Joseph Stromberg profiles Dr. Clyde Wilson

also at First Principles: The Southerner as Historian (and Vice Versa)

Wilson has a definite philosophy for the working historian. In it, history turns as much on imagination and creative engagement as on collections of raw data, statistics, and the like. It ought never to become a mere vehicle for telling the story of supposedly inevitable social forces working themselves out in time. There are real people in the past, with ideas, families, social relations, interests, etc. Historians devote themselves to fleshing out the “objective record” or developing “symbolization”—an exposition of values and ideas characteristic of a particular place and time; “the greatest historians are those who synthesize the two separate functions”—a distinction calling to mind Page Smith’s contrast between “existential” and “symbolic” history.

For Wilson, “Civilization is primarily a spiritual phenomenon” and “begins with the successful combining of the universal with the particularities of time, place and people. Such a combination results in forms of behavior, standards… revealed in both high and folk culture. . . .”. The formulation here closely resembles Professor Claes Ryn’s notion of “value-centered historicism,” and we are not surprised that in the next essay, Wilson favorably reviews Ryn’s book on The New Jacobinism.

The real people of the past are not necessarily very much “like us.” Historians’ treatment of Thomas Jefferson is a case in point and a sore spot for Wilson. Jefferson correctly understood the source of American populism and the notion of periodic “revolutions” in the sense of restorations of a functioning social order (For Wilson’s view of Jefferson’s changing reputation, see 2003, pp. 31–45.)

Wilson can write evaluations of other historians which are balanced and sympathetic as well as critical. On the other hand, he has little patience with historians whose work seems completely given over to replicating and perpetuating the unexamined myths of American (U.S.) nationalism, Official Liberalism, multiculturalism, etc.[6]

Thus, he has kind words here and there for C. Vann Woodward, dean of Southern liberal historians, not merely because the latter’s Southerness mitigates his modern liberalism but also because Woodward, at his best, can be a very insightful historian.

On the other hand, the late Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. was in Wilson’s view, merely a pamphleteer. An “imperial penman,” Schlesinger wrote partisan tracts for the New Deal, helped launch Cold War liberalism—the immediate source of neo-conservatism—and deigned to warn us against “the imperial presidency” only when Richard Nixon held the office, rather than Schlesinger’s friends the Kennedys.

American historians have tended to be carriers of the union-nationalism forged in the war of 1861–1865. That nationalism, nurtured in New England and tempered in the flames of Atlanta and Columbia, “long furnished the matrix for American historical writing,” down through the work of Frederick Jackson Turner and the Progressive historians of the early twentieth century. Post-national or multicultural historical writing is, in Wilson’s view, “a product of the state and not of the culture.”