Two Deaths: Whiggery vs. "Great Men" in Contemporary US Public Memory

Last Wednesday, October 5, 2011, two Americans of great historical significance passed away: Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and Steve Jobs.*  Shuttlesworth's death was announced in the morning.  His memory was quickly framed by his relative lack of fame compared to the one civil rights leader that all Americans know.  "Marching in the shadow of Dr. King"--which would serve as the title of Diane McWhorter's NYT op-ed the next day--was the theme of most of the news stories that morning about Shuttlesworth, which rightly focused on his crucial importance to the movement in his home base of Birmingham, Alabama. If Shuttlesworth seemed--then and now--to be in King's shadow, he shouldn't be remembered that way.  For it was Shuttlesworth who convinced an initially reluctant King to take the movement to Birmingham following the SCLC's failed 1961 campaign in Albany, Georgia.  And when the focus finally did shift to Birmingham in 1963, the clashes between peaceful protestors and the violent police force under the direction of Bull Connor helped galvanize national opinion in favor of civil rights.

But if Shuttlesworth in life marched in King's shadow, in death he would soon find himself in Steve Jobs's.  When Steve Jobs's death was announced in the evening, the news coverage immediately began to focus more on the entrepreneur and technological innovator than the civil rights leader.  Jobs's fame had been greater--and more recent--than Shuttlesworth's. And the changes that he wrought in American life were also more recent.  Most Americans take the lack of racially segregated public facilities entirely for granted.  We are, for better or for worse, more amazed by our iPads. 

Rather predicatably, Jobs dominated the frontpages of the nation's papers the following morning. The traditionally staid Wall Street Journal gave him a six-column headline.  But from the moment that Jobs's death was announced, a dissenting view began appearing online that Shuttlesworth was simply the more significant figure...and that all the focus on Jobs revealed what a hopelessly materialistic, shallow, and/or forgetful culture we had become.  Certainly a common theme among African American writers online rang true: without Jobs, they wouldn't have their MacBooks; but without Shuttlesworth they wouldn't have their freedom.  But I was most struck by a notion that I saw in a number of comments on websites and on Facebook to the effect that, while we'd still have personal computers without Jobs, African Americans wouldn't have civil rights without Shuttlesworth. I found this argument fascinating precisely because I think it takes a Whiggish attitude I find from many of my students about the Civil Rights Movement and applies it, exclusively, to the technological revolutions of the last several decades. By positing that a change was essentially an inevitable result of inevitable social or technological progress, the contributions of (potentially) "Great Men" can be ignored or downplayed.  

Both the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and the technological revolution of the late 20th and early 21st century are the kinds of changes that so transformed American society that they are very easily naturalized and made part of the kind of Whiggish narrative of progress that constitutes the backbone of American public memory (when it's not in the jeremiad-laced apocalyptic mode, at any rate).  In such stories of inevitable progress, the risks taken by important historical actors can easily get forgotten. But they are both also precisely the sorts of stories that we like to tell in terms of a tiny handful of Great Leaders who are imagined as bringing them about. What Thomas Edison and Henry Ford were to the turn of the last century, Jobs and Bill Gates are to the turn of this one.  And King (occasionally assisted by Rosa Parks, Thurgood Marshall, and, once he became a major motion picture, Malcolm X) plays a similar role in the narrative of the Civil Rights Movement.

My own view is that virtually nothing in history is inevitable.  Movements and social and cultural forces, featuring many important actors beyond the tiny handful of leaders let into the pantheon of public memory, are necessary to produce changes like the civil rights and technological revolutions.   While it is as wrong to understand the modern personal computer as the creation of Steve Jobs, Solitary Genius, as it is to see the phonograph and motion picture as emerging fully formed from the head of Thomas Edison, that does not mean that the real contributions of either should be ignored.  And the nature of obituaries is that they focus on individuals and their contributions, not movements and social forces.  It's certainly unfortunate that Fred Shuttlesworth's extraordinary and often under-appreciated work in the black freedom struggle once again became overshadowed on the day of his death. Like Jobs, his extraordinary individual accomplishments deserve to be remembered and celebrated 

But in a sense the greatest importance of rescuing Shuttlesworth from (public semi-) obscurity was that doing so encouraged the public to look beyond the leaders they already knew, not simply to a larger handful of leaders, but to the civil rights movement as whole. And to foster such a richer public memory of a social movement we will never be able to rely on obituaries. 

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* In fact, a third significant American also died that day, legal scholar and critical race theorist Derrick Bell.  Like Shuttlesworth, Bell was a figure of some importance in the ongoing civil rights movement. Though early in his career he was, briefly, the only African American in Eisenhower's Justice Department (he was asked to resign his membership in the NAACP so as to avoid appearing to have a conflict of interest; he quit his federal job instead), he became best known as a legal academic, who reached his greatest fame as a scholar--and protester against Harvard Law School's hiring policies--in the 1980s.  But it's taking little away from Bell to say that he was a less consequential figure than Shuttlesworth.  And even more than Shuttlesworth, public memory on the day of his passing fell victim to the coincidence of more famous men dying on the same day.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial and Public Memory

Had the threat of Hurricane Irene not intervened, the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial would have been dedicated in Washington, D.C., yesterday.

It's utterly unsurprising that the Memorial is controversial. Every memorial to appear recently in and around the National Mall has been (as were such now iconic monuments as the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials at the times of their construction). 

The National Review called the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, when its design was announced in 1981, an "Orwellian glop," while Vietnam veteran (and future Princeton history PhD) Tom Carhart denounced it as "a black gash of shame."

The World War II Memorial was criticized for its blandness, its authoritarian style, and its effect on the sweep of space between the Washington and Lincoln Monuments.

The FDR Memorial was criticized for the initial decision not to depict Roosevelt in a wheelchair, for its eventual decision not to depict him with a cigarette, for its downplaying of Eleanor Roosevelt's role in the FDR White House, and, most importantly for its overall effect. "The tragedy of the memorial," wrote Allida Black in Public History,

is that with all this promise, with the intricate care give to FDR's programs and their recipients, the horror of war, and the promise of the United Nations, the individuals responsible for this sit on pedestals, parodying themselves.  Rather than personifying the leadership the Roosevelts exuded, the statues stand in frozen stoicism.

The same could be said about the figure of Dr. King in the new memorial.

Indeed, the controversy surrounding the King Memorial is similar to these other recent public debates. Unions are angry that, despite promises to the contrary, non-union labor was used to construct the monument.  The Washington Post cultural critic Philip Kennicott has chided the design for being "stuck between the conceptual and the literal" and has argued that

the memorial is focused on the anodyne, pre-1965 King, the man remembered as a saintly hero of civil rights, not an anti-war goad to the national conscience whose calls for social and economic justice would be considered rank socialism in today’s political climate.*

Others have questioned the decision to have a Chinese sculptor design the likeness of MLK, either because of his national identity, his "socialist realist" aesthetics, or a combination of the two.

But what is surprising is how muted this whole debate is. Only twenty years ago, in the early 1990s, the federal holiday celebrating Dr. King was still bitterly opposed in a handful of states, with opponents citing King's associations with "a great many communists" and his opposition to the Vietnam War.  Today, even the majority of the critics of the King Memorial at least pay lip service to the notion that King is a figure worthy of such celebration.  And its biggest fans include some voices on the right, like columnist Charles Krauthammer.

What has changed over the last two decades?  There's some truth in the Whiggish story of racial progress that is the most popular explanation for what's different today. Although it certainly didn't herald a "post-racial" America, Obama's election in 2008 remains a touchstone of this progress.   But our racial progress is, of course, much more incomplete than the self-congratulatory bromides of that election night suggested.

Just as surely a "safe" Dr. King has emerged in recent years, a figure whose career seems to have begun and ended at the March on Washington.  Today, everyone can celebrate the end to legal segregation.  If King's message were no more or less than the fact that Jim Crow was a massive injustice, and his greatest accomplishment was framing that message in soaring rhetoric, we could all marvel at the "I Have a Dream" Speech and pat ourselves on the back for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 (even as today's Republican Party tries to undo some of what the latter bill accomplished).

This King is safe not merely for those supportive of our new racial consensus. Over the last two decades, the ghost of Martin Luther King, Jr., has been invoked as supporting such unlikely causes as the destruction of affirmative action programs and support for our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In fact, it's almost become a cliché to point out that King was much more radical than he's often remembered as being.  Cornel West is entirely correct to argue in the New York Times that "MLK Would Want a Revolution, Not a Memorial," but this message is hardly new.

But even the emergent, "safe" King is more complicated than first meets the eye. Among the fourteen quotations on the new King Memorial, is one in which he explicitly expresses his opposition to the Vietnam War: "I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against it not in anger but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and above all with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as a moral example of the world." What's missing, oddly enough, is any quotation which focuses on African American civil rights as such (though there is a reference to Montgomery, African Americans themselves go utterly unnamed among the quoted materials).

Philip Kennicott's complaint that the memorial focuses on "the anodyne, pre-1965 King" in a sense misses the point.  First, there was nothing anodyne about the early Civil Rights struggle. Indeed, part of the problem with the "safe" King is that it retroactively makes the black freedom struggle not much of a struggle at all.  While it's critical to remember the unfinished business of King's life--from his pacifism to his social democratic commitments to end poverty regardless of race--it is just as critical to remember that there was nothing at the time safe about the goals for which King fought in the 1950s and early 1960s that now receive essentially universal acclaim in the public sphere.  That King, pre-1965, has become anodyne is, itself, much of the problem (after all, the chief fault of Whiggish views of history are their tendency to assume that progress is inevitable).

But, second, as that quotation about Vietnam suggests, the Memorial does not, in fact, focus entirely on the pre-1965 King.  Perhaps the problem isn't this Memorial, but any memorial to a figure whose politics were as firmly in the prophetic mode as Dr. King's.  Memorials celebrate. Memorials morn. But memorials--at least official, national ones--rarely call us to further action, especially not against the powers-that-be that create them. 

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* Given that a healthcare policy that is the direct descendent of Mitt Romney's Massachusetts system and Bob Dole's proposals from the early 1990s is considered rank socialism today, Kennicott substantially understates this last point.

The 2011 Ward Connerly Award for Martin Luther King, Jr. Revisionism goes to....

This is, of course, the day on which the nation remembers the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

It's important to recall that a little over a quarter century ago, when this day became a federal holiday, there was still fierce opposition to the idea of honoring King.  In the Senate, that opposition was led by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC).  The final Senate vote on the measure to declare a federal holiday in King's name was taken on October 19, 1983.*  Helms was joined in opposing the measure by seventeen of his fellow Republicans and four Democrats:

James Abdnor (R-SD)
John East (R-NC)
James Exon (D-NE)
Jake Garn (R-UT)
Barry Goldwater (R-AZ)
Charles Grassley (R-IA)
Orrin Hatch (R-UT)
Chic Hecht (R-NV)
Gordon Humphrey (R-NH)
Roger Jepsen (R-IA)
James McClure (R-ID)
Frank Murkowski (R-AK)
Don Nickles (R-OK)
Larry Pressler (R-SD)
Jennings Randolph (D-WV)
Warren Rudman (R-NH)
John Stennis (D-MS)
Steve Symms (R-ID)
John Tower (R-TX)
Malcolm Wallop (R-WY)
Edward Zorinsky (D-NE)




A couple interesting notes about that list.  First, two members who voted against the holiday still serve in the Senate:  Chuck Grassley and Orrin Hatch.

Second, there are surprisingly few Senators from the South on that list. Even Strom Thurmond voted for the holiday. Only Helms, East, Stennis, and Tower among the "no" voters came from states that had joined the Confederacy; arguably Randolph and Nickles could also count as Southern. The vast majority of Southern Senators voted for the measure. And fully sixteen of the twenty-two Senators who voted against the holiday were from regions other than the South. The fiercest opposition came from the Great Plains and the West.  Indeed, Arizona led the national opposition, with its Republican Governor Evan Mecham rescinding the federal holiday as his first act in office, a move that prompted a boycott movement, the relocation of Superbowl XXVII from Tempe to Pasadena, and, following continued opposition by Mecham's successors, Public Enemy's "By The Time I Get To Arizona" (1991):

 

Arizona was joined by a number of other states in footdragging on the holiday, including New Hampshire, Utah, and South Carolina. Virginia decided to let King share the holiday with Robert E. Lee (whose birthday falls close by); Mississippi still does this.  But today, all fifty states recognize the holiday in one form or another. 

We've come a long way since the battles over the King holiday in the 1980s and 1990s.  But one of the prices of King's transformation from a revolutionary figure to a national icon has been a deradicalization of his legacy.

Indeed, over the years, King has been repeatedly invoked in support of positions that he would have deeply disagreed with.  Leading the way in this regard were conservatives who, starting in the 1980s, invoked King in opposition to affirmative action.  In many ways the leading figure in doing this was Ward Connerly, who led the battle against affirmative action in the University of California system and later took his fight to other states, as well.  Connerly has never ceased quoting King selectively in a desperate effort to make King into an opponent of affirmative action.

So in honor of the holiday and Ward Connerly's leadership in this regard, I'd like to present the 2011 Ward Connerly Award for Martin Luther King, Jr. Revisionism.

This year's award goes to Jeh Johnson (pictured above), the current General Counsel for the U.S. Department of Defense.  In a speech in honor of MLK Day at the Pentagon last week, Johnson argued that, were he alive today, Dr. King would support our nation's current wars (h/t Salon.com):

I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation's military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack.

Luckily, I happen to have Martin Luther King right here...

_____________________________________

* The Senate's own online database of votes doesn't go back to the 1980s, so for this roll-call, you'll need to descend behind the paywall of the New York Times.

The 2011 Ward Connerly Award for Martin Luther King, Jr. Revisionism goes to....

This is, of course, the day on which the nation remembers the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

It's important to recall that a little over a quarter century ago, when this day became a federal holiday, there was still fierce opposition to the idea of honoring King.  In the Senate, that opposition was led by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC).  The final Senate vote on the measure to declare a federal holiday in King's name was taken on October 19, 1983.*  Helms was joined in opposing the measure by seventeen of his fellow Republicans and four Democrats:

James Abdnor (R-SD)
John East (R-NC)
James Exon (D-NE)
Jake Garn (R-UT)
Barry Goldwater (R-AZ)
Charles Grassley (R-IA)
Orrin Hatch (R-UT)
Chic Hecht (R-NV)
Gordon Humphrey (R-NH)
Roger Jepsen (R-IA)
James McClure (R-ID)
Frank Murkowski (R-AK)
Don Nickles (R-OK)
Larry Pressler (R-SD)
Jennings Randolph (D-WV)
Warren Rudman (R-NH)
John Stennis (D-MS)
Steve Symms (R-ID)
John Tower (R-TX)
Malcolm Wallop (R-WY)
Edward Zorinsky (D-NE)




A couple interesting notes about that list.  First, two members who voted against the holiday still serve in the Senate:  Chuck Grassley and Orrin Hatch.

Second, there are surprisingly few Senators from the South on that list. Even Strom Thurmond voted for the holiday. Only Helms, East, Stennis, and Tower among the "no" voters came from states that had joined the Confederacy; arguably Randolph and Nickles could also count as Southern. The vast majority of Southern Senators voted for the measure. And fully sixteen of the twenty-two Senators who voted against the holiday were from regions other than the South. The fiercest opposition came from the Great Plains and the West.  Indeed, Arizona led the national opposition, with its Republican Governor Evan Mecham rescinding the federal holiday as his first act in office, a move that prompted a boycott movement, the relocation of Superbowl XXVII from Tempe to Pasadena, and, following continued opposition by Mecham's successors, Public Enemy's "By The Time I Get To Arizona" (1991):

 

Arizona was joined by a number of other states in footdragging on the holiday, including New Hampshire, Utah, and South Carolina. Virginia decided to let King share the holiday with Robert E. Lee (whose birthday falls close by); Mississippi still does this.  But today, all fifty states recognize the holiday in one form or another. 

We've come a long way since the battles over the King holiday in the 1980s and 1990s.  But one of the prices of King's transformation from a revolutionary figure to a national icon has been a deradicalization of his legacy.

Indeed, over the years, King has been repeatedly invoked in support of positions that he would have deeply disagreed with.  Leading the way in this regard were conservatives who, starting in the 1980s, invoked King in opposition to affirmative action.  In many ways the leading figure in doing this was Ward Connerly, who led the battle against affirmative action in the University of California system and later took his fight to other states, as well.  Connerly has never ceased quoting King selectively in a desperate effort to make King into an opponent of affirmative action.

So in honor of the holiday and Ward Connerly's leadership in this regard, I'd like to present the 2011 Ward Connerly Award for Martin Luther King, Jr. Revisionism.

This year's award goes to Jeh Johnson (pictured above), the current General Counsel for the U.S. Department of Defense.  In a speech in honor of MLK Day at the Pentagon last week, Johnson argued that, were he alive today, Dr. King would support our nation's current wars (h/t Salon.com):

I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation's military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack.

Luckily, I happen to have Martin Luther King right here...

_____________________________________

* The Senate's own online database of votes doesn't go back to the 1980s, so for this roll-call, you'll need to descend behind the paywall of the New York Times.

Political Anti-Intellectualism And The Liberal Arts: Historical Considerations

Since anti-intellectualism has often been most effective in politics (e.g. with victims such as Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s, Eugene McCarthy in the 60s, and even Bill Clinton in the 90s), I'm not surprised to see a present-day application via the "professor" label.

With regard to the article, I'm not sure I agree---initially at least---with Charles Ogletree's assertion that today's manifestation in relation to President Barack Obama is a "thinly veiled" kind of racism (article's phrase, Jack Stripling is the author). The problem I have with that line of thinking is that it's nowhere in the recent history of anti-intellectualism---as a broad social phenomenon at least. All of the late twentieth-century political figures that were objects of anti-intellectualism were white. Indeed, if there's any historical racism associated with political anti-intellectualism it's in the fact that Martin Luther King, Jr. was never derided precisely for his mental prowess. To carry Ogletree's argument a bit further, it seems to me that if any "uppity" association occurs to racists in relation to Obama, it will be because of his newfound aggressiveness (i.e. bully pulpit), not his mental ability. The "professor" appellation is likely just straightforward anti-intellectualism on the part of some opposition that may be racists.

Returning to Stripling's article, I do appreciate the thinking in this passage related to David S. Brown: It’s no surprise that the anti-intellectualism that Hofstadter wrote about has resonance among some Americans today, says Brown, a historian at Elizabethtown College. Higher education programs are increasingly moving toward the pre-professional variety, and students and parents are inclined to press colleges about how their programs will lead to jobs -- not to intellectual growth, Brown says. In that context, the stereotypical liberal arts professor is ever more marginalized.

When I first read the InsideHigherEd article I thought that, with more people than ever in college and even more than ever in graduate school, this line of political strategy can't be effective, long term, beyond a limited cohort of our citizenry. But I hadn't directly linked today's anti-intellectualism, as Brown did, to the ongoing vocationalism (read: devaluing of the liberal arts) that's occurred in higher education---beginning after World War II but increasingly evident in the last 10-15 years. - TL

Political Anti-Intellectualism And The Liberal Arts: Historical Considerations

Since anti-intellectualism has often been most effective in politics (e.g. with victims such as Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s, Eugene McCarthy in the 60s, and even Bill Clinton in the 90s), I'm not surprised to see a present-day application via the "professor" label.

With regard to the article, I'm not sure I agree---initially at least---with Charles Ogletree's assertion that today's manifestation in relation to President Barack Obama is a "thinly veiled" kind of racism (article's phrase, Jack Stripling is the author). The problem I have with that line of thinking is that it's nowhere in the recent history of anti-intellectualism---as a broad social phenomenon at least. All of the late twentieth-century political figures that were objects of anti-intellectualism were white. Indeed, if there's any historical racism associated with political anti-intellectualism it's in the fact that Martin Luther King, Jr. was never derided precisely for his mental prowess. To carry Ogletree's argument a bit further, it seems to me that if any "uppity" association occurs to racists in relation to Obama, it will be because of his newfound aggressiveness (i.e. bully pulpit), not his mental ability. The "professor" appellation is likely just straightforward anti-intellectualism on the part of some opposition that may be racists.

Returning to Stripling's article, I do appreciate the thinking in this passage related to David S. Brown: It’s no surprise that the anti-intellectualism that Hofstadter wrote about has resonance among some Americans today, says Brown, a historian at Elizabethtown College. Higher education programs are increasingly moving toward the pre-professional variety, and students and parents are inclined to press colleges about how their programs will lead to jobs -- not to intellectual growth, Brown says. In that context, the stereotypical liberal arts professor is ever more marginalized.

When I first read the InsideHigherEd article I thought that, with more people than ever in college and even more than ever in graduate school, this line of political strategy can't be effective, long term, beyond a limited cohort of our citizenry. But I hadn't directly linked today's anti-intellectualism, as Brown did, to the ongoing vocationalism (read: devaluing of the liberal arts) that's occurred in higher education---beginning after World War II but increasingly evident in the last 10-15 years. - TL