Carl Becker, Historian

Abstract

CARL BECKER wrote his most important books and essays in 1930s, yet students of European history still read and debate message of his Heavenly City, and historians of every stripe find food for thought in his AHA Presidential Address Everyman His Own Historian. Survival across half a century is unusual in a profession where revisionism prevails and latest is commonly believed to be best. But for all longevity of these two works, Carl Becker's is not exactly a household name amongst us, so perhaps I should begin with a few facts about his life. Carl Lotus Becker was born in 1873 on a farm in Iowa, but his father soon removed to near-by town of Waterloo, where his son grew up. Just what a small-town middle western childhood was like a hundred years ago is getting to be hard for us to imagine. Republican and Protestant piety figured largely in that milieu; so did a sense of grievance against big business and East Coast superiority-whether that superiority took form of cultural refinement, economic wealth, or local pride in colonial past. In 1892 young Becker went off to University of Wisconsin, where he lost his religion, if indeed he had ever subscribed to attitudes and doctrines of what in later years he referred to as the Methodist menace of his childhood. He also gave up vaguely formulated literary ambitions with which he entered college for an academic career in history. Here it was contagion