11
Criticism and Political Thought

To enter once more into the spirit of those fine old idealisms, and to learn that the promise of the future has lain always in the keeping of liberal minds that were never discouraged from their dreams, is scarcely a profitless undertaking.…

—V. L. Parrington

To love ideas is excellent, but to understand how ideas themselves are conditioned by social forces is better still.

—V. L. Parrington, 1917

I

THE METHOD and design of Parrington’s Main Currents discloses a marked disproportion between his object and the means to reach it. He insisted that he was not making esthetic judgments or writing a conventional history of literature, but he included so many writers whose political ideas were inconsequential that their presence could be justified only by their stature as imaginative writers; and it is hardly necessary to say that he did in fact, as one must, make some judgments about their worth as writers. On the other hand, he chose to leave out or subordinate a few writers who had political ideas of decisive importance, a procedure which impaired his scheme as a plan for a history of political thought. The work is thus haunted throughout by an unresolved ambiguity, a suspension between political thought and literature. That the undefined area where literature and politics intersect is a legitimate subject need not be disputed. But to write well about our political-literary culture requires a fine feeling for the nuances of ideas which was hardly the strongest quality of the Progressive mind. Much too often we are left with the sense that Parrington has not succeeded in finding the relation between politics and literature, but only in putting them into awkward juxtaposition. His method, moreover, was biographical, and biography requires a certain patience with the individuality of the materials as well as a feeling for the nature of each subject’s development, which was hardly feasible within the framework of his plan. These difficulties are related to the other basic defects of Main Currents: its lack of penetration in depth, of historical specificity, and—as a corollary of this last—of a feeling for the actual historical movement of ideas.

Consider first the plan of Parrington’s book. It is a series of biographical-intellectual portraits linked together by several explanatory connective sequences. The portraits number almost a hundred, and if the author had lived to complete the scheme sketched out in the table of contents of his third volume, he would probably have needed still a fourth volume, and would have added some forty more. Here the very nobility of his conception became an obstacle: his plan required him to read so extensively that penetrating inquiry was possible only at a few points, and to write with such rigid compression that not a single writer could get extended discussion. Where his model, Taine, had felt free to take seventy pages or more for an author, Parrington allowed himself in the longest of his sketches to take no more than fourteen or fifteen. In order to include scores of minor literary figures of hardly more than incidental and symptomatic significance for the development of American thought, he had to neglect the dynamics of the basic ideas, and to cut his portraits of central political writers to a pattern so cramped that he could not seriously deal with them: it is all but impossible, for instance, to cope in fifteen pages with the complexities, nuances, and changes in John Adams’s thought, or with the subtle problems of interpretation posed by Jefferson. And for James Madison, a thinker of absolutely central importance, Parrington found no place at all, aside from a few pages in an account, itself far too perfunctory, of The Federalist.

The ambiguity of Parrington’s intent and the multiplicity of his sketches go far to explain his difficulty in getting below the surface. His tendentious purpose and the simple dualism of his scheme help to explain the abstractness, the static quality in his conception of intellectual development. At the beginning of his admiring sketch of Roger Williams, Parrington makes a significant suggestion that sums up a major premise of his work. Williams, he concludes, though in manner and speech a Puritan controversialist, was really “contemporary with successive generations of prophets from his own day to ours”—a forerunner, in fact, of Locke and the natural-rights school, of Paine and the French romantics, of Channing and the Unitarians, of Emerson and the transcendentalists. Main Currents, indeed, has a very full quota of forerunners and precursors, and as one reads with an eye for its sense of intellectual filiations and continuities, the significance of the metaphor in Parrington’s title emerges: we are in the presence of two great historical currents that course through our history, the currents, roughly speaking, of democratic and antidemocratic thought. Through changing intellectual assumptions and through various phases of manner and speech, we deal in substance, always and recurrently, with the same age-old controversy. The major thinkers of the past are summoned up, in effect, as contemporaries of each other and ourselves. The colonial Americans, for example, were “old-fashioned only in manner and dress,” and the subjects they dealt with were at heart “much the same themes with which we are engaged and with which our children will be engaged after us.” Whitman, enlisted for democracy, was “fighting the battle of 1790 over again.” The great debate of the Progressive era “was the struggle of 1789 over again.”¹ Even the Puritans must be understood in this way as thoroughly preformed moderns, for if we discard their strange manner and dress to interest ourselves solely in the matter of their arguments, “and if we will resolutely translate the old phrases into modern equivalents, if we will put aside the theology and fasten attention on the politics and economics of the struggle, we shall have less difficulty in discovering that the new principle for which those old Puritans were groping was the later familiar doctrine of natural rights.…”²

The suggestion that the theological forms of Puritan thought are like transient fashions in dress, and that we will understand the true content of Puritan thought better if we brush aside Puritan theology, is the counterpart, in intellectual history, of Parrington’s canon in literary theory that esthetic judgments are of incidental concern and belong to the “narrower belletristic.” There is, as he sees it, a hidden core, a basic substance, to history; and once we have found this, the essential thing, we have reached reality and have come to the point at which the actual contemporaneity of history can be clearly perceived. The true significance of our ancestors lies just here: in their contemporaneity.

There is, of course, a sense in which Parrington’s disposition to abstract from the specificity of historical events can be defended. Later struggles for democracy have something in common with earlier struggles for democracy—if indeed we can be sure that that is what they actually were—and it would be impossible to generalize at all if it were impermissible to look for such resemblances. In Parrington’s history, however, the conviction of the similarity seems to have preceded an examination of the particularities of events and at times to have taken the place of such an examination. His method, then, is governed not simply by the defensible assumption that our ancestors had something in common with us but by the far less defensible one that the respects in which they will be found to differ from us are of little consequence. The result is that in his search for the hard core of “reality” Parrington’s view of things becomes, paradoxically, increasingly abstract, and we get carried further and further away from what was really on the minds of Roger Williams, John Cotton, and their successors. For example, in his long sequence on Puritan thought Parrington found occasion only for fleeting mention of the Half-Way Covenant and the troublesome problems of church polity it was meant to solve. These problems may have been frippery to the Progressive mind, but they were meat and drink to the Puritans; indeed the Puritans’ ideas of church polity provided the conceptual model for their understanding of civil polity, and without them their political theory cannot be understood. We may profitably turn our attention, as Parrington suggests, to “the politics and economics of the struggle” but to “put aside the theology,” as he also enjoins us, will only guarantee that we will never comprehend them at all. It is this lack of concern with the immediate terms on which intellectual problems present themselves to the makers of history that accounts for our failure to get from Parrington a feeling for the movement of ideas, their change in function in different situations. One looks to him in vain for an account or explanation of just how Puritanism gave way to latitudinarianism and to the skeptical thought of the Enlightenment, how transcendentalism emerged in the Unitarian environment, or how the laissez-faire ideas that seemed so radical in some of the left-wing Jacksonians turned up in such an ultraconservative guise forty years later when people were reading Herbert Spencer. In Main Currents ideas do not develop, they only recur.

Some of the static quality in the work comes from Parrington’s very passion for form and proportion. As E. H. Eby reports, his love of architecture carried over into his book and determined the structure he would give it. One need only look at the Table of Contents of his first volume to see how this urge toward design affects its organization. It is full of counterpoise—the stewards of theocracy versus the independents, the Mather dynasty versus the liberals, Edwards as against Franklin, the mind of the Whig against the mind of the Tory, and, among the later political thinkers, “The English Group” against “The French Group,” the Constitution against the Declaration of Independence. Each sketch is touched off by some key designation upon which everything depends. As Professor Eby writes, Parrington began with a thesis, fixed in a phrase, a sentence, or a revealing figure, and he was so habituated to follow the dictates of this formula that “his ability to write would be blocked until he had in mind a perfectly crystallized concept expressible at the maximum in one sentence.” For a long time he was suspended over the Gilded Age, but could not get on with his writing until the indispensable title occurred to him. Finally, after some weeks, he showed relief. “I have found the phrase,” he said: “I will call it the Great Barbecue”—and so the work went on.³ The advantages of this mode of presentation are clear enough: one always knows where one is in Parrington’s volumes, and the atmosphere of each scene, the role of each actor, is firmly fixed at the beginning. Its disadvantage hangs on the fact that history itself does not take place architectonically, but with a fluid dialectic of its own. It is capricious, asymmetrical, organic, rather than geometrical; and if it is to be likened to architecture it is more like a church by Gaudi than one by Wren. Ideas appear, make their mark in one context, begin to change form, and then sometimes, rather suddenly, change function also. The architectonic conception, then, for all the obvious merits it had in organizing an accessible popular work, accounts in some part for the static feeling one gets, the sense that in his love of counterposing sets of ideas Parrington has all too often neglected to get them into motion.

II

The sheer size of his cast of characters required Parrington to paint a large number of portraits, but the limited and predetermined nature of his interest in his writers, his belief that many of the specifics of their intellectual lives were not of enduring importance, left him with only limited means by which to render their features. He painted with a palette confined, by his own decision, to a few stark primary colors and permitted himself only the broadest and boldest strokes of the brush. It became necessary for him to classify almost every writer in relation to certain very broad categories drawn from the spheres of political, literary, and intellectual history. Such terms as realism and romanticism, conservatism, liberalism, and individualism thus took on a saliency in his writing that is unfortunately not matched by their clarity or sharpness of definition. He knew that these terms are difficult and imprecise, and he tried to take honest cognizance of the fact by putting them in the plural—which was a way of acknowledging their multiple meanings but not of coming to grips with them. This device accounts for a noticeable awkwardness in his abstractions, his references to the “liberalisms implicit in the Puritan Revolution,” or the “liberalisms implicit in Plymouth Congregationalism,” “the inchoate idealisms of English Puritanism,” the “diverse liberalisms” that were being stifled by the Massachusetts Bay oligarchy, “the liberalisms involved in Luther’s premises,” “the nineteenth century with its cargo of romanticisms,” and indeed of the whole complex of “ebullient romanticisms” with which his second volume was concerned. He found it important to place the individual writer in relation to these large tendencies in thought, which were sometimes almost personified, as when he said of Godkin: “His realism was a profound discouragement to his idealism.”⁴ Now and then these abstractions rattle against each other: “Overseas liberalisms had flourished in the soil that proved inhospitable to overseas conservatisms, and it was these European liberalisms that provided the mold into which ran the fluid experience of America to assume substantial form.” It is almost as though Parrington at a late point in his work had read Arthur O. Lovejoy’s famous paper of 1924, “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,” and had taken its lesson, if not exactly to heart, at least into his rhetoric, and had gone through his text and changed many of his key terms from the singular to the plural.⁵

Parrington also worked with a set of fundamental counters, or basic elements of characterization, which he tended to combine and recombine as he thought the merits and defects of his subjects warranted. It is the frequent recurrence of these counters that in the end gives the impression of similarity in his portraits of so many of his heroes and villains. Perhaps the most important of them was that treasured personal quality designated as idealism, which he found prominent in almost all the heroes of his book. “The idealist,” as he put it, “has always seen deeper into the spirit of America than the realist.”⁶ An all but indispensable attribute of true greatness, idealism was fortunately not in short supply, and Parrington found writers aplenty upon whom he could lavish his affection.

Both Thomas Hooker and Roger Williams were men of “fine idealism,”⁷ Williams indeed because he anticipated so many “idealisms of the future,” among them those of Emerson, Channing, and Paine. Paine too, though a realist in his handling of facts, was “a thoroughgoing idealist in aim.” Jefferson, “far more completely than any other American of his generation … embodied the idealisms of the great revolution.” It was fortunate that he was an idealist, since his idealism was badly needed to leaven the strong materialism of his times. His ally, the journalist Freneau, was “an idealist who cared only for the res publica.” Cooper too was “at heart an idealist” and in fact paid “a great price for his idealism.” Greeley was “an incorrigible idealist,” and so was Edward Bellamy, and oddly enough, Sinclair Lewis. John Brown was “a primitive idealist of rugged mold,” Theodore Parker a man of “frank idealism,” Margaret Fuller a woman of “romantic idealism.” Charles A. Dana, another Brook-Farmer, was a spoiled idealist: “disappointed with idealism, he turned materialist,” and therein lay his downfall. E. L. Godkin was “at once an idealist and a realist” and his intellectual history is largely comprehended in his change from one to the other. Hamlin Garland, more consistent, was “an idealist of the old Jeffersonian breed.” Such characters were a necessary counterpoise to numerous men of quite another breed. Thomas Hutchinson had not “the faintest spark of idealism,” John Trumbull “was not a political idealist,” and Hamilton (it seems hardly necessary to say) “was without a shred of idealism, unless a certain grandiose quality in his conceptions be accounted idealism.” Federalists in general do badly here: “One might as well look for the sap of idealism in a last year’s stump as in John Marshall,” and Fisher Ames “naturally … regarded every idealist, the Rousseaus and Paines and Jeffersons, as ‘democratick babblers’ ” and the enemies of law and order.

Some of Parrington’s other counters were deployed in his assessments of motives. His are moral as well as intellectual portraits, perhaps moral portraits primarily. We should not cavil at the presence of such evaluations. It is only that Parrington’s attributions of motive are so onesided and so predictable. Orthodox Puritans, Tories, Federalists generally fail to win his admiration for one or more of three failings: profit, power, and pride. Even Samuel Sewall, kindly and neighborly though he was, probably stood unintelligently against all popular movements because of his “subconscious concern for his material interests.” In Cotton Mather nothing “can obscure the motive of personal ambition,” and vanity provides “the sufficient explanation” of his various political activities; he came by it legitimately because his father, Increase, had been “ambitious and self-seeking,” “wanting in self-denying love.” The Tories were moved by vanity and arrogance: “Their most cherished dream was the institution of an American nobility, with the seal of royal favor set upon their social pretensions.”⁸ Thomas Hutchinson was “avaricious of power, even more than of money,” and his entire philosophy, a compression of Toryism, represented simply “the will-to-power of the wealthy.” The conservative John Dickinson, “as a large property owner,… hastened to the defense of the principle of self-taxation”—which leads one to wonder if this was not a view also sympathetic to small property owners in America. A strong conservative like Francis Hopkinson, who joined the Revolution but later became a stout Federalist, is easily accounted for: “His Whiggery was probably commercial in origin, a reflection of the economic interests of the merchant class with which he mingled.” The “mendacious” Anglican clergyman, Samuel Peters, a strong advocate of episcopacy whose “better qualities were corroded by overwhelming conceit,” was a man with “all the arrogance of a lord.” John Marshall was easy to understand: “His financial interests overran state boundaries and his political principles followed easily in their train, washing away all local and sectional loyalties.” Webster, for all his rich native endowment, was, after all, “the greatest corporation lawyer of the day, certain to be found defending vested interests, never on the side of the leaner purse.” The one great disinterested act of Webster’s life, the Seventh of March speech, in which he sacrificed his provincial reputation and exposed himself to the fury of New England reformers in his eagerness to preserve the Union, Parrington, in common with many other writers, saw as merely another token of his hopeless materialism.

To find a certain unchristian pride in some Puritan leaders or a concern for money among rich merchants and their legal spokesmen or a note of class arrogance in the Tory rich puts no strain on our credulity, and independent study might bring us to similar judgments. But the same kind of moral realism does not infuse Parrington’s judgments of his idealists and humanitarians, who are not only free, as we might well suppose, of the desire for gain, but of vanity and ambition as well. Thomas Hooker, seen as a man of democratic sympathies, was “a simple man in worldly ambitions as well as in origin, not given to climbing or feathering his own nest.” John Wise, the village democrat, was “uninfected by the itch of publicity that attacked so many of his fellow ministers.” Crèvecoeur, though he yielded in the end to his Loyalist sympathies, was at heart a frontier democrat, “devoid of petty ambition and local prejudice,” and, strangely enough, “an embodiment of the generous spirit of French revolutionary thought.” Samuel Adams preferred politics to profits: “He was no self-seeking politician, but a man of vision,” and “all cynical and sordid interpretations of his strange career” are beside the point. Freneau was “wholly free from lust of economic aggression, either for himself or for his class.… There was no envy in the soul of Freneau, and no self-seeking.” As for Joel Barlow, another sound republican, “politics for profit was a sorry spectacle to him,” even though he was an agent for a speculative land company. One of the few non-idealists to join this company—Parrington had a disposition to be a little tender to Southern spokesmen—was Alexander Stephens, who was “never selfishly ambitious.”

If idealists were sometimes a bit sharp, they had the best of excuses. If they failed to be lovable, they had provocation. Freneau, for example, was often ruthless, and his writings reveal him as “a good hater”; but after all, “it was an age of partisan ruthlessness, and if Freneau was a fierce partisan it was because the new hope then whispering to liberals was in danger of being stifled by selfish men who feared it.… If like Sam Adams he was given to robbing men of their characters, it was due to no personal or selfish motives; those great ones whom he lampooned so fiercely, he believed were enemies of the new order.” And so with Sam Adams: “To stimulate what we call today class consciousness was a necessary preliminary to a democratic psychology.… The ways of the iconoclast are rarely lovely, and the breaking of idols is certain to wound sensitive souls.” If Adams also robbed men of their characters, as Hutchinson charged, it was because the respect that attached to men like Hutchinson was a part of their authority. “For the good of America their power must be destroyed. Doubtless Adams was ungenerous in attack; certainly he was vindictive in his hates; but the cold record as we read it today justifies one in the belief that the men whom he attacked were tools of the ministry and must be struck down if the rights of Massachusetts were to be preserved.” It is only where William Lloyd Garrison was concerned that Parrington paused to give thought to the problems of ruthless radical prophecy. Single-minded men like Garrison and John Brown, he remarked, “sometimes do succeed in moving mountains; but unfortunately they leave a great scar, and the débris litters the whole countryside.” And even after the waste of the leveling, other mountains may arise, for out of Emancipation came the Fourteenth Amendment, due process of law, and the whole apparatus of capitalist exploitation. Here, for a moment, we get a glimpse of the difficulty of things: “The devil understands the ways of the world too well to become discouraged at a temporary set-back, for if righteousness succeed in breaking the bonds that bind a generation, he knows that the market place carries an ample stock of new cords to replace those that are broken.”

In characterizing his idealists and reformers, Parrington broke with the environmental determinism as well as with the search for motives that colors his accounts of his villains. Power, pride, and profit move the conservatives and possessors and they can always be understood, sometimes with and sometimes without sympathy or a note of admiration, by reference to their location in society. For idealists it is necessary to derive their motive power from some more mysterious and inaccessible inner resources, since society, as Parrington conceives it, does not seem in itself to generate the reform impulse in the way that it generates self-seeking. Roger Williams simply “lived in the realm of ideas,” and “his actions were creatively determined by principles”; Franklin transcended his environment and in a rare way “freed [himself] from the prejudice of custom … a free man who went his own way with imperturbable good will and unbiased intelligence”; William Cullen Bryant’s nature was “self-pollenizing.” Wendell Phillips came out of morally backward Back Bay, but did not accept its prejudices because “something deep within him, a loyalty to other and higher ideas, held him back.… An instinctive love of justice held him back.”⁹

One of the most persistent themes in Parrington has to do with the unintellectual character, the ignorance, the limited interests of the writers he dislikes and of many others as well. The charge often made against critics who work exclusively in American studies that they overestimate American writing is one that can never be responsibly pressed against Parrington. He looked at the faults as well as the virtues of American writers—and what an imperfect lot they are, especially if they stand in the traditions of Puritanism, Federalism, Brahminism, or modern conservatism. No anti-American from another literary culture would be likely to draw up a more consistent list of limited men. It begins with the substantial Puritan diarist, Judge Samuel Sewall, whose “intellectual interests were few,” who “cared nothing for pure literature, and was unacquainted with the English classics,” whose mind ran to things “either occult or inconsequential,” and who was “quite without imagination”—and it goes steadily on from there. That pillar of the Puritan order, Increase Mather, “was quite unread in the political philosophers and wholly ignorant of major principles,” having read none of the major writers from Locke on. “Ideas in the abstract held no interest for him.” As he had a conventional mind, he was “incurious intellectually.” His son Cotton Mather “knew no other political philosophy than that of the obsolete theocracy in which he had grown up,” and his work was “barren of ideas.” Even the undeniably learned Jonathan Edwards suffered stultification because he remained “isolated in Massachusetts” and was denied the opportunity of mingling with “the leaders of thought in London.” The royal governor, Thomas Hutchinson, though a historian of parts, had not even read Locke, was “little given to intellectual interests,” and “his knowledge of political classics was of the slightest.” He was “only an unintelligent politician who served the hand that fed him.” John Dickinson shared the regrettable quality of many men versed in the law, of knowing little else. “He rarely refers to political authorities.” Unlike Hutchinson, he had read Locke, but he ignored him. In the end, though a cultivated lawyer, Dickinson emerges as “in no sense a serious political thinker.” His “Fabius” letters in defense of the Constitution contain “not a single illuminating comment.” The Tory satirist Jonathan Odell fares still worse: “Of any valid or reasoned philosophy, social or political, he was as wanting as a child.” He was a man of “vast ignorance.” Alexander Hamilton, though perspicacious and admittedly a “great master of modern finance,” was otherwise lacking: he was “not a political philosopher in the large meaning of the term,” comparing badly with John Adams in his knowledge of history and with Jefferson in his studies of politics. (He compares badly also with Thomas Paine, who was likewise not to be compared with Adams as a student, but who somehow “absorbed ideas like a sponge.”) The mind of Timothy Dwight, president of Yale and pillar of Connecticut Federalism, “was closed as tight as his study windows in January.” It is true that he read widely in rationalist writings, “but he read only to refute.” The Connecticut Wits, to whom Parrington had given some special attention, “were not devoid of cleverness, but they were wanting in ideas. They were partisans rather than intellectuals.” Perhaps in emulation of Dwight,¹ “they sealed the windows of their minds against the disturbing winds of doctrine that were blowing briskly,” and rather gratuitously “chose to remain too ignorant to be interesting.” National independence, with its new problems, did little to quicken the minds of men who stood in this tradition. The easygoing Justice John Marshall, we are hardly surprised to learn, “was wholly wanting in intellectual interests. Strangely ill-read in the law, he was even more ignorant of history and economics and political theory.… There is no indication that he had ever heard of the Physiocratic school of economics, or had looked into the writings of Rousseau or Godwin or Paine. The blind sides of his mind were many,” though what he did see and understand he at least grasped firmly. The Virginia lawyer and biographer William Wirt was “curiously ignorant of the economic and political philosophy of agrarianism,” though it flourished around him, and he “was little given to abstract speculation on the rights of man.” Jefferson Davis had “little intellectual curiosity.” Even the learned immigrant scholar Francis Lieber was a victim of legalism and of “his failure to investigate the economics of politics.” The Charleston intellectual, Hugh Legaré, was a similar case: he had “read too many law books” and speculated too little on politics. “Immersed in his codes, he had forgotten to inquire into the hidden springs of sovereignty,” and “in his contempt for practical politics he had neglected to study even the primer of economic determinism”—a strong reproach to a man who died five years before the Communist Manifesto was written. Legaré accepted the economics of Adam Smith, but was seriously handicapped by “his ignorance of the economics of John Taylor.” Henry Clay, as we might by now expect, was “unread in history and political theory,” and if this is true one need hardly be surprised to find Andrew Jackson, for all that can be said for him on other counts, “almost wholly lacking in political and social philosophy.” Augustus Longstreet, the Georgia writer, “had no intellectual curiosity and was incapable of rigorous intellectual processes.” Washington Irving, for all his gaiety and humor, “was lacking in a brooding intellectuality.” Justice Story was another of those lawyers who troubled Parrington for being too immersed in their law books: “Against such a mind, deeply read in the law and with scanty knowledge of economics and political theory, the waves of liberal and romantic thought broke impotently.” Whittier, though approved on other counts, “felt rather than thought,” being a man of “conscience rather than intellect,” who never thought about economics and appears not to have read even such supposedly congenial writers as Rousseau, Paine, and Jefferson. We need not look for anything better from Longfellow: “There was little intellect in Longfellow, little creative originality.… The winds of doctrine and policy might rage through the land, but they did not rattle the windows of his study to disturb his quiet poring over Dante.” Hawthorne’s notebooks provide “the occasional record of one who lived an unintellectual life.… Few books are referred to; systems of thought lie beyond his ken. Compared with the thinkers and scholars of his time he is only an idler lying in wait for such casual suggestions as he may turn into stories.” Lowell, again, had “no interest in ideas, only a pottering concern for the text.… Scarcely an important movement of contemporary thought awakened his interest.… He never took the trouble to ground himself in the elements of politics,” and “of American constitutional history he was as ignorant as a politician.” Thomas Bailey Aldrich, an embodiment of “intellectual sterility,” was worse: “Of many things that concern men greatly he was very, very ignorant. Of the American people beyond the Hudson River, he knew nothing. Of social economics he knew nothing.” Sarah Orne Jewett, for all her strivings for realism, “was as ignorant as her Maine fisherfolk of the social forces that were blotting out the world of her fathers,” and Mary Wilkins Freeman’s thinking “on social questions was still in its teens.” She had a warm heart, “but her inadequate knowledge of economics served her ill.” The fact that Theodore Dwight Woolsey’s speculations on the state were thought to be significant is only “added confirmation of the shallowness of the Gilded Age.” Indeed most of the critics of the Gilded Age, including some very well-meaning ones, were “ill equipped … intellectually lean and impoverished” as the result of too much constitutional debate, “uninstructed idealists with no understanding of Realpolitik.” The entire self-constituted educated leadership of the Gilded Age consisted of “second-rate men—mediocre minds cramped by a selfish environment, imbued with no more than a property-consciousness.”² John Hay was a perfect example of this, the product of an education that “seems to have been faulty.” George William Curtis, one of its finer and saner spirits and a most useful man, was still “not a great scholar and not an acute critic,” and “never a serious student of politics in the broader sense … an inadequate political philosopher … as helpless in diagnosing the evil as Lowell or Norton.” Even the distinguished Godkin, a man of such wide range and once so well in touch with things, turned out to be in the end “a very ignorant or shallow critic, blinded by his prejudices … he seems [by the 1890’s] to have done no serious reading in economic theory for half a century.” John Fiske, though once intellectually curious and a brilliant popularizer of science, was a poor interpreter of the American past, having “an inadequate knowledge and an inadequate philosophy.… The economics of historical change he seems never to have considered, and his analyses of social forces are never acute or penetrating.”

Ignorant as they were, the members of the Puritan-Brahmin-Tory-Federalist tradition produced a heavy portion of anachronisms. John Winthrop was “unable to adapt old prejudices to new conditions,” Samuel Sewall “refused to go forward with the changing times,” Increase Mather came to be mocked at in Boston because “he had outlived his age,” and his son Cotton was “an anachronism in his own day”; Jonathan Edwards, “the greatest mind of New England, had become an anachronism in a world that bred Benjamin Franklin.” Thomas Hutchinson “never understood the assertive capitalism that was rising about him.” The Tory Jonathan Boucher spoke with “the voice of seventeenth-century Cavalier England.” John Dickinson was “incapable of understanding current economic forces either in England or in America,” and belonged “in that older world in which he was bred.” John Trumbull remained “an echo … throughout his life.” The mind of the Old South, though Parrington found some sympathy for its resistance to centralized power, was still found to be “so archaic … as to appear singular.” One of its keenest critics, Whittier, so much esteemed for his honest conscience, was still “fast becoming an anachronism in industrial New England.” Hawthorne “lived in the shadow of a Puritan past,” and seemed wholly anachronistic. By the time of the 1870’s and 1880’s “the incurious Boston mentality missed pretty much everything vital and significant in American life.” Thomas Bailey Aldrich “traveled back a hundred years.” Godkin, with his archaic program of reading, certainly “did not go forward to meet new times.” Henry Adams even “seemed to himself a somewhat pathetic anachronism.”

It is not that Parrington was singularly ungenerous. Quite the contrary: he usually welcomed the chance to make even his less favored subjects sympathetic or understandable. Moreover, the art of deprecation, as applied to standard American writers, was well developed among the critics of his time—Brooks and Mencken stand out here, but there were others—and Parrington was writing in a common idiom. Nor was he so wrong in his estimates: he was neither the first nor the last writer to find a certain flabbiness of thought and thinness of sensibility in some of the men he dealt with, and his acid judgments frequently seem not wide of the mark. What does trouble me in these estimates is their essential sameness, the predictable uniformity of his reproaches, the forceful, if rather indirect suggestion that most of these writers suffered from the same combination of vanity and selfishness, the same lack of robustness and realism, and that they would all have been cured in roughly equal measure if they had infused themselves with large doses of “idealism” and then read liberally in the Physiocrats, Rousseau, Jefferson, and John Taylor of Caroline County.

I am tempted also to offer the unprovable guess that Parrington was extraordinarily preoccupied with the idea of men ill prepared for their tasks, insufficiently educated, and unreceptive to ideas coming from outside their own tradition. The modest tone in which he spoke of his own omissions, doubtful interpretations, and hasty generalizations seems to me to be truer to the man than the hauteur with which he appeared to dispose of one uncongenial writer after another. But his role was, by his canons, a difficult one. He had committed himself to a kind of economic realism which, by his own reckoning, appeared to require a firm foundation in economic “reality”—a thing he constantly sought in those he read. Yet his own notions of economics were not well grounded. When he refers to a parochial windbag like John Taylor as the source of some arcane or indispensable wisdom on economic matters, or classifies Bastiat with Louis Blanc and Proudhon as a “left-wing” economist, or when he tells us that part of the trouble with Hawthorne was that he “never grappled with economics as Thoreau did,” or again when he imagines that Hamilton, as an avid reader of Adam Smith, stood in the tradition of English liberalism instead of seeing him as a bridge between the older mercantilism and the new economic nationalism of Friedrich List, I begin to wonder if he must not have been half-aware of the contrast between the state of his own preparation in economics and the stringent demands he made upon other American writers.³ In this sense, Parrington had cast himself in a role he particularly disliked—that of the “narrow belletrist” writing upon matters concerning which the wisdom of “the economist” seems more important. He preached with the desperation of a minister who doubts his own salvation.

III

It remains only to look at the main currents of American thought as Parrington saw them. His characteristic procedure was to describe certain major ideas or tendencies that came from Europe—English Independency and Whiggery, French romantic theory, the laissez-faire ideas that rose with modern industry and commerce, nineteenth-century science as it affected social and literary thought, the various strains of Continental utopianism or collectivism—and to examine their course in the American environment. Usually he saw two sets of ideas as being brought into direct and blunt confrontation. He was fascinated, as many writers had been before him, with the battle waged in Puritan New England between dissent and a rigid system of doctrine, and then between what he took to be the correlated principles of aristocracy and democracy. “Unfortunately,” he wrote, “the liberal doctrine of natural rights was entangled in New England with an absolutist theology that conceived of human nature as inherently evil, that postulated a divine sovereignty absolute and arbitrary, and projected caste divisions into eternity—a body of dogmas that it needed two hundred years’ experience in America to disintegrate.”⁴ The first part of his work was concerned with the long continuing clash between liberal political philosophy and “reactionary theology” culminating in a rather rapid deterioration of the Puritan system at the close of the seventeenth and the early decades of the eighteenth century.

Outside New England a similar process of liberation took place, but against less resistance. There, various European immigrants reacted more directly to the stimulus of the new environment and a great population of yeomen developed the philosophy that was to be characteristic of America for a hundred years or more. “It was to these scattered and undistinguished colonials that French romantic theory was brought by a group of intellectuals in the latter years of the [eighteenth] century, a philosophy so congenial to decentralized society that it seemed to provide an authoritative sanction for the clarifying ideals of a republican order, based on the principle of home rule, toward which colonial experience was striving.” Now this French romantic theory, which was “spreading widely through the backwoods of America,” provided a view of human nature antagonistic to the Puritan view, a new view of man as potentially excellent, capable of indefinite development. It argued for a government circumscribed in its powers and for a social policy that deferred to the great and virtuous mass of yeomen farmers. At the same time, English liberalism was fortifying itself in the commercial towns, promulgating a philosophy based on the values of the market place, stressing competition, seeing human nature as being above all acquisitive, ministering to the needs of those who profited from commercial expansion.

Parrington traces these currents of thought through two sharply counterposed sets of thinkers, matched in pairs at almost every point along the way. On one side are the stewards of the theocratic order, such men as John Winthrop, John Cotton, and the Mathers, followed in a later age by Jonathan Edwards, who tried to infuse new life into a dying Calvinist orthodoxy. In later political debates these men were followed by the more conservative Whigs like John Dickinson, by outright Tories like Thomas Hutchinson, and by the architects of the new coercive state, the exponents of commercialism and minority control symbolized and led by Alexander Hamilton. Against them is the camp of the idealists—the independents, dissenters, liberals, democrats, humanitarians—represented at their best by Roger Williams, Thomas Hooker, and John Wise as opponents of the theocracy; by Franklin, Jefferson, and Paine as spokesmen of the more secular, enlightened, democratic, and humane movements of the eighteenth century.

In dealing with the political thought of the Revolution, Parrington was modest and candid. He realized how puzzling the event was for historians (it remains so even now), but in his own stab at accounting for its thought he followed the traditions of Progressive historiography, emphasizing the role of “liberal impulses in the background of the American mind” which had been precipitated into militancy by the crisis in the British Empire after the Seven Years War. An ungainly coalition of aggressive, profit-minded town merchants, aristocratic planters in debt to English merchants, and frontier liberals who stood for republican principles had brought about the Revolution. It was the last faction, he concluded, that provided the revolutionary dynamic. “In every colony the party of incipient populism had been checked and thwarted by royal officials; and it was this mass of populist discontent, seeing itself in danger of being totally crushed, and its interests ignored, that provided the rank and file of armed opposition to the King.”

The period of state-making and internal debate that followed the Revolution, Parrington accounted for on lines substantially like those drawn by Beard and J. Allen Smith. What was unique in his own account was chiefly his sense of the derivation of the ideas in the debate. For him the opposition to the new Constitution was founded not in old ideas of English republicanism qualified by American experience but rather in “the humanitarian theory of the French thinkers.” He saw the opponents of the Constitution as being handicapped in the great debate because the principles of French romanticism and Physiocratic agrarianism were not yet sufficiently known and accepted on American soil, and because the principles of democracy had not yet been clarified by Jacobinism. The leading English authorities like Locke, at best aristocratic republicans, were of no use to emergent democracy. Lacking discipline and cohesion as well as a developed political theory, the populists lost to “the money group,” which was able to “overwhelm the silent majority with clamorous argument” and to establish “the coercive state.” Still, on the merits of the matter, and even without quite enough French theory to draw on, Parrington thought the Anti-Federalists had much the better of the case. As political thinking, he saw very little in The Federalist, which is “of interest only to students of constitutional law and practice,” and must be seen as a “frankly partisan” attempt to stave off popular rule and underwrite government by the minority. In striking contrast, Richard Henry Lee’s Anti-Federalist pamphlet, Letters from the Federal Farmer, is so outstanding for its “calmness and fair-mindedness” that it “ill deserves the name partisan.”

Jefferson’s victory in 1800 at last put liberalism in the saddle, and greatly extended the influence of French humanitarian thought. However, it left the eighteenth-century aristocratic class still in possession of the vantage points of polite culture. Eventually the new romanticism of the middle class shouldered aside the aspirations of both gentlemen and farmers. The flourishing romanticism of the years from the War of 1812 to the Civil War is the theme of Parrington’s second volume. Romanticism in different guises prevailed in the South, in New England, and on the Western frontier; but its real strength Parrington somehow found to rest in the middle class. Colonial America had been static, rationalistic, inclined to pessimism; the nineteenth century was ebulliently optimistic, and though it usually saw human nature as acquisitive rather than good or evil, it was content to find it so. Southern romanticism, stemming from Scott, deserted Jefferson for Calhoun, developed the slaveholders’ ideal of a Greek democracy—“the most romantic ideal brought forth by our golden age of romance.” The idea of Greek democracy was an ingenious one, but it fatally left out of account the middle class that finally destroyed it. The middle states, eclectic in culture, were fundamentally an expression of the mind of Philadelphia and New York. For a long time, under the leadership of Boston Federalism, New England rejected French ideas, and hence lost itself in a morass of reaction; but finally, in the age of Channing, it caught up first with Rousseau and other French thinkers to produce the Unitarians, and then with German idealism to produce the transcendentalists. On the frontier, a coonskin democracy came forth, at once intensely acquisitive and intensely egalitarian. Jacksonian democracy too, Parrington believed, owed a great deal to French thought, but at this point in history he apparently felt it had begun to lose its pertinence to economic society, for Jacksonianism, though “it imposed upon America the ideal of democracy to which all must hereafter do lip service,… lost its realistic basis in a Physiocratic economics and wandered in a fog of political equalitarianism.”

The Civil War broke the last obstacle to a consolidated capitalism. After Appomattox, “a slave economy could never again thwart the ambitions of the capitalistic economy.” Particularism was dead; the future belonged to the machine, to the centralized state, to those who knew how to seize, possess, and enjoy. Americans fell upon the riches of the continent like a gang of frontiersmen invited to a grand barbecue. More sensitive souls might gag at the sight, but few of them had any animating philosophy that would inspire them to resist the depredations of the gluttonous individualists. After the long spell of optimism that had come with the romantic era, the combination of industrial capitalism and modern science once again undermined the foundations of hope. A new pessimism, founded not like colonial pessimism on Calvinist theology but on modern mechanistic philosophy, swept over the American mind. Parrington’s third volume was concerned both with the implications of this pessimism and with the countervailing promise of critical realism, of the signs of revolt among intellectuals and artists.

IV

His point of view, Parrington explained in a disarmingly candid introduction, was “liberal rather than conservative, Jeffersonian rather than Federalistic, and very likely on my search I have found what I went forth to find, as others have discovered what they were seeking.” This avowed partisan dualism accounts in some part for the signal importance that matters of intellectual genealogy had for him. If he considered an intellectual tradition like Calvinism to be bad, he was also rather likely to find that it had a fixed and monolithic character, and little or no capacity for development. Since it could not be expected to evolve, it would have to be overthrown or rejected, and this destructive task would have to be carried out by men stemming from an altogether different tradition. Opposing ideas demand opposing ancestries. Calvinism he thus saw not as having grown gentler and more receptive to modification under the stress of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century changes, but as having been “grotesque and illiberal to the last,” and as having been “finally rejected” by natural rights thinkers and democrats.⁵ Although he did have some insight into the positive historical relation between Puritan thought and the natural rights philosophy, Parrington put his primary emphasis upon the opposition between them. His tendency to see two sets of completely opposed ideas in conflict made it impossible for him to see the shared Calvinism of Roger Williams and John Cotton, the basic similarity of the ideas of Thomas Hooker and the Massachusetts theocrats, or the common Whiggery behind the friends and opponents of the Constitution. It also led him to some bizarre notions of intellectual genealogy, of which the most important are the idea that early American dissent had its intellectual foundations in Lutheranism and the idea that the American democratic tradition had its primary animating sources in “French romanticism.”

While the settlers of Massachusetts Bay were strong Calvinists, resting their theocracy on firm Calvinist foundations, Parrington imagined that the Pilgrims at Plymouth were far more democratic Separatists drawing their inspiration from Luther. “The teachings of Luther,” he wrote, “erected on the major principle of justification by faith, conduced straight to political liberty.…” These teachings embodied “the spirit of uncompromising individualism that would eventually espouse the principle of democracy in church and state.” Hence Radical Separatists turned naturally to Luther rather than Calvin. Roger Williams could be understood both as “a follower of Luther and a forerunner of French romantic thinkers.” Parrington seems to have consulted too exclusively some of Luther’s early utterances on “the liberty of the Christian man” and to have ignored entirely the later phases of his political development. The Luther who said: “I would rather suffer a prince doing wrong than a people doing right” makes no appearance in his calculations. In comparing the political impact of Lutheran and Calvinist thought he was almost pathetically unsure. He overemphasized the clarity and constancy of the political theories of both men, as well as overstating their differences from each other as political thinkers. But above all, he put the case the wrong way round. There had been more margin in Calvin than in Luther for a theory of popular resistance to absolute authority; and in Holland, France, Scotland, England, and finally America, it was Calvinist thinkers who had actually made progress toward finding a theological foundation for popular rights. Perhaps more important for the historian of ideas, by ascribing the source of democratic tendencies to Lutheranism, Parrington had turned away from one of the most interesting tendencies in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought—the emergence of a strong doctrine of natural rights within the Puritan tradition itself.⁶

Parrington belonged to a generation that found it especially hard to look at the Calvinists in detached historical terms. He had experienced too keenly the ugly little tyrannies of rigid religion at Emporia and again at Oklahoma. Along with so many others of his time, he had emancipated himself from religion with the aid of Darwin and Spencer; and while it is by no means impossible for a predominantly secular mind to enter imaginatively into the Puritan experience (one need think only of the wholly secular Perry Miller in this respect), there were very few among the liberal minds of Parrington’s generation who could have looked upon such an effort of imagination as anything other than an abject return to the intellectual manacles they had just broken. In the wake of their emancipation, Puritanism meant little more than harsh theology, aristocratic or theocratic politics, the stultification of natural human impulses, prudery and intolerance, superstition, and burnings for witchcraft. In criticism, at the same time, Mencken and others were lashing away at the fundamentalist assumptions of large segments of American culture, and were stigmatizing Puritanism, along with frontier influences, for having warped and desiccated American literary culture. The modern rediscovery of the American Puritans, which owes so much to the work of scholars like Samuel Eliot Morison, Kenneth Murdock, Clifford K. Shipton, and Perry Miller had barely begun when Parrington was at work. Here, then, Parrington was only shaping his own variation of the view of Puritanism commonly shared by emancipated American intellectuals during the years when his volumes were being written.

Today historians of Puritanism can see many aspects of Puritan society that were not of interest to Parrington’s generation, and find themselves fascinated by complex changes in the texture of a dedicated and disciplined community that took place under the stress of time and circumstances. Here, almost as in some kind of laboratory experiment, a sect can be seen evolving into a church, and one can observe the tension between utopian piety and the imperatives of organization, between the claims of the deterministic doctrine of election and the hortatory and evangelical side of religion, between the desire to create a church of true saints and the pressures, pleasures, and profits of the world. One can see how the Puritan community—pressed first by the dissenting sectaries and then by the awakeners in its own midst, shaken by profound internal problems of church polity, moved by the religious and political struggle with English authority, menaced by latitudinarian and Arminian thinkers, challenged at last by science and the rise of secularism—changed character within a few generations, and how the ministerial class struggled to cope with these changes and yet in some ways cooperated in bringing them about. To those who bear in mind the pristine aims of the first Puritan emigrants, what is impressive is the gradual yielding of the old order. Even by the time the Half-Way Covenant was adopted in the 1660’s the Puritan community was no longer the same, and the succeeding decades were so filled with change that the Mathers themselves could not avoid being swept along with the tides.

For writers of Parrington’s generation and of his stamp of mind, little of this had reality or significance; and they tried to find what sympathy they could for a few Puritan rebels on the ground that they prefigured modern democracy. Hence to Parrington the God-intoxicated Roger Williams was “more concerned with social commonwealths than with theological dogmas,” a man whose religion “issued in political theory rather than in theological dogma,” who was “primarily a political philosopher rather than a theologian,” and who indeed anticipated the principles of “local home rule, the initiative and the referendum, and the recall.” Again, Thomas Hooker’s basic intellectual similarity to the other stewards of the Puritan theocracy disappears in Parrington’s treatment, and Hooker too emerges if not as a secular mind at least as a radically democratic thinker.⁷

Distracted by this single-minded concern for democracy and dissent, Parrington failed to see much significance in the fascinating change that swept over the Puritan community. He paid no attention when even the Mathers went with the tide, espousing toleration and refusing to defend the old ways of their tribe. Instead, like so many other writers, he used the Mathers only as “anachronisms” who personified the old order. In seeking for the causes that overthrew Puritanism from without, Parrington and many of his contemporaries passed up the profound changes that were taking place within. And something in his populistic bias made it impossible for him to see what the process of change was like. For example, writing of the early eighteenth century, Parrington suggested to his readers that although rationalism “might be excluded from the minister’s study, it spread its subtle infection through the mass of the people,” though what actually happened was closer to the reverse. Here again it is the common people that become the vehicles of virtue, just as in the Revolution it is invariably the popular party that provides strength and as later it is in the “backwoods” of America that Physiocratic social idealism spreads. Calvinism is undermined not by the increasing cosmopolitanism of the towns, by science or latitudinarian speculation, but first by the native kindliness of the New England village and then by the philosophic assaults of Rousseau.⁸

Rousseau: perhaps the most persistent and, for him, fundamental of Parrington’s ideas was that American democratic thought was basically French in origin. Throughout his first two volumes impulses derived from what are loosely called “French romanticism” and “French humanitarianism” are invoked to account for the democratic proclivities of one writer after another. Even the dissatisfaction with Calvinism that could be seen in the eighteenth century is traced not to the English Arminians and latitudinarians but to a “fresh impetus from the new social philosophy of France.” But if we look for the particular French writers upon whom all this influence depends, the only names we find mentioned are Rousseau, the Physiocrats, and, collectively, “the Jacobins.” Parrington passes over a vast tradition of English latitudinarian and rationalist thought to make of Rousseau the fundamental secularizing influence. What undermined Calvinism, he thought, was the teaching of Rousseau that men are naturally good and that evils come from society, an idea that quickened the revolt against “every form of arbitrary authority,” theological and political. Even a colonial who had no direct contact with such speculative thought could hardly escape being affected by it. Again, in the nineteenth century, “French liberalism” is given the central role in the formation of New England Unitarian culture; in a somewhat disguised garb, “the gospel of Jean Jacques presently walked the streets of Boston and spoke from its most respectable pulpits under the guise of Unitarianism.” In fact Unitarianism discreetly “accomplished for New England what Jeffersonianism had accomplished for the South and West—the wide dissemination of eighteenth century French liberalism.” As to politics, Parrington, being unable to find much power in the English backgrounds of American democratic thought, had to ascribe democracy in the Federalist era to the Jacobins, who he thought were necessary to “clarify” its principles for Americans. He concluded that if only the American debate over the Constitution had taken place five years later than it did, “after the French Revolution had provided new democratic theory, the disparity of intellectual equipment [that is, between Federalists and Anti-Federalists] would have been far less marked.” Indeed, he regarded the enthusiasm for the French Revolution as “the first great popularization of democratic ideals in America.”⁹

The notion that Rousseau was a major source of the ideas of the Declaration of Independence and of democratic thought in the Jeffersonian era was, again, no peculiarity of Parrington’s. Many historians and men of letters writing in the Federalist tradition—most of them shockingly ignorant of Jefferson—had taken up this idea as one of a number of ways (so they thought) of discrediting the Virginian as a wild theorist of the French type, and by the sheer force of repetition it gained ground. John Morley, for example, had been persuaded by such writers that the ideas and phrases of the Declaration of Independence came from Rousseau’s writing, and many American writers would have followed Lowell in referring to Rousseau as “the father … in politics of Jefferson and Thomas Paine.”¹ No doubt this notion of a Rousseauian influence got much of its impetus from the memory of the enthusiasm shown among many Jeffersonian Republicans for the French Revolution, though it was a mistake to identify this enthusiasm for the event with an immediate conversion to its ideology or to forget how short-lived the enthusiasm was. But above all, the defenders of Jefferson made a mistake in inverting this Federalist version of intellectual history by simply accepting the idea of the Rousseauian Jefferson and holding that the impact of Rousseau was, after all, an excellent thing.

No serious student of early American thought has in fact been able to find that Rousseau had any considerable influence here, and it is doubtful that there was a single American thinker of any consequence who professed to owe him anything of importance.² The Anglo-American tradition of republicanism had taken on a firm character before Rousseau began to write (the Social Contract appeared in 1762) and long before his works were known here. He was occasionally read by Americans, but rather infrequently cited, and then often as the object of disdain, or even, especially after about 1800, of revulsion. His abstract approach to the majority will was quite uncongenial to the particular problems of representation that were of utmost concern in America, and it would have been a rare American democrat who could have seen in him much more than a spirited but vague confirmation of sentiments they found expressed more clearly and usably in Anglo-American writing. The major American writer who seems to have known him best was John Adams, and Adams detested him. Jefferson took little or no interest in him, and even Paine, who is supposed to have followed him, found him seriously wanting in guiding principles. It is doubtful that any American democrat who read Rousseau did not imagine that he could get a better intellectual foundation for his political aspirations from more congenial and accessible English sources. The really interesting question is not whether Rousseau had much influence in America but why he struck so few resonances in the American mind.

Finally, the notion, so central for Parrington, that American democratic thought owed its economic rationale to the influence of the Physiocrats can be regarded only as a gratuitous intrusion on the facts. Parrington considered the thought of a striking number of his heroes to have been shaped by the economic ideas of the Physiocrats, beginning with the seminal trio of Franklin, Paine, and Jefferson, and going on to Barlow, Crèvecoeur, John Taylor, and Cooper. The Southern mind as a whole also had “a frank bias towards … Physiocratic agrarianism.” Various Americans who were not to be classed as openly Physiocratic had “a pronounced bias” toward Physiocratic views of society (Emerson), or were, however informal in their thinking, still Physiocrats by derivation (Jackson, since Jacksonianism was merely “John Taylor’s economics written into the law of the land”), or were instinctive “stepsons” of the Physiocrats without reading them (Greeley), or had at least “a Physiocratic dislike of middlemen” (H. C. Carey), or arrived along an independent path at identical conclusions (Henry George). When the Physiocrats cannot be found, Parrington misses them. Whitman, whom he admired, was, he thought, a superb latter-day representative of Enlightenment thought, but “there was wanting only a physiocratic economics to make it perfect”; and a whole host of writers whom he did not admire were reproached for ignoring or never having gone to school to the Physiocrats.

Had Parrington spoken of physiocracy simply to refer to a generally agrarian cast of thought, there would be little to differ with, for the agrarian bias of so much of the American mind is undeniable; but there are several passages which make it clear that he meant that specific doctrines of Physiocratic economics, including the produit net, the principle of laissez faire, and the proposal of the impôt unique, were literally taken over by American followers. To Jefferson, he asserted, “the appeal of the Physiocratic theory of social economics [was] irresistible,” and the “strongest creative influence on the mature Jefferson” came from Quesnay and Du Pont de Nemours, along with a few other French writers. The struggle between Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian economics was an American version of “a conflict between the rival principles of Quesnay and Adam Smith, between an agrarian and a capitalistic economy.” It was “the Physiocratic conception that explains [Jefferson’s] bitter hostility to protective tariffs, national banks, funding manipulations, the maturity of credit, and all the agencies which Hamilton was skillfully erecting in America.” Accordingly, “Jeffersonian democracy as it spread through Virginia and west along the frontier assumed a pronounced Physiocratic bias.”³

In fact Parrington understood the Physiocrats no better than he understood Luther, and was no more successful in finding American followers for them than he was for Rousseau. The Physiocrats were not fundamentally interested in expressing a sentimental agrarianism or in laying the basis for a humanitarian social economics. They were trying to rescue the ancien régime from its fiscal difficulties by devising an economic theory which would justify it in taking adequate tax revenues from landed proprietors. Neither their absolutist political principles nor their ideas about the virtues of a single tax upon the revenue of the land—perish the thought!—were congenial to the American agrarian mind. The warm regard for agricultural life which Parrington attributed almost wholly to them could have been drawn from any of a score of writers in the ancient tradition of pastoral poetry.⁴

Taken superficially, Parrington’s version of intellectual history seems to have been inspired by a kind of Anglophobia that disposed him to accept readily enough the English ancestry of ideas he disliked but caused him to minimize or even deny the English ancestry of ideas he approved. This feeling is charmingly laid bare near the end of his third volume where, discussing the importance of the Progressive attack on the Constitution, he remarks that the myths that had gathered about it were dispelled by the work of J. Allen Smith and Beard, and that “the document was revealed as English rather than French”—as though this were indeed a revelation, and also the last word in condemnation.⁵ A hatred of Tory England was, of course, a vital part of his family inheritance, and it may have been confirmed by the anti-English feeling that was commonplace in the Populist movement. Yet it could be argued that Parrington was at the worst deeply ambivalent about England and English culture, since his own debt to the Victorian moralists was considerable and his response to the country, when he was at last able to visit it, was one of instant affection. More important than his anti-English feeling, I suppose, was his partisan dualism, his uncontrollable passion for schematization, and his flimsy knowledge of the very “sources”—Luther, Rousseau, the Physiocrats—he liked to invoke. But the consequence is unmistakable: a whole series of misleading suggestions in which the traditions he most wanted to celebrate—the traditions of early dissent, of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy, and of secular enlightenment—are desiccated and shorn of even so much of their true history as might have been recoverable in the light of the scholarship of Parrington’s day. To make way for Luther, Quesnay, Du Pont, and Rousseau it was necessary to minimize or ignore America’s inheritance from Coke, Milton, Locke, and Sidney, not to speak of a throng of lesser writers, now interesting perhaps mainly to specialists in the history of thought but once of central importance to American rationalists, revolutionaries, and democrats: those English Arminians, latitudinarians, Whigs, and radicals who were the true precursors and shapers of the American mind.

V

In his first two volumes, Parrington’s work seems a strong and clear illustration of the Whig interpretation of history: it is avowedly partisan, it takes the side of dissenters and protestants against establishments, of democrats against aristocrats, of revolutionaries against old regimes; it seems to be telling a story of steady progress, pointing toward a certain satisfaction with the enlightened ideas of the present. But then, as it reaches and passes the Civil War, its mood changes. The third volume, which one reviewer labeled a study in disillusionment, is afflicted by that awareness of defeat that so often beclouds the agrarian mind. It becomes tainted with a certain wistfulness or melancholy, and yields now and then to a note of pessimism. Here we find Parrington arriving at a common ground with Turner. Both men had the same misgivings, arising from the decline of agrarian America, the disappearance of the frontier and free land, the same fear that American democracy, once separated from its agrarian and particularist base, might be doomed to go down before the machine and the city. On this count a common strain of poignant nostalgia underlies their thought: while they might be able to see the inevitability of industrial culture and the modern state, neither could find it in himself, as Beard could in the 1930’s, to embrace modernity in the hope that it would lead to a democratic collectivism; and of course neither lived to the era of the New Deal, which constituted a kind of test case for the agrarian liberal mind.

Parrington shrewdly understood that the liberalism of the Progressive era to which he belonged was “the spontaneous reaction of an America still only half urbanized,” and “an attempt to secure through the political state the freedoms that before had come from unpreempted opportunity” on the frontier. He thought about the possibility that his social ideals could be achieved only under socialism, and though I believe that he remained much more the Jeffersonian liberal than the Marxist, he seems to have arrived at a generous, undoctrinaire, ecumenical radicalism which, seeing no enemies on the left, reached out to embrace many varieties of protest that were hospitable in spirit even if not quite congenial in doctrine. There is no doubt that his private sentiments were more radical than his book, and he might have enjoyed the brief burst of radical literary criticism that came after his death. He had a high regard “for critics of the left wing,” he wrote in 1928 to a radical critic, “for long ago I learned that they were far more likely than conventional critics to have some insight into Realpolitik, and to be able to judge men and programs in the light of underlying principles.” To the same correspondent, who had referred to him as “a diluted Marxian,” he replied that the remark was “pretty near the truth—at least I was a good deal of a Marxian and perhaps still am, although a growing sense of the complexity of social forces makes me somewhat distrustful of the sufficiency of Marxian formulae.” His use of the term liberal in Main Currents, he also explained, was a considered one: “I could see no harm and some good in using the term, and warping it pretty well to the left. As a matter of fact, in my first draft I used the word radical throughout, and only on revising did I substitute the other.”⁶ But his idea of Marxian intellectual filiations was an extremely loose one if one may judge by his belief that the thought of the later Wendell Phillips exemplified “pretty much all of Marxism” and that William Dean Howells was “the first distinguished American man of letters to espouse Marxian socialism.”⁷

If Parrington’s agrarianism was overlaid with some sympathy for proletarian socialism, it was more surely and profoundly affected by a quite contradictory perennial anti-institutional strain in American thought which verges toward anarchism. In him the old American fear of centralized power, echoed repeatedly in his references to “the coercive state,” was very much alive. Characteristic here was his response to Herbert Spencer, whom he had first read in the early 1890’s. Seeing in Spencer an intellectual liberator for his secularism and his anticlericalism, Parrington was also attracted, as no Marxist could be, by Spencer’s view of state power. In his enthusiasm for the note of anarchism that he found there, a total dislike of governmental authority that accorded with his own feeling about “the coercive state,” he found it easy to overlook the less congenial side of Spencer’s mind, its laissez-faire complacency and social Darwinism. Always a little indulgent to those conservatives whose views were founded in opposition to state authority, he welcomed the anarchist and nonconformist elements in Spencer, his passion for individual liberty and his faith in progress, and overlooked his hostility to all plans for human welfare. Spencer, he thought, had achieved “a fresh justification, based on the findings of Victorian science, of the master principles of eighteenth-century speculation; its individualism, its liberalism, its passion for justice, its love of liberty and distrust of every form of coercion,” and concluded that Spencer’s final deductions were such “as to warrant a disciple of Jefferson in becoming a disciple of Spencer.”⁸

His regard for localism and for all who resisted the centralized state accounted in good part for the tenderness with which Parrington, despite his antipathy to slavery, racism, and caste exclusion, treated certain spokesmen of the South. “I was at particular pains,” he explained, “to present the doctrine of States’ Rights sympathetically, partly because it has had too little recognition and partly because the States’ Rights men were the best liberals of the time.”⁹ Calhoun—whom he struck off splendidly as “a potential intellectual whose mind was unfertilized by contact with a generous social culture”—was too harsh a spirit to win his approval. But he did see much to admire in Calhoun’s elaboration of the states-rights doctrine, and found his great mistake to lie in linking its fate to the doomed institution of slavery and so mobilizing against it American idealism and liberalism. “What Calhoun so greatly feared has since come about,” he wrote. “He erected a last barrier against the progress of middle-class ideals—consolidation in politics and standardization in society; against a universal cash-register evaluation of life: and the barrier was blown to bits by the guns of the Civil War.” For Parrington the truly admirable Southern spokesman was Alexander H. Stephens, a figure many other historians have found attractive. A gentle, selfless patriot, whose career exemplified “the passionate love of freedom,” Stephens was so highly principled, as Parrington read his mind, that he refused to sanction the use of extraconstitutional powers even in the urgent crisis of war. “He was of an earlier generation, instinctively hostile to all consolidation,” and even though he failed to understand the economic basis of politics, he was worthy of a characterization which, coming from Parrington, was almost the ultimate accolade: the doctrine upon which his Constitutional View of the Late War between the States was based was “the doctrine which Paine and Jefferson derived from the French school, namely, that a constitutional compact is terminable.”

Parrington’s feeling about the power of government was founded, it must be said, on a lifetime of hard experience during which he had rarely, if ever, seen authority acting in an enlightened, flexible, and humane way. He had moved from his Republican family into the tight little environment of Emporia College, whose windows (as he might have said) were certainly closed against the winds of doctrine, and where everything went on under the encompassing eyes of the Presbyterian Church and Major Hood; from there he had gone first to Harvard, which he found impenetrable, and then to Oklahoma, where he endured the ruthless cabal of the Methodists and political hacks, and finally to Washington, where he saw J. Allen Smith so shabbily treated. Arriving at maturity as a young agrarian in the era of Harrison and Cleveland, and finishing his book in the age of Harding and Coolidge, when the hopes of Progressivism seemed to have been blasted, he had seen little to suggest that somewhere a reliable center of power existed where the needs of the common man were a matter of vital concern. What experience taught him, and what the Jeffersonian tradition instilled, may have been confirmed in more self-conscious philosophical terms by J. Allen Smith, whose distrust of centralized government had led him to conclude by 1923 that “the only way to secure any real democracy in this country is to check the growth of federal power” and that democracy “is possible only where there is the largest practicable measure of local self-government.” (On these grounds Smith refused to support a federal child-labor amendment.)¹

Parrington, E. H. Eby concluded, “feared above all … the cancer of power. ‘Man,’ he used to say, ‘has never proved himself worthy of an unrestrained control of his fellows, nor has any special group of men ever been dominant without injustice to others.’ ” This distrust of state power, which I believe would have made Parrington ultimately resistant to Marxism, made him somewhat skeptical even of the possibilities of Progressivism. He understood that, to achieve their ends, the Progressives needed the power of the state, and also that the cry of states’ rights was being used by businessmen to protect themselves against reforms; but he was afraid that the state apparatus was always more likely to be captured by the vested interests than by the people. The centralized state, he wrote to a fellow reformer in the year of his death, was certainly coming, but he was troubled about it: “Wherever power is lodged a great struggle for control and use of that power follows. When one controls the political state, whatever one wants can be done under cover of the law and with the sanction of the courts. Have you been able to convince yourself that the corporate wealth of America will permit the centralized political state to pass out of its control and become an agent to regulate or thwart its principles? The entire history of federalism shows clearly that the business interests of the day desired first, to create a strong state; second, to control that state; and third, to transform it into an agent of a class.… You see the dilemma in which I find myself. We must have a political state powerful enough to deal with corporate wealth, but how are we going to keep that state with its augmenting power from being captured by the forces we want it to control? I agree … that taxation is a vital problem, but how are we going to tax our masters?”²

To such questions Parrington offered no easy optimistic answers. His own economic realism seemed to point to the defeat of his social aspirations. The philosophy of Jefferson and John Taylor, he sadly remarked in his last volume, had been “buried in the potter’s field,” and he was not confident or dogmatic enough to predict a better turning, though he had not given up every hope in the liberals and radicals of his own time. With his love of balance and proportion, his taste for elegance, his awakened secularism, and his affection for the ideals of humanitarianism and progress, Parrington belonged intellectually, as he fully realized, to the eighteenth century. For him the American Enlightenment remained the high point in national thought, and it was a warm compliment on his part, if wistfully conceived, to speak of Walt Whitman as “the afterglow of the Enlightenment”—as though Whitman represented not a beginning in poetry but a lovely echo in philosophy. Though he preferred the ebullience of the early optimistic reformers, he showed a certain gentle sympathy for the pessimism of men like Melville and Henry and Brooks Adams, men who, like himself, were caught on some receding wave of history: courageous, honest, sometimes rebellious minds who faced with poise the fatality of extinction. Whether later turnings of American history would have given him any comfort we cannot know, for he died suddenly during a trip to England in the summer of 1929. It seems a pity that he should have been denied some years more to finish his work and enjoy the fame that had come to him, and it would have been instructive to see him balance his humane ideals against his distrust of the consolidated state in the era of centralizing reform that was about to dawn.

¹ III, xxv, 83.

² I, i, 6. One is reminded here of Beard’s belief that Puritan religious thought was “the defense mechanism of men who were engaged in resisting taxes and other exactions” and his confidence that “the historian need not tarry long with the logical devices of men in action.” Rise, I, 31.

³ III, vi.

⁴ III, 160; cf. I, 11, 13, 26, 72, 397; II, 473.

⁵ It is possible that Parrington (though he disliked the Modern Language Association and did not take its periodicals) might have read Lovejoy’s essay. It appeared in PMLA, which is often seen, if not always read, by university teachers of English. In this essay Lovejoy asked what could be done to diminish a confusion of terminology “which has for a century been the scandal of literary history and criticism,” and suggested, among other devices, that “we should learn to use the word ‘Romanticism’ in the plural.” PMLA, 39 (1924), 229–53. See Lovejoy’s Essays in the History of Ideas (1948), 234–5.

⁶ I, 368.

⁷ I, 53. Because Parrington’s characterizations of individual writers are easy to find in the relevant chapters, I have here documented only those quotations which, having no obvious place, would be hard to find.

⁸ I, 194.

⁹ If I give little stress to this gap in Parrington’s “environmental” view of ideas, it is because it has been more than once commented upon, and is well documented by Robert A. Skotheim and Kermit Vanderbilt, “Vernon Louis Parrington: The Mind and Art of a Historian of Ideas,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly, 53 (1962), 102–4.

¹ Or even of Increase Mather, who also “closed the windows of his mind against the winds of new doctrine.”

² III, 137–8, 178–9.

³ II, x, 449; I, 296; the italics are added.

⁴ This section draws in some part on Parrington’s own summaries. See I, iii–vii, 5–15, 51–3, 179–90, 267–91, 397–8; II, xix–xx, xxiii–xxix, 3–5; and for particular quotations, I, iv, 180, 185, 284, 288, 289; II, 28; III, xxiii, 3.

⁵ I, i, 13, 15.

⁶ I, i, 11–12, 70. In his approach to Luther, Parrington seems to have passed by the standard authorities and turned to an unreliable study by Luther H. Waring, The Political Theories of Martin Luther (1910), and to have ignored the course of Luther’s thought after 1525. See Esther E. Burch, “The Sources of New England Democracy,” American Literature, I (1929), 115–30.

⁷ On Williams, see Alan Simpson, “How Democratic Was Roger Williams?” William and Mary Quarterly, 13 (1956), 53–67; on Williams’s supposed secularism, see Mauro Calamandrei, “Neglected Aspects of Roger Williams’ Thought,” Church History, 21 (1953), 239–56. For Hooker, Perry Miller, “Thomas Hooker and the Democracy of Early Connecticut,” New England Quarterly, 4 (1931), 663–712.

⁸ I, 148–51, 185. For an early attempt to clarify the decline of old-fashioned clerical influence from about 1680 to 1740, see Clifford K. Shipton, “The New England Clergy of the ‘Glacial Age,’ ” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 32 (1937), 24–54; this essay was originally written in 1933.

⁹ I, 151, 279, 281, 324; II, 322.

¹ On the Rousseauist image of Jefferson, see Merrill D. Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (1960), 44, 117, 133, 214, 269; for Morley and Lowell see Lewis Rosenthal, “Rousseau in Philadelphia,” Magazine of American History, 12 (1884), 46.

Parrington saw Rousseau as having cut an extraordinarily wide swath in the American mind. Thoreau, for example, was “a child of Jean Jacques,” Melville “a spiritual child of Jean Jacques,” and even Sinclair Lewis was “an echo of Jean Jacques and the golden hopes of the Enlightenment—thin and far off, no doubt, but still an authentic echo.”

² One had only to seek carefully for the influence of Rousseau in American political thought in order to be able not to find it. Howard Mumford Jones, whose exhaustive study, America and French Culture, 1750–1848, appeared the same year as Parrington’s first two volumes, concluded that, as to political theory, “the influence of Rousseau was negligible.” P. 369 n; cf. 572. Carl Becker, in his Declaration of Independence (1922), which, unlike Jones’s book, was available to Parrington but which was not cited in his bibliography, remarked: “It does not appear that Jefferson, or any American, read many French books. So far as the ‘Fathers’ were, before 1776, directly influenced by particular writers, the writers were English, and notably Locke.” Ed. 1942, 27. See also the finding of Lewis Rosenthal, “Rousseau in Philadelphia,” 46–55. Paine is sometimes cited as owing much to Rousseau. He did think that Rousseau’s works were full of an elevating spirit of liberty, but he also found that they “leave the mind in love with an object [liberty], without describing the means of possessing it.” Rights of Man in Complete Works (ed. 1954), II, 75.

³ I, 346; II, 10.

⁴ The supposed influence of the Physiocrats is the subject of my essay, “Parrington and the Jeffersonian Tradition,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 2 (1941), 391–400; see also the Introduction by Gilbert Chinard to The Correspondence of Jefferson and Du Pont de Nemours (1931).

⁵ III, 409.

⁶ Letter to a confidential source, February 24, 1928; on “half-urbanized” liberalism, III, 404.

⁷ Parrington seems not to have owned any work of Marx, though he had a full set of the works of William Morris.

⁸ III, 197–201; Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., sees clearly this side of Parrington in “Parrington and the Decline of American Liberalism,” American Quarterly, 3 (1951), 295–308.

⁹ Eric F. Goldman, “J. Allen Smith,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly, 35 (1944), 209, quoting a letter to Ross L. Finney, January 23, 1929.

Parrington was also doubtful whether the Constitution could survive the changes that the near future would bring. “My own view is that it will not, and that when the masters of society think the time has come to throw it on the scrap heap they will do it.” To Howard Lee McBain, December 18, 1928.

¹ Goldman, “J. Allen Smith,” 210, 212.

² Goldman, “J. Allen Smith,” 209. Cf. Woodrow Wilson in 1912: “If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit at the helm of government. I do not expect to see monopoly restrain itself. If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it.” The New Freedom (1913), 286.