Vernon Louis Parrington

American historian

• Born: August 3, 1871
• Birthplace: Aurora, Illinois
• Died: June 16, 1929
• Place of death: Winchcomb, Gloucester, England

Parrington’s three-volume Main Currents in American Thought was a landmark work that not only helped shape how the generation coming to maturity in the 1930’s viewed the past of the United States but also did much to stimulate interest in American intellectual history as a field of study.

Early Life

Vernon Louis Parrington was the son of John William Parrington and Louise (née McClellan) Parrington. A graduate of Waterville (modern Colby) College in his native Maine, Parrington’s father had moved to Illinois and, after a stint as a school principal, began the practice of law. He served as an officer in the Union Army during the Civil War, and then, after moving to Kansas in 1877, he farmed and was elected judge of the local probate court. Vernon attended the preparatory department of the College of Emporia and then its collegiate division before transferring to Harvard as a junior. Given his upbringing on the Western plains, he had an unhappy two years at Harvard an experience that did much to shape his hostility to the upper-class Eastern establishment. After he was graduated from Harvard in 1893, Vernon returned to the College of Emporia as an instructor in English and French and there received an M.A. in 1895. In 1897, he began work at the University of Oklahoma as an instructor in English and modern languages. The following year, he was promoted to professor of English. In 1908, however, Parrington lost his job when the newly elected Democratic governor fired the president and fourteen faculty members including Parrington who were deemed insufficiently politically sound or religiously orthodox by southern Methodist standards.

Parrington managed to find a position as assistant professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle. In 1912, he was promoted to full professor. He was a highly popular teacher whose courses on American literature and thought drew impressive enrollments. He appears to have begun work in 1913 on what would become Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920 (1927-1930). A related article, “The Puritan Divines, 1620-1720,” appeared in the first volume of The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917). He edited and wrote the introduction to The Connecticut Wits, published in 1926. Apart from Main Currents in American Thought, Parrington’s other publications did not amount to much: an occasional review, a few encyclopedia articles, a brief appreciation of the novelist Sinclair Lewis, and an essay, “The Development of Realism,” in The Reinterpretation of American Literature (1928). Parrington married Julia Rochester Williams on July 31, 1901; the couple had two daughters and a son.

Life’s Work

As a student at the College of Emporia, Parrington had accepted without question his father’s allegiance to the Republican Party, the school’s Presbyterian religious orthodoxy, and belief in the inevitability of progress. At Harvard, exposure to Darwinian ideas eroded his religious faith. During his first years of teaching, his interests were primarily literary and aesthetic. Parrington dabbled at writing poetry, and he was strongly impressed by English utopian socialist William Morris’s attacks on the shoddiness and commercialism of the machine age and extolling of the work of the Middle Ages, which Morris romanticized as the time when craftsmanship reigned supreme. By the late 1890’s, however, under the impact of the agrarian revolt that swept over Kansas, the major focus of Parrington’s interest had shifted to reform politics. “I become,” he confessed in 1918, “more radical with each year, and more impatient with the smug Tory culture. . . .” His Populist sympathies shaped his approach in Main Currents in American Thought. “The point of view from which I have endeavored to evaluate the materials,” he admitted, “is liberal rather than conservative, Jeffersonian rather than Federalistic. . . .”

The first volume, dealing with the period from settlement to 1800, was turned down by the first two publishers to whom Parrington submitted the manuscript, because of doubts about its sales potential. He was so discouraged that he abandoned work on the projected second volume. The literary critic and historian Van Wyck Brooks, however, who had read and liked the manuscript, interested Alfred Harcourt of Harcourt, Brace and Company. Harcourt agreed to publish the work if Parrington would finish the second volume carrying the story to 1860. The two volumes appeared in 1927, with the first bearing the subtitle “The Colonial Mind: 1620-1800” and the second “The Romantic Revolution in America: 1800-1860.” The work was an immediate success; Charles A. Beard spoke for most of the reviewers when he hailed Parrington for writing “a truly significant book . . . that promises to be epoch-making, sending exhilarating gusts through the deadly miasma of academic criticism.” Main Currents in American Thought was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1928. When liberal or left-wing intellectuals were polled in the late 1930’s about the authors who had most influenced their thinking, Parrington’s name was prominent among those listed. As late as 1952, when a sample of American historians were asked to name their “most preferred” American histories published between 1920 and 1935, Main Currents in American Thought received more votes than any other.

Main Currents in American Thought had the subtitle “An Interpretation of American Literature,” and the larger part of the text was devoted to literary figures. Yet Parrington had scant interest in literature as literature. “With aesthetic judgments,” he confessed in the foreword to volume 2, “I have not been greatly concerned. I have not wished to evaluate reputations or weigh literary merits. . . .” When dealing with the work of literary figures, he focused primarily on their political and social views. Writers who had been uninvolved with such issues were summarily dismissed. Thus, he devoted less than three pages to Edgar Allan Poe and still less to Henry James. He brushed aside criticism on this point with the reply that he was not writing the history of American literature but was rather concerned “with the total pattern of American thought.” As an intellectual historian, however, Parrington had major blind spots. As a later critic pointed out, “he showed slight interest or competence in metaphysics and theology; he scarcely touched scientific thought and development, or the rise of the social sciences; he ignored legal thought, intellectual institutions, and the nonliterary arts.”

Parrington had been much influenced by the emphasis placed by the French historian Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine in his book History of English Literature (1863-1864) on the role of the social environment in shaping literary expression. “Ideas are not godlings that spring perfect-winged from the head of Jove,” he wrote in an unpublished essay of 1917. Rather, “they are weapons hammered out on the anvil of human needs.” Accordingly, the historian’s task was “to understand how ideas are conditioned by social forces.” The most important social force was economics the “subsoil” on which literature and ideas rested. Unfortunately, Parrington was not consistent in applying this economic determinism. On the one hand, he dismissed ideas that he disliked as rationalizations of selfish interests. On the other, he extolled those with whom he sympathized for their “creativity” and “originality.” Increase Mather, for example, was a supporter of the established order because he was “a beneficiary of things as they were, certain to lose in prestige and power with any relaxing of the theocracy”; Roger Williams, however, was “a social innovator on principle, . . . and his actions were creatively determined by principles the bases of which he examined with critical insight.”

In sum, Main Currents in American Thought amounted to a catalog of Parrington’s biases. He pictured American history as a struggle between two sets of forces: the aristocracy versus the democratic majority; the defenders of selfish privilege against the champions of human rights and social justice; the capitalists versus the farmers and laborers. The work was organized around a series of biographical-critical sketches of individuals representing those conflicting forces: John Cotton versus Roger Williams; Alexander Hamilton versus Thomas Jefferson; Henry Clay versus Andrew Jackson; Daniel Webster versus Ralph Waldo Emerson. The metaphor of a ship’s voyage was utilized to provide a unifying theme. The ideas with which Parrington sympathized were the progressive currents carrying the vessel forward; those to which he was hostile were “reefs,” “barriers,” a “dragging anchor.” Similar value judgments were freely applied to individuals. The target of his animus would be described as “the victim of a decadent ideal,” “studiously conventional,” or so closed-minded as to be “shut up within his own skullpan”; the object of his favor would be pictured as an “unshackled thinker,” “an adventurous pioneer,” or a man of “fine idealism.”

Parrington directed his sharpest barbs against the Puritans perhaps a reflection of the slights of which he believed himself the object while at Harvard. Typical was his portrayal of Cotton Mather: “What a crooked and diseased mind lay back of those eyes that were forever spying out occasions to magnify self! He grovels in proud self-abasement. He distorts the most obvious reality. . . . His egoism blots out clarity and even the divine mercy.” More broadly, he juxtaposed Puritanism to the liberating force of the Enlightenment. Puritanism represented “an absolutist theology that conceived of human nature as inherently evil, that postulated a divine sovereignty absolute and arbitrary, and projected caste divisions into eternity.” By contrast, the Enlightenment

asserted that the present evils of society are the consequence of vicious institutions rather than of depraved human nature; and that as free men and equals it is the right and duty of citizens to re-create social and political institutions to the end that they shall further social justice, encouraging the good in men rather than perverting them to evil.

In his treatment of the Founding Fathers, Parrington took the view put forward by his friend and University of Washington colleague J. Allen Smith in his book The Spirit of American Government (1907) that the framers of the Constitution had as their major purpose to clip the wings of a threatening democracy. He portrayed Hamilton as “a high Tory.” “Accepting self-interest as the mainspring of human ambition,” he elaborated, “Hamilton accepted equally the principle of class domination.” Parrington did feel an almost grudging admiration for John Adams: “A stubborn intellectual independence and a vigorous assertiveness were his distinguishing characteristics. . . . He was no believer in unchecked government by wealth. His honest realism taught him the sophistry of Hamilton’s assumption that gentlemen of property are equally gentlemen of principle, and that wealth voluntarily abdicates selfish interest. He feared the aggressions of the rich as much as the turbulence of the poor.” Parrington’s special hero was Thomas Jefferson.

To all who profess faith in the democratic ideal Jefferson is a perennial inspiration. A free soul, he loved freedom enough to deny it to none; an idealist, he believed that the welfare of the whole, and not the prosperity of any group, is the single end of government.

Parrington pictured the conflict between Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson as a continuation of the struggle over the Constitution and the Hamilton-Jefferson battle of the 1790’s. At a philosophical level, Parrington portrayed the issue as a clash between the egalitarian and humanitarian idealism of the Rousseauian tradition in French Romantic thought and the cold, calculating rationalism of English liberalism, represented by Adam Smith, with its exaltation of the beneficent workings of the pursuit of self-interest. He lamented the growing ascendancy of the belief in what he sarcastically termed “the natural right of every free citizen to satisfy his acquisitive instinct by exploiting the natural resources in the measure of his shrewdness.” Even in the West, where once the democratic frontiersman had held sway, egalitarianism gave way to get-rich-quick “speculative psychology” under the impact of “abundant wild lands, rapid increase in population, and an elastic credit, operating on a vast scale.” Even Abraham Lincoln was found to have had his “instinctive democracy” compromised by the new Whiggish “philosophy of progress [that] had displaced the older agrarianism.”

Parrington died on June 16, 1929, while on vacation in England, before completing a third volume that would have continued the history to the 1920’s. Parrington’s publisher issued the unfinished and in parts fragmentary manuscript in 1930 under the subtitle “The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America.” The volume exuded a mix of pessimism and hope. The pessimism grew out of the reign of plunder carried on by business in the years since the Civil War what Parrington, in one of his most striking metaphors, called “The Great Barbecue.” Nevertheless, he was optimistic that the revolt underway among American intellectuals during the 1920’s against middle-class philistinism might yet manage “to unhorse the machine that now rides men and to leaven the sodden mass that is industrial America.” He simultaneously reaffirmed his faith that “Jeffersonian democracy still offers hope.” He was, however, ambivalent about what substantive policies were required. In correspondence, he expressed a vague sympathy with Marxism, but Main Currents in American Thought resounded with hostility to “the coercive state.” Parrington even eulogized the southern spokesmen for states’ rights as “the best liberals of the time.” He thus remained trapped in what he saw as the irresolvable dilemma facing the would-be reformer: “We must have a political state powerful enough to deal with corporate wealth, but how are we going to keep that state with its augmenting power from being captured by the forces we want it to control?”

Significance

The popularity of Main Currents in American Thought owed much to the fit of Parrington’s prejudices with those of American intellectuals and would-be intellectuals of the time. In the 1920’s, the Puritans were the favorite target of the self-consciously enlightened as the source of all the shortcomings found in American life: sexual repression, Prohibition, religious Fundamentalism, the Ku Klux Klan, and the middle-class philistinism that Sinclair Lewis satirized in Babbitt (1922). Here, then, Parrington was simply reinforcing existing stereotypes. His animus against business would similarly fit the mood of the Depression years. Parrington is typically linked with Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles A. Beard as one of the founders of so-called Progressive history, but he had neither their intellectual power nor their longterm influence. Later scholarship has left most of his interpretations in shambles; even his style, with its melodramatic rhetoric, appears contrived and overdone to the modern reader. The most generous appraisal of his lasting contribution is that he directed the attention of scholars to American intellectual history as a legitimate and important field of study.

Bibliography

Gabriel, Ralph H. “Vernon Louis Parrington.” In Pastmasters: Some Essays on American Historians, edited by Marcus Cunliffe and Robin W. Winks, 142-166, 438-440. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. A rambling and disjointed sympathetic appraisal.

Hall, H. Lark. V. L. Parrington: Through the Avenue of Art. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1994. This biography of Parrington looks at his life and his body of works.

Harrison, Joseph B. Vernon Louis Parrington: American Scholar. Seattle: University of Washington Book Store, 1929. A brief appreciation that is gushingly admiring of Parrington as a “humanist and liberal.”

Hofstadter, Richard. The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968. Contains the fullest available account of Parrington’s life. Hofstadter makes a valiant effort to treat Parrington as a major thinker but is sufficiently astute an analyst to recognize that he was not.

Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. This volume looks at American history from the late 1800’s when the Metaphysical Club was formed to the start of the Cold War. Parrington’s work is mentioned.

Skotheim, Robert A. American Intellectual Histories and Historians. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966. Includes an examination of Parrington’s place in the development of American intellectual history that is devastating on the shortcomings of Main Currents in American Thought.