Milton Gaither Professor of Education Messiah College

I enjoyed reading Thomas Fallace's fine essay connecting Bailyn's famous critique of our discipline's history prior to 1960 to several intellectual trends stemming from postwar consensus liberalism. I think he is correct about all of it. His work adds nuance and particularity to claims I made some years ago.Footnote ¹

However, one aspect of Bailyn's work that is present in Education in the Forming of American Society and everything he has written since still needs to be explained. Bailyn was, and has remained, everything Fallace claims. He was clearly influenced by the anti-ideological strain of thought associated with the postwar milieu, anthropology's granular and empirical approach, the concept of culture as fluid, dynamic, and grounded in lived experience, and especially by Perry Miller's history of ideas approach unpacking an internally consistent mental universe. But for all that, and despite his most cherished beliefs about history, Bailyn has always been a progressive at heart when it comes to understanding his own discipline. History might be contingent, but historical scholarship is not. Let me explain.

As Fallace notes, several of Bailyn's reviewers familiar with the educational historiography he canvassed in the first part of Education in the Forming of American Society were quick to point out that Bailyn's account was deficient in many respects. It overstressed some works, undervalued others, ignored the cross-fertilization between historians connected to education programs and those in history departments, and, most egregiously, judged previous generations of historians by his own generation's ideals. My book provides more detail about all of this, concluding that Bailyn simply got the story wrong. Why? Because of his ideology.Footnote ²

To get at Bailyn's ideology about the discipline of history, we have to go outside of Education in the Forming of American Society. The ideology is implicit in that work, informing the historiographical narrative; his subsequent writings would make his commitments explicit. Taken as a whole, they reveal that Bailyn's basic outlook has been consistent over many decades. He has always been a living embodiment of the very thing he finds most fascinating about early America—contradictions, complexities, and contingencies. Bailyn is a narrative historian with a fondness for quantification, a grand synthesizer with a specialist's eye for fine-grained detail, a social historian who just can't stop writing about famous men, a contextualist who can't resist making connections to the present, and, most importantly for our purposes, all of the things Fallace claims, wrapped in a self-image that is pure progressivism.

Fallace's Bailyn, the postwar consensus Bailyn impatient with ideologically driven accounts, has been a constant presence over seven decades of work. Bailyn has chafed against “intemperate, impassioned, remorseless—peculiarly venomous” historians who dwell long on Jefferson's many failings, just as he has castigated the “scholastic …, self-absorbed, self-centered” hagiography that sometimes passes for history of the Constitution.Footnote ³ He had no patience for critics of his work on the ideological origins of the American Revolution who substitute theories of economic determinism or subliminal race and class interests for careful presentation of evidence.Footnote ⁴ In his clearest and most expansive explanation of his views, a charming 1994 book called On the Teaching and Writing of History, Bailyn put it this way:

Despite this bluster against dogmatic impositions, Bailyn has smuggled in, unawares it seems to me, an ideology of his own that is entirely in keeping with the progressivism he has spent his career denouncing. You can see it clearly in the quotation just cited. Perceptive historians are not the splitters forever finding counterexamples to any and every generalization hazarded by lumpers. Anybody can write a monograph drowning in unassimilated detail. Perceptive historians see connections, parallels, patterns. If the progressive baby is the belief in civilizational advance through reform, its bathwater is the sweeping grand narrative style. Bailyn most emphatically rejects the baby, but he loves, even pines for, the bathwater:

Bailyn thought he had found that large-scale structure. He dedicated the latter years of his career, for the most part, to expounding it. Atlantic history provided Bailyn with a canvas large enough to contain everything. Just as the Mediterranean Sea had been the hub around which the peoples of today's Europe, Middle East, and North Africa had once radiated a complex but recognizable civilization, so the Atlantic Ocean became, in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, the nucleus around which Europe, Africa, and the Americas orbited, their fates bonded together through cultural, economic, technological, military, ideological, and demographic exchanges. Atlantic history proffered Bailyn “a fresh look at the whole story,” an interpretation that drew together “the great mass of available material—literary and statistical, new and old, local and cosmopolitan.”Footnote ⁷

In 2012, the culmination of Bailyn's long-standing commitment to the synthetic potential of Atlantic history was released to the public in The Barbarous Years. Here was no paean to the genius of the American experiment. The tale was one of marchland chaos and violence, as men and women on the outskirts of civilizations that had developed in isolation from one another for centuries were suddenly thrust together in geographic competition and carnage. The book is a stunning achievement of erudition and literary talent, showcasing a scholarly work ethic that would please the most uncompromising Puritan. And yet.

Bailyn knew all along that others might construe the idea of Atlantic history as a passing fad made popular by its affinities with the preoccupations of the present. In 2005, Bailyn published a short book titled Atlantic History that readers of his Education in the Forming of American Society, published forty-five years before, will find eerily familiar. Both books have the same structure. They begin with a biased historiographical essay that provides a scholarly context. They then proceed to lay out in a series of impressionistic generalizations a sweeping synthesis of the field. In 1960, the historiographical critique lambasted educationist historiography as a setup for Bailyn's own contextualist synthesis that sought to place educational history within the mainstream of postwar cultural and social history. In 2005, however, while the sweeping synthesis was much the same, the historiographical account was antithetical. This time he was not critiquing what had gone before as presentist. He was defending Atlantic history against charges of presentism.

Bailyn's account of Atlantic historiography's origins acknowledges that its early practitioners were deeply committed to the post-WWII “western civilization” concept, hoping that their work unifying Europe and the Americas into a common culture would contrast the West's democratic essence with the collectivist East then in the thrall of communist dictatorships. As the field gained in status in the 1960s and afterward, was it a coincidence that its emphasis on the Indigenous cultures of Indians and Africans emerged at the very moment of anticolonialist political movements and Red Power? Bailyn had cast his lot with Atlantic history, but was Atlantic history itself not just a historiographical emulator of intellectual fashions?

For Bailyn, the answer is no. His historiographical survey in Atlantic History hammers away at the point on almost every page. Historical scholarship, declares Bailyn, “has its own internal dynamics.” Works like those of Robert Palmer and Jacques Godechot on the transatlantic nature of eighteenth-century revolutionary movements “had developed not abstractly or deductively but empirically, from their own documentary research.” Such work emerged “simply by the force of scholarship itself” rather than being “reflective of its environment and responsive to social pressures and rewards.”Footnote ⁸

Studies of the transatlantic slave trade were the same. This scholarship grew “naturally, organically, in response to creative impulses of scholarship…, enhanced but not defined by social pressure.” So were studies of plantation economies, where “no extrinsic forces had been at work; the impulses that sustained this universally creative enterprise were intrinsic,” driven primarily by “the excitement and satisfaction of recovering a lost world.”Footnote ⁹

What about the highly controversial studies of the demographic collapse of the Indian populations after European contact?

Bailyn insists that key historians like Magnus Mörner “had no political agenda, however useful his findings might prove to be for those who did,” insisting that even these scholars’ critics “did not charge them with political correctness for their high initial estimates” of the precontact population. Bailyn cites approvingly the words of James Lockhart, who claimed that historians like himself were “more likely to be motivated by a positive fascination with their subject than by … moral outrage.” Even political history was pure, according to Bailyn:

What's going on here? We see, finally, that when it comes to his own historical profession, Bailyn embraces not only the progressive bathwater of grand synthesis but the progressive baby too. He always has. In 1960, he and his generation of younger historians were going to sweep in and save the day, bringing reform and progress to the field of the history of education. In his 1994 explication of his views he optimistically predicted:

That it does. What is odd, though, is that, for Bailyn, the history of historical writing is the history of dialectical progress. It is not shaped by the contingencies and complexities of the broader society within which it operates. It has its own inner logic that unfolds gradually, systematically, inexorably, progressively. Generation builds upon generation, replacing old syntheses with newer, better ones as we all march steadily to historiographical weltgeist. How lucky we are to be alive right now.

Derrick P. Alridge Professor Curry School of Education University of Virginia

Thomas Fallace offers a fresh and thoughtful examination of Bernard Bailyn's Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportunities for Study (1960), a critique of Progressive Era historians of education.Footnote ¹³ Bailyn's critique was aimed mainly at educational historian Ellwood Cubberley and his influential texts Changing Conceptions of Education (1909) and Public Education in the United States: A Study and Interpretation of American Educational History (1919).Footnote ¹⁴ Since its publication, historians such as Sol Cohen, Milton Gaither, among others, have revisited Bailyn's work. For Fallace, these conversations lacked an examination of the role of Cold War ideology in shaping Bailyn's critique.Footnote ¹⁵

Bailyn argued that Cubberley and his fellow educational historians worked outside the mainstream of professional history and presented anachronistic, romantic, and decontextualized interpretations of American education. As Fallace points out, Bailyn believed early twentieth-century historians and social scientists uncritically embraced progressives’ ideological positions. This approach, Fallace notes, seemed to Bailyn akin to the way populations around the world adopted the ideologies of totalitarian regimes.

Bailyn's critique is understandable given that the history of education field developed in schools of education, rather than in history departments. However, what has always puzzled me about Bailyn's critique is that it ignores historians of education who offered critical interpretations of American education, which Fallace notes. More specifically, in Education in the Forming of American Society, Bailyn almost completely disregards the work of black historians writing about education.

Subsequently, Lawrence Cremin's monumental The Transformation of the School, which Fallace argues reinforced Bailyn's thesis, also neglected the work of black historians such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, and Horace Mann Bond, who studied and wrote about American education during the first half of the twentieth century. Ironically, while Bailyn and Cremin criticized Cubberley and other early educational historians for failing to survey a larger historical milieu, in some ways they themselves failed to engage a larger historiography of education. Both Education in the Forming of American Society and The Transformation of the School are texts published during the Cold War and civil rights era. However, from reading the texts, one does not get a sense that the civil rights movement was in full swing or that African American historians ever studied education.Footnote ¹⁶

Bailyn and Cremin probably did not consider black historians like Du Bois, Woodson, and Bond as members of the Cubberley school of historians. They may also have viewed black historians as ideologically committed to challenging white supremacy and, therefore, too far afield of the mainstream historical profession. An examination of the reasons for their absence in Bailyn's and Cremin's works can provide further insight into the history of education's evolution.

Du Bois produced several sociohistorical studies on education as part of the Atlanta University Studies. These studies included The College-Bred Negro (1900), The Negro Common School (1901), and The Common School and the Negro American (1911). These works contextualized the education of black Americans, showed how the vestiges of slavery and racist policies obstructed the progress of blacks, and provided social and historical data that revealed the potential ameliorative power of education for blacks.Footnote ¹⁷

In 1935, Du Bois published Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, which examined the plight of black Americans during Reconstruction. Drawing on Marxism, Du Bois identified economic stratification between blacks and whites as an ongoing problem since Reconstruction. He argued that the “wages of whiteness,” the psychological superiority poor whites derived from being white, prevented the unification of the black and white proletariat.Footnote ¹⁸

The most poignant chapters on education in Black Reconstruction in America were “Founding the Public School” and “The Propaganda of History.” The former examined white resistance in the face of blacks’ demand for education; the latter identified curricular practices that barred black children's access to a good education. Although not a text on the history of education, the book examined education within the historical milieu of Reconstruction and laid a solid foundation for subsequent groundbreaking work in the history of education.Footnote ¹⁹

Following the publication of Black Reconstruction in America, the Cold War increasingly influenced Du Bois's views on education. Du Bois's views became more openly Marxist starting in the late 1930s, and in the late 1940s, he periodically delivered a speech titled “The Freedom to Learn” that clearly reflected the Cold War ideology of the time. Du Bois urged, “Especially we should insist upon the right to learn, upon the right to have our children learn, and upon keeping our schools, uncoerced by the dominant forces of the present world, free to exercise the right to join with the great Goethe in a worldwide cry for ‘light, more light.’”Footnote ²⁰

The “dominant forces” Du Bois feared were schools and governments that prevented progressive thinking. “I should think that the greatest disservice that this nation or any people could do to the United States would be to stop the study of economic change; to prevent people from pursuing knowledge of Marx and Communism.”Footnote ²¹ Du Bois believed that the people who owned capital and controlled production had a strong interest in maintaining the existing educational system, which prevented students from learning about noncapitalist ways of understanding the world.

Du Bois, who came under FBI surveillance for his views, eventually joined the Communist Party in 1961. Certainly, Bailyn was aware of Du Bois and his work. Fallace's examination of the influence of Cold War ideology on Bailyn's work may illuminate the reasons for Du Bois's absence in Bailyn's critique.

Woodson published his meticulous The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 in 1919 and The Mis-Education of the Negro in 1933.Footnote ²² The former sought to chart blacks’ quest for education, whereas the latter critiqued blacks’ failure to use the knowledge they learned in colleges and universities to help their own communities. In true progressive fashion, Woodson believed that education should have a practical and community-based dimension. These works, and others, established Woodson as a major figure in the history of American education.Footnote ²³

Likewise, in The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order (1934), Bond argues that American education and schools reinforced existing social hierarchies that barred blacks from achieving equality in school and society. Reflecting a distrust for institutions, Bond proposed developing new systems to create better educational opportunities for blacks. Surprisingly, this clearly progressive and ideological tome escaped critique by Bailyn and Cremin.Footnote ²⁴

In American Educational History Revisited: A Critique of Progress, Milton Gaither reviewed African American educational historians’ contributions, arguing that “the trailblazers of black educational historiography have had an influence on contemporary historians that outweighs Cubberleyan institutionalism and Bailynesque culturalism.”Footnote ²⁵ Gaither's statement illuminates the importance of early black historians and the need to include them in discussions of the early field. In his seminal article, “‘Outthinking and Outflanking the Owners of the World’: A Historiography of the African American Struggle for Education,” Ronald Butchart also highlights the significance of black historians of education as well as historians who write about black education.Footnote ²⁶

Fallace has done an excellent job of offering a new interpretation of the Bailyn critique, as the decade of the 1950s and its Cold War ideology certainly played a role in Bailyn's work. However, I submit that Bailyn, by omitting the work of Du Bois, Woodson, and Bond, missed an opportunity to expand his interpretation of the history of education. Including these black historians would have offered a more complete and complex understanding of the history of education. Fallace's essay is a clarion call for historians of education to push the boundaries in understanding the evolution of our field. It calls upon us to open our minds to the myriad ways that ideas and ideologies shape our understanding of our field.

Mary Ann Dzuback Associate Professor Education and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Washington University, St. Louis

Most historians of education trained from the 1970s through the 1990s were exposed to Bernard Bailyn's Education in the Forming of American Society. Some of us found Bailyn's arguments particularly useful as a foil or critical vantage point for reading other histories of education, both school focused and non–school focused. The book provided a critical means of asking certain questions about the colonial period and the nineteenth century, including: How did those who did not have access to schools become literate? How did children whose parents did not, or could not, teach them become literate? What other institutions taught and what did they teach? How did African Americans in slavery engage in formal learning, acquire skills, and become acculturated? How did poor girls learn, when no one planned for them to go on to advanced learning? What kinds of learning and teaching occurred in the spaces between institutions? As importantly, Bailyn's thought piece pushed us to consider how education occurred: What were the processes? How could we assess education had taken place and whether it was effective? Bailyn's work shifted our gaze from considering education as a discrete set of processes occurring in formal institutions to understanding education as including both teaching and learning that could occur anywhere in a particular society or culture. That signal insight helped us see the contributions schools could make to learning, the obstacles they might present to students who did not “fit” the model student they were designed to serve, and the limitations on the depth and breadth of education they could foster.

Although many of us understood Bailyn as a “consensus” historian (Thomas Fallace's argument), situating Bailyn's thinking in the post-World War II rejection of ideologically motivated historical writing, makes sense. Additionally, Fallace notes, Bailyn's critique of the “professional” motivations of educational historians trying to create a professional subfield within the larger field of education sheds light on why public schools were always portrayed as key cogs in the machinery of progress. Fallace notes the timeliness of Bailyn's suggestion, in the context of the full maturation of the academic social sciences in the US, to draw on theories about culture, human development, and social and economic forces to inform historical writing about education. Fallace's argument that Bailyn's commitment to writing history for its own sake, rather than to meet some professional need for legitimacy or to satisfy “an ideological or political agenda,” carries weight. Historians have been wrestling with the questions of objectivity and neutrality in historical writing since the late nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁷ Fallace's treatment of Education in the Forming of American Society, and the intellectual and cultural context of Bailyn's approach, illuminate how even historians claiming the need to write history for its own sake can use their own context and agendas to frame their narrative analyses.

Rather than focus my comments entirely on Fallace's treatment of Bailyn, I shift to how the author's exploration of Bailyn's context can be a springboard for historians of education to think through what it means to have a viewpoint and how we might use and question it to both improve our craft and inform our analyses. Bailyn does not elaborate on the kinds of political concerns shaping his own perspective on the historical problems he explores; rather, he appears to be claiming that his work is informed by a neutral, professional stance. Fallace notes that Bailyn's Education and other historical work suggest, first, a commitment to writing American history from a neutral stance within the discipline and, second, a commitment to neutrality in a posttotalitarian moment. While this move by Bailyn is an effort to discipline the discipline, it can also be seen as suppressing or curbing critique.

First, I address the notion of neutrality. Is there such a thing as a neutral stance? As Thomas Haskell argues, a certain level of detachment is necessary for the historian to actually see the evidence, attend to and account for unexpected findings, and understand the thinking or motivations of those with whom we disagree, including other historians and their interpretations as well as the historical characters whose positions and activities we might find repugnant.Footnote ²⁸ That position can be captured not by a claim to neutrality but by a commitment to the principle of striving for objectivity. Patricia Hill Collins contends that the epistemological demands of knowledge production are shaped by relative power and by life experiences. Black feminist thought, for example, emerges from black women's experiences and shapes the kinds of questions asked and the problems demanding investigation. As feminists have argued for at least a generation, objectivity, at least in the positivist sense, is not attainable. In the sense Haskell suggests, though, it might be worth striving toward, as long as we understand, as Collins suggests for epistemology, the role of power in knowledge production.Footnote ²⁹

Regarding the second issue, whether disciplining the discipline can curb it by suppressing critique, I ask: How do we take into account the role of power in knowledge production? What motivates historians to ask the questions we do? What leads us to challenge other historians’ interpretations and conclusions, to ask new questions, to use particular theories, however unconventional to the field, and arrive at novel (and persuasive) explanations for historical phenomena? Critical race perspectives have helped advance our understanding of African American and other ethnic groups’ educational experiences. Those kinds of theories emerged at the same time that African Americans entered the field in larger numbers and shifted attention among educational historians to the students who did not fit the “norm.” Black historians brought to the discipline the kinds of questions that emerged from their embodied experiences in American schooling and culture more broadly. Would Bailyn have argued that the questions that they brought to the field, driven in part by critical race theory, were ideological? Similarly, with rare exceptions, the majority of “nonideological” historians of education for a generation after Bailyn seemed to forget half the population in their accounts of the history of education, particularly in studies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and in studies of higher education in the twentieth century. Or they assumed that the experience of education was the same for boys and girls, men and women. When historians of women's education began asking who was left out of the larger story, would Bailyn have argued that their question was ideological because it emerged from their feminist commitments to understanding history?Footnote ³⁰

As Bonnie Smith notes in The Gender of History, in the 1970s, when African American and women's history began having an impact on the discipline, assumptions guiding the long view of history writing assumed that “the history of women and blacks … would politicize the field” because it would “undermine the truth value of real history by exposing it to influences (such as ideology …) that operated outside professional standards for what was important.” In this view, Smith notes, “In Western iconography the knowing subject—along with the historically important objects the mirror [of history] serves up for scrutiny—is usually male, adding complexity to what seems a simple image,” and that when women write history it is seen as less complex, less valuable, less central to the discipline. In other words, the gendering of the historian and the subject matter rendered history, in the eyes of some in the field, as both ideologically driven and suspect in relation to the so-called value-free norms guiding the important, mainstream history being written. Such ideas disciplined and nearly choked the discipline for a long time.Footnote ³¹

When I was rereading Bailyn's Education, and Fallace's treatment of it, Smith's argument floated down from my office bookshelf and refused to let me go. Another image came to mind. When I started teaching in the history of education thirty years ago, I taught two particular courses: The American School and History of Education in the US— from the colonial period to the present in both cases. In the first, I wanted to convey how Americans used institutions to transmit culture across the generations (to paraphrase Bailyn), but I found that the histories of schooling left out entire populations—those who weren't allowed in schools, those who could not afford to attend school, and those who had marginal attachment to schools. I found I had to fill my lectures with the stories of those who pursued learning where they could, and that it was impossible to understand the history of schooling without attending to how schools were designed to serve the “normal” student (usually male, white, middle class, and then working class), precisely the group early “progressive” historians put at the center of their accounts. In History of Education in the US, I took a different tack, focusing on the institutions outside of schools where certain groups learned, either because they didn't have access to schools or because the schools that existed marginalized them.Footnote ³² We studied families, churches, community organizations, museums, libraries, labor unions, print media, and other institutions and agencies of education with precisely that focus: where did African Americans, women, poor children, Native Americans, and others learn when they could not learn in schools? Almost every time I taught this course, at least one student would question why I focused so much on other institutions and nonmajority populations. And, without exception, I had to explain both the limitations of looking at schools alone and, as important, how decentering schools allows us to explore where many pursued and acquired their education, whether or not they had access to schooling.

As Fallace argues, “Bailyn's Education in the Forming of American Society sparked a discussion of ideology in the history of education and revealed it to be a double-edged sword that could be directed at historical actors as well as the historians who wrote about them.” Writing and teaching history are political acts, in the sense that we are situated and situate ourselves politically, and should expose how power operates to the advantage of some and to the disadvantage of others. The history of education is rife with those who used schools and other educating institutions to exclude some and include others, to smooth the paths of some and set obstacles for others. The history of education as a field in a sense can't help but continue to both raise questions about ideology, as Bailyn did, and use those questions to pursue richer and more complex understandings of education in the forming of American society.

Andrew Hartman Professor of History Illinois State University

Tom Fallace is absolutely right to situate Bernard Bailyn's Education in the Forming of American Society in the Cold War liberal intellectual milieu that often goes by the name “consensus history.” Indeed, Bailyn's book is framed in much the same way as the more famous consensus books from that era, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Vital Center, Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America, and Daniel Bell's The End of Ideology.Footnote ³³ In this, Fallace makes an important historiographical point. And yet, in his seeming admiration for Bailyn's approach, Fallace risks repeating some of the glaring errors of Cold War liberalism.

Education in the Forming of American Society widened the scope of conventional approaches to educational history, which tended to narrowly focus on formal schooling in isolation from other social forces. The old paradigm told stories of inevitable progress toward a system of universal public education. As opposed to such a teleological vision of American educational history, one that was largely disconnected from trends in professional historiography, Bailyn employed interdisciplinary methods such as intellectual history, American Studies, and cultural anthropology to tell a more nuanced story about how education helped mold American society. In this way, Bailyn brought an “approach to educational research that embraced the values of scientific rigor and ideological neutrality.”Footnote ³⁴ Thus, in Fallace's reading, Bailyn was anti-ideological, and it was this anti-ideology that made him a consensus thinker of the Cold War liberal variety.

While true that Bailyn and the consensus historians viewed themselves as anti-ideological, the quality that makes Education in the Forming of American Society a product of Cold War liberalism is not its anti-ideology but its American exceptionalism. One of Bailyn's signature historical arguments was that American education formed under conditions unique to America. He wrote that education “was part of the rapid breakdown of traditional European society in its wilderness setting.”Footnote ³⁵ Education was modernity, and modernity was America. Whereas education in Europe was static, much like society itself, “the whole range of education” in colonial America, and later in the United States, “had become an instrument of deliberate social purpose.”Footnote ³⁶ Tradition bred certainty, but also stagnation; modernity signified uncertainty, but also dynamism. Education became a crucial instrument in helping “this new man,” as Hector St. John de Crèvecœur famously called Americans in 1782, adapt to a new and unpredictable world.Footnote ³⁷ Education was one of the central tools in making America a liberal society distinct from feudal Europe.

In contrasting America with Europe in a way that implied American exceptionalism, Bailyn's analysis of American education built on ideas best elaborated by Louis Hartz in his 1955 book, The Liberal Tradition in America. For Hartz, any analysis of American political thought had to begin with what he termed the “storybook truth about American history,” that is, the United States had no feudal past. This “truth” helped explain why the United States, unlike Europe, lacked both “a genuine revolutionary tradition” and “a tradition of reaction.”Footnote ³⁸ The philosopher who embodied American political thought was not Karl Marx or Edmund Burke, but John Locke. Neither class struggle nor aristocratic distinction shaped American political sensibilities. Rather, American politics was animated by Locke's theory that government was socially contracted to protect the natural rights of the individual. Hartz recognized historical exceptions to this American rule existed, most glaringly the political philosophy of the slave South, which Hartz called “an alien child in a liberal family.”Footnote ³⁹ But over time, the liberal tradition crushed all that stood in its way. Whereas American slavery apologist George Fitzhugh and early Marxist theorist Daniel De Leon both were, in Hartz's words, “crucified by the American general will,” liberals like John Dewey “flourished in consequence of their crucifixion.”Footnote ⁴⁰

The fact that Hartz pointed to Dewey as the type of liberal thinker who thrived in an American context is consistent with Bailyn's notions about how education developed in early America. “No longer instinctive, no longer safe and reliable, the transfer of culture, the whole enterprise of education,” Bailyn wrote, “had become controversial, conscious, constructed: a matter of decision, will, and effort.”Footnote ⁴¹ That this description of education sounds a lot like Deweyan pragmatism is no coincidence. Cold War liberals assumed pragmatism was the American way of education—the American way of problem-solving. The drawback with this assumption is that it is normative rather than historical; it confused prescription with description. Just as subsequent generations of historians have since disputed consensus claims about the United States being a liberal capitalist society from its origins, educational historians have contested the idea that a purposeful form of pragmatism shaped early American education.Footnote ⁴²

Even if we forgive Bailyn and his fellow consensus historians for reading the present into the past, a pardonable offense given the impossibility of doing otherwise, we should be skeptical of their belief that America was not only historically exceptional but also politically and socially exceptional. This is not to say that all consensus historians were enthralled with the American way. Richard Hofstadter, whose 1948 book The American Political Tradition marked him as perhaps the best-known consensus historian, argued that American history was “always bounded by the horizons of property and enterprise.”Footnote ⁴³ But his view of consensus should not be mistaken for uncritical celebration. As Schlesinger wrote, “Hofstadter perceived the consensus from a radical perspective, from the outside, and deplored it.” And yet most consensus historians, including Bailyn, were much less critical of the United States.Footnote ⁴⁴

Bailyn's analysis of Benjamin Franklin is instructive. Franklin, according to Bailyn, believed that education should be designed to train young men for a world that they could not hope to predict. In this, according to Bailyn, Franklin recognized “that one's role in life had not been fully cast, that the immediate inheritance did not set final limits, that opportunities beyond expectation of birth lay all about and could be reached by effort.”Footnote ⁴⁵ By invoking Franklin's educational philosophy, Bailyn hoped to show that the values Americans recognized as their own—“American individualism, optimism, and enterprise”—had resulted from a new and purposive form of education. Education was crucial to the internalization of these typically American sensibilities, and the internalization process was so compelling, so potent, that it left a permanent imprint. “The transformation of education that took place in the colonial period was irreversible,” Bailyn maintained. “We live with its consequences still.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Bailyn is cagey on the exact nature of these consequences. It seems like he generally meant modernity or liberal capitalism: the fluid, practical, flexible, forward-looking, pragmatic, unpredictable ways of living that Americans had long ago grown accustomed to. But he is clear in his assessment that these consequences are probably the best possible outcome, particularly in contrast with fascism and communism, the “totalitarian” systems against which Cold War liberals positioned themselves. But Bailyn's assessment need not be ours, and one does not have to be a Marxist to take issue with it. Max Weber, no Marxist, also used Benjamin Franklin as an archetype of America, or what he famously termed “the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.”Footnote ⁴⁷ When Franklin preached that “time is money,” and that industry, frugality, and punctuality were the most important moral sensibilities a person could learn, Weber took this to mean that people should endlessly work to do good deeds, or that people should have a “calling,” mostly because such deeds accrue profit to the individual doing them. For Weber, the whole modern world had succumbed to this logic of individualistic striving, which had locked us all in the “iron cage” of a modernity that Weber clearly saw as alienating. Bailyn's vision of freedom was Weber's nightmare.Footnote ⁴⁸

Unlike Bailyn, when Weber lamented the “iron cage” of American-style modernity, he did not have to grapple with fascism and communism as viable alternatives. Perhaps he might have taken a more benevolent view had he been alive in the 1950s. Perhaps he would have been a consensus historian. Or to pose yet another absurd counterfactual question, perhaps if Weber had lived to see the 1960s he would have been a New Left critic of consensus history. New Left historians did almost irrevocable damage to the reputation of consensus historians by attacking their seeming strength—by unmasking their anti-ideological presumptions as deeply ideological defenses of the status quo. Jesse Lemisch, a New Left historian who famously did battle with the dons of the historical discipline in the late 1960s, scolded Cold War liberals: “We will simply not allow you the luxury of continuing to call yourselves politically neutral.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Such a charge proved to be highly influential to ensuing generations of historians.

Fallace is well aware of all of this. In his conclusion, he briefly waves at New Left criticism and admits that Cold War liberalism was itself an ideology. But he also thinks it was “less ideological” than both the progressive historiography that predated it and the New Left historiography that came after. Fallace is right to praise Bailyn for improving the writing of educational history. Education in the Forming of American Society did important work in expanding our range of what counts as education. But the notion that Bailyn's approach was less ideological than others is incorrect, especially when examining its American exceptionalism. The problem with Fallace's otherwise excellent essay is that he accepts Bailyn and Cold War liberalism at face value. For example, Fallace follows Cold War liberals in using the term totalitarian as a historical descriptor rather than as an ideological construct of American exceptionalism.

The further away we get from Cold War liberalism, the more peculiar its concerns seem. This includes grandiose talk about “scientific rigor and ideological neutrality.” These ideals are desirable, of course, especially in our social media–inflected world of fake news. But, throughout history, every attempt to make claims about neutrality has eventually been made to seem like a rationale for a particular position. It has been made to seem ideological. Cold War liberalism is no exception.

Fallace Response to Commentaries on “The (Anti-)Ideological Origins of Bernard Bailyn's Education in the Forming of American Society”

I am grateful for the thoughtful responses by Derrick Alridge, Mary Ann Dzuback, Milton Gaither, and Andrew Hartman to my article “The (Anti-)Ideological Origins of Bernard Bailyn's Education in the Forming of American Society.” Each commentary extended the conversation in several important directions and added context and depth to my narrative. I was greatly relieved that each historian agreed with my central argument. Alridge writes, “Fallace has done an excellent job of offering a new interpretation of the Bailyn critique”; Dzuback suggests that “situating Bailyn's thinking in the post-World War II rejection of ideologically motivated historical writing, makes sense”; Gaither concludes, “Bailyn was, and has remained, everything Fallace claims”; and Hartman asserts, “Fallace is absolutely right to situate Bernard Bailyn's Education in the Forming of American Society in the Cold War liberal intellectual milieu that often goes by the name ‘consensus history.’”

I was relieved because I felt that my historical argument was somewhat vulnerable. I could not quite nail down Bailyn with a quotation directly linking him to contemporaneous fears of totalitarianism, nor could I locate a source in which Bailyn directly voiced concerns about ideology, as I could do with the period's other leading intellectuals. Gaither's commentary provided ample evidence of Bailyn's post-1960 concerns with ideology and even identified a quotation in which Bailyn explicitly denounced the role of “ideological concerns” in the writing of history (thank you, Professor Gaither). However, Gaither's quotation was taken from a text published well after Education in the Forming of American Society, whereas I deliberately limited myself to pre-1960 sources. In lieu of direct evidence, I built up intellectual context and plausibility. The fact that Alridge, Dzuback, Gaither, and Hartman more or less accepted my argument leads me to believe that context and plausibility are sometimes enough when it comes to intellectual history.

My article was not so much about Bailyn as it was about the generation of historians who enthusiastically and uncritically embraced him. In a quotation cited in the article, Arthur Lovejoy defined the history of ideas as “the unconscious mental habits, operating in the thought of an individual or generation.”Footnote ⁵⁰ My article attempted to outline the “unconscious mental habits” of the postwar generation of educational historians. However, my favorite methodological quotation on the writing of intellectual history comes from Thomas Kuhn:

The repeated references to the term ideology by postwar intellectuals jumped out at me as absurd. They used ideology and ideological so often and in so many diverse and subtle ways, without even really defining it, that the term provided a window into the broader intellectual concerns of Bailyn and his generation. As Hartman observes in the conclusion to his commentary: “The further away we get from the Cold War liberalism, the more peculiar its concerns seem.” Both Hartman's and Kuhn's observations point to the necessity of historical distance in recognizing the peculiar and absurd nature of discourse—absurdities that are virtually unperceivable to the historical actors themselves. The further one gets from the period under study, the more obvious the absurd and peculiar elements become.

The lesson to take from this, and I believe the lesson to take from intellectual history in general, is that we have no idea what elements of our present thinking and discourse will later be considered absurd, peculiar, and contingent. Only future historians will be able to identify the terms we consciously and unconsciously employ in our interactions with one another. They may possibly wonder about our obsession with terms such as diversity, assessment, or discourse in the same way that postwar scholars were so concerned with ideology, or progressive educators concerned with savage and/or efficiency.Footnote ⁵² In order to communicate effectively with other professionals, a shared set of vocabulary and ideas is necessary. Some of this vocabulary may make our descendants proud; much of it will likely make them cringe. The ability to distinguish the worthy from the cringe-worthy will largely depend on the kind of political and ideological world scholars help create in the future. As Dzuback asserts in her commentary, “Writing and teaching history are political acts, in the sense that we are situated and situate ourselves politically.”

The commentaries of Alridge, Dzuback, Gaither, and Hartman largely focused on these political implications. As Alridge points out, Bailyn “ignores historians of education who offered critical interpretations of American education … specifically … the work of black historians writing about education.” Dzuback suggests that Bailyn's consensus liberalism was an effort to “discipline the discipline,” which potentially had the effect of “suppressing or curbing critique.” Gaither insists that Bailyn's view of historiography was not only ideological but “progressive” in the sense that Bailyn considered the discipline of history to be self-correcting, schematic, and synthetic. Therefore, Bailyn's politics—or at least his historiography—was essentially as teleological and “whiggish” as Ellwood Cubberley's. Hartman critiques Bailyn for employing the postwar consensus liberal ideas of American exceptionalism and political pragmatism as “the American way of problem-solving” in early America. Both views, Hartman argues, “are normative rather than historical” and confuse “prescription with description.” All of this proves that the attempt to be nonideological and apolitical is itself an ideological-political decision.

Hartman critiques my article for suggesting that Bailyn was “‘less ideological’ than both the progressive historiography that predated it and the New Left historiography that came after it.” I agree with Hartman that “less ideological” was a poor choice of words; perhaps what I should have written was that Bailyn was less overt in his professional, political, and social vision than the progressives who predated him and even the New Left historians who came after. Consensus liberals would never have written, as John Dewey did in 1897, that “the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.”Footnote ⁵³ Consensus liberals would never have written, as Ellwood Cubberley did in 1919, that “education is our Nation's greatest constructive tool, and that the many problems of national welfare which education alone can solve are far greater than the schoolmaster of two or three decades ago dreamed.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Consensus liberals would never have written, as George Counts did in 1932, that schools should “develop a realistic and comprehensive theory of welfare, fashion a compelling and challenging vision of human destiny, and become less frightened than it is today at the bogies of imposition and indoctrination [emphasis in original].”Footnote ⁵⁵ Maybe Dewey, Cubberley, and Counts were self-promoting or naïve in their proclamations about the importance of schooling in society, or maybe they were simply wrong. Either way, postwar consensus liberals would never have issued such grand statements about the righteousness of education as a field because such statements were not only about the state of education in the past and/or present but about the ability of education to solve problems in the future. Whether the stance of postwar consensus liberals toward objectivity was warranted or simply self-delusional, it certainly represented some kind of retrenchment or humbling in regards to their ideological attitude toward the writing of educational history and its role in social change.

A second thing to consider regarding the ideology of consensus liberalism was Bailyn's relationship to the New Left historians of education. By the mid-1970s, historiographical essays about educational history began referring to Bailyn's work as “revisionist” and the work of New Left historians as “radical revisionists.”Footnote ⁵⁶ This designation implied the scholarship of the New Left had grown seamlessly out of Bailyn's call to arms, not as an ideological challenge to it. In other words, for historians of education in the 1970s and 1980s, the difference between revisionism and radical revisionism was a matter of degree, not kind. As a result, contemporaneous historians failed to recognize the ideology of consensus liberalism inherent in Bailyn's work. Although New Left historians were quick to point to the liberal bias in Lawrence Cremin's The Transformation of the School, Bailyn managed to escape their critical eye.Footnote ⁵⁷ If Bailyn's work was so ideological in endorsing consensus liberalism and American exceptionalism, I wonder why New Left historians failed to identify it as such at the time? The answer, I suspect, has to do with the historical distance needed to recognize the absurd and peculiar elements in Bailyn's work, which were unperceivable to himself and his contemporaries. I wonder what unperceivable ideological absurdities exist in our own generation and what peculiarities await our intellectual descendants to discover.