ALL ABOUT U.S (UNITED STATE): Oktober 2010

Jumat, 29 Oktober 2010

Recorded Talks from the 2010 USIH Conference

Below are links to three talks given at the 2010 USIH conference. The links will send you to google docs where mp3s of the talks are stored. We recorded only 3 talks from this year's conference, but they are good ones.

James T. Kloppenberg, "Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition," Keynote Address to the 2010 USIH conference, October 22.

Adolph Reed, Jr., Kenneth W. Warren, Dean E. Robinson, "Renewing Black Intellectual History," Plenary, 2010 USIH conference, October 21.

Panel: Religion, Isolationism, and American Foreign P0licy
Chair: Leo Ribuffo, George Washington University
Angela Lahr, Westminster College, "Church, State, and War: Evangelicals, Politics, and the Vietnam War"
Christopher McKnight Nichols, University of Pennsylvania, "Opposition to Empire and Isolationist Ideas in the United States, 1895-1910"
Matthew Avery Sutton, Washington State University, "Bracing for Armageddon: The Global Visions of World War II Era Evangelicalism"

Recorded Talks from the 2010 USIH Conference

Call for Papers: American Literature Association 2011 Conference

American Literature Association 2011 Conference / Boston, Massachusetts, May 26 - 29, 2011
Susan Glaspell Society Panel
Dramatizing Ideas: Intellectual Hybrids, Heterodoxies, and Humanisms in Greenwich Village

Selecting for traits, cross breeding, grafting, Claire Archer, the horticultural mad scientist at the center of Glaspell’s 1921 drama The Verge, uses all of these techniques to create a new self-reproducing species of plant, calling her efforts “mad new comings together.” In imagining Claire’s work in this play, Glaspell hit upon a metaphor for the intellectual life of Greenwich Village, where new ideas in politics, philosophy, science, spirituality, and art were bred and crossbred.

Glaspell’s horticultural metaphors for ideas have been linked by recent scholars to the educational organicism of John Dewey, to the Pragmatism of William James, to the Humanism of F. C. S. Schiller, to the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, to the ontology of Henri Bergson, as well as to the evolutionary science of Lamarck, Darwin, and Haeckel. Such metaphors must be seen as the culmination of Glaspell’s own long-standing interest in the fusion of different ways of knowing. “When art weds science,” Glaspell wrote in her first novel, The Glory of the Conquered, “the resulting library is difficult to manage.” Extending these metaphors into a more general inquiry, the Susan Glaspell Society invites papers that address Greenwich Village as a site for the transformation of ideas.

The Glaspell Society is pleased to present its panel as part of the Five Drama Societies’ series on “Dramatizing Ideas.” Papers addressing any aspect of Glaspell’s drama and performance are welcome, as are papers dealing with her novels and short fiction. Additional possible topics include but are not limited to:

Glaspell and Science, Religion, Philosophy
Horticulture in Glaspell’s Writings
Influence of Science and/or Religion on Greenwich Village Writers or Artists
Pragmatism in Greenwich Village
The Heterodoxy Club and other Ideas of Heterodoxy
Aesthetic Fusions in Modern American Theatre, Literature, and Art
Eastern Religion and Culture in Modern America
Intellectual Genealogies of Progressive Reforms
NY Reception of Continental Philosophy: Nietzsche, Freud, Bergson
(Con)fusions of Philosophy / Intellectual Chimeras
Ideas of Race and Race-mixing in Greenwich Village
Early History of Genetics and Race
Ecology and Art in Modern America
Synesthesia in Modern Art, Literature, Theatre
The Idea of Nature in Early Twentieth-Century America
Intellectual Hybridity in Periodicals: The Masses, The Little Review, TNR, The Nation
Material Conditions of Intellectual Activity
Intellectualism and Political Radicalism
History of Greenwich Village

Please send 300 word abstract and brief bio by January 15th to Michael Winetsky at GlaspellsocietyALA2011@yahoo.com. The American Literature Association Conference will meet at the Westin Copley Place in Boston, May 26 - 29, 2011. For further information visit www.americanliterature.org.

Call for Papers: American Literature Association 2011 Conference

Historical Materialist Approaches to Black Intellectual History

This post, the first of my now regular Friday posts, serves as my reflections on the first plenary of the Third Annual U.S. Intellectual Conference, on Renewing Black Intellectual History. Adolph Reed, Jr., Kenneth Warren, and Dean Robinson were the panelists.

To be quite honest, the session got off to a slower start than I anticipated. Being quite familiar with the work of Reed, the first speaker, I expected his usual brilliant polemics. Instead, he patiently discussed the origins of the collection Renewing Black Intellectual History, which he edited alongside his friend Warren. It seems that the book arose from several bitch sessions at Hyde Park watering holes. Reed and Warren were disgusted with the non-materialist approach to black intellectual history, the types of approaches they thought dominated African-American Studies programs during the 1980s and 1990s, which emphasized culturalism and deemphasized political economy. They desired stronger contextual analysis. Racism is protean in character and needs to be posited contextually.

Dean Robinson spoke from his contribution to the collection, a distillation of his 2001 book, Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought. Robinson is critical of treatment of Black Nationalism that ignores political failure and emphasizes cultural success. He particularly mentioned the work of William Van Deburg and Peniel Joseph for this type of faulty analysis, which he sees as a reversal of Harold Cruse. Robinson and his fellow panelists find black politics—and left politics—lamentable in its current state, because activists and intellectuals tend to think about politics as performance of the self, instead of as strategic thinking. These are valuable points and I was happy to hear them, in spite of the aforementioned slow start.

The session picked up steam in the Q&A. The first question was posed by Randal Jelks, who wanted to know why the collection did not include a single essay on black religious thought, a curious omission considering the centrality of religion to African-American history. Jelks implied, I think, that Reed and Warren ignore religion because they dislike it. I’m not sure if this is true or not, but I wish this would have been explored in more depth. Reed replied to Jelks that he did not think an essay on religion would have altered the central messages of the book. But Reed has long been critical of what he considers an over-emphasis on religious leaders in relation to the civil rights movement, dating back to his book on Jesse Jackson. I wish this would have been discussed more polemically and less cryptically. I think it might have shed light on Reed’s historical materialism, which ultimately informs his longtime criticism of Obama. Reed thinks that black political leaders, and all political leaders, are only as good as the movements they speak for.

Speaking of which: Kloppenberg referenced Reed’s 1996 critique of Obama. Here is that passage in its entirety for your reading pleasure, written shortly after Obama won his first Illinois state senate race:

“In Chicago, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program -- the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black activist response hasn’t been up to the challenge. We have to do better.”

“The Curse of Community,” Village Voice, January 16, 1996—reprinted in Reed’s Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene (New Press, 2000).

Historical Materialist Approaches to Black Intellectual History

Kamis, 28 Oktober 2010

The Kloppenberg Plenary: Obama's (Controversial?) Intellectual Biography

Our Third Annual USIH Conference almost received a direct reference in Patricia Cohen's review of James T. Kloppenberg's newest book, Reading Obama: Dreams, Hopes, and the American Political Tradition (Princeton Press, 2010). Here are her two near misses (bolds mine): (1) "In New York City last week to give a standing-room-only lecture about his forthcoming intellectual biography... ." and (2) "Those who heard Mr. Kloppenberg present his argument at a conference on intellectual history at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center responded with prolonged applause."

The USIH omission is a shame because I'm pretty sure I remember Kloppenberg saying in the plenary that his book was released that same day, October 22. The article says "on Sunday," but it is unclear whether Cohen meant this coming Sunday (Oct. 31) or the Sunday after the conference (Oct. 24). In any case, I guess we'll have to wait 'til next year on our conference's first direct NYT appearance. C'est la vie.

We can take some pride, however, in the fact that Cohen quoted from one of our own: Andrew Hartman. Here are her two references to him:

(1) "The way he traced Obama’s intellectual influences was fascinating for us, given that Obama’s academic background seems so similar to ours," said Andrew Hartman, a historian at Illinois State University who helped organize the conference.

(2) "There seemed to be skepticism regarding whether Obama’s intellectual background actually translated into policies that the mostly left-leaning audience could get behind," Mr. Hartman said. "Several audience members, myself included, probably view Obama the president as a centrist like Clinton rather than a progressive intellectual as painted by Kloppenberg."

Andrew deserves the credit for the "standing-room-only" crowd. The plenary was held in the Segal Theatre, and thirty-five seats were available both on the right and left sides of the room. Along with the nineteen standing in the back of the room (which included me), I counted roughly 90 people attending. I round up to 90 because I could not see everyone around the columns, and only noticed a random seat or two empty in the chairs.

The book review fairly summarizes Kloppenberg's talk. I was pleased to see two specific things cited. First, Kloppenberg emphasized at the start of his talk that Obama's intellectual development occurred in relation to three key themes, or "matrices" (a term left out by Cohen but used by him): (a) the history of American democracy, (b) the ongoing development of the philosophy of pragmatism, and finally (c) the history of the intellectual (and social and cultural) upheavals of the 1970s-1990s. Cohen presents all three of these themes in the tenth paragraph of her piece, or roughly half-way through.

Second, I was also happy to see this humorous line from the talk make into Cohen's write up (bolds mine):

Conservatives who argue that Mr. Obama is a socialist or an anti-colonialist (as Dinesh D’Souza does in his book “The Roots of Obama’s Rage”) are far off the mark, [Kloppenberg] said. “Adams and Jefferson were the only anti-colonialists whom Obama has been affected by,” he told the audience in New York. “He has a profound love of America.”

Although I liked seeing those two references, there were some further details Kloppenberg relayed in relation to his three key themes. When he discussed the upheavals of the Culture Wars, he stressed the theme--and the tension---between "universality and particularity." He asserted that Obama absorbed the lessons of Thomas Kuhn, Clifford Geertz, and John Rawls in relation to creating "provisional fixed points" and "useful fictions." In other words, Kloppenberg sees Obama as incorporating the inherent, contingent nature of pragmatism in his thinking about policy and the culture wars. Obama attempts to undercut the passion of ideological thinking by seeing phenomenological truths rooted in events and episodes.

There is no denying the relativism of this philosophical approach, but Kloppenberg did not specify in his talk whether that framework permeated ~all~ aspects of Obama's life (e.g. religion), or just his political philosophy. If the former, then conservatives of all stripes will jump on Kloppenberg's book as proof of Obama's radical leftism, or at least of his lack of deep roots in the long Western tradition (i.e. transcendent truths, achievement of pure objectivity, etc.). And Kloppenberg's explicit reference to Nietzsche as being a part of Obama's intellectual history will push another corner of cultural critics, particularly the Bloomian/Straussian crowd, into apoplexy. I must say that though Kloppenberg made that connection, he did not specify exactly where---in the talk at least---Nietzsche directly entered Obama's story.

One could counter the relativism charge in relation to Obama's political philosophy by citing the (liberal) historicism of Obama's constitutional thinking. Cohen sets this up as the now familiar "living" versus "dead" constitutional philosophies. Here is her passage on this:

Taking his cue from Madison, Mr. Obama writes in his 2006 book “The Audacity of Hope” that the constitutional framework is “designed to force us into a conversation,” that it offers “a way by which we argue about our future.” This notion of a living document is directly at odds with the conception of Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court, who has spoken of “the good, old dead Constitution.”

But Cohen's---and Kloppenberg's---reference to James Madison shows how Obama's philosophy splits, in my opinion, the living/dead difference. Kloppenberg called the following "the only smoking gun" that arose from his research, but he spoke of a November 1991 document wherein Obama elaborated on a "curvature of Constitutional space" around the process of deliberation that informed the document's creation (i.e. the Constitutional Convention itself as a process of compromise).

So if Scalia and his crowd represent one historical tradition in thinking about the U.S. Constitution "works," then Obama---and Madison and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and the Warren Court---represent another. Both traditions are historical, but both are not seen as valid in the eyes of (legal) ideologues. I favor the living/deliberative/curvature interpretation, but my point is that appeals to history don't answer which is better, at least not in the limited context of a discussion about Obama's intellectual history. The argument is a moral-political one about which interpretative tradition is superior. Conservatives can't use history to prove wrong a liberal constitutional train of thought.

As a mild digression, I offer that proof in either direction would have to come through a utilitarian study of the effects of both philosophies on policies that touch people. But do we have the time to figure this out by scientific study? No. We're living the study. And U.S. citizens already complain that our congress doesn't act fast enough (which would itself be an argument in the direction of living/deliberative tradition---anyway).

That Kloppenberg's plenary and book served up such meaty history to chew on is a credit to him and the planning team for the conference---Paul Murphy, Lauren Kientz, and especially Andrew Hartman.

I end these reflections by offering a hearty thank you to James Kloppenberg. It was a great pleasure having him at the conference. - TL

The Kloppenberg Plenary: Obama's (Controversial?) Intellectual Biography

Rabu, 27 Oktober 2010

New Posting Schedule for the USIH Blog

On the heels of another successful USIH Conference, we've decided to try to increase the quantity and regularity of posts on this blog. Five of us have committed to posting at least once a week, which means that from now on, there will be new content on this blog every weekday.

Nothing else will change about the USIH Blog: our roster of bloggers remains unchanged and will continue to post as regularly (or irregularly) as they like. But starting next week, our ~~small~~ exclusive readership can expect more content.

Here's the new schedule of regular posters:

Monday: Ben Alpers
Tuesday: David Sehat
Wednesday: Ray Haberski
Thursday: Tim Lacy
Friday: Andrew Hartman

New Posting Schedule for the USIH Blog

Selasa, 26 Oktober 2010

"Intellectual History for What?” Laschian Analysis for the Soul

It is time to reflect on the Third Annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference, another successful meeting. One of the more memorable moments for me was the final plenary, which grappled with the question, “Intellectual History for What?” The six panelists contended with this question in a variety of ways.

George Cotkin answered by way of a moving, intimate look into his fine career as a writer of intellectual history that despite, or even because of, its setbacks, has nourished his soul. Rochelle Gurstein argued that intellectual historians need to write for “serious, engaged readers,” in order to recreate or reinvent a “public,” singular. The conference theme “Intellectuals and Their Publics,” plural, did not resonate with her.

Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, pulling no punches, advised that U.S. intellectual historians not stoop to the level of our colleagues in other fields, in terms of perpetual self-examination or self-flagellation. She also wished that we would be more cosmopolitan, read more continental theory, learn more languages. In general, she and the others lamented the technocratic, careerist, anti-intellectual culture that pervades academia and elsewhere.

Bill McClay, although pessimistic about our place as intellectual historians in the larger profession, pointed out that all historians do intellectual history when they do historiography. He pointed to the example of the great 1985 debate, in the pages of the American Historical Review, between Thomas Haskell and David Brion Davis about the problem of slavery and capitalism (the debate was later published as a book). This, for McClay, is intellectual history at its finest, even if nobody called it by its name.

David Steigerwald argued that intellectual history is inherently expansive and that we should be shameless trespassers. This spoke to me, as the type of intellectual history I write invades and occupies political, cultural, and educational history. In reflecting upon the wide variety of papers given, it seems to me that U.S. intellectual history, as practiced at our conference, has invaded American Studies, perhaps changing or altering it in productive ways, by putting expressive culture into conversation with more formal systems of ideas.

Casey Nelson Blake, who organized the plenary, concluded by arguing that one of the most important things we as intellectual historians can do is offer contextual maps to intellectuals, activists, and citizens engaged in daily work or struggle. He gave the example of artists who ask him, as an art historian, to help them put their work in a broader contextual framework.

The one theme that remained constant during this plenary session is the despair that humanistic values cannot live in a culture dominated by technocratic or vulgar utilitarian purposes. Humanistic study, including intellectual history, is not long for such a world. To this extent, Christopher Lasch was the not-so-subtle backdrop. Three of the panelists (Gurstein, Steigerwald, Blake) studied with Lasch at Rochester. And, of course, another is his daughter. Blake makes clear in a Commonweal review of a new biography of Lasch (requires subscription to access) how highly he thinks of his mentor. He concludes his essay, “What Emerson wrote of Thoreau holds true for Christopher Lasch: ‘wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.’”

The questions I pose to readers: Is the fate of intellectual history so closely tied to the fate of the humanities? Is there, then, reason for despair? More specifically, to those in attendance Friday night: What did you think of the plenary?

"Intellectual History for What?” Laschian Analysis for the Soul

Minggu, 24 Oktober 2010

14th Annual Brian Bertoti Innovative Perspectives in History Graduate Conference

The History Graduate Student Association of Virginia Tech is pleased to announce a call for papers from graduate and distinguished undergraduate students for the 14th Annual Brian Bertoti Innovative Perspectives in History Graduate Conference to be held at the Inn at Virginia Tech and Skelton Conference Center in Blacksburg, Virginia, from March 25-26, 2011. The interdisciplinary conference is intended to give young scholars the opportunity to present original research in a friendly yet scholarly atmosphere and to expand historical knowledge.

The two-day conference will begin on Friday, March 25, with a keynote address by Dr. Claudrena Harold, author of The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South. Dr. Harold will be visiting from University of Virginia, where she serves as an assistant professor in the Department of History and the African-American Studies Department . Her specialties are women's history, colonial history, and cultural resource management.

Presenters are asked to submit a one-page abstract and brief curriculum vitae by January 10, 2011, to Stephen O’Hara at HGSA.VT@gmail.com . For more information about the schedule, speakers, and accommodations, please visit the conference website at http://www.history.vt.edu/hgsa_website/bertoti.

*Cash prizes will be awarded to the outstanding papers at the conference.

14th Annual Brian Bertoti Innovative Perspectives in History Graduate Conference

Selasa, 19 Oktober 2010

The Myth of American Religious Freedom: Whiggism and American Religious History

David Sehat

It used to be a historical commonplace to claim that the nineteenth century was the century devoted to equal and individual rights, characterized by rugged individualism, and defined by a laissez-faire economic arrangement that looked to the individual as the chief economic actor. Following the publication of Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America in 1955, historians portrayed classical liberalism as the reigning orthodoxy of nineteenth century political and legal thought. Common law protections gave way to statutory and equity law to enshrine the primacy of contract. The rights of citizenship expanded almost inevitably to include greater proportions of the people. And the American ethos triumphantly marched on with its focus on personal independence, sunny optimism, and rational calculation. At least, that was how the story went.

Although social historians have devoted the better part of the last forty years to revealing the many evasions, contradictions, and falsifications in the idea of a liberal America, in many quarters this essentially progressive story—touched by moments of tragedy, to be sure, but tending toward the general inclusion of all—remains firmly in place. To quote but one example of the contemporary liberal narrative, in his Pulitzer-prize winning book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood portrays the revolutionary rhetoric of individual rights and the equality of all men as an inescapable force for freedom and equality. The egalitarian ideological core of the American Revolution had such hold on the American psyche, he claims, that “once invoked the idea of equality could not be stopped, and it tore through American society and culture with awesome power.”

The Whig quality of this still salient narrative is particularly striking when it comes to religion in the United States. As I argued in an earlier post, many writers connect the story of American religious freedom to the broader story of the American democratic experiment. Because the broader American narrative maintains such a Whig cast (at least in popular historical writing), much scholarship on the role of religion in public life portrays religion as an essentially emancipatory force. Religious communities, so the story goes, were central to reform movements by appealing to transcendent ideals in order to challenge unjust social orders. It is through religious movements, in other words, that American liberalism expanded.

But this generally progressive narrative of American religious history has led historians to overvalue the religious sources of reform while simultaneously underestimating the extent to which religious sensibilities formed a critical bulwark in the promotion and protection of illiberalism.

The illiberal impulse of nineteenth century religion did not escape the notice of John Stuart Mill. Mill is often portrayed as a quintessential nineteenth-century political thinker whose classical liberalism stands in as the reigning philosophy of the era. Yet he did not see himself that way. In his rousing 1859 tract On Liberty, Mill claimed simply that all political theory should start with the recognition that “the individual is sovereign.” Anglo-American political thought, according to Mill, had failed to do that and seemed to be moving in the wrong direction. He feared in particular what he characterized as “the engines of moral repression” that he saw gearing up in modern society. The growing number of religious believers strove to gain “control over every department in human conduct” or at least to minimize “divergence from the reigning opinion.” He pointed to the requirement in Britain (similar to the United States) that witnesses must swear belief in the existence of God and a future state of rewards and punishments to testify in court, the increasing prevalence of temperance legislation, the expansion of Sabbath laws, and the crusade against Mormonism, as examples to the mounting religious coercion that seemed to parallel the expansion of evangelicalism. Claiming that it was “not difficult to show, by abundant instance” that “the moral police” presented a danger to the “liberty of the individual,” Mill saw himself not as someone who sat comfortably in a century that honored his social philosophy but rather as a clarion voice who was critical of the nineteenth-century norm.

Because so many have looked to Mill as expression of the reigning orthodoxy of nineteenth-century political thought instead of recognizing him as one of its most cogent critics, they have misunderstood the century’s legal and political arrangement, particularly when it comes to religion. Legal historians have often claimed that although colonial law equated criminality with sin, American law dropped its moral concern after the Revolution, which, as the legal history Kermit L. Hall has claimed, “unleashed powerful forces of market capitalism and individualism.” Those forces, in the standard legal narrative, shifted the focus of law away from the maintenance of moral communities and moved property protection and personal security to the forefront of criminal law. Law, in other words, became the mechanism to regulate autonomous individuals interacting in a free marketplace with a minimum level of interference. Religious historians, following the trajectory, have suggested that religious partisans accepted the de-moralization of law, rejecting the coercion that law provided and looking instead to “moral suasion” as the means of promoting their social goals. In the Whig narrative, the nineteenth-century social movement, born out of religious ideals, becomes the ultimate means of moral suasion, whereby American liberalism expanded to more perfectly include everyone and to embody its own ideal.

This is a partial, if not false, narrative. Religious historians would do better to follow William Novak. Novak has has shown that law in the nineteenth century became a way of advancing a regulatory regime that held a relative view of individual rights subordinated to what courts thought was the good of the whole. This relative view of individual rights often cashed out in a frank illiberalism. As the political scientist Rogers M. Smith has argued, “Through most of U.S. history, lawmakers pervasively and unapologetically structured U.S. citizenship in terms of illiberal and undemocratic racial, ethnic, and gender hierarchies.” Taking seriously these two historical works would reorient American religious history. As Mill pointed out, religious partisans often set the parameters of mutual obligation that ruled in Anglo-American society. That mutual obligation downplayed or rejected the liberty of the individual, resulting in the illiberalism that Smith has documented. Fearing the liberty that might devolve into license and conclude with anarchy, the American moral establishment often upheld the limitation, the situational qualification, or even the flat denial of individual rights to women, Afro-Americans, and religious minorities including Catholics, Mormons, and free thinkers. In other words, the recognition of past religious illiberalism requires a new narrative of religious history that focuses not on freedom but on the power and control that religious believers exercised in the American past.

This is the latest in an ongoing series of posts that use material from my forthcoming book, The Myth of American Religious Freedom. The book can be found here and here. The previous posts can be found by clicking on the keyword below.

The Myth of American Religious Freedom: Whiggism and American Religious History

David Sehat

Selasa, 12 Oktober 2010

The Myth of American Religious Freedom: the Problem with the Founders

David Sehat

The Founders are haunting ghosts of our contemporary political conversation, particularly when that conversation touches on religion in public life. But they manifest themselves, or more accurately, are conjured to support contemporary political positions in puzzling and often intellectually dubious ways.

Consider the following. It is widely known that earlier in their lives Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were political rivals. Jefferson supported an absolute theoretical and practical separation of church and state. He disagreed with Adams not least on the latter’s view that religion, particularly the rational Christianity of liberal Congregationalism and Unitarianism, should be supported by the state to maintain social and political stability. All of this is in line with the way that both of the Founders come up in contemporary political argument, with each occupying twin poles on the issue of religion in public life.

Yet later in their lives they found a curious agreement that demonstrates many of the problems in appealing to the Founders. In 1816, Adams wrote to Jefferson to comment upon the evangelical expansion growing out of the Second Great Awakening. As evangelicals emerged as a powerful social force during the first three decades of the nineteenth century, they quickly formed organizations such as the American Bible Society and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to advance the evangelical cause at home and abroad. Adams observed the actions of evangelicals with a distaste that barely concealed his rising level of alarm. “We have now, it seems, a National Bible Society to propagate King James’s Bible through all Nations,” Adams wrote to Jefferson. Observing the actions of the evangelicals with dismay, Adams complained that they were propagating what he considered the “Corruptions of Christianity. . . in Europe Asia, Africa, and America!”

Jefferson was no more approving of the actions of evangelicals than Adams. But, unlike Adams, he was more sanguine about the limits of Protestant evangelical influence in the United States. Responding a month later, Jefferson concluded that evangelical “Incendiaries” had discovered that the reign of religious coercion—“the days of fire and faggot”—were over in the Western hemisphere and so they were moving on “to put the torch to the Asiatic region.” Then he posed an odd rhetorical question: “What would they [evangelicals] say were the Pope to send annually to this country colonies of Jesuit priests with cargoes of their Missal and translations of their Vulgate, to be put gratis into the hands of every one who would accept them? And to act thus nationally on us as a nation?” Jefferson’s question seemed to assume that, far from religiously neutral state, the United States was a Protestant nation whose government and traditions would be offending by an evangelistic outreach by the Roman Catholic church.

In this exchange, Jefferson and Adams revealed themselves to be something other than they appear in contemporary debate, something more complicated and not necessarily political useful to the partisans that invoke them. Adams was in favor of religion in public life, but he thought it must be the right kind of religion and explicitly rejected the religion of many of the people who appeal to him today. In other words, far from thinking that religion in general supported morals and political stability, which many people claim as his position, Adams distinguished between good religion and bad religion and would have, undoubtedly, viewed many of his contemporary promoters with disdain. Jefferson, by contrast, rejected the influence of religion in public life and especially in government. He seemed to believe that the unique arrangements of the United States had neutralized the power of religious fervor and ecclesiastical despotism that had now shifted to Asia and African with the emergence of missionary organizations. And yet he still could not detach himself from the belief that the United States was a Protestant nation whose sensibility would be offended and whose political principles would be disturbed were the Pope to send Jesuit missionaries to the United States (as he soon did).

These problems suggest a point that many are reluctant to acknowledge: the Founders don’t help us much in addressing the problems of the present. They too often disagreed among themselves. Their conceptions were too different than the people that today invoke them. And they too often changed their own minds as they saw the nation that they created unfold before their wary gaze. Perhaps we should let the Founders sleep in peace. We are going to have to solve our political problems ourselves.

The Myth of American Religious Freedom: the Problem with the Founders

David Sehat

Minggu, 10 Oktober 2010

Third Annual US Intellectual History Conference: 10 Days Away!

After a year of planning and hard work on the part of the conference committee (Paul Murphy, Lauren Anderson, and Andrew Hartman), the entire USIH team, and the good people at the Graduate Center (especially Ana Bozicevic), I am thrilled that the Third Annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference ("Intellectuals and Their Publics,") is a mere 10 days away!

Below are links to all important details:

Program

Registration

Keynote and Plenary Sessions

Book Exhibit

Useful tips (including directions)

See everyone in New York! Cheers.

Third Annual US Intellectual History Conference: 10 Days Away!

Selasa, 05 Oktober 2010

The Myth of American Religious Freedom: Bancroft and U.S. Historians

In 1834 the great American historian George Bancroft published the first volume of his magisterial series, History of the United States. Bancroft’s work would establish the major themes of American history that have come down to the present, emphasizing the genius of the American political system, the austere intellectual rigor of the nation’s Founders, and the virtue and promise of the American people. The United States, Bancroft explained, occupied a unique position in the history of the world because of its peerless political system. The American form of government was “necessarily identified with the interests of the people,” because the principle of freedom was its guiding light. So strong was that principle that even enemies of the state had “liberty to express their opinions undisturbed.” Instead of silencing opponents, Bancroft claimed, American political thought enshrined reason and mutual discourse so that political enemies could be “safely tolerated.”

Most importantly, in a world in which religion and the state were so tightly connected that political and religious enemies were often one and the same, Bancroft touted the principle of religious freedom that existed in the United States where religion was “neither persecuted nor paid by the state.” Yet he was quick to suggest that the lack of public funding did not mean that religion was unimportant. “The regard for public morals and the convictions of an enlightened faith” maintained a land of vigorous belief and order, he claimed. So great was the profusion of faith and liberty that the United States became a beacon of liberty to the world, offering “an asylum to the virtuous, the unfortunate, and the oppressed of every nation.”

Bancroft’s account is striking not least because it established the common trope of U.S. history as a narrative of religious liberty. In American political life, no politician can become elected without in some way performing the appropriate genuflections at the exemplary function of American ideals of freedom to the world. But Bancroft’s account is striking for another reason. Unlike politicians and pundits, most U.S. historians would bristle if their historical works were compared to Bancroft’s. His Whig idealism and his nationalistic boosterism seem out of touch with the critical vocation of the academic historian. And yet many scholarly accounts of religion in United States are essentially in line with Bancroft, proclaiming the genius of the American arrangement and its status as a beacon of liberty to the world.

How do we explain this?

Here’s my attempt. By virtue of their pursuit of knowledge and professionalization into a community of inquiry, many historians are dedicated to the ideals of the Enlightenment. That commitment sometimes contains the Enlightenment’s critique of religion. To many knowledge workers, the desire that faith-based, anti-intellectual religion should decline with the expansion of education and knowledge has set up blinders when studying religion, because to acknowledge the very public role of religion in the American past would mean admitting the failure of a central component of the Enlightenment dream. I have had many conversations with scholars who frankly confess their lack of interest in investigating religion even when it impinges upon the subject of their own study. They find religion distasteful, tedious, and off-putting. For that reason, though the study of American religion has flourished in the last thirty years as its own subdiscipline, it has yet to penetrate broad subdisciplines of American history, even in those areas where its influence was particularly profound. As a result, though many religious historians acknowledge the prominent role of religion in American public life, many historians that do not specialize in religion justify their lack of familiarity with the subject by arguing that, given the church-state separation of the United States, religion is irrelevant to their own work. In this way, many historians tacitly assume the myth of religious liberty put forward by Bancroft in their avoidance of the subject of religion.

This is a mistake on two levels. First, it is simply wrong. Bancroft’s myth of exceptional liberty glossed over the multiple means of coercion that resulted from the connection of religious ideals and state, which he delicately characterized as “the regard for public morals.” But what Bancroft called “the regard for public morals,” the late-nineteenth century woman’s rights reformer, Victoria Woodhull, called “society despotism.” Woodhull was an anarchist, a proponent of free love, and the first female candidate for President of the United States. Her position as a reformer and radical enabled an angle of vision that is a useful corrective to Bancroft’s. Woodhull and other dissenters in the American past clearly saw what the claim of religious freedom and exceptional liberty was: a partial truth that disguised religious power through which the proponents of an ascendant religious ideology could constrain social, religious, and political freedom. Contrary to Bancroft, Woodhull constantly lamented the religious control of U.S. laws, which created what she saw as an organized hypocrisy that imposed religious values behind a veil of moral norms. Woodhull would have been mystified by the claim of some historians that it was possible to understand woman’s rights, American politics, or just about anything in the nineteenth century, without understanding the dominance of religious partisans that she loathed. And this is the bigger problem and the second reason that historians, particularly those on the political left, should avoid Bancroft’s myth. Many historians resist acknowledging that Christians had power in the past, because they fear that it would strengthen religious conservatives in the present. But not acknowledging the power of Protestant Christians in the past distorts the entire context of liberal reform and gives the historian no purchase to understand many of the larger conflicts of American history. In other words, peddling Bancroft’s myth effaces the necessity of liberal reform, which Woodhull and others sought to effect.

This is the third in an ongoing series of essays that use material from my forthcoming book, The Myth of American Religious Freedom. The book can be found here and here.

The Myth of American Religious Freedom: Bancroft and U.S. Historians

How do we explain this?

This is the third in an ongoing series of essays that use material from my forthcoming book, The Myth of American Religious Freedom. The book can be found here and here.