It was a thesis that not all historians were willing to accept. A year of decision, yes. A very important year. But other years just as crucial in our history might have been picked; any year closely scrutinized becomes a year of decision. Nevertheless, it was this thesis which held together the complex narratives of the book, and in fact justified their selection. It provided the bag that made manageable all the loose marbles of events during that chosen year.
Some professional historians complained about a principle of selection that gave the mountain man James Clyman more space than Senator Thomas Hart Benton, the very trumpet of Manifest Destiny, and the Donner Party’s anthropophagous ordeal more space than any other happening of 1846. Almost all objected mildly to some of DeVoto’s inevitabilities. Henry Nash Smith, while generally admiring, thought that by accepting geopolitical inevitability DeVoto had shut his eyes to the moral dubieties of the Mexican War—and, he might have added, to the moral dubieties of our extirpation of the Indian cultures as well. Schlesinger, defending the objectivity of history, protested his unqualified judgments, his willingness to call Frémont a popinjay and Zachary Taylor a lucky fool. Paxson evaded the issue of historical objectivity by describing the book as “a brilliant job on the borderland common to the historian, the essayist, and the analyst.” Hofstadter, while not accepting the central thesis without qualification, thought DeVoto had not meant it to be taken too seriously. “Had he set out to prove it, he would have written an analytical history of an epoch, not the narrative history of a year.”
Perhaps. An orthodox historian would certainly have done it that way. But DeVoto was an unorthodox historian, at odds with the monographic mentality. If he had a model, it was Francis Parkman, who dealt with sweeping events in which a continent was at stake and re-created them as vividly as fiction. In this very book, he did object to Parkman as a Brahmin snob who missed the greatest opportunity offered to a historian since Xenophon, for Parkman was out on the Oregon Trail in 1846 and failed to see the significance of the crude Mormon and Oregon pioneers he met on Laramie Creek and elsewhere. But an objection to Parkman’s snobbery did not prevent him from adopting Parkman’s methods. The Year of Decision: 1846 is romantic history conceived in literary terms—and that statement implies something about form and organization as well as about narrative style.
It implies that the form of this history is not chronological or topical form, but artistic form.6 It implies that proportion, relationship of parts, emphasis, and the evocation of a personal response are all part of the conception, to be reconciled in any way possible with the facts of history. Response, not mere comprehension, is the goal, and this means that the sort of selection practiced will have more in mind than the accurate reproduction of events. It means that big scenes and colorful characters will be as important to this kind of historian as they were to Walter Scott, and will be exploited by every fictional device. “When you get a scene, play it!” DeVoto advised Garrett Mattingly.7 He did not mean distort it. He meant take advantage of drama when history offers it. A historian, he said, should not stop at second simply because some taboo of his trade said that historians did not hit home runs. Go for the fences.
The grisly ordeal of the Donner-Reed party and the hardships of the Mormons driven from Nauvoo by mobs were stories of human agony too strong to be omitted or played down, part of the action on the far-western frontier that was realizable as personal experience. Possibly the space given them might have been devoted to Congressional debates or the private correspondence of Thomas Hart Benton, but that was not the kind of history DeVoto was writing. His kind of history not only permitted the selection and dramatization of striking actions, it also allowed the historian to pass judgment on both events and people, and it permitted the elaboration of large, umbrella theses to contain and explain events, so long as the theses were developed inductively and not imposed from without. Furthermore it permitted symbolic selection—history by synecdoche, the illumination of whole areas and periods through concentration upon one brief time, one single sequence, a few representative characters. DeVoto’s concentration upon the year 1846, his “narrative history of a year,” was not an attempt to limit consideration to that small, focused set of actions. Quite the opposite. It was an attempt to use the part for the whole, the less for the more inclusive; to make the chosen events of that single year illuminate all the years leading up to the Civil War and the triumph of Union and the continental nation.
It was a method he had experimented with as early as the 1927 essay “The Great Medicine Road,” but its rationale he almost certainly got from Robert Frost, who was calling himself a synecdochist in poetry when others were calling themselves vorticists or imagists, and who on occasion saw the world almost as emblematically as Emerson or Hawthorne. DeVoto did not go so far toward transcendentalism, and as in so many matters, he had arrived at his opinions independently and had only had them corroborated by Frost. Nevertheless, with his knack for aphorism, Frost might have been writing a commandment for DeVoto’s historical method when he said, “All that an artist needs is samples.”8
The swarming individuals, the multiple continued narratives of The Year of Decision: 1846 were samples selected out of an otherwise unmanageable variety. The events that in the gestative process had given rise to a thesis were then used to demonstrate, illustrate, and symbolize it, and so carried more than their own weight in the narrative. A reviewer who objected to the space given James Clyman was not reading DeVoto as DeVoto asked to be read. Clyman is in the book not because he was personally so important, but because he was incredibly representative, and touched the energies of his time at many points. Ten years before The Year of Decision: 1846 was published, DeVoto had assigned him a significant place in a book that was as yet only dimly conceived. As he wrote to Mattingly,
I’ve found a culture hero. Look at his career—and it’s history, not my invention. Born on Washington’s land in Fauquier County. Met the Gen’l in person. Down the Ohio in time to be present at Tippecanoe. Militiaman in 1812–14. Helped Alex. Hamilton’s son survey national lands in Indiana and Illinois. Got to St. Louis in time to join the end Ashley expedition, which opened up the Interior basin. On the party that found South Pass. One of the four who explored Great Salt Lake in a skin boat. Five years as a fur trapper. Present at practically everything that happened in those years. Then back to Illinois, where he bought land. In Abe Lincoln’s company in the Black Hawk War. Pioneered in lumber & then in farming in Wisconsin. The milksop Winnebagos shot him twice—& he’d fought Blackfeet. Got asthma & went west to cure it. To Oregon in the great 1844 emigration. In Oregon, was with the Applegate party that blazed the trail to California. Bear Flag revolt as an associate of Fremont. Helped Hastings make his cut off, quarreled with Hastings about its safety, & denounced H’s book. Met Lillburn Boggs & turned him from Cal to Oregon. Met the Donner party & advised them not to take the road they did. Met the Mormons. Came back to Wisconsin & was employed by the Mecomb party to guide them to Calif. Got to Sutter’s in time to see the first gold. Married one of the Mecomb girls, bought a ranch at Napa, and lived halfway through the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes. Think that career over—and I didn’t invent a comma of it.…9
The historical monographer might assume half contemptuously that DeVoto was dressing up his narrative by exploiting a see-all character, a sort of historical Lanny Budd who initiated no events and affected nothing importantly, whose only importance was that, like a television commentator, he was there. That was precisely his function and precisely his usefulness to a historian who thought like a novelist. Sample. Symbol. Culture hero. A part that might be taken for the whole, an individual in whose experience was subsumed a whole folk-wandering.
In the 1936 essay “On Beginning to Write a Novel,” DeVoto had spoken of the fictional process as the trial and error through which the novelist groped toward the inevitabilities inherent in his material. Now it turned out that, for him, history was the same process. History, t
oo, was people in action through times and places, and it did not exclude what went on in the caverns of the soul. But there was one difference, one that was perhaps never fully clear to him.
In his Bread Loaf lectures he had always been something of a strict constructionist with regard to fictional point of view. He believed that a writer of fiction could not shift his point of view, once he had established it, without risking the illusion he was trying to create. He believed the fiction writer should be invisible and not call attention to himself by authorial comment. The first person singular never appealed to him; he thought it too easy, too likely to be verbose, too subject to the intrusions of self-love, exhibitionism, and public confession—everything that gagged him in the novels of Thomas Wolfe. In his own fictions he preferred the strategy of objectivity, or that variant of it which permits the reader to see with the eyes of a single character, and to know only what he knows. That method enforced a degree of identification while still violating none of the rules of objective reporting. In a novel, with due precautions, the point of view might be shifted, preferably at a chapter break or other mechanical division that acted like a theater curtain, from one character to another. But there was no place in his kind of novel where an author could stand and make judgments, nor could the author speak in any but the ventriloquisms of his characters. In short, the judgmental author was as out of place in DeVoto’s kind of fiction as he was in Arthur Schlesinger, Senior’s kind of history.
A weakness in DeVoto as a novelist was that he never mastered ventriloquism. Comparing his fictions with his histories, one is led to wonder if the tentative, brittle unsatisfactoriness of the one and the lusty authority of the other do not stem from that fundamental problem of approach. DeVoto was a man full of opinions. He marshaled facts with great swiftness and made them into generalizations, and he discriminated among ideas with the positive-ness of one discriminating between sound and rotten oranges. The iconic and hesitant representation of ideas as people was not enough for him. When he couldn’t judge and comment, he was inhibited; when he couldn’t speak in his own voice, he was constrained, as Tom Wolfe would have been constrained in fiction by the same limitation.
Which is to say exactly what Frost, Lewis, and many others had said to him: he was an intellectual, a man of ideas, not a novelist. For half a lifetime he had stubbornly misread his gifts, and even after The Year of Decision: 1846 demonstrated what he was best at, he would make periodic efforts to be what he was not. It would take him nearly another decade to persuade himself finally that he was not at home among the puppeteers. He was more truly at home among scientists, historians, and reporters. The pretenses, disguises, and self-effacements of the objective fiction he favored kept him from being himself, and his belligerently anti-literary pretenses were probably an acknowledgment of his dissatisfaction with his own performance.
But history-ward he walked free, and there is a paradox in the way the writing of history emancipated him. History did not ask the historian to disappear; it only asked him to be objective. In history the word “objective” did not mean “invisible”; it only meant “impartial.” But to ask impartiality of Bernard DeVoto was as bad as asking him to efface himself; it was like asking docility of a wolverine. So he challenged the historiographical fashion that said a historian must be cautious in his judgments, and by doing so he acquired a freedom within the historian’s mystery that he had never enjoyed in the related mystery of the novelist. In fact, he introduced into history his controversialist habit of foray and rebuttal. He not only asked his representation of the pre-Civil War far-western frontier to be accurate as history and as vivid as a novel, he asked it to be as challenging as an Easy Chair.
One might select dozens of passages that would illustrate both the vigor and the disconcertingly judgmental character of his method. Take one from the early part of the book, a thumbnail profile of the President who, “carrying twin torches through a powder magazine,” led the nation into and out of 1846:
“Who is James K. Polk?” The Whigs promptly began campaigning on that derision, and there were Democrats who repeated it with a sick concern. The question eventually got an unequivocal answer. Polk had come up the ladder, he was an orthodox party Democrat. He had been Jackson’s mouthpiece and floor leader in the House of Representatives, had managed the anti-Bank legislation, had risen to the Speakership, had been Governor of Tennessee. But sometimes the belt line shapes an instrument of use and precision. Polk’s mind was rigid, narrow, obstinate, far from first rate. He sincerely believed that only Democrats were truly American, Whigs being either the dupes or the pensioners of England—more, that not only wisdom and patriotism were Democratic monopolies but honor and breeding as well. “Although a Whig he seems a gentleman” is a not uncommon characterization in his diary. He was pompous, suspicious, and secretive; he had no humor; he could be vindictive; and he saw spooks and villains. He was a representative Southern politician of the second or indeterminate period (which expired with his Presidency), when the decline but not the disintegration had begun.
But if his mind was narrow it was also powerful, and he had guts. If he was orthodox, his integrity was absolute and he could not be scared, manipulated, or brought to heel. No one bluffed him, no one moved him with direct or oblique pressure. Furthermore, he knew how to get things done, which is the first necessity of government, and he knew what he wanted done, which is the second. He came into office with clear ideas and a fixed determination and he was to stand by them through as strenuous an administration as any before Lincoln’s. Congress had governed the United States for eight years before him and, after a fashion, was to govern it for the next twelve years after him. But Polk was to govern the United States from 1845 to 1849. He was to be the only “strong” President between Jackson and Lincoln. He was to fix the mold of the future in America down to 1860, and therefore for a long time afterward. That is who James K. Polk was.10
Examine that passage in any way you wish, for its organization (as firm as the octave and sestet of a sonnet), for the crispness of its unequivocating judgments, for its generalizations about American politics across a span of years, for the rawhide flexibility of its prose, for the way it states in small a theme that the book which follows will state in large, and you must admit to being in an unmistakable presence, listening to an unmistakable voice. Even some monographers who deplored the method had to admire the result.
When DeVoto re-created past events as personal experience he was carrying on, as we have observed, from the great romantic historians, especially Parkman. When he retained and even accentuated the presence of the historian, he was challenging the dominant historiographical school stemming from Ranke. What is more, the historical presence that he asserted was not an impartial judge, but a maverick of the Henderson-Zinsser kind, a man in a state of deadlock between scientific principle and personal prejudice, who stated his inductive conclusions with passion. That was striking enough. But when he converted chronology into simultaneity (what Paxson called a “chronological symphony”), and when by synecdoche and other devices he gave to history a form almost as intricate and almost as impressionistic as Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, then he was doing something no American historian had done.
He had learned, with others of his generation, the trick of telling stories in a few bright, quick scenes. He had discovered the benefits to be had from turning chronology on its head or playing games with it. He had grown used to asking more and more alertness and participation from his readers,11 he had adjured many a Bread Loaf audience to show, not to tell. When he applied the methods of impressionistic fiction to history, mounting upon the scrupulous gatherer of facts the storyteller skilled in mass entertainment; and when he mounted upon those, like an acrobat on the shoulders of two fellow acrobats, the social analyst and controversialist and editorial thinker of The Easy Chair, he had a combination that might look unstable and even self-contradictory, but that worked. Those who read The Year of Decision: 1846 knew they
were hearing a new voice, and many suspected that the voice was major. It was the voice of Bernard DeVoto, unmasked by the ventriloquisms that properly should have accompanied his impressionism. Like its author, the book had the capacity to wake up any room it entered. As the Mormon historian Dale L. Morgan wrote,12 the only real mistake in the whole book was the title, which threw the emphasis on a doubtful generalization and diverted attention from the brilliant re-creation of individual people and events.
VI
BLOWS GIVEN AND TAKEN