Interracialism

I'm thinking a lot about interracialism in the 1920s and 1930s these days. About what white liberals expected out of it, why many more black women seemed involved in it than black men, and also why African Americans pursued it or did not. Interracialism was a sort of synonym for interracial dialogue which would lead to lasting change in American society (often at an individual level which would lead to changes in attitude and thus less racism, rather than directly confronting structural racism).

I really appreciate this quote from Marion Cuthbert at the 1933 NAACP annual conference. Her speech was entitled "Honesty in Race Relations." She had been lambased the year before for taking a position as a national secretary in the Young Women's Christian Association by Carter G. Woodson, who viewed her career choice as a kind of concession to segregation. The YWCA had been working throughout the 1920s to desegregate parts of their organization. By 1933, they did not hold national conventions at segregated hotels, but continued to have segregated local divisions. One of the biggest problems was that the "central" branch in a city (read white) had financial control over the "neighborhood" branch (read black).

Frances Wilkins, Anna Arnold Hedgeman, and Mabel Byrd were much more forthright and direct in their protest of the segregation and more particularly discrimination within YWCA ranks than Cuthbert and her friend Juliette Derricotte. Yet Derricotte and Cuthbert achieved higher levels of power (perhaps this is not a "yet" but an obvious thing--those who work well with whites would be more likely to rise in an organization. But that does not mean they are necessarily "Uncle Toms") I am trying to figure out how to write about this without suggesting I prefer either group's approach. Protest and cooperative language both have a place. And all these women were exceedingly intelligent, brave, and talented. It's always interesting (and frustrating) to think about what our language accomplishes in its tone, especially when the author does not mean that. Readers think I am advocating one or the other when I mean to present them both and explore what they did.

Here's Cuthbert's quote (from Reel 9 of the NAACP 1 microfilm series):

"I do not know of any word that has had more different kinds of meaning attached to it in the last ten years than our word inter-racial. There have been shades of sentiments, variations of technique, degrees of stress, all of them laboring in some degree under the interracial program or interracial concept. For some people the inter-racial experience has been one so inept, so futile and so sentimental that they have become nauseated and have refused to consider any such part of our American problem. For other people and other groups it has seemed some sort of magic device to appoint an interracial committee and a hoary peace has descended upon such groups once the committee has been appointed, in the true American fashion of taking care of our troubles by that device. For other people the work that has come to be called interracial has been a real insight into the most pressing of our present day social problems, that one of race."

Neoconservatism and the Spirit of the Anti-Sixties

(My first post since it was announced that USIH won the 2010 Cliopatria Award for best group blog!)

At risk of opening up a discussion of another vague, contradictory, often polemical and even more often misunderstood political label, I’m going to move the discussion from neoliberalism to neoconservatism. How should intellectual historians frame neoconservatism? (This post is lacking in that I have yet to read Justin Vaïsse’s much-discussed new book, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement—I’ll get to it!)

Leo Ribuffo always gives the best advice on all things conservative history, in a grumpy senior scholar sort of way. For a classic Ribuffo statement on the field of conservative history, check out the paper he gave at last year’s OAH: “Seventeen Suggestions for Studying the Right Now that Studying the Right is Trendy.” One of his suggestions is that we take Lionel Trilling’s famous statement that there are no conservative ideas in America, only irritable gestures, and “bury it in a deep hole with nuclear waste.” Point taken. Of course, anyone who has read George Nash's 1976 bible, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, hardly needs this bit of advice. But there are several other nuggets of wisdom in the Ribuffo essay. I highly recommend it, crankiness and all.

Tim's Light Reading (1/6/2011)

Happy New Year!

1. The Most Influential Thinker In Europe Is...---According to a poll conducted by the journal Social Europe, "the thinker with the most influence on the European left-of-centre political agenda" is an American, Paul Krugman. A fellow USIHer, Andrew Hartman, will be pleased with #3. Here's the top ten:

1. Paul Krugman
2. Juergen Habermas
3. Slavoj Zizek
4. Anthony Giddens
5. Daniel Cohn-Bendit
6. Umberto Eco
7. Zygmund Bauman, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen
9. Oskar Lafontaine
10. Ulrich Beck

2. A Scandalous Conversion in the Philosophy of Religion---A (former) philosopher of religion at the University of Houston, Keith Parsons, has given up his academic discipline. Parsons said he could no longer sincerely present arguments for theism in an academic setting. Too much support for Intelligent Design seems to have been Parsons tipping point. Here's a snippet from the article:

Keeping an eye on the truth was also a matter of practical importance for Parsons, who was alarmed by the support for Intelligent Design creationism among philosophy of religion’s most influential names. These include Alvin Plantinga and Peter van Inwagen, who led the subfield’s resurgence in the 1970s and ’80s, and William Lane Craig, an Evangelical who popularizes the subfield’s arguments for God in widely-attended public debates. “One of the things the really active conservative Christians covet enormously, more than anything else, is intellectual respectability. And they think they have found it in some of the arguments from these philosophers of religion,” Parsons said.

BTW: The online magazine Religion Dispatches has quickly become a go-to site for thoughtful analysis and news on its namesake topic. Add it to your reader; all the the cool kids are doing it.

3. Almost All of Us are Unhappy with Our Jobs---A survey by Manpower subsidiary Right Management reports that 84 percent of workers are looking for a new job. ...I just thought I'd throw this out there light of the history job market news.

4. Good Censorship---On January 1, Lake Superior State University put forth its 36th annual "List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness." I like several of the selections---fail, viral, man up, momma grizzlies, refudiate, wow factor---but disliked the hate for "back story." Here's the sour quote in the press release on that term:

"This should be on the list of words that don't need to exist because a perfectly good word has been used for years. In this case, the word is 'history,' or, for those who must be weaned, 'story.'" Jeff Williams, Sherwood, Ariz.

BTW: I don't think it's an accident that at least two phrases from Sarah Palin made it into the list.

5. Tips on Refereeing for Journals---Thom Brooks of Newcastle University wrote an article for the open access Social Science Research Network (SSRN) titled "Guidelines on How to Referee." Here's the abstract:

This essay offers clear practical advice on how to act as a referee when asked to review an article for an academic journal. The advice is also relevant for reviewing manuscript proposals for academic publishers. My advice is based on my experiences in editing an academic journal, the Journal of Moral Philosophy, and four book series. I will draw on these experiences throughout as illustrations. The structure of the advice is as follows. First, I will begin by saying a few words about the academic publishing industry. Secondly, I will discuss whether one should accept or decline an invitation to review. Thirdly, I will examine the question of what appropriate standard should be applied when reviewing submissions. Finally, I conclude with advice on how to draft a report before submitting it to an editor.

6. The Intellectual Historian's Toolbox---Larry Cebula at Northwest History offers advice on what should be in a "Digital Toolbox for Graduate Students in History." I agree with all of his recommendations, as well as the suggestions given in the post's comments. In addition, I would add something specific to Cebula's #1 that Ben mentioned in a post here a few days ago: Google's "Books Ngram Viewer." Here's a link to what Google says about that tool.

7. Rethinking Human Rights---The ubiquitous Scott McLemee reviews a book for The National Conversation that takes human rights talk to task for its latent utopianism. The book's author, Samuel Moyn, a Columbia University historian of European intellectual life (and co-editor of Modern Intellectual History), seems to argue that strong doses of hard-headed empiricism (in the mode of Jeremy Bentham) and an on-the-ground, rough-and-tumble political sensibility would be beneficial to the future of human rights ideals. The book's title is The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard, 2010).

Neo-Liberal America?

Count me among those not sold on the idea of a neoliberal America, mainly because I'm not sold on the idea of neoliberalism in the first place. Ben's fascinating trans-Atlantic genealogy of neoliberalism seems to suggest the problems with the term. It is too intellectually fuzzy and, especially when its European meaning (to borrow from Ben's analysis) is attached to the United States, it seems too often to presume a bad history. Let me explain. When the European meaning of neoliberalism--roughly, according to Ben, the revival of laissez-faire economics through the Austrian and then Chicago schools of economics--is applied to the United States in the age of Reagan, it seems to suggest Louis Hartz's analysis of American political history by presuming that liberalism was the dominant tradition of the United States. The narrative seems to be that nineteenth-century liberalism, or classical liberalism, gradual gave way to liberal progressivism and then New Deal liberalism as the dominant political traditions in the United States, before being overcome by Reaganism, which is a return to nineteenth-century liberalism, now called neoliberalism.

Since I'm traveling today, I'll keep this post brief, but I don't think that liberalism is, or at least historically was, the dominant political tradition, so I'm not sure that neoliberalism can be a return to it. Hartz's argument has been extensively critiqued, most notably in the work of Rogers Smith, who argues in his Civic Ideals that the United States has had multiple traditions vying for supremacy. Liberalism, civic republicanism, and what Smith calls ascriptive illiberalism were all present in American political debate and provided friction in the political battles of the ninteeenth century. Of the three, liberalism was rarely the dominant tradition--Smith sees liberalism as responsible for Reconstruction whose influence was as evanescent as the Radical Republicans' commitment to equal rights. Instead, ascriptive illiberalism, which ascribes characteristics to a person's race, class, or gender and then presumes that those characteristics make them unfit for participation in the body politic, was the dominant tradition, Smith argues, and constituted American civic ideals for much of the ninteenth century. By contrast, the discussion on this blog seems to presume that liberalism was responsible for nineteenth-century racism, sexism, and classism (usually with imperialism thrown in) as well as its twentieth century off-shoots.

In my own recent book, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, I argue instead that Smith was correct and that American religion often supported the ascriptive illiberalism that characterized the American past. Liberal progressives in the 1920s began challenging this illiberal order, which resulted in a liberal moment in American political history roughly from the 1936 to 1968, after which liberalism fractured and conservatism became ascendant. In my understanding of American political history, we are indeed in danger of going back in time not to some classically liberal past but to the ascriptive illiberalism that characterized the nineteenth century. But perhaps I have misunderstood the term neoliberalism and the historical vision that it conjures, in which case I look forward to being shown where I am wrong.

A Quote for Tuesday

On creativity: "It's all a question of somehow metering out the right amount of generative impulse and modulating that with the right amount of critical impulse, and knowing when to say, I'm not going to touch that right now, I'll wait until I know more."

Walter Murch in Michael Ondaatje, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film (New York: Knopf, 2002), 39.

The Strange, Transatlantic Career of "Neoliberalism"*

In 1956, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in many ways the leading theorist of Cold War liberalism, published an essay entitled "Liberalism in America: A Note for Europeans" in Perspectives USA, one of the many Cold War-era publications that sought to enhance the reputation of American thought and culture on the other side of the Atlantic.**  The essay is a kind of thumbnail history and celebration of American liberalism. And Schlesinger emphasizes a point that was essential for a European understanding of American liberalism:

Enough should have been said by now to indicate that liberalism in the American usage has little in common with the word as used in the politics of any European country, save possibly Britain. Liberalism in America has been a party of social progress rather than of intellectual doctrine, committed to ends rather than to methods. When a laissez-faire policy seemed best calculated to achieve the liberal objective of equality of opportunity for all -- as it did in the time of Jefferson -- liberals believed, in the Jeffersonian phrase, that that government is best which governs least. But, when the growing complexity of industrial conditions required increasing government intervention in order to assure more equal opportunities, the liberal tradition, faithful to the goal rather than to the dogma, altered its view of the state.

Indeed, for most of the period since the New Deal, the notion that "liberalism" has a fundamentally different meaning on the two sides of the Atlantic has been something of a commonplace. With the partial exception of the British "New Liberal" tradition associated with thinkers like T.H. Green, L.T. Hobhouse, and J.A. Hobson, European liberalism has tended to stick closer to the model of the "Classical Liberals," emphasizing laissez faire economics and often deprecating the kind of activist government that has characterized American liberalism since the 1930s.  Self-described European liberals have thus tended to be  politically closer to American conservatives.

But in recent years, there's been an odd terminological and philosophical confluence of U.S. and European usages that has centered around the term "neoliberalism."  Though the word "neoliberalism" had separate U.S. and European births (corresponding, in each case, to a reimagining of each side's notion of "liberalism") there has been a remarkable convergence of these two "neoliberalisms," such that, while 20th-century discussions of "liberalism" on the two sides of the Atlantic often concerned different things, the discussion of "neoliberalism" on both sides has come to focus on a single, global phenomenon.