ALL ABOUT U.S (UNITED STATE): Juni 2009

Selasa, 30 Juni 2009

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.

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

Jumat, 26 Juni 2009

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

Slightly Off Topic: Government Intrusion Into Historiography

Sabtu, 20 Juni 2009

"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.

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

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.*

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.**

Jumat, 19 Juni 2009

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!

Must I Paint You a Picture?

Kamis, 18 Juni 2009

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.

The Historical Present

Selasa, 16 Juni 2009

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

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

Jumat, 05 Juni 2009

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.

interesting book review

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]

Can You Ask For Higher Praise?

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

Quotes From History: Guess The Author

Selasa, 02 Juni 2009

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.