THERE are two possible approaches to the most recent work of Professor Beard in American history. Either leaves one with the certainty that he has written, with the aid of his wife, a work of the greatest importance. From one point of view, "The Rise of American Civilization" marks an epoch in the writing of history by American scholars. From a broader approach, he has written an epic which should itself figure in American history.
There will be few, outside the stricter circle of pedantry, to deny that this work is important in the development of historiography. It is unfortunately true, however, that too many will look upon it as the defiance of a new school, rather than as the fruition of an old one. The scholars who have looked at history as something more than treaties and battles have been in a minority in this country, but they have not been totally absent. The work of Professor Turner, of J. R. Smith, of Professor Breasted and of a host of younger writers among whom Professor Schlesinger is an eminent figure, forms the only proper background for the amazing synthesis of American civilization which the Beards have produced.
In such strongholds of the "old" history as Harvard this work will be officially frowned upon. Not that it is inexact, or without an array of carefully marshalled factual material. But it is strange ambitious, novel. It is these things inspite of its precursors, men who have tried before to connect history with the reality of life, and not merely with its flags and trappings, who have realized, to quote the Beards themselves, that "the heritage, politics, economics, culture and international filiations of any civilization are so closely woven by fate into one fabric that no human eye can discern the beginning of its warp or woof." For in these two volumes, on a scale never before attempted by any American scholar, the Beards have tried to gather and to express the formative influences, the circumstances and the results of all that has gone to make up American civilization for three hundred years. There is no preface that explains that the author is very sorry that the limits of his study force him to omit all but the diplomatic history of the period; nor is there any method used in the writing of the book other than that of judicious selection. The economic flavor of Professor Beard's former works, that economic bias which has done so much to discredit what its pedantic opponents have seen fit to call the "new" history, is to be found in "The Rise of American Civilization", only in the degree to which it may best blend with the political history, the social history, the intellectual history of the subject with which the study deals.
It is a dangerous method, but a necessary one. How dangerous may be realized by anyone who has ever tried to separate the big from the little in life; how necessary is known only too well to the Senior floundering in a morass of technical histories, of political histories, of diplomatic histories, of social histories, all of which revolve around the central life and spirit of a people or of an age, and none of which ever come to grips with more than a shred of the reality of history. It is to the glory of the Beards that they have succeeded as they have.
The other approach to this work must consider the two volumes as a factor themselves in the civilization which the Beards have tried to describe. Here the ground is full of pit-falls, which the Beards themselves have wisely avoided but which their work has made more obvious and less inevitable. There are students of American civilization who see in this country some signs of a growing self-consciousness, who suspect that as the earlier struggle against geographical frontiers produced its efflorescence in what one of these students has not ineptly termed "the golden days", so the present struggle against social and industrial and intangible frontiers may have some similar result. To such as these, mistaken as they may be, "The Rise of American Civilization" will be put down as at least a tentative landmark
