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The Regressive Historians
     Kenneth Lynn, from The American Scholar, Volume 47, Number
4 (Autumn 1978). Copyright 1978 by Kenneth S. Lynn.


Richard Hofstadter demonstrated in The Progressive Historians
(1968) that the criticism of historical writing can be as
interesting as literary criticism at its best. His assessments
of Charles A. Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the
Constitution of the United States, V. L.  Parrington's Main
Currents in American Thought, and Frederick Jackson Turner's The
Significance of the Frontier in American History combine
rigorous historiographical analysis with a keen attention to
the historical setting in which these works emerged. "The
Regressive Historians" is a title with several layers of
meaning, but as a pun it expresses my desire to bring
Hofstadter's textual-contextual method to bear upon a later
phase of American historical scholarship.

This essay is about three historians of the 1960s and early
1970s who resemble Hofstadter's Progressives, at least in their
range of interests. Bernard Bailyn achieved fame, as Beard did,
with a book about late eighteenth-century politics. Like
Parrington, Leo Marx is an interpreter of the historical
significance of American literature. Eugene D. Genovese is a
sectional historian, although the Old South, not Turner's West,
is his special concern. The main reason, however, for my
singling out Bailyn, Marx, and Genovese is not that they
roughly match Hofstadter's threesome but rather that their most
ambitious books have been widely read. "My criterion was, above
all, influence," says Hofstadter; it has been my criterion as
well.  The Progressive historians took their cues from the
intellectual and political ferment of the period from 1890 to
1915. The regressive historians became prominent during a far
darker era. Except for the Civil War years, the Republic did
more damage to itself in the 1960s and early 1970s than at any
other moment in our history. . Inevitably Bailyn, Marx, and
Genovese were affected by the time in which they wrote, and so
were their many admirers. Although very different from one
another, all three of these historians were acclaimed for what
I regard as their regressive interpretations of the American
past.

The Ordeal of Bernard Bailyn

                                     In the early 1960s, at the
invitation of Howard Mumford Jones, Bernard Bai lyn agreed to
edit the political pamphlets of the American Revolution for the
Harvard University Press. The editing of the pamphlets was a
considerable undertaking. Even the compilation of a
bibliography was a wearying task. When completed, it included
more than four hundred examples of "all sorts of
writings--treatises on political theory, essays on history,
political arguments, sermons, correspondence, poems." Each of
the texts selected for republication had to be painstakingly
an- notated. When he finally sat down to write a general
introduction to the first (and thus far the only) volume of
Pamphlets of the American Revolution (1965), it was natural
that Bailyn felt an urge to justify his labors by saying
something significant about them. Any scholar would have felt
that way. Bailyn's introductory effort was served by a
delicately tuned literary sensibility. What he sensed in the
language of the pamphlets was pulsating conviction. An earlier
generation of historians had interpreted the references to
"corruption" and "conspiracy," which saturate the literature,
as propagandistic devices deliberately employed by the
pamphleteers to whip Up an otherwise indifferent public
opinion. Bailyn, however, realized that to the pamphleteers
those words were serious. They were not merely propagandistic;
they were the hallmarks of an ideol- ogy. Radical journalists
and other opposition groups in early eighteenth-century England
had suspected that men in high office had become corrupted by
power and were conspiring to aggrandize and perpetuate their
authority by subverting the constitutional liberty of their
countrymen. The oppositionists built their suspicions into the
very structure of British politics, and eventually they
affected American politics as well. In the years after 1760,
when the British took steps to make the management of their
empire more efficient, many Americans interpreted such measures
as the Stamp Act as proof that the conspiracy was finally
hatching and that they were its intended victims. It was not so
much the new intrusions of British authority into their lives
as the American interpretations thereof that propelled the
colonists into rebellion.

Only one problem remained. Had a long-familiar ideology
magnified and distorted the colonists' grievances against the
British, or had it clarified them? Had a received rhetoric of
corruption and conspiracy caused the Americans to make
molehills of genuine grievance into mountains of unfounded
suspicion, or had it helped them to describe a new and
dangerous threat to their liberty? Did the new rules of the
imperial game objectively deserve to be described as
"Intolerable Acts, or did they not? In short, were the rebels
fantasts or realists?

Unfortunately, Bailyn never allowed himself to realize he had
two options. Not for a fleeting moment did he pause to consider
that there were two sharply different ways of reading the
corruption-and-conspiracy ideology. For Bailyn was extremely
eager to get his introductory essay into print. If he chose
option one--if he elected to argue that the whole explanation
of the American Revolution was contained within a rhetoric--he
would not have to go beyond the evidence of the pamphlets. If,
however, he chose option two--or even took the time to discuss
its historical merits before discarding it--he would have to
take into consideration all sorts of evidence not contained in
the pamphlets. Like many intellectuals before him, Bailyn found
it convenient to reduce the study of American history to an
analysis of abstractions.

Leftist historians like L. Jesse Lemisch (pronounced Polemisch
by non-admirers of his harangues), who openly taunt Bailyn at
historical meetings and caricature his ideas in magazines like
Radical History Review, are wont to characterize him as a
politically reactionary snob whose historical sympathies lie
with the Tories. There is a rough justice in the first part of
that charge, but it needs to be more carefully defined. Like
many of the Harvard admirers of John F. Kennedy, the editor of
the pamphlets of the American Revolution was an elitist liberal
who believed that only a happy few knew what was best for the
people. Yet if Bailyn was a political snob, he was no Tory. What
Lemisch and company have failed to appreciate is that the
Toryism of Bailyn's scholarship was inadvertent. Confident that
he had read the pamphlets correctly, he rushed into print with
a series of inadequately thought-out and increasingly
overstated arguments that inexorably forced him to traduce the
patriots' cause. Having chosen option one, he was stuck with
it, and the more he talked about it, the deeper he sank into
difficulty. In the most important passage of The Ideological
Origins of the American Revolution (1967), which is his
best-known book, Bailyn summed up what a magnifying and
distorting ideology finally did to the minds of "the majority of
American leaders."

This peculiar configuration of ideas constituted in effect an
intellectual switchboard wired so that certain combinations of
events would activate a distinct set of signals--danger
signals, indicating hidden impulses and the likely trajectory
of events impelled by them. Well before 1776 the signals
registered on this switchboard led to a single, unmistakable
conclusion--a conclusion that had long been feared and to which
there could be only one rational response.No loyal subject of
George III ever spoke more elegantly about the alarmist
propensities of the rebel mind. In addition to its evasion of
the fundamentally important question of whether the rebels'
"unmistakable conclusion" about the perfidy of Albion might
have been correct, the quotation is marked by deception,
misconception, and inconsistency. That preliminary business,
for instance, about "the majority of American leaders," is
poudre aux yeux. Were town selectmen or militia company
officers on his list of leaders, or did they have to be elected
to provincial legislatures or rise to high rank in the
Continental Army before they qualified? What were the reasons
that governed the author's choice of a selective principle? To
these questions Bailyn provided no answers, for the simple
reason that he had never bothered to define what he meant by
"leaders" and had never compiled a list. His statistical
"majority" was plucked from thin air.

Beneath the deceptiveness of his numbers game lay a far graver
deception. Americans who remained loyal to their king in 1776
were as familiar with the corruption-and-conspiracy ideology as
were those who vowed to overthrow him. Bailyn's vague reference
to "American leaders" enabled him to circumvent this
embarrassing fact, because otherwise he would have been
compelled to admit that he could not explain why the light
signals and alarm bells in the loyalists' switchboards had not
been activated by the events that had turned on the rebels'.
Bailyn triumphantly presented his argument as the reason why
the American Revolution occurred. The loyalists, however, were
the ghosts at his victory banquet. He had not accounted for
their deviant behavior. And his inability to say why some
Americans continued to resist the idea of revolution threw into
doubt his contention that he had explained why others had been
overwhelmed by it.

His description of the rebel mind also displays an astonishing
obliviousness of the twentieth century's acceptance of the
principles of dynamic psychology. Bailyn is not only a
psychological determinist, he is an old-fashioned psychological
determinist. The metaphor that controls his description of the
way in which colonial Americans came to the decision to make a
revolution reads like a cross between Ivan Pavlov's reports on
his conditioned-reflex experiments and the inventive dreams of
Alexander Graham Bell. By any standard of modern psychology,
Bailyn's switchboard metaphor is rigid, mechanistic, and absurd.

Even more bizarre is his last-second reference to the rebels's
decision to declare their independence as a "rational
response.'' The switchboard metaphor asks us to believe that
incessant ideological bombardment had programmed the rebels'
minds, so that they reacted with automatic suspicion and
hostility to every British move. Such reactions, however, have
nothing to do with rationality, so why did Bailyn describe the
final link in the chain of rebel responses as rational?  The
answer is that the author of The Ideological Origins was deeply
discomfited by the Tory position into which he was being driven
by the iron logic of option one. In talking of the rebels as if
they were switchboards and nothing more, he had stripped them
of their temperaments, their judgmental powers their
relationships with parents and friends, their political and
economic associations, their individuality; he had reduced them
to the level of automatons, governed by some sort of equivalent
of Ohm's Law. The British had been wont to refer to the
rebellious colonists as children, but in Bailyn's far more
regressive vision the rebels were scarcely human.  Yet he did
not intend to be this insulting; indeed, he wanted it known
that his sympathies were Whiggish. At the sacrifice, then, of
psychological consistency, he rounded off the key passage in
The ldeological Origins by characterizing the break with
Britain as rational. Most reviewers, however, paid little heed
to Bailyn's puzzling and maladroit effort to prove that he was
no Tory.  What they brought away from The Ideological Origins
was the memory of how a magnifying and distorting ideology had
precipitated the American Revolution.

The rush of events in the late 1960s also contributed to an
interpretation of Bailyn's book that the author had not counted
on. The Ideological Origins appeared at roughly the same time
that student attacks on the universities were starting to
escalate into mob violence. Bailyn found that in spite of
himself he had written just the sort of critique of the
revolutionary impulse that many professors over the age of
thirty wanted to read. In the sort of wacky interplay between
the Left and the Right that has often characterized the
American mind, Bailyn was launched into orbit as a Tory
apologist by romantic revolutionaries like Mark Rudd. The
leading American historian at Mark Rudd's university was
Richard Hofstadter, and the shift in Hofstadter's point of view
in the course of the 1960s explains why he and a number of
other left liberals in the New York intelligentsia were
particularly taken with Bailyn's book.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Hofstadter wrote a number of
essays about various individuals and groups in American history
whose political views were dominated by what he called "the
paranoid style." The most striking fact about these essays is
that they all deal with Americans whom he either disliked or
feared. In defense of this curious historical practice,
Hofstadter naively asserted that "of course, paranoid style has
a greater affinity for bad causes than good." He might just as
well have said, "a total affinity for bad causes," inasmuch as
he resolutely passed up every golden chance American history
offered him to write about the paranoid style of "good"
Americans, such as Andrew Jackson's maniacal campaign against
that corrupting tentacular "Monster," the Bank of the United
States--not to mention the paranoid style of professors who
wrote about paranoid style, or the ceaseless suspicions of
poets like Delmore Schwartz, author of the plaintive epigram,
"Even paranoids have real enemies."

In 1965, however, the year Hofstadter collected and published
his essays as a book, his sensibilities were unavoidably
affronted by the paranoid style of a good American cause. Lyndon
B. Johnson, having triumphed at the polls the previous
November, now began to carry out the foreign policy of` Barry
Goldwater, and the reaction of college students was galvanic.
Protests against the conspiracy of"the best and the brightest"
erupted on a hundred campuses; before too long, the
universities were also linked to the conspiracy. Thus did a
good cause tip over into indiscriminate paranoia, one of the
targets of which was the American institution Hofstadter
cherished above all others. In an interview with a Newsweek
reporter in July, 1970, Hofstadter dubbed the current era "the
Age of Rubbish," and summed up his disgust with New Left
activists by remarking sardonically, "I was raised on a more
severe brand of` Marxism."

By the time, then, that Hofstadter read The Ideological
Origins, he was prepared to believe that fears of conspiracy
and feelings of persecution had attended another good
cause--the birth of the Republic. In early 1968, Hofstadter's
horrified fascination with the parallelism between the
revolutionary present and the Revolutionary past must have
grown even stronger, because tension had begun to build in an
ominous way on the Columbia campus. In April--the month that
makes Americans think of Lexington and Concord--the dispute
about the construction of a new gym boiled over into "the
battle at Morningside Heights." The Ideological Origins was
being reenacted right before Hofstader's eyes. His admiration
for the book became known throughout the university and beyond,
and when the winners of` the Bancroft Prize and the Pulitzer
Prize for history were announced that spring, the awards were
interpreted by some observers as a demonstration of
Hofstadter's influence. For both prizes went to Bailyn.

Having already achieved recognition at the outset of his career
for his impressively solid work in entrepreneurial history,
Bailyn now enjoyed fame for his questionable work in politˇcal
history.  From both the Left and the Right he was perceived as
a historian who believed that the American Revolution was an
example of the paranoid style, even though he himself eschewed
the depth-psychology terminology. His depiction of rebel
alarmism was denounced by radicals, but praised by
disillusioned liberals. Wherever he went, Bailyn aroused
polarized responses. He had become, in sum, a sixties writer,
whether he liked it or not. A terrible uneasiness still
assailed him from time to time about the nature of his fame,
but at least one thing was clear: after the Harvard "bust" of
1969, Bailyn had no further desire to call revolutions
rational. At long last, paranoia and its verbal variants
entered his working vocabulary.

 Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (1974), a biography of the last
civilian royal governor of Massachusetts and a bitter-end
loyalist who ended his days in England sorrowing for his beloved
homeland, is a deeply ambivalent book. Mixing arrogance and
guilt, it records Bailyn's ordeal as painfully as it does
Hutchinson's. The book opens with the author's prefatory
insistence that he is writing out of an Olympian detachment.
From high above the tree line of Tory-Whig partisanship, he
sees and understands and sympathizes with everyone who played a
part in the Revolution, the winners and the losers alike; his
view of the whole drama is "tragic." Of course, "it would be
foolish to deny that I have been influenced in writing [this
biography] by the events of the late 1960s .... I am quite
certain, in fact, that my understanding of Thomas Hutchinson's
dilemma in using troops to quell public disorders...has
undoubtedly been sharpened by the course of American politics
in the late 1960s and early 1970s." We should not, however,
misconstrue his consciousness of these events: "This is a book
about the eighteenth century." The long disclaimer ends,
though, on a revealingly wistful note, as if Bailyn knew that
his biography would not be perceived as the work of a
nonpartisan, any more than his earlier books had been perceived
as the work of a Whig. "When one looks at the record of what
historians have said about the American loyalists, the
likelihood of escaping partisanship of some distorting kind
seems extremely small, and the effort I am making to do
precisely that seems doomed to failure from the start."

Finally, the preface tells us what the story of Hutchinson's
life will accomplish. Bailyn does not acknowledge that his
inability to explain the deviation of the loyalists was the
reason above all other reasons why The Ideological Origins
failed to live Up to its title; he says that he will now make
clear why some Americans chose to remain loyal to their king.
The story of"the American loyalists...will allow us to see the
Revolutionary movement from the other side around, and to grasp
the wholeness of the struggle and hence in the end to
understand more fully than we have before why a revolution took
place and why it succeeded." Through the case history of Thomas
Hutchinson, "the most important loyalist of all," we will be
shown "the origins of the Revolution as experienced by the
losers."

Alas, Hutchinson's sad story casts no historical shadow. The
Ordeal signally fails to show us why we should conclude that
the life of the unusually well-to-do, unusually well-connected
man it centers on was representative in any way of` the lives
of loyalists in general, most of whom did not enjoy anything
like Hutchinson's worldly advantages. The Ordeal confirms
beyond a shadow of a doubt the impression left by The
Ideological Origins: Bailyn has not the slightest idea of what
sorts of characteristics and experiences the loyalists shared
in common and therefore has no understanding of them as a
group. Yet if Bailyn's biography miserably fails as a general
explanation of loyalism, it does help to explain the loyalism
of Thomas Hutchinson. Bailyn, as he indicates in his preface,
learned a great deal from his experience of the Harvard "bust."
He learned what it felt like to be an establishment insider who
knows that the social order he is fighting f`or has made grave
mistakes, but whose first duty is to preserve its integrity
against the onslaught of anarchy. That experience informs and
illuminates his analysis of Hutchinson's political conduct.

The Ordeal also allows, for the first time in Bailyn's career,
that he has a talent for writing narrative history. On its
allegorical level--that is, the level on which Bailyn
recapitulates the violent incidents in the Harvard Yard in 1969
and their reverberating consequences--his book is continuously
exciting and satisfying. The students who stormed University
Hall, in the center of the Harvard Yard, headed at once for the
Dean of the Faculty's confidential files, and at their leisure
desecrated the Faculty Room. It is of this scene that Bailyn
invites us to think as he tells the story of the sacking of
Hutchinson's house in the summer of 1765. No matter how often I
read chapter 2, "The Face of Revolution," I am at once swept up
by Bailyn's surging and compelling narrative. Maddened by its
"morbid, pathological, paranoiac" hatred of Hutchinson, the most
violent mob yet seen in American history, more violent indeed
than any that would be seen in the entire course of the
Revolution, attacked the Boston mansion of Thomas Hutchinson,
chief justice and lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. Hardly
giving Hutchinson and his family time to flee from the supper
table into the streets, the rioters smashed in the doors with
axes, swarmed through the rooms, ripped off wainscotting and
hangings, splintered the furniture, beat down the inner walls,
tore up the garden, and carried off into the night, besides
ś900 sterling in cash, all the plate, decorations, and clothes
that had survived, and destroyed or scattered in the mud all of
Hutchinson's books and papers, including the manuscript of
volume I of his History, and the collection of historical
papers that he had been gathering for years as the basis for a
public archive.

Yet when I stop reading and realize that an allegorical lens is
coloring my view of the tumultuous events leading up to the
Revolution, my simple pleasure in Bailyn's prose turns into a
more complex response. The "bust" gave Bailyn an unforgettable
insight into the wild, anarchic passion that characterizes the
mood of mobs, and in re-creating that passion in his book he
deepens our understanding of Revolutionary politics and earns
our gratitude. In the final analysis, though, I find his
allegorizing outrageous. Through deliberately evoked
associations, he equates the awesomely tough, incontestably
impressive men of 1765 with the adolescent myrmidons of the New
Left. While the equation has less regressive implications than
the switchboard metaphor, it is somehow more insulting.

Beyond the conscious allegory in The Ordeal lies an unconscious
one, which completes our sense of` the author's ordeal.
Bailyn's portrait of Hutchinson's personality does not add up.
On the one hand, we are told that he was pragmatic, profit
conscious, self-serving, and devious. On the other hand, we are
encouraged to believe that he was highly intelligent,
principled, broad-visioned, and misunderstood. What prompts
these contradictory statements, and why is Bailyn unable to
resolve them into a coherent summation of the man'? The key
that unlocks these riddles lies hidden in the fact that
Hutchinson, besides being a politician was a Massachusetts
historian. Upon his eighteenth-century protagonist, a
twentieth-century historian of Massachusetts unconsciously
projected his divided, irresolute sense of himself as a scholar
who had been driven toward a political position in which he did
not believe by the ineluctable logic of a badly chosen argument.
In the anguishing ordeal of his schizoid hero we can sense the
pain which Bailyn's ambiguous position in Revolutionary
scholarship has caused him for almost twenty years. The role of
a Tory historian made him famous, but it has never made him
comfortable.

The Literary Parables of Leo Marx

                                     What made Leo Marx such a
charismatic figure for the undergraduates at Amherst College in
the 1960s, and why did his book The Machine in the Garden (1964)
immediately become one of the holy texts in American studies
programs across the nation? The answers to both questions have
more to do with ideology than with critical acumen. Marx had an
impact on the consciousness of the sixties because his literary
parables meshed with the psychic consequences of an
unparalleled American affluence. To many high school and
college students whose comfortable lives had known neither the
Depression nor World War II, the overblown rhetoric in which
Lyndon B. Johnson described his Great Society was as
unbelievable as it was boring, while his commitment of American
troops to South Viet Nam struck them as the act of` an
international criminal. In their disillusionment with the
president, they turned to alternative gurus, who dis- pensed
wisdom through filthy speech, free sex, rock 'n' roll,
communion with nature, and assorted drugs. Between trips some
of the students came back to politics--with a vengeance. The
guru who told them they were right to think that the American
system hold to be destroyed was Herbert Marcuse. In the course
of working on The Machine in the Garden Professor Marx also
discovered Marcuse. It was an important moment for him. Without
Marcuse I doubt that he ever would have pulled together a
publishable manuscript, for the dialectical materialism in
which he had believed since youth had created serious
difficulties for him. In the book he was trying to write, he
proposed to demonstrate that for many generations Americans had
been torn between two sharply conflicting conceptions of their
country. This life-of-the-mind equivalent of Karl Marx's class
struggle was symbolized by two images: the image of America as a
simple rural paradise versus the image of America as an urban
industrial power. A green garden was the symbolic thesis in
Professor Marx's dialectic, a railroad train the symbolic
antithesis.  Where, however, was the symbolic synthesis, which
could give his readers a heart-lifting vision of the future? He
found it hard to speak specifically about a successful
resolution of the conflict between a nation of open fields and
woods and a nation of smoking factories. Another difficulty was
that Karl Marx's basic quarrel was not with machines per se, it
was the ownership of the means of production that concerned
him. Professor Marx's manuscript, by contrast, had cast
machines in the role of the snake in the Garden of Eden. How
could he possibly acknowledge that he fully shared Das Kapi-
tal's acceptance of modern machines when his praise of the
principal American prose writers centered on what he was
convinced were their horrifying descriptions of trains,
steamboats and automobiles?

Dr. Marcuse cured these problems in a jiffy. He taught
Professor Marx that machines repressed instinctual drives,
fostered psychic helplessness, and deserved to be depicted as
horrid. He also showed Marx that he did not have to worry about
not having a symbolic synthesis in mind. A vision of total
destruction was all he needed to hold his book together, plus a
subliminal suggestion or two that radical college students
would certainly survive Apocalypse, even as Ishmael lived to
tell the tale of Moby-Dick's annihilation of Captain Ahab and
his crew.

Because of its bifurcated Marxist-Marcusean lineage, The
Machine in the Garden is one of the few books of the sixties
that spanned the generation gap between the Old Left and the
New. The book's hatred of capitalism warmed the hearts of
thirties radicals, while its condemnation of eros-blocking
machines and celebration of greenness made it beloved among the
flower children.  On the bookshelves in student dormitories
Marx's green-covered Machine took its place beside Charles
Reich's The Greening of America, albeit Marx disagreed with
Reich's contention that the peaceable kingdom could be achieved
peaceably. "Ishmael is saved as Job's messengers had been
saved, in order that he may deliver to us a warning of
disasters to come." Marx, in the almost cheerful tone in which
he predicts future disasters, and in his failure to specify
what sort of value system he would like to see emerge on the
other side of Apocalypse, reveals himself to be a far more
regressive historian than either Bailyn or Genovese. Like
Marcuse, who once shrugged his shoulders by way of reply to the
British journalist Henry Brandon's question about what sort of
civilization he hoped would sprout from the rubble of the
present one, Marx is content to end his book with the
altogether negativistic proposition that the values of
greenness as defined by our very best writers "probably cannot
. . . be embodied in our traditional institutions." It is bad
enough to regress into a Tory attitude toward the American
Revolution, or into a celebration of the master-and-slave
society of the Old South. But to rest content with nihilism
takes the prize.

The first chapter of The Machine in the Garden is entitled
"Sleepy Hollow, 1844." The reference is not to Washington
Irving but to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who sat down in a clearing
in the woods near Concord, Massachusetts, one summer morning to
await "such little events as may happen," so that he could
record them in his notebook. The scene is peaceful, full of
sunlight and shadow, and Hawthorne records his sense
impressions in ''that pleasant mood of mind where gaiety and
pensiveness intermingle." Suddenly the sylvan silence is rent
by a piercing noise.

But, hark! there is the whistle of the locomotive--the long
shriek, harsh, above all other harshness, for the space of a
mile cannot mollify it into harmony. It tells a story of busy
men, citizens, ˇrom the hot street, who have come to spend ¨I
day in a country village men of business; in short of all
unquietness; and no wonder that it gives such a startling
shriek, since it brings the noisy world into the midst of our
slumbrous peace . What Marx does not tell us is that this
passage is extrapolated from a recital of numerous
interruptions, all of them trivial which demonstrate that
Hawthorne has extraordinarily sensitive ears. For example, one
of his ears is somehow invaded by a fly--"the most impertinent
and indelicate thing in creation." Then a mosquito dive-bombs
him--"this incident has disturbed our tranquility."
Disagreeable words like "shriek" and "harsh" are used to
describe the train's whistle, but they are also evident in his
notations of the "sharp, shrill' chirrup of a squirrel, and the
hum, "terrible to the ear," of that damned mosquito.

Marx ignores these comic details because he is determined to
convert the scene into a solemn-serious paradigm of what he
conceives to be the central drama of nineteenth-century
American culture: the abrupt, frightening entrance of the
engine of modern industrial technology into the pastoral
tranquillity of nature's nation, and the registration of that
epochal intrusion by one of the writers of "our first
significant literary generation," who in the mid-s were just
coming into full possession of their powers. Every detail of
the quotation is loaded with meaning for Marx, but the date is
the most significant of all. Repeatedly Marx comes back to
1844. It is the year Emerson delivered a lecture in which he
discussed the relationship of machinery to Transcendentalism;
the year in which the young Melville returned from the Pacific
and began to feel his life unfold within him; the year before
Thoreau went to live by Walden Pond; the year, roughly, in
which Mark Twain retrospectively placed the adventures of Huck
Finn. Eighteen forty-four was a year of"radical change." Indeed
"the fact is that nothing quite like the event announced by the
train in the woods had occurred before." He has introduced the
"little event" of 1844, Marx explains, "to mark the shaping of
a metaphor, or metaphoric design," which appears again and
again in American literature after that date. With Vergil's
Eclogues in mind--for Vergilian pastoral, says Marx, is the
font from which American pastoral writing has flowed--''we can
see that the episode in Concord woods does not represent the
beginning so much as the decisive turning point of a long
story." The justification for Marx's insistence on the pivotal
importance of 1844 can be found, he says, in W. W. Rostow's The
Stages of Economic Growth, in which the period 1843-60 is
defined as the "take-off stage of American industrial growth.

The "take-off'' period, Marx says, quoting Rostow, is "the
great watershed in the life of modern societies," for it is
then that the forces of economic progress "expand and come to
dominate the society." In the United States, as in France,
Germany, and Russian, the introduction of the railroad was the
most powerful single initiator of growth. Hawthorne, in sum,
had twitched in the woods at the first sound of take-off:
Nothing more vividly illustrates Marx's eagerness to deceive
himself; and his readers, than his truncation of Rostow's
argument at this point. What Marx neglects to add is that
nineteenth-century America was a big country, and that its
regions--much more sharply differentiated then than
now--advanced economically at strikingly different rates of
speed. "If," says Rostow, "we are prepared to treat New England
of the first half of the nineteenth century as a separable
economy, its take-off into sustained growth can be allocated to
the period, roughly, 1820-1850." Its take-off, moreover,
was--like old England's--powered by a disproportionately large
cotton-textile industry.  By 1844, therefore, those
bred-in-the-bone Yankees, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau, had
been living through takeoff for most of their lives and could
hardly have been surprised by it. Had Marx made a serious
historical effort to begin his book at the moment when take-off
first became a subject for discussion by New Englanders, he
would have focused on what ministers and politicians had to say
about textile factories in the 1820s.

A further instance of Marx's misconception of take-off is
provided by Rostow's critics, who have persuasively argued that
take-off for the American economy as a whole ought not to be
graphed as a steep vertical climb lasting only seventeen years,
but as a much more gradual curve, beginning in 1815 or even
earlier and terminating, as Rostow argued, in 1860. Rostow's
critics place particular emphasis on the effect of the Erie
Canal (completed in 1825) upon the growth of a market economy
in the state of New York. What makes this statement of
particular interest to historians of American culture is that
New York in the 1820s was the one state in the Union which
could boast that two of its native sons were major writers. Why
did not Marx begin his book with Irving and Cooper both of whom
responded literarily to the take-off of New York's economy? I
can only conclude that Marx deliberately avoided their
interesting commentaries on economic change, because if he had
not, he would have been forced to relate them to canal boats,
which he had no interest in discussing. The canal boat has a
pastoral aura even though it had an urbanizing effect; it lacks
the train's demonological attributes of fire, smoke, speed,
iron, and noise that Marx was counting on to make his
anticapitalist, anti-technological parables come alive in the
minds of students and fellow teachers. Another reason why Marx
cherished fire and smoke is that they have been associated with
human society since prehistoric times. Whenever the American
writers mentioned either word--which, like all writers through
recorded history, they inevitably did all the time--Marx
intended to claim the reference as a metaphorical allusion to
trains and other technological monsters, and dare anyone to
tell him he was wrong. Neither the canal boat nor water-powered
textile factories offered such open-ended possibilities to the
parable maker.

The noise of the train in Sleepy Hollow, says Marx, "is a cause
of alienation in the root sense of the word"; it "estranges"
Hawthorne from the "meaning and value" of nature, it is the
"presentiment of history bearing down on the American asylum."
But this is to suggest that Hawthorne lived in nature which is
not true. "Sleepy Hollow, 1844" is not an American version of
Vergilian pastoral, which Marx claims it is, for it records the
observations, not of a reclusive farmer, like Vergil's Tityrus,
but of a resident of the Old Manse in Concord, who is merely a
visitor to the sylvan glade. Because he is a visitor, he
understands and is untroubled by his awareness that visitors
from the "hot street"have come to spend the day in rural
Concord. The train from which they alight is not an intruder
from another world, but a technological invention that has
emerged from within the context of republican values and was
viewed by Hawthorne, no less than by his fellow citizens, as an
extension of nature, not as its dire enemy and destroyer. Just
as the train has brought city men to a country village, so many
Americans--including Hawthorne--delighted in taking trains on
even longer excursions into New England nature. "They
annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize
travel!" Hawthorne wrote in The House of the Seven Gables.

The symbiotic relationship between nature and technology gave
many Americans an exhilarating sense of fulfillment."Machinery
and Transcendentalism agree well," trumpeted Emerson. "Get into
the railroad car," he noted in his journal, "and the Ideal
Philosophy takes place at once.... The very permanence of
matter seems compromised & oaks, fields, hills, hitherto
esteemed symbols of stability do absolutely dance by you."
During such moments, he was thrillingly certain that matter was
"phenomenal." In addition to its philosophical delights,
Emerson found train travel marvelously convenient. As he
pointed out in a letter to a friend in Newton, he and his
brother Charles could easily reach Newton by train in time for
tea and return home the next morning. The stage coach and the
railroad between them, said Emerson, had created a
transportation revolution that was bursting the old rules of
American life "like green withes." By his association of trains
with greenness, the essayist asserted how "natural" he believed
them to be.

Yet many citizens of the Republic were troubled, as many
citizens in other industrializing societies of the nineteenth
century were, by the pollution of the environment that take-off
produced. In the minds of many Americans, moreover, the triumph
of civilization over the wilderness symbolized the death of the
God-given uniqueness of America. With admirable skill, a number
of writers endeavored to express both the dark and the bright
sides of the national mood. While acknowledging that there was
a conflict between nature and technology, they did so within
larger affirmations of their complementarity. One of these
writers was Thoreau, although you would never know it from
Marx's interpretation of Walden.

On the shore of the pond we are once again in a threatened
version of pastoral, according to Marx. "The whistle of the
locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter, sounding like
the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer's yard." The
hawk, says Marx, is noted for its ''rapacity," and in its
scream we hear again the "discordant machine of the Sleepy
Hollow notes."  The statement misses the Transcendental
significance of Thoreau's sentence. In likening the train's
sound to the hawk's, Thoreau is proclaiming the naturalness of
modern technology. The train is a welcome part of his
environment, and as he warms to the task of praising it, even
Marx is forced to give ground. Putting the best face he can on
Thoreau's rhapsodic paragraphs, Marx grudgingly admits that the
chapter called "Sounds" is a "sustained evocation of the
ambiguous meaning of the machine and its relation to nature."
Again Marx misses the point. The lash of Thoreau's satirical
wit is mainly applied to the builders of the train, rather than
to the train itself.

When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with
planetary motion, . . . as if this travelling demi-god, this
cloud-compeller, would ere long take the sunset sky for the
livery of his train; when I hear the iron horse make the hills
echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his
feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils (what kind
of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into the new
Mythology I don't know), it seems as if the earth had got a race
now worthy to inhabit it. If all were as it seems, and men made
the elements their servants for noble ends! If the cloud that
hangs over the engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or
as beneficent as that which floats over the farmer's fields,
then the elements and Nature herself` would cheerfully
accompany men on their errands and be their escort.

The one and only note of ambiguity about trains in this passage
is contained in the invidious comparison of the engine's smoke
to the beneficent cloud floating over the farmer's fields--and
the note is so subordinate to Thoreau's enthrallment with the
railroad ''demi-god" as to be scarcely noticeable. Is there any
literarily trustworthy work in The Machˇne in the Garden? Yes,
there is.  The discussions of the eighteenth century writers
Jefferson, CrŠvecoeur, and Robert Beverley are all quite
believable. Once the machine enters the garden though, the
parable maker takes over and all is lost. Marx tries to make
the steamboat that collides with the raft in Huckleberry Finn
into another presentiment of history bearing down on the
asylum, as if Sam Clemens's years in the pilothouse had not
made him incurably nostalgic about side-wheelers, as his nom de
plume implies; steamboats as well as rafts infallibly conjured
up for him the vanished Eden of his youth.  Frank Norris's
description in The Octopus of a speeding train's slaughter of a
flock of errant sheep, and of the dead animals' "black blood
winking in the starlight," is converted by Marx into yet
another horrifying symbol of industrial capitalism, at the cost
of ignoring the central fact about Norris's imagination: his
love of killing and worship of force. Marx describes Nick
Carraway's decision to go back to the Middle West after
Gatsby's funeral as "a belated, ritualistic withdrawal in the
direction of nature.'" But somehow Marx manages to overlook
Nick's feelings about the mode of` transportation that will
take him there.


One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep
school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went
farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station
at six o'clock of a December evening, with a few holiday
gaieties, to bid them a hasty good-by. I remember the fur coats
of the girls . . . and the chatter of frozen breath and the
hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old
acquaintances.... And last the murky yellow cars of the
Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul railroad looking cheerful as
Christmas itself` on the tracks beside the gate .... That's my
Middle West--not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede
towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth.

Nick's "nature" is a railroad train. A critic not dominated by
ideological regressiveness would have made a great deal of
that. The centerfold in Marx's magazine of parables is his hal-
lucinogenic rendition of Moby-Dick. To get us in the proper
frame of mind, Marx begins by saying that the calamitous story
Ishmael is going to tell us "is a portent of further trials to
come: we too may expect our integrity and faith to be tested."
This invitation to us to identify with Ishmael is immensely
flattering, for Ishmael is an isolato, which is a nifty thing
to be, morally speaking, because it means you have not been
corrupted by the nasty institutions of American power. In
addition to being flattering, the invitation also appeals to
our instinct for survival. If we will only part company with
American capitalism as decisively as Ishmael--according to
Marx--disengages himself from the mad capitalist's pursuit of
the white whale, we will morally qualify to come through
Apocalypse unscathed. In the world of Marcusean fantasy, an act
of conscience is a warranty of safety. "All are directed toward
Ahab's goal . . . except Ishmael. In the end he alone is saved,
a fact that comports with his success in establishing a
position independent of Ahab and the fiery quest."

With that assurance in mind, we are well launched. The next
matter to be cleared up is why an analysis of a whaling voyage
belongs in a book about green fields and railroads. The effort
of explanation requires all of Marx's ingenuity. It seems that
Moby-Dick is an "oceanic pastoral" (you heard what the man
said, Vergil), and that a little question asked by Ishmael at
the outset of the novel is pregnant with implications. What
Ishmael is asking in this question, we are informed, is whether
it is possible "to mediate the claims of our collective,
institutional life and the claims of nature." One could never
guess from this gloss that Ishmael's question is an example of
tall-tale American humor. In the first pages of the book,
Ishmael delights us with a description of the sea-gazing habits
of New Yorkers on Sunday afternoons. From Corlears Hook to
Coenties Slip they stand "thousands and thousands" of them,
"fixed in ocean reveries." Why aren't they spending Sunday
afternoon in the country Melville asks in effect. "Are the
green fields gone?"  Marx takes this buoyant, charming,
transparently rhetorical question utterly seriously; in fact, he
would have us believe that it is nothing less than the overture
to the symphony. Searching Melville's ensuing magniloquence for
every scrap of botanical metaphor he can find, Marx turns the
watery "meadows" of the South Pacific into wall-to-wall
AstroTurf, and then announces that Ishmael has "rediscovered"
the green fields--which certainly comes as a surprise to
attentive readers, inasmuch as Ishmael never said they had
disappeared in the first place. Marx also introduces modern
technology aboard the Pequod by means of metaphor. "Swerve me?"
cries Ahab. "The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron
rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run."  Marx concludes from
such outbursts that Ahab is a mechanical man, made of cogs and
wheels.  The charge is untrue. The hunter of Moby-Dick
deliberately abandons mechanical aids, such as his quadrant, in
the course of his quest. Indeed the closer he comes to the
white whale, the more aware we become of Ahab's humanity, as
f`or example in the scene where he weeps.

The final major mistake Marx makes in his Marcusean rewrite is
his assertion that Ishmael disengages from the mad capitalist's
fiery quest. Chapter 96, according to Marx, "is at once a
repudiation of the quest, a reaffirmation of reason, and a
tribute to the man large enough to withstand the extremes of
hope and fear." In support of that statement he points to the
concluding paragraph:

            Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert
thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me.  There is a
wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And
there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive
down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and
become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever
flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that
even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher
than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.

Once again, Marx's perception is skewed. This passage is
presented to us, as indeed the entire story is, is the
recollection of an aging man who asks that we call him Ishmael.
When he warns us not to give ourselves up to fire, lest it
invert us, "as for the time it did me," old Ishmael is referring
to the entire voyage, not merely to a part of` it. Furthermore,
the acknowledgment that there is a woe that is madness is
immediately followed by the assertion that the lowest, darkest
moods of eagle-like madmen still range above the highest
flights of mind of sane but ordinary men. Even though young
Ishmael knew Ahab was mad, he revered him as a superior being
and remained his faithful follower.  When Moby-Dick bursts into
view on the second day of the climactic chase, "the triumphant
halloo of thirty buckskin lungs" is heard--not twenty-nine, but
the Pequod's full complement of thirty. On the third and last
day of the chase, Ishmael is the bowman in Ahab's boat. Ishmael
survives Apocalypse not because he was innocent, but because he
was fantastically lucky.  Moby-Dick offers neither flattery nor
reassurance to Marcusean nihilists.

Smelling the Magnolias with Massa Gene

                                     In an exchange of views a
few years ago with ''Comrades Foner, Greenberg, Perkins, and
Siegel," Eugene D. Genovese momentarily indulged in personal
confession. "While opposed to ideological history and
presentism, I have never written a line that has not been, in
[the historian] George Rawick's phrase, 'a political
intervention.' " In Roll, Jordan, Roll ( 1974), Genovese does
need intervene. For as the political scientist Harry V. Jaffa
has observed, Genovese claims to have found in the
"antagonistic cooperation" of slaves and masters far more of` a
sense of community than in the Yankee centers of early
nineteenth-century capitalism, and by relentlessly insisting on
that judgment he seeks to discredit late twentieth-century
capitalism as well. Throughout Genovese's regressive fantasy
one is reminded of a comment by Marx and Engels in the
Communist Manifesto: "The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the
upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal idyllic
relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the...fŠudal ties
that bound man to his 'natural superior.'" Just as Marx and
Engels paid tribute to a feudal past in order to arouse
yearnings for a communist future, so for similar reasons does
Genovese pay tribute to the Old South.  The social order and
moral standards of the slave holders "left . . . something to
be desired," Genovese concedes in a breathtaking understatement
in his earlier book, The World the Slaveholders Made (1969),
but at least, he says, they were not dominated by capitalistic
greed.  "The values of` the plantation its way of thought and
feeling, were antithetical to those of the bourgeois world. The
relationship of master to slave, in itself an extension of the
relationship of father to perpetual child, could be reconciled
to the cash nexus only imperfectly." In part, this preposterous
statement derives from the Southern historian U. B. Phillips's
American Negro Slavery (1918), in which Phillips portrays
slavery as a system of marvelously harmonious social
relationships between patriarchal white masters and
happy-go-lucky darkies. The main source of Genovese's
misconception of the master-slave relationship, however, is an
ideologue from antebellum Virginia, George Fitzhugh. To
Fitzhugh, the unrestricted exploitation of wage slaves in
Northern factories was "little better than moral Cannibalism,"
and far more oppressive to the laborer than domestic slavery.
In the North, increases in profits went solely to the owners,
whereas in the South, Fitzhugh averred, increased profits
raised the slave's standard of living as well as the master's,
because the slave was a member of the plantation "family."  ''I
have come to think of him as an old friend," Genovese has
written of Fitzhugh. "As my affection and admiration deepened,
the task of rescuing him from detractors became something of a
private mission." Yet in the long and admiring essay on
Fitzhugh that takes up half of The World the Slaveholders Made,
Genovese fails to mention one of the key facts about Fitzhugh's
career. Throughout the most important years of his writing
life, Fitzhugh was the personal friend and literary hireling of
the South's most energetic advocate of capitalistic
expansionism. As the founder-editor of De Bow's Review and
sometime professor of political economy at Louisiana State
University, James D. B. De Bow was in a position to influence
Southern public opinion. As Superintendent of the United States
Census, he was painfully aware of how far Northern in- dustrial
capitalism had outstripped Southern plantation capitalism. De
Bow urged the Southern planters to modernize their business
methods and force the reopening of the African slave trade.  He
also pleaded f`or a diversification of the region's economy.
The South needed artisans, banks, textile factories, paper
mills, and, above all, railroads. "No people on earth have the
means of building railroads so economically, so speedily, and
with such certainty of success, as we of the South," De Bow
proclaimed, and one of the main reasons for this was "available
cheap negro labor." De Bow did not regard slaves as members of
a beneficent plantation "family." Rather, he saw them as one of
the richest sources of Southern capitalism, and so did the
planters for whom he spoke. De Bow, not Fitzhugh, represented
the mainstream of antebellum Southern thinking about race
relations.  De Bow spoke in statistics. Yet he was tolerant of
other men who spoke in more imaginative terms--as long as they,
too, advocated slavery. Thus he opened the columns of De Bow's
Review to poets like William J. Grayson, author of a
counterattack on Uncle Tom's Cabin, and to maverick polemicists
like Fitzhugh. De Bow also had a weakness for racist
anthropologists. His favorite was the ineffable Dr. Josiah
Nott, co-author of Types of Mankind, which scientifically
"proved" that Negroes were innately inferior, and editor of an
English translation of Gobineau's The Moral and lntellectual
Diversity of Races, which later meant so much to Hitler. Nott's
ideas of Aryan superiority also dominated the mind of
Genovese's old and admired friend Fitzhugh.  Roll, Jordan, Roll
does not deny that the lot of the slaves was often harsh.
Nevertheless, the benignity of plantation paternalism afforded
the slaves sufficient "space" in which to lay the foundations
for a separate black nation. At the heart of their achievement
was their religion, which fused Christianity with African folk
belief; including the belief in magic, into a distinctive black
faith. Through this faith, the slaves shaped their"autonomous
identity." Verification of this sweeping statement is offered
in a chapter called "Origins of the Folk Religion." In three key
paragraphs, Genovese sets out to demonstrate the inaccuracy of
the traditional idea that the strength of "Africanisms" or of
African religion per se among the blacks during the eighteenth
century did not survive into the late antebellum period except
in a few special places. The fact of the matter says Genovese,
is that "white as well as black sources attest to persistence
all across the South even after slavery had passed." In the
final sentence of the last of these paragraphs he declares that
"the planters never doubted that their slaves' Christianity
contained a good dose of African belief." In a book of 665
sprawling pages, this sentence is the most important assertion
of Genovese's thesis that the slavocracy allowed the blacks to
develop cultural independence, and Genovese duly footnotes it.
The footnote consists of four references: to the Laurence
Family Papers at Nashville, to the Calvin Henderson Wiley
Papers at Chapel Hill, to J. Carlyle Sitterson's Sugar Country,
and to Charles Sackett Sydnor's Slavery in Mississippi. At
first glance, the references are impressive; upon closer
examination, they prove to be a hollow shell. The citation from
the Laurence Family Papers takes us to a reminiscence by a
woman named Emily Donelson Walton, in which she recalls a slave
named Uncle Guinea George, of whom she had been somewhat afraid
during her childhood because of his claim that he had once been
a cannibal. He boasted to everyone that he had had his teeth
sharpened so that he could chew better, and "he would tell the
boys in the family," Mrs. Walton recalled, "about being a
cannibal in Africa, and sing weird songs in his own language
when at work in the field at cotton picking time." Nowhere in
Mrs. Walton's recollection of Uncle Guinea George is his
religious faith even remotely alluded to, let alone broken down
into its component parts. Genovese's citation from the Laurence
Family Papers is a sham.  The same word applies to his citation
from the Calvin Henderson Wiley Papers. For the subject that is
under discussion in the document to which Genovese refers is
the duty of the good Christian to preach the gospel to all
peoples everywhere and to strive earnestly and constantly for
their repentance and conversion. Unfortunately, says Wiley,
many races which are "much the superior of the negro," and
which have had many opportunities for repentance, "seem likely
to fade away before the dawning of the Millennial era," whereas
"poor, blind, servile Ethiopia"--that is to say, the Negro
race--is not only "stretching forth her hands, & crying to be
cast into the healing waters," but seems likely to be a
"permanent occupant of the world." There is nothing in the
passage to indicate that Wiley believed that the faith of
Christian blacks differed in any way from the faith of
Christian white men like himself: In the "Note on Sources" at
the end of Roll, Jordan, Roll, Genovese says that "two decades
of work" in the documents of Southern history have helped him
to recognize "what is and is not typical--what does and does
not ring false." One might more accurately say that in two
decades of` work he never learned a proper respect for
historical truth.  The citation from J. Carlyle Sitterson's
Sugar Country is somewhat less fraudulent than the citations
from the two archival documents, for Sitterson does at least
take up the question of` residual African belief: Sitterson,
however, does not assert that African religion was fused with
Christianity into a distinctive black religion; rather, he
says, it existed "underneath" the slaves' Christianity. "The
'Guinea' religion," Sitterson says in his precise way, "never
completely died out in Southern Louisiana. Through the ante
bellum period it was replenished through the addition of
Negroes smuggled in and taken through the bayous . . .and
sold." Far from supporting Genovese's contention that the
traditional view of the role of African religion in black
American Christianity is wrong, Sitterson exemplifies that
view. Only in very special places in the late antebellum
South--like the bayou country of south Louisiana--did belief in
African religion persist.  The passage to which we are led by
the cŤtation from Sydnor's Slavery in Mississippi also makes
Roll, Jordan, Roll look sick:  Few records of the superstitions
of MŤssissippi slaves have been found. Whether the negro
brought the following belief from Africa is not known; it may
have been borrowed from the whites, for cases of this
superstition can be found in European folklore. John, a slave,
was accused of having committed murder in Hinds county. During
the trial it was stated that he and another slave, Willis,
together watched a crowd of people going toward the body of the
murdered negro. Willis told John that a jury was being formed
and that all the negroes who had been working near the scene of
the crime would have to file past the body, each in turn
placing his hands on it, and that blood would flow from the
wounds as soon as the murderer touched the body. On hearing
this John at once jumped the fŠnce behŤnd the place where he
had been talking to Willis and started running away from the
scene.

The contrast between Sydnor's honest confession that he cannot
make a definite statement about the origins of this folk story
and Genovese's declaration, delivered with all the boldness of a
riverboat gambler who is sure that no one will bother to check
his sleeves, that "the planters never doubted that their
slaves' Christianity contained a good dose of African belief"
could hardly be more damning. The Sydnor passage, moreover,
makes no refrence to the alleged fusion of African folk
belief and Christianity.  Circular arguments, slippery-slick
non sequiturs, collapsing time frames, irrelevant quotations,
and gloriously unfootnoted generalizations also contribute to
the excitement of reading Roll, Jordan, Roll. If you happen to
be interested in African history and want to know where
Genovese learned so much about so many tribes that he can
expansively say that "the slaves' standard of formal courtesy
toward the whites arose not only from their servile condition
but from a sense of justice inherited from Africa," you will
just have to keep on guessing, because he does not reveal his
sources. A paragraph on the slaves' gratitude to kindly masters
is equally imaginative, even though it is backed up by two
quotations, because the first is a reminiscence of the Danish
statesman Bernstorff's relations with his serfs, while the
second is an observation of twentieth- century Southern blacks
by the sociologist Charles S. Johnson. The interesting
statement that "married black women and their men did not take
white sexual aggression lightly and resisted effectively enough
to hold it to a minimum" is not footnoted, nor is the paragraph
in "Wives and Mothers" about the greater equality between men
and women in the slave family as opposed to the white f…mily,
nor the paragraph about the "remarkable number of [black] women
[who] did everything possible to strengthen their men's
self-esteem and to defer to their leadership."  The only fault
Genovese finds with the slaves is that not enough of them
rebelled. He is very quick, though, to explain away their
failure. It was not a pathology induced by slavery that
prevented the blacks from rebelling, but their religion-their
grandest achievement. The slaves' Christianity tied them to
their Christian white f•lks and therefore militated against a
general uprising. Nevertheless, the slaves' religion prepared
the way f`or "the struggle of subsequent generations of black
Americans to fulfill that prophecy they have made their own":

But that which ye have already hold fast till I come.  And he
that overcometh, and keepeth my works unto the end, to him will
I give power over the nations ....  I am the root and the
offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.

"Power over the nations." The line is from Revelation, but as
the words come rolling like Jordan out of Genovese's
typewriter, they turn into a prophecy of social revolution.