During the 1830s Vermonters had largely come to accept the sobering fact that their golden age had ended, that no longer would an investment be almost certain to be rewarded nor would rapid growth take up slack and obscure economic problems. After having been the fastest growing state in the Union at the turn of the century, in the 1830s Vermont's population increased by only 11,000 souls, a meagre four per-cent. Without the old boom psychology for support during this turbulent decade, Vermonters coped with chronic cholera epidemics and severe economic dislocations and at the same time experienced a virtual exodus that caused one-third of their towns to lose population. The social fabric clearly reflected the strain as the society desperately sought outlets, and flocked to a variety of movements. Many readily responded to revivalism and, forgetting the teaching of their orthodox divines, easily adopted the word of prophets and millennialists. They turned to egalitarian reforms, anti-slavery agitation, and abolitionism. In politics they rejected the tradional parties of J. Q. Adams and Henry Clay or Jackson and Van Buren for the social nostrums of Anti-Mason candidates.

We have learned recently from the work of a number of historians that the process of national mobilisation and the erection of unprecedented controls over industry during World War I offered to important groups of American liberals models for permanent collectivist reform and institutional renewal. The ease with which such controls were dismantled ought not to obscure the remarkable attraction they appeared to have in 1917 and 1918. It is clear that agencies such as the War Industries Board, the Railroad Administration, the War Labor Board, the Inquiry, and the National Board for Historical Service attracted not only the wartime enthusiasm of intellectuals; these agencies were seen to contain potential for peacetime use.

In his influential study, Art and Life in America, Oliver W. Larkin describes the famous Armory Show of 1913 as an ‘explosion’ in the history of American art. Few would quarrel with this view; indeed, the author's choice of the noun does no more than proper justice to the sudden and powerful impact of the Armory event upon the American public. Certainly, at least with regard to a popular audience for art ‘explosion’ is an appropriate description. Unlike the public, on the other hand, the select group of artists represented by works in the Show itself proved that they were ready for that historic moment. They had practised and created, and over the years the biographical accounts of how they prepared themselves and their art have gradually filled an important place in the larger explanation of why the ‘explosion’ went off at all.

‘The composer’, begins the chapter on music in Harold Stearns's 1922 compendium, Civilization in the United States, ‘here lives in an atmosphere that is, at the worst, good-natured contempt. Contempt, mind you, not for himself … but for his very art …At best, what he gets is unintelligent admiration, not as an artist, but as a freak’. The best that the composer can expect, the article continues, is that by expressing himself he may, by some miraculous accident, express the great remote and inarticulate ‘American soul’. This same year, 1922, saw the publication, at the author's expense, of 114 Songs by the remote but very articulate composer and insurance agent, Charles E. Ives. This book of songs was a result of an effort, as the composer put it, to clean house – to hang out on the line for all to see the result of twenty-five years of ignored composition. When the songs and other compositions of this incredibly creative period were sorted, one would find, as the Stearns article suggested, an expression of the American soul, no longer so remote and inarticulate.

M. W. – I'd like to begin with a question about the Fugitive group. Would you say that there was any special critical emphasis in these early Fugitive discussions of poetry? You have said before that there's a fallacy in assuming there was a systematic programme behind the Fugitive group.

Indian activists have recently complained about the pernicious attentions of white Indian ‘experts’, but they are likely to endure these attentions so long as their people retain a distinct cultural identity and national status. Unlike anthropologists and administrators, historians have not shaped the public policies applied to the native Americans, and so their expertise has seemed comparatively harmless. Yet having played a considerable part in misrepresenting the Indians, scholars have a duty to set the record straight with a minimum of unprofessional moralizing.