Patriotic Progressives

David S. Brown has been my colleague at Elizabethtown College for more than ten years. He has also been a frequent dinner guest and, while I could still handle such strenuous activity, a summer tennis partner. Despite our age difference (I am only one year younger than his father), David has been one of my closest friends at the college, and we’ve often exchanged the crude first drafts of the books we’re working on. Our friendship has survived even in the face of our ideological gulf. While I would describe myself as a curmudgeonly right-winger, David is a fairly conventional left-liberal, albeit one who might dispute this designation.

Despite this polarity, our views are remarkably similar on professional issues. Unlike my few Republican colleagues who insist that our student body is “conservative” (a comment that is contradicted by its overwhelming support for Obama last fall), David and I hold a less favorable view of our late-adolescent charges. Many of them are disinclined to study and will say anything they think professors want to hear in order to get back to their soaps and video games in the dorms.

David has dealt with this discovery more heroically than I. He would think nothing of giving low grades to entire classes “if they fail to produce,” and he contrasts the manner in which our students waste “the opportunities that their parents provide” with the tough row he himself had to hoe, working his way through graduate school at the University of Toledo by washing dishes. Also, David never allows praise to go to his head. Unlike his less-accomplished colleagues, he never places in Update (the weekly record of faculty bragging) the reviews of his works in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, or elsewhere in the national press. David does not dwell on his obvious accomplishments because he feels that boasting is vulgar. Being a temperamental as well as onetime practicing Presbyterian, he also expects much more of himself than what he’s already attained.

Despite our divergent experiences with the liberal and neoconservative presses (David, unlike me, does not have his books ignored by either), my younger colleague certainly does not view his journalistic advocates with undiluted favor. When David received flattering reviews for his biography of Richard Hofstadter, he sometimes wondered aloud about the motives behind the words of praise. I, too, would have looked the same gift horse in the mouth, if the publications in question had not already ostracized me.

The University of Wisconsin, ca. 1899. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-D4-4642].

Nor was David ever offended when I suggested that something other than scholarly concerns had prompted certain reviews of his work. David’s Calvinist mentality, however much unrecognized by its bearer, is one of his most important qualities. It has led him into extraordinary applications of research energy. (Since the appearance of his newest book, he has done considerable research on another monograph, this one dealing with Republican patrician families.) The same mentality has made David suspicious of even those he admires and intermittently celebrates in his work. A second reading of his Hofstadter study revealed for me that his characterization of his subject, who he clearly idolizes, is more critical than I had first realized.

Notwithstanding his dim view of the human condition, David accepts critical comments from those he respects. He listened to me and Bill Mc-Clay when we proposed certain structural alterations in his study. Bill proposed expanding the work from historians at the University of Wisconsin to include other Midwesterners, while I suggested that David elaborate on a distinction—already present in the initial draft—between populist radicals and New York Jewish Marxists. I noticed he took my hint in a general way, while producing what is his own book.

From the attention he devotes to these figures, it seems that William Appleman Williams, Charles Beard, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Christopher Lasch are for David the pivotal historians in defining a distinctively midwestern historiographical tradition. Contrary to what a reviewer in the Wall Street Journal intimated...