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The Progressive Historians--Turner, Beard, Parrington (A Phoenix book)

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Richard Hofstadter was one of the finest and most revered historians of his generation. His body of work epitomized what has been labeled the "consensus school" of American history, wherein he emphasized the larger themes that drew Americans of all perspectives and backgrounds together. At a fundamental level, therefore, Hofstadter concentrated on intellectual history, celebrating the long tradition of shared American ideals and values while de-emphasizing conflict. He questioned the ideas and people who challenged those cherished principles, seeing in many of them strains of authoritarianism, anarchy, and narrow- and simple-mindedness of all varieties. His work advocated a pragmatic liberalism that he believed was in constant jeopardy from forces of fear, anti-intellectualism, and authoritarianism. Hofstadter leapt to fame with "The American Political Tradition: and the Men who Made It" (1948) in which he celebrated the ideals of democracy and liberalism and took aim at dark, divisive ideas in American thought.

In "The Progressive Historians" Hofstadter analyzes the work of three great historians of the first half of the twentieth century, Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles A. Beard, and Vernon L. Parrington. Turner's "Frontier Thesis" influenced a generation of thinkers seeking to understanding the distinctiveness of the American culture. Beard's model of economic conflict of haves versus have nots highlighted class warfare as the dominant theme in American history. Parrington's "Main Currents in American Thought" emphasized the stresses and strains of American life. All three were advocates of a progressive interpretation of American history; that is, a commitment to explaining the advance of American democracy in which "the people" battled against "the interests" leading to a more equitable, just society.

As Hofstadter shows, progressive reform was a persistent aspect of these historians, leading them to a fundamental "presentism" in their work. He finds that their flawed, conflict-dominated account of American history pitted a forward looking Western ethos against the prejudices and status quo mindset of the East. For Hofstadter, this missed a crucial point; virtually all conflict in American history had revolved around who had the largest share of the economic abundance of the nation. What conflict that existed, Hofstadter asserted, was over the size of the slices of the pie, not over the shape or type of pie, much less a more fundamental debate over whether to have pie or cake. The conflict that the progressive school emphasized, for Hofstadter, was conducted within a larger consensus over basic ideas and values that all agreed to.

Hofstadter admitted that he was initially attracted to the interpretation of the progressive school. He explicitly singled out reading Charles Beard's pivotal work, "An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution" (1913), which depicted the framers as landed aristocracy seeking to ensure their own wealth through the creation of a government that abandoned the principles of equality advanced in the American Revolution in favor of securing property rights, as a turning point in his intellectual career.

Late in his life, however, Hofstadter had made a long journey from progressive to consensus history, and he found in a close reading of Turner, Beard, and Parrington a bankruptcy of their emphasis on political and economic conflict. Raised to a high form by a generation of historians between 1910 and 1950, Hofstadter believed that the weakness of this conflict interpretation was laid bare in "the collapse of Europe, the horrors of the war and the death camps." He thought it forced a rethinking of America and led to "a revival of the old feeling that the United States is better and different" (p. 438). Additionally, "the cold war brought a certain closing of the ranks, a disposition to stress common objectives, a revulsion from Marxism and its tendency to think of social conflict as carried à outrance" (p. 439). In such a context, he asserted, the interpretations of the progressive historians seemed quite out of touch with the issues of concern to those seeking to understand the past as an entrée to present situations.

Although published in 1968, one of the last works of Richard Hofstadter because he died in 1970 of leukemia at age 54, "The Progressive Historians" represents a mature critique of a dominant school of thought in the study of the American past. But Hofstadter goes much farther in this book, criticizing the "cheerleading" of the status quo offered by some consensus historians with whom he very much disliked being lumped with, especially Daniel Boorstin and Louis Hartz, arguing that their brand of historical analysis is fatally flawed. He noted that Hartz, and to a lesser extent Boorstin, both engaged in reductionism and view American development as "questions of political thought" even as they claim that "political thought in this country has never amounted to much" (p. 456). Instead, he recommends the consensus school as but one answer to "a whole set of new questions about the extent to which agreement prevails in a society, who in fact takes part in it, and how it is arrived at" (p. 454).

Nearly forty years after its publication, "The Progressive Historians" remains an important study of American historiography and a work with which those seriously interested in the course of historical studies in the United States should become familiar.