Historiography

The decade and a half that followed 1950 was extraordinarily rich in revisionist historical writing. Historians roamed up and down the whole range of American history, and made one lightning foray after another upon preserves that had been assumed to be quite frankly staked out for older views. . . . If there is a single way of characterizing what has happened in our historical writing since the 1950s, it must be, I believe, the rediscovery of complexity in American history; an engaging and moving simplicity, accessible to the casual reader of history, has given way to a new awareness of the multiplicity of forces.

—Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians (1968)

The historical profession especially benefited from the prosperity of American scholarship, as more people are more likely to unearth more material than less. Not only did membership in the American Historical Association double between 1945 and 1965, but thousands of aspiring professors and, behind them, legions of graduate students dredged more trivia within twenty years than the profession had ever seen before. If only through the sheer quantity of published work, Americans became the dominant archivists in nearly every definable historical field. In quantity was also quality, as some of the most ambitious historical minds produced internationally influential interpretations of earlier historical periods—Eric A. Havelock’s Preface to Plato (1963) on the earliest Greek culture, Marshall McLuhan’s study of the determining impact of print in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), Stanley Edgar Hyman’s The Tangled Bank (1962) on the rhetorical strategies of intellectually influential expositions, and Lynn White, Jr.’s impressively original Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962).

The most significant works of American historiography—the literature of history—turned to address three major issues: the nature of American particularity; the veracity of established interpretations of native events; and the causal patterns of historical change. In the first respect, one remembers that even the earliest books written about America, such as Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782), acknowledged the radical difference of the place; and an observer as prophetically sensitive as Alexis de Tocqueville, roughly fifty years later, took to itemizing dissimilarities with the awed sense that in the New World lay the European future. The first studies of American particularity were written by European sojourners—Hector Crevecoeur, Alexis de Tocqueville, and then Harriet Martineau, Frances Trollope, and James Bryce; but by the turn of the century, American scholars like Frederick Jackson Turner began to reconsider this perennial question and countered with their own answers.

In the early decades of this century, no essay on American particularity had as much influence as Frederick Jackson Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893). The next book about the American past to have such great impact, Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913), shaped the explanatory thinking of the next intellectual generation. Both these historians, unlike their major predecessors, clearly identified with democratic, anti-capitalist tendencies in America; and both, as befits their radicalism, were also more analytical and discriminating than earlier writers. During the thirties, the single study of American endeavor commanding the strongest following was Vernon L. Parrington’s Main Currents of American Thought (1927-30), an uncompleted and yet impressively comprehensive, multi-volumed work by our first truly major intellectual historian. Parrington attempted to trace a tradition of enlightened, liberal, pro-democratic thinking that he saw extending from select colonials (such as Roger Williams, John Wise) through Jefferson to the Progressives. Liberals in this pantheon were portrayed as constantly in combat, both political and intellectual, with the representatives of reaction. To Parrington, the differences between progressive and reactionary, light and darkness, good and bad, were all clearly discerned. As a result, his commentary displayed a limited vocabulary of critically evaluative phrases repetitiously classifying a succession of people and positions.

A generation of scholars coming of age in the thirties and forties were taught their native intellectual history by Parrington, and much of their political history by Charles Beard, with a dash of Turner for their sense of cultural uniqueness; but the masters of this emerging generation offered books that in various ways reacted against, or moved beyond, this triumvirate’s canonical interpretations. It was child’s play for Perry Miller (1905-1963), perhaps the most ambitious intellectual historian his generation, to show that Parrington’s view of colonial thought was ignorant and wrong-headed, as Miller’s exceptionally penetrating books, especially the masterful The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (1953), documented many remarkable intelligences and the articulate development of conscious intellectual concerns—in short, portraying the Puritans as more sympathetic than they were previously regarded. Moreover, yet younger scholars specializing in post-revolutionary eras found Parrington’s judgments incorrect. Not only was there little evidence of an unbroken tradition of progressive enlightenment, but some of Parrington’s apostles of light were scarcely lacking darker sides.

One of the earliest and most influential reappraisals came from Richard Hofstadter, an urban-born and urban-educated historian whose The American Political Tradition (1948) presented a gallery of probing, critical and yet unpolemical portraits of major political figures, most of them Presidents. In Hofstadter’s somewhat elusive judgments, these American individuals allowed their activities to become confused by inept ideas, compromised by venal personal motives, and deceived by an inadequate sense of political reality. To deal with states of mind, rather than the progress of events, Hofstadter adopted the strategy, unusual in historiography, of regarding an individual career not as a linear progression but as a circumscribed whole that, like a work of literature, could then be critically scrutinized and evaluated. His most important later work, The Age of Reform (1955), was likewise a reappraisal, as Hofstadter documented how the Progressive movement, to which Parrington and his admirers were predisposed, expressed much reactionary discontent, in addition to illiberal purposes and manners. From Hofstadter’s works, as well as those by others, emerged a neo-liberalism defined both by an image of experience as more complex and ambiguous and then by a post-WWII awareness of totalitarian excesses. This last preoccupation in turn informed the recurring urge to identify incipient totalitarians, of both the “left” and “right,” in American history—a concern epitomized in Hofstadter’s collection of previously published extended essays, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965).

The historian Daniel Boorstin, roughly a contemporary of Hofstadter’s, was critical not only of Parrington but, unlike Hofstadter, of the liberal tradition as well; and first in The Genius of American Politics (1953) and then in a series of books ambitiously entitled The Americans (1958, 1965), Boorstin sought to document a tradition of anti-European, non-intellectual practicality that he saw as saving Americans from culturally inappropriate European ideologies; he also echoed Turner’s image of frontier innocence causing Americans to generate their own wisdom. In Boorstin’s essentially anti-intellectual intellectual histories, the portraits of familiar figures are often unfamiliar, the neglect of many important historical events somewhat suspicious, while his contentious tone suggests less than pure scholarly disinterest. Nonetheless, on a diversity of esoteric subjects—the professions, speech, journalism, military strategy, lexicography, medicine—Boorstin found, or selected, much readily persuasive evidence; so that the sections themselves, independent of the larger argument, constituted significant historical contributions. (Also, the approving sense of America that Boorstin exhibits in these histories contrasts peculiarly with his severe criticisms of the contemporary scene in The Image [1962]).

Instead of regarding America as split by social and intellectual dichotomies—an image favored by Turner-Parrington-Beard and even Arthur Schlesinger’s The Age of Jackson (1945)—or as befuddled by a plurality of conflicts, as in Hofstadter’s work, Boorstin looked for an encompassing national tradition, a “consensus” in the word of the day. In this last respect, he resembled another historian, David Potter, normally a specialist in the Civil War, who identified economic and material abundance as shaping the dominant, homogenizing American style— People of Plenty (1954). Rewriting the liberal interpretation became such an inclusive aim during the fifties that two young political scientists wrote “consensus” books on our political development—Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America (1955) and Clinton Rossiter’s Conservatism in America (1955); and so did one of the greatest theologians, Reinhold Niebuhr, in The Irony of American History (1952).

It should be remembered that Parrington’s primary interest was less political history than our indigenous literary traditions—he was in fact a Professor of English at the University of Washington; and as he saw it, the fundamental strain of American writing favored realistic representation, philosophical optimism, and enlightened social and economic values—in sum, a set of characteristics that had Americans extending the dominant liberal tradition of English writing. Although this Parrington position continued to have its advocates in such essentially derivative critics as Van Wyck Brooks, Maxwell Geismar and Alfred Kazin, the most convincing post-WWII comprehensive interpretations of first-rank American literature fundamentally repudiate Parrington. Scattered passages in F. O. Matthiessen’s The American Renaissance (1941) suggest a contrary, tragic tradition, with Hawthorne replacing Emerson as the central figure; but the Harvard professor was characteristically too cautious to pursue his unfashionable observation. A far more courageous, if not more difficult, study was Charles Fiedelson’s Symbolism and American Literature (1953), which saw not examples of realism but an obsession with surface signs that suggested many possible meanings, such as the whale in Moby-Dick and the letter “A” in The Scarlet Letter; and this perception led Fiedelson to conclude, quite contrary to Parrington, that in the best American writing “symbolism is at once technique and theme.” R. W. B. Lewis’s The American Adam (1955) found repeated, over and over again, the pattern, or “myth,” of the innocent young American pursuing his destiny in the Wilderness (in fact, or in metaphor); and Richard Chase’s far slighter but still significant The American Novel and Its Tradition (1958) regarded “the romance” or nonrealistic parable as the principal American form.

The most radical, as well as the most spectacularly written, of these comprehensive appraisals was Leslie A. Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (1960; revised, 1966) whose thesis held that instead of mature heterosexual love, the staple of the realistic novel, American writing offered gothic, nonrealistic obsessions with violence and death. This psycho-sociological causality, derived from both D. H. Lawrence’s ( Studies in Classic American Literature 1923) and Gershon Legman’s vitriolic polemic Love and Death (1949), was scarcely persuasive, while Fiedler’s hyperbolic prose regularly verged on irony; yet the literature itself only confirmed his major point. Indeed, the earlier realist interpretations of American writing had become so discredited by the sixties that the new comprehensive studies—Daniel Hoffman’s Form and Fable in American Fiction (1961), Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964) and Richard Poirier’s A World Elsewhere (1966)—all opened with the recognition that American literature had fundamentally little in common with English or European. In less than two decades, this new image of American literary particularity had won its argument. Perhaps because the histories of American painting and music have invariably been more factual and individually evaluative than comprehensively interpretative, native literature has customarily been regarded as offering the surest key to that intangible entity called “the American Imagination.”

Otherwise, the best American historical writing of 1945-68 inevitably questioned an earlier generation’s established interpretations of significant events. As Robert B. Brown’s Charles Beard and the Constitution (1956) focuses on the internal contradictions and methodological inadequacies of Beard’s essay on the Constitution, so Forrest McDonald in We the People (1958) massacres Beard’s argument with overwhelming evidence. C. Vann Woodward’s several books portray byways and complexities that escaped earlier historians of the late nineteenth-century South, and by the middle sixties several young scholars loosely associated with “the New Left” were, on one hand, attacking the established “consensus” interpretation of World War II and the Cold War and, on the other, elevating the historical reputation of the Abolitionists and their humanistic protests against slavery, as well as collectively trying to restore the “present-mindedness” typical of Beardian history.

Another spate of major books discovered whole dimensions of American experience neglected by previous historians—the relations between politicians and populace traced in Marvin Meyers’ The Jacksonian Persuasion (1957) and John William Ward’s Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age (1955), immigrants in Oscar Handlin’s The Uprooted (1951) and African-Americans in John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom (1947), the changing styles of popular salvationists in William G. McLoughlin’s Modern Revivalism (1960), the evolution of epidemics in Charles Rosenberg’s The Cholera Years (1962), the psychology of oppressed peoples in Stanley Elkins’ Slavery (1959), changes in furniture and housing surveyed in Alan Gowans’s Images of American Living (1964), and xenophobic reactions to immigrants in John Higham’s Strangers to this Land (1955). In general, social and intellectual history became more interesting than economic and political, for at times it seemed as though the collective development of a rich cultural tradition depended upon making visible, if not immediate, those great areas of native experience previously lost from memory.

To include, if not emphasize, what had previously been neglected ultimately serves to make the invisible visible. Another procedure toward a similar result is the discovery of previously unseen connections and causalities. The historian customarily achieves this purpose by imposing a radically different organizational scheme upon familiar evidence, if not to generate a new comprehensive understanding, then at least to reveal insights previously unknown. Since this post-Freudian, post-Marxian period at once lacked a dominant mode of historical explanation and yet witnessed the impact of all kinds of “new knowledge,” a variety of original approaches were cultivated, with varyingly insightful results. One of the most suggestive enabled the scholar to identify and dissect the mythic resonance evoked by popular hero (often without regard to the actual facts of his life)—John William Ward’s essays on Andrew Jackson and Charles Lindburgh, David Donald’s Lincoln Reconsidered (1956) and Henry Nash Smith’s study of the Westerner, Virgin Land (1950). Even though unifying myths can be regarded as an index of cultural consensus, this vein of interpretation remained scarcely mined. Richard Hofstadter, among others, favored a form of sociological explanation, drawn more from Karl Mannheim than Karl Marx, that subtly identified collective social ambitions behind an ideology, to show that status-strivings are often a more powerful determinant of ideology than purely economic motives. The influence of empirical sciences informed the ideal of “value-free” historiography, particularly in dealing with subjects previously regarded as controversial, such as America’s largest corporations; and Alfred D. Chandler’s shrewdly perceptive book on the last subject, Strategy and Structure (1962), also revealed the influence of sophisticated organizational theory.

Technological determinism is scarcely a new scheme of historical interpretation, dating back at least to Marx and subsequently emphasized by only certain Marxist scholars; and another technologically conscious intellectual tradition, that of the Bauhaus, stands behind Sigfried Giedion’s monumental book about machinery in America, Mechanization Takes Command (1948). The emphasis on informational technology—the physical media of communication—that is found in Marshall McLuhan’s eccentric works seemed genuinely original when it first appeared; however, as a conscientious scholar aware of his debts, McLuhan regularly acknowledged the work of an earlier Canadian historian, Harold A. Innis, who was quite eminent in his own country but scarcely known south of that border. In a series of essays and books written just before his premature death in 1953— Empire and Communications (1950) and The Bias of Communication (1951)—Innis marshaled innumerable examples to argue that whether a culture wrote on parchment or used print had a determining impact on its politics and everyday life. In certain essays collected in the latter book, he also realized the formal innovation of a truly cubist history that leaps across time and space in successive sentences; so that a topic statement introduces a succession of examples, one to a sentence, drawn from widely varying historical times and places. Indeed, this post-War commitment to analytic exposition made linear narrative history an indubitably old-fashioned form, still cultivated, nonetheless, by popularizers; but no other academic historian so completely disposed of linear sequence or even sequential exposition for such a radically different structure for historical writing.

Another strain of major American historiography emphasized the kinds of questions more indigenous to the domain of philosophers than to professional historians. The question of whether history is an art or a science goes unresolved and, at best, undisputed; but objectivity and personal disengagement are generally more lauded than their contrary qualities. Although none of the recent American comprehensive interpretations of human history succeeded as well as H. G. Wells’s Outline of History (1920) or Arnold Toynbee’s History of the World (1934-54), a few of the most extraordinary recent American histories dealt with that large kind of issue. Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) questioned the progressive idea of science as the result of the collective evolution of increasing knowledge. Instead, Kuhn suggested that scientific advance generally takes the shape of a discontinuous intellectual leap beyond the previously established ways of conducting a particular science; so that a completely new “paradigm” supercedes a previously established system (and, thus, much of the evidence accumulated on its behalf).

The prosperity and expansion of the scholarship industry inevitably serves to encourage the focusing upon ever smaller terrains of past experience; yet perhaps the most lucrative task in the profession lay in judiciously synthesizing this material into a successful textbook. Nonetheless, there remains a distinction between history that contributes to outstanding preoccupations and works that exploit an established body of knowledge and opinion (Henry Steele Commager probably being the most prolific example of the latter). In my judgment, truly consequential books are those that persuasively reinterpret familiar or introduce entirely new questions, as much as complement as reappraise our previous understandings; and the sum of major books made 1945-68 the greatest era of American historiography.

The new historians also influenced Americans’ perception of their cultural environment and even themselves; yet no new historian shaped more general thinking as powerfully as Parrington, Turner and Beard had done for their generations. This observation is actually less a criticism of the intellectual quality of the new histories than the recognition that an increase in the number of prominent practitioners made it harder for one or two to shine and then that complex historical understanding, even if comprehensive, is inevitably less popular than decisive dichotomies and dramatic simplicities. It is as well perhaps an admission that the conservative bias of history handicaps its possible impact; for in contrast to certain other competitors for intellectual influence, the literature of history concerns itself not with how things might happen but with how they have (and have not). In times that seem so fresh, perhaps this viewpoint seems superficially less relevant.

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Alperovitz, Gar. Atomic Diplomacy. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965.

Boorstin, Daniel. The Americans. Two volumes. New York: Random House, 1958, 1965.

———. The Genius of American Politics. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1953.

———. The Image. New York: Atheneum, 1962.

Brown, Robert P. Charles Beard and the Constitution. Princeton: Princeton Univ., 1956.

Chandler, Alfred D., Jr. Strategy and Structure. Cambridge: M.I.T., 1962.

Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1958.

Donald, David. Lincoln Reconsidered. New York: Knopf, 1956.

Elkins, Stanley. Slavery . Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1959.

Fiedelson, Charles, Jr. Symbolism and American Literature. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1953.

Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Criterion, 1960.

Franklin, John Hope. From Slavery to Freedom. New York: Knopf, 1947.

Giedion, Sigfried. Mechanization Takes Command. New York: Oxford Univ., 1948.

Gowans, Alan. Images of American Living. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1964.

Hartz, Louis. The Liberal Tradition in America. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955.

Havelock, Eric A. Preface to Plato. Cambridge: Harvard Univ., 1963.

Higham, John. Strangers to this Land. New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ., 1955.

———, et al. History. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965.

———, ed. The Reconstruction of American History. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.

Hoffman, Daniel. Form and Fable in American Fiction. New York: Oxford Univ., 1961.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform. New York: Knopf, 1948.

———. The American Political Tradition. New York: Knopf, 1956.

———. The Paranoid Style in American Politics. New York: Knopf, 1965.

———. The Progressive Historians. New York: Knopf, 1968.

Hyman, Stanley Edgar. The Tangled Bank. New York: Atheneum, 1961.

Innis, Harold A. The Bias of Communication. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto, 1951.

———. Empire and Communications. New York: Oxford Univ., 1950.

Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1962.

Lewis, R. W. B. American Adam. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1955.

Lipset, Seymour Martin. The First New Nation. Garden City: Doubleday, 1963.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford Univ., 1964.

McDonald, Forrest. We the People. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1958.

McLoughlin, William G. Modern Revivalism. New York: Ronald, 1960.

McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto, 1962.

Meyers, Marvin. The Jacksonian Persuasion. Stanford: Stanford Univ., 1957.

Niebuhr, Reinhold. The Irony of American History. New York: Scribner’s, 1952.

Noble, David W. Historians Against History. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota, 1965.

Poirier, Richard. A World Elsewhere. New York: Oxford Univ., 1966.

Rosenberg, Charles. The Cholera Years. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1962.

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land. New York: Knopf, 1950.

Ward, John William. Andrew Jackson: Symbol of an Age. New York: Oxford Univ., 1955.

———. Red, White, and Blue. New York: Oxford Univ., 1969.

Woodward, C. Vann. Origins of the New South, 1877-1913. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ., 1951.

———. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford Univ., 1955.