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Poverty and Progress Revisited: A Response to Riess, Frisch, and Pessen

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Stephan Thernstrom
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Extract

It is a rare author, I suspect, who is capable of assessing the impact and influence of his own work with any insight. I do not pretend to be one of them. I cannot venture an opinion as to how well these three interesting papers succeed in illuminating that question. While reading them I felt like Huck and Tom hiding away in the church gallery to hear the eulogy at their own funeral. The minister:

drew such pictures of the graces, the winning ways, and the rare promise of the lost lads that every soul there, thinking he recognized those pictures, felt a pang in remembering that he had persistently blinded himself to them always before, and had as persistently seen only faults and flaws in the poor boys. The minister related many a touching incident in the lives of the departed, too, which illustrated their sweet, generous natures, and the people could easily see, now, how noble and beautiful those episodes were, and remembered with grief that at the time they occurred they seemed rank rascalities, well deserving of the cowhide [Twain, 1875: 151 — 152].

Type
Comment and Debate: Thernstrom’s Poverty and Progress: A Retrospective After Twenty Years
Information
Social Science History , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , Spring 1986 , pp. 33 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1986 

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