How Uniform were the Old American Studies?
By David Levin

     The value of the New American Studies does not depend on the
accuracy with which the innovative scholars depict their
predecessors. Although a movement's account of its own origins
usually tells us more about how the movers perceive their
predecessors' inadequacies or neglect than about the predecessors
themselves, we do not have to reject the acute insights or the rich
information elicited by the new perspective. We may gratefully
accept Sacvan Bercovitch's intricate delineation of Hawthorne's
compromises, Eric Sundquist's reading of Pudd'nhead Wilson against
Plessy versus Ferguson and the cases leading up to it in the 1880s,
Richard Brodhead's examination of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the context
of campaigns to replace corporal punishment with internalized
discipline--we may welcome Philip Fisher's own perceptive essay on
Melville and Whitman, even though we must dismiss as untenable much
of Fisher's introductory narrative about the "old" American
Studies.

     Yet we must explicitly confront the defects of that narrative.
While repetition of false statements does not make them true, it
does make further repetition more likely, and critical examination
of the evidence less likely. Like the false claim that the New
Criticism drove historical scholarship out of literary classrooms
and critical publications during the 1940s and 1950s, Fisher's
introduction seems to be based on general impressions about a few
figures rather than on a broad study of
2

fifty years of critical scholarship. Fisher concedes that his story
may be "perhaps too simple" (vii), but then he presents it
seriously, as if the scholars whose names he invokes--F.O.
Matthiessen, Perry Miller, Henry Nash Smith, R. W. B. Lewis, and
Leo Marx--were not only celebrated and influential but truly
representative.

     The old American Studies, Fisher says, presented "Myth," but
the new American Studies examines "rhetorics." The old American
Studies thought of one American culture, one New England or
American mind; the new American Studies is multicultural. It
professes to study the diverse rhetorics of a multicultural
society. Fisher's bare synopsis omits many practitioners in the
founding generation, from Leon Howard to Howard Mumford Jones and
Harry Hayden Clark. It also shows more awareness, for example, of
Perry Miller's title The New England Mind than of the narrative
that transforms the grand trope of volume I--a single mind holding
together over nearly a century the contradictory tendencies of
"Augustinian piety" and learned, rational argument--into the
disparate fragments Miller delineated in volume II. As one could
learn even from a quick reading of the preface to that second
volume, Miller wanted to put more emphasis on the last word of his
title than on the first.

     Can we enjoy the taste of the new diversity without either
forgetting the old pluralism or swallowing the canard about the
old uniformity? Fisher acknowledges a competing "claim of pluralism
within American culture," but only as a regional
3

counterpoint to "the search for grand unifying myths" (xii). He
divides the first generation of Americanists (presumably in the
1930s) into only two camps, the Left and the Right, and he insists
that both groups not only mistrusted but were surprised by the
"guiltless relationship that figures like Emerson, Whitman, Cooper,
or Parkman had to their own past" (xii)

Presumably, Fisher never heard Perry Miller intone the opening
lines of Nature, or Emerson's injunction to build a better
mousetrap, or the deliciously ironic news that Emerson the icono-

clast, after nearly thirty years of exile from Harvard, had
commemorated his election to the Board of Overseers by voting for
compulsory chapel. In Miller's famous essay "Jonathan Edwards to
Emerson," nonetheless, in Miller's anthology The
Transcendentalists, and in other writings by Miller's
contemporaries about Parkman and Cooper, at least, Fisher could
have found unsurprised acknowledgment of the guiltless relation.
Mark Twain's faith in the Paige typesetter and his friendship with
the millionaire Rogers were a commonplace in the lectures and
writings of Miller and other founders.

     For a moment Fisher does offer a minor qualification to his
caricature of "the first generation of Americanists." Their "most
common theme," he says, "was the disappointment of myth by fact,
the failure of reality to live up to the ways it had been
imagined." But he promptly abandons the implicit qualification in
the vague modifiers that I have italicized: "Within American
studies, the study of America had become the study of dissent" or
4

resistance. "It was the era of Thoreau, Henry Adams, and Bartleby,
not of Emerson and Whitman" (x-xi). Having named

Miller, Matthiessen, and the few other celebrated interpreters
whose works continue to be read or at least cited, Fisher simply
declares the nature of "the most common theme." He overlooks the
dozens of books and scores of articles, sounding disparate themes,
on Benjamin Franklin, Emerson, Whitman, George Bancroft, James
Madison, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, James K. Polk; on
the rise of liberal Catholicism, on seventeenth-century Puritans,
as well as David Potter's People of Plenty, Oscar Handlin's books
on immigrants the younger Arthur M. Schlesinger's The Age of
Jackson, Marvin Meyers's The Jacksonian Persuasion, John William
Ward's Andrew Jackson, Symbol for an Age, William Hedges's
Washington Irving, an American Study.

     These books, and a dozen others that I could name without
having to look up anything more than the exact titles and dates of
publication, were written or sponsored by the generation whom
Fisher's introduction misrepresents. At Harvard alone, the scholars
who are now said to have described one national or regional mind,
or myths with "an inevitable narrative of a fall into imperfection
and disappointment" (xii), encouraged Charles Sanford's studies of
Franklin; my exploration of the rhetorics of

progress, Manifest Destiny, and Teutonic germs in the romantic
historians; Robert Cross's study of the rise of liberal Catholicism

in the last quarter of the nineteenth century; Kenneth Lynn's book
on the submission of Theodore Dreiser and several
5

others to the dream of success; Barbara Myers Cross's book on
Horace Bushnell's theology; and Barbara Miller Solomon's Ancestors
and Immigrants. F. O. Matthiessen not only gave a seminar on
Whitman and Dreiser but wrote his last book on Dreiser. And sharp
differences developed between the leading Harvard professors and
the so-called Pennsylvania Positivists. The graduate programs in
American Studies at Harvard, Yale, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota, and
the undergraduate programs at Amherst and Michigan State, differed
too much to be adequately described by Fisher's categories.

     Beginning in the late 1940s, moreover, a movement to gain
pedagogical control of the standard research paper in freshman
composition courses led to the preparation of sourcebooks,
collections of documents about specific historical subjects. At
Harvard in my second year as a teaching fellow, we used a
collection called Problems in Reading and Writing, which included
documents from the controversy over who owned a mural in Rocke-

feller Center--the Rockefellers or the artist, Diego Rivera, who
refused to erase his portrait of Lenin. And in 1950 I was asked by
the Director of English A to prepare for the Harvard English A
Handbook a collection of documents from the Salem witchcraft trials
of 1692. At a time supposedly dominated by the New Criticism,
irony, paradox, and close readings of aesthetic texts, all students
at Harvard and Radcliffe were required to base four to six weeks'
worth of their themes on these historical readings. Similar books
flourished in the market later in the decade;
6

English departments across the country obliged students in freshman
composition courses to study knotty problems in American history.
At Stanford in 1958-59, for example, instructors were free to
choose among the witchcraft materials, the Sacco-Vanzetti case, the
socialist experiment at Brook Farm, and John Brown's raid at
Harper's Ferry. How did it happen that these books appeared, and
were widely assigned, in the 1950s?

     I don't deny that political commitments influenced the
founders of American Studies who taught my generation. I do insist
that the founders' political opinions were much more varied, and
their work much more complex, than Fisher's introduction and other
manifestoes of the New Historicism acknowledge.

Fisher's discovery of the most common theme has no more historical
authority than his undocumented claim (ix) that the major books by
Matthiessen, Smith, and Leo Marx were "shaped to a remarkable
degree" by "a coherent set of books or themes that fit into the
fifteen-week semester" of a university course.

Since "The Old Testament" and "The History of the Westward
Movement" fit into the same semester, the statement is almost as

irrefutable as it is (in two senses) insupportable. In the Harvard
English department during the 1930s and 1940s, Professor James B.
Munn magically squeezed "The Old Testament" into one semester and
then somehow stretched the slim "New Testament" to fill the same
number of weeks in the spring term!

     "That the very greatest figures of American literature were
not oppositional figures seemed," Fisher says, though he does not
7

say precisely to whom it seemed, "almost beyond belief" (xii).

Useful though this stark division between old and new American
Studies may be both as manifesto and as liberation from the duty to
read all that old scholarship, it can only encourage confusion
about what Americanists were doing in the three decades after the
Crash of 1929. That confusion has already infiltrated the narra-

tives of two commentators who welcome the New Historicists' best
work, as I do, but who stand critically outside the movement.

     Lawrence Buell presents a welcome argument for studies of
nineteenth-century American literature that compare North

American literature to the literature of other "post-colonial"
cultures. But his warning against "cisatlantic hermeticism" (413)
is marred by his rash claim that Matthiessen's American

Renaissance "was the last major pre-contemporary book on the era to
be informed by a profound appreciation for Anglo-American
intertexts" (413). To refute this claim, though the adjectives
"major" and "profound" may offer prudent routes for escape, one
need only read two splendid introductory pages by Warner Berthoff
on Melville's "intense and yet objective personal experience of one
of the great creative conceptions of his era-- . . .the conception
of 'the growth of the mind,' as the earlier nineteenth century
understood that phrase . . . Melville found himself ready to take
this great theme in charge. He found himself able, that is, to
lodge his crowding private intuitions in a scheme of apprehension
which was authoritatively established in his era's literature and
yet far from being played out. As a result he
8

could capitalize immediately and extravagantly upon certain major
conventions for dealing with it--those conventions of understanding
and expression that his pell-mell assimilation of Goethe, Emerson,
Hawthorne, Coleridge, and Carlyle, among masters of this theme in
his century, had disclosed to him--without losing his own identity
or direction" (9-10). The lines that I have quoted precede an
admirably succinct paragraph on the idea of the growth of the mind
in Romantic literature in general, and another paragraph
distinguishing this conception from narratives of spiritual
conversion--ranging from Bunyan's Grace Abounding and Newman's
Apologia to Joyce's Portrait of the Artist (10-11). Buell seems,
moreover to have forgotten both Leo Marx's long chapter (34-72) on
The Tempest near the outset of The Machine in the Garden and my own
efforts to set Bancroft's, Prescott's, Motley's and Parkman's
histories in the context of histories and historiographical essays
by Carlyle, Macaulay, Mably, and Barante as well as major
historical paintings and Sir Walter Scott's narratives.

     Far from claiming that any of us were ahead of our time, I
contend that we were repeatedly obliged in our own time and by our
own predecessors to consider the European context, and sometimes
the Asian context, of American literary culture. Why Dorothee
Finkelstein's book Melville's Orienda (1961) and H. Bruce
Franklin's The Wake of the Gods: Melville's MythologY (1962) should
be forgotten in the received narrative, I don't know. I do know
that both writers were encouraged and rewarded
9

for their discoveries about Asian religion and the comparative
European anthropology in Melville's fiction. And I know that Perry
Miller, who now figures in the received narrative as the tracer of
a nativist line from Edwards to Emerson, filled his anthology The
Transcendentalists with allusions to Locke, Kant, Scottish Common
Sense philosophy, Schleiermacher, Cousin, Wordsworth, Coleridge,
and Fourier; that even in the first volume of The New England Mind
Peter Ramus plays a major role; and that Darwin, Herbert Spencer,
Kant, and Hegel (along with Royce, Dewey, Peirce, and William
James) dominate Miller's introduction to the anthology that grew
out of his course on American thought between the Civil War and
World War I. Oscar Handlin, meanwhile, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1951
for portraying the experience of immigration from the point of view
of the European peasants who emigrated to North America. If this
was not multiculturalism as the term is currently used, it
certainly is important to notice that Handlin learned to read more
European languages than any multiculturalist known to me, and that
one of the most perceptive of his acute insights in The Uprooted
reveals the disparity between yellow-haired Jane or Dick in the
rural setting of the textbook and the dark-haired children learning
to read English in the public schools of the American ghetto.

     Several years ago, in response to my similar dissent from a
generalization about the origins of American Studies, Philip Gura
pointed out that Howard Mumford Jones and Leon Howard are now mere
footnotes. And besides, since his main subject had been the
10

scholarship published since 1966 about early American literature,
Gura's offhand generalizations about the thirty years before 1963
seemed to him privileged, even though they established the
narrative frame and some implicit and explicit causes for the
phenomena at the center of his attention. His argument about the
late professors Jones and Howard made me feel like the protesting
baserunner whom an umpire silenced with the unanswerable reply: "If
you think you were safe at home, look in the newspaper tomorrow."

     Few of our own names or books will even be footnotes in the
twenty-first century. When we remember Washington Irving's "The
Mutability of Literature," we may want to ascend with Hawthorne to
the attic of the Old Manse, rummage through a few of the dusty old
books, and rejoice in Hawthorne's dismissal of all the recent
Unitarian books as cold and lifeless. I can see why the whole mass
must be ignored or neglected by tomorrow's newspaper. Yet I believe
that one great challenge for new and old historians alike is to
construct general narratives that avoid simple declarations about
evidence we have not studied.

     Vulnerability to such errors is not peculiar to the New
Historicism. I remember hearing the author of a devastating expose
of our predecessors' historical fallacies declare at a meeting of
the English Institute in 1974 that the great narrative historians
in nineteenth-century New England did not annotate their histories,
and that they were all interested in telling stories rather than in
understanding historical causes. We all
ll

repeat such received misinformation. All the more reason to be
vigilant, remembering Benjamin Franklin's amused confession that
when he concentrated on eliminating one fault in his methodical
quest for moral perfection, he found another peeping out at him
from an unexpected direction. Again and again, we shine our
flashlights into the darkness and then neglect the complexity of
the surrounding area.

     In The New American Studies, for example, Michael Warner's
welcome reflections on Benjamin Franklin as an innovator in "print
culture" would be even more valuable if Warner had known more about
the literary context of his first example, the epitaph that
Benjamin Franklin, at age twenty-five, composed for himself. Warner
contends that Franklin's central conceit--comparing his body to
"the Cover of an old Book"--is "too compelling" because "Franklin
in fact wrote the epitaph not for a gravestone but for a page"
(3-4). Unsure of the meaning of "too compelling," I find the rest
of the statement puzzling as well. Why should one be surprised that
a young printer born in Boston--a veteran, moreover, of both a
journalistic battle against the Mathers and a private counseling
session with Cotton Mather himself--committed an epitaph to print
rather than to a stone? Surely Franklin knew that Cotton Mather, in
his twenties and thirties, had published many biographies that
ended with witty epitaphs, one of them punning on both editing and
the body in a way close to Franklin's:

     But Heaven, not brookinq that the Earth should share
12

     In the least Atom of a Piece so rare,

     Intends to Sue out, by a New Revise.

     His Habeas Corpus at the Grand Assize [Maqnalia, II, 25].

Throughout his interesting essay, moreover, Warner neglects
Franklin's hearty interest in the oral and aural value of written
language. In dogged pursuit of his thesis about print culture,
Warner will not allow the creator of Mrs. Silence Dogood to be
interested in speech. Warner's sharp contrast between Franklin's
"faceless" writing and the abusive oratory of the man who denounced
Franklin before the Privy Council in London would need to be
softened if Warner had included any of Franklin's instructions on
the importance of teaching boys to read aloud. In Poor Richard
Improved, Franklin had Father Abraham stand up before a crowd and
parody Puritan sermons by sounding off Poor Richard's economic
proverbs in groups that play delightful variations on sound and
cadence. And in proposing a curriculum for an English school in
Philadelphia in 1751, Franklin explained the importance of teaching
boys to read aloud with attention to meaning:

     They often read as Parrots speak. And it is impossible a
     Reader should give due Modulation to his Voice, and pronounce
     properly, unless his Understanding goes before his Tongue, and
     makes him Master of the Sentiment. Accustoming boys to read
     aloud what they do not understand, is the cause of those even
     set tones so common among Readers, which when they have once
     got a
13

     Habit of using, they find so difficult to correct . . .

     [Writings, 350].

     Still another gratuitous generalization in Warner's essay
needs to be revised: "Puritans, of course, would have found good
reason to be unwilling to commend or dispraise an utterance without
knowing something about the person making the utterance, since
faith governed truth and value" (11). Warner's reasoning here,
provoked by Franklin's opening lines in the original letter of
Silence Dogood, seems at first to be plausible. But why would many
Puritan books, then, have been published anonymously? Why would the
anonymous Bonifacius, with its running title Essays to Do Good, the
one book by an American Puritan that Franklin acknowledged in old
age as an influence on his own thought and moral practice, have
become a bestseller?

     Frederick Crews, whose incisive essays have exposed some of
the excesses of "Left Eclecticism" while eloquently defending the
New Americanists' best insights and the value of open debate in the
academy, has made the mistake of endorsing part of the
oversimplified narrative that I have been questioning here. He
describes "the `liberal consensus' about American literature that
prevailed in academic criticism from the Forties through the mid-

Sixties" as rallying "around a small core of classics by (on the
whole) well-connected white males, using those texts to celebrate
moral earnestness, dense aesthetic texture, and a genially
democratic idea of the American dream and its gradual fulfillment
in history" (32). The gradual fulfillment, of course, differs
14

from the disappointment that Fisher says characterized the founders
of academic American Studies, and there may also be room for some
uncertainty about the differences between American Studies and
"prevailing academic criticism." That distinction might well be
studied more carefully, for (as few people bother to notice
nowadays) in the two decades named by Crews the New Criticism and
the movement for American Studies flourished together. What I wish
to consider here, however, is the validity of implicit exclusions
and attributions of cause in the concept of "prevailing,"

     Consider the example of Uncle Tom's Cabin. The last of several
"essential questions" that Crews honors New Americanists for having
asked demands to know "Who . . . was excluded from the liberals'
patriotic literary feast, and to whose advantage?" In other words,
how could Hawthorne's "anti-abolitionist politics . . . be
overlooked while his aesthetic greatness was located ln New
Critical ironies and paradoxes beyond the reach of a mere
`propagandist' like Harriet Beecher Stowe [32] ?" Without conceding
that most liberals who praised Hawthorne in those years either
ignored his views on slavery or praised him chiefly for ironies and
paradoxes, I ask whether the old American Studies excluded Harriet
Beecher Stowe.

Many critics and scholars did, of course, reject the sentimental
and propagandistic qualities in Uncle Tom's Cabin, and many will
continue to do so. I first heard that criticism, however, from a
high school history teacher in the 1930s who
15

insisted that economic forces rather than slavery had caused the
Civil War. During the period that Crews specifies, one of the most
vehement (and to my mind wrongheaded) condemnations of "everybody's
protest novel" was written by an African American named James
Baldwin in 1949, published in Partisan Review, and reprinted in
Notes of a Native Son in 1955. A white male named Charles Foster,
meanwhile, had published a respectful study of Stowe's life and
work, The Rungless Ladder, in 1954, and his book received strong
approval in the academic reviews. In 1958, moreover, Uncle Tom's
Cabin was doing well enough in Academe to prompt Harper's Perennial
Classics to reprint it, at the same time as that old liberal Howard
Mumford Jones, general editor of the John Harvard Library, assigned
it to his young colleague Kenneth Lynn for inclusion as one of the
first volumes in the series. As a Harvard student in the 1940s, I
read three of Stowe's novels, including Uncle Tom's Cabin, as
assignments required by my white male liberal professors and
tutors. By the time I read a paper at the national meeting of the
Modern Language Association in 1970, arguing that Stowe's social
and historical intelligence had as much to do with her most famous
book's success as did her sentimental propaganda, I felt obliged to
acknowledge not only Alice Crozier's recent book but several white
male critics, including Cushing Strout and Edmund Wilson, for
taking Stowe seriously before the mid-1960s. And if I had read my
college classmate John William Ward's Afterword to the Signet
edition, I would have tipped my hat to him for his
16

emphasis on both Stowe's radical social analysis and the folly of
our society's asking African Americans to prove their humanity by
being better than their Euro-American oppressors. Even though Ward
narrowly missed beating the deadline of the mid-1960s, he was
another white male liberal, twenty years out of college and already
a senior professor at Amherst. He had been interpreting Stowe and
the book in the same way while he was only an associate professor
directing the American Civilization program at Princeton.

     One of the favorite phrases of the New Historicism, "the
historical moment," thus turns out to be more complex and elastic
than appeals to the idea sometimes assume. Sometimes, as with the
Puritans and Franklin or the liberal critics and their radical
successors, the moment includes decades, and inconvenient people
who were breathing, thinking, and writing at the time are
forgotten. In Richard Brodhead's otherwise excellent essay, the
historical moment of the middle class seems as vague as the concept
of the middle class itself. At other times, the moment is much more
narrowly defined, as in my final example, the conclusion to The
Scarlet Letter and the Compromise of 1850.

     Here again the apparent error is not peculiar to the New
Historicism. Along with Brook Thomas, Bercovitch is admirably
sensitive to historical complexity, and his essay on "Hawthorne's
A-Morality of Compromise" studies the political and other
ideological ambiguities and compromises that enabled the narrator
of The Scarlet Letter to speak authoritatively for American
17

liberalism of his own time and in the intervening century and a
half. Yet in his rich analysis of the word "compromise," Bercovitch
associates Hawthorne's relationship to President Franklin Pierce,
whose campaign biography Hawthorne wrote two years after The
Scarlet Letter, with Hawthorne's admiration for Daniel Webster
(expressed through comments in 1858 on a sculptor's bust of
Webster), and then with Hester Prynne's voluntary return to New
England at the end of The Scarlet Letter and with Webster's role in
crafting the notorious Compromise of 1850.

"The power of The Scarlet Letter," Bercovitch writes, "derives from
its capacities for mediation. It reveals the variety of tactics
available to the culture at a certain historical moment" (Fisher,
50). Although one could argue that "tactics" assumes too much about
Hawthorne's attitude toward Pierce and Webster both, the key
problem here is neglect of the more minute chronological evidence.
Hawthorne delivered the manuscript of the book to his publisher on
February 3, 1850, just five days after the secret meeting in
Washington during which Senator Henry Clay proposed the Compromise
to Webster, and more than a month before Webster made his notorious
speech of March 7th. Bercovitch presents no evidence to show that
Hawthorne knew anything about Webster's interest in arranging a
compromise with his antagonist the Senator from Kentucky.
Bercovitch does cite denunciations of Webster by Emerson and John
Greenleaf Whittier, but those eloquent condemnations, of course,
came even later in March. They have no bearing on Hawthorne's
knowledge at the
18

moment when he was writing his conclusion to The Scarlet Letter.

     It seems to me that in American Studies, at least, the New
Historicism is often at its best when it sets out to deepen modern
understanding of the past by focusing with renewed intensity on
relationships between historical contexts and rhetoric. When I
insist that some members of my generation and our teachers, too,
paid attention to race, class, and gender, I don't deny that
scholarship should move beyond us. I do hope (but do not believe)
that further generalizations will refrain from oversimplifying our
motives and our practice. But I am not gloomy about the prospects
for American Studies. The New Historicism has done considerably
more good than harm, and we should be careful not to underestimate
the amount of traditional research that continues to flourish among
old and young scholars. Nor should we underestimate the range and
quality of debate within the New Historicism itself.

Works Cited

Works Cited