The New American Historians
The Reconstruction of American History.
by John Higham.
Harper Torchbook. 244 pp. $1.60.
This low-priced paperback conveniently introduces the general reader to the current shoptalk of American historians. Ten specialists discourse reflectively on such topics as “The Puritan Strain,” “The Revolutionary Era,” “Disunion and Reunion,” “The Progressive Tradition,” and “Emergence to World Power.” Each essay, in the words of the editor, “tells how a standard topic in American history was understood a generation ago and how its interpretation has altered since that time.”
What use is the past? David Potter’s concluding essay on “The Quest for National Character” suggests one reason for popular interest in American history. “In any deep dimension of time,” Potter writes, all Americans (other than the Indians) are immigrants, and “it is, perhaps, this recency of arrival which has given to Americans a somewhat compulsive preoccupation with the question of their Americanism.” As in psychotherapy an individual may rediscover a sense of himself by returning to certain forgotten experiences, so a people gropes to identify those parts of the past whereon, in the present moment, it can take its stand.
The writing of American history since World War II has been engaged in dubious battle with those authoritative figures of the previous generation who interpreted American history as a continuous conflict, essentially economic, between “the people” and an exploitative minority. Turner, Beard, Becker, and Parrington were the giants whose reading of history was itself a facet of the Progressive movement.
Revisionism, as the questioning of this Progressive reading of the past has been called, has produced a crop of counter-propositions. We are now invited to regard the Puritans as humane intellectuals; the American Revolution as the defense of previously achieved political rights; Jacksonian Democracy as the urge toward achievement of acquisitive entrepreneurs; the Civil War as a needless blood-bath caused by fanatic agitators, particularly of the North; the robber barons as industrial statesmen; the Populists as paranoid racists, and the Progressives as rhetorical moralists fearful of losing status; and Wilsonian idealism, finally, as soft-minded ignorance of the power realities of international affairs. The Reconstruction of American History is the first comprehensive attempt to assess these revisions against the background of the older historiography.
The authors of these essays would be the first to admit that no over-all synthesis has been produced, comparable to the Progressive interpretation, to bind together the disparate revisionist critiques. Indeed one of the implicit themes of the book is the difficulty of writing history without some theory of how society hangs together and how social change takes place. “The third generation of professional historians,” writes editor Higham, “has largely given up its predecessor’s belief in the preponderance of material forces in history. We have no alternative theory of causation.” John William Ward comments: “What students of the American past mostly need at present is a self-conscious theory of culture which will enable them to win their way through to a description of the patterns that give coherence to particular events.” “A coherent history of the working class,” Rowland Berthoff concludes, “still awaits a coherent history of the larger American social structure.” These are, it would seem, historians in search of a theory.
Contrary to Higham, the recent work described by these essays appears to confirm an economic interpretation of history as much as to dislodge it. Consider the matter of Jacksonian Democracy. Progressive historians, down to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., tended to idealize the Democratic party of the 1830’s. Revisionists counter with the assertion that the movement sought freedom for the entrepreneur more than equality for the common man. But who originated this conception of a “petty-bourgeois” Age of Jackson? As Ward tells us, it was the socialist Algie M. Simons who, in his Social Forces in American History (1911), stated that “the rampant individualism of young competitive capitalism determined the Zeitgeist of the period.” Or glance at the new reinterpretation of Progressivism itself. Who first anticipated the critical tone of historians like Richard Hofstadter? Arthur Mann, in his essay “The Progressive Tradition,” says that it was H. L. Mencken, Lincoln Steffens, and John Chamberlain in the late 20’s and early 30’s, the latter two, of course, writing from the standpoint of a conversion to Marxism.
What these observations point toward is the possibility that what revisionism has undermined is not all economic interpretation of the American past, but a particular, somewhat simple-minded economic interpretation associated with Progressivism. After all, the most famous work of the older school professed to be not the economic interpretation of the United States Constitution, but an economic interpretation. One might almost argue that what revisionism has weeded out of Progressive history is not its emphasis on economics, but its uncritical sentimentality about individuals like Jackson and movements like Populism.
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Certainly one feature of a more sophisticated economic interpretation would be the attempt to place American history more firmly in the framework of European and world history. As Ernest May observes in his account of “Emergence to World Power,” there has been a connection in the writing of American history between parochialism and moralism: “those historians who concerned themselves exclusively with American events tended also to be those who were on the hunt for villains.” The tendency of the Progressive historians to see the clash of classes as a contest of good with evil was related to their tendency to see the American experience, by virtue (for instance) of the influence of the frontier, as exceptional and unique. There has not yet been a solid comparative study of the American and the great European revolutions, still less of the American Revolution and colonial independence movements of the 20th century.
Sophistication, however, need not entail abandonment of the Progressives’ moral commitment. David Potter, in his essay concluding The Reconstruction of American History, finds the key to American character neither in individualism nor in conformity, but in the passion for equality. One defect of the Progressive mind was its indifference to the plight of the American Negro, an indifference in some cases amounting to explicit racism. Today’s American historian, with a deeper commitment to equality, will be able to view the American story through the eyes of its perennial victims. He will thereby be capable of “viewing occurrences from more than one perspective,” in Ernest May’s words, which makes for objectivity.
Such an approach—basically economic, but more cosmopolitan, and more able to enter imaginatively into the experience of different groups, than the Progressive view—might produce some exciting history. It might also enable American historians to fulfill the higher function of grappling with the future as well as echoing the past. One contributor to the present volume makes the depressing generalization that trends of historical interpretation tend to lag after trends of history itself, so that “the historian steps in after a movement or a process peters out.” Need it be so? May poets anticipate history, but historians merely copy it? All history is selective, but it would be an interesting adventure to attempt to select on the basis of what seems likely to matter ten or fifteen years from now.
I believe that such an anticipatory history would find itself synthesizing the massive contribution of the Progressive historians with the refinements proposed by their critics. It would agree with William Miller, in his essay on “The Realm of Wealth,” that “the Progressive indictment [of the Rockefellers, Carnegies, and Morgans] survives in the general history books because it is a true bill.” It would concur with Walter Lippmann’s assertion in Drift and Mastery, quoted by Miller, that “no one, unafflicted by invincible ignorance, desires to preserve our economic system in its existing form.” And it would go on from there.
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