Whose American Revolution Was It?: Historians Interpret the Founding

II. Progressives and Counter-Progressives

American Historians Confront “The Transforming Hand of Revolution” 33 tidewater aristocracy. And if he was more comfortable framing his history around abstract issues, he made it possible for others to study the people themselves—to go from antislavery to the slaves, from religious liberty to the Baptists, from the expanding economy to the rising middling men. Finally, Jameson tried to grasp the American Revolution in a holistic way. That “all the varied activities of men in the same country and period have intimate relations with each other, and that one cannot obtain a satisfactory view of any one of them by considering it apart from the others” was not a self-evident truth to historians.52 In flight from Becker’s factional and class conflict and Beard’s economic-interest conflict, Jameson played down political activity but did not jettison it. Schlesinger took social history in the direction of history with the politics left out—not Jameson, whose thesis rested on the impact of the political on the social. By distinguishing his thesis from the more political, conflict-driven theses of the other Progressives, he won more of a hearing for the American Revolution considered as a social movement. If there was a certain pose in Jameson’s tentativeness, there was also a certain wisdom. He was asking scholars to “interrogate the past” with questions they had not asked in fields of study that did not exist. His book was an invitation to an inquiry, a door-opener in the study of American history. II. Progressives and Counter-Progressives 4. The Progressive Historians To enter the domain of historiography one has to pass through the thorny thicket in which scholars are sorted out by “schools.” The dangers in such exercises have been persistently deplored by scholars of almost all persuasions. Jameson’s lament to Beard in 1926 of the tendency rigidly to classify historians is recurrent. Four decades later Merrill Jensen was convinced “that the moment we start pasting labels on historians and groups of historians mental rigor mortis sets in.” By 1974 Jensen thought it would be in order to abandon “such labels as ‘Progressive,’ ‘consensus,’ ‘new conservative ,’ ‘neo-whig,’ ‘New Left’ and the like.” Writing at the same time, Bernard Bailyn was critical of the “uncontrollable inner dynamic” of bibliographic essays on the Revolution in which “trends or schools are detected and criticized before they are fully developed” and “general interpretations 52 Ibid., 100. 34 Alfred F. Young are pounced upon before the ink has dried.” Moreover, the entire process, as Richard Morris complained, frequently leads to distortion, to setting up straw men to knock down.53 Yet for all the pitfalls of bad historiography—pigeonholing, dismissive labeling, and distortion—it remains true, as Edmund Morgan, another foe of lumping, remarked in 1976, that “historical understanding of the Revolution has proceeded in a series of reactions, one generation emphasizing problems and espousing views that the previous generation seemed to neglect or reject.” Morgan’s contention that “the successive reactions have carried us to new levels of perception” smacks of the whig history he has deplored. “The so-called consensus historians,” Morgan argued, “could scarcely have reached their own understanding of the Revolution without attention to the Progressives who emphasized the internal conflicts of the Revolution. Similarly New Left historians, while returning to the themes of conflict have also built on the work of those with whom they disagree.” Yet it is reassuring to be reminded that “since the time needed to produce a historian is a good deal less than a lifespan, a lively dialogue has been possible among generations of scholars.”54 It is only unfortunate that more scholars have not accepted Morgan’s invitation to a dialogue and that leading historians were often more interested in closing doors than in opening new ones. For a quarter of a century after Jameson’s book appeared in 1926, his thesis stayed alive largely on the strength of the Progressive paradigms for American history as a whole advanced by Beard, Turner, and Vernon Parrington and on the strength of the Progressive synthesis of the Revolution. He was the arch in the bridge between the interpretations of the origins of the Revolution, introduced by Becker and Schlesinger, and its consequences , offered by Beard. While Jameson may have “thrilled younger scholars,” as John Higham writes, “by publishing an almost radical economic and social interpretation of the American Revolution,” there was no Jameson school. He had no graduate students to pursue or...