Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing by David A. Brown (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 92 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing David A. Brown D o midwesterners write history differently than other historians? What might account for the differences? Reviewing a century of historical writing, and focusing on the work of four prominent historians , David Brown argues that midwestern historians combine sharp intellect with provincialism to write history in a way that is “sympathetic to populist politics, critical of America’s drift toward empire, and unreconciled to unrestrained capitalism” (xiv). Brown, the author of a biography of Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, began this project when he realized that Hofstadter’s most strenuous critics shared personal and professional ties to the Midwest. In a welcome departure from strict analyses of academic pedigrees or abstract professional ideals such as “objectivity,” Brown roots the practice of academic history in the life experience of the writers who were “passionate about the possibilities of democracy and unafraid of popular protest” (xvii). Brown’s strongest case comes in the opening analysis of the impact of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis. The Civil War turned the Midwest into an economic and military power and the ensuing decades witnessed a rise in the region’s political influence, a diversification of its ethnic population, and an outpouring of successful work by poets and writers. The emerging historical profession bore the imprint of the era’s regional rivalries. New England writers emphasized their long history and prominence , writers from the quasi-aristocratic South pushed for the recognition of local elites, while a new school of social scientists at Columbia University called for a meritocracy. In this context , Turner, a native of Portage, Wisconsin, combined his personal experience in the Midwest and a love of the outdoors into an environmental argument about the nature of American democracy. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” published in 1893, connected the West with both the promise and the peril of American expansion. In the process, Turner’s writing shaped a generation of historical scholarship. After Turner’s response to the variety of geographical expressions evident in his time, succeeding midwestern historians largely critiqued the profession’s dominant idea, produced primarily by writers of eastern and ethnic origin. Charles Beard of Knightstown, Indiana, brought midwestern suspicion of centralized power, hostility to imperialist interventions, and belief in the corruptibility of the industrial state to a body of work that culminated in a critique of the chief executive in his 1948 President Roosevelt and the Coming of War. As the profession adopted a consensus view of the history of the “American Century”—characterized by liberalism, the two-party system, Keynesian capitalism, and the quest for conformity—diplomatic historian William Appleman Williams of Atlantic, Iowa, resisted. In light of Soviet containment, wars in the Far East, and the loss of American innocence , in 1959 Williams criticized The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. He saw Turner as a poet BOOK REVIEWS SPRING 2011 93 who permitted Americans to see “open land” as non-imperial “expansion” while they simultaneously laid the foundation for a century of imperialism. As the consensus fragmented during the 1980s conservative revival, Christopher Lasch of Omaha, Nebraska, critiqued the way American territorial expansion had transformed into consumer craving in the quest for, as he titled his 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven. Lasch sought to replace reliance on European Marxist models of resistance with an awareness of America’s indigenous tradition of populist reform. In an argument that now resonates in the urgency of economic hard times, Lasch criticized universities for abdicating freedom of intellectual thought and succumbing to funding opportunities linked to the consumer-containment state. By examining his subjects’ politics, culture, and personal lives, Brown identifies two types of midwestern writers—those like Turner for whom the place prompted innovative thought, and others who invoked place to conceive of themselves as “outsiders” to the eastern bias of the historical profession. In a welcome move, Beyond the Frontier examines Turner’s impact beyond the field of western history and places it within the broader history of American empire. Less illuminating is Brown’s confinement of historical writing to a narrow genealogy of white, male academics with...