The Irrepressible Repressible Conflict Theory

American historians keep wanting the Civil War not to have happened, the slavery issue not to have been intractable, keep wanting to deny the centrality of racial problems to our history, to downplay the facts that many whites positively enjoyed racial discrimination and profited from it while many others genuinely hated it and sacrificed to end it. The initial Civil War Revisionists developed these views out of an aversion to war and an indifference (at best) to racism, but a belief in them persists even among those who are uncompromisingly antiracist and who do not betray a hint of opposition to all wars. Michael F. Holt is a prisoner of revisionism. One of the most thoughtful, original, widely and deeply read, and productive American political historians, as these ten graceful essays again demonstrate, Holt is his generation's heir to the revisionism of his teacher, David Herbert Donald, who was, in turn, the heir of his teacher, the original Revisionist, James G. Randall. Holt's first book, Forging a Majority (1969), a study of the transformation from the second- to the third-party system in the 1850s in Pittsburgh, argued that religiously inspired state and local issues, not sectional animosity, underlay the Republican victory. Asserting that white northern voters feared white southerners but were indifferent to the morality of slavery and actively disliked African Americans, Holt implied that slavery did not directly cause the North to fight. Firmly within the ethnocultural school of Lee Benson, Forging a Majority emphasized the social bases of partisan politics -not policies, elite strategies, chance events, or ideology. While ethnoculturalism could be somewhat clumsily attached to theories that emphasized slavery and the inevitability of the War, it fit more comfortably with revisionism: If what Yankee Republicans really wanted to do was to persecute the Irish, stop others from drinking, and prove their superiority to Catholics, why should they care about slaves and why were slaveholders so worried

Criminology · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Race, History, and American Society

• The People's Choice

  Paul F Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson et al.•The People's Choice•1968

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