Whose American Revolution Was It?: Historians Interpret the Founding

American Historians Confront “The Transforming Hand of Revolution”

13 American Historians Confront “The Transforming Hand of Revolution” Alfred F. Young Introduction In August 1926 Charles A. Beard published an enthusiastic review of John Franklin Jameson’s book The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement in the New Republic. Jameson sent him a warm letter of appreciation and clarification, and Beard responded with even more lavish praise.1 The exchange is a convenient point from which to launch an inquiry into the achievement of Jameson in the context of the scholarship of his day, the remarkable durability of his little book of four lectures, and the way American historians have dealt with the Jameson thesis and the larger, still unresolved issue of what Jameson called “the transforming hand of revolution.” Beard has since been battered and some would say buried, but his ghost still haunts historical studies, and were he to appear, he might be tempted to borrow the comment John Adams allegedly made about Thomas Jefferson from his death bed, on July 4, 1826, when he was told that Jefferson, who also lay dying, was still alive: “J. Franklin Jameson still survives.” In 1950, when a historian published the results of a poll of 103 scholars (drawn from “an approximate cross section of the profession”) as to the ten 1 J. Franklin Jameson to Charles A. Beard, Aug. 10, 1926, and Beard to Jameson, Aug. 14, 1926, in Elizabeth Donnan and Leo F. Stock, eds., An Historian’s World: Selections from the Correspondence of John Franklin Jameson (Philadelphia, 1956), 319–320. 14 Alfred F. Young “best” works in American history published between 1920 and 1935, Jameson ’s book came in fourteenth, with 26 votes. At the head of the list were Vernon Louis Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought (84 votes) and Frederick Jackson Turner’s collection of essays on the frontier (83), followed by Charles and Mary R. Beard’s Rise of American Civilization (58), Carl L. Becker’s Declaration of Independence (51), and Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr.’s New Viewpoints in American History (32). Jameson clearly held a place on the hit parade of Progressive historians. Counter-Progressive “consensus ” history was only a cloud on the historical horizon.2 Four years later Frederick B. Tolles, in a full-dress reevaluation of Jameson’s book in the American Historical Review, summarized the serious challenges to Jameson’s hypotheses but concluded that “basically the ‘Jameson thesis’ is still sound, and what is more important, still vital and suggestive, capable of further life, still greater usefulness.” The tide, however , was already turning. Edmund S. Morgan, in what became the most influential short work of synthesis on the American Revolution, The Birth of the Republic (1956), recognized Jameson’s “influential essays” as a book that “helped focus attention on the internal conflicts that accompany such changes” as the American Revolution. But he was convinced there was “no radical rebuilding of social institutions at this time,” the Revolution bringing only “a host of incalculable, accidental, and incidental changes in society .” A decade later Jack P. Greene pronounced the Progressive interpretation of the Revolution associated with Beard, Becker, Schlesinger Sr., and presumably Jameson, “shattered and deeply discredited.”3 Scholars continued to pay deference to Jameson, however, even as they substituted alternative syntheses of the Revolution. Gordon S. Wood called Jameson “the starting point for appreciating the social changes of the Revolution .” James A. Henretta thought the book “remains a good summary of the social changes of the revolutionary era.” In 1987 Richard B. Morris, one of the few senior historians who kept the door open to the Jameson thesis in the 1960s, summed up his own reflections on social change in the era by entitling a chapter in his last book “A Cautiously Transforming 2 John W. Caughey, “Historians’ Choice: Results of a Poll on Recently Published American History and Biography,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39 (1952): 293, 299. 3 Frederick B. Tolles, “The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement: A Reevaluation ,” American Historical Review 60 (1954): 1–12; Edmund S. Morgan, The Birth of the Republic , 1763–1789 (Chicago, 1956), 96, 98; Jack P. Greene, “Social Origins of the American Revolution : An Evaluation,” Williams and Mary Quarterly 88 (1973): 1–22, quotation at 3; also see Greene, The Reappraisal of the American Revolution in Recent Historical Literature (Washington, DC, 1967). American Historians Confront “The Transforming Hand of Revolution” 15 Egalitarianism.” Greene in the late 1980s paid...