50 Years of Counter-Counter-Subversion

Chris Beneke
.

Before the year ends, it may be worth noting that 2010 marks the fiftieth anniversary of a classic work in American history. In September 1960, a full tenure-cycle before the appearance of his classic tomes on slavery and abolitionism, David Brion Davis, published a modestly titled article in The Mississippi Valley Historical Review (today, The Journal of American History) called “Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature.” Perhaps overshadowed by the subsequent publication of Richard Hofstadter’s monumental The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964), Davis’ little gem has been, and continues to be, profitably invoked by historians and non-historians alike.

A half century is a long-time for a publication with heavy interpretive implications to stay afloat in the roiling waters of American historiography. Most significant arguments from that long ago now rest under an ocean of dissertations and monographs. Occasionally they resurface—only to be unceremoniously dunked under again by a desperate graduate student. But “Some Themes” has remained buoyant even amid massive shifts of interpretive currents over the last five decades. Google Scholar alone counts 118 citations, many of them fairly recent.

Davis’ topic was antebellum hostility toward three outlier groups: Masons, Catholics, and Mormons, and he discovered conspicuous parallels in the structure of prejudice against them:

What distinguished the stereotypes of Mason, Catholic, and Mormon was the way in which they were seen to embody those traits that were precise antitheses of American ideals. The subversive group was essentially an inverted image of Jacksonian democracy and the cult of the common man; as such it not only challenged the dominant values but stimulated those suppressed needs and yearnings that are unfulfilled in a mobile, rootless, and individualistic society. It was therefore both frightening and fascinating. (208)

.

The themes of nativist literature suggest that its authors simplified problems of personal insecurity and adjustments to bewildering social change by trying to unite Americans of diverse political, religious, and economic interests against a common enemy. Just as revivalists sought to stimulate Christian fellowship by awakening men to the horrors of sin, so nativists used apocalyptic images to ignite human passions, destroy selfish indifference, and join patriots in a cohesive brotherhood. Such themes were only faintly secularized. (214)

My hunch is that Davis’ argument has avoided the twin perils of irrelevance and infamy because it presaged a discernible shift in the historiographical current. In particular, “Some Themes” provided early American historians with a handy, empirical point of access to the theory of The Other—the ubiquitous scholarly assumption that our understanding of self and community is always developed against imagined understandings of another (usually benighted and/or marginal) culture or people. In the five decades since, few ideas have exercised a more profound influence on historical interpretation. Davis’ article also captured the ideological spirit of the post-Red Scare academy, which has embraced the subversive and the counter-counter-subversive.

“Some Themes” had the additional virtue of not being overly burdened with clinical baggage. While Davis gestured toward mid-century concerns about identity formation and social anxiety, he was clearly more concerned with the cultural and political causes and manifestations of what is nowadays sometimes called “othering.” That too aligned his argument with late twentieth-century (at least post-1970s) historical study, which has never been comfortable with the essentialism of the psychological and philosophical foundations on which so much of it rests.

Contingency

Heather Cox Richardson

Two of the speakers I heard at The History Society’s conference last weekend got me thinking about the importance of contingency in historical events. Michael Barone of the American Enterprise Institute argued that the pattern of American politics since the early twentieth century had been determined by two central pivot constituencies. George Washington University’s Leo Ribuffo disagreed. He pointed instead to the unexpected quirks that had shifted key elections. Ribuffo’s funny look at the oddities of history poked a hole in the idea that there was any such thing as the sort of clear pattern Barone found in the political history of the past century.

I might have passed over this disagreement except that the previous day, in a session devoted to a review of his work, William Freehling—one of our leading scholars of the antebellum American South—had also mentioned contingency. He explained that his work on the rise of secession had made him come to see history as a series of themes flowing through time, altered at an immediate level by contingency. For proof of his theory, he challenged the audience to think of events in their own lives that had been determined by something accidental. And who can’t?

Two references to chance in two days made me wonder: What is the role of contingency in historical change? Professors Freehling and Ribuffo are undoubtedly correct. Our lives are not predetermined by impersonal societal forces. Chance matters. But historians study the past to figure out what creates change in human society, and Barone’s identification of a pattern that gave certain constituencies control over political elections also had great merit. How do these two seemingly contradictory factors work together?

As I thought about it, I came to lean toward Freehling’s vision of contingency, with an important adjustment. I do believe that societal change is driven by larger forces (my personal favorite is ideas) and that there are unexpected accidents that affect change in quirky ways. But—and this is an important but—I think that the larger forces in play limit which accidents turn out to be important, change the terms of those accidents, and ultimately define their significance. That is, a chance meeting might enable two scientists to develop an energy technology that goes on to change the world, but that chance meeting can only happen in certain kinds of societies, the nature of the meeting is determined by the society, and the results of the meeting can only matter in a society that recognizes the importance of their sort of work. That same chance meeting of two brilliant innovators in a society convulsed by civil war might mean they pass each other unnoticed as they struggle to get their families to safety. If they do speak, they might work together not on energy technology, but on a new wagon box spring or artillery carriage . . . or they might kill each other. And the result of their collaboration or collision might either fall forgotten in a society that has no current use for it, or it might revolutionize society in ways that have nothing to do with energy. In this scenario the same two great minds meet—a contingency—but the significance of that meeting depends largely on the trends of the larger society in which they live.

Or so I think at this particular (contingent?) moment.