Comparative Biography as Political History: Huey Long and Father Coughlin

Abstract

I S THE TASK OF THE BIOGRAPHER synonymous with the task of the historian? The answer, of course, depends on our definition of historical inquiry. If we assume that the study of history involves simply the reconstruction of the past, the illumination of human experience in all its variety and nuance, then the study of any individual is a contribution to historical understanding. But there is another, broader conception of the historian's task: the belief that the purpose of scholarship is not simply to reveal the past, but to explain it; to make connections and identify transformations; to look at the individual pieces of history in terms of how they fit into a larger pattern. By that definition, the connection between biography and history becomes less clear, and all historians engaged in biographical inquiry must grapple with an important question: how does the study of individual lives illuminate the larger history of a society or an era? There is no additional question facing those historians whose excursions into the field of biography take them into the lives of more than one person: what can they study of several lives, juxtaposed against one another, teach us that an ordinary biography, or another mode of analysis, can not? My own work in the field of what some have called comparative biography' has forced me to confront both these questions and has led me to answers that have discomfited some traditional biographers but that suggest, I believe, several avenues for enhancing the connection between the study of individuals and the illumination of the larger patterns of the past.