Another Wood Review

by Cliopatria

Gordon Wood has his second important review in as many weeks. In tomorrow's Times Book Review, he hails publication of Sean Wilentz's"monumental" The Rise of American Democracy.

I'm one of the academics Wood notes are likely to"slog through" this enormous work, and I'll defer judgment on the text itself till I have had time to reflect on it some. As with his review of Ackerman, however, Wood uses the occasion to lament the state of study about American history.

Wood accurately notes that the book

is not likely to receive similar acclaim from the scholarly left; for it very much runs against the flow of current academic trends. Most historians today, especially those writing about the period Wilentz is concerned with - the period of the early Republic from Jefferson to Lincoln - are interested in what they call 'the new political history.' They seek to transcend the usual stuff of politics - elections, parties and the political maneuvering of elite white males in government - and to provide a history that views politics through the lenses of race, gender and popular culture. So they devote themselves primarily to the symbols and theatrics of politics - the various ways common people, including women and blacks, expressed themselves and participated in the political process, whether in parades, costume or drinking toasts. These historians believe culture trumps policy and power. They explicitly reject any sort of narrative of dead white males bringing about the triumph of democracy within the two-party system. This, however, is the very subject of Wilentz's book.

Indeed, there's very little"political" in the"new political history" at all--although hiring its practioners allows departments (like, say, UCLA) to claim that they have a political historian on staff. Wilentz himself, as Wood points out, has described the"new political history" as filled with"bargain basement Nietzsche and Foucault, admixed with earnest American do-goodism, that still passes for 'theory' in much of the academy."

Since the book seems likely to have little effect in the academy, what is Wilentz's intended audience? Wood speculates that Wilentz hopes to emulate Arthur Schlesinger's study of a similar (though obviously less broad, both thematically and chronologically) period to speak to the dilemmas of contemporary liberalism. In the 1940s, Schlesinger saw in Andrew Jackson a model for the vital center. Today, argues Wood,"by suggesting that the race, gender and cultural issues that drive much of the modern left are not central to the age of Jackson, Wilentz seems to imply that they should not be central to the future of the present-day Democratic Party."

The Dems would be wise to take this lesson to heart.

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Ralph E. Luker - 11/16/2005

Wilentz has very little good to say about those whom you characterize as "very respected and productive figures."

Jonathan Dresner - 11/16/2005

I don't think I misread the article: it clearly was tying present Republican conservativism to a "tradition" going back to the early 19th century and which he associates with some very respected and productive figures.

I may, however, have misread Wilentz as a result of reading only that article.

Ralph E. Luker - 11/16/2005

I'm afraid that you must have misread Sean Wilentz's article. He is neither Republican-friendly nor Whig-friendly.

Jonathan Dresner - 11/16/2005

I don't know. The article clearly did intend a present purpose as well as an historical one: to legitimate a current position as "traditional"... very whiggish. But that was an op-ed, not a book, and it was focused on the Republican, not Democratic, party.

I might ask, then, why Democrats should care what message an apparently very Republican-friendly historian has encoded in his historical narratives?

Ralph E. Luker - 11/16/2005

Wouldn't you agree that his NYT op-ed, "Bush's Ancestors," which appeared with the publication of his book and on which we had the last symposium, invited that assumption? We'd have had a more definitive answer to your question if we'd gotten his response to the symposium.

Jonathan Dresner - 11/16/2005

This has been bugging me for days now:

Why does everyone seem to think that Wilentz is making some kind of sub rosa presentist argument?

Ralph E. Luker - 11/13/2005

Chris, You've made the point that you don't like KC many times before. You've even said that he has no credibility many times before. When you have something to say that is not an ad hominem attack, do feel free to speak up. As it is, I've not seen you make a significant substantive argument on any issue here in many months.

chris l pettit - 11/13/2005

You know Ralph...

why can't you just let the two ideological misfits go at it? Both Mr. Proyect and KC have little (Mr. Proyect) to no (KC) credibility left...and have established themselves not as scholars, but as hypocritical mouthpieces incapable of critical and objective thought outside of their little fantasy worlds. You, at least, have some more lucid moments...although i fear they are becoming more and more rare as you attempt to defend some of KC's garbage (all you need to do is read the last line of his ignorant blather to figure out what he is up to). Your self righteousness is at times abhorrent.

Can we please get on to some serious academic scholarship...or is that below the three of you?

CP

Ralph E. Luker - 11/13/2005

Mr. Proyect, It would be good of you, if you were to comment on KC Johnson's post as if you had actually read it. Instead, you use it to mount your own soapbox and make your own reference to Gordon Wood's review of Wilentz's book, as if that was something KC had not already done in his post.

Louis N Proyect - 11/13/2005

There’s an interesting review of Sean Wilentz’s "The Rise of American Democracy" by Gordon S. Wood in today’s NY Times Book review section (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/13/books/review/13wood.html). Wood, a historian himself, correctly identifies Wilentz as having the reinvigoration of the Democratic Party as one of his chief aims in this book, particularly through his elevation of Andrew Jackson, a figure who no longer is flattered the way he was in Arthur Schlesinger Jr. “Age of Jackson,” a book that didn’t even mention the ethnic cleansing of the Cherokees.

Unlike Schlesinger, Wilentz does acknowledge the Democratic Party’s pro-slavery and anti-Indian policies, but forgives them in the same way that Communists used to apologize for Stalin. In Great Projects like building American Democracy or Socialism, it is sometimes necessary to subordinate lesser peoples for the Greater Good.

Wood makes the case that Wilentz has no use for pesky minorities when it comes to advancing the cause of the Democratic Party today:

“Like Schlesinger in 1945, he wants in 2005 to speak to the liberalism of the modern Democratic Party. By suggesting that the race, gender and cultural issues that drive much of the modern left are not central to the age of Jackson, Wilentz seems to imply that they should not be central to the future of the present-day Democratic Party.”

Of course, this is somewhat old news. People like Richard Rorty and Sean Wilentz deeply resent the New Left’s impact on American politics. By forcing the issues of Black, gay and women’s inequality on the world’s oldest bourgeois party, they allow the Republicans to demagogically exploit the fears of the sort described in Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter with Kansas.”

As everybody probably knows, there is no such thing as “impartial” historiography. Every historian imparts his own ideological agenda into yesterday’s events, no matter the pains they take to conceal it under a veneer of scholarly dispassion. What about Gordon S. Wood himself?

As the author of “The Radicalism of the American Revolution,” one might expect Wood to be Howard Zinn’s second cousin. However, the radicalism he writes about is that of Thomas Jefferson than that of Crispus Attucks.

For Wood, as well as Wilentz, it is necessary to learn to appreciate the Greater Mission of American capitalism, even when they are getting short shrift:

“I do think that there were -- there are lots of historians who feel that we didn't do enough for these oppressed or -- oppressed people, particularly black slaves and -- and women. I mean, I -- my answer to that is, of course, that the Revolution did really substantially change the climate in which slavery had existed.

“For thousands of years, slavery had existed in the Western world without substantial criticism. And the Revolution marked a major turning point. It suddenly put slavery on the defensive. And I think that's the point that needs to be emphasized, not that Jefferson didn't free his slaves, but that as a man raised as a slave holder, in a world that was dominated by slavery, he criticized it. That's what's new. That's the point that I think needs to be made. Where did that come from? Why -- why did this generation suddenly become critics of slavery and put it on the defensive? That I think is an important point.”

Full: http://www.booknotes.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1672

John Chuckman, a frequent contributor to Alexander Cockburn and Jeff St. Clair’s “Counterpunch” has an interesting review of Wood’s book on amazon.com that starts as follows:

“Mr. Wood's book tries to put some intellectual and moral sizzle back into an American Revolution that has long come to be regarded by world scholars as something less than an earth-shaking event.

“Despite much-labored efforts, Mr. Wood fails, and he is pretty dull along the way in presenting his case. It really could not be otherwise, for his basic thesis is faulty. The Revolution has been summed up, quite accurately I believe, as a group of home-grown aristocrats taking power from a group of foreign-born aristocrats.

“America's central myth about its founding goes something like this: An extraordinary bunch of men, dressed in frock coats and wearing powdered wigs, closeted together after a long and heroic war against tyranny, worked unselfishly to give the United States a perfect modern system of government.”

For obvious reasons what repels a genuine radical like Chuckman also attracts Newt Gingrich, who hyped Wood’s book when it came out and that is found on the ‘recommended books’ section of Gingrich’s website, along with “Gone With the Wind” and Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather.”