Last Frontier
Noble, David W.
BOOKS Last Frontier THE END OF AMERICAN HISTORY by David W. Noble University of Minnesota Press. 166 pp. $25 hardcover. $14.95 paperback. In The End of American History, historian David W. Noble...
...but later, he voiced dissent with the Marxist vision as practiced in Russia for stressing economic production over social concerns...
...As a backdrop for his analysis, Noble defines the prevailing world view of the Nineteenth Century...
...In his famous book, The Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, Beard traced the conflict to the Constitutional Convention at which the forces of greed (the Ham-iltonians) overwhelmed the virtuous agrarians (the Jeffersonians...
...For his own use, Noble adapts rhetoric from Sacvan Berkovitch in presenting the American dream as a jeremiad from which there was, at times, a falling away or declension that, in turn, required a prophet (a Moses) to return backsliding sinners to the Utopian vision...
...He wrote "Third Party Footprints"and "Populism: A Psychohistorical Perspective...
...This process goes on in popular culture, as well, to which Noble barely alludes...
...For the frontier was now on the rim of hell, and the inferno was radioactive...
...He linked the potential for the dream with the American frontier, an arena in which democracy was constantly renewed in closeness with nature...
...In The Great Evasion, he criticized Americans for their ignorance of Karl Marx...
...Noble challenges the simplistic view that there was a clear-cut progressive revolution at the turn of the century, sparked by Charles Beard, and that this revolution is in place to this day...
...This pattern of shifting and vacillation continued with theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and historian Richard Hofstadter, both of whom accepted a version of conflict history from Beard as young men and both of whom finally emerged as the dominant figures in the Counter Progressive or Consensus school of historians...
...Hofstadter made a similar shift from seeing Franklin Roosevelt as a bungler to seeing him as a heroic, pragmatic realist who was the political counterpart of economic modernization...
...This was the notion of Americans as a unique chosen people, who, after making an exodus from decadent Europe to a Promised Land, formed a new society of virtuous citizens who enjoyed the fruits of freehold property...
...In The End of American History, historian David W. Noble stresses not facts but the intellectual frameworks of five modern historians...
...In this regard, he agrees with Niebuhr that progress can only be partial and that any vision of a "good society" can only be temporary...
...He inveighs against those historians who subscribe to some vision of a timeless Utopia outside of the historical process...
...Still later, Williams projected a new jeremiad, a dream of a decentralized America rooted in the arguments for the Articles of Confederation by which economic modernism, the imperial Presidency, and imperialism would be combated...
...But Turner did not like the industrial stage and could only engage in nostalgia...
...He saw no hope for his vision of an industrial democracy, and he finally shifted to endorse an "isolationist" nationalism rooted in the Nineteenth Century American dream...
...Beard, along with John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen, seemed radical as he stormed against special privilege and excessive individualism...
...For his part, Niebuhr came to believe that history can only be filled with ironic contradictions and that we must learn to avoid tragedy by understanding that progress can only be partial and that pretensions to perfection must be dropped...
...James M. Youngdale (James M. Youngdale has retired from teaching history and American Studies...
...Thus, he developed a conflict theory of history depicted as a contest between greedy, parasitical capitalism and public-spirited industrial democracy, the latter initially represented by the New Nationalism of Theodore Roosevelt...
...The End of American History is a highly instructive book...
...Noble is saying we must pay attention to our scribblers and to their debates lest we drown in American innocence which parades as perfectionist transcendentalism...
...In response to fascism, Niebuhr abandoned his belief in salvation by the working class for an acceptance of liberal capitalism and democratic pluralism with roots in the doctrines of the Founding Fathers...
...Unlike Niebuhr and Hofstadter, Williams looks to a conservative past to be used as a means to radicalism...
...Instead, he sees major paradigm revolutions occurring first in the 1890s and then again in the 1940s, but he also finds much shifting of intellectual gears on the part of his selected historians...
...He noted, too, that industrialism was following hard in the wake of the frontier and that society does advance in evolutionary stages...
...This view denied the reality of petty capitalism by calling it democracy, and it denied the reality of differentials in social power within society by idealizing the concept of "masterless men...
...For him, American history had ended...
...It helps us understand the historians' reactive process to a changing reality, especially at times of major crises...
...Frederick Jackson Turner was the last American historian fully to articulate and believe in the Nineteenth Century version of the American dream...
...Noble strikes a note of pessimism over the seemingly everlasting tendency of mankind to rationalize temporal concerns into timeless visions and thus to forfeit control over history...
...Like the other historians under consideration, Williams also shifted his position through time...
...Henceforward, they, too, would share the fate of mankind...
...Accepting the reality of industrialism, Charles Beard theorized that this mode of social existence could be tempered and tamed if mixed with public mindedness...
...Beard feared Roosevelt was misleading America into the arms of an international Hamiltonian plutocracy...
...The historians are Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles Beard, Reinhold Niebuhr, Richard Hofstadter, and William Appleman Williams...
...At the same time, he rejected the Nineteenth Century American dream as a populist delusion bent toward hopeless nostalgia...
...Finally, in reaction against Mc-Carthyism and then the New Left, Hofstadter came full circle with Niebuhr, embracing pluralist democracy as the best of all worlds with a good word for the Nineteenth Century tradition, which he had earlier scorned as populistic...
...Noble hails William Appleman Williams for clearly understanding that the Nineteenth Century American dream about chosen people was a delusion and that America had been a capitalist society with imperialist dreams and behavior from the outset...
...Americans, however, have preferred the dream to the reality...
...But he might agree with the aphorism, from John Maynard Keynes, that behind every madman hearing strange voices lies an academic scribbler...
...Noble quotes Williams on the dust jacket: "Americans were no longer unique...
...In 1932, Beard initially held high hopes for Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, but by the end of the decade, his hopes turned to hatred...
...For him, the content of history is about particular events and theories are about events...
...Both briefly turned to a Marxist analysis in response to the Great Depression, and Niebuhr projected an early version of liberation theology...
...but in the 1890s, Turner was forced to acknowledge that the frontier had reached the Pacific Ocean and that the promise of renewal could no longer be fulfilled...
...The Promised Land was in disrepair...
Vol. 50 • April 1986 • No. 4
