Popular History and the Literary Marketplace, 1840–1920

Chapter 6: Writing Himself Out of Trouble Julian Hawthorne and the Commercialism of Popular History

................................................................. There is no fiction or non-fiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative. . . . Why should fiction writers be denied the composition of history?—E. L. Doctorow (1985) 6Writing Himself Out of Trouble Julian Ha wthorne and the Commercialism of Popular History . Julian Hawthorne and the Commercialism of Popular History { 283 Living among the Elect While the works of Eggleston and Ellis sold fairly well in the popular marketplace, their relativistic philosophies made it difficult for readers to find any absolute standards in them by which to navigate safely in a chaotic, everchanging contemporary world. Eggleston’s desire to tell the “past everything” and his rejection of singular explanatory devices had the disconcerting effect of pluralizing authority with respect to the past. His use of topical, non-narrative approaches instead of chronological, storytelling ones also threatened to trivialize history by destroying its coherence.1 Ellis’s habit of privileging the here and now, of concentrating on the immediate needs of the present, exacerbated such concerns by implying the conditional or contingent quality of all knowledge . The volatile mixture of relativism and presentism caused others to fear that causation was vanishing as a heuristic tool in modern historical scholarship . The more arbitrary knowledge was, the greater also was the challenge of making meaningful pronouncements about the past.2 The prospect of reviving Ridpath’s old project of defining grand, synthesizing ideas that operated consistently across temporal realms seemed equally dim.Specialization within the discipline of history and new interests in distinctive perspectives also “discouraged the integration of particular histories into some kind of synthesis.”3 In short, the relativity of historical knowledge (with its “shallow indifference about ultimate truth”) made it difficult for people to establish permanent standards for action and left them devoid of the propensity for reasoned conviction or moral judgment.4 Skeptics also feared that the moral relativism of presentist methodologies encouraged an abnormal interest among historians in the tangible artifacts of contemporary culture, especially the economic and commercial ones, and left the door open for historical materialism. Eschewing metaphysical or speculative explanations for motivation and human behavior, historical materialists believed that the “structure of society and its historical development are determined by ‘the material conditions of life’ or ‘the mode of production of the material means of existence.’”5 This philosophy had implications not only for what historians studied about the past but how they studied it.The assumption here, Gertrude Himmelfarb has noted of the Marxist variant of materialism, is that ideas are not personal reflections but “instruments of production and consumption ,” while language is not a rhetorical device but an “instrument and product of power.”6 Not everyone within the profession was pleased with the commodification of history implied by historical materialism, of course, and some rejected outright its tendencies to “tie literature, the arts and ideation in general to social class” while turning “ideas into ideologies and texts into 284 } Writing Himself Out of Trouble discourses.”7 The notion that history is “devoid of any reliance on metaphysical principles and cosmological generalizations” was, in philosopher Alfred Whitehead’s estimation, an example of the unhealthy workings of “minds steeped in provinciality—the provinciality of an epoch, of a face, of a school of learning, of a trend of interest,—minds unable to divine their own unspoken limitations.”8 In repudiating the most pernicious particularizing elements of historical relativism, Whitehead called for a return to idealism and synthesis as a way of restabilizing the role of truth within the historical enterprise. He envisioned the past not as a myriad of disconnected contingencies but as “a space of stable relationships, known boundaries, and a sense of place.” For Whitehead, historical writing should provide an opportunity to engage with “those attributes construed to be absent from contemporary life.”9 In 1913,the Dodge Foundation for Citizenship attempted to combat the decentralizing tendencies of relativistic, presentist, and materialistic thinking by sponsoringaseriesoflecturesbyStanfordprofessorEphraimDouglassAdams to highlight the fact that the American people have been largely influenced in their development by moral principles or by abstract ideals. Published as The Power of Ideals in American History, these lectures were offered as an antidote to the “very decided tendency to seek purely material reasons for historical development ” in a time “of undue emphasis on materialism.” With Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913) in mind, Adams complained that historians had turned the...