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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
One of the more perplexing problems in American historiography is the search for group identity. Writing about a group, the historian is unable frequently to describe precisely what it is. The American patriciate is no exception to the general problem of defining group identity.
The historian approaches group definition, or an approximation of it, through interaction between historical evidence bearing upon group membership and analytic constructs imposed upon the data. Some of these are borrowed from the social sciences and seem to su$er as a consequence of the seemingly unnatural transplant. Others rise more naturally from the data. One strives for the correct synthesis of data and theory that, somehow, is never as satisfactory as the historian and his critics would like it to be.
1 The author has dealt with the problem of the treatment of group in American historiography in a paper "American History and Social Science: A Trial Balance" delivered before a session of the American Historical Association, December 29, 1966. This is reprinted in the International Social Science Journal 20 (May, 1968), 319-30. Robert Wiebe and J. R. Hollings worth are two among the many historians who, consciously or not, have come up against the problem of group definition; Businessmen and Reform (Cam bridge, 1962); "Populism: The Problem of Rhetoric and Reality," Agricultural History, XXXIX (April 1965), 81-85.
2 Theodore K. Rabb, Enterprise and Empire, Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575-1630 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), takes the concept of "gentry" as given. He overlooks the historiographic controversy over gentry identification.
3 Ralph E. Pumphrey, "The Introduction of Industrialists into the British Peerage: A Study in Adaptation of a Social Institution," American Historical Review LXIV (October 1959), 1-16; Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford, 1965).
4 Howard J. Rogers, ed., Congress of Arts and Sciences, Universal Exposition, St. Louis, 1904 (Boston, 1906-07), 7, 744.
5 Triumphant Democracy, 19.
6 Elizabeth Eliot, Heiresses and Coronets (New York, 1959), passim.
7 Early Memories, 208.
8 The problem of patrician definition probably could be facilitated if so ciologists were more certain of what they meant by the term social power. Dennis Wrong, "Some Problems in Defining Social Power," American Journal of Sociology LXXIII (Hay 1968), 680.
9 I Came Out of the Eighteenth Century, 129.
10 Lanterns on the Levee, 41.
11 Education, 65, 189, 200.
12 Samuels, Henry Adams: The Middle Years, 169.
13 Backward Glance, 68-69, 144.
14 The Gentle Americans, 104-105, 165-67, 220.
15 Ibid., 103.
16 Samuel Eliot Morison, Memoirs of a Boston Boyhood (Boston, 1961), 62-66.
17 The Power Elite, 57.
18 E. Digby Baltzell, Philadelphia Gentlemen; the Making of a National Upper Class (New York, 1958); The Protestant Establishment (New York, 1958); and "'Who's Who in America' and ‘The Social Register': Elite and Upper Class Indexes in Metropolitan America" in Reinhard Bendix and S. M. Lipset, eds., Class Status and Power (New York, 1953).
19 G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America (Englewood, N. J., 1967), 15; quoted in White, The Eastern Establishment, 29.
20 General Psychopathology (Chicago, 1963), 56.
21 David Levin, History as Romantic Art (Stanford, 1959), 60, 73.
22 For a fuller discussion of Adams' use of the representative type, see Edward N. Saveth, The Education of Henry Adams and Other Selected Writings (New York, 1963), xix, 23, 25. For a critique of the "selectivities" of Oscar Lewis' La vida in defining the "culture of poverty," see Kenneth Keniston, review of La Vida in American Scholar (Summer 1967), 505; Oscar Lewis, "The Culture of Poverty," Scientific American CCXV (October 1966), 19-25.
23 My discussion of the ideal type has been informed by Don Martindale, "Sociological Theory and the Ideal Type" in L. Gross, ed., Symposium on Social Theory (New York, 1959), 57-88 and the discussion of the ideal type in Frederic C. Lane and Jelle C. Riemersma, eds., Enterprise and Secular Change (Homewood, Ill., 1953), 431-63. I have been particularly mindful of Gabriel Kolko's, "Max Weber on America: Theory and Evidence," History and Theory 1 (1961), 243-68. See also, John C. McKinney, Constructive Typology and Social Theory (New York, 1966), 3, 16, 25, 26, for an attempt to develop a type concept "shorn of any fictional qualities."
24 W. L. Warner, et al., Social Class in America (Chicago, 1949), 16-17; The Social Life of a Modern Community, 123-25, 352-53; Leonard Reissman, Class in American Society (Glencoe, 1959), 99-100.
25 Joseph A. Kahl, The American Class Structure (New York, 1961), 186.
26 R. C. Wade, The Urban Frontier, 106, 204, 206, 210, 217, 321.
27 "Meaning for Turner's Frontier Part I: Democracy in the Old Northwest," Political Science Quarterly XXIX (September 1954), 321-53.
28 M. R. Stein, The Eclipse of Community (Princeton, 1960), 333-34.
29 Stephen Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nine teenth Century City (Cambridge, 1964).
30 The Writings of John Quincy Adams, ed. W. C. Ford (New York, 1913- 17), I, 63.
31 Diary of Charles Francis Adams, ed. Aida Di Pace Donald and David Donald (Cambridge, 1964), Introduction, xix-xxi; 2:309.
32 Backward Glance, 56.
33 Early Memories (New York, 1913), 18, 28, 192, 209-11; "The Uses and Responsibilites of Leisure," in Speeches by Henry Cabot Lodge (Boston, 1892).
34 Early Memories, 126, 210-24.
35 Quoted in Richard M. Abrams, Conservatism in a Progressive Era (Cam bridge, Mass., 1964), 34, 165.
36 Kirkland, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., 84; Charles Francis Adams, Jr., An Autobiography, 1835-1915 (Boston, 1916), 190.
37 Samuels, Henry Adams, The Major Phase, 364.
38 Ibid., 366.
39 This is approximately the conclusion of William B. Hesseltine, "Four American Traditions," The Journal of Southern History XXVII (February 1961), 3.
40 "Some Notes on the Problem of Historical Generalization" in Louis Gottschalk, ed., Generalization in the Writing of History (Chicago, 1963), 145-77.
41 "Social Classes in an Ethnically Homogeneous Environment," in Impe rialism and Social Classes (New York, 1951), 158.
42 Bernard Bailyn, "The Beekmans of New York: Trade, Politics and Families," William and Mary Quarterly XIV (October 1957), 601.
43 Fred I. Greenstein, Personality and Politics (Chicago, 1969), 123-24. According to Greenstein, "what needs to be emphasized is that the connections are empirical, that they need to be carefully examined, and that the relation ships are neither necessarily strong nor positive…" Not as strong and positive as Christopher Lasch makes them out to be in attempting to relate "the new radicalism" to family structure. See particularly the review by Carl Resek of Lasch's The New Radicalism in America 1889-1963. Studies on the Left (January-February 1966), 68-69.
44 I have explored this problem at length in "The Problem of American Family History," American Quarterly XXI (Summer 1969), part 2, 311-29.
45 David M. Potter, "Explicit Data and Implicit Assumptions in Historical Study," in Gottschalk, ed., Generalizations in the Writing of History, 191.
46 Wainwright, "Sidney George Fisher," 15.
47 Fred I. Greenstein, "The Impact of Personality on Politics: An Attempt to Clear Away Underbrush," The American Political Science Review LXI (September 1967), 629-41; Urie Bronfenbrenner, "Personality and Partici pation : The Case of the Vanishing Variables," Journal of Social Issues XVI (1960), 54-63.
48 Martin Duberman, "On Becoming an Historian," Evergreen Review (April 1969), 57-59 et seq.
49 Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., A Behavioral Approach to Historical Analysis (New York, 1969), 7-8, 67.
50 G. Kitson Clark, quoted by W. O. Aydelotte, "Quantification in History," American Historical Review LXXI (April 1966).
51 "New Possibilities for American Political History: The Social Analysis of Political Life," (Paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, December 29, 1964, 23).
52 John Brooke, "Namier and Namierism," History and Theory III (1963- 64), 333; Karl Pepper, The Poverty of Historicism (Boston, 1957), 27-28. Studies framed along the lines suggested by Professor Hays have produced no remarkable results either in ascertaining group identity or explaining group behavior. See particularly Richard B. Sherman, "Status Revolution and Massa chusetts Progressive Leadership," Political Science Quarterly LXXVIII (March 1963), 59-65; Geraldine M. McTigue, "The New York City Liberal Republicans: A Study of Reform," (Master of Arts thesis, Columbia University, 1965); James S. McLachlan, "The Genteel Reformers: 1865-1884"; Edward N. Saveth, ed., American History and the Social Sciences, 167-202, for a critique of career-line analysis.
53 For a critique of the presumed relationship between group structure and ethics see Raymond E. Wolfinger and John Osgood Field, "Political Ethos and the Structure of City Government," American Political Science Review LX (June 1966), 306-26.
54 Robert Schotheim, American Intellectual Histories and Historians (Princeton, 1966).
55 H. A. Nelson, "A Tentative Foundation for Reference Group Theory," Sociology and Social Research XLIV (April 1961), 280; Saveth, American History and the Social Sciences, 196-97.
56 "On Becoming An Historian," op. cit.
57 "Explanation sketch " is Professor William Dray's term. See J. H. Hexter, Reappraisals in History (Northwestern University Press, 1961), 16.
58 Railroad Leaders, 13-15.
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