Historical Perspective and Scale

Great Men versus Social Trends

I was recently reading several books on the start of the American Revolution for my blog series, and one of them - 1775: A Good Year for Revolution by Kevin P. Phillips - made me chew over it.

On the one hand, it keeps telling in the background the story I'm familiar with, with the Founding Fathers and others nobly standing forward for liberty with brave and noble deeds. We hear many times how one or another individual person (like Washington, Warren, Arnold, or Montgomery) made a decision that changed the course of history. But much of the story is taken up with analysis of broad-scale social trends in culture, economics, religion, and other aspects of life which pushed events in one or another direction during the Revolution.

I'm used to history books taking either choice there - but usually, they lean into one or the other. In this book, Phillips split the difference. He's trying to take a middle course between great-man and social-trend history. That made me think more about the difference and connections between the two sorts of history.

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A few years ago, I wrote about Telling the Story of a Social Movement. The book I'd read then, about the French Resistance in World War II, had as its main protagonists not individuals but different groups. This was more or less inevitable from the story the author (Robert Gildea) was telling. There were no single leaders to the Resistance, except toward the end, and even then the authority of de Gaulle and his "Delegate" was very remote.

In the American Revolution, we do have leaders... some of the time. Even there, look (for instance) at the Portsmouth Powder Alarm where none of the major names except Paul Revere even participated. But you can tell a story centered around people like Adams and Warren and Washington without going too far astray.

But still, that is losing something. I would've acknowledged that from the beginning, but reading Phillips drove it further home. John Adams joked once that people would misremember the Revolution's history as "Dr. Franklin" and "General Washington" doing everything, neglecting all the other Founding Fathers such as himself. But even if we remember all the other Founding Fathers, along with another few names such as Captain Parker of Concord, we neglect all the other people who fought in the army or militia or supported one side or another in other different ways.

They have their parts too. The trends Philips discusses - such as the different ways different communities had immigrated to America, or the economic depression in Boston, or the growing divide between rural farmers and urban artisans in Pennsylvania - influenced them in deep ways that many histories paper over. We don't know how strong these influences were; Philips repeatedly apologizes that we just don't have better statistics. But they were there.

History is fractally deep. Everyone's life is part of the story, woven in through many different ways. All the talent of all the historians in the world can't trace them all - but we can try, building out the story without denying any other more typically-central part of it.

The story Gildea tells doesn't deny the story of de Gaulle (other historians have written books centered around him) which doesn't deny the story of Roosevelt and Churchill and Eisenhower and the other Western Allied leaders (who have been the center of many other books). Similarly, the story of the common American in the Revolution doesn't deny or minimize the story of the central deeds and the Founding Fathers which I've been telling more of on this blog.

This was, in a way, the story that the historical novelist tried to tell in Paper Woman, a historical novel about a woman in Georgia during the Revolution. I said at the time she wasn't telling the story of the Revolution, but just a story set during the Revolution. Looking back, you could argue that is a story of the Revolution: showing that our protagonist thinks of it just like any other war, without caring about its reason or what distinguishes the two sides. It does help the reader understand that one perspective on the Revolution and what it was like. It may not be an appealing story as Suzanne Adair tells it, or it might not be a representative story (that's a serious question given it's a novel), but it is a story.

But is it representative? Even if the protagonist of Paper Woman wasn't fictional, we could still question how typical an American she might be. (Not very typical, I'd argue! Even as fictional protagonists go!) As Phillips points out multiple times in his book, there're gaps in our knowledge, so we can't fully answer that question. Perhaps that's why he focuses much of his book on trends, rather than telling individual stories. We get names dropped throughout - this pastor, this farmer - but more than that we hear the tales of groups and of trends. With individuals, we can know that there is one definite true story. No matter how confusing it might be to find what really happened, you don't need to build it up out of individual points of statistical data. With groups, we're either deluged under too much information (like in the modern day) or picking among too little (like in the classical world), and either way we're arguing about the relative significance of different trends and trying to fill the gaps.

I wrote earlier that when we're living through the story of history, we can't know the story yet. We can't fully know it afterwards, either, even to the extent that events can be captured in words. There are individual gaps in our knowledge, but there's also so much background we don't know either. That's one advantage to focusing on individuals who not just did significant deeds, but whose lives were documented better than others.

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So when you're digging into the story of history, obviously both - as Phillips demonstrates - are part of the story. But which focus is better?

There have been major battles over this among historians. People have tied this question into larger social and economic theories about how much influence "great men" have over history in general. As I've said here, I'm convinced they're both important, and giving up either would be giving up something very significant. But I think it's valuable to try to consider the question on its own.

So, with all due reluctance - if I had to pick one, I'd say I'd pick the story of individual great people. That story, at least, can stand by itself more. At a real level, however invisibly, the story of mass movements and trends is built out of individual choices, so it can't stand without telling of individual choices and stories.

What's more, as Phillips' narrative implicitly acknowledges, many individual choices of history were decided by individual figures. Not all - witness the continuing mystery over who fired the first shot at Lexington - but many. Were it not for men like Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren and Patrick Henry, there would not have been a Revolution. Were it not for men like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, the Revolution would have perished in ignominious defeat.

One of the many times George Washington kept the Revolution from perishing. It wasn't single-handed - he absolutely depended on others, including the anonymous soldiers in the boat with him - but it almost certainly wouldn't have happened without him.

But limiting it to that story would be giving up much. The great persons of history made their decisions within the boundaries set by the masses. Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren had resolved long before 1775 that independence was needed, but they didn't even press for it because they knew the people weren't ready. Even as the war broke out, many people hesitated to talk of independence. Massachusetts, and later the Continental Congress, kept claiming they were only fighting "the ministerial army", not King George himself. This wasn't because the individual Founding Fathers insisted on it, but because they had to work within the limits of a people who even then weren't yet ready for independence.

The story of history is rich with interweaving plot threads. I'm reminded of one kids' history of the United States which had to spend one short chapter on Germany, and then another on Russia, just to make sense of twentieth-century American history. Similarly, the threads of social movements and the threads of great individuals weave together. Perhaps one can be summarized quickly if you're focused on another, but to truly understand history, both are necessary.