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JAMES BURKHART GILBERT
THE BIRTH OF A NAliON
TOWARDS A NEW PAST: DISSENTING ESSAYS IN AMERICAN HIS·
TORY. By Barton J. Bernstein. Pantheon Books. $6.95.
THE LIBERAL IDEAL IN THE CORPORATE STATE, 1900·1918. By Jam••
Weinstein. Beacon Press. $2.95.
In the broadest sense, the "New Left" historians are a genera–
tion in revolt against the thirties. Despite their internal disputes they
all reject what they construe to be the liberal interpretation of the
American twentieth century. They contest the views of a group of im–
portant historians who have devoted themselves to glorifying the history
of the New Deal, its predecessors and its latter-day defenders. Quite
naturally they reject the diluted radicalism of the post-Comintern period,
which in its few contributions to historical writing has done little to
disturb a complacent view of the American past. No less angrily, they
have chipped away at the happy celebrations of American social devel–
opment which describe an age of pastoral liberties transforming itself
into an era of industrial democracy. On the contrary, they conclude
that American leaders have often been tragically caught between eco–
nomic goals and humanitarian ideals - or worse, that they have em–
ployed liberal democracy to mask an exploitative economic and political
system. In sum, as a self-conscious generation of historians they have
turned their revulsion not so much against the system they have dis–
covered, but against those who have written defensive histories of it.
The most suggestive aspect thus far of New Left history has been its
call for a new intellectual history, by which is meant a new conception
of American ideology. The present dominance of liberal capitalism in
America supported by business and labor leaders, and by most intel–
lectuals, is an immensely important key to the past. In one way or an–
other, Eugene Genovese, Staughton Lynd, William Appleman Williams
and others have all suggested that it is imperative to understand the
distinctive American liberalism which emerged from the conflicting social
movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is
an
immensely difficult task. The isolation of an American ideology has not
been a very successful enterprise, even for those historians who have
identified it with philosophic Pragmatism or have defended it as
an
a posteriori
truth. It is still more difficult to see this ideology among its
contemporary alternatives, challenged, for example, by a non-capitalist
