Books: The Uses of Yesterday

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THE PROGRESSIVE HISTORIANS by Richard Hofstadter. 498 pages. Alfred Knopf. $8.95.

No nation ever began with a richer inheritance or more radiant prospects than the United States of America. But living up to the promise of a perfect childhood can be a terrible strain. Everything achieved afterward tends to appear as anticlimax: the course of adult life seems to run depressingly downhill.

So it has often been with America. As the pioneer vanguard of the young Republic swept westward, Americans were gradually confronted by an embarrassing discrepancy between political dreams and everyday realities. There was on the one hand the agrarian, egalitarian Eden of their early (often mythical) memory, and on the other, the violent have-and-have-not realities of an incipient industrial state. At the end of the 19th century, this conflict—exacerbated by a civil war and a massive infusion of immigrants—had dislocated millions of people, to say nothing of their ideals. Where was America going? Had a continent been laid waste only for material wealth? Faith in progress was an essential American religion. How was it to be sustained?

Historic Trio. By and large, such questions troubled busy Americans only during pessimistic moments of crisis and political unrest. Near the turn of the century, however, the search for a usable past that would somehow square the original American ideal with exploitive American practices began to be the constant concern of a handful of historians. Their efforts and ideas form the background of this book by Columbia University's Richard Hofstadter. The Progressive Historians tells the story of three men—Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles A. Beard and Vernon L. Parrington—who did the most to shape America's image of its history as a tapestry of continued progress. Part biography, part intellectual history, part scholarly polemic, the volume is a sharp but generous inquiry into the underlying conceptions of American history and the reasons for writing it. Hofstadter, who has twice won the Pulitzer Prize (for The Age of Reform and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life), only rarely lapses into the repetitions of a professor who can never be quite sure that the whole class really attended his previous lecture.

Frederick Jackson Turner sounded his single but remarkably lasting note—on the paramount significance of the frontier in American history—in 1893. Charles Beard created his most influential and controversial book, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, in 1913. He had completed his most popular history. The Rise of American Civilization, by 1927, the year when an unknown English professor named V. L. Parrington published his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Main Currents in American Thought. These men, writes Hofstadter, were the first "to make American history relevant to the political and intellectual issues of the moment." And, he might have added, the issues of the moment endured.