Subject: Brent Tarter's "The Grandees of Government"
Date: Tuesday 10 December 2013. 6:05 pm
To: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history 
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From: Jim Glanville <[log in to unmask]>

Fellow List Members:

Nearly three months have passed since the launch of Brent Tarter's book 
"The Grandees of Government."  Apart from some good Public Radio 
coverage at launch time, this transformative book has to date garnered 
little other attention.

Dismayed that no Virginia newspaper has yet published a review of the 
book, I presumed to write one. Its draft is copied down below at the end 
of this posting. The review appeared last Saturday under the heading 
"Tarter: A must-read for today's politicians" in lightly edited form as 
an opinion piece in the Radford Journal (http://goo.gl/s38FUT) and the 
Montgomery-News Messenger (http://goo.gl/nKoomm).

Absent also, has been discussion of Grandees of Government on this list 
serv. That absence dismays and surprises me, given the book's obvious 
importance as a powerful and unprecedented piece of work about the 
nature of Virginia history. Frankly, I never expected to live to see 
such a work in print.

On page 365 Tarter writes: "[Pat] Robertson often related the divine 
interventions that assisted his ministry and on his live television 
broadcasts asserted the importance of faith, prayer, and divine 
intervention by reciting episodes of faith healing. Like many Christians 
of an earlier time, Sir William Berkeley in seventeenth-century 
Virginia, for one, Robertson firmly believed that God worked miracles on 
earth every day and that the Devil worked mischief on earth every day, 
too." That sentence, conjoining 1660 to today's 700 Club, encapsulates 
the breadth of Tarter's historical vision.

Any one of the book's fifteen essays is deserving of commentary from 
professional historians and others. I would like to read such commentary 
here.

Aspects of the book that are of particular interest to me include 
Virginia history written as "Myths of the Old Dominion," the long-term 
intimidation of professional historians by the Virginia establishment, 
and the baleful role in misshaping  Virginia history played by Richmond 
newspapers writers.

"Myths of the Old Dominion" is the title of a 1947 essay by the Richmond 
novelist James Branch Cabell, who once wrote that conventional Virginia 
history "commemorates not what did happen but what ought to have 
happened." I, like Cabell, came to that conclusion late in life. Tarter 
expounds on the mythic nature of Virginia history in several essays and 
tellingly quotes Scribner's editor Lawrence Burnette, Jr., writing in 
1957, that the Virginia saga "has taken on so many of the qualities of 
folklore that it is now largely academic to attempt the separation of 
fact from lore," (p. 348).

Tarter writes that "no professional historian undertook to write a full 
history of Virginia at any time during the entire [twentieth] century," 
(p. 349). As an illustration of the intimidation that must have silenced 
the professionals, Tarter relates the following anecdote about Dr. 
Marvin W. Schlagel, a Longwood College history professor, who was 
selected in the 1950s by a General-Assembly-appointed Commission to 
develop a Virginia high school history text book. Schlagel complained 
that the Commission kept tight control of his work simply by refusing to 
approve it and that the Commission's desire was for history books that 
kept the past unchanged. After the dust had settled, Schlagel spoke at a 
history symposium at Longwood College and closed his lecture by 
sarcastically remarking that "the opinions expressed in this paper are 
not necessarily those of the speaker" (p. 348).

Richmond newspaper writers of mythic Virginia history (or even worse) 
include Douglas Southall Freeman (pp. 334, 340-42,346, and 392); 
Virginius Dabney (pp. 317-18, 320. 322, 334, 372, and 392); and J. J. 
Kilpatrick (381-82). It is noteworthy that Tarter finally puts in print 
a realistic assessment of these men and their roles in perpetuating the 
myths. Although Tarter does not mention him, I was recently instructed 
that the "sort of" Richmond journalist Clifford Dowdey may be added to 
the list.

In addition to "The Sprit of Virginia" (which is the essay referred to 
in the above three paragraphs), others of Tarter's essays that I have 
read with profit (and will read again) are "For the Glory of God and the 
Good of the Plantation" with its discussion of the first Virginia 
Assembly; "An Anglo-Saxon Electorate" with its discussion of how the 
voter franchise was closely controlled for decades after the Civil War; 
"I Was Born Black"; and "Public Good and Private Interest" which nicely 
summarizes Virginia political history of the late twentieth century that 
both Tarter and I lived through and participated in.

Go out and buy a copy for yourself as well as an extra one for your 
favorite politician.

Jim

Jim Glanville
Former Fincastle County

PS: Anticipating the inevitable establishment criticism that I am not a 
Virginian (though I have lived here for 45 years) I note that 
Christopher Newport married into the Glanville family in 1595 and that 
Francis Glanville was an early investor in the Virginia Company.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Review of The Grandees of Government: The Origins and Persistence of 
Undemocratic Politics in Virginia" by Brent Tarter (University of 
Virginia Press, October 2013, 464 pp., $35.00). Historian Brent Tarter 
spent almost forty years at the Library of Virginia in Richmond and 
probably has a more comprehensive view of Virginia's history than anyone 
living. He assuredly does not subscribe to the romanticized and 
self-deceptive view of Virginia history succumbed to by many popular 
Virginia history writers and journalists. Interviewed recently on Public 
Radio, Tarter said that from the 1880s to the 1960s "[The Grandees] left 
out the black people, they left out the women, and maintained a 
political economy that favored the same sorts of people for 
generations." The book is a stunning series of fifteen essays, arranged 
chronologically from Jamestown settlement to the late twentieth century. 
In them, Tarter portrays Virginia's government as always being under the 
domination of one or another undemocratic cabal. Using the pejorative 
term "grandees" to refer to such cabals goes all the way back to a 1676 
Declaration by Nathaniel Bacon during his Virginia rebellion. At various 
times, Virginia was controlled by tobacco planter oligarchs, land 
barons, railroad men, and the "Byrdocracy." In his thirteenth essay "The 
Spirit of Virginia," Tarter observes that in the twentieth century the 
eastern cliques were at long last challenged by pro-democracy leaders 
from western Virginia such as Martin Hutchinson, Ted Dalton, and Linwood 
Holton. Had there ever been an Un-Virginian Activities Committee of the 
Virginia House of Representatives, Tarter writes, such men would have 
come to its attention. Tarter's thought-provoking book should be on the 
reading list of every elected official in Virginia. Go out and buy a 
copy for your favorite politician.

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