More on Wood’s Review of Lepore

I am a fan of Gordon Wood’s work.  (Who else would spend three hours live-blogging his recent appearance on Book-TV, prompting one reader of this blog to describe my efforts as “history dorkitude”).  After I read The Creation of the American Republic during my first semester of graduate school I thought seriously about becoming a socialist.  (I didn’t, but I will save that for another post).  In my second semester of graduate school I read Sean Wilentz’s Chants Democratic and Nick Salvatore’s Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist and became quite taken by the way Wood’s “republican” synthesis could be applied to other time periods in American history.  (I eventually realized that Daniel T. Rogers had already figured this out).

Like others in the history blogosphere, I found Wood’s review of Jill Lepore’s The White of Their Eyes to be a bit unfair. (Thanks to my readers I had three or four copies of the review in my mailbox within an hour after my earlier post).  But I did not find it “fantastically, even goofily, unfair.”

I really like Lepore’s book because I think its central argument is correct.  There is such a thing called “historical fundamentalism,” and it is practiced by many on the Right AND the Left.  There is indeed, to use Lepore’s words, “a distance between the past and the present.” The acknowledgment of this distance is missing from Tea Party rhetoric.  As Barbara Clark Smith and others have shown us, the comparison between the Boston Tea Party and the current Tea Party is a weak one. As Lepore notes, history cannot bear the weight that we place upon it when we use it to solve our contemporary political debates.  I think Wood would agree with all of this.

So why does Wood have such a negative reaction to the book?  It might be suggested that Wood has issues with Lepore that go beyond the content of her book.  Lepore’s November 2009 review of Wood’s Empire of Liberty was fair, but not particularly flattering.  But I am inclined to give Wood the benefit of the doubt here.  He has enough integrity to avoid getting into a pissing match with another historian.

Wood’s negative criticism is born out of a misreading of Lepore’s book.  When Wood concludes that Lepore should have written “a less partisan and more dispassionate account of the Tea Party movement to help us understand what it means,” he misses the point of the book. Lepore did not write a history of the Tea Party.  Her goals were more limited than that.  Instead she wrote an analysis of the ways in which the Tea Party uses (and misuses) American history, particularly the history of the American Revolution, to promote its political agenda. I felt she made a good effort to understand the members of the Tea Party whom she interviewed.  Where she does show “contempt,” however, is in her attack on the way in which the Tea Partiers are using history.  And she is justified in this attack.  Someone had to say this and I am glad Lepore did.  It seems to me that historians have a responsibility to show how the past is being misused or manipulated.  This is part of our vocation. 

As Paul Harvey has noted in the comments section of my previous post, Wood’s use of Bernard Bailyn on the difference between history and memory is a very useful one. Indeed, Wood makes a point here that all critics of the Tea Party (including Lepore) should consider.  Memory plays a powerful role in our society and it is up to the conscientious historian to understand that role.

Wood writes:

Memory, or what Lowenthal calls “heritage,” may be, like the Tea Party’s use of the Founding, a worthless sham, its credos fallacious, even perverse; but, wrote Lowenthal, “heritage, no less than history, is essential to knowing and acting.” It fosters community, identity, and continuity, and in the end makes possible history itself. “By means of it we tell ourselves who we are, where we came from, and to what we belong.”

(Wood has been making these points for a long time. Parts of this review, right down to the The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance reference, are lifted directly from a 1997 NYRB review of Pauline Maier’s American Scripture: The Making of the Declaration of Independence.)

In the end, Lepore’s book was written by a critical historian.  Wood’s review was written by a fellow critical historian who wanted her to write a book that went beyond critical history to include the powerful role that memory plays in the Tea Party movement. Wood thus committed one of the gravest sins any reviewer can commit–he gave into the temptation to review the book that he wanted Lepore to write rather than the book Lepore actually wrote.

Yet I also learned something from Wood’s review.  Indeed, if there was no collective memory, Lepore’s critical history would not have been needed. Without memory, our job as teachers of critical American history would be a lot more difficult and a lot less fun. Wood is correct in suggesting that memory “makes possible history itself.”

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