moreover,
the chapter argues that the mobilisation of Johansson’s stardom in
Under the Skin illuminates the transnational deployments and possibil-
ities of stardom more generally in relation to art, film production and
national cinemas.
In “Man, Meat and Bêtes-machines: Scarlett Johansson in Under the
Skin,” Janice Loreck takes a different approach to the meanings initiated
by Johansson in Under the Skin. At first glance, Johansson’s status as a
global sex symbol makes her a fitting choice to play the role of a pred-
atory alien seductress. However, Loreck argues that Johansson’s fame
and body also facilitate the film’s exploration of the materiality of per-
sonhood—whether humans consist of body or mind. Conducting a close
analysis of the film’s narrative and mise-en-scène—and Johansson’s vital
place within them—Loreck considers how Johansson’s much-desired
body becomes the focal point for the film’s anxiety about the mind/
body split and humanity’s corporeal vulnerability.
In “‘What We Do Defines Us’: ScarJo as War Machine,” William
Brown and David H. Fleming investigate how Johansson’s image works
xii PREFACE

to signify who counts as human, inhuman and posthuman in the sci-

ence fiction worlds in which she appears. Brown and Fleming consider
a range of texts that associate Johansson with technology—including
The Island, Under the Skin and Her—but focus chiefly on the live-action
film of cult manga Ghost in the Shell. Brown and Fleming consider how
Johansson’s image is deployed to promote violence, white supremacy
and violent dehumanisation of others in this text.
Finally, looking to her recent science fiction works Sean Redmond’s
chapter, “The Alien Whiteness of Scarlett Johansson,” examines
Johansson’s at times problematic position as racialised star. Taking
up a discourse of idealised whiteness in conjunction with star the-
ory, Redmond frames Johansson as at once “unattainably immaculate”
and “essentially non-reproductive.” Both intensely desired as perfected
female form and yet rendered unobtainable and sterile through idol-
atry, Redmond frames white female stardom as a privileged yet restric-
tive state. Locating Johansson within such a construction of stardom,
Redmond looks to how her idealised white star image as resolved
through her roles in Her, Under the Skin and Ghost in the Shell is simulta-
neously recognisable and alienating within these texts. As idealised white
star, Johansson traverses the cinematic universe, moving with privileged
access into roles, spaces and intimacies laid open for her. Yet as an unob-
tainable and non-reproductive idol, Johansson is also alienating, an
embodiment of the loneliness, fragmentation and isolation that plagues
contemporary (white) social existence.

Caulfield, Australia Whitney Monaghan

Parkville, Australia Kirsten Stevens
Bentley, Australia Janice Loreck

Works Cited
Cashmore, Ellis. 2016. Elizabeth Taylor: A Private Life for Public Consumption.
New York: Bloomsbury.
Cook, Pam. 2012. Nicole Kidman. Basingstoke: BFI, Palgrave Macmillan.
Cousins, Mark. 2016. “A Study in Scarlett.” Sight and Sound, 26 (10): 15.
D’Amelio, Elena. 2013. “Stardom.” Oxford Bibliographies in Cinema and Media
Studies, edited by Krin Gabbard, January 28. http://www.oxfordbibliogra-
phies.com/obo/page/cinema-and-media-studies.
Davies, Ann. 2014. Penélope Cruz. Basingstoke: BFI, Palgrave Macmillan.
 PREFACE xiii

Dorney, Kate, and Maggie B. Gale (eds.). 2018. Vivien Leigh: Actress and Icon.
Manchester: Manchester UP.
Gorfinkel, Elena. 2016. “Sex, Sensation and Nonhuman Interiority in Under the
Skin.” Jump Cut 57. https://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/-Gorfinkel-
Skin/index.html.
Hancock, Grady. 2015. “Episode 9: Deletion|Deviation.” Deletion, May 4. http://
www.deletionscifi.org/episodes/episode-9/episode-9-deletiondeviation/.
Hollinger, Karen. 2006. The Actress: Hollywood Acting and the Female Star. New
York: Routledge.
Holmes, Su, and Sean Redmond. 2010. “A Journal in Celebrity Studies.”
Celebrity Studies 1 (1): 1–10.
Lewis, Tania. 2008. Smart Living: Lifestyle Media and Popular Expertise. New
York: Peter Lang.
McLean, Adrienne L. 2004. Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and
Hollywood Stardom. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP.
Moseley, Rachel. 2002. Growing Up with Audrey Hepburn: Text, Audience,
Resonance. Manchester: Manchester UP.
Nguyen, Sophia. 2014. “The Posthuman Scar-Jo.” Los Angeles Review of Books,
September 12. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/posthuman-scar-jo/#!.
Robehmed, Natalie. 2016. “Scarlett Johansson Is The Top-Grossing Actor of
2016.” Forbes, December 27. https://www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobe-
hmed/2016/12/27/scarlett-johansson-is-the-top-grossing-actor-of-2016/#5f39
e14f1433.
Sastre, Alexandra. 2014. “Hottentot in the Age of Reality TV: Sexuality, Race,
and Kim Kardashian’s Visible Body”. Celebrity Studies 5 (1–2): 123–37.
Smith, Daniel. 2014. “Charlie Is so ‘English’-Like: Nationality and the Branded
Celebrity Person in the Age of YouTube.” Celebrity Studies 5 (3): 256–74.
Vincendeau, Ginette. 2013. Brigitte Bardot. Basingstoke: BFI, Palgrave
Macmillan.
———. 2014. Brigitte Bardot, The Life, The Legend, The Movies. London:
Carlton.
Yu, Sabrina Qiong. 2017. “Introduction: Performing Stardom: Star Studies in
Transformation and Expansion.” In Revisiting Star Studies: Cultures, Themes
and Methods, edited by S. Yu and G. Austin, 1–22. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
 Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all of our contributors for their ideas, persever-
ance and input throughout the creation of this book. We acknowledge
the organisers of the Deletion-Deviation: The Perversions of Science Fiction
symposium, where we were first inspired to undertake an extended
project on Scarlett Johansson. We also thank the editors at Science
Fiction Film and Television journal and the authors who contributed to
our dossier: “Stardom and sf: A symposium on the sf films of Scarlett
Johansson” (2018), where many of the ideas leading to this volume were
further developed. The guidance and enthusiasm of the team at Palgrave
Macmillan were also instrumental in shepherding this volume to publi-
cation. Our appreciation especially goes to all the people who provided
instrumental advice on specific sections of this book, with special men-
tion to Tim Laurie, Teresa Rizzo, Claire Perkins, Belinda Glynn and
Belinda Smaill for their feedback and insight.
We would also like to extend our gratitude to our friends and col-
leagues who have endured endless conversations about Scarlett
Johansson and who have supported and advised us throughout the
writing process: Kerreen Ely-Harper, Christina Lee, Thomas Loreck,
Lyn Loreck, Bronwyn Stevens, Sian Mitchell, Hayley Summers, Isabella
McNeill and Hannah McCann.

xv
 Contents

1 Why Scarlett Johansson? 1

Kirsten Stevens, Janice Loreck and Whitney Monaghan

2 Young Scarlett Johansson and the Liminal Perspective 23

Whitney Monaghan

3 Blank Stares and Blonde Hair: Performing

Scarlett Johansson 41
Kirsten Stevens

4 “Certain Only of What She Didn’t Want”: Scarlett

Johansson’s American Outsiders in Woody Allen’s
Match Point, Scoop and Vicky Cristina Barcelona 63
Edward Lamberti

5 “Who Do You Want Me to Be?” Scarlett Johansson,

Black Widow and Shifting Identity in the Marvel
Cinematic Universe 81
Chris Davies

6 On the Off-Screen Voice: Falling in Love with Her 99

Troy Michael Bordun

xvii
xviii CONTENTS

7 Scarlett Johansson Falling Down: Memes, Photography

and Celebrity Personas 121
Daniel Palmer and Kate Warren

8 Remapping Femininity: Johansson’s Alien

Transnationalism in Under the Skin 145
Fulvia Massimi

9 Man, Meat and Bêtes-Machines: Scarlett Johansson

in Under the Skin 165
Janice Loreck

10 “What We Do Defines Us”: ScarJo as War Machine 183

William Brown and David H. Fleming

11 The Alien Whiteness of Scarlett Johansson 203

Sean Redmond

Filmography 221

Index 223
 Notes on Contributors

Troy Michael Bordun is a contract instructor in Art History at

Concordia University, English and Film Studies at Bishop’s University
and Sociology and Cultural Studies at Trent University. His recent work
can be found in Celebrity Studies and Porn Studies, among other journals.
He has forthcoming chapters in ReFocus: The Films of Carlos Reygadas
and Screening #TimesUp: Exploring Rape Culture in Hollywood Film and
a forthcoming article in Mise-en-scène.
William Brown is a Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of
Roehampton, London. He is the author of Supercinema: Film-Philosophy
for the Digital Age (2013) and, with Dina Iordanova and Leshu Torchin,
of Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New
Europe (2010).
Chris Davies is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of
Exeter. He is the author of Blockbusters and the Ancient World: Allegory
and Warfare in Contemporary Hollywood (Bloomsbury, 2019), and his
research interests include history on film, principally the ancient world,
westerns and war films, as well as sci-fi and comic book movies. He
currently works as a Senior Compliance Officer at the British Board of
Film Classification. His views are his own and do not reflect those of the
BBFC.

xix
xx NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

David H. Fleming is a Senior Lecturer in the Communication, Media

and Culture division at the University of Stirling, Scotland, and his
research interests gravitate around the intersectionalities between cinema,
philosophy and technology. He is the author of Unbecoming Cinema
(2017) and the co-author of Kinoteuthis Infernalis, or Squid Cinema
from Hell with William Brown (forthcoming), and Chinese Urban Shi-
nema with Simon Harrison (forthcoming). He has also published widely
in interdisciplinary journals including SubStance, Film-Philosophy, Deleuze
Studies, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Journal of Urban Cultural Studies,
Social Semiotics and edited collections such as Posthumanisms Through
Deleuze (forthcoming) and Deleuze and Film (2012).
Edward Lamberti teaches film at King’s College London and also
works at the British Board of Film Classification. He is the editor of
Behind the Scenes at the BBFC: Film Classification from the Silver Screen
to the Digital Age (2012) and the author of Performing Ethics through
Film Style: Levinas with the Dardenne Brothers, Barbet Schroeder and Paul
Schrader (2019).
Janice Loreck teaches in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social
Inquiry at Curtin University. Her research focuses on representations
of women and film violence in global art cinema. She is the author
of Violent Women in Contemporary Cinema (2016) and is Festival
Coordinator for the Melbourne Women in Film Festival. Her recent
writings have also appeared in Australian Humanities Review, Science
Fiction Film and Television Studies and Feminist Media Studies.
Fulvia Massimi teaches in the Humanities Department at Vanier
College in Montreal. She holds a PhD in Film and Moving Image
Studies from Concordia University. Her research focuses on local and
global understandings of gender and nationhood in the cinemas of
Québec, Flanders and Scotland. Her work appears in Synoptique: An
Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies (2016), Trespassing
Journal (2018), The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema (2019) and
ReFocus: The Films of Xavier Dolan (2019).
Whitney Monaghan is an Assistant Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies
at Monash University. She has a background in screen, media and cul-
tural studies, and her research examines queer and youth representa-
tion on screen. She is the author of the book Queer Girls, Temporality
and Screen Media: Not ‘Just a Phase’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxi

co-author of Queer Theory Now: From Foundations to Futures (Red

Globe Press, 2019) with Hannah McCann. She is the founding editor of
Peephole Journal, an online magazine devoted to creative screen criticism,
and Festival Coordinator at the Melbourne Women in Film Festival.
Daniel Palmer is Professor and Associate Dean of Research and
Innovation in the School of Art at RMIT University, Melbourne. His
books include Photography and Collaboration: From Conceptual Art to
Crowdsourcing (Bloomsbury, 2017); Digital Light (Open Humanities
Press, 2015), edited with Sean Cubitt and Nathaniel Tkacz; The Culture
of Photography in Public Space (Intellect, 2015), edited with Anne
Marsh and Melissa Miles; Twelve Australian Photo Artists (Piper Press,
2009), co-authored with Blair French; and Photogenic (Centre for
Contemporary Photography, 2005).
Sean Redmond is an Associate Professor in Screen and Design at
Deakin University, Australia. He has published ten books, including
A Companion to Celebrity (2015), The AFI Film Reader: Endangering
Science Fiction Film (2015) and Celebrity and the Media (2014). With Su
Holmes, he edits the journal Celebrity Studies, shortlisted for best new
academic journal in 2011.
Kirsten Stevens is Lecturer in Arts and Cultural Management at the
University of Melbourne and has a background in film and screen stud-
ies, popular culture and media and communications. Author of the
book, Australian Film Festivals: Audience, Place and Exhibition Culture
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), her research engages with media industries
in national screen contexts, reception studies, media exhibition and dis-
tribution, and issues of gender in the cultural industries. She is vice pres-
ident of Senses of Cinema journal and deputy director of the Melbourne
Women in Film Festival.
Kate Warren is a Lecturer in Art History and Curatorship at the
Australian National University. She is an art historian, writer and ­curator,
with expertise in modern & contemporary Australian and international
art and cinema. She received her PhD in Art History from Monash
University in 2016, and her research interests cover film, photography,
video & new media art, creative research practices and arts writing &
criticism. She publishes extensively in publications including Australian
and New Zealand Journal of Art, emaj: Online Journal of Art, Senses of
Cinema, Persona Studies, History of Photography, Discipline, and Objektiv.
xxii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

She has curated exhibitions for the Australian Centre for the Moving
Image, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Channels Video Art
Festival, and she is also co-editor of Peephole Journal, an online journal
dedicated to creative film criticism.
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Scarlett Johansson’s blank stare in the final frames of “Falling
Down” music video. Video still, “Falling Down” music video
(Bennett Miller 2008) 43
Fig. 7.1 Scarlett Johansson trips on a Glasgow street, 2012, unknown
photographer (Source Reddit) 122
Fig. 7.2 Selected examples of the Scarlett Johansson Falling Down
meme, in order: Johansson as DJ (Source Know Your Meme),
with “Sad Keanu” (Source Says.com), as walrus (Source Sad
and Useless), riding a dolphin (Source Know Your Meme),
playing bongos (Source Know Your Meme), and dancing
“Thriller” (Source Know Your Meme) 134
Fig. 8.1 Female-as-nation, film still Under the Skin (2013) 159
Fig. 8.2 Fusion with nature, film still Under the Skin (2013) 159

xxiii
 CHAPTER 1

Why Scarlett Johansson?

Kirsten Stevens, Janice Loreck and Whitney Monaghan

In his introduction to the BFI’s Star Studies: A Critical Guide, Martin Shin-
gler suggests, “One of the most persistent questions asked about stardom
is why some film actors become stars and not others” (2012, 3). Yet we
might also pose another question—why do some stars become the focus
of scholarly and popular writing on their stardom and not others? What
qualities do some stars possess, in their saleability, their enduring appeal
or their engagement with processes of commodification, that make them
worthy of the type of close scrutiny that sustains articles and book-length
examinations? In developing Screening Scarlett Johansson, these questions
have been unavoidable. What about this actress, whose career—while span-
ning more than two decades—is far from complete, makes her ready and
fitting to be the focus of a book? Of all the actresses who currently populate
the films of Hollywood and world cinema, or adorn the pages of magazines

K. Stevens (B)
Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia
e-mail: kirsten.stevens@unimelb.edu.au
J. Loreck
Screen Arts and Cultural Studies, Curtin University, Bentley, WA, Australia
W. Monaghan
Film and Screen Studies, Monash University, Caulfield, VIC, Australia

© The Author(s) 2019 1

J. Loreck et al. (eds.), Screening Scarlett Johansson,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33196-2_1
2 K. STEVENS ET AL.

promoting perfumes, fashion brands or simply themselves, what makes this

one distinctive? In short, why a book on Scarlett Johansson?
There are many reasons to single out Johansson for special attention
within the growing collection of studies devoted to contemporary stars
and stardom. Johansson sits among a number of female stars who have
transitioned from child actor to adult star since the 1990s. Alongside the
likes of Natalie Portman, Kirsten Dunst, Kristen Stewart and Emma Stone,
Johansson has emerged over the past two decades to an increasingly central
role within Hollywood filmmaking, franchise cinema and global celebrity
culture. While a case could be made for an exploration of many of these
women, however, there are qualities to Johansson that stand her apart from
this company. Unlike the majority of these actresses, she has not won an
Academy Award. Instead, she has achieved fame and acclaim in other ways.
Much of Johansson’s celebrity rests in her popular appeal as a hyper-
feminine beauty and global glamour star. Moreover, much of this notoriety
has come, as Dyer (1986) suggests it does for all stars, from the diverse,
multimedia and intertextual star images of Johansson that have circulated
beyond her on-screen roles. After topping a poll run in Esquire in 2006,
Johansson has regularly featured in “sexiest woman alive” lists in men’s
magazines such as Maxim, GQ, Playboy, FHM and Men’s Health, includ-
ing achieving the perhaps dubious honour of becoming in 2013 the first
woman to have achieved top spot twice on the Esquire chart. The pop-
ularity and fascination with Johansson’s body and beauty have not only
captivated male fans, however. Numerous brand endorsements have also
secured her place in the pages of women’s magazines. She has worked as a
model and spokeswoman for several fashion and cosmetic brands, includ-
ing Calvin Klein fragrance, Louis Vuitton fashion, L’Oréal hair products
and Dolce & Gabbana perfumes and cosmetics. Such endorsements shore
up Johansson’s image, building on her sexualised persona and place within
the popular imagining of contemporary Hollywood stardom. Yet it was
in 2016 that Johansson’s popularity found a more material measure, with
Forbes naming her the year’s top-grossing star due to the $1.2 billion USD
brought in by the films in which she starred (Robehmed 2016).
Although such popular appeal offers a reason why this star might be
singled out for a closer look, there is more to Johansson than her status as
a sexy, bankable actress. Johansson’s films and her actions off-screen move
within and beyond this popular image in ways that distinguish her as a star
worthy of closer scrutiny. Johansson’s long and varied career demonstrates
 1 WHY SCARLETT JOHANSSON? 3

she is an actor capable of change, and it is precisely this changeable qual-

ity—and the performances it fosters—that drives this book. Beyond her
place as popular Hollywood starlet, Johansson’s career has also framed her
as a child actress, a darling of American independent cinema, a leading lady
within global art house productions, and more recently as the recognisably
female face of contemporary science fiction and action franchise cinema.
Her ability to move through and across genres and institutional modes
with an ease and visibility possessed by few other contemporary actresses
marks her as a figure worthy of some consideration. Her body of work,
moreover, provides a fertile ground to interrogate not only what contem-
porary stardom, and female stardom particularly, looks like, but also to see
how an examination of the work of a single actor might foster new critical
approaches to explorations of gender, genre and stardom in the twenty-first
century. It is on this fertile ground that this book sits.
If Johansson has charted a career through a multitude of roles that play
to and subvert cultural norms around her recognisable femininity, sev-
eral of her roles have also worked to highlight her tendency to play up
such transformations. Johansson has, with somewhat astonishing regular-
ity, embraced characters that are themselves in transition. Whether playing
ingénue or cyborg, Johansson is frequently cast as women who wander,
experiencing coming of age or identity crises. She plays American flâneuses
in Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona
(Woody Allen, 2008); characters that investigate the boundaries of their
humanity and non-humanity in The Island (Michael Bay, 2005), Her (Spike
Jonze, 2013) and Ghost in the Shell (Rupert Sanders, 2017); and femmes
fatales burdened by their own performances of seduction in Under the
Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013) and Avengers franchise. As Johansson (2017)
remarks:

perhaps subconsciously I’ve chosen characters who are on some existential

quest, perhaps it’s some reflection of my own journey … These characters all
have that struggle and brush up against themselves time and again until they
break through and are sitting as women in their own skin.

Whilst Johansson has a large body of work in which she does not play
such characters (turns in Hail, Caesar! [Joel and Ethan Coen, 2016] and
Rough Night [Lucia Aniello, 2017] indicate her skill in comedic roles, for
example), it is a conspicuous feature of her career that her persona should
be so regularly mobilised to portray femininity in transition.
4 K. STEVENS ET AL.

Johansson’s decision to take on such characters has a pragmatic ele-

ment. Roles as ingénues and cyborgs have allowed her to participate in
several milieus of cinema culture at various points in her career, perform-
ing as both a starlet of independent films as well as a mainstream science
fiction performer. Yet it is nonetheless intriguing that Johansson should be
the actor who is emblematic of unstable personhood and feminine identity
crisis. She is the contemporary go-to actress for Hollywood’s own feminine
archetype; blonde-haired and green-eyed, Johansson’s appearance recalls
1950s sex icons such as Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. Admir-
ers routinely make hyperbolic claims about her femininity—calling her
“gilded to behold” (Lane 2014) and “sexually overwhelming” (Allen qtd.
in Hill 2007)—as well as comically redundant declarations: “She looks like
a woman. She exudes womanness ” (Jacobs 2006). Despite this characteri-
sation of Johansson as femininity embodied, she has nevertheless become
representative of women in flux.
This chapter gives an overview of Johansson’s career as a way of map-
ping out her persona and its vicissitudes. As the contributors to this volume
demonstrate, Johansson’s critical interest is extensive, her persona opening
up numerous pathways for discussions of child performance, the erotici-
sation of violence, white supremacy, national versus transnational cinema,
and the human and animal divide. The purpose of this opening chapter,
then, is to offer an overview of Johansson’s career to precede and comple-
ment these contributions, as well as to give a unifying perspective on her
image. We therefore examine Johansson’s early career as a child actress,
her positioning as a star of American independent cinema, her fame as an
object of heterosexual male desire, and her recent turn towards self-parody
in science fiction cinema. In providing this overview, we trace the develop-
ment of—and productive contradictions within—Johansson’s image. We
consider how Johansson has evolved in paradoxical ways throughout her
twenty year career to become representative of Hollywood’s iteration of
the perfect woman, yet, at the same time, a star of feminine transformation
and instability.

Early Roles and Rising Stardom

As with all stars, Johansson’s persona consists of a lived biography. Scarlett
Ingrid Johansson was born in 1984 in New York City to parents Melanie
Sloan and Karsten Johansson. She has three siblings—an older sister and
brother, Vanessa and Adrian, as well as a twin brother, Hunter. The Johans-
son and Sloan families had ties to the film industry long before Scarlett
 1 WHY SCARLETT JOHANSSON? 5

began acting: her mother was a film producer, and her paternal grandfa-
ther worked in Danish film and television. As noted in a recent profile of
Johansson on PBS’s ancestry show Finding Your Roots (2012–), her back-
ground is of Eastern European Jewish, Danish and Swedish descent. Her
mother’s ancestors immigrated to America from what is now Poland, and
she holds dual American and Danish citizenship.
In interviews, Johansson regularly mentions that her ambition to
become a performer began at an early age. For instance, she describes her
time on the set of her first film North (Rob Reiner, 1994) as natural and
comfortable: “for some reason, I just knew what to do, instinctively. It was
like, I don’t know … fate” (qtd. in Bhattacharya 2004). Success was not
immediate, however. When Johansson first attempted to enter into acting
via the world of commercials, casting agents found that her deep voice
was not typically childlike. However, this quality became her asset when
she started regular work. Johansson won an important role as a teenage
runaway in the independent film Manny & Lo (Lisa Krueger, 1996); she
then played the part of a girl recovering from a riding accident in The Horse
Whisperer (Robert Redford, 1998). At the time, director Robert Redford
was said to have praised the maturity of Johansson’s persona by describing
her as “13 going on 30” (qtd. in Billson 2013).1
Alongside these roles, Johansson continued to perform in children’s
films such as Home Alone 3 (Raja Gosnell, 1997) and My Brother the Pig
(Erik Fleming, 1999). Johansson’s career gained momentum again in her
late teenage years when she was cast in two acclaimed films: Joel and Ethan
Coen’s The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), and the cult comic book adap-
tation Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001). Despite her successful perfor-
mances, however, it was not until, at eighteen years of age, when she starred
in Girl with a Pearl Earring (Peter Webber, 2003) and Lost in Translation,
that Johansson’s position as star was secured. At the time, director Sofia
Coppola noted, “[t]here’s something deep about her. She makes you feel
like she has been around the world” (qtd. in Bhattacharya 2004). A sense
of maturity beyond her years—contrasted against her evident youth and
beauty—became Johansson’s hallmark and asset as a young star.

1 Redford’s comment is widely repeated in accounts of Johansson’s career (for example

in Vernon [2003], Bhattacharya [2004], Severgnini [2010], Schaefer [2012], and Billson
[2013]). However, we were unable to locate the original source of the quote after extensive
searching. Through sheer repetition, however, the quote has now become an entrenched part
of Johansson’s narrative.
6 K. STEVENS ET AL.

Since her breakout in the early 2000s, Johansson has worked consis-
tently in both independent and commercial cinema. The development of
her image via her film roles evaded any kind of neat teleology: she was cast as
wandering ingénues, teenagers, comediennes and alluring young women.
For instance, Lost in Translation and (four years later) Vicky Cristina
Barcelona framed Johansson as a modern-day flâneuse reminiscent of the
wandering “free spirits” of European art cinema; they also, simultaneously,
played on her appeal as an emerging icon of female sexuality and desirability.
At the same time, however, Johansson also performed conventional teen
characters in the hybrid comedy-horror Eight Legged Freaks (Ellory Elka-
yem, 2002) and The Perfect Score (Brian Robbins, 2004), which follows a
group of teenagers stealing results for their high school exams. Johansson
also began a career relatively early as an action star in The Island and Iron
Man 2 (Jon Favreau, 2010). Johansson’s choice of roles over the early part
of her career thus saw her developing as both a recognisable mainstream
performer and an alternative “indie” ingénue and collaborator to figures
like Coppola and Allen.
This trajectory raises exciting questions regarding Johansson’s fram-
ing and development as a star. As Paul McDonald argues, the star status
awarded to actors working within the independent cinema sphere must be
distinguished from actors whose recognisable body of work exists more
within the mainstream and popular cinemas (1998). While on the one
hand this distinction exists in terms of a star’s (and their performances’)
visibility—the more niche market for independent titles means stars such
as Chloë Sevigny and Parker Posey, for instance, have never gained the
universal recognition for their film work a career in the mainstream may
have afforded—the distinction of star images forged in independent and
art house films also rests on the potential semantic complications that their
roles often raise. While Johansson’s early career maintained a link to Hol-
lywood, her more active participation in art house and independent films
through the early and mid-2000s problematises a simple reading of her
evolution as a purely mainstream star.
In its early formation, Johansson’s stardom existed within the peripheral
space of the indie spheres—specifically, what Geoff King (2009) names the
‘Indiewood’ milieu of cinema.2 Johansson’s work in independent film was

2 King defines Indiewood as “an area in which Hollywood and the independent sector
merge or overlap” (2009, 1). Such films emerged in the North American film industry in the
1990s and 2000s and are typically the products of specialty-oriented and niche studios, both
 1 WHY SCARLETT JOHANSSON? 7

relatively short and encompassed only her late teens and early twenties.
Unlike other stars of American independent cinema, such as Sevigny and
Posey, Johansson transitioned out of the sector to take more mainstream
roles. Her indie work formed a significant milestone, however, insofar as it
won her visibility and fashioned her image as an intelligent, modern young
performer. Ghost World, The Man Who Wasn’t There and Lost in Trans-
lation were each critically-acclaimed films3 and Johansson’s performances
attracted praise in each. In 2003, she won the British Academy of Film and
Television Arts (BAFTA) Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for Lost
in Translation, and was nominated in the same category for Girl with a
Pearl Earring ; she was also nominated for Golden Globe Awards for both
films.
Johansson’s early association with independent cinema also connected
her to an attitude and disposition that characterised American indepen-
dent cinema at the time—one of irony and wit.4 As a star of independent
films, Johansson was thus mobilised as more than a young beauty—she was
positioned as a self-aware and intelligent actress. Indeed, this combination
proved central to her performance in Lost in Translation in particular. As
Lucy Bolton observes in her analysis of the film:

Johansson’s star persona has been constructed around the image of an old-
fashioned femininity, clothing and makeup, and offers itself as a mimetic
text when adopted by a modern, intelligent, assertive woman with a deep,
resonant voice and sardonic opinions. (2011, 119–120)

Directors who worked with Johansson at this time similarly insisted upon
her sophistication in ways that integrated with the indie ethos. Zwigoff

independent (such as the now-defunct Miramax and Weinstein Company) and subsidiaries of
major studios (such as Fox Searchlight and Focus Features). King argues that Indiewood films
draw stylistic and aesthetic characteristics from both independent and mainstream cinema:
examples include American Beauty (Sam Mendes, 1999), Lost in Translation and Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004), to name a few.
3 Awards for Ghost World include Independent Spirit Awards for Daniel Clowes and Terry
Zwigoff’s screenplay, as well as Steve Buscemi’s performance in the film; Girl with a Pearl
Earring was nominated for multiple BAFTA Awards (including Best Actress, Best British
Film and Best Adapted Screenplay); Lost in Translation was nominated for numerous awards
in North America and Britain, with its most prestigious win being the Academy Award for
Best Original Screenplay.
4 For a discussion of the significance of irony in American independent cinema of the 1990s,
see Sconce (2002).
8 K. STEVENS ET AL.

notes that “Scarlett at age 15 had the poise of someone much older” (qtd.
in Hoffman 2017). Joel Coen notes her self-confidence: “I think we were
all a little intimidated by Scarlett” (qtd. in Jacobs 2006). Indeed, comments
on Johansson’s wit and intelligence continued to surface in profiles of her;
A. J. Jacobs describes her as “so preternaturally confident and self-
possessed, you feel as if she could be, at any moment, inwardly rolling
her eyes at your dorkiness” (2006); Woody Allen describes Johansson as
“wittier” than himself (qtd. in Hill 2007). Johansson’s ascent to fame as a
child actress and through the independent sector thus paved the way for
a particular inflection of her persona; Johansson was not only a promising
talent and beautiful ingénue, but a thoroughly modern one too.

Sexiest Woman Alive: Johansson’s Body at Work

While her stardom was forged as much around her wit as her appearance,
the facet that has come to most dominate Johansson’s negotiated star image
is her physicality and its associated sexualised appeal. Since achieving fame
in her late teens, Johansson’s star image has centred on her reputation
as a superlatively attractive and desirable celebrity. Alongside her numer-
ous accolades as “sexiest woman alive” mentioned at the beginning of
this chapter, Johansson’s star image has been shaped by a range of on-
and off-screen roles and critical reception that have worked to foreground
her ‘sex symbol text’. As Will Scheibel (2013, 5) argues with reference to
the enduring construction of Marilyn Monroe as a sex icon, “The term
‘sex symbol text’ refers to the ways in which various mass-produced media
texts… together manufacture and manage a celebrity image that derives its
dominant meaning and affect from sex.” For Johansson, her sex symbol
text derives from a combination of sources: her on-screen roles as alluring
but unobtainable object of desire; her modelling and brand endorsement
work for the likes of Dolce & Gabbana; her noted physiology: green eyes,
blonde hair, curvaceous body, distinctive lips, “luminescent skin,” throaty
voice; her retro-star appeal; and the continual centring of her sex appeal
within critical discourse. All of these combine to align Johansson’s star
image first and foremost with her physicality and heteronormative sexu-
alised desirability.
First among the sources that create Johansson’s sex symbol text are her
films. Several performances establish the importance of her body and sex
appeal as defining features of her image. She is regularly centred within the
frame as someone to be looked at and lusted after. As the maid Griet in
Another random document with
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 8. Resolved, That the separation of the moneys of the government
from banking institutions is indispensable for the safety of the funds
of the government and the rights of the people.
9. Resolved, That the liberal principles embodied by Jefferson in
the Declaration of Independence, and sanctioned in the constitution,
which makes ours the land of liberty and the asylum of the oppressed
of every nation, have ever been cardinal principles in the democratic
faith; and every attempt to abridge the present privilege of becoming
citizens, and the owners of soil among us, ought to be resisted with
the same spirit which swept the alien and sedition laws from our
statute book.
Whereas, Several of the states which have nominated Martin Van
Buren as a candidate for the presidency, have put in nomination
different individuals as candidates for Vice-President, thus
indicating a diversity of opinion as to the person best entitled to the
nomination; and whereas, some of the said states are not
represented in this convention; therefore,
Resolved, That the convention deem it expedient at the present
time not to choose between the individuals in nomination, but to
leave the decision to their republican fellow-citizens in the several
states, trusting that before the election shall take place, their
opinions will become so concentrated as to secure the choice of a
Vice-President by the electoral college.

1843.—Liberty Platform.

Buffalo, August 30.

1. Resolved, That human brotherhood is a cardinal principle of
true democracy, as well as of pure Christianity, which spurns all
inconsistent limitations; and neither the political party which
repudiates it, nor the political system which is not based upon it, can
be truly democratic or permanent.
2. Resolved, That the Liberty party, placing itself upon this broad
principle, will demand the absolute and unqualified divorce of the
general government from slavery, and also the restoration of equality
of rights among men, in every state here the party exists, or may
exist.
3. Resolved, That the Liberty party has not been organized for any
temporary purpose by interested politicians, but has arisen from
among the people in consequence of a conviction, hourly gaining
ground, that no other party in the country represents the true
principles of American liberty, or the true spirit of the constitution of
the United States.
4. Resolved, That the Liberty party has not been organized merely
for the overthrow of slavery; its first decided effort must, indeed, be
directed against slaveholding as the grossest and most revolting
manifestation of despotism, but it will also carry out the principle of
equal rights into all its practical consequences and applications, and
support every just measure conducive to individual and social
freedom.
5. Resolved, That the Liberty party is not a sectional party but a
national party; was not originated in a desire to accomplish a single
object, but in a comprehensive regard to the great interests of the
whole country; is not a new party, nor a third party, but is the party
of 1776, reviving the principles of that memorable era, and striving to
carry them into practical application.
6. Resolved, That it was understood in the times of the declaration
and the constitution, that the existence of slavery in some of the
states was in derogation of the principles of American liberty, and a
deep stain upon the character of the country, and the implied faith of
the states and the nation was pledged that slavery should never be
extended beyond its then existing limits, but should be gradually,
and yet, at no distant day, wholly abolished by state authority.
7. Resolved, That the faith of the states and the nation thus
pledged, was most nobly redeemed by the voluntary abolition of
slavery in several of the states, and by the adoption of the ordinance
of 1787, for the government of the territory northwest of the river
Ohio, then the only territory in the United States, and consequently
the only territory subject in this respect to the control of Congress, by
which ordinance slavery was forever excluded from the vast regions
which now compose the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan,
and the territory of Wisconsin, and an incapacity to bear up any
other than freemen was impressed on the soil itself.
 8. Resolved, That the faith of the states and the nation thus
pledged, has been shamefully violated by the omission, on the part of
many of the states, to take any measures whatever for the abolition of
slavery within their respective limits; by the continuance of slavery in
the District of Columbia, and in the territories of Louisiana and
Florida; by the legislation of Congress; by the protection afforded by
national legislation and negotiation to slaveholding in American
vessels, on the high seas, employed in the coastwise Slave Traffic;
and by the extension of slavery far beyond its original limits, by acts
of Congress admitting new slave states into the Union.
9. Resolved, That the fundamental truths of the Declaration of
Independence, that all men are endowed by their Creator with
certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness, was made the fundamental law of our national
government, by that amendment of the constitution which declares
that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without
due process of law.
10. Resolved, That we recognize as sound the doctrine maintained
by slaveholding jurists, that slavery is against natural rights, and
strictly local, and that its existence and continuance rests on no other
support than state legislation, and not on any authority of Congress.
11. Resolved, That the general government has, under the
constitution, no power to establish or continue slavery anywhere,
and therefore that all treaties and acts of Congress establishing,
continuing or favoring slavery in the District of Columbia, in the
territory of Florida, or on the high seas, are unconstitutional, and all
attempts to hold men as property within the limits of exclusive
national jurisdiction ought to be prohibited by law.
12. Resolved, That the provisions of the constitution of the United
States which confers extraordinary political powers on the owners of
slaves, and thereby constituting the two hundred and fifty thousand
slaveholders in the slave states a privileged aristocracy; and the
provisions for the reclamation of fugitive slaves from service, are
anti-republican in their character, dangerous to the liberties of the
people, and ought to be abrogated.
13. Resolved, That the practical operation of the second of these
provisions, is seen in the enactment of the act of Congress respecting
persons escaping from their masters, which act, if the construction
given to it by the Supreme Court of the United States in the case of
Prigg vs. Pennsylvania be correct, nullifies the habeas corpus acts of
all the states, takes away the whole legal security of personal
freedom, and ought, therefore, to be immediately repealed.
14. Resolved, That the peculiar patronage and support hitherto
extended to slavery and slaveholding, by the general government,
ought to be immediately withdrawn, and the example and influence
of national authority ought to be arrayed on the side of liberty and
free labor.
15. Resolved, That the practice of the general government, which
prevails in the slave states, of employing slaves upon the public
works, instead of free laborers, and paying aristocratic masters, with
a view to secure or reward political services, is utterly indefensible
and ought to be abandoned.
16. Resolved, That freedom of speech and of the press, and the
right of petition, and the right of trial by jury, are sacred and
inviolable; and that all rules, regulations and laws, in derogation of
either, are oppressive, unconstitutional, and not to be endured by a
free people.
17. Resolved, That we regard voting, in an eminent degree, as a
moral and religious duty, which, when exercised, should be by voting
for those who will do all in their power for immediate emancipation.
18. Resolved, That this convention recommend to the friends of
liberty in all those free states where any inequality of rights and
privileges exists on account of color, to employ their utmost energies
to remove all such remnants and effects of the slave system.
Whereas, The constitution of these United States is a series of
agreements, covenants or contracts between the people of the United
States, each with all, and all with each; and,
Whereas, It is a principle of universal morality, that the moral laws
of the Creator are paramount to all human laws; or, in the language
of an Apostle, that “we ought to obey God rather than men;” and,
Whereas, The principle of common law—that any contract,
covenant, or agreement, to do an act derogatory to natural right, is
vitiated and annulled by its inherent immorality—has been
recognized by one of the justices of the Supreme Court of the United
States, who in a recent case expressly holds that “any contract that
rests upon such a basis is void;” and,
Whereas, The third clause of the second section of the fourth
article of the constitution of the United States, when construed as
providing for the surrender of a fugitive slave, does “rest upon such a
basis,” in that it is a contract to rob a man of a natural right—namely,
his natural right to his own liberty—and is therefore absolutely void.
Therefore,
19. Resolved, That we hereby give it to be distinctly understood by
this nation and the world, that, as abolitionists, considering that the
strength of our cause lies in its righteousness, and our hope for it in
our conformity to the laws of God, and our respect for the rights of
man, we owe it to the Sovereign Ruler of the Universe, as a proof of
our allegiance to Him, in all our civil relations and offices, whether as
private citizens, or public functionaries sworn to support the
constitution of the United States, to regard and to treat the third
clause of the fourth article of that instrument, whenever applied to
the case of a fugitive slave, as utterly null and void, and consequently
as forming no part of the constitution of the United States, whenever
we are called upon or sworn to support it.
20. Resolved, That the power given to Congress by the
constitution, to provide for calling out the militia to suppress
insurrection, does not make it the duty of the government to
maintain slavery by military force, much less does it make it the duty
of the citizens to form a part of such military force; when freemen
unsheathe the sword it should be to strike for liberty, not for
despotism.
21. Resolved, That to preserve the peace of the citizens, and secure
the blessings of freedom, the legislature of each of the free states
ought to keep in force suitable statutes rendering it penal for any of
its inhabitants to transport, or aid in transporting from such state,
any person sought to be thus transported, merely because subject to
the slave laws of any other state; this remnant of independence being
accorded to the free states by the decision of the Supreme Court, in
the case of Prigg vs. the state of Pennsylvania.

1844.—Whig Platform.
 Baltimore, May 1.
1. Resolved, That these principles may be summed as comprising a
well regulated national currency: a tariff for revenue to defray the
necessary expenses of the government, and discriminating with
special reference to the protection of the domestic labor of the
country; the distribution of the proceeds from the sales of the public
lands; a single term for the presidency; a reform of executive
usurpations; and generally such an administration of the affairs of
the country as shall impart to every branch of the public service the
greatest practical efficiency, controlled by a well regulated and wise
economy.

1844.—Democratic Platform.

Baltimore, May 27.

Resolutions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, of the platform of 1840, were
reaffirmed, to which were added the following:
10. Resolved, That the proceeds of the public lands ought to be
sacredly applied to the national objects specified in the constitution,
and that we are opposed to the laws lately adopted, and to any law
for the distribution of such proceeds among the states, as alike
inexpedient in policy and repugnant to the constitution.
11. Resolved, That we are decidedly opposed to taking from the
President the qualified veto power by which he is enabled, under
restrictions and responsibilities amply sufficient to guard the public
interest, to suspend the passage of a bill whose merits can not secure
the approval of two-thirds of the Senate and House of
Representatives, until the judgment of the people can be obtained
thereon, and which has thrice saved the American people from the
corrupt and tyrannical domination of the bank of the United States.
12. Resolved, That our title to the whole of the territory of Oregon
is clear and unquestionable; that no portion of the same ought to be
ceded to England or any other power, and that the reoccupation of
Oregon and the reannexation of Texas at the earliest practicable
period, are great American measures, which this convention
recommends to the cordial support of the democracy of the Union.

1848.—Democratic Platform.

Baltimore, May 22.

1. Resolved, That the American democracy place their trust in the
intelligence, the patriotism, and the discriminating justice of the
American people.
2. Resolved, That we regard this as a distinctive feature of our
political creed, which we are proud to maintain before the world, as
the great moral element in a form of government springing from and
upheld by the popular will; and contrast it with the creed and
practice of federalism, under whatever name or form, which seeks to
palsy the will of the constituent, and which conceives no imposture
too monstrous for the popular credulity.
3. Resolved, Therefore, that entertaining these views, the
Democratic party of this Union, through the delegates assembled in
general convention of the states, coming together in a spirit of
concord, of devotion to the doctrines and faith of a free
representative government, and appealing to their fellow-citizens for
the rectitude of their intentions, renew and reassert before the
American people, the declaration of principles avowed by them on a
former occasion, when, in general convention, they presented their
candidates for the popular suffrage.
Resolutions 1, 2, 3 and 4, of the platform of 1840, were reaffirmed.
8. Resolved, That it is the duty of every branch of the government
to enforce and practice the most rigid economy in conducting our
public affairs, and that no more revenue ought to be raised than is
required to defray the necessary expenses of the government, and for
the gradual but certain extinction of the debt created by the
prosecution of a just and necessary war.
Resolution 5, of the platform of 1840, was enlarged by the
following:
And that the results of democratic legislation, in this and all other
financial measures, upon which issues have been made between the
two political parties of the country, have demonstrated to careful and
practical men of all parties, their soundness, safety and utility in all
business pursuits.
Resolutions 7, 8 and 9, of the platform of 1840, were here inserted.
13. Resolved, That the proceeds of the public lands ought to be
sacredly applied to the national objects specified in the constitution;
and that we are opposed to any law for the distribution of such
proceeds among the states as alike inexpedient in policy and
repugnant to the constitution.
14. Resolved, That we are decidedly opposed to taking from the
President the qualified veto power, by which he is enabled, under
restrictions and responsibilities amply sufficient to guard the public
interests, to suspend the passage of a bill whose merits can not
secure the approval of two-thirds of the Senate and House of
Representatives, until the judgment of the people can be obtained
thereon, and which has saved the American people from the corrupt
and tyrannical domination of the Bank of the United States, and
from a corrupting system of general internal improvements.
15. Resolved, That the war with Mexico, provoked on her part by
years of insult and injury, was commenced by her army crossing the
Rio Grande, attacking the American troops, and invading our sister
state of Texas, and upon all the principles of patriotism and the laws
of nations, it is a just and necessary war on our part, in which every
American citizen should have shown himself on the side of his
country, and neither morally nor physically, by word or by deed,
have given “aid and comfort to the enemy.”
16. Resolved, That we would be rejoiced at the assurance of peace
with Mexico, founded on the just principles of indemnity for the past
and security for the future; but that while the ratification of the
liberal treaty offered to Mexico remains in doubt, it is the duty of the
country to sustain the administration and to sustain the country in
every measure necessary to provide for the vigorous prosecution of
the war, should that treaty be rejected.
17. Resolved, That the officers and soldiers who have carried the
arms of their country into Mexico, have crowned it with imperishable
glory. Their unconquerable courage, their daring enterprise, their
unfaltering perseverance and fortitude when assailed on all sides by
innumerable foes and that more formidable enemy—the diseases of
the climate—exalt their devoted patriotism into the highest heroism,
and give them a right to the profound gratitude of their country, and
the admiration of the world.
18. Resolved, That the Democratic National Convention of thirty
states composing the American Republic, tender their fraternal
congratulations to the National Convention of the Republic of
France, now assembled as the free suffrage representative of the
sovereignty of thirty-five millions of Republicans, to establish
government on those eternal principles of equal rights, for which
their La Fayette and our Washington fought side by side in the
struggle for our national independence; and we would especially
convey to them, and to the whole people of France, our earnest
wishes for the consolidation of their liberties, through the wisdom
that shall guide their councils, on the basis of a democratic
constitution, not derived from the grants or concessions of kings or
dynasties, but originating from the only true source of political
power recognized in the states of this Union—the inherent and
inalienable right of the people, in their sovereign capacity, to make
and to amend their forms of government in such manner as the
welfare of the community may require.
19. Resolved, That in view of the recent development of this grand
political truth, of the sovereignty of the people and their capacity and
power for self-government, which is prostrating thrones and erecting
republics on the ruins of despotism in the old world, we feel that a
high and sacred duty is devolved, with increased responsibility, upon
the Democratic party of this country, as the party of the people, to
sustain and advance among us constitutional liberty, equality, and
fraternity, by continuing to resist all monopolies and exclusive
legislation for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many, and
by a vigilant and constant adherence to those principles and
compromises of the constitution, which are broad enough and strong
enough to embrace and uphold the Union as it was, the Union as it
is, and the Union as it shall be in the full expansion of the energies
and capacity of this great and progressive people.
20. Resolved, That a copy of these resolutions be forwarded,
through the American minister at Paris, to the National Convention
of the Republic of France.
 21. Resolved, That the fruits of the great political triumph of 1844,
which elected James K. Polk and George M. Dallas, President and
Vice-President of the United States, have fulfilled the hopes of the
democracy of the Union in defeating the declared purposes of their
opponents in creating a National Bank; in preventing the corrupt and
unconstitutional distribution of the land proceeds from the common
treasury of the Union for local purposes; in protecting the currency
and labor of the country from ruinous fluctuations, and guarding the
money of the country for the use of the people by the establishment
of the constitutional treasury; in the noble impulse given to the cause
of free trade by the repeal of the tariff of ’42, and the creation of the
more equal, honest, and productive tariff of 1846; and that, in our
opinion, it would be a fatal error to weaken the bands of a political
organization by which these great reforms have been achieved, and
risk them in the hands of their known adversaries, with whatever
delusive appeals they may solicit our surrender of that vigilance
which is the only safeguard of liberty.
22. Resolved, That the confidence of the democracy of the Union
in the principles, capacity, firmness, and integrity of James K. Polk,
manifested by his nomination and election in 1844, has been signally
justified by the strictness of his adherence to sound democratic
doctrines, by the purity of purpose, the energy and ability, which
have characterized his administration in all our affairs at home and
abroad; that we tender to him our cordial congratulations upon the
brilliant success which has hitherto crowned his patriotic efforts, and
assure him in advance, that at the expiration of his presidential term
he will carry with him to his retirement, the esteem, respect and
admiration of a grateful country.
23. Resolved, That this convention hereby present to the people of
the United States Lewis Cass, of Michigan, as the candidate of the
Democratic party for the office of President, and William O. Butler,
of Kentucky, for Vice-President of the United States.

1848.—Whig Principles Adopted at a Ratification Meeting,

Philadelphia, June 9.
 1. Resolved, That the Whigs of the United States, here assembled
by their representatives, heartily ratify the nominations of General
Zachary Taylor as President, and Millard Fillmore as Vice-President,
of the United States, and pledge themselves to their support.
2. Resolved, That in the choice of General Taylor as the Whig
candidate for President, we are glad to discover sympathy with a
great popular sentiment throughout the nation—a sentiment which
having its origin in admiration of great military success, has been
strengthened by the development, in every action and every word, of
sound conservative opinions, and of true fidelity to the great example
of former days, and to the principles of the constitution as
administered by its founders.
3. Resolved, That General Taylor, in saying that, had he voted in
1844, he would have voted the Whig ticket, gives us the assurance—
and no better is needed from a consistent and truth-speaking man—
that his heart was with us at the crisis of our political destiny, when
Henry Clay was our candidate, and when not only Whig principles
were well defined and clearly asserted, but Whig measures depended
on success. The heart that was with us then is with us now, and, we
have a soldier’s word of honor, and a life of public and private virtue,
as the security.
4. Resolved, That we look on General Taylor’s administration of
the government as one conducive of peace, prosperity and union; of
peace, because no one better knows, or has greater reason to deplore,
what he has seen sadly on the field of victory, the horrors of war, and
especially of a foreign and aggressive war; of prosperity, now more
than ever needed to relieve the nation from a burden of debt, and
restore industry—agricultural, manufacturing, and commercial—to
its accustomed and peaceful functions and influences; of union,
because we have a candidate whose very position as a southwestern
man, reared on the banks of the great stream whose tributaries,
natural and artificial, embrace the whole Union, renders the
protection of the interests of the whole country his first trust, and
whose various duties in past life have been rendered, not on the soil,
or under the flag of any state or section, but over the wide frontier,
and under the broad banner of the nation.
5. Resolved, That standing, as the Whig party does, on the broad
and firm platform of the constitution, braced up by all its inviolable
and sacred guarantees and compromises, and cherished in the
affections, because protective of the interests of the people, we are
proud to have as the exponent of our opinions, one who is pledged to
construe it by the wise and generous rules which Washington applied
to it, and who has said—and no Whig desires any other assurance—
that he will make Washington’s administration his model.
6. Resolved, That as Whigs and Americans, we are proud to
acknowledge our gratitude for the great military services which,
beginning at Palo Alto, and ending at Buena Vista, first awakened the
American people to a just estimate of him who is now our Whig
candidate. In the discharge of a painful duty—for his march into the
enemy’s country was a reluctant one; in the command of regulars at
one time, and volunteers at another, and of both combined; in the
decisive though punctual discipline of his camp, where all respected
and loved him; in the negotiation of terms for a dejected and
desperate enemy; in the exigency of actual conflict when the balance
was perilously doubtful—we have found him the same—brave,
distinguished, and considerate, no heartless spectator of bloodshed,
no trifler with human life or human happiness; and we do not know
which to admire most, his heroism in withstanding the assaults of
the enemy in the most hopeless fields of Buena Vista—mourning in
generous sorrow over the graves of Ringgold, of Clay, of Hardin—or
in giving, in the heat of battle, terms of merciful capitulation to a
vanquished foe at Monterey, and not being ashamed to avow that he
did it to spare women and children, helpless infancy and more
helpless age, against whom no American soldier ever wars. Such a
military man, whose triumphs are neither remote nor doubtful,
whose virtues these trials have tested, we are proud to make our
candidate.
7. Resolved, That in support of this nomination, we ask our Whig
friends throughout the nation to unite, to co-operate zealously,
resolutely, with earnestness, in behalf of our candidate, whom
calumny can not reach, and with respectful demeanor to our
adversaries, whose candidates have yet to prove their claims on the
gratitude of the nation.

1848.—Buffalo Platform.
 Utica, June 22.
Whereas, We have assembled in convention as a union of freemen,
for the sake of freedom, forgetting all past political difference, in a
common resolve to maintain the rights of free labor against the
aggression of the slave power, and to secure free soil to a free people;
and,
Whereas, The political conventions recently assembled at
Baltimore and Philadelphia—the one stifling the voice of a great
constituency, entitled to be heard in its deliberations, and the other
abandoning its distinctive principles for mere availability—have
dissolved the national party organization heretofore existing, by
nominating for the chief magistracy of the United States, under the
slaveholding dictation, candidates, neither of whom can be
supported by the opponents of slavery extension, without a sacrifice
of consistency, duty, and self-respect; and,
Whereas, These nominations so made, furnish the occasion, and
demonstrate the necessity of the union of the people under the
banner of free democracy, in a solemn and formal declaration of
their independence of the slave power, and of their fixed
determination to rescue the Federal government from its control,
1. Resolved, therefore, That we, the people here assembled,
remembering the example of our fathers in the days of the first
Declaration of Independence, putting our trust in God for the
triumph of our cause, and invoking His guidance in our endeavors to
advance it, do now plant ourselves upon the national platform of
freedom, in opposition to the sectional platform of slavery.
2. Resolved, That slavery in the several states of this Union which
recognize its existence, depends upon the state laws alone, which can
not be repealed or modified by the Federal government, and for
which laws that government is not responsible. We therefore propose
no interference by Congress with slavery within the limits of any
state.
3. Resolved, That the proviso of Jefferson, to prohibit the existence
of slavery, after 1800, in all the territories of the United States,
southern and northern; the votes of six states and sixteen delegates
in Congress of 1784, for the proviso, to three states and seven
delegates against it; the actual exclusion of slavery from the
Northwestern Territory, by the Ordinance of 1787, unanimously
adopted by the states in Congress; and the entire history of that
period, clearly show that it was the settled policy of the nation not to
extend, nationalize or encourage, but to limit, localize and
discourage, slavery; and to this policy, which should never have been
departed from, the government ought to return.
4. Resolved, That our fathers ordained the constitution of the
United States, in order, among other great national objects, to
establish justice, promote the general welfare, and secure the
blessings of liberty; but expressly denied to the Federal government,
which they created, all constitutional power to deprive any person of
life, liberty, or property, without due legal process.
5. Resolved, That in the judgment of this convention, Congress has
no more power to make a slave than to make a king; no more power
to institute or establish slavery than to institute or establish a
monarchy; no such power can be found among those specifically
conferred by the constitution, or derived by just implication from
them.
6. Resolved, That it is the duty of the Federal government to
relieve itself from all responsibility for the existence or continuance
of slavery wherever the government possesses constitutional power
to legislate on that subject, and it is thus responsible for its existence.
7. Resolved, That the true, and, in the judgment of this convention,
the only safe means of preventing the extension of slavery into
territory now free, is to prohibit its extension in all such territory by
an act of Congress.
8. Resolved, That we accept the issue which the slave power has
forced upon us; and to their demand for more slave states, and more
slave territory, our calm but final answer is, no more slave states and
no more slave territory. Let the soil of our extensive domains be kept
free for the hardy pioneers of our own land, and the oppressed and
banished of other lands, seeking homes of comfort and fields of
enterprise in the new world.
9. Resolved, That the bill lately reported by the committee of eight
in the Senate of the United States, was no compromise, but an
absolute surrender of the rights of the non-slaveholders of all the
states; and while we rejoice to know that a measure which, while
opening the door for the introduction of slavery into the territories
now free, would also have opened the door to litigation and strife
among the future inhabitants thereof, to the ruin of their peace and
prosperity, was defeated in the House of Representatives, its
passage, in hot haste, by a majority, embracing several senators who
voted in open violation of the known will of their constituents,
should warn the people to see to it that their representatives be not
suffered to betray them. There must be no more compromises with
slavery; if made, they must be repealed.
10. Resolved, That we demand freedom and established
institutions for our brethren in Oregon, now exposed to hardships,
peril, and massacre, by the reckless hostility of the slave power to the
establishment of free government and free territories; and not only
for them, but for our brethren in California and New Mexico.
11. Resolved, It is due not only to this occasion, but to the whole
people of the United States, that we should also declare ourselves on
certain other questions of national policy; therefore,
12. Resolved, That we demand cheap postage for the people; a
retrenchment of the expenses and patronage of the Federal
government; the abolition of all unnecessary offices and salaries; and
the election by the people of all civil officers in the service of the
government, so far as the same may be practicable.
13. Resolved, that river and harbor improvements, when
demanded by the safety and convenience of commerce with foreign
nations, or among the several states, are objects of national concern,
and that it is the duty of Congress, in the exercise of its constitutional
power, to provide therefor.
14. Resolved, That the free grant to actual settlers, in consideration
of the expenses they incur in making settlements in the wilderness,
which are usually fully equal to their actual cost, and of the public
benefits resulting therefrom, of reasonable portions of the public
lands, under suitable limitations, is a wise and just measure of public
policy, which will promote in various ways the interests of all the
states of this Union; and we, therefore, recommend it to the
favorable consideration of the American People.
15. Resolved, That the obligations of honor and patriotism require
the earliest practical payment of the national debt, and we are,
therefore, in favor of such a tariff of duties as will raise revenue
adequate to defray the expenses of the Federal government, and to
pay annual installments of our debt and the interest thereon.
16. Resolved, That we inscribe on our banner, “Free Soil, Free
Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men,” and under it we will fight on,
and fight ever, until a triumphant victory shall reward our exertions.

1852.—Democratic Platform.

Baltimore, June 1.
Resolutions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7, of the platform of 1848, were
reaffirmed, to which were added the following:
8. Resolved, That it is the duty of every branch of the government
to enforce and practice the most rigid economy in conducting our
public affairs, and that no more revenue ought to be raised than is
required to defray the necessary expenses of the government, and for
the gradual but certain extinction of the public debt.
9. Resolved, That Congress has no power to charter a National
Bank; that we believe such an institution one of deadly hostility to
the best interests of the country, dangerous to our republican
institutions and the liberties of the people, and calculated to place
the business of the country within the control of a concentrated
money power, and that above the laws and will of the people; and
that the results of Democratic legislation, in this and all other
financial measures, upon which issues have been made between the
two political parties of the country, have demonstrated to candid and
practical men of all parties, their soundness, safety, and utility, in all
business pursuits.
10. Resolved, That the separation of the moneys of the government
from banking institutions is indispensable for the safety of the funds
of the government and the rights of the people.
11. Resolved, That the liberal principles embodied by Jefferson in
the Declaration of Independence, and sanctioned in the constitution,
which makes ours the land of liberty and the asylum of the oppressed
of every nation, have ever been cardinal principles in the Democratic
faith; and every attempt to abridge the privilege of becoming citizens
and the owners of the soil among us, ought to be resisted with the
same spirit that swept the alien and sedition laws from our statute
books.
12. Resolved, That Congress has no power under the constitution
to interfere with, or control, the domestic institutions of the several
states, and that such states are the sole and proper judges of
everything appertaining to their own affairs, not prohibited by the
constitution; that all efforts of the Abolitionists or others, made to
induce Congress to interfere with questions of slavery, or to take
incipient steps in relation thereto, are calculated to lead to the most
alarming and dangerous consequences; and that all such efforts have
an inevitable tendency to diminish the happiness of the people, and
endanger the stability and permanency of the Union, and ought not
to be countenanced by any friend of our political institutions.
13. Resolved, That the foregoing proposition covers, and is
intended to embrace, the whole subject of slavery agitation in
Congress; and therefore the Democratic party of the Union, standing
on this national platform, will abide by, and adhere to, a faithful
execution of the acts known as the Compromise measures settled by
last Congress, “the act for reclaiming fugitives from service labor”
included; which act, being designed to carry out an express provision
of the constitution, can not, with fidelity thereto, be repealed, nor so
changed as to destroy or impair its efficiency.
14. Resolved, That the Democratic party will resist all attempts at
renewing in Congress, or out of it, the agitation of the slavery
question, under whatever shape or color the attempt may be made.
[Here resolutions 13 and 14, of the platform of 1848, were
inserted.]
17. Resolved, That the Democratic party will faithfully abide by
and uphold the principles laid down in the Kentucky and Virginia
resolutions of 1792 and 1798, and in the report of Mr. Madison to the
Virginia Legislature in 1799; that it adopts those principles as
constituting one of the main foundations of its political creed, and is
resolved to carry them out in their obvious meaning and import.
18. Resolved, That the war with Mexico, upon all the principles of
patriotism and the law of nations, was a just and necessary war on
our part, in which no American citizen should have shown himself
opposed to his country, and neither morally nor physically, by word
or deed, given aid and comfort to the enemy.
19. Resolved, That we rejoice at the restoration of friendly
relations with our sister Republic of Mexico, and earnestly desire for
her all the blessings and prosperity which we enjoy under republican
institutions, and we congratulate the American people on the results
of that war which have so manifestly justified the policy and conduct
of the Democratic party, and insured to the United States indemnity
for the past and security for the future.
20. Resolved, That, in view of the condition of popular institutions
in the old world, a high and sacred duty is devolved with increased
responsibility upon the Democracy of this country, as the party of the
people, to uphold and maintain the rights of every state, and thereby
the union of states, and to sustain and advance among them
constitutional liberty, by continuing to resist all monopolies and
exclusive legislation for the benefit of the few at the expense of the
many, and by a vigilant and constant adherence to those principles
and compromises of the constitution which are broad enough and
strong enough to embrace and uphold the Union as it is, and the
Union as it should be, in the full expansion of the energies and
capacity of this great and progressive people.

1852.—Whig Platform.

Baltimore, June 16.

The Whigs of the United States, in convention assembled adhering
to the great conservative principles by which they are controlled and
governed, and now as ever relying upon the intelligence of the
American people, with an abiding confidence in their capacity for
self-government and their devotion to the constitution and the
Union, do proclaim the following as the political sentiments and
determination for the establishment and maintenance of which their
national organization as a party was effected:
First. The government of the United States is of a limited
character, and is confined to the exercise of powers expressly granted
by the constitution, and such as may be necessary and proper for
carrying the granted powers into full execution, and that powers not
granted or necessarily implied are reserved to the states respectively
and to the people.
Second. The state governments should be held secure to their
reserved rights, and the General Government sustained in its
constitutional powers, and that the Union should be revered and
watched over as the palladium of our liberties.
Third. That while struggling freedom everywhere enlists the
warmest sympathy of the Whig party, we still adhere to the doctrines
of the Father of his Country, as announced in his Farewell Address,
of keeping ourselves free from all entangling alliances with foreign
countries, and of never quitting our own to stand upon foreign
ground; that our mission as a republic is not to propagate our
opinions, or impose on other countries our forms of government, by
artifice or force, but to teach by example, and show by our success,
moderation and justice, the blessings of self-government, and the
advantages of free institutions.
Fourth. That, as the people make and control the government, they
should obey its constitution, laws and treaties as they would retain
their self-respect and the respect which they claim and will enforce
from foreign powers.
Fifth. Governments should be conducted on the principles of the
strictest economy; and revenue sufficient for the expenses thereof, in
time of peace, ought to be derived mainly from a duty on imports,
and not from direct taxes; and on laying such duties sound policy
requires a just discrimination, and, when practicable, by specific
duties, whereby suitable encouragement may be afforded to
American industry, equally to all classes and to all portions of the
country.
Sixth. The constitution vests in Congress the power to open and
repair harbors, and remove obstructions from navigable rivers,
whenever such improvements are necessary for the common
defense, and for the protection and facility of commerce with foreign
nations or among the states, said improvements being in every
instance national and general in their character.
Seventh. The Federal and state governments are parts of one
system, alike necessary for the common prosperity, peace and
security, and ought to be regarded alike with a cordial, habitual and
immovable attachment. Respect for the authority of each, and
acquiescence in the just constitutional measures of each, are duties
required by the plainest considerations of national, state and
individual welfare.
Eighth. That the series of acts of the 32d Congress, the act known
as the Fugitive Slave Law included, are received and acquiesced in by
the Whig party of the United States as a settlement in principle and
substance of the dangerous and exciting questions which they
embrace; and, so far as they are concerned, we will maintain them,
and insist upon their strict enforcement, until time and experience
shall demonstrate the necessity of further legislation to guard against
the evasion of the laws on the one hand and the abuse of their
powers on the other—not impairing their present efficiency; and we
deprecate all further agitation of the question thus settled, as
dangerous to our peace, and will discountenance all efforts to
continue or renew such agitation whenever, where-ever or however
the attempt may be made; and we will maintain the system as
essential to the nationality of the Whig party, and the integrity of the
Union.

1852.—Free-soil Platform.

Pittsburg, August 11.

Having assembled in national convention as the free democracy of
the United States, united by a common resolve to maintain right
against wrong, and freedom against slavery; confiding in the
intelligence, patriotism, and discriminating justice of the American
people; putting our trust in God for the triumph of our cause, and
invoking His guidance in our endeavors to advance it, we now submit
to the candid judgment of all men, the following declaration of
principles and measures:
1. That governments, deriving their just powers from the consent
of the governed, are instituted among men to secure to all those
inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, with
which they are endowed by their Creator, and of which none can be
deprived by valid legislation, except for crime.