The rage to turn the past into the present has made for lively controversy, and helped many a man to a Ph.D. So it has gone for two or three historiographical generations. The Populist tracts celebrated in Vernon Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought figured in a whole literature of the nineteen twenties and thirties as the Wave of the Future. McCloskeys into a Social Darwinist and an imperialist. William Graham Sumner, who attacked the plutocracy of his day and actively opposed the Spanish-American War, was transmogrified by our Richard Hofstadters and our R. Hard Money and Free Enterprising Democrats of the eighteen thirties were turned into partisans of the New Frontier and the Great Society. Arthur Schlesinger, writing about the Age of Jackson, couldn’t resist imposing the face of Franklin D. At least that’s the way it’s been ever since the New Deal and the New Economics conquered the academy. If you scratch a historian, you find a politician.
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