The End of American History: Democracy, Capitalism, and the Metaphor of Two Worlds in Anglo-American Historical Writing, 1880-1980

178 Pages·1985·9.53 MB·English

by  David W. Noble

THE END OF
AMERICAN
HISTORY
The publication of this book was assisted by
a bequest from Josiah H. Chase to honor his parents,
Ellen Rankin Chase and Josiah Hook Chase,
Minnesota territorial pioneers.
THE END OF
AMERICAN
HISTORY
Democracy, capitalism, and
the metaphor of two worlds
in Anglo-American historical
writing, 1880-1980
DAVID W. NOBLE
University of Minnesota Press • Minneapolis
Copyright ® 1985 by the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo-
copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press,
2037 University Avenue Southeast, Minneapolis MN 55414
Printed in the United States of America
Second printing, 1989
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Noble, David W.
The End of American History.
Includes index.
1. United States-Historiography. I. Title.
E175.N63 1986 973'.072 85-1077
ISBN 0-8166-1415-6
ISBN 0-8166-1416-4 (pbk.)
The University of Minnesota
is an equal-opportunity
educator and employer.
For Martha, Tasslyn, Alice, Andrew,
Matthew, Joshua, and Jonathan
Our grandchildren
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Chapter 1.
Reformation and Renaissance: Republican Virtue and
the American Promised Land 3
Chapter 2.
Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles Beard:
International Capitalism or International Democracy,
1880-1920 16
Chapter 3.
Charles Beard: American Democracy or International
Capitalism, 1920-48 41
Chapter 4.
Reinhold Niebuhr: International Marxist Democracy or
American Capitalist Democracy, 1915-55 65
Chapter 5.
Richard Hofstadter: American Democracy or American
Capitalism, 1940-70 90
Chapter 6.
William Appleman Williams: Universal Capitalism,
Universal Marxism, or American Democracies,
1955-80 115
Chapter 7.
The 1980s and the Irony of Progress: Limits on the
Development of Democracy, but No Limits on
Economic Development 141
Notes 149
Index 163
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Acknowledgments
The greatest influence on my approach to the history of ideas came from Carl
Becker's The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, which I read
as an undergraduate in 1947. Undergraduate courses from Eric Goldman and
Stow Persons also were crucial in giving me a perspective on the years between
1890 and 1940 and the place of that period within the larger context of the his-
tory of ideas in America. Both taught me to think about the 1890s and 1940s
as watershed decades. In graduate school, Merle Curti shared his sense of the
crisis of Progressive historiography in the 1940s and encouraged my study of
the assumptions that underlay the Progressive outlook. Henry Nash Smith's
Virgin Land added a significant dimension to the concept of crises in particular
climates of opinion which I had learned from Becker and Persons. Then
Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions provided another lan-
guage for discerning such crises. Correspondence with Gene Wise, as well as
his book, American Historical Explanations, encouraged me to apply Kuhn's lan-
guage to the work I had already done for my 1965 book, Historians against His-
tory, and to reconsider the importance of the 1940s as a decade of dramatic
change.
Friends, colleagues, and students who have been particularly helpful in
sharpening my ideas on the crises of the 1890s and 1940s, and on the issue of
paradigmatic change, are Robert Schneider, Gayle Graham Yates, Harry Boyte,
Joseph Amato, Peter Carroll, Bruce Stuart, Richard Chase, James Youngdale,
Earl Shaw, Lary May, Susan Beck, John Plomondon, Darryl Hattenhauer,
Garvin Davenport, Michael Passi, Ralph Brauer, Richard Nigro, David
Howard-Pitney, Colette Wanless, David Fields, Deanne Lundell, Heather
Huyck, Richard Nelson, Robert Lerfald, Ruth Townsend, Thomas Woods,
David Horowitz, Terrence Ball, Steven Trauman, Sue Beckam, and Karin
McGinnis. Marlene Tungseth of the University of Minnesota Press has greatly
improved the style of the book. The help of my wife, Lois K. Noble, has been,
as always, invaluable in editing and preparing the manuscript for publication.
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