American Perspectives: The National Self-Image in the Twentieth Century by Robert E.SpillerReview by: Carl BodeThe American Historical Review, Vol. 67, No. 1 (Oct., 1961), pp. 148-149Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1846318 .

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148 Reviews of Books

the progressive assault on the Constitution. Furthermore neither author took his hypothesis as seriously as Benson does. Beard was casually inconsistent in the application of the economic interp-retation in his volumes on the Constitution and Jeffersonian democracy and in his Rise of Amecrican Civilization; Turner was willing, in his essay on "The West and American Ideals" (1914) to jettison the idea of a necessary link between free land and democracy and to interpret the frontier metaphorically as "a whole wealth of unexploited resources in the realm of the spirit." Such a volte face would have shocked Loria. But then, these were not analytical social scientists but historians, although of a different kind.

Beard wrote primarily for the general public. His methods were not rigorously scholarly, he had no students, and there was little scientific continuity to his work. His influence upon subsequent scholarship was slight, and his hypothesis was not tested because it did not need to be. We can deal with it best now by forgetting about it and by approaching such problems as the adoption of the Constitution afresh.

Turner did have students and exerted a significant influence on scholarship in his own time and after. But his contributions and those of his students did not emanate from tests of his hypothesis. He suggested the importance of the frontier, of the West, of sectionalism, and of physiographic factors in terms that were not always precise or internally consistent. These concepts were aids toward catagoriz- ing specific problems, not formulas to be tested. The core of his approach was something else again, the insistence that historical developments be viewed in their total context and not within rigid institutional lines. Only in the light of that in- sistence can his contribution to American historical writing be appraised.

These comments are not designed to add to the sterile argument about whether history is a science or not. History is a science, but it is as different from any others as astronomy is from botany. Its methods of ordering data are unique and re- lated to the type of material it treats. It does not proceed by defining and testing precise hypotheses in Benson's sense. At least, it has not thus far done so.

Harvard University OSCAR HANDLIN

AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES: THE NATIONAL SELF-IMAGE IN THE

TWENTIETH CENTURY. Edited by Robert E. Spiller et al., for the Ameri-

can Studies Association. [Library of Congress Series in American Civiliza-

tion.] (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. I96I. Pp. vii, 2I6. $4.75.)

THIS little book had five editors: two principal and three associate. Its ten es-

says are the work of some of the most interesting scholars in American studies.

Yet their combined efforts failed to make out of American Perspectives the synthe-

sis originally intended. The editors admit their failure. In palliation, they assure

the reader that he has before him, at any rate, "a conversation among students of

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Mllorton: Colonial Virginia 149

the American image." Even this modest claim does not hold up; he has instead a series of monologues.

The book, however, is by no means negligible. It has something to offer in one way or another to many observers of our culture. Three or four of the essays are exceptionally rewarding, and no essay is devoid of merit. To take them in the order of their appearance: Ralph Gabriel's essay, "History and the American Past," comes first and looks back farthest. With the wisdom of long contemplation he sees a pattern in the past and urbanely describes how our historians have inter- preted it. Morton White's "Pragmatism and the Scope of Science" has a striking thesis: "the story of American philosophy may be told as a tale of radically op- posed attitudes toward science." He argues his points persuasively. Robert Spiller writes about trends in twentieth-century literary criticism; Edward Waters writes all too briefly about American music, as does Lloyd Goodrich about American painting and sculpture. Thomas Cochran's topic is "The Social Scientists"; he is surprisingly successful in sorting out his widely scattered materials. The economist Kenneth Boulding holds to his assigned subject more closely than some of his col- leagues in this book. He concentrates on the public image of our chief economic institutions. The Yale historian John Blum deals similarly with the public image in politics. He writes as well as anyone in the book, and his style has a dry felicity that reminds us of Santayana. Reuel Denny contributes a sprightly, authoritative essay on the discovery of popular culture by the intellectual. Eric Larrabee ends American Perspectives with an essay on an idea, the doctrine of mass production. His essay has a neatness to it which comes in part from the pursuit of a single object.

With every essay bearing an individual stamp, it would be surprising if many views were held in common. There were a few, however. Most of the contributors, as the editors note, agreed that the first fifteen years of this century were ones of "mounting dissatisfaction with previous norms and standards, and that the period between wars was one in which new cultural energies were consequently released." In more recent years a conflict had developed, the contributors felt, between con- solidation and diffusion, between an attempt by Americans to fix their national image, on the one hand, and, on the other, to extend their imagination far beyond national boundaries. Finally, the contributors seemed to agree that this conflict had brought instability with it and an unsteadiness which is today most marked.

University of Maryland CARL BODE

COLONIAL VIRGINIA. Volume I, THE TIDEWATER PERIOD, I607-

I7ro; Volume II, WESTWARD EXPANSION AND PRELUDE TO, REVO-

LUTION, 17I0-1763. By Richard L. Morton. (Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press for the Virginia Historical Society. I960. Pp. xiv, 408;

viii, 409883. $I5.00 the set.)

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