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The weakness of consensus history, argue many revisionists, is that it is elitist. It reflects the viewpoint of the political and economic establishments that left the most voluminous records. Revisionists concentrate instead on writing history, in the words of Roosevelt University's Jesse Lemisch, "from the bottom up." This presents problems of its own: the masses do not leave much in the way of records. Nonetheless, Revisionist Stephan Thernstrom of Brandeis University was able to overcome this obstacle in his Poverty and Progress, by making an imaginative use of U.S. census reports. Generalizing from shifts in population, occupation and income in a typical Massachusetts industrial town, he concludes that there was much less social mobility in 19th century America than is commonly assumed. Few laborers repeated the Horatio Alger story and moved out of their class, although in the course of a generation some rose within it. Only a high rate of movement between towns, says Thernstrom, prevented the development of a permanent proletariat in the European fashion. Similarly, Revisionist Leon Litwak of San Francisco State College combed newspapers, letters and legislative records of pre-Civil War days for his North of Slavery, which contends that anti-black prejudice existed on a much wider scale than has been suspected. Litwak found less racism in the South than in the North and West, where many localities enacted laws to keep Negroes out. Americans outside the South objected to the spread of slavery not so much because they thought it was evil as because they were terrified that the despised black man would move to their part of the country.
Doctrinaire of the Center
Many historians have viewed the Civil War as a tragic, unnecessary accident; Revisionist Eugene Genovese of the University of Rochester regards it as the inevitable clash of two highly developed and mutually exclusive class structures. In The Political Economy of Slavery and The World the Slaveholders Made, Genovese characterizes the "slavocracy" as a self-contained culture with an authentic lifestyle and ideology of its own.
He berates even his mentor, Karl Marx, for failing to understand that the Southern "way of life" served as more than a veneer for the exploitation of the black man. It seems anomalous for a Marxist to offer a defense of the old South, but the strength of Genovese is that he believes in respecting the enemy. He feels that the admirable qualities of Southern statesmen, from Thomas Jefferson to Robert E. Lee, were inseparable from the tradition that produced them. "If we blind ourselves to everything noble, virtuous, honest, decent and selfless in a ruling class," Genovese asks, "how do we account for its hegemony?"