After the Civil War, American society had experienced an explosive growth in industries and cities, the arrival of millions of new immigrants, and new problems in the rural sector. What was the just social order for that new society with its many interest-groups and their aspirations, each of them claiming fuller rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and how could it be established? Few people talked in such abstract terms but specific controversies occurred in great numbers. Since the 1880s, American life had been full of discontent as the Populists called on government to protect the many against the few possessing power and wealth. But even though their program did include some demands by urban laborers, the Populists were essentially a rural group and they failed. In the early 1900s, however, the failure of Populism was atoned by Progressivism, the broad reform movement with an urban accent. It saw as its task the reconciliation of democratic ideals with the political, social, and economic realities of the new urban and industrialized America.
Turner’s revision of American history. Scientific history claimed to be the response to the call for a New History appropriate for the modem period. But calls advocating a different New History were heard in the 1890s. Among them, those of Karl Lamprecht in Germany and Henri Berr in France have been much more appreciated than that by Frederick Jackson Turner in the United States. While in Turner’s appeal for historiographical modernization, published as “The Significance of History” in 1892, his methodological approach remained generally in line with the prevailing positivism of contemporary American historiography, his ideas on the substance of history were remarkably innovative. Historiography must become life-encompassing rather than being dedicated to affairs of politics and state, deal with all the people and not Just elites, explain history in terms of the stmctural forces “behind” the institutions, recognize the pervasiveness of change, and have world history as its ultimate reference. His limited interest in theory made Turner develop his reformist ideas in his works on American history rather than in additional theoretical essays. These works focused on the process that transformed the many different groups of immigrants into a democratic nation. In accounting for the process Turner stressed the central role of space and its settlement; a geographical orientation that paralleled but was not caused by contemporary European developments (Friedrich Ratzel and Vidal de la Blache).
His first attempt at a geographical interpretation of American history, presented as “The Significance of the Frontier” at the 1893 meeting of the American
Historical Association at the Chicago Columbian Exposition, came at a fortunate moment. America was rapidly evolving into a large, industrialized nation and embarked on a democratic experiment on a grander scale. Americans were enamored of technology, conscious of being pioneers in democracy, science, industry, and general progress, and ready to reject too close a linking of their past to that of England or continental Europe.
However, at the time Americans also were deeply concerned about the repercussions of the closing of the frontier. Turner’s acknowledgement that a whole period of American history had come to a close could have contributed to that anxiety, but his frontier thesis allowed for a great deal of optimism because of what it said about the American character and the origin of American democracy.
The thesis spoke of an American nation that was unique in character and development because it had been shaped less by cross-Atlantic links than the dramatic conquest of a vast continent. It refuted the Germanist thesis which Turner’s teachers had propounded. The frontier thesis became America’s declaration of historiographical independence from Europe.
Turner, a native of Wisconsin, studied the settling of the American continent and concluded that American history must not be viewed from the Atlantic coast since the “real lines of American development, the forces dominating our character, are to be studied in the history of westward expansion.” The vast, empty continent offered free land aplenty, but the price of its mastery was a life of selfreliance, simplicity, and practicality, as well as some coarseness and cupidity. And “this ever-retreating frontier of free land is the key to American development,” because the American “forest clearings have been the seed plots of American character” and of American-style democracy.'' That democracy “was bom of no theorist’s dream” but was “shaped in ceaseless stmggle with the
Environment. ”'2
In his thesis Turner partially answered his own call for a history shaped by structural forces other than individual persons and events, celebrated change, acknowledged the role of economic forces, and gave the “common” people a decisive importance. The latter he described with special eloquence. “But history has its tragedy as well, which tells of the degraded tillers of the soil, toiling that others might dream, the slavery that render possible the ‘glory that was Greece,’ the serfdom into which decayed the ‘grandeur that was Rome’—these as well demanded their annals.
Yet the frontier thesis gave to the agrarian past the dominant role in the shaping of the American character, nation, and democracy. Turner would find it impossible to deduce from his thesis a satisfactory historical interpretation for a strongly progressive and future-oriented nation. He had romanticized the frontier, limited to one aspect the much broader American mobility, and overlooked the fact that, except for the dynamic of the settlement process, his geographical interpretation of American history had a pronounced static quality.
From 1895, Turner’s work carried the mark of the section as the key concept. The new approach was exemplified by his only book-length work, The Rise of the New West, 1819-1829. The sections were units shaped by a complex mixture of geographical, economic, and social influences. The people of a certain section shared distinctive life experiences and specific interests over the span of generations. Thus Americans carried the marks of the sections which shaped them, and the American past could not be understood if one ignored the sectional rivalries between East, West, and South.
In the sectional interpretation American history (with the exception of the Civil War) appeared as a sequence of successful compromises between regions. Even Congress was seen as “an assembly of geographical envoys.” Critics argued that Turner’s insistence on the centrality of the sectional interpretation was flawed because the ever denser network of communications was diminishing its value. At best it could serve as one interpretive scheme for pre-industrial America. Turner spent his remaining years composing a sectionalist-oriented American history for the period between 1830 and 1850. He hoped that the “Big Book,” as he called it, would be persuasive enough to convince his critics also. But the work remained unfinished and was completed by co-workers (The Significance of Sectionalism, 1932).
Turner’s work on behalf of a New History remained unappreciated in comparison to similar efforts by Europeans. He had issued and partially answered the call for a structural history, the inclusion of the broad masses into history, and a greater emphasis on the economic aspect of history. Yet even at home his influence would soon be overtaken by another group of New Historians—The Progressive historians—who were perceived as being more in tune with industrialized and urbanized America. It also helped that the prominent Progressive historians published considerably more than Thmer, who was hampered by his inability to complete book-length manuscripts. The Progressive historians gave Thmer credit for having appreciated the economic aspect of history (albeit not the economic interpretation of history). They, who affirmed progress as the key historical pattern and saw it accomplished through social conflict, found some sympathy for Turner’s early agreement on that point. Thus, at one time Turner had hinted at a contest between the “capitalist” and the “democratic pioneer” from the earliest colonial days, but he found class conflict not as congenial— perhaps not as genuinely American—as his concept of sectional conflict and did not pursue it. But all of that proved a fragile link from the Progressive historians to a historian whose work was far afield from theirs in historical interpretation and activist aims.
Truth as servant of action. Many Progressive ideals and the ensuing changes originated in the scholarly world, where a decisive shift in outlook had occurred. The belief in history as progress remained as strong as ever but it underwent a metamorphosis. Up to that point its driving force had been providential (God) or at least metaphysical (reason). Now progress was seen as resulting from human actions increasingly informed by rational planning and considered to be more effective because of it. Specifically, at the turn of the century, it was thought necessary not only to expose the divergence between democratic ideals and the realities in American life but to remedy it. Indeed, there was present a pervasive suspicion that traditional ideals were used to hide the selfish interests of those in power and thus to mask the “real” forces at work in society. In the new scheme of preferences experimentation ranked above tradition, the “real” above the “ideal,” change above stability, assertion of conflict in the interest of democracy above its deliberate reduction, and the recognition of separate constituencies above the ideal of a harmonious nation. Such a new attitude came easily to the new American intelligentsia, whose members were no longer drawn mainly from well-established families but from the middle classes, and whose actions and thoughts were not so much guided by tradition as by a vision for the future; the promise of American life was to be fulfilled in a truly democratic American society pervaded by a spirit of equality and rationalism.
Little of American life remained untouched once some of the long-standing American traditions were questioned. Trust in universal, eternal, and benevolent forces was replaced by faith in the efficacy and benevolence of rational human actions aimed at social reforms and planned by intellectuals. Traditions impressed the new activists as irrational, mere impediments to progress; and adherence to them was considered empty formalism. Roscoe Pound, Louis Brandeis, and Oliver Wendell Holmes proclaimed law to be a means of social reconstruction. John Dewey denied the absolute validity of philosophical concepts and made them into instruments for the mastery of life. Thorstein Veblen called for an activist economics in order to achieve an economic democracy with a just distribution of wealth. These activities were joined by proponents of the New History who expected their discipline to find its proper place in the new American enlightenment as soon as it would analyze the past in a “scientific” manner rather than narrating it or using it for entertainment. There already were, to their minds, substantial hopes for a “scientific” history.
She [the muse of history] had already come to recognize that she was ill-prepared for her undertakings and had begun to spend her mornings in the library, collating manuscripts and making out lists of variant readings. She aspired to do even more and began to talk of raising her chaotic mass of information to the rank of science.'"*
Once the insights of such a history could be used as tools for social and political action, the “historiography for reform” would have arrived. In 1912, James Harvey Robinson chose Edward Eggleston’s phrase the “New History” as the title of his manifesto and it became the name of the new school of historical writing. Actually that school may be most accurately described as the initial phase of American Progressive historiography.
For those New Historians who would become the Progressive historians, James H. Robinson, Charles A. Beard, and Carl L. Becker, the need for social, political, and economic reforms held the first priority and hence historians must be advocates for and sponsors of them. Such service to the present and the future had its price, for it forced historians to be present-minded, even to the point of having as their “ever conscious aim to enable the reader to catch up with his own times; to read intelligently the foreign news in the morning paper.”‘5 Mere erudition smacked of contemplation and hence led to a nonuseful history. Representatives of the New History accepted with no regret the fact that the strong emphasis on recent history downgraded the regard for works dealing with the remoter past. These periods, particularly the European Middle Ages, were simply not as relevant, yielding at best examples of how things should not be.
Some implications. As partial compensation for the loss in the time-span covered, the New History offered an account of the past that was, in Turner’s words, the biography of society in all its departments. This kind of history would be a democratic history because it would lift the masses out of undeserved obscurity; it would be an activist history because it would grasp the “real” forces governing history and then teach people how to use them. Since the search for the “real” forces must go beyond the limits of political history, the New Historians called for an alliance of history with sociology and economics. How else could one study all aspects of society? But the call found scant response among historians and social scientists. Ironically, just when Robinson and Beard admonished historians to see the social scientists as their comrades-in-arms, the sociologists and economists were moving away from the evolutionary model, which had tied them loosely to history, toward ahistorical approaches. The social scientists now expected experimentation and present-day observations to yield the laws they wished to find. The bridge between historians and social scientists was never built. The New Historians had to construct their social history by themselves.
The failure to cooperate occurred despite the fact that the two groups shared many attitudes and approaches, including an incipient environmental determinism. Bancroft had thought of the ideas of progress and liberty as autonomous forces, lodged and fostered in human minds and hearts. But the advocates of the Germanist thesis had already treated the idea of liberty less as a universal human endowment than as a product of the Germanic village, forest, and spirit. Turner had credited the frontier with creating the American spirit and character. One need only set Edward Eggleston’s Transit of Civilization (1901), describing the flow of ideas from Europe to America, against Turner’s view to perceive the difference between the traditional and the new interpretations of what ideas represent—here a quasi-autonomy of ideas, there a dependence of ideas on the environment. The New Historians, who counted themselves among the pioneers of a new democratic society, were quite willing to consider ideas, at least to a high degree, as products of the social environment. They expected, therefore, that a truly democratic society, once established, would foster proper ideas, namely those close to rationalism and science and far away from superstition, error, oppression, and even religion.
But what were those “real” forces in the human environment that governed the ideas and actions of human beings? In the early 1900s, as was seen above, economic motivations fascinated a number of scholars. To some American historians it seemed obvious that after all the emphasis on the power of ideas and ideals and of American society as an organic and homogeneous whole one should turn to a more “realistic” approach and speak of economic self-interest and conflict. Typical for the distrust of traditional views and the desire to expose the “true” motives of “real” life was Charles Beard’s already mentioned An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution.
The directions and themes of the New History were well set when the United States was drawn into World War I and for a time foreign policy overshadowed domestic policy. A few years after the war’s end, Americans once more turned inward, opening the way for further development of the New History, which after 1912 is best referred to as the Progressive school of historiography.
World History
