President Obama and American Intellectual History

Guest post by Leo P. Ribuffo (a version of this essay was to have been presented at the S-USIH conference).

At some point late in his term President John Kennedy read and respected Listen, Yankee, C. Wright Mills's attempt to "present the voice" of the Cuban revolution.  A month before he died, JFK used a French journalist to send an oblique message to Fidel Castro about the prospect of improved relations.  Castro must understand that Kennedy was president of the United States "not some sociologist." (1)

In many respects it is odd to write about a president for the Society for United States Intellectual History (SUSIH), a group dedicated to the revival of intellectual history including the "history of ideas."  So let's start with a definition.  I'm not defining "intellectual" in Richard Hofstadter's ebullient sense as someone who lives for ideas, if any such person has existed since the day John Stuart Mill met Harriet Taylor.  Rather, in the Wright Millsian sense, my intellectuals are people who use ideas as elected officials, policy wonks, social critics, or ideologists. 

It is hard to measure the policy impact of intellectuals, even those who both espoused grand theories and held important offices.  President Harry Truman began containment before George Kennan coined the term.  The Alliance for Progress would have existed without Walt Rostow's modernization theory, though Rostow's silly historical comparison of Latin America in 1961 and the United States during a Jacksonian era economic "take off" contributed to the unwarranted optimism.  Economists have had the best luck.  Walter Heller convinced Kennedy to endorse a Keynesian deficit to stimulate the economy even though JFK had trouble distinguishing between fiscal and monetary policy.  In general, however, intellectuals exaggerate the influence of complex ideas and of intellectuals.

Complex ideas encountered in youth do seem to have influenced one major modern presidential decision.  Before pardoning Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford not only prayed and took Communion at Saint John's Episcopal Church across from the White House, but he also recalled lessons from his "legal realist" law professors at Yale who had taught that "public policy often took precedence over a rule of law." (2)

Certainly presidents are affected by what intellectual historians used to call the "climate of opinion"--which presidents also have significantly helped to shape since the early 1900s. The Enlightenment republicanism of the first six presidents, Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis as a rationale for imperialism and an explanation of the Great Depression, and the ubiquitous Munich analogy of the Cold War era stand out as cases in point.

But consider another case SUSIH members might think as odd as Jerry Ford legal realist:  Dwight Eisenhower's vision of the United States as a "middle of the road" corporate commonwealth. (3) During the "fifties" moderation was the dominant rhetorical theme (trope may be substituted if it makes readers feel smarter):  consensus history, pluralist social theory, neo-Freudian psychology, economic fine tuning, and if you went to the Rand Corporation, advice on how to fight a moderate nuclear war.  Eisenhower admired longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer's The True Believer, a social psychological critique of so-called extremism that overlapped with the jargony versions offered by Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset.

Unlike Ike, Obama is a Hofstadterish intellectual who takes ideas very seriously as a person if not necessarily in his day job.  While trying to figure out the world and his place in it as a young man, he read widely, including the works of African-American writers male and female, Friedrich Nietzsche, T. S. Eliot and Peter Drucker.  Certainly he knows that C. Wright Mills wasn't just "some sociologist."  At age 34 Obama published a powerful, stylized account of his education in the Henry Adams sense, Dreams from My Father.  He is obviously very smart which, given the centuries of stereotypes about African-Americans, is absolutely wonderful though a source of added animosity on the Right.

Yet Obama is not a uniquely intellectual modern president.  Professor presidents Woodrow Wilson and William Howard Taft wrote books on American government that are still worth reading.  So did Herbert Hoover.  Some of Theodore Roosevelt's speeches on government and society merit attention too, and a colleague specializing in the topic tells me that TR's naval history of the War of 1812 holds up well.

Exemplifying pack journalism Jonathan Alter dubbed Obama "professor-in-chief." (4) What "professorial" means in the news media stereotype is that Obama is more thoughtful than the typical national political reporter and feels uncomfortable with emotional appeals beyond the obligatory "hopey-changey thing," as Sarah Palin described Obama's inspirational side in the best quip of her career.

Although journalists have uncovered an enormous amount of information about Obama's early life, no one seems to have paid much attention to what sort of intellectual he was like as a teacher at the University of Chicago.  Judging from his pre-presidential and early presidential speeches, he is at his best mulling over ethical issues with policy implications.  Some of these were very good, especially the Reverend Wright speech, Cairo speech, and Nobel Prize speech.

But explanation of policy, with all of the inevitable simplifications, isn't Obama's strong suit.  Having worked at a business information company before becoming a community organizer, he surely knows the difference between fiscal and monetary policy.  Indeed, Paul Volcker credits Obama with the best understanding of economics of any president he has met. Yet Obama has never used this knowledge to explain the virtues of Keynesianism during the Great Recession as cogently as Kennedy (and his speech writers) did amid the relative prosperity of 1962.  Nor would he dare to join JFK in decrying the "myth" that government is "big and bad--and steadily getting bigger and worse." (5) Times have changed.  What was once an arguable economic theory briefly in the ascendant among liberal politicians has become at most a hidden heresy. (6)

Undoubtedly there are psychological factors affecting Obama's incessant moderation and repeated calls for cooperation in "one United States of America" without blue states and red states long after congressional Republicans rejected cooperation.  Recognizing that hostility to government is "as American as apple pie," as Obama said after the 2010 elections, perhaps he also sees no point to picking fights he will lose in a historically conservative country at least a third of which is even more economically conservative than usual (relative to the existing spectrum) at the moment.

Psychology and politics aside, Obama's incessant moderation intersects with part of the prevailing climate of opinion, not with the thunder on the Right but with the partly sunny day with a chance of showers forecast by the Center-Left.  We encounter moderate punditry from E. J. Dionne, moderate Keynesianism from Lawrence Summers, moderate social philosophy from Michael Sandel, and, at the Center for a New American Security, advice on how to fight a moderate drone war.  Trendy buzz words like "civil society" and "communitarianism" should not obscure historical continuities.  Somewhere Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset are smiling.

What about those conservative and Right-wing thunderstorms?   I have written often about the American Right, the chronically obtuse liberal and radical response to it since the 1930s, and the limitations of the historical profession's recent belated discovery that there are lots of conservatives in the United States and most of them believe in God. (7) So I will restrict my comments here to four points.

I will begin with just about the only thing Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote that I agreed with until he opposed the second Iraq War.  In 1955 during the first post-World War II discovery of conservatism by liberals and radicals, Schlesinger wrote:  "What matters  . . . is not the conservatism of the professors  but the conservatism of the industrialists, bankers, and politicians." (8) When I first read this passage four decades ago, I thought Schlesinger should have added the clergy.  Now, with all due respect to intellectual historians highlighting Richard Weaver or Leo Strauss, I would in addition emphasize war veterans, gun owners, popular novelists (some of whom are clergy) and--here too--economists (even if they double as professors).

Second, much of the Right's assault on Obama is consistent with its perennial mistaken belief that ideas have more consequences than they do. One prominent example of this bad intellectual history is Dinesh D'Souza's charge that Obama as a teenager absorbed his ostensibly radical views from his maternal grandfather's Communist drinking buddy Frank Marshall Davis.

Third, we need to consider the possibility that the Right broadly conceived has changed more than the Left broadly conceived since their respective contemporary origins during the 1930s.

Fourth, we need to think about the unthinkable, that the United States for roughly a century has been in complex ways a conservative country. 

For more detail beyond these points, come to a session I organized at the American Historical Association convention in January called Studying the American Right, Center, and Left--All at the Same Time!

In the meantime, keep in mind that Barack Obama is President of the United States not some intellectual historian.

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Notes

1. C. Wright Mills:  Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (New York:  Ballantine,, 1960), 8.  The Kennedy anecdote comes from Norman Birnbaum, "The Half-Forgotten Prophet:  C. Wright Mills," Nation, March 20, 2009.

2. Gerald R. Ford, A Time to Heal:  The Autobiography of Gerald R. Ford (New York:  Harper and Row, 1979), 173-175.

3. See the classic essay by Robert Griffith, "Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Corporate Commonwealth," American Historical Review, February 1982.

4. Jonathan Alter, The Promise:  President Obama, Year One (New York:  Simon and Schuster, 1980), 267.

5. Kennedy omitted the term Keynesian economics, probably out of prudence, but his address at the June 1962 Yale commencement included something even more heretical by current standards, an explicit acknowledgement that the United States could learn lessons from Western Europe about effective government and economic policy.

6. My admiration for Kennedy's effort to popularize complicated and counterintuitive economic ideas should not be taken as general enthusiasm for his presidency.  His civil rights actions were sluggish even if we apply standards appropriate for a president rather than some sociologist.  Many of his foreign policies were so risky that relatively few Americans now have any real sense just how dangerous these were.  Collective memory of the U.S. public "victory" in the Cuban missile crisis stands out as the prime example.  This obliviousness to the continued relevance of  the Cold War extends to some of President Obama's closest foreign policy advisers, a disposition amply documented--and misconstrued as wisdom--in James Mann, The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power(New York:  Viking, 2012).

 7. For a quick summary see Leo P. Ribuffo, "Twenty Suggestions for Studying the Right Now that Studying the Right isTrendy," Historically Speaking, January 2011.

8. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Hope (Boston:  Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 80.

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.

Eugene D. Genovese: Recollections of a Former Student

Leo P. Ribuffo

The death of a favorite teacher in his or her late old age typically evokes strong emotions from former students in their early old age.  In this case the emotions are mine and the teacher is Gene Genovese, one of my professors at Rutgers when I was an undergraduate from 1962 to 1966.  We remained in contact off-and-on over the decades and I saw him last in Atlanta in July 2010.  This piece is not another attempt to offer an instant analysis of the “real” Genovese, an enterprise now well underway in cyberspace.  Rather, I want to add something to the story from the perspective of an undergraduate he taught who subsequently entered what Gene called the “history business.”

I first heard about Gene in the fall of 1963, the first semester of my sophomore year, from my friend Ken O’Brien (who also entered the history business).  Ken was taking Gene’s course in American Negro history.  As a naive 18 year old from a white working class-lower middle class New Jersey family, I was surprised to hear that this subject existed.  I soon learned in detail that it did from Genovese himself.  During the spring semester of 1964, the Intro US history course since the 1870s, taught in lecture by the terrifying Richard P. McCormick, allowed some students to take tutorials in small groups.  Three of us were assigned to Gene.  Our first assignment was to make sense of the currency issue in the late 19th century via debates in the Congressional Record.  No, I’m not making this up.  During the rest of the semester Gene tamped down my enthusiasm for William Jennings Bryan (a racist), delighted in my discovery that Theodore Roosevelt posed no threat to the standing order, and chided me for still liking Woodrow Wilson (the worst racist of the lot).

During my junior and senior years I took three courses from Gene, a two semester sequence on the history of the American South and a seminar on comparative slavery in which I first heard the word hegemony spoken (by him).  I was attracted by Gene the professor rather than by the subject matter.  Nor was I unique in this respect.  The obits, which focus on Gene’s scholarship and shifting but always controversial worldview, ignore his record as a great teacher of undergraduates.  Jocks liked him as much as aspiring scholars did even though he assigned readings on ante bellum agriculture, at least some of which had to be skimmed to get through the courses.

Part of Gene’s appeal to undergrads was that he wasn’t scary like Professor McCormick or their great colleague Warren Susman.  I was not alone in enjoying a glass of wine while visiting his office, an act of hospitality that now might be more likely than an endorsement of Vietnamese Communism to prompt official university censure.

Gene offered such an endorsement at the first Rutgers teach-in on the Vietnam War in April 1965.  Speaking as a “Marxist and a socialist,” he did “not fear or regret the impending Vietcong victory in Vietnam.  I welcome it.”  These two deliberately provocative sentences, quoted in the school paper, the Daily Targum, were picked up by New Jersey news media and soon became notorious.

Initially Warren Susman seemed to be the star of the night for his confrontation with a conservative speaker --yes, there were some on the program-- who called the war a defense of “civilization.”  But Gene’s welcome of a Vietcong victory became the main issue in the 1965 New Jersey gubernatorial campaign.  According to State Senator Wayne Dumont, the Republican nominee, no one expressing this opinion should be allowed to teach at a public university.  Democratic Governor Richard J. Hughes and the Rutgers board of governors grudgingly defended Gene’s right to speak his mind.  Gene’s popularity among students remained undiminished.  

Truth be told, Gene’s rhetorical extravagance outside the classroom was another part of his appeal to students, much as George Fitzhugh’s rhetorical extravagance was part of Fitzhugh’s appeal to Gene as a historical subject.  Gene’s fans included Wayne Valis, the foremost conservative in the Rutgers Class of ‘66 and a future aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan.  The teach-in still elicits fond memories among Rutgers alumni of a certain age and a certain sort.  At a recent reunion of the Targum staff from that era faded copies of the paper reporting on the “Genovese case” stood out among the relics of our youth.

On the whole Gene’s teach-in speech hardly seems extravagant in retrospect. [1] He announced at the outset that he was offering a “frankly political” analysis in a setting that was “not in any sense an enlarged classroom, but a place where professors and students can speak their minds on vital questions in a manner not ordinarily proper in class.” Indeed, his self-identification as a Marxist was intended to “put you on guard against my prejudices as you should be on guard against everyone’s, especially your own.”

Gene placed the war in the context of the Cold War “struggle for the underdeveloped world” in which the United States supported such “thugs” as Chiang Kai-shek, Francisco Franco and the Shah of Iran as well as “whichever general is fronting in Saigon.” Fidel Castro was viewed as a threat not only because he was a Communist but also because of Cuba’s example as a “small country rebuilding a distorted economy on a socialist basis, evicting foreign capital. and suggesting to others that they, too, are entitled to be masters in their own house.”   

American Cold War policy stood “completely naked” in Vietnam.  Having initially  built up the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem instead of seeking elections in keeping with the Geneva Accords of 1954, the United States was now “applying napalm to a people that every honest reporter admits would still overwhelmingly elect Ho Chi Minh.”  In short, the ultimate purpose of the war was “containing a rival social and economic system and punishing those who move toward it.” 

Yet, in an echo of William Appleman Williams’s  The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, Gene said that President Lyndon Johnson, was “not an evil man.” While rightly interpreting the war as part of a purposeful Cold War strategy, Gene mistakenly credited the Johnson administration with more sophistication and forethought than the available evidence warranted even in 1965.  But one aspect of the “predatory” American strategy did seem wrong-headed even in its own terms.   Gene doubted that the People’s Republic of China planned to expand throughout Asia, but if this was Beijing’s intent, then a Communist Vietnam could serve as a bulwark.  These men and women had not bled for decades "in order to make foreigners the masters of their country."  This passage would bring cheer to the hearts of two recent visitors to Hanoi, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.  Even Gene’s two deliberately provocative sentences look astute.  If the Johnson administration had allowed the “impending” Vietcong victory to occur in 1965 or 1966, both the United States and Vietnam would have been spared enormous pain. 

Gene’s pointed endorsement of a Vietcong victory does highlight one side of his temperament.  He loved controversy and combat--but sometimes only until he had second thoughts about what he had said or written. 

At the 1969 American Historical Association convention Gene opposed a resolution denouncing the Vietnam War on the grounds that it would divide the organization.  As a graduate student at the time, I agreed; in retrospect this position seems wrong though the issue still does not look clear cut.  As far as I know, Gene never changed his mind.  Nor did I ever hear him regret his inflammatory words urging the AHA business meeting to crush proponents of the anti-war resolution--”put them down hard.”

Perhaps Gene did regret this extravagant rhetoric.  Certainly he came to regret other academic controversies that had needlessly turned personal.  Gene’s clashes with his friends (and comrades) and then enemies Herbert Gutman and Christopher Lasch were especially notable. Throughout the academy the magnification of  intellectual differences is standard operating procedure even during eras less volatile than the 1960s and 1970s.  Nevertheless, the differences between Genovese and Gutman on the question of slave autonomy were slight in comparison to other scholarly disputes about, for example, the existence of an American empire or the effectiveness of federal regulation of big business.  In the final analysis both Genovese and Gutman recognized that the slaves tried to preserve as much of their autonomy and culture as possible and that the masters held ultimate control. 

Although the methodological differences between Lasch and Genovese were more substantial, their friendship lapsed because these two eccentric intellectual giants tried to co-exist in the same history department (Note to readers:  eccentric is a term of respect in my vocabulary).  In these instances the sides of Gene’s temperament that valued intelligence and friendship triumphed over the side that reveled in controversy and combat.  He patched things up with Gutman and resumed a friendship with Lasch.  Yet there is no denying that Genovese could be a very difficult man.

Gene was the second of my Rutgers professors--following Lloyd Gardner--to urge me to enter the history business and he remained supportive over the decades.  Our worldviews and approach to history shared at least one important feature, a willingness to write with understanding about bigots and weirdos.  But in Gene’s view I was a wimpy social democrat who watched polls in Democratic Party primaries for Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, and other fellow wimps. Sufficiently distant from his strongly held political positions--first on the left and then on the right-- I was never at risk of ideological excommunication. The political never became the personal.

I began seeing Gene and his wife Elizabeth (Betsey) Fox-Genovese regularly when in the early 1990s I started making research trips to Atlanta once or twice a year.  Amid their extraordinary hospitality, we reminisced a lot.  Gene was always happy to hear about Rutgers students from the early 1960s who still told stories about him.  Along with Betsey, and I’m sure many others, I urged him, apparently without success, to write a memoir and to deposit his private papers in an archive instead of destroying them.  Once again I enjoyed Gene’s outrageous comments about his former, present, and future ideological allies.  I also witnessed, on a “same time next year” basis, his move to the right.  As a good Genovese student I tried to understand his rationale.

The personal and psychological aspects of this transition I will leave to others if they must. But the intellectual roots of the change are not hard to find.  I liked to tease Gene that he had always hated liberalism more than he loved socialism; liberalism (in the twentieth century American sense) was intellectually too messy for him as well as insufficiently disciplined in its means and ends.  Sometimes Gene conceded that I might have a point.  A few years ago he half joked that he would tell me the single most important reason for his shift “if you promise not to laugh.”  Gene said that he had concluded that liberals in their optimism were “wrong about human nature.”  I didn’t laugh.  Neither did I offer the futile response that he might have moved a shorter distance on the spectrum to become a Niebuhrian social democrat.  I have no doubt that Gene considered this quip part of a serious explanation of his transition.

Although honored by conservative organizations and claimed especially by traditionalists after his return to the Roman Catholic Church, Gene in his last years is better categorized as a “man of the right” rather than as a conservative  (to recall a distinction Whittaker Chambers made to William F. Buckley, Jr.)   Even this distinction does not fully capture the continuing idiosyncrasies of his worldview.  A fierce defender of Israel, Gene nonetheless voted for Pat Buchanan at least once because he distrusted Republican neocon dreams of creating a worldwide capitalist utopia.  Despite his return to Catholicism, Gene talked often and nostalgically about the Communist party of his youth as well as about the ex-Communists and Popular Fronters who energized New York City Democratic reform politics during the early 1960s.  It is almost as if he considered Communism a necessary stage in both his own life and the life of the country.

In the end two legacies count above all else:  first, Gene’s enormous contribution to the study of American history which, by and large, was enriched rather than marred by his extracurricular ideological combat, and second, for those of us fortunate enough to have been his students, his excellent undergraduate teaching.   

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[1] See the abridged version, the only one I could find, of "American Imperialism Confronts a Revolutionary World," in Louis Menashe and Ronald Radosh, ed., Teach-Ins: U. S. A. Reports, Opinions, Documents (New York:  Praeger, 1967), 224-229.  This anthology also contains useful contemporary documents on the Genovese case in New Jersey politics.

Change and Continuity

If you have not yet read Kevin Mattson's thoughtful response to my criticisms of his work, please do so right away. It is a wonderful thing when a scholar that I respect engages me in such serious fashion. In return, I plan to post a response soon. I also plan to respond to several of the excellent comments on my original post and on Mattson's reply. I am particularly interested in discussing Bill Fine's criticisms regarding my take on style and substance, a topic picked up later by LD.  Alas, all of this will have to wait. I am in the midst of rushing to finish up a chapter of my manuscript in the hopes of meeting a self-imposed deadline.

In the meantime, I will pose a question that might generate commentary. My wise mentor Leo Ribuffo read Mattson's essay and wrote to me about the disagreement that Mattson and I seem to have about change and continuity. Leo and I often disagree about change and continuity with regards to recent US history. He thinks I overstate the case for change. He also wrote the following, which makes for a great discussion point: "Judging change and continuity is the hardest thing historians do and probably the main justification of our existence. As you and I have battled several times, the American (perhaps human) and certainly journalistic emphasis is on newness and if we are to make semi-sense of anything we need a hearing for the counter-position."

Agree? Disagree? 

Ribuffo, "President James A. Garfield Had a Great Personality" (Personality and the Self Panel, Part III)

Dear Readers: As a special holiday season treat, I give you one of the more interesting panels from our recent conference--"Personality and the Self in Twentieth-Century American Social Thought."' See the first paper by Dave Varel here. The second paper by Dave Steigerwald is here. Below are the comments by Leo Ribuffo.

PRESIDENT JAMES A. GARFIELD HAD A GREAT PERSONALITY
Leo P. Ribuffo, The George Washington University

In the generous spirit of S-USIH, this is less a comment in the AHA/OAH “gotcha” sense than some reflections on two interesting articles. My first reflection is that both of these essays deal with what might be called the self-absorbed era in the conceptualization of the self—and all deal primarily with middle class people or above in a rich world power during a relatively short span of time, the past 120 yrs or so. Accordingly, choosing a conception of the self was to an increasing degree voluntary, especially after the culturally normative “American Way of Life” of the Great Depression yielded to the looser notion of “life styles” in the 1960s and 1970s. This is the era, as David Varel stresses (following Warren Susman's classic essay), when, amid visions of affluence, an ascetic emphasis on “character” yielded to a “culture of personality” befitting a “culture of consumption.”

Without totally discounting the now standard notion that the search for the self in some sense escalated during the modern era, whenever that began, let me suggest that it had a longer lineage, was not confined to rich “Western” countries, and often involved what William James called forced options. Consider the following hypothetical situations:

A speaker in 331 B. C. E. Persia. “Believe it or not, guys, Darius III just lost to Alexander the Great. We’ve got to decide how Hellenized we’re going to become.”

Fast forward to the Indian subcontinent in the seventh century C. E. “Hey, guys, there’s this new religion going around called Islam. It doesn’t have a caste system. Sounds pretty good to me.”

Fast forward again to the sixteenth century—to a place our history department colleagues call early modern Europe. “Hey buddy, does the wine in church turn into Christ’s blood or is it just a symbol? Decide fast; we’re piling the kindling around the stake.”

And across the ocean in Peru: “Look, guys, I know the Spanish conquerors have really powerful weapons and are trying to win our hearts and minds with paintings of the Apostles as Indians, but don’t we owe it to our Inca ancestors to join Tupac Amaru’s revolt?”

Even for the prosperous United States. (by world standards) choices about self were in play for more than a century before the era of self-absorption began in the late nineteenth century. We can see this behavior in many “keywords.” In addition to the ubiquitous “character,” we have for instance: republican virtue, honor, patriot, true woman, born again Christian, and manliness (preferably self-made). At the same time there were negative selves that should be avoided or (in the Darwinian worst cases) could not be avoided—undeserving poor, rebel, feeble minded, racial mongrel, and gook.

As Susman acknowledged, such notions did not disappear even as the “culture of personality” came to dominate the Zeitgeist. For instance, self-made manliness survived from Henry Clay through Booker T. Washington to Malcolm X and the Nixon White House, honor persisted from the Hamilton-Burr duel to Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd, gook echoed from the Philippine War to the Vietnam War, and derision of the undeserving poor affected politics from Theodore Roosevelt's Square Deal to Bill Clinton’s signing of welfare reform, so-called, in 1996.

Nor should we forget the enormous legacy of Romanticism with its cult of the hero, which popularized the self-absorbed search for the self long before this disposition became professionalized. Despite the countless gospel of success guides published by Russell Conwell, Edward Bok, Garfield, et al, what red blooded American boy would choose to clerk in that startup company Carnegie Steel instead of riding with General George Custer? At least until June 25, 1876.

And if we want a more complicated symbol (or modal personality if you prefer), although James Garfield wrote one of the classic tracts about achieving success through character, he did have a great personality even before there was a whole “culture of personality,” a fact confirmed by his phrenologist, by his rapid political rise, and by the three women madly in love with him during his early twenties.

David Steigerwald takes us from the early days of the professionalized search for the self to the 1970s. Steigerwald begins by bringing us back to the first heyday of guides to success, variously defined, in this world and the next, and nicely places this search in the context of a longer debate about free will and determinism.

Thus we return to the question that vexed scholars three decades ago in the heyday of the academic study of the gospel of success--such scholars as Susman, Donald Meyer, John Cawelti, Irwin Wylie, Richard Huber, and Lawrence Chenoweth --Is William James responsible for Norman Vincent Peale? This question is a lot of fun, along with its kin: Is Marx responsible for Stalin, is Rousseau responsible for Timothy Leary, and what would Jesus do? Steigerwald gets it right in this instance, writing that James with his “famous open-mindedness” would have found some merit in Charles Reich’s The Greening of America.

Yet Steigerwald leads us astray when he dismisses the medical side of nineteenth century positive thinking as “self-evidently unscientific.” These theories were considered science by many Americans just as much as eugenicist warnings against racial mongrelization and the homeopathic medicine preferred by President Garfield. So too, later on, with Abraham Maslow cultivating his peak experiences and Wilhelm Reich absorbing the intergalactic libido in his orgone box.

The issue of “agency” also needs a closer look (“deconstruction” if a trendier word makes readers feel smarter). As currently bandied about, agency means two related but separate questions. First, can “the people” in some sense think for themselves or are they just easily manipulated dimwits, a notion already on the rise in American social science before there was a Frankfurt School even in Frankfurt, as Edward Purcell showed in his brilliant book The Crisis of Democratic Theory. As Purcell also showed, this question influenced the interwar debate between behaviorists and humanists in the social sciences.

Second, even if “the people” can think for themselves, do they have enough power--agency--to change the Zeitgeist let alone the social order? In the broad sweep of things, my sense is that people do think for themselves when they are moved to think, but that they tend to limit their thoughts and feelings to what seems possible. Hence most educated women went along with the feminine mystique in the 1950s, there is no socialism in the United States, and only a minority of Incas joined Tupac Amaru’s revolt.

Steigerwald sees two great eras of agency affirmation, and both seem to coincide with periods of major social change and political flux. The odd exception is the 1930s, and here Steigerwald’s Google search may have led him astray. Guides to success flourished during the Great Depression, none more so than Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. If there was a drop off in references to free will, perhaps this was because a critical mass of “the people” temporarily had both the will and the freedom to change things significantly (by American standards).

Varel takes us forward to Henry Murray, a self-described William Jamesian and one of the creators of “humanistic psychology”--as Murray called the field as early as 1930--along with Gordon Allport, Carl Rogers, John Dollard, and Abraham Maslow.

While agreeing that we need more than an “internalist” examination of Murray’s ideas, I am skeptical of Varel’s main choice of social-intellectual context. From Richard Hofstadter through Christopher Lasch to Jackson Lears, historians have noted the importance of personal crises about the meaning of life for modern thinkers, crises summed up in the key word “weightlessness.”

Murray doesn’t fit very well. As a youth he stuttered, felt rejected by his mother, and suffered from sexual repression but he is a long way from being a Jamesian “sick soul” and a modal personality for an age of “weightlessness.” Until his early twenties, Murray’s main crisis seems to have been guilt about his role in a rebellion against his Harvard crew coach that may have resulted in a loss to Yale. As we used to say in working class New Jersey before I encountered the psychiatric mode of denigration, the young Murray was a rich spoiled jerk.

In his early thirties Murray did suffer what he called a “profound affectional crisis” that involved immersion in Romantic literature, enthusiasm for Carl Jung, and lust for Christiana Morgan. Except perhaps for the Jungian infatuation, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor would have understood ninety years earlier.

This affectional crisis did influence Murray’s work, including his senior authorship of Explorations in Personality, but so too did a broad assortment of ideas. Although Varel can only sketch the early years, we do need to appreciate what a juicy life Murray lived. By his early forties his circle included Alfred North Whitehead, Lewis Mumford, Conrad Aiken, Eugene O’Neill, Archibald MacLeish, Joseph Schumpeter, and Paul Robeson.

Varel neatly summarizes Explorations in Personality but we should appreciate, too, what an incredible mish mash the book is, a combination of empiricism, insight, jargon, empathy, and elite insularity. For instance, Murray in effect regrets that his Catholic subjects, adhering to their church's "rationalized fantasy system," are "blissfully" less neurotic than their Protestant and Jewish counterparts. Certainly Murray's work had the potential to nudge psychology in various directions. The TAT became a tool for sorting out corporate executives, as William Whyte satirized in The Organization Man. Murray personally influenced Talcott Parsons as well as Kenneth Keniston and Erik Erikson.

If we are looking for sweeping contexts, we might say that both Explorations in Personality and Murray himself in the late 1930s illustrate tenacious American optimism. According to Murray at that time, Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents exuded “black despair.”

Since Murray lived well into his nineties, he can be used as a symbol or modal personality for many intellectual trends. After the United States entered World War II he discovered evil, informed the world of its existence in his writings, and administered TATs for the Office of Strategic Services--“great fun.” Murray testified for the defense at the second Alger Hiss trial, diagnosed Whittaker Chambers as a “psychopathic personality” on the basis of his writings, and took pride in coming off better on the witness stand than Cornell psychiatrist Carl Binger. Joining in the post-World War II disenchantment with “the people” this rich spoiled jerk complained that soldiers, students, and his own research assistants were becoming uppity. Ever adaptable in self-absorption, however, Murray enjoyed an acid trip with Timothy Leary.

As we move into the 1960s and 1970s, Steigerwald sees the denouement of the descent from Jamesian giants to Maslovian pygmies. Although guides to success variously defined still proliferate in all sorts of media, the late 1970s marked the end of a phase in the discussion of the self. It had been a triumphant phase marked by psychological interpretations in venues as significant as George Kennan’s Cold War tract “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” the United States Supreme Court decision in Brown v Board of Education, and Justice Harry Blackmun's majority opinion in Roe v Wade.

Maslow, Reich, and others criticized by Steigerwald, a good Laschian, have never been my cup of chamomile tea, and I have been trying all of my professional life to bury the phrase “paranoid style in American politics.” But as a Susmanite I have always had a soft spot for the gentler positive thinkers. Many people would be better off listening to Maslow than listening to Prozac. And with the resurgence of “economic man,” construed with a stunted conception of rationality that would surprise Adam Smith, I am softening further. Come the revolution, perhaps we could sentence the authors of Freakonomics and the policy wonks at the American Enterprise Institute to a few weeks in a hot tub with Charlie Reich.

Neoconservatism and the Spirit of the Anti-Sixties

(My first post since it was announced that USIH won the 2010 Cliopatria Award for best group blog!)

At risk of opening up a discussion of another vague, contradictory, often polemical and even more often misunderstood political label, I’m going to move the discussion from neoliberalism to neoconservatism. How should intellectual historians frame neoconservatism? (This post is lacking in that I have yet to read Justin Vaïsse’s much-discussed new book, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement—I’ll get to it!)

Leo Ribuffo always gives the best advice on all things conservative history, in a grumpy senior scholar sort of way. For a classic Ribuffo statement on the field of conservative history, check out the paper he gave at last year’s OAH: “Seventeen Suggestions for Studying the Right Now that Studying the Right is Trendy.” One of his suggestions is that we take Lionel Trilling’s famous statement that there are no conservative ideas in America, only irritable gestures, and “bury it in a deep hole with nuclear waste.” Point taken. Of course, anyone who has read George Nash's 1976 bible, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, hardly needs this bit of advice. But there are several other nuggets of wisdom in the Ribuffo essay. I highly recommend it, crankiness and all.

Another panel at last year’s OAH offered suggestions on the field. (Wow, how often do I remember not one but two panels from an academic conference that took place nearly a year ago? Other than the USIH annual conference, of course, where all the panels are memorable!) The panel, on rethinking conservative intellectual history, featured, among others, Jennifer Burns, whose biography of Ayn Rand: The Goddess of the Market, is one of the best books in intellectual history of the last five years. To that extent, surprisingly, the panel hardly offered any sage advice. The basic point I gathered: we should go beyond Nash—we should go beyond a narrow definition of intellectuals in studying conservative intellectual history. Beverly Gage, for instance, suggested that we consider the texts of political figures like J. Edgar Hoover as intellectual texts (she just happens to be writing a book on Hoover). This is good advice. But did we need this advice? (For video links to this OAH panel, featuring Burns, Gage, and Angus Burgin, click here.)

Certainly Eliot Weinberger does not need such advice, based on his brilliant and hilarious review of George Bush’s presidential memoir, the number one selling book in America, Decision Points. Weinberger treats Decision Points as a postmodern text, arguing that were Foucault still alive, he would have considered it one of the quintessential demonstrations of that philosophical question, “What is an author?” (Weinberger also reads Turning Points as a country and western song: “one minute they’re raising hell and the next they’re jerking tears.”)

Lately I’ve been diving into the work of one of the most important neoconservative thinkers, Gertrude Himmelfarb (aka Bea Kristol, wife of neoconservative "godfather" Irving, mother of Republican house intellectual Bill). As an intellectual historian, her example serves as one model for how to think about conservative intellectual history. Himmelfarb is a firm adherent of that paleoconservative Richard Weaver’s mantra that “ideas have consequences.” In other words, her theory of intellectual history is explicitly non-materialist, or, at least, non-Marxist, in the sense that ideas do not take a back seat to economic forces. Ideas, for Himmelfarb, quite often shape material reality. In her view, this is a properly conservative approach to intellectual history, even though, on its face, it is also a properly postmodern approach to intellectual history.

What ideas have consequences in Himmelfarb’s work? Most prominently, she contends, in The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values and elsewhere, that what the Victorians referred to as “virtue,” or morality, shaped the culture of nineteenth century Britain (and America) to a greater degree than did the political economy. In this, Himmelfarb thinks she proves wrong one of the more popular passages from The Communist Manifesto, about how the bourgeoisie has “pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties…[and] the family its sentimental veil…” Marx and Engels were wrong since Victorian virtues, for example, made the traditional family stronger than ever in nineteenth century Britain, at the height of rapid industrialization. For Himmelfarb, this goes to her larger point that capitalism is not to blame for our contemporary pathologies: crime, illegitimacy, welfare dependency, pornography—the usual litany (see Charles Murray for a complete run-down). Older ideas about work and thrift kept people in line in spite of the “all that is solid melts into air” vertigo experience of capitalism or modernity. Rather than capitalism, Himmelfarb argues, the cultural and moral shift that took place during the sixties is to blame for our current pathological society. Duh, it’s the sixties! Always the sixties!

Himmelfarb’s dissonant interpretation raises three questions for me:

1) Must intellectual history be all ideas or all material? All text or all context? One or the other?

It seems to me that the new intellectual history as practiced by those who write for this blog, and as practiced by most of those who regularly attend the USIH conference, seeks to situate ideas in cultural context without necessarily reducing those ideas to some opaque reflection of “reality.” In other words, it’s not a question of either-or.

2) Even if Himmelfarb is correct in her assertion that major cultural changes did not obliterate Victorian values until the 1960s—dubious, but OK—why does this prove Marx wrong? Is there a statute of limitations on the “all that is solid melts into air” theory of dissolution?

A new book by Daniel Rodgers, The Age of Fracture, which I predict will be the most talked about work of intellectual history since Louis Menand’s Metaphysical Club, implies that Marx’s thesis is a pretty good explanation for our postmodern condition. As Robert Westbrook writes in an excellent review, Rodgers “hints, much like Marx and Engels, that at the bottom of things lay the powerfully destabilizing impact of capitalism.”

3) Why do neoconservatives always blame the Sixties?

This is one of the major currents of intellectual history that I am exploring at length in researching and writing my book on the culture wars. There are several reasons for this, most of which I won’t get into here for reasons of time and space (this is already far too long for a blog post!) A major reason, though, is the neoconservative distaste for antinomianism. This is made clear in a new biography of Norman Podhoretz, who, as editor of Commentary from 1960 to 1995, was equally if not more important than Kristol in delineating the neoconservative mind. Podhoretz had a longstanding yet latent (in terms of outspokenness) distaste for antinomianism and sexual liberation, revealed as early as 1958, when he wrote a scathing Partisan Review essay on the Beats, titled, “The Know-Nothing Bohemians.” Anti-antinomianism became foundational to his distaste for the sixties.

Of course, not all of the neoconservatives rooted the origins of cultural demise in the sixties. Robert Bork, in Slouching Towards Gomorrah (don’t you love that title!) argued that the sixties enshrined the radical individualism of the Declaration of Independence. Allan Bloom went much further back. For him, it was all downhill after Plato. But the larger point: the sixties formed the neoconservative view on American culture. Thus, if neoliberalism is, as I argued a few weeks ago, the spirit of the sixties, neoconservatism is the spirit of the anti-sixties.