URI Issues a New Statement on Loomis

This is just a quick follow-up to my post on Erik Loomis from last week. The President of URI issued another statement today, responding in part to criticisms of his earlier statement:

Over the past several days we have heard from many individuals concerning statements made or repeated by Professor Erik Loomis. Many writers forcefully expressed serious concern about his statements and many others expressed very strong support for Professor Loomis, especially in regard to his First Amendment right to share his personal opinions. In the statements at issue, Professor Loomis did not make it clear that he was speaking solely as an individual, and that the views he expressed were his alone and did not reflect the views of the University of Rhode Island. This was the rationale for our original statement.

The University of Rhode Island strongly believes that Constitutionally protected rights to free expression are the foundation of American democracy, and central to our mission of imparting knowledge and promoting the exchange of ideas. It is our conviction that Professor Loomis’s personal remarks, however intemperate and inflammatory they may be, are protected by the First Amendment, as are the views of those who have contacted us in recent days.

David M. Dooley, Ph.D.
President
University of Rhode Island

You can head over to Crooked Timber for a thorough discussion of whether or not this constitutes a victory for those of us who were concerned about the tone and content of President Dooley's first statement on this matter (I'm inclined to see this glass as half-full rather than half-empty, for whatever it's worth).

Erik Loomis and Free Speech

As 99% or so of folks who read this blog probably already know, Erik Loomis, a labor and environmental historian, Assistant Professor at the University of Rhode Island, and blogger at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, has been under public attack following his posting the following angry tweet a week ago today:

I was heartbroken in the first 20 mass murders. Now I want Wayne LaPierre’s head on a stick.

Loomis was initially denounced by conservatives who falsely accused him of calling for the murder of Wayne LaPierre (who is head of the National Rifle Association). Within days he had received visits from the Rhode Island State Police and his Dean.  Earlier this week, the President of the University of Rhode Island issued the following statement:

The University of Rhode Island does not condone acts or threats of violence. These remarks do not reflect the views of the institution and Erik Loomis does not speak on behalf of the University. The University is committed to fostering a safe, inclusive and equitable culture that aspires to promote positive change.

In response, bloggers at Crooked Timber, one of the leading academic blogs, issued a statement of their own on Wednesday, the nut 'graph of which reads as follows:

Even to suggest that Loomis’s tweet constitutes a “threat of violence” is an offense against the English language. We are dismayed that the university president completely fails to acknowledge the importance of academic freedom and of scholars’ freedom independently to express views (even intemperate ones) on topics of public importance.  This statement—unless it is swiftly corrected— should give alarm to scholars at the University of Rhode Island, to scholars who might one day consider associating themselves with this institution, and to academic and professional associations that value academic freedom.

If you haven't done so yet, please go and read the whole thing.  Among the most important other points they make is that, while this case raises issues of academic freedom, in fact, what's happened to Loomis is part of a much broader issue: the ability that employers in general have to punish their employees for expressing unpopular political views that have no bearing whatsoever on the performance of their jobs. 

Given that Loomis does not have tenure, that some opponents were calling for his firing, and that his institution has fundamentally misrepresented his actions in a public statement, I believe it is particularly important that his fellow academics, especially those of us who also blog, to defend Loomis from these attacks. The bloggers who put together the Crooked Timber statement have asked other bloggers to support it and have set up a comment thread on which you can do so. I already have expressed my support on it (along with about a thousand others at this writing); I urge you to do so as well.*  That's the primary purpose of this post.

Its secondary purpose is to create an open thread to discuss this case...perhaps even in an historical context (as would befit this blog).  So have at it!

A few more thoughts below the fold...

First, I wanted to link to some other materials on this case.  It was covered today by Inside Higher Ed.  The foreign policy blog Duck of Minerva also issued a statement supporting Loomis's free speech rights.  One of the most thoughtful letters to the URI administration was written by UNM history professor Virginia Scharff.

Though the URI administration has yet to respond (at least publicly) to the criticism of its statement, some of the leading academic conservative bloggers who had attacked Loomis for his tweet have, at least, explicitly stated that he probably shouldn't be fired (perhaps because they themselves have used violent rhetoric in the past). 

Finally, I wanted to say that my wholehearted endorsement of the Crooked Timber statement should not be read as enthusiasm for Loomis's now-infamous tweet.  While it was in no way an incitement to violence, I'm not a great fan of violent rhetoric like this.  Loomis himself has expressed regret about employing it, if only because it (pretty predictably) became a distraction from the real issues raised by the Newtown shootings. My disagreements with using such language run a little deeper.  However, I almost didn't add this thought to this post, because I think it is quite beside the point when one is talking about the free speech issues raised by the campaign against Loomis and addressed by the Crooked Timber statement (which are the principal topics of this post).  One does not always defend free speech that one likes...indeed, if one is committed to free speech, one often defends speech that one doesn't.  And pointing out one's dislikes while issuing such defenses of speech can, in a sense, detract from those defenses. 

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* It should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway, that I do these things as an individual and that I am not speaking for this blog nor for the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, which are not in the habit of issuing collective statements and have no plans to begin doing so at the moment.  I'd also add that I think this is basically a good thing, as issuing truly collective statements can often be a complicated and contentious matter. Indeed, even Crooked Timber attributed its statement to the individual bloggers signing it, not to the blog collectively.

Historians and History-at-the-Movies

As an historian interested in film history, I've often been frustrated with the ways in which historians have tended to use history films in the classroom and to discuss them in the public sphere. 

I tend to use movies in the classroom as primary source materials, e.g., I show films made in the 1930s to teach about the 1930s.  Films can be wonderful when used this way.  Students tend to already be more sophisticated consumers of motion pictures than they are of most other kinds of primary source material.  A well-chosen film can teach us both about its subject and about the way films themselves were made and consumed at the time of its creation. Using films in this way is, of course, a luxury available to those of us who teach courses about the last 120 years or so.

Most historians, however, teach about earlier periods.  And if they use films in the classroom, it's usually as secondary sources, e.g. screening a film like Black Robe to teach about French interactions with Native Americans in the 17th century.  Films used as secondary sources in the classroom share one big feature with films used as primary sources in the classroom: students by and large prefer viewing motion pictures to reading books. But many of the things that recommend primary-source classroom films make secondary-source classroom films problematic.  For example, Black Robe is a pretty complicated and interesting portrait of Native American life, especially for a mainstream narrative film. But as a product of the early 1990s, it no doubt bares the marks both of that era of filmmaking and that era (or possibly earlier eras) of historiography.  And, of course, Black Robe wasn't filmed to be used as a textbook manqué, but rather to be a piece of narrative entertainment. Reading Black Robe in its cultural context is thus necessary, but doing so takes us far away from 17th-century Quebec.

Perhaps this latter use of films in the classroom helps explain the dominant way in which (non film-) historians have tended to write for the general public about history films.  When dealing with films about the past, historians have tended, first and foremost, to fact-check them. Indeed, volumes and websites have been dedicated to separating "reel history" from "real history" (a pun that ought to be retired, btw). 


I have long felt that such an approach to history films was problematic because of its unwillingness to seriously grapple with history films as a filmic genre.  And, especially in the last two decades, historians interested in studying film have taken more sophisticated approaches to studying history films.

But recent discussions of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln and Oliver Stone's Showtime documentary series, Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States, have highlighted another weakness of historians' fact-checking approach to movies: it does a terrible job conveying to the public what it means to do history.*

Spielberg and Stone have devoted much of their careers to putting American history on film. And though both have (often ostentatiously) employed professional historians to validate their films' take on the past, they have positioned themselves rather differently in relation to the historical mainstream. By and large, Spielberg's history films have tended to reflect the mainstream scholarly consensus about the past; Stone's have tended to be openly iconoclastic and revisionist. Perhaps unsurprisingly, academic historians have tended to prefer Spielberg's films (at least as works of history) to Stone's.

Lincoln, as far as I can tell from reading about the film, fact-checks well. But as any historian would tell you, getting the facts right, while necessary for doing good history, is not sufficient. It is perfectly possible to construct an historical narrative which is accurate, but misleading.  Historians are responsible not only for getting the facts right, but for selecting which facts are significant and constructing explanations for why things happened as they did.  Non-historians are often unaware of--or even downright hostile to--this aspect of the historical craft.**

While a number of historians have praised Lincoln, which focuses on the passage of the 13th Amendment, others have objected to the way it frames the story of emancipation entirely through the actions of European Americans, while reducing African Americans to the status of onlookers.  Prof. Kate Masur, of Northwestern University, published an editorial in the New York Times on November 12 that made this case.  And academic bloggers (and friends of this blog) Corey Robin and Aaron Bady have launched similar criticisms of the film.  All are well worth reading (as are most other things written by Robin and Bady).  But I was particularly struck by the comment thread on Corey's post on Crooked Timber.

As most readers of this blog know, Crooked Timber is an eclectic academic blog that reaches an audience that extends well beyond the academy.***   What's interesting about the comment thread on Corey's post is how many respondents don't quite get why some historians (and historically-oriented social scientists like Robin) object to Lincoln.

Some examples:

EMS:  "I’m astonished, though, and rather disgusted that any would criticize this film because there weren’t enough blacks in it, or that black agency in their own emancipation seems to have been omitted. This reminds me of a huge fight I had with my wife over “Tell ‘Em Willie Boy was Here” when she accused Polonsky of anti-feminism, despite the fact the film took place way the hell before there was any such thing as Feminism (except in a few small Eastern precincts). It’s about Lincoln and the 13th amendment. Why the hell should any blacks be in it at all? One could, probably with some force, argue that Spielberg and Kushner are guilty of tokenism. I’d argue it’s just bad film-making. Does every film have to be judged by the inclusion or exclusion of blacks? How about The Red Badge of Courage? Ya wanna make that one all black? One can dislike the choices Spielberg makes, but he’s about emotion more than historical accuracy. What he’s not is a profound thinker. What he is, usually, anyway, is a superior craftsman."

Bloix: "I know all about history from the bottom up, but I believe that there are great people whose acts turned the course of history. Lincoln, Gandhi, King, and Mandela. Their stories are great stories that deserve to be told over and over again, in every era, in every form of art."

Dave: "It may not be the constraints of history or genre driving Spielberg’s choices, but presumably culture as it is presently configured and the master-narrative of the period preclude the possibility of Spielberg telling the kind of story Corey would like. At least, it’s as likely as 'Spielberg’s blinkered vision.' There is no pop culture artifact anywhere telling that story; why be outraged at Spielberg for failing to account for an academic history when no one else does?"

Mark Field: "I saw the movie yesterday and thought it was excellent. I’m not much impressed by this criticism. There are thousands of stories that could be told about the war and about emancipation. There are stories of Thaddeus Stevens, of Frederick Douglas, of millions of unidentified slaves, of Union generals, etc. No movie can easily incorporate them all. And it’s not as if Lincoln was peripheral to the story, not then and not in historical memory.
"The fact that Spielberg chose to tell one of these stories — one which fits well the nature of film — doesn’t strike me as anything worth criticizing. It just means there are lots more (good) movies to make."

Harold:  "Masur is silly (not for the first time). Tony Kushner made a decision to restrict the story to a time period of two months in the interest of narrative economy, and it worked."

Two thoughts about these (and many other similar) comments:

One repeated trope among Lincoln's defenders in the CT commentariat is the contrast between the requirements of a movie and the requirements of history (or, more specifically, academic history).   This line of reasoning is correct...so far as it goes. To the extent that historians expect or want historical dramas to look exactly like academic history, we are bound to be disappointed. And, as I've said above, in the past, many of us have not been careful enough about distinguishing the requirements of one from the requirements of the other.  But the fact that a Hollywood historical drama is not a work of academic history does not--and should not--shield it from criticism from the perspective of academic history. Though those of us who seek to criticize a work like Lincoln need to bear in mind what those differences are...and perhaps even foreground them in our criticisms.

This leads to my second thought about these comments: just as, in the past, historians have not always been very sophisticated in the way we treat Hollywood's attempts at telling historical stories, we have also not been very effective at explaining to the public what it is we do and what we expect from works of public history (broadly understood).  The crude role of fact-checker nicely fits the public's conception of us as nothing more or less than fonts of knowledge about what happened in the past.  But it is in our capacity as interpreters of the past that we have the most interesting things to say about Hollywood's historical fictions.  If we don't understand the rather complicated, shifting generic expectations of the historical film, and the various tasks it performs beyond informing its audience about its historical subject, we will not be able to grapple with historical films successfully as interpretations of the past. And if the public doesn't understand what it means to interpret the past, or even that any historical narrative necessarily entails a series of interpretations, our public interventions are likely to be misunderstood or dismissed.


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* I'm not addressing my own opinions on Lincoln or Untold History in this post for a very simple reason: I haven't seen either of them yet.  Most of this post concerns reactions to Lincoln, but for a good example of a take on Untold History that takes an unsubtle approach to Stone's take on history, see this piece from last Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

** Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) at the 1995 Senate hearings into the Smithsonian's proposed Enola Gay exhibit:  "[I]s it really the role to interpret history, rather than just simply to put forward historical facts...? ...I was a history major. In the days when I studied the text... was essentially a recitation of fact, leaving the reader to draw their own analysis..."

*** Like Spinal Tap's, our appeal is more selective.

What Use Are the Politics of Authenticity?

(Photo: Gage Skidmore)

Not much argues Rich Yeselson over at Crooked Timber in a long post about Mitt Romney that's getting a fair bit of attention on the interwebs today.

It's worth reading the whole thing, but here are the highlights.  Yeselson suggests that "authenticity" is a mirage, both because people don't have single, "real" selves and because, even if they did, there is simply no way for others to judge who a person is in his or her heart of hearts.

Citing the work of Erving Goffman (be still my 20th-century USIH heart!), Yeselson argues that far from presenting (or failing to present) one's authentic self, a person's life necessarily involves the presentation of an array of selves:

Romney, like all of us, performs the roles he must within the public institutions he inhabits and the different dramas which he plays a part in enacting.  There are reasons why he performs on the stages he does—he’ll never be any kind of liberal—but he doesn’t just play the same character every time. Each of those institutions will have a different set of observers with which the individual engages. The audience, venue and dramatic script shape and constrain our public performances.  To perform the wrong script at the wrong time is entirely possible—and a contradiction between verbal and non-verbal cues often occurs—but significant social costs will then accrue to the performer. Even famously “conviction” driven politicians like Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush or Paul Wellstone behaved in a manner that could only be socially interpreted—once an individual’s “inner direction” engages in a variety of externalized, relationally-defined episodes, the protocols and rules systems of those episodes channel the behavior of even the most willful actors.

Yeselson further suggests that the key to understanding Romney is the fact that he referred to the opposing political party as "the Demoratic Party" on one occasion several weeks ago and as "the Democrat Party" on a more recent occasion.*  Neither Democrat Party-referring nor Democratic Party-referring Romney is the authentic candidate. What we learn from his performance, instead, is that, like that of all the rest of us, his behavior is determined by its context. Which leads Yeselson to conclude:

We will probably never find out who the real Romney is, just like we haven’t found out who the real Obama or the real Lincoln is. And it won’t matter what he is not telling us about his Mormonism or how many nightmares he’s had about that terrible day in Beaulanc, France in 1968.  But who controls Congress will matter a lot as to whether we see the Romney who basically agrees with Obama about health care, but just wants to figure out a way not to tax his own class to pay for it, or the Romney who will abolish Obama’s health care reform bill, defund the EPA and the NLRB, and redistribute money from the elderly and the poor to the rich. That is a play we should never want to see performed. I can’t make it any more real for you than that.**

But can the importance of the idea of authenticity be so easily dismissed?

Let me begin by agreeing with Yeselson about the ontological and epistemological problems with attempts to gauge a politician's authentic self.  Like Yeselson, I tend to think that we do not possess such selves, and that it is not possible for us to gain full access to the inner lives of others.

But despite these problems, the discourse of authenticity is a vital one in our culture and politics. The fact that its objects may be largely imaginary no more allows us to wave it away as politically irrelevant than an atheist's non-belief in God allows her to deny the importance of religion in American life.  Instead, the empirical problems and paradoxes of the discourse of authenticity simply make it more difficult to pin down and analyze.  Since the idea of authenticity does not in any simple sense pick out a fact about the world, making sense of authenticity talk requires more, not less, attention.

Even Yeselson, who argues that Romney is like "'conviction'-driven politicians" and, in fact, "all of us" in performing himself, admits that Mitt seems particularly bad at this activity: 

People are what they do, and part of what presidential candidates must do is project a fully integrated depth of being before multiple audiences. Romney’s political problem—his poor job performance as a professional politician—is that he has an almost poignant difficulty in managing to do that. His inability to merely fake the “realness” that people hunger for reminds me of what was once said about former Texas Governor, and Democrat turned Republican John Connally:  he is the only man in the world whose real hair makes people think he’s wearing a toupee.

This admission on Yeselson's part is fairly significant.  Though his account of Romney's failure here is different from one that might be given by someone who buys the myth of authenticity--who might have said that Romney "doesn't know who he really is" or "can't communicate who he really is"--Yeselson seems perfectly capable of distinguishing Romney from other, more successful, politicians in a way that makes some sense of that authenticity talk. 

But for Yeselson this doesn't--or at least shoudn't--matter. Politics should be about policy outcomes, which are, in turn, more determined by presidential circumstances than by Presidents.  Sure some act the part better than others, but this is--or should be--of little consequence once we see that they are all, in a sense, acting.

The problem is that's not how politics work.  Authenticity as it's invoked in our political talk may be an empirically lousy concept, a buzzword borrowed from existentialism, shorn of any intellectual depth it might once have had.  But authenticity talk actually makes a political difference, as all those who rightly complain about the way the media treated Gore and Bush in 2000 would acknowledge.

In fact, I think authenticity talk has political significance beyond the crude levels of character assassination and political hagiography. Among its other functions:

• It's a way of discussing how much one can trust what a particular politician says.

• It's a way of describing the cultural fit (or, more skeptically, the imaginary cultural fit) between a politician and his or her potential (primary or general) electorate.

• It's a shorthand for a host of questions about character (another important concept whose concrete existence is hard to pin down).

The empirical dodginess of authenticity talk makes it an imperfect tool for all of these things. And one might more generally deplore the importance of some of them in our political culture.   Why should it matter, for example, that a candidate is an appropriate cultural "fit"?

But what one can't do is pretend that these things don't matter simply on the basis of the fact that they shouldn't.
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* Yeselson correctly notes that the latter usage is a standard right-wing slur. A surprising amount of space in comments is taken up by folks naively suggesting that "Democrat Party" may just be an unfortunate malapropism.   Eat your history, kids!

** I'm going to focus on Yeselson's treatment of the idea of authenticity in my post. But I wanted to point out in passing how much his argument is framed by the idea that a President's behavior is largely determined by political circumstance. It's really quite remarkable how common this trope has become in public discourse since Obama became President.  If people--especially on the left, but to a certain extent on the right, too--tended to overrate how great a departure from past practice and how unilateral and even authoritarian the George W. Bush presidency was at the time, the presidency is now often described in terms that renders it almost entirely the hostage of circumstance.  I tend to think that both these portraits are exaggerations.  But the latter view--that presidential behavior says more about the political constraints within which a president operates than anything about the president him or herself--fits very nicely with the view of self that Yeselson outlines.  The idea of the circumstantially restrained presidency is useful to rally those somewhat disappointed with Barack Obama's performance to the cause of the President's reelection. Not surprisingly that turns out ultimately to be the point of Yeselson's post.