Word: parrington
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Your review of Richard Hofstadter's book [Oct. 25] gives a misleading impression of one of The Progressive Historians. I knew well and remember as a very great teacher Vernon Louis Parrington. From the review, one would judge that he never left the Middle West. In point of fact, he was an undergraduate at Harvard, and the last 20 or more years of his mere 58 were spent as a professor at the University of Washington...
...PROGRESSIVE HISTORIANS, by Richard Hofstadter. A graceful and perceptive study of three men-Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles A. Beard and V. L. Parrington-who have most shaped America's conception of its past...
They had much else in common. Born in the 1860s and early 1870s, brought up in the Midwest (Turner in Wisconsin, Beard in Indiana, Parrington in Kansas), all of them came of age at a time when the balance of power and influence was shifting from the effete East to the still raw and resentful Midwest. The financial panic of 1893 was in the making. The Populist movement was galvanizing Westerners and farm folk everywhere into a struggle against big money and big-city interests...
Compared with Beard or Turner, Parrington seems a somewhat perfunctory figure. In a series of interlocking biographical sketches-marked by Anglophobia and a gift for rhetoric-Parrington, in Main Currents in American Thought, reconstructed the U.S. cultural evolution. His notion, deeply ingrained in the American character, was that art should have a social purpose; realism, it followed, was better than fantasy. The great republic, he said, had solved through a struggle between the ideas of Good Guy liberals, dissenters, democrats and humanitarians, like Roger Williams, Ben Franklin, and naturally, Thomas Jefferson, and Bad Guy conservatives like Jonathan Edwards, Increase Mather...
This kind of partisan polarity is as familiar to Americans as Sears Roebuck and peanut butter. But since World War II, modern scholarship has nitpicked Turner to death-on grounds of detailed inaccuracy and cloudy thinkng. Parrington has been buried by the New Criticism as a prejudiced bore and a square to boot-both of which he most emphatically was. Beard has not so much been demolished as deplored for his slighting of the non-economic complexities of history...