The socialists and anarchists are here, too, but mostly as a premonitory growl off stage. What Louis Hacker has done is to reconstruct the ethos of an era, giving us long and detailed sections on what was being said and done by judges and law courts and labor organizers and farmers and railroad men and bankers and schoolteachers and clergymen to enforce the so-called Puritan ethic of nineteenth century America. This isn’t designed to be a history of the Carnegie Steel Company, though you will find such a history in it. Hacker has addressed himself to the tremendous task of explaining the most symbolic of our nineteenth century competitive enterprisers in terms of the intellectual and moral forces that beat in upon him. In his The World of Andrew Carnegie: 1865-1901, Louis M. But what happens to the Exterior View in all this chopping and changing? How can we treat our ancestors with simple understanding of their own reactions to their own contemporary problems? How can we read reality into their economics, their morality, their religious feelings? No doubt it is a sure cure for unemployment in Academe, for, if the past has always to be made over into a blueprint for what is going to happen next week, it means that the history books must be changed every decade. The rage to turn the past into the present has made for lively controversy, and helped many a man to a Ph.D. So it has gone for two or three historiographical generations. The Populist tracts celebrated in Vernon Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought figured in a whole literature of the nineteen twenties and thirties as the Wave of the Future. McCloskeys into a Social Darwinist and an imperialist. William Graham Sumner, who attacked the plutocracy of his day and actively opposed the Spanish-American War, was transmogrified by our Richard Hofstadters and our R. Hard Money and Free Enterprising Democrats of the eighteen thirties were turned into partisans of the New Frontier and the Great Society. Arthur Schlesinger, writing about the Age of Jackson, couldn’t resist imposing the face of Franklin D. At least that’s the way it’s been ever since the New Deal and the New Economics conquered the academy. If you scratch a historian, you find a politician.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |