"Have you finished reading every book in the library?" Nikky Finney's Acceptance Speech

Nikky Finney won the National Book Award for poetry this year for Head Off and Split. She is in the English department at the University of Kentucky. Her acceptance speech has gone viral among the literati; the Lexington, Ky. Herald Leader, described it four days later as “a spoken-word poem that has flown around the world and back along digital wires, bringing tears and awe in its wake.” John Lithgoe, the host for the evening, called it the "best acceptance speech I've heard for anything in my life." It is a wonderful encapsulation of the nuanced ways a literary life is born, and in particular a black literary life. It is the moments of inspiration and connection that she evokes that I strive to capture in my writing. It is not just about ideas, but about the way that ideas flow between us, through tiny, almost inconsequential touches, through the persistent, every day choices of friends, parents and teachers, and through myriad pieces of written words.

Dr. Finney mentions sitting on the wall at Taladega College (I've been there! I saw the next generation sitting on that brick half-wall) on a Friday afternoon, dreaming about being a poet, and a professor came up and asked her if she had time to do that, had she read all the books in the library yet? May we all strive to inspire like Professor Gloria Wade Gayles inspired Finney. Here is her speech:

P.S. I've been honored to be in the same room with Dr. Finney several times here in Lexington, as we both attended different events in the community and on campus.

Changes to S-USIH Constitution

I have sent out a message to members of S-USIH regarding proposed changes to the constitution. For this particular situation, we will use the blog as one way to discuss these proposed changes and answer questions. The constitution in its current form can be found here.

We intend to use the website for communication regarding the society in the future.

So we invite you to ask questions here or you can email me directly at haberski@marian.edu.

Thank you.

Andrew's Compulsory Reading

(I title today's post with tongue firmly in cheek, partly as a playful attempt to tease Tim about his "light reading" series, and partly because some of the "compulsory" reading is my own writing, the height of shameless self-promotion.)

1. Occupy Wall Street: A New Culture War?, by Andrew Hartman, Chronicle of Higher Education

My thinking in this article comes from my October 18 blog post. That post got thousands of hits thanks to a plug by Andrew Sullivan (who also linked to Ben's post the day before on the ubiquity of being labled a Straussian--the common ingredient: we were both critical of Matt Yglesias).

2. Our Age of Fracture Roundtable.

This link is to the excellent response by Dan Rodgers--which carries links to the entire roundtable, including reviews by me, Jim Livingston, Lisa Szefel, and Mary Dudziak. They all made it a wonderful roundtable, both in person at our conference, and in "print" here at the blog.

3. 2011 Cliopatria Nominations for best historical blogging.

Make your nominations. And enjoy reading some of the best in historical blogging.

4. "America's Superman," Adam Kirsch, Prospect Magazine.

This marks the second positive review of Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's book, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas--and her book has only been on shelves for a few weeks!

5. "The Mythologian," By Perry Anderson, New Left Review.

Unfortunately, this lovely review of Patrick Wilcken's new biography, Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory, which sounds like a marvelous book, is behind a pay wall. Boo. I'll paste the final paragraph of the review for flavor:

The final verdict of Wilcken’s delicate and moving book is impeccable. ‘In a world of ever more specialized areas of knowledge, there may never again be a body of work of such exhilarating reach and ambition’, but though ‘there was great breadth and scope to Lévi-Strauss’s ideas’, they were ultimately fitted into an ‘intellectually claustrophobic space’—a ‘one-man enterprise that became so utterly idiosyncratic that it was impossible to build on.’ As a system, ‘structuralism implied depth, but with its interplay of referentless signs, often felt more like skidding along polished glass.’ Yet ‘what gave life to Lévi-Strauss’s output, and introduced the lyricism that baffled his Anglo-Saxon critics, was a profound interest in aesthetic expression and appreciation that ran in tandem with the cognitive side of his work.’ The anthropologist saw himself as an artist manqué. But Lévi-Strauss was not only a great collector and weaver of narratives—‘myths are very beautiful objects’, he remarked, ‘and one never tires of contemplating them, manipulating them’. The second verb tells its own story. He was also a great writer, in the art, no minor one, of rhetoric.

6. BOOK FORUM: The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism by Daniel Bell, Hedgehog Review.

Unfortunately, the contents of this forum, with contributions by Wilfred McClay, David Courtwright, and Krishan Kumar, are not even available online. So if your institutional library carries Hedgehog, check out this neat little forum on a book crucial to 1970s social thought.

7. Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South, by Andrew Zimmerman.

I am currently reading this book with my graduate students. It's fascinating--in both empirical and methodological terms. Zimmerman applies the cultural theory that informs so much micro-history to the macro-history of capitalism and imperialism.

Rodgers Responds (Part V of AGE OF FRACTURE roundtable)

Dear readers: This response by Dan Rodgers is the fifth installment in our roundtable. For the first, see my review here. For the second, see Jim Livingston's review here. For the third, see Lisa Szefel's review here. For the fourth, See Mary Dudziak's review here.
------------
It is a great pleasure to participate in this forum, and I am grateful to Andrew Hartman and Ben Alpers for organizing it and to Andrew, Lisa Szefel, Mary Dudziak, and Jim Livingston for their thoughtful and wide-ranging comments. Those comments have focused in part on Age of Fracture, but they have also focused on the period as a whole, on the books that others are completing (Jim’s new rereading of the late twentieth-century economy and Mary’s forthcoming book on the concept of “wartime”), and on books that they would like to see written, as Lisa urged in her HNN review and repeatedly so eloquently today. And that is as it should be. The subjects of our times are big and urgent, and there is no way that a single book can, or should presume to, encompass all of what needs to be done.

Because this forum has ranged so widely, however, it may be useful to start by saying what I intended in Age of Fracture. I wanted to think about social ideas and arguments in the last quarter of the twentieth century, but still more I wanted to map out some stories about change. I wanted to probe the ways in which certain assumptions fell out of use, new terms crowded in, and debates were reframed. This was an experience everyone felt who lived through this period, and I thought there might be something to be gained by looking at it more closely.

This is not the only way to write a period’s intellectual history. Many of our best models in intellectual history are, by design, static. They identify a period’s key thinkers and key books, they work their way into the period’s central debates, and they figure out a pattern, a wall mural of sorts, that will hold them all. This is important work, and we have all done some of it, if not in print then in our undergraduate teaching.

But I wanted to experiment with a different design: to take some key arenas of debate in which change was particularly striking and explore the ways in which, within those same arenas, the very terms, arguments, and assumptions cracked and shifted. As those who have read Age of Fracture know, I was particularly interested in those arenas where academic thought and public argument met. I wanted to probe the way economics changed its skin, how its disciplinary axis and textbook formulas shifted and how economic argument and policy shifted with them. I wanted to explore not only arguments about race and racism in American society but the ways in which the very terms for thinking about race and identity shifted. I was interested in the ways in which feminism, launched so confidently at the period’s beginning, was remade. I was interested in the ways in which notions of instantly traversable time moved into unexpected places. In the mid-twentieth-century moment in which Alexander Bickel’s jurisprudence was formed, as Mary Dudziak notes, time and history had a glacial presence. It was the point of law school and college education to demonstrate how slowly history moved and how sticky and massive its motions were.

That mid-twentieth-century moment in social thought and argument is the reference point for these and other stories of change braided through Age of Fracture: the years of the high Cold War, when recognition of the power of history, society, institutions, and social structures was at its height in the academies and in public life. By looking at the same fields of argument as their common sense shifted over the next quarter century, I thought we might learn something important both about ideas and about change.

Shaping the design of the project in this way meant leaving out a lot. Popular media, the cracking of the monopoly of network television, the extraordinarily rapid dissemination of the personal computer, the rise of new media icons, the collapse of mid-twentieth-century censorship: all this and more fell outside the core focus of the book. So did many other debates that I might have followed, not the least, as Lisa has reemphasized, the crisis, which was simultaneously a crisis in ideas, identities, politics, and society, over AIDS and its devastations. I wasn’t trying to map the whole terrain of argument and debate. The idea of a Zeitgeist went out, or should have, at the end of the nineteenth century. I was interested in probing some critically important parts of the intellectual terrain in which we now live. But there is a lot left do, and a lot that should be done.

These, then, were my intentions in writing Age of Fracture, and I’d like to think that in some ways I succeeded in realizing them. But no one should endeavor a serious project without anticipating serious critique. That, too, is as it should be. In the comments at this forum and in other venues, critical reactions to Age of Fracture have tended to cluster around three issues which, in shorthand, might be called machinery, metaphors, and mood. First, where is the causal motor to be found behind the shifts in ideas and argument that Age of Fracture describes? What drove and explains the pervasive fracturing of the vocabulary of social life into small, actor-centered pieces, imagined as choosing, preference-satisfying individuals? Second, in this quest for causal explanations, of what serious use, if at all, is a phrase like “a contagion of metaphors?” Last, what is the mood of Age of Fracture? Austere and bleak, as Michael O’Brien reads it, elegiac and funereal, as Jim Livingston has it, or ambivalent, as Andrew Hartman suggests? All of these are invitations to larger discussions about which there’s time here only to say a word.

In explaining why a larger, thicker sense of society became so much more difficult to grasp in the last quarter of the twentieth century there are two powerful arguments in the existing scholarship. The first points to the work of the conservative foundations and the efforts of their managers and business funders to alter the terms of social debate. The second points, more generally, to the new shape of the post-industrial, post-Fordist economy and the needs of the new regime of flexible accumulation for the provisional, socially disembedded selves and disembedded ideas that the era produced.

Both these explanations are terrifically important, and yet, in themselves, they both seem to me insufficient. Assuming relatively passive audiences for the books the conservative think tanks fostered and for the economic forces of the age, they leave out the enormous amount of intellectual work that pervaded the era: the arguing, debating, claiming, refuting, puzzling out, and creative intellectual imagining that also shaped these years. Without wrestling seriously with its intense intellectual labor, we miss a key part of the age.

Is it naive of me to think that we must hold simultaneously to the extraordinary importance of structures—social, economic, technical, and political--and to the extraordinary vitality of ideas, aspirations, nightmares, and theories: the stuff of the mind? I think not. For to pose it as an either-or choice—choose structures or choose culture, as Andrew Hartman proposes—seems to me a false demand. And that is not because I like some forms of structural reasoning for some purposes, and like culturalist explanations for others. Or because I like or don’t like their political outcomes. It is a false choice because there is no recognizable picture of the world that doesn’t have a strong place for both structures and ideas. To refuse a false choice isn’t to slip into ambiguity. It is a position of realism.

But once you take the demands of the late-capitalist economy out of the driver’s seat and once you recognize that money can’t, in itself, buy assent, how are we to understand the ways in which so many of these debates seemed to echo each others’ terms and assumptions? This was not the case at the outset. Economists struggling to find adequate models for the economic turmoil of the 1970s, feminists struggling to forge a politics in which the personal and the solidaristic would hold together, political theorists struggling to find explanations for power more adequate to their symbol-saturated age, and others moved initially within separate and sharply defined contours of argument and experience. Only in time did it become apparent that these efforts had taken many of them down uncannily parallel tracks.

Through a “contagion of metaphors,” I wrote, and in retrospect it is clear that I should have made it an argument not just a phrase. I won’t spell out that argument now, but it’s a realm of intellectual and cultural life that intellectual historians ought to take more seriously than we do. For nothing is more powerful in shaping ways of seeing than a claim of likeness. “War is a surgical operation.” “War is hell.” “War is a strategic game.” “War is a gigantic fog.” These are not simply phrases. They act as trump cards in academic as well as popular debate: analogies with powerful real-life consequences.

The play of opposing metaphors can lead toward standoffs; it may strew the field of argument with the radical incommensurabilities that make discussion impossible. But claims of likeness can also be generative, as ways of seeing and claiming move from one terrain to another. 1960s liberation movements were all about seeing one’s own situation and claims for justice as like that of others. To see the Berkeley campus as another version of racist Mississippi, to see the subjugation of women as just as deep as the oppressions committed in the name of whiteness, to see gays as standing in the same social space as a phalanx of other oppressed persons: the “movement” was built on likeness claims of this sort, and it fell into smaller pieces when the analogies could no longer sustain their weight.

In a parallel fashion, in what I have called an age of fracture, the metaphor which constructed the self as a choosing entity, as engaged in a kind of perpetual shopping and choice-making activity—raced through the academic disciplines and through politics alike, spilling across boundaries of academic discipline and social debate. It did so not as theory but as a claim of one context being “like” something else. This is the work of metaphor, and we should think about it more consciously and take it more seriously than we do.

Finally, a word about the mood of Age of Fracture. Some readers have found it mournful and nostalgic, though neither was my intent. I’m not as hopeful as Jim Livingston is in his new Against Thrift. I am not as convinced as he is that those aspects of social and economic change that he identifies as primitive disaccumulation are the only game in town. I am more worried by the forms of highly sophisticated accumulation going on at a terrific speed underneath us. But going back to the high Cold War era in social thought is not my aim.

Andrew Hartman worries that I take “a moral position neither for nor against our age,” but that, too, seems to me a false choice. What would it mean to be for an age, or against it? You live in the middle of the age you are in: arguing with it, shaped by it but hoping to shape it as well, inextricably part of it, struck by the beauty and courage you find in it, angry and distressed by its meanness and injustice. There is really no other place to stand than that.

I didn’t write Age of Fracture to pronounce a simple judgment on the last thirty years of American intellectual life. What I hoped to do, rather, was to take seriously the ways in which some Americans, placed where their ideas turned out to have very large consequences, talked and argued and thought their way from one set of assumptions about society and selves to another. I wanted to show that in the midst of that creative and productive ferment they let the language for some important dimensions of life fracture. I hoped that retracing those steps might help us find our way to something more adequate for our times, when our practical, collective interdependence strains against the choice-saturated language with which we try to grasp it.

Dan Rodgers

2011 Cliopatria Award Nominations

You have until the end of November (only 3 more days!) to make nominations for the 2011 Cliopatria Awards, for which I'm serving as a judge.

The Cliopatria Awards recognize the best history writing in the blogosphere. There will be awards in eight categories:

Best Group Blog
Best Individual Blog
Best New Blog
Best Blog Post
Best Series of Blog Posts
Best Writer
Best Twitter Feed
Best Podcast Episode

Cliopatria, as host of the awards, is ineligible for the"Best Group Blog" category. Individual judges are ineligible for nomination in their respective categories, but may be nominated for other awards. Judges may also make nominations in other categories.

Bloggers, blogs and posts may be nominated in multiple categories. Individuals may nominate any number of specific blogs, bloggers or posts, even in a single category, as long as the nominations include all the necessary information (names, titles, URLs, etc).

Nominations will be open through November; judges will make the final determinations in December. The winners will be announced at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in early January 2011; winners will be listed on HNN and earn the right to display the appropriate Cliopatria Award Logo on their blog.

Judges for 2011 are: Manan Ahmed, Kelly Baker, Jonathan Dresner, Mary Dudziak, Katrina Gulliver, Andrew Hartman, Brett Holman, Sharon Howard, Shane Landrum, Randall Stephens, Karen Tani, David Weinfeld.

Dudziak on Rodgers (Part IV of AGE OF FRACTURE roundtable)

Dear readers: Mary Dudziak's review of Age of Fracture is the fourth installment in our roundtable. For the first, see my review here. For the second, see Jim Livingston's review here. For the third, see Lisa Szefel's review here. Expect Dan Rodgers's response in the next day or two.

------------------
My Age of Fracture, and reflections on Time in the History of Constitutional Theory
Mary L. Dudziak, University of Southern California Law School

I. My Age of Fracture

In the halls of the Yale Law School in the fall of 1980, the spirit of Alexander Bickel – the great constitutional theorist who died in 1974 at the age of 49, still hung in the air. Forever caught in time, Bickel’s portrait of too young a man to occupy those picture frames, graced the walls of the school’s most important lecture hall. Bickel was not simply a revered former colleague. He had become a hegemon, so that the rest of his generation’s intellectual leaders thought and wrote in his wake – his legacy generating an understanding of the world so that others had to respond to his terms. [1] He had the sort of structuring impact on legal thought that Dan Rodgers so beautifully describes as the way that ideas have a structuring impact on history at the beginning of his book.

Bickel appears as minor figure in Age of Fracture, but was so important to legal thought that for one of the next great constitutional theorists, Bruce Ackerman, his greatest legacy – a legacy no longer seen because he was so effective – was to finally change the conversation away from Bickel, shifting the terrain of constitutional discourse, and in essence, putting Bickel to rest for a second time. [2] (I will return to Bickel and Ackerman when I take up the role of time in Age of Fracture.)

Alongside Bickel’s visage, the walls of the Yale Law School were covered with portraits of aging white men, so that for women, upon entering the building, it was hard not to think that you’d entered a men’s club. But the idea of this and other American law schools as men’s clubs was not simply metaphoric, as the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson found when she taught at Yale law school as a visiting professor in the early 80s. Settling in, she sought out a restroom. On her hallway was a door that said “Faculty.” Being a member of the faculty, she of course went in the door – only to find that she had entered a men’s bathroom. [3]

In September of 1980, there was more on the walls than Bickel and other greats from the history of the Yale Law School. The Age of Fracture was, thankfully, on display. There was an underground feminist organization at the law school – an organization that, sadly, I was never invited to join (I liked law school too much, so I was not to be trusted). These women had come in secretly in the night, in an age before security systems and surveillance cameras. Alongside the venerable portraits was a poster of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Over the faces of men on some of the portraits, they had hung paper plates on which they had drawn women’s faces. [4]

These were heady days at Yale for the Age of Fracture. In Rodgers’ narrative, the Federalist Society plays a role in the fracturing of legal thought. (Rodgers mentions the Federalist Society only briefly in his discussion of the conservative turn in legal thought, but he notes its success as part of the rise of a broader conservative legal intelligentsia.) [5] But from the way it looked from within the law school those days, I wonder whether the Federalist Society was part of the fracture. To us they looked like part of the furniture.

My classmates founded the Federalist Society. Well-funded from the start, they organized a conference – their first – held at Yale in 1982. The conference is remembered warmly in their celebratory organizational histories. George W. Hicks, Jr. writes: “At a time when the nation’s law schools are staffed largely by professors who dream of regulating from their cloistered offices every minute detail of our lives . . . the Federalists met—and proclaimed the virtues of individual freedom and of limited government.” [6]

I attended this meeting – as a picket. We did not picket their existence, or the idea of individual freedom. Instead we supported freedom: we supported abortion rights, and one of their speakers was a key supporter of the Human Life Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which wouldn’t limit government, but would criminalize abortion across the nation, undermining the very federalism that the Federalist Society sought to promote. If you support federalism, then you should support federalism, we argued.

The picketers are not written into the celebratory histories of the Federalist Society, though in debates at their meeting, some conservatives raised our point that their own principles would seem to support the ability of states to maintain their own rules, unimpeded by a nationalizing constitutional amendment.

For Rodgers, the Federalist Society and their colleagues helped to fracture a preexisting greater unity of ideas, which is certainly part of their own sense of origins. But there were multiple fracturings underway at the same time. We sought to shatter what to us seemed to be a hegemony furthered by our own classmates. For women on the margins, we sought to fracture a world that seemed to deny our experience. Our mere presence was a fracture. Perhaps this helps us to think about how we might write the next layer of the age of fracture – bringing the social and political history into the story, and layering the different narratives of fracture within each other, in a way that was simply not the project of Rodgers’ more sweeping narrative.

And I wonder if the periodization of fracture needs more nuance. There is an overlap at the beginning. We were still trying to break in in the early 80s, before Joan Scott and others shattered gender as a construct, as Rodgers takes up in chapter 5. Among ourselves, we were problematizing the collective “we” of earlier feminist writing, but we also needed that idea of gender solidarity in order to exist in an environment that seemed permeated with the unacknowledged gender solidarity of our male professors and students, and of the walls of the buildings themselves.

II. Time in the History of Constitutional Theory

What work is Time doing in the chapter “A Wrinkle in Time”? Sometimes “time” seems to be a stand-in for “history,” but the basic conceptualization of time, needed for there to be a “wrinkle in time” is the idea of time’s linearity. We might think of time’s linearity – its movement from a point in the past to (we hope) a distant point in the future is often assumed to a natural phenomenon. But our ideas about time come not from nature but from social life, Durkheim argued long ago. And even the idea of time’s linearity, anthropologist Carol Greenhouse has argued, itself comes from culture not from nature. [7]

William Sewell points to historians’ “implicit or working theories about social temporality.” Historians “believe that time is fateful,” he writes. “Time is irreversible,” as an event is lodged in the memory of those whom it affects and therefore irrevocably alters the situation in which it occurs.” Further, historians believe that

every act is part of a sequence of actions and that its effects are profoundly dependent upon its place in the sequence . . . . Historians assume that the outcome of any action, event, or trend is likely to be contingent, that its effects will depend upon the particular complex temporal sequence of which it is a part.

Rodgers’ understanding of the path of ideas in time is consistent with Sewell’s depiction of historians’ temporality. But within this framework, there is, for Sewell, a “diversity of temporalities” as well as an assumption that time is heterogeneous. He suggests that “Temporal heterogeneity implies causal heterogeneity. It implies that the consequences of a given act are not intrinsic in the act but rather will depend on the nature of the social world within which it takes place.” [8]

The contemporary history of time literature also stresses temporal heterogeneity. Thomas Allen writes: “the homogeneity of time that supposedly results from the centrality of such instruments as clocks, watches, and calendars to modern life is
only possible if technologies produce time by themselves.” Heterogeneous temporalities do not drive people apart, Allen argues, – so arguably are not the source of fractures – but instead “are themselves the threads out of which the fabric of national belonging has long been woven.” [9]

Age of Fracture seems to present its thinkers in a common temporality. The differences do not come from their experience of time, but instead from what they do with it. The constitutional originalists attempt to wrinkle time, he argues – to fold it back upon itself, so that present and past occupy the same moment.

In some ways, legal thought always involves this wrinkling. The past is always present in legal analysis because precedent – past cases – is an essential part of the lawyer’s tool kit. So I think the battle over constitutional theory in the 80s and after was not about whether to wrinkle time, but what sort of wrinkling was in order.

The 80s originalists, and the rest of constitutional theory, were working within the terms of Bickel’s critique of judicial review. Bickel was the most important voice in a series of works on the nature and role of judicial review in the aftermath of Brown, and also with the memory of the New Deal-era crisis over the court.

Bickel’s seminal contribution was the idea of the counter-majoritarian difficulty. In The Least Dangerous Branch, he argued that judicial review (the power of courts to strike down statutes) is inherently problematic in a democracy because courts overturn majoritarian will. Because of this, he argued for a restrained approach to judging.

1980s originalism was one answer to the counter-majoritarian difficulty. For Bickel, judges have a constitutional role, but that role must be constrained due to the counter-majoritarian difficulty. For other conservative legal thinkers, one way to constrain judicial review was originalism – so that judges would not be a band of platonic guardians displacing the majority’s will, but would play the more limited role warranted in a democracy. [10] Others, like liberal constitutional theorist John Hart Ely, also worked within the counter-majoritarian framework, carving out arguments for a more expansive role for courts within the terms of the counter-majoritarian difficulty. [11]

Putting Bickel in the center of the narrative might help us to see the originalists not as fracturing a conceptual order put in place by constitutional liberalism and the Warren Court. Instead, originalism was one methodology for responding to a critique that came earlier than the 80s, and was positioned not on the left but somewhere right of center.

Bruce Ackerman’s innovation was to argue that time mattered in a different way in constitutional theory, thereby pushing Bickel to the sidelines. “The people” – the nation’s constitutional sovereign – speak at different times in different ways, he argued, and it was in extraordinary “constitutional moments” (distinguished from everyday regular politics) that they articulate their foundational values which are then imbedded in the constitution’s meaning, whether or not the text of the constitution itself is amended. So for Ackerman, constitutional history simply had more wrinkles to it. There were more past moments that had to be brought forward to the present – most importantly the New Deal crisis over constitutional meaning, which, for Ackerman resulted not only in an extraordinary political moment, but the actual amendment of the constitution. [12]

In some ways, Ackerman’s work embodies Greenhouse’s argument that ideas of time come not from nature but from social life. The constitution’s times, for Ackerman, could not be determined from looking to formal signs, like the actual use of Article V to formally amend the constitution. Instead a constitution’s extraordinary times can be found in the life of the people, and the moments in which they take it upon themselves to infuse their age’s meaning into the constitution’s sparse words.

So in Age of Fracture, time works as an argument in legal thought, but not as an experience. I wonder whether future ages – for example an age in which electronic communications are immediate and fleeting – yet also enduring – with be thought to turn more fundamentally on an idea that the experience of time itself is fractured.

------------------
1. Alexander Bickel’s most influential book is The Least Dangerous Branch: The Supreme Court at the Bar of Politics (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962).

2. Bruce Ackerman’s turn away from Bickel’s critique of judicial review appears in a body of work including We the People, Volume 1: Foundations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1991).

3. Judith Jarvis Thomson told this story to members of the Yale Law Association, myself included, when we had lunch while she was visiting at Yale.

4. I was a first year student at Yale Law School in the fall of 1980.

5. Rogers, Age of Fracture, 8. For a more detailed treatment of the Federalist Society, see Stephen M. Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

6. George W. Hicks, Jr., “The Conservative Influence of the Federalist Society on the Harvard Law School Student Body,” Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 29 (Spring, 2006): 623-718.

7. Carol Greenhouse, A Moment’s Notice: Time Politics across Cultures (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).

8. William Sewell, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 6–7, 9–10.

9. Thomas M. Allen, A Republic in Time: Temporality and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 10-11.

10. A particularly influential critique of originalism is H. Jefferson Powell, “The Original Understanding of Original Intent,” Harvard Law Review 98 (March 1984): 885-948.

11. John Hart Ely, Democracy and Distrust: A Theory of Judicial Review (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).

12. Bruce Ackerman, We the People, Volume 2: Transformations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1998).

signing off

As one of the founders of the U.S. Intellectual History blog, I announce with some sadness my resignation as a writer on the site.

This blog went live on January 25, 2007, and my first two posts were both on January 31 of that year. In the intervening period I served as an active blogger for some time. Nearly five years later, however, I am no longer a regular USIH contributor, and cannot claim to have been one in quite a while. Though I very much enjoy having this outlet for my thoughts, in the upcoming year I will be prioritizing other projects: finishing my book, trying to land a permanent academic position, and building up the administrative infrastructure at the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, where I serve as treasurer and, until a few days ago, chaired the committee that put together the recent conference. Additionally, it is my opinion that the blog deserves to be staffed by regular writers who are strongly committed to establishing a voice for the site. The continued presence of those who have a long history with the blog but post on it only rarely, might make it difficult for S-USIH Publications Committee Chair Ben Alpers to enforce such high but appropriate standards.

This blog has brought together a large and dynamic group of scholars. It allowed for the founding of the annual conference, which in turn prompted the creation of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. For me personally, it has allowed for the development of a writing style that I can employ, when appropriate, as an alternative to traditional academic prose. More importantly, it has introduced me to a continually expanding circle of mentors, colleagues and friends.  Founding and writing for USIH has had a greater impact on my own post-graduate academic experience than has any other development. I will sincerely miss not only posting here, but being a member of this group.

Book Review: O'Connor on Kazin's *American Dreamers*

Review of Michael Kazin’s American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). ISBN: 978-0-307-26628-6. 352 pages.

Reviewed by Mike O’Connor
Georgia State University


The U.S. history survey course is typically a rather liberal affair. It frequently offers a Whiggish narrative in which the evils of the American past—British imperialism, slavery, robber baronism, U.S. imperialism, the Red Scare(s), economic depression, Jim Crow, gender inequality, Cold War paranoia—are consistently, if often belatedly, overcome by the words and actions of those who are dedicated to an expanding vision of freedom. Despite Gordon Wood’s attempt to highlight the radical nature of the American Revolution, or Eric Foner’s insistence that freedom hasn't always meant what it does today, the typical introduction to U.S. history seems an object lesson in Hartzianism. To the longstanding consternation of conservatives, it is very difficult to fit into this story the ideals of those who “[stand] athwart history, yelling Stop.”[1] Yet, as Michael Kazin points out in his new book, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation, the left resists, just as strongly, assimilation into this version of the national narrative.

Perhaps this is because radicals (a word Kazin uses interchangeably with “leftists”) are not merely liberals with greater dedication or purity, but a different beast altogether. In Kazin’s “classical” formulation, the left is “that social movement…that [is] dedicated to a radically egalitarian transformation of society” (xiv n.). While radicals who are dedicated to equality will find much in common with liberals who prioritize their own specific conception of freedom, the two groups will also differ on many key issues. When these philosophies have come into conflict, the much smaller left has typically found itself marginalized. On the other hand, when the two movements have found common cause, it is the liberal groups that have gotten the credit. To the extent that radicals have affected policy at all, Kazin writes, “they generally did so as decidedly junior partners in a coalition driven by establishment reformers” (xiv). Whatever victories that the left has managed to achieve, then, “never occurred under its own name” (xv). This pattern has resulted in an underappreciation of the contributions of the left, one that is perpetuated in many classroom narratives.

American Dreamers provides a welcome corrective to this tendency. Perfect for use with undergrads, it is a compact, readable overview of the history of the American left. Perhaps the book’s greatest achievement lies in imposing order on an otherwise unruly subject. Its seven chapters do not merely move forward in time, but instead concentrate on the movements that most clearly embodied leftist aspirations at a given moment. In successive chapters, Kazin explains, analyzes and criticizes abolitionism, suffragism, the trade union movement, Populism, socialism, communism and the New Left, concluding with the fragments of a contemporary left represented by such disparate figures as Naomi Klein, Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky.

Some of these movements are more easily summarized than are others. The Communist Party of the USA, for example, is comprehensible within an institutional framework, and much ink has already been spilled interpreting the New Left. (Kazin himself is one who has extensively covered the latter ground.) For the general reader, however, the most helpful features of American Dreamers will be its author’s interpretive frameworks, which corral otherwise sprawling subjects into comprehensible stories. The initial chapter, for example, uses three significant primary documents from U.S. intellectual history to situate the origin of the American left. The three pamphlets—Frances Wright’s Course of Popular Lectures, Thomas Skidmore’s The Rights of Man to Property, and David Walker’s Appeal…to the Colored Citizens of the World—each appeared in the fall of 1829, and together they defined the central issues for future generations of American radicals: gender, labor and race, respectively. From this rather narrow focus, Kazin is able to generalize outward about the role of religion in antebellum protest movements. “Radicals made no apologies for using language that drew a sharp line between the sinful and the righteous…Their approach was proudly illiberal” (10). This point allows him to segue to the abolitionism’s religious roots, a subject that sets up the two following chapters, which cover that movement before and after, respectively, the Civil War. In less certain hands this barrage of topics could be quite disorienting, but Kazin’s structure imposes a discipline on them that renders the shifts quite manageable.

Another example of this successful scaffolding is the treatment of American socialism. This subject can range from the Shakers to Robert Owen to hippie communes, but Kazin reasonably focuses on the period of the movement’s greatest influence: 1890-1920. He frames his treatment around the notion that “three different kinds of socialisms existed, somewhat uneasily, during the Progressive Era, and they suffered different fates” (113). The first of these groups were the Midwestern laborers and farmers, perhaps best exemplified by the Milwaukee “sewer socialists” who elected the nation’s first socialist mayor and Congressperson. The secular Jews who worked in New York City’s garment district and published the Daily Forward make up the second group, while avant garde cultural modernists comprised the third. Such a taxonomy allows Kazin to explain how socialism could cast such a long shadow during this period while leaving a legacy that boasts of few tangible accomplishments.

Similar fates were met by most, if not all, of the movements chronicled in American Dreamers. This unavoidable observation has led many to conclude that leftism in the United States has been a failed project. The thesis that rests somewhat lightly over the book takes issue with this perception. Kazin is the first to admit that no specific political victories are notched in the left’s column, but that does not mean, he argues, that radicalism has not significantly influenced American history. He claims for the left a much greater effect than success in any political campaign: it has “transform[ed] the moral culture, the ‘common sense’ of society” (xiii). Its willingness to take extreme and unpopular positions has made such stances familiar over time, so that more broad-based liberal movements could, essentially, turn them into actual political changes. Additionally, the expression of leftist views through cultural vehicles such as literature, art, film and music has had the greatest effect in transforming once-radical ideas into mainstream ones. “The cultural left articulated outrage about the state of the world and the longing for a different one in ways that political left was unable to do” (xiv).

Such an argument recalls, of course, Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front, and Kazin’s chapter on twentieth-century communism, with its biographical portraits of Woody Guthrie and Paul Robeson, and treatment of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, echoes the themes of the earlier book. American Dreamers breaks new ground, however, in applying a similar concept consistently to all periods of American history. The Hutchinson Family Singers, for instance, toured the antebellum nation performing abolitionist songs such as “The Bereaved Slave Mother” and “The Fugitive Slave.” Kazin argues that their great popularity suggests that “[t]he music of abolitionism may have reached as many Americans as turned out to hear anti-slavery speakers” (23). Henry George and Edward Bellamy were instrumental figures in spreading the word about socialism in the late nineteenth century, and the cause of the New Left was communicated most effectively not by “traditional kinds of leaders” (such as union officials or elected politicians), but by “celebrities.” Figures such as Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Abbie Hoffman, Robin Morgan, Eldridge Cleaver and Martin Luther King, Jr. possessed a cultural clout that was as important as their political thinking or activism. While William Lloyd Garrison or Eugene V. Debs might also have been considered earlier leftist celebrities, their relationship with the movement was different: the unstructured nature of the New Left meant that what the celebrities “said and did often steered the activist core, instead of vice versa” (217).

American Dreamers is filled with similarly interesting observations, and the book makes for an easy and compelling read. Yet one of the very trends that Kazin laments—the recurring dynamic by which the left is put in the position of “handing off” its momentum to liberals at crucial moments—must have presented him with a difficult narrative problem. Since American Dreamers concerns leftism rather than liberalism, Kazin repeatedly abandons particular concerns just at the moment in which they finally arrive on the national stage. Without the liberal or mainstream perspective, and the possibility of narrative climax, the book is reminiscent of eavesdropping on one side of a telephone conversation. Early on, for example, one learns much of early abolitionism but comparatively less of the rise of the Republican Party and the Civil War. The pattern continues when the book covers Populism but says little about Progressivism, treats early twentieth century labor radicalism in some detail but glosses over the New Deal, and highlights the campaigns against racism by the Communist Party USA but sends the reader elsewhere for the gains of the Civil Rights Movement.

It is difficult to know how Kazin might have addressed this problem short of writing an entirely different book. A deeper issue raised by American Dreamers, however, is whether “the left” qualifies as a tradition in the sense that Kazin intends. Without a core tenet, text or history, do the disparate struggles for justice in the name of race, gender and labor constitute a single movement? Moreover, to what extent does the work of later radical activists derive from that of earlier ones? To cite Kazin’s earliest examples, can we draw direct lines from David Walker to Malcolm X, Frances Wright to Robin Morgan, or Thomas Skidmore to Occupy Wall Street? Kazin suggests that all of these figures and groups are committed to the ideal of equality and therefore such connections are justified. But have these leftists seen themselves as unified in a common project? Is such self-conscious identification necessary to be designated a tradition in this sense? American Dreamers will likely raise these provocative questions for many readers, though a through consideration of them lies outside of its scope.

The structure and overarching thesis of American Dreamers provide a framework that allows the reader easy entry into the wide-ranging topic of American leftism. At the same time, Michael Kazin’s insight and depth of knowledge continually challenge received notions about the subject. While the book is unlikely to upend the primacy of liberal Whiggery in the nation’s classrooms, placing it in dialogue with this vision could serve to foster new thinking on the subject, for teachers and students alike.

-----------------------------------------------
[1] William F. Buckley, Jr., “Publisher’s Statement,” National Review, November 19, 1955, 5. Available here.

Our Pilgrims, Some Progress

I'll keep this post brief--it's a holiday weekend and I am grading like a fiend.

My first-grader asked me about the Pilgrims yesterday after having seen a movie in school about a mouse who stows away aboard the Mayflower. She liked the mouse, didn't know what she thought about the Pilgrims, but was curious about the Compact made aboard the Mayflower. She said that she would like to see the original document (which made my heart leap) to check if the mouse's prints were on it (my heart sank). So I told her that the mouse was fiction, the compact was not. I then wondered why we need to include mice in historical stories, why not just make either a movie about a mouse or a movie about the Mayflower. But then she asked a question that put things back in perspective--did any girls (read: women) sign the compact? After my response, her heart sank.

A teachable moment? Well, she thought so. We talked about who these Puritan-Separatists were; why they felt the need to make a dangerous trek across the sea; and why that compact might have made it possible to survive a pretty terrible first year. She took all that in, and wondered aloud why the women and the Native Americans didn't get to sign the compact later. She even knew enough to point out that the Pilgrims were supposed to land somewhere else. A gesture from my first-grader toward to a point made in recent cover of the 'New Yorker' which illustrated, as Nathaniel Philbrick has observed, that the Pilgrims might be considered America's first illegal immigrants.

In a gesture toward my kid's pragmatism, I think it's time to renew our interest in compacts and covenants, if only to imagine whether there is such a tradition left in a nation of contracts, commerce, and conspicuous consumption.

Szefel on Rodgers (Part III of AGE OF FRACTURE roundtable)

Dear readers: Lisa Szefel's review of Age of Fracture is the third installment in our roundtable. For the first, see my review here. For the second, see Jim Livingston's review here. Expect Mary Dudziak's comments to be posted soon, followed by a response by Dan Rodgers. [Parts of this paper were previously published on the History News Network website, February 24, 2011]

Daniel Rodgers is the Fred Astaire of intellectual history. Words and arguments flow across the page effortlessly. One idea glides to center stage then moves off as another waltzes forward. What I would like to do today is, to paraphrase Hillary Clinton: dance backwards and in high heels. I'd like to get up close and talk about Rodgers' steps.

In Age of Fracture, Daniel Rodgers offers an elegant, often eloquent, history of intellectual life in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Primarily interested in the construction of ideas that shaped conceptions of history, society, and responsibility, he analyzes texts from an eclectic array of academic thinkers across the political spectrum. Rodgers argues that in the 1940s and 1950s, social scientists and political philosophers established the terms of the debate on a range of issues concerning the self and society, obligations and justice, morality and destiny. To these postwar intellectuals, ideas had severe consequences, contexts and nature constricted human action, and history loomed very large indeed.

While the turmoil and chaos of the 1960s caused tremors, it was not until the quakes of oil embargoes, unemployment, and inflation in the 1970s, that fault lines in this ideological consensus emerged. Into this breach, a lexicon of microeconomic principles, which had been forming for decades in libertarian circles that stressed agency, contingency, and reason emerged, promising solutions to seemingly intractable problems of disco-era stagflation. Instead of focusing on property and production, workers and owners, these economists celebrated instead the slight of (an invisible) hand that produced wealth and fostered the virtues of competition.

The vocabulary, metaphors, and grammar of the free market boosters seeped into academic discussions. Instead of the public solidity of politics and pressure groups, American historians, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary scholars seeking to understand the formulations of class and exercise of power, now uncovered the ineluctable influence of culture and diffuse workings of hegemony. Gramsci, Geertz, and Foucault replaced Marxist dialectics while close readings of popular songs, prisons, and cockfights superseded analyses of elections, parties, and unions. This cultural turn reshaped the color line as well, as race came to be viewed less as a fixed state and more as a social construction. Notions of gender likewise became subject to preoccupations with language and consciousness-raising rather than investigations into the architecture of patriarchy.

Some other reviewers of the book, most notably Robert Westbrook, have mentioned some important omitted thinkers, most importantly, Martha Nussbaum and, I would add, Elaine Scarry. Other critiques highlight the lack, at times, of sufficient causal analyses. We see how but why did the language and values of free markets triumph so decisively? How did the fall of Communism across Europe and in Russia affect attitudes toward liberal Democrats in America who, for decades, had insisted that the Soviet economy was out-performing domestic capitalism? Cold War triumphalism, after all, was grounded in the reality that the prime alternative to free markets had been defeated. In that scenario, why heed those who were wrong?

Along those lines, why didn’t liberals offer a stouter defense of communitarian principles? Focusing on the progressives’ multicultural and linguistic turn leaves unexamined some dramatic mistakes made by liberal politicians and their supporters, which diminished their credibility. It also ignores the many images of fat cat Democratic power players showing up for budget talks, after the federal government had been shut down, in limousines.

None of this went unnoticed among the working class in those parts of the country hardest hit by deindustrialization—the manufacturing cities of the Midwest and Northeast—who switched party affiliation to become Sunbelt and Rustbelt Republicans. The usual story about backlash and resentment, perpetrated famously in Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas, misses the point. Rodgers, however, is on the right track. A more vertical study that presents a cross-section of values would help to illuminate the common bonds that tied blue collar and Catholics to blue blood conservatives. This is something that is missing in the history of conservatism more generally.

An intellectual historian who clearly delineates his methodology, Rodgers rarely ventures outside the realm of books and articles to explain how conceptions are formed, leading to some connections that ring hollow. In discussing the post-Fordist focus on the present, for example, no mention is made of CNN, personal computers, or the ubiquity of media images. Ideas about race are dissected without analysis of the impact wielded by rap music, MTV, or films like “Boyz n the Hood,” giving the appearance that Charles Murray was primarily responsible for stereotypes that linked skin color to violence. However, Murray said little that Archie Bunker hadn’t already articulated more than a decade earlier and, while liberals were busy decrying the possessive investment in whiteness, ethnic Americans were denouncing the possessive investment in racism among the well-heeled. While lending sheen and coherence to a neat narrative about fracture, the methodology of this particular type of intellectual history can skew analysis of issues and omit important developments." So, while I appreciate the coherence and precision with which Rodgers traces ideas--from left to right, from economics textbooks to presidential podiums. Sometimes this approach--tracing the ebb and flow of ideas--is highly appropriate. Sometimes, however, it belies the way ideas actually circulate or the way history happens. I wonder: What is lost or distorted when intellectual history is not tied to social and cultural history?

Along these lines, I don't believe in trickle down economics and I don't know that trickle down intellectual history is the best representation of the way ideas emerge and circulate. What about trickle up intellectual history (or, for that matter, trickle up economics)? Who should we include as members of the "communities of discourse" that we examine? (There was a nice debate about this on the USIH blog earlier this year).

I mentioned earlier that I would like to dance backwards and in high heels. Let me now add "in drag": Rodgers devotes three pages to the topic of AIDS. In his examination of race and racism, conversely, Rodgers delves deep and wide, devoting an entire chapter to the topic and strewing comments throughout the text. He even makes a rare foray into pop culture, nodding toward the contributions of Sanford & Son, the television mini-series Roots, Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson, Oprah Winfrey, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. He discusses “the new black presence in public life” and the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance and black arts movement, and he goes into loving detail about the conscious quest of African American authors to inculcate race pride. He cites polls from Black Enterprise magazine about black solidarity and decries the “day-to-day injuries imposed by the social marks of race in American society.” Willie Horton, Jesse Jackson, the Los Angeles riots, Anita Hill, and the debate among black intellectuals about the persistence of poverty are all there. The chapter on gender is less comprehensive but still works toward explaining relevant questions.

However, where are the gay intellectuals, writers, and activists? Where are Frank Kameny, Barbara Gittings, Larry Kramer, Sarah Schulman, Cleve Jones, John D’Emilio’s landmark, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities (1983), The Celluloid Closet (1996), Lauren Berlant, Gayle Rubin, Matthew Shepard, and Ellen Degeneres? Where are the concerns about injuries inflicted on gay Americans, about their struggle for pride and dignity in the midst of denial and death?

Citing this omission is not just a plea for inclusion of yet another oppressed group. As Eva Sedgwick argues in Epistemology of the Closet (1990), leaving out queer voices distorts the historical lens. And, if these voices are needed to understand any era, it is most certainly the Reagan-Bush-Clinton years when anti-gay bigotry was embedded in social and intellectual life, when homophobia blanketed, like a fine layer of soot, the nation. What other community suffered as many casualties as a result of the government’s inaction? Estimates place the number of lynchings during Jim Crow as high as 5,000. Over 58,000 Americans died in the Vietnam War. The number of reported AIDS deaths from 1980 through 1997 in the United States is 641,087. Globally 30.6 million people were infected.

Let me say that, citing these statistics is not an exercise in comparative victimology. First, comparative history is a legitimate enterprise. Second, juxtaposition can be useful to bring a stunning reality into bold relief.

Today, approximately 5,000 people die every day because of AIDS, a global calamity that, some scientists argue, could have been controlled had the federal government responded swiftly in 1981 to news of deaths, as it was, most famously, in Australia. But in America the victims were members of a hated, marginalized minority and received no compassion, a key emotion that Rodgers seeks to trace as it relates to the poor. As Randy Shilts in And the Band Played On documented, the CDC and NIH were chronically underfunded. As Reagan biographer Lou Cannon concluded, Reagan's response was "halting and ineffective."

If Rodgers was reaching for a capacious survey of shaping intellectual ideas, how could he ignore this disease or the ideologies and language that allowed it to become a pandemic? The word AIDS itself would benefit from a Rodgers-style definition. Paula Treichler takes on this challenge to analyze the construction of AIDS as an “epidemic of signification” with culture, medicine, linguistics, socioeconomic status, gender, class, and race all influencing scientific naming practices. Considering the emotional and physical toll, it is no wonder that LGBT activist and intellectual Urvashi Vaid writes that “For lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered people, the Reagan-Bush years were the worst years of our lives.”

At the heart of the Reagan-Bush era, the moral center of the period, is the AIDS crisis, the callous reaction to victims, and the lurid homophobia that sanctioned isolation and death. Historians, as a profession, have not come to terms with these events. Look at the index to almost any book on the 1980s and AIDS along with the hatred of gay people that fueled the epidemic are barely mentioned, those who do mostly talk about the response to AIDS among homosexual Americans only and the formulations of difficult to read queer theorists.

I do believe that writing a history about this period without addressing the AIDS pandemic is like writing a history of the George Bush years without talking about 9/11. AIDS and the diminishing calculus of compassion during the Reagan era are linked. Conservatism drew its force from antipathy toward a group of people who loved differently. This animus animated evangelicals and justified indifference to AIDS sufferers among Catholic leaders. It can be found everywhere in sermons, political speeches, journals, and newspapers. It inflected thinking on what constituted “normal,” on sex and gender more generally as well as reproductive rights. William Bennett, included in Age of Fracture for work that expounds on virtues, was Secretary of Education, who, along with his Undersecretary Gary Bauer (who later became head of the Family Research Council), served as the principle spokesmen for Reagan’s AIDS policies. Instead of disseminating information to educate people about how transmission occurred and how to prevent infection, these two guys were too worried about saying anything even remotely positive about gay people. Precious time was lost. Lives were lost.

I also wonder about historical context and if we need to consider authorial intention, that elusive quest that Roland Barthes deemed futile. Rick Warren receives mention by Rodgers for forging “more generous even radical frames for evangelical Protestant social thought” but not for barring gays from membership in his Saddleback Church. Pat Buchanan’s 1992 “culture war” speech gets airing for its patriotic invocations, but not his snide remarks about “homosexual rights” and denunciation of gay marriage as “amoral.” Irving Kristol’s work in the knowledge industry is acknowledged but not his charge that homosexuality was a “disease” (Reagan himself referred to it as “a tragic illness”). The issue of gays in the military and same sex marriage played a decisive role in elections, including ballot initiatives in the 1970s, and get-out-the-vote anti-homosexual campaigns, gay-bashing, and gay-baiting in campaigns since then, even affecting the outcome of presidential contests between the “straight panic” years of 1996 and 2004. If Rodgers is interested in the power of ideas, why doesn’t he analyze the origins and allure of anti-gay ideas? In our question and answer period, I hope we will discuss whether the motive of the people we analyze should form part of our analysis. How should intellectual historians consider statements motivated by bigotry and the desire to promote intolerance?

What would Age of Fracture look like if it had included this subject? On some matters, it would have reinforced his assertions. John D’Emilio’s classic essay “Capitalism and Gay Identity” would have fortified the convictions held by many that free markets induced freedom. With pastors and ministers expending tremendous energy, expounding wrathfully on homosexuality as an abomination and blaming victims for their “choice” little room was left to speak of Jesus as the man who overturned the money tables, preached poverty, humbleness, compassion, and charity, the very kind of emotional economy that Rodgers is interested in mapping.

On other important points, Rodgers would have found his organizing principle, around fracture, did not hold or at least that it was more contested. For example, by citing Butler’s notion of sexuality as a performance, he gives only one side of the debate between nature and nurture. A very large constituency of gay people themselves argued publicly for essentialism. The debate played out on the pages of Time and Newsweek, National Review, The Advocate and Slate.com, with scientific studies examining the role of genes and hormones in determining sexual orientation. At stake in this ontological question was whether gayness was akin to race and thus deserved legal protections or a choice that could be changed (and criticized).

On a final note: Who mourns for the gay men and women who either committed suicide, lived closeted lives filled with fear and anguish, alienated from family, friends, church, and denied the opportunity to build their own families or to love who they loved. I understand it is not the historian's job to hold pity parties, but I wonder if empathy is a necessary first step before historians start weaving the experiences of gay people into the story of our past. It is certainly within our realm of responsibility to try to understand, as Ranke would say, how it really was, to see not only flawless execution but missteps, and trips, and dips, to assess not just waltzes, but break dancing, the Hustle, the rumba, the samba, and cha-cha-cha.

Tim's Light Reading (11-24-2011): The Thanksgiving Edition

If you're bored with your relatives, TV, or the general holiday scene---or if you love USIH so much that you're browsing here on a Thanksgiving whim---something from the entries below may be of interest. I will offer up reflections on our conference next week. - TL

----------------------------------------------------

1 (of 8). Nietzsche in America

Check out this review of Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's new book, Nietzsche in America. I don't know how I'm going to top Ross Posnock for my USIH review, but don't count on seeing my effort soon; I just got my copy of the book yesterday.


2. Middletown and Intellectual History

Slate's John Plotz writes here on his attempt to make some sense of the newly released readership information from Muncie (IN) City Library (from the 1891-1902 period). It's an interesting read for many different reasons. But I was struck by the following two paragraphs in relation to how intellectual historians conduct some of their work (bolds mine):

The book I’m currently trying to write is about the way that ordinary readers—Louis, me, or you [Louis is late 19th-century Muncie reader]—can sometimes feel drawn into a book, so far into it, that it gives us a partial sense of a life elsewhere—until we recall that our hands ache, our eyes are tired, and it’s time to pick up the kids. My working title is Semi-Detached, and that about summed up my feelings by the end of my Bloom experiment. I was partially there with Louis in the Muncie library—but I was also a very, very long way away. I’d gathered and crunched some data, and heard some stories, but …. I was always gaining on Louis, but somehow I was never fast enough to fall into stride with him, to turn sideways and find myself looking him straight in the eye. I was struck by Stuart’s reaction [one of Louis's grandchildren] when I asked him what we could deduce from his granddad’s reading. He laughed and said, “You know, I don’t even think the books I read as a kid say much about who I am now. It was all baseball then and I haven’t even seen a game in 20 years. Even as a grown man I changed; I feel like I’m in my fourth lifetime now.”

Stuart’s point about the gap between what you read and who you are got me thinking. Maybe the way Louis receded as I chased after him was not my problem but my answer. In the books Louis checked out he found, as readers everywhere always do, more than just a perfect mirror of his own life (as if “what Middletown read” told us “what Middletown really was”). He also found a way out: a glimpse of the Italy where scientists experimented with frog’s legs, or the state of Mississippi back when killing a slave was a simple property crime. The books he read might even have helped him catch a glimpse of what he wanted his own future to be working in the world of mechanics and of physics, far from Muncie (“Go West, young man”—yes, until you hit the Philippines). Thanks to those books, he too had a telescope. Like mine, it was small and imperfect, with no guarantees about the accuracy of what he glimpsed through it. Still, coming from the sort of Muncie life that he did (his mom had moved them in with in-laws, had even been threatened with having to send the kids off to various relatives) I bet that glimpse at a distant world loomed fairly large for him.

I forward these passages for your consideration because I often think about the difference between what my subjects read and what they actually took away---what they used.


3. Is a Rise in Faculty Salaries the Cause of Higher Education Tuition Inflation?

Reuter's columnist Felix Salmon says no. Here's a key passage from the piece (bolds mine):

Overall, if we exclude for-profit schools, which were a tiny part of the landscape in 1999, we have seen tuition fees rise by 32% between 1999 and 2009. Over the same period, instruction costs rose just 5.6% — the lowest rate of inflation of any of the components of education services. (“Student services costs” and “operations and maintenance costs” saw the greatest inflation, at 15.2% and 18.1% respectively, but even that is only half the rate that tuition increased.)

The real reason why tuition has been rising so much has nothing to do with [William] Baumol, and everything to do with the government. Page 31 of the report is quite clear: “except for private research institutions,” it says, “tuitions were increasing almost exclusively to replace losses from state revenues or other private revenue sources.”

In other words, tuition costs are going up just because state subsidies are going down.

...It's the State Subsidy, Stupid!


4. Herbert Marcuse's FBI File

Lawrence Winsaft of the UC-San Diego Philosophy Department has done a little research on his department and uncovered some faulty FBI book assessments of Herbert Marcuse's works (esp. Reason and Revolution, One Dimensional Man, and Essay on Liberation). Good stuff.


5. Heretics and the Gospel of Education

In a collective review of four recent books about education (higher and secondary), titled "The Educational Lottery" and published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Steven Brint frames the books in a novel way. He posits each author as a particular kind of heretic in relation to the pervasive American myth that education is at the root of all social, political, and cultural progress. Here are a few paragraphs from the review's opening (bolds mine):

Education is as close to a secular religion as we have in the United States. In a time when Americans have lost faith in their government and economic institutions, millions of us still believe in its saving grace. ...“The answer to all of our national problems,” as Lyndon Johnson put it in 1965, “comes down to one single word: education.”

The American education gospel is built around four core beliefs. First, it teaches that access to higher levels of education should be available to everyone, regardless of their background or previous academic performance. Every educational sinner should have a path to redemption. (Most of these paths now run through community colleges.) Second, the gospel teaches that opportunity for a better life is the goal of everyone and that education is the primary — and perhaps the only — road to opportunity. Third, it teaches that the country can solve its social problems — drugs, crime, poverty, and the rest — by providing more education to the poor. Education instills the knowledge, discipline, and the habits of life that lead to personal renewal and social mobility. And, finally, it teaches that higher levels of education for all will reduce social inequalities, as they will put everyone on a more equal footing. ...

The advance of the education gospel has been shadowed from the beginning by critics who claim that education, despite our best efforts, remains a bastion of privilege. For these critics, it is not that the educational gospel is wrong (a truly democratic, meritocratic school system would, if it existed, be a good thing); it is that the benefits of education have not yet spread evenly to every corner of American society, and that the trend toward educational equality may be heading in the wrong direction. They decry the fact that schools in poor communities have become dropout factories and that only the wealthy can afford the private preparatory schools that are the primary feeders to prestigious private colleges. The higher education Establishment recognizes critics like these as family. They accept the core beliefs of the education gospel and are impatient only with its slow and incomplete adoption.

Brint then goes on to outline several schools of heresy: "the new restrictionism"; "the 'free the students' school"; "the 'fool’s gold' group"; and "the 'true educators' sect."


6. Occupy AHA?

Werner Herzog's Bear says yes, and has drawn up a preliminary manifesto to aid the cause. Here are the first five demands (of ten total) in the manifesto:

1. That the AHA officially repudiate the rhetoric of "overproduction" and acknowledge that the lack of good jobs is the biggest cause of the current crisis in employment for historians.
2. That the AHA create high-level positions in its organizational structure specifically intended to be filled by and to advance the interests of graduate students and contingency faculty members.
3. That the AHA encourage departments that persist in using non-tenured labor to establish permanent positions with decent pay, health benefits, and job security, and to officially censure those departments that fail to meet these standards.
4. That the AHA recognize the current crisis in academic publishing and encourage departments to make their tenure and hiring decisions.
5. That the AHA put an end to the conference job register and discourage the practice of on-site conference interviews, and encourage their replacement with preliminary interviews over the phone of via video chat. ...

I think I like 3 and 4 from this excerpted list the best. Check out the rest here.


7. Pepper Spray

It's not organic.


8. History Corps

If the AHA wants to avoid scenes with pepper spray and an OWS-style movement, they could do worse than support a plan offered by USIH friend Culture Rover (aka Michael Kramer): he calls it "History Corps." Kramer's plan expands on one offered by Jesse Lemisch in his dialogue with Anthony Grafton (latest installments here and here). Here's Kramer's summation:

This kind of endeavor would address the very real economic issues that younger historians and aspiring historians face. But it does so not by telling them that they should have gone to business school. Instead, it offers a vision of historians as professionals. It gives them dignity and it more clearly distinguishes the distinctive skills, perspectives, and expertise that historical training brings. It’s not about making historical training applicable for other fields, but rather of clarifying how history as a field is necessary to a good society.

Read the whole thing here.

----------------------------------------------------

Enjoy! - TL

Lauren's Light Listening--pre-Thanksgiving show

For your Thanksgiving holiday, some radio pieces on the origin of ideas, the writing of history, and the origin of Thanksgiving as a holiday:



The origin of ideas--an individual or a system? From Radio Lab's Patient Zero episode

We're left wondering, what would happen if you were to treat a good idea like an infectious disease? Could you trace it back to one individual, and one flash of insight? Jon Mooallem tells us about his quest to track down the origin of the high five--a story that starts with one of the most celebratory gestures imaginable ... and ends with a choice that pits a happy ending against a more complicated reality. Lutha Davis, Greg Harrell-Edge, Nolan Smith, and Kathy Gregory all weigh in with competing explanations. And Tim Hemmes and Katie Schaffer tell a moving story about the power of their very own first high five.
All this leaves us with an inevitable, but unsettling question. A question that Jonnie Hughes helps answer with a broadminded look at the history of the cowboy hat.

Julian Barnes on Writing History from Kurt Andersen and Studio 360.

Last month Julian Barnes received the prestigious Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sense of an Ending. It’s about a middle-aged man who must reconsider events from his youth upon the death of a childhood friend. When he discovers a past that clashes with his memories, he must reconceive both his history and identity. At 163 pages, the book has been recognized for its compact simplicity, intensity, and depth.
In 2006, Kurt Andersen interviewed Barnes as part of the National Book Foundation's "Eat, Drink & Be Literary" series at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Barnes had just published a very different kind of historical exploration, Arthur & George (also shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year).
Barnes began the event with a reading from Arthur & George, a historical fiction about Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (2:45-20:45 in the audio below). But in the conversation that followed, he told Kurt, "In a funny way, I don't consider it a historical novel. I think with a historical novel set at that time you would imagine the reader in a deep-buttoned late-Victorian tub chair by a blazing log-fire. I want the reader to feel that they are sitting in an uncomfortable modern chair with someone's walkman blaring in their ear."
Listen to the full 70-minute recording here:

The History Guys analyze Thanksgiving on Backstory

When we sit down to Thanksgiving dinner, we think we know what we’re commemorating. But if an actual Pilgrim were to attend your Thanksgiving, chances are he’d be stunned by what he saw there. In this episode, historian James McWilliams discusses why the Puritans would have turned up their noses at our “traditional” Thanksgiving foods. Religion scholar Anne Blue Wills reveals the Victorian  origins of our modern holiday, and one woman’s campaign to fix it on the national calendar. An archeologist at Colonial Williamsburg explains what garbage has to tell us about early American diets. And legendary NFL quarterback Roger Staubach describes what it was like to spend every turkey day on the football field.