The Search for a Usable Gordon Wood

One of the drawbacks of subscribing to a blog through Google Reader is that I see posts early and miss conversations that later erupt in the comments. Luckily, Bill Hogeland’s Twitter feed alerted me to the response to Michael D. Hattem’s posting “Where Have You Gone, Gordon Wood?” at the Junto.

The comments actually helped Hattem clarify the point of his post:

Wood looms large in the field and yet there is a fair number of people who think of him as merely a caricature or as the butt of a joke, which I find somewhat sad because he has made significant contributions to the field. Hence, I wrote the piece because I thought it would help me think through why this was happening.

One of Hattem’s themes is “generational differences between early Americanists,” with Wood being perhaps the last giant of the “republican,” “ideological,” or “consensus” school, followed by a generation that demanded study of the non-elite as well. Hattem, currently a graduate student, sees himself two generations below Wood, thus having perspective not only on him but on the stars of the intervening years.

Paul wrote in response:

It strikes me that as much as historians try to deny it, nevertheless it appears that a certain teleology or more strikingly a whiggishness haunts the profession. There is the understanding that we stand on the shoulders of those who go before us but the fundamental assumption that the previous generations have built an understanding of history that is broken or incomplete and that succeeding generations can right the wrong is inherent in the discipline.

Is there indeed a generational, even oedipal, conflict with the next generation of historians having to overthrow the most prominent of the previous? Is this the Hegelian dialectic at work, with Wood having helped to define a new synthesis only for it to become the new thesis to be challenged? Or is there just something about the human life cycle that takes many people who start by pushing against boundaries and has them end up yelling at kids to get off the lawn?

Roy Rogers commented:

Wood, himself, is responsible to “poisoning the well” of his relationship with the academy as much as anyone. Since the late 1980s (getting worse into the 1990s to present), Wood has been reviewing many race/class/gender paradigm books negatively – often in snarky and (sometimes) disrespectful ways. You can watch this evolution in Wood’s collection of reviews – “The Purpose of the Past.”

I recall that Wood’s review of Jill Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes seemed to bend over backwards to find value in what he acknowledged were false notions of the founding.

Hattem’s remarks and the comments also get into the perpetual issue of popular history versus academic history (i.e., Why don’t more people read my book instead of the latest from a former sportswriter?). That’s a tougher fit because for all his talk about communicating to the public Wood doesn’t really qualify as a popular writer; the closest he’s gotten to that mode is The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, and his big books sell because they’re used in classrooms, not because they entertain. Hattem restates a good point:

I tried to make the point that thinking of narrative as the savior of the profession is a bit naive, especially when you consider popular early American history. The majority of readers who devour books by [David] McCullough and [Ron] Chernow…read them not because they are narratives per se but because they are a particular kind of narrative about the founding and the founders.

I had more to say on “narrative history” in 2009.

Thomas J. Gillan wrote:

I think it’s fair to say, as Dan Rodgers did in 1992, that the republican synthesis was a product of its time and place, that it was a response, in Rodgers’s words, “not to evidence” but to the “interpretive problematics” of a particular moment.

That refers to Daniel T. Rodgers’s article “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept” (P.D.F. download). Rodgers is an intellectual historian, and here he looked not at eighteenth-century ideas of the republic but at late-twentieth-century thinking about those ideas. (Rodgers is also my uncle Dan, hence the special link.)

Finally, I’d push Alec Rogers’s questioning whether Hattem’s phrase “the historians’ version of the chitlin circuit” is the right metaphor. The “rubber-chicken circuit” seems like a better analogy since that involves speaking comfortably to the comfortable. Chitlins are pigs’ intestines, eaten by poor people who couldn’t afford to let any protein go to waste, and they gave their name to a string of legally segregated entertainment venues. In contrast, chicken breasts become rubbery when cooked en masse to please a large group of well-off people who don’t want to be surprised by their food.