John Clark Ridpath, a Case Study

A Plea for a New Appreciation of Popular History: John Clark Ridpath, a Case Study Chris Smith* Baseball buffs, older Americans, and a surprising number of historians often refer nostalgically to the Chicago Cub combination, Tinker to Evers to Chance. Even the most traditional scholars, although they may not be conversant with specific terms or teams, admit that baseball is an integral and influential part of the nation’s heritage and popular culture; and in- creasing numbers of academics and critics hold that the conceptual beliefs of a popular culture must be analyzed and studied in order to understand better a particular age in history. Popu- lar culture, of which baseball is a small segment, penetrates American bones; it surrounds the lives of American citizens even when they are abroad. Norman Podhoretz, editor of Com- mentary, saw the marrow of America in the Fulbright scholars who studied in Europe in the 1950s. After weeks of living “pure” in another culture, the scholars gathered together, ad- mitted mutual passions, and shared in a thousand guilty Amer- icanisms: “the Shadow, and the Green Hornet, . James Cag- ney . and Glenn Miller, ‘Did You Ever See a Dream Walk- ing?’. .”l Professional American historians, however, have been slow to take note of the interest in popular culture that has grown so explosively since the 1950s, when the ideas of Marshall McLuhan began to surface, and slow to realize the potential for serious research in the cultural area. Many historians perhaps listened too long to cues from Van Wyck Brooks who posited only low brow and high brow cultures and from pundits such as * Chris Smith is assistant professor of history, Arizona State University, Tempe. The Arizona State University Faculty Grant-in-Aid Program helped to support the research for this article, and Carol Lee Smith, Kristina Valaitis, Roberta Bender, Michael Stewart, Paula Wolfe, Joan Jensen, and Margaret Finnerty helped with earlier versions. Norman Podhoretz, Making It (New York, 1967), 85-86. 206 Indiana Magazine of History Dwight MacDonald and Edmund Wilson who dictated that any- thing “widely disseminated must be esthetically inferior.”2 Still, a few historians did change their perspective. Quite early in the 1950s George H. Palmer wrote that a better perspective of an age was gained by studying not the literary geniuses but the writers of lesser quality. The geniuses “tell of past and future as well as the present. They are for all times. But in the sensitive, responsive souls of less creative power, current ideals record themselves with ~learness.”~As early as 1967 Donald R. McCoy urged that American historians utilize “underdeveloped sources” for writing about the nineteenth century. He did not use the term “popular culture,” but he pleaded for historians to make use of “religious tracts, weekly newspa- pers, pulp novels, posters, handbills, burlesque, social and busi- ness clubs, cartoons, comic strips, sermons and speeches’’ as e~idence.~Radical and social historians in the 1960s, such as Jesse Lemisch and Herbert G. Gutman, urged the understanding of “the inarticulate” in history and the need to write history from the “bottom up.”5 Although a number of scholars have questioned such ideas, if followed they would certainly help to chronicle the totality of human experience, surely the goal of all democratic historians.6 To approach history from this point of view scholars would have to consider evidence and * Ray B. Browne, Larry N. Landrum, William K. Bottorff, eds., Challenges in American Culture (Bowling Green, Ohio, 1970), xiv. The work of the Popular Culture Association at Bowling Green has been outstanding in developing a national journal (now in its sixteenth volume) and attracting such renowned scholars as Russel B. Nye, Northrup Frye, and Leslie A. Fiedler to serve in administrative positions. On other developing programs in popular culture areas-although they are very few in history-see John Cawelti, “Popular Culture Programs,” in Ray B. Browne and Ronald J. Ambrosetti, eds., Popular Culture and Curricula (Bowling Green, Ohio, 1970). Quoted in Arthur Mann, Yankee Reformers in the Urban Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), 240. * Donald R. McCoy, “Underdeveloped Sources of Understanding in Amer- ican History,” Journal of American History, LIV (September, 1967), 255-70. Some of the writer’s conceptual indebtedness is to this school. For a basic understanding of their theses see Jesse Lemisch, “The American Revolution Seen From the Bottom-Up,” in Barton J. Bernstein, ed., Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History (New York, 1968), 3-46;Jesse Lemisch, “Listening to the ‘Inarticulate’: William Widger’s Dream and the Loyalties of American Revolutionary Seamen in British Prisons,” Journal of Social History, 111 (Fall, 19691, 1-29;Herbert G. Gutman, “The Worker’s Search for Power: Labor in the Gilded Age,” in H. Wayne Morgan, ed., The Gilded Age: A Reappraisal (Syracuse, 1963), 38-69. David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward A Logic of Histori- cal Thought (New York, 1970), 208; Jack Kirby, “Early American Politic-the Search for Ideology: An Historical Analysis and Critique of the Concept of ‘Deference,’” Journal of Politics, XXXII (November, 1970). 831. Plea for a New Appreciation of Popular History 207 artifacts from all components of American popular culture; yet, despite these new suggestions an obvious and neglected compo- nent of popular culture has been ignored. It is one that affects historians directly: the importance of popular history and popular historians. In their analysis of American historiography of the years 1870-1920, historians have always paid due homage to the double-play rhythm of George Bancroft to Frederick Jackson Turner to Charles E. Beard.’ Perhaps these scholars are “for all time,” but they were not the only influential historians of their respective generations.s Consider a combination less familiar to the students of American historiography, that of Benson J. Lossing to John S. C. Abbott to John Clark Ridpath. These best-selling historians were household names in their day, and since their works were “popular,” their histories may have come closer to recording clearly the historical consciousness of their respective times than do the works of honored historians. If knowledge of the past is important for everyone, then all kinds of interpretations, written and oral histories alike, will help a people know themselves: who they are, what their rela- tionship to their world is, and of what races, institutions, and nations they are comprised. Some current scholars suggest that the collective meaning of history for a people consists of indi- viduals developing a consciousness of themselves in historical time.g If this can be accepted, then the importance of popular histories and popular historians can no longer be ignored, and popular historians such as Lossing, Abbott, and Ridpath have been kept on the bench too long. The popular writers of history were not always overlooked or denigrated. Young Abraham Lincoln read and reread Parson Weems’s Life of Washington. Later in life he believed also that See for example Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York, 1968); Michael Kraus, The Writing of American History (Norman, Okla., 1953); Robert Allen Skotheim, American Intellectual Histories and Historians (Princeton, N.J., 1966); Harvey Wish, The American Historian (New York, 1960). 8 Of the well-known historians George Bancroft sold the most copies of his books, but even his sales were not outstanding in comparison to the popular histories. See Russel B. Nye, George Bancroft: Brahmin Rebel (New York, 1945). Even the so-called popularizers of ideas, such as E. L. Godkin’s Nation, had actually a very small circulation. See Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines (3 vols., New York, 1938), 111, 337. W. Stull Holt, “Who Reads the Best Histories?” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XL (March, 1954), 613-19, clearly reveals shockingly low sales of the so-called “best histories” of the twentieth century. Bruce Mazlish, The Riddle of History (New York, 1966), 8. See also John Lukacs, Historical Consciousness; or, the Remembered Past (New York, 1968). 208 Indiana Magazine of History the writings of Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin were en- tirely too heavy for the ordinary mind to digest.1° Throughout most of the nation’s first century, average Americans learned about history from the popularizers and from various components in the popular culture. The historic images of Washing- ton, for example, were everywhere in the culture.ll After the Civil War, however, a process of modernization and professionalization began to change all aspects of American life including the historical discipline.12 The American Histori- cal Association was founded in 1884 with only forty or forty-one charter members. As did other new professional organizations, it struggled for its existence and for recognition and cam- paigned for new exacting standards derived mainly from the ideas of American scholars trained in Germany.13 In order to survive, the AHA enticed to membership and high office many of the old filiopietistic historians such as George Bancroft, Ed- ward Eggleston, Captain Alfred T. Mahan, and Theodore Roosevelt, but there was much internal and external bickering between the new and old interpreters of Clio. Roosevelt, for example, eventually termed the AHA “a preposterous little organization” filled with “painstaking little pedants.”14 The end result was a shift in professional standards. A new generation of scholars, trained in graduate schools such as the one that developed at Johns Hopkins University, learned the great dic- tum that “history is past politics.” The popular historians’ repu- tations faded, and the reading public suffered. Finley Peter Dunne, an astute Chicago newspaperman and the creator of the famous Mr. Dooley, understood a good portion of the problem; the new histories were dull.

Load more