A review of David S. Brown’s Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing
(University of Chicago Press, 2009)
The Middle West thought it had a good thing going. By the end of the nineteenth century, after not much more than one hundred years of settled European living, it boasted a way of life robust enough to call forth its own academic defenders, native sons who could articulate for those beyond the middle border—and especially those in the nation’s East—the good it had in such short time both preserved and discovered. The Middle West had become, in short, solid—certainly not as solid as its boosters hoped, but solid enough to impel sharp, shrewd, and sophisticated men to dedicate their careers to protecting and advancing its vision of the good life. It is these men whose story David S. Brown sets out to tell in Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing.
They were historians, crucially. Their task was to stretch out a narrative frame large and strong enough to cover the nation’s past and sustain its future. And they were academic historians, constituted and defined by a vast, venerable network of associations far from their own place, including a professoriate largely inclined by birth and training to disregard the possibilities of not just a vigorous midwestern intellectual life but an admirable life of any kind out on the outpost of civilization. Despite the condescending skepticism that greeted their efforts, though, these midwesterners wrote histories that pulsed with the sense that much was at stake in the nation. How the nation made sense of its past, they knew, would have huge consequences.
The “midwestern voice in American history writing” matured in the aftermath of the Civil War, a central dimension of what Brown terms the “Midwestern Renaissance.” It was the moment of the region’s historical ascendance, symbolized by the remarkable rise of Chicago and displayed for all at the World’s Fair—or the “Columbian Exposition,” as it was called—held there in 1893. Tens of thousands came and experienced Chicago as the very edge and instantiation of the great modern thrust. Brown insightfully locates the emergence of his midwestern historians amidst this larger regional surge, when “modernity’s erratic trinity”—“industry, democracy, and multiculturalism”—seemed most fully incarnate, strangely, west of the Appalachians.
Frederick Jackson Turner was the first among these historians to gain national prominence, and would become in 1910 the first president of the American Historical Association to give his presidential address while teaching at a midwestern university. His remarkable influence had begun seventeen years earlier at the Columbian Exposition, where he delivered a paper that sent the nascent historical profession down an interpretive course from which it would not fundamentally depart for decades. His central claim, so fruitful for so long, Brown summarizes succinctly: “Optimistic, pragmatic, inventive, individualistic, and restless, the pioneer personality type . . . bloomed most abundantly along frontier fault lines.”
Put another way, it was, for Turner, the Middle West Way, not the New England Way, that was the sine qua non of democratic civilization. People working out their relationships to one another on the land, rather than people working out their relationships to one another before their God, had proven to be the necessary environ for the flourishing of republican freedom. By Turner’s day, the dominant midwestern political persuasion, captured in Turner’s vision and labeled by Brown as “progressive,” was “democratic, populistic, and isolationist,” in direct and defiant contrast to “the liberal typology of thought and politics—elite, urban, interventionist,” proffered by those eastern intellectuals and politicians who thought of themselves as “cosmopolitan.”
The historians who followed in Turner’s train took up his vision and charge, which, by the twentieth century, required considerable skill in apologetics, given the encroaching, eroding force of the corporate capitalist juggernaut that (as a contemporary midwestern historian, William Cronon, powerfully argues) had actually called the Middle West into being. Brown’s discussion of the Indiana native Charles Beard—his “Progressive Maximus”—anchors what is perhaps his most fascinating chapter. “Like no other public intellectual, the iconic Charles Beard popularized the pool of ideas that characterized midwestern resistance to the American Century,” Brown contends; “the fundamental ideas that moved Beard—suspicion of centralized power, belief in the corruptibility of the industrial state, and hostility to imperialist diversions—were firmly in place by the time he left the Midwest.”
Beard resembled Turner in key ways, not the least of which was his ability to hold captive the entire historical profession to his view of the American genesis. Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States,published in 1913, lent a kind of inverse support to Turner’s general argument, revealing the corrupting influence of money and power at the founding of the nation and pointing to the margins for promise. “Beard built a career on plausible provocation,” Brown observes, and Beard’s own outrage ignited that of others—both his friends’ and his enemies’. When Columbia University, where Beard was teaching, dismissed three faculty members in 1917 for their criticism of the nation’s foreign policy in the midst of the Great War, Beard at age forty-three resigned in protest and spent the rest of his life writing with remarkable force (often with his wife, Mary Beard, also a historian) as an independent scholar in Connecticut, sustained not just by royalties from his publications but also by the sale of milk from his dairy farm.
The times were not kind to Beard, nor to his Middle West. The internationalism of Wilson and FDR Beard regarded as a species of imperialism that would inevitably lead to a savage end, no matter how glorious the rhetoric and noble the aim. His politics were no more popular by the time of his death in 1948 than were those of any other opponents of the nascent cold war.
But by the late 1950s the cold war’s first great thaw began to warm up some opposition. Perhaps the most vital academic center of that resistance turned out to be Madison, Wisconsin, where talented historians including Merle Curti and Howard Beard had been guarding and deepening the Turnerian legacy. Curti even won the Pulitzer Prize in American history for his efforts. Brown’s rendering of the juncture of eastern and midwestern radicalism at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s is particularly keen. The progeny of New York leftists and midwestern progressives joined at that propitious moment to develop a distinct and often compelling reading of American history, manifested most powerfully in their famed periodical Studies on the Left. The “progressive” reform of the first half of the twentieth century, so piously celebrated in the academic and political mainstream, never looked so bad. This “progressivism,” it turned out, was actually “corporate liberalism”: the outrageously successful activity of, in Brown’s words, “a self-interested business class looking to manipulate markets, destroy competition, and undermine the labor movement,” all toward the end of thwarting whatever revolutionary possibilities might have then existed and retaining their grip on American economic life.
Helping to direct these younger scholars was another legendary midwesterner, the Iowan William Appleman Williams, a historian who followed Turner and Beard in shaking up mainstream historical understanding for a long time. “The tragedy of American diplomacy,” as Williams argued in his book by that title, was simply that American foreign policy had been throughout its history mainly in service of empire—once in quest of land, now in quest of markets. As Brown puts it, at bottom Williams believed that “the market uprooted communities, mocked moral convention, and tempted the republic with endless wars, interventions, and occupations.” A man of the Left, Williams nonetheless praised Herbert Hoover’s Good Neighbor policy, along with southerners and other conservatives who saw in corporate capitalism a malign presence utterly at odds with democratic civilization. “Is the idea and reality of America possible without empire?” Williams piercingly asked.
With the great energy of the ’60s, though, also came a great dispersal, and at many levels. Madison’s easterners, seeking to become more politically active, migrated back, taking Studies on the Left with them, where it would lose some of its academic and midwestern shape. Williams himself took a teaching position in Oregon. And the ’60s, of course, turned into the ’70s, leaving many erstwhile radicals wandering toward the center and right, disoriented, chastened, chagrined.
It is at this point that Brown introduces the last of his great midwestern voices, Christopher Lasch, son of Nebraska, son, too, of highly educated midwesterners conflicted between allegiance to the high liberal culture of the East and the more communal, egalitarian vision of the old Middle West. “The time was ripe,” Brown writes, “for a postprogressive, postliberal reckoning with the past,” and Lasch surely gave it his best shot. Teaching and writing for more than three decades from Chicago, Iowa, and Rochester (New York), Lasch devoted himself with uncommon verve to developing a sharp, damning historical judgment against what he called the culture of “progress,” seeking all the while to redirect Americans back to their older, nobler ideals, centered on the republican notion of virtuous citizenship that, he believed, should reorient all of American life—from government to business to neighborhoods.
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, published just three years before his premature death in 1994, was Lasch’s magnum opus, a magnificent effort both to debunk the liberal dream of scientific, market-driven progress and to recover a truer way. He dedicated the book to his grandchildren and left them with a telling, troubling inscription: Hope against Hope. The hope he had, he confessed, was not rooted in the evident flow of history. “How does it happen,” asked Lasch, “that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once and for all?” Still, his testament, he maintained, was a testament of hope. “The worst is always what the hopeful are prepared for,” he wrote—they have eyes to see the corruption that always threatens at every level, the grave possibilities that smiling believers in progress shield themselves from seeing. “Hope implies a deep-seated trust in life that appears absurd to those who lack it,” he believed. “It rests on confidence not so much in the future as in the past.”
In the end, it’s this lingering, inspiring sense of the past that Brown most compellingly captures in the work and lives of this remarkable collection of historians, historians whose archetypal sense of the good life was rooted in real, lived, communal experience, an inestimably valuable treasury for anyone wishing today to recover a sense of life in the American grain. And, as we might expect, this archetypal vision continues to inspire historians. Brown ends his book by underscoring the continuity between the work of three leading contemporary midwesterners, Andrew Bacevich, Thomas Frank, and William Cronon, and the vision of the men he’s discussed. Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West is a particularly striking complement to Lasch’s True and Only Heaven (they were in fact published in the same year). An ecological history, it centers on the grand irony referred to above: that the very midwestern way of life so vigorously defended by Turner and his descendants was itself sponsored at the outset by the engine that would in short time doom it: corporate capitalism, which made possible the village life so central to this vision and then made it impossible, weakened and dissolved by capitalism’s “progressive” defiance of all limits, boundaries, and virtue—a transgressive force Lasch so unceasingly descried.
Brown’s is, in short, a sobering story, taking us into the tragedy not just of American diplomacy but of America itself. These historians were right: the Middle West really did have a good thing going—it had many good things going. Yet it found itself unable to protect its goods. What could be worse? The outrage of Beard, Williams, Lasch, Bacevich, and so many others is utterly warranted.
That’s how the story looks to this historian, at least. One of the curiosities of the book, though, is Brown’s near inability to express strong judgment on the matter. What judgments he does make certainly do not structure his narrative in direct fashion; they creep in, cautiously, gingerly, as quiet side notes. The poet and essayist Christian Wiman says there is “perhaps one definite requirement for a vital style: it must make a reader feel that something is truly at stake.” But Brown, for all of his analytic insight and narrative skill, is unfailingly—and these are the words that come instantly to mind—even-handed, impartial, objective, detached. He does not take sides—or rather, he takes all sides. The eastern cosmopolitans had their strengths, the midwestern “provincials” (his term for them) had theirs. “Lasch combined scholarship with social idealism to construct a suggestive if incomplete analysis of what ailed America,” we learn as we close out the chapter. “Taken as a whole, the earnest, uneven results remain exciting.” As the book ends, we’re brought to see that, “bowed but unvanquished, the heart of this persuasion beats on—as it must. Our sense of place, after all, has always illuminated our sense of the past.”
Surely, in the real, moral universe that we all every moment inhabit, a story such as Brown’s requires more response than this—more judgment, more extremity, more feeling, above all, more engagement. Is it really enough to drily note that since we all live in places, we can be assured that they will affect our historical and political visions? Is there really nothing else at stake? Beard would surely think so.
Make no mistake: Brown is an impressive scholar, with a sharp eye and fine narrative style. What he lacks is a professional climate that grants the freedom to write what the editor and writer Paul Elie describes as “great books,” “books we read with our lives.” “We don’t segment off some part of ourselves to read them,” Elie suggests. And yet this is precisely what the academy requires of its faithful, who must act as if the world, including the entire past of the world, can be defined and narrated on the terms of naturalistic science, with its discredited notions of objectivity, its barren empiricist epistemology, its truncated rendering of all we know to be vital and decisive—and its shrunken ability to make possible a good story about our past, much less a true story about our past.
At their best, Brown’s historians fought for ways, even within the straitened language of the modern academy, that would permit a moral vision to shape their narratives about what happened. At their weakest they became (as the example of Turner shows—he who insisted on calling himself a “social scientist”) propagators of the great secularizing movement of modernity that would narrow considerably the possibility for “great books” in the field of history, placing out of methodological and narrative reach the deepest questions of the human race itself. It goes without saying that in the absence of such books it is difficult to conceive of a great common life in any region of the modern West, let alone the Middle West.
Still, Brown’s historians knew this: that history is not an end in itself. Those who love life, and especially the way of life of their people, find ways to write histories that will call their people to it. Too much is at stake not to. We, living in these troubled times, are fortunate to have the books of these historians, who loved their place and its ways. We would do well to write our own.
To learn more, visit the ISI short course on The American Experience.
Eric Miller is associate professor of history and the humanities at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. His biography of Christopher Lasch will be published by Eerdmans in 2010.