In Memoriam
John Phillip Reid
We include below a remembrance in honor of John Phillip Reid, longstanding ASLH member and the first Honorary Fellow of the Society, named in 1988. It is written by John’s former student, and then long-time colleague and friend William (Bill) E. Nelson, who is himself an Honorary Fellow (2011). Hendrik Hartog, well known to legal historians in all fields and an Honorary Fellow (2015), also credits his course in legal history with John at NYU Law School as his first (and inspirational) introduction to the field. The book on the Overland Trail that Bill mentions is Law for the Elephant: Property and Social Behavior on the Overland Trail (San Marino, Calif., 1980). We would also suggest that John’s Chief Justice: The Judicial World of Charles Doe (Cambridge, Mass., 1967) on the nineteenth-century New Hampshire Supreme Court, is a captivating study of an innovative and influential (if long overlooked) state judge. Whatever our members choose to read of John’s enormous oeuvre, we know that his career and mentorship are among the most storied in our field. He will be sorely missed.
John Phillip Reid
John Phillip Reid, who died on April 26, 2022, just short of his ninety-second birthday, was a man of an era that was rapidly coming to a close when he was born on May 17, 1930. For Reid, the New Deal was an anathema. By teaching people to rely on government to solve their problems, the New Deal, in his mind, destroyed the self-reliance that made the American people great. Reid’s own self-reliance was extraordinary; it overcame his hearing deficiency. I remember after spending a day with him at an academic conference, how exhausted he was from working to hear talks that had been a relaxing pleasure for me to listen to. I also remember John give up trying when his reliance on himself could not overcome the obstacles of old age.
John Reid also hated the bureaucracy through which the New Deal governed. He saw bureaucracy as destructive of community. Community, in Reid’s view, was the only mechanism through which democratic governance can occur. As he saw it, the destruction of community and the undermining of individual self-reliance would result in the end of liberty and its replacement by arbitrary rule.
Reid did not cast his vote in elections to accomplish some policy objective or to avoid some terrible political result. John Reid’s vote constituted a moral statement that he made chiefly for himself. Thus, he made a moral statement by refusing to vote for Donald Trump in 2016. But he did not cast a vote to keep Trump from carrying New Hampshire. That would have required him to vote for Hillary Clinton, whom he viewed as a New Dealer, which his moral views prohibited him from doing. So he wasted his vote – but made his moral statement – by voting for a third-party candidate.
I have begun this remembrance by describing John Reid’s political views because those views informed his scholarship. Reid was the most prolific scholar ever to write in the field of American legal history, and he undoubtedly will remain that for the foreseeable future. He published a total of 26 books, some 100 articles, and a number of important book reviews. He was able to write so much, in part, because he held an old-fashioned view of what historical scholarship ought and ought not to be. It ought not be political but should merely report and summarize what an historian finds in archival sources. Reid thus did not struggle with explicating the deeper meaning of his writings; when we read his work in progress in NYU’s Legal History Colloquium, we would often argue with him that his work had some particular importance that he should emphasize, and he would routinely ignore us and publish the work without exploring that deeper significance. His work simply reported what his extraordinary eye for interesting material – an eye that few other historians ever matched – had spotted in some archive, leaving it to his readers to use the material as they wished.
John Reid’s reviews of two important books illustrate well what he believed history ought and ought not to be. The first was his negative review of Morton Horwitz’s first volume of The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860. Reid saw the book as a political argument and not as a report of exciting new and interesting archival material, and he criticized it accordingly. The second book that Reid criticized was Bernard Bailyn’s Pamphlets of the American Revolution, the introduction to which was subsequently published as Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Reid observed that the people whom Bailyn viewed as making ideological arguments were in fact lawyers making legal arguments. Reid’s observation led him somewhat later to study the arguments of those lawyers in detail and to write and publish his four-volume, monumental opus, The Constitutional History of the American Revolution.
What Reid did not do was dig into the deeper significance of his constitutional history work. Bailyn had written Ideological Origins to show that Americans had fought the Revolution not to protect economic interests but to defend political and constitutional ideals. Reid never tried to show whether the lawyers who made the arguments that Bailyn had discovered believed in those arguments deeply or were merely hired guns defending the economic interests of the clients who retained them. Were the lawyers simply doing the best they could manipulating the seventeenth-century precedents that they could find and twist to support their clients’ positions? If so, then Bailyn had at the very least overstated the importance of ideas in bringing about the American Revolution, and economic factors remained important. Reid never addressed this major historiographical issue; he merely reported on what the lawyers said and wrote.
I have noted that John Reid’s reports on what he found in the archives were apolitical summaries of what was in there. But the eyes he brought to bear to search the archives were highly political. I noted at the outset that Reid believed in self-reliance as the basis for human achievement and in community as the basis for governance. He went looking for archival sources in which he could find support for his beliefs. In early books on the Cherokee Indians, for example, he found communities of self-reliant warriors that governed themselves without bureaucracy or formal mechanisms of coercion, and he portrayed those communities elegantly. Arguably his most important work came later when he wrote about the self-reliant individuals on the Overland Trail who formed themselves into communities for self-governance when the coercive bureaucracy of the state was absent from the wasteland between Missouri and California.
Ultimately, John Phillip Reid displayed profound wisdom in his understanding of what history ought and ought not to be. He understood that historians can choose topics for whatever reasons they wish, political or otherwise. He chose at least some of his topics politically, in order to display to people that it is possible, because people had lived that way in the past, to live self-reliantly in noncoercive communities even in the present. But Reid also understood that, once he had chosen a topic, he had to report objectively on what he learned from the archives about that topic. As an historian, he could not go beyond the archives to persuade readers to choose his preferred way of life. They had to make that choice for themselves, on some nonhistorical ground.
Many historians today disagree with John Reid’s limited view of what history ought and ought not to be. They seek to use history as public intellectuals in a public, political forum. Their arguments are designed not merely to display what is possible, but to persuade readers to choose their favored possibility over alternatives. In remembering Reid, however, we need to recognize that perhaps he was correct in his more old-fashioned view.
William E. Nelson