The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington

by Richard Hofstadter

Richard Hofstadter, the distinguished historian and twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, brilliantly assesses the ideas and contributions of the three major American interpretive historians of the twentieth   Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles A. Beard and V.L. Parrington. These men, whose views of history were shaped in large part by the political battles of the Progressive era, provided the Progressive movement with a usable past and the American liberal mind with a historical tradition.  The Progressive Historians is at once a critique of historical thought during this decisive period of American development and an account of how these three writers led American historians into the controversial political world of the twentieth century.
   Turner, in developing his idea that American democracy is the outcome of the experience of frontier expansion and the settlement of the West, introduced his fellow historians to a set of new concepts and methods, and in doing so doing re-drew the guidelines of American historiography.  Beard insisted upon the elitist origins of the Constitution, crusaded for the economic interpretation of history, and ultimately staked his historical reputation on an isolationist view of recent American foreign policy.  Parrington emphasized the moral and social functions of literature, and read the history of literature as a history of the national political mind.
   In recent years, the tide has run against the Progressive historians, as one specialist after another has taken issue with their interpretations.  The movement of contemporary historical thought has led to a rediscovery of the complexity of the American past.  Although he cannot share the faith of the Progressive historians in the sufficiency of American liberalism as a guide to the modern world, Richard Hofstadter believes we have much to learn about ourselves from a reconsideration of their insights.

Genres: History, American History, American

498 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Richard Hofstadter was an American public intellectual, historian and DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. In the course of his career, Hofstadter became the “iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus” whom twenty-first century scholars continue consulting, because his intellectually engaging books and essays continue to illuminate contemporary history.

His most important works are Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 (1944); The American Political Tradition (1948); The Age of Reform (1955); Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963), and the essays collected in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964). He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize: in 1956 for The Age of Reform, an unsentimental analysis of the populism movement in the 1890s and the progressive movement of the early 20th century; and in 1964 for the cultural history, Anti-intellectualism in American Life.

Richard Hofstadter was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1916 to a German American Lutheran mother and a Polish Jewish father, who died when he was ten. He attended the City Honors School, then studied philosophy and history at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1933, under the diplomatic historian Julius Pratt. As he matured, he culturally identified himself primarily as a Jew, rather than as a Protestant Christian, a stance that eventually may have cost him professorships at Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Berkeley, because of the institutional antisemitism of the 1940s.

As a man of his time, Richard Hofstadter was a Communist, and a member of the Young Communist League at university, and later progressed to Communist Party membership. In 1936, he entered the doctoral program in history at Columbia University, where Merle Curti was demonstrating how to synthesize intellectual, social, and political history based upon secondary sources rather than primary-source archival research. In 1938, he joined the Communist Party of the USA, yet realistically qualified his action: “I join without enthusiasm, but with a sense of obligation.... My fundamental reason for joining is that I don’t like capitalism and want to get rid of it. I am tired of talking.... The party is making a very profound contribution to the radicalization of the American people.... I prefer to go along with it now.” In late 1939, he ended the Communist stage of his life, because of the Soviet–Nazi alliance. He remained anti-capitalist: “I hate capitalism and everything that goes with it.”

In 1942, he earned his doctorate in history and in 1944 published his dissertation Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915, a pithy and commercially successful (200,000 copies) critique of late 19th century American capitalism and those who espoused its ruthless “dog-eat-dog” economic competition and justified themselves by invoking the doctrine of as Social Darwinism, identified with William Graham Sumner. Conservative critics, such as Irwin G. Wylie and Robert C. Bannister, however, disagree with this interpretation.

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

A caveat at the outset: this is a book most likely to be enjoyed — and finished — by professional historians and other citizens who are interested in a deeper understanding of three great Progressive-era historians and in their interpretations of “history.”

After all, what is “history”?

To a casual viewer, that probably seems obvious: it’s an accounting, either in broad sweep manner or in more focused views on particular people, events, or era of “what actually happened.”

And, as far as it goes, that is a probably OK understanding. But, in truth, it is actually a lot more complicated. Just think of your own life and how you would sum up what you have done, thought, and with whom you have spoken over the past week or so. Even this simple version of history illustrates what historians have to do, and the multiple problems that inevitably accompany it.

1) SELECTION: What do you leave out (the flip side of what you tell about your past week)? After all, even if you had the time and space, you could not really relate everything, for you’ve probably forgotten much of it. This is one of the “biggie” challenges facing every historian, and the greater the sweep of time or the larger the groupings of people that you wish to include, the more difficult this is.

2) INTERPRETATION: “How” do you tell your story? Part of the answer probably depends upon whom you are telling it to. You would likely write it somewhat differently for a family member than you would for an acquaintance, let alone an outsider. Well, historians face a variation of this challenge. Depending upon personal interest, background, cultural framework, etc. each historian is likely to tell the story differently. Now “differently” doesn’t mean, in most cases, more truthfully but, rather, which focus point(s) are chosen, how much emphasis is given to one person or fact versus another, and the “understanding” the historian brings to the table. This “understanding” is the unavoidable fact that we all live and write in a certain time and place that inadvertently must color how we see things and interpret them. Writers who live during or shortly after events will interpret things quite differently usually than those who follow decades or centuries later.

3) SOURCES: What information is available? Who is reliable? Whose “facts” or previous account are influenced by what contemporary views? (For example, in the Middle Ages someone writing from a Christian perspective would probably have a difficult time, for a whole lot of reasons, accurately telling the story of the followers of Mohammed). And, for most of the time we humans have lived on this planet, the “historical record” has vast gaps. Human beings have not lived in literate times except for the past couple of thousand years and even then most of these years were times when only a relative few could read and write their own language, let alone understand and communicate in others.

So, with this long introduction, let me say a relatively few words about Hofstadter’s book.

My copy is dated July 23, 1969, the summer between my leaving my first teaching assignment at Briar Cliff College in Sioux City, Iowa and returning to my home town of Davenport, Iowa to run for a seat on its city council. Thus, I am certain that I did not finish the book then, which is probably just as well, since I had not read any of the Progressive historians mentioned in this book yet.

Fast forward (or at least so it seems) 51 years to the present when I DID finish the book! Happily, this was also after I had read the principle works covered in Hofstadter’s essays on Frederick Turner, Charles Beard, and Vernon Parrington.

Hofstadter’s work is really an examination of each of those author’s works, major themes, and a thoughtful explanation of what he (Hofstadter writing some 30 years after their heyday) thought of them, where he disagrees with them, which elements of their work still survive as important and instructive, and just why they, in more recent times, have fallen out of favor.

He ends his book with an essay on historians of his time (mid-20th-century America).

In short, while he finds Turner’s major theme — an extended musing on the importance of “the frontier” in American history and its having come to an end in the 1890s as a domestic frontier, albeit perhaps the beginning of a newer, more fraught international empire — overly simple, he does think Turner hit on an aspect of American life that deserved attention. Up until the 1890s — when Americans have really come to “conquer” the entire continent for the United States — the American experience had been an ongoing process of extending settlements ever westward, a process that had begun even before the American Revolution. One of its consequences was that restless folks, people who hated cities or “civilization,” and various social misfits could always “move West” to find a place where they could be alone or with others of their choosing. This functioned as a pressure-relief valve for the settlements they left behind as they moved. By the 1890s, this valve had snapped shut and it thus posed a real challenge for how we would have to live with each other.

As for Charles Beard, his important contribution was his introducing the economic status of the Founders — indeed, of all of our country’s various players through time — as one of the things historians needed to pay attention to in explaining the “whys” of events. This principle, especially as we have come anew to understand in the US of the 21st century, is extremely important, and does play a huge role in helping us understand the positions various people take as ONE of the forces working to shape their understanding and self-interest. Hofstadter thinks, however, and I concur with this (modest of me, huh?) that Beard overdid his application of this idea to the Founding Fathers, and to the split between the Federalists and anti-Federalists in the debate over the US Constitution’s merits.

Lastly, Parrington, the one whose writing style I most enjoyed and the one who introduced me to some heretofore unknown American thinkers and writers. His problem, Hofstadter opines, is that he sought to attempt a new form of history in which he tried to trace the development of significant currents of American though through the mini-biographies of many persons from the 17th century to the early 20th. This noble attempt, however, was only partially successful, partly because Parrington chose to include too many figures, many of them not really all that influential even in their own time, and this meant he had to give relatively succinct biographies of each of them and their thoughts, a process that led to some questionable selection of pertinent essays or books and which also bounced back and forth between the tracing of thematic developments and the relative merits and demerits or each person as a writer. I would point out, as Hofstadter also did, that Parrington’s sudden death in 1929 left the third of his three-volume effort only partially completed, thus depriving his readers (and I felt this most keenly) of his reflections over the most recent period of American history — that of the late 19th century Gilded Age and of the muckraking journalists and Progressive political leaders of the early 20th century. Had he lived to do this, we might have come to appreciate and remember Parrington much more.

If anyone reading this long review is interested in one or more of these three very important historians, he or she might want to get a library copy of paperback version of this book by Hofstadter in order to read the substantial coverage he gives to each of them. This would probably help you determine whether or not you want to pursue acquiring one of these historians’ works.

Bon Voyage!

[James Bechtel · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. Published in the late 1960s, Hofstadter undertook an examination of the methodologies, evidence, and conclusions made by these Progressive Era historians and their famous works. He discovered blind spots, oversights, and a lack of convincing evidence. He issued a warning that simple generalizations, although correct at one level, can be dangerous to a complete understanding of complex historical events.

[Frank Stein · Rating 3 out of 5]

Richard Hofstader's last book, written in 1968, was a look back at the great Progressive-era historians who influenced his work and, more so than any subsequent generation of historians, the debates of the public at large in their era. Turner, Beard, and Parrington all took history-writing out of the almost mythical or providential realm that it once held and posited American history as part of an eternal struggle between different classes and types. It was both a semi-Marxist and semi-sociological look at history, and Hofstader points out the benefits and the shortcomings of such a stance. The book tends to ramble quite a bit, but this is certainly a fresh look at these figures. For people who spend so much time writing, historians themselves are rarely written about, and this critique cum biography is an interesting attempt to see how lives are shaped by historical forces, and then how they try to shape them, or at least their meaning.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Used as a text in a graduate history seminar - I knew next to nothing about this period of history, so it was enlightening.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll have more thoughts about this book later. But for now it is a little unnerving how glib Hofstadter could be and how brilliant, and how he could sometimes even be both at the same time.

[Djereloz · Rating 5 out of 5]

a masterpiece in historical writing