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History of the Elite and History of the Folk

These are exciting times in the historiography of American history. Individually and collectively, historians of America’s past are appraising their own and their predecessors’ methods, biases, and presuppositions. These examinations of history-writing that have appeared in close succession over the past half dozen years display a variety of methods and formulas themselves, and attest the lively self-interest and advanced professionalism among American history specialists. Let us have a quick look at them.

Here is a trio engineered by John Higham, who is Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. He ushered in the new wave of historiographical interest in 1962 by editing The Reconstruction of American History (the only one of the dozen titles I cite that falls before the 1965-1971 period, since it connects with two other works by Higham). For this reassessment he enlisted the coopération of ten other professional historians, each of whom surveyed and appraised the recent historical literature on major chronological topics in American history, from Puritanism, the Revolution, and the West to progressivism and America as a world power. In his opening essay Higham commented on certain trends detectable in the reports of his colleagues: the absence of towering leaders in the profession such as a Turner or a Beard of an earlier generation, the growing attraction of intellectual history, and the concomitant decline of economic determinism as a governing theory of historical causation. The contributors often indulged in shoptalk of the profession about notable historians of the previous and contemporary generations.¹ In spite of the range of topics, the same names recur regularly from the colonial to the modern themes, most conspicuously Parrington, Beard, Turner, Hofstadter, and Schlesinger junior.

In 1965 Higham produced his own extended and synthesized account of the same subject matter in History, The Development of Historical Studies in the United States, with an emphasis on the growth of professionalism among academic historians. Of particular interest is his account of the sharp clash within the American Historical Association in 1939, when Allan Nevins’ proposal that the Association sponsor a popular historical magazine was rejected. Nevins eventually succeeded in launching the magazine as American Heritage, which, as Higham said, pleases a public but dismays the historians. Higham contends that there are a number of selective publics for whom the historian with ideas can write, without catering to the vulgus.² In contrast to the earlier volume, Higham traces broad currents of historical theory in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, under such rubrics as evolutionism, the New History, and relativism. The uneasy relationship of the historical profession to the new social sciences provided the central issue in these debates. For authors of works of history, as opposed to the philosophy of history, he employed such labels as conservative and progressive historians to give a seeming coherence to the variety of titles he felt obliged to mention.

As a kind of sequel, Higham brought together in 1970 under the title Writing American History nine of his essays that explored in greater depth his concerns with American intellectual history, with Turner and Beard, and with the responsibility of the historian for moral criticism. In his concluding essay on “American Historiography in the 1960V Higham confessed to shock at the wave of protest-engendered histories suddenly emerging from radical critics.³ Higham himself had pleaded for a development of the young historian’s moral and aesthetic sense, but not in this direction. His final words, marking the end of consensus, are “... a general framework for understanding American history has collapsed.”⁴

Three other historians have examined the Progressive school in depth. Robert Allen Skotheim concentrated on American Intellectual Histories and Historians (1966), recognizing the tribute given this new area by Higham and discussing a number of the same figures under the same labels. He placed Robinson, Beard, Becker, Parrington, and Curti in the progressive tradition reacting against scientific history, and grouped together Morison, Miller, and Gabriel as challengers to that reforming, pragmatic, optimistic tradition, which held sway from the beginning of the twentieth century to the end of World War II. To one like myself who studied under Morison and Miller, their designation as “dissenting historians” seems forced. Skotheim justified his category by their admiration for early New England thought and disregard for the social seiences.⁵ He does acknowledge that Miller’s scholarly genius raises him above neat pigeonholes.⁶ Skotheim ends with the mild rejection of the Progressive school by intellectual historians writing in the 1930’s and ’40’s. This rejection becomes much more acerb in specific critiques of the Progressives by two well-established historians, the late Richard Hofstadter and Robert E. Brown.

Hofstadter titled his work of 1968 The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington. With its preliminary chapter on the precursors of these giants and an afterword on their successors today bounding the richly annotated central essays, this book too is a semi-history of the American historical profession. Hofstadter is scrupulously fair in these marvelous portraits of the three giants of the generation past, and seems genuinely sad at the dismemberment to which he subjects them. In the end nothing is left of their reputations but charred ashes. Turner, the non-writer, lived off an early essay whose lofty uses of such terms as “democracy” and “individualism” would be riddled by critics. Beard, linked with a classconflict interpretation of the origins of the Constitution that has melted away before the revisionists, ended his career pitied by his colleagues for his monomaniacal isolationism. Parrington, an Enlightenment rationalist in a populist age, built a monument to Jeffersonian liberalism by inventing a Rousseauistic influence on American thought and stereotyping a motley cast of characters. Having patiently and sorrowfully disposed of the Progressives, Hofstadter turned in his epilogue to the current school of consensus historians, notably Hartz and Boorstin, from whom he dissociated himself, rejecting their consensus premise as explicitly as he had repudiated the conflict premise of the Progressives. Both schemes of interpretation are too simple; they cannot stand up to what he called the “rediscovery of complexity in American history . . . , the new awareness of the multiplicity of forces.”⁷

The great contemporary of Turner, Beard, and Parrington left unscathed by Hofstadter, the historian’s historian Carl Becker, came tumbling down before the flail of Robert Brown. A merciless iconoclast, Brown, in Carl Becker on History and the American Revolution (1970), applied to Becker the same technique he had previously employed on Beard; he checked the sources of the historian against his interpretations and conclusions, and found glaring discrepancies. Becker had developed in his various volumes on American history a class-conflict interpretation of the American Revolution, which saw two struggles, that of colonial Americans against British imperialism and that of unfranchised patriots against Tory aristocrats: home rule versus who should rule at home. Examining Becker’s source for his figures on the small number of freemen in Revolutionary New York, Brown found them so obviously understated that he accuses Becker of wilful distortion.⁸ To this charge he adds the criticism that Becker, trained under Turner as a scholarly, objective historian pursuing truth, embraced for the major portion of his illustrious career a philosophy of history compounded of Progressivism, pragmatism, presentism, and subjective relativism, with which he manipulated and contrived facts to persuade his audience that the evils of the past served as lessons for the social revolution of the present that would bring a heavenly city of the future. Becker’s quotation from Voltaire, that “history is only a pack of tricks we play on the dead” and, if it serves useful social ends, “does not harm the dead, who had in any case tricks of their own,” Brown repeats throughout his dissection, as evidence of Becker’s own lack of historical scruples.⁹ On the credit side, Brown gives Becker points for pulling back, in the last five years of his life, 1940-45, from the reforming liberalism that drew him close to communist doctrine and for disavowing much of his subjective relativism and cynicism of democracy when faced by the ugly real facts of Hitler and Stalin. But Brown feels that recantation came too late with too little, and in itself did not check the Becker cult. All the glowing tributes to Becker’s craftsmanship and style, from famous peers and forgotten students, with which Brown lards his text, seem to add up to a wholesale indictment of the profession. Not only did eminent fellow-historians laud Becker to the skies, but they adopted and expanded his class-conflict thesis of the Révolution. The thesis found powerful allies in Beard and the senior Schlesinger, entered the popular textbooks of Muzzey and Hockett, and persisted among later colonial historians such as Jensen, John C. Miller, and Bridenbaugh. Only at long last, Brown concludes, have the consensus historians laid it to rest and acknowledged the democratic character of Revolutionary America. But they have not yet, he feels, recognized the hypocrisy in most of Becker’s work.

Two books published in 1965 grappled with the question of the central theme in American history as conceived by historians. In Conflict or Consensus in American History, editors Allen F. Davis and Harold D. Woodman grouped selections from major historical writers around the pivotal topics of the Revolution, the Constitution, Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democracy, the Civil War and so on up to the New Deal and the American Character, to show how sharply historians disagreed on whether Americans were a united or divided nation. Students must have been thoroughly confused after reading Clinton Rossiter on general agreement and Merrill Jensen on class conflict among Revolutionary Americans; Charles Beard on deep-rooted divisions and Robert Brown on middle-class democracy among the Constitution makers; Parrington on the JeffersonianHamiltonian schism, Morton Borden on Jefferson as compromiser; Schlesinger junior on Jacksonians versus the business community and Bray Hammond lumping Jacksonians and businessmen together as expectant capitalists; Beard seeing in the Civil War a second American Revolution and Boorstin viewing it in terms of continuities; David Potter regarding Americans as molded into one people by abundance and Michael Harrington finding them riven between the rich and the poor, the “other America.” Whatever the final verdict of historians may be, one thing is sure: “conflict” and “consensus” have become clichés in the profession.

One ingenious historian did contrive a synthesis that meshed the most illustrious American historians into the fabric of American history itself. David W. Noble gave his Historians Against History the subtitle “The Frontier Thesis and the National Covenant in American Historical Writing since 1830,” and he accomplished the tour de force of bringing Bancroft, Turner, the earlier and the later Becker and Beard, whom he treated as separate entities, Parrington, and Boorstin into one pattern. Noble used for his binding principle the Puritan idea of the covenant between God and his saints in New England, secularized in the eighteenth century by Jefferson and the founding fathers in the social compact entered into by free men to safeguard their natural rights. Each historian, in Noble’s analysis, saw the American covenant fulfilled or threatened by the play of historical forces. To Bancroft the covenant was realized in the bounty of the American land; to Turner it was clouded by the passing of the frontier. Beard at first believed it was renewed by the promise of industrial progress, and later felt it had been betrayed by eastern plutocrat-interventionists championed by Franklin Roosevelt. Becker first contended for the free action of Americans to reassert the covenant with nature in behalf of progress, but later abandoned the isolationist idea of the covenant in favor of traditions and values linking America to European civilization. Parrington viewed the covenant in terms of an eighteenth century Jeffersonian America toppling before the onrush of technology; and Boorstin reaffirmed the covenant as a natural growth from the American wilderness into a satisfying urban-industrial culture. The issue, in Noble’s perception, was not conflict or consensus but the covenant with nature as the basic structure of American society, whose failure or success involved historians as much as it did the covenanting community of Americans.

The domain of American historiography has even enticed an historian of the European Enlightenment, Peter Gay, who dealt with William Bradford, Cotton Mather, and Jonathan Edwards in a brief but elegant volume, A Loss of Mastery, Puritan Historians in Colonial America (1966). Gay promises a sequel devoted to other colonial historians. His title conveys his theme; the Puritans failed to break out of the mythical-theological cast of their historywriting and steadily went downhill, as historians and as a sainted commonwealth. To Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation Gay awarded his highest marks, for its noble detachment and felicitous style, although the History and the colony alike petered out. Mather’s Magnolia Christi Americana is an apologetic family and tribal history that emphasizes consensus at the expense of unpleasant conflicts, such as John Cotton’s flirtation with the antinomians and the Puritan extinction of certain trespassing Quakers, episodes hastily glossed over by Mather. As for Edwards, “An American Tragedy” as Gay captions him, his posthumously published History of the Work of Redemption reveals how static and oldfashioned were his world־view and his conception of history. “His mind was the opposite of reactionary or fundamentalist,” Gay writes. “Yet his history was both.”¹⁰ Venerating history, the few Puritan chroniclers never developed it as art or science.

Three recent history-probing enterprises involve a galaxy of Establishment historians. In The Craft of American History, published in two paperback volumes by Harper Torchbooks in 1966, A. S. Eisenstadt reprinted thirty-three articles from historical and other periodicals dealing with general questions of methods and values, themes and problems in the writing of American history. Some pieces had already won their own niche in the historical record, such as Higham’s baptism and critique of the “consensus” school in Commentary; the spirited exchange between Allan Nevins and Matthew Josephson in the Saturday Review over whether American history of the Gilded Age should be rewritten with greater sympathy for the Robber Barons (Nevins “yes,” Josephson “no”); and Schlesinger junior’s eloquent mea culpa in Foreign Affairs on recognizing the untidiness of actual history as compared with the symmetry of written history, after having watched history-in-the-making at a president’s elbow. Familiar names are invoked in The Craft: Billington sees much residual good in Turner in spite of revisionism; Hofstadter in a 1950 article is sympathetic to Beard; and in an historical survey of American history Edward N. Saveth places Turner and Beard in perspective. Other articles consider the relation of American history to the social sciences, to biography, to American Studies. The revisionists have their say: Bailyn assails the myth of the American Enlightenment and Vandiver of the Confederacy.

A second collaborative work carries the punning title Pastmasters, Some Essays on American Historians. In this volume, edited in 1969 by Marcus Cunliffe of the University of Sussex and Robin Winks of Yale, thirteen experts in American history interpret eight of their contemporaries and five of their predecessors. As a gesture of Anglo-American comity, and a recognition of the rising interest in England in American history and American studies, English coeditor Cunliffe, himself a contributor, enlists four of his countrymen to render appraisals. Another fillip is provided by the dual appearance of two historians as subjects and authors: Arthur Schlesinger junior writes on Hofstadter and is written on by Cunliffe; David M. Potter lauds C. Vann Woodward and is eulogized by Sir Denis Brogan. The editors take pains to explain their selection of Clio’s favorites, conceding that Becker and the senior Schlesinger would have made it in a second volume, and allowing that the New Left historians are not quite ready for canonization. They disclaim any intent to bring forth a mutually congratulatory Festschrift, on the order of Stubbs buttering Freeman and Freeman buttering Stubbs from alternate tubs, but the book has some of that flavor. The only unrelievedly negative judgments fall upon the battered trio of Progressives, Turner, Beard, and Parrington, but their flaying merely contributes to the sense of harmony and consensus among the living Establishment historians. As for the other two deceased pastmasters, Parkman and Henry Adams, they represent brilliant anomalies outside the profession proper, and their critics, William R. Taylor and J. C. Levenson, feel no need to discredit them. Contributors are established stars or rising young professionals.

What the professionals agree upon, as they examine each other and belabor the Progressives, is the social-scientific basis of modern historical method. Howard Lamar on Turner, Forrest McDonald on Beard, and Ralph Henry Gabriel on Parrington all point to the faulty use of sources and the drawing of large, false generalizations by these masters with feet of clay. Turner unwittingly portrayed American folk myths; Beard played the role of devil’s advocate in the classroom to ignite his students and carried this role over into his writing; Parrington allowed his emotional sympathies for Jeffersonian liberalism to mar his esthetic and intellectual judgments. The most caustic critic, McDonald, charges Beard with “deliberately stacking the cards” and purposely misstating facts to prove his point about the economic self-interests of the supporters of the Constitution.¹¹ He carried over this technique of falsification, McDonald alleges, into his attack on Franklin D. Roosevelt for maneuvering the United States into World War II, under the axiom that a worthy social end justified manipulating history.

The essays on contemporary historians in Pastmasters all contain balanced judgments and they all distribute bouquets. Handlin is “one of the foremost historians of the common man”¹²; Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition was written “with brilliant freshness and economy”¹³; Potter’s examination of the American character is “far more subtle and far more intelligent than Turner’s famous frontier theory, making Potter one of the truly great interpreters of American history”¹⁴; “The Age of Roosevelt demonstrated Schlesinger’s exceptional talent for marshaling the raw stuff of history like an impresario directing a cast of thousands”¹⁵; C. Vann Wodward is “a scholar of extraordinary maturity, humane understanding, breadth of mind, and capacity to combine tolerance with idealism”¹⁶; the work of Daniel J. Boorstin “has grown to be one of the most ambitious and persuasive of all attempts to impose on American history the vision of a unified interpretation”¹⁷; Samuel Flagg Bemis “has no equal among American diplomatic historians”¹⁸; the “brilliant” work of Perry Miller is characterized by “extraordinary sensitivity.”¹⁹ These phrases of praise should not obscure passages of sinewy criticism; only H. C. Allen’s tribute to Bemis is obsequious, while in most of the essays revisionism is heaped upon earlier revisionism, extracted from the so-called monographic explosion, until one despairs of any finalities in American history. For instance, Oscar Handlin’s block generalizations about the trauma of immigrant experience in America are riven by Rudolph J. Vecoli’s case studies of successful Italian settlements in Chicago, but Vecoli in turn is challenged by Humbert S. Nelli with contrary evidence.²⁰

Precedents exist for essays by historians on other historians, but John A. Garraty’s Interpreting American History, Conversations with Historians (1970) is sui generis. Professor Garraty of Columbia University, my former colleague at Michigan State University, interrogates twenty-nine accomplished historians (although two are professors of English, one is an economist and one a sociologist) with a tape recorder, in the presence only of his charming wife Gail, who draws a sketch of each historian that adorns the volume. The edited tapes provide the content of the meaty seven hundred page book. This method follows the new technique of oral history, and it seems fitting that American historians should employ it upon themselves. Some of the pastmasters reappear here: Schlesinger junior, Hofstadter, Potter, C. Vann Woodward, with other wellknown names, such as Henry Steele Commager, T. Harry Williams, Ray Allen Billington, David Donald, well fixed in the firmament, and ascendant luminaries like Bernard Bailyn. As Garraty states in his Introduction, his panel represents the Establishment of consensus historians, but he does query his interviewees on the contributions to their fields of the New Left radical historians. He has organized the volume by chronological topics, broadly conceived, so that the reader can follow generally the familiar narrative thread of events and issues, but this is no textbook, rather it is everything that a textbook is not: vivid, alive, questing, opinionated; some of the conversations, such as Commager’s on American nationalism and Potter’s on interpretations of American history, transcend neat boundaries of time. There is a good deal of shoptalk about the profession, and Garraty is at pains to elicit views on sensitive and controversial points of scholarship. For instance, in talking with Bailyn on the American Revolution, he inserts questions on the validity of Robert Brown’s thesis that middle-class democracy existed in revolutionary Massachusetts, rather than the class society postulated by Beard. Brown’s attack on Beard has never sat too well with many of his colleagues, even with those who have discarded Beard, as being somehow an attack on the credibility of the profession; Hofstadter, Schlesinger, Forrest McDonald consider his tone intemperate. (Brown himself tells of his difficulty in obtaining a publisher for his Charles Beard and the Constitution; the presses to whom he submitted the manuscript kept asking him, “If what you say is true, why hasn’t it been published before?” He finally resorted to publishing his critique of Becker himself.) Bailyn gives a rather negative judgment on Brown, saying that his point of view is anachronistic and his method marred by “important technical errors,” but pressed by Garraty, he grudgingly concedes that Brown did contribute “to some degree” to disproving the old Beardian theory of class conflict.²¹

The titles so far discussed, while they may not all reveal a sympathy with the consensus viewpoint, do betray an inner consensus. They are written by American professional historians with a strong sense of the prestige of their guild. Their ritualistic slaying and regeneration of Turner, Beard, and Parrington gives them a spirit of community and an historical anchorage. Their emphases may shift from conflict to consensus, from objectivity to relativism to moral judgment, but they never question the classic divisions of the coloniai period, the Revolution, the westward movement, the Civil War, industrialism, and America as a world power, as the main preoccupations for American historians, and as the areas to cultivate to gain fame within the fraternity.

Three recent works do however challenge the fellowship of the guild. In Historians’ Fallacies (1970), David Hackett Fischer employs an unprecedented technique to demolish the entire historical profession. Instead of addressing himself exclusively to one historian and checking his sources and interpretations with infinite labor, as does Robert Brown with Becker, Fischer administers the coup de grâce to a host of chroniclers in a few lightning strokes by simply finding them guilty of bias. Thus Schlesinger junior is guilty of the fallacies of both presentism and pragmatism, in selecting facts from the past that bear on the present, and in associating them with his cause of New Deal liberalism. Handlin commits the fallacy of argument ad nauseam by rewriting the same book over and over, making immigration the central factor in American history, even to converting Negroes into Jews. C. Vann Woodward sins with the telescopic fallacy in foreshortening the story of The Strange Career of Jim Crow to make it appear that racial segregation was a late development in the South. He and Potter are both charged with pro hoc, propter hoc, putting the effect before the cause, in their theses of America as a land of security and a land of abundance; they simply overlooked the first two centuries of American history, Fischer declares, when people were neither secure nor rich. Hofstadter’s greatly admired The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It sins with the fallacy of the lonely fact, by which vast generalizations about major American statesmen are built upon single facts, while his highly praised The Paranoid Style in American Politics falls afoul of the apathetic fallacy, in failing to show the same sympathy for conservatives as for liberals. Perry Miller’s studies of Puritanism are marred by the fallacy of idealism that leads to neglect of individual thinkers, economic and social processes, and behavior patterns; to over-reliance on intuitive judgment; and to neglect of historical setting. Morison’s stress on telling a beautiful story shores up the aesthetic fallacy. And so it goes: every living and a number of dead historians of consequence are skewered sooner or later on one or more historical fallacies. To this bomb the guild has responded with anguish and ridicule. The editor of the Journal of American History offered me the paperback edition of Historians’ Fallacies, just to get it out of his office. At the December, 1970, meeting of the American Historical Association in Boston, Fischer served as commentator on Handlin’s lament, “History: A Discipline in Crisis,” before a packed audience in the grand ballroom of the Sheraton Hotel. Bewailing the demise of sound historical writing, Handlin remarked in passing on the stupidities in Fischer’s new publication, which berated Handlin for slanting history and yet could not get the titles of his books straight. In reply Fischer apologized for his inaccuracy but pointed out that both of the factual statements Handlin made in his long paper were incorrect: one an inversion of a demographic table, the other a misattribution to John Adams of the oft-quoted statement that the American people on the eve of the Revolution were divided into one-third patriots, one-third loyalists, and one-third neutralists. Fischer then went on to reiterate his accusation that in all his books, and in his present paper as well, Handlin romanticized a golden past that never existed.

The rumblings of the New Left rose to full cry in a volume of essays edited in 1967 by Barton J. Bernstein, Toward a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History. Such prominent radical historians as Staughton Lynd, Eugene Genovese, and Christopher Lasch appeared among the eleven contributors, all of whom subscribed to the historiographical revolution that rejects elite history and calls for a history “from the bottom up” rather than through the eyes of “a few at the top,” phrases that Bernstein in his introduction quotes approvingly from the initial essay on the American Revolution by Jesse Lemisch. Turning their guns on consensus, the radicals return to conflict, to Beard and Marx, but construe conflict in ideological terms of the power structure versus the dispossessed and inarticulate. From the Revolution through Jacksonian democracy, the slave South, the Gilded Age up to the New Deal and postwar, the essayists seek to redress the balance of elitist emphasis and interpretation. In his chapter “Beyond Beard” Lynd frankly states that his radical revisionism is spurred by the current civil rights movement, prompting him to take a fresh look at slavery in Revolutionary times, and by the “worldwide colonial independence movement,” which suggested a new model for conceptualizing the Revolution and its relation to the Civil War.”²² In his review of Jacksonianism Michael Lebowitz draws a line between declining farmers and unskilled workers on the one hand and rising merchants and manufacturers on the other. Looking at the urban population of the late nineteenth century, Stephan Thernstrom gives attention to the bottom layer of society, which he finds fixed in status but fluid in membership.²³ Bernstein belabors Franklin D. Roosevelt and his liberal-historian supporters for preserving American capitalism at the expense of the forgotten man, and tars Truman with the same brush for failure to execute a liberal program; FDR could have nationalized the banking system, and Truman should not have prepared the way for Joseph McCarthy by pushing anticommunism. The message of the New Left chroniclers is clear enough; they see in liberalism and the liberal consensus historians a sell-out to and whitewash of the power elite, and they seek to bring the poor, the enslaved, and the exploited into mainstream American history.

In contrast to these spokesmen for the downtrodden who teach at excellent universities, win fellowships and grants, and publish in the professional journals and with university presses, our last revisionist talks with the fresh voice of militancy from far outside academe. Eschewing the soporific language of pedantry and the barrage of documentation that stamp the radicals as full-fledged members of the guild whose premises they oppose, Dick Gregory tells it like it is, or like he thinks it is, in No More Lies, The Myth and the Reality of American History (1970), a book dedicated to Women’s Liberation and American Indians. His aim is to show that the standard treatises and textbooks on American history add up to a giant swindle against the red man and the black, and their surrogates, the Irish or Italian immigrant as Indian and today’s college student as nigger. Dividing his book into twelve myths—of the Puritan Pilgrim, the Founding Fathers, Black Content, Free Enterprise, and so on—he subjects each to scorn as a travesty on the realities of racism, brutality, and double-dealing. Wherever possible he introduces little-known black and Indian heroes omitted from Whitey’s version of the American story. Thus Billy the Kid has become the legendary bad man of the West, but Cherokee Bill, part Indian, part Negro, and part white, was “just as tough and twice as vicious.”²⁴ Gregory ends with a comparison between the fall of Rome and the sickness of America.

How can one summarize this body of recent publications about the writing of American history? It shows a deep intensity of con־ cern on the part of many historians about their craft. It shows an Oedipal obsession with Turner, Beard, Becker, and Parrington, who serve as continual points of departure and return. (Why is Nevins so neglected? Does no one want to read his hundred books?) It shows a haunting uneasiness about the achievement of American history, in the rejection of the earlier masters, in the swings from conflict to consensus to complexity, in the dissent of the radical historians, and in a bracing for blasts from the counter־ culture, signaled in the radical caucuses at the historical association meetings and delivered in the rhetoric of Dick Gregory’s diatribe.

One cause of the uneasiness, I believe, is that American historians are trapped within an elitist concept of history and do not see how to break out of the circle. Some have said as much in one or another of the volumes under discussion. Responding to Garraty’s question about the contribution of the New Left historians to coloniai history, Jack P. Greene conceded that they were on the right track in seeking to look at Revolutionary society from below. “We have spent so much time in the last twenty years looking at early American history from the point of view of the elite, the dominant groups, that we have tended to ignore other elements in society.”²⁵ The editor of The Craft of American History, Eisenstadt, commented on the traditional character of American history writing with its emphasis on a narrative of well-known events and of great men, usually the major American presidents, and its preoccupation with political history, as in Nevins’ ten volume Ordeal of the Union and Schlesinger junior’s The Age of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Historians of today are also drawn, he added, to biographies of the famous and to editions of the collected papers of the founding fathers.²⁶ In a similar expression of dissatisfaction with “presidential history,” Samuel Hays recommended a shift “from top-level affairs to grass-roots happenings.”²⁷ The radical historians have called for “a revolution in historiographical attitudes, a rejection of elite history” based on generalizations about entire societies from the examination of a small minority at the top; and they criticize pretended revisionists who merely swap heroes of politics for heroes of business.²⁸

But when it comes to rewriting American history directed at the “powerless, the inarticulate, the poor,” the historians flounder. How do they get at the records of those who leave no record? Garraty pointedly asked two historians of the Negro, C. Vann Woodward and Stanley Elkins, how they could unearth sources for blacks, and in discussing historiography with Potter he queried, “Is it possible to write a history of the poor? Is it possible to write the history of the slaves’ discontent? Do the necessary records exist, or is the history of the inarticulate masses of the past lost simply because of their inarticulateness?”²⁹ None had a very good answer. Potter alluded to what medieval historians were able to do with fragmentary evidence. C. Vann Woodward believed it was possible “to write scrupulously and objectively about Negroes who took part in the great themes of American history: colonization, expansion, independence, wars, immigration, urbanization,” but he did not suggest how.³⁰ Elkins acknowledged that some black historians like Vincent Harding referred to such potential sources as “folklore, songs, religious traditions,” and admitted how much luckier was an historian of slavery than an ancient historian of Egyptian peasants, but still doubted that the slave would ever come to life as fully as the immigrant.³¹ Among the New Left historians, Thernstrom rued how difficult it was to get any information about the bottom of American urban society in the nineteenth century, for “dead men tell no tales and fill out no questionnaires.”³² Allan Nevins bemoaned that the “most difficult part of history to obtain is the record of how plain men and women lived, and how they were affected by the economic, social, and cultural changes of their times; the most fascinating part of history is this same record.”³³ After pleading for grass-roots history, Hays could only turn to precinct voting patterns in Iowa to exemplify it, on the curious grounds that how people voted “is about as close to the grass-roots as one can get.”³⁴

Let me state my own view of the matter. Historians writing elite history employ the national framework for their narratives, and the dissenters who desire a redress toward grass-roots, bottom-layer history still operate with nationalist boundaries. C. Vann Woodward followed just this thinking when he said that the Negro could be brought within the great themes of American history. But this is not the history of the Negro, who has his own themes.³⁵ Nor is it the history of the white man. It is nobody’s history, but an artificial construct based on the structure of the federal government. It does not relate to our bored students, it does not relate to the average citizen, who carries none of this history with him. It is historians’ history, and even they are getting dissatisfied with it. Hays declared that the “reason that much of history is formal and unsatisfying is because the units of history we write and talk and teach about do not consist of types of human experience, thought, and behavior.” The history books are preoccupied with “nominating conventions, campaigns, cabinet meetings, the administration’s legislative program and its treatment by Congress.”³⁶ How little does this heavy emphasis on politics reflect the quality of American experiences or the daily concerns of most Americans!

History of the elite I contrast with history of the folk. Folk I use in the sense of the German Volk and the Russian narod, meaning a people united with common traditions. In this sense an Indian tribe is a folk, with its own tribal history. Joseph Mathews has described this kind of “father-to-son history” as he heard it when he returned to his people, the Osages, after a ten-year interval:

Folk history of this sort is not formalized among nontribal groups in American society, but it has its equivalent in the remembered experiences of the regional, occupational, and ethnic groups into which we all fall. This folk history is an extension of our personal history, and it belongs to us as elite history never can. The sources of folk history are both oral traditions and personal documents.

Oral history has now achieved its own professional association and its own practitioners and caretakers among historians, archivists, and curators. But oral history simply copies the formulas of elite documentary history. The big shots are interviewed. Allan Nevins draws upon oral history tapes for his biography of Henry Ford, T. Harry Williams for his biography of Huey Long. Accordingly I make a distinction between oral history, the new tool of the nationally oriented historian, and oral traditional history, a new tool for the folklorist with historical training or the grass-roots historian with folklore training. Two good examples of oral traditional history are doctoral dissertations in folklore I directed at Indiana University, a study by Gladys Fry of the night riders who terrorized slaves, and a history by Lynwood Montell of a now vanished Negro community in southern Kentucky, which he has published as The Saga of Coe Ridge.³⁸ Both Fry and Montell obtained their primary materials from taped interviews with descendants of slaves and, in Montell’s case, also from white farmers and farmwives. Oral historical traditions of this sort differ from oral history in deriving from the folk rather than from the elite, and in carrying information from past generations. Folklore elements will enter such traditions, but the folklorist can recognize them, as Montell does in an appended table of motifs, and separate the kernels of history, which he checks against written and printed sources. In the United States with its relatively short history, oral traditions can span much of the distance; with later arrivals, like the immigrants, or newer settlements, as in the trans-Mississippi West, they can cover all.

Folk history is not however simply a matter of oral traditions. By history of the folk I have in mind the history of the structures in which individuals play active roles, of what psychologists call “vital circuits.” This way of looking at history does not begin with the past nor with the top, but with the present and with the individual. It is the history that belongs to each one of us. This is not state and local history, an alternative to national history which simply reduces the governmental unit but does not necessarily involve the individual any more deeply. What are these structures that involve the individual? Well, schools and colleges involve most of us. The great sports—football, baseball, basketball—absorb large sectors of the American public. Ethnic, racial, regional affiliations engender tribal loyalties, but within small groupings: not the Italians, but the Apulians; not the blacks, but blacks from the Mississippi Delta; not the Kentuckians, but the residents in the creek bottoms of Pine Mountain. The factory, the shop, the neighborhood, the family, the office, all have their histories, and a representative history of one would do service for its innumerable counterparts. But the nationalist historians never write on such themes. Arthur Schlesinger senior did make a plea for the common man as an entity in American history, but his common man is faceless, a statistic in the national count of dietary habits and clothing styles. The most persuasive tract for the humanizing of the presidential synthesis that passes for American history was written by Theodore Biegen in Grass Roots History in 1947, a book unmentioned in any of the historiographical works I have cited. In these works I find only one illustration of folk history, in an essay by Douglas E. Leach on “Early Town Records of New England as Historical Sources,” reprinted in The Craft of American History from The American Archivist. Leach drove to the small towns of New England in quest of the handwritten township records kept by the town and city clerks to preserve vital statistics and local information, and he came up with some nuggets about the execution of Indians, regulations for the sweeping of thatched chimneys and the fencing of cornfields, and a special permit given certain farmers of Rowley for making a wolf pen. There are other sources in abundance, oral and printed, that will lead the historian to the folk of an earlier day.

One national historian did once consider the folk. In a celebrated essay, “Everyman His Own Historian,” his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1931, Carl Becker admonished his colleagues to keep in mind the history that Mr. Average Person carried with him and made use of in his daily life. “History is the memory of things said and done,” and so “every normal person, Mr. Everyman, knows some history.” Becker gave a homely illustration of a man who forgot which company had delivered his coal, checked the invoices, and remembered how he had switched from one company to another. Here was a personal use of history. “What then of us, historians by profession? “ Becker asked. “What have we to do with Mr. Everyman, or he with us? More, I venture to believe, than we are apt to think. For each of us is Mr. Everyman too.” The academic historian using documents belongs to the “ancient and honorable company ... of bards and storytellers and minstrels” that maintained the myths of old. With more self-conscious method, he performs the same function as does Mr. Everyman when he breeds “legends out of remembered episodes and oral tradition.”³⁹

This is a splendid support for my thesis, save in one respect, the stress that Becker places on the written source in Mr. Everyman’s need to check his memory against the coal company’s ledger. An historian of the folk will employ documentary sources where possible to complement the oral tradition, as does Montell in The Saga of Coe Ridge, but he recognizes that traditions contain their own veracity, as reflectors of the ideas of their transmitters, and that documents are filled with imperfections, and often not available. Contemporary historians complain of the paucity of adequate records in these days of instant communication.

If historians have shown little awareness of the folk side of American history, one radical historian has discovered the American Folklore Society. Shortly before the 1970 meeting of the American Historical Association in Boston, I received a sizable manuscript from John A. Williams of the Notre Dame history department entitled “The Establishment and the Tape Recorder: Radicalism and Professionalism in Folklore Studies, 1933-68.” Professor Williams explained that he had become interested in the folklore approach while doing research on miners in southern Appalachia, and he courteously invited me to reply to his paper, if I wished, which he was delivering on a panel of radical historians at the AHA. After reading his paper I decided to go and I did reply.

This paper, buttressed with many footnotes, traced the organization of folklore as a corporate discipline in the United States over the past four decades. In the ’30’s and ’40’s leading practitioners of folklore like Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger were nonacademic and leftwing. In the ’50’s and ’60’s the professors took over folklore and made it a tool of the Establishment, by toadying to the foundations and the federal government in order to obtain grants and subsidies. Williams’ chief document for this charge was a letter I had written to Senator Wayne Morse in 1961, and published in the Journal of American Folklore, protesting the dropping of folklore from the National Defense Education Act by Senator Morse’s Committee on Labor and Public Welfare. I made the point that the Soviet Union and other communist countries used folklore as a technique for propagandizing socialist ideology. Williams stated that Dorson, having thus allied himself with the Establishment, was rewarded with a renewal of the grant. In Williams’ analysis, the American Folklore Society sought in the ’50’s and ’60’s to achieve prestige and status through conformism to the power structure. Thus Dorson as president of the Society proposed an oral history of the Society’s elder statesmen, just as elitist historians interviewed each other in the name of oral history. Drawing a further analogy between the AHA and the AFS, Williams declared, and produced incomplete statistics to support his contention, that the number of women officers in the Society had declined over the past quarter of a century. When introducing the radical panel at the AHA, Staughton Lynd noted the paucity of women members in evidence at the American Historical Association meeting, and Williams was following this theme of the radicals that the big professional organizations were anti-feminist with their other sins.

In reply I said that Professor Williams had made a slight error of fact in his statement that the NDEA grants to folklore were renewed. He left out the word not. While Williams cited a source for the grant renewal, he did not realize that the grants were offered in 1960 and renewed for 1961, but that the barrage of criticism against the grants led by the Wall Street Journal came after the renewal, and led to the exclusion of folklore from the National Defense Education Act Amendment of 1961. It was this exclusion that I protested in my letter to Senator Morse, to no avail. The fallacy in the oral history illustration is that I in my fieldwork and writings, never mentioned by Williams, have always espoused the history of the folk, not the elite, while to make an interrogation of American folklorists an elitist enterprise evokes laughter bordering on tears; no learned society has been more battered and buffeted, from the Wall Street Journal, Senator Goldwater, and Congressman Gross on the right, and now the radicals on the left, and selfstyled experts from other fields in the middle, than the poor American Folklore Society.

Far from inhibiting the careers of women, the American Folklore Society and the academic discipline of folklore have advanced them more successfully than most fields. Two of the last six editors of the Journal have been women, Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin and Katharine Luomala; one of the last three delegates from the American Folklore Society to the American Council of Learned Societies was a woman, Thelma James; the newly elected first vice-president of the Society is a woman, Linda Dégh, who won over Albert Lord of Harvard. The issue is actually a false one, since women have done conspicuously well in folklore, earning doctorates, getting faculty positions, publishing, and actively participating in the national society. There is no parallel whatsoever between the status of women in history and in folklore. At Indiana University in 1970-71 we had more women teaching associates than men. In fact the charge from the complete outsider John Williams is the first complaint I have ever heard about anti-feminism in folklore.

What is disheartening in Williams’ paper is the obvious way he has sought to reinforce his own prejudices in attempting to build his case against the academic folklorists, to the neglect of their techniques and accomplishments in reaching the folk. A member of the radical panel at the AHA, Will Watson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, confessed in his paper on the anarchist background of the Spanish Civil War his difficulty in making contacts with Spanish radicals, because of the difference in culture, language, customs. In my response I mentioned my colleague in folklore, Jerome Mintz, then in the field in Benalup de Sidonia in southern Spain, where he had established excellent rapport with old-line anarchists. The grass-roots history of Lynwood Montell which Williams admired was done as a doctoral dissertation under my direction. Williams and his fellow radical-historians do not fathom the methods and concepts of the folklorist, from which they could benefit in their desire to penetrate to the anonymous masses. Still, if they will skew all their data to support a radical vision of a repressive America, they can of course manipulate oral sources just as Williams has twisted documents. If an historian in our time can in pursuing his bias obtain so perverted a view of reality, what will he do with a past period? Yet Williams scrupulously documented every statement he made. He quoted from my own reports as president and editor of the Society, and from files in the Folklore section of the Library of Congress. But my reports were public statements that by their nature reflected nothing of the inner turmoils of the discipline, and the files he found in Washington had little bearing on the Society’s affairs. The central issue in the Society in the late fifties and early sixties was professionalism versus amateurism, and the Society polarized between Indiana University representing the academic point of view and the University of Pennsylvania which, as the seat of the Secretary-Treasurer’s office, took a lenient view toward standards of membership. When Williams declares that MacEdward Leach of Pennsylvania and Stith Thompson and Dorson of Indiana led a united front of the Society in their bid for status, he is unaware that Leach and Dorson were at loggerheads, if not swords’ points within the Society, and that Thompson had retired.

Why this interest of radical historians in folklorists? The two coteries share a common point of departure; they are concerned with the anonymous, inarticulate millions in American life. The New Left has discovered the technique of the tape-recorded interview with the man in the street; at the radical panel in Boston, Staughton Lynd played a tape of a factory worker recalling an episode of police brutality, and young men in the audience, apparently engaged with him in a history of the CIO in the 1930’s, gave reports on problems of the oral interview, such as how to record changes in ideology of the speaker occurring during his lifetime. Interviewing the folk, using the tape recorder, the New Left historians would naturally sooner or later cross the path of the folklorists, and hope to find them allies. Speaking for myself, and I think for a good number of my colleagues in folklore, I would say that the folklorist does not link his sympathy with the folk to any ideology—radical, liberal, or conservative, communist or capitalist. The history of the folk I endorse does stand opposed to history of the elite, but not in terms of a class opposition, rather in terms of personal social structures versus an impersonal national structure.

What sources can the historian of the folk tap? There is first of all the vast reservoir of oral reminiscences, family sagas, and gossipy personal and local history that living Americans possess. In Division Street America (1967), Studs Terkel, who interviews all kinds of persons on his Chicago radio and television shows, let a number of uncelebrated Chicagoans from one neighborhood talk into his tape recorder, and the transcripts lay open the minds of a cross-section of the folk. While their revelations are personal, often the attitudes, prejudices, fantasies, and world-view they express are traditional, inherited from an earlier generation. Terkel repeated this technique in Hard Times, an Oral History of the Great Depression (1970), save that he included celebrities among his reminiscers, and gave his interviews a specific historical slant. Terkel’s books reached the bestseller lists, but only specialists will encounter the two privately printed oversize volumes prepared by Harry M. Hyatt, a retired Episcopal clergyman, from his hundreds of tapes recorded over the last thirty years from American Negroes and issued under the title Hoodoo, Witchcraft, Conjuration, Rootwork (1970). This work is indispensable for an understanding of the Negro and the slave mind in America. The first volume contains statements about supernatural beliefs current in the Negro population, and the second consists entirely of interviews with hoodoo doctors, the practitioners of magic. When the black historian Sterling Stuckey was asked what was the first thing he would do if he assumed the directorship of an Afro-American Studies program at Indiana University, he replied, “Teach the students about folklore.” These publications of Terkel and Hyatt cover a spectrum of verbal narration from statements of personal experience and outlook to discussions of folk belief, and the whole spectrum is useful to the historian of the folk.

Another large body of source material on which he can draw is the printed counterpart of these oral forms, in personal narratives, memoirs, diaries, travel accounts, overland journals, immigrant letters, and the like. In constructing my anthologies of the seventeenth century and the Revolutionary War, America Begins and America Rebels, I drew entirely from such sources to convey a picture of the dramas of colonization and the Revolution as seen through the eyes of participants. My Jonathan Draws the Long Bow culled newspapers, town histories, almanacs, and similar printed matter for folklore reflecting the ethos of New Englanders from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries.

An example of the kind of source available to the historian of the folk is a newspaper item that came to hand while I was writing this paper, captioned “Reb Russell Full of Baseball Lore.” It appeared in the Indianapolis Star of Sunday, September 5, 1971, and set down the recollections of eighty-two year old Albert (Reb) Russell, who in 1913 won twenty-one and lost seventeen games for the Chicago White Sox. He recalled the infamous Black Sox scandal of 1919, when players of the White Sox threw the World Series, and his own refusal to the gamblers who bribed them; stars like Shoeless Joe Jackson, who played left field barefoot because he could not find baseball shoes big enough to fit his feet, and whose paychecks Reb often signed because Joe was illiterate; and Babe Ruth, who pitched his first game for the Boston Red Sox in 1914 against Reb, losing to him 1-0, and who visited Reb several times, drinking whisky in memorable quantities; Reb’s sudden release by the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1922 after he spiked a fan who was heckling him; and his later years in the minors. Here is an ephemeral printed source once removed from an oral transcript, giving the personal history of a veteran athlete now forgotten, whose memories would enrich a history of the national pastime.

To his enduring credit, one academic historian, Harold Seymour, has published with the Oxford University Press two volumes of a projected trilogy on the history of baseball written from the “perspective of American history.” Seymour recognizes that “Baseball, like some other aspects of our popular culture, has been badly served by history.” He conceived the first scholarly account of baseball as a doctoral dissertation at Cornell, and in it he deals not with star players and winning teams but with the “workings of the baseball business and its deeper significance as an American institution.”⁴⁰

For the past two years I have experimented with a seminar at Indiana University called “The Folk in American History,” in the effort to apply some of the ideas discussed here. The students have chosen topics keyed to the history of a definable group: the Irish in Indianapolis, coal miners in Kentucky, the Ottawa and Ojibwa Indians, Mexicans in the Midwest, American settlers in Hawaii, the people of Shelby County, Indiana. One undergraduate developed a paper on the youth culture in recent American history, and accompanied it with a tape of selections from rock music singers, explaining the double entendres in the lyrics obvious to members of the drug culture but unsuspected by older listeners. Where possible the students interviewed and tape-recorded folk informants, and they all used personal, grass-roots sources. In the end none complained of paucity of materials, rather the reverse.

In one session of the seminar I used myself as a model for the personal structures with which we are all associated. The structures whose histories would be meaningful to me are Exeter, the préparatory school I attended for four years; Harvard, where I took three degrees; Michigan State and Indiana Universities, where I have taught for twelve and fourteen years respectively; the American Folklore Society; and the game of tennis. This list is heavily weighted to educational institutions, but all Americans go to school and many go on to college and universities. Exeter and Harvard are elite schools, but the students who attend them are a folk, in my sense, largely unrepresented in the elitist histories of these and other schools and colleges written from the point of view of the presidents, the boards of trustees, overall educational policies, a few eminent faculty and alumni, and the growth of the physical plant. Such histories have nothing to do with the lives and thoughts of the students, and not too much to do with the faculty. One evening I took my seminar to hear one of the Patten lecture series being given on the history of Indiana by Distinguished Professor Thomas D. Clark. There were maybe a dozen of the thirty thousand students in the audience, along with a somewhat larger number of administrative officials, including one ex-president, who enjoyed it hugely. The lecture was on the presidency of William Lowe Bryan. There was no reason for students to be there, because their college lives shared nothing with the career of President Bryan beyond residence in Bloomington. After the lecture I took the seminar to the Commons for coffee and opened up the subject of college traditions, and for two hours we exchanged anecdotes of our college years with mounting excitement. A vast subterranean lore permeates the high school and college, samples of which are now represented in our Folklore Archives, and a folk history of any American college will delve into this lore.

Professor Tom Clark is an eminent historian whom I value as mentor, colleague, and friend, and he has shown considerable sympathy toward the history of the folk in such books as The Rampaging Frontier and Plows, Pills and Petticoats. But in Indiana University, Midwestern Pioneer he was obliged, by his mandate, to write a history from the top. Madison Kuhn inscribed my copy of his Michigan State, the First Hundred Years, “To one who will describe college life as it really is,” a compliment I do not expect to justify, but an indication on his own part of the bounds within which he was writing the history of Michigan State University.

Let me offer a few glimpses of the student as folk. Besides the collected folklore of school children and undergraduates, one can look for personal and autobiographical statements that yield fresh viewpoints. Here is a volume of solicited reminiscences, Exeter Remembered, edited by a longtime Exeter teacher, Henry Darcy Curwen, who used to preside at the Saturday night movies, coach crew, and instruct in English. Most of the pieces are conventionally nostalgic, but two strike home. Humorist Richard P. Bissell, 1932, who was a class ahead of me, in three deft pages titled “Evolution” sketches the changing mores and values of three generations of Exonians: the cornball atmosphere of his father’s day; the rah-rah spirit of his own time; and the disdainful air of his sons, who, when he visited them, “created an impression of bored minor State Department officials exiled to an outpost up some river in Paraguay.”⁴¹ In contrast to this wit is the impassioned “Letter to a Friend” of Sloan Wilson, ’39, author of The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, who in a breath of fresh air writes Darcy Curwen, “... I honestly hated the school, and I still remember the one year I spent there as the unhappiest year of my life. . . .”⁴² Wilson affirms his passionate interest in education, and criticizes the whole philosophy of Exeter that locks seven hundred adolescent boys in a New England town under the supervision of “morose bachelors.” The homoerotic tendencies and anxieties that he hints at were made the subject of the play “Tea and Sympathy” written by another Exonian, Robert Anderson. Wilson must be pleased to know that Exeter has finally gone coed. The Exeter I remember is an Exeter of awesome sexual brags in the “butt-rooms” where we were permitted to smoke, of caste-like social levels from the fraternity “smoothies” at the top to the “queers” and “fruits” at the bottom, and of masters who inspired fear or ridicule. As an instance of the gap between the elite and the folk, there is the episode that occurred in chapel the morning of the Exeter-Andover game when “Doc” Perry, addressing the seven hundred students in his customary bland, benign, peeringover-the-spectacles manner, wished the coach victory to reward the fruits of his labors. Seven hundred boys rocked in uncontrollable laughter, while Doc Perry wondered what had hit him. He did not know that “fruit” was the most loaded term in an Exonian’s vocabulary, a catch-all for queer, fairy, deviant, untouchable, and unspeakable. The more sophisticated boys also savored the innuendo in “labors.”

In the yet to be written folk history of American colleges, a major theme will be cheating. Sitting in a downtown restaurant in Bloomington recently, I heard a serious, pretty coed complaining to her table-mate about the extent of cheating in her classes. “If everyone cheated it wouldn’t matter,” she said, “but those who don’t are penalized.” She then told of taking a chemistry examination, in which a bright student sat in the front row while those of his fraternity brothers who had paid five dollars each took places in the formation of an inverted V behind him, so that each could copy from the one ahead. Determined to put a stop to such cheating, the instructor on another examination asked all those students having ID cards to go to one side of the room and those without them to go to the other, whereupon six students who were taking the examination for class members made a dash for the door. Such stories I casually overheard on the passing air circulate on every college campus; they grow into a folklore based on reality and fill folders in our folklore archives, and I know a sheaf of them myself.

A former professor in the history department of Michigan State University, Elmer Lyon, told me of one. During an examination he noticed a student continually opening the fob of a turnip pocket watch. Professor Lyon took a position behind the student and saw that answers were written on a paper inside the fob. He reported the student, who, being related to one of the trustees, was let off with a light reprimand. Some years later Professor Lyon happened to be in the local bank making a deposit when the auditors were inspecting the bank’s books, and he recognized one of the auditors as his cheating student.

The code of college students does not allow an honest student to inform the professor of misdeeds. In an American history survey class I was teaching, word of wrongdoing reached me indirectly. A student in the back row boasted loudly that a fraternity pledge had written his book report for the course, and that this pledge was a genius; he could read any book assigned one of the fraternity members in twenty-five minutes and dash off an A report for him to hand in. A girl near this student reported the brag to a colleague of mine (whom she would subsequently marry), the colleague told me, and I confronted the student. Seeing I had him, he did not deny the charge. “I’ve been busy this semester/’ he confided to me, “and I didn’t have time to do a book report, but I wish you could meet our fraternity pledge, Professor Dorson; he can read any book you assign in twenty-five minutes and write an A paper on it.” “Well,” I pondered, “I have been pretty busy myself and I don’t have time to read the book reports, so I turn them over to a grading assistant. But I would be happy to arrange a meeting between your writer and my reader.”

The classic cheating story in my annals involves a football player who signed up for my class in “American Folklore.” Twelve years at Michigan State had taught me how to appeal to that particular student clientele, and in the spring of 1956 my enrollment reached one hundred ninety, even including some star athletes. This one, whom I shall call Jack Armstrong, came up to me after the first class to make sure he would do satisfactorily in the course. It was crucial, he informed me, that he pass, so that he would graduate, so that he would obtain his coaching contract at Mudville High. I assured him he need have no worries provided he come to class, find his seat, laugh at my folk jests, and write a book report on my Bloodstoppers and Bearwalkers. The day came when one hundred ninety reports flowed in. All but ten were typed, and these handwritten ones I struggled with last. The one hundred eighty-ninth seemed somehow familiar, and I checked it with the one hundred and eighty-seventh, to find both cited the same page references and ended with the same glowing tribute: “I thoroughly enjoyed your book, Professor Dorson, and will recommend it to all my friends.”

At the next class meeting Jack Armstrong tarried after the bell, as was his wont, to check on his progress. “You copied your book report, didn’t you,” I said. “You mean from Merke?” he replied. I nodded. He explained that he could not afford to buy the book, but would get hold of one and write me another paper. “Too late,” I said. “What will that do to the grade?” he queried. “F,” I answered. Strenuously he pleaded his graduation, his coaching contract with Mudville High. I remained adamant, and he strode off in the direction of the fieldhouse.

When I reached home the telephone was ringing, and I lifted the receiver to hear a deep voice say, “This is Biggie Munn.” Clarence Biggers Munn had been brought to Michigan State by President John Hannah to develop a winning football team; Time magazine quoted President Hannah in 1956 as saying that when he determined to make Michigan State a first-rate university, the first thing he did was to get a coach to go out and find the eleven toughest gorillas he could locate to field a winning football team. Biggie did the job successfully, leading Michigan State to a Big Ten title and a Rose Bowl championship and getting elected Coach of the Year. He himself wrote a book about his winning ways called Multiple Offense.

“Are you calling about Jack Armstrong?” I asked. “Yes, he’s right here in my office. What’s this about his studying with other students? I always studied with other students,” said Biggie.

“No, it wasn’t that. He copied his paper from another student, and admitted it.”

“Well, what are we going to do for this boy, after the way he has dug and scraped for Michigan State?”

“Nothing I am afraid, Mr. Munn. The game is over.” I heard a sharp intake of breath, but that was the only point I scored in the next forty-five minutes as Biggie turned his multiple offense on me. He wanted to know if Armstrong could make up the course in the summer, and when I said it was not offered then, he thought that very unreasonable. I asked if he wished to compare the two papers, and he said, “No, you have a Ph.D., you must have a brain.” He stressed the importance of the coaching contract at Mudville High. “We work hard for those contracts and if we don’t get them it makes us look bad.”

“There is too much cheating that goes on at Michigan State,” I said, “and we have to take a stand on it. In my course in American Intellectual History I gave the students an assignment to keep personal diaries in the manner of Emerson and Thoreau, and almost all of them complained at the amount of cheating that went on in college.”

“How long have you been at Michigan State?” he demanded. I asked why he wanted to know. “I thought maybe you were a newcomer and didn’t appreciate our traditions.” Actually I had come several years before Biggie. This ignorance of my name particularly wounded my amour propre, as I had received a good deal of publicity in the local press for my talks and writings on folklore, and had even been awarded a special citation by the Michigan legislature.

“You believe in ethics, don’t you, Mr. Munn,” I asked. “Why of course, my teams always play clean, don’t they?” Finally Biggie said calmly, “I couldn’t override you if I wanted to. What do you suggest?”

I suggested we bring the matter to the attention of the student’s dean. After some discussion between Biggie and Jack it was decided that, physical education being in the School of Education, the dean of that school must be Jack’s dean. Biggie said he would call the dean next morning.

In the morning I received a call from the dean’s assistant, who said that Biggie had been on the phone with his superior for an hour. Biggie was perturbed because Armstrong was the only member of his Rose Bowl championship team who would have graduated in four years, and he was also concerned about the contract with Mudville High. “Why did you fail the student?” the junior dean asked. “Because he cheated,” I said. “Oh, Biggie never mentioned that. In that case we will uphold your grade.”

That summer my wife’s older sister moved from Detroit to Mudville, and one of her sons took American history from Jack Armstrong because, according to the folkways of the American high school, the football coach is expected to teach a course and the course he teaches is customarily American history. So the contract with Mudville High was honored, although I never learned how.

This episode, which I have recounted many times, illustrates for me central aspects of American college life. There is the towering figure of the football coach, usually the best known personality on campus; the intersection of two distinct subcultures, that of the playing field and that of the classroom, which give rise to colorful college legends; the fiercely paternal interest of the coach in his players; the vaudevillian element of the instructor catering to his large clientele; the crisis point of the grade, the chief concern of college students, now acknowledged by educators as an undue cause of anxiety; and, in the background, the era of transition in which Michigan State climbed from a cow college to a big-name university. After the new football stadium was built, a new library building arose. Educators may talk and historians may write about expanding intellectual horizons and enriching curriculum content, but the student asks first, how much work is there in the course, how many examinations are there, and what grade can I expect. Once I had occasion to visit a girls’ dormitory, the evening before registration in the fieldhouse for fall courses, in my capacity as a faculty associate, and I heard a senior advising panicky freshmen on procedures and cautions to observe in the fieldhouse; the new students dreaded registration as a rite of passage and frightened each other with stories of disaster, like the one of the coed who had fainted in the fieldhouse the year before when all the sections she desired were closed.

Nor are these undergraduate attitudes confined to midwestern state universities. In the summer of 1952 I taught at Harvard, and heard President James B. Conant welcome the summer session faculty one bright morning. He assured us that Harvard’s standards in the summer were the same as Harvard’s in the winter; Harvard was Harvard the year round; there must be no relaxing of Harvard’s standards. That afternoon I went charging into my seminar on colonial American literature aflame with the message, and danced around the podium exhorting the fourteen students to give their all for research, to use the magnificent resources of Widener Library, visible through the window, the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, and even the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester—in short to spend their summer happily grubbing in these great repositories of colonial Americana. That evening I heard President Conant address the summer session students with a different tune. The theme now was: Enjoy yourselves, this is summertime; socialize with your fellow students in the Wednesday afternoon yard mixer and drink the free fruit punch that will be served on the steps of Widener; join in the Friday evening dances in the Union; take the buses to the beaches of the North Shore and the South Shore and the Tanglewood Music Festival; and above all, shop around to find interesting courses; don’t sign up with the first one you wander into but make sure you will receive a stimulating and enjoyable classroom experience. Next day I found four students in my seminar, one an auditor, and that was my class for the summer.

When a history of American college life is written from the folk point of view, it will need to incorporate experiences of this sort, rather than quote from the minutes of the board of trustees’ meetings.

It will also need to embrace the inside story of faculties, and here again is a large gap in our knowledge. The histories of departments, disciplines, and learned societies are largely unwritten. Perhaps even more valuable than the discussion of historiography in the books I originally cited is their record of the historical profession. We can expect historians to be history-minded, but what of all the other fields of learning from astronomy to zoology? The late William Riley Parker, former executive secretary of the Modern Language Association and chairman of the English department at Indiana University, had begun shortly before his death to issue a series of highly readable newsletters covering the early history of his department, and he was encouraging other English departments around the country to undertake similar histories. Such histories would contain accounts of feuding and factionalism unsuspected by the public outside the ivory tower. Recently I completed a history of the English folklore movement, which had lain in almost total darkness, although it is a vigorous and even spectacular chapter in the history of learning.

Another structure in which I am involved is the sport of tennis. There exist of course the usual illustrated histories of the game and autobiographies of famous players. One of these autobiographies, Gardnar Mulloy’s The Will to Win, gives me a paragraph. Mulloy, who attained the number one ranking in the United States, described my first encounter with him when he was sweeping courts at Woodstock in the Catskills, and I sauntered by with my Exeter blazer and superciliously inquired who around could give me a game. For lack of other competition I finally permitted him to play with me, and was lucky to win a point! In my own span I have seen enormous changes in the sport: in dress from long trousers to shorts, in tactics from back-court rallies to the big game of cannonball service and smash volley, in scoring from the marathon deuce set to the tie-breaker, in organization from sham amateurism to contract and independent professionals who now battle the United States and International Lawn Tennis Federations for control of tournaments and stars. The full history of tennis, as of other sports, would encompass all aspects, not simply the stars but the role of the game in the lives of Americans, covering the social gamut from the country clubs to the public parks; the restriction of blacks and the poor; changing attitudes of spectators (today they feel the top women are more interesting to watch than the top men); the regional and seasonal factors affecting the sport; the international dimension; the relation of tennis playing to concepts of health and fitness; fashions in heroes and heroines, exemplified in Big Bill Tilden, a national idol tarnished with the charge of homosexuality, before gay liberation, and Billie Jean King, who battles for Women’s Lib with her racquet.

American historians of the elite ignore Everyman’s history and write continuously on the same national themes. They are revisionist in their interpretations but not in their selection of subjects. I am not suggesting that history of the elite is expendable, but that history of the folk is not expendable, if we are to know our personal roots, traditions, and tribal affiliations. Each person will select his or her own set of social structures for the attention of the grass-roots historian—but whatever they are, whether scholarly organizations or urban slums, they carry a history that relates to its human parts as the chronology of federal policy-making never can relate to two hundred million individual Americans. The history of the folk is the history of our own personal worlds, and deserves the attention of talented historians.

Notes

1. Arthur Mann says as much in his chapter on “The Progressive Tradition” in The Reconstruction of American History, ed. John Higham (New York: Harper and Row, Harper Torchbooks, 1962), p. 177.

2. John Higham, with Leonard Krieger and Felix Gilbert, History, The Development of Historical Studies in the United States (Engelwood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1965), p. 85.

3. John Higham, Writing American History, Essays on Modern Scholarship (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1970), pp. 166-67.

4. Ibid., p. 173.

5. Robert Allen Skotheim, American Intellectual Histories and Historians (Princeton, N.J.; Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 186, 188-90, 211.

6. Ibid., p. 309.

7. Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), p. 442.

8. Robert E. Brown, Carl Becker on History and the American Revolution (East Lansing, Mich.: The Spartan Press, 1970), p. 39.

9. Ibid., p. 58.

10. Peter Gay, A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), p. 104.

11. Pastmasters, Some Essays on American Historians, ed. Marcus Cunliffe and Robin W. Winks (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper and Row, 1969), pp. 133-34.

12. Maldwyn Jones, in ibid., p. 275.

13. Arthur M. Schlesinger, jr., in ibid., p. 286.

14. Denis Brogan, in ibid., p. 344.

15. Marcus Cunliffe, in ibid., p. 366.

16. David M. Potter, in ibid., p. 407.

17. J. R. Pole, in ibid., p. 210.

18. H. C. Allen, in ibid., p. 194.

19. Robert Middlekauf, in ibid., pp. 180-81.

20. Ibid., pp. 256-57.

21. John A. Garraty, Interpreting American History, Conversations with Historians (New York and London: Macmillan and Collier-Macmillan, 1970), pp. 85-86.

22. In Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History, ed. Barton J. Bernstein (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), p. 49.

23. Ibid., p. 167.

24. Richard Claxton Gregory, No More Lies, The Myth and the Reality of American History, ed. James R. McGraw (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 145.

25. In Garraty, Interpreting American History, vol. 1, p. 60.

26. A. S. Eisenstadt, “American History and Social Science,” in The Craft of American History, ed. A. S. Eisenstadt (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), vol. 2, pp. 115-16.

27. Hays, “History as Human Behavior,” in Eisenstadt, ed., The Craft of American History, vol. 2, pp. 126, 128.

28. Jesse Lemisch, in Bernstein, ed., Towards a New Past, pp. xi, 4.

29. Garraty, Interpreting American History, vol. 2, p. 329.

30. Ibid., p. 65.

31. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 200.

32. In Bernstein, ed., Towards a New Past, p. 167.

33. Nevins, “History This Side the Horizon,” in Eisenstadt, ed., The Craft of American History, vol. 2, p. 269.

34. Hays, in ibid., p. 129.

35. To develop this point would require another paper, but some glimpses of Negro historical traditions are available in my American Negro Folktales (New York, 1967), especially chs. 5, 6, 9, and 10. There is elitism in black history too, in the concentration on well-known figures such as Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, and W. E. B. Du Bois, and the neglect of personalities among the rank and file, such as James Douglas Suggs, whose life history I give in American Negro Folktales.

36. Hays, in Eisenstadt, vol. 2, pp. 128, 126.

37. John Joseph Mathews, The Osages (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961 ), p. xii.

38. Gladys-Marie Fry, “The Night Riders: A Study in Techniques of the Social Control of the Negro” (1967) and Lynwood Montell, “A Folk History of the Coe Ridge Negro Colony” (1964).

39. Becker, Everyman His Own Historian (New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1935), PP. 235, 246, 247, 252.

40. Harold Seymour, Baseball, the Early Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), pp. v-vi.

41. Exeter Remembered, ed. Henry Darcy Curwen (Exeter, N. H.: Phillips Exeter Academy, 1965), p. 154.

42. Ibid., p. 27.

This paper was delivered at Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2 October 1971, as the Clarence C. Burton Memorial Lecture for the Historical Society of Michigan. It was published in somewhat briefer form in the Chronicle of the Society, 7:4 (April, 1972): 2-19.