EVERY epoch recreates its own concept of the past. As the climate of opinion shifts over the course of a generation, so do historians' views of history. A series of events as related by one historian may be altered beyond recognition by a later one. Such is the case with American history today. Traditional notions of the past are being brusquely challenged from the left by a group known as revisionists who emphasize not the homogeneity and accomplishments of the American heritage but its massive dislocations and conflicts. Though forming a diffuse movement rather than a well-defined school, they have a growing influence on the study of history; at last December's meeting of the American Historical Association, their candidate for president, Staughton Lynd, the ex-Yale professor who now works with Radical Organizer Saul Alinsky, received nearly one-third of the vote.
The revisionists have a particular quarrel with the dominant scholarly voice of the recent past: what they call "consensus history," as exemplified by such diverse writers as Richard Hofstadter of Columbia, Daniel Boorstin of the Smithsonian Institution, Henry Nash Smith of the University of California at Berkeley, and George Kennan of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. The consensus historians, who came to maturity during World War II and the early years of the cold war, exhibit an understandable hostility to totalitarianism in their writings. By contrast, they emphasize the spirit of compromise and accommodation in American history. Compared with the violence that racked the Old World, the New seems to them refreshingly free of sustained class and sectional strife. They feel that the pluralism of American life has blurred ideological divisions between rich and poor, between agrarians and urbanites. They are friendly to the realistic practicing politician and denigrate the self-righteous crusading reformer.
In place of this relatively benign view of America, the revisionists have portrayed a land of teeming passions and deepseated, almost irreconcilable disagreements. Some revisionists accept the class-warfare theories of Karl Marx; most of them owe a considerable debt to Progressive Historian Charles Beard, who interpreted the American past as an economic struggle between haves and havenots. Since most revisionists took part in the civil rights or antiwar movements of the past decade, they make an easy transition to a study of previous periods of intense struggle: the Revolution, the Civil War, the Populist revolt, the efforts of labor to gain recognition. Compared with the America summarized in contemporary textbooks, theirs is indeed another country.
Viewpoint of the Masses