Richard Hofstadter - Progressive Historians

F or their kind assistance I wish to thank librarians at the College of Emporia, The Henry E. Huntington Library, and at the following universities: Columbia, Cornell, DePauw, Harvard, Yale, the University of Washington, and the University of Wyoming. I have also received cordial aid at the Oral History Collection of Columbia University. Quotations from Charles A. Beards letters to Oswald Garrison Villard are with the permission of the Harvard College Library; from his letters to Carl Becker with the permission of the Cornell University Library; from his letters to Harry Elmer Barnes with the permission of the library of the University of Wyoming. Quotations from the letters of Frederick Jackson Turner are with the permission of The Henry E. Huntington Library. If I refrain from acknowledging the several scholars who read drafts of chapters, it is only to spare them association with my judgments and to avoid the impression that this work aims to convey something like a professional consensus; but they will know that they have my gratitude. Alfred A. Knopf gave me access to the relevant portion of his own memoir in the Columbia Oral History Collection; Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., permission to consult that of his father; Harry Elmer Barnes to consult his correspondence with Charles and Mary Beard. Others provided me with distinctive information or unpublished materials: Ray Allan Billington, Stuart Bruchey, E. H. Eby, Isabel Grossner, Alfred Kazin, Everett Sims. Vernon Parrington, Jr., generously made available the papers of his father and the use of his study, corrected some errors in my first drafts of appeared in Dissent, JanuaryFebruary 1968.

T his book began as a study of three central works of twentieth-century American historical writing. I intended at first to write rather full essays on the setting and influence of Frederick Jackson Turners The Significance of the Frontier in American History, Charles A. Beards An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, and V. L. Parringtons Main Currents in American Thought, and to set in order my own views on the issues raised by the large body of criticism that has grown up around them. As I went on, the historical setting in which these works emerged and their sources in the lives of the authors began to compel my attention. I found myself writing not merely historiographical criticism but a certain measure of intellectual history and even, in a limited way, of biography. It seemed less sensible than I had first imagined to write about Turners ideas on the frontier without giving some attention to his other notionson sectionalism, for exampleor on Beards study of the Constitution without saying a good deal about his use of the economic interpretation of history, his approach to the problem of historical knowledge, and finally his ideas on foreign policy. But in some respects the original design of this book is still evident in its present form. The reader who wonders why I have given so much more attention to Beards book on the Constitution than to all his other writings taken together must remember that it was my first intention to write about that book alone, and that whatever I have done with his other concerns has been in the hope of illuminating the leading ideas and the particular style of thought that are evident in this basic work.

Few readers, I believe, will be puzzled as to why I started with works by these three men. I might easily have written also about Carl Becker, who had a subtler mind and wrote better prose than any of them and who might have qualified too as a Progressive historian. But no single book of Beckers compared in its effects with the three I began with; and quite aside from my wish to keep a long book from getting still longer, and my awareness of two admirable books on his historical thought by Cushing Strout and Burleigh Taylor Wilkins, Beckers influence on our thinking about American history was not to be compared with that of my trio. My criterion was, above all, influence; and among writers on American history it was Turner, Beard, and Parrington who gave us the pivotal ideas of the first half of the twentieth century. It was they who seemed to be able to make American history relevant to the political and intellectual issues of the moment. It was their ideas that seemed most worth exploring and testing, and it was they who inspired one young man after another to take up history as a profession.

In grouping these three as Progressive historians I do no more than follow the precedent of other recent writers on American historiography. Not one of them was, to be sure, an easily classifiable partisan in the day-to-day national politics of their time, but all of them took their cues from the intellectual ferment of the period from 1890 to 1915, from the demands for reform raised by the Populists and Progressives, and from the new burst of political and intellectual activity that came with these demands. They were directed to their major concerns by the political debate of their time; they in turn contributed to it by giving reform politics a historical rationale. It was these men above all others who explained the American liberal mind to itself in historical terms. Progressive historical writing did for history what pragmatism did for philosophy, sociological jurisprudence for law, the muckraking spirit for journalism, and what Parrington called critical realism for letters. If pragmatism, as someone has said, provided American liberalism with its philosophical nerve, Progressive historiography gave it memory and myth, and naturalized it within the whole framework of American historical experience.

If I call these men Progressive historians, however, it is not because of a desire to group them together as an altogether unitary school, still less to suggest that they took precisely the same view of the political changes of their age. Although they came from the same region and belonged roughly to the same class and generation, they had different experiences, they were different in temperament, and their ideas did not always coincide. Beard, for example, was quick to see that the frontier idea, though linked at certain points to American insurgency, was also overlaid with a kind of conservatism and even of nationalist complacency. Both he and Parrington responded more positively to the leftward tendencies in the heterogeneous movement that we loosely describe as Progressivism, while Turner might be said to have belonged to its conservative wing. And in the New Deal era, just when Turners ideas were beginning to be questioned sharply by a new generation of historians, the ideas of Parrington and Beard probably reached the peak of their influence. Even between these two, who stood closer to each other intellectually than either did to Turner, there were some important intellectual differences. There was in Beard, except for the last years of his life, a pervasive note of hard-boiled iconoclasm about most aspects of the American tradition, which made it impossible for him to celebrate with Parringtons warmth the legacy of Jeffersonian liberalism. To such differences in personal style and thought I hope I have done justice in the text.