The Regrowth of American Thought

The title of this essay is an homage to Merle Curti’s 1943 The Growth of American Thought, a book he completed a year after he moved back to the Midwest to take a position at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, following a long sojourn in the eastern United States.¹

Curti was well-known for the uncommon diversity of his interests, the omnivorousness of his research: as one of his students put it, “coterminous attention to dime novels and John Locke, world fairs and educational policy . . . From peace movement history to early forays into women’s history, from American philanthropy abroad to democracy on the frontier.”² As many tributes and eulogies to him pointed out, the Organization of American Historians’ Merle Curti Award has either been split between an intellectual history and a social history or alternated between the two fields since it was first given to Henry May in 1978. “Curti’s historical writing is so diverse that, on first glance, it seems to lack any common themes,” the intellectual historian Paul Keith Conkin noted. That is not quite true, he goes on to say: “From first to last he tried to understand, and evaluate, the cultural achievements of Americans—all of them, through all their history.”³ Oh, well, only that.

In fact, Conkin offers another possible candidate for “the clearest theme in [Curti’s] historical writing.” That theme was democracy, and it was an ethical commitment as much as it was a topic or subject. “Democracy,” as Conkin reconstructs Curti’s views,

requires for everyone an opportunity for fulfilling participation in collective life, not only in political choice but also in education and above all in economic management. The concrete realities of life must, above all else, fulfill the ideal of equal worth, even for those with limited abilities. From the elementary school curriculum on up, people should have a real, effective, informed voice in the decisions that most affect their lives. By this type of social involvement, by participation in the choice of both means and ends, more and more areas of life can partake of artistry and yield a type of beauty.⁴

Fig. 1.

Merle Curti, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1942 to 1968, is pictured leading a meeting, presumably of the Department of History, ca. 1950s. Twenty-first-century audiences will note the striking racial and gender homogeneity of those gathered. Courtesy the University of Wisconsin Collection, S00181.

But how does one write about this vision of democracy? We might take note of the fact that Curti wrote a larger number of synoptic histories than any other major US historian, more histories that stretched from the colonial era or the Revolution to the twentieth century. He wrote a history of patriotism that does this, and a history of educational theories, two books about the history of ideas of human nature—one just about historians’ notions of human nature and another about everyone else’s. How many monographs do you see with the dates 1636 to 1936? That was the span of his study of peace movements in America, published in 1936. He wrote textbooks and a guide to US history for immigrants seeking to become naturalized citizens.⁵ And he wrote The Growth of American Thought, which didn’t need dates in the title because it included it all, including tentative but important discussions of both Indigenous and African cultures.

It is in the meaning of that title that I think we can catch a glimpse of how Curti thought to write a history of democracy, and it also gives us our first glimpse of why I think both midwestern and intellectual histories are seeing a revival today. “The growth of American thought” meant three things to Curti. It meant a holistic approach, but not necessarily a unified approach. We can perhaps think about two other titles of contemporary intellectual histories for contrast: Ralph Henry Gabriel’s 1940 The Course of American Democratic Thought and Henry Steele Commager’s 1950 The American Mind.⁶ Both...