Bernard Bailyn Memorial Remarks October 25, 2020

Abstract

THE poem that John just read makes two striking appearances in Professor Bailyn's most important book, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. It appears in full in the opening section and is quoted again in the final paragraph of the Postscript that he added to the twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition of 1992. Bud called this Postscript, “Fulfillment: A Commentary on the Constitution.” In it he argued that the constitutional arguments of the late 1780s had indeed “corrected the cave—enlarged its dimensions, reshaped it, modernized it.” And we also “may weave and flitter, dip and soar in perfect courses through the blackest air. In that spirit we too—in the very happiest intellection—may continue to correct the cave.”This is a striking metaphor for the debates that Bud had examined so carefully. But it is also a strange and surprising image to insert here. He must have put it there for some other purpose. When Bud alludes to “the very happiest intellection” in that final sentence, he was illuminating his own remarkable creativity as a historian just as much as he was describing the events of the Revolution.I want to use my few minutes here this afternoon to muse about the creativity that made Professor Bailyn the most brilliant, influential, and intellectually cosmopolitan American historian of the past century, and also our field's greatest narrative artist.My starting point for this discussion was his research seminar, which was a transformative experience for so many of us. The course was not designed to teach us all that much about early American history. Indeed, from one session to another, we were unsure what the real topic was or what relation it had to our nominal subject. Why were we reading Lord Denning's legal report on the 1963 scandal involving John Profumo, the British minister of defense? Because when Denning brought the story's two leading ladies, Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, on stage, he taught a valuable lesson on the use and misuse of adjectives. Why did we read the Prologue of David Cecil's biography of Lord Melbourne? To learn how to set the stage for a longer story and to think about transitional sentences. Why did we read E.H. Carr's book, Romantic Exiles, about Alexander Herzen and his circle of nineteenth-century Russian expatriates? To think about how to construct a complex narrative with a shifting cast of characters.But Bud had more important lessons to teach us than the use of adjectives and transitions. The real point of the seminar was, first, to learn how to identify a true historical problem—an “anomaly,” Bud called it—and then to make sure your solutions explained its true significance. In the seminar, he gave us a set of topics, but to write your dissertation, you had to find your own problem. Whether we were doing it right seemed less certain to Bud than he let us know. At his festschrift dinner thirty-some years ago, he intimated, with a chuckle that was only half-waggish, that he thought most of us were getting the story wrong. Yet somehow, he conceded, it had all worked out.If that was true, it was probably because we learned how to answer the toughest question we dreaded most. If you went up to Widener J for a chat, you'd tell Bud what you'd been doing, and he would offer a short restatement of your remarks. And then he would ask: “So what?” That was his favorite question and the one that demanded the most thought. And the more you asked this same question of yourself, the better a historian you would become.In his own writing, Bud was primarily a problem solver, too. There was no single research agenda he wanted to pursue. The best way to understand his work is to identify the distinct problem each of his great books pursued. Bud perceived his amazingly productive career as “a series of projects,” each of which involved “a main publication” after which he “worked further around the margins and implications in lesser publications until I had little more to say.” Nor can one typecast Bud as a particular kind of historian (economic, political, social, intellectual, whatever). The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, arguably his best book, is an extraordinarily subtle psychological biography. By contrast, Voyagers to the West, his second Pulitzer winner, is a landmark, hypothesis-testing venture in social history; yet its concluding two parts provide moving accounts of how land speculators and ordinary migrants interacted along the grand arc of settlement in the American interior.How Bud thought about doing history was thus a product of the problems he set out to solve. There was no one method to deploy for every situation. One learned the method only as one explored the real bat's caverns that historians inhabit: the documentary archives that are unique to every project. Think about the revolutionary pamphlets that Bud began exploring in the early 1960s. At first glance, that archival cavern seemed to confirm what Bud called his “old-fashioned view” of the Revolution. But he soon realized, again through the “very happiest intellection,” that these pamphlets contained not merely a set of sustained constitutional arguments but a coherent political ideology, an entire “logic of rebellion” that drove the Americans to independence.But the most intriguing flights of Bud's creative imagination came when he discovered individuals or documents that carried their own independent, illuminating spark. This happened time and again in his research: with Robert Keayne, the tormented puritan merchant whose last will or Apologia exposed “the double bind of ascetic acquisitiveness and the guilt that breeds paranoia”;with Harbottle Dorr's four bound volumes of Boston newspapers, copiously indexed and annotated to map the growth of revolutionary ideology;with the correspondence of Thomas Hutchinson, who grasped the imperial crisis better than anyone did in London but could never fathom why he was the target of the irrational hatred of his Massachusetts countrymen;and perhaps best of all, with the Register of Emigrants that the British government began compiling in the early 1770s, to ask why so many of their subjects were making their way to the mainland colonies.Weaving and flittering his way around the vast archival cavern, Bud used these discoveries and soundings to achieve the creative imagination he had been developing since his boyhood.I have one last point to make about the sources of Bud's analytical and narrative power. Three years ago, the Yale Humanities Center celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Ideological Origins. In his remarks there, Bud returned to the book's great initial theme: the fear of unchecked, arbitrary, tyrannical power that obsessed the colonists before the Revolution. Rereading his own work, he had been struck by the palpable presence of this fear in so many places: in the colonists’ absorption in the story of Denmark, transformed into an absolute monarchy within the space of four days back in the 1690s; in their deep knowledge of the collapse of the Roman republic; but also, just as revealingly, in the drawings of Piranesi, especially his “earliest and most famous etchings, the sixteen nightmarish, hallucinatory scenes of wildly imagined prisons, the Carceri—deep, gargantuan, cavernous and darkly threatening spaces with sweeping ranges of staircases and platforms that lead nowhere, soaring ropes of heavy chains, spiked wheels, and racks,” all conveying a raw “sense of the brutality of power.”But Bud's profound “sense of the brutality of power” had one other source. From his military career, Bud acquired a deep interest in the tragedy of German history, which necessarily involved reckoning with the catastrophe the events of those years had imposed on mankind. And from his marriage to Lotte Lazarsfeld, daughter of one of the prominent Jewish refugee scholars who escaped fascist Europe, Bud gained access to that cosmopolitan cluster of luminaries who remade the American intellectual landscape. Together, this preoccupation with the disastrous wielding of political power and the enlightenment that the refugee intellectuals imported into American life contributed to the flowering of Professor Bailyn's creative intellect, giving his writings a narrative grace, interpretive power, and moral foundation few historians ever attain. And throughout his ever curious life, down to age ninety-seven, he remained the youngest historian I have ever known.