The degradation of American history 9780226316154, 9780226316161, 9780226316178

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THE DEGRADATION OF AMERICAN HISTORY

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THE

Degradation of American

History DAVID HARLAN

David Harlan teaches in the history department at California State University, San Luis Obispo. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 1997 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 1997 Printed in the United States of America

06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 12345 ISBN: 0-226-31616-5 (cloth) ISBN: 0-226-31617-3 (paper)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Harlan, David (David Craig) The degradation of American history / David Harlan

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. _) and index. ISBN 0-226-31616-5 (cloth : alk. paper). —- ISBN 0-226-31617-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. United States—Historiography—Moral and ethical aspects. 2. United States— History—Methodology. I. Title. E175.H37 1997

973’ .07'2—dc21 97-164 CIP

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American Na- tional Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

For Sallie

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History belongs above all to the man . . . who needs models, teachers, comforters and cannot find them among his contemporaries. —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Uses and Abuses of History

Our teachers used to be able to pose the possibility of a national culture—a line connecting Thomas Jefferson, the slave owner, to Malcolm X. Our teachers used to be able to tell us why all of us speak Black English. Or how the Mexican farmworkers in Delano were related to the Yiddish-speaking grandmothers who worked the sweat-shops of the Lower East Side. —Richard Rodriguez, “The Birth Pangs of a New L.A.”

You will hardly know who I am or what | mean But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you. —Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments x1 INTRODUCTION

“It Hath No Relish of Salvation in It” American Historical Writing at the End of the Twentieth Century xv

Part One THE LEGACY OF THE SIXTIES ,

TWO : ONE

Deeper into the Wilderness

History Takes the Linguistic Turn 3

A People Blinded from Birth | American History according to the Left 32 THREE

Doubts and Dispossessions Feminist History in the 1990s 53 FOUR

After Looking into the Abyss

The Promise of Professionalism 74 ,

Ix

X Contents

Part Two ,

THE RENEWAL OF AMERICAN HISTORICAL WRITING FIVE

The Return of the Moral Imagination 105 SIX

A Choice of Inheritance 7127 SEVEN

The Dream of a Common History 158 EIGHT

Love and Objectivity 187 Epilogue 209 Notes 215

Index 279

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For the past ten years I have had the good fortune to be a member of the History Department, California State University at San Luis Obispo. I thank my colleagues for their warm collegiality and the former and current chairmen, Max Riedlsperger and Bob Burton, for encouraging me to teach the courses out of which this book emerged. hanks also to the students in my historiography class, particularly Steve Tootle, Greg Robinson, and Rob Smith for forcing me to clarify my thoughts. | am grateful to Janice Stone, Zoe Brazil, and the staff of the university’s Interlibrary Loan Department for supplying me with a host of otherwise unavailable books and articles.

Thanks to Alice Bennett of the University of Chicago Press for working over the manuscript so carefully and making so many helpful suggestions. I am particularly grateful to Douglas Mitchell, my editor at Chicago, for seeing some merit in an unsolicited manuscript and for his encouragement and sage advice. And to Hans Kellner for his valuable thoughts and comments. Thanks also to David ‘Thelen

for taking the time to read the entire manuscript so carefully and to write such an insightful and helpful critique. John Patrick Diggins has been a teacher, mentor, friend, and inspiration for over twenty years. It was the moral seriousness of his teaching that first drew me to American intellectual history and the imagi-

native power of his books that forced me to write my own book. I know that he disagrees with many of the answers I develop here, but all of the questions are his. My friend George Cotkin is no more ~ convinced by my arguments now than he was the first time he heard xi

xii Acknowledgments them, nearly ten years ago. But it is a measure of his generosity and openness of mind that he has continually prodded me to strengthen and refine them——and to finish this book. My understanding of

American intellectual history owes much to his work on William James, on American modernism, and more recently on American existentialism. [ have been living out of Leonard Wilcox’s intellectual

pockets ever since graduate school, running up debts I can never repay. But truth be known, I look forward to seeing my account sink even further into the red. I have admired and in various ways drawn upon Marta Peluso’s photographs, especially her “Scar” series, with their celebration of selves seasoned to a hickory-like toughness.

I have learned much from my mother and father, who came of age during the Great Depression and the Second World War, know everything there is to know about sorrow and loss, and nevertheless gave their children a world of love and compassion. By the power of his own example, Roberto Lint-Sagarena has made me rethink my all-too-easy relinquishment of faith. 1am every day more grateful for his affirmations, for his intellectual companionship, and for the way he has redrawn the emotional geography of our lives. Most of all I have been continually delighted and enlivened by my daughter Anna’s love of American literature. She is the most thoughtful, resourceful, and reflective reader I know and continues to deepen and complicate my understanding not only of nineteenth-century American thinkers like Hawthorne and Melville but also of Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, and other contemporary writers. My son David has given me more than he knows. His instinctive cheerfulness, his refusal of despair, his eagerness in the face of life’s unfolding possibilitles are a constant source of inspiration, vitality, and hope. Finally, this book is for Sallie, who is her own pure poem and the luminous center of my life.

THE DEGRADATION OF AMERICAN HISTORY

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