( Charles': "Herbert Aptheker replies to Beard in _The Early Years of the Republic_"
What's the gist of his reply?
Carl Remick) ___________
"The Nature of Revolution"
by Herbert Aptheker
The dominant trend in recent American historiography - though by no means uncontested - so far as the American Revolution is concerned, is to treat it as quite unique in that it was either no "revolution" at all, or, if a "revolution," then a conservative one. This interpretation, while not new, as we shall show, clearly does form part of the general pattern of the "New Conservativism" that has been so significant an ideological phenomenon in the United States in the years since World War II.
Among the more explicit of this school is Prof. Daniel J. Boorstein, whose work (The Genius of American Politics, 1953) may be used as characteristic of its views. Boorstein finds: "The obvious peculiarity of our American Revolution is that, in the modern European sense of the word, it was hardly a revolution at all. " He notes that this view is the one promulgated for generations by the Daughters of the American Revolution; but he refuses to allow anything, even this coincidence, to keep him from announcing the results of his scholarly pursuits. Hence: "The more I have looked into the subject, the more convinced I have become of the wisdom of their [the Daughters] naivete."...
The new feature of this conservative revisionism, of which Boorstein's work is so striking an example, is its abundance and its starkness. Its essence may be found in the observations of DeTocqueville, made a century ago, to the effect that the United States was democratic without ever having had a democratic revolution. It is present , too, in the writings of some professional historians of earlier generations; for example, of John Fiske, in the late 19th century, and of G.A. Koch and Reginald Coupland, in the 1930's....
Similarly, in the present period, writers like Louis Hartz and Robert E.Brown see the revolution as coming not because of oppression but because of freedom; the American revolutionists sought stability, not change. Indeed, if there were any "revolutionists" - i.e. any who sought drastic change - they were the inept, deluded, and misinformed British King and his Ministry. Hence, as Hartz says in The Liberal Tradition in America ( 1955), " this makes radicalism irrelevant to the American Revolution." The Americans did not "join in the great Enlightenment enterprise of shattering the Chrisitian concept of sin" and "did not share the crusading spirit" that one finds in real revolutionists as those of France and Russia.
This again, is similar to the earlier view of Charles M. Andrews, who insisted that the Americans were seeking nothing but the "rights of Englishmen", that these rights "had nothing do do with democracy and represented nothing that was in advance of the age in which the colonists lived"....
Robert E. Brown, in his effort to prove that the colonists sought to preserve and not to change, made of colonial society an advanced "middle- class democracy" and so pictured the Revolution purely in terms of speparation from England which was seeking to destroy an already existent democratic social order....
A variant of the effort to take the revolution out of the American Revolution consists of ascribing the outbreak to errors in judgement and failings in temperament. That is a essential thesis of Charles R. Ritcheson's _British Politics and the American Revolution (1954)....
Another reflection of the impact of conservative revisionism is writing which does not go so far as to deny the revolutionary content of the Revolution, but which apologizes for its existence. John Richard Alden, for example...
No matter how the Revolution is evaluated, however... there remains the related, but yet, distinct problem of accounting for its occurrence. On this question there is truly an enormous literature...
A still widely prevalent view is that which may be characterized as economic determinist, a view subjected to severe buffeting in the past generation and one which , in its time, made important contributions. Emory R. Johnson...History of Domestic and Foreign Commerce of the United States (1915)...(said)
"The Revoluton in America was fought to secure commercial and industrial freedom through the establishment of political liberty... The Revolutionary War was fought to secure freedom of trade and to obtain home rule in the levying of taxes for the support of the government."
...J.Franklin Jameson ...The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement (1926)...
A view very much like that of Johnson and Jameson was held by Edward Channing, the young Charles A Beard and the young Louis M. Hacker. Here the essence remained economic determinist but the expression was Madisonian and redolent with terms suggesting conflicts between different propertied groups and classes. Thus Channing opened the third volume of his monumental _History of the United States_ with these words:
"Commercialism, the desire for advantage and profit in trade and industry, was at the bottom of the struggle between England and America; the immutable principles of human association were brought forward to justify colonial resistance to British selfishness. The governing classes of the old country wished to exploit the American colonists for their own use and behoof; the Americans desired to work their lands and carry on their trade for themselves."
The Beard-Hacker version did not differ substantially from this, though its use of words like bourgeoisie and its concentration upon conflicting needs of British mercantilism and rising American capitalism led some, like Charles M. Andrews, to confuse their views with the outlook of historical materialism - a confusion expedited, at least in the case of Hacker's work, by the fact that the author himself then fell victim to such confuson...
There is also a substantial body of literture, clustering about the names of scholars like George L. Beer, Lawrence H. Gipson, Lawrence A. Harper, Oliver M. Dickerson, and Curtis P. Nettels, which offers dffering views as to the actual impact of the Navigation and Trade Acts, the weight restrictions upon manufacturing and currency, the period when these and other mercantile mearsures began to adversely affect the colonial eocnomy. These writings are of great consequence...
There are many scholars who take an eclectic approach to the origins of the Revolution and attribute it to the existence of a myriad of discrete and separate "factors"...
On the other hand, there have been some scholars who have taken a more dialectical view and in doing so have offered fresh insights... Charles H. Lincoln's Revolutionary Movements in Pennsylvania, 1760 - 1776 (1901)... Carl L. Becker _HIstory of Political Parties in the Province of New York , 1760 to 1776 (1909) ...Arthur M. Schlesinger _Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution_ (1918)... ...the enormous range of writing by Charles M. Andrews
...(However) Andrews attacked what he thought was " the Marxian doctrine" as enunciated by Beard and Hacker, but actually was an economic determinist view. Andrew felt it was " untrue to fact to say that there was any one grievance common to all (colonies) and that grievance solely commercial or industrial." He saw more to history than " a clash of economic interests" and concluded:
"To emphasize the economic aspects to the exclusion of all else is to interpret human affairs in terms of material things only , to say nothing of the spiritual power necessary to use these material resources for human welfare, to ignore the influence of sentiment and morality, and to underrate the rich and varied stuff of human nature, the distractions of statesmen, the waywardness and uncertainty of events."
Marxism ignores none of the forces mentioned by Andrews. Marxism does not see the American Revolution "exclusively" in terms of "commercial or industrial ," or , one might add, agrarian grievances. Marxism does deal with "England" more realistically than did Andrews, for even Disraeli acknowledged that there was more than one "England" and the class differences in England were certainly of the greatest consequence in the origins , conduct, and conclusion of the American Revolution. Marxism sees "the colonies", also, more realistically than did Andrews, for these colonies were themselves class-stratified socieities ( as so much of Andrews' own narrative makes clear) and this fact , too is of decisive consequence in comprehending the nature of that society and the changes therein and the demands raised by different classes adn groups within the colonies....
Marxism, in viewing the economic factor as ultimately decisive, does not think of "economic factor" in the narrow sense as this or that particular economic conflict or eocnomic interest. The economic factor in the Marxist outlook, is itself the offshoot of the basic eocnomic foundation- the mode of production, the resulting relations of production, and the social superstructure arising from them bulwarking them and effecting them. In this sense, is the eocnomic factor ultimately the decisive one in the historical process...
It will not be amiss to quote Marx's own definition of historical materialism, where he gives this in the fullest form. This is the philosophical outlook of the present work's author...The passage occurs in the preface which Marx wrote for his book, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)
(Here Aptheker quotes the famous passage which begins "In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensible and independent of their will...")
Continued later.
Charles Brown
Detroit