The Nation's Pulse/The Art of History

...The first of these books was James MacGregor Burns's The Vineyard of Liberty, * Volume I in a projected three-volume history of the United States entitled The American Experiment...

...conjunction of the two lasted well into the nineteenth century, in the form of grand narrative histories -exemplified by such works as Macaulay's celebrated History of England and George Bancroft's ebulliently self-confident History of the United States...

...Does it make sense for Burns to express admiration for a compromising system and yet t.o disparage the very sort of politician such a system is designed to produce...

...Yet elsewhere in the book Burns lavishes praise on the American political system for its pragmatic flexibility, its capacity for mitigating conflict and promoting fruitful compromise through the checks and balances provided by the Constitution and a strong two-party arrangement...

...Yet when Homer sang of Achaeans and Trojans battling on the plains of Ilium, or when the Old Testament authors recounted the tribulations of a people blessed with a destiny of distinctive-ness, they did more than tell a story...

...For Oxford History of the United States...

...he writes not to comprehend the past, but to exploit it...

...Indeed, he should know better: as he points out, the immediate cause of the Civil War was the failure of the . American government's various mechanisms of compromise and accommodation to function-precisely because the system was overwhelmed all their sound and fury, Burns writes, the debates proved only that neither Lincoln nor Douglas was "capable of reaching into the minds and hearts of human beings, appealing to their more generous instincts, recognizing their fundamental wants and needs, and mobilizing their hopes and aspirations...

...far from responding to Bailyn's suggestions, he seems largely to have ignored them...

...Athough both books are narrative histories, they reflect quite different intentions...

...A great narrative and a great civilization seemed unimaginable apart from each other...

...The peculiarly ferocious tone of political debates in the 1790s, for example, becomes more intelligible when Burns sets them against the background of the clamorous, bustling, gossipy, intimate New York City where they took place...

...His aims, in other words, are more political than scholarly...

...But his narrative, far from promising to restore liberalism's health, serves rather to document its sickness...

...For, just as the effective wooing of particularist interest groups does not translate automatically into coherent public policy, so the attempt to "integrate" a chaotic mass of particularist historical writing does not necessarily translate into coherent narrative...

...By majority rule .? Or would the minority be granted special rights and powers in order to protect elites against the populace...

...Vagrants, ignorant peasants, and in many cases foreigners who were dragooned or hired felt neither moral commitment to their rulers nor loyalty to ifheir nation which, in a modern sense, did not exist...

...It is, in short, the very model of Bailyn's "complex narra tives...

...Needless to say, the Lincoln-Douglas debates do not arouse Burns's admiration, either...

...Stripped of its former eminence, narrative history fell into disrepute among historians, and has played almost no part in the tremendous growth of historical writing since World War II...

...Take his treatment of Lincoln, a figure particularly tantalizing and frustrating to historians in search of acceptable heroes and useful precedents...

...To cite one final example of Burns's present-mindedness, there is his transformation of the makers of Shays' Rebellion, the western Massachusetts agrarian debtors' revolt in late 1786, into "grass roots" populists who, by "challenging the 'system,'" succeeded in "fomenting powerful insurrections in people's minds...

...Can it be realized...

...How, then, to find a unifying theme within the massive literature on the Revolutionary era...

...Then came Robert Middlekauffs The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 A the first installment in what is to be an eleven-volume series, The by the uncompromising force of extremist ideologies, both Northern and Southern...

...He places politics, and the doings of great men and political elites, in the forefront of history...

...Clearly Burns would like to believe that the Vital Center will hold, and that American history can be made to illustrate the eternal verities of twentieth-century liberalism...

...As impossible as Burns's job may seem, however, Middlekauff's is probably even harder, and his history demonstrates why the hopes of Bailyn and others for "new narratives" appear so forlorn...

...the traditional story-telling role began to give way to an analytical, "problem-solving" approach to historical inquiry, modeled after the empirical methods of natural science...

...Ultimately, however, The Glorious Cause fails for the same reason as Burns's narrative: because the author cannot quite decide how he feels about the American past...

...These early narratives stood at the very center of their civilizations, at the heart of social and spiritual life...

...In this sense, it is hard to see that The Glorious Cause even begins to accomplish what the Oxford series has set as its goal...

...They expressed their people's shared values and cherished aspirations, embodied their collective memory, imparted life-sustaining meaning to their sufferings...

...like Aristotelian drama, it has a beginning, middle,-and end, which makes the writer's organizing easier...

...In outlining the problems of running an eighteenth-century army, he informs us that "[a]rmies composed of dregs were difficult to recruit, difficult to train, and expensive to maintain...

...But he has also heard the siren songs of his disaffected colleagues who routinely condemn this past as an unrelieved procession of crimes and horrors...

...Even as they mirrored a society's special shape, they served to perpetuate it...

...We can be grateful to Burns for his engaging style...

...By using the story-telling form to link the findings of analytical research, Bailyn's proposed "complex narratives" would "bring order into large areas of history" that now lie in formidable disarray...

...But even a suitably protean historian, who pays proper attention to the women's-history lobby, the black-history lobby, and all the rest, has barely begun to do the job...

...Or is the narrative form too antiquated, and the professional literature too fragmented, to permit any such union...

...The Americans . . . believed that their cause was glorious-and so do I. But their cause, however glorious, had its inglorious sides, and the Americans' manner of advancing it was sometimes false to the great principles they espoused...

...What questions were raised in people's minds by this rebellion: "When is rebellion justified...

...but at its worst-all too often-it stumbles into a swamp of blurry ideas, run-on sentences, pseudo-scientism, mixed metaphor, and tone-deafness...

...When describing English religious persecution, he asserts that "English policy soon cut down opportunities to make a living by discriminating against wool, cattle, and linens from Ireland...

...Middlekauff's opening paragraph speaks for the rest of the book: The title that I have given this book may be understood in this day-when all is suspect-as irony...

...W]ere people who felt cheated in their rights justified in a republic in turning to bullets rather than ballots...

...These new narratives would conserve the best of both worlds...

...Middle-kauff s solution was to concentrate to a surprising extent on the Revolutionary War itself, providing an exhaustive blow-by-blow account of its politics, diplomacy, and battles...

...Burns is only too glad to acknowledge Lincoln's extraordinary humility and compassion, and to praise his opposition to slavery...

...I do not intend that it should be...

...Middlekauff's concerns, on the other hand, are much closer to those troubling Bailyn and other profes sional historians...

...And war has literary advantages...

...A few examples: when discussing the colonies' ethnic composition, he inadvertently conjures up a Gulliveresque vision: J'The culture was only imperfectly homogeneous...

...They were many-sided mirrors into which a people peered, again and again, to interpret themselves and reaffirm their identity...

...Though he neatly summarizes the issues and manages to capture some of the grand theater of these oratorical jousts, he cannot keep his anachronistic perspective from intruding...

...This is particularly unfortunate, since the bulk of recent scholarship on the Revolution, good and bad alike, deals with the before-and-after periods, rather than the war itself...

...Indeed, it seems doubtful that it can so translate, for precisely the same reason that all institutionalized interest groups resist integration: because their very self-definition relies on an adversarial relationship to the mainstream...

...Moreover, Middlekauff shows how this particular war directly touched nearly every element of American society...

...This is not the way to revive narrative writing in American history...

...Bailyn called for a revival of narrative writing, an approach endorsed by other eminent historians...

...in its waging as well as its results, it was a powerful engine in the formation of American national self-consciousness...

...The series will test whether the frag mentary work of today's professionals can be pieced together into meaning ful patterns...

...While the central war story is narrated crisply and coherently, the chapters covering the war's origins and aftermath are disjointed and meandering...

...But Middlekauff devotes so much space to the war-half of this 600-page book-that one is forced to conclude that his organizing principle overwhelmed his subject...

...Like Burns, Middlekauff wants to believe in the basic decency of his country's historical record...

...The Oxford books are ostensibly for the general reader-but they will first have to pass muster with professional historians, to whom the Oxford series has come to represent far more than just another big publishing project...

...THE NATION'S PULSE THE ART OF HISTORY In the beginning, history-writing was story-telling...

...Hence, unlike Burns, Middlekauff must write with two quite different audiences in mind...

...Similarly awkward, misleading, or unintentionally comic phrases appear on nearly every page...

...Burns thus is afflicted by gnawing liberal self-doubt-the very disease he would heal...

...Although Burns is curiously silent about his reasons for undertaking a multi-volume narrative history, the primary motive could not be clearer: to give new life to dispirited present-day liberalism by providing it with a usable past...

...Even so, narrative history, if only as an idea, refuses to disappear entirely...

...As Bernard Bailyn admitted in his 1981 presidential address to the American Historical Association, the proliferation of analytical history-writing "has served not to illuminate the central themes of Western history but to obscure them...

...Such is the pattern of his history...

...But when faced with Lincoln's refusal to espouse slavery's immediate abolition and his repeated willingness to subordinate the slavery issue to the preservation of the Union, Burns cannot contain his disappointment: "What was the Union for, if not for the ideals of the Declaration of Independence...

...Burns repeatedly takes early America's political pantheon to task for failing to meet his high twentieth-century expectations...

...There is much to be said for Middlekauff's approach...

...Schlesinger had inherited from the Progressive era a beautifully Manichaean view of American history, and could easily distinguish its businessman villains from its liberal heroes...

...The political thought of Madison, Adams, and Hamilton is prominent here, for Burns believes political ideas have integrity and power, rather than merely fronting for material interests...

...In a word, it is to test the increasingly quixotic hope that the last twenty years of American histori cal scholarship will add up to some thing coherent...

...It is this scholarship that most needs critical scrutiny and creative sifting by an experienced historian, but Middlekauff has simply not addressed himself to that need...

...Writing a general history these days is a bit like running for the Democratic presidential nomination: one's "constituency" (in this case, the historical profession) is so badly splintered into specialized, single-issue advocacy groups, each of them institutionalized, that only Proteus himself could keep them all happy...

...There is more, much more, but I trust the rhetorical pattern is clear: Burns has turned an irrelevant event info a parable encompassing nearly every item on the liberal agenda...

...And therefore, while I have tried to convey a sense of the achievements of the Revolution, I have also pointed to its failures, and tried to understand both achievements and failures and their peculiar relationship...

...Does Burns seriously expect the American people to "treasure" the nearsighted temporizing of two morally bankrupt politicos...

...An attractive, if sketchily conceived, prospect...

...Liberalism has come a longay since 1956, when Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., published the first volume in his Age of Roosevelt series...

...T]he standard culture retained its English cast but the presence of large bodies of non-English populations eroded its English texture...

...And under either system would all people-all adult men women, poor persons, Indians, black people-have'an equal voice and vote...

...Burns, perhaps best known for his partisan biographies of FDR and JFK, is a venerable curator of the Vital Center, closely associated throughout his career with such New Deal enthusiasts as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., William E. Leuch-tenburg, and Frank Freidel...

...But a generation of radical assaults on the liberal tradition's most cherished figures, from Jefferson to FDR to JFK, has left all somewhat bloody and bowed...

...Nor does Middlekauff s prose have any of Burns's redeeming liveliness and charm...

...They were also civilizing agents...

...If decisions were indeed to be made by ballots, how would ballots count...

...Historians cannot reduce the importance of warfare in human history simply by ignoring it...

...These loving portraits, however, often stand in stark contrast to the stories in which these men act...

...The "scientific" approach to historical writing has never lived up to advance billing...

...It's not that Burns has converted to radicalism...

...Indeed, if the reviews of The Glorious Cause that have so far appeared are any indication, he has been much too positive for his colleagues' tastes...

...At its best Middlekauff s writing is workmanlike and straightforward...

...I say surprising, because it runs so counter to the current tendency to disparage military history in particular, and "elitist" history generally...

...With the rise of professional history-writing in the late nineteenth century, however...

...He knows how to use telling detail to illustrate a point...

...It is difficult to understand why Oxford could not have chosen a more skillful writer for such an important assignment, and even more difficult to understand why Oxford's/editorial staff apparently did not notice Middlekauff's motley army of bloopers as they tramped into print...

...An examination of two large-scale attempts at g'rand narrative in American history, both published in the past year, suggests the shape a narrative revival could take-if it comes...

...The long-awaited Oxford series, under the general editorship of C. Vann Woodward, is explicitly designed to synthesize the findings of recent American histori ography into a general narrative ac count of each major period in Ameri can history...

...But just how to exploit it, given the present climate, is no simple matter...

...A historian who bends over backward to create a "balanced" account suggests not the subtle misure of distinguished scholarship, but the absence of any viewpoint at all...

...But an undercurrent of self-doubt runs through the book, with much hemming and hawing over any delicate point...

...His sketches of the Republic's founders, though somewhat lacking in psychological depth, are nevertheless evocative- even in the formidable case of George Washington-as are later portraits of Jackson, Clay, Calhoun, Douglas, I and Lincoln...

...He remains an Old Liberal at heart, and deep within that heart lies an enduring affection for the principal players of the American past...

...An The Vineyard of Liberty, whose story stretches from the prelude of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 to the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Burns bucks many of the most salient trends in historical writing...

...He writes in a crisp, vivid, accessible style...

...So how can Burns write-in the very next sentence-that the debates "became a model for vigorous but rational political discussion, and a treasure of the nation's intellectual heritage...