No Need to Apologize

With the changing generations, historians alter their interpretations of past events. Historian Francis Parkman, writing in the 18505, thought of the westward movement in the U.S. as the story of man's impact on nature. Frederick J. Turner, writing 50 years later, saw pioneering as the origin of U.S. individualism. A modern U.S. historian, Columbia University's Allan J. Nevins (The Ordeal of the Union), speaking in Dearborn, Mich, to the Society of American Archivists, discussed some added meanings of the modern era in U.S. history--"the emergence of America to the leadership of the Western world." Said Historian Nevins:

"My own guess is that this great development . . . will in some fashion be connected, by future interpreters, with the advent of an age of mass action, mass production and mass psychology in American life. From being one of the most unorganized, the most invertebrate of nations in 1860, we have grown into the most powerfully and efficiently organized people on the globe . . . Our thinking in 1864 was still individual thinking. Today it is largely mass thinking, shaped and colored by mass media of unparalleled and sometimes dismaying potency . . . Our national outlook, once that of the individualistic pioneer, has become a social outlook. Without this pervasive internal change, our new position in the world would have been impossible.

"The striking shift in our character and our world position in the last half-century, of course, has some direct results, already visible, in our interpretation of history . . . The apologetic attitude of the years of the Great Depression is gone. We can henceforth be more confident and more energetic in asserting that our way of life, called decadent by our enemies, has proved itself historically to be freer, more flexible and more humane than any other . . .

"In the past, our historians were apologetic about our love of the dollar, our race to wealth, our interest in material objects . . . Our writers in general--for our historians but followed the poets, the novelists and the dramatists, intimated that America had grown too fast, too coarsely, too muscularly . . .

"We can now assert that this historical attitude was erroneous. The nation grew none too fast. We can see today that all its wealth, all its strength, were needed to meet a succession of world crises--and we still dwell in a crisis era. Had we applied restrictions to keep our economy small, tame and pure, we would have lost the first World War. Had the United States not possessed the mightiest oil industry, the greatest steel industry, the largest automotive factories . . . and the most ingenious working force in the world, we would indubitably have lost the second World War. Were we significantly weaker today in technical skills, in great mills and factories and the scientific knowledge which gave us priority with the atomic bomb and hydrogen bomb, all Western

Europe would be cowering--we ourselves would perhaps be cowering--before the knout held by the Kremlin. The architects of our material growth--the men like Whitney, McCormick, Westinghouse, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Hill and Ford--will yet stand forth in their true stature as builders of a strength which civilization found indispensable.

"It will yet be realized that the industrial revolution in the United States came none too soon, and none too fast, and that the ensuing mass-production revolution, as yet so little understood by Americans, was not born a day too early."

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