Progressive Intellectual History and the Midwest: Alien Country or Familiar Territory?

“I have been a stranger in a strange land.” (Exodus 2:22, KJV). That was one of my sentiments when I finished my first post at this blog that explored twentieth-century intellectual history and the meaning of America in Robert Skotheim’s American Intellectual Histories and Historians (Princeton, 1966).  As an antebellum U.S. intellectual historian, I had journeyed “far from the home I love” (as Hodel in Fiddler on the Roof would have it) but the new home I found would not let me leave so quickly.

In American Intellectual Histories and Historians, Skotheim maintained totalitarianism’s threat united Progressive historians and their reactionary brethren to double-down on what it meant to be American: a “re-embracement” (as he called it) of some quintessential American values and “common-sense.” Now, notice the order of subjects in the title.  Histories come first and those who write them follow.  It is the authors behind the histories I trace in this blog post.  The Progressive historians loomed large for Skotheim as they commanded two out of five chapters in American Intellectual Histories.  What fascinated me in my first read was that Skotheim, a higher education administrator, carefully noted the collegiate backgrounds of most of the historians he surveyed.  As a historian of higher education, such details scream at me.  All the colleges the Progressive historians attended for their undergraduate degrees (or at least part of them) were in the Midwestern United States.  It seemed significant and merited an investigation.  What I found raised questions about the roots of modern intellectual history and kept me in the twentieth-century home for another post.

Skotheim dove into the collegiate and regional roots of the “early chroniclers” or pre-Progressives (because they shared some intellectual traits and regional roots with the Progressives) and the Progressives.  Moses Coit Tyler (1835-1900), an Episcopalian minister and son of a Congregationalist minister, was raised in the Midwest and was a professor of English literature at the University of Michigan, a Midwestern institution of higher learning.  Skotheim highlighted a few of Tyler’s works of American intellectual history including The Literary History of the American Revolution, 1763-1785.  Opposite the religiously-motivated Tyler stood the avowed “secularist” Edward Eggleston (1837-1902).  Skotheim wrote of him:

“Born and raised in Indiana, he was a Methodist preacher throughout his twenties, a writer for Christian denominational publications as well as other periodicals during his thirties, and as late as his forties, he returned to a pastorate.”[i]

Eggleston’s drift away from religion came through his recognition that evolution did not square with Methodism dogma. Nonetheless, his Midwest origins and strong denominational involvement are significant.  On the Progressive spectrum of historians, James Harvey Robinson (1863-1936), the New Intellectual History scion, was born in the Midwest.  Charles Beard (1874-1948) attended DePauw College in Indiana founded by the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1837.  Furthermore, Carl Becker (1873-1945) hailed from Waterloo, Iowa and pursued studies at Cornell College—a school run by the United Methodist Church—for one year but spent the remaining three at the University of Wisconsin.  Additionally, Vernon Louis Parrington (1871-1929) lived in the Midwest in his early years and went to the College of Emporia, a Presbyterian institution of higher learning established in 1882.  Finally, Skotheim mentioned Merle Curti (1897-1996) had a Nebraska upbringing but all his academic degrees from Harvard.  The pattern of a Midwestern undergraduate degree paired with an Eastern Ivy league graduate degree held true for most of the Progressive historians Skotheim examined.  Reading Skotheim gives one a sense of the magnitude of Midwestern intellectuals in twentieth-century American life and culture.

Very recent historical scholarship confirms such an assertion.  In 2011, Kenneth H. Wheeler wrote in his history of Midwestern colleges, Cultivating Regionalism: Higher Education and the Making of the American Midwest that Progressive leaders largely came from the Midwest and its denominational colleges.  Wheeler’s book is a masterful view of the vast impact Midwestern collegiate institutions made upon American intellectual life.  He argued the height of Midwestern culture came in the Progressive Era (1890-1920) and that Midwestern colleges facilitated the sciences the Progressives reverenced. Furthermore, Wheeler asserts the two pillars of antebellum Midwestern college education were the construction of social harmony and education and uplift of the poorer classes.  Skotheim touched on these themes in American Intellectual Histories because he called “reform sympathy”—a vision that included social unity and poverty relief—a major, unifying thread of Progressive intellectual historians.  More recently, Jon Lauck and Jess Gilbert examined Progressive intellectuals in different lights.  Lauck’s From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism, 1920-1960 (featured in two recent posts at this blog) recovers the lost field of early twentieth century Midwestern history.  In a similar vein, Jess Gilbert’s 2015 monograph, Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal, chronicles the Progressive vision of democracy that stemmed from Midwestern intellectuals in the USDA’s land-use program.  Both works highlight the importance of Midwestern intellectuals and Midwestern history to the social forces of the early twentieth century.  On the other hand, Skotheim’s book provides us with a dissimilar window into intellectual history: how the Midwest influenced American intellectual history through Progressive ideology.

How does Skotheim’s American Intellectual Histories draw that out?  I avow it magnifies the Midwest’s importance in American intellectual history but gives more questions than answers.  One query I had after reading Skotheim, Wheeler, Lauck, and Gilbert is whether the Progressive intellectual historians Skotheim writes of alter the dynamic tension between region and nation.  Wheeler and Lauck explicitly acknowledge that tension.  Wheeler writes: “Regionalism is precisely the dialectic between thought and action, between the imagined and the tangible.”[ii]  Moreover, Lauck attests the likes of Frederick Jackson Turner, Josiah Royce, and Hamlin Garland were partisans for a robust Midwestern field of inquiry separate but related to study of the Midwest in the American nation.[iii]  For Gilbert, the relationship of what is distinctly Midwestern stands in strong relation to what is national because participatory democracy connects national and regional levels.  In Skotheim’s work, the Progressive intellectual historians rarely delve into what is regional about America.  Their books continually concerned “American civilization” or civilization-in-general.[iv]   Additionally, the Progressive intellectual historians in Skotheim’s narrative and their opponents had what I call a “Puritan hinge” around which their monographs and scholarship turned.  Each side used the Puritans to advance their interpretation of American intellectual history.  For late nineteenth and twentieth century American intellectual history, the Puritans were “good to think” with (in the Darntonian sense).  Yet, where do the Progressives’ Midwestern roots show through?

I close with one final question.  The Progressive intellectual historians in Skotheim’s work might have been influenced by their region more than I’ve seen in the surface-level analysis above.  Skotheim emphasized their concern with an “environmental” interpretation of intellectual history that did not posit free-floating ideas but grounded those ideas in social and cultural trends.  This heritage profoundly shaped intellectual history as we know it today.  Did this Progressive “environmental” focus stem from the importance of the Midwestern environment (or region) in their own intellects and writings to form the basis for their theory of intellectual history?  I look forward to pondering those questions with this community of intellectual historians and gradually revoking my status of “stranger” and wanderer amidst twentieth-century intellectual history.

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[i] Robert Allen Skotheim, American Intellectual Histories and Historians (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 49-50.

[ii] Kenneth H. Wheeler, Cultivating Regionalism: Higher Education and the Making of the American Midwest (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011), 103.

[iii] John Lauck, From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism, 1920-1965 (Iowa City, IO: University of Iowa Press, 2017).

[iv] For example, James Robinson’s Introduction to the History of Western Europe (1903); Charles Beard’s The Rise of American Civilization (1927) and The American Spirit: A Study of the Idea of Civilization in the United States (1942, fourth part of “The Rise of American Civilization” series); Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (1922); Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature (1927-1930); and Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought (1943).