III. The Historical Fiction of Kenneth Roberts

Consider, in brief summary, the careers of three prominent historical novelists of the last century: Kenneth Roberts (1885-1957), John Dos Pas-sos (1896-1970), and Gore Vidal (1925-). Kenneth Roberts grew up in his hometown of Kennebunkport, Maine, matriculated at Cornell from 1904 to 1908, then traveled to Massachusetts, where he spent a decade as a reporter and columnist for the Boston Post. He served in U.S. Army intelligence during World War I, then joined the staff of the Saturday Evening Post as a roving correspondent. He spent the next decade moving constantly, from London to Paris to Berlin to Prague to Washington, D.C. and back again, in search of material for his articles for America's most popular general magazine.

Finally, in 1928, at the age of forty-three, Roberts turned his back on j ournalism and embarked on a project he had long considered and dreamed about, but had never before attempted: the writing of a carefully researched historical novel. "I've had a theory for a great many years," he wrote in a 1935 letter, "that a writer can write more effectively about his own people than he can about people that aren't in his blood.... My people have always lived in Maine."⁵⁸ Four years earlier, in a letter to fellow writer Julian Street, he had confessed that he began writing historical novels to help insure preservation of "the speech, the events, the customs and the appearance" of his beloved native state.⁵⁹ Accordingly, then, he called this first historical novel of his Arundel (Arundel having been the original name of Kennebunkport—the name was changed in 1821). Arundel was published in 1930. It was followed, in short order, by The Lively Lady (1931), Rabble in Arms (1933), and Captain Caution (1934).

None of these volumes became bestsellers, or anything close to it. But Roberts persisted in his chosen course, and his next novel, Northwest Passage (1937), not only made the bestseller lists but was also sold to Hollywood and became the basis for the February 1940 motion picture of the same name, starring Spencer Tracy, Robert Young, and Walter Brennan. So successful was this cinematic debut at the box office that by October, another, much less ambitious film had been quickly thrown together to cash in on the new Roberts boom—an adaptation of Captain Caution, starring Victor Mature. Roberts's next two novels, Oliver Wiswell (1940) and Lydia Bailey (1946), were bestsellers as well, and the latter title was adapted by Hollywood for release in the late spring of 1952. All this activity by Roberts on the bestseller lists and the silver screen during the late '30s, the 40s, and the early '50s stimulated new interest in—and new sales for—his earlier novels as well. In 1957 he was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize for "his historical novels which have long contributed to the creation of greater interest in our early American history."

In a nutshell, then, Roberts's novels attracted relatively little attention for several years, only to become the cat's meow and the toast of the town by the end of the first decade in which he occupied himself writing them. To what may we attribute this sudden and very definite turnaround in public opinion?

Well, consider the nature of most of Roberts's novels. His first two novels of the American Revolution, Arundel and Rabble in Arms, focus on Benedict Arnold—his unsuccessful expedition against Quebec in Arundel, his victories at Lake Champlain and Saratoga in Rabble in Arms. Roberts maintained to the end of his life that Arnold had been "the most brilliant soldier of the Revolution."⁶⁰ Moreover, in his third and final novel of the Revolution, Oliver Wiswell, Roberts describes the last year of the conflict through the eyes of his title character, a loyalist spy who joins Arnold when the most brilliant soldier switches sides. Linda Orlando may be overstating the case when she writes that Roberts "explained and defended the treason of General Benedict Arnold" and that Roberts considered Arnold "misunderstood," and "not the villain history had depicted him to be." But there can be little doubt that Roberts's novels were taken in just this way by many of his contemporaries.

Now, generations of Americans had been taught in school that the revolutionaries of 1776 were on the side of the angels, that the views of the loyalists were the merest rubbish, scarcely worth recounting, and that Benedict Arnold was a Traitor with a capital "T," an utterly evil and despicable man, as close as you could come in American history to the Devil himself. Moreover, the England of the 1930s was no more likely to win any popularity contests held in the United States than was the England of George III. As Charles Callan Tansill reminds us, it was only twenty years earlier, in the first years of World War I, long before the United States had become involved in that conflict, that the British government had commenced seizing "American vessels under such specious pretexts that even our Anglophile President lost his patience and called for some action that would protect American rights."⁶¹ And now, two decades later, the British were up to the same tricks all over again.

Up to the middle of November 1939 the British had detained thirty-three American ships for examination, and had removed cargoes, wholly or in part, from seven of them. After November 4, under the terms of the Neutrality Act, American ships were forbidden to carry cargoes in combat areas in European waters. It was expected in Washington that British detentions would sharply decrease after this date. But the British Government, with the same irritating unconcern for American feelings that it showed during the years 1914 to 1917, continued the practice of detention and even compelled American ships to proceed to control ports within the combat area which was closed to them by the express terms of the Neutrality Act.⁶²

Not that this was the full extent of the beef most Americans felt they had with the English in the 1930s. There was also the fact that, in the popular mind at least, the great war the English had helped persuade the United States to enter in 1917 had been a disastrous waste. As Thomas Fleming puts it,

Disillusion with the American experience in World War I permeated the nation. The soaring idealism with which Democrat Woodrow Wilson had led the country into that sanguinary conflict "to make the world safe for democracy" had ended in the vengeful Treaty of Versailles. Thanks in large part to that document, Europe's statesmen had created a world in which democracy soon became ridiculed and dictatorships of the left and right ran rampant. Worse, America's democratic allies, England and France, had welshed on repaying billions of dollars loaned to them to defeat Germany.⁶³

As late as the late summer of 1941, only a few months before the Pearl Harbor attack, Fleming points out, "polls revealed 68 percent of the people preferred to stay out [of the war in Europe], even if that meant a German victory over England and Russia."⁶⁴

The confidence of those Americans who held that position was fast eroding by the summer of 41, however. It had been eroding, with gathering speed, ever since 1937, when the intellectual leadership of the "liberal" wing of the Democratic Party—which dominated American politics from 1932 to 1952—began revising its view of U.S. foreign policy. As James J. Martin reminds us,

[m]any American liberals were warm supporters of Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy which led us into war in 1917. Disillusioned with the outcome of this first American crusade in foreign lands, they repudiated their previous position on the First World War, bitterly opposed the Treaty of Versailles, seriously criticized the motives and conduct of our wartime Allies, adopted and supported revisionist historical writing, and became the main bulwark and shocktroops of the peace movement and disarmament for nearly two decades between the two World Wars.⁶⁵

As Martin sees it, liberals in the '30s displayed "[a] benign, friendly and optimistic attitude towards the 'collective security' foreign policy of Soviet Russia" but were "shocked and repelled by what was presented in the public prints and personal reports as the nature of the Fascist systems in Italy and Germany." Gradually, but with rapidly accelerating speed, they allowed themselves to be persuaded by articles, including editorials and reviews, "on the subject of United States foreign policy and our relations with the rest of the world by [...] authors, journalists, essayists, professors and related specialists in the realm of the social studies, in a [...] group of highly influential periodicals circulated nationally in the United States."⁶⁶

These "authors, journalists, essayists, professors and related specialists" were, of course, the people Friedrich Hayek labeled "the intellectuals" in his famous essay "The Intellectuals and Socialism." Intellectuals, Hayek declared, were "professional secondhand dealers in ideas," or, differently formulated, "professional interpreters of ideas." The intellectual, he wrote, is

neither[...] the original thinker nor[...] the scholar or expert in a particular field of thought. The typical intellectual need be neither: he need not possess special knowledge of anything in particular, nor need he even be particularly intelligent, to perform his role as intermediary in the spreading of ideas. What qualifies him for his job is the wide range of subjects on which he can readily talk and write, and a position or habits through which he becomes acquainted with new ideas sooner than those to whom he addresses himself.⁶⁷

It is the intellectual class, Hayek contends, that exercises the greatest influence in "shaping public opinion."⁶⁸

There is little that the ordinary man of today learns about events or ideas except through the medium of this class; and outside our special fields of work we are in this respect almost all ordinary men, dependent for our information and instruction on those who make it their job to keep abreast of opinion. It is the intellectuals in this sense who decide what views and opinions are to reach us, which facts are important enough to be told to us, and in what form and from what angle they are to be presented. Whether we shall ever learn of the results of the work of the expert and the original thinker depends mainly on their decision.⁶⁹

The intellectuals' "selection from the multitude of new ideas presenting themselves at every moment creates the characteristic climate of opinion, the dominant Weltanschauung of a period." And it can do so more quickly than one might expect, for "once the more active part of the intellectuals has been converted to a set of beliefs, the process by which these become generally accepted is almost automatic and irresistible." ⁷⁰ Thus it was that the intellectual leadership of the "liberal" wing of the Democratic Party in the 1930s brought off the considerable feat of turning its members around 180 degrees—from doves to hawks, as we say today—in a mere handful of years. But to accomplish this, the intellectuals had to first accomplish a number of lesser public relations triumphs. One of these was rehabilitating England's tarnished reputation. Martin notes that before 1937, "cordiality toward England was not a feature of editorial policy" in the "liberal" press. On the other hand, he reasons, "[t]he sudden growth of deep affection for England at war after a lengthy period of often grievous criticism could hardly have been possible if a basic, underlying favorable pre-disposition had not been lying dormant during this spell of coolness."⁷¹

Perhaps it was this same "underlying favorable pre-disposition" that led the reading public to suddenly embrace the pro-British novels of Kenneth Roberts, after years of ignoring them. Or perhaps, as the efforts of the "liberal" intelligentsia to reshape public opinion on the crisis in Europe began to succeed, the pro-British stance of Roberts's novels began to seem more palatable—even appealing. Or did a confused American public, still only partially weaned from its suspicion of England and its distrust of what George Washington had called "foreign entanglements," reach out for Kenneth Roberts's novels out of a felt need to find a way to justify the friendlier attitude toward the English that already seemed well on its way to becoming the new conventional wisdom?

We don't know. But we do know this: history is, as Cicero insisted, "the witness of the times." Note the plural. History is the witness both of the times it describes and of the times in which it is written, for each generation revises history to accord more closely with its own particular values and preoccupations. Roberts's meticulously researched depictions of the American Revolution tell us much about the times they depict, but they have much to reveal as well about the times in which they were published and first found a mass audience. For the writers who gain the widest fame and favor with the public in any given period are the writers who do the best job of reflecting back to that public whatever are its own major preoccupations—the ideas, the dreams, the notions of what things in life are the most and least important, most and least worthy of a person's attention and concern.