Writing a History of Things Left Out

Abstract

Absence of Old World institutions and values in the New has seldom troubled American historians. Rather, the dearth of traditional materials which, to Henry James, was only a discouragement to the novelist [n]o sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools . .. ; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting -has been celebrated by historians from Frederick Jackson Turner to Louis Hartz and Daniel J. Boorstin as marking, blankly, the happy openness of American society.1 Unencumbered by a feudal past and quick to break away from such reactionary ideas and antiquated institutions as some now and then sought to implant, nineteenth-century Americans have seemed to their historians, as they seemed to themselves, the most modern of moderns, free to pursue a practical happiness and happier, eventually, with William James, the pragmatic philosopher who stayed home, than with Henry who fled to Europe. The assumption persists that the history of America can be written without reflecting on what was missing from its unestablished religion, self-made elite, negligible government, discontinuous literary tradition, and loyalty to lofty but impersonal abstractions. Were they not enough? Thatch and ivy have seemed well lost. Problems remain, all the same, in composing a coherent account of so disjunctive a history. Although, for example, we now accept that American political history is misrepresented by the old presidential synthesis on the Engl sh model of a seamless succession of reigns or governments, as yet none of the proffered substitutes party systems, electioneering styles, voting behavior, ideological paradigms has proved as convenient or comprehensive.2 It has been still harder to conceive of a history of American social ideas and institutions that dispenses with standard European classifications, either traditional or modern. We sense well enough that the American upper class was never an ancien regime aristocracy nor American workingmen a Marxian proletariat, that American religious denominations were unlike either an