The American States

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY at Columbia and twice Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, Allan Nevins pays a classic tribute to the value of historical study at the “grass roots” level in this thoughtful introduction to the new AMERICAN STATES SERIES. He also makes clear the need for such a series, which has been projected by the American Association for State and Local History to tell the story of America in words and pictures, through the color fill and all too little known pageant of its regional and local history. The first volume — on Vermont — is now available, and volumes on New York, Indiana, and Pennsylvania are being scheduled.    
 
FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER predicted in 1893 that the closing of the frontier would probably have two major results : a marked enhancement of regional or sectional loyalties, and a sharp increase of class consciousness and class conflicts. Fortunately for America, neither of these anticipated changes has taken place. The failure of the first to materialize is particularly interesting. Two areas alone, the Pacific Northwest and the Old South, have occasionally shown a heightened interest in regional culture and history; but even this has been slight and transitory.

The principal reasons why Turner in this respect has proved a bad prophet are probably three. For one, communications have grown with such rapidity, breadth, and power — telegraph, telephone, radio, television, railroads, automobiles, airplanes — that they have kept the country closely knit together; have in fact kept it shrinking rapidly. For another, great migrations of population have been constant. The westward movement has been maintained; between the two world wars both white and colored labor flowed from the South into the industrial plants of the Middle West; and the Second World War saw huge transfers of population from New England and the Middle Atlantic States to the Pacific Slope. This churning of the American people naturally operated to reduce sectional consciousness. Finally, the drift to the cities has been steady, and most American cities, wherever the region, are much alike.

At the same time, however, State fealties and State pride have been heightened. If sectional sentiment has not taken deep root, it is partly because State sentiment remains strong. After all, this is a very large nation; too large for most people to love in concrete terms as a unit. Our affections have to have a local habitation, and the State, whether it is as big as Texas or as small as Delaware, is the natural resting point. Every Indianian feels a special throb as he hears an orchestra launch into “On the Banks of the Wabash.” Every Kansan knows with Carl Becker that Kansas is a state of mind. Every Kentuckian has somewhere in his inner conscious a picture of Crittenden proudly telling the Spanish officers about to shoot him: “A Kentuckian kneels only to his God.” Every Virginian feels that Robert E. Lee was eternally right when he decided that his first loyalty was not to the United States of America, but to the Commonwealth of Virginia.
 
It is partly the novelists and short-story writers who have nurtured this abiding attachment to the States. Critics may talk of our regional novelists. But Faulkner has always really written of Mississippi, as has Eudora Welty; Willa Cather at her very best wrote not of the Middle West, but of Nebraska; Herbert Quick wrote of Iowa, and William Allen White’s novels were Kansas through and through. George W. Cable gave us the Creoles of old Louisiana, and Thomas Nelson Page the people of Virginia, and Charles Egbert Craddock those of Kentucky. It is absurd to speak of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and John Peale Bishop as regional writers; the one has written of Florida and the other of West Virginia, a thousand miles apart geographically and culturally. The songwriters, too, have done their part. Of State songs we have an incomparably richer store than of national songs. The feeling may be passionate, as in “Maryland, My Maryland,” or sentimental, as in “I Love You, California,” or merely hopeful, as in “A Four-Horse Team Will Soon be Seen, Far out in Idaho”; but countless songs enshrine it.

In part, old political and social traditions have built up our state loyalties. The divergence between the Massachusetts and the Virginia tradition was marked when William Bradford and John Smith wrote their respective memoirs, and grew more so as Samuel Sewall and William Byrd penned their respective diaries. Compared with Massachusetts and Virginia, such a State as Tennessee has not much social tradition. But look at war and politics! She has John Sevier and Richard Henderson; she has Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk; she has Andrew Johnson, “Parson” Brownlow, and the fighting war governor Isham G. Harris; and bless her, she has Cordell Hull. Not an Illinois boy but feels faintly superior to his neighbors because Illinois can boast Lincoln, Douglas, and Grant. Sometimes, too, State loyalty owes much to some special institution. It may be a university, like those of North Carolina and Wisconsin. Or it may be a newspaper; for who can measure what the Portland Oregonian under Harvey Scott did for State pride in Oregon, or the Louisville Courier-Journal under “Marse” Watters on for Kentucky, or the Emporia Gazette under William Allen White for Kansas?

Most of all, however, it is history which supplies the basis for State feeling. Of really first-class state histories, unfortunately, we have all too few. If they are judged according to a combination of scholarly and literary standards, we should probably have to assign first place to an author of alien blood and language; for Charles Gayarre’s History of Louisiana has hardly any peer in the English tongue. At the close of the eighteenth century Jeremy Belknap in his History of New Hampshire set a high standard, while a little later William D. Williamson’s volumes on Maine possessed solid merit. California has been particularly happy in her historians, from the painstaking and thorough Hubert Howe Bancroft to modern writers like Chapman, Bolton, and Cleland. So has Illinois, where Clarence W. Alvord produced in the five-volume Centennial History a model cooperative work. Such single-volume histories as Reuben Gold Thwaites wrote long ago for Wisconsin and George P. Garrison for Texas, and as Grant Foreman and C. H. Ambler have more recently penned for Oklahoma and West Virginia, have high merit. The political history of New York in D. S. Alexander’s four stout volumes is both entertaining and expert, while Edward McCrady’s equally bulky history of South Carolina from its founding to the end of the Revolution ranks among the very best writings of the kind. Any State with a good narrative history has an unsurpassable foundation for the best kind of pride : pride in the great achievements of our ancestors, a determination to protect the fruit of their labors, and an ambition to broaden and heighten the structure they built.

The writing of truly good State history — good in the sense exemplified by this admirable volume of Earle Newton’s — has become a work for the expert; that is, the expert scholar, and the expert literary craftsman. No longer does a place exist for such writers as Henry Howe, whose Historical Collections of Ohio, unsystematic, diffuse, and full of dubious legend (though, it must be admitted, vastly entertaining), were once so popular. No longer can we find much satisfaction in such sketchy, superficial works, however well written, as Thomas Nelson Page’s The Old Dominion: Her Making and Her Manners, or Nathaniel S. Shaler’s resume of Kentucky history. Local history in this country has long been the province of the amateur. Yet the reconstruction of local politics, economic life, manners, and social institutions is in many ways more difficult than the writing of national history; the sources are more meagre, and the changes are more difficult to analyze. The day has now dawned when the thoroughly trained investigator and author, determined to explore the past in a truly scientific spirit and to present its lineaments with human warmth and literary felicity, must take over the field.

Hence the importance of the series of State histories which this volume so delightfully inaugurates. By a marriage of pictorial and literary art with scholarship, they will touch the imagination while they throw light on many a neglected aspect of our record. A true understanding of our national history is impossible without a better knowledge of the State and local record than we have hitherto possessed. Who can fully comprehend Douglas’s part in national affairs without some exploration of his impetuous part in the Jacksonian politics of Illinois? Who can measure Thaddeus Stevens’s role in the Civil War without scrutinizing his previous role in Pennsylvania’s “Buckshot War”? Some students believe that the basic elements of American democracy are to be found in the Atlantic seaboard communities and in successive waves of influence from the Old World. Some believe, rather, that the special traits of our democracy were born from a union of the pioneer with the wild forest, and were renewed and strengthened every time a new frontier was opened. How can the truth be ascertained without a fuller writing of State history? Our national government may have become Leviathan. But the development of morals, manners, early economic situations, most political institutions, and a great deal of our culture can best be studied against a State background.

It is a happy fact that this series begins with Earle Newton’s Vermont Story. It was once said that every cultivated man’s second country was France; it can certainly be said that every American’s second State is Vermont.

The history of this rugged little State has a memorable individuality. In the era of the Anglo-American wars with the French, this wilderness country between the two disputants was left almost untracked. Then, when Canada had been conquered, the district became a tempting pioneer area, and waves of settlement poured in. But New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire quarreled over the prize. The pioneers had ideas of their own as to government, and set up for themselves. It took them nearly a generation to establish their independence, and the struggle placed its stamp on the new State. The Vermonters were the first Americans to prohibit slavery and they can boast that no slave was ever held within their limits. They created a sturdy democracy, to which they have tenaciously adhered. They managed their affairs more economically than any sister State. They wrote a glorious record in every American war. They contributed in unsurpassed proportions to the upbuilding of every Western community, and in countless activities, from the founding of the Mormon religion and of the two principal morning dailies of New York to the establishment of a new movement in landscape painting, their sons have furnished leadership.

The greater part of our national heritage is to be found in the record of our States. From the study of that record we can gain a renewal of our most precious possession, faith in the national ideal.