That Noble Dream by Peter Novick

Author:Peter Novick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

III

If one had to choose a single term to characterize the dominant tendency in postwar American historical writing, “counterprogressive” would seem the best choice, for no project was more central to historians from the late 1940s onward than the revision and refutation of the alleged deficiencies of the Progressive Historians who had preceded them. As is usual in such revisionist projects, the new school constructed something of a straw man to battle against. The hegemony which Turner, Beard, and the literary historian Vernon Louis Parrington had exercised over interwar historiography was exaggerated by the new generation, and their theses were often vulgarized so as to present a broader target.

The attack on the Progressive Historians featured variations on themes prominent in postwar intellectual life. The reformist optimism of Beard’s generation was naive, and their activism skewed their perceptions. The approved postwar sensibility was “the tragic sense,” and the approved posture, spectatorial. The previous generation had mistakenly thought that the central theme of history had been struggles between haves and have-nots. Postwar historians saw the defense of freedom as the thread which wove American history together. Overall, the progressive emphasis on social conflict was rejected not just as overdrawn but as fundamentally wrongheaded; historians’ focus shifted from the conflict of classes to a consensual culture.

“Consensus” became the key word in postwar attempts to produce a new interpretive framework for American history, focusing attention on what had united Americans rather than what had divided them. In the earliest general statement of the consensus orientation, Richard Hofstadter wrote in 1948 of his growing conviction of “the need for a reinterpretation of our political traditions which emphasizes the common climate of American opinion.”

The existence of such a climate of opinion has been much obscured by the tendency to place political conflict in the foreground of history. . . . The fierceness of the political struggles has often been misleading; for the range of vision embraced by the primary contestants in the major parties has always been bounded by the horizons of property and enterprise. . . . The sanctity of private property, the right of the individual to dispose of and invest it, the value of opportunity, and the natural evolution of self-interest and self-assertion, within broad legal limits, into a beneficent social order have been staple tenets of the central faith in American political ideologies; these conceptions have been shared in large part by men as diverse as Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Cleveland, Bryan, Wilson, and Hoover.

Hofstadter’s attempt to identify and explicate the core ideology of Americans was carried farther by Louis Hartz, who in The Liberal Tradition in America produced the most elaborately worked-out argument for abiding American ideological consensus. Meanwhile, the third of the most influential consensus theorists, Daniel Boorstin, argued forcefully that rather than agreeing on an ideology, Americans were united by their rejection of the very notion of ideology, or indeed, of theorizing of any kind. “We do not need American philosophers,” Boorstin explained, “because we already have an American philosophy, implicit in the American Way of Life.

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