‘Bernard Bailyn, R.I.P.’

     

Courtesy The British Journal

The American historian Bernard Bailyn died yesterday. If not for his being very elderly, at age 97, his death may sound tragically apropos, coming as it has during this endless Two-Minute Hate when everything U.S. History is being invalidated systematically, and sometimes violently, for the cause of compelling everybody toward a grim unknown. Perhaps his fatal heart failure, at home near Boston, might satisfy a poetic impulse.

He was not a Freemason, as far as I know. His enduring contribution to his craft is in how he told early American history. We Masons in the United States largely are guilty of upholding a folklorist telling of our Masonic forefathers’ roles in the American Founding. We credit them all with everything from the Boston Tea Party to winning the War of Independence to promulgating the U.S. Constitution. Go ahead, ask a random lodge brother how many signers of the Declaration were Masons, and I bet you’ll be told “Well, all of them!”

Well, not so fast. Nothing is quite that simple, especially in history, particularly in a history of a revolution. When examining the past, we quickly realize truth is stranger than fiction. The details of yesteryear, thanks to the limitless inconsistencies, improbabilities, and missteps dealt by human hands often leave one exclaiming “You can’t make this stuff up!”

A professor at Harvard University, Bailyn wrote and co-wrote dozens of books and is known best for his text from 1967 titled The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. In his research, he delved into the print shop pamphlets circulated during the quarter century before the Declaration. Rather than see the Revolution as only a fight for the right to make money, Bailyn reminded a forgetful people that it was the classically liberal thinking for natural rights—human liberty and happiness—that drove a mostly agrarian society to fight off an oppressive power. The book garnered Bailyn his first Pulitzer Prize. I’m not old enough to know for certain either way, but I can’t help but wonder if his rendering of history had encouraged this country’s enthusiasm for its bicentenary, immediately preceded as it was by various ignominous national failings.

And one wonders if Ideological Origins could be published today. We live in Howard Zinn’s world, when the Pulitzer committee now awards vapid manifestos like the New York Times’ 1619 Project.

On Freemasonry, Professor Bailyn was not one to connect the fraternity to the fight for freedom. He drove where the evidence led, and it does not lead anyone to surmise that Freemasonry, as a group, was an engine in the war for personal liberty and national sovereignty. We know individual Masons were heroic giants, and how local Masonic lodges played their part in building community, but our fraternity was no congress for a new republic.

For a host of reasons, we need more Bernard Bailyns. R.I.P.