Theology Today - Vol 43, No.4 - January 1987 - BOOK REVIEW - The End of American History: Democracy, Capitalism, and the Metaphor of Two Worlds in American Historical Writing, 1880-1980

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

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

By David W. Noble

Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1985. 166 Pp. $25.00 ($14.95 Paper).

What set of philosophical or religious beliefs undergird the way a historian describes and explains the past and its significance for the present and the future? Assuming that each historian has a consistent ideological buttress to sustain scholarly work, David Noble seeks to determine what that ideology is for selected figures. Written in part to revise the thinking in his Historians Against History and in part to show the relevance of interpretive constructs advanced by Sacvan Berkovitch, Gene Wise, and J.G.A. Pocock for understanding American historiogra-

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

phy of the last century, this book examines images of the New World and the Old World and their variants in the thought of historians Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles A. Beard, Richard Hofstadter, and William Appleman Williams as well as ethicist-theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. All but Turner were alive and productive either professionally or as students during the 1940s, a decade that Noble regards as a watershed in recasting American historical self-consciousness, Hence, the final item on his agenda is to demonstrate that those of his subjects alive then underwent significant ideological reorientation, during that decade. Subtly argued and passionately written, Noble's study presumes familiarity with the corpus of the five individuals on whom he concentrates.

Noble is particularly captivated by Bercovitch's The American Jeremiad (1978), which convincingly argued that this sermonic genre was a strategy for maintaining the contrast between Old World and New through its proclamation of promise in the New, lament over failure to live up to the promise, and near apocalyptic hope for its fulfillment in the future. Hence, Noble dissects Turner's lament over the apparent American commitment to an industrial society rather than a presumably more purely agrarian one as well as Beard's early attempt, not to bemoan the industrial, but to see in it the potential to fulfill the myth of the New America, an attempt that gave way to a despair that retreated to isolationism as the only means to preserve and protect the purity of the American way.

Noble believes Reinhold Niebuhr's sense of irony in American history and his counterpoising the economics of socialism and capitalism offer an alternative to Beard, for Niebuhr did recognize national shortcomings as well as the global context of American society. But Niebuhr's increasing suspicion of Soviet intention as the Cold War marched on causes Noble to see in him, as in Turner and Beard, a preacher of jeremiads of foundering causes.

So, too, with Noble's analysis of Hofstadter and Williams. While both accepted capitalist economics as part of the stuff of the New World, not an aberration transplanted from the Old, Hofstadter, according to Noble, sought to temper the sway of capitalism through democratic principles, while Williams hoped to temper it through a Marxist critique. Neither finally pinpointed a flawless vision of America, for both reveal weaknesses in previous understanding-as had Niebuhr, Beard, and Turner before them.

Noble speaks of The End of American History then as termination in that once the philosophical props holding up one interpretation of American history are understood, the story can never again be told the same way. But Noble is speaking as well of end as telos, purpose, or design, for the monograph is itself a jeremiad, a lament that no one has yet discovered what really does constitute the uniqueness of the American enterprise and a despair that none will. To that extent, Noble's book is also one that could not have been written before the 1980s when the

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

scholarly world already had Robert Bellah's The Broken Covenant (1975) to deplore the loss of liberals' commitment to American values as scions of the myth of America and Charles Dunn's counterclaim in American Political Theology (1984) that only religious, political, and economic conservatives were legitimate heirs of the American dream.

Who is the true American? What is the meaning of the American experience? David Noble may not be able to answer these questions any more satisfactorily than could Crevecoeur answer his own similar queries many years ago. But in The End of American History Noble offers a sophisticated analysis of the way leading interpreters of American common life have sought answers that were right, but answers that always seemed to slip from their grasp.

CHARLES H. LIPPY

Clemson University
Clemson, South Carolina