Crosspost: A Two-For-One Review On The Attractions Of Eugenics

After teaching a semester of the history of medicine in the U.S., I keep my ear to the ground for news in that field that intersects with intellectual history (including the history of ideas). With that, this H-Law review---which I received courtesy of H-SCI-MED-TECH, will be of interest to those who think, occasionally or otherwise, about eugenics, legal history, and aspects of social control.

Lynne Curry ably recounts the new work of two scholars, Paul A. Lombardo and Victoria F. Nourse, and shapes their topics into a commentary on the relevance of eugenics history to current legal and social debates about our genetic inheritance. The title of Curry's review, "Intellectual Seduction: The Promise and Perils of Eugenics," draws from a line in Nourse's book. I doubt the history of the emotional attachment to eugenics is a focus, but appreciate the nod to that aspect of the history of ideas.

One could write a powerful history of fear in the United States as it relates to loss, both individual and social, of status, power, beauty, the other, random violence, degradation by disease, etc. One might also link that fear to both conservative and liberal impulses.

It's amazing how even succinct reviews of books will open your mind to new areas of thought.

Slightly Off Topic: Government Intrusion Into Historiography

I just saw this. I love the universal applicability of the committee title: Commission to Counteract Attempts at Falsifying History to Damage the Interests of ____fill-in-the-blank____. In this case it's reminiscent of Soviet Russia, or Animal Farm, or any run-of-the-mill Communist endeavor.

Tongue-in-cheek, I ask what would a Commission to Counteract Attempts at Falsifying History to Damage the Interests of the United States do? What would be the fictional order of the Commission's tasks and/or topics?

1. New Deal History
2. Slavery
3. Christianity and the Founders
4. Reagan: the man vs. his policies
5. 1960s
6. Andrew Jackson "the hero"
7. Clinton: the man vs. his policies
8. Welfare history
9. The Confederacy
10. Universal health care vs. the AMA

In sum, every object of the Culture Wars could involve an investigation by this Commission. Um, right.

So, my message to this new Russian Commission? If your task list is anything like ours would be, good luck! This might require all of your excess oil funds.

In this case, the First Amendment is actually cost efficient. I'm no big fan of the phrase "market of ideas," but one has to trust---to some degree---that the truth will out. And I've never known a successful government intrusion into the historiography debate (excepting perhaps the EU and Holocaust denial). - TL

"How does it Feel to be a Problem?" or the Etymology of "the Negro Problem"

This is not so much a post as a plea for help. Throughout my dissertation work, I've been thinking about terminology largely in a functional way. How do I describe the vast system of discrimination and injustice that African Americans faced during my period (interwar)? Often "segregation" is used as a shorthand, but it does not adequately convey the range of racism from the North to the South. Do people think of Richard Wright being rejected from every hotel in New York City (even in Harlem) in the 1930s when I say segregation? Plus, there were whites who supported segregation but condemned lynching.

Similarly, how do I discuss individuals and groups that reacted to this system on various levels? Activist is a nice catch-all word, but not all acted directly (is education activism? is avoiding harassment? is unconscious protest? is a speech? an interracial friendship? is breaking tools?). Civil rights is another catch-all term, but many groups did not actually fight for civil rights--they fought for economic justice, or they encouraged interracial cooperation, or they protected and cared for the physical needs of new migrants to the north. Another term that has come into popular usage to describe all resistance is the Black Liberation Movement.

During the interwar period, there were two or three common terms used. One is "interracialism," but this was often used expressly to connote cooperation between the races, not necessarily supporting African American culture or caring for economics. I've noticed it used much more among Christians, women, and white groups (see my hopefully soon to be published article on YWCA national student secretary Juliette Derricotte). Another term is "race relations." This could be the same as interracialism, but it is much wider in intent. Race relations included protesting lynching, supporting African Americans within all black environs, and working with whites without necessarily establishing close friendships (as Derricotte supported).

Finally, there was the term "Negro Problem." It was ubiquitous, such that even African Americans used it (though I have heard this denied). I have seen Du Bois use it even after his famous discussion of it in Souls of Black Folk, referenced in the title of this post. Sometimes in an ironic way. Sometimes in an evaluative way. And sometimes simply to get beyond the simple fact of acknowledging there was a problem and on to the weightier issue of solving it. Most African American intellectuals (at least that I study) by the 1930s resisted "Negro Problem" when they used it. More commonly, they tried to use a long sentence or paragraph to explain just what issues they were discussing. And they argued that it was much more a "white problem" than a black one.

Paternalistic whites also interested in solving the "Negro Problem" tended to use the term with less irony or critique. Many wanted to help blacks, without interacting with them as peers. And, unconsciously or not, they viewed the problem as if it would not exist if blacks were not in the country--in other words, as a function of the existence of blacks, not as a function of white racism. For example, at the first Swarthmore Race Relations Institute in 1933, a newspaper summary explained that this had been discussed (the question marks come from unreadable parts of my photocopy):

In discussing the subject "Race as a World Problem" a special effort was made to impress the fact upon the minds of the gathering that the American race problem is by no means [???] greater problem of minority groups everywhere. An earnest appeal to all to [?] an objective point of view as a means of seeing the problem more clearly and acting on it more intelligently was voiced repeatedly. Striking similarities between our problem and those of Japan, India, South Africa, and Germany were pointed out. Analogies to the Mexican problem in Texas and the Oriental problem in California were also drawn.*

This quote recognizes similarities between German persecution of Jews and Japanese persecution of the Chinese with white American's treatment of black Americans. Yet the language still fundamentally sounds like it is the minorities' fault for being a "problem."

The Race Relations Institute was composed of the leading scholars, white and black, of the day gathering to discuss specific techniques in improving race relations, drawn from objective, scholarly research. (It was held a month before the Second Amenia Conference, sponsored by the NAACP, which forms the lynch pin of my dissertation. The Institute and the Amenia Conference shared several participants, but the Amenia conference was almost all black, so the terms of the debate were quite different).

Anyway. I would like to know if anyone has ever studied the etymology of the "Negro Problem." Instead of simply searching for my own language, I would like to actively analyze the language used within the discussions I am critiquing. Perhaps this seems obvious, but there are a lot of other things going on within the discussions that I had been studying first. My initial search hasn't brought up anything yet. Do you have recommendations?

I leave you with this excellent quote from James Baldwin:

What I try to suggest is that the terms in which people speak about the Negro problem have nothing to do with human beings. There seems to be some extraordinary assumption on the part of a great many people in the American Republic that Negroes are either saints or devils, that the word 'Negro' describes something, and it doesn't. There isn't such a thing as a Negro, but there is such a thing as a boy, or a man, or a woman, who may be brown, or white, or green, or whatever; but when you say 'the Negro problem,' you create a big monolith, and beneath this wall are thousands of millions of human beings' lives which are being destroyed because you want to deal with an abstraction.**

*Hunt, Charles L. "Swarthmore College Race Relations Meeting Successful" [Tribune] August 31, 1933 Box 9 RG 2, Committee on Race Relations Collection, Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College. Hunt was then at the University of Philadelphia, a "Temple U. graduate and recipient of a scholarship to the Institute of Race Relations held last month at Swarthmore. He writes of the Institute in this week's Tribune."

** Baldwin, James, and François Bondy. “The Negro Problem.” Transition, no. 75/76 (1997): 82-86. Reprint of a 1964 interview.

Must I Paint You a Picture?

Over at the New York Times blogs, documentary film-maker and visual historian Errol Morris has just wrapped up his long series entitled Bamboozling Ourselves, which might be of interest to readers of this blog.

Bamboozling Ourselves explores the case of Han van Meegeren, the 20th century's most famous art forger, through the lens of two recent books on van Meegeren and his paintings. From the 1920s through the 1940s, the Dutch van Meegeren painted a series of "Vermeers" which were authenticated and praised by art historians and critics. One of them was eventually bought during World War II by Hermann Göring. Accused of collaboration after the war, van Meegeren came clean as a forger and claimed that he had intentionally duped the Nazis and was thus not a collaborationist. This story of forgery-as-resistance stuck but is now being questioned. The authors of the two recent books on van Meegeren, Edward Dolnick and Jonathan Lopez, offer new views of the case from slightly different perspectives. Dolnick stresses psychological factors at work in van Meegeren's success as a forger. Lopez focuses on the historical visual-cultural context, making a strong case not only for van Meegeren's Nazism, but for the necessity of seeing the van Meegeren "Vermeers" through a National Socialist "period eye."

Morris takes these two analyses and weaves a fascinating, broader essay that touches on many issues of interest to this blog. It's not U.S. intellectual history, but it is European intellectual history. And it concerns an aspect of the European past, Nazism, that haunts American culture and thought as well. It's a fine example of the kind of very long-form blogging that Morris has been exploring with great success on his blog. And it even includes a few examples culled from analytic philosophy, which in turn connects it to an earlier topic of discussion over here (a topic which, incidentally, I hope to return to sometime soon).

As they say, read the whole thing...but give yourself plenty of time to do so!

The Historical Present

A further thought on Mike's earlier post about the use of the present tense in history: In tribute to John Updike for his now closed life, I've been reading his Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy in the evenings. I decided to buy the Everyman's edition of the four books, bundled together in hardback for the bargain basement price of 23.00 bucks on Amazon.com. Fortunately, the edition has an introduction written by Updike himself in which he makes the following observation on his use of the present tense in the first novel, Rabbit Run, written in 1959 and first published in 1960:

"The present tense was a happy discovery for me. I has fitfully appeared in English-language fiction--Damon Runyon used it in his tall tales and Dawn Powell in the mid-Thirties has a character observe, 'It was an age of the present tense, the stevedore style.' But I had encountered it only in Joyce Cary's remarkable Mister Johnson, fifteen or so years after its publication in 1939. . . . [T]he present tense, to me as I began to write in it, felt. . .exhilaratingly speedy and free--free of the grammatical bonds of the traditional past tense and of the subtly dead, muffling hand it lays upon every action. To write 'he says' instead of 'he said' was rebellious and liberating in 1959. In the present tense, thought and act exist on one shimmering plane; the writer and reader move in a purged space, on the traveling edge of the future, without vantage for reflection or regret or a seeking of proportion." [x]

The power of the present tense to communicate experience seems to be its allure. But his notion that the present tense allows no vantage "for reflection or regret or a seeking of proportion" seems to suggest its limits for historical writing and lecturing whose primary purpose is something more than the communication of past experience with pure immediacy.

Alice O’Connor’s Poverty Knowledge: Intellectual History in Action

I am persistently interested in examples of intellectual history that relate to political history, or more specifically, that demonstrate explicit influence over policy. This is not to say that intellectual history needs such a rationale: intellectual life helps us explain a given historical context, with or without explicit reference to its political influence. But my interests tend to gravitate towards intellectual history’s relation to politics, or what might be called “intellectual history in action” (with a nod towards Kevin Mattson, author of Intellectuals in Action, about early New Left intellectuals, including C. Wright Mills and William Appleman Williams.)

Alice O’Connor’s 2001 book, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History, is an excellent model of intellectual history in action. She painstakingly traces how social scientific thinking on poverty—what she terms “poverty knowledge”—was shaped by policy struggles, and how it helped shape those struggles, often in ways not anticipated by poverty scholars.

O’Connor researched and wrote this book in the dark shadow of welfare reform—the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, signed into law in 1996 by Bill Clinton, who made good on his promise to “end welfare as we know it.” The role intellectuals played in paving the way for Clinton’s welfare legislation acts as a microcosm of O’Connor’s larger argument: however much social scientists objected to how their knowledge was put into practice, they were complicit in policies that hurt the poor. In other words, their knowledge, intentionally or not, provided a rationale for polices that sought to remold the behavior of the poor, rather than attend to the structural inequalities of the US economy—“blame the victim” policymaking. O’Connor states it best:

“Following a well-established pattern in post-Great Society policy analysis, the Clinton administration’s poverty experts had already embraced and defined the parameters of a sweeping welfare reform featuring proposals that promised to change the behavior of poor people while paying little more than rhetorical attention to the problems of low-wage work, rising income inequality, or structural economic change, and none at all to the steadily mounting political disenfranchisement of the postindustrial working class" (3-4).

Social scientists have long debated whether culture or economy is more important in determining poverty. O’Connor traces this intellectual history, recognizing that these two modes of thinking—behavioral and structural—are not mutually exclusive. In the early twentieth century, poverty thinkers, taking their cues from the Chicago School of Sociology, fretted over growing “social disorganization” in northern cities, which they attributed to the gap between rural patterns of living, brought north by black migrants, and the grim realities of living in the industrial city. But many of these theorists saw economic policies as the solution to the supposedly degenerate culture of the ghetto dweller. In other words, job creation and higher wages would curtail bad behavior, such as alcoholism, prostitution, illegitimacy, and other vices. (Touré Reed, in his book Not Alms But Opportunity, recently reviewed here, demonstrates how such a framework shaped the Urban League.)

More recent thinkers have combined similar cultural description of the ghetto with calls for structural change, including Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in his infamous Moynihan Report (1965), and William Julius Wilson, in his widely read and controversial book, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (1987). The two chapters of O’Connor’s book most interesting to me (Chapter 8: “Poverty’s Culture Wars”; and Chapter 10: “Dependency, the ‘Underclass,’ and a New Welfare ‘Consensus’”) deal with the wide-ranging debates that followed the publication of Moynihan and Wilson’s defining works, and how the policy world responded.

It turns out that, put into practice, Moynihan and Wilson’s calls for economic policy changes went unheeded, not surprisingly, while their descriptions of ghetto life were accentuated in the national discussion. Rather than Moynihan’s “case for national action”—the subtitle of his report—people keyed in on his description of a “tangle of pathology,” a phrase he used to describe the culture of poor black urbanites, a culture he rooted in the black, matriarchal family structure. And rather than Wilson’s calls to create jobs, raise wages, and otherwise stem the negative effects of deindustrialization, an increasingly conservative political climate led people to focus on the culture of “underclass,” the 1980s metaphor for poor black urbanites.

As O’Connor sees it, the biggest problem with the type of poverty theorizing done by the likes of Moynihan and Wilson—with a focus on the bad behavior of poor, often black, people—is that there are no left or liberal policy solutions to bad culture. Thus, the logical policy conclusion to a scholarly emphasis on ghetto behavior is that government cannot solve the problems of poverty, unless by way of authoritarian behavior modification. In fact, this is the argument made by Charles Murray, in his celebrated Losing Ground (1984). It is also the logic of Clinton (and Gingrich’s) welfare reform. There we have some of the consequences of liberal poverty knowledge.

AH

interesting book review

In the June 3 issue of The New Republic, Alan Taylor has published a review of Richard S. Newman's new book, Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (NYU Press).

I had never heard of Richard Allen, and have not read the book. But the review alone made me think that Allen is someone I'd like to learn more about, and perhaps include in my courses. He was born a slave in 1760, got religion at 17 from a Methodist itinerant, worked odd jobs to buy his freedom for $2,000, and made his way to Philadelphia. He became a whitewasher, shoemaker and a chimney-sweeper. (George Washington was one of his clients in the latter business.) "By 1800," Taylor tells us, "he had become the city's second most prosperous African American--although his property ranked him only in the middle-class by white standards."

Allen's main contribution, however, is in the area of religion. He continued to preach and, growing increasingly uncomfortable with the segregation in the local Methodist church, built a black church, called Bethel, where he was the minister. Taylor quotes Newman on the significance of this action: "For subsequent generations, Allen's act of defiance had all the meaning and power of Rosa Parks's sit-in during the mid-twentieth century." After a great deal of intrigue, legal action and skullduggery from the local white Methodists, Allen succeeded in establishing his church under black leadership. Along with other ministers from different areas, he founded the African Methodist Episcopal church in 1816.

Newman (according to Taylor) argues for Allen's significance in two ways. In calling him a "black founder," he means that, on the one hand, he "pioneered black institutions and black politics." In this narrower sense, he was a founder for African-Americans. But in a broader view, Allen "advanced a prophetic vision of America as a multi-racial democracy of equal rights and equal opportunities," an "egalitarian vision" that "was far more daring than anything considered by the more famous white Founders." On this reading, "Allen insisted that blacks had a sacred and prophetic mission to save the republic from the racism of white Americans."

Having not read the book, I don't have an opinion as to whether Allen should be thought of as a "black founder." But the claim is at least provocative, and buying into it doesn't seem to be a requirement for paying more attention to Richard Allen himself. At the bare minimum, I'd recommend the review, which gives a short summary of Allen's life and of the arguments for his significance.

Can You Ask For Higher Praise?

"The recent exchanges between Curtis J. Evans and David Sehat about Booker T. Washington,” [W. Fitzhugh] Brundage observes, “have been models of thoughtful and learned debate.”

As an academic, can you ask for higher praise than this? Kudos to USIH contributor, David Sehat! It's all downhill from here.

[Source: Brundage, "Thinking with (and about) Mr. Washington," Journal of Southern Religion XI (2009). Available here: http://jsr.fsu.edu/Volume11/Brundage1.htm (opening line). Accessed June 5, 2009]

Quotes From History: Guess The Author

Here's the quote: "The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belong to one category."

Ah, the ideologue's dream---get the crowd to believe that everyone else is a socialist, communist, racist, pro-abortion, etc.

Who provided us with quintessential utterance? Try to guess the author without Wikipedia or Google. I'll provide the answer this afternoon. - TL

Update On The Second Annual USIH Conference (Nov. 12-13, 2009)

The June 15 deadline for proposals is fast upon us. With that, let me provide a few updates.

1. Although there is still room for proposals, the program is shaping up nicely. Here are some highlights:

(a) Plenary Speaker: James Livingston, Rutgers. He just completed a book on U.S. intellectual history since WWII, and intends to speak from that work for the plenary.

(b) Special Panel #1: John Patrick Diggins Retrospective
Participants: Neil Jumonville, on JPD as a public intellectual; Martin J. Burke, on JPD & John Adams; James Oakes, on JPD & Lincoln; James Livingston, On JPD & Pragmatism; Andrew Robertson, on JPD & the Lost Soul of American Politics; Ron Radosh, on Up From Communism; Matthew J. Cotter, Chair

(c) Special Panel #2: Assessing the Legacy of the 1977 Wingspread Conference
Participants: David Hollinger, Thomas Bender, Charles Capper, Dorothy Ross, and David Hall.

(d) We already have panel and paper proposals representing individuals from our host institution (CUNY), as well as the Boston University, Brandeis University, Carleton University, Gannon University, Harvard University, Hofstra University, Illinois State University, Johns Hopkins University, Marian College, New York University, Rutgers University, Seton Hall University, University of California-Berkeley, University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Southern California, University of Texas-Dallas, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

2. This is not indicated on the CFP, but we are looking to hold the registration fee to under $50. It was $35 last year, and our CUNY/Graduate Center sponsors are on board with keeping the fee low. So transportation, room, and board are the primary costs for those wishing to either attend or present.

3. The Useful Information and Links page has been updated. Check it out.

Do Intellectual Historians and Philosophers Play Well Together?

Last month, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an interesting interview (for the moment at least available online to non-subscribers) with the Harvard sociologist Michèle Lamont, whose new book How Do Professors Think examines multidisciplinary peer-review panels and compares the different ways in which the various American academic disciplines understand themselves and what constitutes quality work.

At the end of the interview, Lamont briefly summarizes some of her conclusions, beginning with two disciplines of interest to this blog's small exclusive readership:

In history there is a high degree of consensus among scholars about what is good. But it is not based so much on a common theory, or method, or whether people think the discipline is part of the humanities or social sciences. It's a shared sense of craftsmanship. People care about whether the work is careful. They believe they can identify careful work. And that they can convince others about it. The degree of consensus has varied over the years. In the 1960s, for example, the discipline was polarized politically. But it has found consensus in the practice of scholarship.

Historians believe that contrasts sharply with English literature. As one told me, "The disciplinary center holds." That sense of consensus makes history proposals and applicants very successful in multidisciplinary competitions like the national fellowship and grant programs.

Philosophy is a problem discipline, and it's defined as such by program officers. Philosophers do not believe that nonphilosophers are qualified to evaluate their work. Perhaps that comes out of the dominance of analytic philosophy, with its stress on logic and rigor. Philosophers think their discipline is more demanding than other fields. Even its practitioners define the discipline as contentious. They don't see that as a problem; argument and dispute are the discipline's defining characteristics.

All that conflict makes it difficult to get consensus on the value of a philosophy proposal — or to convince people from other disciplines of its merits. The panels I studied are multidisciplinary. Nonphilosophers are often frustrated with the philosophers. They often discounted what philosophers had to say as misplaced intellectual superiority.

The Lamont interview has sparked an interesting discussion of philosophers (inside and outside of philosophy departments) and their relationship to their discipline and other disciplines over on Crooked Timber, a site which has always featured a robust philosophy presence among its posters and commentariat.* Much of the discussion focuses on Lamont's contention that philosophers don't get along with other scholars and that there is an unusual lack of mutual understanding between philosophy and other disciplines.

I'm always interested in the relationship between intellectual historians and philosophers (and philosophy). Many, if not most of us, spend much of our time reading philosophers from the past. Certainly any intellectual historian has spent a lot of time thinking about philosophy. However the level of actual engagement between contemporary philosophers and U.S. intellectual historians seems rather limited to me. Among the more analytically inclined philosophers, there's still a strong "history of philosophy, just say 'no'" strain that makes them disinclined to be interested not only in historical accounts of philosophical thought, but also in older philosophy even taken out of its historical context.**

At last year's USIH Conference, David Marshall of Kettering University gave an interesting talk on the methodological lessons that intellectual historians might take from the work of the philosopher Robert Brandom. I was struck by how unusual it is to hear an intellectual historian--especially, it must be said, a U.S. intellectual historian--explicitly draw on the work of a contemporary philosopher in this way (my purely anecdotal sense is that European intellectual historians have a more lively interface with contemporary Continental philosophers).

How would you describe the current relationship between U.S. intellectual history as a (sub) discipline and philosophy? Do you find yourself turning to contemporary philosophy in your own work (and do you do so as an object of study or for some other reason)? If you work on philosophy/philosophers, do you share your work with actually existing philosophers? Are they helpful readers?***

_________________________________________________________

* I assume most readers of this blog already read CT. If you don't, you should. It is an excellent multidisciplinary group academic blog which more often than not features not only interesting posts but also interesting comment threads. You really learn stuff over there.

** Princeton philosopher Gil Harman used to have a sign on his office door that read "History of Philosophy: Just Say 'No'" It was intended as a protest against philosophers being required to study the history of philosophy. Harman believed that philosophers needn't study the history of philosophy for the same reason that physicists needn't study the history of physics: today's philosophers were often asking different questions and almost by definition had better answers than philosophers from the past. In a 2005 volume entitled Analytic Philosophy and History of Philosophy, which he coedited with G.A.J. Rogers, Tom Sorrell uses Gil Harman's sign as a starting point for his reflections on the place of history of philosophy in analytic philosophical practice.

*** Upon reflection, I fear that the conclusion of this post reflects the fact that I've spent most of the past two weeks giving and grading exams! Please consider outlining your answers before posting them ;-)

the 23rd century is not what it used to be: the philosophy and politics of Star Trek

[Spoiler Alert: I waited to post this until after the new Star Trek movie had played for two weekends. In Hollywood terms, that’s a geological age: the DaVinci Code sequel has already replaced the young Captain Kirk as the prime object of moviegoers’ curiosities, and this weekend the Terminator franchise will reboot. But if you, dear reader, still have not seen the film, please be aware that the following post assumes that you have, and is consequently packed with very significant spoilers.]

In his seminal 1988 article, “Captain Kirk: Cold Warrior,” (Journal of Popular Film and Television, 16.3:109-117), Rick Worland argued of the original 1966-69 television series that “its progressive humanism aside, Star Trek neatly duplicated the configuration of international Cold War politics of the 1960s.” Worland’s argument essentially accused the show of not living up to the intellectual and political ideals it set for itself. The article was something of a watershed in academic treatments of Star Trek, in that many such musings before it veered toward a somewhat fawning tone, while those that came after tended to be more critical of the show. Moreover, later scholars shared Worland’s interest in the politics of Star Trek (rather than, say, its mythological, psychological or literary resonance) though they tended to adopt a focus on race, gender, sexuality and audience reception that is largely absent from Worland’s analysis in more conventionally political terms. With a brand-new incarnation of Star Trek now at our multiplexes, then, it’s worth considering how Star Trek’s themes manifest themselve today.

The original Star Trek centered on the adventures of a group of interstellar space travelers who serve aboard the starship Enterprise, led by Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner). The Enterprise crew represent the geopolitical interests of the United Federation of Planets, while simultaneously engaging in scientific research and humanitarian interventions. 

Kirk is advised by his friends and subordinates Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and Dr. Leonard McCoy (DeForrest Kelley), who embody the conflict in his head between his frequently competing mandates and missions. The show was not terribly popular in its initial run, but once cancelled generated a phenomenal following in syndicated reruns. As a result, Paramount Pictures released Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979; many subsequent films followed. In 1987, Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered on television, featuring new characters and actors; it would run for seven years and serve as the basis for four of the later movies.

After three more television series and a total of ten films, however, many perceived that these efforts were running out of gas creatively. The previous Star Trek feature, panned by critics and avoided by audiences, is now seven years old, and the last television series, Enterprise (2001-2005), was unceremoniously cancelled due to low ratings. Hoping to breathe new life into its former cash cow, Paramount Pictures hired Lost creator J.J. Abrams to direct a new movie, and decided, significantly, to “reboot” the franchise by returning to the characters of the original series and recasting younger actors in the famous roles of Kirk, Spock, McCoy and their shipmates.

Thus as the new film opens it has been over forty years since the first show articulated its peculiar political vision of humanist Cold War liberalism. To some extent, this outlook has come unmoored from its origins in the actual Cold War, becoming part of the DNA of the series itself. But in other ways, changes in real-time contemporary politics have significantly influenced Star Trek. To take one example, as the Soviet Union crumbled, the sixth film, The Undiscovered Country (1991), found the intrepid crew working for peace between the Federation and its enemy, the now-weakened Klingon Empire; in the diegetic universe of The Next Generation, the Klingons became uneasy allies. Additionally, the original series’s allegorical references to racial integration and the Vietnam War were replaced in later shows with developments that paralleled controversies over issues like homosexuality, religion or cultural imperialism. Thus the real-world political landscape, the cinematic production team and the diegetic Star Trek universe have all undergone significant changes in recent years; one might wonder how these changes would affect the evolving outlook of the central text.

Well, we need wonder no more. Star Trek now, perhaps unsurprisingly, maneuvers almost entirely in the intellectual and emotional space carved out by the so-called “War on Terror.” The film’s villain, Nero (Eric Bana), is an evildoer with no agenda other than to cause pain to his enemies; though a Romulan, he is a non-state-actor who specifically rejects any connection with the government of his empire. He is, in short, a terrorist. He is responsible for the most harrowing act of the film, one simply unprecedented in all of Star Trek: the destruction of the planet Vulcan and the consequent murder of nearly all of its six billion inhabitants. Of course, such large-scale acts of destruction are not uncommon in cinematic science fiction, or even in Star Trek. But Vulcan is not some stock planet that the filmmakers made up solely for the purpose of having Nero destroy it in order to establish his evil credentials. It is Spock’s home, a planet whose inhabitants have developed a stoic philosophy that has traditionally served as a central element in the very meaning of Star Trek. In this context, even this fictional act of destruction is quite harrowing, and certainly suggests an invocation of September 11.

As a result, the new Enterprise crew is motivated less by its customary balancing act between power politics and compassion, and more by revenge. Generally, Star Trek has accorded this emotion little respect: it is reserved for villains (such as Khan in Star Trek II, or Nero himself), or “good guys” whose judgment or sanity is has been compromised. In the new film, however, revenge is a significant motivational factor for the heroes. This difference plays out most clearly in the revisions to the character of Spock, played in the new film by Zachary Quinto. Always tortured by his conflicting desires to adhere to the Vulcan ideology of logic and to claim part of his human emotional heritage, he is in this film pushed to the breaking point. During Vulcan's final minutes, Spock attempts to rescue his mother, but instead must watch her die. This is a lot for anyone to take in, and Quinto’s Spock yields to strong emotion far more than did Nimoy’s. (Nimoy is also in this film, playing an older version of the same character, and even his Spock is far more touchy-feely than usual.)

In the same vein, the new Kirk (Chris Pine) owes his very existence, or, at least, the form that such an existence will take, to terrorism. He is born in the midst of Nero's attack on his father’s ship some twenty-five years before the main events of the film. Kirk's father is killed and young Jim grows up rebellious, impetuous, glib, and aloof, with a penchant for going with his gut. Far from the Kennedyesque figure of the 1960s show, he almost seems an homage to George W. Bush, complete with a tendency to bestow uncreative nicknames on his shipmates.

The fact that the captain and first officer have both had one of their parents killed by the villain brings a decided de-emphasis on two virtues that have long been a hallmark of Star Trek: empathy and compassion. Most striking in this regard is a short exchange between Kirk and Spock near the end of the film. After Nero has been defeated, his ship is about to be sucked in to some vortex or another, and Kirk offers to rescue his crew. When Spock questions this decision, Kirk argues that saving Nero would make for better relations with the Romulans, and suggests that Spock should approve of his logic. In a response played for comedy, Spock replies, “No…not this time,” and Kirk orders the destruction of Nero’s ship. Never have these two characters, or any protagonists in a Star Trek production, been so cavalier about taking life. Indeed, many of the original episodes end with Kirk quite pointedly refusing to kill, even though it may seem justified or even necessary to save his own skin.

One of the tag lines in the film’s advertising campaign is “This is not your father’s Star Trek.” Indeed, it is not. Politically and historically speaking, it has exchanged a complicated and ambivalent relationship with the Cold War thinking of the 1960s for a rather uncritical acceptance of the dominant paradigm of our own era.

More on Feminism and Capitalism

After reading Andrew Hartman's piece on the work of Nancy Fraser about second-wave feminism and capitalism, I happened to read Walter Lippmann's, Drift and Mastery. Apropos Fraser's argument but nearly one hundred years earlier, Lippmann said this:

"Women to-day are embarked upon a career for which their tradition is no guide. The first result, of course, is a vast amount of trouble. The emancipated woman has to fight something worse than the crusted prejudices of her uncles; she has to fight the bewilderment of her own soul." [218]

"The first impulse of emancipation seems to be in the main that woman should model her career on man's. . . . Yet at the very time when enlightened people are crying out against the horrors of capitalism, you will find many feminists urging women to enter capitalism as a solution of their problems. Of course millions have been drawn in against their will, but there is still a number who go in voluntarily, because they feel that their self-respect demands it. They go in response to the desire for economic independence. And they find almost no real independence in the industrial world. What has happened, it seems to me, is this: the women who argue for the necessity of making one’s living are almost without exception upper class women, either because they have special talents or because they have special opportunities.” [221-222].

"And the theorists of feminism have yet to make up their minds whether they can seriously urge women to go into industry as it is to-day or is likely to be in the future. I, for one, should say that the presence of women in the labor market is an evil to be combatted by every means at our command. The army of women in industry to-day is not a blessing but the curse of a badly organized society." [223].

Thoughts? -DS

Cementing My Ignorance In Print: An Addendum To My Recent Thinking On Transnational Historiography

Last month I unhesitatingly promoted a review essay of mine at USIH. In that essay, as well as my prior work here on transnationalism (particularly in November 2008 and the January just past), I cited OAH and AHA work on the topic. Sadly, however, I overlooked this Perspectives on History piece from December 2008. But it's not just the article; it's the content. So my situation gets worse.

Perspectives detailed the work of a summer institute on transnational topics for college teachers held in 2008. The article also noted that a 2005 institute gathering predated the one last summer. The Perspectives essay publicized, furthermore, a 2008 publication edited by Peter Stearns and Noralee Frankel, titled "Globalizing American History: The AHA Guide to Re-Imagining the U.S. Survey Course." Through the link you can purchase the 128-page pamphlet for $15. [FYI: Rob Townsend of the AHA informed me that a key part of the pamphlet is at this link.]

Prior to a few weeks ago I was ignorant of the AHA pamphlet, and therefore neglected it in my Councilor review. This is irritating---and humbling. I aimed for comprehensiveness in my write-up, at least from the late 1990s going forward. But somehow I missed a publication from one of the largest historical societies in the United States. Yep. Since the AHA pamphlet addresses teaching, it likely changes my perspective on the place of America on the World Stage (AWS) in the literature on transnationalism.

I haven't yet seen the AHA publication. But if it incorporates more practical advice on teaching, then it provides a concrete alternative to AWS---an alternative I explicitly called for in The Councilor review. The pamphlet might also indicate a deeper penetration of transnationalism into secondary education than I might have imagined.

The Perspectives article also enlarges the cast of characters cited in my review. I claimed that Thomas Bender was a kind of de facto leader of the transnational turn. He is still clearly important, but now I must recommend that interested parties explore the AHA conferees to sift who played key roles in the two institutes. It appears, on the surface, that Carl Guarneri and John Gillis are more prominent than I realized. This makes sense as Guarneri was mentioned in the endnotes of a few of the AWS essays.

In sum, I'm ashamed. I'll have to read the AHA pamphlet to discern whether its contents change my interpretation of the transnational turn, my prescriptions for future endeavors, or both. In the meantime, don't take my word for it. It appears I've done what every historian fears: cemented my ignorance in print. - TL

Tim's Light Reading (5/15/09)

1. Writing Tips from Scott Eric Kaufman---How many times do professed intellectual historians direct your attention to graphics that involve a hamburger? For the record, I generally agree with Ahistoricality when he/she comments that, with regard to history, the evidence needs to outweigh the analysis. Furthermore, as a adopted Chicagoan, my evidential burger condiments generally exclude ketchup (and I do like dijon).

2. Issues in Borderline Slavery Denial at Civil War Memory---I concede that my comments on this post are akin to killing a fly with a hammer: I propose a theoretical solution that overreaches the current problem. But I do genuinely wonder if memories of the American Civil War are, at times, being pushed by extreme revisionists into a denial of slavery. Is there a need for some kind of mild law against denying our own holocaust?

3. Is David Brooks Avoiding Politics by Rethinking the Intellectual Life? (here and here)---Mr. Brooks is known, among some, for his intelligent and reasonably moderate conservatism. His commentary on PBS last fall, during the presidential campaign party conventions, compelled a grudging admiration for his sense of perspective. But I wonder, in light of the current political scene, if he is sort of retreating into the intellectual life? Don't get me wrong, I don't mind. I'm finding the intellectual Brooks more interesting than the political one. And perhaps I don't know his biography well enough; he may have been this way all along?

But on the links provided, the first, on the notion of genius, contains important elements of consideration for all aspiring and working intellectual historians. In particular I appreciated Brooks' citation of Daniel Coyle's The Talent Code and Geoff Colvin's Talent Is Overrated. Both works correspond with an ongoing theory I've held about how one becomes an intellectual with regard to whatever topic is at hand (assuming that multiple intelligences theories hold): superior ability doesn't always manifest itself clearly for evaluators of youth talent, but drive and discipline that correspond with an strong internal vision can sometimes be detected, and would be equally valuable to evaluators. With that, taking a more working, or developmental, view of "genius" would have no small consequences for how history departments, for instance, ought to select applicants. And since the brightest of our faculties in history are encouraged, for the most part, to develop their own genius to its fullest (i.e. research and publish) rather than train those under them, it seems likely that next generation of history "geniuses" is likely to come from hands-on, teaching-type doctoral departments. In other words, those that don't overly emphasize research.

The second Brooks piece looks at the Harvard College "Grant Study." Here he is underscoring Joshua Wolf Shank's June 2009 Atlantic article. That piece is about the pursuit and causes of happiness, but it's also an object lesson in the caprices of intelligence. It highlights something emphasized by Barzun in House of Intellect: namely, that pursuing the intellectual life has only a moderate correlation with intelligence (circling back to the Coyle/Colvin thesis above, reflecting a consistent thread in Brooks' reading list). And of course all historians should keep these two conclusions from Brooks in mind:

a. "It is as if we all contain a multitude of characters and patterns of behavior, and these characters and patterns are bidden by cues we don’t even hear."
b. "There is a complexity to human affairs before which science and analysis simply stands mute."

- TL

"Richard Halloran: Owns Home Computer"

Frank Rich's column in today's New York Times mentions, in passing, a YouTube video entitled "1981 Primitive Internet Report on KRON," in which San Francisco's Channel 4 news announced that the San Francisco Chronicle and its then-jointly operated (and now defunct) semi-rival the San Francisco Examiner had started a service that allowed computer owners with modems to download text copies of the morning paper (download time: 2 hrs).

Here's the report:



It really is a fascinating historical document that nicely shows the technological and cultural distance we've traveled in a little over a quarter century. My favorite moment: the chyron that identifies one speaker as:

Richard Halloran
Owns Home Computer

Speculating on Humanity

I just finished listening to Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello as an audiobook. I use audiobooks for my commute, exercise, cleaning, crafting, etc. The few history books I've tried in this format have emphatically not worked as audiobooks (especially compared to fiction). Their narrative structure is simply too diffuse to follow while listening.

I would like to comment briefly on Gordon-Reed's amazing book as a non-specialist (for others who thought it was amazing, see the Pulitizer and National Book Award committees, among others).

First of all it is highly enjoyable as a read (all 30 hours of it). I think this is one of the first requirements for attention from major award committees, and something that historians fail to achieve all too often (though I think we achieve it much more often than other humanities and social sciences).

Beyond simple enjoyment, the book raises several fascinating issues. Two that I was struck by was the way that Gordon-Reed focuses on the humanity of the Hemingses and the way that she uses speculation to do this. It is my perception that speculative history has automatically been a sign of poor history, but Gordon-Reed's work should disprove this assumption. She uses intensely careful research to craft a skeleton of facts from which she hangs human flesh. Perhaps we all do this in our writing, without admitting it, but I couldn't count the number of times that Gordon-Reed starts sentences with "perhaps" and its synonyms. She laid out the evidence she had, the historical context around it, and then suggested possible reasons individuals might have acted in such a way. This is particularly forceful in her situation. We have perhaps more information on the Hemingses than any other slave family in American history, and yet even with that there are large gaps in our knowledge. Gordon-Reed fills in those gaps by carefully correlating dates, extrapolating from other evidence, analyzing naming patterns, and sometimes suggesting what a teenage girl or adult man might have done in such a circumstance (given what we know of their personalities in that time). She is also not afraid to suggest several different interpretations.

Gordon-Reed uses so much speculation because her primary interest is in recreating the lives of the different Hemingses as individuals with emotions, hopes for the future, plans, family connection, and impulses. She argues at one point that “throughout American history there has been a tendency to see African Americans as symbols or representations rather than as human beings. Even when specific details about an individual life are available for interpretation, those details are often ignored or dismissed in favor of falling back on all the supposed verities about black life and black people in general. For African Americans, social history almost invariably overwhelms biography, obscuring the contingencies within personal lives which are the very things historians and biographers usually rely upon to reconstruct events and lives.” Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008), 290.

As someone elbow deep in writing a collective biography of black intellectuals, I find her argument incredibly coercive. Someone might point out the numerous biographies of African American leaders in reaction to her point. Some of these do achieve a human portrait (Levering-Lewis on Du Bois springs to mind), but all too many fit more neatly within the impossibly perfect--or tragically flawed--leader troupe. I hope that I will be able to achieve as compelling a portrait as Gordon-Reed has, though stylistically with fewer "perhaps."

Of course, her greatest accomplishment is in reassessing the Thomas Jefferson-Sallie Hemings relationship, particularly within the context of Hemings' extended family. She emphatically discounts the extremes who would argue that either Jefferson was a demi-god (and who cannot stand the thought that he might have had sex with, let alone love, a black woman) or that Jefferson was a monstrous racist, who is an easy stand in for all white racists. He was a product of his time and his internal life discounted and contrasted with many of his public statements. And he chose in most circumstances to avoid conflict and make those around him love him rather than engaging in direct confrontation or violence. The evidence that Gordon-Reed amasses does indeed suggest that Jefferson's relationship with several of the Hemingses was amicable, while constraned by the dictates of a slave society. She is a brave woman to take on this thesis.

Tim's Light Reading (5/5/09)

1. McNamara on Maritain: Few people realize that Jacques Maritain spent over 15 years living in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s. Pat's brief post emphasizes Maritain's Catholicism, but the latter's influences on neo-Thomism, as an international movement, and neo-Aristotelianism were profound.

2. McLemee on Comments and Online Writing: Scott McLemee reflects on the hazards of online intellectual life in an age where everyone thinks of her/himself as important, as part of the conversation. [Amendment: Scott objected to the wording of my pointer sentence. I should've emphasized "thinks of" to convey the notion that simple human vices and virtues, namely false pride and appropriate humility, need to be a part of one's consideration when commenting. Otherwise you risk being a jerk who deserves scorn when you seek to be a part of the conversation.]

3. Dana McCourt and Eric Rauchway on Philosophy and the Humanities, here (1) and here (2): Both reflect on expectations about philosophy, and theoretical aspects of the humanities and social sciences, in the public sphere. Ultimately, both McCourt and Rauchway are concerned with variants of anti-intellectualism.

4. Reflections on C.P. Snow's 1959 "Two Cultures" Lecture, here (The Telegraph) and here (NYT): Although Snow was a Briton, his lecture was a popular sensation around the English-speaking world---for different reasons. Snow was concerned with a peculiarly British problem of the 1950s: bright kids being pushed into the literary/traditional intellectual directions, and the less bright into the sciences. In the U.S., however, post-Sputnik (i.e. 1957), the high-test-result kids were pushed into the sciences and the rest were left to their own devices, no matter their intellectual worth (whether literature, industrial labor, or the service sector). While the NYT piece supplies something of the American reception of Snow's lecture and eventually gets to the British context out of which Snow arose, it is quite presentist in its analysis. As such, The Telegraph article is better for historical context (British and otherwise). In some ways the NYT piece is a brief, transnational intellectual history of the lecture, while Robert Whelan's Telegraph article is a more complete "nationalist" analysis. The latter is better intellectual history.

is it just me...?

...or is there a pronounced trend lately against people speaking and writing about the past, in the past tense?

I notice this tic most often when grading student papers, in which those under my tutelage nearly always write things like, "Ames begins his career," rather than "Ames began." But I've also seen it frequently in History Channel-type documentaries, on which the academic talking head will say, presumably to add a sense of gripping immediacy to an event that happened long ago, something along the lines of "Booth jumps onto the stage and shouts, 'Sic semper tyrranis!'"

I have seen this mode of speaking creep into conference presentations and, yes, my own course lectures. And it's no longer used only for sudden or discrete events, but also in statements like "after Vietnam and Watergate, Americans begin to lose confidence in their country." This style appears to be very quickly becoming the standard way of speaking about history, and even writing about it, at least informally.

Assuming that this trend actually exists, the question is whether it is in any way significant: I mean, everyone knows you're speaking about the past, right? So where's the harm? I'm not sure there is any, but I'll admit that it does bother me. I think that my problem is that, if a style that originally served to make the past more immediate has now become standard, then a) it will no longer serve the function for which it was adopted, and b) the distinction formerly made by the older formulation will become lost. Such developments would inevitably impoverish the way that we think.

At the heart of my nagging concern is the fact that students seem to write this way, not for dramatic effect, but as a matter of course. It reminds me of people learning a new foreign language, in which tense distinctions are too difficult and subtle, so everything comes out in the present tense. And I shudder to think of the day that my French or Spanish is anyone's model for speaking about history.

Theorizing The Culture Wars: Jacques Barzun, Politics, And Fostering Intellectual Life In A Democracy

by Tim Lacy

Jacques Barzun predicted the Culture Wars. Well, maybe not. He was both a historian and a product of his times, not a prophet. But there is little doubt that the Culture Wars of his early years, the 1940s and 1950s, bear at least some resemblance to today's battles over books, religion, the arts, and education.

As such, passages in Barzun's 1959 book, The House of Intellect, both describe his times and explain something about the causes of political and cultural skirmishes of the last quarter of the twentieth century, as well as first decade of the current one. If we read his book with the last 40 or so years in mind, we see the outlines not only of an explanatory theory for the problems of mixing culture and politics, but maybe also some potential solutions. With Barzun in mind, this essay both thinks historically and philosophizes about the present. He will help me demonstrate the usefulness of U.S. intellectual history today.

House of Intellect begins by outlining three primary enemies of the intellect, at least as Barzun saw them in the late 1950s. They were Art, Science, and Philanthropy. These separate but inter-related combatants work against the intellect by: demanding exclusive allegiance (art), garnering intellectual prestige and fearing the so-called regressive effects of the humanities (science), as well as fostering a demeaned equality and psychology of help (philanthropy).[1] Barzun provides much more, of course. For instance, he dedicates an entire chapter (seven) to the insidious generosity of philanthropy.

Barzun defines the “intellect” as neither raw intelligence nor the accumulation of credentials. Rather it is a love for “order, logic, clarity, and speed of communication.” The intellect is characterized by a high degree of literacy (not mere reading skill) and a “feeling of mystery and awe” in learning.[2] His notion of the intellect is not about compromise, material interests, public service, or social peace. The intellect might inform things considered practical and pragmatic, but practice and pragmatism will only be hampered if the intellect alone leads the way. Intelligence, cunning, craftiness, and industriousness work well in a democracy, if ordered toward comprise, but not the intellect. ...

[Continue reading here. You may return to this page for comments.]

I'd Rather Switch Than Fight; or, Goodbye, MS Word?

I lost about an hour worth of worktime this morning due to Word 2008 misbehaving on my Mac (mid-2007 MacBook Pro 17 inch running the latest version of OSX 10.5, fwiw). Lots of delays while the old color wheel randomly spun and two outright colorwheel crashes. This was completely frustrating.

It's been years since I've seriously considered using another word processor. We get MS Office for free at my institution, so price is just not an issue. And though I've been aware that some colleagues in the sciences and social sciences have done their work on LaTeX for years, that never seemed like a viable option to me.

Lately, however, I've been reading about people using three other Mac word processors that, in principle seem attractive to me: 1) Pages, the iWork word processor; 2) Nisus Writer Pro; and 3) Mellel. Nisus has been around for a long time. Pages is a relatively new addition to the iWork suite (which I already own, so I could use it for free). I just heard about Mellel last week.

So why don't I just switch? After all, I avoid the rest of the MS Office suite at this point; I use Mail.app and Keynote and basically don't use spreadsheets at all. In principle I'd love to entirely free myself from Microsoft and their bloated, buggy software. Each of the three alternatives I've mentioned is supposed to be more stable than MS Word. And Mellel is specifically designed for academic writing. It's apparently a champ at dealing with large documents, footnotes, etc.

Here are my biggest concerns:

1) Compatibility: So much of my life involves sending people soft copies of documents. Can they open documents that I produce on these other word processors?

2) Mark-up: I've become addicted to MS Word's editing functions. This is how I read and mark-up student papers these days. And it's how I collaborate on written projects. Do these word processors have similar features and if I'm relying on others opening my documents in other word processors, will they see my comments?

3) Learning curve: I know MS Word. How long will it take me to get up to speed in these other programs?

I imagine that much of our small exclusive readership uses word processors in similar ways to me.

Have any of you tried to switch from MS Word to any of these other programs? If so, what advice can you give?

Universities

I'd like to start a forum here to discuss Mark Taylor's article that just shot to the top of the most emailed list on the New York Times website. In this op-ed piece, the chair of the Religious Studies Department at Columbia University advocates getting rid of the University as it is currently structured by creating cross-disciplinary centers focusing on problems rather than hierarchical disciplines.

I spent a year studying interdisciplinarity, assisting a Matrix committee with research. There is some dynamic interdisciplinary work going on. That word is here used to cover all "cross" things, including cross-disciplinary--the least integrated, interdisciplinary--merging different disciplines and using different methodology, trans-disciplinary--sometimes defined as developing theories beyond disciplines (like Marxism), and creating new disciplines--bio-chemistry or cognitive science, for instance. It seemed to me that the most successful work was either transitory and cross-disciplinary--so the only real fusing going on was at the level of the committee (individual professors maintained their disciplinary standards and solved a problem through teamwork), or was the creation of entirely new disciplines that answered current questions more effectively.

But I still found in that year of study that most of interdisciplinarity was band-wagon jumping. It looked a whole lot like disciplinary work, but found a way to put an interdisciplinary label on it. Perhaps I had this sense because as historians, we dabble in each others disciplines all the time (more or often less effectively), while maintaining a sense of ourselves as historians. Much of interdisciplinarity seemed like dabbling.

So what did you think of Taylor's suggestions for the university? As someone soon to be on the job market, I can understand the desire to not be constantly creating more graduates than can be hired. I can also understand wanting to streamline the graduate school process in some way that does not take so long. And yet, I do feel like I needed all this time to percolate and learn enough to write a comprehensive dissertation. (I could go on ruminating, but I will stop and hopefully you will chime in.)

From The Self-Promotions Desk

The Councilor, the semiannual, peer-reviewed journal of the Illinois Council for the Social Studies, published a book review essay of mine on America on the World Stage: A Global Approach to U.S. History. The essay is titled "The Transnational Turn and Trickle Down Disturbances." The title doesn't seem as apt or witty to me now as it did when I was attempting to dream up something eye-catching for the piece. C'est la vie. But after rereading the review, I think it builds toward some important points about the book and the Transnational Turn in general.

In case you're interested, here is the table of contents for The Councilor's inaugural issue. There you'll find that another USIH contributor, Andrew Hartman, authored a piece titled "The Enemy Within (the Ivory Tower): How Conservatives Came to Despise the Academy." - TL

Louis Brandeis: "the curse of bigness" in an era of "too big to fail"

Most of the recent Federal bailouts of U.S. financial and automobile corporations were justified under some version of the concept of "too big to fail." This is to say that some companies have become so intertwined with the rest of the economy that, even if their financial collapse is entirely earned, they should not be allowed to go bankrupt, lest too many other entities also collapse through no fault of their own. The notion of "too big to fail" has played a prominent role in dozens of U.S. bailouts, such as those of Chrysler in 1980 or New York City in 1975, and is in no way limited to the current crisis.

Today GM and Chrysler prominently fit the bill of "too big to fail": not only do their large number of employees mean that bankruptcy would put an unacceptably large number of people out of work, but these companies' failures would be the harbinger of a cascade of bankruptcies that would follow as the smaller companies who supply them with parts would probably fold after losing their biggest customers, and other automobile manufactures, in turn, would suffer without the parts manufacturers. But the most prominent contemporary example of such a firm is, of course, AIG, the financial company whose massive losses and interconnections with other financial concerns have motivated two very different presidential administrations to offer federal support totaling, as of this writing, $170 billion.

On the Tonight Show, President Obama invoked this rationale with regard to the company. "So the problem with AIG was that it owed so much and was tangled up with so many banks and institutions that if you had allowed it to just liquidate, to go into bankruptcy, it could have brought the whole financial system down. So it was the right thing to do to intervene in AIG."

AIG itself touts its own size as a reason to justify such government largesse, as its own analysis, reported in Time magazine, reveals. “The extent and interconnectedness of AIG’s business is far-reaching and encompasses customers across the globe ranging from governmental agencies, corporations and consumers to counterparties. A failure of AIG could create a chain reaction of enormous proportion.” The same article, written by Bill Saporito, explains the potential negative consequences of the firm's bankruptcy. "Among other effects, it could lead to mass redemptions of insurance policies, which would theoretically destabilize the industry; the withdrawal of $12 billion to $15 billion in U.S. consumer lending in a credit-short universe; and even damage airframe maker Boeing and jet-engine maker GE, since AIG’s aircraft-leasing unit buys more jets than anyone else."

The upshot of all of this appears to be that sufficient size has become a Federal insurance policy against a company's own incompetence and criminality. This is clearly unacceptable, from both the perspective of "moral hazard" (it actually encourages behavior that we would presumably like to minimize) and that of "class warfare" (it creates a double standard for wealthy corporations that does not apply to those of more limited means). But what, on the other hand, should we do? Large bankruptcies really are bad, and they really do harm lots and lots of people who have nothing to do with bringing them about. Thus it seems more and more reasonable to me lately that companies should just simply should not be allowed to get this big in the first place, an idea also briefly advanced in a New York Times op-ed by Michael Lewis and David Einhorn. “Another good solution to the too-big-to-fail problem," they wrote on January 4, "is to break up any institution that becomes too big to fail."

This line of reasoning put me in mind of Progressive era jurist Louis Brandeis, who famously found the "bigness" of large corporations to be one of the more egregious sins bedeviling the nation. I had thought that the current crisis might bring about a resurgence of interest in Brandeis, but so far I have yet to see one. (One might think that at least David Brooks, who loves to dredge up forgotten social scientists in his columns, might have said a few words about him!) To be honest, I don't know much about the man myself, beyond the most basic: he was a crusading attorney appointed to the Supreme Court by Woodrow Wilson, and later in life became an ardent Zionist. He is also well-known in legal circles for his concern with facts as opposed to abstract logical reasoning, the creation of the "Brandeis brief," and the development of the concept of the right to privacy.

Certainly an impressive résumé, but none of this really relates to what I was interested in: Brandeis's positions on the dangers of corporate size. I looked into his 1914 collection of essays decrying the "money trust," called Other People's Money: And How the Bankers Use It. Honestly, it was the only book of his that I had heard of, and the title certainly made it seem relevant to the current crisis. After reading a few of his essays, however, it became apparent why the popular political media will not be overrun with Brandeis artices the way they were with pieces on Keynes a month or two ago: the issues that concerned Brandeis are rooted in behaviors that seem particularly characteristic of the nineteenth century. Specifically, he saw the large size of the corporations in his day not necessarily as an inherent problem, but as a tool that could be used to nefarious ends. His major concern appears to have been the tendency toward mononpoly, which would stifle competition and lead ultimately to significant harm to workers and consumers. And the financial industry, in Brandeis's view, was the worst offender. In the essay "Our Financial Oligarchy," Brandeis quotes then-Governor Woodrow Wilson on this point.

The great monopoly in this country is the money monopoly...Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men, who...are necessarily concentrated upon the great undertakings in which their own money is involved and who, necessarily,...chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom.

Wilson's concern, therefore, is not that these companies shouldn't be too big lest the rest of us wind up on the hook for their failures. Instead he, and Brandeis, are more worried about the consequences of the success of such businesses. Brandeis believed that there is a point at which greater size would begin to limit the efficiency of a corporation, and the only reason a business's managers would seek to grow beyond that point was to profit from anti-competitive activities. As one example, he noted that the House of Morgan essentially paid fees to itself out of the proceeds for underwriting the formation of U.S. Steel. "This sum of $62,500,000 was only a part of the fees paid for the service of monopolizing the steel industry."

As much as Brandeis detested monopolies, however, he was not terribly interested in breaking them up. According to Philip Cullis, author of "The Limits of Progressivism: Louis Brandeis, Democracy and the Corporation" (Journal of American Studies, 30 [1996], 3: 381-404), "the accusation that dominated his indictment of the trusts--that they relied on unfair practices to dominate industries--also led him to downplay the need for the government to break up large firms." (383) This is because Brandeis "believed that, in comparison with action against unfair practices, limiting corporate size was of secondary importance." (395) Moreover, while Brandeis's own actions in publicizing such unfair practices "enhanced public enthusiasm for reforming business conduct, it also undermined support for limiting corporate size." (394) In general, Cullis concludes, "Progressives assumed that the solution was to make big business good, rather than to make it small." (404)

Despite the fact that he wrote a book called The Curse of Bigness, then, Brandeis was unable to provide much guidance on the "too big to fail" question. This is mainly for two reasons: first, the government was not yet in the business of directly bailing out companies, so the issue simply was not on his radar; and second, he did not oppose corporate size per se. It appears that those who seek to limit the size of corporations must look elsewhere for intellectual support.

The Elvis of Scholars

There is a new documentary coming out on Melville Herskovits. This preview makes it look fascinating.

The filmmakers call Herskovits the Elvis of scholars because on the one hand he appropriated what black scholars had already been doing, and on the other he popularized the thesis that black Americans had a cultural past from Africa. I've read a lot of his correspondence and I'm struck over and again by the way he personally interacts with black scholars. He wanted so badly to be accepted by them, and yet at the same time could not quite let go of white privilege. Ralph Bunche, for example, was frustrated that Herskovits never invited him to the all white faculty lounge at Northwestern. When another professor did, Herskovits greeted Bunche at the table with an intensity of embarrassment. In order for Bunche to return to Africa on an SSRC grant, four years after completing his first trip to Africa and receiving his award winning PhD from Harvard's Political Science department, the SSRC mandates that Bunche study anthropology with Herskovits for a semester and then with Malinowsky at the London School of Economics for a year before going to Africa. Bunche's personal diaries about this time (held at UCLA, unpublished except for his months in South Africa) document a man of remarkably good humor, despite being forced to study, as a tenure-track professor, with someone not much older than himself, but who had shot up the ranks of academia that Bunche could not then travel. I'm convinced that Bunche's ability to get done what he needed to get done, despite any and all slights, coupled with his ability to befriend everyone (from African chiefs to white British MPs), was what led him into his thirty year diplomatic career with the United Nations and his Nobel Peace Prize.

I'm looking forward to the documentary because I've looked at Herskovits so often through the eyes of the black scholars that associated with him and had to depend upon his gatekeeping ways. It will be good for me to see the world through his eyes (have you noticed in your dissertation writing that there are ever more things on your to do list to master?)

It Could Have Been a Brilliant Career

Blogger texasinafrica has read Newt Gingrich's PhD dissertation so you don't have to.*

(h/t Dave Noon)

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* Offer may not apply to actual intellectual biographers of the 58th Speaker of the House.

Tim's Light Reading (4/17/09)

1. Patrick McNamara on Orestes Brownson---I once wrote a historiographic study on Brownson during my graduate studies at Loyola. The paper was panned, but I never should've been allowed to write a historiographic study on a person about whom only traditional biographies had been written. I think only Schlesinger's book, mentioned in McNamara's write up, ventured into the historical-biography realm. Anyway, grad-school bitterness aside, Brownson is an important figure mentioned in virtually every intellectual history covering mid-nineteenth century America. I'll probably hearken back to his 1866 book, The American Republic, for my own upcoming paper on Catholics and world federalism---proposed for a panel with Pat and fellow USIH blogger Ray Haberski for a tentative 2010 OAH panel.

2. InsideHigherEd's Christine Kelly on The Perils of Grad Student Life and Beyond---Continuing somewhat the grad studies theme, this relatively succinct piece captures a number of concerns that grad students face with regard to life in and, more importantly, out of the academy after graduation. This is important reading for every current, potential, and just-released graduate student, whether studying U.S. intellectual history or beyond.

3. Anna Yeatman's H-Ideas review of Anne Phillips' Multiculturalism without Culture---Heretofore I was unfamiliar with the work of Anne Phillips. Since Yeatman's review was more of a traditional factual relay of the book's contents than criticism, I feel I can reflect here from the review with a decent sense of Phillips' arguments. With that, I found Phillips' assertion that multiculturalism stands against borrowing, crossing, and redefining to be more than intriguing. For instance, that which we commonly call Hip-Hop culture, a movement often associated with multiculturalism, is almost entirely premised on clever borrowing, crossing, and redefining in terms of music, visual arts, and fashion tastes. Phillips defines multiculturalism this way because she sees it as an essentializing discourse with regard to race, class, gender, and ethnicity. This essentializing works against individual autonomy, she argues. This means multiculturalism sometimes undercuts equality as well. Against all of this, Phillips forwards the notion that multiculturalism ought to be seen, or defined, as an "emancipatory discourse" on behalf of autonomy and equality, but against essentialism in terms of one's cultural background. In sum, multiculturalism should be seen as a means---involving contestation and contextualism---and not as a confining term about cultural ends. This explains the title of the book. I'm not sure what to make of Phillips' argument, but my first reaction is to like it. It actually seems to make multiculturalism more inclusive, to move it into conversations about democratic or common culture. I mean, we're all striving for betterment, change, and progress, yes?

4. Allan Brandt's 1987 book, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880, has no obvious relation to U.S. intellectual history. But when you read it with questions about the Culture Wars in mind, Brandt's history becomes an exercise in attempting to understand how ideology and pseudo-intellectualism trump politics in today's world. It's amazing how the costs of prevention, versus therapy and treatment, are continually undervalued in U.S. history. It's also both comforting and sad to know that our utopian ideals about human behavior have continually trumped practicality in terms of social policy and politics. - TL

my article in Contemporary Pragmatism

The current issue of Contemporary Pragmatism features my article, "The Limits of Liberalism: Pragmatism, Democracy and Capitalism." (It is issue 5.2, which is somewhat confusingly dated December 2008.) The journal is the official publication of the International Pragmatism Society and is relatively new. Though I'd certainly encourage readers to request that their local academic libraries subscribe to the journal, anyone interested in reading my article can also write me to receive a copy and an emphatic thanks for his/her interest. The abstract is below.

Liberalism sanctions both democracy and capitalism, but incorporating the two into a coherent intellectual system presents difficulties. The anti-foundational pragmatism of Richard Rorty offers a way to describe and defend a meaningful democratic capitalism while avoiding the problems that come from the more traditional liberal justification. Additionally, Rorty’s rejection of the search for extrahuman grounding of social and political arrangements suggests that democracy is entitled to a philosophical support that capitalism is not. A viable democratic capitalism therefore justifies its use of markets on the consent of the governed, rather than appeals to liberal notions of individualism, liberty, and property.

--Mike

(VERY) Post-OAH Meeting Wrap-Up, Part III: Blogging and Our Profession

I wanted to wrap-up my short (but temporally extended) series* on the OAH with a post on blogging-related program activities at the OAH Meeting (this post does not concern the many other history bloggers who blogged the OAH itself....it's meta, but not that meta).

The (now inevitable?) panel on blogging, entitled "Blogging History: Explorings in a New Medium" occurred at 1:45 pm on Friday, March 27. Or rather it would have occurred at 1:45 pm had the organizers of the panel been able to get their computer to successfully communicate with their projector. After establishing its professional credentials via its technological prowess, the panel lurched to life about twenty minutes late. Chaired by William T. Youngs of Eastern Washington University, the panel assembled a diverse group of excellent and successful historically-oriented bloggers to discuss and display their various approaches to blogging.**

Larry Cebula from Eastern Washington kicked things off with a presentation on his Northwest History blog, which won the 2008 Cliopatria Award for Best Individual Blog. Cebula's presentation focused on his blog's entries about primary materials on the history of the Pacific Northwest. While that's the focus of the blog, Northwest History also has more general posts about history...especially online. Independent scholar J.L. Bell followed Cebula. Bell is the creator of the excellent Boston 1775, which, as its name suggests, focuses on primary materials concerning life in the Massachusetts capital at the start of the American Revolution. Bell spoke about being a non-academic historian, and the many ways in which the internet has made it easier for him to find and share information about 18th-century Boston.

Mary Schaff, who blogs at the Washington State Library, spoke about the possibilities of institutional blogs. She was followed by the University of Western Ontario's William Turkel, who spoke about his recently shuttered Digital History Hacks, which focused on new ways for historians to use computers and the internet. Finally my former colleague at the University of Oklahoma Ari Kelman and Eric Rauchway, both now of UC Davis and founders of the 2008 Cliopatria Award-winning group blog Edge of the American West, addressed the ever-burning question of whether or not blogging is worth the time. Discussion, naturally, followed the presentations.

Overall the panel was interesting but un-earth-shattering. The panelists certainly represented SOTA blogs and engage in the medium for a variety of reasons. Kelman and Rauchway said they began to blog because they wished to reach a broader audience. Blogging is Bell's primary means of communicating his historical interests. Schaff's blog communicates information about the Washington State Library that previously would have been communicated in other media (a less-frequently updated website or, before that, a newsletter). And Turkel's blog seemed like a natural place for his professional interest in digital history. All agreed that history blogging at its best was valuable, but that many, many history blogs quickly become moribund, or (as Cebula noted) revert to blogging about politics instead. As pretty much everyone knows, we get very little professional credit for blogging. But Turkel was quick to point out in discussion that peer-review is a technology that could in theory be extended to a blog, at which point the logic of discounting blogging as scholarship/creative work would begin to disappear.*** And both Turkel and Schaff pointed out that, among the academic disciplines, history is well behind the technological curve. Blogs are so 2004 (perhaps in four years we'll be having OAH panels on the professional uses of Twitter).

At their best, history blogs also act as places to network and exchange ideas with other historians, a kind of non-stop conference (with no registration or travel costs).**** I do think there's a kind of tradeoff between attracting a large audience of non-historians and engaging in such conversations. To be blunt: we tend to be interested in somewhat different things than non-historians are (as the comment sections on the History News Network attest).

I do wish the discussion had been a bit more intellectually lively...but perhaps that's the price of blogging's success. I imagine a panel entitled "The Scholarly Paper: Explorations in a Medium" that had a series of presentations by first-rate historians about the different kinds of papers that one might publish would also provide little that was unexpected.

One other blogging note from the OAH Meeting. Thursday night's plenary session "The 2008 Election as History" took place in Town Hall Seattle, a beautiful former Christian Science church that was designed in 1916 by architect George Foote Dunham, who was--like seemingly everyone else--apparently a relative of Barack Obama. In fact, the session really consisted of a number of prominent historians discussing their personal relationship to the 2008 election and its outcome. Many of these talks were interesting and moving (videos of all of them can be found on HNN), but I think I would have preferred to hear the same panel actually discuss the 2008 election as history rather than the 2008 election as autobiography.

I mention the panel in this post because one of the participants was McGill's Gil Troy, who spoke about blogging the election for HNN.***** Troy's talk began with five, mostly sensible, rules that he set up himself as a historian-blogger, which concluded with the following:

Fifth, and finally, keep ‘em guessing – as to where I stand politically. I have always said that the best compliment I can get, at the end of a contemporary US history class – or when invited back by a TV producer -- after having tackled major, controversial issues, is when I am asked: “Professor Troy, I’m confused, are you a liberal or a conservative?” I believe my job in the classroom – and as a blogging historian – a historiblogger? -- is to avoid plunging into partisanship, and to stimulate debate rather than dictate thought or preach to the converted. I also think that partisan positions have become too rigid and frequently simplistic in this country, whereas our job as academics is to embrace the complexity of reality even at the cost of ideological consistency. I take as my standard, the words of New York’s former Mayor Ed Koch, who said, “if you agree with me on nine out of twelve issues, vote for me. If you agree with me on twelve out of twelve issues, see a psychiatrist.”

In this spirit, I try to avoid what we could call the Zinn not Zen of History (Howard Zinn), marshalling the forces of history to prop up my own contemporary partisan position. Historians should use the public platforms we are privileged to be offered to give historical perspective rather than partisan screeds with some historical camouflage.

But much of the rest of the talk consisted of Troy aggressively plugging his preferred political position--centrism--and describing the ways in which he devoted his blogging of the campaign to a similar end. Indeed, his latest book, Leading from the Center: Why Moderates Make the Best Presidents, seems entirely devoted to marshaling the forces of history to endorse a particular political position.

This did not go over well with the assembled historians, who spent much of the question period pressing Troy on whether "centrism" was even a meaningful political position or a kind of political tautology (i.e. a successful president's policy will become mainstream regardless of how people may have responded to such policies before his presidency).

My problem with Troy's position was somewhat different. It's entirely possible to take the view that professors have no business speaking politically in their professional role as academics. This is essentially Stanley Fish's view. Clearly, however, Troy does not share this view (nor, for what it's worth, do I). But rather than engage with the politics of those with whom he politically disagrees, Troy denounces them for using history to political ends. But so far as I can tell, that's exactly what Troy does (and more power to him, say I). Troy's real difference with Howard Zinn is that he disagrees with both Howard Zinn's politics and Howard Zinn's reading of history. Indeed, I suspect Troy views those two disagreements as connected. Which is why it's a little disingenuous for him to denounce Zinn for using history to draw political conclusions. Of course, Troy did not invent this rhetorical tactic. One of the infuriating tics of David Broder-style centrism is its careful political deployment of shock and surprise at the very existence of politics.

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* Previous posts in the series can be found here and here.

** It was, in effect a state of the field panel...though it was not a State of the Field® Panel.

*** In my institution, though one receives much more credit for a peer-reviewed publication, one receives some credit for a non-peer reviewed one. And for the life of me, I cannot think why a (serious) blog entry shouldn't count as much as any other non-peer-reviewed pub.

**** I pointed this out during the panel's discussion, fwiw.

***** A video of Troy's talk can be found here, or, if you prefer to read it yourself, as a blog entry here.

The Religion Of John Rawls

This is a crosspost, but The Times Literary Supplement published a nice historical piece on John Rawls' relationship with Christianity. Authored by Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel, the article is a shortened version of their co-written introduction to a book just released from Harvard University Press. - TL

Free Speech And Academic Freedom On Catholic Campuses

A subtitle for this post might be: "The Travails Of U.S. Catholic Intellectual Life At The Turn Of The 21st Century." Historians, you know, like to invoke the weight of time in their arguments.

I offer two addendums to my post here a few weeks ago on the controversy about President Barack Obama giving the commencement at the University of Notre Dame.

First, this piece authored by Cary Nelson, current president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Here's a relevant excerpt:

The American Association of University Professors has repeatedly argued that an invitation is not an endorsement. ...Nor was it necessary for Columbia's president Bollinger to go to such embarrassing lengths to distance himself from Ahmadinejad. No one thought Columbia was promoting him for the Nobel Peace prize.

But then efforts to get an invited speaker disinvited are not necessarily really based on anger at giving the person a platform, especially since real monsters often acquit themselves poorly on stage. They are as much as anything else efforts to housebreak American higher education, to establish external forces and constituencies as campus powers. They are about establishing who is really in charge -- students and faculty, or politicians, talk show radio hosts, and donors. Get a university to cancel Churchill or Ayers and anyone on the political or cultural spectrum whose views you oppose can be your next target.

Second, this April 3 post by John Thavis at the Catholic News Service blog. It contains three important points from recent history---two from unnamed Vatican officials and one from Mr. Thavis (so 1a, 1b, 2):

1. Non-Americans at the Vatican ...seem more comfortable with the idea of accommodating dignitaries and civil authorities in a church setting, even when their political positions aren’t in line with the church’s teaching. ...Two episodes in particular have been mentioned to me by Vatican officials over the last week.

(a) French President Nicholas Sarkozy received the title of honorary canon of the Basilica of St. John Lateran during his visit to Rome in 2007, a tradition that goes back centuries. Sarkozy, who also met Pope Benedict, supports legal abortion. The Vatican and the Diocese of Rome seemed to have no problem with honoring the twice-divorced Sarkozy, who says he is a Catholic. In fact, the Lateran vespers service to bestow the title was “all pomp and circumstance,” as one Vatican official put it.

(b) When Pope Benedict was invited to give a major talk at the Rome’s Sapienza University in 2008, the criticism and protest by some professors and students who didn’t want to give him a platform caused the pope to cancel the appearance. The episode was viewed at the Vatican as a prime example of intolerance.

2. Last year, a minor controversy erupted at Rome’s Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, known as the Angelicum, when Cherie Blair was invited to speak on “Women and Human Rights.” Some U.S. and British groups called her “pro-abortion” and tried to get the invitation rescinded; the university refused to cancel, despite receiving hundreds of complaints. During her talk, Blair said she had difficulties with the church’s teaching on responsible parenthood, but implied that her problems were with church teaching on contraception, not abortion.

We clearly see here the three main issues laid on the table in relation to Rome: honors, academic freedom, and abortion. With Mr. Thavis' examples in mind, I forward the following: Even for U.S. Catholics who less stridently argue that President Obama should not be honored (as opposed to being dis-invited or not allowed to speak), how does the recent history of the Catholic Church's intellectual life in Rome, on these three issues, square with your position? - TL

Post-OAH Meeting Wrap-Up, Part II: Intellectual History at the OAH

This post continues my brief series on last week's OAH annual meeting.

Although it didn't earn a "State of the Field" panel all its own, intellectual history seemed to be live and well at the OAH. I attended three sessions devoted to intellectual history or with strong intellectual history content. All were interesting, coherent, and exciting, featuring strong papers followed by lively discussion.

On the conferences opening day, I attended a panel on Social Science and the Nation State from the New Deal to the Cold War. Jessica Wang of the University of British Columbia led off the session with an interesting paper about the role institutional economists played in the early years of the National Labor Relations Board. Although their vision for the NLRB was eventually crowded out by more legal-minded and conservative members, Wang argues that, in their focus on local factors in their analysis of labor relations, these economists represented a reformed social science tradition that challenges the notion--put forward by James Scott among others--that modernist state intervention necessarily contravenes local knowledge. Hamilton Cravens of Iowa State University followed with a paper that presented a (grander) narrative of social science during the Cold War, a period in which U.S. social science became more positivistic and more establishmentarian in its orientation, before fragmenting in the 1970s. Finally, Mark Solovey from the University of Toronto presented a fascinating paper about Sen. Fred Harris's failed efforts to create a National Foundation for Social Science in the mid-1960s. Solovey's paper offered interesting glimpses into the relationship between science and the social sciences and the limits of Great Society liberalism (as well as giving some attention to the single most interesting politician that my adoptive state has ever produced). The panel concluded with a thoughtful comment by Alice O'Connor of UC Santa Barbara and a lively audience discussion.

Later that day I also attended a terrific panel entitled Liberalism Without Boundaries: the Varieties of Liberalism in American Thought and Culture. Among the other attendees was Rick Shenkman of HNN, who video'd the papers for posterity. Chaired by George Cotkin of Cal Poly SLO, the panel featured three terrific papers by Dan Wickberg of UT Dallas ("The Cultural Sensibility of American Liberalism, 1890-1941"), Susan Pearson of Northwestern ("'The Rights of the Defenseless': Sentimental Liberalism in Gilded Age America"), and Jamie Cohen-Cole of Yale ("The Straightjacket of Conformity: Cold War Social Science and the Production of Consensus Liberalism"). Each of the papers was (and is) very much worth listening to. Wickberg offered a fresh (and to my mind convincing) description of liberalism that spanned the Progressive Era and the New Deal built around the notion of "sensibility." Pearson looked at the relationship between the animal and children's rights movements in the late nineteenth-century and raised interesting questions about the shifting meaning of the idea of rights. And Cohen-Cole offered a critical exploration of Cold War liberalism that explored the paradox that critiques of conformity and the "authoritarian personality" helped forge a conformist vision of consensus liberalism in which the American academy was postulated as a microcosm of the world at large. Unfortunately Wilfrd McClay's excellent comment wasn't recorded by HNN.*

Finally, on Friday, I attended the State of the Field panel on the history of conservatism. This has been blogged about below and the papers by Emory's Joseph Crespino, independent scholar Rick Perlstein, the University of Michigan's Angela Dillard, and NYU's Kimberly Phillips-Fein (whose paper, in her absence, was read by panel chair Nancy MacLean of Northwestern) were all recorded by Rick Shenkman and posted on HNN. Unfortunately, the final paper by Bethany Moreton of the University of Georgia, as well as comments and discussion were not posted online.

Though the panel was not as devoted to intellectual history as the other two I've mentioned in this post, intellectual history was very well integrated into the discussions of conservatism. I say "well integrated" because when the study of conservatism really began to take off in the mid-1990s, it seemed divided between intellectual histories of conservatism (largely offered by conservatives) and social histories of conservatism (largely offered by liberals and scholars on the left). This divide was certainly present at a conference at Princeton that Jennifer Delton (now at Skidmore College) and I hosted back in 1996 (and at which a number of the participants in this panel gave papers). These two, largely incompatible narratives seem in the process of being replaced by narratives that try to see an interaction between conservative ideas and social and political facts. In different ways, each of the participants on the panel tried to do this...and (given the historiographical orientation of the panel) pointed the audience in the direction of other work that tries to do so as well.

Indeed, this last session's comfortable mix of intellectual history with social, political, and cultural history nicely instantiated the sense I had of the healthy place of intellectual history at this conference (and in U.S. history today). After decades in which intellectual history was often seen as a subfield in crisis--top-down when bottom-up social history was on the rise in the '70s; simultaneously buoyed and threatened by the rise of cultural history in the '80s--we seem to be in a quietly comfortable and confident place. Intellectual historians are playing important roles in central discussions in the larger field of US history. And within intellectual history, junior, mid-career, and senior scholars seem to be talking with, rather than past, each other. I didn't see any particular Next Big Thing in intellectual history at the OAH. But that's part of this generally positive picture. "Normal science" can be a nice, productive and even interesting place to be.

I'll conclude this series sometime in the next few days with a post on blogging and bloggers at the OAH.

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* If you're reading this by any chance, Rick Shenkman, please consider recording the comments and discussion as well as the papers! Putting this stuff on line is a great service, but as you know comments and discussion can be just as interesting as the papers.

Conservatism at the OAH

I know there's some interest on this blog in American Conservatism, so I thought I would point out this remark and this response.

Post-OAH Meeting Wrap-Up, Part I: Whither the Organization of American Historians?

I've just returned from the 2009 meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Seattle, Washington. In an effort to be more bloggy in my blogging, rather than write a single, long post about the OAH, I'm going to write three shorter ones.

Before heading out to Seattle, I e-mailed the other folks involved in USIH in the hopes of gathering to discuss the state of our subfield, plot world domination, or at least have a few beers. To my surprise, not a single other member of our collective was planning to attend.

Now, perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised. I haven't exactly been an OAH annual meeting regular myself. The Organization of American Historians is the professional organization for historians of the United States (not to be confused with the American Historical Association, the professional organization for historians in the United States).* Though I've been a member of the OAH for about two decades, I've only attended about half a dozen OAH meetings, the last in 2003 in Memphis.

But this year's meeting was unusually sparsely attended, with only 1,800 registrants, significantly lower than was expected (lower even than the 1,900 who showed up at the 2007 meeting in the more bicoastally out-of-the-way Minneapolis). And the main culprit appears to be the economy. Indeed, the entire meeting was shadowed by our current economic woes, as Rick Shenkman reported on HNN. C-SPAN wanted to cover the convention, but couldn't afford to send a crew. The book exhibit was half empty and reported poor sales. Even the OAH business meeting was clouded by economic woes:

Officials reported that the organization's endowment is down some 30 percent. Contributions are down 40 percent. Income from the exhibitors was down $38,000, though this loss was offset by strong receipts from corporate sponsors. As it usually does, the annual convention is netting a substantial profit, some $95,000, but that's lower than is usual.

The OAH is not expecting to lose money this year, but there are fears that things may get worse before they get better. Most troubling is that these economic worries come in the midst of a longer-term downturn in professional association memberships. The OAH had 9,300 members last year. This year it has 8,750.

And this gets me to the point of this first OAH post: in our changing information, professional, and economic environment, what does the future hold for professional organizations like the OAH? Despite my poor attendance at OAH meetings past, I've always enjoyed these conferences. Significantly smaller, more focused, and less haunted by the job market than the AHA, the OAH tends to offer a much higher percentage of interesting panels and opportunities to exchange ideas. And yet it's a large enough conference that, as at the AHA, one bumps into people with whom one has fallen out of touch. As an intellectual and cultural historian who works on the post-New Deal U.S., I really haven't had a smaller subfield conference to attend for most of my career, so the OAH is particularly nice.**

But it's not clear to me that such an organization will matter enough to enough historians to remain vibrant in the future. As such meetings get smaller, the costs of attending will likely rise while the intellectual value will likely decrease, both of which will, in turn, further drive down attendance.

Before turning to my (very positive, as you'll see) intellectual experiences at this year's OAH, then, let me open with a series of questions, especially directed at the U.S. historians among our readership: Do you find the OAH annual meeting--or mid-size conferences like it--to be valuable? Why or why not? And what, if anything, would we lose if we didn't have an organization (and an annual conference) dedicated to covering all of American history?
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* I'm sure most readers of this blog are aware of this fact...but we might as well flatter ourselves and assume that there are some non-historians reading this.

** Historians of the West and the South have the Western and the Southern. Historians of the antebellum period have SHEAR. Diplomatic historians have SHAFR. One of the reasons I started blogging here is that I so appreciated last year's inaugural USIH conference--which I didn't help plan--and wanted to get involved in this effort to create some professional infrastructure for at least one of my subfields.

“The Cunning of History”; Or, the Unintended Negative Consequences of Good Ideas

Nancy Fraser’s powerful new essay, “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History” (New Left Review 56: Mar/Apr 2009) is a template for how to trace ideas—and the use of ideas—across different contexts. Fraser’s article, a history of how second-wave feminism was co-opted by the forces of capitalist accumulation, asks “whether second-wave feminism has unwittingly supplied a key ingredient of what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello call ‘the new spirit of capitalism’” (98). She writes: “The cultural changes jump-started by the second wave, salutary in themselves, have served to legitimate a structural transformation of capitalist society that runs directly counter to feminist visions of a just society” (99).

Fraser introduces her historical argument by succinctly and effectively describing the feminist critique of the Fordist, state-dominated capitalist system that characterized the global economy during the 1950s and 1960s. In that context, the feminist critique was not only necessary, but also liberating, especially the unmasking of patriarchy internal to the idealized “wage earner.” In other words, state-dominated economic regimes that promoted families with only one wage earner simultaneously empowered men as against women (not to mention whites as against blacks and other minorities). But the premise of this critique was not simply about allowing women the “right” to also earn wages, as Fraser makes clear: “Far from aiming simply to promote women’s full incorporation as wage-earners in capitalist society, second-wave feminists sought to transform the system’s deep structures and animating values—in part by decentering wage work and valorizing unwaged activities, especially the socially necessary carework performed by women” (105).

In short, Fraser lauds the goals and critical theories of second-wave feminism, especially that of the socialist variant, which combined gender analysis with a systematic critique of capitalism and imperialism. Thus, in analyzing how feminism was co-opted by capitalistic forces, she is not laying blame, rather, she is attending to the “cunning of history.”

Second-wave feminism had unanticipated consequences that can hardly be considered liberating on a grand scale. “With the benefit of hindsight,” Fraser argues, “we can now see that the rise of second-wave feminism coincided with a historical shift in the character of capitalism, from the state-organized variant… to neoliberalism. Reversing the previous formula, which sought to ‘use politics to tame markets’, proponents of this new form of capitalism proposed to use markets to tame politics” (107).

In the context of this shift from a Fordist to Post-Fordist regime, Fraser makes a compelling case that “second-wave feminism thrived.” She continues: “What had begun as a radical countercultural movement was now en route to becoming a broad-based mass social phenomenon. Attracting adherents of every class, ethnicity, nationality and political ideology, feminist ideas found their way into every nook and cranny of social life and transformed the self-understandings of all whom they touched. The effect was not only vastly to expand the ranks of activists but also to reshape commonsense views of family, work, dignity” (108).

This was all to the good, right? Not so fast according to Fraser, as the rise of neoliberalism coincided with the rise of identity politics, which took hold of feminist politics. “Claims for justice were increasingly couched as claims for the recognition of identity and difference.” Feminist identity politics tended “to overextend the critique of culture, while downplaying the critique of political economy.” This had practical effects, as feminists worked harder in their struggle to gain recognition from the state or other institutions, as opposed to their earlier struggles, which prioritized more tangible things like the feminization of poverty. This shift to neoliberal identity politics also had theoretical effects. Fraser observes that “in the academy, feminist cultural theory began to eclipse feminist social theory” (108).

Fraser cites Chiapello and Boltanski for helping her think through her larger theoretical framework. In their important book, The New Spirit of Capitalism, Chiapello and Boltanski argue that each new epoch of capitalism co-opts the spirit of dissent that challenged the previous epoch. Thus, in the 1970s and 1980s, corporate management theorists acted as a neoliberal vanguard when they sopped up the radical spirit of 1968 and sold it to the masses of New Economy workers. “For Botanski and Chiapello, the new ‘spirit’ that has served to legitimate the flexible neoliberal capitalism of our time was fashioned from the New Left’s ‘artistic’ critique of state-organized capitalism, which denounced the grey conformism of corporate culture” (109). (To extend this further back, in an American context, the Sixties critique of corporate conformism took its cues from 1950s thinkers like David Riesman, William Whyte, C. Wright Mills, and Paul Goodman, not to mention Betty Friedan.)

In the context of such cooptation, the “new spirit of capitalism” incorporated second-wave feminism’s critique of state capitalism. Second-wave feminism acted as an unintentional ideological softener for neoliberalism as women poured into the labor market in numbers never before seen. The following lengthy passage hints at Fraser’s logic in making this argument:

“Our critique of the family wage supplies a good part of the romance that invests flexible capitalism with a higher meaning and a moral point. Endowing their daily struggles with an ethical meaning, the feminist romance attracts women at both ends of the social spectrum: at one end, the female cadres off the professional middle classes, determined to crack the glass ceiling; at the other end, the female temps, part-timers, low-wage service workers and microcredit borrowers, seeking not only income and material security, but also dignity, self-betterment and liberation from traditional authority. At both ends, the dream of women’s emancipation is harnessed to the engine of capitalist accumulation. Thus, second-wave feminism’s critique of the family wage has enjoyed a perverse afterlife” (110-111).

In the United States, this “perverse afterlife” can be seen in the neoliberal polices of Bill Clinton. “In the new climate,” Fraser contends, “it seemed but a short step from second-wave feminism’s critique of welfare-state paternalism to Thatcher’s critique of the nanny state. This was certainly the experience in the United States, where feminists watched helplessly as Bill Clinton triangulated their nuanced critique of a sexist and stigmatizing system of poor relief into a plan to ‘end welfare as we know it’, which abolished the Federal entitlement to income support” (111).

If Fraser is correct, and I believe she is, then she is illustrating the saddest of ironies: feminists, unwittingly, helped pave the way for legislation that has had a profoundly negative impact on women. Cunning indeed, you history!

Obama, Notre Dame, And Catholic Higher Education

[Updated: 4:35 CST, 3/24]

Notre Dame invited President Barack Obama to speak at its upcoming commencement ceremony. He accepted. The current plan is that he will also be awarded an honorary doctorate of laws. The linked article reports that "Obama will be the sixth U.S. president since Dwight Eisenhower to speak at a Notre Dame commencement." This Yahoo article reports that the other past presidents to speak include:

2001---President George W. Bush.
1992---President George H.W. Bush
1981---President Ronald Reagan
1977---President Jimmy Carter
1960---President Dwight Eisenhower

Some concerned alums and non-alum Catholics are opposed to Obama giving the commencement. The leader of the Fort Wayne-South Bend diocese, Bishop John M. D'Arcy, will not attend. Why the resistance? For the Obama administration's early actions on stem cell research, the so-called "Mexico City Policy," and for rescinding some health-care worker conscience protections strengthened by President George W. Bush late last year. Catholics see these actions as indicative of Obama not sharing their concerns about abortion or pro-life issues in general.

But what can we learn from the circumstances of past presidential appearances at Notre Dame? President Carter might be a useful example in terms of precedent. He had been criticized by the Catholic hierarchy during his 1976 campaign for not promoting an anti-abortion plank to the Constitution. At the time of his commencement address, he was not viewed favorably by the Catholic hierarchy on abortion. Carter used the occasion to give a foreign policy speech.

Eisenhower spoke on balancing domestic and foreign policy. Reagan, making his first public appearance after the assassination attempt, spoke on shrinking the nation's government. Bush senior spoke on "family values and service to society."

Although the effects the following circumstances were indirect, Eisenhower, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush nominated Supreme Court justices that both instituted and upheld Roe versus Wade. You can't hold Eisenhower or Reagan responsible for justice actions, due to the timing of the Roe decision and the points at which they gave their commencements. But one could argue that Bush senior could have been held accountable.

Some past commencement invitees, prior to speaking, have been accused of criminal actions, or held politically and theologically controversial opinions--both conservative and liberal. Off-hand examples include Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, who gave the 1983 commencement, as well as William F. Buckley, Jr. (1978), Jose Napoleon Duarte (1985, former El Salvadoran president accused of election fraud in 1972), and Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman (1865, accused of atrocities during the famous "March to the Sea"). More digging on my part would no doubt expose other dirty laundry from past speakers. The point is that Notre Dame is no stranger to inviting speakers with questionable Catholic resumes even apart from current Culture Wars vitriol.

But is a commencement address the right place and time for Notre Dame, or any Catholic university, to take a stand on pro-life causes? Perhaps. If so, has President Obama warranted a strong negative reaction? Is it not prudent to consider the nature of the commencement address rather than the speaker? Is it not the content of the speech that matters more than the speaker when arguments against the person, on the whole, are still somewhat weak? What if Obama chooses the occasion to talk about programs for reducing the numbers of poor and homeless in America? What if he rolls out more details on his support for reducing abortion demand (e.g. like promoting the 95-10 initiative supported by Democrats for Life of America)? But, more generally, what role do Catholic universities play in promoting dialogue on subjects of concern to Catholics?

I don't know the answers to all of these questions. But I have a sense of what U.S. Catholic intellectual history can tell us. Namely, that the possession of an uncomplicated, unblemished resume---whether the blemishes are small or potentially big---is no prerequisite for being invited. - TL

"Nihilism" in 19C America: an Intellectual History Bleg

Does anyone among our readership know anything about the history of American uses of the term "nihilism" in the 19th century?

I know that the German philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi is said to have coined the term in the late 18th century. And by the late 19th century, American intellectuals like William Graham Sumner and Lester Frank Ward are using it:

"Then we have socialism, communism, and nihilism; and the fairest conquests of civilization, with all their promise of solid good to man, on the sole conditions of virtue and wisdom, may be scattered to the winds in a war of classes, or trampled underfoot by a mob which can only hate what it cannot enjoy."
-- William Graham Sumner, "Sociology" (1881)

"The feeling is distinct in the best minds, and to a large extent in the public mind, that the tendency of modern ideas is nihilistic."--Lester Frank Ward, "Mind as a Social Factor" (1884)

Or course Sumner and Ward are denouncing precisely opposite things as "nihilistic."

I've managed to find what appears to be the first appearance of the term in the New York Times. A July 22, 1871 "Foreign Notes" piece notes that a decision by the Russian government to bar graduates of schools of science from attending universities was applauded by Conservatives who "hold that schools of science are the hotbeds of Nihilism." Indeed, the vast majority of the appearances of the term in the Times during that decade involved Russia, and most of the rest involved continental Europe, though a May 28, 1878 article about a sermon preached in Wilkes-Barre, Penna. by Bishop O'Hara denouncing the Knights of Labor declares that the Knights of Labor are "the entering wedge of Socialism, Communism, and Nihilism, those repulsive societies which have been compelled to skulk for years in the dark corners of European States."

So by the 1870s, "Nihilism" seems pretty clearly associated with foreignness and radicalism, which brings us more or less to the threshold of Sumner's usage (indeed Sumner uses the same trio of "socialism, communism, and nihilism" that Bishop O'Hara invoked a decade and a half earlier. But that doesn't quite account for Ward describing laissez faire as "nihilistic."

Any details that those who specialize in the late 19C can add to this picture would be greatly appreciated!