1928




 "I have undertaken to give some account of the genesis and development in American letters of certain germinal ideas that have come to be reckoned traditionally American--how they came into being here, how they were opposed, and what influence they have exerted in determining the form and scope of our characteristic ideals and institutions. In pursuing such a task, I have chosen to follow the broad path of our political, economic, and social development, rather than the narrower belletristic..."
                                                                                                                                                                                                   --Vernon Louis Parrington


The American historian Vernon Louis Parrington (1871-1929) is known for his three-volume intellectual history of America, Main Currents in American Thought.
Born at Aurora, Ill., on Aug. 3, 1871, Vernon Parrington was of Scotch and Irish descent. His father was a school principal in New York and Illinois, served in the Union Army, and became a judge of probate in Kansas. While growing up near Pumpkin Ridge, Kans., Vernon early became acquainted with the sources of agrarian discontent, and he later recalled his bitter feelings at seeing a year's corn crop used for fuel. Searching for answers, he found inspiration in the writings of William Morris, who "laid bare the evils of industrialism … and convinced me. … that the businessman's society, symbolized by the cash register and existing solely for profit, must be destroyed to make way for another and better ideal."

After 2 years at the College of Emporia, a Presbyterian institution, Parrington entered Harvard as a junior and graduated in 1893. His Harvard experience was not happy, and he afterward referred acidly to his eastern alma mater. Returning to the College of Emporia, he taught English and French while obtaining his master of arts degree. He also ran unsuccessfully for the school board on a "Citizen's" ticket. In 1897 he was appointed instructor in English and modern languages at the University of Oklahoma, where he stayed for 11 years. Meanwhile he married Julia Rochester Williams in 1901 (they had two daughters and a son), did research in London and Paris (1903-1904), wrote some poetry, and took an interest in archeology. Fired from his job in 1908 because of a "political cyclone, " Parrington accepted an assistant professorship at the University of Washington in Seattle.

There Parrington formed a close friendship with J. Allen Smith, a political scientist whose book The Spirit of American Government (1907) claimed to expose the antagonism between the Declaration of Independence, with its romantic egalitarian spirit, and the Constitution, a "reactionary document" drafted by representatives of "wealth and culture" to prevent effective popular rule. Smith saw a strong Federal government as the weapon of the propertied classes, and he opposed any extension or centralization of national power. His ideas profoundly affected Parrington, who later dedicated his book to Smith. Until 1927 Parrington wrote little: a chapter in the Cambridge History of American Literature, a few encyclopedia articles, an anthology, and some reviews. In 1927 the first two volumes of his Main Currents in American Thought, entitled The Colonial Mind and The Romantic Revolution in America, were published and received the Pulitzer Prize for history. The third volume, The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, was incomplete when Parrington died on June 16, 1929, but was afterward published together with the earlier volumes in a one-volume edition.

Meaning of Main Currents

Though Parrington used the subtitle "An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920, " he denied writing "a history of American literature." His true subject was the history of American liberalism, seen as a long struggle between freedom and individualism on the one hand and privilege and authoritarianism on the other. The roots of the struggle were always in economic relations, and literary productions were strategic elements in the fight. For Parrington, writers embodied or exemplified some interest of an age, and each was considered in relation to his battle position. Mark Twain was a great frontier republican; Walt Whitman, a great democrat; and William Cullen Bryant, a fighter for free labor. Parrington deliberately slighted the "narrowly belletristic." He had little understanding or appreciation for writers who would not or could not carry a spear in the war.

As Parrington unfolded the story, from the days of the Pilgrims to his own time "idealists" had contended with "realists, " humanitarians with crass materialists, agrarians with capitalists, Jeffersonians with Hamiltonians, and decentralizers with centralizers who sought to control the power of the state in order to dominate and exploit the majority. In generation after generation, between these opposing hosts, mighty battles had been fought, and historic defeats had been imposed on the democratic forces. The Constitution itself was an early monument to a victory of financiers and capitalists over agrarians, who held to the romantic idealism of the Declaration of Independence. A half century afterward, the democratic army of Jacksonian Democracy had gone down before the cunning Whig propaganda of business and industrial interests. Once again, in 1896, the old Jeffersonian cause, led now by William Jennings Bryan, had failed to throw off the yoke of eastern capital. Thereafter the trend in government was toward increasing centralization with consequent loss of individual freedom. The future looked bleak, as a new cynicism was corroding the Jeffersonian faith in human nature and education.

Scholarly Opinion

During the 1930s Main Currents had enormous prestige in the academic world. The liberals embraced it as the "usable new history" that James Harvey Robinson and Charles A. Beard had been calling for, and to them it was a "realistic" guidebook to the American past. In 1952 over 100 American historians rated Main Currents the most important work published in the field during the period 1920-1935. Yet its influence was relatively short-lived. Parrington's judgments were in many instances revealed to be simply mistaken, and his conflict thesis began to be recognized as artificial and overly simplistic. Especially in the 1950s, with the rise of a "consensus history" that stressed elements of basic agreement in the American tradition, Main Currents lost scholarly respect. Even with a renewed emphasis upon the place of social struggle in American history, it is unlikely that Parrington's interpretation will ever again appear plausible. But if its Jeffersonian partisanship is out of fashion, Main Currents continues to be read for the distinction of its literary style, perhaps the most brilliant since Francis Parkman's. Many of Parrington's individual portraits remain unsurpassed, and his description of the post-Civil War national orgy of venality and vulgarity as the "Great Barbecue" has become classic.

Further Reading

The most extensive study of Parrington, together with an excellent annotated bibliography, is in Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians (1968). Parrington is examined in the context of American historiography in Robert Allen Skotheim, American Intellectual Histories and Historians (1966). Important analyses are in Alfred Kazin, On Native Ground (1942; abridged with a new postscript, 1956), and Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (1950).In the spring of 1928, the literary community eagerly awaited the announcement of the Pulitzer Prizes for literature. Many were expecting playwright Eugene O'Neill to win an award for "Strange Interlude." They anticipated Thornton Wilder would win for his novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. They guessed, correctly, that Edward Arlington Robinson would win the poetry award.

And in the category of historical writing, most expected that Charles Beard would win for his Rise of American Civilization. So it came as a surprise that on May 8, 1928, UW English professor Vernon Louis Parrington received an official telegram from the Pulitzer Prize Committee announcing that he had won the historical writing award for his two-volume work, Main Currents in American Thought. Not only that, but he also had been awarded the largest literature prize: $2,000, or twice the amount the other winners received.

Two volumes of Main Currents had been published in 1927. The first volume, The Colonial Mind, 1620-1800, treated such figures as Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Tom Paine, and Thomas Jefferson. The second volume, The Romantic Revolution in America, 1800-1860, traced the "optimistic and restless mood of the country eager for land and new opportunities, epitomized by Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln." A third volume, later published posthumously and entitled The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, covered the period from 1860 to 1920.

The volumes comprise about a hundred intellectual portraits linked by explanatory material that analyzes the evolution of ideas of the period. The portraits are noted for their flair and imagery. The work chronicles three phases of American intellectual history: Calvinistic pessimism, romantic optimism, and mechanistic pessimism. "Through these periods Parrington traces the fortunes of democratic idealism, the 'main current,' impeded but never turned back by 'reefs, barriers and barnacled craft.'"

He had come out of relative obscurity to win the prestigious Pulitzer. Leading figures in the field of American letters had "lined up to bestow enthusiastic praise and congratulations," writes David W. Levy, historian and well-known coeditor of the Letters of Louis D. Brandeis, in a foreword to the 1987 edition issued by the University of Oklahoma Press. And there was, in this case, "an unusually large gap between the prestige of the critics who welcomed these volumes and the obscurity of the author who had produced them."

Parrington was born in 1871 in Aurora, Illinois. The family settled in Kansas when he was six, where the harsh life and a never-ending series of natural disasters had hardened the prairie farmers against the capitalist establishment. Of that time, Parrington wrote: "I have never been able to escape, nor have I wished to escape. To it and to the spirit of agrarian revolt that grew out of it, I owe much of my understanding of American history and much of my political philosophy."

Those early life experiences set the tone of Parrington's entire scholarly career. "The vigor of his hostility toward the moneyed oppressors and the depth of his sympathy for the humble, hard-working farmer-democrats, who battled against them in the uneven contest, are obvious on every page of his work," notes Levy.

Parrington was a liberal who regarded the field of American letters as "a battleground between 18th century French humanism and the economics of contemporary capitalism." Parrington himself admits his point of view is "liberal rather than conservative, Jeffersonian rather than Federalistic."

"...Main Currents in American Thought is, by any fair standard, one of the great monuments in the history of American learning. It stands as a once-familiar and imposing landmark along the trail of our scholarship.

"...[F]or its unexcelled verve, its wide-sweeping boldness, for the consistent and passionate vision of democratic sympathy that it maintains from start to finish, Main Currents in American Thought will stand as a model for venturesome scholars for years to come."

--David W. Levy, historian

Parrington graduated from Harvard in 1893, and taught at the College of Emporia for four years. He became professor of English at the University of Oklahoma in 1898, where he worked for eleven years until, caught up in a religious and political controversy, he was fired. Parrington joined the faculty of the UW in 1908.
Parrington's closest friend and colleague at the UW was J. Allen Smith, a professor of government and economics. Smith's political philosophy, expressed in his 1907 book, The Spirit of American Government, exerted a profound influence on Parrington. Smith believed that the framers of the Constitution had created a system that actually hindered true democracy; in order for democracy to work, it must shun the corrupt and centralized industrialism and return to local self-rule.

Campus life for Parrington was quiet, unassuming; he spent his days teaching and reading, and gardening at his University District home. His evenings after dinner were spent reading, writing, and revising his work. Although it took some time for Parrington's classes to gain popularity on campus, he came to be regarded by his students as "a brilliant and provocative teacher." Employing the Socratic teaching method, "he would fire a volley of sharp questions at the class, his purpose not clear until the end of the hour when he would characterize an author or an age in a phrase or an image that was impossible to forget."

Parrington did not live to enjoy his new-found fame for very long. He died suddenly while on a tour of the Cotswolds in England in June of 1929. During the 1950s and 60s, Main Currents suffered a decline in popularity, but enjoyed a revival during the 1970s. Concludes Levy:

Readers and scholars of the rising generation may not follow Parrington's particular judgments or point of view, but it is hard to believe that they will not still be attracted, captivated, and inspired by his sparkle, his breadth, his daring, the ardor of his political commitment.