[In the following review, Noble argues that That Noble Dream provides “a rich and powerful narrative” surrounding the “objectivity question” in the American historical profession.]

[In That Noble Dream,] Peter Novick has written an unprecedented and invaluable study of the idea of objectivity among American historians. Starting in the 1880s, when historians established their professional identity, he carries his narrative up to the immediate present. To illuminate what objectivity meant to each succeeding generation during this century, he has analyzed the personal papers and major publications of many of the most important historians. When young American historians in the 1880s rejected the authority of the previous generation of amateur historians, they found legitimacy for themselves in the German ideal of scientific history which they brought back from Europe along with the doctoral degree. The scientific historian was supposed to have a “commitment to the reality of the past, and to truth as correspondence to that reality; a sharp separation between knower and known, between fact and value, and, above all, between history and fiction” (p. 2).

For Novick the commitment to scientific history steadily gained strength until World War I as the first generation of professional historians consolidated their power in the academic world. When he explores the social patterns facilitating this consensus, he establishes a theme of irony which continues throughout the entire book. These new professional historians were overwhelmingly male Anglo-Protestants. They monopolized the term “American” for themselves and were certain that no other social group living in the United States was capable of rationality and objectivity. They excluded American Indians, African Americans, Mexican-Americans, immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, and all women from their narratives.

Novick does find some challenge to this consensus in the writings of James Harvey Robinson, Charles Beard, and Carl Becker, who found the works of their colleagues irrelevant to the needs of society. But Novick does not clarify the problem that national loyalty had always posed, namely, the claim of American historians that their ability to be objective depended on their ability to express universal truths. Middle-class historians in every country were committed to the superiority of their national history. Robinson, Beard, and Becker wanted to fuse history with the social sciences because they hoped to return to the Enlightenment affirmation of universal natural laws that transcended national boundaries. For these “New Historians” the recently accepted authority of evolution pointed to such universal laws. For them the evolving patterns of nature were always ahead of cultural adaptation to the environment. They were “relativists” in the sense that they believed that there was always culture lag; culture always represented an adaptation to a natural environment which had now changed. The “New History,” for these “progressive” historians, would locate where the laws of nature were at the moment; it would also demonstrate what aspects of current society were irrelevant to the new natural environment. Like Karl Marx they defined industrialism as a force in harmony with the universal patterns of evolution. For them, American democracy must be liberated from concepts of exceptionalism and linked to the universals of industrialism and evolution.

Because he does not focus on the hope of the “New Historians” that they could replace national with universal history, Novick does not see how completely different their “relativism” was after World War I. He writes that “whereas before the war, American historians were largely isolated from modernist currents in philosophical, scientific, and social thought, after it, these currents became a significant factor in the rethinking of historiographical issues” (p. 111). Beard did become interested in these currents because he violently rejected his commitment to universal patterns of world history, a commitment which had led him to urge the United States to go to war against Germany. For Beard, in 1917, the universal force of industrial progress was being blocked in Germany by a reactionary political system. American destruction of that system would free the forces of economic progress. But by 1919 Beard believed he had failed to comprehend the influence of capitalism in causing the war. He no longer hoped that the irrationalities of capitalism would be overcome by the victory of universal reason. He turned, therefore, to a celebration of national tradition—the uniqueness of every nation—as the best way to thwart the corrupting influence of capitalism. He now explicitly defined national historians as artists who evoked the spirit of their nations' traditions. As a social scientist before 1919 he had believed he must be objective in his description of universal law. But he was a self-consciously artistic historian after 1919 as he evoked a national tradition which was unique because it sprang from a particular landscape.

Becker joined Beard in rejecting this reality of the universal laws of nature associated with the Enlightenment. But in the 1920s he also rejected Beard's new belief in the reality of national traditions as well as Beard's attempt to fuse a progressive narrative to that tradition. By the early 1930s he had rejected every element in the historian's creed of objectivity. The entry of the United States into World War II, however, abruptly reversed the doubts about historical objectivity that had been caused by the disillusionment of many historians in 1919 when they became aware that they had acted as emotional propagandists for a particular national viewpoint in 1917 and 1918. The continuing theme of irony in Novick's narrative now reaches its greatest intensity as he describes how the critical mass of the historical profession restored the mood of 1917 by claiming that the particular national interest of the United States represented the objectivity of universal natural law. But in 1917 there had been an overwhelming consensus among historians to support World War I. In 1941, however, many of Beard's generation desperately wanted to stay out of the war. Novick is most devastating here in his use of historians' letters to reveal the systematic campaign to convert the opposition or, failing that, to coerce them into silence. He uses the letters of many from Richard Hofstadter's generation to show that they believed they would lose their opportunity to become academic historians if they did not repress their criticism of the war. And this pattern continued into the Cold War. The result was a counter-Progressive consensus in the 1950s that was both powerful and fragile. It was fragile because there was so much suppressed resentment waiting for a chance to express itself. It was also fragile because of the unanswered questions raised by Beard and Becker about how historians, loyal to their nation, could claim an objectivity based on a relationship with the universal.

The criticisms of capitalism made by Beard and Vernon Louis Parrington in the 1920s and 1930s had been based on the distinction made by the republican tradition between virtuous and corrupt private property. Novick does not focus on the way this tradition lost its authority at the same time the relativism of Beard and Becker was linked by pro-war historians to both Nazi and Soviet ideology and thus dismissed as un-American. But the appearance for the first time of a significant Marxist voice in the American historical profession in the 1960s must have a relationship to the collapse of Beard's position which he had held throughout the 1930s. Beard had argued that the critique of capitalism must come only from the indigenous republican tradition. The young Marxists of the 1960s used, however, the logic of Beard's argument that national history and scientific objectivity were antithetical to argue that only Marxist historians were capable of scientific objectivity because only they transcended the provincialism of national history.

But counter-Progressive historians had also committed themselves, as part of Cold War politics, to cultural pluralism. When it became legitimate for historians to study American Indians, African Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian Americans, and women, they soon became aware of how male Anglo-Americans had monopolized the identity of “American” for themselves. It became increasingly clear that the male Anglo-Americans who had dominated the profession from the 1880s had written history which expressed their particular gender, class, and racial values.

Novick is correct in emphasizing that the collapse of the Cold War consensus was much more profound than the collapse of the World War I consensus. The Marxist critique is unprecedented as is the critique of cultural pluralism. There is no American history now, only American histories. But Novick also emphasizes the unprecedented critique coming from the academic field of cultural criticism. These developments in linguistic theory have reached the conclusion that the distinction between fact and value is purely arbitrary. Becker had said this in 1930, but his was an isolated voice. Now in the 1980s there are many scholars writing books and editing journals which present this position. Hayden White and Dominick La Capra are the two historians who have been most strongly influenced by this literary scholarship.

Although the narrative structure of Novick's book is the rise and fall of the ideal of objectivity in the American historical profession, he refuses to conclude with such a prophecy. He has written a rich and powerful narrative. No other scholar has made such a marvelous contribution to our understanding of the history profession during its first century. Historians who read this book will be forced to confront their tacit assumption that they are a privileged group always able to escape the complex, ironic, and often frightening lives which they observe as the experience of those humans who are mere mortals.