These Historians' Deaths

By Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

Over the past few days I have followed, with so many others, the commentary on the lives of not one or two but an entire trio of eminent historians: Eugene Genovese, Eric Hobsbawm, and Henry May. I admire the care that has gone into reflections that have appeared elsewhere as well as on this blog, including those of Leo Ribuffo on Genovese, Andrew Hartman on Hobsbawm, and Ray Haberski on May. For myself, I can only offer something along the lines of a blogger's equivalent to a moment of silence in honor of their memory, and that of the others we have already lost from their remarkable generation.

I knew only one of these three men personally. Eugene Genovese's life was intertwined with my family's at key points, a story some readers here no doubt know much better than I, and for almost as long as I can remember, his name has been a household word. I met him when we moved to Rochester in 1970 and again a few years ago when he invited me to participate in the early planning meetings for the Historical Society, including a memorable one at the New York City apartment of intellectual historian John Patrick Diggins, who died in 2009.  After learning second hand over the intervening decades of Genovese's reputation as firebrand, which in other settings he of course earned, I found his tremendous personal warmth and charm truly disarming. And enlightening.

As Genovese goes from man to a legend to many, albeit one who has erred (is there any other kind, of either?), there is genuine pathos in this moment when a soldier--for he certainly fought passionately for causes he believed in--lays down sword and shield for the final time. His life is complete now, but perhaps it is my long-term awareness of him, directly and indirectly through his best written words, as in his amazing Roll, Jordan, Roll, as someone of such presence that makes it difficult for me to believe he can no longer be living--at least not yet.

Trading Places

It is only appropriate that the week of the fourth annual conference for US intellectual history that we announce a little change to the blog. Lauren and I will trade days; so starting next week her posts will appear on Wednesdays and mine on Fridays. I certainly appreciate the change.

Our colleague Andrew Hartman has been digging around at the NYPL today (a very luck guy, I think) and came across a curious piece from John Diggins. You can read his full post below this one. Andrew takes Diggins to task for dismissing cultural and social history. I wonder how much of Diggins's critique stemmed from where he made it. In other words, as I traveled from LaGuardia airport to Manhattan, I passed a Queens far different from the one my parents grew up in--the Irish and Polish replaced people from southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim. Did Diggins discount the ability of academics to get a hold of the social history that swirled around him? As Andrew suggests, perhaps it comes down to a failure of imagination.

With friends like these...

I arrived in New York a day early (the conference begins tomorrow) in order to spend some hours with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s Papers at the New York Public Library. I came across a letter written to Schlesinger from John Patrick Diggins, dated February 27, 1995, regarding the National History Standards controversy. I will quote at length without commentary:

"The critique of great civilizations and great men is part of a general critique of intellectual history and the history of ideas… And here is one of the great ironies. The [Standards] regard intellectual history as ‘elitist’ and ‘chauvinist’ because by definition it has dealt with rather towering figures. But at least when one does intellectual history one must defer to those thinkers who are our superiors, must get straight what they thought and believed. In the [Standards], however, the historian is almost free to impose his or her thoughts on workers, slaves, and other subalterns of the past who have no voice of their own... ‘Those who cannot represent themselves, must be represented,’ so said Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Ok, fair enough. The historian can claim to speak for workers and others who left no record to articulate their own thoughts. But it turns out that this so-called ‘history from the bottom up’ is really history from the top down in that it is present-day scholars who now claim to speak for the silent dead. This is elitism with arrogance."

A house that Diggins helped build

It has been nearly two years since the prolific John Patrick Diggins died, thus leaving to a dozen intellectual historians the work that he used to do alone. Diggins played a role in fostering the US intellectual history conference, and the bar at which we will hold the celebration to inaugurate the S-USIH is the one that Diggins haunted with colleagues and students. We'll have to toast Jack Diggins Thursday night.

I am writing a review of a couple of recent books on Reinhold Niebuhr, including the book Diggins wrote just before his death, "Why Niebuhr Now?" That question doesn't really organize the book as much as acknowledge that Niebuhr's insight (even wisdom?) has not yet grown stale. Diggins makes that case better than anybody I have yet read on the topic. Perhaps that is because Diggins, like Niebuhr, found sustenance in the mixing of intellectual history and theology; a potent antidote (if handled correctly) to the American pathological tendency toward self-deception. There was no beating history; and thus there was considerable honor in being a historian.

Therefore I look forward to hearing papers and panels and plenaries (especially the one that closes the conference on American exceptionalism) that cut across topics that Diggins almost without fail addressed one way or another in his work.

Near the end of his book on Niebuhr, Diggins points to one passage in "The Irony of American History" that he called beautiful. It is a passage that many have found worthy of being prayed. Those who knew Diggins might be able to say something about his reaction to it.

'Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.' (The Irony of American History, 63)