IN CARRYING THIS STUDY of “The American Experiment” on from the Civil War years to the crises of the early 1930s, I have continued to emphasize the role of purposeful leadership in the processes of historical causation. But now my central concern is with economic as well as intellectual and political leadership. The late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were indeed an era of great financial and industrial tycoons—Morgan, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, and many others. I have tried to indicate some of the influence these leaders had on American thought, society, and politics.
As in the first volume, however, I do not conceive leadership as a function merely of the more celebrated persons, but as the product of numberless purposes and actions of leaders of the second and third cadres in many social and political arenas. Even in situations where the top economic leadership—the great industrialists and financiers—appears capable of wielding enormous economic and political power, the “subordinate” leaders in my view have a critical influence on the course of events. Their role also helps to explain why economic power cannot be simply or mechanically converted into political power; for these “lesser” leaders, reflecting as they do the endless social and ideological diversity of the American people, will often tend to lie outside, or even block or divert, the vertical flow of power from the top—and the more numerous and varied such leaders, the greater this tendency. I plan to return to the central problem of the role of concentrated economic power in a democratic republic in the third volume of this trilogy.
Once again I have sought to illuminate the role of second- and third-cadre leaders by sinking “historical drill-holes” in specific sectors and situations, through research in a number of archives and libraries. For their unfailing helpfulness I thank the archivists and librarians at the Baker Library at Harvard Business School, the Buffalo Historical Society, California Historical Society, Columbia University Library, Ford Motor Company, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Huntington Library, Kansas State Historical Society, Library of Congress, Louisiana State University Library, Massachusetts Historical Society, Minnesota State Archives, New-York Historical Society, New York Public Library, Ohio Historical Society, Pennsylvania Historical Society, Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe, Stanford University Library and Archives, Stowe-Day Library (Hartford), Williams College Library, and various other, more specialized archives and libraries.
This volume, like The Vineyard of Liberty, has been very much a collaborative venture, in which I have had the privilege of working with great and varied talents. Once again I have pitilessly enlisted assistance from my family. My wife and fellow author, Joan Simpson Burns, helped me understand literary and other cultural forces in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries by sharing with me her ideas on and extensive knowledge of these subjects. I made full use of the versatility of Deborah Edwards Burns, a journalist who helped me with research on women’s history and related social history, and who conceived and executed the illustrative endpapers. Trienah Meyers Kuykendall critiqued the whole manuscript, making particular use of her legal background, and I tested my ideas against those of Peter Meyers, a young political theorist. I was especially fortunate to have the creative assistance of Stewart Burns, author of a doctoral dissertation, “The Populist Movement and the Cooperative Commonwealth: The Politics of Non-Reformist Reform” (1984), who generously helped me in placing the role of the Farmers Alliance in a broad historical and theoretical framework, shared with me his data, and collaborated with me in the drafting of the sections on the Alliance, Populism, and related intellectual and political developments.
Because of the emphasis on economic and social history as well as intellectual and political history in this volume, I am especially grateful for help and collaboration from social historians working in these areas. Joan G. Zimmerman gave me indispensable assistance in the fields of Progressive politics, social legislation, and women’s education, as did Ellen M. James and Dee Ann Montgomery in women’s history, Eric Scheye in intellectual and ethnic history, Fran Burke in the political leadership of women, Anne Margolis in intellectual history, and Philippa Strum, author of a preeminent study of Louis Brandeis, in legal history and politics. Others who provided valued help in specific areas were Eunice Burns, Laurie Burns Gray, Rodger Davis, Lee Farbman, Michael Koessel, and Jay Leibold. Michael Beschloss, Lisl Cade, and Maurice Greenbaum also contributed in important ways. Milton Djuric provided extensive and invaluable editorial assistance at every stage of the book’s preparation.
The most important contribution to the volume was made by my good friend, close associate, and former student, Jeffrey P. Trout. Not only did he collaborate with me in planning, researching, and drafting in areas in which he is especially knowledgeable—military, diplomatic, and political history; he also worked closely with me in conceptualizing the whole volume, in organizing the flow of chapters, and in bibliographical research and criticism. His sense of history, enthusiastic participation, and crisis-management have improved every part of the volume.
As with the first volume, I solicited critical reviews of the manuscript from scholars far more expert than I, and I was fortunate in receiving stringent and constructive criticism from David Burner, John Milton Cooper, Jr., Eric Foner, James M. McPherson, Jerome Mushkat, Irwin Unger, and my longtime friend and colleague at Williams, Robert C. L. Scott. At our neighboring North Adams State College, historians W. Anthony Gengarelly, Clark Billings, Richard Taskin, and David Oppenheimer generously shared their specialized knowledge with me. My friends in the Faculty Secretarial Office at Williams literally made possible the production of this work. At Alfred A. Knopf, my editor, Ashbel Green, Betty Anderson, Peter Hayes, Anne Eberle, and Melvin Rosenthal played indispensable roles.
Any errors or deficiencies are solely my responsibility—and I would appreciate being informed of them, at Williams College, Williamstown, Mass. 01267. I wish to thank those who sent in corrections for the first volume. They were: (p. 116) Benjamin Franklin lay mortally ill at this time rather than “lay dying,” as he did not die until a year later; (180) it was not Lewis but Clark who had probably met Daniel Boone; (501) Whittier was a Quaker, not a Unitarian (though he did have Unitarian sympathies); (518) Lovejoy was the son of a Congregational minister, not a Presbyterian one, he was a student at Princeton Theological Seminary but did not graduate from it, and he might better be described as an “extremist” than as a “fanatic.” These changes have been made in the paperback edition (1983).
As with the first volume, I have borrowed occasional phrases or sentences from my own earlier works in cases where I felt my prose was—or should be made—imperishable.
J.M.B.