As the COVID-19 pandemic, a presidential election and social justice protests dovetailed to make 2020 one of the most significant inflection points in American history, two-time History Prize winner and disciplinary luminary Bernard Bailyn succumbed to heart failure at his home in suburban Belmont, Mass. on August 7.
Although he was 97 and had carried his rarefied academic appointments at Harvard University (the Adams University Professorship, reflecting "groundbreaking work [that] crosses the boundaries of multiple disciplines," and the James Duncan Phillips Professorship of Early American History) with the semi-retired qualification of emeritus for decades at the time of his death, Bailyn remained a bastion of academic life at the institution that had served as the locus of his entire professional career well into his final decade, retaining a study at the flagship Widener Library and eagerly serving as an interlocutor to younger colleagues who embraced vastly different methodological approaches — even as he remained committed to the positivist paradigm of "a realistic understanding of the past, free of myths, wish fulfillments and partisan delusions."
Indeed, as late as 2013 — more than two decades after he completed his third and final cycle as a Pulitzer juror — Bailyn was named a History finalist for "The Barbarous Years," the long-germinating sequel to his Pulitzer-winning "Voyagers to the West" that chronicled the early settlement of British North America. While the work elicited a modicum of criticism for neglecting certain patterns, it readily evinced the historian's steadfast dedication to the once-incipient subfield of quantitative history.
“He has transformed the field of early American history as much as any single person could,” 1993 History winner Gordon S. Wood, a former student of Bailyn’s, said in an interview for his New York Times obituary in 2008. “He transformed the history of education. He turned over our entire interpretation of the Revolution. He changed the way we think about immigration. Almost every single thing he did had a profound impact on the field.”
Born to a Jewish family in Hartford, Conn. in 1922 and known as "Bud" to his friends and colleagues throughout his life, Bailyn was one of a handful of figures (including such contemporaries as Lionel Trilling, Harry Levin and Isaac Asimov) to surmount the pejorative ethnic quotas enforced at private academic institutions of the era, first receiving a bachelor's degree in English from Williams College in 1945. During brief World War II-era service as a draftee in the Army Signal Corps, he became enamored of history in earnest through studies of German and social geography.
Enrolling in the Harvard graduate history program immediately thereafter, he studied under such disparate figures as 1966 History winner Perry Miller (an pioneer in the interdisciplinary field of American studies who was best known for his countervailing contention that revivalist preacher Jonathan Edwards was a litterateur working in one of early America's few cultural media) and two-time Biography winner Samuel Eliot Morison, who oversaw the U.S. Navy's institutional history of World War II during this period as a reservist rear admiral. (A patrician mainstay of the Harvard faculty, Morison frequently conflated Bailyn with another student who belonged to the Harvard Yacht Club.) As his graduate studies progressed, Bailyn immersed himself in colonial history to cultivate the "connections between a distant past and an emerging modernity," cognizant of the intuitively apprehensible parallels between Hanover Britain at its political-mercantile apogee and the similar role effectuated by America as a postwar great power.
Receiving his Ph.D. (with a dissertation on New England merchants of the seventeenth century that evolved into his first book) in 1953, Bailyn stayed on as a tenure-track assistant professor as President Nathan Pusey envisaged more meritocratic admissions and hiring processes, as exemplified by the admission of Daniel Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky to the prestigious Society of Fellows; the establishment of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, which offered non-degree research and practitioner fellowships to such figures as 1983 Fiction winner Alice Walker; and the hiring of astronomer and 1978 General Nonfiction winner Carl Sagan, who was entirely educated in Brooklyn and New Jersey public schools before being admitted to the University of Chicago during a period of pedagogical experimentation led by then-Chancellor Robert Maynard Hutchins.
While the university failed to retain many of these prodigious figures — the Radcliffe fellowships were inherently transitory and seldom led to permanent employment amid the era's systemic employment discrimination against women; Ellsberg moved on to the lucrative defense sector as a staff economist at the RAND Corporation; while Sagan was denied tenure in what amounted to a personality conflict with various elders in his field, most notably Nobel laureate Harold Urey — Bailyn thrived in the more ecumenical environment, drawing as much attention for his comprehensive undergraduate lectures and interrogative graduate seminars as for his innovative research. Shortly after the publication of his third book (including a joint study of Massachusetts shipping in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries with his wife, MIT management scholar Lotte Bailyn), he became a full professor in 1961 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (reifying his prominence in the field) in 1963. But a series of papers and presentations (exemplified by his editorship of a 1965 collection of Revolutionary-era pamphlets) would set the stage for his definitive work.
For much of the twentieth century, historiography of the colonial and Revolutionary periods had been defined by the pathbreaking work of independent scholar Charles A. Beard, most notably "An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States" (1913). Building upon the thesis of Carl L. Becker's "History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760–1776" (1909), Beard argued that the Revolution was effectively a bipartite conflict, shaped by propitious grievances against Britain and class conflicts among the colonists themselves. To Beard, the drafting of the Constitution was a "counter-revolution" designed to attenuate the influence of the agrarian sector and strengthen Northeastern financial interests, whose participation in the Revolution may have been predicated on private inurement as opposed to ideological sympathy. The perceived overreach of the Adams administration would facilitate the rise of Thomas Jefferson in what amounted to a counter-counterrevolution, offering the dominant political milieu until the beginning of the Civil War.
But while Beard's interpretation would dominate academic historiography of the period for more than thirty years, its sweeping amalgamation of the yeomanry (including small farmers, debtors and other marginal agrarian populations) with the slaveholding landed gentry and a stringently concomitant focus on the economic dialectic between North and South would deemphasize some of the most salient threads of early American history, from the stain of slavery to the Jackson administration's abuses of Indigenous peoples.
In the immediate postwar era, Beardian historiography was gradually superannuated by a new generation of scholars. In his seminal "We The People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution" (1958), Forrest McDonald "tumbled a very large Humpty Dumpty from a very high wall of history," arguing that dozens of factors (broadly centered around political comity, diplomacy and national security and economic development) forced convention delegates to form a new government. In "The American Political Tradition" (1948), his breakthrough work, two-time Pulitzer winner and canonical Columbian Richard Hofstadter took a circumspect view of Jefferson, arguing that his laissez-faire agrarianism "became the political economy of the most conservative thinkers in the country," a throughline that would continue in his later work on the relationship between anti-intellectualism and religious orthodoxy. In such works as "The Stamp Act Crisis" (1953) and "The Birth of the Republic" (1956), 2006 Special Citation recipient Edmund Morgan contended that the patriots were genuinely motivated by a commitment to Enlightenment-era ideals. Outside of the profession, public intellectual Hannah Arendt foregrounded the American Revolution as an unlikely success story driven by personal agency in "On Revolution" (1963), while anthropologist Clifford Geertz would contend that meaning was derived from cultural processes, refashioning symbolic anthropology as an "interpretative [science] in search of meaning."
Beginning with a "charitable" critique of onetime mentor Perry Miller's work on Puritan culture and continuing with his early 1960s oeuvre, Bailyn began to synthesize many of the aforementioned intellectual currents into his magnum opus: "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution." Arguing that "the 'progressive' historians of the early twentieth century and their successors of the post-World War I era adopted unknowingly the Tory interpretation in writing off the Revolutionary leaders' professed fears of 'slavery' and of conspiratorial designs as what by then had come to be known as propaganda [...] deliberately devised for the purpose of controlling the minds of a presumably passive populace in order to accomplish predetermined ends."
Although conceding a superficial engagement with classical literature and a more substantive reliance on legal theory, Bailyn situated the emergence of American republicanism in an intellectual tradition that built upon the radical libertarianism of the "country Party," a loose coalition of Tories and disgruntled Whigs who dominated British politics during the first half of the eighteenth century, particularly as embodied by the writers John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon. In "Cato's Letters," their definitive work, Trenchard and Gordon lambasted what they saw as corruption and amorality in British political life, advocating instead for civic virtue as a bulwark against autocracy.
Bailyn added that this strain of writing had always resonated in British North America: "Opposition thought, in the form it acquired at the turn of the seventeenth century and in the early eighteenth century, was devoured by the colonists. From the earliest years of the century it nourished their political thought and sensibilities. There seems never to have been a time after the Hanoverian succession when these writings were not central to American political expression or absent from polemical politics." As he would later reflect in his introduction to the fiftieth anniversary edition of the book, it was, in short, "an emergent world, slowly becoming part of our familiar present."
An immediate sensation upon publication in 1967, "Ideological Origins..." received a 1968 Bancroft Prize from Columbia University, immediately establishing its importance in the field. It also was among five books shortlisted by that year's History Prize jury. Chaired by Julian P. Boyd (a past president of the American History Association and editor of the Thomas Jefferson Papers at Princeton University), the panel also included Louis Morton (a military historian best known for his long association with Dartmouth College) and Harold Syrett, whose variegated career encompassed many administrative roles and work on the Alexander Hamilton Papers at Columbia. In the report, drafted and signed by Boyd, the jury singled out "Ideological Origins..." as "a work of such originality, distinction and enduring value [...] as to make it preeminent among all the nominations for the award." The Advisory Board heeded their recommendation, and the book became one of only sixteen titles to earn the Bancroft and the Pulitzer.
Even though Bailyn pioneered, traversed and repudiated many subfields of early American history for the remainder of his career, the themes of "Ideological Origins..." continued to reverberate throughout his later work. On the cusp of the Watergate hearings in 1973, he offered what may be his most succinct exegesis of the period in a shorter essay on the central themes of the Revolution:
The Founding Fathers were mortals, not gods; they could not overcome their own limitations and the complexities of life that kept them from realizing their ideals. But the destruction of privilege and the creation of a political system that demanded of its leaders the responsible and humane use of power were their highest aspirations. To note that the struggle to achieve these goals is still part of our lives—that it is indeed the very essence of the politics of our time—is only to say that the American Revolution, a unique product of the eighteenth century, is still in process, in this bicentennial age.
Read the jury report for "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution" here.