Immersed in Great Affairs: Allan Nevins and the Heroic Age of American History

Preface

Preface My interest in Allan Nevins as a subject of a biography began in a rather ordinary way. As a graduate student, I had read his study American States During and After the Revolution (1924) and found for the first time an explanation of what was taking place in the newly formed states and commonwealths following the declaration of American independence. Before the Revolution, American history was focused on the thirteen colonies. After the Revolution, historians shifted toward a nationalist perspective, focusing on the weaknesses of government under the Articles of Confederation, the formation of the Constitution, and the creation of the American Republic. Textbook writers seemed little interested in the internal development of the thirteen states. Nevins’s John D. Rockefeller: The Heroic Age of American Enterprise (1940) also engaged my interest as a graduate student because of the wealth of information he provided about the rise of big business and the response of government, themes that fitted in with my work in American legal and constitutional history. In both instances, however, I did not connect these studies to any purpose other than that Nevins was recording valuable information about events and people. But American States was written against the background of the Progressive movement. It was in the states, which served as laboratories of change during the teens and the twenties, as Justice Brandeis remarked in his famous dissenting opinion in New State Ice Company v. Liebmann (1927), that some of the most meaningful reforms were taking place. Nevins showed that similar efforts had been undertaken by the states in the 1780s to work out new models of constitutional, political, economic, and social organization, some of which would find expression in the Constitution and in the policies of the new republic. Similarly, when I read John D. Rockefeller, I did not comprehend the extent to which Nevins was engaged not just in presenting a thesis, but in serving as Rockefeller’s defense attorney, exonerating him for the abuses of the ix Standard Oil Company and suggesting that his rationalization of the oil industry in the late nineteenth century contributed during the first half of the twentieth century to America’s economic growth and military security. This realization—the connection between history as a record and history as an aspect or reflection of contemporary society and issues —cast a new light on Nevins. He became for me both a historian and a public man. Add to this realization the fact that he began his career as a journalist (and very much remained so the rest of his life), and the framework for the present book became evident. However , the difficulty of portraying Nevins through the medium of a typical “life and times” biography (the kind Nevins wrote and preferred ) soon became clear. As I combed his extensive manuscript collection in the Columbia University Library, I found that Nevins left few if any copies of the letters he wrote. Nearly the entire collection is made up of letters to him, although I was able to secure numerous letters that he wrote to prominent figures, in particular the historian James Truslow Adams and the columnist Walter Lippmann, in the collections of these correspondents. Interestingly, I discovered that the letters written to him from a host of people were as important to the study as his to them, because they provided insight into the influence of Nevins’s ideas, which is the object of this book. x Preface ...