Beyond the Frontier
The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing by David S. Brown
Chicago, 256 pp., $32.50
In the hands of the right author, a seemingly dull and parochial subject can become an engaging and exciting book. Take, for example, the curriculum of a stuffy, snobbish Ivy League men’s college at the middle of the 20th century. In 1951, William F. Buckley made this the subject of his fascinating, unfailingly provocative, and widely read God and Man at Yale. Or take an academic department at a Midwestern state university over the course of a century and a quarter. David S. Brown has now made this the subject of his equally fascinating and often comparably provocative Beyond the Frontier, which might just as easily be entitled “Relativism and Isolationism at Wisconsin.”
Although Brown frames his narrative and analysis in larger regional and cultural terms, the core of this book resides in the department of history of the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The professors and students there repeatedly formed the epicenter of a viewpoint toward American society, politics, and foreign policy that greatly influenced the left side of the opinion spectrum. Brown opens the book with a discussion of Midwestern self-consciousness, which will be of interest to anyone who has moved to or visited there from what the denizens call “the East”—pronounced with a special edge and nasality. Whether he succeeds in making his case for a distinctive and significant Midwestern view of American history is debatable. But no matter, Brown engages his real subject when he addresses the growth of state universities in general and Wisconsin in particular, starting with its preeminent historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, who propounded his “frontier thesis” in 1893.
Turner is one of four historians who get named in chapter titles, and the chapter devoted to him distills into a nicely analytical account of his own writings and the much larger corpus of work about him. Brown also recounts how Turner shaped the department that freed the study of American history from a postcolonial inferiority complex and fostered a new viewpoint stressing environmental influences and the importance of ordinary people, particularly away from the Atlantic seaboard. Brown likewise notes how singularly unproductive Turner was when it came to writing books, and how he betrayed a streak of nativism in his attitudes toward the largely Roman Catholic and Jewish “New Immigrants” who flooded into the country in the half-century between the Civil War and World War I—an attitude that would persist in various guises among the later exponents of this hinterland-centered viewpoint.
Next, Brown turns to his second historian named in a chapter title: the other great progenitor of such an angle of attack on American history and affairs, Charles A. Beard. Inasmuch as Beard never studied or taught at Wisconsin, his inclusion might seem to be a detour from the book’s main institutional focus; but that is not so, as will soon become apparent. Brown does not make the claim outright, but the overwhelming weight of evidence in this book ranks Beard as far and away the most influential historian included here. As Richard Hofstadter (the subject of Brown’s excellent previous book) once said, “There was a time when all American history seemed to dance to Beard’s tune.” Despite repeated attacks on Beard’s often slipshod and biased scholarship, and his onetime banishment to pariah status because of his unreconstructed isolationism during and after World War II, a great many practitioners of American history have continued to dance to his tune, as this book shows.
Brown characterizes Beard’s views as a mixture of quasi-Marxism, relativism, and rejection of liberal internationalism. He also argues, correctly, that Beard derived those views largely from his Indiana roots, which included Quaker pacifism, Lincoln Republicanism, and progressive idealism. As influential as were his pejorative economic determinism and “continentalism” (the term he and others understandably preferred to isolationism), his greatest influence lay in his relativism, which argued that “objectivity” was a foolish, perverse, impossible notion and that history must necessarily be written selectively for the sake of pursuing “progressive” goals.
Both Beard’s foreign policy and his relativism prompted a fierce counter-attack in the last years of his life and just after his death by a host of writers, led by the Harvard historian and Boston brahmin Samuel Eliot Morison. Snobbish in manner and blistering in attack (although no more so than Beard himself), Morison nevertheless scored a telling point when, in his presidential address to the American Historical Association, he challenged Beard’s relativism head on, declaring that “no person without an inherent loyalty to truth, a high degree of intellectual honesty, and a sense of balance, can be a great or even a good historian.”
Beard’s inclusion is not really a detour from Brown’s institutional story because the history department in Madison led the counterattack against Morison and others. Its leading lights defended Beard and reasserted his viewpoint in several fields of American history, particularly foreign policy. That last assertion of neo-Beardianism flowered in what proudly dubbed itself the “Wisconsin School of Diplomatic History,” led by its pugnacious champion, William Appleman Williams, who is the third historian named in a chapter title. Williams deserves that distinction, but another of this book’s strengths is that it illuminates the part played by others, students and faculty alike. The eminent Americanists of the department, such as Merrill -Jensen, William B. Hesseltine, and Howard K. Beale, pugnaciously maintained their faith in Beard, but his leading defender was the milder-mannered intellectual historian Merle Curti. He organized a volume of essays in honor of Beard, and, in his own presidential address to the AHA, he lashed back at Morison’s rejection of relativism.
Then, in 1959, a group of graduate students, most of them Jewish red-diaper babies from New York, started the journal Studies on the Left. Like their professors, they scorned New Deal liberalism at home and internationalism abroad, as well as “objectivity,” and they first promulgated the concept of “corporate liberalism,” which argued that regulation and state intervention in the economy by progressives and New Dealers actually served the interests of big business. Brown makes an important point when he notes that SOL antedated the New Left of the 1960s and anticipated its “hunger for deviance, for some posture of radical dissent that could create new identities.”
As for diplomatic history, the Wisconsin School did not spring fully formed from the head of Williams. His major professor during his doctoral studies in the department was a man who also kept faith with Beard’s stress on economic motives behind foreign policy and rejected expansionism, Fred Harvey Harrington. Later president of the university, Harrington hired Williams as his successor, and several of the men (no women) who sallied forth to carry the banner of the Wisconsin School in the wider academic world began their graduate studies under Harrington. Much of the influence of Williams and his school, Brown aptly notes, came from good timing: Disillusionment with the Bay of Pigs, the Dominican intervention, and above all, Vietnam spawned receptivity to their baleful reading of the nation’s foreign policy. But Brown points out that, as with SOL, Williams had formed his views well before any of those events transpired, as had Harrington. In his own writings, Williams largely eschewed research in favor of argument and practiced what he called “seriation quotation,” by which he meant weaving together disparate statements and citations in order to elicit what he saw as deeper, hitherto hidden meanings. Both his viewpoint and his practices drew fierce attacks, especially from Oscar Handlin, in a fight that harked back to Morison’s assaults on Beard. This time, however, the assailant from Harvard was not a Brahmin but one of its history department’s first Jewish professors, and the son of immigrants.
Although Williams and SOL anticipated the counterculture of the 1960s, the student unrest of that decade and its attendant violence did not find cheerleaders among these erstwhile prophets. Harrington recoiled from the turmoil, particularly on his own campus, which eventually cost him his presidency. He also privately repudiated Williams, even though his former protégé also disliked what he saw and eventually left Madison for a reclusive life in Oregon. The Wisconsin School gained broader acceptance among diplomatic historians, although many in the field still strongly dispute its interpretations and deplore its influence. Revealingly, many of its proponents still call themselves “revisionists,” even though their own views are now the targets for would-be revisionists. Neither the Wisconsin School nor the Beardian persuasion holds sway in the home department any longer, but a new and creative incarnation of the original impulse toward viewing American history has begun to take hold there.
Brown ends his book with that new incarnation, but not before he makes one last detour. The final historian who earns a chapter title is Christopher Lasch, a widely read historian and critic of American culture. The son of Nebraskans, born in Omaha and raised there and in the Chicago suburbs, Lasch appears to Brown to offer another good example of a heartland perspective on the nation’s past, and he presents a perceptive explication of Lasch’s life and writings. But unlike the detour to Beard, this one strikes me as leading nowhere in particular, since Lasch had no special interaction with most of the other historians treated here, except when he turned down an offer from Wisconsin in part because of his distaste for student radicalism there. In the last chapter, Brown cites Andrew Bacevich and Thomas Frank, both native Midwesterners, as latter-day exponents of the earlier viewpoint because one deplores “empire” and the other excoriates unchecked capitalism. Their inclusion in a peculiarly Midwestern viewpoint also strikes me as a stretch.
What does seem eminently fitting at the end of the book is Brown’s mention of the revival of Turnerian themes at Wisconsin through the work of William Cronon. Infusing his work with a keen sense of place—particularly -Madison, where he grew up as the son of a member of the history department—Cronon both criticizes and bows to the founder: “Turner’s notion of the ‘frontier’ may be so muddled as to be useless, but if Turner’s ‘free land’ is a special case of . . . American abundance, then the general direction of Turner’s approach remains sound.” In addition, Cronon credits Turner with bringing to the study of human history a keen appreciation of the physical world, which lies at the heart of the field he himself has pioneered, environmental history. Appropriately, Cronon lives only a few blocks from Turner’s last home in Madison, and he is currently at work on what he calls a “Michener-scale” history of a locality in Wisconsin from the Ice Age to the present. Since the locality is Portage, which was Turner’s home town, the circle is complete.
I commend this book to anyone who wants to see how a small, seemingly narrow subject can open up a world of wider importance. Much of what Brown treats in these pages is the history of the intellectual left in 20th-century America, which fell into a virtual civil war along lines that were at once geographic, ethnic, and intellectual. He makes no secret of his liking for most of his leading characters, and his insistence on the continuing validity and relevance of Beard’s foreign policy views will not sit well with some readers. But Brown takes an uncritical stance toward nobody, and he writes with unfailing verve and perceptiveness. What he might have entitled “Relativism and Isolationism at Wisconsin” is a worthy successor to its comparably titled predecessor about Yale.
John Milton Cooper, E. Gordon Fox professor of American institutions at the University of Wisconsin, is the author, most recently, of Woodrow Wilson:A Biography.