Gordon S. Wood on Sean Wilentz
Posted to www.marxmail.org on
There’s an interesting review of Sean Wilentz’s
"The Rise of American Democracy" by Gordon S. Wood in today’s NY
Times Book review section (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/13/books/review/13wood.html).
Wood, a historian himself, correctly identifies Wilentz
as having the reinvigoration of the Democratic Party as one of his chief aims
in this book, particularly through his elevation of Andrew Jackson, a figure
who no longer is flattered the way he was in Arthur Schlesinger
Jr. “Age of Jackson,” a book that didn’t even mention the ethnic cleansing of
the Cherokees.
Unlike Schlesinger, Wilentz does acknowledge the Democratic Party’s pro-slavery
and anti-Indian policies, but forgives them in the same way that Communists
used to apologize for Stalin. In Great Projects like building American
Democracy or Socialism, it is sometimes necessary to subordinate lesser peoples
for the Greater Good.
Wood makes the case that Wilentz has
no use for pesky minorities when it comes to advancing the cause of the
Democratic Party today:
“Like Schlesinger in 1945, he
wants in 2005 to speak to the liberalism of the modern Democratic Party. By
suggesting that the race, gender and cultural issues that drive much of the
modern left are not central to the age of
Of course, this is somewhat old news. People like Richard Rorty and Sean Wilentz deeply
resent the New Left’s impact on American politics. By forcing the issues of
Black, gay and women’s inequality on the world’s oldest bourgeois party, they
allow the Republicans to demagogically exploit the fears of the sort described
in Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter with
As everybody probably knows, there is no such thing as “impartial”
historiography. Every historian imparts his own ideological agenda into
yesterday’s events, no matter the pains they take to conceal it under a veneer
of scholarly dispassion. What about Gordon S. Wood himself?
As the author of “The Radicalism of the American Revolution,” one might expect Wood to be Howard Zinn’s second cousin. However, the radicalism he writes about is that of Thomas Jefferson than that of Crispus Attucks.
For Wood, as well as Wilentz, it is necessary to learn to appreciate the Greater Mission of American capitalism, even when they are getting short shrift:
“I do think that there were -- there are lots of historians
who feel that we didn't do enough for these oppressed or -- oppressed people,
particularly black slaves and -- and women. I mean, I -- my answer to that is,
of course, that the Revolution did really substantially change the climate in
which slavery had existed.
“For thousands of years, slavery had existed in the Western
world without substantial criticism. And the Revolution marked a major turning
point. It suddenly put slavery on the defensive. And I think that's the point
that needs to be emphasized, not that
Full: http://www.booknotes.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1672
John Chuckman, a frequent
contributor to Alexander Cockburn and Jeff St. Clair’s
“Counterpunch” has an interesting review of Wood’s book on amazon.com that
starts as follows:
“Mr. Wood's book tries to put some intellectual and moral sizzle back into an American Revolution that has long come to be regarded by world scholars as something less than an earth-shaking event.
“Despite much-labored efforts, Mr. Wood fails, and he is pretty dull along the way in presenting his case. It really could not be otherwise, for his basic thesis is faulty. The Revolution has been summed up, quite accurately I believe, as a group of home-grown aristocrats taking power from a group of foreign-born aristocrats.
“
For obvious reasons what repels a genuine radical like Chuckman also attracts Newt Gingrich, who hyped Wood’s book
when it came out and that is found on the ‘recommended books’ section of Gingrich’s
website, along with “Gone With the Wind” and Mario Puzo’s
“The Godfather.”