George Bancroft: Brahmin Rebel
by Russel Blaine Nye
Summary
Russel Blaine Nye calls his subject a Brahmin rebel because George Bancroft was born into exactly the kind of proper New England family, Phillips Exeter, Harvard, a doctorate from Göttingen in Germany, that should have produced a conventional Federalist gentleman, and instead produced one of Jacksonian democracy's most articulate defenders. The book follows Bancroft from that patrician education through the decision, startling to his own social class, to embrace the Democratic Party and its expansive, populist vision of American government, a choice that put him at odds with nearly all of Boston's elite for the rest of his career.
Nye gives real attention to Bancroft's parallel career as a historian, tracing the decades he spent writing and constantly revising his sweeping History of the United States, a multivolume project telling the nation's story as a story of providence and democratic progress, work he continued alongside active political office rather than instead of it. The book follows his single term as Secretary of the Navy under James Polk, when Bancroft used existing legal authority rather than waiting for new legislation to establish the Naval Academy at Annapolis on the site of an abandoned army post, essentially building the institution before Congress had formally created it.
The biography closes with Bancroft's later diplomatic career, as minister to Britain and then to Prussia and a unified Germany, where he negotiated treaties on naturalization that gave immigrants clearer legal footing between their old countries and their new one, and arbitrated a boundary dispute between the United States and Britain over the San Juan Islands. Nye writes as an academic historian tracing how one man's political convictions and scholarly ambitions reinforced each other across six decades, and it suits a reader interested less in a single dramatic episode than in how a working historian, diplomat, and politician built one long, coherent public career by keeping all three roles running together.
Historical Context & Significance
George Bancroft: Brahmin Rebel won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Russel Blaine Nye, a young Michigan State professor of English who would go on to help found American popular culture studies as an academic field, work that eventually mattered more to his own scholarly reputation than this early biography did.
Bancroft himself remains a significant but not widely read figure today, remembered inside historical circles chiefly for founding the Naval Academy and for a multivolume history whose romantic, providence driven view of American progress fell out of academic fashion long before Nye wrote about him. Nye's biography, arriving as that older style of history was already being superseded by more skeptical twentieth century scholarship, gave Bancroft's own long and genuinely consequential career its fullest modern telling, even as Bancroft's own historical writing had, by the 1940s, become more a historical artifact than an active influence.