REMEMBERING GORDON WOOD.

Steven Hayward mourns his passing.  "Now we shall mark the occasion next month without his cheerful demeanor and fund of hard-earned wisdom and knowledge, which finds no intellectual equal in this nation of equal citizens. It will not be the same without his presence."  By all means, read his eulogy in full, and pay close attention to his arguments noting that "radicalism" does not have to mean "leftward ho."

It is hard to avoid wondering whether the shocking news of the ghastly accidental death of historian Gordon S. Wood, struck down by a motorist in a shopping center parking lot, is a bad omen, coming within a month of our observance of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Wood has been enjoying a much-deserved spotlight in the runup to the sesquicentennial, but now his voice will be absent on July 4.

Widely acknowledged as the pre-eminent historian of the American Founding in our time, Wood was virtually without peer within academic American history today. There is, however, an arc to his career and thought as a historian that offers encouragement that, in this time of doubt and division about the character and future of American democracy, it is possible to capture and celebrate America’s complex and enduring foundations.

Wood burst onto the scene in 1969 with the publication of The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, a capacious 653-page exploration of the ideas that crystallized into the American Revolution and the Constitution eleven years after the Declaration. Wood had been a student of Bernard Bailyn, one of the leading historians of American political thought in the mid-twentieth century, and Wood built upon Bailyn’s well-regarded Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, but can be said to have advanced and refined a bold new interpretive strand of American historiography—the “civic republican school.”

The civic republican school argued that modern democracy owed less to Lockean liberalism than to a more classically inspired tradition centering on “civic virtue.” It was an explicit alternative to the liberal tradition of natural rights and rugged individualism. Although Wood was restrained in staking out a clear position, his book offered considerable backup for the civic republicans, many of whom were openly seeking an alternative for understanding America and to displace the “liberal tradition” as defended by Louis Hartz and other mid-century historians.

Mr Hayward's colleague at Power Line Scott Johnson offers Hillsdale's Wilfred McClay an opportunity to extend.

[Professor Wood] may have spent his life working mainly in the Ivy League, but he was no blueblood. He was an affable, hardworking guy from a working-class family in Concord, [Massachusetts], and you could hear his origins in his unmistakable Yankee accent. A great historian could also be a regular guy.

Although he studied at Harvard under the august Bernard Bailyn, and excelled in all he did, he acquired none of the mandarin manners of the higher professoriate, but remained himself. His sympathy for the lives and ways of ordinary people informed his most important work, and was part of his visceral love of democratic America.

His book The Radicalism of the American Revolution was in large measure a tribute to the Revolution’s astonishing achievement in ushering in a genuinely new world, one in which feudalism and monarchy were a dead letter, the elite values of pre-Revolutionary classical republicanism had lost their appeal, and there was a general awareness that, in Jefferson’s famous words, “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”

Instead, Wood wrote, America would find its greatness in a new way: “by creating a prosperous free society belonging to obscure people with their workaday concerns and their pecuniary pursuits of happiness—common people with their common interests in making money and getting ahead.”

Such sentiments are what one might expect from Power Line, which argues from an institutional-conservative seasoned lightly with populism.

Two senior contributors to the World Socialist Web Site, however, offer a similar tribute.

A tragic accident has brought to an end the life and career of one of the United States’ major historians. Gordon S. Wood died Sunday at the age of 92, hours after being struck by a car while walking through a grocery store parking lot in East Providence, Rhode Island. He died later that day at Rhode Island Hospital—less than one month before the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the commemoration of the revolution whose history he had spent a lifetime studying.

It speaks to the degradation of democratic consciousness, intellectual life and culture in the United States that Wood’s death, apart from scattered and superficial obituaries placed on the inside pages of newspapers, has gone largely unnoticed. The country’s foremost historian of its own founding has passed from the scene, on the very eve of the semiquincentennial, with hardly a ripple in official public life.

Within the historical profession, however, Wood’s death is deeply felt as a tragic loss. Several of his colleagues, reached by the World Socialist Web Site, conveyed their admiration and grief. Carol Berkin, professor emerita at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center, wrote that Wood’s work “was the starting point, even for those of us who focused on the economic or social origins of the struggle for independence.” James Oakes, also of CUNY, noted that “Wood was committed to the proposition that the War for Independence was also a radical revolution, an event that left an inspiring legacy we should all cherish.” Richard D. Brown, professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut, remembered him as “a great scholar, an honest, unpretentious person, and a true friend. His brilliance was manifest.” Mary Beth Norton, professor emerita at Cornell University, and Peter S. Onuf, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia, sent similar messages of mourning.

It is no accident, dear reader, that the World Socialist Web Site took a leading role in calling attention to the phony vanguardism of the so-called 1619 Project.  The Cold Spring Shops condensed version puts it, "The Declaration of Independence made self-evident the eventual end of chattel slavery. To quote a more recent song, 'In a land that's known as freedom, how can such a thing be fair?'"

The tribute offers such arguments, at much greater length.

Wood emphatically insisted on the revolutionary, transformative character of the American Revolution, on its world-historic significance. He never budged from this stance.

This put Wood increasingly at odds with what passed for “the academic left,” which came to find in the American Revolution either a scheme to perpetuate elite white male rule—the argument advanced by identity-centered historians—or else a non-event, as maintained by scholars influenced by postmodernism. It was indeed in response to such arguments that Wood wrote The Radicalism of the American Revolution. The book has never been forthrightly answered by his critics.

When the World Socialist Web Site first interviewed Wood in 2015, he expressed confidence that postmodernist approaches to history would never gain broad traction among the public. Yet academia, it turned out, had been incubating ideas that would eventually serve as the basis for a far-reaching assault on the historical significance of the American Revolution. The campaign would emerge from none other than the flagship publication of American liberalism, the New York Times, which earlier, back in 1969, had praised Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic as “one of the half dozen most important books ever written about the American Revolution.”

Wood was already elderly when the Times launched this attack on the subject of his life’s work, but he responded with the vigor of a much younger man. It was the World Socialist Web Site that initiated the fight against the 1619 Project. In the autumn of 2019, the WSWS published a series of interviews with historians Victoria Bynum, James Oakes and James McPherson exposing the project’s major errors of concept and fact. In November 2019, Wood sat down with the WSWS for an extended interview of his own. Together, these interviews were read hundreds of thousands of times. Wood later joined several of these historians in an open letter to the Times, which pressed the criticisms that had first been raised in the WSWS interviews and demanded corrections.

The Times was forced on the defensive. Its defenders in the academic pseudo-left launched vicious attacks on Wood and McPherson, paced by Nikole Hannah-Jones, who condemned these eminent scholars as “white historians” who could never understand American history on account of their race. Hannah-Jones elaborated a quasi-zoological view in which not only did one’s race determine one’s view of history, but in which history itself was the never-ending working out of the conflict between “white Americans” and blacks. It remains a travesty and a shame that so few in the profession found the nerve to oppose these foul and intellectually bankrupt attacks.

Against them, Wood persevered with remarkable energy. He carried on his collaboration with the World Socialist Web Site, joining an important webinar on American Independence Day 2020, “The Place of the Two American Revolutions: Past, Present and Future.” Many thousands viewed this event, which also included Oakes, Bynum, Clayborne Carson of Stanford University, and Richard Carwardine of Oxford, as well as labor historian and WSWS writer Tom Mackaman, and David North, the editorial board chairman of the WSWS.

Wood was not a socialist or a Marxist, and neither he nor the WSWS made any claims to the contrary. What fused our work was a common insistence that the American Revolution was a transformative event—that it was indeed a revolution—as well as our common insistence on a truthful, objective approach to history.

Wood appreciated this collaboration. In 2021 he wrote to his WSWS interviewer, “you seem to be the only historian who understands what I was saying in my Radicalism book.” The correspondence continued until just a few weeks before his death. Wood said that he had finally retired from writing—“at 92 it would be foolhardy” to continue, he wrote—but he was looking forward to a full schedule of events marking the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution.

At the close of his life, as the United States approached the 250th anniversary of independence amid deep political and social crisis, Wood stood as one of the last major representatives of a historical tradition that is now embattled and endangered. He belonged to a generation of historians who believed that the past could be understood objectively, that ideas mattered and that great revolutions altered the course of human history. He rejected cynicism, superficial and ahistorical present-mindedness and the reduction of history to race, identity or power for its own sake. For him, the American Revolution remained one of the decisive events in the democratic development of humanity, however incomplete and contradictory its results.

Alas, Professor Wood is not with us to see the events of Freedom Week, in all its incomplete, contradictory, tawdry, and uplifting glory.  We had occasion to use his remarks upon receipt of the Irving Kristol Award, "To be an American is not to be someone, but to believe in something. That is why we are at heart a creedal nation, and that is why the 250th anniversary of the Declaration next year is so important," as our Thanksgiving benediction.  R. I. P.