A Racial Liberal (part deux)

I accidentally deleted part 1 of A Racial Liberal. For those who read my public conversation with myself and commenters about whether or not I misused "liberal" in the article I'm working on, I offer this quote from Gery Gestle's American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century.

In this book, I argue that the pursuit of these two powerful and contradictory ideals--the civic and the racial--has decisively shaped the history of the American nation in the twentieth century. I show how both ideals influenced critical immigration and war from progressivism and the New Deal to the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and civil rights, and animated the nation's communal imagination. I give special attention to American liberals:

[ah ha! this sounds like how I was defining liberals, at least on some level.]

These liberals and others, I contend, were the most influential architects of the twentieth cnetury nation. They were committed to the civic nationalist tradition in general and to equal rights for ethnic and racial minorities in particular. But many of them periodically reinscribed racialist notions into their rhetoric and policies. I examine the antinomies of the civic and racialist traditions in the writings and speeches of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, and explore the ways in which these same oppositions figured in many of the moments that defined the nation they built, from Theodore Roosevelt's charge up San Juan Hill in 1898 to Lyndon Johnson's confrontation with the Mississippi Freedom Democrats at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. I am particularly interested in how liberals and their supporters wrestled with the contradictions between the two nationalist traditions, how they managed to adhere to both simultaneously, and why the tensions between them did so little for so long to weaken the authority or cohesion of the nation.

I will give you my definition of "white racial liberal," which sounds rather too blunt to me. I seem to swing between the extremes of nuanced-to-the-point-of-no-argument to blunt-to-the-point-of-losing-all-nuance.

Dah! I promised myself I would stop criticizing myself publicly. :-) Well, I'm learning.

Here's my definition:

"When I use the term “liberal,” I mean it in both the positive and sarcastic sense evoked by John P. Davis when he criticized Clark Foreman as being the “type of emancipated Southerner who likes to boast how liberal he is on the Negro problem,” all the while remaining bound to a white Southern attitude about race. By a white racial liberal, I mean someone who thought of themselves as not-racist and non-discriminatory, but who perhaps did not know or care that much about African Americans. There was a wide spectrum from someone ignorant of all racial matters to a committed interracialist like Foreman. The reader is advised not to equate a racial liberal with someone who desired civil rights or the end to segregation. The New Deal era was too soon for that."

A Racial Liberal (part deux)

I accidentally deleted part 1 of A Racial Liberal. For those who read my public conversation with myself and commenters about whether or not I misused "liberal" in the article I'm working on, I offer this quote from Gery Gestle's American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century.

In this book, I argue that the pursuit of these two powerful and contradictory ideals--the civic and the racial--has decisively shaped the history of the American nation in the twentieth century. I show how both ideals influenced critical immigration and war from progressivism and the New Deal to the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and civil rights, and animated the nation's communal imagination. I give special attention to American liberals:

[ah ha! this sounds like how I was defining liberals, at least on some level.]

These liberals and others, I contend, were the most influential architects of the twentieth cnetury nation. They were committed to the civic nationalist tradition in general and to equal rights for ethnic and racial minorities in particular. But many of them periodically reinscribed racialist notions into their rhetoric and policies. I examine the antinomies of the civic and racialist traditions in the writings and speeches of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, and explore the ways in which these same oppositions figured in many of the moments that defined the nation they built, from Theodore Roosevelt's charge up San Juan Hill in 1898 to Lyndon Johnson's confrontation with the Mississippi Freedom Democrats at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. I am particularly interested in how liberals and their supporters wrestled with the contradictions between the two nationalist traditions, how they managed to adhere to both simultaneously, and why the tensions between them did so little for so long to weaken the authority or cohesion of the nation.

I will give you my definition of "white racial liberal," which sounds rather too blunt to me. I seem to swing between the extremes of nuanced-to-the-point-of-no-argument to blunt-to-the-point-of-losing-all-nuance.

Dah! I promised myself I would stop criticizing myself publicly. :-) Well, I'm learning.

Here's my definition:

"When I use the term “liberal,” I mean it in both the positive and sarcastic sense evoked by John P. Davis when he criticized Clark Foreman as being the “type of emancipated Southerner who likes to boast how liberal he is on the Negro problem,” all the while remaining bound to a white Southern attitude about race. By a white racial liberal, I mean someone who thought of themselves as not-racist and non-discriminatory, but who perhaps did not know or care that much about African Americans. There was a wide spectrum from someone ignorant of all racial matters to a committed interracialist like Foreman. The reader is advised not to equate a racial liberal with someone who desired civil rights or the end to segregation. The New Deal era was too soon for that."

"Roosevelt calls me bad names. He calls me an economic royalist."

I'm reading Frances Perkins' reflections on FDR for an article I'm working on about Mabel Byrd's stint in the New Deal. In what I just read, Perkins discusses the reactions to a 1936 FDR speech in which he suggested America had overcome the political royalists but still had a whole set of powerful economic forces ("royalists" in his sudden splurge of literary flair) to overcome. There is a historical echo here in terms of contemporary arguments about Obama trying to define "rich" as earning $250,000 a year.

     "it was used against him, and almost immediately. Many rich persons, even widows who derived their income from trust funds over which they had no control and from investments in enterprises in whose conservative managemetn they could take no part, began to whimper, 'Roosevelt calls me bad names. He calls me an economic royalist.'
       "People who ought to have known better jumped to the conclusion that he was declaring himself an enemy of every rich person, whether one's riches accrued from old land holdings in whose development and management one took no part or from portfolios of investments which had come to one under Grandfather's will.
       "Even people who earned large incomes by intellectual or artistic activities, who actually contributed to the economic life and progress of the country, were inclined to believe that he meant them in his condemnation of 'economic royalists.' This reaction, of course, was typically American; it was not literate or urbane, but in some subtle way, I suppose, it expressed a more widely distributed guilty conscience than anyone realized [my emphasis]. I remember explaining to two rich women, personal friends of mine, that they were not economic royalists; that they had no control over anything; that they merely lived off the profits which farsighted fathers and husbands had secured for them.
          "Roosevelt was both the gainer and the loser from his use of this challenging phrase--the gainer because people who were not rich reacted like those who were rich but not powerful. I told him that these two women, also friends of his, were deeply disturbed. He laughed. 'Of course, they did not know what I had in mind, but perhaps it was a lucky choice of words. Anyhow, I don't think people ought to be too rich.'
          "He said 'too rich' in an emphatic tone of voice. I never knew what he meant by 'too rich' and I doubt that he did. It was probably a hark-back to the older and simpler American scene before the apperance of the multimillionaire, who was a puzzle and embarrassment to the old-fashioned 'well-to-do' and often seemed like an aggressor to the poor."1

What parallels or disimilarities do you see between Perkins' note about "Americans' guilty conscience" and contemporary discussions about taxing the "wealthy?"

1. Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew. (New York: The Viking Press, 1946) 123-4.

"Roosevelt calls me bad names. He calls me an economic royalist."

I'm reading Frances Perkins' reflections on FDR for an article I'm working on about Mabel Byrd's stint in the New Deal. In what I just read, Perkins discusses the reactions to a 1936 FDR speech in which he suggested America had overcome the political royalists but still had a whole set of powerful economic forces ("royalists" in his sudden splurge of literary flair) to overcome. There is a historical echo here in terms of contemporary arguments about Obama trying to define "rich" as earning $250,000 a year.

     "it was used against him, and almost immediately. Many rich persons, even widows who derived their income from trust funds over which they had no control and from investments in enterprises in whose conservative managemetn they could take no part, began to whimper, 'Roosevelt calls me bad names. He calls me an economic royalist.'
       "People who ought to have known better jumped to the conclusion that he was declaring himself an enemy of every rich person, whether one's riches accrued from old land holdings in whose development and management one took no part or from portfolios of investments which had come to one under Grandfather's will.
       "Even people who earned large incomes by intellectual or artistic activities, who actually contributed to the economic life and progress of the country, were inclined to believe that he meant them in his condemnation of 'economic royalists.' This reaction, of course, was typically American; it was not literate or urbane, but in some subtle way, I suppose, it expressed a more widely distributed guilty conscience than anyone realized [my emphasis]. I remember explaining to two rich women, personal friends of mine, that they were not economic royalists; that they had no control over anything; that they merely lived off the profits which farsighted fathers and husbands had secured for them.
          "Roosevelt was both the gainer and the loser from his use of this challenging phrase--the gainer because people who were not rich reacted like those who were rich but not powerful. I told him that these two women, also friends of his, were deeply disturbed. He laughed. 'Of course, they did not know what I had in mind, but perhaps it was a lucky choice of words. Anyhow, I don't think people ought to be too rich.'
          "He said 'too rich' in an emphatic tone of voice. I never knew what he meant by 'too rich' and I doubt that he did. It was probably a hark-back to the older and simpler American scene before the apperance of the multimillionaire, who was a puzzle and embarrassment to the old-fashioned 'well-to-do' and often seemed like an aggressor to the poor."1

What parallels or disimilarities do you see between Perkins' note about "Americans' guilty conscience" and contemporary discussions about taxing the "wealthy?"

1. Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew. (New York: The Viking Press, 1946) 123-4.

So Long, Edge of the American West!; or, The Life and Death of Blogs

It's with some sadness that the online historical community notes the (temporary?) passing of The Edge of the American West, the Cliopatria-award-winning group blog that began in UC Davis's History Department in 2007 and exapnded into other places and fields over the last three years.  Although EotAW has always featured content that was not about history, and has long included non-historians among its writers, at its heart it was a history blog, and one that suggested much about the possibilities of this medium for our discipline.*

EotAW did many things well, but it probably had its greatest impact with a long series of posts, mainly authored by founding member Eric Rauchway, tagged "New Deal denialist truth squadding."  Beginning with a November 6, 1998 post entitled "Stop Lying About Roosevelt's Record," which got mentioned and linked by Paul Krugman,  EotAW has contributed in significant ways to the pushback against the many lies that have been published in recent years about the New Deal.   While there's been a fair amount of (deserved) public handwringing about the nonsense that Glenn Beck has tried to fob off as history, far too much serious attention has been given to the equally false, but superficially more respectable, "history" offered by Amity Shlaes. Though Shlaes is no more qualified as an historian than Mr. Beck, she has a better pedigree (a BA--in English--from Yale; a sinecure in "economic history" at the Council on Foreign Relations) and a more sophisticated audience, so the recycled rightwing lies that she peddles about the New Deal are treated more seriously by the media than Beck's similarly sourced garbage.  EotAW's rebuttals of Shlaes, her enablers, and allies took full advantage of the blogging medium, drawing on better and more recent scholarship than is usually seen in traditional media, while simultaneously eschewing the politeness and assumption of good faith that those media tend to grant people like Shlaes.

EotAW has also been very good at many other things that tend to typify good, academic blogging: scholarly informed commentary on the events of the day and reflections on their own professional experiences and academia in general (rather than load this post with links to examples of all of this, I'll just suggest that those unfamiliar with EotAW root around the site for yourselves).  Like most good blogs it was often funny.  And it had great comment threads.  Indeed, like the most successful blogs, it was defined as much as anything by its commentariat.  Great blogs build virtual communities, and EotAW was no exception.

Rauchway and his fellow EotAW founder Ari Kelman (who started his career as a colleague of mine in the University of Oklahoma's Honors College) were among the participants in a 2009 OAH panel entitled "Blogging History: Explorations in a New Medium." Both emphasized that they started their blog in order to reach a broader audience.  I think it's fair to say now (and, indeed, back in early 2009) that they succeeded.  At the time, I noted on this blog that the OAH panel, while effectively presenting a variety of ways in which historians could use blogs, offered little that was surprising.  After wishing that the panel had been more lively, I concluded:

perhaps that's the price of blogging's success. I imagine a panel entitled "The Scholarly Paper: Explorations in a Medium" that had a series of presentations by first-rate historians about the different kinds of papers that one might publish would also provide little that was unexpected.

Although it's still a very new medium by historical standards, blogs are, I think it's fair to say, here to stay, though their role in our profession is still evolving.  They will, to a greater or lesser extent, be part of all of our professional lives going forward. And, as future US intellectual historians start to study the early 21st century, they will offer a vital record of (important parts of) American thought at the turn of the millennium.

One of the things that we are still learning about blogs is their life cycles.  Individual blogs obviously come and go with the author's personal commitment--to the blog and to the rest of his or her life. But group blogs potentially have a longer life.  Some successful group blogs--Obsidian Wings and Pandagon are good examples--have gone through dramatic changes in personnel over the years, but have somehow maintained their voice, purpose and community.  Others have slowly added personnel, building the kind of critical mass that allows individuals to post more or less frequently without really affecting the core of the team or the "feel" of the blog.  Crooked Timber and Lawyers, Guns, and Money both fall into this category.

But blogging is a young enough medium that we don't really have a sense of how long a blog can live.  Will we, by the end of this century, see the blogging equivalents of The Atlantic Monthly, with uninterrupted publishing histories extending back generations?  Or will the life of blogs reflect the supposed shortness of our attention spans?  Only time will tell.

But even in our limited experiences of blogging, I think we can say that, if its hiatus is permanent, EotAW was with us very briefly. Plenty of other successful group blogs have eventually run out of steam--BitchPhD, which had a lot of personal links to EotAW closed up shop this October, or example. But their runs have generally been longer than EotAW's three years; BitchPhD began in 2004.

We will of course be hearing plenty in the future from Kelman, Rauchway, and the other EotAW bloggers in the more traditional media of our profession. But here's hoping that none of them give up on their very successful efforts to reach broader audiences with good history.
________________________________________________
* I am proud to say that I did some guest blogging, mainly on film history, for EotAW in its early days.  If these pieces were auditions, however, I must have failed them ;-)

So Long, Edge of the American West!; or, The Life and Death of Blogs

It's with some sadness that the online historical community notes the (temporary?) passing of The Edge of the American West, the Cliopatria-award-winning group blog that began in UC Davis's History Department in 2007 and exapnded into other places and fields over the last three years.  Although EotAW has always featured content that was not about history, and has long included non-historians among its writers, at its heart it was a history blog, and one that suggested much about the possibilities of this medium for our discipline.*

EotAW did many things well, but it probably had its greatest impact with a long series of posts, mainly authored by founding member Eric Rauchway, tagged "New Deal denialist truth squadding."  Beginning with a November 6, 1998 post entitled "Stop Lying About Roosevelt's Record," which got mentioned and linked by Paul Krugman,  EotAW has contributed in significant ways to the pushback against the many lies that have been published in recent years about the New Deal.   While there's been a fair amount of (deserved) public handwringing about the nonsense that Glenn Beck has tried to fob off as history, far too much serious attention has been given to the equally false, but superficially more respectable, "history" offered by Amity Shlaes. Though Shlaes is no more qualified as an historian than Mr. Beck, she has a better pedigree (a BA--in English--from Yale; a sinecure in "economic history" at the Council on Foreign Relations) and a more sophisticated audience, so the recycled rightwing lies that she peddles about the New Deal are treated more seriously by the media than Beck's similarly sourced garbage.  EotAW's rebuttals of Shlaes, her enablers, and allies took full advantage of the blogging medium, drawing on better and more recent scholarship than is usually seen in traditional media, while simultaneously eschewing the politeness and assumption of good faith that those media tend to grant people like Shlaes.

EotAW has also been very good at many other things that tend to typify good, academic blogging: scholarly informed commentary on the events of the day and reflections on their own professional experiences and academia in general (rather than load this post with links to examples of all of this, I'll just suggest that those unfamiliar with EotAW root around the site for yourselves).  Like most good blogs it was often funny.  And it had great comment threads.  Indeed, like the most successful blogs, it was defined as much as anything by its commentariat.  Great blogs build virtual communities, and EotAW was no exception.

Rauchway and his fellow EotAW founder Ari Kelman (who started his career as a colleague of mine in the University of Oklahoma's Honors College) were among the participants in a 2009 OAH panel entitled "Blogging History: Explorations in a New Medium." Both emphasized that they started their blog in order to reach a broader audience.  I think it's fair to say now (and, indeed, back in early 2009) that they succeeded.  At the time, I noted on this blog that the OAH panel, while effectively presenting a variety of ways in which historians could use blogs, offered little that was surprising.  After wishing that the panel had been more lively, I concluded:

perhaps that's the price of blogging's success. I imagine a panel entitled "The Scholarly Paper: Explorations in a Medium" that had a series of presentations by first-rate historians about the different kinds of papers that one might publish would also provide little that was unexpected.

Although it's still a very new medium by historical standards, blogs are, I think it's fair to say, here to stay, though their role in our profession is still evolving.  They will, to a greater or lesser extent, be part of all of our professional lives going forward. And, as future US intellectual historians start to study the early 21st century, they will offer a vital record of (important parts of) American thought at the turn of the millennium.

One of the things that we are still learning about blogs is their life cycles.  Individual blogs obviously come and go with the author's personal commitment--to the blog and to the rest of his or her life. But group blogs potentially have a longer life.  Some successful group blogs--Obsidian Wings and Pandagon are good examples--have gone through dramatic changes in personnel over the years, but have somehow maintained their voice, purpose and community.  Others have slowly added personnel, building the kind of critical mass that allows individuals to post more or less frequently without really affecting the core of the team or the "feel" of the blog.  Crooked Timber and Lawyers, Guns, and Money both fall into this category.

But blogging is a young enough medium that we don't really have a sense of how long a blog can live.  Will we, by the end of this century, see the blogging equivalents of The Atlantic Monthly, with uninterrupted publishing histories extending back generations?  Or will the life of blogs reflect the supposed shortness of our attention spans?  Only time will tell.

But even in our limited experiences of blogging, I think we can say that, if its hiatus is permanent, EotAW was with us very briefly. Plenty of other successful group blogs have eventually run out of steam--BitchPhD, which had a lot of personal links to EotAW closed up shop this October, or example. But their runs have generally been longer than EotAW's three years; BitchPhD began in 2004.

We will of course be hearing plenty in the future from Kelman, Rauchway, and the other EotAW bloggers in the more traditional media of our profession. But here's hoping that none of them give up on their very successful efforts to reach broader audiences with good history.
________________________________________________
* I am proud to say that I did some guest blogging, mainly on film history, for EotAW in its early days.  If these pieces were auditions, however, I must have failed them ;-)