Essays in American Historiography. Papers Presented in Honor of Allan Nevins 9780231881722

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Essays in American Historiography PAPERS PRESENTED IN HONOR OF

ALLAN NEVINS

Essays in AMERICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY PAPERS P R E S E N T E D IN H O N O R ALLAN

NEVINS

Edited by Donald Sheehan & Harold C. Syrett

COLUMBIA U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS New York and London

OF

Publication of this work has been made possible by a gift from Mr. Marcellus Hartley Dodge and by grants from the William A. Dunning Fund and the Edgar A. and Frederic Bancroft Foundation, made available by the generous cooperation of the Department of History, Columbia University, and of the Columbia University Libraries.

COPYRIGHT

©

1960

COLUMBIA

First printing Second printing LIBRARY

UNIVERSITY

PRESS

I960 1961

O F CONGRESS C A T A L O G CARD N U M B E R :

M A N U F A C T U R E D IN T H E U N I T E D S T A T E S O F

60-8187

AMERICA

ALLAN NEVINS — AN APPRECIATION by John Allen

Krout

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

era of historical writing it is not often that a professional historian elbows his hard-won notes off his desk and sets himself the task of defining the nature and scope of history. Fortunately for us that is exactly what Allan Nevins did almost a quarter century ago. The result was published in 1938 under the title The Gateway to History. A gateway it has been ever since to generations of college and university students, intent upon teaching as a career, and also to a host of amateurs merely seeking "a very Doric entrance to the historical domain." Its pages are bright with the qualities which Professor Nevins over the years has exemplified: erudition, enthusiasm, clarity, and brilliance. "History," he writes, "in its protean forms touches the realm of ideas at more points than any other study, and in the best of its forms it is compact as much of ideas as of fact." One doubts that he fully realized this truth when, as a boy in an Illinois farmhouse, his imagination was first stirred by the events recorded by Macaulay and Prescott and Parkman. But he learned it quickly as newspaperman, teacher, biographer, and editor. His life long he has been trying to persuade his fellow countrymen that if history is read "by the blazing illumination" of an aroused intellectual curiosity, it will richly provide the materials out of which each successive generation may fashion the philosophy it so sorely needs. Allan Nevins was already at home in the world of letters when Professor Carlton J. H. Hayes persuaded him in 1928 to join the Department of History at Columbia University. His editorials IN THIS RATHER AUSTERE

vi

AN A P P R E C I A T I O N

in the New York Evening Post, The Nation, and the New York World had shown how happily were combined in him the talents of the painstaking scholar and the literary artist. His interest in aspiring students quickly became highly personal and stubbornly enduring. He was concerned not only to guide the young historian toward an understanding of historical method but also to make him aware of the opportunities which history, as a form of literature, offered to the writer, the editor, the critic. For almost two decades he carried the responsibility for all those in the Department of History who were candidates for the master's degree and were writing a master's essay; and yet he found time to give a hand to scores who were preparing doctoral dissertations for publication. When his colleagues protested that he was carrying too heavy a load, he would reply with a wry smile that no task had really seemed burdensome since he left the Illinois farm. What moments he could call "spare," he devoted to his own writing. And most of it was exciting. In 1933 the Pulitzer Prize for biography came to him for Grover Cleveland: a Study in Courage, and again in 1937 for Hamilton Fish: the Inner History of the Grant Administration. T e n years later he received the Bancroft Prize and the Scribner Centenary Prize for the first two volumes of The Ordeal of the Union. Now in the fifth of ten volumes, the Ordeal portrays on a heroic scale the cruel testing of American national unity from the Compromise of 1850 to the close of the Reconstruction Era. T o appreciate Professor Nevins's monumental achievement one needs only to compare his volumes with James Ford Rhodes's History, so long regarded as the classic interpretation of this period in American life. His inquiring mind, fortified by his enduring energy, has led Allan Nevins into many bypaths off the main highways of history; but his chief concern about mankind's story is unmistakable. He has given it monolithic form in the address which he delivered to the American Historical Association, as its President, in December, 1959. He would have the professional historians and the popular historians forget their earlier recriminations and join in a common effort to give greater attention to a. humanized and at-

AN A P P R E C I A T I O N

vii

tractive presentation of the record of the past. In the last analysis, he insists, the historian is the servant of the great democratic public. "That public has come through a terrible period of confusion, effort and disaster, and lives on in a period of intense strain. It needs all the sense of pattern, all the moral fortitude, all the faith in the power of liberty and morality to survive the assaults of tyranny and wrong, that historians of every school can give it." T h e contributors to this Festschrift, all of them recipients of the doctorate under Professor Nevins's supervision, have had in the present enterprise the benefit of the encouragement and guidance of Donald Sheehan, Associate Professor of History and Assistant to the President at Smith College, and Harold C. Syrett, now Professor of History at Columbia and editor of the Alexander Hamilton papers. They represent hundreds of students who would honor Professor Ν evins as scholar, author, and teacher. They have enjoyed his exciting lectures, have learned of new areas for historical research in his seminars, and have been instructed by the way in which he has applied his concept of the nature and scope of history to the subjects on which he has written. Most of all they have been moved by his ability to show then) how engrossing the pursuit of history can be. T h e late Stuart P. Sherman of the University of Illinois once remarked that Allan Nevins in his younger days was a remarkable combination of St. Vitus and Benjamin Franklin. If the observation be true, surely the Franklin strain has grown stronger with the passing years. Indeed, one might say today of Professor Nevins what Carl Van Doren said of Franklin: "More than any single man, a harmonious human multitude." March

1,1960

CONTENTS Allan Nevins—An Appreciation

JOHN A. KROUT:

Scientific History in America: Eclipse of

EDWARD Ν. SAVETH:

an Idea ROBERT

c.

1 BLACK, HI:

JACOB E. COOKE:

Thoughts on the Confederacy

Radical Reconstruction

DONALO SHEEHAN:

The New South

tics from the Civil War to the First World War MARK D. HIRSCH:

50 81 109

The Idea of the Robber Barons in American

History c.

37

Reflections on Urban History and Urban

Reform, 1865-1915 HAL BRIDGES:

20

American Historians and National Poli-

JAMES A. RAWLEY:

CARLTON

Ν

138 QUALEY:

Some Aspects of European Migration to

the United States JOSEPH A. BOROMÉ: SIDNEY RATNER:

153 The Evolution Controversy

Pragmatism in America

EVERETT WALTERS:

193

Populism: Its Significance in American

History

217

JAMES P. SHENTON: LOUIS FILLER:

169

Imperialism and Racism

The Muckrakers: in Flower and in Failure

231 251

χ HARRY

CONTENTS w.

BAEHR:

A Cycle of Revisionism between Two Wars 271

BERNARD BELLUSH: INDEX OF NAMES

An Interpretation of Franklin D. Roosevelt 287 311

Essays in American Historiography PAPERS PRESENTED IN H O N O R OF

ALLAN Ν E VIN S

SCIENTIFIC HISTORY IN AMERICA: ECLIPSE OF AN IDEA by Edward N.

Saveth

T H E GRADUATE FACULTY NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH NEW YORK

of a science of history that would chart the past and enable the future to be projected has invariably intrigued the historian. Technically, this would leave history unencumbered by its mass and the historian concerned only with lines of development delineated by historical science. With the road map of the future before him, the status of the historian would grow as indispensable counselor of politicians and statesmen, bringing the science of human development to bear upon his deliberations. Henry Adams, in "The Tendency of History" written in 1894, imagined a situation in which state and church, capital and labor, and all other important social groupings and institutions, would ask anxiously of the historian: Am I justified in history and will I live on? T h e movement toward a science of history, which had its most significant development toward the last two decades of the nineteenth century, coincided with the professionalization of historical study. Throughout most of the nineteenth century and before, history had been the province of those who regarded it as primarily a branch of literature. The best of the literary historians did no injustice to the muse, since they were as discriminate in their use of sources as they were careful in their stylistic presentation. T h e last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed the development of the professionally trained American historian, many THE PROSPECT

2

SAVETH: SCIENTIFIC HISTORY

of whom attended German graduate schools. T h e professional American historians were inclined to associate the development of a science of history with the growth of professional prestige and aspired to a utilitarian history in an increasingly practical era. They were less interested in attracting and entertaining a relatively large reading public than were their predecessors such as Francis Parkman and William Hickling Prescott. Indeed, the strain of romanticism which had attracted the public to early nineteenth