As they professionalized the teaching and writing of history, the new academic historians sought to dislodge the picture of the American past that had been painted by their predecessors. The first shock occurred in 1893, when Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932) delivered a paper on his “frontier thesis.” Whereas Bancroft and most other leading historians of his generation had claimed that the early settlers of New England brought with them the germs of “Teutonic liberty,” Turner—inspired by the announcement of the U.S. Census Bureau in 1890 that the western frontier was now “closed” (or entirely occupied)—declared that the decisive experience in American history had been that of pioneers as they pressed westward, settling the “empty” frontier. On the frontier, he declared, Americans developed their most distinctive characteristics: egalitarianism, self-help, and pragmatism.
Frederick Jackson Turner.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Few important historical writings have ever rested on such a slender empirical basis. The “emptiness” of the frontier was an illusion created by the Census Bureau, which made no count of the Native Americans who inhabited these lands. Although the frontier thesis had been anticipated by Hegel, Turner’s genius lay in bringing it forward at just the right time. The closing of the frontier did mark the end of a readily understandable period in American history.
Turner not only introduced a new conception of American history but also wrested the historical spotlight from Harvard and New England and shone it on his native Wisconsin and points west. His book The United States, 1830–1850: The Nation and Its Sections (1935), emphasized the importance of sectional conflict and demonstrated how cultural traits interacted with the natural environment; he thus achieved his goal of making history not just “the brilliant annals of the few” but also the story of “the degraded tillers of the soil, toiling that others might dream.”
A generation of Turner’s younger contemporaries, most notably Charles Beard (1874–1948), Carl Becker (1873–1945), and James Harvey Robinson (1863–1936), issued the first of many calls in the 20th century for a “new history.” Although there was actually little novelty in the methods they advocated, they all aspired, like Turner, to reinterpret American history in the interest of a more democratic and rational society.
This desire to challenge conventional wisdom led to new works, including Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913). Although he did not claim that his was the only possible interpretation of the founding document, he asserted as a fundamental principle that
different degrees and kinds of property inevitably exist in modern society; party doctrines and ‘principles’ originate in the sentiments and views which the possession of various kinds of property creates in the minds of the possessors; class and group divisions based on property lie at the basis of modern government; and politics and constitutional law are inevitably a reflex of these contending interests.
Beard neatly expressed his reinterpretation of the American Revolution by saying that it concerned the issue not just of home rule but of who should rule at home. Marxist historiography
These historians, who were generally Progressives in politics, emphasized the importance of class conflict and the power of economic interests in their studies, revealing the influence of Karl Marx (1818–83). Marx and Friedrich Engels (1820–95) worked together in almost total isolation, and when Marx died it would have been difficult for a casual observer not to conclude that his ideas would disappear with him. By 1900, however, Marxism constituted the greatest challenge to the idealist tradition.
Karl Marx, c. 1870.From Karl Marx's Oekonomische Lehren, by Karl Kautsky, 1887
Despite the influence of philosophy, sociology, and economics, Marx’s thought was profoundly historical. Hegel had taught him that history was constant change, produced by oppositions, reconciliations, and more oppositions. Acknowledging (in a way) this debt, Marx remarked that he found Hegel standing on his head and turned him right side up again. By this he meant that Hegel had mistaken the real motor of history: it was not the conflict of ideas but the conflict of social classes. Marx admitted, however, that this was not his own discovery; the “bourgeois” historians, such as Vico, had anticipated him. What Marx brought to the idea of class struggle was a conception of how it had developed and how it must eventually turn out.
Marx’s understanding of class struggle was influenced by the work of the English economist David Ricardo (1772–1823), who had developed a model of how “perfect” markets work in a capitalist mode of production. Ricardo had made the conflicting interests of landlords, employers, and workers the centre of his picture of the economy. He argued that, because of Malthusian population dynamics, the wages of workers would always be held at or near subsistence levels. Marx extended the analysis by taking into account increases in population and in the productive powers of the economy. He correctly predicted—at a time when there were very few companies that employed more than 50 workers—that the size of capitalist enterprises would inexorably increase until giant corporations dominated the economy. Equally correctly, he predicted that the proportion of the labour force engaged in agriculture (over half in parts of Europe) and the number of small business owners would sharply decline, so that proletarians—those who had nothing to sell but their labour—would become the overwhelming majority of the population. Marx was less certain about the political consequences of these changes; by the end of his life he thought that capitalism might be brought to an end without violent revolution in some countries (the United States among them), and he saw that not all societies would pass through exactly the same sequence of changes. But he never lost his confidence that the system of private ownership of the means of production, in which enormous quantities of wealth accumulated in fewer and fewer hands, would inevitably be replaced by socialism.
None of this is history, properly speaking. The appeal of Marxism, for some historians, has been the rigour of this economic argument, which promises an eventual system based on moral precepts more appealing than “greed is good”; they also have been attracted to its suggestive implications for a unified approach to history. These are implications only, however. Marxist historiography, as a contemporary Marxist once said, is still “under construction.” Marx’s own historical writings are far from a mechanical application of his system. In his brilliant Der 18te Brumaire des Louis Napoleon (1852; The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte), several classes, not just two, played important roles, and the political skill of Napoleon III is acknowledged—albeit grudgingly—as significant. Although some Marxist historians may still maintain a residual allegiance to the notion that ideas are a mere “superstructural” reflection of the material “base,” the way this relationship is supposed to work has never been satisfactorily demonstrated, and this aspect of Marxism has largely been laid aside.
In recent times the idea has gained currency that Marxism has been “refuted by history.” No successful revolution has broken out in any advanced capitalist country, and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the failure of the regimes in eastern Europe that called themselves Marxist has been taken as the conclusive demonstration that Marx was wrong. But “history” refutes nobody; only historians can do that, and other historians, looking at different evidence or reinterpreting the same, can in turn refute them. A more well-grounded objection might be that there is no way to refute Marx, because his predictions are insufficiently precise; for example, he wrote that no mode of production gives way to its successor before it has exhausted all of its possibilities. The history of historiography suggests, however, that no grand scheme, whether of Augustine, Hegel, or Marx, can be “disconfirmed” by empirical evidence. They are different interpretations of history, more or less persuasive as one judges them on what are essentially aesthetic or moral grounds. The option to refuse to interpret in such a mode is of course always open. Contemporary historiography