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Being Schooled with Gordon Wood
Rakove, Jack N.
Rakove, Jack N.
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Abstract
I first encountered the work of Gordon Wood when I began graduate school in September 1969. Like Gordon, I had not come to Harvard to study early American history. Initially I was a twentieth-century guy. But on the morning when entering graduate students made the rounds of Widener Library to meet the faculty, Frank Freidel, a biographer of Franklin Roosevelt, advised me to take my first graduate seminar with Bernard Bailyn, rather than his own. So I walked over to Widener J, introduced myself, and told Professor Bailyn that I wished to take his seminar. At its first meeting, Bailyn produced a list of topics for the eight students gathered there. Because I was interested in the history of political ideas, I chose “early uses of The Federalist” as my subject. Either then or a little later, Bailyn sent me to the University archives to look at Gordon’s dissertation, which he had completed five years earlier before taking up a post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute of Early American History at Williamsburg. My ideas of original research in history were then so crude and ill-formed that I could not appreciate what a prodigious work it was. Had I not been so naïve, I might have wandered over to the law school and made some inquiries about changing schools. (Instead my first visit to the law school was to meet the young William Nelson, who showed me how to research constitutional issues in the Early Republic era.)
The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 was published soon afterward. I did not have time to read the book until I began my orals preparations a year later, when I was also a teaching assistant in Bailyn’s lecture courses on colonial and revolutionary America. By then I was no longer a twentieth-century guy, but someone who wanted to join the rewriting of Revolutionary-era history that Bailyn and his students were obviously conducting. Although my notes on Creation ran to something like twenty pages, which I regularly used, it was always a pleasure to return to the text. Despite the daunting sophistication and intricacy of its arguments, the book is a pleasure to read—and also to teach. It is replete with memorable sentences and key phrases. I always loved his image of bewildered Anti-Federalists trying to grapple with their opponents’ arguments: “those who clung to the principles of 1776 could only stand amazed with confusion, left holding remnants of thought that had lost their significance.” Another sentence I later required graduate students to unpack contained an allusive reference to Louis Hartz, now a neglected figure but someone who deeply influenced mid-twentieth-century scholarship. Again describing how the Federalists preemptively gained control of “the most popular and democratic rhetoric available to explain and justify their aristocratic system,” Wood assayed the long-term consequences of this maneuver: “the Federalists in 1787 hastened the destruction of whatever chance there was in America for the growth of an avowedly aristocratic conception of politics and thereby contributed to the creation of that encompassing liberal tradition which has mitigated and often obscured the real social antagonisms of American politics.”