historical truth

To continue my meditations on primary sources (or original historical sources) and the role of bias in historical writing, I offer this quote:

When thinking of evidence as a way of reconstructing the past, one ought to keep in mind that there are in fact different forms of historical truth that are being accessed through that evidence. This is by no means to say that there is no such thing as historical truth, much less its cognate opposite, that there is no such thing as historical falsehood. Both truth and falsehood most definitely exist but neither is homogenous or unitary. There are multiple forms of truth and of falsehood, even with regard to any single instance or event. Different forms of evidence are useful for accessing different forms of truth. Similarly, different modes of interpreting the same evidence will likewise generate different forms of truth.*

My students are discussing the chapter which this quote comes from in Reading Primary Sources next Monday. I'm curious to see how they respond to this paragraph.

The author, Devin O. Pendas, offers interesting parallel suggestions for interpreting oral testimony--hearing and listening. Hearing spots the factual/forensic claims, and listening marks things of experiential value.

*Devin O. Pendas, "Testimony" in Reading Primary Sources: The Interpretation of Texts from Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century History edited by Miriam Dobson and Benjamin Ziemann. (London: Routledge, 2009), 231.

The Irritating Genius of Reinhold Niebuhr: The Question of Anti-Catholicism

[Updated 2:15 pm CST, 9/29]

At the end of the summer I finally picked up Reinhold Niebuhr's The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. I say finally because the book had been on my shelf for years. I am not 100 percent sure when I bought my copy (almost exactly like the one pictured to the right); I may have purchased it before moving to Chicago in 1997. The point is that I've been carrying it around for years---through five moves, a marriage, more than a few jobs, and three cities---based on the fact that it was written by a prominent, famous author. And I kept it even though I am Catholic and I knew the author was Protestant. I had suspected that Niebuhr had the potential to transcend sectarian differences---to be ecumenical. I bought the book even before I decided to study intellectual history, and was therefore not aware that David Hollinger and Charles Capper's The American Intellectual Tradition source book includes a selection from Children.

Upon reading I learned, in short order, that the book is a treatise on Protestant Christian political philosophy. How I had missed the quintessentially Niebuhrian subtitle---"A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense"---after all these years is beyond me. Thanks to my dissertation work I had known, before scrutinizing the table of contents, that Niebuhr was involved, for a time, in the late 1940s effort called "The Committee to Frame a World Constitution" (which produced a book--a preliminary draft of a world constitution). Niebuhr had dropped out, however, due to philosophical differences. Even so, I was still surprised to see that Children would cover "The World Community" in its final chapter.

I'm not here, however, to simply relay to you my personal story of delay and surprise in relation to Niebuhr and the book's contents. I'm here, in fact, writing about the book because it raised my expectations, dramatically, after getting only ten pages or so into it. Niebuhr is deceptively easy reading; he slowly unfolds his philosophical points with a sense of caution and humility, as well as an acumen for the problematic areas of practice (i.e. he's always on the watch for how humans corrupt good things, especially reason). His one-hand/other-hand thinking appeals to minds who imagine counterpoints quickly after formulating an argument. Niebuhr's self-dialogue is paradoxically both intellectually comforting and disquieting; you feel like he's leaving no stone unturned.

I was disappointed, then, to perceive some not-so-latent anti-Catholicism in Children. Because I am Catholic, you might argue that I am predisposed to seeing anti-Catholicism, and there may be some truth to that. By reputation, however, I came into the book thinking of Niebuhr as one of the most important theologians of the twentieth-century English-speaking world; I had understood his Protestantism to be a lower-case. I expected ecumenism, and was surprised to find otherwise.

Indeed, the potential for anti-Catholic thought arose as early as page 8 (of my 1972 Scribner's paperback edition). Here Niebuhr generalizes that Catholics engage in a "polemic against the modern world." Although I know that to be true in some conservative Catholic circles (think Hilaire Belloc and other fascist sympathizers), I also know it to be false in others (think Frederic Ozanam, Fr. Hans Reinhold, Fr. John A. Ryan, Dorothy Day, etc.)---others covered well in Jay Corrin's Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy (Notre Dame, 2002). Back to Niebuhr, one instance does not of course create a curve. So I read over this early instance as Niebuhr challenging conservative Catholic thought.

There can be no doubt, furthermore, that Catholic intellectual life, as of the 1940s (Children was published in 1944) and 1950s, was not at a high point in American history. This was documented by John Tracy Ellis (right) in his American Catholics and the Intellectual Life (1956). Here's a nice reflection on that book, its truths, and its reception.

As I kept reading Children, however, I found other examples of Niebuhr over-generalizing about Catholic thought. He wrote that Catholicism (not just conservative, undemocratic Catholics) are fearful "that questions of 'right and wrong' [in a democracy] may be subjected to the caprice of majority decisions. For [all of] Catholicism believes that the principles of natural law are fixed and immutable" (pp. 68-69). Niebuhr briefly gives the Catholic tradition respect for its insistence on "freedom of conscience beyond all laws and requirements of the human community" (p. 80). He returns, however, to big generalizations about Catholic thought or slanted points of view. On the latter, for instance, Niebuhr cites Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum (1891) not for its defense of labor unions, but for its insistence on "property...as a necessity" (p. 92).

Suffice it to say, by the end of the second third of the book it's getting irritating. Niebuhr writes, apparently ignorant of the 1920s liberal American Catholics documented by Corrin, that "Catholics" (not just a corner, but all) are "fond of defining the Renaissance and Reformation as forces of decadence because they initiated the destruction of the unity of Christendom" (p. 121). This absolutist reduction of Catholic thought continues in Niebuhr's discussion of the "three primary approaches to the problem of religious and cultural diversity in the western world" (p. 126). Here Niebuhr generalizes that "Catholicism" (all of it) has only one approach: "overcome religious diversity and restore the original unity of culture. ...Catholicism frankly accepts religious diversity in a national community only under the compulsion of history. ...It insists on official status" (p. 126).

It may be true that a significant, vocal portion of Catholics (thinkers and otherwise) in the 1920s and 1930s voiced traditionalist positions; they could only look back at a civilization they felt was more amenable to Catholic theology. The mostly careful Niebuhr, however, chooses at this point to write of Catholicism as if it is homogeneous on this belief throughout time and space---admitting of no possibility of change, progress, or internal diversity.

Even as one sees those passages, however, you are impressed by the quotable, on-target Niebuhr. For instance, his useful pessimism is evident early in the text: "There is no level of human moral or social achievement in which there is not some corruption of inordinate self-love. This sober and true view of the human situation was neatly rejected by modern culture" (p. 17). And then there is Niebuhr pointing out the error of the "ideal of self-sufficiency" as being a "primal sin" in Christian thought (p. 55). He even writes, somewhat presciently, of "embodied rationality," saying that reason is "organically related to a particular center of vitality, individual and collective. ...Reason is never dissociated from the vitalities of life...[and therefore] cannot be a pure instrument of...justice" (pp. 66-67, 72-73). Great stuff. Rich.

What do others say about Niebuhr's relationship with Catholicism? It seems to be mostly praise. Citing Richard Fox's biography of Niebuhr and, interestingly, Kenneth Jackson's 1992 book, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, everyone's quick and dirty reference, Wikipedia, actually underscores Niebuhr's fight against anti-Catholicism in Detroit. Niebuhr could be seen as a hero for justice in the fight against anti-Catholicism---at least in Detroit in the 1920s.

However, in Alan Wolfe's review of John Patrick Diggins's last book, Why Niebuhr Now?, Wolfe dissents a bit. Here's the relevant passage (bolds mine):

Niebuhr has become so lionized that we often fail to recognize his faults. Diggins is aware of them, but pays them insufficient attention. Although Niebuhr warned against American exceptionalism, he was not above a bit of Protestant triumphalism. In his Gifford lectures, published as The Nature and Destiny of Man between 1941 and 1943, Niebuhr dismissed Catholicism (along with liberal Protestantism) as “semi-Pelagian,” meaning that it allowed too much space for free will. That position was, and is, inaccurate; try telling it to anyone reading Fr. Arnall’s hellfire and damnation sermon in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It was also slightly obtuse and offensive: the United States had more than its fair share of anti-Catholicism in the 1930s and 1940s, and while Niebuhr was no bigot, he was not especially ecumenical.

It is true, of course, that "Christian triumphalism" is not anti-Catholicism. It is also true that over-generalizing about Catholic theology and politics is not strictly anti-Catholicism. And perhaps Niebuhr was just in a bad mood in the 1940s. But if you put these circles together, they overlap enough to lessen those distinctions: there is a strain of anti-Catholicism in Niebuhr's 1940s writings.

Wolfe's review makes it clear that my expectation of theological ecumenism from Niebuhr was, well, unfounded---based on a perception of his reputation. If Niebuhr had been willing to look, it would not have been that hard, despite Ellis's tract, to find and cite Catholics who believed in democracy, in all its beauty and diversity. - TL

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Update (2:15 pm CST, 9/29): Maybe one of the things I'm wanted to know, or to ferret out, with this post is whether by declaring Niebuhrian anti-Catholicism I'm being presentist? I feel that Wolfe's review absolves me of this somewhat, but Wolfe is a a political scientist and sociologist. In other words, I might be importing, or seconding, his presentism. - TL

Music to Fracture By

This week marks the 20^th anniversary of Nirvana’s first studio release, Nevermind. I’ve written before on this blog about how that album and the band’s sound shocked me out of a pop-music, Gulf War-induced stupor. I was in an MA program reading Reinhold Niebuhr and George Kennan (!) and considering their contributions to a critique of American culture as it turned increasingly sectarian, corporate, and commercial. This blog has contributed mightily to a discussion of that period through various assessments of Daniel Rodgers’s book, The Age of Fracture, and the struggle many of us have taken up to interpret the era out which we got everything from Jerry Falwell and Disney Corp. to varieties of multiculturalism and Kurt Cobain. It was an age, Rodgers writes, during which conservative intellectuals pined for a common culture that had, it seemed, existed just a couple of decades earlier. “But their ideas of society had been infiltrated by the new market metaphors, the notion of communities of choice, the narrowing of the language of obligation, and the appeal of the idea of natural, spontaneous civil society. They could desire a common culture. But only in fragmented ways could they envision the institutions that might create it.” (219)

As I read Niebuhr’s essays on the obligation Christians had to live out at least one of the Gospels, and Kennan’s “sermons” on American decadence and excess captured in books such as Democracy and the Student Left (1968), The Nuclear Delusion (1983), and Around the Cragged Hill (1993), I moved through communities that did indeed seem hopelessly ambivalent, if not outright fractured. I attended SUNY Albany, one of those big, concrete campuses that fostered little sense of intellectual community as students, by and large, seemed fixated on the careers they hoped would lead them to promise land of life on the upper east side of Manhattan. The city of Albany, once a stronghold of Democratic machine politics, had fallen into a stalemate of partisan gridlock. And in the fall of 1991, the nation had come down from its high after celebrating victory in the Gulf War that August. As a reporter for the New York Times put it: “Many Americans could not find triumph in the conquest of a nation with the gross national product of Kentucky.”

When Nevermind appeared that fall, it reminded me that there were still communities out there that lived off a grid that I assumed defined American life. A story on the album and the Seattle Sound in the New York Times reminded me that for a brief moment the idea of “grunge” seemed relevant to my hope that an anti-anti movement might still exist. Grunge wasn’t forthright “for” anything—it didn’t stake out a position that was outwardly anti-corporate or anti-fashion; anti-Los Angeles or anti-pop music. Grunge just simply wasn’t anything in particular—and so it was anti-anti. And while it wasn’t necessarily anti-authority, it did seem anti the anti-authority pose that became the trademark of a generation buy and selling their memories of the 1960s.

After a relatively short stint in Russia, where I did witness the genuine fracturing of an entire society, I returned to graduate school in the fall of 1993. I entered Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, a small, pretty town that sat like a preppy oasis amidst a hard region of closed coal mines and dilapidated villages. During my first fall in Athens, I stood on a second-story porch of my friend’s home looking over a mass of undergraduates enjoying a block party. I turned to my friend and pointed out that it took less than two years for grunge to disappear into the J. Crew catalog. Before us was a river of plaid and flannel, clothes of choice for those living in cool, damp Seattle as well as what many folks in the environs around Athens. The undergrads had on two even three shirts tied fashionably around their waists and layered in ways that coordinated colors and patterns. I couldn’t really be against them, I thought; after all they probably like the Seattle sound. And yet, these future masters of commercial culture stood in stark contrast to their neighbors in towns such as Chauncey and Nelsonville, places that had been overlooked and underemployed for decades. Those folks, not the ones wearing the new hip uniform, had much in common with that most famous of Nirvana’s refrains, tragic and fitting as it is: “oh well, so what, nevermind.”

Judge W. Brevard Hand, Intellectual Historian

United States federal judge W. Brevard Hand (1924-2008) was one of the more important conservative intellectuals of the culture wars. And yet his significance is rarely recognized. His opinion in the infamous “Alabama Textbook Case” (1987)—published as American Education on Trial: Is Secular Humanism a Religion?, with an introduction by Richard John Neuhaus—is the work of a creative and far-reaching conservative intellectual. In fact, it reads like an intellectual history of secular humanism.

In Age of Fracture, Daniel Rodgers briefly discusses the obstreperous Hand in the context of his discussion of constitutional originalism, part of his “wrinkles in time” chapter. Hand, as Rodgers writes, “set out to show that history proved the Supreme Court wrong” on its rulings on religion in school. As such, he made arguments from his Alabama bench in the early 1980s that served as an important precursor to the originalist movement, particularly in his disagreement with incorporation, a process by which portions of the Bill of Rights were applied at the state level. Among other revolutionary legal transformations, the precedent set by incorporation led to the 1962 Engel v. Vitale landmark decision that ruled school prayer violated the First Amendment. In contrast, based on a properly originalist understanding of the Constitution, Hand declared that states were not bound by the First Amendment and, as such, that Alabamans were free to establish religious practices of their choosing.

Hand’s early originalism proved influential, especially to Edwin Meese, Reagan’s attorney general, who made it the cornerstone of how the Reagan administration would deal with religious freedom issues. The Reagan administration openly pushed for prayer in public schools following this logic. Hand’s interpretation also influenced future Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, among others. But Hand’s creative conservative jurisprudence did not end there. For in the 1983 case where he made his name as an originalist—Wallace v. Jaffree—Hand anticipated that the Supreme Court would reject his logic regarding incorporation. Thus, he helped the defendants in that case, those associated with the Alabama law that set aside one minute in the school day for school prayer or the equivalent in quiet contemplation, construct an alternative legal rationale for their actions. If it was determined that the Alabama law violated the First Amendment “establishment clause,” via incorporation, then Hand and the defendants-cum-plaintiffs sought to make their case by going through the “no establishment” provision. In other words, Hand sought to use the incorporation precedent against itself by making the case that “secular humanism” was a religion, and furthermore, that it was the established religion of the public schools, and thus, that it violated the religious freedom of Christians. This is an example of how conservative Christians often made use of multicultural “rights” language to advance their causes during the culture wars.

The “Alabama Textbook Case” (Smith v. Board of School Commissioners) (1987), then, was an attempt by Judge Hand and the plaintiffs, comprised of several hundred Alabama citizens, including teachers, to prove that secular humanism was the operant religion of the public schools by way of a close reading of textbooks. As Hand wrote: “What this case is about, is the allegedly improper promotion of certain religious beliefs, thus violating the constitutional prohibitions against the establishment of religion, applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment.” The Neuhaus introduction nicely sets the stage for the nearly-100-page opinion that followed. Neuhaus argued that what Hand’s interlocutions proved was that “the law with respect to religion and public education is in a terrible jumble,” which is hardly controversial no matter your dog in this fight. In his book The Myth of American Religious Freedom, David Sehat makes a similar point from a very different perspective. He contends that the liberal mid-twentieth-century Supreme Court that overturned the moral establishment based its decisions on bad history, which encouraged dissent. “By underselling the liberalizing rationale for their decisions,” Sehat explains, “the Court created a damaging uncertainty as to its purpose in taking on these cases.” Furthermore: “In not acknowledging past religious power and not explaining that that power had led to an unfair exclusion or coercion of individuals, the Court left obscure the reason that it felt compelled to act in the first place, which in turn allowed conservatives to press their claims without acknowledging their desire for a return to coercion.”

Neuhaus also analyzes the work and influence of John Dewey in ways that I do in my book, Education and the Cold War, though, as with Sehat, I come from a very different vantage point from Neuhaus. In seeking to concur with Hand that secular humanism was indeed a religion, Neuhaus pointed to the influence of John Dewey, who was open and honest about his secular humanist position. “The main defendant, be it understood, is the venerable John Dewey.” More: “Dewey lives on, so to speak, in the establishment philosophy of government education today.” And more still: “If fish could write a report on their environment, probably the last thing they would notice is the water. Dewey is the philosophical water within which government education swims.” And yet again, more: “Dewey was both wiser and more candid than much of today’s public educational establishment. He made no bones about the fact that education required religion and, in his view, the religion required is the religion of humanism. I say he is wiser because, with educators from Aristotle through Secretary of Education William Bennett, he knew that education has most essentially to do with paideia, with the transmission and nurturing of truths by which a community would live. A new religion was needed, he believed, and he called it the religion of humanism.” This gets at the point I was trying to make in my previous posts on secular humanism and the teaching of evolution: teachers should not hide behind professionalism and pretend their pedagogies don’t challenge fundamentalist Christianity, or even, ideally, capitalism.

This then leads me to the intellectual history of secular humanism provided by Hand in his opinion, which was, in essence, an attempt to refute the notion that education should operate in a bias-free vacuum of professionalism—put on display in the trial by John Tyson, Vice-President of the Alabama State Board of Education, as paraphrased by Hand: “values are not something that he thinks should be taught in the schools, but should be taught at home and in the churches. ‘What you go to the public schools for is to be educated to learn how to read and write.’” Instead of this, Hand interpreted the thought of several key people who gave testimony. One such person was Glennelle Halpin, a professor of educational psychology at Auburn who gave a lengthy testimony summarizing the major philosophies that informed educational theory, from behaviorism to humanist psychology. She was a proponent of values clarification, a pedagogical method that conservatives pointed to as representative of the hyper-relativism that informed public school curriculum, though Halpin said it was often misunderstood. Hand summed up her thought process on this: “Dr. Halpin says that the school does not have the right to teach a value system that is different from the parent, but the content of the curriculum in the school is not necessarily based on a survey of the value systems of the parents, so when the teacher does instruct she may well match or mismatch, deliberately, the information about values that has been presented to that child.”

As counter to Halpin’s insider view, Hand relied upon the testimony of famed conservative intellectual Russell Kirk, whose traditionalism informed his many writings on education. Based on Kirk’s analysis, Hand presented a brief but compelling overview of secular humanism’s etymology. The term emerged in the twentieth century, used by humanists in the Dewey vein to separate themselves from new humanists Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. For Kirk, as for Babbitt and More, this was the distinction between humanism and “humanitarianism,” the latter being a sickly form of relativism. On whether secular humanism is a religion, Kirk argued that it indeed was, based on the fact that it had a set of documents which formed a creed—the Humanist Manifestos—and because it tended to make immanent “symbols of transcendence.” As Christians claimed “that one enters upon immortality through perfection in grace in death,” secular humanists made immanent “the perfection of society here in this world.” “The equivalent of death to the secularists is passing through a form of revolution to a new order of a perfect kind. The role model for this secularist thinking, Dr. Kirk says, is the Marxist theory: revolution and then eternal changelessness here on earth, a condition of perfect equality.”

My musings here only briefly touch upon the intellectual history of secular humanism synthesized by Judge Hand in the “Alabama Textbook Case.” My argument is neither that this is necessarily good intellectual history, nor that Hand made compelling legal or political arguments (all of which, luckily, were shot down by higher courts). Rather, I find it fascinating that Hand’s opinion reads more like intellectual history. And I maintain that the conservative critique of secular humanism points to some of the weaknesses inherent to the professional cloak worn by contemporary progressive educators and proponents of multiculturalism.

Oscar Handlin (1915-2011) and the Emergent Culture Wars

This weekend, I heard that Oscar Handlin had passed away last week at the age of 95.  Handlin seems to be nearly universally celebrated online. In addition to admiring obituaries in the New York Times and the Boston Globe, bloggers from left to right are singing Handlin's praises.

And rightly so.  Handlin virtually invented the field of immigration history in the 1950s.  His history of American immigration, The Uprooted, won the 1952 Pulitzer Prize in history and helped solidify the mid-century notion that the U.S. was essentially a nation of immigrants.

Especially in the first half of his career, Handlin also distinguished himself as a public intellectual, writing numerous book reviews in general circulation publications, signing an ACLU-organized petition of scholars demanding that the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) cease operations, and, perhaps most significantly, playing an important role in the great immigration reforms of the mid-1960s.*

But my first impression of Oscar Handlin was very different. I first heard of Handlin when I arrived as a freshman at Harvard in 1982.  And though he was known as a great historian (though I didn't really appreciate his achievement at the time), he had more recently made himself famous as a culture warrior (though we wouldn't have used that expression at the time).

In many ways, Handlin's political journey was typical of many Cold War liberals of his generation.  Although Handlin was a civil libertarian and a supporter of opening the gates to new immigrants, he was also a staunch supporter of the Vietnam War.  In December, 1967, as public opinion began to turn against the War, Handlin was one of fourteen scholars who co-wrote a report for the Freedom House Public Affairs Institute arguing that disaster would strike if the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam.** 

And it was Handlin's continuing sense that the Vietnam War should have been won, and that the anti-war movement constituted a threat not only to freedom around the world but to the proper functioning of representative government at home, that led to his move to the right over the next two decades. 

Handlin's political reputation at the time I arrived at college was based in part on his recent publication of The Distortion of America (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1981), a book which repeated Handlin's arguments for the Vietnam War, accused recent American intellectuals of anti-Americanism and "neutralism," and enthusiastically repeated the charges that Alexandr Solzhenitsyn had leveled against this country in his 1978 Harvard Commencement speech.   In many ways the book echoed the themes sounded by Handlin's near-contemporaries among the first generation of neoconservatives.

And yet Handlin wasn't really a neoconservative. While neoconservatives in the late 1970s and early 1980s spent as much time on domestic affairs--the unintended consequences of the welfare state, opposition to school busing, and the like--as they did on foreign relations, The Distortion of America is focused on foreign policy.  And the book was strangely stuck in the past.  Cobbled together from shorter pieces that Handlin had published earlier, Distortion's source material was overwhelmingly from the 1960s.  And though Handlin was hardly alone in remaining focused on Vietnam in the early 1980s (the decade brought us Rambo, after all), the case for the disaster of American defeat in Vietnam was, if anything, less coherent in 1981 than it had been in 1967.

Although widely reviewed, Distortion was not widely admired.  M.E. Bradford in The National Review gave it something resembling a positive review, agreeing with Handlin on his critique of the recent trahisons des clercs, but suggesting that Handlin, in retaining his Cold War liberal views, failed to grasp that liberalism itself had created the monster he wrote against:  "The way not to have Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, and John Anderson [three politicians that Handlin singles out for criticism] is not to have Franklin Delano Roosevelt," wrote Bradford.***

Other reviewers were less kind. James Neuchterlein in the New York Times, noted that "this is one of those books whose cause is better than its argument."  "Even for those inclined to accept the author's assumptions of national decline," wrote Norman Graebner in the Journal of American History, "there are other ways of interpreting the trends in recent years."  "Polemical in tone, long on assertion, and short on new argument or convincing analysis," concluded Choice.****

Oscar Handlin would continue to be at least a fellow-traveler of academic conservatism over the course of the 1980s. In 1988, Handlin, alongside other former Sixties liberals like John Silber, would become a founding member of the conservative National Association of Scholars, one of the signature campus organizations of the culture wars.*****

And yet, unlike his student and Harvard colleague Stephan Thernstrom, Handlin never became a leading member of the new academic right.  Indeed, I'm not even sure if he ever considered himself a conservative.

Perhaps Handlin was a few years too old to really make the neoconservative journey and say "I used to consider myself a liberal, but thanks to the anti-war movement, I'm outraged by AFDC!"******

And perhaps The Distortion of America just hit the shelves a few years too early to take advantage of the culture war publishing boom of the mid-to-late 1980s.*******

At the end of the day, it is fitting that the remembrances of Handlin have largely focused on the first half of his career while largely passing over its second half.  Just as Charles Beard is better remembered as a founder of progressive historiography than as a Pearl Harbor truther, Handlin's proper place in the history of our discipline--and our country--is as an interpreter of the immigrant experience and its meaning for this nation.

Nevertheless, his journey into the nascent culture wars is a fascinating instance of what the experience of the Sixties did to many liberals of his generation.

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* On the anti-HUAC petition, see "250 Teachers Hit House Comittee," New York Times, March 20, 1961.

** "14 Scholars Warn A Vietnam Means Bigger War," New York Times, December 20, 1967.  Freedom House was an interventionist organization originally founded by Dorothy Thompson and others in 1941 as a counterweight to Hitler's propaganda operations. More on Freedom House can be found here.

*** M.E. Bradford, "The Nightmare of Oscar Handlin," The National Review, May 14, 1982.

**** All of these quotes can be found in Book Review Digest. Hey...it's a blog post!

***** Joseph Berger, "Scholars Attack Campus Radicals," New York Times, November 15, 1988. For an interesting account of Silber's early career as a leading liberal on the UT Austin campus, see Doug Rossinow's The Politics of Authenticity.


****** With apologies to Michael Bérubé.

******* The Distortion of America was reissued in a revised edition in 1996, which was probably a bit too late to take full advantage of the culture war boom...though it would have arrived just as the neoconservatives were beginning to focus more thoroughly on foreign policy. Unfortunately, my library doesn't have a copy of this version.  It seems to have been less extensively reviewed.

The role of bias in historical writing

Are your students enamored of bias? My students are. Everything that might be complicated about a historical source is traced to "bias"--why is an autobiography a troubling source? Because it's hard to separate bias from fact. Why is a novel a difficult source? Because it's hard to separate fact from opinion.

I'm having the students read a challenging tome entitled Reading Primary Sources: The Interpretation of Texts from Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century History.  It is challenging because most of the authors depend upon post-modern theory for their suggestions on how to interpret primary sources. I think the students, if they are unsure what the text is saying, depend upon prior understanding and that screams to look for bias!

This is bugging me for two reasons.
One is that I just read "Primary Sources in History: Breaking Through the Myths" (see my post about it here) and one of the first myths is "historians use a 'sourcing heuristic' to evaluate bias and reliability." The author, Keith Barton, quotes Sean Lang, that "historians do not ask 'Is this source biased?' (which suggests the possibility of unbiased sources), but rather 'What is this source's bias, and how does it add to our picture of the past?'" In Reading Primary Sources, the editors, Benjamin Ziemann and Miriam Dobson, argue that the concept of bias "should be scrapped because it is impossible to get round the structural patterns and material elements of texts which every source genre imposes in a different way. Rather than trying to unearth the hidden but distorted meaning the author has invested in a text, historians should aim to focus on the specific mediality and the inherent structure which are provided by every genre of text."

The second reason it bugs me is because it feels like a parroted response rather than a thought-through one.

I think that this love of "bias" arises from students' discomfort with relativism and the possibility that we cannot know the full and complete "truth" through historical inquiry. I think it also arises because it is easily grasped--look in a source for bias and if you find it, throw it out.

I was very proud of one of my students on Monday, though. He was part of a group presenting on Benjamin Roth's The Great Depression: A Diary and one of his classmates asked if Roth was such a biased Republican whether the diary was worthwhile as a source. The student answered that it depended on what question was being asked of the source (yay! that was the point for the day!). His groupmates immediately replied that, in addition, it was a worthwhile source because there was a lot of objective facts in the diary that could be separated from Roth's bias (sigh).

What do you think is the role of bias in historical writing? How do your students think about it? And is it ok to write about one's current students in a public blog post?

When Niebuhr Met Spelly (sort of)

As often happens around this blog (I wish we all shared an office), somebody prompts someone else to think about a post. Tim Lacy has helped me do this yet again. He asked me what I knew about Niebuhr and anti-Catholicism. What follows is one insight into that query.

In the summer of 1949, Reinhold Niebuhr had had enough of Catholic cries of “intolerance” and “bigotry.” His Democratic ally and fellow ADA member, Eleanor Roosevelt, had provoked a testy fight with New York City’s imperious Francis Cardinal Spellman over a bill before Congress that would extend federal funds to pupils in America’s public schools. Spellman denounced the bill as “anti-Catholic” for failing to give equal aid to children who attended parochial schools. Spellman contended that if the nation paid for school children to have a “bottle of milk” then all school children should get such aid, not merely those in public schools. On June 23, 1949, Eleanor Roosevelt shot back in her newspaper column “My Day”: “The controversy brought about by the request made by Cardinal Spellman that Catholic schools should share in federal aid funds forces upon the citizens of the country the kind of decision that is going to be very difficult to make.” Ominous words from the “First Citizen of the World.” And such a remark belied a whole set of assumptions that Roosevelt was apparently unable to detect. For his part, Niebuhr wrote in the August 8, 1949 issue of Christianity and Crisis: “If a Roman Catholic cardinal regards an honest difference of conviction between himself and Mrs. Roosevelt on provisions of the education bill as proof of ‘anti-Catholic prejudice’ on Mrs. Roosevelt’s part, it would appear that there is no possibility of proving oneself free of ‘prejudice’ except by agreeing with him.”

To say the least, Niebuhr shared with Roosevelt a “problem” with what they determined was Catholic pride. Daniel Rice explains in an essay from the terrific volume, Reinhold Niebuhr Revisited: Engagements with an American Original (2009), that Niebuhr “viewed the church’s identification with the kingdom of God as the essence of Catholic heresy…Given that the Catholic Church can brook no criticism, Niebuhr labeled Catholicism ‘an officially intolerant religion,’ confessing that it is ‘not easy to deal charitably’ with an institution making the kind of claims it makes.” (326) Revisiting this controversy, even briefly, helps me consider the centrality of competing moral authorities in American religion history—a theme developed in great detail in David Sehat’s book on American religious freedom. As my students and I work our way through a course on the Catholic Church in America, we run into these episodes in which both sides (though often represented most clearly by elite Protestants) assume that they are defending an American legal principle in the face of forces that threaten the sanctity of the separation of Church and State.

Ironically, Niebuhr emulates this pattern in a statement that I am pretty certain he meant as a debate-stopper in his piece on the Roosevelt-Spellman feud. “One further point must be considered in weighing the charge of ‘bigotry’ made by those who disagree with the Catholic position on any question,” Niebuhr lectured. “Have our Catholic friends ever thought how much patience is required when our own convictions are constantly challenged as obvious violations of the natural law, and as, therefore, in conflict with the expressed will of God?” Ouch!

No doubt Niebuhr believed toleration of Catholic schools and the instruction of children therein was a magnanimous feat. However, for a thinker so concerned with power and the dangerous pretentious of confidence in one’s righteousness, Niebuhr might have considered not whether his “Catholic friends” should be sensitive about how their dogmas had been received by others, but what options there were for those friends. Was there some other way to prove one’s fealty to American pragmatism than to agree with the liberal thinkers of the moment? To say that Spellman saw himself as God’s representative on earth is to take things a bit too far—he was the Church’s man in America and America was a nation that commanded a great deal of devotion. While Niebuhr questioned Catholic claims for natural law, there were a few Catholics who occasionally questioned the American (often Protestant-based) claims for the American Way of Life. This dispute over the mythological beast of Church-State separation in the summer of 1949 appears to illustrate this most fundamental clash.

David Harvey’s “Mental Conceptions”

Yesterday, I finished writing up my comments on Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture, which I will present at our conference in November. This was a difficult review for me to write because there are so many things about the book that sparked my intellectual curiosity. I settled on examining the epistemology implied by the book, in part because, though we’ve done a great deal of speculating about it here (see for example David Sehat’s posts on whether Rodgers is Rortyian here and here and here), none of the formal reviews have addressed Rodgers’s theoretical underpinnings to my satisfaction. I also rested my review on epistemology because, as regular readers of this blog have no doubt noticed, I am always thinking about it in relation to history and historiography.

This is not to say that my epistemological influences or interests are necessarily well rounded. As our frequent gadfly Varad pointed out in a recent post, the theories of culture and power I focus on tend to run the gamut between Marxism and its derivatives. Fair enough. In my defense, this gamut seems large when I’m trying to decipher the differences between Marx and Derrida. But I admit this might be the narcissism of small differences. Oh, well, at the risk of beating a dead, narcissistic horse, today I continue my thread about theories of culture by returning to the subject of last week’s post: David Harvey, specifically, his latest book, The Enigma of Capital (which I find a deeply satisfying read).

In Chapter 5, “Capital Evolves,” Harvey pauses from his historical dissection of capitalism (by way of Marx’s Capital) to offer up a general theory of history (by way of, you guessed it, Marx’s Capital). I find this theory worth discussing because it makes sense to me, but also because it puts into clear words the nuanced sense of culture that Harvey displayed in his classic work, The Condition of Postmodernity. I also find it worth discussing because I think its an implicit structuralist response to those poststructuralists who only see base-superstructure determinism when they see Marxism.

Harvey argues that “cultural norms and belief systems (that is, religious and political ideologies) are powerfully present but do not exist independently of social relations…” Pretty standard stuff, and not far removed from Althusser or from Marx for that matter. Harvey calls these cultural norms and belief systems our “mental conceptions of the world,” one of seven “distinctive activity spheres” that comprise the historical development of capitalism. All seven in Harvey’s words:

1. Technologies and organizational forms
2. Social relations
3. Institutional and administrative arrangements
4. Production and labor processes
5. Relations to nature
6. The reproduction of daily life and the species
7. Mental conceptions of the world

This last “sphere” of course speaks most to intellectual historians. Harvey sees all of these spheres as mutually constitutive: no one sphere dominates even as none of them are independent. "Each sphere evolves on its own account but always in dynamic interaction with the others.” So though this is a structuralist account of historical change, in that a contrived mental conception like a metaphor cannot take on a life of its own apart from the other spheres, and although it’s “total” or even “totalizing” in its sense of a social formation, which postmodernists of the world have united against, it is not economically determinist in the “vulgar” sense that economics underlies all else. More from Harvey to give a sense of how he sees this at work:

Our mental conceptions of the world… are usually unstable, contested, subject to scientific discoveries as well as whims, fashions and passionately held cultural and religious beliefs and desires. Changes in mental conceptions have all manner of intended and unintended consequences for [the other activity spheres]…

Harvey argues that we should think about the interrelatedness of these spheres as we think about an ecosystem. Parts of the ecosystem can act seemingly independent of the rest, but have consequences for the whole by way of the dialectic processes of accommodation and resistance. “The complex flow of influence that move between the spheres are perpetually reshaping all of them.” In stable societies, these seven spheres roughly harmonize. In societies in flux or crisis, there are imbalances that shakedown in unpredictable ways.

In Harvey’s conclusion, he provocatively asks if this co-evolutionary theory of social change can be projected into a co-revolutionary theory of a break. He argues it can and it should. In fact, he maintains that past revolutionary projects failed in part because “they fatally failed to keep the dialectic between the different activity spheres in motion and also failed to embrace the unpredictabilities and uncertainties in the dialectal movement between the spheres. Capitalism has survived precisely by keeping that dialectical movement going and by embracing the inevitable tensions, including crises, that result.”

Some might think this all too abstract or utopian. But I like the way, as a general theory of history, it allows for the importance of structure without being deterministic; and the way it allows for (mild) optimism while also calculating heavy constraints.