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Few American historians have achieved so much success with material which at first looked so unpromising as Daniel Walker Howe. In the years during which Howe was an undergraduate at Harvard and a graduate student at UCLA, American historians were convulsed in the pursuit of social history, a "history from below" to match the Sixties' pursuit of politics in the streets. Howe, contrariwise, wrote his dissertation at UCLA in 1966 on a chapter in American intellectual history, which was nearly as unproletarian a gesture as a graduate student could make. Its topic—moral philosophy at Harvard in the antebellum 19th century—could not have seemed less attuned to the times that were a-changin'. [4] But it led to a teaching job at Yale in American history and American studies, and to the exploration of yet another much-snubbed intellectual subculture, the Whig party, in The Political Culture of the American Whigs (1979), which was the first kind thing said about the Whigs since their demise as a party in 1856.
More than kind, Political Culture of the American Whigs was a passionate argument for the depth and validity of the Whig ideology, both of which were attested to by the Whigs' success in creating an ambient culture of "mood, metaphors, values, and style" in order "to exhort, persuade, and conciliate." At a moment when other American historians were agog with Clifford Geertz-style anthropologies of working-class culture, Howe co-opted the festishization of "culture" and applied it to political ideas. For decades, the contest of Jacksonian Democrats and Henry Clay Whigs over banks, deposits, railroads, and canals had been endured as the ultimate dreariness in American historical writing. In one lapidary sentence, Howe re-cast it into a culture war: "The Whigs proposed a society that would be economically diverse but culturally uniform; the Democrats preferred the economic uniformity of a society of small farmers and artisans but were more tolerant of cultural and moral diversity." [5]
This tipped Howe's hand ever so slightly. He did not merely think the Whigs were interesting; he thought they were right. And in 1997, when he published Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, he dropped the mask entirely and re-affirmed "the place of morality and the 'moral sense' in the process of character-formation." What a "functioning democracy" needs is not the overthrow of the capitalist burden but "the habits of personal responsibility, civility, and self-discipline" which were the scorn of the New Left, but the backbone of the Whigs. [6]
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