tenants, and agricultural laborers. "His theoretical categories take no account of the wage-labor relationship and comprehend no exploitation except that which arises in the realms of credit and commodity exchange." Like the Populists themselves, Goodwyn fails to understand the importance of "public ownership of the whole industrial sector as the necessary precondition" of farmers' independence. James Green, after denying that Marxist historians and "capitalist historians" subscribe to the same model of progress, unwittingly proceeds to bear out the justice of this charge. Small forms are "inefficient," Green declares; and Populism, a defense of small farms and "traditional ways of life," was a "rudimentary," "petty-bourgeois" form of social protest. Like Hofstadter, Green dismisses Populism as retrospective and nostalgic; this convergence of liberal and Marxist interpretations, as Goodwyn notes, raises the "intellectual inheritance" behind it to a "new level of visibility." The "condescension" that runs through these interpretations, according to Goodwyn, grows out of the "American historical tradition of conveying the national experience as a purposeful and generally progressive saga, almost divinely exonerated ... from the vicissitudes elsewhere afflicting the human condition." Their acceptance of this tradition, he thinks, may help to explain why American historians, unlike American novelists, have made so little impression on readers outside the United States.

American historical writing, to put it another way, takes little account of the possibility of tragedy—missed opportunities, fatal choices, conclusive and irrevocable defeats. ^* History has to have a happy ending. Thus

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"Are there no calamities in history?" Brownson asked in 1843. "Nothing tragic? May we never weep over the defeated? ... Must we always desert the cause as soon as fortune forsakes it, and bind ourselves to the cause which is in the ascendant, and hurrah in the crowd that throw up their caps in honor of the conqueror?" In our day as

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