Immersed in Great Affairs: Allan Nevins and the Heroic Age of American History

256 Pages·2004·0.91 MB·English

by  Gerald L. Fetner

Immersed in Great Affairs

Immersed in Great Affairs
Allan Nevins and the Heroic Age
of American History
GERALD L. FETNER
S U N Y P
TATE NIVERSITY OF EW ORK RESS
Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2004 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fetner, Gerald L.
Immersed in great affairs : Allan Nevins and the heroic age of
American history / Gerald L. Fetner.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical reference (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-7914-5973-X (acid-free paper).
1. Nevins, Allan, 1890–1971. 2. Historians—United States—
Biography. 3. United States—Historiography. 4. Journalists—
United States—Biography. I. Title.
E175.5.N48F47 2004
973'.07'202—dc21
[B]
2003045655
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Leslee
Aman of puckish wit and inexhaustible vitality, of superb courage
and old-fashioned Scottish virtues, a captive to the fast vanishing
Puritan ethos, Allan was no ivory tower academician. He immersed
himself in great affairs.
—Tribute by Richard Morris at a Memorial
Service for Nevins, 11 October 1971,
St. Paul’s Chapel, Columbia University
. . . I have an intense, almost a passionate conviction that in a great
democracy like ours, making way through most troubled waters,
history has a broad democratic function to discharge as teacher,
guide, and inspirer.
—Allan Nevins to Evarts Greene, 17 February 1939
The affairs of men are far too complicated for safe generalizations—
except that generalization—and we must step from tuft to tuft
through the morass.
—Learned Hand to Allan Nevins, 12 September 1951
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Color and Light 1
1. Progressive-era Values and Influences (1890–1917) 9
2. Journalism in Its “Higher Walks” (1913–31) 25
3. Crossroads of American History (1913–27) 45
4. Biography in the “Victorian Manner” (1927–45) 67
5. The Temper of Modern Times (1929–39) 89
6. Capitalism, Power, and the Historian (1934–40) 113
7. America, “Projected into World Leadership” (1940–68) 131
8. History, “Broader, Deeper, and More Mature” (1946–71) 155
Afterword: A“Public Enthusiasm for History” 177
Notes 179
Bibliography 215
Index 235
vii

Preface
My interest in Allan Nevins as a subject of a biography began in
a rather ordinary way. As a graduate student, I had read his study
American States During and After the Revolution(1924) and found
for the first time an explanation of what was taking place in the
newly formed states and commonwealths following the declaration
of American independence. Before the Revolution, American history
was focused on the thirteen colonies. After the Revolution, historians
shifted toward a nationalist perspective, focusing on the weaknesses
of government under the Articles of Confederation, the formation of
the Constitution, and the creation of the American Republic. Text-
book writers seemed little interested in the internal development of
the thirteen states. Nevins’s John D. Rockefeller: The Heroic Age of
American Enterprise(1940) also engaged my interest as a graduate
student because of the wealth of information he provided about the
rise of big business and the response of government, themes that fit-
ted in with my work in American legal and constitutional history.
In both instances, however, I did not connect these studies to
any purpose other than that Nevins was recording valuable infor-
mation about events and people. But American States was written
against the background of the Progressive movement. It was in the
states, which served as laboratories of change during the teens and
the twenties, as Justice Brandeis remarked in his famous dissenting
opinion in New State Ice Company v. Liebmann(1927), that some of
the most meaningful reforms were taking place. Nevins showed that
similar efforts had been undertaken by the states in the 1780s to
work out new models of constitutional, political, economic, and social
organization, some of which would find expression in the Constitu-
tion and in the policies of the new republic. Similarly, when I read
John D. Rockefeller, I did not comprehend the extent to which
Nevins was engaged not just in presenting a thesis, but in serving as
Rockefeller’s defense attorney, exonerating him for the abuses of the
ix