If we desire that sort of rubbish taught, it is just as easy to secure professors at Bloomingdale as it is at Columbia.
The legendary and sentimental makers of history seem to thrive best in New England; and a fine type of the cult is the so-called “scholar in politics,” Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts and Nahant. There is in China a religion whose principal tenet is the worship of ancestors, the placation of ancestral manes. This religion is called Tavism; and possibly the purest type of Tavist, outside of China, is the junior senator from Massachusetts.
Mr. Lodge is firmly convinced that the Puritan represents the perfect type of man; that the history of the world began in 1620; that the Puritan derived most of his excellence from being of English blood; and that, while Puritans were Dutch, French, Scotch, and even Irish, the lack of English blood somehow made them incomplete. While the ordinary English Puritan was a wonderful personage, the one who landed in Massachusetts was a genuine marvel, but when he settled around Boston and Nahant, he began to ooze genius and take on wings and halo. To this legend is added, sometimes by direct statement and sometimes by implication, the intelligence that all the great and good things that make this republic different from and superior to other lands are due to the miraculous powers of the Puritan. He is the creator of human freedom, the father of religion, liberty, and tolerance, the founder and originator of free schools, and the reputed author of so many ideas totally at variance with his narrow creed that were he to rise from his bed of clay in New England into the sunlight of to-day, he wouldn’t know himself.
This is the school of historical incubation of which Mr. Lodge is the high priest. Mr. Lodge has many admirable qualities; but his mental vision is defective, strabismal, and his ancestral credulity amazing. I am satisfied that Mr. Lodge would not knowingly do an unjust, intolerable, or dishonorable thing; but he is so en-webbed in tradition and so steeped in myth and legend that his rôle of historian is a decided misfit. How else can we account for the absurd theories he has exploited and the conception of historic events he has fathered in literature?
Anybody who has even read his history of the Thirteen Colonies will learn that the success achieved in building them up was due to the Puritans; and one is convinced that had some wandering vagabond from Massachusetts been cast away on the coast of Spanish-America, the Latin Republics south of us would now be the model governments of the earth and probably be called “Anglo-Saxon” nations. Everything that makes for success he attributes to the Puritan; and he does it with such a solemn, awe-stricken lack of humor that the irreverent are moved to Homeric mirth.
Now, as a matter of fact, the Puritan was a hard and fast bigot, who hated and persecuted everybody who differed from him religiously, and tolerated nobody; he was as priest-ridden as a Scotch Presbyterian, and he set up a system of Church and State that amounted almost to a theocracy. The climate and soil of New England made him a hard worker; his environment and neighbors, a stout fighter; but if his laws and records tell us any story, they say his morals and practices were no better than they ought to have been.
New England in colonial days produced some shrewd and levelheaded men, but if she ever produced a great one, I have failed to catch his name. When the hour of her struggle came the same phenomenon was exhibited in New England as elsewhere in the Colonies; her natural leaders, the people of education and wealth, followed the fortunes of the oppressor, and the common people took up the cause of freedom. New England in the Revolution did her whole duty, but the other Colonies did not shirk, and furnished not only men and money, but the theater of war.
Mr. Lodge is now furnishing “The Story of the Revolution” for Scribner’s Magazine, and already we can see his peculiar defects of historical vision in what he has written. Here is a hint of his ideas: “He [Washington] entered on the war with an army composed wholly of New England men. He ended the Revolution with an army, after seven years’ fighting, largely made up from the same New England people.” He does not say so in so many words, but he leads us to infer that the army between those two periods was made up of New England men. This sort of writing is as absurd as it would be to say New England did nothing. Has Mr. Lodge never heard of the 40,000 men on the Revolutionary rolls of New York? Has it ever occurred to him that Pennsylvania, Virginia, and other Colonies furnished some men, money, and leaders? Have his historical researches ever led him far enough to learn that Yorktown might have been a waste of blood but for the armies and navies of France? Does he know that the soldiers of America’s ally were the regiments of a brigade immortalized on every battlefield of Europe,—the Irish Brigade?
It is very doubtful. I sometimes wonder if Mr. Lodge knew what an Irishman was before he went into politics.
In his account of Bunker Hill he hasn’t a word to say of Sullivan, whose capture of Fort William and Mary with its supplies of precious gunpowder made Bunker Hill possible; yet he has much to say of the lack of powder during the siege of Boston.