James Ford Rhodes
Cleveland, 1848 - 1927, Boston
In 1872 Rhodes married Ann Card, whose father had been one of Daniel Rhodes's business associates. The couple had one son. Determined to conclude his career as an industrialist as quickly as possible in order to become a historian, Rhodes worked until 1884 to amass a fortune that was adequate enough to allow him to retire and write a history of the United States. Though without training in the field of history, Rhodes asserted that "a business life" provided "an excellent school for the study of human character," and he compensated for his lack of formal training by bringing tireless energy and ample time and finances to his research.
From 1885 to 1890 Rhodes, aided by Ph.D.-trained research assistants in Cleveland, researched extensively the last decade before the Civil War. He began writing in 1888 and, with the help of a professional editor, completed the first two volumes of his history in 1891, the same year that Rhodes moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, ostensibly to take advantage of Boston's research facilities and intellectual life. There he quickly won acclaim as one of America's most respected historians and gained acceptance into Boston society, which better suited Rhodes's elite, epicurean life-style than had Cleveland's.
Published in 1892, volumes one and two of Rhodes's influential History of the United States From the Compromise of 1850 concentrated on the sectional crises that led to the coming of the Civil War. Over the next dozen years Rhodes published three more volumes, which covered the Civil War era. In 1906 he added two volumes that treated the history of Reconstruction. In addition to three other books (a collection of essays, a set of lectures, and a general history of the Civil War), Rhodes published History of the United States from Hayes to McKinley, 1877-1896 (1919) and The McKinley and Roosevelt Administrations, 1897-1909 (1922). Though his early volumes received considerable praise (even from academic historians) for their use of sources, fairness in treatment, and literary style, Rhodes's last two volumes were criticized harshly for their shallowness, lack of interpretation, and intolerance of alternative social and economic views. Nevertheless, the sheer volume of Rhodes's writing was unsurpassed in his day. He was elected president of the American Historical Association in 1898 and received the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1918.
Rhodes's outpouring of scholarship and the arguments that he presented made him one of America's most popular historians during the Progressive Era. He espoused a "nationalist" interpretation that deemphasized blame for the sectional conflict, explaining it instead as a necessary stepping stone to national reconciliation, to a stronger, greater America. Unlike other northern writers, Rhodes referred to the armed conflict not as a "Rebellion" but rather as a "Civil War." Determined to be objective and fair to both North and South, Rhodes nonetheless identified slavery as the cause of the war but reminded readers that Great Britain and its New England colonies held responsibility for slavery's establishment and expansion. He described the South's "peculiar institution" as a tragedy, not a crime. Like other neo-abolitionist historians, however, Rhodes denounced the horrors of slavery and was the first to identify slavery's institutional features and to examine the institution as a system of economic exploitation and social control.
For all his criticisms of slavery, Rhodes was remarkably balanced in his assessments of the South. He praised individual southerners, including Confederate generals, and wrote approvingly of the "Southern way of life." Ironically, Rhodes sympathized openly with the South in his treatment of Reconstruction. Though his own political allegiances shifted back and forth between the Democrats and the Republicans, Rhodes consistently opposed black suffrage and regretted that the Radical Republicans had not allowed white southerners to deal with the freedmen in their own way. Throughout his works Rhodes wrote condescendingly about blacks, Jews, immigrants, and other minorities. He endorsed the gold monetary standard, wrote approvingly of America's "captains of industry," and praised civil service reform. Somewhat of a mugwump, Rhodes also opposed tariff protection and American imperialism (especially annexation of the Philippines). Rhodes viewed organized labor and radicals and dissenters as dangerous obstructionists who stood in the way of American "progress." During his final years Rhodes revised earlier volumes of his History (a new edition appeared posthumously, in 1928), traveled to Europe, and cared for the family of his son Daniel. He died in Boston.
Rhodes was an important transitional figure between the "literary" historians of the early and mid-nineteenth century and the "scientific," academic historians who dominated American historical scholarship after World War I. He identified race as a major theme in American history both before and after the Civil War. Methodologically, he dug deeply in printed primary materials (newspapers, travel accounts, government records) and often allowed these sources to speak for themselves. Rhodes, however, never shunned interpretation. The advantage of writing about events that had occurred during his own life and about individuals whom he knew personally provided him with certain insights. But Rhodes failed to distance himself from the concerns of the men he admired, such as Grover Cleveland, Mark Hanna (his brother-in-law), William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt (his friend). Indeed, Rhodes was acquainted intimately with many of America's leading political and industrial figures. In the end he employed history to bolster moral judgments, whereas historians trained in the emerging graduate schools used history to analyze and to explain change. Nevertheless, until at least the 1920s, Rhodes's "nationalist" interpretation appealed to Americans who sought to put the bitter sectionalism of the Civil War behind them and to revel in the triumphs of American capitalism.
Bibliography
Rhodes's papers are in the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, and at Duke University. His letters appear in manuscript collections at many institutions, including the Library of Congress and Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Cornell Universities. Many letters appear in M. A. De Wolfe Howe, James Ford Rhodes: American Historian (1929). The standard biography is Robert Cruden, James Ford Rhodes: The Man, the Historian, and His Work (1961). For Rhodes and race relations, see Cruden, "James Ford Rhodes and the Negro: A Study in the Problem of Objectivity," Ohio History 71 (July 1962): 129-37, and the important collection of correspondence between Rhodes and his black Cleveland barber, The Barber and the Historian: The Correspondence of George A. Myers and James Ford Rhodes, 1910-1923, ed. John A. Garraty (1956). For analyses of Rhodes's contributions as a historian of slavery, see John David Smith, "James Ford Rhodes, Woodrow Wilson, and the Passing of the Amateur Historian of Slavery," Mid-America 64 (1982): 17-24, and An Old Creed for the New South: Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865-1918 (1985). Thomas J. Pressly provides an influential assessment of Rhodes's writings on the cause of the Civil War in Americans Interpret Their Civil War (1954).
John David Smith
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