Bernard Bailyn for Years, Historians Had Been

Bernard Bailyn

For years, historians had been writing that the American Revolution was the virtuous reaction to England's curtailment of rights. Then, in 1967, Harvard history professor Bernard Bailyn added his additional theory of ideology. In his book, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Bailyn agreed that the settlers were principled. Yet that was not the main cause of the discontent. Instead, he said, the settlers had inherited the suspicion of dangers that lurked with power of one entity over another. Rather than seeing England's actions as solely unintended slipups, the colonists were paranoid enough to read them as part of a political plot. Obsession, not principles, led to the revolution.

Four decades later, no one is surprised that Bailyn comes up with a different twist to history. "For the last five decades Bernard Bailyn has been the preeminent colonial American historian'1. According to Professor Richard Beeman of the University of Pennsylvania, he has been more influential understanding "the content and cultural dynamic of American history than any other historian of the past half century.2

Bailyn truly believes the saying, "learn by history." To President Bill Clinton and other guests at the 2000 White House Millennium Council, reprinted on the website, he stated, "in our public life we Americans, though we are often described as a young nation, with a shallow history, in fact live remarkably close to our past, and I mean the deeper past, reaching back 400 years to the first settlements of Europeans on mainland North America and 200 years to the founding of the nation."3 Every day, the past and present are interrelated. For example, he added, are the Federalist Papers of over 200 years ago, "Yet we study every phrase of these essays for meanings relevant to our present public life. The Supreme Court refers to their authority repeatedly 34 times between 1981 and 1985 in decisions that affect the lives of every American in the late 20th century."4

Pulitzer Prize author Jack Racove, who had Bailyn as a professor, recalls how enthralled the students were with this lectures that were "a transforming intellectual experience."5

Racove cites The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution as a prime example of Bailyn's "revolutionary" approach to history. The telling of the ideological story occupied only half of the book. In two concluding chapters, Bailyn provided a complex explanation of the settlers' radicalism. Its deeper meaning lay in the fundamental challenge posed to the political understanding of the time. The decade of "pounding controversy" after the Stamp Act led the colonists to give new meanings to such ideas as representation, sovereignty, rights, and the nature of a constitution. In developing these positions, Bailyn argued, Americans also came to realize how different their society had become from the parent culture they had long sought to imitate.6

Bailyn ended Ideological Origins with the Revolution's opponents saying that the colonists' cry for their just rights hardly disguised the anarchic results to which their protests must lead. "No form of authority, however traditional or proper, would be safe ever after, the loyalists warned. Yet as Bailyn's moving conclusion made clear, the future deservedly belonged to the revolutionaries."7

It is essential to continually study such historical events, as the Revolution, notes Bailyn. In the personal search for understanding and wisdom:

history should be studied because it is an absolute necessary enlargement of human experience, a way of getting out of boundaries of one's own life and culture and seeing more of what human experience has been.8

By studying history, it is possible to orient the present moment from where humans have come and make decisions based on actual experience and not on myth or fantasy about the past. When knowing the pathologies of the past, people in the present stand a better chance of recognizing them and preventing them in the future. Bailyn believes that just as individual needs memory for his/her individual identity, a civilized society requires a historical consciousness.

Bailyn, himself, saw history in his own lifetime. During World War II he served in the Army Signal Corps and in the Army Security Agency. He has since won numerous awards including the Pulitzer and Bancroft for Ideology. In a paper read at the 96th annual meeting of the American Historical Association in 1981 he emphasized the importance of historians:

In the end, however, historians must be, not analysts of isolated technical problems abstracted from the past, but narrators of worlds in motion -- worlds as complex, unpredictable, and transient as our own. The historian must re-tell, with a new richness, the story of what some one of the worlds of the past was, how it ceased to be what it was, how it faded and blended into new configurations, how at every stage what was, was the product of what had been, and developed into what no one could have anticipated. all of this to help us understand how we came to be the way we are, and to extend the poor reach of our own immediate experience.9

In his speech to Clinton at the Millennium Council in 2003, he warned about the future based on happenings in the past: "Just as the American revolutionaries confronted the 'self-absorbed, self- centered' political world of London, so today Americans can expect contemporary challenges to American constitutionalism by people both domestic and foreign with 'other values, other aspirations, other beliefs in the proper use of power.'" For these individuals, the American constitutional establishment has little relevance and seems, similar to the British political establishment appeared to settlers in the 18th century, to be self-centered and exercising illegitimate authority. What then occurred shows what happened when England ignored the colonists' complaints. "We can only hope that the British mistakes will not be repeated" 10.