The Regressive Historians

years ago, Richard HoFSTADTER demonstrated in The Progressive Historians 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 are widely regarded as authoritative. "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. These years constituted one of the great eras of American achievement, and they inspired in Beard, Parrington, and Turner a proud faith in our democratic institutions. The regressive historians, on the other hand, became prominent when deceits and disasters were the order of the day. Except for the Civil War years, the Republic did more damage to itself in the 1960s and early 1970s than in any other period of our history. Inevitably Bailyn, Marx, and Genovese were affected by the time in which they wrote, and so were their readers. Although very different from one another, all three of