With his sober and serious scholarship, the historian was among the last of his generation.
With his sober and serious scholarship, the historian was among the last of his generation.
I n 1992, I joined one of National Review’s early cruises, where I found myself one night seated at dinner next to Newt Gingrich. Gingrich was about to become the first Republican Speaker of the House in almost 40 years — indeed, the first of my lifetime since Massachusetts’s Joseph Martin had surrendered the gavel in January 1955, a month before I was born. But Gingrich had older history on his mind that night. I was writing a book about George Washington; Gingrich urged me to read two books, Citizen Tom Paine by Howard Fast, and The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon Wood. Fast’s book was Popular Front patriotism; Wood was a serious scholar of the founding, worth anyone’s time.
Our paths crossed now and again. Wood invited me to write the article on George Washington in an encyclopedia of the Enlightenment whose American entries he was compiling. He was amused when — my journo synapses firing — I submitted on time, and a bit short. Speed and brevity, it seems, were not common in the academy. I reviewed Empire of Liberty, his contribution to the Oxford History of the United States, for NR, and Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson for the New York Times Book Review. What was noteworthy about the second book was that, while Wood clearly sympathized with Adams as a thinker — tough-minded, realistic — and as a man — honest, forthright — he gave Jefferson credit for better understanding the spirit and direction of their country. It was a measured judgment, and an argument against preference, characteristic of Wood’s integrity.
Another sign of it came when the New York Times published the 1619 Project, an assault on American history plunging all of it in the black shadow of the first slaves off-loaded at the Jamestown colony. The Trotskyist Fourth International, amazingly, pushed back. Why would they do such a thing? Because identity politics weakens worker solidarity? Because the bourgeois revolution must succeed before the proletarian revolution can begin? Whatever the reason, the Trots rounded up mainstream historians willing to criticize the Times’s handiwork. Wood was among them, insisting that the American Revolution had not been fought to defend American slavery from our abolitionist overlords.
Second Amendment–heads will note that Wood praised Michael Bellesiles’s Arming America, which argued that our forefathers did not pack heat. So Wood did. So did practically everybody. When Bellesiles’s shoddiness was exposed, his endorsers recanted. That is what honest men do.
Wood belonged to a generation of historians who rejected the economic determinism of Charles Beard. The American founders, they said, were not rich men protecting their investments, but thinkers who took ideas seriously, and whose achievements were net positive. The first of that generation included Douglass Adair, Bernard Bailyn, and Edmund Morgan. Wood was among the last. They kept their discipline an island of sobriety in the tsunami of nonsense that overwhelmed the humanities (the comic novels of David Lodge describe what happened to my major, English). Wood died, age 92, as a result of a car accident in a supermarket parking lot. We will miss him, and we will remember him.