The Challenges of Democracy:Ê James Harvey Robinson, the New History, and Adult Education for Citizenship

Kevin Mattson
Ohio University

Mention James Harvey Robinson and most students of American history will think two words: "New History." Robinson tried to articulate what better-known historians of the periodÑCharles Beard, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Vernon Parrington—were doing in their research and writing. As Richard Hofstadter explained, the leading historians of the Progressive Era tried "to make American history relevant to the political and intellectual issues of the moment. . . .They attempted to find a usable past related to the broadest needs of a nation fully launched upon its own industrialization, and to make history an active instrument of self-recognition and self-improvement." Situated firmly in the "revolt against formalism" that marked Progressive Era intellectual work, historians made their research instrumental, teasing out what William James called the "cash value" of ideas. Historical writing could no longer, in Robinson's own words, "catalogue mere names of person and places which have not the least importance for the reader." Rather, it had to "help us understand ourselves and our fellows and the problems and prospects of mankind." In those words and his pioneering (though largely forgotten) work in European and intellectual history, Robinson codified the purpose of what has come to be known as Progressive history.1	1
Robinson, though, was much more than a historian who developed the idea of a "New History." Like other intellectuals during the Progressive Era, he wanted to reform and improve society. His primary effort centered on the civic education of adult citizens for the responsibility of democratic self-governance. A small chapter in Robinson's lifeÑthe founding of the New School for Social Research in 1919Ñplus his concomitant social thought of the 1920s tell this story quite nicely. Given short mention in many intellectual histories, the founding and early history of the New School for Social Research stand squarely in the center of so much intellectual activity during the Progressive Era and the wake of World War I. At this institution, major thinkers gathered, including Thorstein Veblen, Herbert Croly, Charles Beard, Horace Kallen, and John Dewey. As we will see, the New School not only attracted big names, its founding helped prompt debate about democratic education and the role of the intellectual. That is why I believe the history of the New School and James Harvey Robinson's engagement in it deserves attention today, especially in terms of the Progressive Era and its democratic legacy.	2
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