Prosperity Far Distant: The Journal of an American Farmer, 1933-1934

Afterword

257 AFTERWORD Michael Birkner Charles Wiltse’s days as an american farmer constituted a brief interlude in his peripatetic career, which carried him through a series of jobs in the federal civil service and ultimately to the editorship of daniel Webster’s papers.1 during his years in Washington, Wiltse operated along two disparate tracks. By day he produced memos, reports, and institutional histories—exacting products of a first-class intellect—as part of his duties in half a dozen different federal agencies. By night and on weekends he pursued his scholarly agenda, which morphed from the explication of thomas Jefferson’s democratic creed, the focus of his doctoral dissertation at Cornell, to a multiyear , multivolume study of american political culture from the War of 1812 through the crisis and compromise of 1850. to the amazement of many who knew his background and personal beliefs , the vehicle for this latter project was a biography of the cast-iron man, John C. Calhoun—slavery interests’ great champion in the decades leading to the Civil War.2 Publishing a series of academic articles and by 1935 a book on Jefferson, Wiltse hoped to build a reputation as a significant new voice in american historical writing and thereby propel himself into academe. he succeeded in his first objective, but not the second. The Jeffersonian Tradition in American Democracy, published by the University of north Carolina Press in 1935, aspired to significance by connecting thomas Jefferson’s pragmatic temper 258 * afterword with twentieth-century progressive public policies of President franklin delano roosevelt. the book won wide critical praise, including henry Steele Commager’s assertion that it was “the most intelligent [and] the most discriminating analysis of Jeffersonian democracy in our literature.” Such encomiums helped sell books but did not translate into a teaching job.3 over the next decades, as Wiltse commenced and then completed his work on Calhoun, he authored, as a salaryman in a Charles Wiltse, in a formal photograph, possibly taken in conjunction with the publication of his 1935 book, The Jeffersonian Tradition in American Democracy afterword * 259 series of federal agencies, reports on topics ranging from public works and transportation to studies of natural resources critical to the american war effort against the axis powers. Wiltse’s research and writing projects in the government were wide ranging , his output prodigious. during the war years he ghost-wrote and edited reports for the Chairman of the War Production Board and produced a substantial study of aluminum policies as related to the war effort. Perhaps most impressive, in 1947 Wiltse coauthored a one-thousand-page history of industrial mobilization in wartime, a book which one leading scholar argued would “be immeasurably useful to all students of the economic administration of World War ii.”4 Examples abound, to be sure, of civil servants who publish books unrelated to their work. But few of them publish as much significant work, or enjoy as much influence in the scholarly community, as did Wiltse. Enjoying special access to the stacks of the Library of Congress, Wiltse pored through relevant manuscript collections that served as the foundation for his interpretation of Calhoun and his milieu. in 1944 Bobbs-Merrill published the first volume of his projected trilogy. John C. Calhoun: Nationalist garnered the welcome critical praise Wiltse had earned for his volume on Jefferson, but this time the reviews were prominently featured in leading newspapers and magazines, and the book sold surprisingly well, considering the subject and the nation’s attention being focused on winning a world war. allan nevins of Columbia University called Wiltse’s Calhoun “one of the most important biographies of the year.” Writing for the New York Herald-Tribune book review section, Gerald W. Johnson suggested that Wiltse’s Calhoun was “so good that it brings dr. Wiltse at a stride into the company of important american biographers.”5 this was remarkable praise indeed for a book that sought to reconcile Calhoun’s steadily increasing sectionalism with Jeffersonian democracy. By highlighting economic interests (agrarian South versus commercial north) as the motor of american political conflict after the War of 1812, Wiltse joined company with the likes of other leading “Progressive” historians, among them Charles a. Beard, arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and C. Vann 260 * afterword Woodward. But in his sympathetic rendering of “the Marx of the master class,” as richard hofstadter once styled Calhoun, Wiltse was charting a distinctive and highly...