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 <[log in to unmask]> 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. ______________________________________ To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html