Platt's History, and Ours Clyde Griffen
W
e invent our past, partly to comprehend the available historical record and partly to meet our current needs and perspectives. Those needs and perspectives change, and so does the evidence available, especially when the time in which we live makes us look at aspects of the past that did not concern earlier historians. That change over time is the reason for this volume. Through most of the twentieth century, one book written near its beginning has been the major source for Poughkeepsians' awareness of their local past. Our purpose here, after an initial assessment of the characteristics, virtues, and limitations of Edmund Platt's pioneering chronicle, is to break new ground in the writing of the city's history by pursuing some of the special interests of our own times. When Platt undertook the writing of a history of Poughkeepsie in 1903, he joined a host of amateurs, many of them journalists like himself, who had been publishing local histories in great numbers since the 1880s. They provided for the leading citizens of their time a usable past, a chronicle of local development in which citizens could take pride and which gave them a reassuring sense of community harmony. Their works continue to be read by members of the community they describe, and the more gifted writers, like Platt, remain very useful for professional historians. Despite the idiosyncrasies of individual authors and the distinctive careers of individual localities, these amateur city histories tend to be similar in major features and in general outlook. The similarity stems partly from the frequency with which formulas for organizing these urban biographies were supplied to authors by companies which specialized in producing city and county histories. As Kathleen Conzen notes, the usual formula included "chronological narrative of political and governmental milestones; recitation of the community's contributions to such national events as wars and economic crises; brief chronicles of the main economic, social, and cultural institutions of the town; and often a 'mug book' celebrating the lives of individual citizens."' We do not know whether Platt ever read such a formula, although he and the publishers of the Eagle originally had a contract with F. T. Smiley of New York for "a History of Poughkeepsie, similar to the histories he had been publishing for other cities." But Platt's emphases and organization are very similar, right down to his biographical appendix with its flattering sketches of more than fifty individuals and businesses who were thereby rewarded for subscribing to the book. In his conclusion, Platt says that he has tried "to show the progress and development of Poughkeepsie. . . to give some account of the part its citizens have taken in all of the great National political movements, as well as in the solution of various local problems; and to show the beginnings and something of the progress of all important local enterprises and institutions."2 Undoubtedly Platt's task in organizing his history was simplified somewhat by this widely-used contemporary formula for urban biography. But we should not underestimate the challenge a sophisticated observer like Platt faced in applying 6
