History Professors and Historians
American History and American Historians: A Review of Recent Contributions to the Interpretation of the History of the United States.
by H. Hale Bellot.
University of Oklahoma Press. 336 pp. $4.00.
Until near the beginning of this century, the major works of historical scholarship had been written by “gentlemen” with an avocational interest in history; since then, Mr. Hale Bellot tells us, history has become the domain of professors. In Justin Winsor’s “Narrative and Critical History of America,” a collaborative series appearing from 1884 to 1889, less than a third of the thirty-four authors were professors (only two of history), and only one had received graduate training in history. In the “American Nation Series,” its counterpart twenty years later, nearly all the authors were university professors who had done graduate work.
The history of American historical writing during the critical period when it was being annexed into the academic empire is the subject of Mr. Hale Bellot’s book. His work is itself an impressive piece of scholarship, with useful bibliographies; but it is technical and often ponderous. It is really an account of the growth of professionalism among American historians. His account is cast into a description of the two phases of recent historical scholarship. The first, beginning in the 1880’s under German influence, sought the origin of our institutions among Anglo-Saxon tribes and in the German forest; its halcyon days were at Johns Hopkins University under Herbert Baxter Adams. The second (to which the book is mainly devoted) began in the 1890’s under the stimulus of Frederick Jackson Turner, and looked to the frontier and the American forest for the roots of our culture.
The reader of this catalogue of American historical writing during the period when it was taken over by a specialized profession cannot fail to draw certain conclusions about the effect of a growing professionalism on the character of that literature and on our resources for understanding our own past. With the domination of what Mr. Hale Bellot calls the “Middle Western school,” much of our historical writing (or at least of our monograph writing) has become an attempt to document the Turner thesis. Except for a rare Vernon L. Parrington or Walter Prescott Webb, a discouraging number of historians have undertaken to ask the same questions that Turner suggested, but of more and more limited bodies of material. Turner himself had the daring to ask how the past could help us understand the uniqueness and the virtues of our institutions. His disciples, under the guise of “objectivity”—too often a euphemism for academic timidity—have defended the technical character of their exercises; they have expressed a negative or at best a neutral approach to our institutions. We look in vain for that normative flavor which gives pungency to the work of Turner himself, and to that of our greatest historians from Tocqueville, Francis Parkman, and Henry Adams to Parrington and Beard.
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According to Mr. Hale Bellot, a result of the growth of the historian’s profession and of the shift in emphasis has been that “most of the American history that was published before 1910 has been out-moded.” It is hard to know what this could mean, unless one is pessimist enough to believe that dullness and narrowness have lately become the mode. True, no one can fail to be impressed by the prodigious accumulation and classification of facts about our past, during the last half-century. What is more significant is how few new insights have been given by all this literature, how few works of literary value have been produced by this enormous industry.
It would be more accurate to say that much of the American history that will never be outmoded was published before 1910. Despite the growth of a respectable academic profession, the elaboration of techniques, and the accumulation of materials, the important historical works of the “pre-professional” period have, if anything, increased in stature. These works would include, for example, the writings of Parkman, Prescott, and Henry Adams. Nor is this surprising or paradoxical, unless one starts from the assumption that an 1890 work on American history is as liable to be obsolete as an 1890 work on physics.
It is still a striking fact how many of the important works continue to be written by men for whom history is an avocation. A list of the recent books of American history most likely to be read fifty years hence would still be dominated by men who were, for the most part, not academic historians. Such a list could hardly omit the writings of Mark Sullivan, Douglas Freeman, and Herbert Agar, all newspapermen by profession, or Theodore Roosevelt and Albert J. Beveridge, who were statesmen, or Carl Sandburg. Even Charles A. Beard was partly banished and partly self-exiled from the university community. Perhaps men outside the academic environment are bolder to seek the contemporary relevance of the past, to give artistic form to their vision, and hence to set themselves outside the sterilizing quest for objectivity.
Turner himself would probably not have dominated the academic scene had he not made (in Mr. Hale Bellot’s phrase) “the first clear break with the pure inductive method that proceeded without hypotheses to the tabulation of facts.” And yet the artistic vision of Turner became a technical mannerism in his successors. With the present academic overvaluing of technique, and the undervaluing of art and imagination, professors of history are today committed to the axiom that by taking a Ph.D. in history in some reputable university a person of moderate intelligence can be “trained” into being a historian. A corollary is the notion that any such person, if not capable of writing an extensive historical work, can at least write a piece of one: that if he cannot be taught to paint a whole portrait, he can at least learn to draw hands and feet. These assumptions have bred the notion that a large historical work is nothing but a collection of monographs—“expanding your Ph.D. thesis.” The extensive, and hardly exhilarating, bibliography of recent American historical writing that Mr. Hale Bellot has given us shows how large a proportion of the literature has the character of Ph.D. theses, however much expanded. There is no denying that the elaboration of the Ph.D. as an “objective” test of competence has given us a larger number of competent teachers of history than any other country. But it has led also to the grossest confusion of historical scholarship with the historian’s art.
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